I.
Darkness swimming with humming stars. Vince Vader is safely buoyed below the surface, gently rocking in the protective arms of Mother H. Beyond the nod there is only brightness and pain, expectations and ego vampires who want to suck him dry. There’s no reason to return when life could always be like this.
But the pool is being drained, a rushing swirl as the wombwater disperses, leaving him beached and coughing. Above him blocks of lavender light chase themselves across the ceiling, falling away, repeating like the tide. Vince’s sweaty palms slide impotently across slick leather. His jaw falls open and cool air fills him, coating his tongue with uncertain fragrances. “I’m not dead,” he says to no one, equally comforted and appalled by the sound of his rusty voice.
A distant voice mumbles reassuringly, like a late night disc jockey talking to the air. He turns to the sound, the front of the limo a hundred miles away, a familiar face in the rearview. Name, what’s his name?
Vince’s head slips gently to his left and he’s confronted by the flat gaze of a frozen blonde beauty. His ragged face and twisted mouth are doubly reflected in the boy’s dark blues, and he grins with mossy teeth at the two of him—they grin back. Vince reaches out to turn her head away, but his fingertips only graze the clammy flesh of the kid’s cheek. Pat-pat-pat, fingertips on the chalky surface. “Such a waste,” he says to the blank stare. “Whole life,” he sympathizes. “I’m not dead,” he whispers to him.
A sharp broiling seizes his stomach and Vince hitches up and expels a solid stream of vomit onto the leather seat. Mucousy tendrils catch the lavender light, shifting in waves of luminescence as they reach the dead boy and puddle against his face, joining them together.
“Driver,” a raspy cry, but barely audible above the whoosh of cars gliding by. “Driver.” Coughing and expelling, flakes of red in the ocean of bile, the boy’s face a placid shoreline. “Driver.”
The rocking slows, stops. A moon of a face above his. “Vince. Wake up Vince.” Shaking. Too much light. Sinking back into the wombwater, swaddled beneath the comforting blanket of nothing, Vince retreats.
II.
“How long has he been like this?”
“’bout an hour. I came straight here… but traffic. Fuck.”
“What does this make, three, four?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’ll just leave it, you know, let him finally take it to that level, but dammit, this is a good gig. We just got a house in the Valley.”
“What about the kid?”
“Can’t do nothing for him?”
“Who is he?”
“Just a groupie. Picked him up after the show.”
“Anyone see them leave together.”
“Who the fuck knows. I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Okay, listen. Take him downtown. Kids are always od’ing. Leave him in an alley. Wear gloves. I didn’t see him. You didn’t see him. Vince was never with him. Got it?”
“Yeah, sure. Fuck.”
“Go on, then. Go. The press will be all over this faggot shit if you don’t take care of it right the fuck now.”
“Sure, just… yeah. Okay.”
“Where were you tonight?”
“What do you mean? This shithead just fucked up everything.”
“Where were you tonight? Think about it. You picked Vince up after the show and dropped him off at home. Then you went to be with your pretty little wife in your pretty little house. Right?”
“Yeah?”
“Keep your mouth shut. That’s what you’re paid for.”
“Yeah. Shit, this is a balls-up.”
III.
Vince Vader, lead singer of Hog Head, is recuperating tonight in a private Los Angeles hospital after a reported drug overdose. This is the singer’s third close call since the release of the band’s second album, “Rope Music”. Sony refused to comment on rumors that they are suing the band for breech of contract.
All remaining dates for The Lord of the Flies tour have been canceled.
Stay tuned for updates.
MTV News. You. Hear it. First.
IV.
A naked man stands in the steamy reek of jungle rot and mutant vegetation. Vince parts the creepers with faraway hands and enters the clearing with a dreaded sense of déjà vu. The fever burns him; his thoughts muffled like cries from the closet. The trees crowd out the sun except for a burning cylinder of light on the post protruding from the earth. Vince stares at the fly-swarmed pile of guts on the ground as the sweat courses over his skin, down the center of his back and into the crack of his ass. His legs propel him forward though he wills them to stop. “Why am I here?”
