The Armageddon Rag

  “Need me,” he repeated. “For what?”

  Edan Morse turned and snapped his fingers. “Gort, get me a copy of the schedule.”

  The giant grunted, went to the desk just beyond the bedroom door, returned with a crisp sheet of white paper. He handed it to Sandy.

  It was the tour that Richmond had mentioned; neat columns of photocopied type, dates and times, cities and auditoriums. It began in New York City and snaked west, zigzagging north and south as it went: Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Houston, Kansas City, Denver. But it was the final date that Sandy read aloud. “Albuquerque,” he said. “West Mesa. September 20th.” He folded the schedule into crisp quarters with a deliberate precision and shoved it deep into his back pocket. “No west coast dates.”

  “Of course not. Those dates were canceled after the assassination. It would be pointless to book anything after West Mesa.”

  “This is why you need me?”

  “You’ll make a public announcement at a press conference in a day or two. Then you’ll orchestrate the national media blitz.”

  “It won’t happen,” Sandy said, desperately hoping that was so. “One look at that schedule and Faxon is going to recognize the itinerary. You think he wants to dance those steps again? You really think he’ll play another West Mesa concert? On that date? For that matter, you think the local authorities will allow it?”

  Morse smiled grimly. “The permits are already in hand and the advance work well begun. Money can accomplish wonders. You underestimate the sheer corruption of this society. It will all come together. On that date, at that place, the forces will be immense. The time, the place, the music, the people, the belief. When the Nazgûl sing it will all fuse together. Past and present and future. They’ll perform the entire album, just as they did in 1971, and this time they will finish the Rag, sing it all the way through, sing up armageddon and give us our resurrection. Patrick Henry Hobbins will live again, the Movement will live again, and this time we will seize our tide.” His scarred hand made a fist and pounded softly against the arm of his chair, over and over, rhythmically.

  “But it will only happen if we all keep the faith, right?” said Ananda. “We all have roles to play, Sandy. You’re important. If you leave us, they may win again.”

  Sandy felt lost and confused. “I want the same things you want,” he told them. “I want to go back as much as any of you, want to try it all again and get it right this time. I want it for myself, and for… for some friends of mine, people you wouldn’t know. But the blood …I don’t want any more. Francie, in my dreams, she…I don’t want her hurt, you hear?”

  “Who’s Francie?” Morse asked.

  “One of Rick’s lady friends,” Ananda said. “She was with him when he found the dog tonight.”

  “Very well,” Morse said. “I’ll prove to you that I don’t want bloodshed any more than you do, Blair.” He turned to Gort. “Find this girl. Take care of her. Guard her. If anybody tries to hurt her, blow the fucker away. Got it?”

  Gort cracked his knuckles. “No sweat.”

  “Terrific,” Sandy said. “You just assigned the head butcher to guard the lamb.”

  Gort said, “Get off my case. I’m tired of you, Blair.”

  “That’s the best I can do,” Morse said. “Trust me or not, I don’t give a flying fuck. But make up your mind.”

  “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” Ananda said. She had taken her hand away. Her features were chilly and full of judgments waiting to be made.

  “It’s going down, Blair,” Morse said. “With you or without you. It’s going to happen, whether you approve or disapprove. There’s going to be blood, ours or theirs or both. Armageddon, brother. Believe it. Resurrection. All you got to decide is whose side you’re on. Commit yourself, Blair, one way or the other. What’s it going to be? Us or them?”

  His face was iron, unyielding, gray, cold. His words were sudden hammer blows, driving Sandy back, nailing him to the wall. The room was spinning. They were all watching him, Morse, Ananda, Gort. He forced himself to his feet unsteadily. “I…I don’t know.” He put a hand to his brow. Everything was so thick, so stuffy. He was trapped and suffocating. “Give me a minute,” he said.

  “You have a minute,” Edan Morse said. Gort grunted and cracked his knuckles threateningly.

  “I need some air,” Sandy said. He went to the window, the window that Gort had closed. Their eyes were still on him. He put his palm to the glass. It was cold, almost icy. June, and yet the window burned with cold. Sandy held his hand against it, and the chill crept up his arm, the pain stabbed through his fingertips. Beyond the thin pane of glass was darkness. All the eyes were on him, on both sides of the glass. Beyond the window was a cold wind and the lights of a black alien city, where ignorant armies still fought by night, still, still, after all these years. He saw the Kent State Guardsmen raise their rifles and fire, and the students fell. He saw the napalm drop from the sky. He heard the chanting, stared at gas-masked glassy-eyed visages of the enemy, saw the small candles wink out one by one.

