Crashin' the Real E-Book

Deb Hoag

• Herausgeber: Dog Horn Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 229

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Armed with a Glock and a bottle of Jack, accompanied by her adventurous Grandma Rose, Eve starts on a cross-country trip to find her hero - Steven Tyler - and to ask him to explain the meaning of life. Along the way, she escapes murderous circus performers, becomes a Girl Scout cookie and meets a Wild Man in a sharkskin suit. ' . . . an exhilarating ride, a kind of CANDIDE in reverse, as Eve, as unpredictable as Boadicea on a bad hair-AND-Roman day, learns to see through her false shell, which has imprisoned and impoverished her. Every scene (with not a single wasted word daring to show itself) packs a witty punch . . . A really remarkable first novel, which I can fully recommend to the cool and the uncool alike.' -Steve Redwood

Leseprobe

Crashin' the Real

One woman's search for truth, justice... and Steven Tyler

By Deb Hoag

Crashin' the Real

Published by Dog Horn Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Deb Hoag

Dedication :

This book is dedicated to my stunningly wonderful husband, Chuck, also known as

The Handsomest Man in the World; and to the kids – his, mine and

ours – none of whom areallowed to read this until they’re thirty.

Acknowledgements

This book is only possible due to the support, friendship and constant encouragement from my awesome friend, editor and publisher, Adam Lowe of Polluto and DogHorn Publishing. May you have every good thing, darling, in abundance. To Miki Dark, who tookprecious time from his plot to overthrow the universe in order to give me support and encouragement in the wee hours. To Victoria Hooper, who got everything, amazingly enough; no one could be kinder (or firmer!). To Bill Highsmith, the king of the emergency, last-minute readers, to Richard Ware, the best tattoo artist on the eastern seaboard and illustrator extraordinaire, and allmy other good friends at Polluto and at Hatrack River, for endless reading, thoughtful commentsand a good boot up the ass once in a while – thanks!

No llamas were harmed in the making of this book. Any resemblance to anyone, real, fictionalor imagined, is solely the product of the author’s lurid imagination, and has no basis inreality whatsoever.

Contents

Chapter One Sucks to be Me

Chapter Two The Fun and the Fury

Chapter Three: Let Frank Do It!

Chapter Four Hard-headed Man

Chapter Five Life is a Circus

Chapter Six Gross Pointe Blues

Chapter Seven Emerald City Ugly

Chapter Eight Concert of the Century

Chapter Nine Ridin’ the Peace Train

Chapter Ten Church of the Same Ole, Same Ole

Chapter Eleven Of Rainbows and Llamas

Chapter Twelve In-Out, Good-Bad, Done

Chapter Thirteen Of Wild Men and Pocket Protectors

Chapter Fourteen Learning to Chill

Chapter Fifteen Heard the One About the Really Fat Priest?

Chapter Sixteen Dark Dreams

Chapter Seventeen The Land of Pixie Dust and Protozoa

Chapter Eighteen Night Sparks

Chapter Nineteen Journey's End

Now

Chapter One: Sucks to be Me

First band I ever saw live, I was seventeen; the band was Aerosmith. Tyler a Demented Juicy Monkey Sex God, in a striped spandex jumpsuit. Joe Perry all blistering heat in intimate rock-n-roll incest next to him. Didn't know if Perry wanted to fuck him, or kill him, while visions of hash oil danced in my head. I loved him. I loved them all. Something clicked inside my head and everything was okay.

Twenty years later, I was writing a column, "All About Eve", for Whipt! Detroit's Alternative Entertainment Magazine. Whipt! wasn’t just some boring entertainment mag, though. It was a jittery explosion of art, parties, bands and politics chaotically crammed between a folded full-color cover. Whipt! was actually published in the city, in a grimy hundred-year-old building with chipped marble floors and gilt-trimmed ceilings. A lot of publications claiming Detroit-hood were actually based in the suburbs, and the writers involved had no more idea of what it meant to be a Detroiter than a gladiola knows what it means to be a spice cake.

