Long before he hanged himself in his garage last winter, my father was the drummer for the ‘80s metal band Steel Rampage.
Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of them. No one has. Steel Rampage were a bunch of third rate, Motley Crüe wannabes who released exactly one album “Chains of Fate” featuring their quasi-anthem “Party ‘till Ya Die,” which barely a dent in the metal charts. What the band did accomplish in their short, decadent life was a relentless and meaningless quest for drugs, groupies, and fame. And then they disappeared. Because the real reason Steel Rampage never made second album, never made it big, is that they’re dead.
All of them. And all by their own hand.
Michael “Lights Out” Sikes, the bass player jumped off a parking structure. Danny Miller, the guitarist, was found with his wrists cut in a rehab facility. The singer Brian Baynes blew his own head off with a shotgun. And I found my father, Dex Farnham, swinging from a garage ceiling beam.
Dex and I barely had a connection. And he never, ever, spoke of his rock and roll days. Since my mother left him and he finally got sober, my dad was a broke and haunted man. My single defining image of him is standing, pale and nervous, his rock star locks reduced to grey wisps around his bald head, smoking cigarette and after cigarette, as he stared down a dark stretch of tree-lined highway.
As if waiting for something.
But what?
The terrible answer came when I cleaned out his possessions in his attic. Danny, the guitarist, had mailed him a large box. My Dad had never opened it. A small envelope was taped to the lid. Inside was a note, in nervous, handwritten scrawl: “I’m scared, Dex. May God help us all.”The box was crammed with of old VHS tapes, all with women’s names on them: “Candy” “Kendra” “Michelle” “Roxy” “Tanya” and “Melanie.” I bought an old VHS machine from the Goodwill and clunked in the first tape. Grainy, shaky hand-held camcorder footage flickered to life to show the back seats of the Steel Rampage tour bus had been removed and mattresses had been laid down to create a “party room.” In tape after tape, I watched the boys of Steel Rampage drug-soaked, debauched encounters with the hapless, star struck groupies they picked up in the dismal, industrial towns they burned through.
I was about to call it quits when saw one last tape at the bottom of the box. The label was blank. I popped it in, and a grainy image flickered to life. Someone had placed the camcorder on one of the seats of the bus as it recorded the rear facing action. My father and his three other bandmates were splayed out on mattresses in the back of the bus, as usual. But there were votive candles on the floor around the mattresses, eerily lighting their faces. The band were all looking at an unknown person off screen, with a kind of… numb fascination.
And then she appeared. Legs first, striding into frame.
She was small, waif-like, with large dark eyes and long, jet back hair framing her face. Her torso was decorated with ancient tattoos and symbols. This delicate creature had a doll-like calm about her, an unsettling stillness. The look in her dark eyes I can only describe as “feral.”What I saw unfold between this young woman and the band was far different from anything on the other tapes. Sure, there was plenty of sex and drugs in this bacchanal; coke, weed, speed and a tangle of flesh. But this time, the groupie, if that’s what she was, seemed to be the one dictating the men’s actions. The men were the ones supplicating themselves to her. She was fully in control, and they responded to her commands with zombie-like focus, as she straddled them, one by one, satiating herself. Then the tape went black.
I leaned forward thinking something had gone wrong with the machine. But the tape flickered to life again with an eerie and startling image appeared: All four band members standing motionless, like mannequins. Their faces, lit by flickering candlelight, all wearing the same, numb expression.
I watched as the young woman, fully nude, walked slowly, weaving between these motionless men. She moved sinuously, making odd hand gestures, and low, guttural tones that sounded like an animal being born. Or dying. Not once did the men, suspended in some kind of trance, move. Their eyes were brain dead, vacant.I paused the tape. My heart was pounding. The room suddenly felt cold. But I couldn’t stop watching. The answer to what happened my father and his bandmates was playing out before me.
I resumed the tape. There was an abrupt jump cut. The young woman was facing camera now. Staring into the lens, staring at me. I sat frozen, as her face filled the frame. Then she opened her mouth wide. Gums to roof, the interior of her mouth was covered in rot and open sores. I recoiled. Her tongue slithered out towards the lens. It was black and hideously forked at the end. Her eyes were black and depthless. Her pupils, vertical magnesium slits. A reptile’s eyes. They stared right into my soul.In a hoarse whisper she said:
“All you are, and all that comes from you, shall be damned.”
The screen went black again. Nausea surged in me. I sat in the dark struggling to breathe. As soon as I’d recovered, I ripped the tape from the machine, went outside to the yard and burned it. Under fading moonlight, I buried the ashes. That young women’s twisted presence, that look in her eyes, were burned into my soul. Who was she? Where did she come from?
