We Sold Our Souls Read online

  Having an audience made her fingers extra clumsy and she kept saying, “Hold on. Wait a minute,” and her cheeks were burning hot, but he didn’t interrupt, and she’d spent a lot of time woodshedding, and finally there was a flawless, euphoric forty-five seconds of “Iron Man” falling forward from note to note, Kris’s fingers racing ahead of her brain, dancing up and down the neck of her guitar. She didn’t know how to mute strings, and her Musicmaster’s tone was better suited to “Happy Birthday,” but for the first time in her life she felt like the world had room for her. Then she blanked on how to move her fingers from G to D and it all fell apart.

  His name was Terry Hunt and they became each other’s audience. He didn’t care that everyone thought he was boning the sophomore. They were the only two people who took each other seriously. By Halloween, they were trading tapes, and then, after Christmas, Kris went to his house for the first time, and sat in his dad’s hi-fi room as the shrink wrap came off his brand-new copy of Sabbath’s Seventh Star.

  “The only one left is Tony Iommi,” Kris said.

  “But if he says it’s Sabbath, it’s still Sabbath.”

  “He can say whatever he wants,” Kris said, “but if a band has four people in it, and three leave, it’s not the same band.”

  “It is if the person who stayed behind is Tony Iommi. Same as if it were Ozzy.”

  “What if it’s Geezer?” Kris asked.

  “Bass players don’t count,” Terry said.

  That was the year when Metallica and Megadeth, not her mom or her teachers, taught Kris everything she needed to know. Her dad could tell her what she couldn’t wear to school, and her mom could tell her when to go to bed, but Metallica’s Master of Puppets told her that anger opened doors, and Megadeth’s Peace Sells…but Who’s Buying? taught her that some fights were worth having.

  All through the summer of ’86 she and Terry hid in their bedrooms, hunched over their turntables and guitars, debating the talmud of heavy metal. She thought David Lee Roth’s Eat ’Em and Smile was goofy; Terry thought it was “masterful showmanship.” Kris thought Iron Maiden made a huge mistake adding synths to Somewhere in Time; he thought synths added body and sounded rad.

  They argued endlessly over whether the Judas Priest song “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ ” should actually be “You’ve Got Another Think Coming.” Kris defended Mercyful Fate’s new album against Terry’s charge that they were “Dungeons and Dragons bullshit.” They stormed out of each other’s houses. They ate dinner with each other’s families. They rode their bikes to Wall to Wall Sound and got Terry’s mom to drive them to the mall where the big record store was. They didn’t agree on anything except the most important thing: heavy metal was their religion. It tore the happy face off the world. It told the truth. It kicked down doors.

  Heavy metal saved their souls and they saved each other. When a kid told everyone that Kris had VD, Terry stole his homework notebook and filled it with drawings of pentagrams and the rough draft of a suicide note. The kid’s mega-Christian parents pulled him out of Independence High and sent him to boarding school in Delaware. When Kris heard that Metallica’s bass player, Cliff Burton, had died in a bus crash, she ran for her bike and pedaled like hell to Terry’s house. He opened his door, red-eyed, and without saying a word, they hugged each other for the first time. The two of them spent that entire month hiding in Terry’s bedroom, listening to Metallica. Terry even bought some black candles and used what he said was graveyard dirt to make a pentagram so they could speak to Cliff’s spirit, but nothing happened except they set off the smoke detector.

  They talked about forming a band, but it was all talk until Christmas, when Terry went to visit his cousins in Ottawa. His weird uncle Mark worked as a gravedigger and he loved telling Terry stories about his “dirt work.” When Terry came back home he showed Kris what he’d drawn in his notebook in razor-edged lightning bolts: Dürt Würk. He’d borrowed the umlauts from Mötley Crüe.

  “Righteous,” Kris breathed.

  “Metal up your ass,” Terry agreed.

  He spent three months in art class coming up with their logo while Kris focused on recruitment. She spotted Scottie Rocket at the Lehigh Valley Mall. He was the only person she’d ever seen wearing a Plasmatics T-shirt. She followed him for an hour, lurking outside Toones and the arcade, before she finally got the courage to tap him on the shoulder.

