Page 2 of Dead Rockstar

She smirked. “Be that as it may, I have no desire for a night with some bloated, booze-soaked addict who croons in my ear off-key while he’s trying to get his flaccid dick up. I've dated enough live musicians to know I don't want a dead one.”

This was horribly unfair, but I let it slide. Sloan is a mean bitch at heart, and it does no good to point it out. She gets worse by the hour. I swear, she wakes up Suzy Sunshine and by the time she uses her withered claws to pull down her bedclothes she’s turned into a cackling old crone. Why she’d want to meet Mister Rogers I’d never know. She’d have him running, screaming for the hills. She eats gentlemen for breakfast and burps up their bones. She's the perfect muse for an angsty, boy-man songwriter, which is why it was so irritating that she wouldn't play along.

“I actually have someone in mind,” I began again. I don't like being derailed when I'm on a thought-bender.

“Of course you do,” Sloan said with a groan. “Philip Deville, aka the Turquoise Devil, aka the Robert Plant wannabe that you’ve been wanting to bone since you were fourteen years old. Who has been rotting in his grave for over twenty years, and newsflash, Stormy, wasn’t even that famous when he was alive,” she said, smirking. “God, if you’re gonna be one of those obsessive fan-girls about this shit, couldn’t you pick somebody everybody likes so that we can at least relate?”

“Like who?” I demanded. “John Lennon?”

She rolled her eyes. “Get with this decade, man. No, he's too sincere - too serious, just like you. You need somebody fun, somebody to dust the cobwebs from your ass. How about a live person? Hmm. What about Steven Tyler?”

I glared at her. “Steven was an androgynous fox back in the day, I'll give you that, but he's what, seventy? He's old enough to be my grandfather.”

“It's not like Phillip Deville was a millennial,” she pointed out. “If he was in his late thirties when he died, and it's 2019 now...”

“You are missing the point entirely,” I said, irritated. “It isn't what age he'd be now – he's been on ice, so to speak, for over twenty years. If I raised him – you know, from the dead – he'd still be thirty-eight. That's older than me, but not, like, Woody Allen level creepy.” I flashed her a look. “Some people I know don't mind a little May-December, but-”

“So you’re going to become the world’s first atheist vegan necromancer,” she interrupted me. I didn't like her tone. She made it sound crazy. “And you're trying to make it non-creepy?”

“Yes.” I smiled. “Precisely.” I sucked the dregs of the icy coffee from my cup and tossed it across the table toward the trash bin where it bounced off the lid and hit the floor, spraying mint-mocha everywhere. This kind of stuff happens to me a lot. I jumped up, muttering apologies to the bored-looking cashier, and grabbed a handful of napkins. “I’m going to raise the dead.”

“You're going to reanimate all 6'5” of Phillip Deville's mostly decomposed, festering corpse?”

“You understand rightly.” I grabbed another wad of napkins.

“You’re an idiot, Spooner.” She peered at me sideways. “Did you bring the flask to work today? Nipping a little Jim Beam in between shelving boring textbooks?”

“I resent that.” I did have my flask with me that day, but she didn’t need to know that. “Remember that vinyl I got? I just found these weird printed lyrics and I thought maybe-” I shrugged, mopping up puddled coffee. “It’d be fun. To try. You in?”

“If it means I have to listen to fucking Bloomer Demons one more time – on my night off – then no. I am decidedly not in.” She finished her own beverage and tossed it at the bin. As expected, it sailed right in. “Nah, I love you, Stormy, but I’m out. Anyway, I’ve got a date tonight. I plan to get laid. By, you know, a live dude.”

“Killjoy.”

“Sorry. I’ve been trying to cinch this guy forever. He’s in med school. Studying to be a surgeon. He might actually be able to find the-”

“Dude,” I interrupted her, gesturing with my head toward the legging-clad soccer mom at the counter, holding up her gold Amex like a trophy. “You're kinda loud.”

“I think even Karen would agree that men should know basic female anatomy,” Sloan retorted, but she lowered her voice. After another moment watching me clean up my mess, she moved off her chair and started to help me. “Maybe I’ll come by in the morning. Bring you a celebratory bagel. One for you and your zombie. Think he’d want a schmear?”

“I think he’d rather have donuts.” I'd read once that in his tour rider he'd always asked for powdered-sugar donuts. There was a joke there, a whole is-that-cocaine-on-his-upper-lip-or-powdered-sugar thing that some tabloid had printed once, but I preferred to think he just really liked his sweets.

She looked at me and shook her head. There was mocha on my shoe. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Try not to get too blitzed and attempt to summon a dementor in the card catalog.”

“That doesn’t even make sense. First of all, we haven’t had card catalogs, since, like, twenty years ago. Where have you been? And they weren’t a place you could go, like a room. It was literally just a cabinet with...oh, forget it. And if you'd actually read Harry Potter, you'd know that dementors aren’t summoned-”

But she was already halfway out the door of the coffee shop. She turned back to me with a grin. “Catch you later, necromancer. Hope he rises to the occasion.” I could still hear her cackling as the heavy glass door shut behind her.

Sometimes I hated Sloan. You're joking around, just trying to get a rise out of her, and she refuses to be ruffled. So you end up taking your whole shit seriously and you end up doing all sorts of failed-jokes out of spite, just to prove you can, even though you never meant to to begin with.

Which is how I got into all this trouble in the first place. Fucking Sloan.

Just as I was hopping into my truck, breathing a sigh of relief to be done for the day, my phone rang. It isn't like my job is hard or anything, not compared to some, but I was just...weary. Most days I'd come home from work bone tired and fall into bed. I wasn't exercising much anymore, something that I always used to enjoy. All I wanted to do was sleep, ever since my life had fallen spectacularly apart.

I glanced at my phone as I put the truck in reverse and sighed. Sloan. I didn't really feel like talking to anyone right now, even her, but I knew she'd call me back every two minutes until I finally picked up. She had a sixth sense when it came to my black moods. Without fail, any time the curtain was beginning to fall over my eyes, she'd call within a few minutes. She wouldn't let me dwell. It was both maddening and a lifeline.

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