The French Revolution (34 page)

The crowd murmured. Network engineers repositioned satellite uplinks. A girl ran up to the Skylark and tapped her finger on the windshield. Then a crash in the back, a woman’s oof, Werewolf’s fez bobbing over a field of craned heads.

“I smell Carnegie Hall tonight!” Werewolf called. “Where you kitty-cats been all my life?” He lurched down a rapidly opening corridor toward the car, postured like a crunched telephone pole and groping. When he got to the Skylark he pulled a bottle of Uncle Joe’s vodka from his pants, uncapped it, and chugged. Then he sneezed into his hand and parked his caboose on the hood. “So many of you came out, shit. Feel like I should ask if you got any requests.”

Utter silence. Responding felt wrong; they didn’t know his repertoire, his range, how serious he was. The quiet held for a minute, until a sloshed insurance adjustor suggested “When the Levee Breaks,” Led Zeppelin, in C minor.

“Gotta be an asshole to ask for that one,” Werewolf said. “But a nice tune, used to hear it on the radio all the time out in San Fran. We’ll lose the power chords. Maestro?”

Tiny Jake put drumstick to head in the approximate pace of the one Led Zeppelin song he knew from his wife playing it all
the time, “Going to California,” until he realized the song didn’t have much if anything for a drumbeat and was too slow for Werewolf’s vibe. He threw it all out and went free flow like usual, the line coming out cresting and punchy, with long gaps for improvisation. He worked the cymbals over easy, toe-tapped the kick, closed his eyes, and felt Werewolf sipping his vodka and unloading melody. The whole street cottoned to it, he realized later when he saw the video and the crowd sobbing to Werewolf’s undone lyrics, the cameras flashing like a swarm of lightning bugs, the music holding over everything but a growling dog somewhere. Wolf hummed through the parts he didn’t know, and the lyrics he remembered he didn’t go buck nasty on, didn’t push it down to empty. The song came together stark and broken, mucked up like a pigpen, fitting the souls of New Orleans snug as new socks.

Five months later they were the opening act at the Comeback Mardi Gras, crowds packed in like stock cattle and crying arduously when their encore ended. Over brunch the next morning they inked an eye-popping record contract, celebrating with Sazeracs and mimosas and a spontaneous jam session, beating forks and spoons on the table, the diners at Commander’s Palace supplying lyrics Werewolf wouldn’t sing during daytime. Videos of their driveway duets went viral, streamed across the planet, played as slow songs at proms and formals and later remixed into club dance numbers. Fan websites materialized; Led Zeppelin’s lawyers sent menacing letters demanding royalties. Tiny Jake went whole days without thinking about his wife.

They didn’t talk to each other, Werewolf and Tiny Jake. They made joint decisions on song selection, financial planning, tour dates, cover art, distribution strategies—but too much was caught in their deadeye feel, knowing the holes in each cadence, rim shots tied to huffed breaths, the serene emptiness that filled their music. It couldn’t be wrecked with words. So Werewolf kept away from Jake’s scent and Jake steered clear of the ratty
fez, and it was only on stage that they came together, distant strangers partnered on a macadam driveway, their agents fighting over points in day-long meetings downtown.

On the Buick
went platinum before the first week was out, in a year when industry analysts posited that there was no point to recording music anymore with all the piracy; artists should play live venues only, with jacked-up ticket prices and the full complement of overpriced band merchandise. The blind man and his sheep flew off record shop racks and into computers, the lowlight cover photo of them knocking out a tune on the abandoned city’s driveway jacking into hearts, pity, wallets. The moon broke the sky like an eyelid, the vodka bottle digitally removed.

Word spread that Werewolf had made the entire album from the hood of the Skylark, he’d towed the vehicle to the Music Shed on Euterpe Street and recorded his vocals in the garage. He only sang when the moon was out, he could hold a note for ten minutes. He ate bats and pissed puss and drank vodka like water. He said he was blind but didn’t carry a cane, didn’t have a seeing-eye dog, walked straight down the street like the sun showed the way. The rumors crawled across radio shows and gossip columns, festered in internet chat rooms, selling magic and albums by the crate.

