Rock Chick Reckoning

  Okay, there it was again.

  Proof that my luck sucked.

  We had three gigs scheduled in the next two months at The Palladium. Even with him skimming off the top, we got our biggest take from Monk. Hell, Leo and Buzz could live for weeks off one night’s take at The Palladium. We couldn’t lose The Palladium.

  Before I could retort, Mace moved. One second, I was between him and Monk. The next second, nothing was between him and Monk and Monk had miraculously grown six inches. This was because Mace had him off his feet, pressed to the wall partly with Mace’s body, partly with Mace’s hand at his throat.

  “Do I have to explain my point?” Mace asked from between his teeth.

  Monk’s eyes were bugged out and he was staring down at Mace. He shook his head as best he could with Mace’s hand wrapped around his neck just under his jaw.

  Mace dropped Monk but stayed close.

  “You give the band’s take of the door and pay to me tonight. I count it and I don’t like what I see, we’re gonna continue that conversation,” Mace told Monk.

  Effing hell.

  Did Mace just say that?

  Monk glared at Mace but he nodded then he scooted out and lost himself in the crowd.

  I watched Monk go.

  Yep, Mace just said that.

  Mace just took care of me and the band.

  Again.

  Effing, blinding hell.

  “I fuckin’ love that guy,” Pong said, his eyes were on Mace.

  Effing, effing, blinding, blinding, hell, hell, hell.

  “Don’t you have groupies to tag for post-gig festivities?” I asked Pong.

  Pong’s body jerked at the realization that he was standing around with me and a bunch of men when he could be working the girls in the crowd, setting up that night’s action.

  “Oh shit, yeah.” Pong turned and punched Hugo’s arm. “Time’s a-wastin’, black man.”

  Hugo looked down his nose at Pong. “Don’t call me ‘black man’.”

  “Why not?” Pong was on the move. He didn’t actually care why not, he always called Hugo “black man” and Hugo always told him not to.

  “A black man can call me ‘black man’. An eyeliner wearin’, hair-spray sprayin’, skinny white cracker can’t call me ‘black man’.” Hugo was on the move too.

  “Don’t call me ‘skinny white cracker’.” I heard Pong say as he disappeared into the throng.

  “You are a skinny white cracker.” I heard Hugo respond as he disappeared too.

  “I need a beer,” Floyd said to no one and he headed toward the bar.

  “I need my weed.” Leo headed backstage.

  Buzz came up, eyes avoiding mine, and he gave me a brief hug. Buzz was often affectionate but, after all the drama, this still took me off-guard.

  Before I could respond, he disappeared in the crowd too.

  I watched the space where I’d last seen Buzz.

  I knew what the hug was for – Linnie and “La Grange”.

  I pressed my lips together so I wouldn’t cry.

  Duke, Vance and Lee melted into the shadows leaving me with Mace.

  I took a swig of my beer. I was too emotionally charged to deal with Mace at that moment.

  No, strike that, I was too emotionally charged to deal with Mace at all, ever.

  “I need some alone time,” I told him even though I should have been thanking him. Yet again, he was taking care of me and my band.

  To avoid looking at Mace, I was looking at the crowd. Duke, Lee and, I noticed, now Hank and Willie, were holding back some people who wanted to get to me. They were creating a little pocket of solitude in the crowded club.

  I could have kissed them.

  “You had a year of alone time. That time’s up,” Mace replied and my eyes shifted to his then they narrowed.

  Erm, pardonnez moi?

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  He got close.

  I retreated.

  My back slammed against the wall. His hand came up to rest on the wall by the side of my head and his body curled around, fencing me in.

  “Mace, please…” I asked softly, hoping he’d give in as he often did when I went soft.

  “You’re magic up there,” Mace clearly wasn’t in the mood to give in and I knew then that he wasn’t newly arrived either. He’d likely been there all night, in the shadows, watching.

  This made me shiver.

  In the dim light of the club, I saw he’d gone soft too and his soft was a heckuva lot more powerful than mine.

