-TRACK 2-

-TRACK 2-

THE GYPSY ON DARKENED SHORES

The first time I saw Camilla Bierce was in a dive bar called Murphy’s, the local watering hole in some no-name town out West. We were on tour then, supporting the Jesters in Our Court EP. It was our first official release, save for a self-titled demo we’d circulated to all the labels a year before. Most of the songs from that demo—‘The Infernal Machination’ and ‘Holes in the Fabric’ parts one and two, in particular—ended up on the EP, except this time they didn’t sound like they were recorded in Bobby’s basement.

The suits at the label were cautiously optimistic at best. Our style of rock was a niche genre for sure—no one wanted 15-minute epic rock journeys anymore, and they hadn’t for at least 30 years—but other bands like Tool, Mastodon, and Opeth had found their audience, and our manager Reggie was able to convince the suits to send us on a small tour.

“Let them get their feet wet,” he told them, or at least that’s what he told us he told them. We weren’t there for the actual meeting. Our bassist, Hank, was the only one of us who had a car, and the night before he’d gotten drunk and left his headlights on. Reggie made something up to explain our absence, but I don’t remember what it was.

Anyway, Reggie was the only one who didn’t seem surprised by the label’s decision to pony up the cash for a tour.

“Me and a couple of the execs go way back,” he said. “Besides, you boys are the full package in spades. You’ve got the name, the mystique, you’ve got the look, and more importantly you’ve got the sound. You’re King Crimson two-point-oh!”

Johnny was the one who picked the name ‘The Yellow Kings’. He’d lifted it from some book he read when he was in high school. He was always into weird shit like that. I think if he hadn’t picked up a guitar and fallen in love with Robert Plant, he would’ve been one of those creepy writer dudes, sitting in the dark, hunched over a keyboard, writing about the apocalypse.

I’d like to say our ‘mystique’ was something we’d planned, but the truth is, all of us were pretty terrified of playing in front of a crowd. We dealt with it in our own ways. Hank always carried a bottle of Jack onstage with him. Me and Bobby, we grew our hair long to hide our faces. Johnny would always sing with his eyes closed until someone told him to just wear sunglasses like Al Jourgensen or Layne Staley. He did, and he caught a lot of flak for it at first. We joked once that maybe we should all just wear masks like the guys from Slipknot, but Reggie shot that down real quick.

You know, thinking back on it, I can see why the label wanted us to get our feet wet. We were all pretty green.

So, Reggie booked us some shows, and Bobby borrowed some money from his ma so we could buy a beat-up shit-heap of a van. And off we went, The Yellow Kings on our first tour.

We’d played live plenty of times, but always local shows or festivals, and never on our own. I think that made the stage fright easier, knowing there were other bands going through the same sort of thing. You’d be amazed how many people throw up before show time.

That first tour—what Bobby lovingly referred to as the ‘Court Jesters’ tour—was like going to war. It was our way of learning how to handle being on the road, performing night after night, dodging bottles, and handling hecklers. The first few shows we were timid as shit and the crowd could smell it on us. Some places, it’s amazing we got out of them alive.

This one night, down in Texas, Hank’s bass kept cutting out. This was before we had our own roadies to take care of shit for us, so we’re halfway through our opening number—which was entirely bass-driven—and out it goes. The booing started almost instantly. One thing led to another and before we knew what was happening, Hank dives fists-first off the stage and into the crowd. We called him “Axl” for a while after that.

There we were, a bunch of no-name rednecks from the South, going out on stage every night to educate the masses with our brand of rock. Some places were more receptive than others, and they let us know it. We were lucky if we made it through a show without any bruises or cuts, but little by little, word started to spread. We knew things were starting to take off when we started selling out of shirts and CDs at our merch booth.

The night we met Camilla was our first sold out show. We were just a month into our tour, and Reggie already had to place our second rush order for more shirts and discs. Driving our shitty van around the front of Murphy’s, seeing how people were already lined up outside, three hours before the show—y’know, I think that’s when it really hit me things were starting to move for us.

We’d played some shitty shows before—what band hasn’t?—but the good ones always stand out, and that night at Murphy’s was, in my mind, one of our top five performances. Sure, the venue was complete shit, but we were on fire that night. The crowd was so energized you could feel electricity coming off them in waves, man. Johnny hit all the right notes, my guitar stayed in tune, Hank’s bass didn’t cut out, and Bobby’s synth actually worked this time. Trust me, trying to play ‘The Infernal Machination’ without the synth solo after the second chorus completely cuts the balls off that song.