I walked into work and looked around the editorial department. It was a big, open space, with half-walls separating the cubicles by the big windows. You could tell in one quick sweep who was there and who was MIA.

Framed posters made from past Whipt! covers decorated the brick walls. My favorite just happened to be a full-length shot of me, laying on the editorial department conference table in a seductive pose, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray in front of me, a tumbler of Jack right next to it, and a bright green apple in my left hand. The headline read: Get a Taste of Eve.

I crossed over to Loyola, the new receptionist, whom I had known for years and thoroughly loathed, and gave her the usual greeting. "Tyler call this morning?"

She rolled her beady little eyes, like she had somehow become confused over the fact that a star columnist trumped a puny receptionist. "First of all, it hasn't been morning for hours. Secondly, no, Evangeline, Steven Tyler did not and never will call you. Just like he didn't call yesterday, and he didn't call the day before that, and he didn't call the day before that. And like he won't call tomorrow, or the next day, or the next."

She knew my full name. In order to know that, she had to have been snooping in my personnel file. "Loyola, you're such a bitch." I started to walk away. I'm mature.

"At least I wasn't born with my eyeliner already tattooed on." There was a snotty little sniff that punctuated that remark, one of those sarcastic, snarky sniffs.

So, I did what any mature woman would do. I picked up a letter off her desk, took out my lighter, and lit it on fire. Then I threw the burning letter back on her desk. I had the satisfaction of seeing that snarky look disappear into a grimace of horror as she watched the papers on her desk go up in flames.

I gave her a sympathetic look. "Oh, Loyola, whatever are you going to do? Here, let me help." I reached out and pulled the fuck-me roses from the vase on her desk.

"Here, hold these for a minute."

Passing the flowers to Loyola, I helpfully dumped the vase of water on the desk.

The fire was out, but water was spreading everywhere. Her keyboard was making funny sizzling noises. Loyola sat there for a minute, blinking like a moron. Then a flood of cold water hit her lap. She jumped up, cursing and frantically trying to brush water and ash off her fancy dress.

My work here was done. I turned and walked away, not wanting to gloat in her defeat. Kindness is a quality of great leaders.

Behind me, Loyola called in a thick voice, "You're just an old, black- leather bitch. You look like Joan Jett's mother. Wait till I tell Peter!"

Joan Jett's mother? Who was she kidding? And who the hell was Peter? Current boyfriend? Big brother? No problem. I have a Glock in my purse for emergencies. Satisfied, I went to my office.

"I heard you set the receptionist on fire." Blue, the publisher, had called an editorial/management team meeting, which usually only happened when somebody really pissed off an advertiser.

"No, I set the desk on fire. I haven't lit a receptionist since the nineties."

He raised an eyebrow at me.

"Things are changing, Eve. You can't go around setting people's desks on fire and expect them to take it just because they answer phones and you write a column."

I looked at him, stumped. "Why not?"

"Maybe I can explain that to you, Ms. Petra," said a man at the far end of the table. I had never seen him before, but we had a lot of folks float in and out of editorial meetings – the pissed off advertiser, for example, people hustling a product Blue was interested in, new employees, blah, blah, blah.

The old guy dragged his saggy ass out of the chair and rose to his feet, placing his hands flat on the table in front of him, so that he could peer down at me authoritatively.

"Explain away," I said, going for breezy. Who the hell was this jerk?

"Well, Ms. Petra," he said ponderously, "Even those who consider themselves above all us working stiffs have rules that we have to follow. That includes not terrorizing, threatening and intimidating, or otherwise opening Whipt! to legal action for providing an unsafe working environment."

I tipped my chair back and put my booted feet on the table. "Who's gonna sue us?"

The man's face grew red, his eyes bulged, and he hollered out the answer. "Everyone, if you don't learn to conduct yourself appropriately, you overpaid, talentless hack!"

