Shuteye for the Timebroker (10 page)

The only thing missing that day was experience. Little Sister’s voice was still too new, untouched by real sadness or doubt, pain or heartache, to make her a real queen of the blues.

But that soon changed. Right about the same time as Little Sister’s body.

Little Sister seemed to grow up overnight. The singing must have released all her hormones in a surging flood. Somatic changes followed hard on the musical ones. From out of nowhere, as if her body were absorbing substance from the music, she developed Earth Mother hips and tits, an ace pair of the latter, visions of which would send more than one spurned high school classmate home to hump the bed.

There was a famous picture of Little Sister from later in her life, wearing nothing but several long chains of beads, her glasses, and a goofy smile. Her belly was like a pillow beckoning you to rest your head on it. And maybe it was only sweat, but there seemed to be a drop of moisture exuding from each big dark nipple that looked suspiciously like Southern Comfort. But that part comes later …

Well, as soon as Little Sister quit looking so little, boys began to do her wrong. She had a trusting heart and a bottomless need to be loved. The guys could never see Little Sister as an individual. To most, she was sheer cosmic archetype, a red-hot small-town mama who liked sex and could sing the paint off the wall. Her musical talents added some cachet to her girlfriend credentials. At first, so did her libido. But after a while, whatever guy was currently squiring Little Sister around would begin to make excuses not to see her anymore. It seemed Little Sister had made the cardinal mistake of liking sex too much for a woman. She scared guys with her appetites. They’d try to get out of bed after an all-night marathon and Little Sister would haul on their shirttails or some appropriate portion of their anatomy and drag them back. Guys only took this treatment for so long, and Little Sister couldn’t change. After a while, there got to be a saying in her hometown: “I got these blisters from Little Sister.” No one would go out with her anymore. That was when she decided to split.

Little Sister had started smoking by this time. It had roughened her voice in an intriguing way. But that instrument still hadn’t reached the peak it would soon attain.

Little Sister was living in a midsize nowhere city, singing in a dive for fifteen dollars a night, when she met Bobby M. Handsome and affable, he was the bartender of the joint. He and Little Sister hit it off. There was more chemistry in their relationship than there was at Dow Labs. Little Sister was happy.

One night between sets, Little Sister, hanging with her man while he worked, noticed Bobby pouring amber liquid from a curious bottle. No matter how many shots came out, the level of booze in the bottle stayed the same. Little Sister asked for an explanation. Bobby had none. He told her it was an anomaly he had discovered one day, an inexplicable thing, a quirk of the cosmos, like the one factory-standard lightbulb that just wouldn’t die. The bottomless bottle had simply arrived one day from the distillery with the rest. He saved it for special customers. Now he poured Little Sister a shot.

She had never tasted anything so good. Despite the familiar label, this wasn’t the same liquor she had tried once before. It seemed to sit in her belly like molten love.

Bobby noticed right away how Little Sister reacted, and put the bottle away. But it was too late; she was hooked. And, after a few months, the magic liquor had cured her already formidable vocal apparatus into an instrument that could produce a unique, head-turning, heart-stopping sonic barrage. When she got up onstage to sing, it didn’t matter that she had spent most of the day in an alcoholic haze.

And when Bobby tried to wean her from the bottle, she slid it into her bag one night along with her few clothes and left him, not without a tear or two that would later show up, transmuted, in her songs.

After that it was a short ride to the top.

Once, Little Sister almost died from an overdose of some meaner drug. But a last instinctive pull on the magic flask had brought her back, to keep on shouting and hollering her soul out in great raw gobs …

* * *

Now, despite parallel careers in the same business, Slowhand and Little Sister had never once occupied the same stage. It was said that they simply couldn’t. Not out of competitive mean-spiritedness, but simply because they were each too huge, too titanic a natural force. People still spoke about a famous incident, when their tours had accidentally intersected at O’Hare airport. The rivets had begun to pop from both planes before the pilots were alerted to taxi farther apart …

It didn’t seem likely, given this natural barrier, that Slowhand and Little Sister would ever knowingly work together. There was too much at risk.

But unknowingly—well, that was another story …

* * *

Slowhand was sitting alone at the dark bar of a sleazy cavern of a club called Crossroads, waiting to go on during an open-mike night. He was clean of junk for once, he had shaved his beard, and he was without his entourage. No one, not the owner or the patrons, knew who he was. Or if they guessed, they were all too polite or awed to speak to him. Careful to keep his dark glasses on, he hoped it was true ignorance. Because Slowhand had reached a point he had reached several times before. He was sick of himself, sick of being Slowhand, sick of mounting the stage with his enthusiastic reception guaranteed. It was all a tremendous bore sometimes, a royal pain in the ass. You wondered if they even heard the playing, or if it was just a reaction to his legendary presence. And then there was the money. The money distorted everything. Every now and then he had to get away, to find out if he could still cut it as an unknown, to discover again what the music had once meant to him.

Nursing a beer, Slowhand waited for the inept act onstage to finish. He spotted the owner coming across the floor toward him. There was a woman on his arm.

Slowhand’s guitar, resting on the floor and leaning against his leg, let out a raw amplified squeal without being touched. Slowhand felt a quiver in his gut. He knew who that was holding the owner’s arm. And he knew that even across the room, she knew, too.

Little Sister had shaved her head like a punk, and substituted contacts for her trademark wire-rims. Always known as a natural chick, she had put on too much makeup, black encircling her eyes and orange on her lips. But there was no hiding her identity as it came roaring down an invisible channel into Slowhand’s groin.

The owner and Little Sister came up to within a yard of Slowhand and stopped. It was as close as they could get. Slowhand felt like he was being torn apart, atom by atom. Judging from her face, he knew that Little Sister was going through the same thing.