Nothing answers. The toxic sourness within him wells into the back of his throat and he falls on all fours and expels into the fetid earth. The buzzing calls him. “You are a silly, ignorant little boy, don’t you agree?” Vince looks up from his watery offering into the black eyes of the Beast. “Pig’s head on a stick.”
“They think you’re batty.” It sneers, its snout abuzz with flies, animating the expression, moving at His will. “You’re a little nothing, a nobody. No one wants to hear you sing.” It laughs, then growls. “I gave you a voice. I gave you a chance.”
The jungle swells around Vince, towering over his tiny form, a child in the darkness. The flies buzz with an earsplitting din. “You can’t get off this island. No rescue for ignorant children who waste their talent.”
“It’s not my fault,” Vince cries, “He wanted it. He wanted to go with me. We were going to end it together.”
“He was someone’s son. You killed him and you’re still alive.” The flies hover over the boar’s head in a shifting veil, swirling with sudden intent and direction.
Vince shakes his head and curls up into a fetal ball. “Not my fault,” he whispers as the flies swarm on him, covering his puny body in prickly stabs until he is as black as God. “No one wants to play with you, ignorant boy. Just wasted space.”
“I’m sorry,” Vince cries, his mouth full of flies, his eyes black with their bodies.
“You will sing for me or no one, my darling,” God says in his mother’s voice. “You knew,” it says with a grinning satisfaction, “that I’ve always been a part of you?”
Vince shrinks into the blackness, carried to God’s mouth, a black pill, swallowed deep.
V.
“Now tell me again in plain English. Is there anything wrong with him?”
“Physically, no. It’s all in his mind. He thinks God stole his voice.”
“He’s been here for a week, why can’t you make him speak?”
“If you believe something strongly enough…”
“Don’t give me that voodoo crap. We have to get him back in the studio or he’s over. You understand? It’s all over.”
“Maybe that’s not what he needs right now. He’s completely gone. Have you seen him?”
“Look, I’m his fucking manager, all right, not his nanny, and if he’s not in the studio then his career is over and we’re both off the payroll, got it?”
“He’s not ready.”
“Fuck this, and fuck you my friend. You’re fired.”
“You can’t fire me, I’m his doctor.”
“The hell I can’t. He’s going to stop playing this stupid game and get out of here and into the studio where he belongs.”
“I’m not letting you take him out of here AMA.”
“There’s nothing you can do to stop me. He belongs to us.”
VI.
Vince shakes his head and mouths the word, No.
Jefferson Trowley frowns as he grabs Vince’s frail arm. He yanks him out of the chair, slightly repulsed at how light he is now. “If you’re not in the studio after this fiasco, they’re going to drop you. I had to fuck my mother to get them to agree to that much. Without me you’re deader than dogshit, so be fucking grateful and get dressed.”
Vince wobbles on unsteady feet, then lets himself go dead and drapes back into the chair. No. He scribbles a message on his pad, “No Voice,” and hands it to his manager.
“Don’t give me that bullshit, I know you better than that, Vince.”
Jefferson tosses a set of clothes at his client, then stands back as one of America’s most controversial singers slides into jeans and a sweatshirt that hang like loose skin. He escorts his client through the silent corridors of the hospital, navigates him past the front desk and into the waiting limo. Vince collapses into the back seat.
His manager yells at someone on the cellphone as LA whisks by the window. Vince wishes he was one of those nameless people on the street, no obligations, no third album. Back in the day playing shitty dives for beer and scoring with punk boys after the show, back when no one cared who he slept with, struggling to the goal of success when the music mattered more than profit margins and guest appearances.
