Rock On (49 page)

“He told her he wanted to be famous, and she said, sure, you can be famous. At about four o’clock in the morning, she took him to see this weird old woman, and this weird old woman gave him a voodoo. She said so long as he fed this voodoo, he’d be fine, and famous all over the world, and every wish he ever wished would come true. But the day he stopped feeding that voodoo, that voodoo would take back everything, and he’d be shit, that’s all, just shit.

“But Jimi wanted fame more than anything else. He could play good guitar, but he wanted to play brilliant guitar. He wanted to be so fucking brilliant that nobody would even believe that he came from earth.”

“So what happened?” I asked. The rain pattered against the window like handful of currants.

John blew smoke out of his nose and shrugged. “She gave him the voodoo and the rest is history. He played with the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Curtis Knight. Then he was famous; then he was gone. Why do you think he wrote that song ‘Voodoo Chile’? He was a voodoo child, that’s all, and that was true.”

“John, he’s still alive,” I insisted. “I saw him; I talked to him. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

But John shook his head. “He’s gone, Charlie. Twenty years gone. When he became famous, he started to starve that voodoo, but in retaliation the voodoo made him weak, made him crazy. Jimi wanted to play for an audience, but the voodoo made him play music that was way beyond anything that an ordinary audience could understand. It was beyond anything that even great guitarists could understand. You remember Robin Trower, from Procol Harum? He went to see Jimi in Berlin and said that he was amazing, but the audience was out of it. Robin was one of the greatest guitarists ever, but he was out of it. Jimi was playing guitar that nobody would understand for about a hundred fucking years.

“So Jimi tried to get rid of the voodoo, but in the end the voodoo got rid of him. The voodoo canceled him out, man: If you don’t live with me, then you don’t live at all. But you don’t die, either. You’re nothing—you’re absolutely nothing. You’re a slave, and a servant, and that’s the way it’s going to be forever.”

“Go on,” I whispered.

“There was only one thing he could do, and that was to take the voodoo back to that little town in Georgia where he first got it. That meant leaving his grave in Seattle and bumming his way back to England, finding the voodoo, and taking it back, in person, to that weird old woman and making her a gift of it. Because if the person you’re giving it back to doesn’t accept it as a gift, it’s still yours, man. Still yours, forever.”

I sat in that ridiculous chair with its collapsed bottom and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What are you trying to tell me? That Jimi’s turned into some kind of zombie? Like the walking dead?”

John smoked and looked away, didn’t even try to convince me.

“I saw him,” I insisted. “I saw him, and he talked to me on the phone. Zombies don’t talk to you on the phone.”

“Let me tell you something, man,” John told me. “Jimi was dead from the moment he accepted that voodoo. Same way I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want me to show you?”

I swallowed. “I don’t know. Maybe, yes. All right.”

He stood up awkwardly. He took off his scruffy black coat and dropped it onto the bed. Then he crossed his arms and lifted up his T-shirt.

He was white-skinned and skeletal, so thin that I could see his ribs and his arteries, and his heart beating under his skin. But it was his stomach that shocked me the most. Tied tightly to his abdomen with thin ropes of braided hair was a flattish ebony figure, very African in appearance, like a small monkey. It was decorated with feathers and diseased-looking fragments of dried pelt.

Somehow, the monkey-figure had become part of John. It was impossible to tell where the figure ended and John began. His skin seemed to have grown around the ebony head and enclosed in a thin, translucent webbing the crooked ebony claws.

John let me look at it for a while; then he dropped his T-shirt and covered it.

“I found it under the floorboards in Monika’s hallway. It was all wrapped up in one of Jimi’s old shirts. I’m pretty sure that Monika didn’t know anything about it. I knew it was dangerous and weird, but I wanted the fame, man. I wanted the money. I thought that I could handle it, just like Jimi thought that he could handle it.

“I wore it for a while, tied loose around my waist, under my shirt, and I fed it bits and pieces just like you’d feed a pet animal. In return, it kind of sang to me; it’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it. It sang to me, and all I had to do was play what it sang.

“But then it wanted more. It clung tighter and tighter, and I needed it tighter because when it was tighter it sang such amazing music, and I got better and better. One morning I woke up and it had dug a hole in my skin, and kind of forced its mouth inside me. It was sore, but the music was even better. I didn’t even have to listen to it anymore, it was right inside me. I didn’t even have to feed it with scraps anymore, because whatever I ate, it sucked right out for itself.

