The Best of Lucius Shepard (111 page)

I filled
Stanky in on Black William’s biography, telling him that he had fought with
great valor in the Revolutionary War, but had not been accorded the status of
hero, this due to his penchant for executing prisoners summarily, even those
who had surrendered under a white flag. Following the war, he returned home in
time to watch his father, Alan Garnant, die slowly and in agony. It was widely
held that William had poisoned the old man. Alan resented the son for his part
in Ethelyn’s death and had left him to be raised by his slaves, in particular
by an immense African man to whom he had given the name Nero. Little is known
of Nero; if more were known, we might have a fuller understanding of young
William, who—from the war’s end until his death in 1808—established a
reputation for savagery, his specialities being murder and rape (both
heterosexual and homosexual). By all accounts, he ruled the town and its
environs with the brutal excess of a feudal duke. He had a coterie of friends
who served as his loyal protectors, a group of men whose natures he had
perverted, several of whom failed to survive his friendship. Accompanied by
Nero, they rode roughshod through the countryside, terrorizing and defiling,
killing anyone who sought to impede their progress. Other than that, his legacy
consisted of the statue, the ziggurat, and a stubby tower of granite block on
the bluff overlooking the town, long since crumbled into ruin.

Stanky’s
interest dwindled as I related these facts, his responses limited to the
occasional “Cool,” a word he pronounced as if it had two syllables; but before
we went on our way he asked, “If the guy was such a bastard, how come they
named the town after him?”

“It was a
P.R. move,” I explained. “The town was incorporated as Garnantsburgh. They
changed it after World War Two. The city council wanted to attract business to
the area and they hoped the name Black William would be more memorable. Church
groups and the old lady vote, pretty much all the good Christians, they
disapproved of the change, but the millworkers got behind it. The association
with a bad guy appealed to their self-image.”

“Looks like
the business thing didn’t work out. This place is deader than McKeesport.”
Stanky raised up in the seat to scratch his ass. “Let’s go, okay? I couldn’t
sleep on the bus. I need to catch up on my Zs.”

My house was
one of the row houses facing the mill, the same Andrea and I had rented when we
first arrived. I had since bought the place. The ground floor I used for office
space, the second floor for the studio, and I lived on the third. I had fixed
up the basement, formerly Andrea’s office, into a musician-friendly
apartment—refrigerator, stove, TV, etc.—and that is where I installed Stanky.
The bus ride must have taken a severe toll. He slept for twenty hours.

After three
weeks I recognized that Stanky was uncommonly gifted and it was going to take
longer to record him than I had presumed—he kept revealing new facets of his
talent and I wanted to make sure I understood its full dimension before getting
too deep into the process. I also concluded that although musicians do not, in
general, adhere to an exacting moral standard, he was, talent aside, the most
worthless human being I had ever met. Like many of his profession, he was lazy,
irresponsible, untrustworthy, arrogant, slovenly, and his intellectual life
consisted of comic books and TV. To this traditional menu of character flaws, I
would add “deviant.” The first inkling I had of his deviancy was when Sabela,
the Dominican woman who cleaned for me twice a week, complained about the state
of the basement apartment. Since Sabela never complained, I had a look
downstairs. In less than a week, he had trashed the place. The garbage was
overflowing and the sink piled high with scummy dishes and pots half-f of
congealed grits; the floors covered in places by a slurry of cigarette ash and
grease, littered with candy wrappers and crumpled Coke cans. A smell compounded
of spoilage, bad hygiene, and sex seemed to rise from every surface. The
plastic tip of a vibrator peeked out from beneath his grungy sheets. I assured
Sabela I’d manage the situation, whereupon she burst into tears. I asked what
else was troubling her and she said, “Mister Vernon, I no want him.”

My Spanish
was poor, Sabela’s English almost nonexistent, but after a few minutes I
divined that Stanky had been hitting on her, going so far as to grab at her
breasts. This surprised me—Sabela was in her forties and on the portly side. I
told her to finish with the upstairs and then she could go home. Stanky
returned from a run to the 7-11 and scuttled down to the basement, roachlike in
his avoidance of scrutiny. I found him watching
Star Trek
in the dark,
remote in one hand,
TV Guide
(he called it “The Guide”) resting on his
lap, gnawing on a Butterfinger. Seeing him so at home in his filthy nest turned
up the flame under my anger.

“Sabela
refuses to clean down here,” I said. “I don’t blame her.”

“I don’t
care if she cleans,” he said with a truculent air.

“Well, I do.
You’ve turned this place into a shithole. I had a metal band down here for a
month, it never got this bad. I want you to keep it presentable. No stacks of
dirty dishes. No crud on the floor. And put your damn sex toys in a drawer.
Understand?”

He glowered
at me.

“And don’t
mess with Sabela,” I went on. “When she wants to clean down here, you clear
out. Go up to the studio. I hear about you groping her again, you can hump your
way back to McKeesport. I need her one hell of a lot more than I need you.”

He muttered
something about “another producer.”

“You want
another producer? Go for it! No doubt major labels are beating down my door
this very minute, lusting after your sorry ass.”