  “Cool shirt,” she said.

  She was wearing the exact same one. After a basement audition they put Scottie on rhythm guitar. What he lacked in skill he made up for in energy. His dad had taken off for Alaska when he was three, and his mom was a nurse, and Scottie’s after-school activities mostly consisted of going to shows and getting in fights. His biggest claim to fame was a scar on his hip where a skinhead had stabbed him with a screwdriver at a Dead Kennedys show. His mom was so relieved he was doing something after school besides getting stabbed that she put the deposit down on their first PA system.

  Tuck’s high school orchestra performed at Independence later that year. He played electric bass on Pachelbel’s Canon. Kris caught him just before he got back on the bus and wrote her phone number on the palm of his hand while his buddies shouted out the windows, “Once you go black, you never go back!”

  Her parents were nervous that she had yet another boy in the basement, and a black one at that, but she kept the door open while she played him Dio’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers” on her boom box. Starting with a gentle acoustic intro that erupted into shredded electric chaos, Kris thought it was exactly the kind of structured, challenging metal that a guy who played classical music might like.

  Tuck was huge—six foot three and wide as a wall—and there was no way he wasn’t getting pushed onto his school’s offensive line, and probably onto its basketball team right after. It didn’t matter that he didn’t like sports, that he lacked a killer instinct, that he’d rather play Mozart. He was a black guy the size of a house in small-town Pennsylvania. His dad and his coach had already planned his future: high school ball, athletic scholarship to a state school, seventh-round NFL draft pick, five seasons, then dumped back into the world at thirty-one with a blown knee and brain damage. He was looking for anything that would help him say “no.” Metal was his answer.

  She couldn’t remember how JD, their first drummer, wound up in the band. Whatever happened to JD? Nothing good, probably. He was the stupidest, angriest kid they’d ever known. He thought Jewish was a country and claimed his dad invented the question mark. When a kid called him a liar, he tried to throw a hornet’s nest at him. He got stung so many times the paramedics had to inject him with adrenaline to restart his heart.

  What she did remember was when Bill came up to them after that epic backyard show at PJ White’s house and said they needed to get rid of their drummer and play with him instead. Bill was an uptight control freak who constantly panicked about fingerprints on his cymbals. He played by math, counting the beats instead of feeling them, but Kris still remembered the blissful look on his face the first time he lost himself in their noise that night at the Sporting House.

  In the basement, she played Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” the same song they opened with at the Sporting House the night they finally became a band instead of five people onstage playing their instruments at the same time. They’d screamed through the five-minute song in three minutes because they were so nervous to be on a real stage for the first time. But when they closed their set with their first original song, “Get in Your Coffins,” it sounded bigger than themselves and they all leaned back into the pocket, suddenly feeling like old pros, knowing that there was finally a place for them in the world, thinking that they could keep doing this forever.

  Then Terry went and fucked it all up.

  No, Kris fucked it all up.

  Actually, it was both of them working together. But sometimes, Kris was scared that it was mostly
her.

  “Angel of Death” was Scottie’s favorite song, and down in the basement Kris ran through it for an hour and a half until she could tear it off, note perfect. By the time she finished, her fingernails were bleeding and sweat dripped onto her strings.

  None of what she played would pass onstage. Too many finger scrapes and missed notes, a million lazy chord changes and sloppy progressions. But the longer she played, the angrier she got. She hadn’t felt angry in a long time. For years, Dr. Murchison had taught her to breathe in the flower, and blow out the candle. Now she breathed in Slayer and blew out Black Sabbath.

  Everyone told Kris that anger was her enemy. They told her to accept things. They told her life wasn’t always fair. So she took pills. She took anger management classes. She listened to relaxation tapes. She gave up playing. But now the music kept punching her in the ears and her fast-moving fingers rekindled a fire from dead ashes. Something woke up inside her that had long been declared dead: an old desire so painful that it used to keep her up in the middle of the night, gnawing at her guts. After six years of silence, there was no way she was stopping now. She turned up her amp. She filled that dead house with sound.

