Ravens Fly at Night

"Your offer of reconciliation didn't go over as well as you had hoped, I see", I quipped, once we were alone together many hours later in her hospital room. She tried to laugh herself silly, but her ribs hurt a bit too much and I promised to make no further jokes and just held her hand. She soon she drifted off to sleep in a medicated fog, and I got a few fitful hours of sleep myself in the chair beside her before she was released the following afternoon. We picked up her prescriptions that included some pain killers, and I took her to my apartment and put her into my bed where she slept all of that day and a pretty decent chunk of the next full day as well.

Naturally, we canceled the first few intended days of our recording sessions, and my apartment was constantly flooded with band mates and assorted friends and well wishers. Invariably someone was now always crashed out on the sofa (usually Irv), so I grabbed some sleep in my mother's old rocking chair next to her bedside. When awake, and not otherwise engaged, I began to read through her collection of hand-written spiral bound books of poetry. Those had been among the first items of hers that I had packed at her ex-lovers home. She began writing when she was just 14 (now about to turn 27 later this summer). The material was special, and some of my favorites I flagged with book markers for her to later sing for us in the studio, assuming we could find the right musical accompaniment.

It took a day or so, but eventually I finally got nearly everyone thrown out of my apartment, except for Irv, who defied every hint I offered that it was ok for him to go home now, and who now seemed to be permanently implanted upon my sofa. I did have one surprise visitor from one of the last people I ever would have expected. Darryl!

He looked thin, but healthy, his eyes showing that he was off of "the junk" and that he planned to stay that way. Just as I had predicted, nearly immediately after the breakup of the band, Samantha had dumped him in Kansas City and split town with a new boyfriend, and with the rest of Darryl's cash. One of his new band mates gave him the money for a bus ticket back to Houston and he had been back "getting my head straight" for the last month or so, and had just now started to check back in with old friends. I had never met Darryl before he had become the drug addicted pawn of Samantha, and I must admit I liked this "new" Darryl. He mentioned before leaving that he might swing by our practice hall to hear the new sound of things before we left, and I encouraged him sincerely to please do so.

The next morning, Erin was ready to be up and about, and she sat at my small dinette table while I started to cook the three of us breakfast wearing just a pair of old shorts. I was out of clean t-shirts, as Erin was now wearing my last one... everything else I owned was now in the washer. Irv as usual, was seemingly asleep on my sofa. Erin came into the kitchen and hugged me from behind, and asked me the serious question that I had been expecting for some time.

"How come, since we've now been sleeping together for over a week, you have not tried even once to kiss me, let alone try and fuck me, and I've seen the way you look me. You want to do both... badly".

I turned to face her, and holding her I kiss her bruised forehead gently. "Don't you think the timing lately would have been just a little bit poor for either of those things?" I said with a wink. She hugged me closer.

"I would love to do both of those things", I continued, "but the timing has been far from right, and besides you're supposed to be a "confirmed lesbian" with little or no interest in feeling my lips kiss you, or any other enjoyable activities involving any of our other hot and sweaty body parts. I don't think you've made the decision that you want me to be your lover as well as your friend, and at this stage, that most definitely is your decision, and yours alone."

"Besides", I added as we briefly separated which revealed her robe to be partially open revealing most of her still bruised breasts and vaginal area, "I think 'the girls' and your lovely region further south are still a bit too bruised at the moment for any further attentions, however gently offered".

She laughed and hugged me tight again, her robe now nearly fully opened, and for the first time I felt her pierced bare breasts pressed against my naked chest. From that moment on I never wanted to let her go, and I think we were both gently leaning for that first tentative kiss when the door rang. Erin refastened her robe and I answered the door to find an older woman in her late-30's with an angry sour expression on her face. Without a word uttered, I knew that this was Erin's ex, Marla.

"I've come for Erin", she said without preamble, and those were the last words that I let leave her mouth. I had picked up the blood stained thin rattan switch, which I had left next to the door for this very purpose, and brandished it in her face.