Stanky
fiddled with the remote and lowered his eyes, offering me a look at his infant
bald spot. Authority having been established, I thought I’d tell him what I had
in mind for the next weeks, knowing that his objections—given the temper of the
moment—would be minimal; yet there was something so repellent about him, I
still wanted to give him the boot. I had the idea that one of Hell’s lesser
creatures, a grotesque, impotent toad, banished by the Powers of Darkness, had
landed with a foul stink on my sofa. But I’ve always been a sucker for talent
and I felt sorry for him. His past was plain. Branded as a nerd early on and
bullied throughout high school, he had retreated into a life of flipping
burgers and getting off on a four-track in his mother’s basement. Now he had
gravitated to another basement, albeit one with a more hopeful prospect and a
better recording system.

“Why did you
get into music?” I asked, sitting beside him. “Women, right? It’s always women.
Hell, I was married to a good-looking woman, smart, sexy, and that was my
reason.”

He allowed
that this had been his reason as well.

“So how’s
that working out? They’re not exactly crawling all over you, huh?”

He cut his
eyes toward me and it was as if his furnace door had slid open a crack, a blast
of heat and resentment shooting out. “Not great,” he said.

“Here’s what
I’m going to do.” I tapped out a cigarette from his pack, rolled it between my
fingers. “Next week, I’m bringing in a drummer and a bass player to work with
you. I own a part-interest in the Crucible, the alternative club in town. As
soon as you get it together, we’ll put you in there for a set and showcase you
for some people.”

Stanky
started to speak, but I beat him to the punch. “You follow my lead, you do what
I know you can...” I said, leaving a significant pause. “I guarantee you won’t
be going home alone.”

He waited to
hear more, he wanted to bask in my vision of his future, but I knew I had to
use rat psychology; now that I had supplied a hit of his favorite drug, I
needed to buzz him with a jolt of electricity.

“First off,”
I said, “we’re going to have to get you into shape. Work off some of those
man-tits.”

“I’m not
much for exercise.”

“That
doesn’t come as a shock,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a new man
out of you, I just want to make you a better act. Eat what I eat for a month or
so, do a little cardio. You’ll drop ten or fifteen pounds.” Falsely convivial,
I clapped him on the shoulder and felt a twinge of disgust, as if I had touched
a hypo-allergenic cat. “The other thing,” I said. “That Local Proffit Junior
name won’t fly. It sounds too much like a country band.”

“I like it,”
he said defiantly.

“If you want
the name back later, that’s up to you. For now, I’m billing you as Joe Stanky.”

I laid the
unlit cigarette on the coffee table and asked what he was watching, thinking
that, for the sake of harmony, I’d bond with him a while.

“
Trek
marathon,” he said.

We sat
silently, staring at the flickering black-and-white picture. My mind sang a
song of commitments, duties, other places I could be. Stanky laughed, a cross
between a wheeze and a hiccup.

“What’s up?”
I asked.

“John
Colicos sucks, man!”

He pointed
to the screen, where a swarthy man with Groucho Marx eyebrows, pointy
sideburns, and a holstered ray gun seemed to be undergoing an agonizing inner
crisis. “Michael Ansara’s the only real Vulcan.” Stanky looked at me as if
seeking validation. “At least,” he said, anxious lest he offend, “on the
original
Trek.
”

Absently, I
agreed with him. My mind rejoined its song. “Okay,” I said, and stood. “I got
things to do. We straight about Sabela? About keeping the place ... you know?
Keeping the damage down to normal levels?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Catch
you later.”

I started
for the door, but he called to me, employing that wheedling tone with which I
had become all too familiar. “Hey, Vernon?” he said. “Can you get me a
trumpet?” This asked with an imploring expression, screwing up his face like a
child, as if he were begging me to grant a wish.

“You play
the trumpet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you
promise to take care of it. Yeah, I can get hold of one.”

Stanky
rocked forward on the couch and gave a tight little fist-pump. “Decent!”

I don’t know
when Stanky and I got married, but it must have been sometime between the
incident with Sabela and the night Mia went home to her mother. Certainly my
reaction to the latter was more restrained than was my reaction to the former,
and I attribute this in part to our union having been joined. It was a typical
rock-and-roll marriage: talent and money making beautiful music together and
doomed from the start, on occasion producing episodes in which the relationship
seemed to be crystallized, allowing you to see (if you wanted to) the messy bed
you had made for yourself.

Late one
evening, or maybe it wasn’t so late—it was starting to get dark early—Mia came
downstairs and stepped into my office and set a smallish suitcase on my desk.
She had on a jacket with a fake fur collar and hood, tight jeans, and her nice
boots. She’d put a fresh rasberry streak in her black hair and her makeup did a
sort of Nefertiti-meets-Liza thing. All I said was, “What did I do this time?”

Mia’s lips
pursed in a moue—it was her favorite expression and she used it at every
opportunity, whether appropriate or not. She became infuriated whenever I
caught her practicing it in the bathroom mirror.

“It’s not
what you did,” she said. “It’s that clammy little troll in the basement.”

“Stanky?”

“Do you have
another troll? Stanky! God, that’s the perfect name for him.” Another moue. “I’m
sick of him rubbing up against me.”

Mia had, as
she was fond of saying, “been through some stuff,” and, if Stanky had done
anything truly objectionable, she would have dealt with him. I figured she
needed a break or else there was someone in town with whom she wanted to sleep.

“I take it
this wasn’t consensual rubbing,” I said.