Shriek of the Week, fiction, Nick Mamatas

Jeremy Spokane—a mondegreen more than a pseudonym—had plenty of reasons to dislike metal. To despise it. There was that “Say You Love Satan” guy out over in Northport who killed someone over a drug deal, and how every teenage dirtbag on the island, from Seagate to Montauk, actually loved being implicated. The long-hairs loved it when the cops beat the shit out of them too; chicks dig battle scars and contusions. Jeremy, his hair long in the front, great swoopy bangs over his eyes, was less enthusiastic about being called a devil-worshiper and getting punched in the face. There were the endless guitar solos—virtuosos, sure, but in the service of what? Not even Satan, just baby baby baby and sometimes flowers sad in the rain, girl. Power ballads to play during tearful slow dances at prom in memoriam of Jenny and the Craigster who got their heads chopped off in a drunk driving incident two Saturdays prior while on their way back from Laser Zeppelin at the planetarium.

And then there was the face full of birdshot, like something out of a Roald Dahl story. Jeremy and a few others of his ilk had carved out a small and pissy section of the school’s outdoor smoking area which was otherwise dominated by the Iron Maiden T-shirt crowd. A freshman transfer from way out in Ridge, a school district so remote they had a chicken coop that produced the eggs for their junior high breakfast program, brought his father’s shotgun to school. What had been his name? Dewey. Had Dewey had slightly better taste in music, he would have been a gormless Advanced Dungeons & Dragons asshole painting Conan the Barbarian in art club, but Dewey liked metal and Dewey didn’t like being a chubby kid with freckles and Dewey’s mother probably had gotten drunk every night of her pregnancy, so Dewey brought his father’s rifle to school hidden under his duster, showed it off to the boys, and then decided to point it at Jeremy’s crowd and tell them to get lost.

“What?” Jeremy had said. It took a second to juggle his cigarette and his headphones and then Dewey pulled the trigger and then there was a lot of screaming. Mostly Dewey screaming, howling like David Coverdale or something, about blood and the sky and mistakes and disintegrating quails and such. Jeremy remembered just sitting there, suddenly no longer able to see Dewey’s pumpkin grin, suddenly no longer able to feel his own face.

Two days later Jeremy awoke. He could see out of his right eye, could feel his face again but burning and itching like deer ticks had crawled in between skin and skull via the tear ducts, and he could hear the music. When the conditions were right—sinuses full of snot and teeth gritted—Jeremy could pick up WLIR via the shrapnel embedded in his skull. A reason to like metal.

WLIR was legendary. Who was playing The Smiths back then, or Depeche Mode, The Pixies? Nobody. And bands since forgotten: Chiefs of Relief, Hipsway, Voice of the Beehive. Can you hum a few bars? Didn’t think so. All these bands had songs that were WLIR’s famous Shriek of the Week at one point!

Jeremy’s parents wouldn’t spring for cable, so it was only the radio for him, and WLIR had a weak transmitter. Until that morning in the hospital, it had been endless fiddling with his clock radio while praying for sunspots to hear anything good.

One more reason to like metal. There was a lawsuit, a settlement, and suddenly Jeremy Spokane had the money to attend New York University in the city. The city, where Tower Records and CBGB’s and Kim’s Video and The Continental and the Limelight were open every night and Cozy Soup and Burger and Waverly Place Restaurant were open 24/7 and the legs of girls with little studs in their noses and jobs in the real-life music industry were open maybe two hours every Friday and Saturday night after a movie at the Quad Cinemas or Film Forum.

Or not. Jeremy had been shot in the face. Remember that video, the freeze frame of all the kids in white shirts splattered with red blood, looking shocked and dismayed? That’s the one. Who were they looking at? There you go. Jeremy was constantly chewing on painkillers, and not the kind you could make friends with by sharing. He was weird and slow, with a mug only an art history major with an emphasis on Cubism could love. A job stocking zines at Tower Records—including my own synthpop fanzine Keyboards/ Keening—was about as cool as it got with a BA in English Literature from NYU. Occasionally, he’d wake up to WSOU buzzing in his forehead; the goddamn metal station for Staten Island assholes. Jeremy would choke himself back to sleep with his belt.