It was amazing. Little drops of spittle were flying through the air. When he finished shouting, he stood straight and took off his glasses to wipe them with a care that was diagnosable.

“She’s not talentless, and she’s not a hack. Little crazy, maybe, but you don’t have to listen to what she says, just read what she writes.” I gave Blue a dirty look, and he shrugged a what did you want me to say? gesture at me.

I leaned over to Blue. "Who the hell is this guy?" I whispered. I was afraid if I said anything else and he heard it, he could go right into cardiac arrest.

Blue leaned toward me to whisper in my ear, "He's the new owner, and he's Loyola's uncle. I just sold Whipt! to him."

Peter Beater was a successful entrepreneur, who thought the sun shone out the Pope's ass. He was not only Loyola's uncle, but when his half- brother died in Vietnam, he moved right in and married Mia Monk, Loyola's mom – she became Mia Monk-Beater.

Beater himself was best known for taking Detroit's last great album rock station, WBAX, and turning it into a 24-hour advertising broadcast, occasionally interrupted by insipid pop tunes. When he sold it, he made millions. Now, he was the owner of Whipt! and the only person in the place who wasn't terrified was Loyola, who had been promoted immediately to publisher's assistant.

Beater didn't fire me outright, the devious putz. Instead, he said the two words guaranteed to strike fear in the heart of anyone who has devoted their lives to rock-and-roll, life underground, or the democratic party: drug test.

Twenty-four hours later, going through every proper channel, and with Loyola grinning at me like a hyena from behind his back, Peter Beater notified me that I was fired. And, because my drug test confirmed I had violated company policy by way of using illegal substances, I wasn't going to get severance pay or unemployment, either. What the hell did I care? I'd have a new job before the end of the day, and I was ready to take on a new cause: dedicating the rest of my life to humiliating the shit out of Mr. Peter Beater. And with the great new job that was out there waiting for me, I could do it. One column at a time.

A week later, I was sure Peter the Beater had sabotaged my career. Everywhere I applied for a column gig, I got turned down. Sometimes with laughter. I called Blue, and he listened to me sympathetically, but wasn't very optimistic. "Face it, Eve, you and I are dinosaurs. Nobody wants a female Hunter Thompson in the editorial department, just like no one wants an old rock dog at the helm. Peter's not a bad guy. He can take Whipt! into the future. I not only can't, I don't want to."

He didn't sound very upset about it.

"So what are you going to do, now, Blue?"

I could practically hear him shrugging over the phone. "Take the money and run, babe. Figured I'd go lay around on the beach for a while, then look into something fun. I know a syndication service going cheap. Want me to keep in touch?"

I muttered something vaguely affirmative – Blue and I had known each other for years now, sometimes better than others, and I couldn’t quite picture not seeing him on a near daily basis. But there was nothing else I had to say to him at the moment, so we said our goodbyes and I hung up the phone.

Nobody wanted a female Hunter Thompson in their editorial department anymore? I wouldn't have believed it, if I hadn't been around to half-a-dozen magazines already this week, and seen the starched and stuck- up yuppies that were crawling around the places like roaches. Every lobby had ferns. And they had these ridiculous signs up everywhere, "No Smoking," "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Entry". Christ! How could they keep any writers with rules like that?

After the phone call with Blue, I admitted defeat and slunk back to my room to lick my wounds. I'd been licking for a while now, and it hadn't helped much. I hadn't realized how much time had gone by, until I woke up one night and heard Grandma Rose outside my bedroom door with Max, trying to convince me to unlock the door.

As they pounded, I clutched a fifth of Jack Black to my chest and pulled a pillow over my head.

"Eve? Evangeline Petra, you have not gotten out of that bed except to go to the bathroom and the liquor store for three days. If you don't come out, right now, I'm going to tell Max to bust that damn door down. You hear me, Evangeline?"