I needed a plan. I knew most of the members of Steel Rampage were long out of touch with each other before they died, but they must have had families of their own. Did they know what happened that night? Perhaps I could find an ally in my search for the truth. I did some research tracking the band’s relatives down, through public records and social media. That’s when I discovered the real horror of this story. Not only did my father and his bandmates die by their own hand, so did all of their families.
Every. Single. One.
My life descended into panic and chaos. Somewhere in my future, moving towards me, was my ending.“All you are, and all that comes from you, shall be damned.”There’s something else I need to tell you. I am married and about to start my own family. We just found out that my wife, Bonnie, is pregnant. I have kept my investigation into this terribly dark truth a secret from her. How could I begin to tell her that the sins of my father have cursed our bloodline? That our unborn son may be doomed?
I had one more card to play here. I remember my father talking about the band’s tour bus driver and roadie, a big affable guy name Eddie Nichols. Perhaps he knew something. If he was still alive. I did search and found him. Eddie Nichols was alive and living in the back end of a run-down trailer park in Dayton, Ohio, overlooking a swampy lake. We sat in lawn chairs outside his trailer. Eddie was an overweight man with kind eyes and an oxygen tank he huffed from, between pulling one Coors after another from a cooler.
I got right to it. Was he driving the bus that night? Did he know the young woman? The blood drained from Nichol’s face. He took a long pull of oxygen and finally looked at me.
“I told them. But they wouldn’t listen.”
“Told them what?”
“Not to pick her up.”
“Say more.”
A swallow of Coors and he sighed.
“We were heading back from a show in Branson, going through the Ozarks. And there she was. Standing alone, by the road, near a dark stretch of woods. What she was doing there I have no idea. The guys caught one look at her and yelled for me to stop and let her on. It didn’t feel right, but hell, they were paying me, so I did. First thing that hit me was her smell. My God, this girl stank like… rotting meat. I had to cover my nose. But the guys were so zonked out of their minds they didn’t seem to notice. Anyway, she gets on the bus, and without a word, heads to the back straight for the band. Like she knew exactly what she exactly was doing. Like she had…a purpose. The guys told me to get out and take a cigarette break which I did, for about an hour. When I got back on the bus, they were all passed out. Like, totally unconscious. And she was gone. Just vanished.”
A cold wind rattled the bare trees. Then he added, “You know that old saying, don’t fuck crazy? Here’s another: Don’t fuck evil.”
I stared at him.
“Why are you still alive?”“Why are you?””I don’t know.” I put my head in my hands. “There must be a way to stop this.”He shook his head.“You can run, but that’s about all. Feel like I been doing it my whole life. If there is a way to stop it? No one’s found it yet. “
I left him there, huffing oxygen, staring out over the dark lake.
Things moved fast after that. My life unraveled. I started drinking heavily. Quit my job. Left my wife. I had no other choice. I see it as an act of mercy. My unborn child, my dear son’s future was at stake. I had to find a way to end this cruel parade of suicides before my own and before his. I would bargain with whatever force created this death sentence. But does darkness know mercy? It became my life’s purpose to find out.
I was on the road for days. Staying in my car, motels, camp sites. Drinking. Sleeping when I could. Staving off the nightmares. I had nothing with me but a change of clothes, a hunting knife, and my phone on which I chronicle this.
I was making my way to the source. My one hope: to negotiate the terms of my release.
I landed in a rundown motel on a stretch of a highway outside Bentonville, at the edge of the Ozarks. In this cruelly generic room, I make my last stand. I’m no expert at this. All I know is what I’ve gleaned from dark folklore, rumor, and bad movies. But I’m covering all my bases. My cheap room is decorated with 99 Cents store, candles, and dime store Santeria tchotchkes. I bought a tattoo gun and etched into my own flesh as best as I can remember the strange tattoos and symbols I saw on her. Is it enough? Will my black prayers be answered?
I heard Eddie Nichols drowned himself in the lake. Loaded his wheelchair full of rocks and rolled himself off the end of the dock.
I step outside my room and into the night air. Something unspeakably rank wafts toward me from the Ozark woods. Is she on her way?
It’s midnight now. I find an old Steel Rampage CD in my car and put it in a boombox. I sit waiting in the dark listening to my father’s wretched band:
Little Girl Don’t you cry
It’s rock and roll
So don’t ask why
Comin’ to your town
Ain’t gonna lie
Party till we die.
Party ‘till we die.
Footsteps in the hallway. The door creaks open.
The smell is unbearable.
I leave you now as I turn to face her
.And pray for my unborn son.