Then WLIR went away, and Tower Records went away, all his music friends but me went away back to Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Columbus, Ohio, and Carson City, Nevada, where they had come from. I was also from Long Island; my home was also too close to return to, and I hadn’t even made the front page of Newsday back in high school. The literal closet bedroom he rented in an apartment with four roommates went away and then his parents went away and their little vinyl siding house in Lindenhurst sold for a few bucks so Jeremy Spokane could stay in the city even after everything that had made his nickname went away.

But he still needed a job, and the Village Voice delivered. A classified ad reading flâneur wanted for midnight strolls through the park.

You know, night-shift dog-walking for Big Law attorneys, arbitrageurs, plastic surgeons, other douchebag millionaires of the sort who jogged around the reservoir and fucked their Dominican nannies to the dulcet stylings of Metallica and Korn. No chance of meeting any real musicians at this gig. Joey Ramone always let his dog just shit on the floor. Thurston Moore too. Patti Smith lived upstate, Lou Reed in fucking Jersey.

Years of sultry summer nights and blistery Christmases on the streets, Jeremy holding dollar pizza slices over his head between bites as his clients yipped and jumped for the crusts. Dogs went away too, but there were always more to walk. The Village Voice went away, Joey Ramone and Lou Reed went away, then the city that never sleeps went away. COVID emptied it out. The dog-walking routes were empty of everyone, even the homeless, even the knots of craps players outside the bodegas, even the quartets of drunken ladies in clicky heels waving for cabs, and even the cabs.

Jeremy Spokane had license to walk thanks to four little chihuahuas who still needed walking and who happened to belong to one of the assistants to the assistant of Manhattan’s borough president, Mister Whatshisname. Even the blocks around the Port Authority were desolate, like a neutron bomb had hit the place. The people were gone, but the buildings remained. The cold snap was such that even the pigeons had retreated, the rats huddled in the steaming underground, and police ... Where were the police?

One frigid night, his face properly half-frozen and sinus cavities filled with gunk from please-God-let-this-not-be-the-’Rona, Jeremy’s ethmoid began buzzing.

The tune was familiar but the words were foreign.

Armagedon, ven armagedon.

Spanish. The chihuahuas were of no help.

And then the lyrics repeated, the words in a slightly different order. Jeremy sang them to me from memory, four stories beneath my feet.

“Jeremy,” I said. “This is an extremely long conversation to have over the building intercom. I’ve been standing here depressing the button for ten minutes.”

“But Nick ...” Jeremy said, tinny and distant and crackly, like a voice recorded on an Edison cylinder. “The song! What is it?” He hummed the bars.

“It’s Sunday,” I told him. “Like every day.”

“Oh! Yeah! Of course.” Then he asked, “Can I come up?”

“Even if it wasn’t literally illegal to have three people in the same room, the answer would be no,” I said.

“Three? Who’s there with you?”

“Let’s just say a Tinder date,” I said.

“You’re living dangerously, friend,” Jeremy said.

“If it’s armagedon,” I said, copying the Spanish inflection, “I don’t want to die alone in a studio apartment among my toilet paper stockpiles.” That part was true, but it’s not like I could do anything to help myself. Of course there were no Tinder dates. People weren’t even checking their phones for anything except the Worldometer death count. Every smiling face on the screen in my hand/ was frozen in time like something already dead. I made a mental note to write that thought down later. There was a lyric in there somewhere.

Jeremy buzzed me again the next night, and the night after that. He’d changed his normal route with the dogs in the hope of picking up another song with his broken face, and to chew the fat with me. And I couldn’t blame him too much. There was something more intimate about intercom chats than texting or calling or, my God, “Zooming” as we’d all just begun saying. Theoretically, I could put my spare keys in a sock and drop them out the window any time I wanted Jeremy to come up and introduce me to the chihuahuas. My neighbors wouldn’t dare leave their own apartments to challenge me on the no-pets policy or the little piles of dog shit in the hallway Jeremy would surely not be so diligent about picking up. One wayward exhalation from Jeremy could wipe out the entire building. If only!

And Jeremy had heard a few things, he said. On the second night, the utterance Where is my mind? eight times in a row, with howling in the background. A good song, and, frankly, a good question. Then, on the third night, a familiar riff on the piano shifting into power chords. He scatted the first bit to me: pom pom pom POM paaaahm dootdootdootdoot.

“Yeah, from every cartoon with a mustachioed villain in a top hat,” I said. “Mysterioso Pizzicato.”

