“Wrong,” said Herman.
“What do you mean, wrong?”
Herman didn’t answer, preferring to let her see for herself.
She reached over the seat and shuffled aside a pile of clothes. Underneath were several boxes. The one on top was full of books.
“Christ, you need to clean your fucking car,” said Heidi. “You are a hoarder.”
God, she knew how to push his buttons. “Don’t tell me what I need to do,” said Herman. “And I ain’t no hoarder.”
“I’m going to get you an intervention on that show for hoarders,” she said. “Hoarding Emergency or whatever.”
“I ain’t no hoarder,” he insisted again.
She ignored him. She pushed the box to one side, opened one of the boxes under it. It was the right box, Herman saw with a glance in the rearview mirror as she opened it. She pulled out an 8ʺ by 10ʺ promo photo and then settled back into her seat and examined it.
When they had to stop at a light, Herman snuck a glance, curious to see if it was as bad as he remembered. “Big H Radio Team,” it read along the bottom. And there he was. Yeah, his clothes looked good, as usual, but his head didn’t look like that, did it? No, no way it could. It just wasn’t natural. Heidi looked good, though, in her tattered Ramones shirt and her torn jeans, and totally at ease as well. But he, there was this problem with his head, probably some kind of Photoshopped joke, and plus he just didn’t look relaxed. The third member of the team, Whitey, didn’t look as bad as him, but didn’t look half as good as Heidi either. He was a gangly man with long hair and a huge, bushy beard and he wore mirrored sunglasses that looked straight out of the seventies. Like he’d stolen them off an aviator. Just beaten the fuck out of an aviator and then taken his glasses. Yeah, Herman had to admit Whitey looked okay. A little creepy maybe, but still. Maybe he should have worn sunglasses, too.
“We look pretty cool,” said Heidi. “What’s so wrong?”
“My head!” said Herman, exasperated. Couldn’t she see it? “My head looks too fucking big! It’s got to be the fucking lens that asshole was using. I knew he snuck on a wide-angle lens, some kind of fishbowl thing. I know my head ain’t that big.”
“You look fine,” said Heidi. “God, you are worse than a fucking chick.”
“Fine? Fine is your polite-ass way of saying, ‘Herman, he got a big fucking beach ball head.’ I look like Charlie Brown.”
He examined himself in the mirror. No, his head wasn’t that big. No way it was that big.
Heidi put her hand on his arm, spoke in mock consolation. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re still a stud.”
“Yeah?” he said. He smiled, looked at himself in the mirror again. “Yeah, I do look good, don’t I.” She was all right, Heidi was.
Chapter Twelve
Just goes to show you, you think you’ve seen everything and then they go and pull out some new horror show, thought Cerina Hooten. I got to get myself a new job. She sat at her receptionist’s desk, tapping her pencil against the desk’s edge. How could she be expected to work under these conditions? Okay, musicians were eccentric, but this was too much. And couldn’t they have the decency to sit down somewhere else in the waiting room rather than taking the chairs right across from her, facing her? What happened to common courtesy? She reached up and ruffled her bushy Afro. No, no. She couldn’t be expected to type something up with them staring at her the whole time, no matter how urgent the station manager said it was. He was lucky she was even bothering to answer the phones.
She had their publicity photo on the desk and a Sharpie out. She’d thought the photo would be labeled, but it wasn’t, which meant that she’d have to talk to them and ask them who was who or else Chip, the station manager, would complain. She looked closely at the photo. They looked just as bad in that. Ugh. Hideous. Why would anyone want to dress up like someone dead? She shivered. It was just plain morbid.
“Umm, excuse me,” she said.
Neither of them looked up. Maybe they weren’t aware that they were being addressed, but how could they not be? They were the only two other people in the reception area. They were foreign, right? Norwegian, maybe. Maybe they didn’t even speak English.
But no, she thought a moment later, if they didn’t speak English, why would they be here for a radio interview? They were just being difficult.
“Hey, you,” she said. “The ghoul reading Highlights.” Highlights? she wondered. Wasn’t that a kid’s magazine? The man looked up. He was wearing pale white face makeup, except for his eyes, which were lost in a pool of black. His lips were bloodred and smeared wider than his actual mouth, and blood or something that looked like it seemed to have dripped from his chin to stain his chest. Leather thongs bristling with nails formed a sort of headgear for him. A kind of black leather harness covered with larger spikes, what she saw as a sort of pervert’s idea of lederhosen, was his only clothing. She couldn’t help wondering what the spikes were doing to the vinyl chair he was sitting on. Who was going to pay for that?
“Which one of you is Count Gorgann?” she asked.
The musician reading Highlights lifted one hand in a Satanic salute, pointer finger and pinky lifted, his two middle fingers bent to touch his palm. He waggled his tongue and tipped his wrist to point his salute at his own face.
“All righty then,” said Cerina. She turned to the man next to him. “Which I guess makes you Dr. Butcher,” she said.
This one had apparently painted his face black first and then applied white face paint over it. It made his face look like a broken skull with darkness seeping out from behind it. The more she looked at it the more unsettling it seemed. His mouth had been painted in blood in a drooping frown that reached the side of his jaw. What must their monthly face paint bill be? Cerina asked herself, which made her wonder if she should check her own makeup. His arms were covered from wrist to elbow with leather bracers, with rusty iron spikes on them. High tetanus risk, Cerina couldn’t help but think. He had more clothes on, a black T-shirt with the sleeves torn off and black jeans, but over the jeans he’d affixed a kind of codpiece with dozens of screws jutting tip-first out of it. He lifted his head briefly. He opened his mouth wide to show black-stained teeth, then returned to his magazine.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said.
You gotta be shittin’ me, she thought, carefully writing each name in Sharpie beneath the correct image. Damn, I really got to get a better job.
“Are you serious?” asked Heidi. “I’m the problem?”
“You know you’re the problem,” said Herman. “Don’t make me explain it to you.”
He pulled into a parking spot behind the studio, turned the car off. He’d opened the door and was starting to step out when she put her hand on his arm and stopped him.
“Excuse me,” said Heidi. “Just how am I the problem?”
He turned back toward her. “Well,” he said. “For one, if you weren’t always all dolled up and striking some glamour pose, me and Whitey wouldn’t end up looking like ebony and ivory mutants.”
“I’ve got news for you,” said Heidi. “You’d look like ebony and ivory mutants whether I was there or not.”
“Thanks a whole lot,” said Herman.
They got out. Herman opened the back door and began unloading the boxes of promo photos, stacking his arms full. Heidi grabbed the last one.
“I’m the one all dolled up?” she said. “You dress like that pimp on TV Land, Teddy Bear.”