it's like, how much more black could this be?
TITLE: Rough Riders (the None More Black remix)
FANDOM: Spinal Tap
CATEGORY: David/Nigel, rated R for language, sex, drugs, rock, and roll
DISCLAIMER: Whether the band is real or fictional is a matter of some dispute. Either way, not mine.
NOTES: This is a Bordello remix of the Buffy/Giles story Rough Replacements by the sensational unwinding. I've borrowed heavily from her for the serious bits, and from the special edition DVD extras as well as spinaltapfan.com for the funny. My end-times theology is completely unsound, but then, so is Mr. St. Hubbins'.
THANKS: mazily, darthfox, and cesario, comedy coordinators and handholders extraordinaire.
mandysbitch, this is all your fault, babe.
SUMMARY: To hell with Marty DiBergi, he's dead now, and to hell with the bastard film. This is Spinal Tap.
David is doing quite well come the new millennium. He's all right for money and definitely not washed up, which he would have told those bastards at VH1 had they bothered to ask. He meditates in the morning and sometimes before bed if a certain kind of movie's on the dish; he manages a pair of local bands and a football team (ages eight to ten) into the bargain, and once a month he goes to his sweat-lodge, and comes out scalded and clean. Spiritually clean.
He met Jeanine at a funeral and knew it was for life, for this life and their last one and the next. Things like legal marriage and civil divorce can hardly wobble that scale. So it's nothing unusual when she rings him in London from their old house in Pomona. It's not even unusual when she instructs him not to speak during the conversation, because she often does that when Mercury's in retrograde.
"Do you know anything about Kabbalah? Don't answer that. Listen to me very closely, David. The world is going to end," she says, and that, he'll allow, is somewhat off the beaten. "Next week. Tuesday. You must prepare yourself for the tribulations."
"The tribulations?" he says. "Motown act, innit? I think they opened for us once."
"I told you not to talk!" She's using what Nigel once called her freeze-your-nadgers-off voice. "The world is ending. Really and truly. All the numbers add up."
There's an echo on the line. He listens to it fading. "Well, numbers can add up to anything, if you--"
"Pick up the chairs of your life and stack them on the tables of your soul," she says, and hangs up on him.
He hangs onto the phone, looks around the flat at his chairs, and calls someone who can book a flight to California.
*
The plane lands at LAX at just around midnight--over an hour late, thank you very much, Virgin. There's the usual mad dash for the customs counter. David lags behind, reading his horoscope in a magazine he bought on the plane.
Leo: You can expect a burst of fire energy, thanks to Mars moving into your sign. Make sure you're looking your best and be prepared for a sizzling time.
He smiles, licks his fingers and runs them through his hair. Oddly, the crowd's not stampeding anymore. Everyone's stopped in their tracks. Someone says, "Hey, look at--" and then it's quiet, as well.
David cranes his neck so he can see the telly. Actually, it's the reflection of the telly in the black window behind him. He can't read the words racing in reverse across the picture, but he can recognize mushroom clouds when he sees them.
Definitely Ice Capades time in his trousers.
A woman screams, or some bloke screams like a woman, and as if they were waiting for that signal, many of the people start moving again, running to telephones and ticket counters. Or fainting. David clutches the magazine and is stunned to realize he knows what to do.
He needs what any right-thinking rock star, talent manager, footie coach (ages eight to ten), or seeker of enlightenment needs in a time of catastrophe.
He needs a van.
*
Begging doesn't work, and "do you know who I am" hasn't done a thing for him since the Seventies and then only twice, but bribery puts David behind the wheel of a white Ford with rotting tires and wall-to-wall vomit stains. Traffic is so bollixed up that it's half an hour before he realizes he's meant to be on the other side of the road, and nearly three hours before he's anywhere near Pomona. Once he's off the freeway, though, he's all but alone on the road.
Maybe it's psychic intuition, maybe it's just paranoia, but he's sort of expecting the worst before he turns down his--Jeanine's street. He smells the smoke, tinged with lavender and patchouli, before he sees the fire. The house. The house is what's on fire.
But she must have known, she told him what would happen.
Somehow or other, he knows that there's nothing to do but drive on.
*
By the time David pulls up outside Nigel's place, he's got himself halfway convinced he's been dreaming ever since Jeanine's phone call. The other half of him is too busy noticing all the insects splattered on his windscreen, a hell of a lot of them, a plague of them. He walks to the house and presses the buzzer, feeling foolish when he sees his own fingers shake.
Nigel pulls the door open, staggering backward under his own momentum. "Look, if you've come to take the Camaro, I haven't got it any--David!" He goes all saucer-eyed and puts his hand out, fingers in a V, for the secret handshake. He smells like grass and beer. "Get in here, man, come in! Old home week, is it? Derek's upstairs. He's in town for one of those reality shows."
"Nige," David says, "have you seen--"
"'Fuck Me, I'm a Celebrity!' Or something like that, I dunno. I don't have cable."
He follows Nigel into the house, barking his shin on the corner of an amp cabinet; he blinks, and the room swims. Literally swims, because there are huge fish tanks all over the place. Nigel must have nearly as many fish as guitars these days, and he walks about the room feeding them, not food from a canister but bits of some stinking plant that he shreds with his fingers, humming a little as he goes. David gropes behind him for the wall and leans against it. "Someone's dropped an atom bomb on someplace," he says.
"Now, I admit I missed spring cleaning out this year, but--" Nigel glances up and the smile drops right off his face. "You're joking."
"No."
"Yes, you are, you're joking."
"No."
"Well, you must be."
David heaves himself off the wall, comes up to the tank and looks across it, looks right into Nigel's eyes. "I saw fucking Iran, or Israel, or some country that starts with an 'I,' blow up on the news, all right?"
"You're joking."
"Don't, don't, don't, don't start that again!"
Nigel opens his mouth and closes it and opens it again, like one of his fish. His face has gone very white and, somehow, very young, much younger than he should look without some sort of surgical or divine intervention. All at once, David can't stand it. He covers his eyes.
"So, who," Nigel begins, and pauses to let out a long sigh. "Is it a world war, or...what..."
The insides of David's eyelids are burning. He pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers. "Jeanine says it's going to be the end of the world."
"Wait, wait. Jeanine's involved in this?"
"Involved? Involved in dropping a fucking bomb? No! God. She's an Aquarius."
"You know she lies about her birthday 'cause that song--"
"Jeanine's dead," David says, letting his hand drop, keeping his eyes tightly shut in spite of the burn. He hears himself say the word and shudders. "And it's raining bugs."
For a minute or so it's just silence. David starts to hear the water sloshing around the tanks, and beyond that, the menacing whisper of the night outside. It's in his head, of course, he's already decided this is a dream. A drug dream. Like most of 1975. Someone will come and pinch him awake.
Nigel's hand pats his shoulder, very gently, just three times.
David opens his eyes and nothing changes.
"Right," Nigel says, softly. "What...what do we do? Dig ourselves a hole?"
"We might well need one before long." There's a rattle in David's voice that he hates to hear there, a fucking vibrato, no less. "I don't, I haven't got any idea where to start. I should go. I should go, I think, to Miami, and find my son."
"Oh, yeah, how is he these days?"
"Fine, fine, he's doing great," David says. "Apart from, you know, the bloody great explosion--"
"You couldn't hear that," another voice interrupts. "Not all the way down here!"
They look round at Derek as he comes downstairs, a stoned smoothness to his movements as he fastens his leather braces. "Toilet's a bit muggy," he goes on, starting to smile, catching himself as he studies them. "This doesn't look like the beginning of a reunion tour, lads."
This is where David begins to realize that he's the only one who knows what's happening, maybe the only one in the world; that he will spend whatever future he has explaining it, over and over, trying to find words and finding only that long-distance echo of Jeanine's voice. Pick up the chairs of your life--he can't say that, he can't. He takes a deep breath.
Nigel's eyes dart around the room, from David to Derek to the fish and back. "Well," he says, "it sounds like we're going to Florida."
*
The roads are clogged with empty cars, the heavens with strange oily clouds. "It looks like a bruise," David says, as they cross into Nevada. "Like someone's been beating the sky."
"Oh, that's sad," Nigel says. He's riding way in the back of the van, and whenever they swerve or run something over, he flings his arms wide to protect the guitars. "That's very sad and lovely, that is. Only--it looks more like the cold sore I had from that birdie in Chicago. Two, three tours back."
"It does not."
"Yeah, with Vaseline on."
"I have to go with Nigel on this," Derek says, peering through the windshield at the sky in question. "Because I also got a sore from that bird in Chicago, and it was exactly that color."
David clenches his jaw, laughs in spite of himself. He tilts the rear-view mirror and smirks at Nigel. "You're filthy, you are."
Nigel shrugs. "You know, apart from all that, she was a very nice girl."
For an hour or two, while they drive, Derek fiddles with the radio and fails to find anything tolerable. Either it's the news, which is mostly lists of places that have been blown off the map, or it's country and western, which is even worse. David tries to keep his eyes on the road, checking the mirrors now and then, not that he can see much beyond all the crap they've thrown in the back, and the top of Nigel's head.
When Patsy Cline starts speaking in tongues on KWAT, David reaches over and shuts the radio off. "Let's do something," he says.
