Shuteye for the Timebroker Read online

  Luckily, thought Billy, his special project had not fared as badly as the town. The womandrake was now over five and a half feet tall and fully mature, as Billy had discerned from many timorous peeks. It seemed psychologically whole, too, no longer reacting so violently to Billy’s readings. He hoped that it would recall nothing of the filming that had been such a pernicious prenatal influence.

  And today—today was the first day the plant might be expected to open. Billy was ecstatic. He hardly believed his longtime dream was about to come true. Since planting the seed, he had been careful to distance himself, thinking of his mate as “it,” never knowing if something would go wrong and prevent the expected birth. But now, he dared to mentally say the crucial pronoun. She was almost ready!

  Striding happily through the once-again deserted yard around the Mowbray house, Billy came unexpectedly upon a familiar figure.

  Luke Landisberg stood there alone, a smile on his enigmatic features.

  “What are you doing here?” Billy asked, trepidation knotting his stomach. Had the film been lost or destroyed? Was the entire project about to start all over again?

  “I just wanted to be in on the climax, Budd. From the moony way you’ve been acting, I knew your lady friend was about to emerge, and I wanted to see her. After all, I helped keep the rest of the crowd away from her, you know. I issued strict orders about staying out of the woods, right after I learned what was going on. Although I must admit, I did visit her a few times myself, when you were otherwise occupied.”

  A pang of inexplicable jealousy shot through Billy when he heard this, but he suppressed it as unworthy. Instead, he chose to concentrate on Landisberg’s good deed of helping to keep his secret.

  “Well, why not?” Billy said, forcing himself to be generous. “Come on, then.”

  Together, the two men walked to the clearing.

  Just as they entered, the birth occurred.

  The big glossy leaves, heretofore encapsulating the growing woman, lost all their rigor and fell away into a flaccid pile at her feet. The woman was revealed in all her naked green and golden glory.

  Billy’s breath caught in his throat. She was just as he had pictured, yet more than he had ever dreamed of. He completely forgot the presence of Landisberg in the exaltation he felt.

  The woman opened her eyes. With a tentative motion, she snapped her pedal umbilical stalk and stepped out from the collapsed leaves.

  Billy held up one hand toward his garden-girl. She focused on the movement and took a step forward. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, she sprinted and launched herself—

  —into Landisberg’s arms!

  “Oh, Luke,” she exclaimed in a melodious voice, “all those scripts you read me sounded so thrilling! And the contracts! Not to mention your reviews! Take me with you to Hollywood!”

  Landisberg encircled the waist of the green woman with one arm. “Sure thing, honey. I’ve got just the vehicle for the start of your career. It’s an old book by some sci-fi guy named Williamson. The Green Girl. You’ll love it.”

  “I can’t wait,” said the treacherous womandrake. “Let’s go!”

  And so they did.

  When Billy was finished crying, he started to think.

  An outsized tubful of this special soil brought to his greenhouse, where conditions could be more carefully controlled; another letter to Thompson and Morgan; a few months’ work after receipt of the seed—

  Happiness was just a retake away.

  I am uncertain how younger people today regard pop stars. Are they seen as mere shills for the various products with which they are commercially associated? Are they seen as clowns and jesters fulfilling a societally mandated position? Are they seen as commodified rebels? Are they seen simply as working stiffs doing a job like any other? Are they seen as “artists,” special beings aloof from the masses of fans? I suppose any and all of these guises could be applied to different performers at different times nowadays.

  But what I do know is that back in the 1960s, for a brief shining moment, certain rock stars were veritable louche and embraceable demiurges to their listeners, manifestations of larger cosmic forces at play, conduits through which glory flowed.

  That’s the mythos I’ve tried to capture in this tale of an unrecorded meeting between Eric Clapton and Janis Joplin.

