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Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Sortmind Press
ISBN-10: 1979041202
Type: Fiction
Pages: 377
Copyright: October 23, 2017
ISBN-13: 9781979041201
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
A cinder block falls on Akard Drearstone’s head and he trades his print shop job for lead guitar. Months later, as the four members of the Akard Drearstone Group face the onslaught of national fame at their rural Texas commune, twelve-year-old Jan Pace nurses her crush for the narcissistic, paranoid bassist Jim Piston, growing up way too fast in a surreal summer between seventh and eighth grade.
At their commune north of Austin, Texas in May 1975 the four members of the Akard Drearstone Group begin to feel the onslaught of national fame as twelve-year-old Jan Pace, daughter of a commune couple, falls in love with narcissistic, paranoid bassist Jim Piston. Lead guitarist Akard Drearstone invites country musician Bill Dunn to play rhythm on the group’s psychedelic masterpiece, “Overturned Runway,” but narcs raid the concert, kidnap Dunn, and kill him. On his wedding night, contemplating the dissolution of his hours-long marriage to Exponentialist philosopher Michelle Morgan, the group’s manager Harray Andreall finds a dead body packed in ice on the second floor of the barn. Though he tries to convince the sullen members of the group that their musical experiment is worth continuing, Harray’s boss has been arrested on murder charges, the record company is on the verge of collapse, and Harray is dumbfounded to discover a second killing perpetuated by another band he manages.
Excerpt
CHAPTER THREE
Regarding the Cinder Block Incident
“Christ, it’s insane, we’re insane to be doing this,” Jim muttered. Jan had never seen his jawline so taut. He wore a dark blue work shirt and tight jeans. Blue was his color. He was so handsome.
“No, it’s all right,” she told him. “You’ll have a wonderful time!”
He turned to her, eyes so raw and glaring she shrank back. “I can’t handle this! Any of it!” He marched to his own amplifier and jammed a cord into his clear bass. The feedback blare got the crowd cheering and Jim’s head jerked as if a bullet hit it.
“No, really, you’ll be all right,” Jan protested. But she’d failed to protect him. Why did these idiots take these drugs? They babbled dangerous nonsense. They did dangerous nonsense. Hadn’t Jim told her his head was too fragile for psychedelics? That he was going to lay off LSD and mescaline? But that sure didn’t stop him from smoking dope until he got paranoid.
The sun, low in the trees, was an intoxicating glare. Hundreds of freaks still streamed up the five hundred-foot driveway, shouting and laughing. Everyone held joints and pipes and beer cans. Jan was light-headed from breathing all this smoke. She’d had contact highs before and knew what being stoned was like.
She studied the crowd by the vast purple farmhouse and realized that any number of these stoned, tripping crazies could march right through the place where she’d grown up and blast it apart like a tornado. But Uncle Bill was inside and surely he wouldn’t let anybody mess around in there. Probably some other commune members would be keeping guard too, wouldn’t they? Thank God Horth was nowhere near. Jan scanned the far south fields in the waning light. Beyond the grove of mesquite trees, partly hidden by a rill of tall golden grass, lay the low dilapidated stable. It was too far way for anyone to want to climb up there for a view, she decided. And all they’d see anyway was the morning-glory fence and the backs of the musicians.
Her father Richard worked on the amps with Craig. Pete sat behind his drums, Harley touched his electric piano, and the freaks hooted.
“Hey! Drearstone Group! Drearstone Group!” someone shouted.
“We want Akard!” someone else cried. More cheering. “We want Akard!”
Jan turned to the beautiful Jim. “Look, it’s a concert!” she laughed.
Jim stared back in incomprehensible shock. “I ... I don’t know ... what’s going on.” Akard ambled over to tune his guitar with him and Jim struggled with the four big keys on his bass. The twangs and booms went out over the amps to intensified shouts.
“You’ll be fine!” Jan called over the crowd. “Maybe you can play some of your own songs!”
Jim shook his head. “What ... are you talking about?”
“The songs you’re writing at night!”
“I’m not writing any songs! Akard writes the songs!”
“Hell with that,” Akard grinned, pinging notes across to Jim’s thurbs. “The music for ‘Cop on a Ten Speed’ is fuckin’ genius.”
Jan nodded eagerly. The rehearsals for ‘Cop on a Ten Speed’ were among the loveliest experiences of her life. Nobody at the commune had ever heard anything like that before. One night they’d insisted the group repeat it six times. Though like all the rest of the songs “Cop on a Ten Speed” featured Akard’s poetry, it was the first music Jim had written for the group on his own. “No, he writes words, too!” Jan laughed.
“No ...” Jim protested. “I can’t write words. That’s insane!”
Jan shrank back. She’d hurt him! He had to really be suffering--and she never knew!
“C’mon, Jim, we all hear you banging on the typewriter every night,” Akard said. “Everyone figures you’re working on some lyrics. Don’t worry about it. Bring ’em to the group whenever you’re ready.”
“You should know better than that,” Jim said, fingering a few notes. “I’m just messing around, sorta like ... stream of consciousness bullshit ... just blowing off steam or something. I can’t write fuckin’ song lyrics.”
