The Song Remains

His name was Johnny Marshall, and he was the scariest guy I'd ever met.

Not scary like an ax murderer or Boris Karloff or anything like that. This was more like the feeling you got when you looked at the yearbook pictures of those nurses Richard Speck killed, or a painting of a clown by John Wayne Gacy. It was a feeling of something that wasn't quite right, some lethal undercurrent just below the quiet sparkling surface of the ocean. It was sort of a brooding freakiness, like some low-level electric throbbing you could feel in the fillings of your teeth whenever you were around him. Mixed in with the weirdness was a melancholy resignation, a world-weary knowledge that showed in his eyes. It always seemed to me like he was waiting for something to happen in his life, and he had the sinking feeling that when it did happen, it wouldn't be anything good.

That indefinable something happened one day when we were sitting around his house, smoking and drinking beer. I remember it was beer: none of us had really gotten to the hard stuff yet, at least not on a regular basis. Marshall and I were in a garage band, strictly coffee-house bait at that point, although Marshall liked to think of himself as a big-time hardass like Trent Reznor. Marshall looked up from the guitar he was plunking at and announced, "I'm gonna change my name."

"Do what?" I said. "What's wrong with the one you have now?"

"Let's face it, man," he replied. He set the guitar down. The expression on his face was earnest. "You just can't get famous with a name like Marshall Johnson. Sounds like I should be walking around some dusty Western town spittin' tobacky and wearin' chaps."

Debbie snorted laughter and almost spilled her beer.

"Oh, that was feminine, hon."

"Sorry," she choked around her giggles. She glanced at Marshall with a mischievous glint in her eyes. "I was just picturing you in chaps and a cowboy hat, and nothing else … you know."

"You, woman, have a filthy mind." He was grinning as he said it. Debbie was the closest thing to a girlfriend he'd ever had, and she could say things like that and get away with it.

"No, I think I need a different name," he continued. He took another swig of beer. "How 'bout Johnny Marshall? Just switch it around, you know? Maybe that would, like, change our lives around too."

Debbie favored him with one of her "looks". I went to the fridge and shagged myself another beer.

"It'll never happen, you know,” I said as I came back. “Getting famous and all that stuff. Changing your name won't change anything else in your life. You'll still just be a singer in a second-rate band, I'll still be a drummer, and Debbie will keep on doing whatever it is she does." She stuck her pierced tongue out at me. Not that I minded, you understand. I'd had my share of experience with the things that tongue could do.

Okay, I admit it, I was wrong. He did change his name to Johnny Marshall. It was as if that was the catalyst, the signal for change in general. Things began to happen with almost frightening speed, good things. If you know anything about hardcore alternative music, you know that "Cracked and Bleeding" shot out of nowhere to become the hottest underground album ever that year. Johnny Marshall was huge, and everyone wanted a piece of him. For a while, it even seemed as if there was enough of him to go around. Videos from "Cracked and Bleeding" played on MTV every night. I say "night" because these weren't your ordinary alternative fluff videos, with sunflower-faced girls in short-sleeved shirts and pastel pants. These were scary videos, with images that were expressly designed to haunt your dreams long after you clicked off the tube and curled up under a ratty blanket on a friend's couch.

Johnny was famous, like he always wanted to be, and lovin' it. If you could have put fame in a bottle and sold it like booze or cologne, Johnny would have been first in line, wallet out, coughing up the dough. Fame was something he wanted real bad. Johnny started hanging out with dudes like Marilyn Manson and his idol, Trent Reznor, and man, he could top them all. Purple hair, safety pins through the eyebrows, you name it. He got into the drug thing too, him and Debbie both. A regular Sid and Nancy, those two.

And me? Well, the little drummer boy was just not fitting in as well as Johnny and Debbie were. Not that I didn't try, I'll admit that. I'm not saying I'm a saint or anything. I just have a little more respect for my body, that's all. After several months of all-night parties that were little more than orgies seen through a smoky drug haze, and of stumbling around the next day trying to play music with an aching head and a thick tongue, I'd had enough.

