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The man in black watched the slim guitar-wielding figure commandeer the stage simply by breathing, by being an emblem of the wave of change sweeping a nation. The tight frizzy curls loosened by the wind framed the cherubic face in a smoke-soft haze. An angel of the revolution who had lain in the arms of a demon, and would do so again when night fell over the seaside city.
Their first heated encounter, that slide of skin against skin and searing, biting, smoke-laced kisses, had not so much scratched an itch as roused a bottomless hunger. Yesterday’s show had begun with those long legs — slim and sinewy and soft, the limbs of a baby deer — wrapped tight around his hips, thrusting frenetically in response to the cock buried deep inside him. The baby-faced angel was delightfully insatiable once he was in the mood, and delightfully shameless about it. Al Grossman had once entered the room to find him lying amidst the rumpled sheets like a harem odalisque and wearing nothing but a string of love bites on his creamy thigh. Bob’s manager was a man of discretion, however, for all that he was a loudmouth hustler, and said nothing about the incriminating position he had found his prize pony in.
Of course, Al himself had once been found in the same bed as Bob, albeit with all his clothes on and claiming to have simply dropped onto the nearest soft surface while falling-down drunk. Johnny did not believe for a moment that he hadn’t gotten a handjob from his precious ingenue while they lay sprawled in the same sheets. He knew how boys like Bobby kept some men wrapped around his little finger.
“Get up,” Johnny said a half hour later, tucking his shirt tails into his pants while Bob continued to lie there naked as the day he was born, smoking a cigarette and reading a dog-eared Vonnegut paperback. “And don’t hang around here in that state. Folks here aren’t as tolerant as they seem.”
“You were eager enough for it an hour ago,” came the sulky reply.
Johnny did not favour his rejoinder with another. If he gave in now, Bob would cling on for another ten minutes, and ten would become twenty, and Johnny would end up falling anew into his own trap. One that had been laid when he first lured the waifish bard into his lair after they’d kissed under a mild summer sky.
“If you’re dying for a fuck,” said Johnny, adjusting the collar of a shirt he’d discarded in hasty abandon earlier, “you can always go crawling back to Joan.”
At those words, Bob sat up rigidly in what passed for a furious huff, deliberately dragging his feet as he pulled on his clothes. He was not the kind to kick up a loud storm; his aggression manifested in moody stares and cutting words and long disappearances off the face of the earth. The meteoric career no one had seen coming would soon take off to such a degree that he could afford to disappear at whim. But that day had not yet come. And if Joan Baez was on before him, it was almost a guarantee he would be there. The cold war between them was a farce as far as Bobby’s side was concerned. He was prone to moping after her like a lost puppy, hiding his sullen, yearning stares behind the safety of his signature sunshades.
The shades stayed firmly perched on his nose as he took the stage to a thick wall of cheers to rival the adoration that Joan had left in her wake. He signalled to his band, a small smile on his rosebud lips. Those elegant fingers strummed a series of chords that carried in the mellow evening air like honey.
And then the fingers began a mad, merry jig upon the strings. The acoustic notes danced with electric pinpricks, intertwining in a syncopated dance. The recognisable thump of a rock ‘n roll beat that would not have been out of place at a Little Richard show shook the planks beneath their feet. Applause turned to befuddled frowns. Still the audience held its breath for their angel-faced maestro. Until, that is, he opened his mouth to sing.
“I wake up in the morning, fold my hands, and pray for rain;
I got a head full of ideas, that are drivin' me insane…”
The realisation that this opening cacophony was more than just a grand joke began to sink in. Starry-eyed admirers met this sonic assault with bewilderment, then disappointment, their cries of objection joining the rowdier calls from the haters and rabble-rousers. It wasn’t long before Bob was having to shout far above his usual languid drawl just to be heard. The band behind him soldiered on with admirable cockiness, playing on like true cowboys through the shouts and boos. They could handle a little booing; hell, it seemed to egg them on. Johnny felt a smile tickle the corner of his mouth. The boy sure could strut. He was no folk tale fairy-child, but a true rock ‘n roll rebel. Perhaps even more so than Johnny himself with his outlaw image would ever be.
By the end of the first song, the yells of disapproval had evolved into a hailstorm of balled-up flyers and empty beer cans. Still they remained undaunted. For a while, the electric riffs only seemed to grow more delightfully frenzied under the influence of such raucousness. And interspersed with the boos were whoops from the clusters of thrilled youngsters who worshipped at the altar of the Stones and the Byrds — and were now witnessing the rise of a new electric idol setting on fire the very nest which had nurtured him. The Bob Dylan band had burned down the house, and now they were scorching out the earth itself.
