Chapter Text
Coroded Coffin: An Auditory Influenza
This is a band you’ve never heard of, and for good reason. To the five people who have heard of them, we missed you at the concert. First of all, they made me reset my Hamilton because I thought the time was off, but no, the band was just an hour late. I soon discovered, however, that this was God working in his mysterious ways to spare me from the miasma of tinnitus-inducing racket.
The only thing the drummer did consistently was rush. If the guitars were any more out of tune, they would have circled back to being in tune. The bass player fiddled with his amp the whole time, and somehow managed to remain unheard during the show's 45-minute runtime. Lastly, the singer/lead guitar player should have stuck to just one. Maybe then, he'd be able to sound remotely competent.
The most emotion I felt during the show was when I dropped a bar peanut on the floor. I was sad because it was a perfect peanut.
— An excerpt from Hawkins Music, November 23rd, 1988
—
Ronnie Ecker slammed the journal article down onto the hardwood desk, atop a mountain of other paperwork. She didn’t even need to read the headlines to know what the papers were. Because, more than likely, it was all more of the same. Poorly worded journal articles, written with the sole goal of dragging down an up-and-comer before they could even get their footing. Maybe those bands would stand for it; maybe they would let their name be ruthlessly dragged through the mud, but she wouldn’t.
"I bet this makes you feel like a big, strong man, doesn't it?” She sneered. If there was one thing Ronnie had nailed, it was her sardonic tone. “You must feel pretty tough right now. I bet your kids really look up to you."
She wasn’t even sure if Bill Munch had kids. There weren't any framed pictures on his desk to indicate either way. And if she was being honest, he didn't look like the type of guy who would be able to land any women, much less one who would give him children. But he still seemed to take slight offense from the barrage of insults.
The editor-in-chief took a long drag of his bootleg Havana cigar and exhaled a billowy cloud of smoke into the already stuffy room. Even Ronnie, who tended to fully immerse herself in the rockstar lifestyle, fought the urge to wince at the strong, chemically smell.
“Look, kid,” he said, gesturing with the cigar between his fingers. “If you're going to stay in this business, you have to learn that not every article about you is going to be positive."
Which was different than having a single journal article written about them, with such a scathing review that Ronnie had to hide it from her other band members. Because who knew what they would do, if they got a hold of it? If this guy thought she was bad, he had another thing coming when her bandmates found out.
Ronnie shoved her pointer finger into the headline, punctuating each of her words with a sharp jab. "He couldn't even spell our name right."
"Sweetheart, spelling it right wouldn't have made it any less terrible,” he snorted, reclining back in his desk chair. She wished, more than anything, that the chair would do her a solid and give out from beneath him.
"Let me ask you something, William,” Ronnie stood and braced herself over the desk, splaying her hands over the multitudes of papers scattered across the surface. She wasn’t a tall girl, by any means, but with her boots, it was just enough to imitate intimidation. “Can you name one rock band? Just one?”
Bill blew out a lazy trail of smoke, really taking his time to mull over his answer. "Starship."
“Starship?” She echoed with a sharp laugh. “Dude, you’re just proving my point!”
“They built this city on rock and roll!”
She pushed herself up from the desk and threw her hands up into the air, vindicated. This guy couldn't actually be the editor of a music journal. Maybe the host of Candid Camera, or one of the other dozen prank shows plaguing the TV Guide, sure. But the editor? They may as well have given the position to three kids stacked in a trench coat. “You obviously have no music knowledge, whatsoever! What qualifies you to publish something like this about us?”
“I was in the trenches, princess. I was the first one to write about Echo and the Bunnymen back in ‘81. I was there when Disco Duck got number one on the Billboard. I slept with two women who looked just like Madonna!”
“Okay, seriously. What does this have to do with anything?” Ronnie met him with the face of a mother dealing with an unruly child. That was what this was, in her mind. Dealing with an adult toddler, who just so happened to have some money. “Let me dumb this down for you. All I want is for you to stop running this article.”
Bill tapped his cigar ash into an ashtray on his desk. The rekindled smoke curled, in wispy tendrils, up toward the low ceiling. “Newsflash, kiddo: I don't work for you. Now if there's nothing else, you're welcome to get the hell out of my office.”
