[JSBX] Rock'n'Roll, Lycanthropy, and Other STDs
Title: Rock'n'Roll, Lycanthropy, and Other STDs
Context: For your delectation.
Thanks: To lindensphinx, for assuring me that while this is Wrong on many, many levels, it is Wrong in the very best sense.
Happy: Halloween, kids! 2257 words. This is 87% true.
As with many diseases, Jon Spencer picked up lycanthropy in college.
What else could have done it? One year, he’s student council class president from a small town in New Hampshire, off to Brown to study semiotics and film, shy and earnest and Kraftwerk-loving, the next, he’s dropped out and moved to the city, where he goes on to form a hate-fuck punk band called Pussy Galore. Say what you will about rich white kids acting out or the academic establishment or differently-ordered priorities, but something bit that boy, you can’t deny that.
*
The first time he woke up the morning after, it was by the side of the highway somewhere in Connecticut. Jon found himself sprawled out like road kill off the shoulder, bees buzzing through the wildflowers. It took a few minutes for his thoughts to clear enough to register where he was. His second realization, once he’d sat bolt upright and clutched his pounding head, was that he felt so full he thought he was going to be sick. After a good deal of scrubbing at his face - and honest to God, how long had it been since he shaved? - he made his first valiant effort at getting to his feet. From the road, it must have looked something like footage of a newborn deer trying to stand, too much knee and shank and too little balance and coordination.
He managed to hitch his way back to Providence by three o’clock. It was a Sunday, and he didn’t have class until tomorrow afternoon, so that worry, at least, could be delayed until he’d had a good freak-out on his own. Nobody seemed to know where he had gone: Saturday afternoon he’d complained of a headache and locked himself in his dorm room. Just before sunset, he was seen tearing through the hall, and after that, he’d vanished into the night. He hadn’t been to any parties on campus, but he still managed to smell like a walking biker bar. Some detached part of him chalked it up to collegiate excess, and was intrigued and disappointed that he couldn’t recollect any of what was probably one hell of a story.
The second time it happened, he distinctly remembered spouting the fangs and hair. Everyone else who was with him at the time remembered the karaoke, which was spoken of in hushed, awed whispers for the rest of the academic year.
*
He’d seen enough horror movies to figure it out on his own. Once the initial shock had passed, a thrill of excitement settled in its place. Jon Spencer, werewolf! Man, how cool was that? One full moon over the summer, he borrowed a video camera from someone in the film school and set it up on a tripod in his room. The footage was a little horrifying from the outside, but then Jon watched himself claw open his window and jump out from the second storey. “Hell yeah,” he muttered to himself, with a private sort of grin.
He was a little more disappointed when he realized he didn’t do anything terribly exciting as a werewolf, for the most part. A diner about a mile from his parents’ house adopted him. People fed him burgers and lots of fried chicken. After that, there were beers. All this came to light when he asked his little sister Muffin to trail him for a night. “You’re like the lamest werewolf ever, Jon,” she reported disparagingly. “I could have been out with my friends all night.”
Jon wilted. “You mean I didn’t try to savage virgins or howl at the moon?”
Muffin shrugged. “No, mostly you just sort of flailed and slobbered. And ate.”
He considered this. “The silverware didn’t burn my flesh?”
“I don’t think Mel’s Diner is exactly the place to experiment with real silver in mind.”
Jon scratched his cheek. “I gotta fix this. If I’m going to be a creature of the night, I’ve got a reputation to keep up.”
“You could mope about it by day,” Muffin suggested. “You could angst and moan about your lot in life and about how you’re cursed and damned, reduced to a merest animal. Chicks dig that tragic bullshit.”
“Fuck that,” young Jon declared, and he knew in heart there was something chicks dug even more.
*
Rock and roll is a sexually transmitted disease. Six months later, Jon Spencer dropped out of Brown University and moved to Washington D.C. He knew two and a half chords on his piece-of-shit guitar and thought he could round up enough to make some noise. He stayed lean and hungry, always attuned to the growl in his belly and the growl in his throat.
Nobody knew he was a werewolf. If Jon was going to make it on the scene, he wanted it to be because of talent and not because his human-to-beast ratio had to a tendency to fluctuate when he got excited. He took a run-down studio apartment in Georgetown, somewhat chagrinned by his inability to escape universities, and threw himself at the D.C. hardcore community. By night, this was great. Jon had a lot of good nights. By day, though, it meant working a shitty job with shitty hours and nobody interesting to talk to.