Werewolf moved out of the Buick and into Marriott hotels, top floor corner pocket, two adjoining rooms, the most space to himself he’d had in his life. Pay-per-view porn played all day while he slept, his dusk wakeup call consisting of fake orgasms and ass slaps. A stack of room service sandwiches passed for dinner, accompanied by the entire contents of the minibar taken straight, no ice. He wore the same wretched outfit, never washed, the desperate getup pilfered from a St. Vincent de Paul store after Katrina and still the only clothes to his name. Every few weeks he called a disconnected phone number and pulled on his earlobes, then fell onto one of his four beds like dirty laundry.

They toured for a year. Tiny Jake’s agent wanted arenas but Werewolf’s agent said clubs, so they settled on stages and charged
ludicrously. They dubbed the tour Moonrise, with a great jelly orb of a satellite and a padded Buick for Werewolf to lie on and cases of cheap vodka, dump truckloads of gravel, as close as could be gotten to St. Bernard Parish without all the unprofitable downside. The tour was noted for Werewolf’s mephitic smell, his extreme tardiness, the variability of the start time, the nights cancelled without explanation, building a reputation as the least reliable ticket in town. Because when Werewolf’s agent had insisted that the shows correspond with the lunar calendar there had been big pushback, stage policies and union contracts and blue laws to consider, and he’d had to settle for a floating start time but the show ending by 2 AM no matter what. Tiny Jake could only riff a solo for so long before the crowd rumbled angry, streamed for the ticket booth, called for refunds, and booked.

Tiny Jake knew it wasn’t star bullshit, a wacked-out trip or too few flowers in his trailer, his name not in big enough lights. Part of Werewolf was wrong, everyone knew that, but Jake guessed it was viler than they thought, something about a woman that gnawed tears from him and made him worship the moon like some alley cat or fucked-up Aztec. Bullets from his past ridged under those sunglasses, crooked his walk. That vanquished voice: the man was older than he let on, Tiny knew, at least sixty-five and not much more to it if he didn’t cut out the liquor and start hitting the salad bar. But Tiny wasn’t gonna rebuke him or lay down the law—no need to prime that bomb so long as the royalty checks kept rolling in. Wolf’d sing when he was ready, and that was it.

Tiny delivered his observations to his agent, who huddled with Werewolf’s man and moved for Vegas. They set up at the Wynn for a trial stint in the fall of 2010, show start times ranging from 6:30 PM to 4:00 AM, drifting thirty-one, thirty-nine, forty-two minutes later each day, until the sun came up with the moon still out and the show went dark until the lunar calendar cycled through a couple weeks later.

“A floating craps game,” Werewolf said after he crawled out of the Buick’s backseat on their first night in the Full Moon Theatre.
“Nice job, you caught us. Let’s play.” He reached into the car and took out two martini glasses and a pair of dice. Opening the vodka bottle with his teeth, he filled both glasses and handed one to Tiny Jake. They looked at each other for a quick second, eyes shining loss and torched women, then drank it all down in one toss. Werewolf rolled the dice on the snare and Tiny Jake made them hop and shimmer until the drumroll peaked, the crowd was shouting, the ricochets filling the theater with the rap of cold rain. He batted the cubes into the lights with his drumsticks as Wolf fell back on the Buick and belted out “Luck Be a Lady” to a crush of lurid whoops. No schmaltzy Nathan Detroit greased handshake, this was the shook-down version, unwired. Straight like the morning mirror through a hangover, so true it bled.

