Vamp in the Middle

Vamp In the Middle by James Killus I was in a band once, though you might not think so to look at me. Well, it was a bar band, so maybe you would. Almost all our gigs were in bars, though we'd pretty it up some and call them "lounges." All great bands start off as bar bands, lounge acts, that's what we told ourselves. We figured we were going to be great. It was a long time ago. What? Yeah, late fifties. Most of the other guys in high school were full bore rock-and-rollers, but Tom, Harry, and I were jazz babies, I guess. Tom's dad had been a horn player in a swing band in the thirties, so we didn't get the sort of static that some might get, though he didn't care for Miles and Bird much. We practiced a lot of Brubeck tunes at home, just to keep him happy. Tom played either piano or sax, depending on the song; Harry was drums, and I was bass. Sometimes Harry would play clarinet also, and on those I had to sweat to keep the rhythm under control. Had to lie about our ages, of course, at least for the gigs we did while still in high school. Called ourselves the Hot Six Less Three — that was Tom's idea. He wanted it to sound like "Hot Sex" or something. Harry suggested "Tom, Rick, and Harry," so you can see why I backed Tom. We broke up right after high school for a year or two. There was a bit of bad blood for a while, because Harry stole Tom's girl and married her, but they got over it. Both of them went to college, but I didn't quite know what to do with myself other than stay out of classrooms. I hitched around for a while, but I learned pretty quick what Kerouac was full of. Then I came home and got a part time job at the local gas station, still killing time, living with my mother, waiting to see what turned up. I could have been drafted at any time, but the draft was not too intense back then, after Korea, before Vietnam. Anyway, the three of us got back together for a gig or two at Till's Place over in the next county, and it felt pretty good. So we decided to keep at it for a while, maybe get successful, who knows? But most of the outlying bars wanted rock and roll dance music, so we had to start playing in the city to do any club work. And the clubs were hard to please. One owner told us he could use us regularly if we had a vocalist, by which he meant a girl in front of the band who could show a lot of cleavage. We'd done this bit before, usually with one of Tom's girlfriends, one of whom Harry then stole and married, as I said before. So I was pretty dubious about this, but Tom and Harry were sure that all that was past tense, and besides, we needed the work. So we put the word around a little at the club. Maybe we should have posted something at the college, but we wanted someone with experience this time. What we got was almost no response at all. Harry brought us two women in their late thirties, but they left when they realized that we were just three young guys with almost no prospects. Probably just as well. I think that they were strippers trying to snag a second career. Then a couple of Tom's college girls did give it a run, but neither could sing at all. Then no one called for two weeks. Then Francie showed up. We were jamming in the garage that Tom's dad had helped us soundproof, that is to say that he stapled egg cartons on the walls, which cut down the sound a bit. Harry was trying to do a Joe Morello drum thing and failing pretty badly when the side door open and there she was. I think she said something like, "You must be the guys looking for a singer." She had great red hair, even if it came from a bottle. We learned later that she changed her hair color like other girls changed shoes. Aside from that, from the neck up she wasn't very good looking, I guess, though it's hard to remember, and later events may have clouded my memory a bit. But she had a body, and she wore it very well. And she had a voice, a hell of a voice, husky but clear at the same time. When she started to sing you could hear every word. I could almost hear Tom salivate. This one was like his every weakness poured into a low cut dress. She knew the material too, even the scat stuff. She should have been in somebody else's band, somebody who was really good, but she chose us, for no good reason that I could tell. So it was just this redhead walks in, starts into "My Favorite Things," and we had no choice but to hire her on the spot.

