Free Masters of Horror by Lee Pletzers Page B

looked like a dripping Rorschach painted in gray matter. Zack personally felt his buddy’s splatters resembled the finger paintings of a zoo ape, but he had been high enough to swear to reporters that he had witnessed the Holy Virgin’s image dripping down the blood soaked wall. Having lost his best friend as well as his meal ticket, the BaddAss bassist immediately scored the best weed in the western hemisphere, intending to keep himself eight miles high for many months to come. With enough reefer to choke a horse Zacherly Cooper’s agenda was to disappear behind a thick wall of smoke. In the world of heavy metal this passed for grief.
     
    Wisznewski would forever be a tough act to follow. How could any mortal hope to produce a metallic mindfuck like the opening bars of his classic “Saint Damnation”?
     
    “ A fallen man, lost and alone, I discovered an angel dusting the streets of hell.
     
    Curse me Father, for I wish to sin . . .”
     
    Cooper knew better than to compete with lyrics like these, but his career as a solo act would need a jump start if he intended to pick up the dropped gauntlet of his band mate.
     
    You fuck like you play …
     
    The girl didn’t mean that as a compliment.
     
    And what if he played like he fucked? What if there were no second act?
     
    Insisting the band complete its contracted twenty-six city concert tour as a tribute to the fallen BaddAss, Zacherly soon realized the group’s soul had departed along with Kinky. Someone had to kill the band proper before their fans decided to. Onstage at the Cleveland Coliseum Zack informed their legions this tour would be the group’s last. The other three band members understood the logic of his decision, and given the market value on studio musicians no surviving BaddAss was going to die poor.
     
    Dying forgotten was a different matter.
     
    The prospect of not being remembered had terrified Wisznewski. The golden guitar-shaped urn Zack lugged to each concert attested to that fact. In his last note to him the late rocker insisted Zacherly carry his ashes onstage during each of the band’s concerts. That ritual had been among Kinky’s final requests, and the gimmick became his smartest career move. For months the ceremony proved a showstopper, and placing the garish urn alongside Maxie’s drum kit added significant theatricality to BaddAss’ final set when the band really got smokin’. The crowd roared, many of the body pierced enthusiasts lighting matches or propelling themselves into frenzied mosh pits.
     
    But the scenes didn’t take long to turn ugly. Several among the road crew suffered crushed bones keeping the brawls off-stage, and often the fracas carried into the streets and onto the eleven o’clock news. In city after city the focus of the KickkAss Tour 2K1 shifted to the more demonstrative ticket holders’ displays of machismo, and more than a few head bangers left the stadium area with fewer teeth than they had arrived with.
     
    Kinky would have loved it.
     
    The media ghouls reporting on the unholy mess made the inevitable comparisons that followed the departures of Kurt, Elvis, Jim, and Jimmie. Wisznewski had earned his official membership into that exclusive club of rock martyrdom from which no one’s card ever expired. If the Righteous Brothers were correct maybe Heaven did have itself one hell of a band, although to hear Geraldo’s version Kinky Wisznewski more likely played the lounge downstairs.
     
     
     
    * * *
     
     
     
    “ So, you got a name?” Zack asked the girl reaching for her tube top on the floor.
     
    “ Tuesday.”
     
    “ No. Tell me now.”
     
    She offered an abbreviated smile while forcing a rogue tit to behave itself inside her spandex.
     
    “ Tuesday’s my real name. You know, like Ruby Tuesday? My mother was into that sort of shit because I was conceived at Woodstock.”
     
    “ You look pretty good for thirty-two.”
     
    “ I don’t mean the actual concert, just where it took