The Five by Robert McCammon Page B

black handkerchief from his inside jacket pocket and mopped his face and did not give a glance at George, who stood about three feet away.
    Gogo lifted his double chins to catch the breeze. “Have you people ever done a fucking television interview before? Pardon the truth, but you are slow . Benjy, get me some water.”
    “I don’t think we got our full minute,” Nomad said.
    “What?”
    “I said,” Nomad repeated, “that we didn’t get our full minute.” He came forward, brushing between Ariel and Terry. George was shaking his head, warning him: no…no…no . Nomad stopped, but he had no intention of backing down. “You used our time for a commercial. That’s not right.”
    “Oh, Jesus,” Gogo said, as he took the bottled water that Benjy had brought him from one of the bags. He uncapped it, drank but did not offer any liquid relief to anyone else. “This whole show is a commercial. What’d you say you called yourself? Nomad? Okay, when you get the Nomad Show on cable, you can do what you please. Until then, the Felix Gogo Show is the name of this one, and I do what I please. Somebody fucks up, or acts like a moron, or doesn’t appreciate the humor…” He shrugged. “There’s the door. We can shut this down right now.” He turned to George. “You want to shut this down right now, George? I can go sell some cars, huh?”
    The tech guys were waiting to see how this turned out before they moved the floodlights. George looked from Gogo to Nomad and then back again, and he lowered his head and said, “Nobody wants to shut it down.”
    Still the tech guys waited. Gogo drank about half the water. Then he recapped it with a flourish, victor of this particular battle. “Okay,” he announced, and the tech guys started working again.
    Nomad caught Berke’s gaze. Her eyes were slightly narrowed. She was asking him, Do you believe we have to put up with this shit? He didn’t want to, anymore than she did, but they needed this. Even though the show would run too late to put anybody in the audience at Common Grounds, it and the Saturday afternoon rerun would bring people into The Curtain Club for their Saturday night gig in Dallas.
    “Do you want to talk about the video?” Gogo asked them. “Or do you want to talk about your tour?”
    “The tour,” Nomad said, after a quick questioning glance at the others.
    “Fine with me. That video’s going to be about as popular around here as a cactus sandwich covered with turd sauce. But that’s just my opinion. Okay, I want you all standing in front of the flag.”
    The band was in place (like mannequins in a store window advertising a small and hollow version of patriotism, Nomad thought), the floodlights were on, the camcorders lit up, the countdown done, and Felix Gogo got on the right track by mentioning their gig at the Curtain Club in Dallas’ Deep Ellum. Doors at eight-thirty, other gators on the bill the Naugahydes, the Critters, and Gina Fayne and the Mudstaynes. Gogo asked Mike about the tattoos, and Mike said they were a history of his life. Gogo asked Ariel how long she’d been a musician, and she said she couldn’t remember not hearing some kind of music and wanting to write down what she heard. Gogo asked Terry what his favorite song was that The Five had done, and Terry said it was a tough question but he probably had two favorites that were very different from each other and displayed their range: the slithery ‘This Song Is A Snake’ and the hard-edged ‘Desperate Ain’t Pretty’, which they sometimes did as an encore. Gogo was a fly, landing here and there, long enough to start an itch, quick enough to slip a swatter.
    Then Gogo looked directly at Nomad and asked, “You guys have been together three years, right? So how come you don’t have a record deal?”
    It sounded so sincere and sincerely interested, but Nomad knew they were having a big dick contest, after all, and Gogo had just pulled Nomad’s jeans down to show the shrivelled