Reno, Nevada June 9th, 2001 Joe’s Bar & Grill 12:30pm
The smell of smoke, stale beer, and cooking beef coated every single surface of Joe’s Bar and Grill. It was a bar in the traditional sense, a tiny little building in a tiny little shopping center with a couple of tables, a long bar, exactly two pool tables, and on the far wall, about three feet from the bar itself, a section of upraised flooring. It was about three feet high, seven across, and maybe an inch more deep. On it sat a single stool and a mic stand. It could barely be called a stage, but that’s exactly what it was. Many an up-and-coming comedian or musician or poet had tried their luck up there and died the hard death of the untalented. They would always storm out afterward, proclaiming that some crappy little hole-in-the-wall was not ready for their talent. What the fuck was wrong with people, the regulars often wondered loudly. What ridiculous permutations of space and time made them think they were somehow entitled to talent, and a place to showcase it? Worse, what in god’s green earth made any of them think they were good?
This was Pike’s favorite place in the entire United States. He’d been all over and this was it. Because everyone in this bar, without fail, was just like him. Drifters, grifters, wanderers and loners. Every single one of them called the road their home and bar food “the best home-cooking they’ve ever had”. He didn’t have to pretty himself up to go to Joe’s. This wasn’t some club with throbbing beats, an incessant pace, and annoying strobe lights. Joe’s was exactly what it said on the tin and it made absolutely no excuses for that. It was a hole-in-the-wall with paint that was just a hairsbreadth away from peeling, windows unintentionally frosted with all the smoke that wafted around inside, and it always smelled of burnt meat.
Technically, every night was open mic night, but Joe usually only put out an ad once every whenever-the-fuck-he-felt-like-it. Pike didn’t like those nights so much. The ads brought in the public, and Pike didn’t come to Joe’s for the public. He came to Joe’s to be alone in a crowd of loners that knew exactly how he was feeling. He came to Joe’s for the beer on tap and the delicious steaks and the fact that Joe never once questioned why Pike always ordered his steaks as rare as he could possibly make them. He came to Joe’s because no one ever knew anyone’s name, but the faces were often familiar enough to provide a little comfort to the road-weary. Drifters very rarely received the comfort of familiarity, so that was nice. Nicer than Pike liked to admit.
Pike liked screaming punk music and 80’s heavy metal. He liked Black Flag and Rancid, the Ramones and the Pistols, Sabbath and Anthrax, Zombie and the Stones, those sorts of guys. He listened to Henry Rollins’ spoken word for fun, and didn’t consider it ear-raping at all when he listened to the man scream out Flag’s lyrics on the headphones of his beat-up, g-protected discman. He even listened to a little early rap, sometimes. Mostly Public Enemy, NWA, and their constituents. There was a very clearly defined pattern to his tastes, all revolving around rebellion, anger, and basically fucking “the man”. In this case, his old man, who was in Pike’s estimation easily the worst of such men that could be given that descriptor. It was also about fucking the richie-rich types that loved to make his life hell back in the day by flaunting all their dollars and cents and the pretty little things their idioticly extravagant parents bought them, even knowing the kids would toss them in the trash a week later.
Pike didn’t play any of that, though. He didn’t even own an electric guitar, and most of the music he listened to would sound pretty bad on the chill sound of an acoustic. Sure, there were ways around that, and such things had been done by the bands themselves or those covering them in the past, but that wasn’t Pike’s thing. That music was designed with the growl of an electric in mind, and twisting it to fit the less growly acoustic just took the bite out of the music. That wasn’t to say it wasn’t awesome in a technical sense, but there was no way Pike would play those songs that way. It was just a dishonor to the bands in question, and Pike had too much respect for them to do that. Besides, Pike didn’t play music for other people. He played music for one person and one person only, and that was himself. His music came from his soul, and there wasn’t really a ton of anger there. The anger was on the outside, his armor against the world, to protect the soul underneath.
Pike played the blues.
Very occasionally, never on a night when Joe had put out an ad, Pike would bring his guitar. The regulars always knew what to expect that night, and he would often get tiny little salutes of slightly tilted Miller or Coors bottles when he walked in with it. It wasn’t that Pike was the best guitarist to have ever been birthed into the world. He was good, but not that good. It was that Pike very rarely played his music for public consumption, and when he did, it usually meant he wasn’t coming back for awhile. Sometimes it meant he thought he was going to die. Such a thing was common in Pike’s line of work, and while few of the regulars knew what that really was, they all knew he did something particularly dangerous. So they gave him the respect a potentially-dead comrade deserved when it was time to play. It was even more rare for him to sing original stuff. That wasn’t to say he didn’t have his own stuff, but he didn’t like to sing it for anyone. It was private. To this day, no one at Joe’s could honestly say they had ever heard an Oliver Pike original, not that they treated him any differently for it. They knew he had his songs, and that was enough for them.