"No one has anything to say at all to you, and you are going to turn around and leave right now without Erin and return to your pathetic violent life without her. If you set so much as a toe through this doorway, I will consider her life and mine in 'mortal peril' and I will use your own whipping cane against you. In fact, I really, really WANT the excuse to beat you into a bloody pulp, and although I've never stuck a woman in anger in my entire life, I'm willing right now to make an exception for you, because you are definitely no 'lady', just a bitch that needs a good bit of time on the other end of a whipping. Please, just give me the slightest excuse..."

Whether it was the glow of outraged fury in my face or the sight of Irv now taking a supportive position behind me and in front of Erin, I don't know, but she spit at me and left without uttering another word. The crisis for now was over. We called the Police officer who had filed Erin's initial assault report and later received the information that Marla had been picked and charged with violating the Restraining Order but was now out again already, released on bail.

The next day was quiet. Erin continued to heal and as no further crises had arisen, we began to relax a bit, and even planned for us all to start our delayed recording session the following day. We had less than a week to go before the start of our tour and we were already well behind schedule on preparing anything for our demo CD.

This schedule again went to holy heck, when late the next morning Marla tried to shoot us both at the entrance to our warehouse practice and makeshift recording studio. She fired off two shots from a hunting rifle from out of the window of her black Mercedes sedan and then peeled out, tire rubber squealing and smoking. In her panicked escape, she briefly lost control of her car and sideswiped David's beloved family sedan as she drove off. Both shots missed just over our heads missing us by bare inches.

The Police were called once again and everyone gave statements. Within an hour Marla had been arrested and a recently fired .308 deer hunting rifle with two ejected shells was found inside her car. The scraped paint on her front fender was easily proven to be an exact match with David's car. It was a slam dunk for the prosecution and while we were gone on our tour she ended up accepting a plea deal for 2 counts of attempted murder and a felony unregistered firearms charge, to serve a guaranteed 8 years before chance for parole. We never saw or heard from her ever again.

Years later we were told by her Parole Officer just before her release that she had pretty much forgotten about Erin, and was now totally fixated upon a cellmate of hers that had been released about a year earlier. Soon afterward we received a final parting call from the PO that concluded the tale of Marla's sad and sordid life. Tracking down her new lover, she found her former partner had been unwilling to wait for her and had a started a new lesbian relationship. The two now being quite happy with each other, they wanted nothing at all to do with Marla. Marla flipped her last mental switch, and killed her new rival for her love with a kitchen knife and then proceeded to hold her old lover hostage for a few hours before tragically killing her and then herself. Sad, but if Marla had realized that her father's old hunting rifle scope had been sighted for a distance of about 500 yards, rather than the less than 50 she had fired at us from, Erin and I would have been her first victims.

Our recording work for that day was canceled, lost in a sea of police paperwork, red tape and yellow crime scene tape. We now had only six days left and we used every minute of them, recording and doing over-dubs in a completely caffeine fueled frenzy. Darryl came to our first warm-up session for the first song we intended to record and at our invitation began to jam along with us. It sounded better than good, it sounded like the last piece we needed to find our sound. It was like old times, except much better, Darryl's slow haunting lead style fit right in with our sound, and by the end of the first completed track, the Raven's were back together and playing again as a band. Although we agreed it was time for a new name, we tossed around 10 or so, but never found one everyone liked, so we kind of alternated band names for the first few weeks but kept coming back to some variation of The Ravens.

We hit the road already exhausted but with 500 copies of our debut demo CD hot from the press. It was definitely not any masterpiece, by any stretch of the imagination, but for a small indie band with only six days to record, it was the best we could do. Unified as a band we began the "Tour from Hell, Part II" as we ended up naming it by tours end nearly six months later. Why can't anything ever be simple?