"We could play bingo," Derek suggests.
"Not with three people," Nigel says. "You can't, with three people."
Derek turns round to look at him. "I think that's poker."
"No, maybe it's Twister."
"You can definitely play Twister with three people."
"Not in a van. Unless...well, you would need some butter, or..."
"Let's do Name That Tune." David does a drumroll with his palms against the steering wheel. "I've got one, hang on. Here."
He hums a few bars of "Heavy Duty," doing the melody and part of the guitar lick that comes in between the lyrics. He likes knowing they'll know. It's been a long time since they were a touring band, a long time away from groupies, from smelly vans and horrifying disasters. Mad as it is, this feels like a homecoming.
"That's 'Hell Hole,' that is," Derek says.
*
They roll into Vegas at high noon and all the neon is turned off. It's quite cold when they climb out of the van, and the wind so strong that it slices through their California clothes.
David curls his hands inside the ends of his sleeves. Ruffles, it turns out, are surprisingly practical. "I haven't got much money."
"I haven't got any money," Nigel says, or whimpers, rather, through chattering teeth.
"There's a shock. Wait here." Derek looks up at the huge lion in front of the MGM Grand and takes off toward it at a run. They stare after him. Other people are scattered up the length of the Strip, hunched against the wind, ducking in and out of sight around prettily frozen fountains and palm trees. Other people, but none too many. The cold, David thinks, is just the very first item on the epic list of things that are wrong here.
There are ice crystals on Nigel's eyelashes. "D'you know wh-which one Elvis played at?" he asks.
"I can't remember."
"Oh."
"Here, you're turning blue." David reaches out and rubs his closed hands rapidly against Nigel's bare arms, above the elbow and below the sleeves of his T-shirt. They stand like that, sort of huddled. It's a little better.
Derek comes racing back to them, pursued by a bony zombie woman with an evening gown and a jaw like a hatchet. She spits greenish foam at them as they jump back into the van, shrieking in a high, insane voice about how her heart will go on, and on, and on.
*
It snows for a while, thick clotted flakes that hit the windshield with a squelch, leaving reddish-brown stains where the wipers can't chase them away.
*
Night falls. They'd planned to take turns driving straight through to the East Coast--there's so little traffic out here in the middle of nowhere that they don't have to worry about bloody sides of the bloody road--but they've been yawning in uneven harmony for hours. And it's too dark to see, so dark that the van's one working headlight barely makes a dent. They hold a band meeting of sorts and agree unanimously that it's safest to sleep in the van, what with the weather and the political unrest and the possibility of more soprano zombies.
David's money is worthless, according to the ancient Indian lady at the filling station. He doesn't realize right away that she's speaking literally, but it turns out that he went wrong when he changed currencies back at Heathrow. Bugger the Canadians for calling their dollars 'dollars' just like the Americans. It's a terribly easy mistake to make, and there's no need for the old bitch to laugh so hard for so long. Fortunately, she's quite interested in the bag of yellowish-white powder Derek digs up from the front pocket of his trousers.
"Cucumber," Nigel murmurs, and David all but gags himself trying not to laugh.
So Derek and the old lady head into the back room of the station to do that. Nigel helps himself to a six-pack of beer, and they hurry across the empty parking lot and settle into the van. David wonders what sleeping in the passenger seat will do to his spine. Not that he has a problem with his back, thank you, he is not an old man, he's in the best shape of his life, at least since the years before cocaine was bad for you. Behind him, Nigel belches at about eighty decibels.
"God," David says.
"Oh, good," Nigel says. "You're still there."
"Where would I go?"
"I dunno, to take a piss or be devoured by wolves or something."
David twists round in the seat and squints. He can barely pick Nigel's silhouette out of the dark. "I don't need to do either of those things right this minute. Thank you."
"Listen, I'm sorry about, you know." Nigel pauses. "About your wi--"
"She's not my wife," David says, partly as a reflex and partly because Nigel never fucking learns.
"I know, I know, I only--shit. I'm sorry about your Yoko, all right?"
There's a metallic pop as Nigel opens another beer. The sound makes David's mouth water. He swallows. "Be fair, she was your Yoko, too."
"Once. For about ten minutes."
But they've had that conversation before. "No, what I mean is, I'm, I, I haven't always been exactly, ah, right about everything. Including Jeanine. And I'm sorry I..." David sighs. Maybe he should have gone with the old conversation; this one is full of interesting new ways to embarrass himself. "I suppose I'm sorry I fucked up that tour."
"Wow," Nigel says. "That's really, that's all right. I mean, we got some mileage out of the film and all, didn't we?"
"I suppose. No money--"
"Right, no money, no dignity, and no justice, but some mileage."
David slouches forward, his forehead resting against the shoulder of the passenger seat. "This is depressing."
"Yeah...come back and have a beer?"
David's climbed halfway around the seat before he remembers to say, "I don't drink."
"Oh. But that doesn't matter now, does it?"
"Of course it matters, don't be stupid," David says, but he crawls between the seats, over a couple of suitcases, bangs his knee into an amp, scrapes his hand across the strings of a guitar, and nearly knocks his eye out on Nigel's elbow. It's a perilous journey, and so when Nigel hands him the open can, David drains the entire thing in one long glorious gulp. The beer's so good he can taste every bubble. When he can talk again, he says, "Well, there goes the wagon."
Nigel slides his foot out from under David's knee and opens a fresh beer for him. "May I propose a toast?"
"What?" His head is already spinning. "All right, go on."
"To Tap," Nigel says, with a smile. "To Spinal sodding Tap and the last, best World Tour in history."
"It's more a Tour of the Americas, you know." David takes another drink and the spin reverses direction. "One of the Americas. I don't think The End of the World Tour of One America would be one of our catchier titles."
"Still, California to Florida, that's nothing to sneeze at."
"If we get that far."
"Which we will."
David shrugs his shoulders back against whatever it is he's leaning on. "To Spinal Tap," he says, and waves his half-empty beer can around until it clicks against Nigel's. "At long last, the greatest band on the planet."
"Reunited, and none too soon." Nigel tips his head way back and drinks. "Thanks for stopping by and--and all that."
"Anytime, mate. Whenever there's a nuclear arma-thing, you can, you can count on me for a ride."
"We will get there," Nigel says. "We could even hire a drummer in Miami. At this point, the risk seems sort of negligible."
"We're going to die," David says.
Nigel's smile fades away, like the Cheshire Cat's, and he leans in close as if he's trying to read something written on David's face. "Yeah, in the big, er, scheme of it all, but--"
"We're going to die." David lets out a long, noisy string of hiccups. His eyes are stinging like they did back at Nigel's, and he doesn't want to think of either mushrooms or clouds, but he can't help it.
"David?"
"Just hiccups," he tells Nigel. "Not crying."
Now, as an artist and a dreamer and a performer with a profound sense of the dramatic, David fully expects a giant radioactive lizard to arrive at this precise moment of silence and crush the van underfoot. He expects the ground to open up and swallow them whole in a blaze of fire and sulfur.
He doesn't expect Nigel to inch closer to him and shove a hand down the front of his trousers.
Not in the slightest.
"What," he gasps, "what are you, what the fuck..." The complete sentence he wants eludes him, what with the alcohol rushing to his head and the blood rushing away from it. "Nigel."
"David." Nigel's breath is damp against his cheek. "Just let's...it's, it's better than dying, yeah?"
He can't reply, he can only exhale as Nigel's fingers undo his zip and wrap around his knob, warm and damp, fingers first and then, oh, God, tongue.
David spent most of 1975 in a haze, and in drag, wearing a shitload of geisha makeup--that was the glam thing taking over where the rocker thing had grown stale. It all looked and sounded hideous, but it was a sure moneymaker at the time. So he practiced walking around in one of those kimonos, and Nigel drank a quart of peppermint schnapps a day, and once or twice they were both so wrecked they forgot David wasn't a genuine Japanese prostitute.
Well, maybe they didn't exactly forget. Things just got out of hand.
Well, maybe not out of hand.
He hasn't thought of that in about thirty years. He's not a poofter and neither is Nigel. The way Nigel's working the old lap taffy, though--that just doesn't feel like he's thirty years out of practice. David groans through his teeth, and his hand strays into Nigel's hair, soft and sweaty and he can't help holding on. Yeah, this is better than dying, better than better than dying, better than better than better than...
At the moment of the money shot, he whacks his head against the side of the van; there's this terrific metallic clang, and he's yelling and seeing stars.
It takes much longer for him to get his lungs back than it did for him to get off. He helps Nigel untangle his hair from the fucking trouser zip and slumps back against the nearest suitcase when he's free. "I am an old man," he says.
"Nah." Nigel sits back on his heels. "I'm going to be lying in beer," he says, sadly.
David watches Nigel swipe at his mouth with the hem of his T-shirt and thinks about asking him why he did it if it tastes so awful, thinks about asking him why, period. Instead he says, "Go up front, then, if you'd rather."
"Yeah? But--"
"Go on."
The driver's side door thuds open, with a blast of icy air and a faint smell of smoke. Derek clambers up behind the wheel and says, "You better be writing a song in here."
