REMEMBER 85 By Marc Shapiro

REMEMBER 85

By Marc Shapiro

Screaming guitars that made ears bleed. Drugs out the wazoo in firmly packed blunts and finely drawn lines. Women standing in line, legs wide open, falling all over themselves to partake of a real rock and roll ride. This was the stuff of Jesse Brand’s dreams.

The rest was his reality. His nightmare

Jesse woke from a troubled sleep with a shutter and a start, hung his head over a cot that passed for a bed and puked his guts out into a plastic bucket. The bucket was the latest in a seemingly never ending addition that had marked his physical and emotional decline. It was added when Jesse realized that he did not have the strength or desire to make it to the toilet when his every morning rush of upchuck said hello to the day.

Nor did he have what it took to empty the bucket on a regular basis. The stench was palpable. The stench was something he had long since gotten used to. His innards now sufficiently purged, Jesse rolled back onto his cot, brushed a couple of generic beer cans onto the floor and stared bleary-eyed around his room. As always, he was philosophical in his hangover.

57 years of life and 37 years as a musician had bought him this.

A hole in the wall eight by twelve room in a pay by the week rooming house that had never seen anything but bad days. A room he had trouble making the rent on most days. There wasn’t much of a market for drugged out alcoholics with no discernible skills other than to be able to pluck E D and A on a guitar. When he was sober, which was not often, he would manage to get his ass down to the street where he would busk for nickels, dimes and all the abuse he could manage from those who felt that dropping coins into his open guitar case entitled them to give him shit. Flat out begging was beneath Jesse but dumpster diving for recyclables was not.

Out of habit, Jesse absently fished his wallet out of his dirty jeans, ignored the lonely one dollar bills that would hopefully get him through the day and went to the plastic photo files, long since gone to tears, mold and mildew, and decidedly empty. He knew there would be nothing. Whores, when he could afford them, did not leave mementos. The only real woman he had known had lasted two years before she scuttled off into the night with everything he had. Which was nothing.

Jesse’s head lulled to one side and to the only thing hanging on any of the four bare walls. A faded, wrinkled and partially torn publicity photo of four young longhairs, looking angry, young and totally rock and roll. Tom, David, Ernie and Jesse. The Mike Strikes. Jesse managed a tight, ironic smile at the image before the onset of droll instinctively caused him to wipe off on his shirt sleeve.

“Ah The Mike Strikes,” mumbled Jesse to nobody but the four walls. “That was a time. That was 1985.”

The name meant nothing other than the fact that the band thought it would look cool on a club marque. Jesse had to admit that the guys were notorious in their limited thinking. The Mike Strikes had not gotten together to be stars or reshape the world. They were unambitious Southern boys in a Podunk universe of white trash who had formed to make beer money playing the pick- up bar circuit and laying waste to local poon. They liked Skynyrd, the Allmans, Marshall Tucker and they could tolerate 38 Special. Hell! Jesse was often complimented on the band’s ability to do a decent version of The Outlaws’ ‘Green Grass And High Tides’. A cover band playing Southern music in the armpit of the South seemed like their ticket to ride.

The Mike Strikes were the proverbial big fish in the small pond for the good part of a decade. They rocked, smoked and fucked their way through just about every dive below the Mason Dixon; making just enough money to avoid taking day jobs and cementing their reputation as a band that was making the most of limited skills and a total lack of goals.

Until 1985 when fate stepped in to fuck things up.

Jesse had written ‘Throwaway Love’ on the back of a coaster during a post- concert orgy. It sucked when he wrote it drunk. It sucked even more when he sobered up. But when the band put some bluesy riffs, some dirty bass and drum staccato that was laughingly dramatic,  it didn’t sound half bad. Still not great but definitely not bad. They closed the show with ‘Throwaway Love’ the next night in front of an enthusiastic crowd and a slumming A&R type so sauced that he immediately saw God and raced backstage where he offered Mike Strikes a one shot recording deal to record ‘Throwaway Love’ for mighty Swamp Gas Records.

Two takes in twenty minutes in a literal shed of a studio and ‘Throwaway Love’ was drop kicked into the world. The band took it as a joke and figured the song would go nowhere fast. But a funny thing happened on the way to the bargain bin.

A handful of stations along Mike Strikes’ regular touring itinerary actually played it a few times. One even put it in heavy rotation. ‘Throwaway Love’ became an instant cause celebre in which the dead enders who made up the band’s core followers took it upon themselves to get this loser band a hit record.  ‘Throwaway Love’ managed a finger hold at the low end of the Billboard singles charts and quickly disappeared. But not before a local liquor store owner, moonlighting as a concert impresario, threw together a full- fledged tour to capitalize on the Mike Strikes’ liplock with the big time.

