How to Kill a Rock Star (9 page)

I told Paul this and he gazed off into space, his expression meditative. Then he said, “For what it’s worth, I think happiness is a fleeting condition, not a permanent goddamn state of mind. I’ve learned that if you chase after moments of bliss here and there, sometimes those moments wil sustain you through the shit.” He paused to pick a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “Personal y, I don’t like inherently happy people. I don’t trust them.

I think there’s something seriously wrong with anyone who isn’t at least a little let down by the world.”

Insisting we stop for a late-night snack of the liquid variety, Paul steered me to Rings of Saturn. As soon as we walked in, John the Baptist grabbed a bottle from behind the counter and said, “How’s it hanging, Hudson?” Then he recognized me.

“Uh-oh, what’s a nice girl like you doing with this clown?” Paul pointed back and forth between me and John. “You two know each other?”

“Sure,” John said, winking in my direction. “Girl’s got a penchant for green olives, martinis with no booze, and she tips, which is more than I can say for you.”

“A martini with no booze?” Paul said, his face crooked.

“What the hel is that?”

Without asking what we wanted, John went about serving up our respective drinks of choice. Evidently, Paul liked Captain Morgan’s rum and ginger ale.

“It’s a marvelous night for a moondance,” Paul said to John.

John had a red bandanna around his forehead and a dishrag in his back pocket. He wiped his hands on the rag, then went to the stereo behind the cash register and put on the Van Morrison CD Paul had requested. Seconds later, a girl with long auburn hair parted in a perfectly straight line down the center of her scalp walked past the bar and drooled, “
Hi,
Paul.
”

Paul mumbled, “Hey, Alicia,” and turned his back to the girl
so abruptly I was sure he’d slept with her. His indifference, coupled with my awkward jealousy, made me want to kick him.

“It’s late,” I said, getting up off my chair. “I should leave you to your
friends
.”

I hated myself for saying
friends
the way Lucy Enfield did. But I felt stupid for being there, for being with Paul, and for thinking al the stupid things I almost al owed myself to think about him.

Paul touched my arm and, in an almost desperate voice, said, “Don’t go. Please. I want to show you something.” He took his wal et from his pocket and pul ed a smal white feather out of the bil fold. It was tattered from age, the ends looked like they’d been singed, and he held it as if it were a piece of broken glass. “I’ve never shown this to anyone.” I could hear my conscience chiding me to walk away. But Paul’s eyes, at times, had an entirely different personality than the rest of his face. They were needy and they pleaded with me to stay.

“What is it?” I said.

“It’s a feather.”

“I know
that
. What’s it for?”

“My grandmother sent it to me a long time ago.” I settled back in and began questioning Paul in the manner I would have used if I’d been interviewing him—prob-ing but compassionate—and he proceeded to recount the facts of his life as if he were releasing toxins that had been in his bloodstream for years.

“I’m just going to start from the beginning,” he said. “Late morning. December, 1972. Pittsburgh, PA. My mother, who wil herein be referred to as Carol, goes into labor. So she gets dressed and asks her fiancé to drive her to the hospital.”

“She wasn’t married?”

Paul shook his head. “She was engaged. To this guy, Robert Davies, who, incidental y, is not the father of the How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 5:00

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7child she’s about to pop.”

“Is Mr. Davies privy to this information?”

“Yeah, he knows. So he brings a radio to the hospital, per Carol’s request, and they keep it on during the delivery. Six hours later I’m born, and the first voice I hear is Doug Blackman singing ‘A Prayer for the Damned.’” I was shaking my head. “You’re tel ing me you remember that?”

“Like it was yesterday.”

“Impossible.”

“Do you talk to al your interviewees this way?”

“Not the important ones,” I teased. “So, what’s the story with Robert Davies?”

“Swear to God, I don’t remember ever having a conversation with the guy. He was a man of few words and even fewer emotions. I grew up referring to him as Piece of Wood because he was stiff, void of personality, and spent most of his waking hours working. He spent the rest of his time planting flowers in our front yard. He might have been a walking log, but as a rose pruner he kicked ass.”

“What did he do? For a living, I mean.”