David is aware that his mouth is hanging open, that his heart is thumping around in a ridiculous fashion, that he's sticky and freezing and frozen, that Nigel's looking at him again, all eyes in the dark. He realizes all this before he realizes that Derek's laughing.
"'Cause if you're having a party without me, you'll live to regret it," Derek goes on, and for some reason the idea of living to regret makes them laugh, not just in passing but for several straight minutes.
"Mind the Stratocaster," Nigel says, slipping past David on his way to the front. "Don't drool on it."
David folds his arms. "I do not drool."
"Don't breathe on it, then."
Eventually they all drift off to sleep, including David, even though he's lying in beer.
*
Sunlight wakes them, sunlight and a simmering heat. The desert's gone back to being the desert, which David would find reassuring if he didn't suspect the sun came out just to fry his I'm-from-England-and-it's-September white skin right off his bones. They go into the little shop and search for the old lady, but she's nowhere to be found. "That's funny," Derek says, looking behind a rack of snack cakes. "I left her right over here."
"Yes, but maybe she woke up," David says.
Derek sweeps him with a pitying glance. "Unlikely," he says. "That shit was from Uruguay."
David winces at the thought. Just two beers, and yet this morning his stomach's flopping around like a fat man on a trampoline. He blames the drinking anyway. Nothing else happened. Right.
Given the old lady's absence, they go ahead and provision themselves: booze, crisps, white bread, Coca-Cola, more booze, and a couple of key lime yogurts still a few days from expiry. They see no point in leaving any of their so-called worthless money--wouldn't want to be a burden, after all. Nigel gets the van properly aligned with the petrol pump on his fourth try, which for him is a banner day, and they stand in the tiny pool of shade around the machine, watching the digital numbers blur. David tries to remember his special breathing. He can't do it in this blistering heat, though, so he hums a little bit instead. Music's the same kind of spiritual exercise as yoga, anyway; he's always known that, even if he never could articulate it in a way that didn't sound like twaddle. And "Big Bottom" is definitely a tune one sings from the kundalini.
Nigel picks up the beat, rapping his knuckles on the handle of the pump. David notices it from the corner of his eye and turns immediately back to watching the numbers.
"You, uh, might want to look at this," Derek says. "Unless it's a hallucination I'm having, in which case, well done Uruguay."
They shield their eyes against the glare and look. There's a snake--no, two snakes, sprawled out in the ditch on the other side of the highway. Enormous snakes, should be called serpents, really, twined in a massive knot like a living boulder, with their jaws locked on one another's twitching tails.
"Fuck," Nigel says.
"Not a hallucination, then?" Derek scratches at his mustache. "I'm not sure that makes me feel any better."
David blinks. "It's a sign."
"What--what sort of sign?" Nigel asks.
"Well, a bad sign, I would think, Nigel," David snaps, rather louder than he intends to. He flicks his hair back from his forehead. "I admit, I'm no expert in bio--in snake science, all right? But I suspect that two bloody great snakes eating each other in the middle of the afternoon, that doesn't bode terribly well!"
"Are they eating each other?" Nigel takes a couple of steps forward, to get a closer look, and then skitters back. "They don't have to be eating each other, do they?"
"What does it fucking look like?" David says.
"Those look like full-grown diamondbacks to me," Derek says, in his low and steady peacemaker's voice, his let's-work-on-the-verse-and-worry-about-where-the-solo-goes-later voice. "And, er...in my opinion, consenting adults can do whatever they want, so let's leave 'em to it, shall we?" He squares his shoulders and marches back toward the van.
David ignores Nigel's nervous cough and looks straight up into the sun. Funny, the way it turns his face red, as red as a lesser man's face might turn if he were blushing.
*
As far as they can tell from the radio, the whole world's been overtaken by snakes and hellhounds, Tim McGraw tunes, and various lower life forms which persist in falling from the sky. The broadcasts grow fewer and further between, and somewhere in Texas they lose the signal beneath an underpass and never get it back again.
The road shimmers in the heat, and it keeps making David think he sees a mirage, until they get close up and the mirages turn solid: a real house, a real billboard, a real pit of smoking lava. Once a Winnebago passes them going the other way, speeding up when Nigel leans on the horn in greeting. Once a pickup truck cruises up beside them, honking merrily, and Derek speeds up until it's just a speck in the mirror.
David is driving when the four horses come over the hill. He slams on the brakes, sending everything in the back of the van thumping around. Both of the boys start to yell at him and then stop to watch the horses with their riders. There's a man in red on a red horse, a man in black on a black horse, a man in white on a white horse, and another one. They cross the road very slowly, their hooves hitting the concrete like drums turned up way too loud in a mix, drowning out the vocal. And then all at once they're at the horizon, and gone.
"That last horse..." David trails off. He doesn't have words; something about the passage of the horses has shriveled up the part of his brain that puts words together, as well as several other significant bits of his anatomy.
"A horse of a different color," Derek says, coming forward to crouch behind David and Nigel with his elbows resting on each of their shoulders. "I've seen that bloke on an album cover somewhere before."
"The Tribulations, right?" David blurts. "Girl group? With the beehive hairdos?"
"That was no hairdo." Derek sags between the seats for a second and then hauls himself up. Either his knees or his trousers make an alarming creaky noise. "Don't make any plans to repopulate this old planet. I don't think there's gonna be a rock to repopulate."
"Well, I already told you--" David's hands tense on the wheel. "Wait. Exactly what is that supposed to mean?"
Derek shrugs. Nigel makes a noise that starts as a whimper and turns around to become a giggle. "Where..." he stammers. "Where would the babies come out?"
To stop the two of them laughing, David stamps on the gas as hard as he can. Fucking backing musicians. Sly would never take this kind of shit from the Family Stone.
*
"I have a confession to make," Derek says.
They've arrived, after a few wrong turns and one unplanned detour around a huge sucking sinkhole, at the Rio Grande. It's living up to its name, raging above its banks, waves crashing against the sides of the bridge. The noise of the river is deafening. It's reminded them all that they're in serious need of a pee.
So there they are, standing in a row, aiming into the scrub brush above the rising waterline, and David keeps his eyes straight ahead. The sun glares off the choppy surface of the waters ahead of him, and he's pretty sure he sees some sort of tentacles moving around down there. If they're going to try and cross this thing, better to do it on an empty bladder. Nervously, he asks, "Do you think this is really the time?"
"No time like the present," Derek says. "Literally. Now, listen, I'm not proud of this, mates, but I...I did a stretch in a Christian band in the Eighties."
For the last two days, natural laws have been suspended if not utterly expelled from the planet, giving free rein to all sorts of unnatural wildlife and weather and--well, behavior. And in the face of the overwhelming likelihood of imminent, violent death, everything else ought to be a minor oddity at best. Still, David's mind, as they used to say, is blown. His gob is decidedly smacked.
"When?" he hears Nigel ask. "Who?"
"Called 'emselves Lambsblood," Derek says. He does sound ashamed, but he also sounds a tiny bit defiant. "Loudest act on the life-metal circuit."
"Hey, I remember them! I even liked that song, the fast number. 'Whole Lotta Lord,' yeah?"
"You can't have been in a Christian band," David says, zipping up. "You sold your soul to the devil for fame and fortune, Derek. I was right in the room when you did it. There was, there was incense and everything."
"I didn't say I converted," Derek says. "It was just a job. Don't forget, Tap was on a hiatus at the time--"
"A low-atus, more like," Nigel interrupts.
"--All right, but my point is--"
"You sold your cat's soul into the bargain," David adds, remembering. "I'm sure that's frowned upon, to say the least."
"Yes, yes, but the point is--"
Nigel steps back from the bushes. "Don't forget his tattoo."
"The fucking point is," Derek shouts, so loud that it seems to hush the thundering of the river, so loud that even he hushes up when he hears it. His eyes dart back and forth between David and Nigel. "Why do I bother trying to get a word in edgewise?"
David pushes a hand through his hair, feeling every inch a scolded schoolboy. Every inch, that is, except for his spine, which feels more like a very old man who's just gone through a clothes-wringer. "What is it?" he asks, catching Derek's eye. "What's the point?"
"Well, those Christians know an awful lot about this Armageddon business," Derek says, in his normal voice. "Wrote the book on it, you might say. And they used to do these baptisms down in the mosh pit, because who knows when the Day of Judgment shall arrive, and all that. Like an insurance policy. And an insurance policy doesn't sound like a bad idea just now. It's simple, anyway. We just need some water--"
David takes a look over his shoulder at the river. "Not a fucking chance. There's something alive down there."
Nigel looks excited about this, his eyebrows lifting so they're hidden under his fringe. "D'you think it might be a--"
"No," David says, quickly and firmly, and for once he doesn't mind watching Nigel's face go all disappointed.
"Just a cupful or so, from the edge," Derek says. "And then we say, er...it's...how's it go?"
"Dunno." David shakes his head. "You're the great Christian expert."
"Dear God--that's it, I think. Dear God, I am a sinner, and need forgiveness," Derek says. He folds his arms in front of his bare chest, leaning slightly back, in what would be a very good stance onstage. "I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins, and he, er, he's my personal Lord and, and Savior. So, thank you, Lord, for saving me and forgiving me! Amen!"
Twang.