“Well, I ride on a mail train, baby
Can't buy a thrill
Well, I've been up all night, baby
Leanin' on the windowsill”
And then the glint of green glass came flying towards its target in a sharp swooping arc.
The bottle broke upon the wayward minstrel’s brow, knocking his black shades off his face. His head whipped back; he stumbled backwards, teetering right on the edge of crashing into the drum kit. Then he recovered and steadied himself well enough to play on till the end of the chorus. But no words emerged from the pert mouth, which was pulled into a moue of concentration, his brow knitted beneath the blood now trickling steadily past one eye.
The second song came to a close. There was supposed to be a third. Bob held up a hand in a farewell gesture and mumbled something incoherent. The jeers had died down by then, much of the crowd stricken and silenced by the wound their valiant folk hero wore like a crown.
Johnny R. Cash and the Tennessee Three were waiting in the wing, ready to step up after Dylan said his goodbyes. But Johnny was held up when the fallen angel staggered in his direction and crumpled into his arms.
“Goddamnit, Bobby,” he cursed. Bob did not respond; he was dead to the world.
He grunted with the effort of folding the long-limbed, lanky figure into his arms, but found that Bob was light enough once manoeuvred off the ground. Too light, really; fragile in a way that made Johnny want to lock him away from the vitriolic, mercurial world that had devoured musicians more beloved than him.
Johnny carried the unconscious figure to the storage room that had been cleared out to become a cramped backstage area and laid him down just as his manager poked his head into the room. “What the hell, J.R.? You’re on next.”
“Send Joan back out, they love her. I got a friend to see to.”
“Friend,” Saul huffed as he left. Thanks to Bob’s indiscretions — a devil-may-care attitude he blamed on his lover, though they both knew better — the nature of their ‘friendship’ was something of an open secret. It was only a matter of time, Johnny knew, before word reached June and things fell apart just as he had pieced them back together. He had left his drug habit in the dust only to replace it with another addiction in the form of a beatnik wildflower who broke as many hearts as he won.
Bob remained unresisting as a rag doll while Johnny pulled off the jaunty black jacket and unbuttoned his collar to make him more comfortable. He stirred faintly back to life as his wound was cleaned and bandaged. “I called for some painkillers, or whatever meds they can scrape together,” Johnny informed him. “You should probably get to a hospital.”
“ ‘S just a small cut,” Bobby mumbled. “I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, you always land on your feet, don’t ya?” Knowing the meds weren’t likely to ever arrive — behind the faultless sound and rigging, the place was more poorly stocked than a barnyard in bumfuckville — Johnny had started rolling a joint. “You were a real showstopper there, kitten.”
“You encouraged me.”
“What, you gonna put the blame on me?”
“Not blaming you.” Bob tried shifting to a comfier position, only to wince and bite back a whine. “You were smiling fit to split all through it, though.”
“Yeah, well, you sang real pretty. Tracked mud all over the carpet while looking like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.”
Johnny stuck the joint in his mouth and lit it, then peeled back Bobby’s pert lower lip to slide the tapering tip in. “Here. That’ll take the edge off.”
Bob accepted gratefully, inhaling a lungful and breathing out a thin stream of sweet smoke. The faulty lightbulb cast him in a dim splash of illumination like the Virgin in her grotty little barn. His milky skin and unruly hair glowed a soft gold in the thickening marijuana haze as they passed the joint between them.
Johnny’s fingers were languid yet purposeful as he unbuttoned the flame-orange shirt down to the navel and sucked on the stretch of exposed flesh, teasing Bobby’s small pink nipples and making him shiver. He was soft and needy in his moment of weakness, devoid of cocky mystique or coquettish come-ons.
He was preoccupied with removing Bob’s hip-hugging pants when the sound of the opening door was followed by someone tripping and fumbling. “Oh wow,” Neuwirth muttered, going red as he turned his entrance into an exit and slammed the door in haste.
“Think that’s gonna come back to bite ya?” Johnny asked wolfishly.
Bobby arched into his hands and mouth in a manner that said: I don’t give a fuck, just do me already.
And Johnny was tempted to give in, if only partially. Bobby was inclined to misbehave if given too much leeway. If he wanted something bad enough, he was going to have to beg for it.
“I wanted to do it, y’know,” came Bob’s confession in a hazy, yearning mumble interrupted by a sharp moan when Johnny’s calloused fingers stroked his most sensitive spot. “I wanted to…ohhh…to please you.”
