SELF PROMOTION: A Tale Of Workplace Terror Page 2
Rob Errera has worked as a writer, editor, musician, and literary critic. His fiction, non-fiction, and essays have earned numerous awards. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids, and a bunch of rescued dogs and cats. He blogs at roberrera.wordpress.com, and his work is available in both print and digital editions at all major online booksellers.
Also by Rob Errera
Fiction
Hangman’s Jam—A Symphony of Terror
Sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll & tentacles! The worlds of Lovecraft and rock music collide in this novel-length Palomino Tale!
Sensual Nightmares: Tales Of The Palomino, Vol. 1
Eight linked tales of terror guaranteed to give you sensual nightmares, including the full-length novella, The Porn Maid’s Tale.
Ebooks
Zombie Jesus Sex Slaves: A Tale of Blasphemous Horror
Self Promotion: A Tale Of Workplace Terror
Baby Food: A Tasty Tale Of Cannibalism
Non-Fiction
Autism Dad: Adventures In Raising An Autistic Son
15 essays about living with, raising, and loving a child with autism, told from a father’s perspective.
Available in print and digital editions wherever fine books are sold!
Roberrera.wordpress.com
SPECIAL BONUS!
An Excerpt from Rob Errera’s new novel
HANGMAN’S JAM
A Symphony Of Horror
Coming Fall 2012
THE BALLAD OF SMOKE JOHNSON
A snake crawls through time. Look close, you can see where scales have brushed against mankind, flaked off. Shed skin fuels the Renaissance, venom the Holocaust. Look closely, you can see it…you can hear it…
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Two boys press their ears to the weathered wooden clapboards of a juke joint in Greeneville, Mississippi, November 1937. It’s a damp, chilly night, but the music and dancing inside the club keeps the boys riveted. There are knotholes in the planks, enough of an opening so the boys can see a little corner of the stage and part of the dance floor.
“Lord, look how they move!” one boy says. He’s twelve and two months, and he bought his first guitar today for $15. The world will know him as B.B., but for now he’s only Riley.
“Ain’t like gospel music,” his friend notes, only in a way it is. It pulls on your chest, and gets your feet moving the same as gospel.
One tune ends, and another begins, one with an impossible piano run that goes on and on.
“I don’t like this,” Riley says. “This tune makes me feel funny…”
His friend doesn’t respond, presses his ear tighter against the rough wood, so tight he feels a tiny splinter pierce his earlobe. But he doesn’t flinch, because he can hear it…he can hear…
“Come on, man. Let’s go,” Riley says, laying a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “This is messed up…some kinda devil music…”
His friend shrugs Riley off, apparently his friend no longer. Riley wonders if he ever truly was.
“You go,” the other boy says. “Pussy.”
Riley feels himself flush, but doesn’t retaliate. He turns and flees, eager to get away from that music, and the shadowy shapes that came with it.
The other stays…listens.
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The first thing you hear is bass, which you don’t really hear at all. You feel it. It’s the beat of your mother’s heart, the beat of your own. It is the rumble of thunder, the eruption of volcanoes, the sound of the earth birthing mountains. You feel it in your chest and shoulders, the pit of your stomach, shaking your legs from the ground up, a rolling wave, an invisible force that moves the air around you, through you, within you.
That’s bass.
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The boy walks around the front of the club. The name of tonight’s act is written on a chalkboard hanging in the window: Sonny Deacon and Wilma Walters. He’s heard their music before on WGCB.
He walks around back. There’s an old Model T woodie wagon there, ready to take the band to its next show. He sits on the back bumper and waits.
The back door swings open, creaky on black buckle hinges, and there is Sonny Deacon himself, big and brown, pinching one nostril shut, and blowing green snot out the other.
“Mr. Deacon…I think you’re brilliant.”
“Thanks, kid. Kinda late for you to be out, don’t you think?”
“I live at the orphanage. They don’t care. Where you goin’ next, Mr. Deacon?”
“Where don’t we go? Georgia and Alabama next. Up north when the weather gets nice. We’re all over.”
“Can I come with you?”
“Don’t be silly, kid.”
“I can play the Jew’s harp real fine, and I can fill in on the piano if you need a break, Mr. Deacon. I can’t blow no horns ‘cept for the harp and some harmonica, but I can keep time on the drums for you, even play a little standup, or strum some guitar if you give me time with it. I’m a fast learner.”
“You a fast talker. Bullshitter from the sound of it.”
“Give me two gigs. See if I don’t pull my weight.”
“You’re a kid. A little boy.”
“I ain’t no kid. I’ll put myself up against any of your back-up men, and work cheaper, too.”
“You’ll work for free.”
The boy considers this, nods.
“I play with a lot of people,” Sonny says. “Nobody for very long. I’ll give you two gigs, and we’ll take it from there.”
Sonny Deacon looks at him, and there’s something hungry in it.
“But listen up, now. You’re a young man, and your dick’s startin’ to get hard. You’re probably thinkin’ that you’re gonna get up close with Miss Wilma Walters, maybe sneak a peek at her in the changing room, get a glimpse of those big titties. But let me tell you, ain’t nobody get a piece of Miss Wilma Walters but Mr. Sonny Deacon. She in the room, your eyes lookin’ the other way, understood?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now go inside, and fetch that big, ol’ kick drum. We gotta get going if we’re gonna make Athens by morning…”
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Tone comes next. Repetitive tones, layered atop one another.