  Faces swam before him, taking shape from chaos, mouths wide with pain. Faces from the newspapers, faces from television, faces from the past. There was Bobby, his head all bloody. There was King, his dream shattered by a bullet. There was Nixon, and in his eyes Sandy saw the reflections of a Redskins game, saw them blocking and tackling while thousands marched past outside, unheeded.

  Maggie was out there in the night, a soft smile on her lips. She said nothing, but her eyes were sad. Froggy was at the window, grinning. “Plunk my magic twanger, Sandy,” he croaked. “Go on, do it. You can, you can.” Lark was there, headband and mocking smile and all, and he said, “I always knew you didn’t have it, Blair. The revolution failed because of weak sisters like you.” Bambi looked at him solemnly and said, “You have to believe, you have to believe in something.” And finally there was Slum, resplendent in his Slum Suit, all those uptight ties sewn together into something wild and free and gorgeous, with his great beard crawling down his chest, his smile stoned and gentle. “Let me in, Sandy,” he said in that quiet, apologetic voice of his. “Let me in, please. I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want to be incompetent. Let me in.” And he raised his hand and Sandy saw he had a hammer there.

  Chaos roiled beyond that pane, chaos and turmoil and blood and anger. But on this side of the glass was nothing. On this side of the glass it was dead and stifling and Sandy could not find air to breathe. Out there the wind was fresh and cold, and out there his friends were waiting, with flowers and dreams and hope. Beyond the pane. Beyond the pain.

  Slum raised the hammer high. Edan Morse said, “Your minute is up, Blair.”

  Sandy opened the window.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Come hear Uncle John’s band, playing to the tide/

  Come with me or go alone, he’s come to take his children home

  On the road. New York. Pittsburgh. Detroit. Cincinnati. Minneapolis. St. Louis. Houston. Kansas City. And the Nazgûl spread their dark wings across the land, Sandy wrote in a press release.

  On the road, all the cities blurred together, days and weeks and months melted into one seamless sleepless whole. On the road it was all cheap food and driving and noise and crowded rooms, it was all motel suites that looked alike, television sets that played endlessly with no one watching, drugs and booze and strangers and pointless arguments, and music, music most of all, songs that haunted the damp hot nights and echoed deafeningly through the concert halls.

  On the road it was always night.

  On the road it was always hot. July was torrid, August was unbearable, Labor Day came in glowering and sizzling, the air-conditioning never worked well enough, and the parties were always too packed. But the bus and the trucks rolled on, Sandy rolling after them, Daydream burning up the roads, all the old songs repeating on the tape deck and whispering in his head. A dazed time, a crazed time, months turned crimson with
the bright flushed heat of fever.

  New York burned clear, New York was Shea Stadium. The Nazgûl had kicked off their 1971 tour at Shea, and to Shea they returned. They had filled it then, but now, so many years later, with the mystery of Larry Richmond debunked in the press and the reviews from Chicago mixed (Hedgehog had torn them apart), the ballpark was only half-packed. Still, that was almost thirty thousand people, thirty thousand old fans under a hot July night, the band looking small in the infield. It was Chicago all over again. The new songs, Faxon insisted, and he was their leader, and though the quarrel went on and on backstage, in the end it was he who called the shots. So they played “Visions in the Dark” and Maggio milked his axe for every sound that was in it, and Gopher John rode his snares and toms with rim shot after rim shot and broke a stick on the hardest, maddest solo he’d played in years, but Richmond sang lead in his small voice and the crowd stayed cool. And they did “Wednesday’s Child” with the sound cranked up all the way so the stack of Marshalls trembled and thundered and filled the humid Long Island night. But the night swallowed Larry Richmond’s vocal, swallowed every last bit of it and gave nothing back, and the crowd was tired and indifferent. The Nazgûl sang “Goin’ to the Junkyard” and “Good Ol’ Days” and “Sins,” and at last Faxon saw it clear. When he called for the old songs, Richmond nodded and Maggio grinned wickedly and Gopher John scowled and slammed down the lead-in to “Blood on the Sheets.” And it happened, as Sandy had known it would; as all of them had known. Baby, you cut my heart out, Richmond sang, but by the time he reached heart it was not Richmond at all, it was Hobbins, Hobbins back to sing again. The crowd stirred restlessly, uncertainly, and then the excitement began to build. By the end of the song they were on their feet, charged with some power none of them could have explained. They screamed and they shouted and danced in the aisles, and the Nazgûl blasted them with sound and blistered them with raw emotion. Hobbins sang a half-dozen songs, and for an encore they did a fifteen-minute version of “What Rough Beast” and Gopher John tossed his stick twenty feet in the air, rattled it off the front teeth of the stars and caught it again.

