How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie Debartolo Page A

swarming up the stairs for the show, but the place was stil only half ful as the lights dimmed and Michael walked out.
    He saw Vera and smiled, but it was quick and inadvertent, as if he had to maintain a level of coolness that showing affection for his wife did not al ow. I stuck my tongue out at him and he gave me the finger.
    “Doesn’t he look sexy up there?” Vera said.
    As Michael plugged his guitar into an amp and tinkered with the knobs, his presence conveyed a spartan detachment that was not at al what I would cal sexy. Regardless, I was reassured Vera thought otherwise.
    “Another reason why you can’t let him quit,” I said.
    “Back off,” she piped.
    The drummer swaggered out next. Vera cal ed him Angelo in a disapproving tone. Angelo was drinking a beer, mirrored sunglasses hid his eyes, and a smal group of girls whistled at him. He reminded me of a serial kil er, only I couldn’t remember which one.
    Burke, the blond, baby-faced bass player, was behind Angelo. “Oliver Twist,” Vera whispered. “Doesn’t he look like Oliver Twist?”
    “I don’t know what Oliver Twist looks like.” Paul walked out last, causing a downpour of rainy applause to sweep through the crowd. He was wearing the pants to his green suit, and a T-shirt on which he’d written: Fuck you, Mr. Winkle .
    “I gotta hand it to him,” Vera said. “The guy sure knows how to win friends and influence record execs.” Paul had a black Gibson around his neck and a bottle of water in his hand. He approached the microphone and adjusted it down toward his mouth. “Thanks for showing up,” he said using his pretend bashful voice, greeting a group of fans up front, two guys and a girl who looked like runaways.
    “They take the train in from Jersey every Thursday,” Vera said. “Paul is their god.”
    Shielding his eyes from the light, Paul cleared his throat
8and peered around the room until he found me. “This first song,” he said, his eyes locked on mine. “We haven’t real y practiced it much but we’re gonna play it anyway.” He winked, and Vera’s chest inflated. “Did he just wink at you?”
    I was able to disregard the question because the band had launched into a spacey, moving rendition of “The Day I Became a Ghost” that pricked open my ears and set me on the edge of my seat. But it was the next nine songs, the Paul Hudson originals, that raised me up and never set me back down until the band left the stage.
    The music defied classification. If I had been writing a review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive, guitar-driven rock ’n’ rol . But the guitars made sounds guitars didn’t always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds.
    The music dug in so deep you didn’t hear it so much as feel it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid, where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky.
    That’s the only way I could describe the music.
    It was the sonic equivalent of flight.
    And then there was the voice . I’d never heard anyone sing like Paul Hudson. Even Doug Blackman, master storytel er, whose passion and pain could be heard in every holy word he uttered, only wished for a voice like Paul’s—a voice that swept up and down the scale and was, at times, fil ed with deep, lush, apocalyptic emotion, and at other times was a burning falsetto of hope and love and seemed too big to come from his throat, lungs, or diaphragm.
    From his soul, I decided.
    Before the last song, Vera leaned over and said, “Would you ever think such a little guy could make such a big sound?” I couldn’t even blink, let alone turn my head from the stage and respond to Vera. Al of a sudden I was angry. It
was incomprehensible to me that bands like 66 were playing to sold-out crowds, earning thousands of dol ars a night, while Paul Hudson and probably so many other extraordinary artists were stuck in half-empty barrooms getting nothing but