Are you ready to rock? Yes? No? Maybe? To evaluate your Rock Star Preparation Status, please run down the following checklist:
▪ are you a woman?
▪ do you have a girlfriend?
▪ do you look like you eat anything beside cigarettes?
▪ is your hair short?
▪ do you wear jeans and a shirt at the same time?
If the answer to any of these questions is YES then you are not ready to rock. But if you are reading this shirtless, in your ripped jeans, lean abs exposed, hair blasting in the wind even though you're sitting still, with absolutely no women around, then you are ready for...
Meet Michael Sandeen, lead singer for Fiasco, a hard rocking band that rock out with a confusing playlist of BB King, ZZ Top, Willie Nelson, George Thorogood's meathead misogynist anthem, "You Talk Too Much", and close out their sets with Michael's favorite song of all time, "Imagine". It's sort of like the perfect radio station for automotive repair shops run by 45 year old men. At first, no one grooved to their mix of “country and rock and beach music” but then they realized, “People like what we do. It’s something for everybody.”
Everybody except Satan, that is.
See Michael Sandeen and the Fiasco may stroll into all the best clubs in Atlanta, Myrtle Beach, Charleston, Columbia, and Hilton Head (which is confusingly spelled "Hiltonhead" throughout) and get the crowds humping in the corners when they play Foreigner's "Dirty White Boy" but they are not rock stars. Sure, Michael was a foster child who grew up on a farm with "constant verbal abuse and almost daily beatings", and he doesn't wear underwear, and he does wear a denim vest onstage with no shirt so the sweat can trickle into his Man Cleavage, but he also uses words like “shenanigans,” drinks Choco Malt instead of booze, and has a girlfriend.
Let me make one thing clear: ROCK STARS DO NOT HAVE GIRLFRIENDS.
Meet, Kitty, a nurse who fell in love with Michael six days ago after seeing how he played guitar and wondering how it would feel if those fingers played her body. Now, he sings a love song to her from the stage called “Baby, Love Me Tonight,” then puts her on the back of his Harley, and drives her to the beach where he presses his warmth against her so she can feel it like a “long, hot stone through his jeans” until she whispers, “Love me, Michael,” and they make sweet, sweet monkey love right there in the sand.
But Zeke Miller, whom we met in the prologue helping a famous actor named Rex Hogan cut out his 15-year-old niece's heart at a Satanic orgy, wants to make Michael a rock star and to that end he jams with the band, replaces their guitarist on tour, and begins to roofie Michael's Choco Malts with a drug identified as a “bromide” which is “a hypnotic and an aphrodisiac!” Zeke throws a redheaded groupie with “pursed ruby lips that looked like they could suck the nose cone off an MX missile” at Michael but even though she purrs “I'd like to suck your whole body” Michael rejects her.
IS THIS WHAT ROCK STARS DO???
Fortunately, by the time they come back from their quick tour, Michael's ingested so much bromide he's walking into redneck bars, picking fights with hillbillies in trucker caps, and taking home Carolina girls whom he sexes to death in trances.
Soon, he's acting like a real rock star, making love to Kitty that's “rougher than usual,” becoming “greedy, selfish, cruel,” getting super-pale and gaunt, speaking in terrible poetry, and cutting himself. Also, maybe he set a woman on fire and watched her burn. Kitty is confused, but also aroused, but also frightened, which is probably exactly how U2 feels when Bono inevitably starts acting this way on tour.
Things reach a crisis point when Fiasco’s guitarist burns to death in his trailer along with his adorable son and their cute puppy and Michael denounces God while holding their picture, again, probably sounding a lot like Bono when the PA gets his coffee order wrong:
“Goddamn bunch of bullshit. Fucking lies. Lies! Counts every hair on your head. Sees a sparrow fall. Heaven. Bullshit! This! This was real. Flesh. Laughter. Love. And that's all there is. Flesh decays, laughter fades, and all that you love dies.”
He takes Kitty to a volleyball game where he refuses to introduce her to anyone, (WWGTD - What Would George Thorogood Do?), picks a fight, makes out with a groupie in a club right in front of Kitty, then has a threeway in the dressing room with Lisa, Jill, and Cindy, hissing “You're mine!” Now Fiasco is holding rehearsals on top of pentagrams drawn on the floor in blood with black candles burning in a circle, just like Bono makes U2 do, and Zeke is moving in for the kill.
“You will be a great leader, Michael. After tonight, you will appreciate what it means to be a chosen one. Anything you want, Michael. Our brothers will revere you. Our sisters will be honored to serve you. All your needs will be fulfilled. You will be loved, Michael. You will belong!”
I imagine this is exactly how they took an innocent, bright-eyed young street urchin with good rhythm and holes in his shoes named Paul David Hewson and turned him into a soulless monster who wears shoes made out of human babies named Bono. Zeke takes Michael to “the place of celebration” where he drugs Kitty and ties her to an altar, ready to cut out her heart during lovemaking while dirty Satanists sit around in the woods watching, sort of like Woodstock only no one has to pretend they actually like Joan Baez.
Kitty realizes that she's been wearing denim shorts and a halter top for most of the book and is pretty much ready to die (from shame) and Michael is about to put her out of her (fashion) misery when the cops bust in waving their guns. They shoot Michael, who's hesitating anyways, and Zeke gets furious because you can't find good Satanic help these days (“May Satan damn you, Michael! Damn you to heaven with the other weak, loathsome ones like you! Damn you! Damn you!”) and then he gets shot by the cops and his last thoughts as he dies are, “Where's...my...Bono...”
In a surprise twist, it turns out that Zeke killed all those women, not Michael, and so Michael has to be put in a mental institution — just like a rock star! — for three months and now he's out and coming home for Kitty. Not to murder her, in case you had your hopes up, but to sigh, “Kitty. My life.”
THIS MAN IS NO ROCK STAR.
To wash the taste of disappointment out of your eyes, I'd like to leave you with the lyrics for Michael Sandeen and the Fiasco's song, “Warm Buns”:
Don't want no big fine house
Don't need big screen TV
Don't like filet mignon
Or Chicken of the Sea
Don't be mean
Feed me pinto beans
Caviar gives me the runs
Just want some pinto beans and your…warm buns.