When we showed up to audition at The Topsy the next night the owner took one listen and hired us on the spot. "Good choice of vocalist, kid," he told me later. "Even the tin ears will go for her." Then it was just boom! we were off to the races. The Hot Six, less Three, plus One, an almost instant local success. Go figure. We got good notices in the local jazz column, a couple of radio spots, and regular paying gigs. Maybe even better than all that, the local jazz musicians started giving us compliments. "Pretty good for an ofay," one of them teased me, after a gig. "You sure you all white?" I pretended to laugh it off, but I was thrilled beyond description. Pretty heady stuff for, what was I, still not even 21? We were writing songs, too. Even me, but mostly Tom. He co-wrote a lot of stuff with Francie. Almost from the beginning. I'm not sure which started first, them writing together or them sleeping together. You can see the fault lines even from here, can't you? Tom with Francie, Harry with Helen, who used to be Tom's girl. The only thing that saved it from being a sitcom farce from the get-go was that we were damn good. I have no idea how it happened, some sort of chemistry involving Francie, obviously, but how that works, who knows? Like on a typical evening, we'd start up at nine. We'd play three sets ending about one A.M. Helen would be there to keep an eye on Harry sometimes. She claimed it was because she loved what we were doing, but everybody knew different. No matter. We'd start playing and the club would quiet down, which is a phenomenon in itself. The first two sets were mostly standards, spotlight on Francie, except for solos and instrumentals. Francie wore a different dress every night, I swear, I have no idea where she got them, but they always showed her off. And she'd change her hair style or color about once a week, her makeup every other night. Tom told me at one point that he started seeing some of the local college girls in get ups that looked like Francie's. We were attracting a college crowd on some nights, so maybe they started picking up on it. The third set was when we really got into it, though. We'd do our original stuff, or just start to do full tilt improv. Tom and Francie would start exchanging riffs, sax and scat vocals, while Harry and I would start to slide into some polyrhythms straight from some alien experiments in cultural anthropology. The audiences sometimes went wild, sometimes they'd leave the club so silent it was like they were drugged. It was just magic, inside and out. Sometimes after the clubs closed, we'd still play for hours, just trying out stuff, sometimes writing it down, sometimes not. We wouldn't get home until dawn, easy, and I'd sleep until nearly sunset most days, keeping vampire hours, my mom called it, I'm sure she didn't approve. I was being absolutely drained by the night living, but feeling so alive that there was no way I'd stop. There were times I figured that we'd gotten about as cool as you can get without being black or a junkie. So naturally Tom and Francie started doing junk. It first showed up when they'd show up for a gig obviously just a bit on the nod. She'd slur a phrase a little and giggle, and Tom would do a little piano noodle, that made it look like the whole thing was an intentional improv. Once she blanked an entire verse, so the rest of us just vamped until she recovered. It all still sounded good, and I don't think anyone else noticed, except maybe for any other musicians in the audience, which were quite a few by this point. Afterwards, I got a bit angry. "What you do and who you see on your own time is your own business, but it's beginning to get into the act," I told Tom. He stared at me like I was cold fish. "What kind of a crack is that, about who we see?" I felt my stomach sink on that one. "I mean..." I stammered. But it trailed off. "You mean that I've been seeing too many Negroes, don't you?" he accused. He pronounced it Knee-grows, like it was a curse, a curse from, and therefore against, the middle class America that we were all now so much hipper than. He'd nailed me dead to rights, of course. I was accusing him of falling in with a bad, which is to say black, element, that they were feeding him dope and turning him into a junkie jazz musician. Of course I'd pegged him dead to rights as well, because that was exactly what was happening. Well, not quite. Nobody was doing anything to Tom except Tom.