The audience of celebrities and high rollers yawped and hooted. “Y’all happy?” Werewolf asked, his smile a drooping hot dog bun. “Hafta know pain to know what happy is. So let’s ride.” He sang “Black” by Pearl Jam, tearing through notes like loose flagstones; he sang Muddy Waters like the dead; he sang the Beach Boys and Al Green with love snatched from his chest; he sang his own blue, tortured concoctions while Tiny Jake whisked over cymbals. Laid back on the Buick’s hood, his fez lodged between windshield wipers and his feet walling in the hood ornament; his sooty, stained outfit masking his features save the inside of his nostrils, his Adam’s apple, the underside of his lips, occasionally a quick glimpse of his ears. A boom microphone draped over his face caught his heated lamentations, his delivery channeled by vodka and turning frustrated and vexing as the night moved on. There was no sign of him stopping and the crowd ate it up, so they let him go past the scheduled close and into the night, Tiny Jake aching but toughing it out, throwing in some Latin fusion he’d been working on to get people dancing, plumbing out Werewolf’s pipes all over the contour map until daybreak hit like a slap shot and “Amazing Grace” lay in. The curtain crashed down, and the audience hobbled back to their rooms, their intestines laced with hemlock, their souls forever changed.

Two months later, the lifetime contract was signed and stamped home. Tiny Jake filed for divorce soon after, trying to cut out all the nights lost watching the audience for the peanut butter eyes he’d known his whole life, his wife lost to liquor and acts of God, floating free across the Great White North.

Who was this man?

No interviews, never sighted outside the casino, quickly becoming one of Vegas’s richest and most reclusive residents. His televisions were always on, now playing news as well as porn, war footage, death lists, martyrs, elderly women strapping bombs under their abayas and blowing up food trucks, weather, motorsports. Small-cap funds and cellular implants. The first crop of cloned soldiers in accelerated development. Fun snacks to make with leftover party cheese. He paid the most attention to the crowd scenes, feeling out the dead space in the correspondents’ reports, probing the chumming masses for some sound, some thing, someone.

He began to gamble large sums of money. He favored the slots, playing alone at a thousand dollars a shake, his fortunes announced by a roll of bleeps. It passed the time. He hired investigators to provide him with in-depth briefings, hi-res videos with interpolated audio, phone numbers, photographs, report cards, copies of deeds and tax returns, birth certificates and death certificates, all of which he kept in his room safe and never discussed with anyone else. Liquor filtrated through his mind.

At the encouragement of his marketing team he was coaxed out of his ragged attire and into an identical getup, different only in terms of cleanliness and number of Nike insignias. A sponsorship agreement, his agent informed him, had been reached. Something was done about his hair, crusted up into the fez for who knew how long, shaped like a thimble except harder, the sweat and filth of decades compressing it to stone. They hacked it all off and shaved him down to skin, then rubbed lotion onto
his scalp and lined his neck with cologne. He liked how his new shiny skull felt in the shower, the texture of rain suddenly violent and striking, how the Marriott pillows nestled gently around his skull and comforted his anguished brain. Onstage he wore a black Nike toque to keep comfortable against the rusted car hood, the tight synthetic fibers making him feel catlike and sleek, finally worthy of the spotlight.

On the day of Robespierre’s release, he waited in his uniform outside the Hall of Justice, leaning against a railing and smelling the sea air again. He sang her name across the morning, over camera crews taping her release, the press of microphones, supporters, curious bystanders, three rows of demonstrators. J. Malcolm Fletcher gave her a tap, then a nudge, then put his hands on her waist and swiveled her toward the face from lost photographs, the face on magazine covers, the face that surged from memory in the depths of her dreams.

Reason froze her; here was her absent, fair-weather father buying his way out. He didn’t deserve instant affection, a spot on her victory platform—a rotary saw and a barrel of hydrochloric acid and three days in a Kansas basement felt far more appropriate—but she shoved the urge down a steep and rickety staircase, because she knew hokey make-up crap won votes, and she’d already bought in big herself.

When they collapsed into one space everything else fell away. Jasper sniffed the hair he’d always loved and hummed an old lullaby, cradling his daughter like a soft-boiled egg. The supervisor-elect clung to him, rubbing his shoulder blades with her fingers and head-butting his chest, gravity diving through her skin, foam rising in her chest.

“Werewolf?” Robespierre asked. “Dad?”

“Yeah,” sniffed Jasper.