Читать книгу Hairdresser on Fire - Daniel LeVesque - Страница 10

A few weeks after the last Conference, it was somehow decided that I should be able to attend my first concert, a trip with the boys, chaperoned by a van-driving neighbor. All the kids got to go, I said, and it was KISS, so. My sister was pissed. “Why does he get to gooooo?” I don’t think she’d even seen Foreigner yet. So mad. She called me “hateful” in French. “Heeee gets to go?” She was pointing at me.

“Yuht, because he’s going out with the guys,” my mother said. She made these little ditch attempts, occasional one-offs to see if I wanted to hang out with the guys. Hunting trips, fishing, godforsaken ice races with stupid Boy Scouts. I forget what they called it. Something with Alpine in it, Alpine Derby or something, either way it was freezing, with stupid Boy Scouts competing, and obstacles and other things I hated. Hunting. Me with my dad posing in front of the woodstove — at five a.m., an hour I don’t know unless I hadn’t slept yet, even then — me looking evil and so pissed for being woken up I could kill a pheasant using my eyeballs.

KISS was not something I’d need to be dragged to. I was going. In fact, my mother would have to pry her own eye pencil out of my dead hands, and even then. I was already there, busy in my head planning my outfit. Nobody cared if it was a group of Satanists driving me. It was the ’70s, in a Van. With the boys. I remember the ride, classic ’70s from the movie in your head. Bubble windows, curtains. I shoved myself deep into the bowels of the Chevy Van and bounced on carpet, my sweatshirt getting snagged on the inside of the door. “Shit,” I said.

“What?” said Marty.

“Whassamata, Frank?” said his dad.

“Nothing! I’m fine!” I ripped my sweatshirt from the door and sat up, they turned around and Marty’s dad mumbled something. Probably about me. They all laughed. All I saw was my own bouncing.

The show was held at the Providence Civic Center, where just weeks before I watched Kathryn Kurden working her magic spells on the Charismatics. KISS was going to inhabit the same stage where my head got pushed. This time I wasn’t dressed like a cult kid, in a bright orange shirt with a dove on it. Conversely, I had dressed up for the occasion. With my make-up and talcum powder flaking, I must have looked like a zombie Paul Stanley in Zips, but nobody cared. I fluffed my hair.

Past the red velvet curtains thick as doors, we took our seats. First row balcony, stage left, which was a certain drag for the Ace Frehley fan I was but still not too shabby. As soon as we settled, the boys and the rest of the room disappeared into a swirl of pot smoke, lighters — all those lighters — and the sound of people screaming WE WANT KISS WE WANT KISS like this mob, they were demanding it, all sweaty and swearing and openly puking into their fingers. I was enchanted.

My seat was the last thing I wanted at this tent revival and the lobby was a distant planet. I clung to the metal bar in front of me, waiting. Waiting for the voice. The house lights clacked off and the place went quiet for a second before going apeshit.

You Wanted The Best And You Got The Best: The Hottest Band In The World: KIIIIi-uuSSSS!

The demands were met. KISS appeared from under the stage, trap doors coughing with fog machines, their costumed bodies running back and forth in front of the sign. Oh, the sign, with its giant letters: K-I-S-S-K-I-S-S-KISS-KISS-KISS-K-I-S-S blinking in seizure patterns. Sometimes the lights would be all the way around the edges. Or one letter at a time. Or my favorite, the less common every light on the sign on, where the giant KISS would blind you for a second, blasting so much wattage that when you closed your eyes it still said KISS.

“Detroit Rock City” started and I fell over backwards. In 1978 there was zero regulation on how many explosives a band could have and KISS had a shitload of explosives. Giant flames on both sides of the stage licked the metal ceiling of the Civic Center, heating up my face.

“Hello!” screamed Paul Stanley, looking directly at me, pointing his right index at my face. Push. I needed a barf bag or a diaper, I couldn’t tell. I was coming apart, shaking. The stage was going up and down mad with hydraulics, spirals of white light shooting out of Ace’s guitar. And God of Thunder, with the blood? Oh my God, the blood!

