Scratch Fever Read Online Free PDF

big—was still in his booth, waiting for his mythical phone call. She decided to find out. She’d have plenty of time; this song went on for nearly ten minutes. She wandered back through the club, nodding as fans touched her arm and made comments about the sad fact that the Nodes were splitting, and then she was in the bar, where the big sandy-haired guy was sitting in the booth, talking intensely with a woman.
    A woman in white with a black cardigan and tinted glasses and a beautiful face and—even seated in a booth it was obvious—a beautiful body.
    Suddenly the cigarette was burning her throat I knew there was a reason I quit these fucking things , she thought, and went up to the bar and put the cig out in an ashtray up from the bottom of which a little picture of Bob Hale stared. Standing next to her at the bar were two young women.
    Toni had seen these women before; they had been to hear the Nodes at the Ramp in Burlington a few months ago, part of a group of half a dozen hard, hoody-looking bitches, one of whom had been attracted to Jon, and vice versa. She was one of the two at the bar, a lanky brunette about nineteen, in jeans and jeans jacket and a Nodes T-shirt; lots of eye makeup, and smoking a cigarette.
    The other woman was in her early twenties, medium height, boyish build—nothing remarkable, other than the close-set beady eyes, the lump of a nose, the thick lips with permanent, humorless sneer, the dishwater blonde hair greased back in a ducktail, the black leather jacket and red T-shirt and jeans, cigarette dangling from the Presleyesque lips, a hand on the other girl’s shoulder.
    Toni couldn’t remember their names, but she did remember that the night Jon and the brunette had spent a break in the band’s van, the beauty with the ducktail had come up and smiled at Jon during the next break and, cleaning her nails with a switchblade, told Jon if he ever touched Darlene ( that was the first girl’s name; what was the second one’s?) again, she would cut his balls off and hang ’em over her rearview mirror. Jon hadn’t argued with her. He’d tried to make a joke out of it later, about what a cornball creep that dyke was, doing her Sha Na Na routine. But it hadn’t come off: Jon knew the dyke had meant what she said.
    Terrific, Toni thought It wasn’t enough somebody shows up from the part of Jon’s past that included that thief Nolan; the dyke and Darlene had to turn up, too. Wonderful.
    She ducked back into the club. Jon was still playing his organ solo, getting ready to let Roc take over on guitar.
    “Light My Fire”—the baroque opening, anyway—had been the first thing she’d ever heard Jon play on the organ. She’d been in a music store in Iowa City—the Sound Pit—looking at PA equipment with some of those jerks in her old band, Dagwood, and Jon was playing a Crumar portable organ, asking the clerk if he knew anywhere he could find an old Vox Super Continental. The clerk was trying to sell Jon a Moog synthesizer, telling him nobody played combo organ anymore, and Jon was saying, “Bullshit, the punk and new wave bands are all using old Vox and Farfisas.”
    When she heard that she knew she’d found a kindred spirit. She started up a conversation with him, and soon they were having a drink at the Mill, a bar in downtown Iowa City, and then they were in bed at his apartment, or anyway the room he kept on the bottom floor of the antique shop he’d inherited from his uncle, a shop that had been closed since the uncle’s death.
    Rock ’n’ roll, it seemed, was not Jon’s first love. He lived in a cartoonist’s studio, with drawing board, boxes of comic books, posters of comic strip characters like Dick Tracy and Batman and Tarzan, some framed original strips, making a gray-walled, cement-floored former storeroom a four-color shrine to comic art. Even the finely carved antique headboard of the bed they were in had some drawings tacked to it—Jon’s own work, and good work it