A beam of solid white light, much brighter than the sun, reaches for a split second from the sky to the top of Derek's head, and twangs like a gigantic guitar string tuned to an incomprehensibly high C. David is blinded by the flash for a few seconds, and when his vision clears up again, Derek has disappeared. Gone, completely gone.
David looks at Nigel. Nigel looks back, pale where the sun hasn't turned him pink. "No," says Nigel. "No. No way."
David catches his breath. "Did you see which way he went?"
"Bass players do not spontaneously combust." Nigel's voice is high and wavering. "They just don't. That's drummers, that's a thing that happens to drummers. Not Derek."
"I--I don't think he combusted. This was different." David tries to think why, and then he spots the difference: Derek's clothes are neatly folded on the ground where he was standing. Trousers, braces, socks and all. They're even sort of clean. David nudges Nigel's arm with his own and points. "Maybe he didn't need water after all."
"No," Nigel says again, and closes his mouth and his eyes.
*
They decide to drive back to the last motel they passed, and worry about crossing the blasted river when they've had a chance to think things over. They decide to keep Derek's clothes, in case he comes back and needs them, or something. They don't actually decide any of this; David does, on his own. Nigel doesn't argue. Nor, for that matter, does he venture an opinion.
There's no one at the motel to hand out keys and recite the rules about pets and cigarettes, so David uses an amp--one of Derek's, and he apologizes inside his head--to break a door open. The room is empty. The light is failing. They unload some of their gear in the parking lot and David hoists Nigel's Stratocaster onto his shoulder, even shoves it around to his back. Still no reaction. Nigel hasn't said anything since they turned away from the Rio Grande. "Are you all right?" David asks.
Nigel leans against the side of the van, hugging himself. "Me? I'm fine. I'm brilliant. I mean, I haven't been sucked up into the sky today, so I don't think I have much to complain about."
His voice still has that high-pitched, pained thing happening. David takes a step toward him. "I think it's a good thing," he says, slowly. "Honestly, I do. I've read a lot about the various kinds of out-of-body experience you can have, and outside of Velvet Underground songs, white light is always good. It even tidied up after him, so, well, it's got to be heaven, doesn't it?"
"Derek never wanted to go to heaven," Nigel says. "He even had a shirt that said so."
"Well, it was his own bloody fault!"
There are tears in Nigel's eyes, bright and trembly but not, so far, falling. David hopes--prays, even--that they stay put. The last time he saw Nigel cry, they were nine and eight respectively and there had been a very painful and regrettable incident involving a bicycle, a pothole, and a bloater-paste sandwich. This is bound to be even worse.
"The world really is over," Nigel says, and bites his lower lip.
"Yeah."
"The whole world." Nigel waves his hands in a vague circle around himself. "Including this bit here, and the bit you're standing on."
"That's the idea, I'm afraid." David tosses his head back, standing a little straighter, hoping that if he puts on a brave face it will somehow reflect onto Nigel, or be contagious, or anything. "Listen," he says. "You could do that, that prayer thing, too. It seems like it works very fast. And it mustn't have hurt. You know Derek, he'd have been screaming like a girl--"
"What about you?"
"What? What, what about me? I don't scream like a girl."
"No--you could say it, if you wanted."
"I'm going to try and find my son," David says. He hates how he sounds, wishes he'd maintained at least the pretense of believing. As Jeanine would say, pessimism is terrible for your karma. But it's far too late to worry about that. "But you don't have to come--"
"I don't want to go to fucking heaven either!" Nigel's voice cracks, he blinks his eyes and the tears cut loose. "And I don't want to go to hell, and I don't want--I--I want to go to Florida with you, all right? I have all along. I just miss Derek. And my fish."
"Your fish?" David echoes.
"Yeah, I miss my fish, okay? They haven't been fed, so the big ones will probably eat the little ones, after I had 'em all trained and getting along..."
David's about to say that they're just fucking fish, but he stops himself, because they're Nigel's and obviously he likes them. He must have been quite enamored of them if he managed to pay attention to them, to keep them alive.
"...And they're, they're probably scared if it's anything like it is out here," Nigel continues, sniffling and not even bothering to wipe his eyes. "And the water gets all mucky and they bump their heads on the glass if they can't see..."
David feels like he's swallowed a rock. Even imagining that Florida's still there and they can reach it, they're never going to make it back to the Coast. And Nigel could've stayed with his fish. But he's always come when David calls, going back all the way to, Oi, why don't we try and start a new band, together? Going back all the way, and never missing a beat. Well, missing plenty of beats, musically speaking, but in the grander sense, no beats at all. David certainly owes him something for that, something more than a filthy rusting van, an abandoned parking lot, a silent night. "Nigel," he says, and steps forward, closing the distance between them. "I--"
"Fish don't lay eggs in times of, of stress," Nigel says, almost shouting. "So there won't be any baby fish to keep them company, will there? Will there?"
In stories and television and such, a hysterical person always has to be slapped, but Nigel's face is all sunburned as it is, and David's hands are shaking again, if they've stopped at all in the last several days. And he's reaching for some kind of comforting spiritual statement, for a piece of philosophy to apply to Nigel's tears like his mum's hankie. Or else some nice, reassuring ichthyology.
David's got nothing.
So he kisses Nigel, open-mouthed, pushing him back against the van because otherwise they might both fall down. It's a slippery, somewhat snotty kiss, but in spite of that it doesn't feel awful. It feels good, like it makes more sense than anything else. Best of all, it stops Nigel babbling about fish spunk.
They stare at each other, and David can't decide whether Nigel looks less surprised than he himself feels, or more. After a minute, Nigel asks, "What--what are we supposed to do now?"
And David knows what to do. He's a lead singer and a coach and a Leo. Of course he knows.
He reaches up, gives the shoulder strap a tug, and swings the guitar down between them, pressing it into Nigel's hands. "What we do best," he says. "To hell with Marty DiBergi, he's dead now, and to hell with the bastard film. This is Spinal Tap."
*
The song, "Rock To Repopulate," takes twenty minutes to write, excluding the solo, which takes rather more time because it's fifty-three minutes long. David sits on the end of the bed and plays rhythm until he breaks a string, and after that he just listens to Nigel lose himself. Nigel, jumping off their melody and falling back to it like it's a trampoline, getting an inspiration midway through and using his toothbrush as a kind of capo. "For a fresher sound," he explains, when they've got it all down on tape.
David nods. "I think that was pretty good. It's a little bit 'Give Peace A Chance'..."
"And a little bit 'Bitch School.'"
"Right. Very, very much in the noble Tap tradition." He's sweating a little, and he dabs at his forehead with his cuff. "Give it a chance, it could be a gold record."
"I was thinking that. I was just thinking just that." Nigel looks down at his guitar and strikes a pose with it, thrusting his jaw and his hips forward, a caveman with a flying V. "Wonder if there are enough people left to make a record go gold."
"Probably not. How many does it take?"
"I don't remember."
"Probably not." David gets up and walks over to the open door so he can see the sky. The stars are coming out, up there, brighter than he remembers ever seeing them before, close and brilliant like planets. Mercury in retrograde. A sizzling time. It would be silly, and possibly dangerous, to wish on those stars. "We were always better live, anyway," he says. "We've always made extremely vital, improvisational music. As opposed to groups like the Beatles, say, who made...accomplished, professional music."
"The Beatles always did take the easy way out." Nigel lays his guitar down very carefully on the bed, as if to tuck it in. He is tucking it in. David shakes his head. Nigel finishes arranging the pillows under the guitar's neck and looks round at him. "Did you want to do another take?"
"Raw music, you know?" David says. "Without any gravy or anything. It's life affirming."
"Oh." He's biting his lip again, but this time there clearly isn't a breakdown behind it. There's laughter. "Did you wanna, ah, af-firm anything, then?"
And so he and Nigel play a bit of the old pickle-me-tickle-me, sprawled the wrong way across the bed between the guitars, with the cheap mattress and its broken springs making almost as much noise as the two of them. Afterwards, they discover that they never stopped the tape recorder, which is embarrassing. But it doesn't matter now. Perhaps it never did.
They fill up the tape with their own songs, playing snippets of more or less everything they've ever written. It's amazing how much they remember when they put their heads together, right down to the old skiffle tunes. Halfway through an acoustic rendition of "Sex Farm"--spectacular, if David does say so himself--Nigel's amp overloads and bursts into flames.
David jumps back. "Jesus Christ!"
"Don't start that!" Nigel yelps, as the flames climb the polyester curtain. "What if you accidentally said the magic words?"
"Sorry."
"Well, you ought to be. You're playing with fire." Nigel throws a rabbit punch at David's upper arm. He's holding together well, after all. He never changes in any visible way, with that face as young as ever it was. And less spotty, which seems entirely unfair.
Karma. David punches him back and says, "The fucking wall's on fire, I think that's our cue to clear out."
They stumble to the van, still half-naked, laughing some and shrieking some (but only to be heard over the flames, of course), rescuing the guitars and the tape and Derek's trousers. Everything else, they figure, they can leave behind.
Nigel slams the van doors. David drives, his foot thumping the gas pedal in four-four time. The moon's rising, their new single is already number one by default, and the wrong side of the road is open before them, all the way to the Atlantic. And even beyond it. All the way home.
