The Freddie Mercury Sex Tapes
Mary Grimm
Play the Game
When I met the professor, I was dressed as a woman, in my Lands End one-piece, sitting in the glass-walled office that looked out at the pool. She had come in to give me some shit about a boy who was working out in the weight room and who didn’t look like he was sixteen. We had a sign posted that said patrons under sixteen couldn’t use the weights because it was supposed to affect their development which maybe it did. She was wearing a bathing suit, too, a purple bikini with sparkly clasps holding it together at the hips and cleavage.
She was going on with how she didn’t want to be difficult, but she had a concern, although maybe some people would pass on by, but she felt she had to say something, even if she didn’t like putting herself forward—and I was nodding my head, preparing to say that we’d look into it, and to thank her for her concern and so on. Before I could get started though, she said, “Are you playing Queen?”
I had been listening to the songs on the band’s set list. “Sorry,” I said, going to shut off Freddie Mercury, who was singing “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
“I love Queen,” she said, grabbing my hand.
One of the teenaged lifeguards had come in. “Not another Queen freak. Way to date yourself, people.”
“You’re a fan?” she said. “Listen, we should talk.”
The upshot was that the professor, Dr. Holly Adams, came to our next gig at the Greenleaf, a bar out on Pearl Rd. She kept saying how it was fate, by which she meant that I was in a Queen cover band and she was writing a paper about Freddie’s lyrics, which if things went well, would become a book, which, all thing being equal (although God knows, she said, they never were if you were a woman and an adjunct) would mean that she’d get a tenure track job. It was clear from her tone that tenure was something like finding out you were related to royalty or had a pass into heaven.
We hadn’t played at the bar before—Eddie had scoped it out. “This is going to be our big break,” he’d told the rest of us, which is what he always said.
Eddie was my younger brother, the drummer. He had mixed feelings about Queen21 because he wasn’t wild about ‘80s rock and also because he wasn’t the front man. But he couldn’t sing the high notes, not even falsetto, and he didn’t remotely resemble Freddie. He didn’t look much like Queen’s drummer, either, for that matter, but no one thought that was important. By no one, I mean my uncle, Crow, who was the lead guitar, and my father who had pushed us to start the band.
I didn’t care so much about fame, or the money. I just wanted to play in a band. I had wanted that since I was ten, watching my older brother’s band play at the CYO dance in the school basement, knowing already that I could play guitar as well as he did.
My father came to the gig with his girlfriend Loretta and sat at a table close to the stage, and we played the first set without mishap, Kyle prancing around in his glittery costume, Eddie in a blond wig, and me, with my long frizzy hair let down so that I looked like John Deacon, the bass guitar. It started to fill up, and when we played Crazy Little Thing, a few people got up and danced. I saw the professor come in just before the break, wearing clothes that were too dressed up for a west side neighborhood bar.
I was grateful for the break. I was always nervous in a new place, and then there was my father. I knew that he expected me and Eddie to sit with him so he could give us his notes, but I went over to the bar, where the professor was drinking a glass of white wine.
“I never would have guessed it was you if I didn’t know you were in the band,” she said. “The hair—it makes you look so different.”
I’d had it slicked back in a ponytail at the pool and now it was hanging down, a frizzy curtain I could hide behind if I wanted to.
“Cross dressing though—it’s so Queen, right? How did you all get together?”
I tried to answer her questions, stumbling a little. Told her that Eddie and Crow were family, and that Kyle had met Eddie at the community college, where it turned out, she taught sometimes.
“So, introduce me?” she said. “Is it your brother who’s doing Freddie?”
“That’s Kyle,” I said, but it was time for the second set, and I had to go. “You should talk to my father. The band was his idea,” I said, pointing him out.
We had an argument about the set list when I got up on stage, Eddie and Kyle bickering over whether to replace Killer Queen with I’m in Love with my Car, which was one of Eddie’s songs. I saw Holly standing by my father’s table talking, then sitting down and angling her chair to face the band. “It’s too obscure,” Kyle said.
“It wasn’t too obscure when you wanted to do Great King Rat,” Eddie said.”
Crow stopped the discussion with a sharp gesture. “Don’t fuck with the set list.”
So we played, Eddie sulking and Kyle smirking when he wasn’t dancing around and throwing his head back to look like Freddie. I was grateful that John Deacon, Queen’s bassist, hadn’t done anything I had to imitate besides his characteristic way of holding his guitar, wrist and elbow bent akimbo. It had been hard to get used to, but I did it without thinking now.
At the end of the set, Kyle was crooning to play the Game, and there were a fair number of dancers. He looked sincere and dreamy, brushing his hair back with one hand. He was trying to grow a mustache, like ‘80s Freddie, but it was hardly noticeable. I used to have a crush on Kyle, which I’d talked myself out of. Kyle saw the six years I had on him as practically a whole generation older. If I hadn’t known what he thought of me, it would have been plain when the band was getting together. “It doesn’t matter that Lee isn’t hot,” he’d said, “because John Deacon was a pretty funny-looking guy.” My brother disloyally agreed.