Laughingly dubbed The Copulation And Fornication Tour: 1985, the band soon found itself in the midst of a 30 date odyssey through the bowels of the deepest South. The band played in places that rarely saw sunlight, a dentist or a shower.

For Jesse it was all a blur. Play. Chug. Toke. Snort. Fuck. Of the latter, he remembered the women were crazy hot to do the deed. Insatiable to the point of madness was more like it. And all Jesse recalled through the haze was that the members of Mike Strikes were quick to oblige.

Not surprisingly, Jesse’s dick saw more action than his wallet as The Copulation And Fornication Tour: 1985 crashed and burned, literally at the doorstep of his tumbledown back half of a duplex. He had fucked, by all accounts, 30 women in 30 days. But by the time the promoter, the tour bus driver and their drug supplier took their cuts, Jesse barely had enough to pay the next month’s rent. Jesse didn’t care.

All he wanted to do was sleep. And he did, nonstop, for what seemed like another 30 days. On day 31, he awoke with a start to the sound of a phone ringing. It would be the first of many. It hadn’t taken long to find Jesse.

“I’m pregnant you sonofabitch! What are you going to do about it?” Or words to that effect entered Jesse’s world with regularity over the next couple of months.

By the time the dust settled at least a dozen women who claimed Jesse had slept with them on the tour were now ‘allegedly’ with his child. What were the odds? In the rock and roll world, an unplanned pregnancy or two was a sure sign one had arrived. But damn! Was every woman within a stone’s throw of their tour bus ovulating at the same time? Allegedly was the operative word in Jesse’s mind as he pondered this hellish predicament.

In the coming weeks, Jesse would do his due diligence. He took one monster of a DNA test and sent the results to legal representatives who had sprung magically from the weeds to defend these scorned women and to take their cut of what they stupidly thought would be millions. The results of those first 12 tests proved that in all cases ‘Yes he was the daddy!’

Jesse barely had time to catch his mental breath when another six women emerged with the same story…then five more…then three more…then three more. All of which resulted in his now being the biological father of 29 bouncing baby Jesse’s.

Jesse raged drunkenly with each legal defeat. It was a curse set upon him made all the more biting by the fact that the other members of Mike Strikes, after they got finished alternately consoling and mocking him, had apparently shot blanks during the tour.

The rock and roll gods were truly laughing their asses off. Because Jesse was in hell.

It would take three years of pro bono litigation on all sides before a Solomon like decision was put on the books. Knowing they could not get blood out of a turnip named Jesse (aka the poor, loaded small time rock star), the law decided that every cent that Jesse made until his battalion of progeny turned eighteen would be divided 29 ways to the mothers. It boiled down to Taco Bell money but it was that or nothing and Jesse, amused at the notion, agreeably signed on the bottom line with the stipulation that he did not have to meet the children or their mothers face to face.

In Jesse’s world it was all good.

Mike Strikes managed to hang in there a few more years on the low rent bar circuit. After each show Jesse would sit down and divide his night’s pay into 29 separate piles, which rarely amounted to a few bucks and change, stuffed the cash into reinforced envelopes and sent them off to 29 different addresses. The ritual would become part of Jesse’s madness, a methodical slice of idiocy, centered on a nonsensical drive to keep his kids in Pampers. If there was anything left, it went into a jar that would eventually spit out enough for a forty ounce or, with luck, the cheapest of the cheap, a sixer of Night Train Express that was slowly but surely rotting his insides and turning his liver to liquid.

It would be a close race. Would his 29 children turn 18 before he died of alcohol poisoning? At that point Jesse could not care less.

Mike Strikes finally bought the farm in 1991. Tom did the classic rock star thing and died of a heroin overdose. David got fat, found a woman he could stand longer than the five minutes it took to fuck her, quit the band and settled down with a real sub minimum wage job and lived happily ever after. Nobody wanted to end up like The Who, hitting the bricks with the two surviving members and so that was that.

Over the next decade and change, Jesse’s fortunes diminished. His alcohol consumption increased. When he got lucky, there was occasionally enough for a small rock of crack. Jesse easily evolved into a bottom dweller, managing to stay one step above homeless by his willingness to move deeper into a shell. There was scattered residual checks from ‘Throwaway Love’, the occasional sit-in gig or opening act at a place where nobody listened. But as his habits overwhelmed him, his aura of real live musician crumbled into the back recesses of Jesse’s mind.

But somehow, there always seemed to be enough to send a few dollars or, more often as the years went by, a few cents to the 29 children he had never seen. It was in those quiet, often despondent times that Jesse’s mind focused on one fact that seemed to linger.

