They say it was a dragon. Or a snake. Whatever it was it wrapped around the body of Jed Jones slowly, coiling up out of nowhere methodically, it’s evil head, lip-slipping tongue, gargantuan body fence pole thick. Jones was on the ground staring up at the many colored lights, blurred out by now, blowing yellows, curving greens, one big foggy blue. The sound, they say, was like a never ending split of thunder rolling across the plains, rolling but never stopping. Nobody had ever heard it before, this thing, this dirge, this something, but it was coming from Jones, out of him, dipping and trading longings within itself. Far in the distance it would go, forever distance, and then slip back into him a simple container for a too massive sound only to return to the distance as far as you could go.
“I think I’m dead. I think I’m dead. I think I’m dead. I think I’m dead. Whohoowhoawhoa…whoa. Heyyeyyay. I think I’m dead. I think I’m dead…” A croak? A cry? Perhaps a whimper beside the electric roar emanating from his fingers.
Twenty-two thousand people had paid tickets to see him this night in Memphis, Tennessee. Jones and Moxy and Rose and Kenneth and Keith, the bass player, who later died of a heroin overdose in New York City. Twenty-two thousand people who believed that the band Moxy Priestess was perhaps the greatest rock band to have ever existed. Jones lay curled up at the front of the stage, his head beside the giant Marshall stack, his low groaning entering a headpiece microphone, Kenneth leaving his drum set to crouch beside him, to be with him, while the snake twisted and slithered, squeezing the very life out of him.
“Noooooooo!” A massive lament was suddenly released, screamed from the fan in seat 43B in the balcony and heard by only a handful of people due to the roar of the crowd and the world of sound that had become Jed Jones. Dink Merrick burst out of his row, slipping on the stairs, falling ten feet, finding his feet again and then continuing on. He knocked three people into the seats on the way down from the balcony including the usher who tried to stop him. He turned into the archway and found himself in the lobby where he continued to run until he entered another archway, and flew down the stairs knocking over more people including one man who saw him coming and, although punching Merrick square on the jaw, did not stop him, past the first section and then on to the floor, ploughing over several ushers, some of whom were quite large, and on to the floor, through floor seats, a living rift forming in this world of chaos until finally making it to the stage through a line of stage thugs who were ready for him yet none of whom could contain him and on to the stage where the man with the shotgun, his father, was just about to pull the trigger on Jones, had the gun pointed directly at the head of Jones and not the dragon.
“Noooooooooo!”
Merrick leaped upon Jones and began to beat the dragon with all of his might, ripping and tearing at the flesh, pounding, pounding, pounding, but the beast would not let Jones go. His father had suddenly disappeared. There would be no more violence here. But nothing was working. He could not wrest the snake off of Jones. Could not beat the life out of such a monster, but he continued anyway, his fist pounding and pounding. He would continue until it was dead.
Then suddenly the world went gray for Merrick. A peacefulness came over him and before he went fully unconscious the last thing that he saw was Moxy herself, the original Moxy Priestess before her name became also the name of the band, staring down at him with pure hatred in her eyes. The trademark point of her high heel was lodged three inches into the flesh of his neck, and it made him dizzy. He didn’t know now if he had saved Jones. He knew nothing at all anymore except that Jed Jones was under him and Moxy Priestess was over him and his father was gone.
They removed the shoe through surgery for fear it had hit an artery. The LSD overdose was almost as big a concern.
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