chapter one

Martin and Frank drove to San Francisco on a Monday night to reach the Underground.

Two column inches in the Pink Section of the Chronicle promised an industrial music night at the Underground, “Guts and Bolts—Industrial World.” The ad space was crammed with Xeroxed engravings from a nineteenth-century medical textbook and a technical diagram from a typewriter repair manual. To Martin, the tiny ad was a key to a world he knew must exist, but had never experienced. He had convinced Frank to come with him.

The Underground was in the basement of the Lipps Club. The doorman looked at Martin and Frank, and then examined the birth date on Martin’s license very carefully. The ground floor of the club was a dissolute picture. Three bikers wearing chains and leather hunched over the bar. A pinball machine flashed ignored in one corner. The muffled beat of Front 242 was welling up from the dark stairs to the cellar. The sound attracted Martin as if he were an insect drawn to a pheromone. It sent an electric thrill through him. Although he sometimes talked about the “scene” in Chicago, in truth he had been to a loft party and a few underage nights at Medusa’s. He wanted to be seen as experienced, as cool, as out there on the edge. He felt nothing about exaggerating to conceal the broad expanses of naiveté in a midwestern boy.

The surge of excitement spread from his stomach as they descended through the strata of sound. The Underground was true to its name. Brick support columns punctuated the ceiling, and the air had a humid smell of boilers and rusting pipes. A strobe was triggering incessantly. A tall exotic girl was tending a bar lit by red bulbs. Most of the space was empty.

There were perhaps forty others in attendance, gathered around the bar, or leaning with their backs against the wall. Three girls in white and black taffeta dresses were together in the middle of the dance floor.

Near them, some Goths with white makeup and layers of murky wool clothes clustered in a knot, writhing in slow contortions. Frank stared, his mouth slightly open. Headhunter merged indistinguishably into Armed Forces from Manufacture.

Throwing his self-consciousness aside, Martin hurried to the middle of the floor and let the music wash through him. Four NAD monitors focused the sound toward the center. It was deafening; he could feel pulses of wind hinged to the bass response.

The corner of his eye was constantly drawn to the three girls. In the stark flashes of the strobe, it was difficult to see their faces, but the assured fluid motions of the girl with the white dress absorbed him. Feigning a stochastic process, he drifted on a course toward her. The beat dropped out and suddenly redoubled at the start of another song. She was facing more or less toward him. He tried to scale his jerky movements to her liquid rhythm. His body was very tall and thin, as if he were constructed from iron stiffening rods for concrete. The result was bizarre and strange, even grotesque, but a euphoria had come over him like a narcotic. After years of waiting, he felt that he was nearing a goal. The remainder of the song evaporated, replaced by Addiction from Skinny Puppy. He could sense that she was responding to it with a mounting depth of feeling, animated in direct response to some motive force from the music, with movements telegraphed to her body on invisible wires.

The song ended abruptly in ear-ringing silence. The DJ fumbled with a record that had fallen on the floor. The flow was gone. With a languid sweep, she pushed the hair from her face. She had wide set eyes and an immediate feral beauty. She put her hand on his forearm, “It’s hot in here. I need a drink.”

He followed her to the bar, painfully aware that he was overeager, but her gravity had ensnared him in a plunging orbit. Frank was still standing near the foot of the stairs, watching, his mouth still slightly open.

At the bar, she leaned forward and spoke into the bartender’s ear with the easy superficial familiarity attractive women share. Martin felt a clawing helplessness. Inadequacy. The bartender uncapped a Rolling Rock and accepted three dollars with a swift gesture, and then she was suddenly at the other end of the bar. The blond girl gave Martin a look that he couldn’t interpret. She left him standing and sat down at an empty table, facing the floor with her back to him. Three more drinks were served before Martin managed to attract the bartender’s attention. She uncapped a Corona for him with elaborate indifference. “What’s her problem?” Martin thought. “If I were Trent Reznor. A year from now it won’t be like this,” he was quite certain.

She was sitting alone with her drink. Physically overriding the almost overwhelming urge to diffidence, he forced himself to walk over and sit down next to her. She turned and looked at him. He was unable to read her expression. What did people talk about in this sort of situation? He had no idea.

“Do you come here often?” With the side of his mind, he realized the phrase was a loser’s come-on, but he could think of nothing else. He was very nervous.

“It’s just the second time.” She said.

“This is my first time here,” he informed her. His mind was blank, like a patch of blue sky.