“To do as you’re told, hmm?” Johnny leaned in to kiss him. “You keep driving everyone else up the wall, babe. As long as you’re good for me. You hear?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“There’s a clever boy.” He dragged Bobby’s unresisting figure into position so that the head rested on his lap. “Now open up.”
The sight of Bobby’s doe-eyed face with its pert pink mouth being plundered by his girth was almost as bliss-inducing as the sensation itself. The boy was always so damned hungry for his cock, lashes fluttering and small whimpers escaping in wispy breaths around the rigid length filling him up. Johnny felt himself leaking copiously from the things that only Bobby could do so well. His little kitten was too dazed from both the effects of his injury and the smoking of good leaf to do much beyond moan around his cock. But his wicked little tongue moved in languid swirls almost out of habit, with a skill that no mortal man could have resisted.
Such skill came as little surprise to Johnny. In one of his earlier letters during their constant exchange of the written word, Bob had made mention of his days as a penniless drifter taking shelter with various strangers while bumming his way to New York. The amenities of such shelter, he soon came to learn, was sweetened by some provision on Bobby’s end: “a bit of stuff”, he called it, including but not limited to the giving of such pleasure.
Bobby whined when the swollen length left his flushed, glistening mouth, but gasped in delight at his degradation when his exquisite visage was painted with silvery streaks of pre-come. Johnny took a moment to admire the effect — like a forest sylph emerging from the melting frost of winter — before giving in to the urge to fill his sluttish kitten from the other end. Bobby’s waist was almost small enough to span with both his hands as he gripped it to hold those bird-boned hips flush against his own sturdier frame and ride his little angel until he could swear they had both grown wings. The warm, firm opening that enveloped and drew him in ever so perfectly clenched upon his climax as if desperate to milk every drop and keep it inside that hot eager vessel. A guttural groan of sheer satisfaction left his throat as he bit down on a slender shoulder while bringing Bobby to orgasm in turn. He held his lover tight against him and relished the wave of shudders sending thrums of post-coital pleasure through his bones as Bob came undone in his hold.
“You be a good boy now,” his whispered hoarsely after a stretch of bliss-born silence, kissing the mouth that tasted of good leaf, thick with that green fragrance and just as intoxicating. “We’re gonna go out there and close this show. And you’ll give your fans what they came for. The ones still left, anyway. Alright?”
Bob lowered his long lashes coyly, his voice like velvet. “Yes, sir.”
There was a rapping on the door and Saul’s voice on the other end. “Put your dick back in your pants and get out, Johnny,” came the marching orders. Johnny marched out at a purposefully languid pace, just to show the man who was was working for whom.
Twenty minutes after both Joan and Texas Work had made encore appearances, the Dylan loyalists among the crowd were ready to embrace their idol once more, going wild at the sight of the lanky graceful figure in Cash’s shadow when they thought they’d seen the last of him. They were blissfully unaware of the fact that he was still dripping traces of his lover’s spill into his jeans, that his tongue was still laced with the taste of sex and submission. Unaware that their angel, their boy-Madonna, had a mouth that could lead an honest man to sin without speaking a word. They would not catch the subtle differences in his mien, the dreamy, placid look in his half-lidded eyes that indicated how thoroughly he had been fucked into compliance.
The Tennessee Three struck up a foot-stomping beat as if everything had been going to plan all along. And the players took their places upon the stage, in true Shakespearean fashion.
They played their roles to the hilt save for their final act, the yellow spotlight cloaking them in a cheap pasty gold that the mask of nightfall turned to soft splendour. The shadow-black desperado and his sweet-faced angel on the path to perdition together.
“We got a little something more,” Johnny announced as the last notes of 'Folsom Prison Blues' faded from the air. “Something that’s not on the setlist. I know we’re running late, but you folks don’t mind, do ya?”
The swell of enthusing devotees indicated that they very much did not.
“Alright, here we go.” His voice dropped into an intimate, almost caressing timbre as his dark gaze met Bobby’s. “You know this one, don’t you?”
He strummed the first few chords, his fingers exceedingly gentle on the strings. It was Bob’s own song, but drawn out, ponderous and tender, sung with an almost mournful yearning.
“If you’re travelling in the north country fair…”
Bob’s face glowed as sweetly as a young maiden’s in the dim yellow-gold. “Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline,” he responded in kind. Then they were leaning into each other’s shadow and breath as their voices intertwined like tender, overlapping vines.
“Remember me to the one who lives there,
For he once was a true love of mine.”