6
LIVING WITH GHOSTS
Peter didn’t come home that night, leaving Clay as solitary witness to the phantom steps. They traveled the house for nearly an hour after the attack, then faded, gradually, and did not return. Nevertheless Clay waited till dawn-gray found the spiderwebbed cracks in the window, till his swollen bladder threatened to burst like a water balloon, before he dared to leave his bed.
The Rickenbacker was still lying face-down on his desk, no worse for the wear except for a fresh dent on its already battered body. Clay cradled it in his arms, testing the strings. The old girl wasn’t even out of tune.
So what had that ghost-tantrum been about? In life, Boyle hadn’t been known for violent mood swings. Even the most sensationalistic biographies quoted road managers, audio engineers, the lowliest of luggage roadies about Boyle’s unpretentiousness temperament (never having a hissy fit if there wasn’t a bowl of brown M&Ms backstage; never telling an obnoxious fan to fuck off). But for a rock star who told the world he’d kicked his drug habit, then died with enough heroin in his system to kill a prize elephant—who’d professed in Rolling Stone to never being happier, one week before hanging himself—maybe emotional stability wasn’t a strong suit.
Still, what the hell?
Who’s to say it’s Boyle at all? Clay thought. Deidre McGee, his girlfriend, had been the one who’d died in the house. Maybe she’s funny about houseguests. In other circumstances, Clay might have laughed at the idea. Right now, though, it didn’t exactly rattle the funny bone. Right now, the Ganeks settling for a lot less than the house was worth was making sense.
There was more lingering on these grounds than diehard fans.
His body numb in the brightening morning, Clay drove into downtown Burbank and hit the first diner he saw, scarfing pancakes and waffles and French toast with great dollops of butter and ever-spreading reservoirs of syrup.
When the local theater opened, Clay bought a ticket for the first available show and shut his eyes in the back row. It was some children’s flick—celebrity voices screaming at each other through animated animal mouths—and Clay snapped from his head-lolling slumber every time they broke into song. Finally, as two wayward Chuckwallas wrecked havoc on New York’s Fifth Avenue, his lights went out. He woke hours later, with almost the same exact scene playing; apparently the ushers had assumed he was either drunk or cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs because half the day had passed and no one had roused him from where he slouched, legs up like a dead spider.
Whenever he was awake, Clay checked his phone. The result always the same: No calls from Savy. No calls from friends back east. No calls at all except from his father, who hinted at being home late again.
Returning to the house in the afternoon, Clay noticed two carloads of fans shooting video through the gates and used them as excuse to swing a U-ey in the cul-de-sac and sped off again. What now?
Where he ended up was Forest Lawn, resting place of L.A.’s celebrity dead.
And what many there were.
A ten-minute stroll among the tombstones found him at the manicured foot of Rocco’s and Deidre’s five-foot-high monument. Perched over the heaps of flowers and album covers and concert photos was a papier-mâché Rocco bust. On its base someone had written: rip rocco and deidre, your killer will get theirs.
Long had there been a correlation between conspiracy theories and rock-star deaths, but never was it more apparent than with Rocket Throne fans, many of whom refused to believe their champion had died by his own hand. Because Boyle had seemed so much larger than mortality. Because Boyle’s playing and songwriting had been at the top of its game. Because the lyrics in The Disharmonic were so different from anything he’d previously written—the old angst-ridden tales of good people surrendering to temptation, falling victim to addiction, being plowed under by a hostile world, had been entirely abandoned on Throne’s final album, in favor of anthems of hope, of decent people rising from the depths of despair, finding love, victory in defeat, even the strength to make the world something better than it was. Because in other hands, such themes would have amounted to a lot of hippy-dippy shit, but with Boyle you believed he had marched to the teetering edge of ruin and concluded that life was indeed worth fighting for. Because it was easier to buy into a pulpy plot about an unidentified murderer who’d snuck onto his property and forced Boyle—a recovering junkie—to shoot heroin, then forced him to shoot a lethal dose of the same junk into his girlfriend’s arm and, without any evidence of struggle, went on to force Boyle to hang himself from the chandelier fixture.
Some were even convinced it was Deidre who had done the killing—maybe Boyle had broken up with her and she’d strangled him, a man twice her size, then staged a typical rock/drug suicide before offing herself. It was easier, after all, to blame the Courtney Loves and Nancy Spungens of the world than to focus on the problems of the rock star himself. Harder to look at the terrible truth of Boyle’s brilliant, but tumultuous psyche, to realize he was capable of incredible highs and devastating lows—as illustrated so poignantly in his music—and that in the end the darkness had won out in him. Easier to buy into double murder than double suicide. Or simply to believe that the man, disillusioned with fortune and fame, had faked his death and was living the good life in the south of France or the Sonoran Desert, with Jim Morrison and Chris Cornell as neighbors and golf buddies.
Because he was Rocco Boyle. Because he was fucking rock-n-roll, and that, of course, could never die.
As a result, his Forest Lawn grave had been violated on three separate occasions (by comparison, Marilyn Monroe’s had only been dug up once and Bela Lugosi’s—two narrow plots over—never at all). The third