I couldn't help it. I cracked up. The idea of Max doing anything more laborious than picking up a paintbrush was more than I could resist. I could hear Max on the other side of the door, making weird muffled noises. He was laughing, too, and trying not to hurt Grandma Rose's feelings by ruining her bluff.

Still, the sound of Max's laughter sounded pretty damn good right now. Laughing sounded pretty damn good right now. I don't think I had laughed one time since the evil words "piss test" were tossed in my face.

I pulled the pillow off my head, and I could hear Max and Grandma Rose having a heated conversation, in whispers, on the other side of my door. I pulled myself into a sitting position and the springs on my bed gave a loud squeak.

"Eve?" called Grandma Rose, "You okay in there?"

"I'm coming out," I called back crankily, "That is what you wanted, isn't it?" I looked for my slippers. Of course, they couldn't just be where I left them. I had to crawl under the bed for one and wanged my head on the bed frame crawling back out.

"Fuck," I said, clapping a hand to the back of my head.

"Eve, I'm not waiting any longer. Get your ass out here right now, or by God, I'm gonna take a chair and knock that door down myself."

"Jesus, Rosie, don't get your panties in a bunch, I'm coming." I shuffled over to the door, fifth in one hand and head in the other, and had a moment of confusion when I realized I didn't have a hand available to unlock or open the door. Then I jammed the fifth under the elbow of the hand cupping my bruised head, and bobbled the door open.

Light flooded my room, and I blinked my eyes, temporarily blinded.

"Christ, honey, what have you been doing to yourself in there? Taking ugly pills?" That was Max, looking at my streaked mascara and tangled hair.

To the surprise of all three of us, I burst into tears and then took an embarrassingly feeble swing at him. After that, just to make my patheticness completely obvious, I slumped back against the wall and slid down to the floor, and let the tears keep coming.

"Oh, my God, she's totally lost it," said Max in horror. Grandma Rose was just gawking. She'd never seen me take a swing at someone and not connect – hard.

Max sat down on the floor and wrapped his arms around me. I turned my face and rained tears on his sweater. I must have looked worse than even I thought, because he let me.

When I calmed down, I raised my face and blurted out just one of the many things I had become aware of since locking myself in my room.

Reality is a bitter pill. "Did you know they don't actually have music on MTV anymore?"

He nodded. "I know. We had a funeral for them a few years ago." Huh.

He turned his face up to Grandma Rose and gave her one of those charming smiles that makes him beloved by old ladies and poodles everywhere. "Miss Rosie, do you have any Valium around? And how about a nice pot of coffee?"

Grandma Rose beamed. "I just got a new prescription. Let me go get 'em, and then I'll start a pot of coffee. You think a doobie would help?"

"Grandma!" I said, shocked.

"Oh, it's not mine. I'm holding it for Frank at the senior center. He thought the nurses were going to search him. But this is a good cause. I'm sure he won't mind."

Off she went, and I sniffed up a bunch of snot, wiped my nose surreptitiously on Max's sweater, and sat back so I could run my fingers under my eyes and blot up tears and melted eye makeup.

I looked at Max, and he looked at me, and we both burst out laughing. I could hear Grandma Rose digging through stuff in her bedroom. Whiskey, dope, Valium and coffee – late-night snack of champions.

To my total amazement, I burst into tears again.

Max looked at me. "You know what you need?"

"What?"

"A hot shower. Come on."

He hauled me to my feet, dragged me into the bathroom, and sat me on the toilet while he got the water going. Then he took away the bottle of Jack and whipped my shirt off over my head. When I opened my mouth to protest, he stuffed me in the shower.

The hot water burned and stung but it also blasted away several days worth of sweat and old makeup, making me feel nearly human again. I washed my hair and my armpits, then shut the water off. Max handed me a towel, and when I was safely wrapped, pushed me back down onto the toilet seat so that he could brush the tangles out of my hair and run a warm blow dryer over the whole mess.