*
FEEDBACK: is love and is loved.
FANDOM: Spinal Tap
CATEGORY: David/Nigel, rated R for language, sex, drugs, rock, and roll
DISCLAIMER: Whether the band is real or fictional is a matter of some dispute. Either way, not mine.
NOTES: This is a Bordello remix of the Buffy/Giles story Rough Replacements by the sensational unwinding. I've borrowed heavily from her for the serious bits, and from the special edition DVD extras as well as spinaltapfan.com for the funny. My end-times theology is completely unsound, but then, so is Mr. St. Hubbins'.
THANKS: mazily, darthfox, and cesario, comedy coordinators and handholders extraordinaire.
mandysbitch, this is all your fault, babe.
SUMMARY: To hell with Marty DiBergi, he's dead now, and to hell with the bastard film. This is Spinal Tap.
David is doing quite well come the new millennium. He's all right for money and definitely not washed up, which he would have told those bastards at VH1 had they bothered to ask. He meditates in the morning and sometimes before bed if a certain kind of movie's on the dish; he manages a pair of local bands and a football team (ages eight to ten) into the bargain, and once a month he goes to his sweat-lodge, and comes out scalded and clean. Spiritually clean.
He met Jeanine at a funeral and knew it was for life, for this life and their last one and the next. Things like legal marriage and civil divorce can hardly wobble that scale. So it's nothing unusual when she rings him in London from their old house in Pomona. It's not even unusual when she instructs him not to speak during the conversation, because she often does that when Mercury's in retrograde.
"Do you know anything about Kabbalah? Don't answer that. Listen to me very closely, David. The world is going to end," she says, and that, he'll allow, is somewhat off the beaten. "Next week. Tuesday. You must prepare yourself for the tribulations."
"The tribulations?" he says. "Motown act, innit? I think they opened for us once."
"I told you not to talk!" She's using what Nigel once called her freeze-your-nadgers-off voice. "The world is ending. Really and truly. All the numbers add up."
There's an echo on the line. He listens to it fading. "Well, numbers can add up to anything, if you--"
"Pick up the chairs of your life and stack them on the tables of your soul," she says, and hangs up on him.
He hangs onto the phone, looks around the flat at his chairs, and calls someone who can book a flight to California.
*
The plane lands at LAX at just around midnight--over an hour late, thank you very much, Virgin. There's the usual mad dash for the customs counter. David lags behind, reading his horoscope in a magazine he bought on the plane.
Leo: You can expect a burst of fire energy, thanks to Mars moving into your sign. Make sure you're looking your best and be prepared for a sizzling time.
He smiles, licks his fingers and runs them through his hair. Oddly, the crowd's not stampeding anymore. Everyone's stopped in their tracks. Someone says, "Hey, look at--" and then it's quiet, as well.
David cranes his neck so he can see the telly. Actually, it's the reflection of the telly in the black window behind him. He can't read the words racing in reverse across the picture, but he can recognize mushroom clouds when he sees them.
Definitely Ice Capades time in his trousers.
A woman screams, or some bloke screams like a woman, and as if they were waiting for that signal, many of the people start moving again, running to telephones and ticket counters. Or fainting. David clutches the magazine and is stunned to realize he knows what to do.
He needs what any right-thinking rock star, talent manager, footie coach (ages eight to ten), or seeker of enlightenment needs in a time of catastrophe.
He needs a van.
*
Begging doesn't work, and "do you know who I am" hasn't done a thing for him since the Seventies and then only twice, but bribery puts David behind the wheel of a white Ford with rotting tires and wall-to-wall vomit stains. Traffic is so bollixed up that it's half an hour before he realizes he's meant to be on the other side of the road, and nearly three hours before he's anywhere near Pomona. Once he's off the freeway, though, he's all but alone on the road.
Maybe it's psychic intuition, maybe it's just paranoia, but he's sort of expecting the worst before he turns down his--Jeanine's street. He smells the smoke, tinged with lavender and patchouli, before he sees the fire. The house. The house is what's on fire.
But she must have known, she told him what would happen.
Somehow or other, he knows that there's nothing to do but drive on.
*
By the time David pulls up outside Nigel's place, he's got himself halfway convinced he's been dreaming ever since Jeanine's phone call. The other half of him is too busy noticing all the insects splattered on his windscreen, a hell of a lot of them, a plague of them. He walks to the house and presses the buzzer, feeling foolish when he sees his own fingers shake.
Nigel pulls the door open, staggering backward under his own momentum. "Look, if you've come to take the Camaro, I haven't got it any--David!" He goes all saucer-eyed and puts his hand out, fingers in a V, for the secret handshake. He smells like grass and beer. "Get in here, man, come in! Old home week, is it? Derek's upstairs. He's in town for one of those reality shows."
"Nige," David says, "have you seen--"
"'Fuck Me, I'm a Celebrity!' Or something like that, I dunno. I don't have cable."
He follows Nigel into the house, barking his shin on the corner of an amp cabinet; he blinks, and the room swims. Literally swims, because there are huge fish tanks all over the place. Nigel must have nearly as many fish as guitars these days, and he walks about the room feeding them, not food from a canister but bits of some stinking plant that he shreds with his fingers, humming a little as he goes. David gropes behind him for the wall and leans against it. "Someone's dropped an atom bomb on someplace," he says.
"Now, I admit I missed spring cleaning out this year, but--" Nigel glances up and the smile drops right off his face. "You're joking."
"No."
"Yes, you are, you're joking."
"No."
"Well, you must be."
David heaves himself off the wall, comes up to the tank and looks across it, looks right into Nigel's eyes. "I saw fucking Iran, or Israel, or some country that starts with an 'I,' blow up on the news, all right?"
"You're joking."
"Don't, don't, don't, don't start that again!"
Nigel opens his mouth and closes it and opens it again, like one of his fish. His face has gone very white and, somehow, very young, much younger than he should look without some sort of surgical or divine intervention. All at once, David can't stand it. He covers his eyes.
"So, who," Nigel begins, and pauses to let out a long sigh. "Is it a world war, or...what..."
The insides of David's eyelids are burning. He pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers. "Jeanine says it's going to be the end of the world."
"Wait, wait. Jeanine's involved in this?"
"Involved? Involved in dropping a fucking bomb? No! God. She's an Aquarius."
"You know she lies about her birthday 'cause that song--"
"Jeanine's dead," David says, letting his hand drop, keeping his eyes tightly shut in spite of the burn. He hears himself say the word and shudders. "And it's raining bugs."
For a minute or so it's just silence. David starts to hear the water sloshing around the tanks, and beyond that, the menacing whisper of the night outside. It's in his head, of course, he's already decided this is a dream. A drug dream. Like most of 1975. Someone will come and pinch him awake.
Nigel's hand pats his shoulder, very gently, just three times.
David opens his eyes and nothing changes.
"Right," Nigel says, softly. "What...what do we do? Dig ourselves a hole?"
"We might well need one before long." There's a rattle in David's voice that he hates to hear there, a fucking vibrato, no less. "I don't, I haven't got any idea where to start. I should go. I should go, I think, to Miami, and find my son."
"Oh, yeah, how is he these days?"
"Fine, fine, he's doing great," David says. "Apart from, you know, the bloody great explosion--"
"You couldn't hear that," another voice interrupts. "Not all the way down here!"
They look round at Derek as he comes downstairs, a stoned smoothness to his movements as he fastens his leather braces. "Toilet's a bit muggy," he goes on, starting to smile, catching himself as he studies them. "This doesn't look like the beginning of a reunion tour, lads."
This is where David begins to realize that he's the only one who knows what's happening, maybe the only one in the world; that he will spend whatever future he has explaining it, over and over, trying to find words and finding only that long-distance echo of Jeanine's voice. Pick up the chairs of your life--he can't say that, he can't. He takes a deep breath.
Nigel's eyes dart around the room, from David to Derek to the fish and back. "Well," he says, "it sounds like we're going to Florida."
*
The roads are clogged with empty cars, the heavens with strange oily clouds. "It looks like a bruise," David says, as they cross into Nevada. "Like someone's been beating the sky."
"Oh, that's sad," Nigel says. He's riding way in the back of the van, and whenever they swerve or run something over, he flings his arms wide to protect the guitars. "That's very sad and lovely, that is. Only--it looks more like the cold sore I had from that birdie in Chicago. Two, three tours back."
"It does not."
"Yeah, with Vaseline on."
"I have to go with Nigel on this," Derek says, peering through the windshield at the sky in question. "Because I also got a sore from that bird in Chicago, and it was exactly that color."
David clenches his jaw, laughs in spite of himself. He tilts the rear-view mirror and smirks at Nigel. "You're filthy, you are."
Nigel shrugs. "You know, apart from all that, she was a very nice girl."
For an hour or two, while they drive, Derek fiddles with the radio and fails to find anything tolerable. Either it's the news, which is mostly lists of places that have been blown off the map, or it's country and western, which is even worse. David tries to keep his eyes on the road, checking the mirrors now and then, not that he can see much beyond all the crap they've thrown in the back, and the top of Nigel's head.
When Patsy Cline starts speaking in tongues on KWAT, David reaches over and shuts the radio off. "Let's do something," he says.
