Yellow Mama E zine

THE GHOSTWRITER’S PAYROLL

​

(Inspired by 'Groupie' by Cindy Rosmus)

by

G Garnet

 

          The typewriter didn’t care about my soul. It didn’t care about the jagged scars on my thighs or the way I woke up screaming in a cold sweat every time a floorboard creaked. It just wanted the ink.

           I fed it. I fed it every whiskey-soaked memory, every drop of copper-tasting blood that had stained that alley floor, and every beautiful lie I’d told myself until the truth was the only thing left, naked and shivering. I called the book The Zebra Skin. I didn’t use his name. I didn’t have to. You don’t have to name the sun to describe the way it blinds you, and you don’t have to name a god to describe how it feels when he casts you into hell.

          The world went stir-crazy for it. People love a car crash, especially when the car is gold-plated and the driver is an icon. They stripped Jimmy of his throne faster than he’d stripped those spandex pants in that mirrored hotel room. The labels dropped him like a radioactive brick. The "screeching chicks" who once wanted to drown in his sweat turned into a lynch mob overnight. The stadiums went silent, the royalties froze, and the "Rock God" became a pariah.

          I was rich, I was a bestseller, and I was still a ghost haunting my own life.

***

         The rain in this town doesn't wash the streets clean. It just makes the grime slicker, turning the gutters into black rivers of oil and despair.  It was a Tuesday in October, I was sitting in a corner booth at Sal’s, a dive diner tucked between a warehouse and a scrapyard. The coffee there doesn't just taste like burnt rubber; it tastes like failed ambitions and old cigarettes. The waitress, a woman named Marge who looked like she’d been carved out of a block of salt, hadn't smiled since the mid-seventies. It was the only place I felt real. No mirrored hallways here. No tiger-striped carpets. Just Formica, grease, and the cold, hard reality of the street.

           I was halfway through a Lucky Strike, watching the smoke curl into the yellowed ceiling tiles, when the door groaned on its hinges.

          He didn’t walk in; he drifted in, a piece of urban flotsam caught in a draft. He was wearing a tan trench coat that had seen better decades—stained at the cuffs and frayed at the hem—and a baseball cap pulled so low it shadowed his entire face. He looked like every other loser in this city, just another man who’d been chewed up by the industrial gears and spat out into the gutter.

          Then he sat down opposite me.

          He didn’t ask for permission. He just slid into the vinyl booth with a heavy, wet sigh. He took off the cap, and for a second, the oxygen left the room.

         The "Rock God" was dead. In his place was a ruin. His hair, once a wild, electric mane of curls that women fought to touch, was thin, lank, and dull. The "tar-black" eyes were bloodshot and sunken, buried in dark, bruised hollows that spoke of a thousand sleepless nights and a diet of cheap pills. He was trembling. It wasn't the rhythmic vibration of a guitar string; it was the erratic shudder of a cold engine about to seize.

"Julie," he whispered.

          The sound of my name made my skin crawl. It was the same voice that had whispered to me in the dark of that hotel room, but the melody was gone. Now it was just gravel rubbing against a tombstone.

         "You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve," I said. My voice was a blade, honed on two years of therapy, cheap gin, and pure, unadulterated hate. "I should have the cook fry your face on the griddle right now. It would be an improvement."

           Jimmy didn't flinch. He didn't even blink. He reached for my water glass with a hand that shook so violently the ice clinked like a funeral bell. He took a sip, his throat working hard to swallow, then looked at me with eyes that were begging for a mercy I didn't have.

           "I didn't know, Julie. I swear to whatever is left of my soul. I never knew what happened after you walked out that door."

            I let out a laugh, a dry hacking sound that felt like it was tearing my throat. "You didn't know? Give me a break, Jimmy! You sent me out there, you let your 'crew' handle the logistics. You were the king of that castle. Nothing happened in that hotel without your say-so. You played the priest in the sheets and the devil in the halls."