  On the road was an empty highway wet and shiny with rain, the sound of his wheels on slick pavement, the lights of the other vehicles lost behind him, the speedometer pushing eighty, Ananda asleep in the seat beside him. Sandy turned on the radio, found an all-night station, but it was top-forty music, gutless, soulless, commercial as the age. He turned it off and drove faster. Somewhere in the night ahead was West Mesa, and the sweet sound of the past.

  Detroit (or was it Cincinnati?) was wolfing down cheeseburgers with Gopher John Slozewski in an all-night coffee shop after the concert. Gopher John ate ravenously; four burgers, a triple order of fries. “Nightmares,” he confessed, in a heavy, weary voice. “I dream ’bout that fire allatime. Yeah. Alla fuckin’ time. Kids burnin’ up. Screaming. They say I locked the fire exits. Fucking lie, Sandy, fucking lie. I never would of.” He smiled. “It’s good on stage. The drumming. The music puts out the flames in my head.”

  Cincinnati (or was it Minneapolis?) was the Pop-Tarts, a raucous all-girl nostalgia band who opened for them in white shorts and halter tops, and played a bunch of old songs and whipped the crowd into a horny, whistling fit so the Nazgûl could come out and play some more old songs at them. Backstage afterward, the party got wild and then violent, and Sandy drank too much and passed out, and woke in a chair when everything was over. Maggio was the only one of the Nazgûl left by then. He was comatose and the dark-haired big-breasted bass player from the Pop-Tarts was sucking drunkenly on his limp cock. The television was playing. Cable news; Sandy watched it blearily until a familiar face appeared. He knew that man, he thought, but he couldn’t remember where or why, and the words from the screen didn’t make sense. Maggio moaned and stirred a little and Sandy saw he was starting to get hard. The commentator was talking about someone named Paul Lebeque, about to go on trial in Maine. But who the hell was Paul Lebeque? Maggio sat up, patted the Pop-Tart on the head, said, “Good, baby, oh, good.”

  On the road they were always drunk, or stoned, or horny.

  St. Louis was Houston was Pittsburgh was Cincinnati. The new songs failed and old ones worked, the old ones made the crowds come alive. And each night, when they did some cut off Music to Wake the Dead, Patrick Henry Hobbins sang with them again. But only for those songs. On the new material it was still Richmond, poor timid plastic Larry. Even when they tried material from Napalm, or Hot Wind out of Mordor, or the Black Album, they were stuck with Richmond. Only Music to Wake the Dead woke Hobbins. Peter Faxon fought every step of the way, rewrote the new material, reworked the act over and over again, and failed, and failed, and failed. Richmond couldn’t carry it; they needed Hobbins. With each performance, the balance shifted a bit more. Drop “Sins” in Detroit, do “Survivor” instead. Jettison “Good Ol’ Days” come St. Louis (or was it Minneapolis?), play with “Napalm Love” for a while, end up with “Ash Man” rocking ’em in Kansas City. Axe the new songs, sing the old, don’t argue with success.

  On the road you need the applause, the shouts, the whistles, the love of the crowds.

  On the road Francie traveled with the band. She was Maggio’s old lady again, at least in name, and she was up on stage near him during the concerts, swaying and boogying to the music, smiling a small, sad, vacant smile, her big eyes still a little lost. Rick seemed oddly tender with her now. From New York through St. Louis, he went through groupies faster than ever, and talked endlessly about each new conquest. Francie took it all, the blow-jobs and the three-ways, and when he passed out or wound down she would sit by him, stroking his long greasy hair, smiling at him as gently as a mother at a wild, unruly, but much-beloved son. She knew that she was real to him, she told Sandy once, while the others were only passing dreams, faces and names and mouths that changed from city to city. Francie was with Rick always. And Gort, huge and quiet, was never far from Francie.

