I light a cigarette. Not mine. I’m lighting it for the bleached blond beauty in front of me. Right now she’s the best looking thing at this joint. And in this city, all that really means is she still has all her teeth.

The city: Detroit

The city I live in.

The city that hates me.

The feeling is mutual.

I’m not looking to get laid. I’m pretty sure this number’s got Cthulhu hiding somewhere beneath her skirt waiting to wake from his city of R’lyeh and give me a bad case of itching / burning / amputation. Plus the way she’s giggling at everything I say tells me she’s just out tonight looking for someone to punish mommy and daddy with for not getting her that pony. With my tattoos and pink hair, I bet I’d fit that bill perfectly- but its not going to happen. So if I’m not looking for action, why am I going through the motions? I’m lighting her cigarette because I’m a gentleman, and I happened to have a lighter on me when she asked.

Why do I carry a lighter if I don’t smoke?

Easy. Sometimes I like to watch things burn.

Its 3 AM and its cold outside. I just finished playing an acoustic set at a no-name coffee bar for a crowd of all of five people, three of which worked there. It doesn’t matter much to me. I knew what I was getting into from the moment I stuck the keys in the ignition. You don’t pass up an invitation to work with a rock god, even if its a one-way ticket in the wrong direction.

The Celldweller – Klay Scott. ‘Klayton’  to his fans. Most of them don’t know his real name. I do. I’ve followed his work since I could go to the bathroom by myself.  I own every piece of music he’s released, and a lot he didn’t. In many ways I’m the penultimate fanboy when it comes to his work; but its more than that. It inspired me, reached places in me long thought dead. And then, like a rain cloud grows into a tornado it twisted itself into my adversary. It began challenging me. Drawing lines in the sand wherever I heard it.

‘You cannot match my strength’ – it said.

‘Bullshit’ I said, and I played louder.

That was the first time I electrocuted myself with my guitar.

It was not my last.

I began writing, recording, producing. The music was my escape; my release valve. Instead of caving heads in with an aluminum baseball bat when they deserved it, I walked away and recorded. I filled up an album with broken hearts, crushed dreams, and all the filth that was dumped on me every day of every week of every year. Some of it mine, most of it not.

Some nights, the music was the only thing that kept me alive.

Against my expectations, people liked it. A lot of people. It sold out of its first independent pressing in two weeks. I officially became part of the ‘underground’ scene, which is a nice way of saying I still couldn’t afford to eat but people liked my music. Its both heartening and horrific that people found things to empathize with on that album. By the time I was done with it I couldn’t stand the thing, so I gave all the proceeds to a shelter for battered women. Seemed like the right thing to do.

I kept releasing singles here and there, mostly in December because I couldn’t afford to buy Christmas presents for friends and family.

Then one day my phone rang. It was James “Jimmy” Rhodes, manager for Celldweller.

I called him a dick and hung up on him.

Figured it was someone playing a joke only they’d find funny.

He called back. Explained he & Klay had a proposition for me. They wanted to expand their production music business and had been scouting talent. He heard my stuff and thought he’d give me a call to throw it out. I’d have to move to Detroit to do it, but I’d be working with The Celldweller every day, using his gear, learning his tricks, and helping him out in the studio 24/7.

Jimmy called me on Thursday.

I was there in time to start work on Monday.

I’ll gloss over my cross-country road trip with a born-again burlesque dancer named Danni Danger, because while I’ve been reminiscing over what brought me to this hellhole the blond has pulled the cigarette out of her mouth to blow some smoke and ask the inevitable question.

‘So what are you doing tonight?’

What do I tell her? Should I be honest and tell her ‘I plan on going back to the apartment and trying to stay up as long as possible to avoid the nightmares waiting for me in my sleep?’ ‘I’ve got a track due for a movie trailer on Monday and you look about five diseases and two kids over my limit?’

‘Just gonna head home and get some sleep.’

‘Oh. Ok. You play here often?’

‘Not really. First time, actually.’

‘Cool. Well, see you around.’

I see the car seat through her rear window as she drives off.

I made enough from the gig to get some gas and maybe a bite to eat if I can find somewhere still open with a dollar menu. Thats good news because I’ve been on ‘E’ all day in both instances. I fire up the car and let it warm up a little before heading to the nearest gas station. The night seems like a typical Detroit evening / morning. Lousy. The cold isn’t crisp; its oppressive. The city skyline isn’t majestic; the buildings are tombstones. And the guy running in front of my car  would probably be better off if I ran him over. But I don’t. I slam on the brakes and skid to a stop.
‘Hey! Hey man!’ The guy is yelling at me through my window, but he’s not pissed. (Which is the first thing that should have indicated to me something was wrong. No one in Detroit isn’t pissed.) He’s scared.