  Everyone had told her it was a silly daydream, an adolescent fantasy. Back in the day, none of them even dared say it out loud. But it was the only reason anyone ever formed a band. Everyone pretended it was about the three P’s (party, pussy, paycheck), but that was a lie. No one ever formed a band to make money. You formed a band because you wanted to be legendary. Kris wanted to press her fist to the planet and leave a mark. She wanted to be remembered. It’s why they put up with the cold vans and the sweaty venues and the cheap beer and the shady promoters and the constant grind. Because they wanted to live forever.

  She didn’t find the right guy, she didn’t get married, she didn’t go to college, she didn’t even graduate from high school, she didn’t save money, she didn’t have a career, she didn’t do any of that because she’d bet everything on Dürt Würk. And she’d lost.

  The final chord of “Angel of Death” reverbed off the walls and faded. It was getting bright outside now, the morning sun washing out the dim basement lightbulb. In the sudden silence, her amp humming quietly beside her, Kris knew what she had to do. She had to go to the Blind King and demand what was hers. It was time to stand face-to-face with Terry Hunt and make him pay. Money? An explanation? An apology? Breaking his nose? She didn’t know how he’d pay, but all she knew was that she’d paid the price for his success for so many years, and now it was his turn. There was no other way to put this anger back to bed.

  Around the base of the wooden staircase clustered Dollarmax bags with their handles tied shut. Some of them contained her mom’s magazines—National Geographic, TIME, AARP—but most were filled with mail that Kris was too tired to sort and her mom had been too nervous to throw away. Now she ripped them open and pawed through the envelopes until she found a Christmas card from Scottie Rocket with his return address on the envelope.

  Upstairs, Kris reached into the back of her closet for the heavy plastic hanger and pulled out her Bones. It gleamed back at her, the black leather Brooks motorcycle jacket that everyone had worn back in the day. Kris had worn hers for so long that it still held the shape of her body, the bend of her elbows, the curve of her spine. Terry had painted a spinal column up its back in white paint and a curving ribcage that met in front when she zipped it up, wrapping her in its skeletal embrace. She hadn’t worn it in years, but now she slipped it on, grabbed her soft case, and got in her dad’s car.

  On the way out of town, she drove past the billboard of Terry Hunt, the Blind King. He’d taken everything and left her behind, and he thought it was over because his lawyers said it was over, but she wasn’t ready to quit fighting yet. They’d been a band once, they’d been good, they might have even been great.

  But then the Blind King betrayed them all. He had broken her, ruined her, and stolen her music. He’d sold out and gotten rich, while she stayed poor. Now she was coming for him and the first thing she needed to do was get the band back together. There was only one problem: Kris was the only person they hated more than they hated Terry.

  GRAY MANNING: The owners and management of WDIY want to apologize to our listeners for this morning’s broadcast of “Good Morning, Gurner.” Although protected by a tape delay, the crudeness of the band known as Dürt Würk was unprecedented in this station’s history. We have taken steps to ensure that future guests are screened more carefully, and we are undertaking a review of our practices that led to this morning’s incident. Thank you.”

  —88.1 WDIY, Lehigh Valley Community Public Radio, announcement from the station manager

  September 5, 1995

  t was a sign from heaven, a shaft of light slicing through gray clouds, the lone blast of color in a beige world. Nothing gave Melanie more hope than the billboard of the Blind King towering over Star City, West Virginia. She clung to it so that she wouldn’t drown. The final dates had been announced online, and Koffin’s comeback was all over drive-time radio, and the landing pages of Loudwire and Spotify. But all the dates were on the West Coast, so they felt dreamy and faraway to Melanie, like a story about someplace she’d never go. But this billboard was right here. It was real.