I had gotten over the crush, but objectively, Kyle was wonderful to look at, slim and dark-haired. I loved his profile, the straight nose, the full lips. Or I had, before I got over him.
In the last bars of the song, Eddie did a little riff on the drums to annoy Kyle, Kyle ignoring him and bowing in the exaggerated fashion he’d copied from youtube videos on Queen’s official channel, bending deep from his waist, with an exaggerated gesture of his arm. Someone had bought shots for the band, and I grabbed mine, propping my guitar against the amp. My father had his eye on me, and he waved his hand imperiously. No getting away from it this time.
I sat down next to Holly. “Hi, Loretta,” I said, and she said hi back in almost a whisper. In a normal family, Eddie and I might have hated Loretta for not being our mother, who had divorced our father and moved to Arizona, but we didn’t. My father sucked up all our hate and all our love, too, it seemed sometimes.
“You came in late in the second song,” he said, shaking his head. “People think that it doesn’t matter as much what the bass player does.”
It was what he thought, I knew. He had been the lead guitar in his band, and the lead guitar was king as far as he was concerned.
“But, like I always say, every member of the band has to be on the money.” He took me by my shoulder and shook it in a show of good nature. “I’ve been telling Holly here what it means to have a musical legacy.”
Holly had a notebook out. “You didn’t tell me your father was a fountain of knowledge on Queen. I’ve told him all about my theory, and he agrees with me. It’s amazing to me that no one has noticed how many religious allusions there are in Freddie’s songs.” Every sentence had an exclamation point.
“Can I get you ladies another drink?” my father asked. “Not you, Lee, you’re one of the guys tonight, right?”
After he went off to the bar. Loretta stood up, gathering her purse, murmuring that she had to go to the little girls’ room.
Holly grabbed my arm. “You guys are pretty good,” she said. “If I closed my eyes, it could almost be Queen up there.”
“We’re not that good.”
“I can’t thank you enough for inviting me. I needed to have this immersive experience with the music for my paper. It’s not all about the footnotes, you know.”
I nodded, watching my father at the bar. He had a hold of Eddie by the back of his neck, probably giving him a hard time about how he’d dropped a drumstick. He laughed uproariously and started back with two beers stuck in the pockets of his jacket and two glasses of wine.
“Where’s Loretta,” he said, setting everything out on the table.
“Ladies room.”
“You go and turf her out if she doesn’t come back soon. Make sure you don’t scare the ladies.” He grinned at Holly. “Don’t she make a homely guy?”
Holly turned to look at me, as if examining me for the first time.
“Flat as a board, front and back,” I heard my father say as I left.
I got my own beer and stood at the bar between Kyle and Eddie’s stools. “Who’s the cougar sitting with Dad?” Eddie asked.
“She’s writing something about Queen,” I said. “I met her at the pool.”
“You talk to Dad?” Eddie said to me, tapping his fingers on the bar.
“Not much.” We both turned to look at him. He was talking animatedly to Holly, who was writing more things down. Loretta was back at the table, her eyes fixed on something in the distance. I wondered sometimes if she was on something, not that I’d have blamed her if she was.
“What’s he talking to the college babe about?”
“Giving her the lowdown on Queen,” I said.
“Better her than us,” Eddie said. We looked at each other, the corners of our mouths quirking up. We were used to small victories when dealing with our father. “You ready?”
I tapped Kyle on the shoulder, and then again when he shrugged me off. Crow was already up on the little stage, plucking lightly at the strings of his Fender, modified to look like the Red Special, Brian May’s famous homemade guitar. Crow was a stickler for authenticity.
“Religion,” Eddie said. “Huh.”
At the end of the night, Holly came up to the stage with her notebook. “Can I get your emails?”
Eddie shrugged and wrote his down on the post-it she offered him. Behind her back he made a hideous face. Kyle wanted to know if she was writing a book, and when she said she hoped to, he looked interested. Crow said he didn’t give his information out.
“This is so fascinating,” Holly said. “Your father has given me so many new ideas.” She hesitated. “He told me about the sex tapes.”
“What sex tapes?” I stopped packing up.
She leaned closer and whispered. “You know. The Freddie Mercury sex tapes.”
I turned to look at the table where my father still sat. He was talking to Loretta, getting at her about something, I could tell. “What sex tapes?”
“I know it’s supposed to be a big secret,” she said. “But it stands to reason. Freddie had sex pretty much all the time.” She shook her head, her hair bouncing. “And he was famous. It only stands to reason that someone made some tapes.”
“My father told you that?”
“It’s just logical, if you think about it.” She tried to put her coat on with her purse looped over her shoulder, and I helped her to untangle it.
