In my head I can hear perfect music, but only sometimes. The first time I was five, at the dentist. A big day: first cavities (three of them; I couldn't stand the taste of toothpaste), first drugs (sweet nitrous oxide from a nose mask), and the first sour taste of the drill. It bored into my head with a spectacular flash of blue that leapt like a gas flame, and the noise that whined through my jaw to my ears dropped and modulated with each wintry pull of gas until it was low shimmering drone that rolled under me like a highway. And the wind that channeled through the dry bones of my skull finally blew me into the arctic, all pure white ringing light.

The last time I heard the music in its full bloom was with you, when you broke my nose for me. I am a stupid, stupid boy. My reasons for needing to remember you are as pointless to explain as the reasons for any of the other things I... (more...)

---

There was no contact. He was hard, or hard enough anyway, and he was inside her. He had his arms around her; their tongues worked expertly together. She groaned on cue, and thrust her hips to meet his. But there was no contact. The whole thing was a lifeless minuet performed by skilled dancers. It was sex for Buzz Garret and Elena Garret.

David Letterman was in the room. The TV was still on, in the background, but the sound was off. The only light in their bedroom was videolight, shape-shifting in pixel colors and shadow. Garret ejaculated, and thought of a line from a Lou Reed song: Something flickered and was gone . . .

Afterward, Elena went to the bathroom. He heard the faint plastic rattling that meant she was getting a prescription bottle. Taking a Xanax.

He thought: How did we get this way? Is it Elena? It's me as much as her. She's a bit more openly nasty sometimes, is all. She can't blame me... (more...)

---

The curl of blue smoke reminded him of the stage, but this smelled saccharine-bitter while the dry-ice machine filled a club with a wet biting acid stench. This was only one more stage, no more. And Tim McKeon had been on enough of them he reminded himself, toured Europe and the whole U.K. and North America.

He shouldn't be afraid any more. The necromantic ritual to call up the ghost of his favorite writer was really just the creation of his imagination. There wouldn't even be a crowd watching. Not like when he played death music in the late night clubs for children with white painted faces and black-rimmed eyes, when he was somewhere between god and angel.

This was just one more piece of spectacle, cribbed from a book about ritual magic he had picked up more to impress people at the club than to actually read. But maybe the whole occult ceremonial would be the stimulant to get his subconscious on track on time. Something had to help. Nothing else had... (more...)

---

Somehow it seems wrong to me that having sold my screenplay means I can afford to go to the dentist. Writing the screenplay was fun even if the cross-country drive and the irritating Hollywood parties weren't. Going to the dentist, now that is something I should get paid a lot for enduring. Scripting a science fiction spectacular which was to star one of my favorite actresses, now that is not something that should put six figures in my bank account.

I contemplated this injustice as I waited in the oral surgeon's office. I'd gone for so long without dental care while I was working on the screenplay, making it perfect. I was aware at the time that the pain in my mouth had become just a constant in my life, but it wasn't really a thing. You can get used to anything. Julie offered to front me the money to go and get it taken care of, but I didn't want to sponge off of her. So I let it go and... (more...)

---

You probably know him from his solo career, rather than what came first. Before the platinum years, Wesley Acton was in a more theatrical band called False Witness. They had all the cheesy nineties stuff — devil worship, Charles Manson samples, on-stage whippings and all sorts of weird fetishistic ritualism ... or maybe it was ritualistic fetishism. Whichever. At any rate, they had the necessary stage presence and they were good too. I mean, really good.

The night that it either all came together or all fell apart (depending upon your perspective), Wes was in no mood for a woman. They'd just done two nights in Chapel Hill and he'd convinced himself that he kind of liked the girl he'd hooked up with there — delicate little Goth creature, not his usual type. Maybe he actually did like her or maybe he'd just been on tour for too many weeks in a row. Or maybe it had something to do with certain abilities to remove chrome from a trailer hitch, as they say in the small town in rural Georgia... (more...)

---

I was wearing the leather top that shows off my tits, so the private pig patrol didn't look too close at the backstage pass. It was the pass Roxy had forged for me on her computer. Not bad for such short notice. It wouldn't stand up to any serious scrutiny, so once I got back there I slid into the shadows behind the band equipment as I heard the security guards coming. I crouched low and tried not to move, knowing that if one of them caught sight of me I'd have to do it. But no one looked. They were too busy bragging about all the groupies they were going to fuck. Especially that aging porn star with the tit job. They'd heard she'd fuck anyone.

I had to fight to keep from busting out laughing. What a bunch of sleazebags. But I managed to hold still and not make a sound. I was a little cold in the shadows. It was a hot night, but then, I wasn't wearing much. My black stretch jeans were... (more...)

---

Out in front of the coliseum, the place was crammed with traffic, one big ugly jam of cars trying to get on the freeway. Nobody was moving, and Roxy was nowhere in sight. Shit, this was really going to cause a problem if she couldn't get here. I looked everywhere for her primer-black Dodge, but it was nowhere. I sat down on the grass and got my cigarettes, but I seemed to have lost my matches somewhere.

This pair of gothgirls on a Vespa had gotten stuck between this big van and a stretch limo on my side of the road, so they couldn't sneak by on the shoulder. I could have sworn the one on the back was staring at me, and sure enough, before long the other started looking too. I couldn't tell if they were dishing me or checking me out. But they looked like a couple, and Roxy was still nowhere to be seen, so I walked over to the goths with an appropriately dreary smile on my face... (more...)

---

Roxy told me to hold my breath, then she hit the Aqua Net. I ducked, but the great clouds filled the back of the limo and I started to cough. It was a few minutes before I could see or breathe properly, but by then Roxy was beginning to look like her real self.

We had told the limo driver park at the far end of the hotel lot while we got Roxy made up. She had brought a couple of different things, but no extra panties and nothing much to go on my bottom half, so I was pretty screwed, so to speak, with my jeans torn in the crotch the way they were. They were tragically beyond repair, no matter how many safety pins Sid Vicious might have worn once upon a time. I had shredded them most of the way with my roommate's pinking shears, but the rest of the tearing had been done by Roxy's desire to increase her carnal knowledge of my body... (more...)

---

Jasmine died two years ago. She showed up three weeks ago. Should have expected it, knowing Jasmine as well as I did.

I didn't know she was back, not really, for almost a week. Stomping around my little Long Beach bungalow, the one she had called my shell, I caught glimpses of faint reds, gold, of the hazy glow of sunlight through baggy tie-dyes, and of God's Eyes turning in the windows. They were just there enough so I knew I saw something, but was always a part, always a fragment of that something. Same with smells: incense, patchouli oil, pot, cheap wine, and that simple lemon perfume. Same with sounds, walking from the little kitchenette into the living room I would catch the slap of leather sandals on the hardwood floors, the opening clap of Stairway, and that tiny sound, that special sound that would always mean bells on toes. Jasmine.

She had outlasted the ghost of the sixties by a few years, Jasmine had. Even though she'd been born in '71, she was a spirit of the Merry Pranksters, of Airplane, of the Summer of Love, acid, pot, Fat Freddy's Cat...
(more...)