Did it matter what he was selling? Maybe it was sandwiches. Maybe it was lighting fixtures. It hardly matters. What matters is the day she walked in through the front door. He knew it the moment he saw her: his one-and-only had just entered his life.
It was the second day of the moon. Now that he’d had time to get used to it, Jon found that he was more on top of his game the week he changed. No hangovers, better reflexes, more stamina, less shyness. He was remembering more too: he was never quite lucid during the change, but that was kind of the point, wasn’t it? He didn’t have to be a scintillating conversationalist when there were smells to figure out and females to chase.
As has been pointed out, she crossed his path first, not the other way around. It was almost time for his lunch break, and the store was deserted. He was perched behind the counter, doodling a scene from a short film he had vague aspirations of patching together someday. There’d be these aliens, and the pilot would be down on Earth on shore leave, having a good time, and then he’d have to go back to the ship to fix some kind of problem…
The bell above the front door shook. He glanced up. She was striding down the middle aisle, on route to walk right past him.
Rraow, his person-brain went, and raced to come up with a good come-on.
His wolf-brain said several other, louder things that were much more to the point.
*
It was a bad idea to go wooing that night, but Jon couldn’t get her out of his head. Anyway, after a certain point his cognition failed and his instinct to track took over. The lurch from his dive apartment to her somewhat nicer house on the other side of the neighborhood hardly felt like any time at all. He circled the yard three or four times trying to find a way in, but the cellar door was bolted and all the windows latched from the inside. Her light was on, and the music blaring from her room was so loud he had to howl just to get her attention.
When she stuck her head out the window, hair cascading around her face, he thought he’d expire right there on her lawn.
“Is that… Jon?” she called down.
He answered with an ecstatic yowl.
“Um, how’d you find out where I lived?”
A pleased sort of growl.
“Oh. Well, that’s cool, but I’ve kind got something going on now.”
Jon whined.
“I can’t! I - look, I hardly even know you. It’s late, come on.”
Jon threw himself at a nearby tree, in hopes of clamoring up.
“Fuck, shut up! Jesus! Okay! Just hang on, and don’t wake my dad.”
He dropped down from the branch and scrambled up to the porch. She emerged a minute later, wrapped in the same denim jacket she’d worn to the shop. He tried to bury his nose in her neck. “Whoa, tiger!” she laughed, and pushed him down onto the front steps. He stayed there, jaw slack and eyes locked on her. “You weren’t this tongue-tied when you were talking about UFOs,” she remarked, every twist in her face amused.
“Rrraowngh rrmble hrarf.”
“Ha! Well, thanks for the visit.”
“Mmmmmf grrnf arrbwl raah.”
“I was kinda thinking about you after I left too.”
He lurched forward.
“Hey. You’re cute, but I don’t do that shit until we’ve known each other at least half an hour.”
“Ruuuyoo.”
“You’re pretty single-minded, aren’t you.”
“Hrrrrrfh.”
She arched one over-tweezed eyebrow. “Okay, it’s been nice, but maybe I’ll see you around some other time.”
“Naaaaaaa.”
She stood up. “Look, really, I have to get to bed.”
Jon made a protracted and eloquent attempt to proclaim his love for her, as well as his hopes that the two of them might find a nice dark corner somewhere and screw like weasels on amphetamines. She took one look at him and punched him out right over the front steps. That is how Jon Spencer’s first date with Cristina Martinez went. When he showed up the next day with a shiner and a bunch of flowers, she knew it was love at first sight too.
*
They got to both parts of his soliloquy, by the way.
*
Now we come to the parts that everyone knows. How D.C. became too small, and Jon and Cristina, after many years of courting, got hitched and moved up to New York City. How Jon hooked up with two of the Honeymoon Killers, shook, shuddered, and screamed, and brought forth the Blues Explosion. How Jon, Judah, and Russell infuriated, exhilarated, assaulted, and downright rocked the known world on vinyl, CD, stage, and TV. All that is public domain. But off the record, we hardly saw it all. Jon Spencer is notoriously private. We all have our reasons for such behavior, but his are just more so, aren’t they.
