Ugly Behavior (27 page)

There were three or four stones the size of boulders, probably
several tons apiece. He imagined they must have come from some place deep
underground, where everything was larger than life. These were rounded, with
only slight depressions. A half-dozen stones one step down in size were much
more angular, with many sharp edges, as if they had broken off larger
stones.
 
The scale of stones went
down from there. To smaller rounded pieces that still might crush a body completely
if dropped a distance. To large rocks for pounding a skull in. To fragments
sharp and dangerous as ancient arrowheads. Down to water-smooth pebbles ready
for a slingshot, the size of harsh thoughts worn from repetition.

Every time Carter came here, he would stare at the stones for
hours, seeking some sort of summation which would keep them solid in his mind
forever. But stones were hard to define. Loose estimations of size, looser
descriptions of shape.

All stones, he theorized, had come down from the original stone,
the huge mass that had given birth to everything by destroying itself. All
glory, all life came from this unreasoning, dead stone. After thrashing about
in cold silence, it had awakened from its long dream as a world, lived on by
these parasitic creatures called human beings.

The history of this original stone, as with all stones, must have
been a history of
splittings
and fallings apart: slab
became boulder and boulder became stone and stone became pebbles rolled and
smoothed by the outer lips of an enormous sea.

Carter played close attention to how soil filled the cracks in the
stone, plants growing where once it had been impervious. This, he concluded,
was how life first began in the midst of cold, hard death.

The remainders of this great original stone, the slabs and peaks of
it, became the distant mountains, and were used to build the temples of human
beings.

Stone constantly reminds us of our own deaths, he thought.

Watching the pebbles gathered about the bases of the larger
stones, trailing off into grass and dirt, always filled Carter with a nameless
anxiety. Separate from its larger pieces, stone drifts, wanders, moved by
people and scattered by the wind. The center does not hold. Anywhere.

The stones were unyielding, blind, and despite their constant
exposure to all weathers, always dry.

Each time he came here, he walked slowly up the hill, his chest
gradually filling with stones. A fresh body in his arms. Sometimes the skin of
the body would be bruised, if his knife had not been efficient enough, and he’d
had to use a stone to remind the flesh of both its origins and its destiny.
Sometimes he might try to press a stone into the victim’s head, pounding until
the skull broke and the stone lodged there like a jewel. The pieces of skull
themselves were like poor cousins to stone, a reminder of how far human beings
had declined in their devolution.

Over the years his eyes had hardened, gone to stone. His tongue
had the stillness of stone. But, of course, the world was stone, and more and
more he felt a part of it.

He would lay the body down among the larger stones, then pick up a
fist-sized piece, the size and shape of a brain. Holding the stone in his hand
was like holding the world.

He thought to tell the stones about the dreams and aspirations,
the life history of his latest victim, but the language of the stones had no
words for such things. Instead he would stoop and fill his victim’s mouth with
the pebbles he found.

The stones grew harder the longer he looked. They thrived on the
intensity of his gaze. He would touch them worshipfully. Touching stone, his
fingers imitated its stiffness, its need to be all in one place.

Each time he would bend down to kiss his victims, but their mouths
would be filled with stone.

Sometimes, if he stared long enough, he found he could climb inside
the stones, despite their increased hardness.

Inside the stones it was quiet. Inside the stones he could lie
down and watch the pictures moving slowly across their inner walls.

There were always pictures of children, and lovers he would never
have, and more victims he would desperately try to bring closer with his knife.
Sometimes he regretted loving his victims so much that he had to kill them,
although he wasn’t sure where such guilt came from.

All flesh was stone in any case, only in its initial soft phase.
And everyone knew it was impossible to kill a stone.

“Sing
motherfuckin
’ ‘Ugly Behavior’!
Sing
motherfuckin
’ ‘Ugly Behavior’!” The crowd was
screaming it now, but JK didn’t care. Let them scream their lungs out. It was
his show, and the crowd could hate him as much as he hated them, he didn’t
care. He decided when he sang what, when he did what, walk off the stage or
give them the sickest show they’d ever seen, the real show. He got to decide.
It was the first thing in his life he could say that about.

