Dark Star: Confessions of a Rock Idol by Creston Mapes Read Free Book Online

bedside.
    Liza was a ghost of the woman I had once known.
    “She overdosed,” said Liza’s sister, staring at her sibling’s ashen face, closed eyes, and cracked lips.
    “What are her chances?” I asked, knowing she couldn’t possibly live.
    “Not good. I’ll leave you alone with her if you want.”
    “Yes.”
    When the door to the room clicked shut, I pulled my chair close and touched the fingers of her cold, thin hand. That was the only skin I could find amid all the tubes and tape.
    Her appearance upset me. I could see the bones in her face and hands. Her skin was drawn tight against her forehead and cheekbones. The white bedsheet lay smoothly over her, as if there was but a wisp underneath.
    Where had Liza gone? This did not look like the same person.
    I slipped back in time to the late-night, after-show limo rides and dinners, to the parties and shows, to the long walks and talks. I remembered her at her Hollywood townhouse, wearing faded jeans and oversized sweatshirts with her long brown hair flowing out the back of her Dodgers cap.
    “What’s happened to us, Liza?” I whispered, surprising myself with the tears that followed, not able to remember the last time I had cried.
    We were supposed to be on top of the world, but we had hit the slimy depths. We were supposed to be on easy street, but it was difficult to make it through the day. We were rich, but we didn’t have anything of value. We were somebody—and we wished we were nobody.
    Liza used to get a kick out of hanging with the band. Everyone liked her. Every guy wished she were his. She was a bright star in an often dark world. And she was the only person I had ever really opened up to about my past and about the failed relationship with my father. He and Mom had met Liza several times. They liked her. To them, she was one of the few things I had ever done right.
    Slowly, my sorrow melted cold, like wax drying.
    Look at her.
    I wanted to smash the equipment that kept her alive.
    LOOK AT HER!
    I couldn’t stay any longer.
    Had to run.
    “God, why would You do this?” I hissed.
    Standing, I took one last look at her and blew out the door, not looking again at the family and friends lined up in the chairs along the hallway.
    Gray and the band didn’t hear from me for days. The recording session at The Groove stopped in midstream. Liza died two days after I visited her. I did not attend the funeral in California but instead plunged into a weeklong drug binge at my high-rise in Manhattan.
    Somewhere near the tail end of the stupor, I flipped through the channels on my TV and saw a thin, elderly preacher addressing a large congregation in Atlanta.
    “Listen to me ,” he insisted. “Our world is full of sin. That sin nature has been passed down to you and me from Adam and Eve. If you want to know why bad things happen to good people, why tragedy comes unexpectedly, why our world and our country are in such disarray…the answer is sin. It’s in you, it’s in me, and it’s got to be dealt with. Listen, Jesus died to forgive you, right now, wherever you are, whatever you’ve done. He desires to come into your life and to make His home with you…”
    Those were the last words I remember hearing before pulling the trigger of my 9 mm UltraStar and blowing the picture tube clean out of my 60” Magnavox.

    “Yes, he liked guns,” our longtime DeathStroke manager, Gray Harris, testified.
    Dooley pushed his chair back and stood. “Did he own a lot of guns?”
    “Everett was the kind of guy who, once he got interested in something, wanted to be an expert at it, immediately. It was that way with the guns and the knives. Someone turned him on to handguns early in his career, and right away he owned an assortment of them. He took marksmanship lessons and even had a small shooting range built into the basement of one of his homes. But I never saw him misuse guns.”
    “Mr. Harris.” Dooley looked directly from one juror to the next. “In all your