He was about halfway done when Grandma Rose poked her head back in. "Oh, my, she looks better already! Eve, here's your coffee, two Valium and the joint. I rolled it myself." As I watched, she lifted an unexpectedly tight doobie to her lips and lit it.

I washed down the Valium with hot coffee, then reached for the joint. "Grandma Rose, are you sure you're not helping good ole Frank smoke some of that weed? You're a pretty good roller for a marijuana virgin."

She giggled before she handed the joint to me. "Have to keep up with the kids, Eve. Otherwise you just get old and dried out."

I passed to Max, who gave my hair a final fluff and then shut off the blow-dryer. He took a hit, passed it back to Grandma Rose with a grin, and then tugged on my hand. "Come on, Evie. Let's get you dressed in some clean clothes."

In a few minutes, we were in the dining room, a pot of coffee between us, and shot glasses all around.

We spent most of the night talking. Max went down and fetched my tape case out of the car, and we turned Grandma Rose on to Aerosmith while we decimated Frank's pot stash. Talking, not talking, listening to all my favorite tunes. Grandma Rose laughed her ass off at "Big Ten Inch"; I laughed my ass off watching her. We fired up another doob and Max and I taught her the words. Fragrant rite of passage two decades ago, smokin' a doob with the family. Max and Rose were my family. Grandma Rose was my mom's mom and took me in when mommy dearest dumped me.

The last two decades had been big for Grandma Rose. She had lost her bra, watched Grandpa Joe die, found her identity, and gave up shaving her armpits in favor of finding her G-spot. I remember that last bit. We were having breakfast conversations about G-spots when other kids were still trying to decide whether they wanted cinnamon toast or cereal.

She eventually remarried, to a business type who lived in Grosse Pointe and could follow simple instructions related to her G-spot, and we moved out to the Pointe.

Husband number two kicked off a few years later, and left Grandma the house in Grosse Pointe and a hefty chunk of cash in the bank. Which left Grandma with nothing better to do at midnight on a Tuesday than sitting around shooting the shit with me and Max.

Hours later, Max and I were still sitting at the dining-room table, which was a little the worse for wear. Grandma Rose had conked out a while earlier, and we had step-walked her to bed and tucked her in.

Suddenly restless, I turned to Max. "Let's order some pizza and channel surf – you wanna?"

He nodded and we went back to my bedroom, slouching around companionably on the bed while we argued about satellite channels and waited for pizza. When he put on some lame-ass talk show, I fell back on the bed. On the ceiling above me was my favorite Steven Tyler poster, a still from a performance of "Train Kept a Rollin'".

Cocaine jism eyes in a fallen angel face looked down at me. Mouth carved wide to let the screams come out. Somewhere in his eyes, I thought, there were answers. He looked naked, exposed, pain showing through his skin like bones – but with a glint of Sphinx in his eyes.

Is there a better God to have than rock-n-roll? If there is, I haven't found it yet. Sometimes, I think it's going to break me open and spill me out, jittering guts making electric sparks as they arc free. Instead, it puts me back together.

Some people want to engulf it; some people want to be engulfed. There are women who worship God by shaking their tits at him, or trying to fuck the sacred pole. Men try to ring the Chord from mortal fingers. Not me. I didn't want to play it, write it, fuck it or smoke it. I just wanted to feel it. Feel it beating my heart, ringing my ears, dancing my feet. Being the tuning fork. Maybe that is being engulfed. But it's not just notes and words. It's sacredly profane, overwhelming, irresistible.

I wondered if I asked my own personal rock-n-roll God, could he tell me what had happened? What the hell had changed in the world that I had once been on top of? What was I supposed to fucking do about it? Some people ask God. I ask Steven Tyler.

The pizza came, and we stuffed ourselves, then lay around some more, TV turned low. Max painted my nails for me. I had almost nodded off, when my eyes snapped open and I stared right into Tyler's eyes above me on the ceiling.

I grabbed Max's leg. We'd crashed foot to head. "Max, I know what to do. Max, wake up!"