           "I was a product!" he barked, a sudden, pathetic flash of the old stage-fire hitting his eyes before guttering out. "I was a goddamn brand name. I didn't handle 'logistics.' Management handled that. Steiner handled that. Bert handled that."

           He leans in closer, the smell of him hitting me—stale beer, unwashed wool, and the sharp, metallic scent of desperation. "They told me you left happy. They told me they put you in a town car and sent you home with a smile. I found out the truth the same way the rest of the world did, I read your book. I read what that... that animal did to you in the alley."

            "Bert," I said. The name felt like a piece of jagged glass in my mouth. "The guy who shoved me into your room. The guy who looked at me like I was a steak."

           "He wasn't just crew," Jimmy hissed, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial rasp. "He was 'special security.' My manager, Steiner—he liked things 'contained.' He thought fans were liabilities, obsessed freaks who could sue or scream or make a scene. He hired guys like Bert to make sure the girls didn't get ideas. To make sure they didn't linger. To make sure they were... discouraged from ever coming back."

            He grabbed my wrist. His grip was weak, like a drowning man clutching at a piece of driftwood. "They framed me, Julie. When your memoir hit the shelves, they didn't defend me. They didn't call the lawyers. They let me take the full weight of the fall. They leaked 'anonymous confirmations' to the tabloids. They destroyed my career so they could pivot the rest of the band, keep the brand alive, and prune the garden. They used your trauma to cut me out of the profit margins."

         He was crying now. Big, ugly, silent tears that left muddy tracks through the grime on his face. This was the man the world had envied. This was the man I had licked sweat from.            Now he was just a broken doll in a sleazy diner, begging for a scrap of validation.

          "Forgive me," he choked out. "I'm a dead man walking, Julie. My life is over. I just... I needed you to know. I was high, I was arrogant, I was a prick. But I didn't order that. I’m not the monster you wrote about."

           I looked at him, and for a fleeting, dangerous second, I felt the old pull. The "deluded dope" inside me wanted to reach across the Formica and hold his hand. He looked so convincingly shattered. It was a hell of a performance—the kind of raw, Method acting that wins Oscars.

          "Get out, Jimmy," I said, my voice low and steady. "Before I decide I haven't had enough revenge yet."

          He nodded slowly, wiped his face with a greasy, used napkin, and stood up. He looked even smaller than he had when he arrived, his shoulders hunched as if expecting a blow from the sky. He shuffled toward the door, the bell chiming a lonely note as he exited into the downpour.

          I watched him through the window. The rain was coming down hard enough that he blurred almost immediately, just a dark shape moving through the gray.

          Something settled in my chest. Heavy, cold, the specific weight of a thing concluded. I had the apology. I had seen my tormentor in the gutter, doing tricks.

         This is the part I've reconstructed most often. This is where the story I told myself started lying to me.

        The sedan was already there.

          Black Chevy, late eighties, the back quarter-panel eaten by rust, idling at the curb with a muffler that rattled like something loose in a tin can. Exhaust pumping out in gray plumes that the rain caught and dispersed. Jimmy didn't hesitate at the curb — that's the thing, the one thing I keep returning to, the detail that doesn't behave the way it should. He walked to it like he knew it was waiting. Like he'd been walking toward it the entire time.

         The passenger door closed.

         The interior dome light caught for a second as it did.

         Blond. Balding.

         Thick neck.

           The man from the concert. The one who'd watched me from inside those zebra pants with an expression I'd thought at the time was just the dead-eyed look of a man in a job he'd gotten used to. The one who'd been waiting for me in the hotel corridor, in the particular darkness of a corridor that isn't quite a corridor anymore. The one with the blade.

Bert.

         Jimmy doesn’t flinch from him. Doesn’t press himself against the passenger door, doesn’t do any of the things a man does when he's trapped in a car with someone who's betrayed him. He leans his head back against the headrest.

         Closes his eyes.