She didn’t dignify his words with a response. Actions, she was told, spoke much louder than words. So, her action of choice was to sweep her forearms across his hardwood desk and send all of his items cascading to the shag carpet below. It was a disgusting carpet, made even worse by the myriad of bad reviews that now littered it.
No words could measure up to the level of anger she felt in that moment. Anything she did say would do her rage no justice. So, she left the editor-in-chief looking exasperated as she slammed the door behind her.
“Very mature, now I gotta clean this up.” She heard Bill yell from his desk. “Jolene, come clean this up! And get me Harrington!”
“He’s off today, sir!” Jolene called back from her desk in the lobby, obviously very used to shouting as a primary form of communication.
“He’s not off unless I say he is! Get him on the phone!”
—
Steve Harrington didn’t wake up the first time the phone rang. After all, it wasn’t uncommon for the telemarketer calls to start flooding in around midday. He must've put his number on a list at some point, because more often than not, those were the only calls he received. Like clockwork, he rolled over on the couch and pressed his pillow over his ears.
But the noise didn’t stop like it normally did. The shrill sound of his landline was unrelenting, ricocheting off the walls of his dingy apartment.
With a long, drawn-out groan, he stood himself up from the couch and managed to shuffle blindly to the kitchen. He didn’t remember drinking the night before, but he must have. His brain was pounding against the inside of his skull like it had somewhere else to be.
“Go for Harrington.” Steve caught the phone mid-ring and slipped into a suave voice that hid the fact that he just woke up.
“Hello, Steven.”
“Mr. Munch?” He glanced at the calendar he kept hanging beside the landline. Today was not one of the days circled in bright red Sharpie, which meant that it was supposed to be his day off. A prospect that was now beginning to look pretty bleak.
“Maybe you should stop blowing your paychecks on hair products and porno mags, and invest in an alarm clock! Get down here, now!”
Steve fell into a brief, calculated silence, allowing his boss enough time to double-check his own schedule. Which, he knew, was useless. As if Bill Munch would ever do anything that had the chance of proving himself wrong. After enough time had elapsed for the pause to grow awkward, he sighed. "Dude, it's my off day.”
“Don't dude me, you trust fund punk! I know the schedule, I made it! I didn't ask you what days you worked, I told you what days you work. Now if I don't see your ass in my office in the next 30 minutes, the next thing you write for this company will be your fucking eulogy!”
The call ended before Steve could argue any further. Even though the effort would have been entirely pointless. His fate was already spelled out for him, solidified by the drone of the dial tone. Which left him with no choice, he guessed, but to get ready for work.
He closed his eyes and mentally prepared himself for what he was about to endure. When your boss was someone like Bill Munch, these passing moments of ease were a rarity. In all honesty, Steve was convinced he only kept him around to shout at.
Two of his thirty minutes had already ticked by, and he couldn’t afford to waste any more time. He trudged through his apartment to survey the damage from the night before. Laundry littered the floor, getting up close and personal with two bottles of Jack Daniel's and several wrappers. Boppers, if he had to take a guess.
And, most importantly, his pile of clothes. (Clean and dirty were one and the same, as long as they remained stain-free.) He rescued, by the luck of a random draw, the stars of today’s outfit: a button-down shirt, jeans, and his old, brown leather jacket. This was typical work attire for him, low effort, decent payoff. Besides, with looks like his, he didn’t need to put much thought into his clothes.
Really, the outfit would’ve been good on its own, but he felt like something was missing. He waded through the mess of his living room and found his way to the bedroom. Where the nightstands were dusty, and the bed was perpetually unmade.
When he attempted to open his closet, it became quickly apparent that the door was stuck. As if he needed more reasons to avoid this room. The culprit was a stray left shoe, jammed between the door and the wall. Typical.
After he finally managed to pry the door open, he rummaged through an old, mahogany trunk. It took longer than it should have, but he finally found what he was looking for. The piano-key tie that Nancy bought him years ago.
He wasn’t sure why he thought about it now. Really, he hadn’t thought about her in a while. Or, he’d thought about her every day. It was hard to tell, these days.
The reflection in the mirror taunted him, as he fumbled with the tie. His fingers were always too clumsy to ever tie it properly. She used to do that for him, too.
