Songboy Copyright 1991-1992 Dave Laird I had just spent the winter tending bar in a corner of a dismal, sickly green and chartreuse lounge when I first heard Songboy sing for a meal and a place to stay for the night. We didn't get a lot of talented people down on the corner of Fifth and Down streets, so he was a welcome break from the three way monotony of Hard Knocks, No Luck and Bad Luck. We were too near to what little remains of Oldworld-Denver, U.S.A. for anyone with too fancy a reputation to wander by. That, plus the winter of 2014 arrived with more snow than in the previous decade combined, which probably made the farmers to the east happy, but the rad-count was high enough to keep everyone nervous and inside their homes while it was falling, blowing and melting down into rancid little puddles that sometime glowed. Once the screws from Detox got through, everyone began working up the nerve to go outside again. By then, Songboy had become a fixture at the tavern and people started packing the place each night to hear him sing. He made every scarred-up, underpaid, blue-collar stiff in the foul-smelling lantern-lit tavern, feel as if we were on a journey to a better, finer place than any of us either had never been or were likely to see. Once the word got out, the crowds started packing the place. Each night there was always a hint of a message somewhere for everyone in his music, or maybe glimpses of what some folks said was a peculiar sense of humor. Everyone said that he had a way with words and memories that let us all walk out past the lanterns in the room to another place, another time. He touched us all and gave us life on a chord. Weaving pieces of our lives into music, he reminded us of a time before rad counts, before the great fires and the illnesses that had already decimated nearly all of Denver's once-great population. He sang of late night television shows and mid-day soaps. Songs about cars and motorcycles on which people once travelled across the boundless countryside. Of apple pie, reeking of cinnamon and the warmth of kitchens in everyone's home. And love. He sang of the great loves each of us may have once had in our lives. Women in the crowd always sobbed up a storm when he started singing about children of the Old World. Nobody back then had to live with the fear of these damned mutations, or the diseases that are killing all the children. One minute they seem to be on the road to good health, only to mercifully slip away before hardly a day passes by. Songboy sang to us, right through to our hearts, about the pain of being alone and sick in a public radiation treatment facility. He was singing for all of us when he sang the "Sunshine Song" about purity, of ideals and dreams long since abandoned in the radioactive ash and the chemical waste dumps that breath death down on us all. In return, we worshipped him and made him one of our own. Someone said that he came from New York or Los Angeles. Nobody talks much about those places these days, since, for all intents and purposes, neither place exists anymore except in old books and newspaper clippings. Very few of us hold any realistic hope of ever seeing our homelands again. Whenever someone pressed him to disclose his past, Songboy always flashed a smile, asking gently why they wanted to know. Like most decent folks in these times, the question was always hastily withdrawn and the matter was forgotten. After all that mankind has been through, the last thing anyone wants to do is be offensive to anyone. Gorgeous women with hardly a rad mark on them, high-tailed slinky creatures wearing Old-World skin-tight dresses that cost more than anyone in this low-life bar could ostensibly make in a year, suddenly started showing up, night after night, clustering around the makeshift stage. Now some of these upper-class whores probably spent most of the early days of the war someplace far away from Denver, or else had hit it big enough with one of their johns to get surgery done. Most of them, probably had guns too, since they were all coated with diamonds and musk, and pretty much kept to themselves over by the stage. The fancy chippies avoided all the regulars, since some of the old-timers were pretty badly disfigured. The streetwalkers didn't give a damn that these old galoots had been heroes in the first days after the war. When nobody else would go outside to get food and water for everyone in the big underground shelters, these guys volunteered and had paid a terrible price for their bravery. All of them are pretty hard to look at, at least until you get used to seeing them that way. Even the roving pairs of police that came by each evening relaxed a little at hearing Songboy's music, tapping their feet and smiling in an odd way. They are always in here, ever on the alert for vagrants, muggers or unpapered street kids. No one, not even the cops, much want to live here in this time and place. They just try to keep order, is all. But tonight, I am sitting here, in the dark with a bottle and a friend, for earlier last evening Songboy was murdered where he stood. A north-easter came roaring in off the plains of Wyoming, and it was turning cold pretty fast, so somebody had really stoked up the stove out back, until the inside of the tavern was stifling hot. Everybody was sweating, drinking hard and having a good time. Songboy was up on stage, in the lantern light, singing his second set of the night when suddenly, one of the gals in front started screaming, and gesturing wildly. A part of Songboy's face was peeling off, right before everyone's eyes. Men shouted, and some of the women began to cry when the bouncers grabbed him, and not-too-gently brought him up close to the lantern light where everyone could see. It was some kind of Old-World artificial skin, peeling off his face in the heat. Eager fingers plucked and pulled until not a bit of the plastic mask remained. There wasn't a scar or a mark on his face. Not one! Grim-faced men began asking questions, with an ominous air that implied quick answers, and the truth came stumbling out. Songboy had no radscars, not even a birthmark, save for those that lay in tatters on the floor. In fact, while the rest of us had borne witness to our loved ones dying during the early days of the Great War, Songboy had been down deep inside a silo somewhere east of Old-World Denver, pushing the buttons that ultimately scarred us all. He had remained there until the fires died, the toxic waste dumps had burned themselves out and the radiation storms receded. Ah, but the boy could sing. But I did say I never trusted anyone without some kind of radmark. That just ain't natural.