Jan had no idea the wonderful Jim was so shy. Jan had peeked into his room a couple times, a tiny square next to Akard’s closet, with a light bulb hanging from a wire above a double bed that took up ninety percent of the room. Rough yellow boards, still smelling like fresh lumber, formed two of the walls that Akard and Richard had built in February for the newest band member. The other two sides were the rotting brown wood of the outer wall of the house and the separating wall from Akard’s room. There were no windows. The floating gaseous colors of Katy’s huge painting, dominating the dark wood opposite the door, made the room livable. Jim had also tacked up drawings by other commune members, including an Akard Drearstone original, a picture of a three-headed dog.
When Jan realized she’d memorized Jim’s room she knew she was in love. This was the real thing. Of course she was too young for it. She was going to wait six years, until she was eighteen, to tell Jim about it. She’d made up her mind. It was all planned.
She could hardly bear to see him suffering because of these stupid drugs. But wasn’t Jan also feeling the effects of the insanity drugs? And hadn’t she failed Horth as well? Here she’d gotten a contact high and forgotten about him. He must be terrified, locked in the old stable, battered by all this noise. She was ashamed to go to him. He’d hate her for being messed up.
Should she try anyway? Take him some sugar, brush him, give him another blanket in case it got chilly tonight? But he had to love her, didn’t he? She looked past the morning-glory fence, woozily lost as to which way to proceed. Wait--the path by the walnut tree, okay ...
But freaks roamed in the three-foot weeds behind the musician’s area, and Jan knew they’d follow her down that path. They’d break into the stable, jump on Horth and try to ride him. They’d kick at him and break his legs! No, she wouldn’t be able to get away until it was dark.
The cheering was mindless. The yahooing built as Akard plugged in his bright red lead guitar, Katy at his side, brushing back his messy long brown hair for a final kiss. Sure, Jim had let his blond hair grow long, but not disgustingly long and ponytailed like Akard’s. And Jim would never grow such a sloppy beard. He had such a clean sharp jaw. Jan didn’t understand the obsession with covering your face with hair. Her friend Diane loved long hair, long facial hair, chest hair. They’d spent many hours in the barn brushing Horth and discussing everyone’s hair and jaws. Diane had already confessed she was totally in love with Akard Drearstone. Jan had to smile at the naïvety of Diane’s crush.
And then there was Akard’s head. Jan supposed that having a malformed head was a sign of genius. In the simple days, back when she was young, back before all this had started, it had been just the six of them: Jan, her parents, Akard, Bill, and morose Harray Andreall, long gone from the commune. But it had been Harray screaming for them to take cover in the high summer last year, the weeds by the barn over six feet high.
Jan had been walking with Akard through weeds a foot over her head. She was lost in an ocean of green when a thrilling WHOMP! shook the grass two feet to her right.
Akard, stoned out of his skull, giggled: “Man, what’re these weeds doing? What’re they doing?”
At regular intervals the waving weeds, some even higher than Akard, would shiver with an uncanny WHOMP! Akard laughed at another WHOMP! Jan felt a WHOMP! a foot to her left.
Then she heard the kitchen door slam and Harray Andreall crying: “Get away from there, you idiots! Jesus God!”
Jan looked straight up to a last cinder block tumbling end over end in the clear blue sky. She followed it, paralyzed, as it struck Akard on the side of his head in a shower of blood.
Jan was hysterical. She’d thought he was dead. Everyone thought he was dead.
It turned out that a stoned visitor, one of Bill’s musicians, keyboardist Henry James, a nasty bearded skinny guy Jan had always detested, had climbed to the second floor of the barn, found some cinder blocks, and had been stonedly inspired to toss them into the sea of grass below.
Akard survived with a fractured skull and two months in the hospital. He had health insurance from his Georgetown print shop job and never tried to sue Henry, pointedly forgiving him and maintaining that the cinder block toss was “weird and dangerous conceptual art.” Jan had always wondered if Akard was serious about that. Of course the shivering, booming grass had been eerily beautiful before that final block fell.
But Jan was sure the Cinder Block Incident had done brain damage when Akard next announced that he was forming a rock group with his old UT buddy Pete Spangler, who claimed to be a drummer but who hadn’t played in the ten years since high school, and who’d changed his last name to Sponge in the middle of an acid trip in February.
She was even more sure when Akard chose one of her father’s drugged-up mechanics at his shop, Harley Krishna, as his keyboardist. And everyone humored the battered, probably brain-damaged Akard when his ad in some music magazine brought Jim Piston, a complete stranger, in from Houston.
And while her parents and the three bachelors had always joked about this being a commune, after January people had begun flowing in and it really was a commune. Jan’s home had changed. Uncle Akard had transformed into something unrecognizable. Hadn’t Uncle Bill maintained that there’d always been something powerful and strange in their formerly quietly eccentric roommate that the Cinder Block Incident had to bring out? But who could have foreseen the Akard Drearstone Group, “29 Stairway,” and the dizzy beginnings of national fame?
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