“Oops,” she said. “Listen, is Freddie single? I mean Kyle. Do you all call each other by your Queen names sometimes? Maybe I should call you John.”
“He has a girlfriend,” I said.
“That’s too bad, because he’s really hot.” She had her coat on now. “So I’ll see you next week?”
You’re My Best Friend
The next day I sat in my office thinking about what Holly had said. I couldn’t believe that the old man had inside information about any tapes, because if he had, we’d have heard about it before. He liked to talk about things he considered himself knowledgeable about, and Queen was one of those things. He wasn’t exactly a fan. He preferred what he called the hard stuff: the Stones, metal, some punk, which was the kind of music he’d played when he’d been in bands. But he had all their albums and had been to several concerts when they were playing the US. He liked to hold forth on how they’d had a lot of promise in the ‘70s, had been on the cutting edge and so on, but then lost all that when they sold out in the ‘80s and went pop. He blamed it on Freddie’s “deciding to be a goddamn fag.”
He'd been in bands for more than thirty years, including one that had been briefly famous with a song that was number one for a few weeks. That was in the ‘80s, but he’d hung on to the music business until about five years ago, when he had a heart attack. He was out of the game for six months, and the band he’d been in had broken up.
One of the lifeguards came in to tell me that he was pretty sure that there was a turd in the wading pool. Protocol was to shut the affected area down and do a detox, which was a pain in the ass. “I could just net it out?” he said.
“Tempting.” I handed him the chemical kit.
When he’d gone, I pulled out a stack of paperwork. I’d never been able to figure out my father’s games. No one could. I was glad when the phone rang, even though it was Eddie wanting me to pick up his band clothes at the dry cleaners.
“I’ve got a line on another band,” he said. “If I go, you going with me?”
“I don’t know.” Eddie was always looking for a way out of Queen21, even though it was the first band he’d been in that made any money.
“You and me, Lee. We’re a team, right?”
“Sure.” But I knew that even if Eddie skipped, there was almost no chance that his new gig would want an extra bass.
“So what about the teacher babe—is she for real? Kyle says that she wants to write a book about this religion shit, but it sounds like a crock to me. Maybe it’s some kind of scam.”
I pulled out my desk drawer and propped my feet on it. “Who would she be scamming?”
“I don’t know, but come on, it sounds ridiculous.”
“People do all kinds of ridiculous shit,” I pointed out.
“Anyway.” I could hear him lighting a cigarette. “The old man’s all fired up about something. According to Crow.”
We were silent. It was not usually a good thing when the old man was fired up.
“You going to be at practice?”
“Sure.” We always rehearsed on Wednesdays, in Crow’s basement, which had a good sound system and a wet bar. “I’ll bring your glitterwear.”
I Want to Break Free
When I got to Crow’s house on Wednesday, Crow’s wife Carol let me in. She was on the phone, so she just waved me toward the basement. Everyone was there already, Crow and Eddie drinking beer at the bar, Kyle playing pinball on one of Crow’s vintage machines.
I shook my head when Crow held up a Pabst, but Eddie said, “You’ll need it. The old man is coming.”
“Why?”
Eddie shrugged. “Another way to make our lives miserable?”
I was surprised. Usually we don’t talk about him in front of Crow. I don’t know why, since he knows him as well as we do. A kind of tact, I guess, a recognition that he’s Crow’s brother.
“Let’s get started,” Crow said.
We went through the stuff that we always played, and then worked on songs we’d added more recently. You had to know the songs that people always asked for—Killer Queen, Under Pressure, We Will Rock You—what you hear on the classic rock station. We didn’t do Bohemian Rhapsody though, because it doesn’t sound like much without the overdubbing.
By the time the old man came down the stairs, I’d almost forgotten about him. He went behind the bar and got a beer, then leaned against the wall and listened to us finish off We Are the Champions. When we did, he gave us a slow clap.
“You got a little screechy there,” he said to Kyle, who looked offended. “Why don’t you take a break?”
“We’re finished for today,” Crow said.
“I wanted a chat. Not with you,” he said to Kyle. “You can scamper.”
I put my bass in its case, and sat down on the sofa against the wall, brought down when Carol redecorated the living room. Crow sat on a crate by the old furnace, and Eddie stayed where he was, behind his drum kit.
“So,” the old man addressed me. “Your friend, Holly, is she legit?”
“I met her at the pool. I didn’t check her ID. You could call up the college and ask about her, I guess.”
He waved this away. “She’s a professor, all right. Talks like a dictionary.” He paused, giving each of us the eye. “How long have you been playing gigs?”
Thrown by the subject change, we looked at each other. “It’ll be two years in July,” Crow said finally.