It wasn't just that, either. I just wasn't cut out to be famous. I know that makes me sound like the world's biggest dork. Who wouldn't want to be famous? But it seemed to me like I was always an outsider looking in, that I was no better than all the punks in ripped blue jeans that bought our albums. Fame to me seemed like a separate state of being, almost like another country. Everybody outside that country knew the inhabitants, and the people that lived there knew each other, but that's where it ended. It was like being in a zoo, except those of us in the cages couldn't even look out at our audience. What's more, most of us didn't even want to. We just paced around behind those invisible bars, partying and screwing and not caring about the faceless masses who bought their tickets and their t-shirts and created our country of fame without ever setting foot in it themselves.

Not me, though. I didn't want to be on display anymore. So one night, I worked up the courage to tell Johnny that.

"You what?" We were at a party, and as usual, we had to shout to make ourselves heard over the noise and the music. He was sitting hunched over on the edge of a couch, twiddling a rolled-up Franklin, one of the new ones, between his fingers. There were several lines of white powder on a mirror on the coffee table in front of him. Debbie was hanging onto his arm, gazing at the mirror with a flat, dazed half-smile as if she could read her whole future in that dusty surface. I was glad I'd interrupted him.

"You heard me," I yelled, although with the loud thump and pulse of the music, it was possible he hadn't heard after all. "I quit."

It was easier to say than I thought it would be, but it didn't get quite the reaction I was looking for. I had expected Johnny to say something like, "Hey man, you can't quit, we've got a concert coming up in Chicago in a week," or "Hey man, you can't quit, where am I gonna find a drummer as good as you?" What I got instead was, "Hey man, you can't quit. Manager's havin' a really cool party next Friday and we gotta be there."

"Maybe you didn't hear me. Read my lips if you're not too far gone: I quit."

I got his attention that time. Maybe it was the lip-reading line that did it. He rubbed the back of his hand across his nose and sniffed. "You can't do this to me, man. We got a concert in Chicago next week, and Minneapolis two days after that. Where am I gonna find another drummer as good as you?"

I stared at him for a few more seconds. Then I shook my head. "No. I just can't deal with this anymore, Marshall."

"JOHNNY!"

"Whatever. I'm outta here." I turned and walked away. I walked away from Johnny, Debbie, the drugs, the parties, the whole scene. I even walked away from drumming for a while, but I just couldn't leave the music behind.

I got a job as a deejay in a strip club. It was hard there for a while (no Freudian slip there, oh gosh no), but like the song says, I was nice to the girls and they were nice to me. The girls on my shift tipped me for doing their light shows and talking them up when they were on stage. Things worked out okay, and I even got used to the sight of the girls walking around half-dressed or less. I hardly thought about Johnny at all, unless a dancer happened to play one of his songs.

It was the phone call that brought Johnny back into my life. The phone started ringing just as I got home from working the late shift. I remember thinking, anyone who calls me at 4:30 in the morning better have a damn good reason. I slung my coat onto the floor and grabbed for the phone.

"Hello?"

A sniff. "Hey man."

At first I didn't recognize the husky voice. "Who is this?"

"It's me. Johnny."

"Hey, Johnny! How the hell are ya? You sound a little hoarse there. I told you to lay off the whiskey, man. It'll trash your voice. You'll end up singin' like B.B. King."

His next words cut through my babbling like a razor blade on a mirror. "She's dead."

I suddenly found myself sitting down heavily, with no memory of reaching for the chair. "Who, Johnny? Who's dead?" But I already knew.

"Debbie. She's gone." Now I recognized the husky sound in his voice. The booze and cigarettes hadn't destroyed his vocal cords yet. His voice was thick with sorrow and loss.

My mouth moved, then one sound made it past my closed throat. "How?"