As it turns out, the more he thought back to that sunny morning on a Connecticut median, he began to realize that there had never been a first bite. The wolf was there with him all along: he’d been born with it, it and his destiny. The manifestation was psychosomatic. He changed on the full moons because he expected to, but he also changed whenever he got particularly nervous or excited. After a good deal of meditation, soul-searching, and discreet consultations with other werewolves in his field (the friendship of R. L. Burnside and of Tom Waits proved particularly invaluable), Jon was able to curb the effects of his lycanthropic outbreaks, though he never quite conquered his predilection for outlandish facial hair and unique personal grooming. Still, it wasn’t all inconvenience: Cristina certainly never complained.
Dear reader, I would love to assure you that Jon came to no harm, nor inflicted any because of his condition. But as we have noted, he is a secretive creature, and who knows what darkness lurks in his heart, beyond even what his closest friends are aware of. A werewolf is a dangerous creature, prone to fits of madness not even a rock’n’roll show can fully contain. As it is Halloween, I will refrain from trying to comfort you, and instead let your imagination lead you, Virgilian, through the dark and haunted hollows of that life.
Still, where there’s music, there’s hope. Consider this scene: sometime in the recent past, Jon is on the road. It may be Heavy Trash, it may be Spencer Dickinson, it may be the Blues Explosion. He does not complain of queasiness, but it shows in his face, which is pale enough on its own. A few hours before the show, he retreats to some place of sanctuary - a tour bus, say, or a dressing room. Come sound check, no one has seen him. He’s not to be found at the comic store, nor at the local diner. Everyone else is getting antsy, but Matt or Russ or Judah, they sigh to themselves, and they troop to wherever it is he last holed himself up. They go alone, and tell the rest of the crew not to follow. When they pound on that door, no answer comes from the other side, save for maybe a wordless growl.
“Jon,” Judah or Matt or Russell says, “c’mon, dude, it’s time to get ready.” They’ll give him a few moments before picking the lock, if he’s locked himself in, or turning the knob, if he’s forgotten to do so. Jon is probably climbing up the walls at this point, wild-eyed and fanged and beyond conversation. He elocutes as best he knows how, and may accidentally break a few things in the course of the monologue. Russell or Matt or Judah sighs, and holds out a leg of fried chicken. Jon is easily lured and guided after that.
This is because the rock’n’roll community, at its very best, is open-minded, and no matter what the disease, they’ll love you if you put on a good show. And, to be perfectly honest, in all those years of recording and performing, when it came to Jon Spencer, hardly anyone really noticed.
Context: For your delectation.
Thanks: To lindensphinx, for assuring me that while this is Wrong on many, many levels, it is Wrong in the very best sense.
Happy: Halloween, kids! 2257 words. This is 87% true.
As with many diseases, Jon Spencer picked up lycanthropy in college.
What else could have done it? One year, he’s student council class president from a small town in New Hampshire, off to Brown to study semiotics and film, shy and earnest and Kraftwerk-loving, the next, he’s dropped out and moved to the city, where he goes on to form a hate-fuck punk band called Pussy Galore. Say what you will about rich white kids acting out or the academic establishment or differently-ordered priorities, but something bit that boy, you can’t deny that.
*
The first time he woke up the morning after, it was by the side of the highway somewhere in Connecticut. Jon found himself sprawled out like road kill off the shoulder, bees buzzing through the wildflowers. It took a few minutes for his thoughts to clear enough to register where he was. His second realization, once he’d sat bolt upright and clutched his pounding head, was that he felt so full he thought he was going to be sick. After a good deal of scrubbing at his face - and honest to God, how long had it been since he shaved? - he made his first valiant effort at getting to his feet. From the road, it must have looked something like footage of a newborn deer trying to stand, too much knee and shank and too little balance and coordination.
He managed to hitch his way back to Providence by three o’clock. It was a Sunday, and he didn’t have class until tomorrow afternoon, so that worry, at least, could be delayed until he’d had a good freak-out on his own. Nobody seemed to know where he had gone: Saturday afternoon he’d complained of a headache and locked himself in his dorm room. Just before sunset, he was seen tearing through the hall, and after that, he’d vanished into the night. He hadn’t been to any parties on campus, but he still managed to smell like a walking biker bar. Some detached part of him chalked it up to collegiate excess, and was intrigued and disappointed that he couldn’t recollect any of what was probably one hell of a story.
The second time it happened, he distinctly remembered spouting the fangs and hair. Everyone else who was with him at the time remembered the karaoke, which was spoken of in hushed, awed whispers for the rest of the academic year.
