And because it’s life, can’t be anything but simple true life, it had been no more than life for Shelly Morgenstern. It might have been nice had the time in the hospital room been the last time he saw Stag Preston. But it wasn’t. Stag’s rise had been fast, his descent even faster, but the ends were not cut off that neatly. There was one more time, two and a half years later.
Stag had disappeared upon release from the hospital. For his own good, and to dodge the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts he had accrued. Shelly had at first tried to get a line on him, follow him by a close reading of the trades, but it was as though the boy had unzipped the Earth, popped in, and zipped it back over his head.
The moral responsibility Shelly had felt drained almost completely. Time heals. Etc.
Then, two and a half years later, on a publicity junket in New Orleans, Sheldon Morgenstern encountered one of the loose ends of his life. On Bourbon Street with a group of press agents, merely walking, going for a pot of jambalaya, a nice crawfish etouffée stew, a big bowl of andouille gumbo, Shelly passed a strip joint. Kandee Barr was peeling in the joint. The name aroused Shelly, for in half a dozen other buff shows down the strip he had seen billboards boasting Candy Barr, Candi Bahr, Kandy Bar and Candy C. Barr. In smiling at this particular Miss Barr’s photo, life-size and voluptuous, his eyes met someone else’s. A dark, intense, lingering look, even in the photo that held his glance.
It was Stag Preston.
He was singing in the strip joint. He was alive, and working, and singing in this strip joint. Shelly excused himself, suggested the fellows go on up to the restaurant, not waste those reservations, have their gumbo, and he’d meet them back at the hotel.
Then he entered the club.
It had no name.
He didn’t want to know the name.
What sights beyond vision in such places; the trysting places of meaning, where men test their souls, and the vista must be conversant, sympathetic with the mood. What places are these, where great tries are tried, great ties are tied, and great treaties formed. What importance they have, and how seldom they fit. Seldom.
It was dingy, soggy, frayed, splayed, smoky, smoked-out, just damned weary in the nameless strip joint. Artificial as a plastic leg. The walls were of an unidentifiable wood, paneled as though to signify something—perhaps at one time intimacy or relaxation—but saying nothing. The smoke eddied and misted and drifted, a heavy low-hanging cumulus that made Shelly’s eyes water. He had been a smoker all his life, and for the first time of which he was aware, cigarette smoke was making him uncomfortable. The veil was partially drawn, and he wanted to see, to see! All of it.
Just beyond the bare semicircle in which he stood, separated by a worn velvet rope and two tarnished brass posts supporting its flaccid droop, the tables began. Four chairs to a table, all filled with dark shapes hunched in toward the center, or sprawled away from the nucleus, touching female thighs and knees and arms. The men were mostly alone, but some had been hooked, some had been pinged by the unerring sonar of a B-girl slathered with pancake makeup into the hairline. Some of these men had been picked-up, some had been lucked-out, some had been cleaned-out…and some had even brought the wife to this naughty place. But mostly the men were alone. They would, probably, always be alone. Lost in the cumulus.
Just beyond the tables was the raised stage, and on the stage a girl of—why bother to mention them—attributes was peeling. Her flesh was yellow, very yellow, blue, very blue, then red, very very red and back to yellow as the gels spread their diseased light across her empty face, her swollen thighs, her meaningless breasts. She was doing things. They had no interest for Shelly.
“Table, Mister?” The maitre d’ was pear-shaped, out of a comic strip dealing with pugs and hipsters and fat little men in checked suits who spoke from the recesses of their noses. Shelly reached into his side pocket, brought out a bill and waved it through the maitre d’s immediate venue.
“This, when you tell Stag Preston that Shelly Morgenstern is out here and wants to see him.” The pear-shaped man nodded at the bill, puffed a cheek in empty meditation, and turned away. He threaded his way among the tables, into a curtained archway and out of sight. Shelly lit up and waited, seeing the girl because there was nothing else to see. She had split nipples and stretch marks on her belly from a tough pregnancy.
A little bit of time passed and the pear-shaped man returned, hand first. Shelly gave him the bill and the maitre d’ unhooked the velvet cord. He fastened it behind Shelly and led him to a table off to one side, with only two chairs, neither occupied.
