We Sold Our Souls Read online

  Now she was forty-seven years old and her knees hurt when she climbed stairs, and her right shoulder ached all the time, and she had tinnitus in her left ear, and for the past six years this hotel lobby after midnight had been her safe space. It was where the phone didn’t ring with debt consolidation services and no one knew her last name. It was where you wound up when nobody wanted your band, when you never signed that big contract, when your sales never took off, when you missed your big break by inches, when you came close but no cigar. It was the last job she’d been able to get, and even then only with Little Charles’s help, and there probably wouldn’t be another one after it, so she went, and got the mop, and filled a bucket, and cleaned up Josh Morrell’s piss.

  The doors slid open and Little Charles walked back into the lobby, one hand hooked on his overloaded belt. Kris heaved the mop into its yellow bucket, forced down the squeeze handle, and made it barf gray water.

  “Did you see what he did to his pillow?” Kris asked.

  “He says it wasn’t him,” Little Charles said.

  “You left him there?”

  “Running him in won’t do anybody any good,” Little Charles said. “It’d be a he-said she-said situation.”

  “I’m mopping up his piss right now,” Kris said. “It’s a she-said she-said situation.”

  “I told him that if anything happened, and I had to come back here, then he and I were going to have a problem.”

  “I already have a problem,” Kris said. “He’s probably watching the parking lot so he can come back down here and take a shit the second you leave.”

  “I put a scare into him,” Little Charles said. “And that’s all I’m going to do tonight. The subject is closed.”

  He walked back to the doors, which hummed open, then picked the dramatic moment right before his exit to turn and say, “I sold Mom’s house. You need to be out in six weeks.”

  Kris watched him get in his car and roll away through the parking lot, headed toward Route 22.

  She clenched both fists so hard her tendons groaned. She dug her fingernails into her palms so deep they bled. For eleven years Kris and Dürt Würk had fought the world, and she’d fought the world alone for another ten years after that. They’d survived the death of metal, and made it through the grunge years without ever once covering “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and it felt like they were going somewhere. But now the music was over, the money was gone, and in six weeks she would be losing her house. This was what she had left. So she lifted the dripping mop, and dropped it onto the floor, and continued cleaning up Josh Morrell’s piss.

  MARK METAL: In a decade, the LVA’s lost one rock landmark after another: Croc Rock, American Music Hall, Wally’s, and this past Sunday one more casualty was added to that list when Gurner’s Sporting House burned down. A bar with the state’s smallest stage and warmest beer, it was where local bands like Dürt Würk and Powerhole played their first shows, which earned it semilegendary status. Owner Bobby Dali closed the place in September of this year to upgrade the PA and the bathrooms, both of which were disgusting, but six weeks ago he hung himself, and at 3 a.m. this past Sunday morning, an electrical fire burned the Sporting House to the ground before a single firefighter could respond…

  —90.3 WXLV, “The Mark Metal Show”

  December 11, 2013

  ris fell into the maroon interior of her dad’s car, exhausted. No matter how old she got, the nineteen-year-old white Grand Marquis with maroon interior would always be her dad’s car. He’d bought it back in 1999 when everyone actually thought his cancer wouldn’t be so bad. She’d told him it looked like a pimpmobile, and he acted like he hadn’t heard her, but a year later, on their way to the kidney clinic, he’d said out of the blue:

  “This car. I deserve a little style.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut so hard her lids cramped. Sleep tugged at her brain. Eyes still closed, she reached out and turned the key and the engine roared, hyper-accelerated, then calmed back down to a wheezy growl with a clunk that meant she would probably owe the mechanic more money soon. Everyone kept telling her she should trade up, but Kris liked her dad’s car. It didn’t have all that stuff in it that told everyone where you were—no LoJack, no GPS pinging her location out to anyone who was listening. Kris liked to be invisible.