“And the singer didn’t sound American, or British,” he said.

“Oh, ‘Date with—”

“’A Vampyre’,” he finished. “Screaming Tribesmen. From Australia.” Another WLIR Shriek of the Week, once upon a time.

On the fourth evening, Jeremy didn’t buzz me, and I didn’t notice. Let’s say I was busy all night, watching some international animated cinema about a most peculiar high school in Japan. All the days were blurring together in those months. On the fifth evening, Jeremy didn’t buzz me, and I did notice. I checked the temperature. Pretty warm, so he could have comfortably lingered down by the building’s entrance had he wanted to, but maybe warm enough that his sinuses were no longer conductive? March in New York always starts out cold, but heats up easily enough. I was trying to make pastitsio, like my papou used to. I had the spare time for once.

On the sixth night I went downstairs and walked to the corner and back. The sonic landscape of the city had changed. No salsa or hip-hop spilling out car windows, no rumble of the 4 train under my feet, no sighing delivery trucks, no people shouting or even shuffling past me. A nightbird flew by, twenty stories overhead, and I could hear its wings flapping. Maybe I heard the yippy bark of a small dog, maybe it was some other noise that before COVID would have just been smothered under everything else. What sound does a row house make as it settles into the bedrock? When I returned to my front door, I backed into the building.

On the seventh night, Jeremy Spokane started shrieking. He buzzed me, and then even before I got to the intercom by my door, I heard the bells of the apartments on either side of me going off.

“Let me up!”

“What?!”
“They’re going to kill me!”

I didn’t buzz him in. “I’m coming down.”

Nobody was going to kill Jeremy. There wasn’t anyone to kill Jeremy. The whole world was at home, afraid to touch their own faces, cross-examining every sniffle, dreaming every night of their lungs filling with jellified glass. I’m not the call-911 type. I grabbed my baseball bat, and as a disguise, a ball. If I encountered the last cop in New York, would he believe some solo midnight baseball practice, hitting fungos in the park? Jeremy was still howling into the speaker at me when I reached the elevator.

Waiting for me on the sidewalk was much of a chihuahua. It had been stomped to death, its head open and red like tomato paste slathered over egg shells. There was some yipping in the distance, and the skittering of long nails on asphalt. The other dogs. Maybe two of them. A car turned a distant corner.

It was otherwise quiet, but not as quiet as it had been the night before. I could hear breathing, blood running through veins, the displacement of the air from the sheer presence of people on the streets. I was sure I could. Were hallucinations a symptom of COVID? Was going crazy in general a symptom of COVID? Or just the result of COVID? Or just the result of living in New York during COVID?

I looked up at my building. Not even one open window, not one old lady peering down at the scene. Manhattan was truly in a medically induced coma. I noticed a streak of blood, a comet’s tail, leading to the dog’s body at my feet. Someone had dragged the chihuahua to my doorstep, then gave up on it.

The bat felt heavier in my hands. Lights, white then red then white again, painted the far end of the block. Lights, but no siren. A black and white, nice and slow.

“Nick!” It’s not possible to hiss a word with no sibilant phonemes. N’s a nasal and K a plosive, but somehow Jeremy managed to hiss my name. He was in the little alcove leading to the super’s basement apartment, under the bags of uncollected garbage, thirty units’ worth. His hands were bleeding; there was a chihuahua in his grip, its teeth sunk in flesh. I hid my bat behind my legs and shuffled down into the alcove. Luckily, I always wear all black, my mask was black and the garbage bags were all black, and my bat was dark too.

I squatted down; didn’t speak, didn’t turn to him. I could feel his hot breath on my cheek. If he had COVID, he had just given me COVID. Jeremy wasn’t a masker; nothing on the market could form a seal around his messed-up face anyway.

“I found them,” Jeremy said. “I found who was playing the music. It was a little personal FM transmitter, the kind you use to make the playlist on your phone play on your car radio if you want.”

“I think you have,” I said carefully, “COVID-induced delirium.”

“Then who killed the fucking dog?” Another unbelievable hiss, like the syllables were directly leaving the middle of his face.

“Uh... you?”

“No,” Jeremy said. “It was them.”

The patrol car drifted by. The sound of the tires filled the whole canyon of the block. The city abhors a vacuum.

