Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     Lana Butler really missed heavy metal. Not that crap folks started calling metal in the mid-nineties-that bouncy, rap-influenced, grunge rehashing from power-bop bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit and Disturbed. She spent her high school and early college years listening to shrill, sweet overpowering licks on guitar from Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Dio, and yes, even the hair bands like Poison and Ratt. Nobody made that kind of music in the new millennium. 
     "What happened to guitar solos?" she'd been heard to say during lunch dates with other lawyers who preferred to talk about how to convince jurors rape isn't rape or murder's justified because X minus Y equals the square root of something less than nothing. While she ate a turkey sandwich or sipped a Starbucks valencia latté, she often mused about her days of black leather and spikes, or off-the-shoulder Spandex mini-dresses. She reminisced about being front-row for Whitesnake and Dokken, and she even told the story of how she was so drunk at a Queensryche show that she hardly recalled getting a backstage pass and actually making out with Joey "Fritz" Francis, lead singer of that night's opening act The Creeping Neechees. When she thought about that moment in her life, mostly she saw her friends later telling her how he had her half-undressed with a nipple floating like a doorbell and her hand inside the zipper of his jeans. She didn't remember kissing him, though she liked to imagine it-her flowing platinum hair curly and not quite as long as his, her heavy red lipstick smeared on his cheek like graffiti while his covered her neck like bright tattoos, the whole party room watching as she started to go down on him before he stopped her gently with a shake of his head and a slow stroke of hers as if offering comfort. That was the closest she ever came to being a groupie in the eighties. She was glad he'd seen that and spared her. "You're a sweet girl," she somehow remembered him saying. "You should stay this way forever. Go home now before we both do something you'll regret."
     Pawleena Murks knew the story. She was the only lawyer in the firm who'd heard the most intimate and seedy details. As she sat in the conference room with Lana, the two waiting for their client, she leaned over and joked, "It's probably a good thing you don't remember much. Might be a conflict of interest. Have to make you withdraw from the case."

     "That's not gonna happen," Lana said. "This'll be the first time I've spoken to Fritz since that night, and I plan to savor every moment. I'll remember everything this time."
     "Just don't hump him on the conference table, okay?"
     Lana laughed as if she'd been tickled with a feather duster, girlish and high-pitched. "You know I'm a professional," she said.
     "Don't want to hear about your sex life, Honey."
     "Ha ha. Very funny."
     Pawleena shrugged. "Enough for now. Here he comes."
     Fritz walked into the conference room with the dégagé strut of someone still at the top of the charts. He paused to note the muted blue walls and carpet, the shiny black oak table and leather chairs, the wide glass window overlooking Pittsburgh from sixteen floors up. His face had acquired wrinkles over the fifteen years since Lana met him, his cheeks now thin and tight on the bone. Yet he looked young and full of life with his hair still long and his legs squeezed in the same Jim-Morrison-style leather pants and familiar rattlesnake belt-buckle.
     "Good afternoon," said Pawleena.
     "Howdy," he said, shaking her thin black hand. "Great day to be a criminal."
     Pawleena flashed a fake lawyerly smile. "Mister Francis, this is Lana Butler."
     "Pleasure," said Fritz.
     "For me, too," said Lana. She hadn't expected him to recognize her, but she'd hoped. Now, though, she knew he didn't know her in her blue suit and blouse the color of a gold doubloon. Her face had picked up a few pounds, and she balanced the pudginess with a shorter, more natural blonde haircut fluffed only slightly. Her makeup hid her face in the old days like a bandit's mask. Now she wore it more subtly, leaving her looking flat and serious. 
     Pawleena said, "Lana's the best young lawyer in the firm, and she's got good news for you."
     "I need some good news," the aging rocker said.
     Lana hesitated a moment as she thought, God, I miss seeing men with long hair. For the third time today, she imagined being backstage with The Creeping Neechees, making out like mad with Fritz. She wanted to run her fingers through his mane, to smell his sweat after a show.
     Pawleena called her back to reality. "Lana, Dear, tell him what you've done!"
     "Yes, tell me."