  Oh dear.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “You think you’re good but you’re not good, you’re fuckin’ magnetic.”

  “Stop.”

  “You could light up arenas.”

  I closed my eyes tight.

  “Stop,” I whispered.

  I felt him get even closer, the heat from his body hitting mine.

  It felt good. It felt safe. It felt right.

  “What you’re not is black.”

  My eyes flew open but even so, there was only time to see him melt into the crowd.

  Effing, bloody, fucking hell.

  * * * * *

  I knew I was going to do it, right after our never-say-die, always-upon-always, burning-down-the-house, gig-ending, band-defining version of “Ghostriders in the Sky”.

  I knew I was going to do it, break precedent, maybe even shift the entire center of the band, maybe even pound a crack in our foundation just in order to do it.

  Because I had to do it.

  Mace had to get it.

  If he didn’t get it, I was lost. I already felt myself veering off the path.

  And I’d just found my way again.

  I wasn’t going back.

  I couldn’t.

  Nunh-unh.

  No way.

  It was the end of the night, the crowd was screaming for an encore that the regulars knew they were never going to get. They knew this because they never got it.

  Never.

  No matter how much they screamed and clapped and stomped their feet, after we sang “Ghostriders”, The Gypsies were, without fail, done.

  Until tonight.

  The band had had their fill of applause, saying “thank you” into their mics, raising their hands to the crowd and feeling the love. They were turned away and getting ready to pack it in. The house lights were already up. The crowd was just beginning to come to the realization that they’d have to climb down from the high where we’d taken them. I felt the desperate urgency sift out of the applause as it downshifted to appreciation.

  That’s when I started strumming my guitar.

  Buzz’s head jerked toward me and I felt Floyd’s eyes on me. I noticed Leo glancing around in confusion. Hugo froze to the spot, his eyes on the strumming fingers of my right hand, the contorted fingers of my left pressing the frets.

  I didn’t even look at Pong.

  I ignored them all as I strummed.

  Then I stepped up to the mic.

  I gave a soft, “oh yeah,” into it, letting it snake into the quieting crowd, listening to the hum die as I played the chords.

  As if rehearsed, Buzz, Leo and Pong came in right on time which it most definitely was not rehearsed, it was a song I played at home, alone, but never allowed myself to sing, never allowed the band to play, a song so deep in my soul, I couldn’t sing it, I was afraid I wouldn’t do it justice.

  By that time, the crowd was totally still, deathly silent and staring in fascination toward the stage.

  I was known for never changing lyrics, never changing the words of a song sung by a man to fit it to myself as a woman. This gave me a subtle edge because lesbians thought I was one of them when I sang about women and that was my code to tell them I was a member of the club. This didn’t affect me, I was happy for the additional fans and lesbians always gave a good vibe at a gig.

  They didn’t know that I didn’t change lyrics because they weren’t my lyrics to change. In my
head, a song was a solid thing, rendered from marble by its maker and it wasn’t up to me, Stella Gunn, to take my unqualified chisel to it for my own purposes.

  But tonight, I was going to make another unprecedented exception.

  I was going to change Vedder’s lyrics, fit them to myself and Mace.

  My eyes found him. He wasn’t hard to find, throughout the last two sets, I always knew where he was.

  Just like before we broke up, when I always but always knew where he was at a gig.

  He was standing head and shoulders above the crowd, five feet from the bar, his eyes on me.

  Our gazes locked.

  That’s when I sang to Mace.

  Yes, again.

  And I felt it as the crowd pulled in their breath.

  And then, through giving it to Mace, I gave them Pearl Jam’s epically beautiful ballad, “Black”.

  After I finished the lyrics, I held out the “be” and shouted my “yeah” just as Mace came unstuck from my spell and started to push through the crowd, making his way toward the stage.

  The band played behind me with a power and certainty that made it sound as if we’d played the song millions of times rather than just this once. The chords I played sounded angry, as if sliced from my guitar. Floyd’s fingers were pounding out the notes on the piano, notes to a song I didn’t even know he knew.