  Slowhand and Little Sister

  They called him Slowhand with a certain irony, because when he played his demon half-alive guitar (“This weapon kills fascists” was burned on the neck) his fingers disappeared in a blur, pealing out squalling notes at the speed of light, and because those same string-ripped and -calloused fingers had kept many a woman on the edge of coming for up to three and a half hours.

  That record had been set nearly a hundred years ago, back in ’69, with the world-famous groupie Pamela Des Barres. Slowhand’s roadies had started selling tickets during the second hour of the digital engagement. By hour three, there was a crowd of fifty people in the tiny motel room where it was taking place. Slowhand was holding a joint in his free hand, taking an occasional slow toke, and staring up at the ceiling. The hand between Pamela’s legs barely moved. But she was writhing and groaning nonetheless. All the spectators could tell she was trying desperately to climax. But Slowhand wouldn’t let her. It was kinda mean, his toying with her that way. The girl was overmatched. But she knew what she was getting into, and anyhow it wasn’t like Slowhand was abusing her. Midway into hour four, the joint burned down between Slowhand’s pinched thumb and index finger, he swore, jerked away, and set Des Barres off. And that was all she wrote.

  Slowhand’s skin was pasty white, from playing all night under deficient illumination in seedy smoke-curdled clubs and sleeping all day.

  He had had a major drug jones for twenty-five years, had Slowhand. Heroin and coke were his substances—not of choice, but of necessity. They helped him endure life when he wasn’t playing. He could handle more smack and blow than any human had a right to, and still live. Everyone knew it was due to his guitar. The creature in the shape of a guitar sustained Slowhand and siphoned off the drugs from his system.

  One legend said that the guitar had been crafted by Les Paul under the influence of LSD as he sat inside a pentagram. Other legends made it older than time. Some said it had belonged to Django Reinhardt, the gypsy genius. Others said that it came out of Africa with the slaves, and could only be possessed by a sharecropper’s son. Then there were supposedly witnesses who had seen Slowhand sell his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, in order to be rewarded with the instrument. The legend on its neck seemed to link it to Woody Guthrie. However, if the guitar had existed in acoustic form, it had somehow mutated to fit the new era, since its body was now clearly solid.

  Whatever its ultimate provenance, when Slowhand strapped on the instrument he visibly grew stronger. Some nights he’d be so weak and shaky-legged he’d have to crawl onstage or be carried on by his roadies, an oxygen mask pressed to his face. But no matter what condition he arrived in, as soon as he clamped the guitar against his midriff and jacked in, he’d stand tall and swell up all godlike, looking to the audience like some earth-visiting deity from the same heaven that had supplied Van Morrison’s vocal cords.

  There was one school of thought that claimed the guitar actually extruded feelers into Slowhand’s body. Whether that was true or not, Slowhand’s style onstage was not to flail around like other famous guitarists, but to stand composed in one place, with the golden-stringed instrument held tightly against him.

  At age forty-five Slowhand showed few or no signs of growing older or tired, or of stopping. A lot of people said the guitar was supplying him with eternal life. Others claimed it just wasn’t done using him yet. Oh, some sour folks swore they could detect Slowhand resting on his laurels, taking it easy, not pushing himself, using fellow players to carry the weight, letting his fingers rest, thus making his name not ironically antithetical to, but sadly synonymous with, his skill.

  To th
ese detractors Slowhand would usually turn a disdainful blue gaze cold as a Detroit winter on the unemployment line and rip off a chord or two that would reduce them to jelly …

  * * *

  They called her Little Sister because she was anything but. Oh, maybe one time she had been somebody’s actual little sister, but that period was lost in the past she had never cared to hold on to. We could picture, if we wanted, a scrawny twelve-year-old always tagging along with her big brother when he went over to play the drums for a friend’s garage band. Pigtails and a pudgy sunburned face (even then she had a tendency to put on weight), overalls whose bib front covered a flat chest, untied sneakers, and maybe a bandage on her elbow. Told to sit in the corner and keep quiet. Unnoticed until one day, when the boys were striving to master some old blues standard they’d heard secondhand off an old 78, Little Sister; unbidden, opened her mouth and started to wail.