The woman was waiting for us outside our van after the show. I guess you might say she was our first groupie; you could also say she was our Yoko Ono, but I’ll get to that.

She was leaning against the hood, arms crossed, wearing a leather jacket, black mini-skirt, and knee-high boots. Her auburn hair spilled over her shoulders, setting her jacket alight. She had a great figure—that much, I can’t deny—but the first thing I noticed was her eyes. They were different colors, like Bowie. One brown and one hazel. Complete Heterochromia iridum, they call it.

“Great show,” she said. Her voice was like silk. “You’re Aidan, right?”

I nodded, fishing the pack of cigarettes from my pocket. I stuck one in my mouth. “Smoke?” I asked.

“Of course.” She plucked a cigarette from the pack. I lit it for her, and then my own. “Love your sound. That solo at the end of ‘Holes’ gives me chills in all the right places.”

I smiled and blew a ring of smoke. “Thanks,” I said. “You from around here? You don’t sound Texan.”

“Texan?”

“Yeah, you know. There’s no Texas twang in your voice.”

She laughed at that. Genuine or not, it didn’t matter; that laugh of hers had a way of cutting the ice with precision. Camilla was like that, you know. She could make you feel at ease no matter the situation, like you’d been friends for years, like she’d always known you.

“No,” she said finally, “I’m not from around here. I guess I’m . . . from all over.”

“Little bit of everywhere?”

Camilla smiled. “And a little bit of nowhere.”

We let some air into the conversation. I think she paused for effect, but me, I was still trying to wrap my swimming mind around that. She was being elusive, cryptic, qualities which I came to learn were common for her. Camilla had this way of spinning a conversation off the beaten path, sometimes speaking forthright, other times in riddles, and looking at you from the corner of her eye. Sizing you up. Reading you. Everyone was an open book to her. I didn’t catch all of this that first time—by the time I figured her out, I was too late. And how could I? I was still buzzing from the amazing show we’d just played.

Johnny, on the other hand . . . Poor Johnny. Being the enigmatic, moody frontman pretty much entitled him to droves of women throwing themselves at him on an almost nightly basis, but even he was taken aback by Camilla’s charm. I don’t know how else to describe it, really. Talking to her for an extended period of time made you feel drunk on life, almost euphoric, like you’d just done a line of the best coke on the planet. She had that effect on all of us, but none so much as Johnny.

The moment he stepped out of the club, his shades still pulled down over his eyes, Camilla turned her attention from me and almost glided across the alley to meet him. I might as well have not even been there. At the time I wasn’t at all surprised by her being there, waiting for Johnny like that. And why wouldn’t she? Johnny was the one with the words and the voice of the Kings.

I know now that’s exactly why she was waiting for him. She needed a voice.

They must’ve flirted for a good ten minutes, long enough for me to smoke two cigarettes and for Hank and Bobby to spill out the back of the club with their gear. When I was finished, I crushed the cigarette on the pavement and put my hand on his shoulder.

“Help us load up the van, would you?”

He still wore his shades, so I couldn’t tell where he was looking. Probably at Camilla, who was still fawning over him, practically glowing in the dim alley light.

Johnny lifted his sunglasses and smiled. “Sure,” he said, before turning back to her. He put a finger to her lips. “Hold that thought. Don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry,” Camilla said. “I wouldn’t leave you for anything in the world.”

And she didn’t. Not when we packed up our van. Not when we left town. Not when we left the state to our next gig. She came along with us, sleeping with Johnny in the back. None of us ever took a vote. Matter of fact, I can’t exactly recall a single time we ever did discuss Camilla’s presence on the road. It just seemed like she belonged there, and not just at Johnny’s side, either. She was with all of us, in her own way. At least, I think she tried to be. Some of us wouldn’t let her, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Anyway, that’s how things went for the next couple of weeks, our quartet now an unofficial quintet, playing gigs at hole-in-the-wall venues every couple of days, every show sold out, Reggie scrambling to get more merchandise on order. Every night Camilla kissed each of us on the cheek before we went on stage, in a kind of sweet ritual. “For luck,” she told us, “not that you need it.”