************ CHAPTER 4

I've read numerous accounts written by others stating that we were almost immediately an overnight success. Not quite. It took the first few nights of the tour get to get into any sort of routine, and just when we thought we had found a groove Dave played his last night with us in New Orleans before returning home to his extremely pregnant wife. He never played with us onstage again "officially", but he always kept in touch with us and remains part of our 'family' to this day.

He jokes now that he became "another Pete Best" and missed the soft life of riches and fame, but actually he loved his family far too much to enjoy the life of a road musician (they ended up with 6 children) and he had a good corporate career job that brought home more money than they ever wanted to spend anyway. His regrets, if any, were very few and minor.

It is true that we started to accumulate an "entourage" nearly immediately, and at our second gig we met an experienced "road equipment manager" named Gus (figures), who was a gruff curmudgeon on the outside but an absolute creampuff in his gooey center. He had been working for that nightclub part time at minimum wage, and we hired him on the spot (for scarcely more) to be our "Ramrod," and he has performed the job flawlessly for us ever since, albeit with a large increase in pay over the years.

We started developing fans that would follow us for a city or two to hear our concerts, which began to slowly evolve on the road. We first began by adding the old "MR" songs that nearly all of us already knew in our sleep, and twisting them into fitting our new playing style. We didn't have a name for our style yet, but it was definitely sort of Goth/Prog/Opera/Metal. I still don't know what to call it, but right now the sound was unique and ours alone.

Slowly and much more carefully, we started to craft melodies that would fit Erin's poetry, and one by one new and better songs began to emerge. Our available set list now included about 20 original songs we were comfortable with, another five or so cover songs we really enjoyed playing and thought we put a different sort of spin on. This let us create alternate set listings, so that we didn't have to play the same damn songs every night. That gets old fast, especially on the road!

By our Atlanta show, playing to a 500 capacity club near one of the colleges, there was absolutely zero doubt that Darryl was our permanent lead guitarist. Apparently he had never been really comfortable being the front man for the old band and now he was quite happy to let Erin handle all of the lead vocal work. Once removed from the pressures of the spotlight, he now devoted his full concentration to his guitar work, and soon he was improvising right in tune with his rhythm section and Simon's keyboards, which still sometimes got a bit too "wanky" for my taste.

Also by Atlanta, we had sold all of the original 500 copies of our self produced demo CD, and used one of our precious days off in getting another 1000 duplicated.

One night after Simon had creamed all over himself in an especially lurid and messy "Wakeman-gasm", I forced him into my truck passenger seat for the drive to Charleston, SC and made him listen to some of my early Genesis CD's and bid him to "shut up and just listen to Tony Bank's keyboards". I played the CD through and he asked me to replay a few songs, such as "Watcher of the Skies" over again, which I did. Simon sat lost in thought for a moment and exclaimed to me in delight, "That evil genius is playing everything the wrong way", and he explained (although I already knew the answer).

"Every other keyboard plays lower melody with their left hand and 'lead' with their right hand. He often does it the other way around, making the lower 'sadder' notes the leading part of the melodies. I should do that with Erin's slower and moodier pieces!"

Hurray! The light had finally dawned on our likeable but hyperactive keyboardist. The change did not occur overnight, and he had the occasional backslide, but slowly he began to create his own deliberate and moodier style of playing our material, and that new sound was a much improved fit.

By Baltimore, we had also acquired two young roadies that wanted to do something fun for the summer and were willing to learn the trade from Gus. One of them even mastered the art of driving our temperamental band truck so sometimes I could now get some much needed rest, instead of worrying about falling asleep at the wheel. We were followed now by a caravan of usually 5-10 cars of kids who loved our sound and followed us to our next shows sometimes even for a week or so, before heading back home. Our sound improved every night, and I would have been in heaven except that my relationship with Erin seemed to be frozen in place.

She slept every night in my arms, but always at least partially clothed. I often saw her nude while changing and she didn't mind much either if she caught me nude changing clothes or in shower one bit. She had such little personal modesty that she would even come in to use the toilet while I was next to her in the shower or even once while I was shaving.