  The crowd was still silent, stunned, watching, enthralled.

  I let the final words to the song rush out of me, hoarse and filled with scratching despair, just like it rushed out of Eddie Vedder on Pearl Jam’s world-rocking, genre-defining album “Ten”.

  As I sang, Mace was nearly at the stage when I closed my eyes to shut him out as if closing my eyes could shut him out of my life forever.

  Still playing, my head dropped and I rested my forehead on the mic, the vision of Mace, eyes never leaving me, pushing through the crowd toward me, was burned on the backs of my eyelids.

  I played lead, Floyd’s piano thundering around me, matching the same notes that came from my guitar. The band began singing their “da-do-do-do, do-do-do’s” and before my fingers could strum the angry riff and I could shout my anguish like Vedder, I was pulled roughly from the mic.

  My eyes came open and I stared, frozen to the spot in disbelief.

  Mace was there, onstage, right in front of me, right in front of five hundred people.

  I stayed frozen as his hand wrapped around the neck of my guitar; he yanked it over my head and then jerked me forward so that my body slammed against his.

  His free arm sliced at a slant around my back, crushing me to him. His head came down, his mouth finding mine and he kissed me, right there, right onstage, right in front of five hundred people, open-mouthed, hard, wet and full of everything.

  His body bent forward, pushing mine back so I was arched over his arm, my torso and hips pressed deep into him.

  He kissed me and kept kissing me as the band played around us, pushing the song longer, longer…

  I heard the cheers, the shouts, the stamping feet, the applause, the crowd was wild, my subtle edge as a possible lesbian was forever obliterated.

  And through it all, Mace kept kissing me.

  When he finally tore his mouth from mine, he didn’t move away. He kept me bent over his arm, his face less than an inch from mine, our eyes locked and we were both breathing heavily. My heart was beating like a hammer, I could feel it in my chest, in my throat and, dear God, I could feel his too.

  “You didn’t get it,” I whispered.

  I could taste the acid of tears in my throat, the sting of them at the backs of my eyes.

  I really, really needed him to get it.

  But he didn’t understand that he turned my world to black and he didn’t get it that I couldn’t go through that again.

  “No, Kitten, you don’t get it,” he whispered back.

  My hands were clutching his shoulders. I started to try to push but I realized I couldn’t. I couldn’t push and keep control of my tears and my terror and my shaky belief in the fact that what I was doing was right. Not all at the same time.

  So I just held on.

  “Let me go, Mace.”

  He didn’t let me go.

  Instead he spoke.

  And what he said with the background soundtrack of the repeating end notes of a soul-destroying rock song changed my fucking life.

  “I can’t be the star in your sky when you’re the only star left shining in mine.”

  This time, my breath took the Concord out of retirement and shot to Paris.

  That was right before the gunshots rang out.

  And the gunshots rang out just seconds before Mace and I went down, Mace’s big, hard body landing on mine like a dead weight to the sickening, discordant sound of the strings of a crashing guitar.

  Chapter Nine

  Sex Wax

  Jet

  I was smiling at Daisy, still high from Stella and The Gypsies’ “Ghostriders” which always lasted at least ten minutes (if not more) and, no matter how many times we heard it (which was every time we saw them play), they made it fresh, full of energy and it always brought the house down.

  But tonight, it was more. The band was on fire and that fire blazed through the crowd, white-hot. It was enough to make us forget our troubles, the danger again confronting us and just enjoy some good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll.

  Daisy grinned back at me and shouted, “Yippee kay yay!”

  So, of course, I shouted it right back at her.

  Over Daisy’s shoulder, I saw Annette and Roxie doing a high five then they bumped hips and, seeing that, I giggled.

  It was great being a Rock Chick.

  Only thing better was being Eddie’s Woman.

  Lucky for me, I was both.

  My eyes slid through the crowd, looking for Eddie (not finding him, by the way) and coming to stop on Tex.