*
He’d seen enough horror movies to figure it out on his own. Once the initial shock had passed, a thrill of excitement settled in its place. Jon Spencer, werewolf! Man, how cool was that? One full moon over the summer, he borrowed a video camera from someone in the film school and set it up on a tripod in his room. The footage was a little horrifying from the outside, but then Jon watched himself claw open his window and jump out from the second storey. “Hell yeah,” he muttered to himself, with a private sort of grin.
He was a little more disappointed when he realized he didn’t do anything terribly exciting as a werewolf, for the most part. A diner about a mile from his parents’ house adopted him. People fed him burgers and lots of fried chicken. After that, there were beers. All this came to light when he asked his little sister Muffin to trail him for a night. “You’re like the lamest werewolf ever, Jon,” she reported disparagingly. “I could have been out with my friends all night.”
Jon wilted. “You mean I didn’t try to savage virgins or howl at the moon?”
Muffin shrugged. “No, mostly you just sort of flailed and slobbered. And ate.”
He considered this. “The silverware didn’t burn my flesh?”
“I don’t think Mel’s Diner is exactly the place to experiment with real silver in mind.”
Jon scratched his cheek. “I gotta fix this. If I’m going to be a creature of the night, I’ve got a reputation to keep up.”
“You could mope about it by day,” Muffin suggested. “You could angst and moan about your lot in life and about how you’re cursed and damned, reduced to a merest animal. Chicks dig that tragic bullshit.”
“Fuck that,” young Jon declared, and he knew in heart there was something chicks dug even more.
*
Rock and roll is a sexually transmitted disease. Six months later, Jon Spencer dropped out of Brown University and moved to Washington D.C. He knew two and a half chords on his piece-of-shit guitar and thought he could round up enough to make some noise. He stayed lean and hungry, always attuned to the growl in his belly and the growl in his throat.
Nobody knew he was a werewolf. If Jon was going to make it on the scene, he wanted it to be because of talent and not because his human-to-beast ratio had to a tendency to fluctuate when he got excited. He took a run-down studio apartment in Georgetown, somewhat chagrinned by his inability to escape universities, and threw himself at the D.C. hardcore community. By night, this was great. Jon had a lot of good nights. By day, though, it meant working a shitty job with shitty hours and nobody interesting to talk to.
Did it matter what he was selling? Maybe it was sandwiches. Maybe it was lighting fixtures. It hardly matters. What matters is the day she walked in through the front door. He knew it the moment he saw her: his one-and-only had just entered his life.
It was the second day of the moon. Now that he’d had time to get used to it, Jon found that he was more on top of his game the week he changed. No hangovers, better reflexes, more stamina, less shyness. He was remembering more too: he was never quite lucid during the change, but that was kind of the point, wasn’t it? He didn’t have to be a scintillating conversationalist when there were smells to figure out and females to chase.
As has been pointed out, she crossed his path first, not the other way around. It was almost time for his lunch break, and the store was deserted. He was perched behind the counter, doodling a scene from a short film he had vague aspirations of patching together someday. There’d be these aliens, and the pilot would be down on Earth on shore leave, having a good time, and then he’d have to go back to the ship to fix some kind of problem…
The bell above the front door shook. He glanced up. She was striding down the middle aisle, on route to walk right past him.
Rraow, his person-brain went, and raced to come up with a good come-on.
His wolf-brain said several other, louder things that were much more to the point.
*
It was a bad idea to go wooing that night, but Jon couldn’t get her out of his head. Anyway, after a certain point his cognition failed and his instinct to track took over. The lurch from his dive apartment to her somewhat nicer house on the other side of the neighborhood hardly felt like any time at all. He circled the yard three or four times trying to find a way in, but the cellar door was bolted and all the windows latched from the inside. Her light was on, and the music blaring from her room was so loud he had to howl just to get her attention.
When she stuck her head out the window, hair cascading around her face, he thought he’d expire right there on her lawn.
“Is that… Jon?” she called down.
He answered with an ecstatic yowl.
“Um, how’d you find out where I lived?”
A pleased sort of growl.
“Oh. Well, that’s cool, but I’ve kind got something going on now.”
Jon whined.
“I can’t! I - look, I hardly even know you. It’s late, come on.”
Jon threw himself at a nearby tree, in hopes of clamoring up.
“Fuck, shut up! Jesus! Okay! Just hang on, and don’t wake my dad.”
