In the wings, though, Nelson the Pencil was already tapping his watch.
They did an abbreviated version of “Just Can’t Help Falling in Hate,” a mid-tempo grinder with a hip-hop backbeat, an orphan from their old lineup, when Savy and the guys had called themselves Costly Creation. Then, before their final tune, Fiasco took the mic and dedicated their set to Crissy Rudinski, which drew a polite spat of applause from the otherwise savage mass. He went on at length about her growth as a bass player, knowing that no one in their right mind would kill the power while he was praising Ricky Somebody’s daughter, and he informed the crowd that by next year she too would be onstage, twisting their eardrums.
The effect of the lengthy speech was two-fold: It genuinely flattered the birthday girl and it made the crowd visibly restless. So that by the time Spider counted them into “Voices in the Dark,” the reaction was madness, everyone dancing and shoving and jumping up and down. The stage was invaded with bodies, more than the security guards could handle, and Mo appeared from nowhere to help push people off. Someone was climbing a support beam in the middle of the factory. Several hooligans were throwing shoes. Even the beloved clown was ripped off his pogo stick and surfed over a crowd that tore the leisure suit from his body until his bare, skinny torso was exposed to the world. He was finally flung onstage, tighty-whities shredded, red nose stolen, and his makeup smeared with sweat, or maybe tears, as he rolled dramatically over the center monitor and knocked the mic stand back into Clay’s collarbone. Clay slapped it away with the neck of his guitar and stepped over the writhing clown, shouting mic-less at the faces below. “This is how I emp-tee pain!”
Savy and Fiasco picked it up, and after their fifth or sixth time through, the crowd caught the line and began shouting it too. The moment forever tattooed itself on Clay’s mind. In that moment, one thousand people knew who he was—the lonely island he sometimes inhabited, the depthless void he sometimes tight-roped over, the sense of having nothing real in his life but the music he poured everything into.
They were strangers who loved. And for a little while, they understood too.
At the end of the day, what more could anyone ask for?
Next moment, Mo was shoving at some grease-lightning ’50s rebel and the rebel tripped over the clown and clipped Clay from behind, and they all went plummeting into the churning sea of bodies. The crowd let out a collective cheer, thinking Clay had leapt on purpose, and for several seconds he was buoyed up on a swaying hammock of hands, watching Savy shout his line, again and again, as long as the room would keep it going. Then someone was yanking at Clay’s guitar and someone else was tugging him in the opposite direction and he fell into a gap, landing hard on his back against the cement floor.
He had taken someone else down with him and they were lying flat, squirming under his legs. More hands groped, lifting him to his feet, and Clay saw that who he’d landed on was none other than the birthday girl. A whole crowd of people to tackle and he’d taken out the guest of honor. “Hey, sorry!” Clay plucked her tiara off the floor before someone could stomp it and handed it back. “You okay?”
“Incredible!” she yelled and threw her arms around his neck.
Onstage, his band was finishing “Voices” among a storm of feedback and crashing cymbals, in command up there, and Clay felt a strange disconnect, having gone from performer to audience member in seconds. He reached behind him to bring his guitar around, hoping to fight his way back to wrap things up. You’re fuckheads, but we love you. Gooooodnight! But the Rick wasn’t there anymore. The strap had snapped when he’d fallen.
Clay spun this way and that. “Anyone see a guitar? Hey, who the hell has my axe?”
The feedback abruptly cut out, and their set concluded, while the crowd screamed and pumped its fists, and a high-school kid with a faint mustache and a Flogging Molly shirt stepped from the crowd. “Wasn’t me, man,” he told Clay, and when he lifted the Rickenbacker’s neck, there was no body attached.
12
MY EYES HAVE SEEN YOU
Karney and the Demons knew how to work a crowd, no one could argue that. With a practiced hand, they aroused maximum energy from their fans while pacing themselves through a full-length set. Their songs were tight and, to a note, sounded like they did on the album. Davis Karney said all the right things between songs, asked all the right questions, feigned disappointment in the response: “I said, “‘Are we having fun yet?!’” So that the crowd fell all over itself to please him.
Yet, even as the Demons launched into “Sex Doll,” their current hit, even as the crowd hopped up and down en masse, you couldn’t help feeling like there was something missing in the professional men onstage. It wasn’t just that Karney acted like he was the only one up there (Roethke and the others seemed to prefer being in his shadow); it was as if, despite all their radio hits and flawless playing, you could tell this was just another gig for a band that stood onstage two hundred times a year. After all, if Clay had just popped his cherry as a live musician, these guys were veritable porn stars—good at what they did, but having lost the original lusty thrill.
Of course, it might have only been the mood Clay was in. Breaking a guitar that had been given to you by your idol had a way of pissing on your parade. The fact that someone had made off with the Rickenbacker’s body didn’t help either. “I’ll talk to Dooley at the shop,” Fiasco assured him. “We’ll root and plunder, find another Rick just