“You’re still playing the same venues,” the old man said. “Shit bars, bowling alleys. The Elks Lodge, for Christ’s sake. I’ve tried to talk you into working on your presentation, but where do I get with that?” He shook his head. “You think putting your fag singer in a glitter bodysuit is all it takes?”
“He’s not a fag,” Eddie said. “And what’s the difference if he was?”
My father ignored this rebellion. “I’ve got forty years experience in the business. You’d think you’d use the sense God gave you, and listen to someone who knows what’s what.”
He turned to Eddie. “Don’t think I didn’t hear about you sneaking around looking to get with another band.” He shook his head. “You’ve got a group right here you could make something out of, but all you can think of is putting yourself in front. You don’t have what it takes to be a front man. Your friend may be a queer, but he has a voice. You don’t have the voice, Eddie, and you never will.”
I had turned my face away, not wanting to watch Eddie, but I knew how he would look. I had the experience of all our years in the family to tell me, all the times that the old man beat us down with words or his fists. Eddie’s teeth would be clenched, his hands white-knuckled. He would be angry and afraid. He wanted to get up and leave or to pick up the chair he was sitting on and hit the old man over the head with it. Someday he would do it, that was what I was afraid of. Some day he would hit him, maybe kill him.
And so, as I had always done, as we had always done for each other, I put myself into it. “Holly told me about the sex tapes,” I said.
The old man swung his eyes to me.
“I never heard you say anything about sex tapes,” I said. “Where did you hear about them?”
“I know you think of me as just your poor old father, but I still know people.” He took a swig of beer. “This tastes like piss, Crow. You got our own bar down here, you should get in some quality beer.”
“You never mentioned them before.”
“You think I tell you everything I know? I couldn’t if I kept talking until the apocalypse.” He grinned at me. “It’s all up here, Lee girl.”
“But these tapes,” I said.
He interrupted me. “I’ve got no more to say about that now.”
He and Crow started to argue about whether it was worth it to buy new costumes or take out an ad, whether it would get us better gigs. My father was always ready to spend someone else’s money.
Eddie was fiddling with the cymbal, tapping it with his beer bottle, so lightly that it hardly made a sound. His face looked dark, his eyes lowered, his hair falling forward. I knew he was thinking about our brother Jimmy, the one we’d always been compared to, the one who’d gotten out from under my father and the one he’d loved the best, if he loved any of us.
Jimmy could do it all—guitar, drums, piano. He’d played in my father’s band in its later years, first as a fill-in guitar, and later on drums. The old man had been grooming him to take over the band when he stepped down, although he never would have stepped down if he didn’t have to. Eventually Jimmy figured that out, or maybe he just couldn’t take the brunt of the old man’s brutal attention, and he left. We didn’t hear from him for six months, when he sent a postcard to Eddie and me from Oregon.
“How’s Sherry?” I asked, to get Eddie’s mind off whatever it was chewing on. Sherry was his girlfriend.
“She thinks I’m cheating on her.” He looked up at me sideways, from under his hair.
“Are you?”
He shrugged, which might mean yes, or sort of, or not lately. “You still sleeping with that guy?”
I shook my head. The last time I’d had a boyfriend was a good four months ago, someone I’d met at the pool. He had stopped coming in to swim, which I took as a sign that we were over.
“I hate –” Eddie waved his hand in a tight circle. We had moved closer to each other, an unconscious joining of our forces.
I took hold of his elbow, angling my body so no one could see, and squeezed it.
Keep Yourself Alive
When I got home, there was a phone message from Loretta, asking if I knew where the old man was. I texted her that he’d been at rehearsal, then sat down to eat a pb and j. I was worried about Eddie. When I was trying to decide whether I was psyched up enough to watch Jessica Jones, my phone rang again.
“Hey, girlfriend,” Holly said. “I thought we could go out.”
“It’s late,” I said.
“Not even ten yet. I thought we could have a glass of wine, do some girl talk.”
I had the feeling, which I’d had before, that Holly was playing a game with me, with all of us, acting a part, the part of someone who went out to clubs and bars and hung out with musicians. I was pretty sure she never called anyone “girlfriend” at her college. “I’m kind of tired. We had rehearsal tonight.”
“You have to let me come sometime when you rehearse. I think it would help me get deeper into the music.”
I didn’t say anything, pushing the leftover bits of my sandwich around the plate. Maybe if I went out with her, I might get some idea about what the old man was up to, so I said yes, and hung up. I put on a jacket and got in the car, and as I drove to the bar where we were meeting, I thought more about Eddie.
When we were younger, Eddie had longed to be in my father’s band. He was in middle school when they were at the height of their popularity, and he used to talk about it all the time, how he’d be on stage with our father when he was old enough to play in bars. Meanwhile, he’d played first in the band our older brother Jimmy got together, and then in a couple of groups with kids from his class. He wrote a lot of songs back then, and probably most of them were shit, as the old man said, but I was sorry when he gave that up. I used to like sitting in the garage, both of us fooling with our guitars, Eddie stopping now and again to write something down, the little bits and phrases of music like a conversation between us.