He dropped down from the branch and scrambled up to the porch. She emerged a minute later, wrapped in the same denim jacket she’d worn to the shop. He tried to bury his nose in her neck. “Whoa, tiger!” she laughed, and pushed him down onto the front steps. He stayed there, jaw slack and eyes locked on her. “You weren’t this tongue-tied when you were talking about UFOs,” she remarked, every twist in her face amused.
“Rrraowngh rrmble hrarf.”
“Ha! Well, thanks for the visit.”
“Mmmmmf grrnf arrbwl raah.”
“I was kinda thinking about you after I left too.”
He lurched forward.
“Hey. You’re cute, but I don’t do that shit until we’ve known each other at least half an hour.”
“Ruuuyoo.”
“You’re pretty single-minded, aren’t you.”
“Hrrrrrfh.”
She arched one over-tweezed eyebrow. “Okay, it’s been nice, but maybe I’ll see you around some other time.”
“Naaaaaaa.”
She stood up. “Look, really, I have to get to bed.”
Jon made a protracted and eloquent attempt to proclaim his love for her, as well as his hopes that the two of them might find a nice dark corner somewhere and screw like weasels on amphetamines. She took one look at him and punched him out right over the front steps. That is how Jon Spencer’s first date with Cristina Martinez went. When he showed up the next day with a shiner and a bunch of flowers, she knew it was love at first sight too.
*
They got to both parts of his soliloquy, by the way.
*
Now we come to the parts that everyone knows. How D.C. became too small, and Jon and Cristina, after many years of courting, got hitched and moved up to New York City. How Jon hooked up with two of the Honeymoon Killers, shook, shuddered, and screamed, and brought forth the Blues Explosion. How Jon, Judah, and Russell infuriated, exhilarated, assaulted, and downright rocked the known world on vinyl, CD, stage, and TV. All that is public domain. But off the record, we hardly saw it all. Jon Spencer is notoriously private. We all have our reasons for such behavior, but his are just more so, aren’t they.
As it turns out, the more he thought back to that sunny morning on a Connecticut median, he began to realize that there had never been a first bite. The wolf was there with him all along: he’d been born with it, it and his destiny. The manifestation was psychosomatic. He changed on the full moons because he expected to, but he also changed whenever he got particularly nervous or excited. After a good deal of meditation, soul-searching, and discreet consultations with other werewolves in his field (the friendship of R. L. Burnside and of Tom Waits proved particularly invaluable), Jon was able to curb the effects of his lycanthropic outbreaks, though he never quite conquered his predilection for outlandish facial hair and unique personal grooming. Still, it wasn’t all inconvenience: Cristina certainly never complained.
Dear reader, I would love to assure you that Jon came to no harm, nor inflicted any because of his condition. But as we have noted, he is a secretive creature, and who knows what darkness lurks in his heart, beyond even what his closest friends are aware of. A werewolf is a dangerous creature, prone to fits of madness not even a rock’n’roll show can fully contain. As it is Halloween, I will refrain from trying to comfort you, and instead let your imagination lead you, Virgilian, through the dark and haunted hollows of that life.
Still, where there’s music, there’s hope. Consider this scene: sometime in the recent past, Jon is on the road. It may be Heavy Trash, it may be Spencer Dickinson, it may be the Blues Explosion. He does not complain of queasiness, but it shows in his face, which is pale enough on its own. A few hours before the show, he retreats to some place of sanctuary - a tour bus, say, or a dressing room. Come sound check, no one has seen him. He’s not to be found at the comic store, nor at the local diner. Everyone else is getting antsy, but Matt or Russ or Judah, they sigh to themselves, and they troop to wherever it is he last holed himself up. They go alone, and tell the rest of the crew not to follow. When they pound on that door, no answer comes from the other side, save for maybe a wordless growl.
“Jon,” Judah or Matt or Russell says, “c’mon, dude, it’s time to get ready.” They’ll give him a few moments before picking the lock, if he’s locked himself in, or turning the knob, if he’s forgotten to do so. Jon is probably climbing up the walls at this point, wild-eyed and fanged and beyond conversation. He elocutes as best he knows how, and may accidentally break a few things in the course of the monologue. Russell or Matt or Judah sighs, and holds out a leg of fried chicken. Jon is easily lured and guided after that.
This is because the rock’n’roll community, at its very best, is open-minded, and no matter what the disease, they’ll love you if you put on a good show. And, to be perfectly honest, in all those years of recording and performing, when it came to Jon Spencer, hardly anyone really noticed.
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