UNFINISHED AND ABANDONED: Chaos At The Copperhead Club

Unfinished And Abandoned digs deeeeep into my unpublished archives, and exhumes projects that I started (sometimes barely started) but abandoned, unfinished. I am such a quitter.

This Jaime Hernandez sketch of Hopey from Love And Rockets has nothing to do with my story.

This is the beginning of a short story I started writing late last year. "Chaos At The Copperhead Club" was set in the same continuity as three of my previous short stories, "The Last Ride Of The Copperhead Kid," "The Copperhead Strikes!," and "The Copperhead Affair." Let's have a look at the work so far, and then we'll talk a bit after that.

CHAOS AT THE COPPERHEAD CLUB

by Carl Cafarelli

She was just 17, if you know what I mean.

Her name was Copper; I didn't know if that was her real name, or just a nickname inspired by her close-cropped red hair. As she pogo-strutted on the stage, playing a bass guitar as if it deserved a sound thrashing, singing Beatles and Kinks songs with a teenage punk rock group that seemed to think it was still 1965, I stood in the small and sweaty crowd, transfixed. It was the summer of 1983. I was a week away from my own 17th birthday, and a cosmic truth struck me with unshakable certainty:

I was in love.

This was my first slammin' visit to The Copperhead Club. I didn't need my fake ID; The Copperhead did all-ages shows, and I didn't care about booze anyway. Gimme a cup of coffee, and gimme some rock 'n' roll, loud and fast. Copper was on stage, I was in my heaven, and if all wasn't right in the world, I woulda said, "Close enough!"

I had heard about this place, and I had heard about Copper. She ran The Copperhead Club, owned it and operated it, even though she was just a minor. People knew not to mess with her. The stories about Copper were crazy, rumors that she was the club's only bouncer, that her dad had been some kind of James Bond type of guy in the '60s. Nuts, right? I don't know if anyone really believed that nonsense, but it didn't matter. Everyone deferred to Copper as if they believed.

Watching her perform was the first time I realized that I liked girls, not boys. I was gay? I was gay. I'd had no idea until that moment.

Which was precisely the moment when some jock decided to start hitting on me.

I tried to shrug him off, even tried to do it politely at first. He was drunk. Duh. I slapped him, hard, lighting a dim spark of anger in his gray and stupid eyes. He raised his hand....

And Copper was there. 

The rest of the band never stopped playing. I guess they'd seen this all before. Copper had jumped from the stage, unplugged bass in hand, and gotten right in the drunk thug's face. "Shove off, asshole," she said in an even tone. "I don't like bullies." It was as close to a warning as the dummy was going to get.

He didn't take it....

***

That's as far as I got before abandoning the piece. The problem wasn't that I didn't know where to go next; the problem was the next wasn't going anywhere. I have a nice start of a snappy li'l vignette here. It doesn't strike me as a stand-alone story.

I do think this could serve as part of a longer narrative. As a chapter in a novel, this could follow those earlier stories about The Copperhead Kid (which is set in 1885), The Copperhead (which takes place on a winter evening in 1939), and Codename: Copperhead (December 31, 1965) in setting up a storyline that connects these characters from different eras. 

1885. 1939. 1965. 1983. And one later year still to be designated. The long-term goal of bringing them all together has been in the back of my mind ever since I started writing the second story, "The Copperhead Strikes!" And it draws on an inspiration that predates any of these four stories. 

This is unfinished and abandoned for now. But don't count it out just yet.



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