And we didn’t. We blew the doors off every place we played. Every night we took a bow together on stage, every night we piled back into the van, and every night Camilla came along for the ride.

One night, we were driving somewhere through Arizona, having just played our last gig of the tour in Phoenix. We were due in Los Angeles the following morning for a meeting with Reggie, and based on our GPS, we were going to be about two hours late. Par for the course, but there I was, trying to make up time by breaking the law, going thirty miles over the legal limit. The boys were asleep in the back. It was just me and Camilla and the night. We hadn’t been able to pick up a decent radio station in an hour, and I was beat.

Camilla kept me focused, talking so I wouldn’t fall asleep. I asked her once, sort of joking, sort of not, if she was just using us to hitchhike across the country, if she had someplace to go, and she told me, “No, I’m just a gypsy.” She twirled a strand of her hair around her finger and put her feet up on the dashboard. She rolled down her window a crack, letting the cool night air into the van’s cabin, kissing our faces. I shot a glance at her, and she was smiling at me.

“A gypsy, huh?”

“That’s right,” she said. “Your gypsy, wandering across these darkened shores of the heart.”

I’d seen her swallow a pink pill with a smiley face painted on it about an hour before, so I knew she was probably tripping. Smirking, I asked her what she meant by that. She turned around in her seat and reached her hand over, trailing her fingers across my thigh.

“I want to help you take off your mask.”

“My mask?”

She leaned over and whispered in my ear. “We’re all wearing pallid masks.”

At first, I wasn’t sure what she was doing—I was driving, after all, and half asleep at that. Her words slurred together, wet with a kind of delirium that kissed my ears and put me into a sort of trance.

She’d already fished me out of my pants and had me worked into a bar of iron before I stopped her. I don’t know what happened, how it happened, how I let her go that far. That part of my memory is forever gone from me. What I do know is that when I snapped out of the trance, I found my best friend’s girlfriend giving me a handy while he slept mere feet away.

I shook my head. “Need you to stop that, darlin’.”

“Nuh uh,” she cooed. “I don’t think you do.”

She was right. I didn’t. What she was doing with her hand felt great, and I felt myself slipping further backward into that dreamy desert place. My eyes were open, my hands on the steering wheel, but my mind was pulled back with every rise and fall of her hand. She worked at me, taking my breath away, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard my own voice screaming back to me to stop her, that this wasn’t right, she was my best friend’s girl. I glanced down at her, and her eyes weren’t different colors anymore. Her eyes were yellow-gold like an animal, and they were burning holes right through me.

“You want this,” she whispered, the flirtatiousness all but gone from her voice. There was someone else talking through her now, a low grating voice that had crawled up from her throat. It was wet and dark and deeply guttural, speaking words coated in phlegm, and the mere sound made me wilt in her hand. “You want this because we will it,” she growled. “And we will have this because we want it.”

She squeezed me tightly in her fist. Pain shot up through my groin, but I’d lost the voice to cry out. I clenched my teeth and white-knuckled the steering wheel.

“You belong to us now, and when we wish it, you will take off your mask. So shall you all.”

A coyote darted in front of the van, and my instincts took over, but only because she allowed them to. I jerked the wheel and swerved to avoid the mangy animal. The guys in the back cried out as they were jostled from their sleep, and Camilla fell away from me, striking her head against the side of the cab.

I righted the van, guiding it off the median and back onto the highway. Dazed, my heart racing, I remembered my cock was still hanging out of my shorts, so I tucked myself back in before anyone else could notice. Camilla shook her head, giggling quietly to herself.

“Aidan, what the fuck, dude?”

Hank leaned forward and punched my shoulder.

“Sorry,” I said. “Coyote. Go back to sleep.”

Camilla was still laughing. I looked over at her and frowned. “That wasn’t funny.”

She looked at me and shrugged. She giggled for another twenty minutes before the drugs got the best of her, and she slipped into a deep sleep.

I’ve replayed that incident in my head multiple times a day for the last thirty years, and every day I reach the same conclusion: I should’ve done what I wanted to do in that moment.

I should’ve reached over, opened the door, and kicked her pretty ass out into the desert night. God damn me for doing nothing. God damn me for waiting until it was too late.