Being typically too compassionate for my own good, I roll down my window so I can talk to the guy.

‘Hey. You need help?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. I need help. I ran my car off the road and down the embankment. My daughter is still inside! Come help me get her out!’

I unbuckle my seat belt and climb out of the car, leaving it running.

‘Hurry!’ the dude is yelling at me, running a few steps and then turning to see if I’m coming.

I’ve been in a lot of life and death situations. Admittedly, a lot of them were my fault, but not always. Over time you become a kind of numb to them. Experience, I guess. So even as I’m running toward the edge of the road and pulling out my cell phone I’m still pretty calm. Sure enough, there’s a car down the steep embankment, flipped on its roof, undercarriage in the air. The guy, panicked, grabs me, helpfully sending my cell phone skittering down the embankment & off into the darkness.

Awesome.

‘I already called the police. Hurry, She’s down there!’ he yells at me, starting to scramble down.

I decide that I’ll talk to him about replacing my cell phone AFTER the kid is ok.

The car is in bad shape. All the windows are blown out and the safety glass looks like raindrops in the headlights. The roof is pancaked. But there’s something weird about it, something off. I can’t wrap my head around it, so I ignore it. Write it off as my natural paranoia. After all, life has given me a lot to be paranoid about. Ignoring the crunching glass I grab one of the door handles and try it. Jammed. Shocking.

‘What side was she in?’ I ask.

Thats when things get weird.

The guy, who has suddenly become the picture of zen,  digs both hands into his forehead and rips his face off like he was splitting a melon.

I kid you not.

Of course its right after I watch this happen that my brain figures out what it was trying to tell me before, and takes that moment to share with me. Specifically, none of the doors on the car were open. And with a wreck like that it would have been impossible for someone to get out of the car without opening one.

The guy / thing’s new / real face is pretty different from his old one. For starters he’s got three eyes, all black and shiny like a spider and all clustered dead center where his nose should be. Oh yeah, I said SHOULD be. Because he doesn’t have a nose. Just the eyes. And a mouth. But instead of normal human-type omnivore teeth he’s got nasty little needle-teeth. A LOT of them. I can tell because his mouth is open and he’s squealing at me.

He’s got short mandibles too, and these must be shiny because I can see them kind of  gleam in the reflected light of the car’s headlights. His whole head is covered in a sort of grey-black fur that ends where the jagged pieces of his earlier face still peek up from his collar.

In the few seconds I take all this in, I achieve a sort of clarity I rarely experience. Not a revelation, exactly; more of a reminder of sorts. My brain, pushing aside the confusion caused by watching someone rip their face off, speaks to me very clearly:

THIS is why you just keep driving.

Touché, brain. Touché.

I would have loved to consider that point more, but the guy was already charging at me with surprising speed. I wish I could say that I took him out with a single punch and donated him to science, but that just didn’t happen. I was still confused at seeing something that could have been from one of my tamer nightmares here, in Detroit, during what I was fairly certain were still waking hours for me. He had me by my throat and in the air before I snapped out of it.

It was instinct that saved me.

Maybe when I tell the story again I’ll make me more badass and tell you that I meant to do it, but it really happened without thinking. I shoved my hand in my pocket, grabed my lighter, and with a flick of the flint I set his head on fire.

The whole thing.

I don’t know what kind of product this thing used on its fur, but whatever it was it was very flammable. He went up like an old newspaper soaked in gasoline. (Something I’m fairly familiar with.)

Its scream turned from one pitch to another, and the musician part of me wishes I had been recording because it was a fairly cool noise. Then two things happen.

It drops me, which I was pretty pleased about.

It runs off burning into the forest, which was conveniently close.

Let me be clear on this: I hate the forest. I hate the trees, I hate the bushes, I hate the streams and the deer and the ferns and every other green thing in there.

They give me panic attacks.

Concrete, asphalt, steel, and neon. Those are the four food groups of my world.

So I let it run off.

Think me a coward if you want. I’ve been called a lot worse.

The bottom line is I don’t go after it. A combination of pissed flaming monster and 3 AM forest exploration just does not sound like a good decision given the tone the evening is taking.

I climb the embankment after a quick once over looking for my phone, which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to start working out.

The car is what really tops the night off for me.

It won’t start.

It won’t start because its out of gas.

Its out of gas because I left it running while I went to help the monster that tried to eat my face.

Perfect.

So I walk two miles to the nearest gas station, using my gig money to buy a gas can and a few gallons of gas. This gets me far enough that I can get the car gassed up the rest of the way.

The gas can cost what I was planning to use on dinner.

Looks like no one gets to eat tonight.

Fucking Detroit.