Shelly sat and the pear-shaped man inquired about a drink. Shelly shook his head, turning the scene off as easily as a shower.
He waited, and continued waiting until he felt the hand on his shoulder. “Hi, kid,” he said, staring straight ahead.
The body moved around him, a hand reached into his line of vision, pulling out the chair, and then the body in its tuxedo lowered into his sight, first the waist, then the stomach, then the chest, the shoulders, the neck, the chin, the scars, the face, the eyes, and he was there, once more, completely in Shelly Morgenstern’s life.
He was no longer the golden boy of the rock’n’roll world. He was no longer even a boy. If he was a man, he was some kind of man that did not exist in the world of reality, of sight and sound and emotion. He was something else completely. The ravages of his own sins and sour living had caught up with him, beat the hell out of him and left him for gone, but he had fooled them. He had saved the hulk, pieced it together with Scotch Tape and gin and grapnels thrown into the cliff because it was a long drop.
He was on the verge of alcoholism. The abyss lay in his eyes.
The end result of what he was now, living in the Bowery, on the Embarcadero, on every Skid Row from Bangor to Bangkok, was called a “wetbrain.” He wasn’t that yet, and he probably never would be, because the scream was still there, like the abyss, in the eyes, in the cruel mouth…but it was bad, very nasty, very bad indeed.
There was even the faint stink of the junkie about him. There? Yes, there, that faint odor, is that it? High-tech crematoria, autopsy rooms, dumpsters outside slaughterhouses.
It was obvious Stag Preston had gone in search of artificial stimuli to bring back tumescence to the limp dick of his dead dreams. In the high flights of liquor and junk he was still Stag Preston. On Top. Up There. Pow!
The scars were covered with a heavy layer of No. 2 theatrical makeup, and the hair worn longer over the ears to cover one free-sliding furrow that rode onto the cheek. But the mass of them just under the right ear, covering the underside of the chin, the back of the neck where hair would not grow, these stood out in bold, pink rat-tail relief. Good enough for men with limited budgets. His hair was thinner now, combed over a little, for camouflage.
Stag Preston had healed badly on the surface; how had he done inside?
“What’s shaking, kid?”
The boy was looking at him intently, almost ferociously, with open hunger. “Shelly Morgenstern.” It was a prayer. “Jeezus, it’s you. I thought for, for a minute it was maybe a gag, a thing, y’know, but Jeezus, it’s, it’s you.”
“Yeah.” Shelly laughed nervously. “So how goes it?”
Stag spread his hands like the wings of a small bird. “Not to complain.”
Shelly nodded and waved broadly at the joint around them. “This isn’t much.”
“Not much,” Stag agreed. Then added, “Jeezus, it’s really you.”
It was getting awkward. Shelly had wanted something…he wasn’t quite sure what…a feeling of import? A feeling of some change, something happening that would form a great epiphany to his world-view: see the boy, get a bit more of “the message,” the way it really was. But nothing was happening. Stag was sitting there with a peculiar, almost worshipful look on his face, and it was starting to smell embarrassing. It was like a reunion with an old buddy whose interests are now totally divorced from yours, and the empathy is gone. I
t was absurd. But he was trapped, hooked, there.
“Well, listen,” Shelly said, half-rising, “I’ve got some people down on a promotion, I’ve got to get back to them, so you take it—”
“Hey, now, wait a bit, hey wait.”
Stag was suddenly galvanized, intent on holding this together till it was done; but not yet, wait a bit, come on; just a few more minutes till I get up the nerve. “Listen, I, uh, I want you to hear something. I been training myself, and uh, hey I know—” He rose, looked around, spied the pear-shaped man and yelled over the brassing, booming music of the trio backing the stripper, “—Hey! Mario! Hey, Mario baby, c’mere.”
He sat down, smiling to reassure, a surprise just ahead of us if you’ll sit a minute, huh, just hold on. The pear-shaped maitre d’ put down an empty glass on a passing bus-boy’s tray and maneuvered to their table and waited for Stag’s word. It was obvious he wanted to serve the singer, didn’t feel put upon.
