by Richard Christian Matheson
“I’m always here,
please never cry.
You may refuse,
you might ask why
One life as two,
two lives as one.
I am your rose,
you are my sun.”
5:47 PM
Daddy is still. He stuck himself and he’s sleeping bad. Blowtorching; fevered. His veins blister and rush. All the rust and suffering is going for his throat. He twists and moans, soaking in nightmares. It’ll hit Baby soon. His dyed hair is crepe black on white, casket skin.
I’ve been on the road with them for three days.
I picked up the tour in LA as it slid slow and sensual across America, coming up that Gibson-neck heartland and making people feel again. Be alive again.
All the major venues, SRO. Critical raves. Brilliant this, brilliant that. “. . . wonderment.” “. . . perfection.” “. . . horror.” I covered Elvis in ’76 through his Australian/Japan tour for the Stone, and it feels the same. Powerful, out of control.
Sacred.
Nashville is close. Light quilts feed the ground; warm veins. I hit PLAY and walk over to sit beside Daddy and Baby.
“How you feelin’ Baby? Can we talk a little more?”
We’ve already laid down five hours’ worth. Scholling. Family. Bones. We keep our voices low. Daddy talks in his sleep. She stares out the Lear’s swim-mask window, cradles freckled fingers. Nods.
“Let’s get a little more into some history. I’ve read you and Daddy met when you were thirteen . . .”
She fingers her 7 Up. Slips a delicate finger into hollowed cube, watches it melt; a momentary ring.
“I was just a little girl.”
Her blonde hair smells like apples. I tell her and she smiles. Her voice is soft. Gentle.
“I used to listen to Daddy sing when I was a kid. Had all his records. HE was all that made me happy.” Her accent is Kentucky; a calming sound. “My folks drank heavy, argued heavy. It was violent. Real violent.”
Her expression falls somewhere to its knees and weeps helplessly even though it barely changes. She looks at me, sad and happy.
“Daddy sang like an angel. Sounded a little like Hank Williams. I wore out every album I had. Learned to sing harmony that was perfect with him.” She whispers. “We’re not talking too loud are we? He has to sleep.”
Daddy moans a little. The coral bed inside his nervous system cuts him. Baby strokes his brow, kisses it.
“Okay, Daddy,” she whispers. “I’m here. I’m always here.”
I smile.
Baby nods, gently hums the melody to “I’m Always Here,” and I remember hearing the haunting ballad when I was losing my marriage; drowning. It soared with mournful, aching confession and always made me cry.
“I loved that song first time I heard Daddy sing it. That’s when I knew for sure I’d do anything for him.” She looks off. “Literally anything.”
The Lear is slashing clouds and they bleed grey. We’ll be landing in Nashville in ten minutes. Daddy and Baby go on at eight-thirty, right after the Oak Ridge Boys. I have orchestra pit, dead center. Rolling Stone wants it all from up close. The faces. The music.
The poignant impossibility.
“After Daddy won the Grammy for best album in ’81, it all started going bad. We’ve all heard about his marriage, failing money troubles. Why did he lose it all?”
I’m already tinkering with the header for the piece. But it needs work. Something that plays with “seamless.” I’m not happy with it.
Baby shades a palm over tired eyes; a priest closing the lids on a dead face. She thinks back, seeing the photo album that always hurts, the one that’s always half-open; memories bound and trapped. A phrase occurs to me: “terrible questions, sad answers.” From one of Daddy’s early songs, “Being Left Ain’t Right.”
“. . . drugs. All kinds. Daddy’s still fighting it. It’s hard for him. He’s so sensitive.” She takes his sleeping hand as a nightmare wraps him in barbed wire. “But more than that. I guess you’d really have to call it loneliness. From the deepest part of himself. First time I managed to get backstage and talk to Daddy, I could see his eyes were like . . . wounds. It was more than being an addict. It was . . .” She licks girlish lips. “I don’t know, the despair. I suppose. Everybody he cared about was gone. His heroes. His family. They’d all left, abandoned him.”
She sipped more of the 7 Up. Wiped her soft mouth with a “DADDY AND BABY ’88 TOUR” napkin.
“I wanted to be there for him. So . . .”
“So, you followed him.”
“Yes.”
“Everywhere?”
“Yes.”
“Like a groupie?”
“People said it. I never was that. I was his friend. His mother. Later, it’s true . . . his lover.”
I pull out a cassette, Baby and Daddy’s first album, MOTHER AND LOVER. Baby takes it, feels it in her curious, childlike hands.
“He dedicated all the songs to me. ‘Course the biggest was . . .”
“. . . ‘I’m Always Here.’”
“‘I’m Always Here,’ yes. It was our biggest seller until the new album. But you can never feel the same as the first one. The thrill.”
We’ve gotten to the hard part.
About the procedure.
I choose words carefully, watching her features for reaction, as if staring at a radar screen, checking for impending collisions.
“The question is . . .very personal.”
“It’s all right. Go ahead.”
“. . . did it hurt?”
She smiles the way some people do when they’re in terrible pain.
“Yes, it was extremely painful. After, that is. It hadn’t been done before. But the doctor was reassuring . . . he’d been researching . . . in the same area of . . . procedure.”
“Only in reverse.”
“That’s right.”
“How long did it take?”
“Almost two days. Thirty-seven hours.”
She laughs a little. “You’re probably wondering how I talked Daddy into it, right? Most folks wonder that.”
She grows serious, once again.
“When I met him, he told me he had nothing left and nowhere to go. He was sick. Owed money to agents, promoters, the government . . . it was awful.”
“And he was ill.”