  On the road it was always midnight. On the last leg of interstate heading into Minneapolis, Sandy pushed on the radio, the power antennae rose with a crackle of static, and the music filled Daydream. Between two smarmy contemporary hits, the DJ said, “Now for a blast from the past…or maybe the future, right?” and he played “Napalm Love,” the long version recorded in concert but never used on any Nazgûl album.

  And the Nazgûl spread their dark wings across the land, and the tribes gathered, Sandy thought, and so they did. Each night he watched the crowds swell and seethe and change. They came in middle-aged and just a bit frayed around the edges, came in wearing designer jeans and jewelry, drawn by their memories, by the echoes of the songs they had marched to, fucked to, dropped acid to, sung along with, and believed in during the Sixties. They went out younger somehow, full of an energy that was almost tangible, a power that crackled; they went out smiling and whistling, holding hands like kids again, and often as not the jeans seemed faded afterward, cheap and worn and stained, with flower patches and peace symbols ironed on to cover up the holes. At Minneapolis (or was it St. Louis?) he counted twenty headbands, five tie-dyed shirts, one pair of granny glasses. The concerts lasted hours, but could human hair really grow that far, that fast? Then why did the women’s hair seem so long and clean and straight coming out, flowing down and down, stirring in the wind, when it had seemed so shagged and styled and curled coming in?

  On the road anything seemed possible, and everything was real. In St. Louis Sandy thought he recognized a face he’d seen in Pittsburgh, right up front. In Houston he was sure of it, of that face and of a dozen more. They were following the band; the pudgy woman who always stripped down to the buff and danced slowly to even the fastest songs, her eyes closed, and the tall, stringy, goateed guy who always had a joint dangling from his lip, the bikers, the gaggle of hippies out-of-time, the fellow who was hairy as a werewolf but wore a three-piece violet Edwardian suit, the sultry sloe-eyed knockout with the silver-blond hair. Night after night, city after city. In Kans
as City he could have sworn he saw Lark out there in the crowd, throwing his fist in the air and shouting, “He’s coming!” with all the others, one vast roar of prophecy and promise.

  On the road all the faces seem familiar.

  Kansas City was Houston was St. Louis, and they lived and moved and traveled in their own lost world, in the eye of a rock ’n’ roll hurricane, in the midst of gathering force. By St. Louis (or was it Houston?) they were national news again, the mixed reviews from Chicago now forgotten. Dan Rather talked about the Nazgûl on the CBS Evening News, Time finally delivered on the cover they had promised months before, Hedgehog did a second cover, much better than the first, to feature a twenty-page article called “The Impossible Comeback Flight,” even though Sandy never returned any of Jared’s calls. Two encores in Minneapolis (or was it St. Louis?), and in Houston the crowd wouldn’t let them leave the stage, and Hobbins danced and sang like a man possessed (what else?) and drove them on and on, and they ran out of material and kept going anyway, playing “What Rough Beast” with an endless jam in the middle, until the cries of “He’s coming!” brought the police screaming in to shut down the show. There was shouting, curses, rocks thrown, arrests made, two tear gas canisters thrown to disperse the crowd. The Nazgûl played on through all of it, and when the Houston cops finally whipped out nightsticks and formed a battle line, the crowd charged and overwhelmed them, while the Nazgûl struck up “Ragin’.”

  And the Nazgûl spread their dark wings across the land and the free peoples gathered and they raised their banners of old, with love and joy and righteous anger, Sandy wrote in the statement he released to the media after the Houston “police riot.” But he thought twice and crossed it out before release. Already you could see the polarization beginning. Some Texas politicians wanted the band indicted for inciting a riot, there was agitation in Kansas City and Denver and Albuquerque to ban the three remaining concerts, and an Alabama television evangelist called rock a communist, satanist plot. But rushing north through the darkness to beat dawn to Kansas City, Sandy told Ananda to turn on the radio. She found a big Dallas top-forty station, but they were playing “This Black Week,” and they followed it with “Blood on the Sheets” and “Napalm Love” and “What Rough Beast,” a solid hour of Nazgûl hits, one after another, and at the end the DJ said, “I want to thank all of you who called in. We’ll keep playing the Nazgûl as long as you keep calling, boys and girls, and keep sending the money. And remember, all the filthy lucre goes to the legal defense fund for the Houston Eighteen.” Ananda made a fist, pounded the dash, and whooped with gleeful laughter.