Hard to tell how many of them were out there. The lights were up
too bright. He couldn’t see much more than pieces of faces past the front row,
but there was definitely some young stuff out there. Like that one, the blonde,
how the fuck old was she? She looked like a baby.

When JK glanced down at his arms and legs, he thought he looked
like an over-exposed black-and-white photograph. The scars on his arms were
like ink lines. He danced and pranced, wishing for a strobe light.

Back behind him, Dean worked on a sloppy drum roll. His drumming
got worse every week, not that it mattered much. JK had told him more than once
to cut out the stupid drum rolls—they sounded like Dean was making fun of
him, though JK wasn’t clear exactly how. Maybe tomorrow night he’d pull Dean
off his drum kit and kick his ass. He’d fuck him up good. The crowd would love
that. Jack and Lee wouldn’t interfere—it was about all they could do to
hold onto their guitars.

The place smelled like shit, but that was a good thing. Made JK
feel right at home, knee deep in the shit and ugly.

“There’s just no call for all that ugly behavior,” was what JK’s
grandma always said. But JK’s grandma didn’t understand rock and roll. JK had
made his living for ten years behaving ugly, and though it had been mostly
small-time gigs, cassettes and then CDs from small, independent labels, a few
paintings sold to hardcore fans, it had been good enough. Some years about half
of it went up his nose, but that was okay. Business expense. Nobody ever said
being an artist was the easy way.

 
Oh, there was plenty
of “call” for it, all right.
 
All JK
had to do was look at tonight’s crowd,
beggin
’ for
‘Ugly Behavior’. But he never argued the point with her. A woman of her
generation wasn’t supposed to understand—that was part of it and always
had been. Not doing what they told you to do and
stickin
’
it up their asses and speaking to your own generation, although most of JK’s
fans were a lot younger, with a sprinkling of guys his age who he seriously
doubted were true fans—not that any of that crap mattered—but who
were mostly into it for the opportunity at underage pussy.

Not that they’d get much—bunch of fat pricks in glasses
wearing black JK T-shirts too tight across the belly. Tonight they were the
ones pushing up to the front of the stage, their damn glasses shiny like
bottles, blinding him under these bright lights. What the hell did they know
about kicking open the doors of perception?

No real loyalty there, or anywhere, for that matter. Every fan JK
ever met was a liar. “JK, you’re the shit!” the guy in the green T-shirt spat,
eyes rolling off the top of his head.

“JK, you say the truth like nobody can!” some fat chick
whined.
 

And “JK, we love you man!” Somebody always said that, a few dozen
times a night. He hated these cock suckers. But what was he going to do? They
kept him in beer and drugs.

“You suck!” A guy after his own heart. But even that guy, did he
really think JK sucked, or was he just saying it to entertain his buddies?

And there was that blonde. Fuck! She was just a kid—this was
no place for kids! Where were her
fuckin
’ parents?

JK didn’t always get along with his old granny, but she’d been the
only one he could trust to say what she really felt. She’d raised him when his
mom ran off at sixteen, seventeen whatever that scum bag whore. He did owe his
mom one thing, though, the knowledge that you got nothing left to lose which
every artist needs if he’s going to do real work and not just what’s safe and
profitable. It was like in ‘Ugly Behavior,’ when he yelled “If you
gonna
be real you
gotta
do
something ugly!” and he sang that line about ten or twelve times in a row,
depending on how he was feeling that night, and the crowd yelled it right along
with him, until at the end he pulled out his dick and started pissing on the
stage, or if he was already hard by then he might jack off onto the front row,
and by that time the crowd was going crazy, yelling and screaming, because, of
course, that’s why they came in the first place.