  Like he had been all night, Tex was sitting at a stool, his back to the bar. But now, his narrowed eyes were locked on something as if that something was something he did not like.

  Since there were a lot of things Tex didn’t like, I didn’t think much of this.

  Then, to my surprise, I heard the first notes of Pearl Jam’s “Black” coming from Stella’s guitar.

  Good God.

  I felt as well as heard the tremor of surprise go through the crowd and my stunned body slowly turned. On my way around, I saw that Indy, Ally, Roxie, Daisy, Ava and Annette were no longer Post-“Ghostriders” high. They were all staring, mouths wide open, at the stage.

  The Gypsies never did an encore.

  As in… never.

  When my eyes hit Stella, I instantly became transfixed. She was at the mic and singing a slow, “Oh yeah”.

  Her eyes moved then locked on someone in the crowd and I knew without looking where her gaze was directed. I knew without looking that she was going to sing to Mace.

  Like she did a few months ago when she sang Hank Williams.

  And, just like then, after she started singing, it hurt to listen.

  But it was a beautiful pain.

  I knew it hurt her to sing it just as it hurt me to hear it. She poured feeling into every song she sang but that song… that song, she poured her soul into it and the entire club felt it. And, in a club-wide moment of shared, stunned reverence, we were all dead silent while we watched her communicate her pain.

  It was arresting. As the song wove through the crowd, the lyrics a gentle assault, we all stood frozen and watched.

  Then, as if from nowhere, Mace was onstage, his long legs eating the distance as he came at her. We watched as he pulled her away from the mic, tore her guitar from her hands and then he was kissing her.

  I sucked in breath at the sight of it.

  It was a hungry kiss, a hard kiss, a kiss meant to be private but instead it was very, very public. I felt the kiss stirring in my belly even though I knew I should look away.

  I didn’t look away.

  I couldn??
?t.

  The crowd started to cheer, to scream, to stomp their feet.

  I didn’t want to cheer. I wanted to cry but bizarrely, I also wanted to laugh.

  Before I could give into either of these emotions, I saw the little red dot dancing between Stella and Mace’s bodies.

  Someone had a laser light.

  Through the music-induced stupor I felt annoyance claw at me.

  Who could witness this passionate emotional display and jack around with a laser light?

  Then I heard Duke’s gravelly voice shout, “Gun!”

  Um… gun?

  It came to me that wasn’t a laser light and my body jerked. As if I wasn’t in control of my own actions, instead of running or throwing myself to the ground (both of which would have been smarter), I turned to look behind me and saw Tex throwing people out of his way as he lumbered through the crowd toward a target.

  “Down!” Shirleen yelled.

  I whirled back to face the stage and saw the laser light go up sharply to a point several feet over Pong’s head then I was on the floor, Shirleen’s body on top of mine.

  Then the gunshots rang out.

  I heard screams, shouts, running feet; it was pandemonium at the Palladium.

  The gunshots stopped, Shirleen’s weight left me and she got up, leaned down, her fingers wrapped around my wrist and she pulled me to my feet.

  “Rendez-vous!” I heard Eddie shout and my eyes flew in the direction of his voice. I saw him, gun out, other hand pointing to me. I also saw a man on the floor, Tex over him with a knee in his back. Tex had the man’s arm twisted behind him, the crowd giving them a wide berth. Further, I saw Luke had a rifle, he tossed it to Willie then his eyes sliced to the Rock Chicks and focused on Ava.

  That’s all I saw. Hector’s arm was around my waist and he was pulling me away. Vance was there, so were Duke, Ike and Bobby. All of the boys had their guns in their hands and they were herding the Rock Chicks toward the back of the club.

  This was not easy. There were still tons of people fighting, pushing and running, trying to force their way out but in the opposite direction. The Hot Bunch, big, strong and carrying guns, cleared a path, often resorting to tossing people out of the way to do it.

  “Stella and Mace!” Indy shouted and my eyes flew to the stage.

  Mace was up, Stella flung over his shoulder and he was striding to the stairs, the band on his heels.