“Uh, hey, Mario, what’s good…give uh, give him the Tornado Special, huh. You like that, you think, Shelly?” He looked appealingly at the publicity man.
Shelly did not want a drink, especially not one of the cloying Southern bourbon drinks with too much mint, too much spice, too much greenery; not even in a hurricane lamp mega-glass with umbrellas. But he nodded a yes.
Mario scuttled off like ambulatory pastry from a cartoon, and Stag grinned with familiarity at Shelly. The alumni in the fraternity house. Unsure, trying to relate, trying to capture a piece of someone else’s past.
“Listen, Shelly, I want to tell you something, y’know.”
He was leaning across the table.
The French cuffs peeping from his sleeves were moist with humid sweat-stain, sootiness, frayed. The links cheap.
Shelly nodded imperceptibly. “What?” he asked.
“Y’know, I’m not finished, Shelly. I mean it. I mean, really. You know when they cut me up they thought I was done, they thought that. But they didn’t know, Shelly. They didn’t know I could come back.
“I can sing, Shelly! I can sing.
“I’m better than ever. You know? I mean, like I sing different, because they cut my cords pretty bad, but I worked out, I sang and I learned to do it all over again. I lived all over for a long time, and I got myself back in shape. I can sing, Shelly, all I need is one damned break, just one little push, one little thing, you know, and I can make it bigger than before.”
What was there to say? What do you tell a blind man? That he can see? Do you tell a leper his toes can be stitched on again, just give me a real big Singer Double-Bobbin? Shelly only nodded and smiled patronizingly, mouthing words like, “Gee, that’s swell, Stag. I’m really happy for you.”
The boy’s expression changed with the instant mercurial instability of the true, practicing paranoid. “So you think I’m bullshittin’ you, huh? You think I’m conning you, trying to make a touch. Well, listen, Big Man, I want you to just stay there. You just sit there. I want you to hear me…just sit…now damn it, sit there, and I’m gonna let you hear if I’m boning you.”
He got up and moved quickly through the tables to the curtained archway, disappeared into it, and Shelly rose to leave fast, and Shelly sat back down heavily, and Shelly waited, because Shelly had to wait, because he had to wait—
Mario brought the drink. He pushed it away, ground out a cigarette butt in the already reeking, filled ashtray; and he lit another, and he waited.
The broad finished suffering.
The lights dimmed and a hollow P.A. voice announced:
“The Rampart Club Is Proud To Introduce That Star Of Stage, Screen, Television And Records, The King Of The Rock’n’Roll Beat, The One, The Only, Special Attraction To The Rampart Club, The One And Only…Stag Preston!”
The spotty applause was suffocated by the imperious comping of the trio, then the spot went on, and it was five and a half years before, the stage of The Palace, in New York, and there he was again.
It was terrifying.
It was the same recurring nightmare.
Stag Preston, with guitar and with face and with the same stance, except now it was more matured, more deliberate. And he began singing.
He had regained his bravado. It was all there, again. The song was something low, something vaguely dirty, with heart and movement, though. Something he was doing specially for Shelly that said, I was at the bottom, and I made the top, and then found out the bottom had been the middle, because then I really hit bottom, and this is what it looks like, from the floor, from the underside. I’ve seen it all, I’ve even eaten the corrupt flesh of it; cupped here in my hands, want a look? Just a peek? All right, here, look!
It was all that, and a great deal more.
It was the voice of Stag Preston, grown larger.
Deeper.
More meaningful, because now it was more than the trickery of someone who has eidetic feelings, who emulates others’ suffering or triumph or courage or cowardice, others’ true emotions. It was something he had been and suffered through, and come out better for having learned.
If anything, Stag Preston was more commanding when he sang.
He can still do it, he can still charm them, Shelly thought, with a flash of sudden fear.
All he needs is a break, one little shove, that’s what he said. Now as a professional talent scout, as a man who knows what will play, can he?
When he was seven years old and his tonsils had been removed, Shelly had been under ether on the operating table and had heard someone say his name, “Shelly,” and in his unconsciousness it had seemed to be reverberating down and down and down a long hall, a corridor, endlessly. It was that way now, as the answer came back to him, up and up that long corridor, lost till now, lost since he was seven, the word of unassailable truth.