If this was what he wanted, why was there nothing to say? He sat and stared at his beer, tracing the cold beads of condensation with his fingertip. He knew he was screwing up.

“Do you live here in San Francisco?” His words emerged like dull chunks of lead.

“Yes.” She told him.

“You and your friends?” Jesus, he thought.

“Yeah,” she said, distractedly. The other two girls left the dance floor. Now they were over at the bar. They would join them in a moment. He glanced at Frank, who was still standing nearby, watching them. “What’s your name?” He asked. The DJ was spinning a noisy song from the new Ministry record.

She said something that didn’t sound like a name, a word he didn’t quite catch.

“I’m Martin,” he said, holding out his hand, wondering desperately if a handshake was appropriate. Her two friends sat down. One of them met Martin’s nod with both a suspicious look and a glance at the third friend, who Martin greeted with an awkward smile.

“Hello, I’m Ellen,” she said.

Martin grasped eagerly at this crack in the wall. Of her own accord, Ellen told him that she was dating the DJ, which was the reason why the three of them were there. They had arrived by way of a dance recital, explaining their out-of-place dresses. Frank drifted over. Martin was glad to introduce him, and made room for him to pull up a chair. Now he was seated very close to the blond girl. He wished she would take a more active interest in the conversation. Ellen asked what they did. It was a question that Martin was happy to answer.

“We’re in graduate school at UC Santa Cruz. Astrophysics.” He pronounced Astrophysics proudly, every syllable crisp and audible. He imagined that now they were really listening.

“Really?” Ellen asked, leaning forward, “Do you know Burton Meers?”

“Sure!” Burton Meers was solitary and laconic. He had a talent for unbalancing Martin with rare ironic comments.

“He’s my brother!”

Martin and Frank were amazed. Burton Meers’s sister was the last person that they were expecting to meet at the Underground. The coincidence was a godsend. He no longer had to thrash around for things to say. The blond woman was back in the conversation. Interested. She told Martin that the three of them worked for the same company. What do you do? “Corporate web solutions.” Martin suddenly found that he was conversing easily.

The two of them had somehow spun away from the rest of the table. He told her how the weeks of enforced studying required a kind of bacchanal counterbalance, a late-night drive up to San Francisco on a Monday night.

She finished her beer, eyeing him with a slightly bemused expression.

“Let’s dance some more,” she said, as the song changed to Finland Red Egypt White. The mix had been stripped down almost to the beat; the song stretched out a dozen minutes. It merged by degrees into Digital Tension Dementia from Front Line Assembly. Martin knew the words by heart. He tried to copy her strange fluid movements without coming on as too obvious. He was dazzled, awed by the way her hair fell forward to shadow her face. The sound enveloped him, and gradually he stopped worrying about how he appeared to others. Soon it seemed as if their movements were merging, focused by the walls of sound into resonance.

Then he felt something hot and wet on his cheekbone. He brushed at it with the back of his hand, and was horrified to see that it was blood. His mind raced in a blur of panic.

Where was it coming from? His nose was dry. There as no pain. Was he hurt somehow? Then he saw that a crimson stain was spreading on the fabric over her right breast. She was bleeding profusely and did not realize it. Her eyes were glazed and distant, lost in the linear intricacies of the beat. He put his hand on her arm, abruptly disconnecting her from the trance. She saw the blood and gasped. She ran to the bathroom. Ellen noticed and ran to join her. Two minutes later, they emerged. The blond woman had Ellen’s coat around her shoulders, covering the stains. The other friend was with them now, and they were rushing up the stairs. A song came on which Martin had never heard. They disappeared. After a moment of awkward hesitation, he ran after them.

The bar upstairs was deserted. He pushed his way outside. The foggy wind was cold against his skin. He saw the three of them across the street, illuminated like a still life in the orange glow of a sodium vapor bulb. Ellen was unlocking the car door. He ran up to them.

“Are you all right?”

She was embarrassed. “Oh it was nothing, really, I’m fine.”

“Listen,” he stammered, “Could I have your phone number? Maybe we could meet here again sometime.” He felt this sounded lame, and most probably inappropriate. She gave him an odd, startled look.

“Sure.” she said. She reached into the glove compartment and pulled out an address book and a pencil. She tore out a piece of the last page and wrote.

“This is my work number,” she said, handing him the slip. “I guess perhaps I’ll see you again” The car door slammed and they drove off. Martin watched the red taillights until they vanished near the highway on-ramp. He looked at the torn piece of paper. She had written “Hollister” above a number.