  She opened her eyes, ran the wipers to clear the early morning dew, reversed out of her space, and cruised through the Best Western parking lot toward US-22. Her brain was in neutral, stewing in a skull full of sleep juice, and she could smell the sleepy smell rising up from her chest. Her bed was covered in pillows, her room was dim, her blankets were soft: it would feel so good to have a beer and fall in.

  Little Charles had sold her mom’s house. She had six weeks to find someplace to live. Kris put that thought in a box and stuck it on the shelves in the back of her brain where all her other problems slept in the dark. It was hard to find room, but she managed to slide it in between “Credit Card Debt” and “I Didn’t Cry at Mom’s Funeral, Something Is Really Wrong with Me.”

  She turned east on 22, driving between the abandoned Standard Cement factory and its derelict bride, GB&B, the old ball-bearing plant, rising up like twin tombstones that marked the entrance to Gurner. She passed the weedy lot where the Sporting House once stood. It had been a roadhouse where every single Lehigh Valley band played their first show, and the tiny cubbyhole where bands waited to go onstage was lacquered with graffiti from Teeze, Dirty Blond, even Vicious Barreka, all memorializing that Geronimo moment before they jumped off the cliff for the very first time. Kris’s inscription read:

  Dürt Würk - Sept. 27, 1989 - METAL NEVER DIES

  Now it was just another weed-choked lot with a sun-faded “Available” sign out front. Turns out, everything dies.

  Kris’s leg lashed forward and she stood up on the brake, her chest slamming into the steering wheel. Adrenaline flooded her veins, sleep fled, and her eyeballs vibrated as a car horn blasted and almost plowed into her rear end. More cars screamed around her, laying on their horns, but Kris couldn’t move. Frozen in the right-hand lane of US-22, she stared up at what loomed on the horizon and felt her spit turn thin and bitter. Her breath got fast and high in her chest as she witnessed the hideous thing rising over Gurner, sprung up overnight like some dark tower from The Lord of the Rings.

  The Blind King was back, staring down at her from the massive billboard with his black, pupil-less eyes. In Gothic font, the billboard read:

  KOFFIN — BACK FROM THE GRAVE

  Beneath it was a photo of the Blind King. A brutal spiked crown was nailed to his head. Black blood streamed down his face. The digital retouchers made sure he hadn’t aged a day.

  Across the bottom it read:

  FINAL FIVE CONCERTS MAY 30–JUNE 8, LA, LV, SF

  Kris stared up at the Blind King, and her guts turned to water. He was vivid. He was legion. Made up of lawyers and accountants and session musicians and songwriters, a colossus that could be seen from space. In contrast, she was puny and small, and stood in the empty lobby of the Best Western, seeing herself reflected in the glass doors, a shadow in navy slacks, nametag pinned to her vest, smiling at people as they ground out their hate on the ashtray of her face.

  In the dark storeroom at the back of her brain, the overloaded racks tipped forward and the packages slid to the edge of their shelves, and she scrambled to push them back up. Her hands started to shake, and the world lurched and spun around her, and then Kris stood on the gas, and hauled ass, desperate to get to the toilet before she threw up, yanking her dad’s Grand Marquis onto Bovino Street, taking a right at Jamal’s Sunshine Market, plowing through the Saint Street Swamp.

  Back here, abandoned houses vomited green vines all over themselves. Yards gnawed away at the sidewalks. Raccoons slept in collapsed basements and generations of possums bred in unoccupied master bedrooms. Closer to Bovino, Hispanic fam
ilies were moving into the old two-story row homes and hanging Puerto Rican flags in their windows, but farther in they called it the Saint Street Swamp because if you were in this deep, you were never getting out. The only people living on St. Nestor and St. Kirill were either too old to move, or Kris.

  She slammed into park in front of the house where she grew up and ran up the brick porch jammed onto the sagging facade, put her key in the lock, banged the water-warped door open with one hip, and bit her tongue to keep herself from calling out, “I’m home.”