“He worked for a company that made and distributed electronics. His job was to make sure the various corporate branches around the country were being run as efficiently as possible. The company transferred him to a new city every few years to rework the offices, and he got to hire and fire as he saw fit. Besides the roses, hiring and firing people were the only things he ever got excited about.”

“What was your mom like?”

“Bored,” he said. “But she discovered ways of dealing with our transient existence and her emotional y absent husband. Bowling in the morning and a couple shots of scotch in the afternoon usual y did the trick. I didn’t have the same luxuries, at least not when I was a kid. Al I had How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 5:00 PM Page 73

was a pile of old records to keep me company.” Sounds familiar, I thought. “Where does Grandma fit in?”

“Here’s the thing…” Paul leaned in so close I could feel his warm, rum-flavored breath on my face. “I didn’t know she existed until my thirteenth birthday, when I got a letter from her, and in it she said her son had been my father. She apologized for my not having met him, but something bad had grown in his brain and he’d died—her exact words. Later on, I learned he’d had a brain tumor. The feather was inside the envelope, and I’ve kept it with me ever since, a little talisman.”

“Was her son real y your father?”

He nodded. “When I showed Carol the letter she shrugged like it was no big deal and said, ‘I don’t know how that crazy woman found you.’”

Paul told me that after hounding his mother for days on the topic of his father’s identity, Carol final y told him the truth.

“She said his name was Wil iam, he rode a motorcycle, and never had any money. He died before I was born, and Piece of Wood was kind enough to make an honest woman out of her. She never mentioned him again.” I scraped an olive from the toothpick in my glass and then sucked the little red pimento out of the middle. Seconds later John the Baptist dropped two more olives into my water.

“Why isn’t your last name Davies?” I asked Paul.

“I went by Davies growing up, but it’s not my legal name.

It’s not on my birth certificate.”

“Hudson is your real father’s name?”

He shook his head.

“What’s your real name?”

“Can’t tel you that.”

“Why not?”

“No one knows my real name. Wel , except for Feldman.” Paul looked like he was debating how much more information to divulge. He took a slow sip of his drink, went
7through a raise-your-right-hand, swear-over-your-life-you’l -never-ever-tel -a-soul rigmarole with me, and said, “When I moved here I wanted a clean slate. I felt like a new person and I wanted a new name. So, I made one up.”

“Okay. Why Hudson?”

“The
river
.” He said it like it should have been obvious. “I was living in this fleapit apartment in Hel ’s Kitchen, and when I say ‘fleapit’ I’m not utilizing a platitude for the sake of the story. My ankles used to itch every time I got out of bed. Even worse than that was the bathroom. The building had a serious plumbing problem, and there was never enough water at the bottom of the toilet, so you had to piss in it about five times before you could flush anything down.” He stared into his drink. “This one night, middle of summer, it was a zil ion degrees outside and the smel in my room was so bad I had to go up and sleep on the roof. It was the lowest I’d ever felt, and I remember laying there staring at the sky, feeling so fucking alone, and wondering what the hel was going to happen to me—if I was ever going to get any farther than that dump, if I belonged in New York, if I was going to be able to make a living making music, or if I should just chuck myself off the goddamn roof and be done with it.” He paused to make sure I was getting the point. “The river was the first thing I saw when I woke up the next morning. Somehow I’d survived the night. And that’s when Paul Hudson was born.” I felt the heat of Paul’s gaze on my face. He was waiting for something from me. Acknowledgement. Validation.

Commiseration, perhaps. I couldn’t even look at him because I was afraid of feeling any more than I already did.

Focusing on the speakers above the bar, I listened to Van Morrison sing about souls and spirits flying into the mystic.

Van was obviously trying to tel me something.

“I don’t know why I just laid al that shit on you,” Paul mumbled.

He finished his drink and sat quietly, stirring the ice in his glass. It took a while for me to think of something to say, and even then, al I could come up with was, “When did you start playing guitar?”