Chants are the first trance music. They bring men closer to God.
One chant brings the gods closer to Man.
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When Wilma Walters is in the room, or anywhere nearby, it’s hard to keep your eyes off her. She’s the closest thing to an angel the boy has ever seen.
But she doesn’t look happy to meet him.
“He’s just a little boy,” she says to Sonny. They’re standing by the woodie behind the club. Sonny shrugs.
She backs Sonny up a few steps, and the boy can’t help but notice the width of her hips, the power of her legs as they move beneath her silk dress. The boy doesn’t know if she’s still wearing her stage clothes, or if she always dresses this way, but she looks magnificent. She’s giving Sonny quite an earful. Sonny looks over, catches the boy eyeing up Wilma, and scowls. The boy looks away. He doesn’t want to blow this gig before it even begins.
When he looks back, Sonny’s nodding. Wilma gives the boy a worried look, and gets in the front passenger seat of the woodie, showing a mile of leg in the process.
Sonny shows the boy two fingers. Two gigs.
He rides in the back with the drum kit.
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Ten thousand years before the birth of Christ, they whittle crude flutes from bone, mimic the sounds of birds in the sky, and wind in the trees. The snake crawls through time, in no hurry, eating here, excreting there, moving on to the next meal.
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The drummer’s name is Max, and he smells of something the boy won’t find out until three gigs later is gin. A guy named Dexter plays alto sax, but he’s gone after the next
gig in Monroe.
“People don’t stay with Sonny and Wil long,” Max tells him, his breath flammable.
They pick up another sax player in Baton Rouge, where they stay for two weeks, playing three different clubs.
That’s when Sonny plays it again. That song the boy heard the first night. The earth shifts, mountains shrug, oceans are sucked through a pinhole, as stars fall from the heavens. The boy’s head swims along with the swirling darkness. Sonny’s fingers are a brown blur as they move over the piano, and when Wilma starts scatting out a vocal line, the boy actually wets himself a little. He hurries offstage after the set to change his pants before anybody notices.
The following morning Max’s ravaged body is found next to the mouth of the Monroe River, chest torn open, heart missing.
The boy plays drums at their next gig in Texas.
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Know what the Voynich manuscript is? Don’t worry, neither does anybody else. People have been trying to break its code for over a hundred years. It carbon dates to between 1404 and 1438. Its language is indecipherable, and the drawings of plants and star-like constellations that accompany the text further confuse its meaning. It doesn’t look like sheet music, and you shouldn’t look at it that way. You shouldn’t consider those mysterious glyphs as tones on a scale, and how they relate to one another, following each other like little ducks into the mouth of a monster. It’s not sheet music. Don’t look at it that way. Don’t look. Look away. Listen to the crawling king snake.
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“That is the most amazing song I’ve ever heard, Mr. Deacon. What do you call it?”
“I call it ‘Blues From Beyond,’ but it’s got a lot of different names…”
Devil’s Blues, The Devil’s Opera, Gallows Blues, Gallows Symphony, Hell in D-minor, Graveyard Blues, Gravedigger Blues, Full Moon Blues, Midnight Blues, The Immaculate Fugue…
The names go on and on, and names have power. But not in this case. Names hold no sway over the song. It is what it is, regardless of what you call it. It does what it does, whether you call it by a thousand names, or none at all.
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She wears a locket around her neck with a picture of a baby inside.
“Whose baby is that?” The boy asks once. They’re in the woodie together, Sonny behind the wheel, Wilma and the boy in the back seat. Wilma has the locket open, holding it so delicately, it’s like she’s holding a real baby instead of a picture of one.
“You ask a lot of questions, kid. How about buttonin’ that lip for a while?” Sonny says.
Wilma pays Sonny no mind. She rarely does.
“That’s my baby,” Wilma Walters says in a voice so soft and full of pain, the boy longs to throw his arms around her, try to make that pain go away.
“Where’s your baby now?” the boy asks, even though Sonny shoots him daggers in the rear-view mirror.
“My little boy is being raised by his grandparents. My parents. The circuit ain’t no place to raise a child,” Wilma says. She looks at him, and the boy never saw eyes so tender. “Even though you’re barely more than a child yourself.”
“I can take care of myself,” he says.
“I know you can,” she says, brown eyes beautiful, worried. “You’re a fine young man, and you’re doing a fine job. Keep playing music, you’ll be okay. And steer clear of him.”
They stare at the back of Sonny’s head. The boy doesn’t know his real mother, but he likes to imagine she’s exactly like Wilma Walters.
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Monteverdi doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s unlike any cantus firmus ever heard. He outlines the tune on parchment, but hides his notes beneath a bust of Plato in his conservatory. From time to time, he takes his notes out, sits with his viola da gamba cradled between his knees, adding new phrases, altering existing ones. But it will never be finished. It will never be right. It never can be. One night in frustration, he throws his notes into the fire. It doesn’t matter. The tune is already in his head, his dreams, his soul.
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They go north, play The Royal Theatre in Baltimore, then on to The Uptown in Philly, The Howard in Washington.
They play The Apollo in New York. A drummer named