Black Hole Blues
"Patrick Wensink is a joyful writer who draws memorable characters." --Evan Mandery, author of Q and First Contact
J. Claude Caruthers is country music’s biggest star and Kenny Rogers’ worst nightmare.
J. Claude hasn’t slept for weeks. This insomnia comes courtesy of his quest to complete Nashville’s most ambitious project since Willie Nelson sculpted the Venus de Milo from rolling papers soaked in Coors beer: Caruthers is writing a love song for every woman’s name on Earth.
But that plan goes straight to hell when his estranged physicist brother creates a black hole. Now the two must patch things up to prevent the apocolypse, finish J. Claude's songwriting odyssey and still find time to whoop Kenny Rogers' ass.
[Note I recently apologized to Kenny on Youtube.]
Enjoy a sample chapter on the house:
CHAPTER ONE
Someone once said: “Being a genius is a real shot in the nuts. Shit’s exhausting as all hell.”
That someone was country music legend J. Claude Caruthers.
When said philosophical nugget was scratched into his autobiography, Nashville’s Shakespeare, Caruthers had no idea how true it was. He just thought it sounded cool.
Recently, that genius swallowed every ounce of the singer’s energy until he was a sleepwalking shell of a man. The exhaustion was so powerful, so numbing, he barely noticed Judy yanking off his scruffy boot.
See, Claude hadn’t slept for more than a week because that genius was currently suffocating beneath the greatest artistic achievement in Nashville history. Well, at least since Willie Nelson sculpted a Venus de Milo from rolling papers soaked in Coors beer.
When that boot finally slipped free, J. Claude’s tour bus was pounding down the road. Nighttime highway lights peeked through crushed velvet curtains and disappeared across the carpet. The singer’s bedroom occupied the cruiser’s rear and was draped from ceiling to floor in purple. It’d been nearly thirty years since the quarters were redecorated and they had barely been cleaned during that span.
Judy popped off the boot and fell backward onto Claude’s bed. The publicist, several decades younger than the wrinkled star, was a leggy dream with soft red hair now spread across the pillow. This was a treat since her locks were normally twisted up like a tight coil of copper wire. J. Claude oozed a long glance at her tiny feet, thin ankles and girlishly small hands. The five-time Country Musician of the Year made a big show of licking his lips.
Claude’s black sideburns were fading grey and his bones ached. But the songster didn’t notice when his heart got to beating like that. He assumed the handsomeness discussed in Nashville’s Shakespeare—rugged good looks that made the Marlboro Man feel “downright gay”—were responsible for Judy’s seductive tumble. His mind’s green lights flashed to crank up that famed Caruthers Charm.
Even though the exhausted flesh around them was puffy and discolored from insomnia, his eyes managed to sparkle with jumping jacks of trouble. “Take off your dress,” he said. “Stay a while.”
“No, thanks, my dress is fine,” she glowered and stood, finding sea legs as the bus swayed. Judy swept crumbs and cigarette ash from that blue cotton dress with a sigh. “Some days, Claude, you are like gum in my hair.” She tossed the boot in his direction.
“Oooh, that sounds kinky. I could get into that.”
Purple braided ceiling tassels, coated in three decades of nicotine, beat into the publicist’s head. Her stomach tensed. When J. Claude’s eggplant bedspread, violet wallpaper and lilac carpet mixed with the bus’ motion, she still ached with nausea, even after all these years.
Judy wanted to deliver a Hall of Fame scowl. She wanted to make Claude cry.
Instead, she settled for her natural reaction of pity, marveling at her boss’ face, weathered by decades of smoky clubs and all-night gigs. “You have an interview. His name is Martin Dobson. He’s riding along until we get to Nashville. I’m going to patch him over to you.” She pointed at the dilapidated intercom system that was pretty hot shit back when the bus was new.
“Aw, relax,” J. Claude hopped down from the window seat. His strut was cracked and dry with beef jerky stiffness. His every movement was a faded copy of its once suave self. “Sit back down on the bed. Let’s me and you have a one-on-one business meeting first.”
The singer eyed a pinpoint scar on her nose: the telling remains of a long-removed piercing. Caruthers wondered once again if it was a diamond stud, a cute little hoop or a chrome ball. Who knew, because the carefree girl who once fit behind a nose ring was long gone. In her place was a woman strict with schedules, marketing agendas and Billboard chart figures.
Her only carefree moments were spent attached to a coffee cup. Strong, black java left a flavor in her mouth. She loved that taste.
“How about you act like a decent human being and let Mr. Dobson into your lair?” Judy’s face bunched and her arm made a dramatic swoop.
Claude’s bright green eyes lit with possibility, the way they always did upon discovering yet another distraction from life’s work. “I put the lay in lair, if you know what I—”
“Claude,” she clapped her hands for attention.
A shocked trail of cigarette smoke slithered from his lips.
“It’d be good for publicity if you spoke man-to-man.” She snatched a thermal coffee mug off a shelf and drank. Closed eyes. And breathed.
The guitar strummer painfully thumped onto the mattress. A skeleton of springs showed through the bed. He propped himself against a wood paneled wall where several holes had been patched with dull silver tape.