Better yet, he wanted to step back and erase the fevered dream that started it all. Halfway through The Lord of the Flies while he was laid up with the flu, somewhere between conscious and unconscious, he was a timid Simon caught up in the awe of a new tribal God in the forest clearing. The pig’s head, swarmed by buzzing flies, granted him a voice, a chance, just sign on the dotted line. He woke up with the name of the band, invented a new name for himself, and it had all fallen into place: the gigs, the contract, the album, the boys smuggled into his dressing room, the parties, the drugs…
Now at the peak, when the world was supposedly his for the taking, there’s an emptiness that can’t be explained away. He’d made it in ways he’d never dreamed, but instead being accomplished, he’d become a commodity. I’m not a fucking can of COkaye, he wants to shout, but the exclamation dies on his lips.
He turns and stares at his manager, seeing him for the first time. He’s not in control of me. For a second Vince is floating in a moment of clarity, as if he can see his entire life laid out like a chessboard. If he doesn’t move, he’ll get checked. Vince motions to be taken home, “I need to sleep,” he writes, but he’s never felt more awake.
VII.
Vince Vader, lead singer of the controversial rock group, Hog Head, has been reported missing. The self-dubbed “Lord of the Flies” disappeared from his Hollywood Hills home following a recent overdose. Police are seeking Vader for questioning in the disappearance of Shaun White, a sixteen-year-old boy from Hancock Park who was last seen with the singer. Though he is not listed as a suspect, local authorities have called his sudden disappearance suspicious.
Stay tuned to NBC for your local weather.
VII.
Vince was amazed at how easy it was to vanish. With his signature black mop of hair shorn down to the stubble, he barely recognized himself. He threw twenty thousand dollars in cash and some clothes into a knapsack, and walked out of his house into the darkness of the early morning. It was good to walk, touring the quiet hills, thinking he should feel some kind of loss or obligation to his past, when all he felt was lightened by the moment. The sun rose like an optimistic omen over the sprawl of LA and the traffic rushed by him going fast from nowhere to nowhere.
He hiked out to the freeway and hitched east, feeling like Kerouac, stretching his legs across the nation. He arrived in New York ten days later with a sense of coming home, and holed up in a cheap studio in Hell’s Kitchen not far from Madison Square Garden, where a version of himself had taken the stage a lifetime ago. He attended shows and dug the music with a mix of nostalgia and expectation. Every once in awhile someone would say he looked like Vince Vader, but he’d only shrug and smile as if to say, “You really think so?”
He picked up an acoustic in a pawn shop and started writing his own music, planning a solo career, not at the vicious top, but on the bar circuit, like old times, where it felt real. Vince billed himself as Simon, no longer “Lord of the Flies”, but its humble servant. He started playing guitar for a local band who shared his new introspection, and they became tight, like family.
In between sets on stage, he sat playing his guitar, a tune that burned for release. A voice exploded out of him, cut with hurt and hope, pronouncing the words as if discovering a new language. The lyrics flowed out of him, a tangled mix of the fevered hog’s head dream, of Shaun White, the dead frozen beauty, and the barren interior landscape that had once been his life. The room fell silent as he bent over his guitar, the song growing larger outside of him, the audience part of the circle.
When he opened his eyes, the crowd sat still, not sure how to respond to his impromptu confession. Then someone applauded, and it caught like a fire across the room. The performer inside of him nodded and remembered that feeling of adulation, like a habit that always needed feeding, but he stepped down out of the lights into the darkness of the wings, content to let his words live a life of their own.
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© 2009 Sean Meriwether
Sean Meriwether has been trying to live up to his moniker as "The Naughty Harry Potter". He has been working his own brand of magic on the page, drafting immersive fiction and erotica and transporting boys and girls into the tumultuous landscape inside his head. He has published over forty short stories in venues including Best of Best Gay Erotica 2, Best Gay Love Stories 2006, and Lodestar Quarterly. His collection of short fiction and erotica, The Silent Hustler
, was released by Lethe Press (2009).
