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  Jake went into the kitchen and brought back a filet knife. He looked down at Jodi and slowly cut her blouse from her waist to the bottom of her bra. Her bare belly was now exposed to him.

  He knelt at her side, took the knife and dragged the blade gently across the skin of her belly. A small trickle of blood oozed from the wound.

  Jodi continued her muffled pleas as tears streamed down her cheeks. He cut two more slits in the skin as to form a flap. He wanted to be careful as not to cut to deep so as not to damage the stomach and its contents within. Jodi remained conscious until Jake began cutting and peeling away the muscle tissue that covered her stomach. He lifted the last layer of flesh, exposing her stomach to him, and the loss of blood anesthetized Jodi as she bled out. Jake knew his time was growing short as she expired.

  His mouth watered at the anticipation of devouring the life-giving liquid beneath his hand as he unearthed it from its prison of flesh. He squealed in delight as the contents of her stomach moved around under the pressure of his touch. He took the knife and placed a small puncture on the surface of the stomach. Air escaped from the hole, and a spurt of fluid sprayed upward. He couldn’t wait any longer. He leaned over his victim and enlarged the incision with the knife. He was amazed at how easy the lining of the stomach cut. The contents began to flow faster than he expected. He reached down in an attempt to keep the fluids from escaping too quickly. He pressed his mouth down to the opening and slurped its contents. He felt invigorated then, carnivorous, tearing at the flesh. Without hesitation he buried his face into the liquid-filled pillow of the stomach beneath. He submerged his entire face into the warm fluid. He drank as if he never eaten before. Unexpectedly he was surprised to feel the surface of his skin begin to burn. He never thought about the effects of the stomach acids coming in contact with his skin. He quickly ignored the thought and was more concerned with the walls of the stomach collapsing and the remaining contents spilling, wasted, onto the floor. The liquid continued to burn his face and eyes as he ate. The stomach fluids and other chewy contents quickly satisfied his hunger. His skin continued to burn as the acids digested his face as he ate. He lifted his face from his feast and inhaled deeply. What a feeling! He thought. He felt great. He looked down at the human buffet before him. His vision began to blur and deteriorate as the burning fluid dripped down his head into his eyes. Ignoring this, he plunged his head down a second time feasting on his victim.

  As he finished the liquid contents he came across the remnants of his victim’s last meal at the bottom of her stomach. He chewed the soft gooey morsels as he sucked them into his mouth.

  When all was gone he heard the voice of someone calling Jodi’s name from outside. A moment later the girl’s father walked through the front door with the view of Jake kneeling at the side of the human buffet that once was his daughter.

  After the trial Jake was found to be clinically insane. His addiction to eating or drinking from his victims didn’t bode well with the jury. They sentenced him life in the New Jersey State Mental Institution. His blind, skeletal frame lay day-in and day-out strapped to his bunk, sustained by nutrition catheters taped to his arms.

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  Is there anyone more prone to substance abuse than rock ‘n rollers? Possibly, but perhaps it’s just not as widely publicized. Keith Richards once remarked that “musicians don’t necessarily get started on drugs because they’re all plentiful and fun—or that they seem entitled to them. A lot of times it’s because you’re in Des Moines one night and you have to be in Chicago the next, all pumped and ready to go.”

  Or, as Ken Goldman writes, there might be another reason.

  Smokin’

  By Ken Goldman

  Grinding his axe in the heaviest balls-out band on the charts had not significantly altered bassist Zacherly Cooper’s pursuit of the young BaddAss groupies, although the thrill of the hunt had long since disappeared. There was no question that he would be bumping bones with the young girls following every concert during the BaddAss KickkAss Tour 2K1; there remained only the uncertainty of how much aggravation this latest cooz pot would cause when time came to toss her butt out of his hotel room.

  “You fuck like you play—pissed,” the nubile blonde informed him as she squirmed back into a silk thong so thin the bassist could have flossed with it. During their time in bed her smiles of pleasure had faded in inverse proportion to her tolerance for pain. “I’m just glad you’re not into Pete Townshend or you might have broken me against the goddamned headboard.”

  The girl got that part right. Zacherly felt pissed enough to do much worse than providing some groupie a shitty fuck. The band had fallen on hard times since its lead guitarist chewed the muzzle of his .38. Almost as disastrous were the media’s talking heads who asserted that the surviving BaddAss members had lost it the night Raymond ‘Kinky’ Wisznewski offed himself. One MTV asswipe claimed Zacherly Cooper was fooling himself if he expected there might be a second act in his future.

  On the warm April evening that was Kinky’s last, some clever cop covering the crime scene remarked that the effect of Wisznewski’s shattered brains on the wall of his hotel suite looked like a dripping Rorschach painted in gray matter. Zack personally felt his buddy’s splatters resembled the finger paintings of a zoo ape, but he had been high enough to swear to reporters that he had witnessed the Holy Virgin’s image dripping down the blood soaked wall. Having lost his best friend as well as his meal ticket, the BaddAss bassist immediately scored the best weed in the western hemisphere, intending to keep himself eight miles high for many months to come. With enough reefer to choke a horse Zacherly Cooper’s agenda was to disappear behind a thick wall of smoke. In the world of heavy metal this passed for grief.