He blinked sleepily at me as he tried to get his eyes focused on my face. "What?"

"I have a plan, Max. I know exactly what I need to do."

"Whazzat?"

"I'm going to go to LA and find Steven Tyler. And when I tell him what happened, he's going to explain everything to me, until it makes sense."

Then

Chapter Two: The Fun and the Fury

I started working for Whipt! by plan. I had been writing for my high-school newspaper, magazine and yearbook since I had arrived there. A rock-n-roll epiphany when I was on the brink of graduation had convinced me that I didn't want to do journalism; I wanted to do balls-to-the-walls insanity.

It took several totally crappy jobs to put together what I needed to get into Whipt! – namely a car to get to work with and enough black in my wardrobe to look the part. When I finally got in, Whipt! fit me like really good leather. Whipt! existed in a little bubble of bizarro, not unlike me. It was the first place I had hung in years where I wasn't the weirdest one. It wasn't just a job. It was an adventure. And a lifestyle. My lifestyle, and it had just been waiting for me to show up. I got hired to answer phones, type letters and greet visitors. The whole time, I was kissin' ass and takin' names.

The publisher, Blue Tingles, looked like he could be Hugh Hefner's kid. Dark hair, cut long; lots of leather suit jackets, cut long; circumcision, cut long. One day he asked me if I'd like to do a restaurant review – no promises – and I jumped at it.

I called up my best friend, Max Vermilion. Neither male nor female, a human genis with a penis. He is Vermilion Gallery on Michigan Avenue in Bricktown. Sometimes he shows me a dark and tender heart, a need for shelter and hope, and lets me open him gently while in my arms, to peer inside.

He specializes in a kind of soulfully artistic undead look, complete with hair so blond it's almost white, and lots of black turtlenecks. And a boatload of mascara to trim out a pair of lake-water blue eyes. Every once in awhile he'd spice things up by slicking a tube of neon red lipstick over his lips.

"Max, I need your help. Can you go out to eat with me tonight?"

"It's drink-and-draw, tonight," he reminded me. That's the one night a week he closes the door to the public and opens it to a bunch of his current favorite alcohol-deficient artists and one nude model, and everybody sits around and gets tanked and doodles T&A – or P&A, depending on the gender of the model. Max provides free booze, so it's a pretty well-attended event. "Why don't you take Grandma Rose, instead?"

"Okay, forgot about it being D&D night. But Rose had her bunions ground down today and she got a couple of Valium appetizers. She'll get dingy and hit on all the waiters." Actually, a shot or two of Jack Black sounded pretty good right now. "How about if I meet you at the gallery. Freddy Gruesome gonna be there?"

Freddy Yak – no kidding, Yak – was Max's assistant and current semen receptacle of choice.

Max sighed. "Yes, Freddy will be there. We've been together two years, now, Eve. Accept."

"Well, I'll come by and hang for a couple of hours, then we can go to the restaurant and eat, and Freddy can babysit. We'll be back in plenty of time for you to close up. Who's the model? Anyone I know?"

Max made a small coughing noise. "I, um, think so. Remember that band, Bio-Degradable Shit? It's their lead singer. Loyola Monk."

"That skanky electric violin playing bitch? I hate her. You know that.

She tried to kick my ass in the bar one night because some guy she liked was hitting on me! She hit me with her fucking violin!"

Max made some noises, but they sounded more like smothered laughter than coughing. "Actually, Eve-my-love, the guy she liked was her husband, and you were hitting on him. As I recall, you grabbed both his ears and shoved his face into your tits. She almost wasn't able to get him out of there alive."

"Details. Anybody that would hit a person with a violin is wacked. Besides, it was still plugged in. My hair was frizzed for a week."

Now he was definitely laughing. "Okay, she's a bitch. Come hang out anyway and we can sit in a corner and do a couple of lines and snicker at her boobs. Now tell me, why do you have to go out to dinner tonight? And, does Grandma Rose have any Valium left?"