  Turned out Little Sister had been spinning all her big brother’s records in secret, absorbing all the intonations and phrasings of the departed great ones—Smith and Holiday, for example—and of the still living soul-belters, Big Mama Thornton and Wanda “Fujiyama Mama” Jackson, say. (We’re reconstructing, remember.)

  But she was no mere copycat, even from the start. This Little Sister had a fire in her belly, a hardscrabble soul, loads of pure talent. Even on that first day, the boys could sense it. They nearly dropped their instruments at first, when they heard that voice pour out of Little Sister. But give them credit, they recovered and continued playing. Little Sister’s voice urged them on. (Two decades later, those boys, now men, would often wake up sweating in the middle of the night, their wives asleep unsuspecting beside them, remembering Little Sister’s wordless yowl, which had gone straight to their crotches, or wherever it was they kept their souls.)

  The only thing missing that day was experience. Little Sister’s voice was still too new, untouched by real sadness or doubt, pain or heartache, to make her a real queen of the blues.

  But that soon changed. Right about the same time as Little Sister’s body.

  Little Sister seemed to grow up overnight. The singing must have released all her hormones in a surging flood. Somatic changes followed hard on the musical ones. From out of nowhere, as if her body were absorbing substance from the music, she developed Earth Mother hips and tits, an ace pair of the latter, visions of which would send more than one spurned high school classmate home to hump the bed.

  There was a famous picture of Little Sister from later in her life, wearing nothing but several long chains of beads, her glasses, and a goofy smile. Her belly was like a pillow beckoning you to rest your head on it. And maybe it was only sweat, but there seemed to be a drop of moisture exuding from each big dark nipple that looked suspiciously like Southern Comfort. But that part comes later …

  Well, as soon as Little Sister quit looking so little, boys began to do her wrong. She had a trusting heart and a bottomless need to be loved. The guys could never see Little Sister as an individual. To most, she was sheer cosmic archetype, a red-hot small-town mama who liked sex and could sing the paint off the wall. Her musical talents added some cachet to her girlfriend credentials. At first, so did her libido. But after a while, whatever guy was currently squiring Little Sister around would begin to make excuses not to see her anymore. It seemed Little Sister had made the cardinal mistake of liking sex too much for a woman. She scared guys with her appetites. They’d try to get out of bed after an all-night marathon and Little Sister would haul on their shirttails or some appropriate portion of their anatomy and drag them back. Guys only took this treatment for so long, and Little Sister couldn’t change. After a while, there got to be a saying in her hometown: “I got these blisters from Little Sister.” No one would go out with her anymore. That was when she decided to split.

  Little Sister had started smoking by this time. It had roughened her voice in an intriguing way. But that instrument still hadn’t reached the peak it would soon attain.

  Little Sister was living in a midsize nowhere city, singing in a dive for fifteen dollars a night, when she met Bobby M. Handsome and affable, he was the bartender of the joint. He and Little Sister hit it off. There was more chemistry in their relationship than there was at Dow Labs. Little Sister was happy.

  One night between sets, Little Sister, hanging with her man while he worked, noticed Bobby pouring amber liquid from a curious bottle. No matter how many shots came out, the level of booze in the bottle stayed the same. Little Sister asked for an explanation. Bobby had none. He told her it was an anomaly he had discovered one day, an inexplicable thing, a quirk of the cosmos, like the one factory-standard lightbulb that just wouldn’t die. The bottomless bottle had simply arrived one day from the distillery with the rest. He saved it for special customers. Now he poured Little Sister a shot.

  She had never tasted anything so good. Despite the familiar label, this wasn’t the same liquor she had tried once before. It seemed to sit in her belly like molten love.