Vibration shook my every cell in harmonic assimilation, synapses making connections that hadn’t existed before the lights came on. People were falling out all around me and I realized, finally, I was on fire. Whatever it was the Charismatics had felt when Kathryn Kurden shuffled across the golden stage, I felt it now. I looked across the flames, and He looked right at me. It was God, in seven-inch leather heels, singing “Do You Love Me?”

“I do,” I whispered, “I do,” deep into the neck of my sweatshirt.

“Thank you!” he said to me. Push. My head rocked back on my neck. “Goodnight!” he shouted to the rest of the crowd.

The house lights came up to twenty thousand crazed teenagers in rubbed-off make-up. I was frozen by the scene, my new people, my new flock. Slow motion showed an eager girl sliding into a pool of puked-up Southern Comfort and Peach Schnapps, landing flat on her back while her asshole boyfriend laughed. She was running towards the front, hoping to be one of the groupies picked by the roadies to be taken backstage to do it with KISS. She probably would have gotten picked, too, she was so metal, but she never made it past the puddle, her cheap pumps snagging an undigested piece of filet o’fish that slid her legs out from under her. She jumped up, her perfectly big hair flattened to the back of her head, soaked with cold puke and warm Budweiser, the drip drip drip from the nest of her frizz pouring into the bowl of her cowl-neck sweater.

Nobody prayed over her, nobody called on the Infant Christ to heal her. Instead the entire balcony laughed, hoping another person would fall victim to the puke slick before security made them leave.

The parking lot was all blasting KISS, puke girl was laid out in the back of a tricked-out Mustang, and there wasn’t a cop in sight and no Kumbaya. I rode this wave of Rock and Roll chaos all the way home in the Van, now knowing the truth: that I was good, I was part of something that I could feel. Driving home, I could still feel the heat of the flames from my spot in the cold van, and it still said KISS on my eyelids when I blinked. Marty’s dad could kiss my ass for all I cared. I wasn’t scared anymore. Every bump in the freeway made me rise up a little more and I knew I had been saved.

When I got home I was dazed, like I had aged ten years. I put on a record and went to sleep. Either the excitement or the healing was keeping me up. After the record was done it didn’t pick up at the end, the needle repeating in the wide circle of grooves ph-lup, ph-lup, ph-lup. Sinking into the hum the skull makes when the ears are blocked, I pressed hard against my pillow. The hum began to morph into a whooshing, a new sound coming from outside my head, a sonic whoosh from the backyard. Not a whoosh like the wind, more of a backwards whoosh, like a vacuum.

Beyond the red shades that covered my window came a blink, then a solid light, like a streetlight coming on. Peeking through the side I saw a figure in my yard, floating a foot above the ground between the bulkhead and the shed. A swirl of flames with the outline of a body visible through the whiteness, the hands down at the side, palms out. The face on the body was that of Ted Neeley’s in Jesus Christ Superstar, only it didn’t sing or smash anything but just floated there, burning.

I couldn’t break contact with the glass of my window, warm to the touch. The vision didn’t say anything to soothe me; it was busy being a vision. My fear grew as it stretched out its arms, I wanted to shove my head down but I couldn’t move. I had seen enough passion plays and movies to know what was coming next, with the nails. My throat closed up around my scream and I forced myself down, the surface of my bed shaking along with my body. I fell to sleep.

In the morning my red shades were still drawn, the sun behind them smacking filtered red light onto my walls like any other sunny day. The faces on my KISS wall posters hadn’t changed. Paul Stanley was still beautiful, his one-starred eye telling me it was all a dream, like the UFO dreams and the Nuclear War ones.

Examining my hands for stigmata, I noticed half–moon shaped slices in the center of my palms, where the nails were driven. All oxygen left me as I waited for the holes to reopen and the blood to resume its flow. My nervous hands balled and I saw my fingernails slide perfectly into the grooves they had cut while I slept. Another mystery explained.

I wondered if all of the people who claimed to have received holy stigmata were only like me, stressed out to the point that their own fingernails ripped holes through their hands while they slept. There was no blood on the sheets, the impression of my fingernails fading as quickly as the memory of a dream. I rolled out of my waterbed and ate Count Chocula for breakfast which tasted the same with no holes in my hands (I tried to pour the milk through my palms, to be sure). I never told anyone about the emergence of the Risen Christ from the gypsy-moth laden lawn of my stolen childhood. Having visions didn’t seem very Rock and Roll.