At the intersection with Glenoaks Boulevard, a Metro bus had screeched to a stop and people were lining up to board. Clay joined them.
Essie was still nowhere to be found.
Pacing, fidgeting, Clay was unable to contain his nerves. The first three people had monthly passes and were quickly on, but the last woman had two small children and couldn’t seem to find dollars crisp enough to feed the machine. Clay withdrew a ten to pay for all of them. The mother, tentative at the sight of him, nodded her thanks. The cash machine beeped angrily. “She’s reading every bill as a one right now,” the driver said.
“Don’t worry, keep it,” Clay said and tried to escape down the aisle.
The machine beeped. The driver sunk deeper into his seat, having to perform this little play with various nitwits and vagrants every day of his life. “She’ll keep cursing till you give exact change. I’ll let the other fares go, but by law I can’t leave this curb till you pay two additional quarters.” He knuckled the glass windshield where a sign was posted, the letters large enough to see from space: CORRECT CHANGE ONLY. DRIVER CARRIES NO CASH. “And don’t ask for change of a dollar ’cause I don’t carry—”
“—any money. I get it.” Clay dug in his pockets, uncertain what had survived his downhill plunge, and found an assortment of dimes and nickels. He stared back down the street.
Now Essie was coming, nightgown billowing as she shouted for the driver to hold the bus. And what would happen next? Would she tear his throat out in front of all these people?
“You alright, Kemo sah-bee?” The driver was watching him closely, sensing an addict in his midst or at least someone psychologically disturbed.
“Doing great,” Clay said. “Just in a real rush.” He managed to drop the coins into the beeping machine without spilling any—which would have sealed his fate for sure. “Can we go now?”
The driver held the wheel and didn’t move, letting Clay know that there was only one person driving the buggy and it wasn’t the idiot with the flushed expression and torn-up shirt. “Take your seat first.”
Clay hurried up the aisle, looking for something—a fire extinguisher, an old man’s cane—that he could wield when the bus became the grisly scene of life-and-death struggle.
Essie was almost to the bus door when the driver closed it up, indifferent to her last-second cry. The vehicle lurched off the curb, and as it gathered speed, Essie punched a window near the rear of the bus. A pair of teenage girls, previously lost in texting, screamed at the sight of the face looming in the window, the raging, carnivorous eyes, hair as wild as the Bride of Frankenstein. Essie was there and then she was gone, and while the girls pointed and drew everyone’s attention, Clay dropped into a seat and was forgotten.
27
I PUT A SPELL ON YOU
It took two buses and a ten-minute walk to reach the Universal City red-line station, but he made it, descending the escalator at a run—more out of time considerations than anything sinister giving chasing. The subway took him under the Hollywood Hills to Hollywood and Vine, where Clay hurried the last two blocks to the Palladium, which was—like so many cathedrals of live music—on Sunset Boulevard.
Since moving to L.A., he had begun to think of the city’s boulevards as sprawling rivers (an ironic notion given how little it rained here); Sunset, Wilshire, Santa Monica all ran to the ocean from deep within the city’s interior, and along the way the landscape changed—buildings and people and storefronts and vibe—like some urban rendition of Twain’s Mississippi.
This end of Sunset had a decidedly lower profile than the hard-partying Strip with its Whiskys and Roxys to the west. Nevertheless, there were still plenty of bars and clubs and theatres and roving humanity. The Palladium didn’t look like more than a run-down hockey arena from the outside, but it had played host to just about every relevant rock act over the last three decades.
Crossing Argyle Avenue, Clay spotted the name currently on the marquee and stopped cold. farewell ghost, november 1. And below that, the thing that really dizzied his brain: sold out.
Despite everything, the hair lifted on his arms, the way it did on the very rare occasion when something you had dreamed about all your life became a living, full-color reality. He could imagine what Savy was feeling backstage, how hard she’d worked for this, and he was excited for her.
Back in Philadelphia, he and Renee had followed a local band who’d frequented all-ages clubs, a bunch of dropout bruisers who slugged their way through Misfits and Circle Jerks covers. They hadn’t been ones for chatting up the crowd between songs; in fact, the only thing any of them had ever shouted into dead air was, in their best cheesesteak accents, “Rawlity Che!” (reality check). It was obviously some inside joke, but the local punks caught on quick and began chanting it at every show. And that was the chant Clay heard now in his head, the united voices on those humid long-ago nights: Reality check! Reality check!
The reality was his band was on the marquee, but the band was no longer his. The reality was that the only reason the Palladium was sold-out was because his band had sold him out. The reality was that Clay had never even been inside the Palladium, let alone on its stage, and now he was going to have to storm the place and play the show of his life.
Oh, the ideas that sounded good when you were chatting with a ghost on a mountainside.
To this point, Clay hadn’t had the luxury of being nervous, but now the old familiar flutter shot up from the sidewalk to take possession of