And the word was yes. Yes yes yes yes yes…
Over and over again, beginning, in fact, to reverberate within his mind, the answer was unarguably Yes, Stag Preston can do it again. All he needs is that one-handed push.
He is something larger than life when he sings.
Even standing in front of a brain-dead, rowdy, inattentive, hung-over derelict crowd in a shitty strip joint, in front of the roughest audience imaginable—make-out artists, hookers, tourists, winos, psychos, perverts, Shriners, screamers, loud old ladies, deadbeats without honor and drenched in boredom and cynicism—a Roman Coliseum crowd that wanted bare tits, bear-baiting, and disembowelments—he had a potent holding power with his voice. How he had done it, slashed that way, Shelly could not imagine. But he had done it. He had trained himself to sing around the broken areas. He commanded, he ruled, he subjugated that rabble.
Shelly felt his mouth beginning to water. There it was, the power, the inarticulate monarchial power that Stag had always possessed. The rabble listened. No matter how stupid or blasé or tone-deaf, they heard him. Not just between their ears, but in the marrow, in the DNA of dead fingernails, to the roots of their pubic hair. Like a prime number, Stag Preston’s necromancy stood alone, undimmed by space or time or previous condition of servitude. There it was, that damned talent, ability, artistry, conjuration…whatever the hell it was, there it was. And Shelly felt his mouth actually begin to water.
Somehow, by dint of work and sweat and naked rage at having his kingship wrested from him, the naked hunger for revenge, for the sweetness that came only with getting back everything taken from him…and more…a bit more than the best, the top, the ultimate, a bit of lagniappe…Stag Preston had done what legions of Olympic athletes could not do, what armies of showbiz-hungry starlets could not do, what pantheons of rejected gods could not do: he had managed to transcend disaster, had bared his fangs and chewed his way out of defeat, had clubbed and eviscerated and smashed in the skull of the Just Desserts life had visited on him. He had pissed on the floor of Heaven. He had beaten God. He had throttled Justice and all those concepts of evil-gets-its-comeuppance. Stag Preston had managed to train his damaged vocal cords. He had screwed th
e odds and transcended disaster, had shaped his own destiny once again.
He wasn’t as wildly infectious as before, but he wasn’t a kid any more. Shelly watched as that rabble in the strip joint became one with Stag, watched as they paid the price and he owned them.
There wasn’t a sliver of doubt in Shelly’s mind that Stag could be huge again, bigger than before, because not only did he have that genuine magic not even pukey music critics could attack, but now he had the potential for being the Very Essence of The Comeback Kid. His story was sensational. Down, all the way down. Cut and sliced and flushed. But back! Back again and better than before, more mature than before, stronger than before because of his travail, his tragedy, his pitiful fall and determined, anguished rise. Not a sliver of doubt: Stag Preston could be on top again, more powerful and important than before…and all he needed was that one tiny break. That gimme-a-shot that he wanted more than his soul, or his posterity, or a light to guide him through the darkness.
Not a sliver, shard, scintilla of doubt, because Shelly was there seeing how the rabble listened, absorbed, just purely dug it. Fingernails, palates, to the roots of their hair.
Stag could be back…and Shelly could go all the way.
He was one with the rabble, he was part of that single giant ear that was tuned only to Stag Preston, part of that gestalt the singer created when he worked a crowd. Shelly was one with him again, once more in the bear-pit, down there with the rabble that loved Stag, wanted only to be ear-fucked by him till the end of eternity…
And then the Angel of Truth touched Shelly Morgenstern with her magic wand. In a heartbeat, the Good Blue Fairy sprinkled him with mind-awakening dream-dust, and he knew in that instant the true nature of the epiphany he had been seeking.
The rabble.
He had thought of them as the rabble. The herd. The pig crowd that could be bought with a song. He had become one with Stag Preston, indeed. He had thought through Stag’s mind, had seen through Stag’s eyes, had reviled the rest of humanity as the rabble, just as Stag did.