One of Pike’s favorites to sing, something he and others considered sort of a personal theme, was a classic Seger piece. Ostensibly about the often bittersweet life of a rock musician, it worked quite well for Pike, too. It was a melancholic piece, and Pike always had a somewhat particular rendition of it. Technically speaking, it wasn’t a great cover. Oh, he sometimes sang it straight, but that was only ever as a karaoke piece. If he brought his guitar, the regulars at Joe’s knew they were in for something more serious, a glimpse into a road-weary soul all-too-similar to their own.
Turn the Page was originally released by Bob Seger back in ’73, about six years before Pike was born. It was one of the tracks on the album Back in ‘72, and it never made it to the charts. It was a little different than a traditional rock song, in that it was a story about the life of a rockstar that wasn’t some romanticized tale of booze and women and drugs. It wasn’t some musical story full of late night adventures and never once was there a yellow submarine or a girl in the sky. It was a melancholic song that painted a much harsher reality on the whole rockstar fantasy so many had back in the day. Some people theorized that was why it didn’t work, but Pike didn’t really think that was it. The years had proved much differently, after all. The truth was, a song like this one really needed a live performance before it could really catch fire. It was loaded with more emotion than people were used to and this song most definitely came from within. In order to really get a song like that, you had to see it live first, see the artist pouring his or her soul out into the song. Only then could you really get the simple genius of a song like that. In 1976, three years before Pike was born, Bob proved that theory correct. All it took was one evocative performance and the song became a hit. This performance showed up on Seger’s Live Bullet album and just furthered its success. To this day, Seger’s Turn the Page was a mainstay on classic rock stations. It’s been covered by a great deal of bands, most notably Metallica. Pike didn’t hate their cover, but he preferred Seger’s version, as anyone with a brain and an ear for music would. Metallica’s wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good as the original.
Pike didn’t bother rating his cover of it. He just played.
When Pike stood up from his table, the entire bar quieted. He took a moment to don his sunglasses and tie his dark bandanna around his head to keep his long, dirty blonde hair out of his eyes. It wasn’t really all that bright in Joe’s, in fact the lighting was kept dim for mood. The sunglasses weren’t really to counteract the lighting. Pike wore the sunglasses when he sang to keep people from seeing his eyes. The regulars here would know the song was coming from somewhere deep inside, but the tourists and the hangers-on didn’t need to know shit. The shades did a damn good job of hiding his eyes and, therefore, his soul from those people. Truth was, he was also hiding from the regulars, though he knew that they knew where the song was really coming from. Still, Pike wasn’t a man that liked to let people in. The sunglasses were a requirement and that was that. No one ever questioned him, because so many of the people here were the same way.
He moved toward the stage, clutching the neck of his acoustic in one hand and the neck of his Miller bottle in between the index and middle finger of his other hand. With his free fingers, he successfully fished out and lit up a cigarette with surprisingly skilled, practiced ease. The cigarette was a little bent, having been rolling around loose in the pocket of his faded, dusty, somewhat ragged jeans. The lighter, once a pristine zippo, was showing signs of rust from sweat absorbed while in the pocket of Pike’s leather bikers jacket, which in turn was getting awfully beat-up and dusty. Still, he didn’t seem to mind, and neither did anyone else here. He dropped the lighter back into his pocket as he took one big step up onto the stage and rolled the coffin nail to the corner of his mouth as he settled on the stool. He took a quick, deep gulp from his beer and then leaned over and set it down next to the stool, then settled his guitar in his lap. He strummed a few chords and tuned where necessary, then plucked the cigarette out of his mouth with his strumming hand and rolled it back between his index and middle fingers until it was butting up against the knuckle.
He took a moment to breath, bringing his strumming hand down to hang loosely in front of the strings. He’d lost his only pick back in Memphis two months ago, and he hadn’t really bothered to buy a new one yet. Truthfully, he kind of liked the feel of the strings scratching at his fingertips when he plucked them. His hands were certainly callused enough for it. Even without the calluses from playing the instrument, he was a warrior. His hands were rough and callused from the hilts and hafts of various different weapons, and even besides that, he was also a mechanic with a bike that often took a beating. One way or another, Pike’s hands would never be the soft hands of someone with an easy life. He would never have an easy life. Truth told, he wouldn’t really know what to do with the easy life, at this point.
