Between verses, Beard moonwalked and blew kisses to the crowd. And then he was tearing at his shirt and shoes. He had his pants and bikini briefs most of the way down before security emerged to drag him away. “Yo Fee,” Clay shouted, “I think we found your replacement!”
Before “Houdini Nights,” the guitar tech hurried on stage, trading guitars with Savy and handing one to Clay as well. Priest, Clay noticed, was no longer stalking the wings.
“I don’t know what they expect me to do with this thing.” Clay plucked a few sour notes. “Lucky for you, we’ve got the best guitarist in the land carrying me through. How about a little love for Miss Savannah Marquez!”
The crowd gave her more than a little and Savy replied with a flattered bow. After “Houdini,” they crashed through “Hot Blood,” followed by their crowd-pleasing cover of “Gimme Danger.” Clay obeyed the set list that had been taped to the center monitor, which meant that “Danger” was followed by—and this took some real nerve, considering everything that had happened—a cover of Rocket Throne’s “American Rapture.”
But Clay took everything in stride up there, living one moment to the next like it was his last night on earth. The thunder of the Marshall stacks, the convulsing of their speaker cones, the vibration in his feet, the palm-muted distortion and frenzied down-picking riffs, the war-gallop of the drums, the sound of his voice carrying out the open lobby doors and across Sunset Boulevard, the shifting shafts of stage light, the writhing animal of the mosh pit, and the great choral echo of every voice singing “American Rapture” (Rocco would have been proud). In many ways Clay had been homeless since the day his mother died. But he realized now, This is my home. Because the stage was more than just wood and hardware; it was a transformative portal for performer and audience. He would live here the rest of his days. And if there were no more days, if tonight was his swan song, these were the moments that would flash through his mind before he was cast into the void.
“In Rolls the Storm” was intended to be their penultimate song. They had never written a proper ending to it, preferring the spontaneous nature of jamming on and on. Such wasn’t the case tonight; Fiasco and Spider’s moods had visibly dwindled, understanding that Clay had the Palladium in his palm, and they played with all the life and movement of studio musicians performing light jazz. Clay could sense them trying to bring “Storm” to a conclusion within seconds of its crescendo, then at the one-minute mark, and at three minutes, Clay acquiesced.
“You’ll have to forgive us,” Clay announced, “we don’t have quite as many tunes as most bands that headline this place. But if the rest of Ghost will indulge me, I’ve a ballad I wrote for the occasion. You don’t mind a quick ballad, do you?”
The crowd let him know it didn’t.
And Fiasco glared his daggers, but dropped his bass onto its stand and followed Spider off. Savy passed her guitar to the tech, as if all this had been rehearsed, and stepped just out of the lights. Clay withdrew the crumpled lyrics for “There’s No End to This Wanting” and the tech reappeared, offering him an electric acoustic and taping the tattered loose leaf at his feet, while Clay tuned and attempted to recollect the chords he’d put together that morning.
After a few false starts, he began. The song wasn’t completely arranged, but there was enough to fake his way through. He had written it as a love letter, a song of faith and belief. But the story soon met with an unhappy twist. Sometimes the harder you fought for love, the deeper your ruin. And that simple truth struck Clay now: He would never hold Savy again, never again make love to her, never tour with her, never unlock the mystery of who she really was. The crowd watched him, their shadows still. They had come to Hollywood to witness a beginning, but what they were getting was a coda, a shooting-star goodbye. It was the quietest songs that killed. And when Clay’s voice broke on the last line—“…and I never saw my love again…”—he looked to Savy and was buoyed up by the sorrow in her eyes.
“Thank you,” Clay mumbled, and the room clapped uncertainly. “We’ve got one more song for you, so if my band is still in the building, how ’bout we finish this together?”
Savy wiped at her face and donned her guitar. Fiasco and Spider returned with all the reluctance of students after a fire drill. “Let’s leave it all out here,” Clay told them, off mic. “Everything we’ve got, no fear, no holding back.”
And then they tore through “Voices in the Dark” for the last time as a band, playing it furiously, and with all the terror and sadness in their hearts, playing for an uncertain fate and a dream gone suddenly wrong. It was everything they were in that moment, maybe everything they always had been, and Clay was proud to be a part of it, however briefly. Savy’s solo never sounded more alive. And when she stepped to the center mic to sing “This is how I emp-tee pain!”, Clay traded the line back and forth with her, and for a few, long moments, the crowd and their band and the plotting going on in the dark of the stage wings ceased to exist. It was only the two of them, expelling hot breath into each other’s faces, screaming until their voices were raw and ragged, and no longer there.
28
BURY OUR FRIENDS
He almost made it. The house lights came up and