  She was working bottomless brunch at Pappy’s, smiling at the frat boys in their Wet Vagina University T-shirts, pulling frozen margaritas for these couch-burners bellowing “Country Roads” at the top of their lungs, ignoring the shoulders brushing her breasts and the eyes boring into her cleavage when she bent over tables to drop off another pitcher of Bud. Suddenly, a table erupted into a ragged, drunken chorus of Koffin’s “Burn You Down.”

  I know where you live

  Got a can of gas

  And I park

  Splash a spark

  It’s dark

  Turn my frown

  Upside down

  When I burn you down

  Down to the ground.

  She had a platter of wings for their table and when she dropped it off she saw they were passing around an iPhone with the billboard on the screen.

  “Y’all Koffin fans?” she asked.

  “That get us a free beer?” a lanky ginger with cheeks full of acne shot back.

  “You know it,” she said.

  He handed her his phone, letting his fingers run over hers when she took it, but after two years at Pappy’s that didn’t even make her blink. The phone showed the massive Koffin billboard, the Blind King staring down on West Virginia with his pupilless black orbs, black blood streaming down his face from the crown nailed to his skull. She handed the phone back with a smile, and asked, “Was that Bud, or Bud Light?”

  After work, she drove out and parked her 2008 Subaru in the Sheetz parking lot, facing the Monongahela River and the Blind King’s enormous face.

  MAY 30–JUNE 8, LA, LV, SF

  She’d never wanted anything more than she wanted to see those shows. The need to get away from this place tasted bitter in her throat. In West Virginia, everyone drove the same cars, and they clogged the highways at the same time, and they ate the same food at McDonald’s, and Starbucks, and Wendy’s. Sometimes there was a Taco Bell. Everyone pumped their gas at Chevron and BP. All their kids were honor students, they all put yellow ribbon decals on their cars to show they supported the troops, or pink ribbons to show they hated breast cancer, and they were insured by AAA, and Liberty Mutual, and State Farm, and Smith & Wesson. They got married, and had kids, and played on the internet, and argued about the latest superhero movie. They filled up their time between childhood and old age trying to be as unremarkable as possible.

  Melanie was only twenty-six years old and already felt exhausted. The light looked exhausted. Colors looked exhausted. The whole world was exhausted. She thought, “How can I be so young and feel so dead?”

  But she knew the answer. She go
t out of college with $29,938 in debt and Navient scratching at her door demanding repayment before her diploma was even in its frame. She worked a job that’d only allowed her to pay that down to $27,309 in three years. She discovered that her degree in computer animation wasn’t a ticket to a good job in Atlanta or LA, because she was stuck in West Virginia, living in the same three-bedroom shoebox she grew up in because she couldn’t find a job that would let her save enough for a deposit on a new place.

  She tried. She tried so hard for so long. She went to group interviews where she sat in a circle with fifty-five-year-old men, all of them in their good suits, taking turns telling the HR rep why they’d make the best bank teller at Citizens. She vowed to apply for a job a day, and created six different versions of her résumé that she sent out to compete with the thousands of other résumés from kids with better degrees from better schools, who could afford to take unpaid internships in New York City, who were willing to animate shorts for free because it would look good in their portfolios. She tried to brand herself by starting a YouTube channel, because content creators are king, and she uploaded her best work every other week for an entire year, but by the end of that year not a single one of her videos had over 337 views.

  Pappy’s started as a part-time gig because two years ago she couldn’t imagine working full-time at a place where training consisted of Big Pappy giving a lecture on the difference between being a tease and being a sleaze (key difference: teases stayed on the floor and let guys pull them into their laps, sleazes took too many breaks and got pregnant). But she made between $60 and $80 a night in cash tips, and close to $100 in credit card tips, and after six months she went to swallow her pride and realized she didn’t have much of that left, so she went full-time.

  Through it all, Koffin was there for her. She drove herself home every night shouting “Stand Strong” or “Burn You Down” at the top of her lungs. She whispered “InFANticide” to herself over and over while she waited in the hospital after her dad’s accident. “Get in Your Koffins” was playing when she met her boyfriend Greg. Whenever she heard someone else from her graduating class had died of an OD (twelve and counting) she played “A Grave Is a Hole Your Heart Makes.”