Was there a 30th woman out there that fell through the cracks? Or did he quite simply lose track in the blur that was that month? That thought was quickly diminished by a drag off a long neck and a fitful roll off into troubled sleep.

Christmas Eve 2004. If Jesse’s math was correct, his 29 children would be turning legal in a matter of weeks. He reasoned that one more packet of envelopes would clear the books. Which was just as well because a recent checkup revealed battered, bruised and rapidly liquefying insides. The doctor was blunt. Six months tops and those would not pleasant times. Jesse laughed when the doctor said it might be time to get his affairs in order.

Jesse let out a loud beer belch. Okay, affairs in order. Now it was time to ring in the holidays as only he could. He reached into the coin jar and, in the spirit of the season, struck paydirt. A handful of quarters, three dimes, a nickel and a half dozen pennies. Enough for a Tall Boy.

He lurched out of his door, moved uneasily down a short flight of stairs and was soon on the street. Snow was falling slow and easy. The sky tilted slightly in his mind, showing shades of aqua and grey. Jesse wandered aimlessly down the deserted street, looking hypnotically into the darkness of closed storefronts, restaurants and dive bars. Everyone with an ounce of decency was home with their loved ones. Which left only Jesse…

And the poor sonofabitch manning the counter at We Never Close Spirits. Jesse grabbed the Tall Boy out of the freezer and shambled up to the counter. Where he looked into the zombie eyes of a kindred spirit. Not a word was spoken as Jesse put the can on the counter and followed it with the clatter of change. The clerk scrapped the coins into the register without bothering to count it before giving him a stink eye that was the equivalent of ‘will there be anything else?’ Jesse smiled the smile that only losers know, mouthed something about ‘keeping the change’ and wandered off into the night.

Where loneliness awaited.

What was that?

Jesse could have sworn that something, a blur of shadow and light, had darted across his eye line in front of him. He blinked twice and looked again. Nothing. He had not had the DT’s in quite a while because he could rarely afford enough to get blasted. But when he did he sort of remembered shapes in the night. He chuckled into the blackness, cracked the Tall Boy and took a long swig, daring the shakes and shits to come. And when they did, he would most certainly meet them at his favorite watering hole, at the end of a dock at the end of the bay. The place where Jesse would go when he mentally needed a table for one.

Jesse took a long pull, tossed the can behind him and looked into the dark water, bathed streakingly in moonlight. He stared back, a distorted image from the depths. Jesse thought he had looked better. Who was he kidding? His attention was suddenly drawn to an image over his reflection’s right shoulder. Hooded but the hood could not describe the glimpse of features that looked totally, or drunkenly, alien. Jesse turned around, expecting to see nothing.

What he saw was something.

A face, angular, showing deep cheekbones, a pronounced somewhat bird like nose. And those eyes. Slanted upward, equal parts Oriental and cat. As Jesse continued to stare, the head jerked to the right, knocking the hood back and revealing a bald head and large curved ears coming to a point a good six inches above the head. The light was bad but, to Jesse’s fevered mind, whatever it was sure looked green.

It had to be the booze, thought Jesse, as he crossed himself and promised to lay off the Night Train Express forever. But his curiosity had gotten the better of him and Jesse continued to stare. As a long, thin arm, coming to an end as a hand that was more talons than digits, reached out and yanked the hood and its connecting coat away. Revealing the final atrocity, a thin and only slightly muscular body with well formed breasts the only indication that whatever this was was naked, and yes, some kind of female.. The coat and hood hit the ground at the feet of long spindle legs and feet more reptile than anything approaching human.

Jesse and this bad dream stood mere inches apart. Staring blankly. After what seemed like a full minute, Jesse mentally blinked. Shaking uncontrollably, he turned on his heels and began to stagger away…

Just as one of the apparition’s arms fell firmly on his shoulder. Jesse stopped cold. This had to be the end. And it was a sure sign that he was going to hell. Well he would go out with all guns blazing and give what was most certainly the devil what for. He turned to face this demon head on with a drunk defiant look that said ‘bring it on!’.

There was no mouth but the words came.

“Jesse Brand,” said a seemingly disembodied, emotionless voice. “Remember 85”.

Jesse started. He could barely remember yesterday. But he could remember 85. And nothing in that long ago misadventure included monsters.

The thing stepped forward, its eyes inches from his. Eyes that were blank, yet knowing.

“Jesse Brand,” it said a bit more forcefully. “Remember 85.”

Jesse still didn’t get it. The creatures’ arm moved slowly down, to a place between its legs. Suddenly Jesse got it. He screamed out in madness.

He had fucked this thing!