  Wisznewski would forever be a tough act to follow. How could any mortal hope to produce a metallic mindfuck like the opening bars of his classic “Saint Damnation”?

  “A fallen man, lost and alone, I discovered an angel dusting the streets of hell.

  Curse me Father, for I wish to sin . . .”

  Cooper knew better than to compete with lyrics like these, but his career as a solo act would need a jump start if he intended to pick up the dropped gauntlet of his band mate.

  You fuck like you play…

  The girl didn’t mean that as a compliment.

  And what if he played like he fucked? What if there were no second act?

  Insisting the band complete its contracted twenty-six city concert tour as a tribute to the fallen BaddAss, Zacherly soon realized the group’s soul had departed along with Kinky. Someone had to kill the band proper before their fans decided to. Onstage at the Cleveland Coliseum Zack informed their legions this tour would be the group’s last. The other three band members understood the logic of his decision, and given the market value on studio musicians no surviving BaddAss was going to die poor.

  Dying forgotten was a different matter.

  The prospect of not being remembered had terrified Wisznewski. The golden guitar-shaped urn Zack lugged to each concert attested to that fact. In his last note to him the late rocker insisted Zacherly carry his ashes onstage during each of the band’s concerts. That ritual had been among Kinky’s final requests, and the gimmick became his smartest career move. For months the ceremony proved a showstopper, and placing the garish urn alongside Maxie’s drum kit added significant theatricality to BaddAss’ final set when the band really got smokin’. The crowd roared, many of the body pierced enthusiasts lighting matches or propelling themselves into frenzied mosh pits.

  But the scenes didn’t take long to turn ugly. Several among the road crew suffered crushed bones keeping the brawls off-stage, and often the fracas carried into the streets and onto the eleven o’clock news. In city after city the focus of the KickkAss Tour 2K1 shifted to the more demonstrative ticket holders’ displays of machismo, and more than a few head bangers left the stadium area with fewer teeth than they had arrived with.

  Kinky would have loved it.


  The media ghouls reporting on the unholy mess made the inevitable comparisons that followed the departures of Kurt, Elvis, Jim, and Jimmie. Wisznewski had earned his official membership into that exclusive club of rock martyrdom from which no one’s card ever expired. If the Righteous Brothers were correct maybe Heaven did have itself one hell of a band, although to hear Geraldo’s version Kinky Wisznewski more likely played the lounge downstairs.

  * * *

  “So, you got a name?” Zack asked the girl reaching for her tube top on the floor.

  “Tuesday.”

  “No. Tell me now.”

  She offered an abbreviated smile while forcing a rogue tit to behave itself inside her spandex.

  “Tuesday’s my real name. You know, like Ruby Tuesday? My mother was into that sort of shit because I was conceived at Woodstock.”

  “You look pretty good for thirty-two.”

  “I don’t mean the actual concert, just where it took place. My folks met there and that’s where my old man liked to get laid, at least before he split. I was born on a Tuesday and the name just sort of happened. The 60’s are in my genes.”

  “Give me a few minutes and I can be back in your jeans too.”

  Zack’s attempt at inebriated cleverness failed miserably. The girl offered no cheerleader smile like those he had come to expect from the jailbait who steamed their panties for him, the worshipful star-fuckers who spent an hour with his dick in their mouth, then asked for his autograph. He whacked the young blonde hard enough on her ass to leave a pink impression of his palm, so hard she turned to stare at him making sure he was just being playful.

  “So, Tuesday, I fuck like I’m pissed, huh? You wouldn’t tell Mick Jagger he’s a bad lay, would you?” He flashed the famous sneer at her, a Billy Idol/Elvis hybrid that had graced last April’s cover of Rolling Stone’s memorial issue to Kinky. The girl returned his expression with a grin much too cocky for such a young kid, a smile Zack considered enhancing with a little more BaddAss meat despite his exhaustion.

  “You’re not Mick Jagger, Zack. I’ve fucked Mick. Trust me. You’re probably more along the lines of Peter Tork.”

  Whether the girl’s sexual encounters were true or not, he felt amused that Tuesday had added his name to her personal chart even if his performance with her had peaked significantly below the Billboard top ten. But somewhere inside him an uncertainty birthed itself, an uneasy stirring that suggested his name already was in serious danger of becoming past tense on the charts that mattered.

  “You don’t have to leave so soon, you know. We could talk a little, maybe get to know each other?”

  The girl stared at him as if he had made another bad joke. After fucking like wolverines, most musicians just wanted to sleep into next week. The perfect woman was the one who knew when to slip back into her jeans and disappear into the night.

  Half dressed, Tuesday shrugged and sat on the bed alongside him. “All right, maybe I can spare a few minutes. But only if you’ll answer some questions for me. Okay?”

  He pulled a fresh bottle of Southern Comfort from his travel bag.