     She felt her cheeks warm with blush. Shaking her head to clear away a past she didn't remember all that well anyway, she said, "Right. Got you a plea deal."
     "That's the good news?"
     "I think so. Trust me, it's a sweet offer you won't pass up. Bet on it. Write a song about it. You'll be back on the road before you can blink twice and translate Ozzy into English."
     The death of eighties-style metal had pretty much ended Fritz's career in terms of the fame, fortune and such. Even after ten years of no major-label album, however, the band continued to tour small venues across the country, not to mention in Germany and Japan where the group never lost its fan base. Mostly the five musicians played "Love Beads," "Sexual Dynamo," and all their other popular sleaze from the eighties, rarely touching the political and concept stuff they tried as a way to keep in the spotlight even though their type of music had faded to black like in the Metallica song. Needless to say, The Creeping Neechees no longer made the well-known magazines like Musicade or ran videos on MTV. Sometimes the band's video for "Rocket to Loveland" popped up on VH1 Classic, but only as a nostalgia thing, never because the fans called to demand it like they did back when teens considered metal records cool. 
     Now, the group had fallen so far that The Domestic Chronicle in Pittsburgh only ran a brief buried deep inside the A section after police caught Fritz in a local graveyard at 2 a.m. He'd taken a fifteen-year-old girl-"She said she was nineteen!"-to Forest Lawn. He was making love to her rather furiously behind a granite statue of an angel. The flashlight caught him like a halo. Two cops put him in handcuffs, then searched his car where they found a loaded pistol and enough cocaine to make a fat man run a marathon. Fritz was charged with trespassing, concealed weapon, intent to deliver and, the kicker, statutory rape-a mix of felonies and misdemeanors. 
     "The prosecutor on the case owed me a big favor. A real big favor," Lana said.
     The timeworn rocker flashed a coy, devilish grin. "Ooh, deviousness. What kind of favor? I mean, what for?" He sounded happy to see hints of the judicial system's underbelly.
     Pawleena said, "Oh, she's a queen of the straight con. Manipulative as hell."
     Lana blushed slightly, then turned away. "No con. Just owed me."
     "Oh, come on. Tell the man about his deal."
     Lana ignored her colleague and met Fritz's gaze. "It's like this. He got really drunk at Judge Snyder's Christmas party last year. Somebody spiked the punch. Probably old Judge Snyder himself, now that I think 

about it. Anyway, Danny-that's Danny Tips, the prosecutor-he kind of backed me in a corner and wouldn't let me leave."
     "Touched you funny?"
     "Oh, definitely not. He was serious as hell about the way he tried to touch me."
     Fritz's glittering green eyes swore he was loving this. He hadn't forgotten why he was here and how serious as hell his own situation seemed, but he nodded for Lana to go on.
     "He felt bad about it, that's for sure. Apologized to me the next day right there on the courthouse steps. He was real embarrassed, if you know what I mean."
     "Uh huh."
     "Putting it mildly," said Pawleena.
     "Anyway, he told me he'd owe me one if I kept it quiet. A big one. My choice. I went over to his office and called in the marker, that's all."
     "Damn deadly devious," said Fritz, still grinning like Satan eating a snow cone.
     "A little. So, anyway, he offered a deal for you. Plead to one misdemeanor. No jail time. Month in rehab, then a year of unsupervised probation. Basically, as long as you complete the rehab and stay out of trouble for a year, you're in the clear."
     "You forgot the best part," said Pawleena. "Tell him the charge."
     She laughed.
     "What?" said the rocker.
     "Making love in a graveyard? What do you think it was? Possession!"
     Fritz laughed as though he'd just learned the meaning of life had something to do with cornflakes, clog-dancing and the Bee Gees. After thanking the two lawyers, got up to make his exit but didn't take a step toward the door. He waited until Pawleena left the room. Then his laughter dimmed to just a smile, though one made of lake fronts and clear night skies-strikingly easy, eternally calm. He said, "I knew you were a sweet girl." He kissed her with only his eyes in a way that left her breathless when he turned and vanished through the doorway.
     "Jesus," she sighed, thinking, He recognized me after all. She stood there alone in the conference room and felt herself smile. It occurred to her they'd each set the other free exactly once. She wondered what would happen if the they ever crossed paths again.