When Jimmie sat in with the old man’s band, he’d make a big deal of it, grinning up on the stage and playing a riff on the guitar to get people’s attention. “This is my boy, he’s gonna play with us tonight, and I want you all to give him a big hand,” everybody clapping and yelling, and the old man eating it up. “You’ve just got to be sincere,” he used to tell us. “They’ve got to know that you mean it, right from the heart.”
He did look sincere when he was up on stage showing his teeth and putting his arm around his son. That’s where Eddie had always wanted to be, in the circle of that arm, the applause rolling over them like waves.
I found Holly at the bar, talking to the bartender, JX, who I’d known for a long time. All the bartenders on the west side were friends of the family. “Lee, honey,” he said. “You know this pretty lady?”
I said I did, and we waited while he got me a Coke.
“You don’t drink?” Holly asked.
“Lee can drink you under the table if she wants to,” JX said. “It’s in the genes, right, honey?”
I nodded, since it probably was. “I have to go in to work early tomorrow,” I told her.
“I know—I’ve got an 8:30 class this semester.” She sipped at her wine, and hummed along with the song on the jukebox, something by Willy Nelson.
“I guess my father was helpful,” I said to her. “With stuff about Queen?”
“He’s amazing. So much information, and so much better than a book because he was living it.” She emphasized the last two words. “He told me a lot about the rock scene in Cleveland. I looked him up when I got home, and he has his own Wikipedia entry.”
Which he wrote himself, I thought, which was unkind, and probably even untrue. He had been famous, a little, and for a while.
“I had to pry it out of him though, he’s so modest.”
JX snorted.
“I told him I was going to credit him in my bibliography, and he didn’t even want me to, can you believe it?”
I made a face at JX so he would stop. He made a face back and went down to the other end of the bar. “What was it he told you about the tapes?”
Holly made big eyes at me. “The sex tapes?” she whispered. “I had this whole theory about the religious themes and allusions in the songs, you know, Freddie’s songs, and then when he told me about the tapes, it got knocked right out of my head.” She signaled to JX for another glass of wine.
“You don’t want to do the book?” I asked.
“No, no, no.” She shook her head. “That’s so important, the book. I need to keep focused on that. And really, it’s all mixed up together, religion and sex, right? And your father pointed out that the kind of publicity that can happen with something like the tapes could be very valuable. You see what I mean?”
I shook my head.
“Did you know that this year is Freddie’s seventieth birthday? There’s going to be a lot of attention. The attention of the world. People will be thinking about Freddie and Queen.”
“At your college, you mean?”
“No—they’re a bunch of old farts. But it’s going to be in the air, right? The zeitgeist. I do the article, which is already half written, really, and there’s going to be this upsurge of interest, which will make it easier to get a book contract. With all that going on, it could be a crossover book. Your father might not have gone past two years of college, but he saw all the implications right away.”
My father, who had no years of college, always saw all the implications. “It’s not clear to me what he’d be getting out of it.”
Holly looked offended on my father’s behalf. “He’s got a real intellectual curiosity, I can tell you.”
“I don’t see how sex tapes have anything to do with all of that.”
She huffed, exasperated with me. “It has to do with authenticity, the connection with the real man. Freddie,” she clarified, when I continued to look doubtful. “I really need to talk to Kyle about all this. I feel like he’s channeling Freddie when he’s up on stage, don’t you think?”
I didn’t like the way she called him Freddie, as if they were old friends, as if she owned a part of him now that she’d fixed her sights on his songs and his music. “Doesn’t it seem a little—“ I looked for a word— “shady?”
Just then, one of the regulars came up and asked Holly if she wanted to dance and after inspecting him, she said yes. They swayed energetically to another Willie song, and JX came over to talk to me.
“She as crazy as she sounds?”
I shrugged. “She’s into something with the old man.”
JX nodded. “So, crazy then.”
We both laughed.
The Show Must Go On
I didn’t see Holly for a while. We had a bad couple of weeks at the pool, when two people quit, and there was a crisis when the maintenance guy came to work drunk and threatened some kids who walked in muddy shoes on the floor he’d just cleaned. She didn’t call, and she didn’t come to the bar that next weekend. Kyle asked me about her, and I said maybe she’d forgotten about it.
“I brought my head shots to show her. She said she was interested.” Kyle worked sometimes as a model, handing out brochures at car shows, or doing local print ads. His biggest job so far had been modeling clothes for a design school’s fashion show.
“Mmhmm.” I was trying to fix the strap on my guitar.
“How old is she anyway?”
“I don’t know. Why do you care?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you can’t tell about a woman, with all the makeup and whatever. You, for instance. You look older than how you are. Not that you look old, but you know what I mean. Not a girlie kind of face.”