Then he began plucking the strings. The sunglasses hid the fact that his eyes were glazed over and staring out past the crowd. He was looking at nothing. Nothing out there, anyway. His gaze was turned inward as he plucked his way through the first few chords of the song. Then his eyes closed entirely as he lifted his head slightly and began the quiet, melancholy singing he was known for.
On a long and lonesome highway East of Omaha You can listen to the engine Moanin' out his one note song You can think about the woman Or the girl you knew the night before But your thoughts will soon be wandering The way they always do When you're ridin' sixteen hours And there's nothin' much to do And you don't feel much like ridin', You just wish the trip was through…
Pike didn’t hate his life. He’d made the choice to follow this path and he didn’t regret it. He couldn’t just ignore the evils that plagued the world, couldn’t ignore the obits that cited “mysterious circumstances” that he knew were anything but. He’d tried. He’d lasted for two weeks, and he wasn’t really sure if that even counted, considering he’d always gone out with at least one stake on his person, just in case. His smart brain had said it was just being cautious, but his moral brain had been telling him something very different. But two weeks was all it took. Two weeks of picking up the paper and recognizing the faces in the obits as people he’d seen the previous night at some bar, or necking in some alley. Two weeks of nightmares about Benny, and about what Merrick must have looked like driving the vampire off and saving Pike’s worthless life.
He didn’t hate his life, but it was a stretch to say that he enjoyed it all the time. Sometimes he did. Sometimes he loved the adventure, the adrenaline, the feeling of actually saving a life. Unfortunately there was also the pants-wetting terror, the guilt for every life he was too late to save, and the sheer, soul-crushing loneliness of it. The loneliness was the worst, especially now, with his near-frenzied quest to find a method of control for his lycanthropy. Staying in one place was pretty much impossible. There were too many hunters out there that knew the signs of lycanthropy, too many people with enough common sense to know that the guy that could never explain where he was three very conspicuous nights out of the month was up to something. Sure, people might not think werewolf when they heard that, but they definitely thought something was up, typically something not good. He’d been called a psycho, a druggie, and a killer on more than one occasion. There was one little town in Texas that he literally could not go back to. It was hard. It was really hard. Somebody like Pike needed familiarity, needed people to care about him and to care about, and that could never happen when he was always on the road, always a danger to them.
That left him with a string of flings and broken hearts. He couldn’t have stayed with any of them long enough to really feel like loss when he left, but that in itself was a potent loss. Worse was that he hated hurting these women, hated that he was selfish enough to be with them and then leave them. He tried not to, he really did. But in the end, when the lonely road got to be too much to bear, he’d shack up with some girl and stay with her for a few weeks out of some misguided sense of obligation. Every single time he’d never make it past a fourth date, sometimes not even a third. It hurt every single time, knowing that he was hurting these women just so he could have a moment of comfort, and he condemned himself more and more every time he did it. Some of them screamed, one of them actually laid a hex down on him – never date a gypsy, ladies and gents, if you don’t plan to go the long haul – and some just cried.
Worst were the ones that just stared. He knew the look. He’d had it enough times to know it in others. It was the look of what the shrinks called internalization and what any layman could tell you was “bottling it up”. Those were the worst because he knew it would be with them for the longest. The ones that screamed, that cried, that cursed him, they were channeling their pain and their fury out, and out there in the open it would fade away with time. The ones that just stuck it all inside, though, they were different. They were the ones that would carry the betrayal with them for years, and he hated himself for being the cause of it. Oftentimes they would know it, and often they would leave tiny little barbs in his mind. Sometimes it was just a little statement, sometimes it was just a sound. Sometimes it was just the feeling of hollow eyes on his back as he rode out of town and away from yet another opportunity for that happily ever after he’d always dreamed of.
Here I am On the road again There I am Up on the stage Here I go Playin' star again There I go Turn the page…
Well you walk into a restaurant, Strung out from the road And you feel the eyes upon you As you're shakin' off the cold You pretend it doesn't bother you But you just want to explode…
Most times you can't hear 'em talk, Other times you can All the same old cliches, "Is that a woman or a man?" And you always seem outnumbered, You don't dare make a stand…
Pike hated people sometimes. He hated being the new guy that drew all the attention. He didn’t want people looking at him, judging him, trying to figure him out. He hated people trying to get close to him, because he knew he’d have to push them away. He just wanted to be in and out of any given place, as empty handed as he was when he went in. So far he hadn’t found much in the way of control for the beast. There was the usual cage, chains, and tranqs routine, but it could be damn hard to get his hands on some horse tranqs when he was in a new town every couple of days or weeks. Any cage he made had to be temporary at best, which usually meant the terror of wondering whether it would break. About the only thing he did count on were the chains he carried with him, heavy iron chains reinforced with old magic. So far they had withstood the overpowering force his ravening beast could bring to bear in its struggles to get free, but there was always that chance that it could get out. He hated knowing that all he really had to depend on was a set of chains. All it took was one weak link and he’d wake up in a field with the taste of human on his tongue, and that would be the very same day he stuck a silver blade into his heart and was done with the whole thing. Pike didn’t mind the idea of dying, it was a risk he’d accepted back when he’d decided to walk this path, but that was definitely not the way he wanted to go out.