"I don't know." He sounded distracted, panicked, like a sleeper struggling in the grip of a nightmare. I could almost see him on the other end of the line, sitting by the phone, one hand pushed up into his mane of hair. "Maybe she took the wrong shot on top of the wrong pill, or on top of the wrong handful of pills. Is that it? Was life with me so hard?"

I didn't say anything. My mind had gone blank -- the first stage, I suppose, of my own mourning for a girl who'd once been my friend.

Johnny was silent for a while. Then he spoke, and his voice was dry and choked. "I got an idea for a song."

I cleared my throat, grateful for a change of subject. "A new song, huh? Did it make it into your notebook?"

You could always tell when Johnny was getting a song idea over whatever mental radio was broadcasting in his head. His eyes would get this faraway look, and sometimes his lips would move slightly. If the idea didn't take, he'd just shake his head and go back to what he was doing. But if it was good, he'd reach into an inner pocket of his leather jacket and pull out a pen and a battered little black notebook, open it, and start scribbling, no matter where he was. He'd just find a quiet little corner (and at some parties we went to, it wasn't easy) and write down the music that was coming into his thoughts. He never let anyone look at that notebook. I don't think Debbie even saw it. But we didn’t have to see inside it to know what it contained. It was his heart. It was his Yggdrasil, the tree of life where all of his best ideas sprang from. It was the place where his music came to be born. It was his soul.

"Yeah, it's in the notebook. It's not gonna be like all my other songs. No drums, no screaming, no makeup, no cussing. Just me, my old acoustic guitar, and Debbie."

"Oh, Johnny, don't do this, man. I'm serious." I tried to think of some way to talk him out of it. "What about your fans? They're gonna hate it if it's not like your other stuff. And if it does make it onto the charts and some bubble-gum station picks it up, it's gonna tear your heart out fifty times a day, if you really meant it when you wrote it." I couldn't find the words to tell him what I really thought -- that hearing a love song written for a dead girlfriend would be a living hell for anyone. It would end up being nothing more than a slow, masturbatory suicide.

But nobody could ever tell Johnny anything. I don't know when he wrote that song. Maybe he started writing it as soon as he got off the phone with me that night. All I know is that one day, sitting in traffic at a red light, I turned the radio on, and there it was.

The song was gentle, hauntingly beautiful. It reminded me of an early Beatles song, like "Michelle" or "Yesterday". I pulled into a parking lot to listen to it. As the melody washed over my soul, tears rolled down my face for Debbie. I had loved her, you know. She was Johnny's girl, yeah, but before that, just for a little while, she'd been mine, and I'd loved her. It was the first time I had cried for her. I missed her so bad at that moment it was like a knife in my guts, a throbbing ache that just wouldn't quit, not as long as that music was playing.

The final echoing notes left me drained but cleansed. I took a deep breath. The song had made me cry, but its message was one of love and hope. Life would go on in spite of loss.

Then the deejay came on the air. "Cool tune, huh? Yeah, I thought so too. Been getting a lot of calls on that one. Lots of people like it, but most people are just asking what the hell is up with this? I gotta tell ya I agree with them. Is this the same Johnny Marshall that gave us "Cracked and Bleeding"? Man, I had to go to the dentist after that last concert of his rattled some fillings loose. My vote? The song's nice, Johnny, but stick with the hard rock, okay?"

I was perversely happy to hear this informal review. Of course his fans were going to hate it. I made a mental note to tell Johnny "I told you so" the next time I saw him.

I never got the chance.

Over the next few weeks the song worked its way steadily up the charts. I had the car radio programmed for six of my favorite stations, and sometimes I heard that song three or four times a day. Every time I heard it I felt a little twist deep in my heart, like a tiny splinter of glass working its way through the muscle. I could only imagine what it was like for Johnny.

Thank god I didn't hear it at work very often. The girls who worked at the club usually played either hard rock, classic rock, or dance music. But it was at work that I heard about the final result of Johnny's love song.