He gestured toward my face, indicating maybe that it was long. A horse face, which I had heard before. I shook my hair forward, bending over my guitar strap.
“Don’t give my sis a hard time,” Eddie said. “Everyone can’t be as pretty as you.”
Kyle grinned. He was wearing a net shirt studded with glitter. When Eddie commented on it, he said that Holly had suggested it. “She says that ‘70s Freddie is hotter than ‘80s Freddie. I’m growing my hair out, too.”
Eddie raised his eyebrows for me to see. “Someone has a crush.”
“It’s all about presentation, right? You go with what the audience wants. Watch for it tonight,” Kyle said. “I’m going to go for the high note.”
He meant the high C at the end of Somebody to Love, which he hadn’t been able to do with any regularity.
“I’ll stand behind you and grab your balls,” Eddie said.
They started to horse around, but Crow came in, and I heard Adolph, the bar owner, turn off the jukebox. It was time to get up on stage. I stood there, my elbow stuck out in the approved Deacon stance, watching the crowd. There were a lot of people there, even for a Friday. A group of guys were hanging out near the hall that led to the restrooms, and what looked like a middle-aged bachelorette party was set up at a couple of tables up front. The table where the old man liked to sit had three women old enough to have been Queen fans the first time around.
Eddie rattled the drums, and Crow played a riff on the guitar, and then we were into Crazy Little Thing, always a good opener with its bounce and heavy beat. We played the first set and it went well, although a couple of times Eddie was lagging on the beat. I saw out of the corner of my eye that he kept looking into the crowd. On the first break, he said he wanted us to sub in You Take My Breath Away, which was his seduction song. He liked to sing it into the crowd, looking right at the woman he’d noticed. It worked about half the time, I guess. Kyle said OK and Crow didn’t object, surprisingly.
So we let Eddie do his thing for the third song of the set. I could see her out in the dark away from the stage lights, watching him as closely as he was watching her. She was pretty, just Eddie’s type—small and blonde, wearing a low cut top and dangly earrings. She looked a lot like Sherry. Eddie said that he loved Sherry, and maybe he did. I didn’t know what love meant, I suppose, not enough to be able to judge.
On the long break, we went our own ways, Eddie on a beeline to the new girl, Crow to the bar, Kyle to the men’s to re-gel his hair. I went outside and stood in the parking lot with the smokers, so I was the first to see the old man arrive. He pulled crooked into a space at the back of the lot, backed out, pulled in again even more so. When he got out of the car, he staggered and leaned against the car for a minute. Loretta wasn’t with him. All of these things were bad signs.
I wanted to walk away, back into the bar, or maybe even out of the parking lot and down the street. But I went toward him, coming up alongside him to catch his arm when he stumbled over one of the potholes in the asphalt, a crater filled with butts and crushed cigarette packs. “Dad,” I said, although I never thought of him as a dad. But I had to call him something, didn’t I?
“Lee baby. Little Lee.” He leaned against me for a minute. “You know we thought you were going to be a boy? I told your mother I didn’t have any girls in me. She fooled me though.”
I tugged on his arm, trying to get him going back toward his car, my mind going a mile a minute. Crow could drive him. I could play lead for a few songs, ditch the bass.
“Lee’s as good for a girl as a boy, I told her. Wanted to name you Jennifer, she did, but I couldn’t let that stand.” He swung around and faced me. “You talk to your mother at all, Lee?”
“Yeah,” I said. The sweat was running down my back, even though the air was cold.
“She complains about me, right? The last nice thing she said to me was in 1997, you know that? I marked the day.” He pointed his finger and drew a line in the air.
“You ought to go home,” I said.
“Got a date with Dr. whatsit.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “She’s hot for a teacher.”
“God, Dad.”
“Just kidding.” He laughed and his warm whiskey breath washed over me. “We’ve got our business, that’s all. And I need to keep an eye on you fuckers. You’ll be screwing up your fucked up group if I let you. Your worthless brother can’t keep the beat, and Crow don’t care. He don’t care at all, it’s just a job to him. And you, Lee.”
I braced myself for what he might say, waiting as the moment hung there, his mind sputtering and wheeling for the putdown he knew I deserved. Hamhanded Lee, not enough of a girl, no talent, no ambition, skinny bitch, all wig and costume. But he pulled away from me and I watched him push past some smokers and go in.
For a minute, I stood there, not thinking, breathing in the secondhand smoke that made a red-stained cloud under the Exit sign. I was feeling tired, I suppose. Had my mother ever loved him? Had he once been someone who could be loved? I knew he had been good looking, there were photos of him all over the house, all of them with his guitar or with his one gold record or with his band, excepting only their wedding picture, which my mother had left where it had always hung in their bedroom. It was there still, and I wondered if it bothered Loretta to see it.
