How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie Debartolo Page B

born, and Piece of Wood was kind enough to make an honest woman out of her. She never mentioned him again.” I scraped an olive from the toothpick in my glass and then sucked the little red pimento out of the middle. Seconds later John the Baptist dropped two more olives into my water.
    “Why isn’t your last name Davies?” I asked Paul.
    “I went by Davies growing up, but it’s not my legal name.
    It’s not on my birth certificate.”
    “Hudson is your real father’s name?”
    He shook his head.
    “What’s your real name?”
    “Can’t tel you that.”
    “Why not?”
    “No one knows my real name. Wel , except for Feldman.” Paul looked like he was debating how much more information to divulge. He took a slow sip of his drink, went
7through a raise-your-right-hand, swear-over-your-life-you’l -never-ever-tel -a-soul rigmarole with me, and said, “When I moved here I wanted a clean slate. I felt like a new person and I wanted a new name. So, I made one up.”
    “Okay. Why Hudson?”
    “The river .” He said it like it should have been obvious. “I was living in this fleapit apartment in Hel ’s Kitchen, and when I say ‘fleapit’ I’m not utilizing a platitude for the sake of the story. My ankles used to itch every time I got out of bed. Even worse than that was the bathroom. The building had a serious plumbing problem, and there was never enough water at the bottom of the toilet, so you had to piss in it about five times before you could flush anything down.” He stared into his drink. “This one night, middle of summer, it was a zil ion degrees outside and the smel in my room was so bad I had to go up and sleep on the roof. It was the lowest I’d ever felt, and I remember laying there staring at the sky, feeling so fucking alone, and wondering what the hel was going to happen to me—if I was ever going to get any farther than that dump, if I belonged in New York, if I was going to be able to make a living making music, or if I should just chuck myself off the goddamn roof and be done with it.” He paused to make sure I was getting the point. “The river was the first thing I saw when I woke up the next morning. Somehow I’d survived the night. And that’s when Paul Hudson was born.” I felt the heat of Paul’s gaze on my face. He was waiting for something from me. Acknowledgement. Validation.
    Commiseration, perhaps. I couldn’t even look at him because I was afraid of feeling any more than I already did.
    Focusing on the speakers above the bar, I listened to Van Morrison sing about souls and spirits flying into the mystic.
    Van was obviously trying to tel me something.
    “I don’t know why I just laid al that shit on you,” Paul mumbled.
    He finished his drink and sat quietly, stirring the ice in his glass. It took a while for me to think of something to say, and even then, al I could come up with was, “When did you start playing guitar?”
    “We’d just moved to Rochester. I was sixteen.” With his tongue, Paul dug out a piece of ice and crunched on it. “For me, moving was symbolized by the dreaded goddamn basement. I always had to clean and unpack the basement. One day I was digging through an old trunk and I found an acoustic guitar. It was dented and needed new strings, but I fel hopelessly in love with it. I had it tuned up, bought a box of picks and a used chord dictionary, and for a week I only put it down to sleep. When Carol tried to drag me out of the cel ar, I made her bring Piece of Wood downstairs, and I played and sang an entire song for them. Ask me what song I played. Go on, ask.”
    “What song did you play?”
    Paul was reanimated, his eyebrows dancing in chorus with his voice. “A little three-chord ditty cal ed ‘The Day I Became a Ghost’ by Douglas J.
    Blackman. Needless to say, the boxes sat in the basement for a long time before anyone unpacked them. And the smel of damp cement stil reminds me of the summer I discovered my cal ing.”
    “That’s my