One of the dancers was in the deejay booth with me, picking out the music she wanted to dance to on the main stage. Athena was one of our hard rock fans. She had taken "Cracked and Bleeding" out of the CD rack and stood next to me, tapping one elegantly manicured fingernail on her red lips, trying to decide which two songs to play, when a customer came up to the rail around the booth.

"Hey, did you hear about Johnny Marshall?"

Athena and I both looked up. "What about him?" I asked.

The man nodded at the CD Athena was holding. "He's dead. Suicide." He tipped his bottle of beer to his lips and drained it in a few swallows. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and continued. "I heard it on the radio on the way here. Guy put a shotgun to his head. Can you imagine that? Musta been some mess."

"Excuse me," Athena said in a faint little voice. She dropped the "Cracked and Bleeding" CD on the counter with a clatter. She turned around, blindly grabbed a different CD out of the rack, and thrust it into my hands. "Uh, just play 6 and 8 off of this one, okay?" She turned away, her face still an expressionless mask, and headed towards the dressing room. Her slim shoulders hitched once as she walked away.

After that, of course, it was impossible to escape the bad news. Almost every magazine on the newsstand had something in it about Johnny's life and death. Rolling Stone ran a haunting black-and-white closeup of Johnny's face on the cover. The photographer had managed to capture that steady look of pain and resignation, that state of mind which everyone now knew had foretold Johnny's suicide.

I didn't buy Rolling Stone. I couldn't bear to have that photo sitting around the apartment. I bought People instead. There was a picture of Lady Gaga on the cover, but I knew there would be an article on Johnny inside the magazine. I waited until I got home. Then I sat at the kitchen table and read it.

The facts were all there. Johnny Marshall had taken a 20-gauge shotgun, put one end of it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The blast had blown his head apart like a balloon stretched over the exhaust pipe of a Jaguar. The horrible truth hit me when I turned to the page with the coroner's photo. I recognized the view. The picture had been taken from the living room of Johnny's house, looking into the bedroom. Johnny lay slumped against the bedroom wall, half in the doorway. The upper part of his body was mercifully hidden by the wall, but I could see his shoes, his legs up to his waist, his limp hand on the floor. The shotgun lay on the floor next to him, thrown by the recoil of the blast that had splattered Johnny's mind all over the other side of that wall.

There were other pictures in the article besides that one. There were pictures of Johnny goofing off for the camera, Johnny on MTV, Johnny looking pensive at Debbie's funeral. The article mentioned the love song and how immensely popular it had become in the past few months. The article predicted that the song would become even more popular, a lament for a shooting star whose flame had burnt out too soon. Reading this, I realized why Johnny had taken the barrel of a shotgun and eaten two ounces of double-aught buck.

Something caught my eye, and I turned back one page. One of the goofing-off pictures showed Johnny in a mid-air leap, kicking up his heels, a Baryshnikov in blue jeans. I realized with a sickening jolt that the old blue tennis shoes Johnny was wearing in that picture were the same ones that were on his splayed feet in the coroner's photograph. Then grief rushed in and smothered me with an almost physical weight. I gasped, trying to breathe normally against the crushing brick of sorrow in my chest. It had all come crashing down on me with painful clarity. I could see Johnny's old house, the ratty couch with the ghost-rings from sweating glasses on the wooden armrests, the nubbly yellow-beige carpet with permanent dent marks from the furniture legs. I could smell beer and fresh pizza.

I had made one other stop on the way home, at a liquor store. Now I reached blindly for the paper bag I had brought home. I took the bottle of Jim Beam out of the bag and unscrewed the cap. I fumbled around in the mess on the kitchen table until I found a juice glass that was sort of clean. The neck of the bottle chattered against the glass, but I managed to pour out a shot and get it down. The cover of Rolling Stone, with his melancholy, tortured face in such close-up you could see every detail, still haunted me. I couldn't get that image out of my head. In my mind's eye, I stared at that picture, into those brooding eyes, and I saw hell looking back at me. Hell was a lonely place. If there was any comfort to be found at the bottom of a bottle of Beam, then by God I was going to look for it. I splashed another shot into the glass, contemplated Fate in its amber depths for a few seconds, then tossed it back. I decided to drink until I was numb enough to go to sleep.