It was easy to say his life hadn't turned out as he planned, but that would be a lie. Steve never had much of a plan for life after high school. All he knew was that wherever he ended up, she'd be there with him. But all the planning in the world couldn't have prepared him for the day she walked out of his life.
Some nights, when he reached for the whiskey a little more than the water, he found it kind of funny. Funny how the one thing he thought he could bank on ended up slipping right through his hands. Certainty was always the hardest promise to keep.
This particular lamentation only lasted for as long as it took him to walk to his car. When he sat down behind the driver’s seat and laid his foot down on the gas, his mind took a shift to a more pertinent area of regret.
He hated this. This dead-end job, with nothing going for it but the meager paycheck he got at the end of each week. Even that was proving to be less and less of a reason to stay.
His hands tightened against the steering wheel, white-knuckling the worn leather. There was no other outlet for his emotions. It wasn’t like he could just tell Bill Munch exactly how he felt about him. That was a great way to end up jobless, homeless, and the laughing stock of an entire company.
How did people do this for their entire lives, when he was struggling to hold out for just two years?
For his previous articles, he tried throwing himself into his work, venting his frustrations in the form of critical reviews. But it just landed him back here, standing in front of the office building that plagued his nightmares more often than not.
With a hand against the outside brick, he steeled himself, working his shoulders into a relaxed slouch. What was the worst that could happen? It wasn’t like Bill had never shouted at him before. This wasn’t anything new. Nothing he couldn’t handle.
Steve flung open the door, looking much more confident than he felt. But the facade was helping, somewhat, to calm the pit of worry that lingered in his chest.
The inside of the office was dimly lit and painted in varying shades of brown. (You know, the most creatively stimulating of all of the colors.) Papers and typewriters were crammed into every space they would fit: on desks, on chairs, on the floor beside desks and chairs. The overall atmosphere was vaguely reminiscent of a dungeon, which really helped to get him into the writing mindset.
Even the walls weren't spared from the crimes of interior decorating. Framed famous faces looked down on him judgingly, and he swore their eyes always followed him as he walked past.
None of his coworkers glanced up at him from their desks as he strolled across the grimy shag carpet. They kept their heads down, almost pointedly. Suddenly very interested in whatever it was they were writing. Which was probably a bad sign. Or, potentially, a very good sign. Maybe he was going to get some big promotion, and everyone was jealous. Maybe Mr. Munch wasn’t angry with him at all—
“Harrington! In my office!”
Wishful thinking. Steve paused just outside of the door and rested his fingers around the doorknob. The name emblazoned on the door's glass panel haunted him, like a ghost he couldn't shake off. He wondered, not for the first time, if Bill had put his own name there in bold letters, or if someone did it for him. Likely, the former.
Only when it was clear he couldn't delay it any further, Steve forced himself into the lion's den. And his fate was sealed, with the click of the door behind him.
The electric whirr of a pencil sharpener filled the cluttered office. Strange in itself, since Steve would’ve assumed Bill would relay that task to those he deemed beneath him. But there he was, at his desk, sharpening pencils that had somehow all been broken.
“Why I keep sticking my neck out for you, I'm sure I don't know.”
As he always did, Steve pulled the opposing chair out from underneath the desk and stepped around it to sit down. “Mr. Munch–”
“Don't sit, boy, you won't be here long.” Bill cut him off, mid-movement. He pulled the most recent pencil from the sharpener and tapped his pointer finger against the tip. “I'll get right to the point. Why'd you come here?”
Steve remained standing, hovering just behind the chair with his fingers curled against the hard back. “Uh… You called me?”
“Not today, numbnuts. Why'd you come to this place?”
Recently, it felt like Steve had been asking himself the same question. Why did he come here, just to be kicked around? He knew the real answer, deep down, but it wasn’t one Munch wanted to hear. So instead, he opted for a half-truth. “I needed a job, sir.”
“Scoops Ahoy is always hiring.” Bill stood up and moseyed around to the front of the desk, leaving only the chair between him and Steve. Just close enough for the proximity to feel uncomfortable. Just far enough to avoid any real claims of workplace harassment. “No, you wanted this job because you dreamed of something better than slinging ice cream to grubby little bastards all day. Respect. That's why you're here.”