“No time,” he lifted Rusty from the floor and plucked a sour G chord. It seemed his guitar could never make up its mind about staying in tune, constantly wobbling back and forth.
Rusty, J. Claude’s maple acoustic, had seen better days. Caruthers refused to have any crew member so much as change a string since the Alice-to-Gwendolyn tour of the early 80s. Three decades of spilled beer, honky-tonk smoke and filthy finger picking covered the instrument in a thin layer of tar. “Now Judy, maybe you’re one of those mentally retarded kids I donate so much money to, but if not, you should know I’m writing the most important damn song of my life here. Probably the most important song the world’s ever known. Silent Night, Ground Control to Major Tom, Footloose, they’re nothing compared to this and you know it. Quit trying to distract me.”
“Those kids aren’t retarded, they’re orphans. And you’ve been writing one song for three years,” her voice was bored, tired of arguing this fact every day. “And I really doubt it’s more important than Silent Night.” She shook her head and in a deep grumble whispered: “Probably not even Footloose.”
Claude offered the grungy guitar to Judy. “You want to try and be Nashville’s Shakespeare?” He tipped back his cowboy hat as if he and the redhead were nearing a gunfight. The hat carried as much gunk as the guitar and its snakeskin band was shredded. Caruthers was careful not to tip things too far and expose his bald spot.
Judy popped a shallow laugh. “Nobody calls you Shakespeare but you.” She swayed with the bus’ movements and waited for an answer.
“Somebody must, I mean it’s airbrushed on the side of the damn bus.”
Her eyes rolled and she shifted shoulder blades. Caruthers kept the room hot and the dress clung to her moist skin.
Judy took another relaxing breath and a quick coffee sip, reminding herself this was the life she’d chosen. There probably were better publicity jobs out there, but something kept her on board. Maybe it was when Claude showed frequent glimmers of innocence, those little dashes of sweetness once in a while. Or maybe it was because his artistic powers were still carved from granite. Love him or hate him, Claude was fun to watch up on stage.
But, still fuming, Judy asked for the millionth time how this was better than a corner office with Daddy’s firm? She couldn’t help but laugh at this mess.
Claude’s attention went back to the fretboard. “Wipe that smirk off your face before I wipe it off with a silver Colt.” Claude plucked the acoustic’s fattest string with one hand and torqued its tuning peg with the other.
“Boss, I wasn’t smiling,” Judy said with a pair of flat, unhappy lips.
J. Claude wished she had smiled. The only truth in his autobiography was a passion for making people smile. Especially ladies. Judy seemed like the one woman he couldn’t crack.
“Plus, the judge took away your gun license. Took away your stupid arsenal, too. Remember?”
He strummed a chord and sniffed at the bacon frying in the bus’ tiny kitchen. “Well, call old mister black robe and sign me up for one of those special twenty-four hour gun licenses.”
There was a beat where Judy squinted at the star. He returned the look.
“Let me get this straight, you want me to acquire a gun license that doesn’t even exist, so you can shoot me?” Judy steadied herself against the wall, the bus lights flickered. “Again?”
“What? Am I on trial? You can’t take me to court twice. That’s double jeopardy. Plus, the shooting was an accident. How was I supposed to know you’d be walking past my target?”
“You set up your target in front of my motel room.” Her forehead and cheeks were red as her hair. A thick vein crawled up her neck. “That’s your idea of an accident?”
“Bing—” he picked Rusty’s string. “Bing—” he cleared his throat. Nashville’s Shakespeare plucked it again and sang with golden vocal cords: “Biiiiiiiiingo.”
It pained Judy to admit it, but J. Claude’s voice still sounded good. It still made steel workers cry and grandmothers turn their panties into white cotton rain storms over the stage.
Those pipes were, however, not a secret to J. Claude.
Nashville’s Shakespeare dissected various elements that created a singing voice so pure and perfect Caruthers once dreamt God requested the country legend sing Heaven’s national anthem. According to the biography, the Big Man Upstairs proclaimed J. Claude’s pipes to be his greatest invention—better than catfish, chewing tobacco and deer hunting, combined. Rumor, or just Nashville’s Shakespeare, claimed Kenny Rogers was still burned up about that one, since Rogers assumed his vocals were superior. The book went to great lengths to sprinkle gasoline and lit-matches over their rivalry. One chapter, titled, “Seventy-eight Reasons Kenny Rogers is a Pussy,” included illustrations of the snow-bearded Texan wearing a dress and sucking his thumb.
“I’ll get right on the phone with Judge Tompkins.” Judy opened the curtain and watched midnight lights flash past. “For now, put down Rusty and talk to this reporter before another writer, with publicity you desperately need after Missoula, runs off and prints something nasty.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Claude’s voice evaporated as he squinted at the guitar. A familiar cramp found his belly—the same one that stabbed whenever J. Claude privately begged the filthy guitar for help.
That ugly feeling started back in 1977. It was once an inkspot, a dash of pepper, a nasty speck of blackness in his belly where people normally get tickles of joy and happiness. But that tiny punctuation mark of dread grew with each song he wrote, until it swallowed him whole.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” J. Claude took a comforting breath, knowing he only had one more song to write before he did something awful to end these black feelings.