Each night he did something a little different with ‘Ugly
Behavior,’ something spontaneous based on his reading of the crowd. Tonight he
was already well into the show and he hadn’t decided yet what he was going to
do.

The really creative part was choosing the ugly thing he was going
to do in that last minute or two, and that’s what was so great about live
performance. It took a lot of self-discipline, though, to get it all timed out
right, and still stay spontaneous. Any jackass could masturbate on stage—it
took an artist to know when to come.

He looked around for the kid, didn’t see her. Maybe her parents
got some sense finally, got her outta there. Motherfuckers trying to save on
babysitters.
Motherfuckin
’ scum.

Inspired, JK started into ‘Scum Bag Whore,’ his mouth stretched as
wide as he could make it. He stuck the black ball of the microphone in as far
as he could, practically swallowing it, making a gargling noise after every
“scum.” One night he had almost swallowed it, running across the stage with it
in his mouth, tripping on a cord. It had made him gag, and he’d thrown up on
stage. Everybody’d thought it was part of the show. Stupid fuckers. He hadn’t
been able to sing for a week after that.

The stupid pricks in front kept yelling for ‘Ugly Behavior,’ louder
and louder until you couldn’t hear ‘Scum Bag Whore,’ you pretty much couldn’t
hear anything but them. He cleared his throat and hawked a
loogey
in their direction but the motherfuckers just laughed.

The main thing was, he had to hold off doing ‘Ugly Behavior’ until
at least near the end of his first set. Most places there wasn’t going to be a
second set because either the fans got too rowdy or JK got too rowdy, somebody
got hurt, somebody got offended, somebody got stabbed, the police were called,
or the management chickened out even though they all knew what JK did before
they hired him, hell, wasn’t that why they’d hired him? It was all a bunch of
happy horse shit.

He started singing the opening to ‘My Prick Wears A Necklace,’ the
serious part, where he’s singing about the diagnosis, got about ten lines in,
when somebody threw a bottle up on stage. He picked it up, started to throw it
back into the crowd, but stopped himself. If he did that they’d shut the show
down for sure, and he didn’t like leaving the stage without singing ‘Ugly
Behavior’ first. And the time wasn’t quite right.

If JK didn’t wait for the right time to sing ‘Ugly Behavior,’ if
he gave in to all those fuckers who’d been yelling at him since the opening
number “Sing
motherfuckin
’ ‘Ugly Behavior’!” then
they’d be getting what they paid for too early and they wouldn’t much want to
listen while he finished his set they’d just want him to do something new,
something worse and sometimes things just got out of hand, or more out of hand
than they were supposed to.

That was pretty much what went wrong that time outside Memphis at
the Headlights Roadhouse. He’d been swallowing everything anybody gave him that
day, all kinds of pretty pills and sweet liquors, and he did a couple of lines
before going on stage, and then they were handing him beers on stage which for
the most part he spat back out at them but he drank a lot of it, too.

Then they started in on that ‘Ugly Behavior’ shit, that chanting
“We want ‘Ugly Behavior’!” shit halfway into the first song, ‘Ice Pick In The
Head.’ It was pissing him off because they weren’t listening. A bunch of drunk
college guys down in front were the ones that started it—they’d brought
dates. He’d seen it before—the guy brings a girl promising her a freak
show which JK could pretty much be counted on to deliver. Well, let the
motherfucker feel superior, as long as he paid for two tickets.

It must have been the combination of everything he’d taken that
day, plus the hot lights and just the natural agitation that came with
performing. Suddenly JK felt warm and wet in the crotch. He wasn’t sure what it
was at first—you felt all kinds of sensations on stage—it wasn’t
unusual for JK to perform with a hard-on, or with his clothes sweated through,
or with his body reeking of spilt beer or jack d. Then he smelled it—JK
had just pissed himself. It wasn’t intentional, and that was what bothered
him—it would have been okay if it had been part of the act. It being
unintentional made him feel like some
pissy
old man.