This snippet post continues from the previous Murder Rule snippet post featuring the beginning of Part Two of a new novel I am working on tentatively titled The Murder Rule. Part Two concentrates on a minor character from both Battle of the Band and The Prodigal Band, prodigal band follower and part-time roadie, Bobby Jones, who later helps the band carry out their ‘missions of God’ by giving them a song he wrote about Christ.
But as with the prodigal band Sound Unltd, Bobby is caught up in the occult, drugs and the party lifestyle, which is how he got connected to the band in the first place: as a part-time roadie. This snippet (© Deborah Lagarde) explains how he got into the ‘roadie’ ‘job’ in the first place, with a fictitious top American band.
That phone call to home was at about 5 a.m. in mid-June, 1993. In the previous hours, I had snuck into a party for one of America’s top rock bands through a backside wall of hedge-bushes facing a pond at the north end of the Hellside Horror House estate of pop culture-TV stars Andre’ Cool and Cheetah Nightshade, owners of that cable and satellite television horror and occultist channel. The place was a little over a mile from the beach.
Since I had done a few hours of roadie ‘work’ for this same band the previous fall and a full-time roadie for this band recognized me, I had no trouble fitting in and found myself involved in some occultist ritual in the Hellside Horror House basement.
Among nearly a hundred wasted rockers, groupies, roadies, and others touring with the group as well as friends of the Hellside owners from the nearby Church of the Circle of Unity run by Cole Blessing, I found myself snorting several hits of skank—which, I found out later, was laced with jimsonweed, a poisonous leafy green plant that grew wild in the Southwest.
Jimsonweed, also called Datura, if eaten even in small amounts, could send a person into fits and seizures and even death. But, ground up into dollops in tiny amounts, jimsonweed was a hallucinogenic added to the cocaine-opioid drug known as skuz.
Several snorts of a drug I had only used once or twice before sent me into a crash in the basement on the tiled floor in a room with what looked like a sacrificial altar. Don’t know when I woke up, but around 3 a.m., I found myself on another floor in another basement—at the local Church of the Circle of Unity roughly two miles from Hellside. I have no idea how I got there.
And I still don’t know to this day, years later.
There was an altar in this basement as well—a flat stone about three feet off the ground, black, made to look like polished obsidian.
I sat leaning at the altar wondering what had been happening to me, and who I was. That was the crazy thing—I could not remember my name.
More about ingesting Datura–a passed-on neighbor friend of mine was once served cooked Datura by his wife who had no clue of its danger in large enough amounts, nor did he. He ate some, and then went into a seizure and nearly died from it! He died a couple of years later in another country, but not from Datura, which mostly grows in the American southwest.
My next post will appear after the Easter holidays. Use the menu above to download the FREE PDF The Prodigal Band, purchase books, read snippet posts by category, and more. Cheers!
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