“The cops killed that dog?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” I glanced over at him. He was just a pair of eyes in the dark. “Why?”

“They’ve got a little operation going on around the corner.”

“An operation.”

“Rolling homeless people, plucking COVID corpses clean, a couple of illegal aliens they’re whoring out. They’re smoking drugs in there too. It’s a little storefront business running out of the storage place. Right on East 62nd. I walked by them once too often, and some cop recognized the dogs. Decided I was a spy for the city. Don’t you ever walk to the other side of your block?”

I leaned over and whispered to him, “Nobody is allowed to leave their homes. I’m not a licensed midnight flâneur like you.”

“Listen...” Jeremy said, taking my face in his hands. I froze. His hands were warm, but it was strange—contact—and it got stranger when he lowered my mask with his thumbs and nudged my lips apart with them too and then clamped his mouth over mine.

It was a kiss, loud like Age of Chance, not acoustic like Prince. Jeremy’s hands slid to and covered my ears, he sucked my tongue into his mouth, pushed his flat smear of a nose against mine, and I heard it all. Everything reverberating in his head was echoing in mine. The police scanner and some cop saying find that deformed-ass fucker and a snatch of cellphone oh yes locked down here in London as well but that awful Bor— and someone sobbing, pleading, in Spanish and a harsh white Shut up!, and then like some bad TV show music supervisor was queuing up the first thing that came to mind, was Ian McCullough’s plaintive croon about sugar kisses.

The chihuahua between us had had enough. It burst free and ran into the street. Brakes squealed. Found ’im echoed in my head, then Jeremy broke the kiss and the audio connection. “That song was my favorite,” Jeremy said. Faster than I’d ever seen him move, he snatched my bat out of his hand and slid of the alcove.

I watched from the garbage pile. A cop got out of his cop car and he looked, except for the uniform, like... one of us. He didn’t have the big ethnic Italian or Irish face that only four generations of NYPD inbreeding down in Staten Island can create, nor the hawk-eye slick What are you looking at, faggot?! glare of an old-school Marine who lifted weights to Pantera. This cop, this particular cop, was thin but not built, could barely keep dyed black curls from peeking out from under his cap, and I swore he was sporting a soul patch. Cops already weren’t masking.

I could picture him, thirty years prior, running up a flight of steps with a milk crate full of vinyl in his arms, rushing to his 2 a.m. slot at the college radio station, up in, where? SUNY Purchase? No! Oneonta. Ten years after that waking up on the eleventh of September and bursting into tears and quitting the job his father got him at the window replacement factory in Bayside to join the National Guard. Then ten years ago, playing what, fucking Nirvana, for his toddler? No, “I Wanna Be Sedated” to a screaming six-year-old, and explaining to his Central Jersey wife the irony of doing so and her snapping Yeah! I know what irony is, Todd! and all the while telling himself that he was gonna change the system from within, that he was no sell-out. He was a good guy, making a difference.

He had his hand on his sidearm. Jeremy was marching up toward him.

“That’s our music!” Jeremy shouted. “It’s mine! How dare you play it! How dare you love it!”

The cop laughed. “You gotta be kidding me. That’s what you’re upset about? Heh heh, I’m fearing for my life.” He shook his head, drew his gun, and fired twice. The last chihuahua ran for it.

Jeremy just stood there. He glanced down at his chest, and the holes in it.

“I’ve been shot before,” he said. “I know I don’t have to fall down.”

Then Jeremy swung the bat and the cop’s head opened just like the first chihuahua’s had and he screamed and I howled and I realized that I was fucked fucked fucked and that the best thing that could happen to me now was the hospital, the intubation, the respirator, and waking up three months from tonight on the other side somehow, or not.

Book Shop: https://www.ebbooksellers.com/item/qHl97caDRCpgW7y8fTG4Pw

Amazon:  https://a.co/d/8ChkyDg

Author’s note: If you are reading this, you have either pre-ordered 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era directly from the House of Gamut website, are well-acquainted with someone who has, or years have passed, and this file has somehow joined with the roiling undifferentiated mass of the internet. Please check out the book, if it, or books, still exist.

I asked contributors to 120 Murders to provide a brief note on their story and which song inspired it, but I am feeling petulant and refuse to do it myself for this story. I will instead recommend the 2017 documentary New Wave: Dare to be Different, about the rise and fall of WLIR. That should explain everything.