I was stuck in "gentleman" mode, and was determined that I was going to let her make the first serious move. We had managed now to kiss lightly a few times, but never open mouthed... until that night in Baltimore. We had had a hard trip getting there due to heavy rain storms, and got to the club later than scheduled and we set a record for getting the stage setup and it was a miracle that we only started the show about thirty minutes late. The show itself went fine, but everyone was ragged out and mentally and physically exhausted. Usually we drive through the night to the next town so that we can sleep in late until it's time for the setup and sound check, but everyone was too tired to budge tonight.

I was thoroughly knackered and was the first one to hop into bed wearing just my usual comfortable old pair of shorts, while she took her usual epic length shower. I have no recollection of her coming to bed at all and when I awoke in the morning I found my shorts pulled down to about my knees while Erin, wearing only a pair thong panties, was playing gently with my arising cock and balls, seemingly fascinated by what she had discovered.

This was definitely a first. I sat up a bit to face her and she warmly kissed me good morning and then kissed me again a bit harder, this time opening her mouth so that our tongues caressed for the first delightful time. Her hand kept a grip on my now hard cock and I gently move a hand to one of her soft breasts and began caressing it. I had just started to lick and suck on one of her magnificent pierced nipples, and things were about to get very interesting as she was starting to remove her thong when a loud knocking at the door interrupted us. I heard Byron's voice yelling something about a "band meeting".

A band meeting? This was much earlier than usual for that sort of thing; NONE of us were morning people. We got very reluctantly dressed and went downstairs to see what the fuss was about. How I managed to fit my cock back into my shorts without breaking it into two, I'll never know.

We all gathered in the hotel lobby but no one seemed to know what was up, or was really awake enough to care. After our last straggler had arrived, Bryon came out from wherever he had been lurking, but he was not alone. With him was a tall slender woman of about our age (about 30), even at first glance she grabbed our attention, and in an instant I knew what all this was about.

Her name was Faith; she was a singer, a high soprano, also of operatic inspiration and training, who had seen last night's Baltimore show, loved us and wanted to get her foot in and see if we were in the market for a backup singer. No one seemed opposed to this, and as we had just a short drive to tonight's show in DC, we could easily get set up early in time to give her a proper audition to see how well her voice mixed with Erin's. Much to my disappointment, we decided to pack up and get going on the road now, as early as possible to have an extra long sound check and audition for Faith. Erin and I were both disappointed but we assumed we'd have some quality private time later.

It was obvious from Faith's looks, that if her pipes were at least half as good, she'd get the job - and she did; unanimously. Onstage she was the exact photographic opposite of Erin in appearance, where Erin was our dark angel with black hair and dressed in a black leather corset, mini-skirt, fishnet hose and tall high-heeled boots, Faith was a long haired honey blonde, dressed in flowing white lace and silk. Her voice soaring to the heavens; in every way the angelic counterpart to Erin's 'darker' onstage persona.

Together, their performance became a sort of religious "Passion Play" and our audience that night was enthralled. Everyone was quick to consider all of the possibilities and ramifications of Faith's addition. Simply put, we were a much better "band" with her and our potential was now limitless. Well nearly so, we were still very weak in the guitar 'metal sound' and we sometimes missed Dave's growling rhythm guitar sound on some of our louder songs, but that was now a very minor consideration.

There was one major fly in the ointment, at least for me, and I could see the trouble coming all the way down the highway with its headlights on. Faith was a delightful, pleasant, well spoken and personable woman who never caused anyone the slightest amount of trouble, and had the knack of easily making friends. She was also however, another "confirmed lesbian" who had never had a male lover in her entire life. I knew in that moment, when Erin agreed to share a hotel room with her, that all of my hard-won progress with Erin was now lost. Indeed, by our big New York Indie gig, they could scarcely be separated from each other. Now it seemed to be impossible to get in a word with Erin alone, not that we really had very much that was private to say. She now had a new confidante and bed partner - I was back to rooming with Irv. It didn't seem like a fair exchange.