  “Janis’ drink of choice. Enjoy,” he said, holding out the bottle for her.

  The girl took an impressive slug without grimacing and handed it back to him, smiling as if she had just earned herself an honorary penis. Zack put away several mouthfuls of the stuff, shaking his head to regain some semblance of equilibrium.

  “And your question is…?” he finally got around to asking.

  “Your drummer. He’s kind of cute. What room is he in?”

  “Fuck you. Ask another question.”

  “BaddAss can’t cut it without your pal, can they? You guys are bailing out before the money stops, isn’t that the plan?”

  The girl had landed her sucker punch, and Zacherly didn’t feel so much like talking after all. He had no clever rejoinder for her. But by not answering he had answered, and Tuesday knew it. Suddenly he needed the Southern Comfort for more than his thirst.

  “Why’d he do it?” she continued like some kid doing a poor imitation of Barbara Walters. “What made Kinky put that gun into his mouth when he had so much—?”

  “—to live for?” Zack interrupted. He could not help glancing at the golden urn on his nightstand. “Christ, Tuesday, I’m going to fuckin’ kill the next person who asks me that question. You don’t know jackshit about Kink. No one does. That guy’s brain shifted into hyperdrive every time he tried forcing one note of music from it, and he was convinced he could never top whatever he did last. He was one of those quiet sufferers, okay? High blood pressure, a heart murmur, and pimples. He had a wife somewhere, but God knows where she is. When Kink was still a kid his father used to go after him with a broken bottle of Jack Daniels. Last year his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimers, on top of which Kinky had been a little overdrawn at the bank. He had a Chinese menu of problems, and you’re asking me why he did it? Some people just implode when the air gets sucked out of them.”

  Cooper turned from the girl and rifled through the drawer of the nightstand, but whatever he searched for he didn’t find. He muttered, “Shit” and shifted his attention back to Tuesday.

  “Legends never die, you know? Only aging musicians do. Maybe Rock and Roll remembers its dead, but it’s not so considerate towards the living. Had he lived ‘Fat Elvis’ would’ve become a bad joke on Leno, but who remembers him that way now? Raymond knew all that, being the kind of guy who always left his fans wanting more. Did you know ‘BaddAss to the Bone’ went to number one the day after Kinky pulled the trigger?”

  “Yeah,” the girl said, only half smiling. “Number one with a bullet.”

  “Better to burn out than to fade away. Kinky said that long before any of the others did.”

  “The gospel according to People Magazine,” she added. “I do read, you know.”

  “I still have the last note he scrawled just before he died. Christ, it was pathetic the way he begged me to keep a part of him with me. He was that afraid of being forgotten. I quoted him when I penned ‘Tonight I Put a Bullet in My Soul.’ You want to see what he wrote?”

  “I already have the CD. Thanks anyway.” She leaned closer. “Being remembered in the Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame like some sort of dinosaur fossil? This was so important to him?”

  “Not only to him.” Zack hesitated a moment, considering his next words. He leaned forward, his voice almost a whisper. “Can you keep a secret?”

  For several minutes he rifled feverishly through his travel bag, finally locating a crumpled pack of rolling papers. The discovery calmed Zack enough to vent a musty chamber inside himself he had kept sealed for a long time.

  “We were just a couple of greasy dropouts in a garage band. Every day Kinky’d show me how to bring life to a new chord or how to work a crowd of teenage girls who creamed their jeans for us. Most times he’d just get me through another fucking night with some new lyric. More than anything else those memories have kept me going these last few months. When I write, it’s his words I’m putting on the page. You were right, Tuesday. Maybe I don’t want the money to stop, but that’s not the point. Raymond Wisznewski was my best friend. I couldn’t help him when he needed me most, but he’d always been there for me. He was so worried I would forget him, as if that could ever happen. He’s with me more than he could ever know.”

  Tuesday frowned. “That’s it? That’s your secret?”

  “No. This is . . .”

  Zack reached for the golden urn containing the ashes of his partner. He unscrewed its lid, pouring some of the contents into his palm, then sniffed the pile of grey ash.

  Methodically he poured Kinky’s remains into the rolling paper, then licked the edges and twisted the ends into an expertly rolled bomber of a joint.

  “From my private stash, courtesy of my late friend and partner.” Lighting the joint he inhaled its contents deep inside. “You listening, Wisznewski? You don’t have to worry, buddy. Rock and Roll never forgets.” He
took another deep draw fully expecting the girl to bolt from his room screaming. He wouldn’t have blamed her.

  She didn’t. Without a word she reached for a hit. Her gesture came more as a relief than a surprise, and her broad smile came as an outright shock.

  “To the baddest BaddAss of them all,” she said, sucking the smoke inside. Like Tuesday had mentioned, the ‘60’s were in her genes. And with a little luck Raymond Wisznewski would soon be in Zack’s.

  For over an hour they laughed and laughed. Zacherly could not recall a high that had ever felt so good.

  He invited Tuesday to spend the night.

  Later she climbed into his bed again.

  It was a whole lot better the second time.

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