“It was only when it was taking stuff direct from my stomach that I realized what was really happening. And by that time, I was playing music that nobody could relate to. By that time, I was so far out that there was no coming back.”

He paused, coughed. “Jimi took it off before it went into his gut. But he couldn’t play shit without it. It’s a need, man. It’s worse than any drug you’ve ever imagined in your whole life. He tried pills and booze and acid and everything, but until you’ve needed the voodoo, you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘need.’ ”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked him.

“Nothing. Go on living.”

“Couldn’t you give it back to Jimi?”

“What, and commit suicide? This thing’s part of me, man. You might just as well tear out my heart.”

I sat with John talking about the 1960s until it began to grow dark. We talked about Bondy at the Brighton Aquarium, John Mayall, Chris Farlowe and Zoot Money at the All-Nighter in Wardour Street, where you could get bashed in the face just for looking at somebody else’s bird. We talked about sitting on Tooting Graveney Common on cold, sunny autumn afternoons listening to the Turtles on a Boots tranny. We talked about the Bo Street Runners and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the girls in the miniskirts and the white PVC boots. All gone, man. All vanished, like colorful, transparent ghosts. It had never occurred to us at the time that it could ever end.

But one gray evening in 1970 I had walked down Chancery Lane and seen the
Evening Standard
banner “Jimi Hendrix Dead,” and they might just as well have announced that our youth had shut up shop.

I left John just after eight o’clock. His room was so dark that I couldn’t see his face. The conversation ended and I left, that’s all. He didn’t even say good-bye.

I walked back to the boardinghouse. As I stepped through the front door, the bristly-mustached colonel held up the heavy black telephone receiver and announced harshly, “It’s for you.”

I thanked him, and he cleared his throat like a Bren-gun. “Charlie? It’s Jimi. Did you find him?”

I hesitated. Then I said, “Yes. Yes, I did.”

“He’s still alive?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“Where is he, man? I have to know.”

“I’m not sure that I ought to tell you.”

“Charlie—did we used to be friends?”

“I suppose so.”

“Charlie, you have to tell me where he is. You have to.”

His voice sounded so panicky that I knew I had to tell him. I heard myself saying the address like a ventriloquist. I didn’t dare to think of what might happen if Jimi tried to get the voodoo back. Maybe I should have minded my own business, right from the very beginning. They always say that it’s dangerous to mess around with the dead. The dead have different needs from the living, different desires. The dead are more bloody desperate than we can even guess.

I went round to John’s place the next morning after breakfast. I rang the doorbell, and a fussy old woman with a brindled cat on her shoulder let me in.

“Nothing but trouble, you people,” she complained, hobbling away down the hall. “Nothing but noise. Nothing but loud music. Hooligans, the lot of you.”

“Sorry,” I said, although I don’t think she heard me.

I climbed the stairs to John’s room. Outside on the landing, I hesitated. I could hear John’s cassette player, and a tap running. I knocked, too softly for John to hear me. Then again, louder.

There was no answer. Only the trickling of the tap and the cassette playing “Are You Experienced?”

“John?” I called. “John, it’s Charlie!”

I opened the door. I knew what had happened even before I could fully understand what I was looking at. Jimi had gotten there before me.

John’s torso lay on his dark-soaked bedspread, torn wide open, so that his lungs and his stomach and his liver were spread around in brightly colored profusion, interconnected with webs of fat and torn-apart skin. His head was floating in the brimful washbasin, bobbing up and down with the flow of the water. Every now and then his right eye peeped at me accusingly over the china rim. His severed legs had been pushed bloodily beneath the bed.

The voodoo was gone.

I spent a week in Littlehampton “helping the police with their inquiries.” They knew I hadn’t done it, but they strongly suspected that I knew who had. What could I tell them—“Of course, officer! It was Jimi Hendrix!”? They’d have had me committed to one of those seaside mental homes in Eastbourne.

I never heard from Jimi again. I don’t know how the dead travel the seas, but I know for a fact that they do. Those lonely figures standing by the rails of Icelandic-registered cargo ships, staring at the foamy wake. Those silent passengers on cross-country buses.