"We could play bingo," Derek suggests.
"Not with three people," Nigel says. "You can't, with three people."
Derek turns round to look at him. "I think that's poker."
"No, maybe it's Twister."
"You can definitely play Twister with three people."
"Not in a van. Unless...well, you would need some butter, or..."
"Let's do Name That Tune." David does a drumroll with his palms against the steering wheel. "I've got one, hang on. Here."
He hums a few bars of "Heavy Duty," doing the melody and part of the guitar lick that comes in between the lyrics. He likes knowing they'll know. It's been a long time since they were a touring band, a long time away from groupies, from smelly vans and horrifying disasters. Mad as it is, this feels like a homecoming.
"That's 'Hell Hole,' that is," Derek says.
*
They roll into Vegas at high noon and all the neon is turned off. It's quite cold when they climb out of the van, and the wind so strong that it slices through their California clothes.
David curls his hands inside the ends of his sleeves. Ruffles, it turns out, are surprisingly practical. "I haven't got much money."
"I haven't got any money," Nigel says, or whimpers, rather, through chattering teeth.
"There's a shock. Wait here." Derek looks up at the huge lion in front of the MGM Grand and takes off toward it at a run. They stare after him. Other people are scattered up the length of the Strip, hunched against the wind, ducking in and out of sight around prettily frozen fountains and palm trees. Other people, but none too many. The cold, David thinks, is just the very first item on the epic list of things that are wrong here.
There are ice crystals on Nigel's eyelashes. "D'you know wh-which one Elvis played at?" he asks.
"I can't remember."
"Oh."
"Here, you're turning blue." David reaches out and rubs his closed hands rapidly against Nigel's bare arms, above the elbow and below the sleeves of his T-shirt. They stand like that, sort of huddled. It's a little better.
Derek comes racing back to them, pursued by a bony zombie woman with an evening gown and a jaw like a hatchet. She spits greenish foam at them as they jump back into the van, shrieking in a high, insane voice about how her heart will go on, and on, and on.
*
It snows for a while, thick clotted flakes that hit the windshield with a squelch, leaving reddish-brown stains where the wipers can't chase them away.
*
Night falls. They'd planned to take turns driving straight through to the East Coast--there's so little traffic out here in the middle of nowhere that they don't have to worry about bloody sides of the bloody road--but they've been yawning in uneven harmony for hours. And it's too dark to see, so dark that the van's one working headlight barely makes a dent. They hold a band meeting of sorts and agree unanimously that it's safest to sleep in the van, what with the weather and the political unrest and the possibility of more soprano zombies.
David's money is worthless, according to the ancient Indian lady at the filling station. He doesn't realize right away that she's speaking literally, but it turns out that he went wrong when he changed currencies back at Heathrow. Bugger the Canadians for calling their dollars 'dollars' just like the Americans. It's a terribly easy mistake to make, and there's no need for the old bitch to laugh so hard for so long. Fortunately, she's quite interested in the bag of yellowish-white powder Derek digs up from the front pocket of his trousers.
"Cucumber," Nigel murmurs, and David all but gags himself trying not to laugh.
So Derek and the old lady head into the back room of the station to do that. Nigel helps himself to a six-pack of beer, and they hurry across the empty parking lot and settle into the van. David wonders what sleeping in the passenger seat will do to his spine. Not that he has a problem with his back, thank you, he is not an old man, he's in the best shape of his life, at least since the years before cocaine was bad for you. Behind him, Nigel belches at about eighty decibels.
"God," David says.
"Oh, good," Nigel says. "You're still there."
"Where would I go?"
"I dunno, to take a piss or be devoured by wolves or something."
David twists round in the seat and squints. He can barely pick Nigel's silhouette out of the dark. "I don't need to do either of those things right this minute. Thank you."
"Listen, I'm sorry about, you know." Nigel pauses. "About your wi--"
"She's not my wife," David says, partly as a reflex and partly because Nigel never fucking learns.
"I know, I know, I only--shit. I'm sorry about your Yoko, all right?"
There's a metallic pop as Nigel opens another beer. The sound makes David's mouth water. He swallows. "Be fair, she was your Yoko, too."
"Once. For about ten minutes."
But they've had that conversation before. "No, what I mean is, I'm, I, I haven't always been exactly, ah, right about everything. Including Jeanine. And I'm sorry I..." David sighs. Maybe he should have gone with the old conversation; this one is full of interesting new ways to embarrass himself. "I suppose I'm sorry I fucked up that tour."
"Wow," Nigel says. "That's really, that's all right. I mean, we got some mileage out of the film and all, didn't we?"
"I suppose. No money--"
"Right, no money, no dignity, and no justice, but some mileage."
David slouches forward, his forehead resting against the shoulder of the passenger seat. "This is depressing."
"Yeah...come back and have a beer?"
David's climbed halfway around the seat before he remembers to say, "I don't drink."
"Oh. But that doesn't matter now, does it?"
"Of course it matters, don't be stupid," David says, but he crawls between the seats, over a couple of suitcases, bangs his knee into an amp, scrapes his hand across the strings of a guitar, and nearly knocks his eye out on Nigel's elbow. It's a perilous journey, and so when Nigel hands him the open can, David drains the entire thing in one long glorious gulp. The beer's so good he can taste every bubble. When he can talk again, he says, "Well, there goes the wagon."
Nigel slides his foot out from under David's knee and opens a fresh beer for him. "May I propose a toast?"
"What?" His head is already spinning. "All right, go on."
"To Tap," Nigel says, with a smile. "To Spinal sodding Tap and the last, best World Tour in history."
"It's more a Tour of the Americas, you know." David takes another drink and the spin reverses direction. "One of the Americas. I don't think The End of the World Tour of One America would be one of our catchier titles."
"Still, California to Florida, that's nothing to sneeze at."
"If we get that far."
"Which we will."
David shrugs his shoulders back against whatever it is he's leaning on. "To Spinal Tap," he says, and waves his half-empty beer can around until it clicks against Nigel's. "At long last, the greatest band on the planet."
"Reunited, and none too soon." Nigel tips his head way back and drinks. "Thanks for stopping by and--and all that."
"Anytime, mate. Whenever there's a nuclear arma-thing, you can, you can count on me for a ride."
"We will get there," Nigel says. "We could even hire a drummer in Miami. At this point, the risk seems sort of negligible."
"We're going to die," David says.
Nigel's smile fades away, like the Cheshire Cat's, and he leans in close as if he's trying to read something written on David's face. "Yeah, in the big, er, scheme of it all, but--"
"We're going to die." David lets out a long, noisy string of hiccups. His eyes are stinging like they did back at Nigel's, and he doesn't want to think of either mushrooms or clouds, but he can't help it.
"David?"
"Just hiccups," he tells Nigel. "Not crying."
Now, as an artist and a dreamer and a performer with a profound sense of the dramatic, David fully expects a giant radioactive lizard to arrive at this precise moment of silence and crush the van underfoot. He expects the ground to open up and swallow them whole in a blaze of fire and sulfur.
He doesn't expect Nigel to inch closer to him and shove a hand down the front of his trousers.
Not in the slightest.
"What," he gasps, "what are you, what the fuck..." The complete sentence he wants eludes him, what with the alcohol rushing to his head and the blood rushing away from it. "Nigel."
"David." Nigel's breath is damp against his cheek. "Just let's...it's, it's better than dying, yeah?"
He can't reply, he can only exhale as Nigel's fingers undo his zip and wrap around his knob, warm and damp, fingers first and then, oh, God, tongue.
David spent most of 1975 in a haze, and in drag, wearing a shitload of geisha makeup--that was the glam thing taking over where the rocker thing had grown stale. It all looked and sounded hideous, but it was a sure moneymaker at the time. So he practiced walking around in one of those kimonos, and Nigel drank a quart of peppermint schnapps a day, and once or twice they were both so wrecked they forgot David wasn't a genuine Japanese prostitute.
Well, maybe they didn't exactly forget. Things just got out of hand.
Well, maybe not out of hand.
He hasn't thought of that in about thirty years. He's not a poofter and neither is Nigel. The way Nigel's working the old lap taffy, though--that just doesn't feel like he's thirty years out of practice. David groans through his teeth, and his hand strays into Nigel's hair, soft and sweaty and he can't help holding on. Yeah, this is better than dying, better than better than dying, better than better than better than...
At the moment of the money shot, he whacks his head against the side of the van; there's this terrific metallic clang, and he's yelling and seeing stars.
It takes much longer for him to get his lungs back than it did for him to get off. He helps Nigel untangle his hair from the fucking trouser zip and slumps back against the nearest suitcase when he's free. "I am an old man," he says.
"Nah." Nigel sits back on his heels. "I'm going to be lying in beer," he says, sadly.
David watches Nigel swipe at his mouth with the hem of his T-shirt and thinks about asking him why he did it if it tastes so awful, thinks about asking him why, period. Instead he says, "Go up front, then, if you'd rather."
"Yeah? But--"
"Go on."
The driver's side door thuds open, with a blast of icy air and a faint smell of smoke. Derek clambers up behind the wheel and says, "You better be writing a song in here."