But I couldn't admit to thinking like that, so I backed off. "No, I don't mean that," I lied. I just think that you and Francie should be careful." He snorted. "Miss Francie and me is full fledged adults now, little fellow. We is free, white, and over 21, so don't you get to worrying about us, hear?" He said it in more fake dialect, so I just gave up. "Shit, do what you want," I said as I left. "Shit, I surely do intend to," he said to my back. *** The next night Tom and Francie were out on the town and he drove into a telephone pole. She was barely scratched, but he had a mild concussion, and a cracked rib so he spent the night at the hospital. Harry and I went down to see them at the hospital, and Harry drove Francie home. I left feeling a little off, like something bad was going to happen, something a lot worse than an auto accident. I drank half a pint of bourbon to get to sleep that night and I had some nightmares that morning that I don't recall. But the next night, with Tom just barely out of the hospital, on crutches and high on prescription pain killers, with Francie in thick makeup to hide the bruises like some battered wife, with me hung over because I never drank much, and Harry just grinning at me like he expected me to puke at any moment, that night we played the best we'd ever played. Our third set was all blues-based that night. Francie and Tom had worked up some jazz versions of old delta blues numbers, like Howlin' Wolf and Lightning Hopkins, stuff you had to find on old race records or hear in clubs where white boys were not welcome. I'd never heard them before, but Harry played them like he knew what he was doing and I sweated just to keep up and under. And Jesus Christ was it good. And through it all was that feeling, like a car accelerating toward the cliff. There's plenty of time to jump free, plenty, but the rush feels so good that you're not sure you'll jump in time. That night it took a full pint to put me to sleep. And that was just the beginning. So as I was saying, it was scary, but damn, the crowds loved us. It was SRO every night. The word was out. We were making plans to tour. And I was getting more and more scared. When you don't know what you're scared of, you fixate on stuff. I was afraid Tom or Francie would get busted. Fair enough. It turned out that Tom had stolen a pile of prescription pads when he was in the hospital and was trading them for junk or just using them to buy it. Fair enough fear, right? But I knew that wasn't it. I was worried about Harry and Helen. Once I went to pick him up for a gig and they were arguing. Loud. Really loud. I couldn't hear what they were yelling about, but I could guess. But what I was really scared about was Francie, and the way she looked when that spotlight hit her and the crowd hushed down and she began to sing. Like she was feeding on something. Something sweet and habit forming. Something like junk, but a whole lot stronger. It was a week before our tour, and I had it in my mind to confront Tom and Francie with the drug use issue. To tell them that it would be too dangerous for them to be using on tour, in other cities where we didn't know anyone. That's what I told myself, anyway. She and Tom still weren't living together, although he spent most of his days in her apartment. He'd already dropped out of school for the tour, and what his folks thought about all this I couldn't say, but in theory he still lived in a converted shack behind their house. She had an apartment in the city, and, like I say, he spent most of his time there. But when I got there, Tom wasn't there. Harry was, though. I recognized his car from across the street.

I held back for a while, waiting in an alley, smoking a cigarette and debating what to do. Sure, maybe they were just working out the details of an arrangement. Right. Like I was a Black Muslim. Just after I finished the cigarette, I saw him leave. He had that look on his face, that old happy Harry look. Like he'd just gotten away with something. I waited a while longer, wanting to leave, to quit the whole thing. Instead I went up the three flights to her room. The door to her apartment was slightly ajar and while I was debating whether or not to ring the bell, I heard music coming from inside. It was an old Victrola playing Porter's Begin the Beguine, and I heard Francie singing softly to herself, but the words were wrong. So I pushed the door open a little bit more to hear: 'A loaf of bread' the Walrus said, 'Is what we chiefly need: Pepper, vinegar besides Are very good indeed— Now, if you're ready, Oyster dear, We can begin to feed.' Through the crack in the door I could see her dancing. She was a blonde this week, and she had on a sheer gray housecoat, loosely belted, loosely enough to tell that the housecoat was all she had on. She was hugging herself as she swayed to the music in front of a floor length mirror, and periodically she would reach up to brush hair from her face and lean