“That’s why he finally agreed. The doctors said he would die. He was weak. His whole body was like . . . a crumbling statue. It was just a matter of time.” Her voice becomes loving, confessional. “I had to help. No one else cared like me.”
I check through my notes. Lawsuits. Divorce papers, bankruptcy bullshit. The guy’s life hit the wall at a hundred, and the windshield cut him into bloody, monthly payments that were impossible.
“He was dying. You have to understand. This giant talent laying in the hospital bed like some frail . . . child. The man I’d loved since I was a little girl. I gave blood, organs . . . whatever they needed.
“It wasn’t enough.” I was reading from an article in Newsweek’s “Medical Breakthroughs” page. Couple years back.
She shakes her head. No, it wasn’t enough.
The Lear starts down at a crash angle. I kill the tape recorder, return to my seat, click my belt on. I glance over and see Baby talking softly into Daddy’s ear, combing his hair with maternal fingers. She kisses his colorless hand and I see he’s speeding, sweating; tissues beyond repair.
It starts to hit Baby as the jet lands, and she cries on Daddy’s shoulder like a little girl, a faint agony tearing her in half.
9:15 PM
Scalpers are getting rich.
The guy behind me is standing and stomping. “Yeah, Baby, we luuvvv you, hon!”
I turn when he whistles. He’s some six-pack crammed into a fat Stetson, and he’s clapping and whooping it up along with the rest of the screaming Grand Ole Opry.
My photographer is Green Beret, squat-crawling across the footlights like they were landmines. He’s snapping Nikon slices of Daddy and Baby taking bows.
They’re dressed in sparkly, Country Western outfits that cost over ten thousand dollars. I asked them at their Marriott penthouse, when they were dressing for tonight’s show; a story I can’t begin to convey.
By then, I will tell you, Baby was completely high. But it doesn’t hit her as hard as Daddy. His system swallows most of it. She told me after the pain subsides, she feels numb and giddy. Sometimes paranoid.
Daddy told her he was doing his best to cut the stuff off. Leave it. Drive past it, like a hideous accident you never wanted to see.
But it’ll take a few more months. Their doctors are furious. Everyone is trying to understand. Baby helps them when they see the love she has for Daddy.
Baby said it was worth it for her to wait.
A dozen rosy kliegs bouquet on the empty stage and, as the two step into its calming circle, they thank the crowd; bow more. Baby smiles.
Daddy looks serious, deeper; sadder.
Then, he softly touches the guitar strings at his waist and a radiant chord begins the trance. The audience feels it. I feel it. My photographer, changing film, stops moving, stares up at the stage.
Daddy starts to sing a low, suffering lullaby and Baby joins him, a foamy, background harmony. He sings his half; looking into her eyes.
“I need to tell you,
I would’ve died.
To say it outright
should bruise my pride.
But without your love
to feed my life.
without your heart,
at my side. . . .
Honey, it’s all for nothing.”
I look around and see tears fill a thousand eyes as Baby twists her head to look at Daddy. They sing the chorus together, as if cutting themselves open and mixing their blood.
“I’m always here,
please never cry.
You may refuse,
You might ask why
One life as two,
two lives as one.
I am your rose,
you are my sun.”
The melody is slow, beautiful; feeling.
The notes are inevitable and Baby’s smile is a twenty-year-old Madonna looking at her perfect child. As they sing, their separate bodies now joined as one, which feeds Daddy, he is singing pure and strong like the old days. Like when he got up there with Hank Williams and Merle Haggard and Carl Perkins and knocked everybody dead.
How the surgeon was able to fuse their two bodies, allowing Baby’s younger, healthier fluids and strength to nurture Daddy’s ailing flesh, has been discussed on talk shows, analyzed on news shows, lampooned on comedy shows. It’s shocking and touching to people. Repugnant and life affirming. Everybody has a reaction.
I found it a hideous misuse of medical technique when I first heard about it. A grotesque immorality. Before I’d met Baby and Daddy. Until I saw the love she felt for him and the total dependency he couldn’t hide, no matter how strong or renown he once was. Bathed in the warmth of her giving and her love, he had returned to being a child, carried not in her womb but outside it.
The lights have dimmed to a single spot, and Daddy and Baby are singing a cappella, staring into one another’s eyes; lovers, friends, mother and child.
“I’m always here,
please never cry.
You may refuse,
you might ask why.”
Throughout the Ole Opry House, couples are embracing, looking in silhouette like countless Daddy’s and Baby’s, joined in unguarded vulnerability. As I look around, I fight remembering how wonderful it was to be in love and hold my wife close when we were going strong.
I look up and see Daddy, and he’s smiling for the first time all day. Baby whispers she loves him, as the crowd screams for more, and I suddenly notice how alone I feel.
“One life as two,
two lives as one.
I am your rose,
you are my sun.”
The applause swirls around me and I start to cry, wanting so bad to be close to someone again.
R. C. Matheson is a #1 bestselling author and screenwriter/producer The New York Times calls “. . . a great horror writer.” He has created, written, and produced acclaimed TV series, mini-series and films, including cult favorite Three O’clock High and Stephen King’s Battleground which won two Emmys. Matheson has worked with Steven Spielberg, Tobe Hooper, Nicholas Pileggi, Joe Dante, Roger Corman, Mel Brooks and many others. He has adapted novels by Dean Koontz, Whitley Strieber, Roger Zelazny, Stephen King, H.G. Wells and George R. R. Martin for film. Matheson’s short stories appear in his collections, Scars And Other Distinguishing Marks, Zoopraxis, Dystopia, and 130 anthologies, including many Best of the Year volumes. His novels include Created By and The Ritual of Illusion. Matheson is a professional drummer and studied privately with CREAM’s Ginger Baker.