Room 1403: The Day the Rock Died.

I am Rock and Roll. The reaper of Soul. The Black Mamba of Funk and the Heart of a song backed by the thunderous booms of a kick drum. I bleed music notes and clot only when I can play no more. My fingers have become rods of blistered flesh, cracked and peeling, and aching to the beat of my drum. I am a rock star and you Envy me and my charmed life. 

The morning sun looked like cooling lava pouring in through the cracked window of the hotel room, flooding the trashed accommodation in warm light that peeled back the darkness to unveil an all too familiar start in the day and life of a traveling rockstar. Clothes lay spread out along the room, across the lampshades, on the bedside tables, a small 26’ television, paused on some graphic porno from the night before and in heaps outside the bathroom. A small desk table sat at the foot of the bed, the top laden with trace amounts of cocaine and heroin, with an 8ball of “Incentive” up against a half brick of “Black Gold”, the finest products road money could buy.

By noon, the numerous empty beer cans had heated in the sun enough that the room now smelled of urine, sweat, mold, and cheap hops. Mixing with the musk of a night filled with a lot of sex, too many drugs and not nearly enough rock and roll. Everyone, whoever they might have been, had left by this time with the exception of the lump of covers on the bed that consisted of the band's semi-famous drummer for hire and his prostitute.

Somewhere inside the bed, a cell phone rang, buzzing like a pocket rocket running low on batteries. Eventually, a partially woken hang snared the phone and began the journey through the covers and beneath the sleeping prostitute’s limbs to a ringing ear.

“Need you downstairs in ten, or you can find your own fucking way back home!” a voice shouted, “Wade. Wade?”

A deep grungy voice belonging to Wade muttered inaudible words that only further infuriated the voice on the other end.

“Ten minutes Wade! You fucking junkie, I swear to god I will leave you in this forsaken town and never look back. Get your ass up and be ready in ten…eight minutes motherfucker!”

The covers now stirred. An aged body tested by the throws of road life and pounded relentlessly by a nightly drug binge that would cause Jim Morrison to turn over in his grave, ached and spasms with the slightest movement only calmed by the mornings first round of anti-inflammatory meds, two 7.5 vicodin and a shot of Old Turkey. It was during his stretch that Wade realized the hooker had not yet moved and, as far as he could tell, still had his cock in her mouth.

Wade reached down and felt her head. It was cold, too cold for anything living. Realizing this, panic immediately settled in. He rose up from the bed tossing the covers off him and the naked prostitute, whose mouth was stiff and dry and noshing enough on his penis that he needed to wedge his fingers inside her mouth and pry him loose. There was a loud crack as the dead hookers jaw broke.

Upon hearing this, Wade rolled off the bed onto the floor, hysterical and sweating profusely, hoping this was all part of some kind of bad trip that he had not been able to shake from in his sleep. It was true in that he was still coming down from his high from the night before, but he was sober enough to know that what he saw was the real thing. Sober enough to know that no matter how you played it, this was not going to end well for him. What the fuck happened? He wondered as he looked around the room for his clothes. Last night was a total blur, the people, his guest, fans, groupies that traveled with the band…Who could identify him from a lineup?

Jesus, what the fuck am I thinking? I need…I need to…Where the fuck are my things? Wade turned and found himself looking back in a mirror fixed to the closet, opening it and nearly pissing himself in fear as a second body fell out onto the floor. This time it was a young man, still dead drunk and passed out, but breathing. Here, Wade had something of an epiphany. In dire need of something to calm his nerves, he returned to the bedside, pushing aside the corpse, sitting down reaching for the Black Gold, rolling a joint. He sat, smoking and trying to calm his foot from rapidly jumping, eyeing the dead hooker, the passed out man slumped halfway out from the closet and the clock. Four minutes- time that felt like an eternity.

There, sitting just inside the bottom of the television cabinet was his wallet. His head had ceased spinning and the effects of the drugs quickly returned to him a state of calm, which he would need a lot of if he were to pull off what he felt was his only option. He grabbed the hooker by her legs, shifting her in the bed so that she now lay normally with her head resting at the headboard. He then took a pillow and placed it over her infinite gaze, her shattered mouth was now more of an elongated oval that would surely haunt him for the rest of his days. As he turned for the young man, he noticed the end of a black strap beneath a red bedazzled dress, he assumed, belonged to the hooker, pulling it to find a purse on the end. Inside he found her High School ID card, drivers permit and a signed CD of Dangerous Musings latest release. Jesus, she was only seventeen! It was all he could do not to vomit, stumbling his way over to the closet. He hooked his arms under the sleeping man and drugged him over to the bed, pulling off his pants and shirt, checking the clock once more.

There was a knock at the door.

A voice said, “Room service.”

Wade froze. He gave the room a quick glance as the housekeeper swiped her keycard through the reader. The little light changed from red to green and the door opened.

“Room service.”

Upon seeing the carnage and disregard for other people’s things, the woman just shook her head, pulling her car just inside the door. It was not unusual to find such rooms in a state of disarray; especially, when longhaired el ojete’s stayed the night. When she reached for the covers and pulled them back, she was startled to see the two naked people lying in the bed. One appeared to be sleeping while the other…

The door to the tour bus was just about to close when an arm shot through. The rest of the band watched as their drummer climbed aboard, sweat dripping from his face and shaking to the point of collapse, which they assumed was just a side effect to the drugs he was likely taking. A short fat Italian man emerged from the back of the bus, his face riddled with disgust, holding a cell phone in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.

“You smell like a dead hooker. If you did not play the fucking drums like nobody’s business, I would fire you and have Max throw your pathetic ass off the bus. Tomorrow night we play the Forum and I expect you to be sober by then!” he said pushing his way past.

Wade climbed into his bunk and said nothing to the other band mates, nor would he for the rest of the day. His thoughts were on the young man he had purposely left behind to take the blame for something he felt no one was responsible for, but he felt that his hands were tied. They were tied, weren’t they?