The Day the Music Died
Joe McKinney
“But this changes everything,” Isaac Glassman said. “You see that, right? I mean you gotta see that. We can’t . . . I mean, Steve, you can’t . . . I mean, shit, he’s dead. Tommy Grind is dead! How can you say nothing’s changed?”
“Isaac,” I said. “Calm down. This isn’t that big of a deal.”
He huffed into the phone. “Great. You’re making fun of me now. I’m talking about the death of the biggest rock star since The Beatles, and you’re cracking jokes. I’m telling you, Steve, this is fucking tragic.”
I let out a tired sigh. I should have known Isaac was going to be a problem. Lawyers are always a problem. He’d been with us since Tommy’s first heroin possession charge back in 2002. That little imbroglio kept us in the LA courts for the better part of a year, but we got The Cells of Los Angeles album out of it and that went double platinum, so at least it hadn’t been a total disaster. And Tommy was so happy with Isaac Glassman that he added him to the payroll. I objected. I looked at Isaac and I saw a short, unkempt, Quasimodo-looking guy in a cheap suit in the midst of a schoolgirl’s crush. “He’s in love with you,” I told Tommy. “And I mean in the creepy way.” But Tommy laughed it off. He said Isaac was just star struck. It’d wear off after a few months.
I knew he was wrong about Isaac even then.
Just like I knew Isaac was going to be trouble now.
Behind me, closed up behind the Plexiglas screen I’d hastily installed across the entrance to Tommy’s private bedroom after he’d overdosed and died from whatever the hell kind of mushroom it was he took, Tommy was finishing up on the arm of a groupie I’d brought him. The girl was a seventeen-year-old nobody, a runaway. I’d met her outside a club on Austin’s 6th Street two nights earlier. “Hey,” I asked her, “you wanna go get high with Tommy Grind?” The girl nearly beat me to my car. And now, after two days of eating on the old long pig, Tommy was almost done with her. There’d be some cleanup: femurs, a skull, a mandible, stuff like that, but nothing a couple of trash bags and some cleaning products wouldn’t be able to handle. Long as the paparazzi didn’t go through the garbage, things’d be fine.
I turned my attention back to the phone call with Isaac.
“Look,” I said. “This isn’t a tragedy, okay? Stop being such a drama queen. And secondly, The Beatles weren’t a rock star. They were four rock stars. A group, you know? It’s a totally different thing.”
“Jesus, this really is a joke to you, isn’t it?” Now he sounded genuinely hurt.
“No, it’s not a joke.” I looked over my shoulder at Tommy. He was at the barrier, looking at me, bloody hands smearing the Plexiglas, a rope of red muscle—what was left of the girl’s triceps—hanging from the corner of his mouth. I said, “I’m deathly serious about this, Isaac.”
“Yeah, well, that’s comforting.”
“It should be. Look, I’m telling you, I got this under control.”
“He’s a zombie, Steve. How can you possibly have that under control?”
Tommy was banging on the Plexiglas now. One hand slapping on the barrier. I could hear him groaning.
“He’s a rock star, Isaac. Nothing’s changed. He’s a zombie now, so what? Hell, I bet Kid Rock’s been a zombie since 2007.”
“So what? So what? Steve, I saw him last night, eating that girl. He looked horrible. People are gonna know he isn’t right when they see him.”
For the last three years or so, Tommy Grind and Tom Petty had been in a running contest to see who could be the grungiest middle-aged rock star in America. Up until Tommy died and then came back as one of the living dead, I would have said Tom Petty had him beat. But now, I don’t know. They’re probably tied.
“Nobody’s gonna know anything,” I said into the phone. “Look, I’ve been his manager for twenty years now, ever since he was a renegade cowboy singing the beer joints in South Houston. I sign all the checks. I make all the booking arrangements and the recording deals and handle the press and get him his groupie girls for him to work out his sexual frustrations on. I got this covered. The show’ll go on, just like it always has.”
“Yeah, except now he’s eating the groupies, Steve.” I thought I heard a wounded tone in his voice. He didn’t like to hear about Tommy’s other playthings, even before he started eating them.
“True,” I said.
“How’re you gonna cover that up? I mean, there’s gonna be bones and shit left over.”
“We’ll be careful,” I said.
“Careful?”
“Get him nobodies, like this girl he’s got now. Girls nobody’ll miss. The streets are loaded with ’em.”
I turned and watched Tommy picking the girl’s hair out of his teeth with a hand that wouldn’t quite work right. No more guitar work, that’s for sure. But then, that was no big deal. I had got him a cameo in Guitar Hero XXI the year before. Tommy Grind’s reputation was secure, even if he never played another note.
Finally, Isaac said, “Did he finish that girl yet?”
Good boy, Isaac, I thought.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just a little while ago.”
“Oh.” He hesitated, then said, “And you’re sure we can do this? We can just go on like nothing’s happened?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Tommy was always prolific. He wasn’t much for turning out a polished product—that part we left to the session musicians and the Autotuner people to clean up—but the man had the music in him. He’d spent fifteen hours a day playing songs and singing and just banging around in the studio we built for him in the west wing of the mansion. Just from what I’d heard walking through the house recently, I figured we had enough for three more full-length albums.
It’d just be a matter of having the studio people clean it up. They were used to that. Business as usual when you work for Tommy Grind.
Isaac said, “Steve?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I . . . can I come over and see him?”
“You’re not gonna screw this up, are you? No whistle blowing, right?”
“Right,” he said. “I promise. I just want to see him.”
“Sure, Isaac. Come on over any time.”
“And this is how he’s gonna live? I mean, I know he’s not alive, but this is how it’s gonna be?”
“For now,” I said.
Isaac didn’t look too happy about that. He was watching Tommy Grind through the Plexiglas, bottom lip quivering like he was about to cry. He put his fingers on the barrier and sniffled as Tommy worked on another groupie.
“He looks kind of . . . dirty.”
“He’s a rock star, Isaac. That’s part of the uniform.”
“But shouldn’t we keep him clean or something. I mean, he’s been in those same clothes since he died. I can smell him out here.”
He had a point there, actually. Tommy was really starting to reek. His skin had gone sallow and hung loose on his face. There were open sores on his hands and arms. The truth was I was just too scared to change his clothes for him. I didn’t want to catch whatever that mushroom had done to him.
“How many girls are in there with him?” Isaac asked.
“Two.”
“Just two?” Isaac said, shaking his head in disbelief. “But there’s so many, uh, body parts.”
“His appetite’s getting stronger,” I agreed. “He regularly takes two girls at a time now, sometimes three. So, when you think about it, he’s actually back to where he was before he died.”
“That’s not funny, Steve.”
I didn’t like the milquetoast look he was giving me. I said, “Don’t you dare flake out on me, you hear? Between the record sales and the movie deals and video game endorsements and all the rest of it, Tommy Grind is a one hundred and forty million dollar a year corporation. I’m not about to let that fall apart because of this.”