Splint Licker

The plane’s landing gear began to wind up when the man sitting next to me in the back row started in. It was an early morning flight from Seattle to Miami, a sort of diagonal cut along Uncle Sam’s torso, that star spangled vest sliced from shoulder to hip. I’d hoped to sleep. But the back row seat refused to recline and the flight attendants in the tiny galley behind clicked coffee pots together and poured orange juice onto the floor. The sticky juice ran down the aisles when the plane leveled out, and a few children, screaming cherubs and imps, laughed and pointed at the bright juice. And that’s when the man began to speak.

He’d hurried onto the plane after everyone was seated, his long gray hair shaped like a triangle around his head, appearing as a strange halo behind him. He was about five feet tall, and he had to reach his arms all the way up when he stuffed his mauve faux-leather sack, which was peeling with age, into the last known overhead spot. He sat down with a light glumph and clicked the seat’s buckle. The massive albatross put its fat head down and flapped down the long runway.

He smelled of a hundred years of cigarette smoke that, unmoved by decades of wind and dust, had settled deeply in the fibers of his vintage light blue, flare-bottomed jeans. Smoke slithered up from cigarettes and penetrated his yellow fingernails, seeping into his every capillary. He wore ebony and stained steel rings molded into the shapes of dragonheads, various weaponry, and symbols of the occult. I wondered why two of his fingers, his right thumb and left middle finger, went without any jewelry.

My eyes had just closed when he began to speak. I found something inexplicably comforting about his voice. It was high-pitched but gripped by a dirty roughness, like a siren dragged through a hallway of shag carpet and 100-grit sandpaper. His entire being emanated the 1970s.

It’s striking how sounds and smell transform us. Before he finished his first word, I had already recalled a dozen forgotten memories, childhood years of playing with the rusty tools in the backyard shed, galvanized nails and slow-rotting wood, a yellow dirt buggy puttering through maple-lined suburbia, old ornaments made of space age materials, long-deemed hazardous.

“Where you heading?” he said.

“Miami.”

“Grape juice,” he told the flight attendant, who ignored him and pushed the drink cart toward the front of the plane. “No. I mean. Why, I guess?”

“Making a getaway. Vacation from my problems. How about you?”

“Going to meet my daughter.” He stared straight ahead for a moment. “You from Seattle?”

“Glendale.”

“Huh.” He looked at me and slowly bobbed his head up and down in apparent appreciation. “Me too.”

“Warm there now.”

“Hotter than hell.”

I rubbed my eyes and yawned. He said, “Have you ever heard of a band called Pentecost Hammer?”

“I’m not familiar. They from Phoenix?”

“I play the bass.”

“Ah.” I bowed my head and rested my chin on my chest and closed my eyes.

I had barely slipped into the dark sleepy waters when I was woken by am incessant click. Click, click, clickity, click, click, click, clickity, click. His rings clanged against the plastic tilt-down tray and he was tapping out a beat while watching the drink cart make its slow, yawning tour down the aisle.

“You know Sabbath, right?”

“Sure.”

“But not Pentecost Hammer.”

“I don’t know. You ever do any hip hop?”

A squeal came from a woman in the row over. “You’re in Pentecost Hammer?!” She had her right arm around her husband, her left hand holding a plastic flute, both the woman and cup half full of champagne. She wore a golf visor and a polo shirt that had the words He’s With Me printed along the chest. I’d watched the couple when they took their seats. They’d coaxed two glasses of sparkling wine out of the flight attendants before the plane took off, saying they’d just been married. “We saw you play at Schlobbityfest last night.”

“Yes!” said her husband, momentarily gleaming, also in a golf visor and a polo shirt: I’m With Her. “Yes. We were in the beer garden. You guys were incredible. I’ve never seen an actual live sacrifice. That was wicked.” To his wife, he said, “Dude.”

“Dude.” The couple put their headphones back on and returned to the action movie playing in the headrests in front of them. The soft roar of the plane filled my ears.

“He’s talking about our goat. It’s not a real goat,” the man said. “It doesn’t even look like a real goat.”

“Is there blood?” I asked.

“The blood’s real,” he said with wide, demon-possessed eyes. His eyes returned to normal.

“Good to meet someone else from Phoenix,” he continued. “The band’s all from the Valley. Omar, Rock, Stu, and me. I’m Vinny. We all grew up there. You know the old jell-o factory? Recorded our first album, FrankenChrist, in a hidden backroom.”

