Are You Loathsome Tonight Poppy Z. Brite

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.When he saw the heavyset man at the Asheville airport holding the sign that said WILLIAM VAN DUYK, he should have just kept walking.Instead the old Terry Cobb took over, the Rockstar Asshole, and he looked down his nose and snapped, “Who the fuck sent you?”The man held up one hand in a placating gesture.He had a thick moustache and a widow’s peak, and his suit was the opposite of Cobb’s, cheap but well pressed.“Sir, I work for a driving service, I was hired to meet your flight —”“How’d you know when I was coming in?”The driver grinned.“Not that many planes coming into Asheville.We’ve had a standing order to meet any flight with a William Van Duyk on the roster.”He’s just a stupid hick, Cobb thought.So Matty had hired a limo.That shouldn’t surprise him.Matty hadn’t minded spending money when he was alive; why should he mind now?When Matty was officially alive, Cobb corrected himself.He knew quite a lot about the difference, and it was this knowledge which made him deeply suspicious of the circumstances at hand.It had happened in 1985, after the Kydds’ acrimonious breakup and the flop of his own solo career.The solo failure had bothered him for a long time, because he thought they were good records — but he’d gone back to his roots, old rock and blues, and that had been a mistake.Cobb blamed it on the endlessly layered, flowery, overproduced sound that was so popular in the seventies, a sound that the Kydds in their later days had helped to create, a sound that dominated Matty’s successful solo efforts.Nobody wanted to hear Terry Cobb cover “Crawling Kingsnake.” It was the timing, that was all.Only when he was very drunk or very depressed did he consider the possibility that his edge wasn’t as sharp without Matty’s melodic genius to back it up.So he fucked around in New York for a while, just doing drugs and being famous.By that time cocaine had arrived in a big way, and his flirtations with it made him paranoid.He converted more and more of his assets into cash, gold, and even diamonds without quite knowing why.On the ninth of December, 1985, Cobb had a reservation on a flight from New York to Amsterdam.Possibly due to the aftereffects of the speedball he had snorted the night before, he overslept and missed his plane.It wasn’t a big problem; he’d only been going for the good hash.He rolled over and went back to sleep.Hours later, the clock radio woke him.A Kydds’ tune, one of his.Cobb almost reached over to turn it off, couldn’t muster the energy, and lay in his darkened bedroom listening.The news came on.Three hundred miles out of New York, the plane he’d missed had fallen into the Atlantic.And apparently everyone thought he had been on it.A search was launched, of course.But the plane had exploded in midair, then plunged into some of the deepest water between the U.S.and Europe.The ocean was black, frigid, and shark-infested, and the diving crew only found about half of the bodies.Terry Cobb’s was not among them despite the crew’s extra efforts (they were all Kydds’ fans, they told the press, causing a minor uproar among the families of the other victims).Which is it better to be? Cobb asked himself that night, over and over.A washed-up rock star, or a dead one?The answer was always the same.When the phone began to ring, he unplugged it.He didn’t make his escape right away.There were important things to be procured, documents that would allow him to travel as somebody else, anonymously, very far away.He took everything he needed to a hotel in Times Square and hid there by day, slipped out by night and gradually, expensively, got what he needed.He opened a vast New York bank account in his new name, acquired credit cards, and said fuck the apartment, the investments, the royalties; let them go to Matty and the other two and whoever else was still making a profit off the Kydds.Near the end of January 1986, a man with a U.S.passport in the name of William Van Duyk boarded a flight to Bangkok.Cobb spent the next several years wandering through Thailand, Bali, India, Turkey, and Morocco before fetching up in Gabon.There inertia took him, and he stayed.But he’d been bored for quite a while now.And the night he’d seen the TV report of Matty’s death, he realized that he missed Matty more than he’d ever let on to himself.They had been essentially married to each other for a decade, after all, without the sex but with all the joys and sorrows, the shared jokes and secrets, like it or not.If Matty was really dead, Cobb wanted to see what his partner had left him, and why.If Matty wasn’t dead … well, Cobb didn’t know what would happen then.Matty had known he was alive all these years, had even known where he was, and hadn’t made a single overture.Cobb pressed his forehead against the window of the limo.He could imagine Matty speaking to him, could hear the words clearly.I came back to you plenty of times, it said.Too many times.If you wanted to be dead, I wasn’t going to argue … and you always knew where I was, too.That was true.He’d never forgotten the address or phone number of Matty’s New York apartment, had contemplated sending a cryptic postcard or making a transatlantic phone call on any number of lonely, drunken nights.But he hadn’t known of any secret hideaway in North Carolina.He opened his eyes and looked out the window.They were driving through mountains, great green humpbacks shrouded with mist.He glimpsed wildflower meadows, waterfalls, mysterious little overgrown paths.The area was beautiful, he supposed.Unlike Cobb, who always wanted to see the squalor of a place, Matty appreciated natural beauty.Cobb frowned.The Rolling Stone tribute said Matty had shot himself in the head — in the mouth.He’d had to be identified by fingerprints.Matty appreciated all natural beauty, yes, but none more than his own [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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