I watched the last of the smokers drop his cigarette and crush it with his foot before he went back in, and I followed him.
Inside, there was the usual noise of the bar during a break, laughter and the clink of glass, voices raised, a song on the jukebox that no one could hear. I pushed my way through the crowd, looking for the old man. I saw Eddie, but not Crow or Kyle.
Crow might be able to talk the old man into going home. I shouldered my way to the bar and asked the bartender if he knew where Crow was. He shrugged. “Break room?”
The old man was standing by the stage, swaying and grinning, gesturing toward the instruments or the amps, talking to one of the aging Queen fans. He looked almost sober now, but I knew he wasn’t. I knew the stages of drunkness better than he did. He was everybody’s friend now. He wanted to talk about his glorious career. But soon, something would set him off and he’d be on to the next stage, where he was angry enough to make his brain boil. And then—
I stopped myself thinking, and slid between two girls in line for the john.
“Hey,” one of them said, “you’re with the band, right? You guys are really cool.” She grabbed my wrist.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, but she kept hold of my arm, peering into my face.
“I thought you were a guy.” She laughed. “Look, Heidi, he’s not a guy.”
I pulled away from her, but she didn’t want to let go. “It’s OK,” she said. “Everybody has to do their own thing, right?”
She put her face up close to mine, and I could smell her perfume. “It’s kind of hot, really.”
I got my arm away from her and ran down the hall. The lights flickered twice, the sign that the break was over in two minutes. Not much time. I pushed the break room door open and went in.
It was dark inside, the only light from a Batman nightlight stuck in the socket by the sink. There was a long drawn out sound, and a rustling. At first, I saw only a confused movement on the ratty couch in the corner, but then it organized itself into two bodies. Kyle and Holly. Their bared skin shone pale in the dim light. Kyle turned his face to me and smiled. “Is it time?” he said, and I nodded.
Kyle’s sequined shirt was rucked up to show his chest. Holly’s hair fell forward over her shoulders. Her lipstick was smeared on one cheek. She didn’t look at me.
It wasn’t that I was in love with Kyle, or thought that we’d end up together. I’d never thought that. But—I would never be the one to push his shirt up. I wouldn’t touch his hair, measuring the new length of it under my fingers, or feel his hands on me, on my body. I had thought I was over all that.
Adolph was standing by the bar, glaring, arms folded, no time to do anything. Crow was on stage, tightening a string, and Eddie was set up behind the drums. He saw me and gave me a hurry up wave. Kyle had come up behind me. “Come on, Lee,” he said, “let’s knock this out.”
On stage, holding my guitar, I adjusted my elbow. I was John Deacon again, and Kyle, in his glittery shirt, was Freddie, and on Crow’s signal, we plowed ahead into Somebody to Love, Kyle singing the first uncanny notes, soft and fierce, and the four of us were wrapped up in what we were doing on the alternate universe of the stage, our air spotlit and heavy with sound.
I’d almost forgotten about the old man, but there he was, sitting with the three older women and Holly, who gave me a prim, almost reproving look. He had a pitcher in front of him, half full, and a couple of shot glasses. His arm was around one of the women, and when he saw me looking, he gave me an exaggerated wink.
He pointed to the stage and then to himself. He was grinning, but his eyes were hard. He wanted to sit in. I slid my eyes over to Eddie to see if he’d noticed, my hands going through the chord changes as if I was a machine. Kyle was in the third verse now, approaching the end, begging for someone to love him. Somebody, somebody, somebody, he sang, moving toward that high note. The other three of us seemed to pull together, wanting him to do it, playing hard, as if the vibrating strings and the beat of the drums were enclosing him and supporting him, pushing him toward the top of his range.
Kyle was standing at the front of the stage, his arms out. I could see him in profile, his head back, neck stretched to open his jaw wider. I heard him start up the hill of notes, faltering once, and then climbing on top of the melody. He’d done it, and he couldn’t stop smiling.
Hammer to Fall
As soon as the last notes of the song died away, my father was on his feet, coming toward the stage while the crowd applauded. He stopped for a minute at the steps, and then started up. Behind me, I heard Eddie say, “Fall, you bastard. Fall on your head and die.”
He didn’t, of course. He got himself up and went over to Crow. “Brother,” he said, “can you lend an old man your six string?” He had made sure to say it into the mike, and his voice boomed out over the bar.
Crow didn’t look happy, but he ducked out of the strap and handed it over. “Now give me a little intro,” the old man said. “Or never mind, I’ll do it myself.” He plucked at the strings, fiddling with the keys.
“I taught him everything he knows, and that goes for the boy back there.” He pointed a thumb at Eddie, “and for this one here as well.”
That was me. He didn’t mention Kyle, who was standing over to the side, looking confused. I hated it that the old man had ruined his triumph, his happiness.