The thing’s head bobbed slightly up and down in the night air. Jesse turned and staggered a good fifty feet in an ultimate panic, his recognition a mixture of disgust, disbelief and finally the recognition that he had been so fucked up during those thirty days that he could have conceivably done anything…

With anything.

He stopped dead in his tracks and slowly turned around. The thing was still there, unblinking, unemotional.

“We had mosix in 85.”

Jesse’s face was streaked with tears of angst and disgust. The knuckles in his hands pressing sheer numbness into his temples. Mosix? Fucking? Then came the inevitable ‘what’ and ‘how’. The thing sensed his confusion and the words came. The words that came from somewhere other than a mouth.

“Your oto,” she pointed to the area where his ‘Johnson’ dwelled. “My sovinish.”

To drive the point inexorably home, it stepped up close, wrapped its arm around his now quivering body and thrust her sovinish into his oto. It was a sign that they were not that different. Jesse pushed it away, more disgusted then frightened when he noticed the erection tenting in his pants. The thing was well aware as well but took sympathy on his confusion and horror.

“I am not from around here,” driving home the insane understatement of it all.

“No shit!,” Jesse pleaded, knowing full well that he had banged some barkers in his day but this went well beyond the idea of attractive and unattractive into the realm of just plain monstrous. The thing stepped back pointed up and looked skyward.

“I am from there.”

Jesse looked up. He got the picture. He had fucked an alien back in 1985. So blind drunk and stoned that he had done the nasty with a thing from another planet.

The thing told the tale in plain English. “I was young, rebellious and bored. Sex had become mechanical and boring with the otos of my world. I wanted excitement, adventure, danger and the unexpected. So I came here one night, watched you and your fellow beings making truly otherworldly sounds. After the sounds stopped you staggered out into a place. You seemed in a blissful state. I approached. We looked into each other’s eyes. Then…

“Wait, let me guess,” said Jesse by now way beyond insanity and well into hysteria. “Mosix.”

“Correct,” said the alien. “But there is one other thing.”

Jesse knew it. The kill shot. Instinctively he sat down at the feet of the thing and curled himself into the fetal position. He could not begin to imagine what would come next and so he prepared himself for the worst.

“You have a daughter.”

Jesse looked up, his face awash in disbelief and shock. So this was number 30. The bullet he thought he had dodged that was only now jumping up to bite him in the emotional ass. His mind jumped at the thoughts of what she looked like. The alien he had mosixed could sense what was going through his pea brain. Its eyes smiled in a way that only a thing without a mouth could.

“Your daughter is quite respectable looking by interspecies breeding standards. She has intellect and drive and is thriving on our world.”

Jesse was light years beyond speechless. His brain was rapidly going off the rails at the prospect of being a father to a… He mentally sputtered. He did not even know where to begin.

“Her name is Zintay,” the alien’s disembodied voice crackled in his brain. “And she has come of an age where she is asking questions. She knows she was the by-product of a moment of passion. But she wants to know her father. So I came here. To take you to her. If that is your wish.”

Jesse’s mind went blank. There was no past to dissect. No far flung future to contemplate. There was only now and the opportunity to play out his life as a father and, who knows, maybe a husband or whatever passes for monogamy on wherever the hell this planet is. He rose to his feet, stood within inches of this creature and wrapped his arms around it. She, it, whatever felt warm and comforting.

He asked No. 30 her name. He had never asked a one night stand that before.

“Aryon,” she stated, not getting the importance of a formality such as this.

This world had been a lot of laughs for Jesse. But now he had the opportunity to give his life substance and meaning. He was ready to meet his daughter somewhere in space.

“Okay,” he sputtered. “How do we do this? Does a UFO come down and swoop us off to the other side of the universe?”

“Spacecraft are how the lower forms travel,” she enlightened him with a raising of her eyebrows and a tilt of her head. Our race is much more advanced.”

She reached out a hand to his. Jesse hesitated. He was afraid to take this step. He was afraid he was going to die. A thousand fears whisked through his consciousness…And stopped on the fact that he was a father and was going to meet his daughter.

Suddenly he was not afraid. Jesse took Aryon’s hand. It was warm to the touch. A gentle breeze blew in off the bay, enveloping them. A wavering shimmer of light washed over them. Ayron turned to Jesse with a look that said ‘hold on tight’.

They were gone. The shimmer of light went up into the night. The gentle breeze reversed course and blew back out across the bay….

Blowing the can of Night Train Express down the pier and over the edge into the water. The only sign that Jesse had ever existed disappeared below the water.

This story was originally featured in Issue #5. Get the whole print issue here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/675468353/the-rock-n-roll-horror-zine-5

See more of Marc Shapiro's work here: https://www.amazon.com/Marc-Shapiro/e/B001IQWQL6