Maybe he persuaded the old woman to take the voodoo back. Maybe he didn’t. But I’ve pinned the album cover of
Are You Experienced?
to my kitchen wall, and sometimes I look at it and like to think that Jimi’s at peace.

Before he became editor of
Penthouse
magazine and then a best-selling author of horror novels, thrillers and historical sagas,
Graham Masterton
edited the rock music page of his local newspaper in Sussex, England, and rubbed shoulders with many of the up-and-coming rock musicians of the mid-1960s, including Jimi Hendrix. Graham’s first horror novel
The Manitou
was filmed with Tony Curtis in the lead role. His latest horror epic is
The Red
Hotel,
a zombie tale set in Baton Rouge. It will be followed by two major crime novels—
White Bones
and
Broken Angels
—set in Cork, Ireland, where he and his late wife Wiescka lived for four years.

We See Things Differently

Bruce Sterling

This was the
jahiliyah
—the land of ignorance. This was America. The Great Satan, the Arsenal of Imperialism, the Bankroller of Zionism, the Bastion of Neo-Colonialism. The home of Hollywood and blonde sluts in black nylon. The land of rocket-equipped F-15s that slashed across God’s sky, in godless pride. The land of nuclear-powered global navies, with cannon that fired shells as large as cars.

They have forgotten that they used to shoot us, shell us, insult us, and equip our enemies. They have no memory, the Americans, and no history. Wind sweeps through them, and the past vanishes. They are like dead leaves.

I flew into Miami, on a winter afternoon. The jet banked over a tangle of empty highways, then a large dead section of the city—a ghetto perhaps. In our final approach we passed a coal-burning power plant, reflected in the canal. For a moment I mistook it for a mosque, its tall smokestacks slender as minarets. A Mosque for the American Dynamo.

I had trouble with my cameras at customs. The customs officer was a grimy-looking American, white with hair the color of clay. He squinted at my passport. “That’s an awful lot of film, Mr. Cuttab,” he said.

“Qutb,” I said, smiling. “Sayyid Qutb. Call me Charlie.”

“Journalist, huh?” He looked unhappy. It seemed that I owed substantial import duties on my Japanese cameras, as well as my numerous rolls of Pakistani color film. He invited me into a small back office to discuss it. Money changed hands. I departed with my papers in order.

The airport was half-full: mostly prosperous Venezuelans and Cubans, with the haunted look of men pursuing sin. I caught a taxi outside, a tiny vehicle like a motorcycle wrapped in glass. The cabby, an ancient black man, stowed my luggage in the cab’s trailer.

Within the cab’s cramped confines, we were soon unwilling intimates. The cabbie’s breath smelled of sweetened alcohol. “You Iranian?” the cabbie asked.

“Arab.”

“We respect Iranians around here, we really do,” the cabbie insisted.

“So do we,” I said. “We fought them on the Iraqi front for years.”

“Yeah?” said the cabbie uncertainly. “Seems to me I heard about that. How’d that end up?”

“The Shi’ite holy cities were ceded to Iran. The Ba’athist regime is dead, and Iraq is now part of the Arab Caliphate.” My words made no impression on him, and I had known it before I spoke. This is the land of ignorance. They know nothing about us, the Americans. After all this, and they still know nothing whatsoever.

“Well, who’s got more money these days?” the cabbie asked. “Y’all, or the Iranians?”

“The Iranians have heavy industry,” I said. “But we Arabs tip better.”

The cabbie smiled. It is very easy to buy Americans. The mention of money brightens them like a shot of drugs. It is not just the poverty; they were always like this, even when they were rich. It is the effect of spiritual emptiness. A terrible grinding emptiness in the very guts of the West, which no amount of Coca-Cola seems able to fill.

We rolled down gloomy streets toward the hotel. Miami’s streetlights were subsidized by commercial enterprises. It was another way of, as they say, shrugging the burden of essential services from the exhausted backs of the taxpayers. And onto the far sturdier shoulders of peddlers of aspirin, sticky sweetened drinks, and cosmetics. Their billboards gleamed bluely under harsh lights encased in bulletproof glass. It reminded me so strongly of Soviet agitprop that I had a sudden jarring sense of displacement, as if I were being sold Lenin and Engels and Marx in the handy jumbo size.