Praise for The Divine Dantes: Squirt Guns in Hades (Book I in the Infernal Trilogy)
“[A] lively and good-natured work with a great deal of humor and wordplay . . ..” —Publisher's Weekly Reviewer
“[R]eminds me a little of the fun I find in Carl Hiaasen or Christopher Moore, but he definitely has his own vibe . . . .” —Breakthrough Novel Award Expert Reviewer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
The Divine Dantes: A Prologue
BEA BROKE UP the band.
Serious. She did. It’s easy to do when there are only two people in it and one leaves. No big deal, right? But it was one of America’s great rock bands!
Anyone got a tissue?
It all started around the clubs and back alleys of Upstate New York. If you go there today you’ll hear rumors of the band that used to play in the area. There’s bound to be confusion over the actual name of the band and how big the lead singer’s boots were and why the band drove around in a meter maid car.
But hey.
Where there is no confusion, like I already mentioned, is that Bea broke up the band. Remember that. No matter how many wild and outlandish stories (rock-n-roll stories to the nth degree, maybe even to the zth degree they’re so good) you’re going to read.
It was Bea. It really was.
I’m here to confirm all of the stories are true. Even those that are false are true in their own way. The band rocked. Straight up. I was at every single one of their concerts. Granted, there weren’t very many of them. About as many as Bea has strings on her Stratocaster. But I attended everyone nonetheless.
My miserable name is Edward T. Nad.
I was one of the two members of said band that rocked. It’s brief—but glorious—history started to end when I pulled up to Bea’s apartment with palpitations in my chest because our biggest gig was at hand. I felt sick. I wondered if I could even get out of the car. I honked. Well, I tried to honk but my horn wasn’t working in the meter maid car. So I waited for my stomach to calm down and got out. Somehow I made it to the front door and figured out how to knock on it.
“Eddie!” She threw her arms around me as soon as she opened it. “I’m so nervous.”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah, right. Then why is your cheek quivering?”
“That’s me winking at you.”
She smiled and we headed along the sidewalk. Bea’s guitar was strapped to her back. She had her trademark pigtails tied off on the sides. They were a work of chaotic art the way she shook them while standing at the mike shredding on her guitar. It was enough to drive a guy crazy, especially from behind where I was pummeling the drums. That was pretty much it for our band. Electric guitar. Drums. Shrieking. Whorls of pigtails. What else do you need? Did I mention big boots?
My meter maid car was parked a few spaces down from the apartment door. From the side it resembled a guitar pick on wheels (if you ask Bea). First thing I did was trick it out with subwoofers and chrome wheels (had to buy four, even though it has three wheels, because the guy told me they were only sold in sets of four and that’s the kinda screwed up world we live in). It’s a two-seater. I mounted a skull (that matches my belt buckle) on the front bumper. It was the scariest meter maid car on the planet and still is.
“The Deathmobile,” Bea said.
“A vehicle the size of a frozen fish triangle that goes twenty miles an hour—tops—is unlikely to kill anyone even if they are run over by it. It’s actually the Lifemobile.”
Bea slid in the passenger seat, leather squeaking against pleather. The front seat was still torn along the front despite Bea asking me to fix it a hundred times. Reddish foam poked out when she sat down.
“It’s sticking its tongue out at you,” I said.
“Or trying to lick me.”
We both said, “Ewwww!”
We drove twenty minutes (that’s five minutes in real vehicle time) to our gig. Bea was nervous, not me. Finally, we pulled up to the curb in front of Hard’s Speakeasy. Bea read aloud from the wipeboard in the street window. “Playing Tonite - Hallelujah & the Southern Gothic!! 2 fur 1 drafts and wells.”
“That’s awesome,” I said.
“Thought our name was Wroth? Did you change our band name without telling me?”
“Must be a typo.”
“Suuuure. Hallelujah & the Southern Gothic is only ten or twenty letters away from Wroth.”
“If you put thirty monkeys in a room with typewriters they’ll eventually crank out the works of Shakespeare. I bet it’d only take them a week to change Wroth into Hallelujah & the Southern Gothic.”
“How long did it take you, Monkey Boy?” Bea asked.
I hopped out of the car and immediately heard, “Uh, I was just leaving. I’m going right now. Right this very second, sir. Let me just get inside and start it up.”
There was a dude standing there in jeans and cowboy boots, waving his hands. Stitched patterns ran across his chest. His huge belt buckle may’ve been a wagon wheel in another life.
I decided to play along. I walked over to the parking meter between our cars and peered down. “Time has expired,” I announced in a gruff voice. “There will be civil fines and repercussions to last generations.”
“I said I was just leaving. Please don’t give me a ticket.”
I rubbed my chin for a moment. Bea was standing behind the cowboy, grinning. The little, triangular, three-wheeled meter maid car brought abject fear on city streets and I was just the kinda guy who would take full advantage of it. It’s worth driving just for the shock value alone. I got my two grand back out of it months ago from sheer devilish pleasure.
I heard the cowboy’s boots click together as he stood up straight. He was still explaining. “It just expired. Just seconds before you pulled up. I don’t know what happened.”
“I have ways of knowing, right down to the very second of expiration. The municipality knows all. It’s a wireless thing.”
“No. Please sir.”
Bea pointed at her wrist and I knew it was time to go inside and get set up. “Alright. I’ll let it slide this time, but do not let the meter expire again.”
“I won’t. I won’t. Believe you me.”
“Thanks, Tex.”
Bea was already unloading our instruments from the trunk. I helped her with the last snare drum. The back bumper that had stickers plastered across it: Arcade Fire, NIN, M83, Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Dead Milkmen. Bea commented on my latest (Wolfmother) as I shut the groaning hatch that protested on its thirty-year-old hinges.
We muscled our equipment up to the swinging front door.
In that moment, us standing there under the flashing neon lights of Hard’s Speakeasy, we both locked on each other’s eyes and exhaled. Bea’s were a calming sea of green. For a split second I got lost in them and right after that I felt her hands clamp onto my shoulders.
“You ready for this?”
“Sure am, Hallelujah. But is the world ready for Hallelujah and the Southern Gothic?”
“I thought you were Hallelujah,” she laughed.
I confessed that I would be feeling better if we had played for any audience larger than the Garden Nursing Home of Greater Florence or any audience with an average age less than seventy before this gig.
Bea gave me a kiss on the cheek and went inside. I struggled moving the drum set through
the door, piece by piece. A rockstar doing manual labor. Not one person on the sidewalk asked for my autograph or offered to help. The indignity of it all.
I was jostling the kick drum from the sidewalk when I noticed a knitting store next to our venue. There was a banner tacked to the front door: I reed—laagh—niit.
“Well I sneeze—eat—drum,” I mumbled on my way by.
My last trip to the car was to get the cymbals that were perched on a stand I had made from PVC. When I clanged inside with them I noticed Bea off to the right. She was talking to an impish Italian with long sideburns who she introduced as Gustavo Hardente. He wore a pinstriped suit and obviously owned the joint by the bling-bling on his wrist and fingers. I was pretty sure he had ties to the mafia so I was nice to him.
“Where’s the rest of your band?”
“Just us,” Bea said with a shoulder shrug. “We’re twice as nice.”
“I play drums and Bea here plays guitar