  Buy your mom a house. That was the rock-star dream. Kris had been so proud the day she’d signed the paperwork. Hadn’t even looked at it, just scrawled her signature across the bottom, never thinking one day she’d wind up living back here. She ran down the same front hall where her nineteen-year-old self had once stormed out, soft case in one hand, screaming at her mom and dad that just because they were scared of the world she didn’t have to be. Then Kris slammed open the fridge door and let the cool air dry her sweat.

  She uncapped a green bottle with a brisk hiss. She needed to slow down for a second. The billboard had her too jacked up. She wanted to go online and get details, but she knew the most important thing already: the Blind King was back.

  On the white plastic tablecloth draped over thr kitchen table sat the Tupperware box with her nail stuff. Five months ago, she’d still been coming home every Sunday and sitting down across from her mom and painting her nails. It always made Kris conscious of how soft her mom’s hands were compared to the big spatulas she had, laced with faded scars and stained yellow with old callouses. Looking at the box felt like falling into a hole, so she stuffed it under the sink. Her skin itched. She needed to do something.

  Her Rolling Rock was empty and her mouth was still dry. The veins in her temples throbbed, her blood felt molten. The Blind King was back. She opened a second beer.

  The thought of the Blind King gave Kris a fluttery feeling behind her breastbone. She’d been able to keep it together as long as he was off the radar, but now he was back. Why couldn’t he leave her alone?

  The shelves tipped forward, and the boxes slid off and smashed open on the floor, filling her brain with shrieking bats: her puny three-digit paychecks, constant overages from MetroPCS, Christmas presents bought at the 99-cent store, trying to scrape together a deposit for a new place from the empty hole that was her bank account.

  Watching the ambulance load her mom inside, pulling away at a pace you used to pick up groceries. Sitting in the front row of the nearly empty Sacred Heart as some unknown priest delivered insert-name-here platitudes about her mother, all pomp and no passion, standing and sitting on command, mumbling sunshine hymns full of false rhymes and bad meter, trying so hard to make herself cry. Sitting across from the kid with the smear of acne on his forehead at Grabowski’s Funeral Home and telling him they wouldn’t be doing a viewing, or any embalming, and she’d just like them to burn her mother to ashes and use an urn she’d already bought online, and watching this kid’s kindness click off when he realized that she was just another poor person wasting his time.

  The money it would have cost to give her mom the funeral she deserved was what the Blind King spent on massages each week. The money separating Kris from the edge was a rounding error in the Blind King’s bank account. She saw him huge and colorful and loved, looming over US-22, and herself at his feet gazing up, gray and small.

  She saw herself too scared to play, too scared to get angry, too scared to fight, too scared to escape Gurner. She saw the UPS van, and his lawyers, and the settlement she signed, and the Paxator and the Wellbutrin and the Klonopin spilling down her throat, all the things they prescribed to make her less angry, that made her feel dead, and she’d thought she was okay, for eight years she thought this was over and she was fine, but she was wrong.

  And then she was shoving the basement door with her shoulder, shoving it hard because it hadn’t been used in forever, and it groaned open, and the air smelled like sour dust and Kris dove down into it, clattering down the wooden stairs, diving toward the one thing she’d sworn she’d never do again.

  REV. CARSON: …you’ve been studying fans of heavy metal music, Satanic music, occult music—whatever you want to call it—for a long time. Who listens to this stuff?

  DR. PADMERE: By and large, these are low-functioning individuals who score poorly on most metrics we use to examine human behavior: low IQ, low patience, low confidence, low reliability. Where they score highly are in areas like anger, deceit, narcotic and alcohol abuse, suicide rates…

  REV. CARSON: In other words, these are not people you want marrying your daughter?

  DR. PADMERE: Definitely not.

  —WCYI 580 AM, Denver Praise and Christian Leadership Network

  December 14, 1993

  he basement was dim, with gray light filtering through the dirty, half-buried windows. Even in summer it was lake-bottom cold. A dusty plaid sofa sat in the middle of the room, piled high with boxes of old tax returns and bills. Chairs with busted seats stood against the walls, the floor cluttered with everything Kris and her brothers grew up with that their mom had clung to: boxes of old toys, a sagging playpen, a tricycle with bent wheels.