close to the mirror, stroking it with her fingertips, and peering intently into its depths. "Hi, Ricky," she called out to me, without looking in my direction. "C'mon in. I was wondering when you'd be by. You just missed Harry, but then you know that, don't you?" I felt exposed standing in the hall, so I slipped inside her room and closed the door behind me, my hand still behind my back on the doorknob. She turned to me and laughed out loud. "Oh, poor baby. It's all coming a bit fast, isn't it? You thought that the music was a good ticket out of the straight life, and now you're beginning to wonder just what it's a ticket to. All the dope and sex and late night games are a bit much, are they? Or maybe it's just that I scare you. I do scare you, don't I, Ricky boy?" She swayed over toward me and make a comic puckered lunge at me, as if to kiss me. I tried to stand still, but I must have flinched a little, because she laughed again and moved back to lean her shoulders against the mirror. The center of her eyes were black pools, the pupils too dilated even for the darkened room, the darkness engulfing the honest color of them. I tried to remember what color her eyes had been and failed. "Know anything about vampires, Ricky?" she said. Her voice had changed now and her back straightened. She took two strides over to where I stood and grabbed my hand and hauled me to her position in front of the mirror. She grabbed the back of my head and turned it toward the mirror. "What do you see there, Ricky? What do you see in the mirror?" "Just you and me," I told her. "I shouldn't be..." "Hush," she said, and pulled my mouth onto hers. I could have struggled, but I didn't. She'd called me a coward too many times already. So I kissed her back for what seemed long enough, then broke it off. "Satisfied?" I asked. "Never," she said. She put out her hand and stroked the mirror again. "You see the two of us there. I can see you, dimly, but I'm not there at all. There's never any me in a mirror, Ricky boy. Never any me there at all. The only time I can see myself is when the audience starts to glow. They do that some nights, have you noticed? This mist seems to fall over them and it starts to pick up this silvery glow. And I can take that glow, and shape it into

almost anything. But mostly it crawls into things that are shaped like me. I sing to the beast and it lets me see myself. Both of us become real at the same time." Her face was only a few inches from mine. She smiled and there was something about her smile that made me remember nightmares that I couldn't remember before. "I can see myself in your eyes, Ricky," she said. "And in Tom's and even in Harry's. That's why we work so well together. That's why I chose you three. You make me real. Alone up there and I'd just dissolve into that silver mist, but with the three of you, I can feed off of your need and find my own. "What do people need, do you think? Some are just slugs, good for nothing but feeding and fornicating, but some of you have dreams, tasty dreams, nourishing dreams. Tom needs a soul mate, someone to make his songs for, someone to lead him down the dark passageways where he finds romance. Harry just needs someone who can help him chippy on his wife, preferably his best friend's girl, so he can get two betrayals for the price of one. "But what do you need, Ricky? I'm the one who can give it to you. Here I am, the walking, breathing sacrifice to need, ready to be anything and anyone for you. Feed your desires and you feed me, what could be fairer than that?" She melted into my arms. I felt like my body had turned to soft wax and there was a siren singing in my soul. Now, if you're ready, Oyster dear, We can begin to feed. Sudden fear shot though me and I gasped and pushed her away. "No," I said. "Not you. Not now. Not like this." She shook her head, and looked at me in amazement, as if I'd just started babbling nonsense. Then she blinked, as if waking up. "Oh, I see. Oh, poor Ricky. That's quite a problem you've set for yourself, always wanting what you can't have. And if you ever get it you won't want it anymore, will you?" She laughed a shrill laugh. "That's one on me, I guess. But it's an even bigger one on you!" She shrugged her shoulders and the housecoat fell to the floor. She spread out her arms. "Here it all is, Ricky. All just for you. You can look but you can't touch, that would spoil it, wouldn't it? I'd have done anything you wanted, anything at all. But as soon as you got it you'd lose it forever. Why not try a taste, Ricky? You're going to lose it all anyway, so why not try a taste?" I turned and bolted from the room. I heard her laughter all the way down to the street. I didn't bother trying to sleep. I just went home, packed a few things, and made it to the recruiting office just as it opened the next morning. A few hours later I was on a bus to Camp Pendleton. I called my mom to let her know where I was headed. She sounded relieved. I'm sure that having a beatnik son had been a strain on her, though she hadn't shown it much. Three weeks into boot camp, I got a call to report to the CO. There were a couple of MPs waiting for me there. "Private Richard Marks?" one of them asked. "Sir, yes, sir," I answered. "A single 'sir' will do for now, private. Your presence is required by the San Diego Police Department." That flustered me enough for me to drop all memory of protocol. "San Diego Police Department...what...?" "They have three bodies that you may have to identify." The trip took two hours and I had horrible waking nightmares every minute of the trip. Pretty much every one of them was true,