David is aware that his mouth is hanging open, that his heart is thumping around in a ridiculous fashion, that he's sticky and freezing and frozen, that Nigel's looking at him again, all eyes in the dark. He realizes all this before he realizes that Derek's laughing.
"'Cause if you're having a party without me, you'll live to regret it," Derek goes on, and for some reason the idea of living to regret makes them laugh, not just in passing but for several straight minutes.
"Mind the Stratocaster," Nigel says, slipping past David on his way to the front. "Don't drool on it."
David folds his arms. "I do not drool."
"Don't breathe on it, then."
Eventually they all drift off to sleep, including David, even though he's lying in beer.
*
Sunlight wakes them, sunlight and a simmering heat. The desert's gone back to being the desert, which David would find reassuring if he didn't suspect the sun came out just to fry his I'm-from-England-and-it's-September white skin right off his bones. They go into the little shop and search for the old lady, but she's nowhere to be found. "That's funny," Derek says, looking behind a rack of snack cakes. "I left her right over here."
"Yes, but maybe she woke up," David says.
Derek sweeps him with a pitying glance. "Unlikely," he says. "That shit was from Uruguay."
David winces at the thought. Just two beers, and yet this morning his stomach's flopping around like a fat man on a trampoline. He blames the drinking anyway. Nothing else happened. Right.
Given the old lady's absence, they go ahead and provision themselves: booze, crisps, white bread, Coca-Cola, more booze, and a couple of key lime yogurts still a few days from expiry. They see no point in leaving any of their so-called worthless money--wouldn't want to be a burden, after all. Nigel gets the van properly aligned with the petrol pump on his fourth try, which for him is a banner day, and they stand in the tiny pool of shade around the machine, watching the digital numbers blur. David tries to remember his special breathing. He can't do it in this blistering heat, though, so he hums a little bit instead. Music's the same kind of spiritual exercise as yoga, anyway; he's always known that, even if he never could articulate it in a way that didn't sound like twaddle. And "Big Bottom" is definitely a tune one sings from the kundalini.
Nigel picks up the beat, rapping his knuckles on the handle of the pump. David notices it from the corner of his eye and turns immediately back to watching the numbers.
"You, uh, might want to look at this," Derek says. "Unless it's a hallucination I'm having, in which case, well done Uruguay."
They shield their eyes against the glare and look. There's a snake--no, two snakes, sprawled out in the ditch on the other side of the highway. Enormous snakes, should be called serpents, really, twined in a massive knot like a living boulder, with their jaws locked on one another's twitching tails.
"Fuck," Nigel says.
"Not a hallucination, then?" Derek scratches at his mustache. "I'm not sure that makes me feel any better."
David blinks. "It's a sign."
"What--what sort of sign?" Nigel asks.
"Well, a bad sign, I would think, Nigel," David snaps, rather louder than he intends to. He flicks his hair back from his forehead. "I admit, I'm no expert in bio--in snake science, all right? But I suspect that two bloody great snakes eating each other in the middle of the afternoon, that doesn't bode terribly well!"
"Are they eating each other?" Nigel takes a couple of steps forward, to get a closer look, and then skitters back. "They don't have to be eating each other, do they?"
"What does it fucking look like?" David says.
"Those look like full-grown diamondbacks to me," Derek says, in his low and steady peacemaker's voice, his let's-work-on-the-verse-and-worry-about-where-the-solo-goes-later voice. "And, er...in my opinion, consenting adults can do whatever they want, so let's leave 'em to it, shall we?" He squares his shoulders and marches back toward the van.
David ignores Nigel's nervous cough and looks straight up into the sun. Funny, the way it turns his face red, as red as a lesser man's face might turn if he were blushing.
*
As far as they can tell from the radio, the whole world's been overtaken by snakes and hellhounds, Tim McGraw tunes, and various lower life forms which persist in falling from the sky. The broadcasts grow fewer and further between, and somewhere in Texas they lose the signal beneath an underpass and never get it back again.
The road shimmers in the heat, and it keeps making David think he sees a mirage, until they get close up and the mirages turn solid: a real house, a real billboard, a real pit of smoking lava. Once a Winnebago passes them going the other way, speeding up when Nigel leans on the horn in greeting. Once a pickup truck cruises up beside them, honking merrily, and Derek speeds up until it's just a speck in the mirror.
David is driving when the four horses come over the hill. He slams on the brakes, sending everything in the back of the van thumping around. Both of the boys start to yell at him and then stop to watch the horses with their riders. There's a man in red on a red horse, a man in black on a black horse, a man in white on a white horse, and another one. They cross the road very slowly, their hooves hitting the concrete like drums turned up way too loud in a mix, drowning out the vocal. And then all at once they're at the horizon, and gone.
"That last horse..." David trails off. He doesn't have words; something about the passage of the horses has shriveled up the part of his brain that puts words together, as well as several other significant bits of his anatomy.
"A horse of a different color," Derek says, coming forward to crouch behind David and Nigel with his elbows resting on each of their shoulders. "I've seen that bloke on an album cover somewhere before."
"The Tribulations, right?" David blurts. "Girl group? With the beehive hairdos?"
"That was no hairdo." Derek sags between the seats for a second and then hauls himself up. Either his knees or his trousers make an alarming creaky noise. "Don't make any plans to repopulate this old planet. I don't think there's gonna be a rock to repopulate."
"Well, I already told you--" David's hands tense on the wheel. "Wait. Exactly what is that supposed to mean?"
Derek shrugs. Nigel makes a noise that starts as a whimper and turns around to become a giggle. "Where..." he stammers. "Where would the babies come out?"
To stop the two of them laughing, David stamps on the gas as hard as he can. Fucking backing musicians. Sly would never take this kind of shit from the Family Stone.
*
"I have a confession to make," Derek says.
They've arrived, after a few wrong turns and one unplanned detour around a huge sucking sinkhole, at the Rio Grande. It's living up to its name, raging above its banks, waves crashing against the sides of the bridge. The noise of the river is deafening. It's reminded them all that they're in serious need of a pee.
So there they are, standing in a row, aiming into the scrub brush above the rising waterline, and David keeps his eyes straight ahead. The sun glares off the choppy surface of the waters ahead of him, and he's pretty sure he sees some sort of tentacles moving around down there. If they're going to try and cross this thing, better to do it on an empty bladder. Nervously, he asks, "Do you think this is really the time?"
"No time like the present," Derek says. "Literally. Now, listen, I'm not proud of this, mates, but I...I did a stretch in a Christian band in the Eighties."
For the last two days, natural laws have been suspended if not utterly expelled from the planet, giving free rein to all sorts of unnatural wildlife and weather and--well, behavior. And in the face of the overwhelming likelihood of imminent, violent death, everything else ought to be a minor oddity at best. Still, David's mind, as they used to say, is blown. His gob is decidedly smacked.
"When?" he hears Nigel ask. "Who?"
"Called 'emselves Lambsblood," Derek says. He does sound ashamed, but he also sounds a tiny bit defiant. "Loudest act on the life-metal circuit."
"Hey, I remember them! I even liked that song, the fast number. 'Whole Lotta Lord,' yeah?"
"You can't have been in a Christian band," David says, zipping up. "You sold your soul to the devil for fame and fortune, Derek. I was right in the room when you did it. There was, there was incense and everything."
"I didn't say I converted," Derek says. "It was just a job. Don't forget, Tap was on a hiatus at the time--"
"A low-atus, more like," Nigel interrupts.
"--All right, but my point is--"
"You sold your cat's soul into the bargain," David adds, remembering. "I'm sure that's frowned upon, to say the least."
"Yes, yes, but the point is--"
Nigel steps back from the bushes. "Don't forget his tattoo."
"The fucking point is," Derek shouts, so loud that it seems to hush the thundering of the river, so loud that even he hushes up when he hears it. His eyes dart back and forth between David and Nigel. "Why do I bother trying to get a word in edgewise?"
David pushes a hand through his hair, feeling every inch a scolded schoolboy. Every inch, that is, except for his spine, which feels more like a very old man who's just gone through a clothes-wringer. "What is it?" he asks, catching Derek's eye. "What's the point?"
"Well, those Christians know an awful lot about this Armageddon business," Derek says, in his normal voice. "Wrote the book on it, you might say. And they used to do these baptisms down in the mosh pit, because who knows when the Day of Judgment shall arrive, and all that. Like an insurance policy. And an insurance policy doesn't sound like a bad idea just now. It's simple, anyway. We just need some water--"
David takes a look over his shoulder at the river. "Not a fucking chance. There's something alive down there."
Nigel looks excited about this, his eyebrows lifting so they're hidden under his fringe. "D'you think it might be a--"
"No," David says, quickly and firmly, and for once he doesn't mind watching Nigel's face go all disappointed.
"Just a cupful or so, from the edge," Derek says. "And then we say, er...it's...how's it go?"
"Dunno." David shakes his head. "You're the great Christian expert."
"Dear God--that's it, I think. Dear God, I am a sinner, and need forgiveness," Derek says. He folds his arms in front of his bare chest, leaning slightly back, in what would be a very good stance onstage. "I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins, and he, er, he's my personal Lord and, and Savior. So, thank you, Lord, for saving me and forgiving me! Amen!"
Twang.