The problem with that was that Pike had no one and nothing to back him up. He was always the new guy, the biker that just road into town a day ago. He was a curiosity, a novelty, a shiny new Christmas toy. But just like all novelties, he’d wear off. He’d wear off and these poor civvies wouldn’t like the dusty drifter that was left when the shine wore off. He was outnumbered by all these locals with their families and steady relationships and connections and he knew it. If he tried to make them go away, tried to make them look away, their scrutiny would inevitably get worse. He knew it as surely as he knew the sun would rise in the morning. So what was there to do but whether it and hope for the best? Not much. He had more important things to think about, like which hardware store he’d be buying – or stealing – his cage supplies from this time.
Cage supplies. As much as he hated the idea of hurting some human in his wolf-induced frenzy, he hated being caged. He did it because he had to, but he definitely didn’t ever like it. You could pretty up a cage however you wanted, build it however you wanted, but at the end of the day it was still a box you got stuffed into. Pike hated being stuffed into little boxes. His entire life, that’s all people had really done to him. His father had stuffed him into two little boxes, first “the mistake” and then “the punching bag”. The LAPD stuffed him into another box, the one they liked to call “punk kid of a repeat offending thug” or, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. The richie-rich types shoved him into the “stupid little poor kid” box, and so did their ridiculous parents. Now he voluntarily shoved himself into a little box, the little box that said that all those people were right. That he was out of control, a victim of fate or sheer bad luck, that someday he was going to hurt people just like his father had. He hated it, and some days he just stayed in the cage, curled up in the fetal position and wishing some cosmic force would just strike him down. But he did it. Three nights a month he stuffed himself into that box and did what he had to do, because that was the right thing to do.
Here I am On the road again There I am Up on the stage Here I go Playin' star again There I go Turn the page!
By now, Pike’s particular rendition of the song was beginning to show itself. His voice wasn’t quite as soft as it should have been, and the strumming on the strings was getting less melancholic and more agitated and angry. This was therapy, or as close to it as a guy like Pike would ever seek out. This really was his personal theme. Like rockstars, those civilians that were in the know often thought hunters had some glamorous life of adventure and excitement. They were stupid and naïve, but most of the time they’d just had their worlds torn down around them and replaced with the reality of the evil in the world. He didn’t have the heart to tear down that illusion, no matter how false it was. Unfortunately that left him with exactly zero people he could talk to when he felt less than pleased with his lifestyle.
Out there in the spotlight You're a million miles away Every ounce of energy You try to give away As the sweat pours out your body Like the music that you play.
Later in the evening As you lie awake in bed With the echoes from the amplifiers Ringin' in your head You smoke the day's last cigarette, Rememberin' what she said…
These days, the hunts he went on were his life. They were pretty much all Pike had left, so when he found a supernatural problem to take care of, he gave it every single ounce of strength he had. No risk was too crazy, no problem was too big, and no threat was too intimidating for him. It left him routinely fighting out of his weight class, sometimes taking on whole cults by himself, but he told himself it was the right thing to do. Not the smart thing, never the smart thing. The smart thing was to go lock himself up three nights of the month and pretend to be normal the rest of the time. That wasn’t something Pike could really do, though. He was a hunter for a reason. Pretty much the same reason Peter Parker was Spider-Man, actually. Because it was the right thing to do…and because once upon a time he didn’t do the right thing and somebody he cared about died. So many people had died around him and for him, and it didn’t feel right to just go trundling off to a normal life after that.
So he gave his hunts everything he had. He took stupid risks and often paid for it. He’d been nearly torn in half by a mystically enlarged iguana in the San Fernando Valley. He’d been bitten more than once by vamps he was hunting. He’d been bitten by the werewolf he’d been hunting back in ’99. He’d been stabbed through by a Miquot, twice now actually. One kidney punch from a vampire, back in the day, had left him peeing blood for a week. Pike had a little black book full of back-alley doctors who, at this point, gave him repeat customer discounts and called him by his first name. His body should have been a mass of scars, from slashes to stabs to burns to bites, and even one nasty octopus-like sucker scar on his leg from this tentacled thing that he didn’t even want to think about anymore. If it wasn’t for all the healing the wolf did for him, he would probably have been dead by now. It was the only reason he still had a mostly unmarred body. The two Miquot scars, one on his right shoulder and one on his left side, were still there, and there was a burn mark from Fyarl mucus on his lower left leg. That was about it, but that was only because of the wolf’s healing.