when it came to it. It was Tom, Harry, and Francie, of course. They'd gone on the tour without me, and when it happened, the calls home had indicated that the nearest person who could identify them was me. "We're calling it a double murder/suicide," the coroner told me. Mr. Oldstein apparently caught the Francis woman with Harold Tate, shot them both, then himself." He drew back the sheets. It was Tom and Harry, all right. Harry had taken one right through the heart, and Tom had half his head blown away from holding the gun to his temple, but he was still pretty easy to identify. Francie was harder. I stared and stared at the corpse. It had been a stomach shot and she'd probably come to for a little while after Tom had shot himself, but before she bled to death. The coroner said she managed to crawl as far as the door. I tried to remember what she had looked like, but it was mostly just a blank. The body had a good figure, black hair, and a face of no particular consequence, save for a hint of blood at the lips. She didn't look like anything I remembered. "That's her," I told him. He sighed. "I was worried about that one," he confided in me. "We got good IDs on the two men, but when we asked the people who had seen them perform, no two descriptions of her matched. And she was the one that everyone remembered. Or at least the one they said they remembered." "She changed her appearance more often than most people change their underwear," I told him. "Different makeup every day, different hair every week. I'm not surprised it confused a lot of people. Too bad you never heard her sing. That never changed. It was special." He nodded. "It's a goddamn shame." I agreed with him, then signed some papers and left. *** After boot camp I shipped out to Korea, reupped once, then bailed right before the Vietnam thing got hungry for blood. I can't say that I saw it coming, but I heard a few tales when on leave in Tokyo. Got married in '66, divorced in '68, remarried in '83 after a string of live-ins that were no more successful than most marriages. I have a grown daughter and an 8-year-old son, an ex-wife that hates me and a current wife that tolerates me well enough. I was smart enough with her not to get either of our hopes up too high, and so far I haven't let her down so much that she'd leave me, though it's been close once or twice. I don't think about the Hot Six Less Three plus One every day, or even every week, but there's a certain crawling feeling that comes down my neck a little too often when I hear about celebrities generally, and one type specifically. I couldn't define it, but I know it when I see it. Elvis was one, of course, and Marilyn, and Kennedy too; you don't have to be in show business to be a star. All three of them had it in spades and maybe that's why they died. Lennon also, and that whole rock era cemetery, Janis, Brian, Jimi, you know the list. Jean Harlow. Judy Garland. Hank Williams. John Belushi. You can add your own favorites. They don't all die young, of course, far from it, maybe just the best of them or the luckiest. Others survive to wait up with the corpse of their careers, looking back at the peak years and wondering who they happened to, and what became of them. Who are they, do you think? Are they real or make believe, or are they the make believe that is more real than reality? Have you ever been in a room where one of them walks in, and the whole room lights up for a while, lights up as long as the magic feeds the need? And then they leave, and the world goes a little dim for a longer while, like they took something vital with them? But it feels the same from the other side, you know? The performers feel the same emptiness when the show's over. To the

performer, it feels like the audience is the one with the magic, and keeps it after the show. What is the star without the audience? What is the audience without the star? Damn, I don't know, and damn, I need a drink. I was right there with it, whatever it is, and I was right there with her, whoever or whatever she was. I kissed her and held her and made music with her but I still don't know who she was or what she wanted or even what I wanted. And maybe I was the only one who didn't get what he was looking for and maybe that's why I'm still alive when all the rest are dead.