After a while I got the munchies. I called and ordered pizza. Twenty minutes later I heard a knock on the door. I got up and stumbled to the door. I was trying to walk and get my wallet out of my pants pocket at the same time, and it wasn't working very well. I opened the door, with my hand still trapped in my pocket, and froze.

Johnny Marshall was standing outside my door. He was holding a pizza box.

"Sausage, onions, and extra cheese. Hope I got it right. Are you gonna let me in, or am I gonna stand out here and eat this by myself?"

I opened the door and let Johnny into my apartment.

Being dead hadn't affected his fashion sense. He was dressed in his favorite go-to-hell outfit: a well-worn, well-loved black leather jacket, ripped jeans with anarchy symbols scrawled on them in red and black permanent marker, a t-shirt dotted with innumerable safety pins, and combat boots with spurs. Honest-to-god spurs. He didn't look any more gruesome than he usually looked on stage, either. I had heard that the police had to ID him by his fingerprints, even though he had considerately left his driver's license on the coffee table in front of him. Of course, I hadn't seen any coroner's photos beyond what was in the magazines. I had simply taken it for granted that his head had become a faceless, shredded horror, smashed beyond recognition by the shotgun blast.

Johnny opened the pizza box, and fragrant steam drifted out. "You didn't order mushrooms on this, didja? I can't stand shrooms." He sat down on the couch, still holding the pizza. The couch appeared to settle under his weight, but there was no familiar creak of springs. That was weird. I told him so.

"Well, yeah, that's just me. You know how I love freaking people out." He held the pizza out to me. "You gonna have some? It's getting cold."

I took a piece of pizza. "So." I was sort of at a loss for words. "What's new?"

Johnny set the box down and did a passable Jack Benny imitation, resting his hand against his cheek as if deep in thought. "Let's see. Being dead. I guess that's pretty much what's been going on in my life lately. What do you think, asshole?"

I shook my head. "I'm drunk. I must be seeing things."

"Nu-uh. You haven't drunk nearly enough for that. You're no lightweight." Johnny Marshall dead seemed to be much like Johnny Marshall living -- quick-witted, sarcastic. "Being dead ain't that bad. My farts don't smell anymore." I must have gotten a really weird look on my face, because he burst out laughing. "Goddamn, don't look so serious, man!"

I didn't know what to say. I decided to eat my pizza before it got cold. Johnny watched me, half-smiling, as I ate. By the time I finished my third piece of pizza, I knew what I had to ask him.

"Why'd you do it? I want a reason, and it better be a good one."

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and feigned innocence. "Maybe I just wanted a change of scenery. Nobody ever thinks of that."

Now I got mad. His wiseass attitude was starting to get on my nerves. "So what? Was suicide the answer? Huh?"

He made a disgusted sound and flumped noiselessly back against the couch. "You sound like one of those pamphlets they hand out in high school if some poor slob offs himself. 'Life is a question, suicide is not the answer.' What a crock."

"So what was it? What possible reason could you have, Johnny? Help me out here. I really want to understand."

He sat up then, and in his eyes was a depth of pleading sadness I had never seen before. I'd thought the picture on the cover of Rolling Stone had captured that look, but it hadn't even touched the lonely anguish that showed in Johnny's eyes now. I knew what the answer was going to be even before he spoke.

"It was the song, man. It's always been that damn song. You were right when you told me not to write it." He buried his head in his hands.

