I stop there because I know what that element is, but I don’t know how to write it. It’s something I’ve been craving like a drug since things fell apart with Tania. Adriftica, I think, trying to imagine the boundaries of that country.
Every night I see that thing behind the band, and it’s not a light cue. It’s not a thing the band brings along. The rest of the band just keeps playing, and they grin at Eron, who writhes in front of a door to elsewhere. Every time I see it, I want to run to it, and every time it’s just a drum kit and a brick wall when they stop playing. Mabel dives every night, and half the time she just disappears. The crowd loves it. I don’t. Magic tricks and mirrors, but none of that appears on the bus. I miss how they do things, and no one will tell me.
“It’s only rock & roll, bro,” says the bassist, and I say, “It’s not,” and he looks at me and shakes his shoulders, and for a moment I swear I see a set of dark blue-black wings, but then they’re gone again, and he’s in the tightest pants and a shirt cut to the top of them, his skin glowing a little, like he’s been roaming in the psychedelic pastures of the PNW, like he’s been there too, and I think about asking him if I can score anything, but I don’t do the band’s drugs, and they don’t do mine.
The audiences of kids keep getting bigger.
“How did Akercock start?” I ask the drummer. Drummers are always easier than the rest. They’ll talk. Not that I even know this guy’s name. He changes his mind every time he tells me. Says he can’t really recall, and people’ve called him lots of things.
“Somebody hired us to play a gig,” he says, “and we came out to do it.”
“But how did you start? Before someone hired you, right, you were already a band?”
“Somebody hired us,” the drummer says, “to get rid of some pests. They paid us a lot of money.”
“You were that bad?”
“We were that good,” he says. “Know how hard it is to get rid of pests? This was, what, an industrial moment, sky black with soot, everyone burning coal. We got the pests and took them down.”
I look at him suspiciously, because this is the classic exaggeration of boys who think they’re cool. I’ve seen it before. Mythologizing themselves into two hundred years of history.
“Only problem was, they kept coming back. We took an entire generation of disaster makers under, trying to keep things good, but then a new generation was born, and they kept making the same mess. We can only do so much about the mess, even if it’s been our job to balance things out. Certain point, the mess is too big to balance. Now it’s maybe too late. Things happened, man. We were kids when this started. We had enough energy to fix things. Or, they did, together, before the breakup. Now? I don’t know.”
That gives me something, at least, though it’s not what I wanted.
“So you met when you were all kids?”
“We met a long time ago,” he says. “This is our last tour. We’re looking for someone out here, and once we find that someone, we can go. Old business, man, and not yours.”
“I’m going to make you stars,” I say.
The drummer just looks at me. “We’ve done that before,” he says. “It was lonely out there.”
They don’t need me. The clubs on this leg of the tour are, without notice, arenas full of worshipful teenagers.
“We just want to get done with what we’re doing,” the drummer says. “This place is shit. We’re looking for someone who took off years ago, and everything’s been a disaster since. Look at Eron. He’s so high he can’t even walk. He keeps his revels going here, and it’s fucked things up.”
“What should I call you for this quote?” I ask him.
“Call me the piper,” he says. “Old stories, right?”
“Old stories,” I say, feeling like I’ve strained a muscle in my back. I’m sick of old stories. I want all the new things at once. I want my son here on this bus, to see if he likes these songs. I want my wife, because I know she’d like them.
Every night on this tour, I dream of Tania, who I never deserved. I was a writer and she was something else entirely. I dream of the way she made my heart feel like it was going to burst, the way she and I got married in the middle of the redwoods, before the redwoods died. I remember when guitars were made out of wood. I remember when mushrooms grew out of the dirt, and not out of metal. I remember when she and I got high for fun and not for desperation, listening to records in my old place in San Francisco, before San Francisco fell off the edge of the world and dropped to the bottom of the ocean and Tania went dark. She wouldn’t come out of her room for days. She sat in the closet crying.
That was before our son started to talk. He couldn’t pass for anything other than what he was. There was no way we could put him in school, not without panicking, and she was too scared to leave him alone, so she stopped playing gigs. A couple of years into our marriage, she quit singing. She said it was no use, that everything was ending.
She started wearing snakes on her skull. I noticed that everything was basically invented by the ancient Greeks, and that we were right back there again, rains of frogs and seas full of monsters. The music was the same, I knew it, and when I heard it, I figured I was still part of a long tradition. I got obsessed with Robert Johnson, and with celestial harmonies, with the kinds of mold you could take to make sure you saw God. I mashed that all up with music and magic and wrote a book, won a prize, stood on a stage, and saw my wife in the back of the room with her middle fingers in the air as I made a speech in which I thanked every man in rock, but not her.
Four weeks into the tour I’m no further ahead than I was when I started, sitting in my seat on Akercock’s bus.
No one would blame you, if you weren’t at these concerts, for wondering where the party is, wondering if there’s a party on Earth anywhere now, wondering if everyone’s died and we just keep rolling on. That could happen. But this band plays, and you’re reminded of something older, of the kind of music you heard in the next room when you were a little kid, record player, parents dancing barefoot in the dark.
I call Tania a few more times, and get no one. I take a sip of a beer, and write. I’m losing my rules for what I’ll put on the page. Now it’s the crazy along with the regular road stuff.
One night Mabel scratches a song into the side of a car with her fingernails, and Eron Chaos sings a song so beautiful and poisonous that the back wall of the club shakes and starts to fall, brick by brick, backward, until all we can see is a field of flowers behind the band, and in that field, a whole new audience waiting to listen. Everywhere Akercock tours, there are moments of summer while they play, frosting over as we drive away, and I remember what summer used to be like in America, the way bees orbited drunkenly around the flowers, the way honey dripped from hives.