  Before she could second-guess herself, Kris plunged across the room and yanked open the closet door to reveal a sagging tower of cardboard Stor-All boxes printed with dark wood grain. They contained the corpse of all her old lawsuits, all her old battles, with the Blind King. Her knees cracked when she squatted down, and her lower back ached when she slid the boxes aside. Behind them leaned a single soft case and a striped beach towel draped over a Laney Supergroup amp. Kris pulled out the soft case by its neck, flicked off the dusty towel, and heaved out the amp. Her lower back gave another twinge.

  She pulled a ladder-back dining room chair to the center of the floor, sat down, unzipped the soft case, and pulled out her guitar.

  Six years ago, Kris had locked her guitar in this closet like a bad dog. At night, she dreamed she heard it scratching to get out. But she had steeled herself and ignored its whimpers. For two years, she’d felt guilty every day she didn’t play, but eventually her guilt had faded into the background hum of self-loathing that formed the backbeat of her life. She hadn’t played since. She’d cut off her hands and buried them underground, and now here she was, digging them back up.

  Her white Gibson Melody Maker balanced itself on the curve of her thigh. After that first Fender Musicmaster, this was the only guitar she’d ever owned. There were gouges on the back from her belt buckle and a groove worn on its face from her wrist. She found a cable in the soft case’s side pouch, wrapped it through the strap and plugged it in, then flipped on her amp. The hum sounded like coming home.

  She found a pick and played an open G, surprised by how easy it was to tune. The notes were all right there inside her ears, waiting to be heard again.

  She played “Iron Man.” She played it badly. She played it slow, stumbling through the chord changes the way she had that very first time. She missed her transitions, her hands were soft spaghetti that didn’t go where she told them to, her picking was tentative, her fingertips were fat. After she finished, she started again, really bearing down hard on the E string behind the nut for the intro and making it moan. Then she turned up her amp and did it again. The steel strings tried to slice her fingertips in two. She felt the dust in the air vibrate. Her left ear began to whine a high shrill E.

  She played “Iron Man” again, coming down hard on the downpick. Then she played it again. And again. And again. And her breathing slowed, and the bats stopped screaming, and the Blind King faded away.

  How had she ever given this up?

  When Little Charles went off to college in 1982, he’d left five records behind: Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, which Kris had honestly never heard him play, Olivia Newton-John’s Physical, which he only bought because
of the cover, The Cars, which he bought because all his friends had it, the bright-orange Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by the Dead Kennedys, and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid.

  She listened to the Dead Kennedys the most because they were loud and funny. Paranoid‘s cheap cover with its blurry flash photo of a guy with a sword jumping out from behind a tree kept her away, but the older she got, the more it wound up on her Sears turntable. By the time she was fourteen, the hooks from “Electric Funeral” and “Paranoid” were baked into her brain.

  She’d started to play because it was the only way to get the songs out of her head, down her arms, through her fingers, and into the air.

  On a cold September evening in her sophomore year, she was down in the basement stumbling through “Iron Man” for the nine thousandth time when, tik-tik, someone tapped on the window with a penny. Kris stood on her chair and slid the window open and a kid stuck his face against the screen and said, “Is that Sabbath?”

  Even as a dark shadow she knew who he was. He was skinny, with almond eyes, high cheekbones, and golden hair. He came equipped with an enormous, mouth-mangling set of braces. He was a year older than Kris and she didn’t know if she was more surprised that he was talking to her or that he knew who Sabbath was.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s Sabbath.”

  Without a word, the kid stood up and left.

  The next day, after school, he showed up at her front door with his acoustic guitar. Thank God neither of her brothers were home. Her mother let them sit in the basement as long as they kept the door open.

  “Play something,” he told her.

  So she played “Iron Man,” because in metal, everything starts with Sabbath, the very first metal band, the original losers from middle-of-nowhere Birmingham, the ones who forced the world to sit up and listen. She was terrible.