“We’d just moved to Rochester. I was sixteen.” With his tongue, Paul dug out a piece of ice and crunched on it. “For me, moving was symbolized by the dreaded goddamn basement. I always had to clean and unpack the basement. One day I was digging through an old trunk and I found an acoustic guitar. It was dented and needed new strings, but I fel hopelessly in love with it. I had it tuned up, bought a box of picks and a used chord dictionary, and for a week I only put it down to sleep. When Carol tried to drag me out of the cel ar, I made her bring Piece of Wood downstairs, and I played and sang an entire song for them. Ask me what song I played. Go on, ask.”

“What song did you play?”

Paul was reanimated, his eyebrows dancing in chorus with his voice. “A little three-chord ditty cal ed ‘The Day I Became a Ghost’ by Douglas J.

Blackman. Needless to say, the boxes sat in the basement for a long time before anyone unpacked them. And the smel of damp cement stil reminds me of the summer I discovered my cal ing.”

“That’s my favorite song,” I confessed, which may have been the understatement of my life.

I toyed with the toothpick in my glass and tried not to be so drawn to the man beside me. But I couldn’t deny the energy I felt being passed between us like the sonic waves traveling from the speakers above the bar to my ears. “How did you end up here?”

“After Rochester, we moved to Houston. Have you ever been to Houston?”

I shook my head. I’d never been anywhere.

“It sucks,” he said. “The day I got there I started making plans to go off and earn my salt as a musician. I did con-How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08

5:00 PM Page 76

7struction, delivered food, worked at a record store, trying to save up enough money to get the hel out of Dodge. Then Carol got sick, Piece of Wood increased his working hours so he didn’t have to deal with it, and I stuck around to take care of her. She went through chemo, lost both of her breasts, al of her hair, and died a year and a half later with a crew cut and a shitload of regret. A week later I packed my suitcase and boarded a plane for JFK.”

I deemed Paul a hero because he mentioned flying as if it were incidental. “What airline did you take?” He looked at me as if I’d just addressed him in Japanese.

“I don’t know. It was a long time ago. But I do remember the plane was painted like a dolphin.” My stomach did a somersault. “A
what
?”

“The company was doing a promotion with a movie studio and they’d painted the outside of the plane to look like the country’s newest animated hero.”

“And you got
on
it? Are you out of your
mind
?
Maybe
painting it to look like a bird might make sense. But a
sea
creature? That’s a crash waiting to happen.”

“Eliza,” he said gently. “Do you have any idea what the odds are of being involved in a plane crash?”

“Depending on the circumstances, the odds of being in a plane crash are about 1 in 4.2 mil ion, but tel that to my parents and the one hundred and seventy-eight other people who died with them.”

Paul looked like he was about to offer a long, sappy apology, and I said, “No pity, please. Don’t say you’re sorry for something you played no part in.”

“Fair enough.”

I didn’t like the direction the conversation had taken and wanted to turn it back around. “What ever happened to your grandmother? The one who sent the letter?”

“Pushing up daisies by the time I found her.”
“And you have no other family?”

“Nope.”

“What about Robert Davies?”

“He was transferred to Nashvil e not long after Carol died, but I haven’t seen or talked to him since I left Texas.” Without pause, Paul hopped off his chair, tugged on my arm, and said, “Dance with me.”

I could think of very few things I wanted more than to stand as close to Paul Hudson as dancing would permit, which is precisely why I shook my head.

“Come on. One goddamn song.”

“Has anyone ever told you how much you overuse that word?”

“What word?”

“Goddamn.”

“I just spil ed my guts al over your lap. It’s the least you could do.”

No one was dancing. There wasn’t even a proper dance floor. And Alicia was stil loitering. But Paul kept tugging until I stood up and fol owed him to the corner.

He put one arm on the smal of my back and with the other he fiddled with the edge of the
Luka
sticker stil stuck to my shirt.

“Is this okay?” he said.

I didn’t know if he was referring to his hands, his dancing, or the ultraviolet warmth his body was emitting, but I nodded, moved in closer, and within seconds I let myself slip into a world where there were no sharp edges, where everything was curved and smooth and seamless, like Paul’s voice as he hummed Van Morrison in my ear. I felt like I was being zapped between the legs with a stun gun.