Warlock Billy

Warlock Billy was always quite the spectacle on Friday nights when he would pour his heart out on stage. His band, "Vengeance of Ares," would play their talentless but fiery brand of death metal on weekends at local bars, or really just one bar, "Jackson's," and that bar was for as many hardasses as could be found. The band more or less was resigned to Jackson's after their initial surprise that there wasn't exactly a crushing demand for death metal in a Midwestern town of less than four thousand residents. They tried performing at a Fall festival one Sunday in October but who could have predicted that we didn't all identify with the same heartfelt day in, day out struggles of locating the blood of virgins or slitting wrists with Satan's temptress? The Mayor invited them not to come back, ever, and the lead singer, puzzled as the rest of them, suggested maybe his mic hadn't been loud enough or perhaps the snare sounded a little dead in the autumn wind.

They soon discovered that Jackson's was the only home for their kind of message, which they then relayed in the form of a nearly identical set every Friday evening starting at nine. Sure, the band was great for that crowd. But everyone knew about Warlock Billy, and most of them were afraid of him. He earned his name not only for being a damn fine metalist, but because he played a special edition Warlock guitar that was painted to look like hell itself. But in his heart of hearts all Billy ever wanted was a wine red hollow-body jazz instrument. The secret the entire bar shared was that they all knew not to let Warlock Billy have more than three drinks. After three drinks, the real madness began. He would hit drink number four and suddenly he went as soft as daisies and would play nothing but jazzy samba ballads.

Fortunately, the band had long since disabled Billy's clean channel, as after all, this was fucking metal and guitar without distortion was as useless to them as drums without double bass pedals. But Billy didn't care and he would strum heartbreaking jazz chords through the wall of high-gain static, mournfully citing incoherent whispers into his back-up mic. Worse yet, if you let him hit drink five, he'd break into a stunning rendition of Jobim's "Girl from Ipanema." This was the point of no return and he'd usually start sustaining blows to the face from half-empty cans of beer thrown full-force across the room.

"I wanna hear some goddamn metal!"

"Fuck this hippie shit!"

"Turn me uppppp!" Billy would howl in response, wavering in and out of pitch with his song. And then he would play louder and he'd always start crying. The rest of the band never knew what to do, so they looked on with faces somewhere between disgust and pity as their guitarist broke all the rules of metal.

Usually 'Vengeance' ended up apologizing profusely to their fans as they cut the power to Billy's rig and called it a night. More often than not, Billy would keep playing silently and weeping until some selfless crusader for all things good and metal would tackle his ass and beat the shit out of him. His band-mates would then carry Billy's limp body out to the van, and they always promised they'd kick him out of the group but they never did because no one else could play metal like he did.