It was all Slowhand could do to pay attention to the owner’s voice.

“We had more performers show up tonight than we counted on,” said the owner, looking a little baffled at his inability to get inside the maelstrom of forces surging between Slowhand and Little Sister. “You two are gonna have to go on together. Work something out. Be ready in half an hour.” Then he left.

“Funny meeting you here,” said Slowhand between gritted teeth.

“Just had to get away,” said Little Sister. “This seemed like a place I could be free. You know how it is.”

“Yeah,” said Slowhand, “I know.” He clutched the neck of his hellish guitar for comfort. It squirmed like an electric eel in his grip. Little Sister took a bottle out of her rear jeans pocket, uncapped it, and swigged. The level didn’t diminish.

Glasses were starting to hop around on the bar, and bottles to shake, rattle, and roll. A lightbulb flared and popped. Drinkers clutched their drinks nervously, picked shards of glass from their hair, and resolved that this would be the last belt for the night.

“Well,” said Slowhand, “I guess we’d better blow. So much for a night out.”

“I ain’t ready to leave,” said Little Sister defiantly. “I come for some release.”

“What else we gonna do?”

Little Sister hooked her thumbs in her belt loops and tugged the waist of her jeans down a little. “Maybe we can defuse some tension before we hit the stage. A little before-play foreplay, if you know what I mean.”

Slowhand held his right hand up, fingers outspread, then slowly cracked all five knuckles without obvious effort. “I’m game if you are, Little Sister.”

There was a dressing room in the back of the club, its walls covered with graffiti, its floor littered with empty bottles. The stained couch with springs poking through its cushions was occupied by a few local guys and girls when Slowhand and Little Sister entered.

“Clear out, kids,” said Slowhand. “Me and the lady want some privacy.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

In answer, Slowhand lightly strummed his guitar, evoking a piercing wail of feedback that went on and on. Simultaneously, Little Sister opened her mouth and released a raw Valkyrie’s scream. When the kids took their hands down from their ears, there was blood on their palms.

When Slowhand and Little Sister were alone, Little Sister said, “We don’t have time tonight for no three hours of your diddlin’. Not that you could do it to me anyway.”

“Well, that remains to be seen,” drawled Slowhand. “But I’ll just have to settle for making you come harder than you ever done before.”

“You just better be grateful you don’t pick that guitar with that big boner you’re showing, ’cuz it’s gonna be mighty sore soon.”

Slowhand set his guitar down on a shelf, and Little Sister put her bottle down beside it. The talismans were wreathed in a mutual nimbus, a heavy corona of visible manna.

Separated from their familiars, the two performers found they could make contact.

“I put a spell on you, woman.”

“You won’t be too proud to beg in just a minute, boy.”

Then Slowhand and Little Sister were out of their clothes and on the couch.

When Slowhand entered Little Sister, the club’s entire electrical system went up in frying insulation and sour smoke.

That’s why no one ever saw exactly what went on in that dressing room, nor who, if either one, could be called the winner of the contest, if contest it was.

When they were done, and lying still a minute, Little Sister said, “Sometimes I get real sick of keepin’ on keepin’ on.”

“I hear you, Little Sister.”

“But if I was ever gonna go out of this world, it would have to be with a bang.”

“Like with me, tonight.”

“Yeah, like with you, tonight …”

* * *

Half an hour later, well after midnight, the demigods emerged. The club called Crossroads had filled up by word of mouth. Their faces lit by candles, the crowd waited breathlessly. When Slowhand and Little Sister appeared, there was a muted whisper that grew to a rafter-rattling roar. Slowhand and Little Sister ascended the stage. Slowhand beckoned imperiously to a couple of the musicians who had been playing earlier. Timorously, the drummer and piano player climbed onstage.

Up front, Little Sister said, “Welcome to our farewell concert, folks. We’re gonna play you a few little numbers now.” Even without a microphone, Little Sister’s voice filled the club.

Slowhand pretended to tune up, trying to reassure the other musicians. The drummer’s sticks shook in his hands; the keyboard man was wiping sweat from his brow.

Deferentially, Slowhand launched first into one of Little Sister’s standards, and she began to sing.

The two mortals sitting in were instantly infused with borrowed skill. They began to play better than they ever had in their lives.

Rust began to flake off the ceiling. No one noticed.

Little Sister finished singing. The crowd clapped for five minutes straight. Then Slowhand launched into one of his own tunes, Little Sister taking over the vocals he had so often sung. They locked eyes across the dim stage. Both felt completely fulfilled, for the first time in their lives. There was nowhere else to go.

A ceiling beam crashed to the floor at the rear of the room, mashing a dozen mesmerized spectators. Slowhand and Little Sister knew it was time.

From the depths of her bowels, Little Sister pulled up the roots of her sad life and distilled it all into a wordless ululation. Slowhand’s fingers accelerated until the strings on his living guitar grew red-hot and glowed in the dimness, before snapping. Plaster crumbled, steel snapped, bricks popped.

And that’s how, together, by the combination of the two, Little Sister and Slowhand brought down the house.

In the mid-1980s, my partner, Deborah Newton, got an interesting job: she became a freelance editor at
Vogue Knitting
magazine. This assignment took her into New York City three days a week; I tagged along. While poor Deborah slaved away, I used the time to roam the city, familiarizing myself with its every nook and cranny, at least insofar as humanly possible. My map of Manhattan in particular was soon threaded with inky lines charting my aleatory progress on foot. And of course, I rode the subways often as well.

I generally never tried to write in the hotel room or in cafés, preferring my home environment, as I still do. But the story that follows is the lone exception to that statement. This tale seemed most susceptible to composition while still environed in that haunted city.