A beam of solid white light, much brighter than the sun, reaches for a split second from the sky to the top of Derek's head, and twangs like a gigantic guitar string tuned to an incomprehensibly high C. David is blinded by the flash for a few seconds, and when his vision clears up again, Derek has disappeared. Gone, completely gone.
David looks at Nigel. Nigel looks back, pale where the sun hasn't turned him pink. "No," says Nigel. "No. No way."
David catches his breath. "Did you see which way he went?"
"Bass players do not spontaneously combust." Nigel's voice is high and wavering. "They just don't. That's drummers, that's a thing that happens to drummers. Not Derek."
"I--I don't think he combusted. This was different." David tries to think why, and then he spots the difference: Derek's clothes are neatly folded on the ground where he was standing. Trousers, braces, socks and all. They're even sort of clean. David nudges Nigel's arm with his own and points. "Maybe he didn't need water after all."
"No," Nigel says again, and closes his mouth and his eyes.
*
They decide to drive back to the last motel they passed, and worry about crossing the blasted river when they've had a chance to think things over. They decide to keep Derek's clothes, in case he comes back and needs them, or something. They don't actually decide any of this; David does, on his own. Nigel doesn't argue. Nor, for that matter, does he venture an opinion.
There's no one at the motel to hand out keys and recite the rules about pets and cigarettes, so David uses an amp--one of Derek's, and he apologizes inside his head--to break a door open. The room is empty. The light is failing. They unload some of their gear in the parking lot and David hoists Nigel's Stratocaster onto his shoulder, even shoves it around to his back. Still no reaction. Nigel hasn't said anything since they turned away from the Rio Grande. "Are you all right?" David asks.
Nigel leans against the side of the van, hugging himself. "Me? I'm fine. I'm brilliant. I mean, I haven't been sucked up into the sky today, so I don't think I have much to complain about."
His voice still has that high-pitched, pained thing happening. David takes a step toward him. "I think it's a good thing," he says, slowly. "Honestly, I do. I've read a lot about the various kinds of out-of-body experience you can have, and outside of Velvet Underground songs, white light is always good. It even tidied up after him, so, well, it's got to be heaven, doesn't it?"
"Derek never wanted to go to heaven," Nigel says. "He even had a shirt that said so."
"Well, it was his own bloody fault!"
There are tears in Nigel's eyes, bright and trembly but not, so far, falling. David hopes--prays, even--that they stay put. The last time he saw Nigel cry, they were nine and eight respectively and there had been a very painful and regrettable incident involving a bicycle, a pothole, and a bloater-paste sandwich. This is bound to be even worse.
"The world really is over," Nigel says, and bites his lower lip.
"Yeah."
"The whole world." Nigel waves his hands in a vague circle around himself. "Including this bit here, and the bit you're standing on."
"That's the idea, I'm afraid." David tosses his head back, standing a little straighter, hoping that if he puts on a brave face it will somehow reflect onto Nigel, or be contagious, or anything. "Listen," he says. "You could do that, that prayer thing, too. It seems like it works very fast. And it mustn't have hurt. You know Derek, he'd have been screaming like a girl--"
"What about you?"
"What? What, what about me? I don't scream like a girl."
"No--you could say it, if you wanted."
"I'm going to try and find my son," David says. He hates how he sounds, wishes he'd maintained at least the pretense of believing. As Jeanine would say, pessimism is terrible for your karma. But it's far too late to worry about that. "But you don't have to come--"
"I don't want to go to fucking heaven either!" Nigel's voice cracks, he blinks his eyes and the tears cut loose. "And I don't want to go to hell, and I don't want--I--I want to go to Florida with you, all right? I have all along. I just miss Derek. And my fish."
"Your fish?" David echoes.
"Yeah, I miss my fish, okay? They haven't been fed, so the big ones will probably eat the little ones, after I had 'em all trained and getting along..."
David's about to say that they're just fucking fish, but he stops himself, because they're Nigel's and obviously he likes them. He must have been quite enamored of them if he managed to pay attention to them, to keep them alive.
"...And they're, they're probably scared if it's anything like it is out here," Nigel continues, sniffling and not even bothering to wipe his eyes. "And the water gets all mucky and they bump their heads on the glass if they can't see..."
David feels like he's swallowed a rock. Even imagining that Florida's still there and they can reach it, they're never going to make it back to the Coast. And Nigel could've stayed with his fish. But he's always come when David calls, going back all the way to, Oi, why don't we try and start a new band, together? Going back all the way, and never missing a beat. Well, missing plenty of beats, musically speaking, but in the grander sense, no beats at all. David certainly owes him something for that, something more than a filthy rusting van, an abandoned parking lot, a silent night. "Nigel," he says, and steps forward, closing the distance between them. "I--"
"Fish don't lay eggs in times of, of stress," Nigel says, almost shouting. "So there won't be any baby fish to keep them company, will there? Will there?"
In stories and television and such, a hysterical person always has to be slapped, but Nigel's face is all sunburned as it is, and David's hands are shaking again, if they've stopped at all in the last several days. And he's reaching for some kind of comforting spiritual statement, for a piece of philosophy to apply to Nigel's tears like his mum's hankie. Or else some nice, reassuring ichthyology.
David's got nothing.
So he kisses Nigel, open-mouthed, pushing him back against the van because otherwise they might both fall down. It's a slippery, somewhat snotty kiss, but in spite of that it doesn't feel awful. It feels good, like it makes more sense than anything else. Best of all, it stops Nigel babbling about fish spunk.
They stare at each other, and David can't decide whether Nigel looks less surprised than he himself feels, or more. After a minute, Nigel asks, "What--what are we supposed to do now?"
And David knows what to do. He's a lead singer and a coach and a Leo. Of course he knows.
He reaches up, gives the shoulder strap a tug, and swings the guitar down between them, pressing it into Nigel's hands. "What we do best," he says. "To hell with Marty DiBergi, he's dead now, and to hell with the bastard film. This is Spinal Tap."
*
The song, "Rock To Repopulate," takes twenty minutes to write, excluding the solo, which takes rather more time because it's fifty-three minutes long. David sits on the end of the bed and plays rhythm until he breaks a string, and after that he just listens to Nigel lose himself. Nigel, jumping off their melody and falling back to it like it's a trampoline, getting an inspiration midway through and using his toothbrush as a kind of capo. "For a fresher sound," he explains, when they've got it all down on tape.
David nods. "I think that was pretty good. It's a little bit 'Give Peace A Chance'..."
"And a little bit 'Bitch School.'"
"Right. Very, very much in the noble Tap tradition." He's sweating a little, and he dabs at his forehead with his cuff. "Give it a chance, it could be a gold record."
"I was thinking that. I was just thinking just that." Nigel looks down at his guitar and strikes a pose with it, thrusting his jaw and his hips forward, a caveman with a flying V. "Wonder if there are enough people left to make a record go gold."
"Probably not. How many does it take?"
"I don't remember."
"Probably not." David gets up and walks over to the open door so he can see the sky. The stars are coming out, up there, brighter than he remembers ever seeing them before, close and brilliant like planets. Mercury in retrograde. A sizzling time. It would be silly, and possibly dangerous, to wish on those stars. "We were always better live, anyway," he says. "We've always made extremely vital, improvisational music. As opposed to groups like the Beatles, say, who made...accomplished, professional music."
"The Beatles always did take the easy way out." Nigel lays his guitar down very carefully on the bed, as if to tuck it in. He is tucking it in. David shakes his head. Nigel finishes arranging the pillows under the guitar's neck and looks round at him. "Did you want to do another take?"
"Raw music, you know?" David says. "Without any gravy or anything. It's life affirming."
"Oh." He's biting his lip again, but this time there clearly isn't a breakdown behind it. There's laughter. "Did you wanna, ah, af-firm anything, then?"
And so he and Nigel play a bit of the old pickle-me-tickle-me, sprawled the wrong way across the bed between the guitars, with the cheap mattress and its broken springs making almost as much noise as the two of them. Afterwards, they discover that they never stopped the tape recorder, which is embarrassing. But it doesn't matter now. Perhaps it never did.
They fill up the tape with their own songs, playing snippets of more or less everything they've ever written. It's amazing how much they remember when they put their heads together, right down to the old skiffle tunes. Halfway through an acoustic rendition of "Sex Farm"--spectacular, if David does say so himself--Nigel's amp overloads and bursts into flames.
David jumps back. "Jesus Christ!"
"Don't start that!" Nigel yelps, as the flames climb the polyester curtain. "What if you accidentally said the magic words?"
"Sorry."
"Well, you ought to be. You're playing with fire." Nigel throws a rabbit punch at David's upper arm. He's holding together well, after all. He never changes in any visible way, with that face as young as ever it was. And less spotty, which seems entirely unfair.
Karma. David punches him back and says, "The fucking wall's on fire, I think that's our cue to clear out."
They stumble to the van, still half-naked, laughing some and shrieking some (but only to be heard over the flames, of course), rescuing the guitars and the tape and Derek's trousers. Everything else, they figure, they can leave behind.
Nigel slams the van doors. David drives, his foot thumping the gas pedal in four-four time. The moon's rising, their new single is already number one by default, and the wrong side of the road is open before them, all the way to the Atlantic. And even beyond it. All the way home.
*
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