Rock
by Leon Chase — Age 34 — Brooklyn, NY
At every minimum-wage job I ever worked, there was the same skinny biker chick. Interchangeable, almost. Maybe the eye color would change, or the jean jacket a slightly different style. But otherwise, the same woman. A crusty, feathered Farrah hairdo, ten years late. A half-crushed pack of Marlboro reds. Bone-tight blue jeans, with a mysterious gap where the insides of her thighs should have been. Crooked teeth and a rough, hollow look around the eyes, so that you were never quite sure what age she was. Could be 25, could be 50. At night she got a ride from her boyfriend who looked just like Bob Seger on the ‘Night Moves’ album. And always, a real rock’n'roll name: Angie, or Angel, or Rose.
At the pizza place, it was Layla.
Layla loved the Rolling Stones. More than anyone else ever loved them, before or since. I know this because she told me.
“I love the Rolling Stones,” she said.
We were pulling pizza dough from a chrome washing-machine-sized mixer, smearing it with vegetable oil and kneading it into fat greasy balls for the walk-in. A fresh Marlboro dangled from her mouth, barely lit.
“Yeah, me too.” I was sixteen and the new guy and not sure if I should ask whether she was supposed to be smoking.
“No,” she said, and stared straight into me. “I don’t think you understand how much I love the Rolling Stones.”
“Oh yeah?”
“One time, I was drunk driving, and I wrecked the car, and was in a coma. And I was in the hospital unconscious for two weeks. And the doctors told my parents that I might not come out of it.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. So one day all my friends came, and they brought a little tape recorder. And they put in the ‘Hot Rocks’ tape—you know that one, ‘Hot Rocks’?”
“Yeah. My mom’s got it.”
“Damn. Your ma must be pretty cool.” She brushed an ash from her doughball. “So they set the tape recorder down next to my bed and they played it. And they said that when I heard the Rolling Stones, I turned my head for the first time, and I said, “˜Mick, is that you?’ And I woke up from my coma. True fucking story.”
“That’s love,” I said.
“Fucking-A right it is.”
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