The woman across the aisle climbed over her husband. She took her champagne cup to the drink cart, which was still on its slow trek, a good 20 rows up still. In a moment of turbulence, she stumbled into the cart, causing a glass coffee pot to fall to the floor. The black, glossy coffee streaked down the aisle, swirling in with the orange juice to create a steaming, infernal river. As the plane jumped over another pocket of turbulence, the liquid jumped into the air. The cherubs and imps, ever watching, saw the gravity defying liquid lines and discerned something secret in the shapes. A joke, must have been, because the screaming little things began laughing hilariously again.

“I don’t know how anyone could believe it’s an actual sacrifice.”

“Have you ever tried with a real goat?”

“Not on stage.” He’d gone wide-eyed again. Then his eyes returned to normal. “No.”

A man with a shaved head approached the back row with his son, who, slightly cross-eyed, also sported a freshly shaved head. The kid had on a faded Cannibal Corpse shirt that draped down to his elbows and knees, 1993 European tour.

Vinny watched them serenely with the look of a holy man deep in the barren wastelands of the back row of a 737, wondering why anyone would come all this way to seek him out. ‘The metal answer lies in your own metal ass my morbid friends,’ I think he wanted to say. ‘You’ve always had the hardcore within you.’

The kid arrived at the feet of this demigod and held his hands together. His fingers interlaced and folded into his palms while his forefingers pointed upwards in the shape of a steeple. The boy held his hands up to his face and stuck his tongue through the steeple in a move I had to guess represented performing some sort of unholy oral sex on the metaphorized Christian church.

Vinny clasped his hands and mirrored the move, his old skinny tongue sticking out.

“We heard you were on this flight,” said the father.

The kid asked, “Will you autograph my shirt?”

“Got a pen?”

The boy looked to his father. There was no pen. The father looked irritated and perplexed.

“We’ll be back,” he promised.

“I’ll be here.” Vinny, hands still clasped, released the form and made the slightest motion of the sign of the cross just below his chin.

“Did you just cross yourself?” I said. He didn’t respond. The death-obsessed duo returned to the front of the plane. “What was that hand action the boy did?”

“He wasn’t even wearing a Pentecost shirt. You notice that? The hand shape is my signature move. I invented it when we started doing Splint Licker live. Back in seventy-two. A long time ago. Profane hand architecture, fake goat slaughters, small fires if we can get the venue to allow it. A day in the life of Pentecost Hammer. We built an entire genre on sludge and Satanism. And of course there’s the makeup.”

“Do you wear face makeup like –?”

“Don’t say it. Don’t say their name. We did makeup first. They copied us.” He thought for a moment. “They did it better.”

“Oh. Wait. Do you wear the black and white spiral makeup? That kind of hypnotic looking spiral?”

“You do know us.”

“I remember. I thought you were called Hell Wing.”

“No. No! That’s the name of our third album. Why do people do that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s been like that since VH-1 captioned all of our videos wrong.”

The drink cart finally arrived and Vinny ordered “a small amount of grape juice and only a few crackers.” I ordered a Bloody Mary. I could tell Vinny was saying a prayer before taking his morning snack.

“For over forty years we’ve been doing everything in our power to convince the world we plug our guitars directly into the devil’s cerebral cortex. Then the next guys come along, even darker than we are, Sabbath, Rainbow, Maiden, Gwar, and we have to figure out something worse. It just gets worse and worse. Now, little kids like that come up to me and pretend like they’re going down on Mother Mary. Hopefully they’ll never even realize what it means.

“Probably a lot of people don’t. Every day I wake up and ask for forgiveness for generations of, at best, ridiculous bullshit, and at worst the assisted damnation of probably hundreds of thousands of people. I slit a fake goat’s throat and hump a dragon on stage and go to bed wondering if He could ever take mercy on my soul. And then, during the day…it’s all part of the show.”

I found myself thinking: sounds like a damn good show. Sorry I missed Schlobbityfest.

“And here’s the worst part.” He looked at the couple, who were re-watching their movie now. “I could never tell anyone the truth if I didn’t want to be kicked out of the only business I’ve ever been in in my entire life. A group of mid-60s wannabe Satanist showmen working the festival circuit and cutting discounts on eco-friendly tote bags in a merchandise booth next to a corndog stand. Depressed?”

He reached into the deep pocket of his dark green military jacket and pulled out a pack of nicotine gum. “I can’t do this,” he said, popping a piece of gum into his mouth.

“In a couple of hours I’m going to finally meet my 30-year-old daughter, who I’ve never shared one word with. If she knows as much about me as I do her, she has no clue who I am. And if she knows about me what everyone else does, she still doesn’t have a clue. But she’ll think she does.”

He was crumpling the beverage napkin over and over in his left hand.

“You’ve never met your adult daughter?”

