Used to be you had to sell your soul to the devil to play like Rooster. Lucky for him, I don’t offer near as raw a deal. Here’s the way it works: I keep Rooster happy and healthy, and he plays that guitar like God himself 6 nights a week. The both of us walk away rich. Simple as that.
I started out as a head pyro guy for his shows, but I like to think of myself now as more of a talent manager. This industry keeps on moving towards marketing execs and suits and design thinking workshops and good God knows what else, but those folks don’t know the first thing about rock and roll. They don’t know that what you’re really selling is flesh and blood, not ideas or aesthetics or whatever bullshit they talk on and on about. To hit the nail a little more square on the head, maybe it’s better to say that what you’re really selling is the fusion of flesh and blood. It’s like vampirism, but it’s not so one-sided. Symbiosis, they call that. You gotta get hearts beating out in the crowd to keep hearts beating on stage, and that feeds back and forth in a loop. Some people call it soul, but it’s more than that. Hell, I don’t know. It’s not something you can put in words, really. It’s just something you feel.
But anyway, all of this started a few months back when Rooster fucked up his left ring finger in the last song one night. Shit wouldn’t bend anywhere, just stuck straight out his hand like a fencepost. Potassium, all his doctors said. That’s all he needs is potassium. Bullshit, I said. That’ll work for a time sure, smooth out the cramps and whatnot, but how about when he starts cramping up midsong? We gonna send somebody up there on stage and feed the boy a banana in the middle of a goddamn rock and roll show? I think not. We’ve every one of us got good money in that boy. That just won’t do.
I had a better idea and thank God he took to it. Nobody else on the team did, but nobody else on the team is the man selling tickets. There’s a vein, see, runs from the left-hand ring finger straight to the heart. That vein’s the reason people wear a wedding ring on the left-hand. They used to call it vena amoris way back when. Most people think it’s a myth, but Rooster’s living proof it ain’t. I rigged a little system up and we got some backalley doctors to put it in. It’s a dilator that fits right in the ventricle that opens into that vein and now with the press of a button, I can open that sucker and get the blood pumping to his left hand like nothing. I never seen somebody play so goddamn fast. And smooth, too. If we woulda got above board surgeons on the case we couldn’t have kept the playing smooth. You go to one of these new doctors, right, and they’ll send you home with an arm full of metal and some bullshit John Q bill can’t nobody pay. And on top of that, metal’s clunky and it weighs you down. We can’t afford Rooster slowing down when that shit starts to give. You can’t outsource heart, so I just enhanced the one in Rooster.
And on that note, it seems like I’m the only motherfucker on this crew that understands a body’s a machine like any other. I worked pyro for years, and before that I worked driving diesel rigs over the road long days and nights. There’s such a thing as machine spirit, as some call it. Same way there’s such a thing as willpower in a man. It’s not the diesel that makes the thing run, same way it’s not the blood that gets you out of bed in the morning. There’s an engine underneath the engine that tells the motherfucker to get up and go, see? A heart behind the heart that does the same. You can’t study any of that, and you sure as shit can’t just replace parts over and over and have that same machine spirit rear its head. You keep replacing shit and the thing just don’t recognize itself at some point. I’ll give you an example on the studying: there’s no amount of research in the world that’ll tell you just how much of a certain amphetamine a body needs at a given time to make it those last couple hours. And certainly no amount that’ll tell that newly revived body just how hard it can push the rig underneath it without breaking down. That’s all a matter of the spirit. Of the heart behind the heart.
That’s what pissed me off seeing Rooster standing there in the middle of the green room that night getting poked at and questioned by that bunch of doctors. The oldest one of em was half my age and still ten times the geriatric I am at damn near 60 years old. Rooster just stood there like a deer in the headlights, not hearing a word they were saying and his eyes all transfixed on that fucked up finger. So I took him out back and got him drunk. He needed two beers to get the finger to relax and another three for my plan to make enough sense for him to come around to. And then he polished off one more for his ego, and that one was probably the most important of the six. I’ve lived long enough to know all that without having to think about it. Heart behind the heart again, right? The marketing execs call that “interpersonal skills” and will still be reading books on it another 30 years before they could even start to think about the sixth beer. Stupid sons of bitches.
So like I said, we got that widener put in him not long after and haven’t had a problem with a finger since. We have hit other bumps in the road, though, what with the kid playing nearly every night. All that blood running straight to his left hand had him slowing down everywhere else, so I had to figure out a way to keep his heart pumping. He’s got a little drip now in his sinuses that runs whatever upper he needs whenever he needs it. I control that, too, of course. I’m responsible enough to know he’d abuse the shit out of it if he could. Rooster’s a smart kid, but he’s still a kid. And a kid that really loves speed, to boot.
We get him back level after he comes off stage the old fashioned way, though. Like I said, there’s an ego factor to having a couple spread out drinks that you gotta account for in situations like this. I already know with all the substances going into him, my next project’s gonna have to deal with the liver. I’m thinking ahead, see, and nobody else seems to understand that. But we’ll keep it on the straight and narrow here, I promise you that. I’m not letting nobody replace parts flat out in the kid.
Here before too long, I’ll have every last bit of Rooster running like a dream, and I’ll do it all cheap, safe, and in-house. The suits keep saying we need to get some wires in him and get him to a shrink before the amphetamines throw his central nervous system too far out of whack and that he needs a real doctor for that. I said motherfucker I’m about as real as they come, and I know better than anybody how much is too much anyhow, and I wouldn’t steer the kid wrong. Rooster’s more enthusiastic about all of it by the day, but that might be due in some part to the speed he’s taken such a liking to as of late. I couldn’t tell you. Most the rest of the team is just horrified about the whole ordeal.
Most of the rest of the team is chickenshit though, and a lot of em have abandoned ship. They saw us working outside of whatever bullshit code their particular departments specialize in and ran back off to their boardrooms and labs. I got no problem with that, of course, seeing as I’ve had to fight em every step of the way to see the kid taken care of. A couple have hung around, though—they’re starting to see just how much money me and the boy are making, is what it is. So I’ve been building out a little team of the people on the crew I think we can actually trust and boxing out the suits wherever I can. It’s a war hard fought for and won, though, just like anything else worth the time of day.
I wished it could just be me and Rooster, but I know it ain’t that easy. It’s like I told him, it takes a village to rise up out of the mud. But we’re gonna do it, by God. Give us a couple years and a little more scrap and just enough of the right balance of illicits to keep us all sane, and we’ll build a living god right before everybody’s eyes. I’m gonna carve an empire out of that boy’s outstretched left hand, just you wait and see.
-- Elijah Cansler is a West Kentucky writer focused on the gutter culture of the South. To find more of his work, you can follow him on twitter @moonrat27