The emotional scars it left on him were just as bad, and unfortunately the wolf couldn’t do a damn bit of healing for those. In the life of a hunter, you didn’t always get the comic book ending. Sometimes the good guys couldn’t win without giving up bits of themselves, and sometimes you couldn’t save lives without compromising your ideals a little. He’d lost pieces of himself in Vegas, ‘Frisco, Miami, a little town in Texas, Niagra, Seattle, Dallas, and Detroit. Detroit. Killing a child was the hardest thing he had ever had to do, and it had cut more from him than he could ever fully articulate. Sometimes he felt so beaten down by the world that he couldn’t even talk.
Sometimes, especially stuck in that cage, there wasn’t really much to do. You could throw cards into a hat. You could play solitaire, war, or the loneliest game of blackjack ever. You could beat a couple of Game Boy games over and over again. You could listen to music or write, but you couldn’t actually play any music because getting the guitar in and out of the cage would be difficult. Oftentimes, Pike just smoked a cigarette, drank an entire bottle of Goose, and waited for the moon. That left him a lot of time to think, and he didn’t really have a great deal of enjoyable things to think about. After his hunts, he didn’t even really have the energy to avoid thinking about things. He was drained mentally, physically, and emotionally after these things and the most he could do was lay there inside his cage, stare up at the ceiling, smoke, and drink. Often, he would think back to the one woman who called him on his bull. Her words would bounce around in his skull and he would be too drained to bother muffling them. Someday you’re going to decide to stop running, she’d told him, and you’re going to turn around and realize you’ve run away from everyone that could’ve ever cared about you.
Pike was inside his own head a lot. It wasn’t really a great place to be. That was one of the reasons he wanted to get this fucking thing under control. Once he had it under control he could veg out with the TV anytime he felt himself sinking too much into his own head. He really couldn’t do that right now. Motel rooms weren’t designed for cages, and he often had to jury-rig the temporary cage in some out of the way corner that left the TV pretty much entirely obscured. He did a lot of reading in there to pass the time. Sure, he didn’t absolutely need to be in there during the day, but honestly, he didn’t really want to be among people during those three days of the month. He found he liked Aasimov and Dick quite a lot, and found himself relating a little too much to some of Chandler’s characters. He also figured out that most fantasy wasn’t really his thing, but he dug Conan, a lot of the military fantasy, and some of the grittier, realistic takes on the whole sword-and-sorcery concept. There weren’t really many of those, mostly short stories in collections, but they were still nice.
He didn’t read horror. He used to, back in the day before his life was a never-ending horror story, but these days terms like “Old One” were popping up in a lot of “Lovecraft-influenced” stories. Pike still wasn’t sure how the hell that happened. His only guess, and this was just a personal theory, is that Lovecraft had family in the know. He was sickly and as a kid went to live with aunts that were rumored to be witches. It was entirely possible that he got clued in on some stuff, maybe even by accident, and wrote about it as a way to get it all out of his head. He wasn’t sure where the guy’s cephalopod phobia had come from, though. That was just bizarre.
Here I am On the road again! There I am Up on the stage! Here I go Playin' star again! There I go Turn the page! Here I am
Pike’s voice rang out in a bitter, soulful scream and his fingers plucked violently on the strings. Somewhere along the lines his fingers had started bleeding. He didn’t know. He wouldn’t have cared if he had.
On the road again! There I am Up on the stage! Here I go Playin' star again! There I go Turn the page… There I go There I go!
All sound in the bar had ceased awhile ago. This wasn’t his usual rendition. Usually he was soulful and quiet, mournful and maybe a little bit depressed. This one had started out that way, but somewhere along the way he’d shifted into anger and hate. The pace of the song had quickened and the tone changed dramatically, from a melancholic song about the difficulties of living on the road to self-loathing and rage at his lot in life. He realized his mistake the minute he stopped playing and heard the silence in the bar. Opening eyes that he didn’t remember squeezing shut, he gazed out over the sea of shocked patrons. For some reason, he hated their shock. Hated the sympathy in their eyes. Hated the pity. So instead of being thankful he smirked disdainfully at them and asked into the mic, “Too real? No, don’t tell me, I already know.”
And that was the last time Oliver Pike ever went to Joe’s Bar and Grill.