He shook his head. “A few weeks ago we were packing our gear after a show at an abandoned zoo outside Mexico City. Weird show. We performed in an old steel-barred lion’s cage; full set, full smoke, full fire. A teenage kid conducted a pyrotechnics fireworks display on top of the cage. Stu got a little too naked, apparently. As we played, the audience shrank and shrank. Anyway. As we were loading the trailer, Omar handed me a letter. ‘Remember Laureen?’ he said.

“Laureen. When I heard her name and saw the letter, it was like I’d been shot from a cannon. My body went dark and then exploded back into light a mile above the zoo. For a second it was like my entire life was made only of thoughts of her. I couldn’t feel them, but I could see my hands were shaking. I tried to hide it, but Omar saw and he laughed and patted me on the shoulder, which, trust me, is not like him.

“On the 1980 tour, she joined us in San Diego. She was a friend of someone’s friend. Then, one morning in Cleveland, she disappeared. Not a word. I checked with the hotel receptionist, walked down the street. I even showed her polaroid to people in the park across the street. She was gone. It had been thirty-six total days. That was it. Sometimes it feels like an eternity. Sometimes I can’t remember it at all.

“Before I even opened the letter, I knew I was probably a father. I just didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, or something worse. But Laureen answered that in the first line. ‘Congratulations!’ in big letters at the top. ‘It’s a girl. Well, she’s a woman now.’ I don’t have any kids. Any other kids. I’ve never had a girlfriend for more than a year.

“Her name is Nora. If I had a picture, I’d show you. Laureen wouldn’t send me one. Hope she doesn’t look too much like me. She’s older today than Laureen had been when we knew each other.”

He kept on talking and I slurped my bloody mary.

“Thirty years old and all my daughter likely knows about me is that I’m a serial goat murdering maniac with a devil fetish and fucked up hair. I don’t think she’ll recognize me if I’m not wearing that damn makeup. Speaking of which. Don’t have much time now.” He sat in silence, eyes going in and out of focus. He stared into some distant, invisible place, somewhere in the near future or distant past. He tapped his foot nervously. “Almost out of eyeliner.”

He stood up. On his tiptoes, he took his bag from the overhead compartment and went into the restroom.  

As Vinny applied his hypnotic demon makeup in the airplane toilet, I was touched by a kind of hollow feeling. I couldn’t identify why. And I was trying to define it when the man and the boy in the Cannibal Corpse shirt came back for the autograph. I was tempted to tell them that Vinny had been raptured into heaven, but I just pointed to the bathroom instead.

“Shit,” said the dad. “We’re gonna be landin’ soon. We’ll catchem on the way out.”

I didn’t know how long face makeup took to apply, but Vinny was in the restroom for longer than I would have guessed. The announcement was made that the plane would be starting its descent. I looked back to the restroom, and the door was still locked. I thought he must be going all out, making sure the makeup was thick and looking exactly as it did on the album covers.

A flight attendant knocked on the door and said, “Excuse me. We need everyone in their seat.” I saw the married couple in the row across the aisle. They were asleep with their headphones on, drooling on each other. The cherubs and imps were distracted by the view out the window, attempting to spot alligators in the Everglades. It occurred to me that Vinny booked a seat in the last row for this — so he could sit behind everyone and not have to deal with gawkers on the plane. I heard the accordion restroom door open.

Not wanting to be one of those gawkers, I looked straight ahead as he took his seat and fastened his seatbelt. He was silent.

I looked at Vinny’s face. He looked at me, eyes wide. His triangular halo was pulled back in a ponytail, and there was not a speck of makeup on him. He wore a small gold cross around his neck. His eyes went back to normal.

In his coarse voice, small and spiked like a hard, brown burr, he said, “Maybe she never found out who I was.”

We were the last two off the plane. The father and son caught him as we exited the jetway. I looked at him as I passed and he looked to me. As he was signing the boy’s shirt, he gave me a nod, I believe of understanding. Backrow compadres, desert children, navigating this strange life.

I saw them lined up against a wall beside a baggage claim carousel. Laureen and Nora and two children. Nora did look like her father. She wore a Pentecost Hammer T-shirt, 1980 tour. Her hair was dyed black, long and straight. The two kids, a boy and a girl, stood on either side of her. Each of them wore black and white spiral face makeup. They craned their necks around the passengers heading toward the exits, looking for him.

Vinny found them there. He put out his hand to introduce himself. She shook it slowly, awe-struck. She went down to her knees and spoke to the children. She pointed to her shirt and pointed to Vinny, who smiled at them. In unison, the two looked to him, held their hands to their hexing faces, and stuck out their tongues.

Vinny closed his eyes.