"I killed myself because I couldn't stand the tame reaction I got to that song. No, that's not right. I couldn't stand the reaction of tame people to the song. My stuff's hard-core, you know that. Bang your head so hard your nose bleeds. But now, the same dorks who like Billy Joel and Michael Jackson and … and Justin fucking Bieber, they like this song even more than my real fans like my hard-core stuff. It's pathetic."

There was something else I had to know. "Can I ask you something?"

He looked up. "What?"

"Do you remember that one conversation we had down by the river?"

"Yeah, I guess I do."

I had been doing some thinking of my own, and I wanted to ask Johnny's opinion on things. I had gone looking for him one afternoon and found him at his favorite thinking spot. It was a place he and I both knew well. It was a place for serious conversations. He was standing on the riverbank, smacking golf balls into the water with a left-handed golf club. I stood next to him on the bank, careful not to get too close.

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to find left-handed golf clubs? I picked this one up at a garage sale for a buck-fifty."

"Johnny, do you believe in God?"

He took careful aim, swung, and knocked a ball three-quarters of the way across the river. It fell with a watery "plonk". "Hell yes."

The answer had surprised me. "I always thought you were an atheist."

"My grandparents were hard-core Baptists, but I was brought up sort of easy-listening Catholic."

"And now?"

"Now I'm a non-practicing Buddhist." His face was carefully blank. He fished another ball out of a plastic bread bag and placed it gently on a tuft of grass. "Found the balls for fifty cents a dozen. I think I got two bucks' worth."

"What happens if you run out of golf balls?"

He stepped back, took a couple of practice swings, and whacked the ball into the water. "Why do you think God made rocks?"

"But do you believe in God?" I had pressed.

"I told you I did. Just because I choose not to worship Him at this point in my life doesn't mean I don't believe in Him."

"And now?" I asked the dead Johnny.

"Now what?"

"Do you believe in God now? Was God there? Did Saint Peter meet you at the Pearly Gates after you blew your brains out?" My tone of voice was bitter, caustic enough to etch glass, but I didn't care.

Johnny looked down at his hands. "No," he said in a small voice. "No, it's not like that at all. It's more like -- just a rest, you know? It's like life was hell because of that song, and now I'm not in hell anymore. I'm just nowhere right now." He looked up at me, and something like resentment burned low in his eyes. "You'd have killed yourself too, if you had to live with a song like that."

I snorted. "Right. You're the great songwriter, I'm just the lowly drummer. So that's why I'm still alive, sitting here in a cheap apartment getting drunk with a Cobain wannabe." God, I sounded like some wiseass Stephen King hero, flippant, trying to bluff my way out of any bad shit the supernatural world could throw at me.

"Johnny, you screwed up, okay? But look at it this way. Even if there's no heaven, you're going to live forever. Better yet, you're gonna be young forever."

"What do you mean?"

"Look at Marilyn Monroe. Look at Judy Garland. Even Elvis. Everybody remembers them as being young. Hell, nobody even thinks of Jimmy Stewart as being old now, man! He's still the guy who did It's a Wonderful Life."

Johnny nodded. "But Jimmy Stewart had a point. Nothing's worth killing yourself over. Not even if you get to be famous and young forever because of it. I could have told him that."

He stood up. For the first time since I'd known him he was calm. "Thanks. You've given me a lot to think about." Then he was gone, poof, just like that. Somehow, it seemed typical.

You wanna know what I think? I think death was the only thing that could have calmed Johnny Marshall down. It's the only thing that was supposed to calm him down. Anything else, like that damn song, that was a living death for him. He should have gone on rockin' for years, like Aerosmith or the Stones, but he had to go and write that damn song. It was then that I realized something. Johnny wasn't the only ghost in my life. The song haunted both of us.

It was getting light outside, and I had to pee. I wandered into the bathroom. As I stood there pissing, I heard the shower come on in the apartment next door. Then, through the thin wall that separated the bathrooms, I heard someone start singing in the shower. It was Johnny's love song for Debbie. I started to laugh then. Pretty soon I was laughing so hard I was crying.

There are ghosts everywhere.