  Bobby noticed right away how Little Sister reacted, and put the bottle away. But it was too late; she was hooked. And, after a few months, the magic liquor had cured her already formidable vocal apparatus into an instrument that could produce a unique, head-turning, heart-stopping sonic barrage. When she got up onstage to sing, it didn’t matter that she had spent most of the day in an alcoholic haze.

  And when Bobby tried to wean her from the bottle, she slid it into her bag one night along with her few clothes and left him, not without a tear or two that would later show up, transmuted, in her songs.

  After that it was a short ride to the top.

  Once, Little Sister almost died from an overdose of some meaner drug. But a last instinctive pull on the magic flask had brought her back, to keep on shouting and hollering her soul out in great raw gobs …

  * * *

  Now, despite parallel careers in the same business, Slowhand and Little Sister had never once occupied the same stage. It was said that they simply couldn’t. Not out of competitive mean-spiritedness, but simply because they were each too huge, too titanic a natural force. People still spoke about a famous incident, when their tours had accidentally intersected at O’Hare airport. The rivets had begun to pop from both planes before the pilots were alerted to taxi farther apart …

  It didn’t seem likely, given this natural barrier, that Slowhand and Little Sister would ever knowingly work together. There was too much at risk.

  But unknowingly—well, that was another story …

  * * *

  Slowhand was sitting alone at the dark bar of a sleazy cavern of a club called Crossroads, waiting to go on during an open-mike night. He was clean of junk for once, he had shaved his beard, and he was without his entourage. No one, not the owner or the patrons, knew who he was. Or if they guessed, they were all too polite or awed to speak to him. Careful to keep his dark glasses on, he hoped it was true ignorance. Because Slowhand had reached a point he had reached several times before. He was sick of himself, sick of being Slowhand, sick of mounting the stage with his enthusiastic reception guaranteed. It was all a tremendous bore sometimes, a royal pain in the ass. You wondered if they even heard the playing, or if it was just a reaction to his legendary presence. And then there was the money. The money distorted everything. Every now and then he had to get away, to find out if he could still cut it as an unknown, to discover again what the music had once meant to him.

  Nursing a beer, Slowhand waited for the inept act onstage to finish. He spotted the owner coming across the floor toward him. There was a woman on his arm.

  Slowhand’s guitar, resting on the floor and leaning against his leg, let out a raw amplified squeal without being touched. Slowhand felt a quiver in his gut. He knew who that was holding the owner’s arm. And he knew that even across the room, she knew, too.

  Little Sister had shaved her head like a punk, and substituted contacts for her trademark wire-rims. Always known as a natural chick, she had put on too much makeup,
black encircling her eyes and orange on her lips. But there was no hiding her identity as it came roaring down an invisible channel into Slowhand’s groin.

  The owner and Little Sister came up to within a yard of Slowhand and stopped. It was as close as they could get. Slowhand felt like he was being torn apart, atom by atom. Judging from her face, he knew that Little Sister was going through the same thing.

  It was all Slowhand could do to pay attention to the owner’s voice.

  “We had more performers show up tonight than we counted on,” said the owner, looking a little baffled at his inability to get inside the maelstrom of forces surging between Slowhand and Little Sister. “You two are gonna have to go on together. Work something out. Be ready in half an hour.” Then he left.

  “Funny meeting you here,” said Slowhand between gritted teeth.

  “Just had to get away,” said Little Sister. “This seemed like a place I could be free. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah,” said Slowhand, “I know.” He clutched the neck of his hellish guitar for comfort. It squirmed like an electric eel in his grip. Little Sister took a bottle out of her rear jeans pocket, uncapped it, and swigged. The level didn’t diminish.

  Glasses were starting to hop around on the bar, and bottles to shake, rattle, and roll. A lightbulb flared and popped. Drinkers clutched their drinks nervously, picked shards of glass from their hair, and resolved that this would be the last belt for the night.

  “Well,” said Slowhand, “I guess we’d better blow. So much for a night out.”