He was standing in a small crowd, backstage. The crowd was amoebic, and though not consciously centered on him, Mark was its natural focal point. And, though each component had his or her dignified reason for being backstage at the last Hindenburg concert of 1972, it seemed to Mark like they were all there to, sinisterly, impress their emotions upon him. Try as they might, the only one he was feeling was panic.
Zeb, his manager, was closest to Mark, and noticed him staring into space. Five minutes, Mark thought. Zeb caught Mark’s eye, and spoke. “Hey—Mark—forget about last night, will ya? Listen, everybody has a bad night every once in a while, right? Relax. I, uh…”
He placed his finger to one side of his nose, inhaled sharply, placed his finger to the other side, inhaled, and then put his hand down.
“I got Benny to get something a little special,” he continued. Mark was staring at a purple light fixture above Zeb’s left ear. He was thinking about what Rob, his crewman in charge of production had told him: Five minutes.
“Mark, are you listening to me? Snap outta it, man!”
Zeb slapped Mark. This caused a stir, though not a big one. Most of the backstagers—notably, Mark’s girlfriend, Teresa, his bandmates, Eric Hamil, the bassist, and Luke Cartwright, the drummer—were inebriated and in their “party-zones.” They didn’t give a fuck about anything for longer than two seconds unless it was a threat to their good time. And Zeb was known for his theatrics.
The slap worked, to some extent. Mark realized he had been listening, at least in part, and his brain regurgitated an abstraction of Zeb’s words to him: Zeb wanted Mark to relax, and he mentioned that he purchased some “special” cocaine, whatever that meant.
Ah, yes, the cocaine. Mark could go for some of that right about now.
“Zeb.” Mark barely spoke. His mouth was dry. It tasted of cigarettes and stale whiskey.
“Let me get somma that.”
Zeb knew what was up. He took out a small bag (he had more in the back, I assure you) with a small rubberband coiled around one end. He opened it, laid it down, and cut it right there, on a small table fashioned just for the purpose. He took out a bill, rolled it quickly and expertly, and handed it to Mark.
Mark didn’t speak. He was no longer thinking about time; he was thinking about getting high. He waited, attentive to Zeb’s every movement. He was caught somewhere between dreaming of joy and lightness and feeling the dread and weight of what he knew was bad for him.
That was part of his trouble. Mark wasn’t stupid—he was brilliant. He made it. His craft, his rock and roll guitar playing, was the undoubted cornerstone of Hindenburg’s success—not to mention his song writing and good looks.
He had a lot going for him. He managed to be amazingly famous and still personably likeable, was great in bed, a favorite of the ladies, and extremely wealthy. He graduated from high school at the top of his class.
He was aware. He bent down, put the rolled bill to his nose, and inhaled strongly.
His head rushed back. He pinched his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Yes, thought Mark. Yes, yes, yes.
Zeb bent and repeated Mark’s ritual.
“Hey, man, think I could get one?” It was Teresa, Mark’s girlfriend. She was blonde, pretty, with blue eyes, the color of lake, which at present had red streaks through the whites. Mark loved those eyes, could see simultaneously a beautiful, confused girl and himself, a lonesome traveler.
She slid her arm around Mark’s waist, seductively. She never bought her own drugs. Only yesterday, right before Mark went catatonic on stage, Mark saw her and Zeb making love in a dressing room. Mark now began thinking about this.
It wasn’t that he loved her—he did, though, for the record. It was that he saw her, saw her actions and emotions truly, and so saw his life. He was sick, desperately sick: all the cocaine and the drunken nights and the senseless groping in the dark, as if for a fleshy proof of human unity. He saw himself as a broken man, of only the capacity to make and use pleasure; a wielder of great “art,” and simultaneously great nonsense. For what is music but sound?
He ran, right then and there, two minutes till show time, October the thirteenth, an audience of twenty-two and a half thousand people, all hungry for him, crying his name into the night.
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