         Let out a long breath — the sound of a man finishing something.

         Bert looked over at Jimmy. Then he turned his head and looked through the window, through the rain, through the buzzing OPEN sign with the E gone dark, and found my eyes.

         He didn't smile.

          Just a small, tired nod. The nod of a man clocking out after a double shift, acknowledging the coworker on the way to the door. Good run. See you next time. Then he put the car in gear.

         The rain closed over them.

         The cigarette had burned all the way down. The filter was hot against my fingers. I don't know how long I'd been sitting there.

          I laid it in the tray and watched the last of the smoke.

          She'd tell this differently — whoever Steiner eventually got to write the authorized version. She'd probably get some things right that I'm getting wrong. But here's what I know, sitting in Sal's with the rain on the window and the smell of burnt rubber and the particular silence of a plan that has just completed itself around you:

          The downfall wasn't a tragedy.

          It was a rebranding.

          The untouchable Rock God had run his course. Too rich, too preserved, too much of a relic from a decade the industry was trying to recycle rather than remember. The brand was stagnant. But a Tragic Hero — a Misunderstood Artist, ground down by a system that had turned his own past against him, emerging from wreckage, acoustic guitar, black-and-white documentary footage, a narrative of redemption with a clear villain and a clear victim — that was a gold mine. That was a comeback tour. That was a streaming special with a cover that looked like contrition.

           They needed the scandal. They needed the book.

           My book. My two years at the typewriter, my whiskey-soaked nights, my copper-tasting memories. For all I knew, Steiner had leaked the hotel's location to me two years ago, had seen me in the crowd and calculated the return on investment, had watched me walk into the setup I thought I was escaping from. And today was the scene they needed to close the first act. The humble, tearful apology. The victim's face through the diner window. If I'd gone to the press — I saw him, he's changed, he didn't know — the resurrection would have been complete by the time the evening edition hit.

           My rape. My scars. My dead child. Narrative beats.

           I wasn't a survivor. I was a ghostwriter who hadn't known she was on the payroll. And here's the part that lives in me, the part that has no clean name for it - I had written the book anyway. I had known, at some level below, the level where knowing registers as knowing, that something about the machinery wasn't right. That the book was too perfectly shaped for what I was told it was. That a woman writing about her own destruction doesn't usually end up rich from it.

           I had written it anyway. I had sat at that typewriter and I had fed it everything.

           And the machine had taken it and built something I hadn't authored.

 

          Marge materialized with the pot. Looked at the empty seat then looked at me.

          "Friend of yours?"

           "No."

           I pulled out the roll, thick enough to be conspicuous, which was a habit I'd developed since the book and hadn't examined, and put four hundreds on the table. Watched Marge look at them with an expression that had evolved past surprise into something more earthly.             She picked them up without a word.

           I stood up. Pulled my jacket tight against what was coming.

          Outside, the rain was still doing what rain in this city always did — not cleaning, just redistributing, making the filth mobile, sending it somewhere else to settle. The gutter ran black. The warehouse was dark. The scrapyard was lit by a single yellow light that buzzed and had been buzzing for as long as I'd been coming here.

          The machine wanted a script. I'd given it a bestseller. A goddamn bestseller.

         But there's a thing about being used. About being worked by a mechanism so much larger and older than you that you can't see its edges from inside it. The thing is -  you still have your hands. You still know what you know. The machine builds its version on top of yours, but your version is still underneath, and it doesn't go away, and it has a weight that the machine's version doesn't have because the machine's version is made of other people's grief, and yours is made of your own, and that's a different material entirely.

          I walked out into the October rain.

           The machine had its script.

          I had something else. I hadn't decided what to do with it yet, and I wasn't going to decide tonight, and tonight was fine — tonight I was just a woman walking in the rain in a city that was still running, still eating, still processing whatever it was given, the same as it had always done, the same as it would keep doing long after whatever I did next had already happened.

         I walked.

         The rain came down.

 

THE END