“You probably don’t remember me,” the old man said, “but I used to play around this town a time or two. Randy Deever.” He looked to the audience expectantly, and there were a few claps and a yell from the bar.
“I still like to get up on my hind legs and play a tune.” He strummed a G chord. “And these fuckers are kind enough to let me do it.” He turned around and said, “Start us up for Under Pressure.”
I looked at Eddie, and what we were thinking and feeling went between us like waves crashing back and forth, all the hurt and anger and hate that we didn’t speak. But what was there to do? I started it up. Eddie followed me, and then the old man. Kyle came forward to the mike and the old man waved him off. He meant to sing it, too. He began singing scat, leaning forward over the mike which was a little too low for him. I could see the spit coming off his lips gleaming under the stage lights. He was ahead of the beat, and Eddie and I struggled to catch up.
Down at the table, Holly and the other women were sitting in attitudes of respectful attention, as if it was the god of rock and roll up here.
“Under pressure,” the old man sang, his voice a little screechy.
I prayed that we might just get through this, just have it over with. We were four songs away from the last break, then one more round and we could go home.
But the farther we went, the more the song fell apart. The old man’s voice was still big, but he didn’t have the breath any more, he was struggling, losing the phrasing. His hands looked wrong on Crow’s Fender, the fingers crooked and splayed. The crowd, who had cheered at the first notes of the song, was losing interest, signaling for another pitcher, getting up to go to the john. The noise of the bar rose and swelled, noticeable even under the music. But we were halfway through. The old man would have the sense to step down after the one song. He wasn’t stupid.
Then his voice cracked, almost a squawk, and somebody by the bar yelled, “Get off the stage!” I kept playing, and the drums were steady behind me, but the old man had let the Fender drop so that it hung awkwardly from his neck. He grabbed the mike, smiling maniacally. “Little trouble here,” he said, his voice loud. “Give us your indulgences, as the priest used to say.”
I could see Adolph coming around from behind the bar.
“Listen,” the old man said. “We’re all friends here, right?” He raised his head and shouted, “Bartender. Drink on the house for everyone! Then we’ll do this up right.”
We stopped playing. Crow hopped up on the stage and grabbed the old man’s arm. I was afraid he wouldn’t go, but he shambled after his brother. “Take the lead,” Crow said to me. “Play something good and loud.”
I picked up his Fender, and nodded to Kyle and Eddie. Don’t Stop Me, I said, which is good and loud and then some. By the time Adolph had come up to the stage we were three bars into it, and some people had started to dance, so he backed off. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Crow pulling the old man down the back hall, and then they were out of sight.
On the last break, I came down from the stage. I was surprised to find Holly still sitting at the old man’s table. She waved at me and I went over and sat down. My arms and legs ached. One of the old women was still there, too, but she looked out of it, her eyes drifting and blank.
“That was pretty awkward,” Holly said.
I nodded, and poured myself a glass of beer, even though I didn’t want any.
“So I guess it was all a load of crap, what he was telling me. About being famous and the gold record, all of that.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s true.”
“He just seemed so,” Holly paused, “charming? You know, that old guy kind of charm where they’re flirting with you but they don’t mean anything by it.”
I wanted to laugh, because I could imagine how it would make him feel to be categorized that way. “He did get a gold record,” I said. “He and his band are in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.” In an alcove, labeled “Local Boys Who Made Good,” over by the elevators.
“But,” Holly said, and then didn’t go on.
“Their hit single was in 1986.” The old man had gone on a bender, and he hadn’t come home for two weeks. I wasn’t born yet, but I’d heard the stories.
Crow came out of the back hall and went up on stage. He picked up his Fender and started checking it over, running his fingers over the strings and frets. Kyle and Eddie were at the bar, huddled over their drinks.
“He used to be hot.” It was the old woman, who had come out of her stupor. “I mean, you know, hot. Used to be.”
Holly was frowning. “But the sex tapes. Was that all a line?”
I shrugged. What I’d seen in the break room flashed in my mind, Kyle’s smooth, pale chest bared, Holly’s hand on it, the sparkle of Kyle’s costume, the tangle of their legs.
“So there aren’t any sex tapes?”
I didn’t bother to answer. There may have been some sex tapes once. The six degrees of Freddie Mercury—the old man was probably only a degree or two away. Someone might have made some, maybe even kept them for a while. But I was pretty sure that if there were any, they’d be hidden in someone’s basement in an old VHS case marked with the name of a John Wayne movie. Or their plastic snarl is tangled up with the trash in a landfill, or floating in one of those garbage islands in the Pacific, nosed at by fish, sliding upwave and downwave in the great furrowed plain of the ocean.
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Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection) - both by Random House. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Antioch Review, and the Mississippi Review, as well as in a number of journals that publish flash fiction. Currently, she is working on a historical novel set in 1930s Cleveland, Ohio. She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University.
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