“Yeah, I guess…”
Far from it, really. Respect was always easy for him to earn—a side effect of his charming personality. He didn’t make it this far in life without learning a few tricks along the way. But he had his share of respect. What he was after was much harder to gain.
But, again, he’d let Munch believe what he wanted to.
“I see a lot of myself in you, kid. A maverick. A rebel. You write what you want about who you want, no matter the consequence. But that's where we differ, Steven.” Bill grabbed Steve’s tie and used it to pull him in, mere inches from his face. “I didn't have me as a consequence.”
And there went Munch’s hands-off approach.
Even though their meetings tended to devolve into something resembling this, it usually happened much further into it. Steve tried not to let the surprise show on his face. “I don’t understand, sir.”
“The name Corroded Coffin jog your memory?”
“Oh shit,” Steve spat under his breath. He couldn't help but react; Munch's tirade made so much more sense now.
Bill dropped Steve’s tie and circled around his chair. Like a predator, locking onto his prey. It made Steve feel suddenly small, in the same way a child felt when adults were talking over their head. He would’ve thought he’d be used to that feeling by now, sitting here in this chair, but he found he wasn’t. The urge to run out of the office was nearly too strong to ignore. He planted his feet, firmly, on the ground beneath him.
“Had a visit today from some little munchkin associated with that rabble.” He scooped a folded paper off of his desk, indicating it with a wave of his hand. Steve recognized it intrinsically. “She went over a few of the nice things you had to say about them.”
“Mr. Munch—”
He watched as Bill unfolded the paper, agonizingly slowly. Like he was trying to draw this out for as long as possible. To really drive home just how much Steve had messed up. He watched as Bill’s eyes skimmed for the familiar article, and noted the exact moment he found it.
“‘A ticket was worth more than they were willing to invest in their equipment.’ ‘They spent more time screaming at each other than singing—not that I would’ve been able to tell the difference.’ ‘The most emotion I felt during the show was when I dropped a bar peanut.’”
“Look, I—”
Unbothered, and unwilling to let Steve get a word in edgewise, Bill continued. “I don't need to deal with little girls whining and knocking things off my desk, just because you don't know how to rein it in a little!”
“Hold on a second, sir.” Steve held his hands up, gesturing for the man to give him a chance to speak. “Now I admit that I was a little harsher than I should've been, but you edited that article and sent it out the door as is.”
It was the journalist's job to write the article, sure. But it was the editor-in-chief's job to make sure the contents aligned with the company’s image. If there was something unsuitable in that article, it was Bill Munch's job to cut it out. And obviously, he hadn’t done that. At least, not to the degree he should have.
Bill shook his head and pitched the article back down on his desk. “Don't you get it, kid? The article's not the problem. It's you. This is not just a one-off thing, here. You have a pattern of going after these nobodies and laying into them because it makes you feel big. But when they storm in here with their pitchforks and torches demanding answers, I'm the one with his feet held to the fire. I've been in this business for over twenty years, and I've had more complaints about your columns than all of the rest put together. You need to learn how to critique, not criticize, Harrington. I shouldn't have to read over every little thing you put down on that paper.”
As if that wasn’t his entire job. It was much easier for him to brush off his responsibilities when he was the one in charge. “‘Course not.”
“I know that look all too well, kiddo. ‘The big bad Munch is telling me what to do again,’” Bill slinked back to his chair and dropped down into it, with an unnecessary and exaggerated groan. “Well you can hate me all you want, but I've got the best interest of this paper in mind. That means I gotta kick asses sometimes to keep it goin’, nothing personal.”
Steve managed a grimace. “I understand, sir.”
“You will, hotshot.” Bill lounged backward in his chair. From a designated spot on his desk, he grabbed a miniature basketball. For a split second, Steve thought he was going to throw it at him. But instead, he chucked it at a goal, hanging off of the back of his office door. Despite being only feet away from the goal, the ball missed entirely. It bounced back, and gently tapped Steve’s shoulder on the return. But even still, they both paid no mind to the ball, which now rolled freely on the carpeted floor.
He continued, “That girl that was in here earlier… She was a bit of a headcase, but she was right about one thing: We need to start thinking bigger, Harrington.”
The word stood out to him. Not only the meaning itself, but the way Bill had said it. Like something bigger could be the turning point for the company. Like it could be vital to their success.
“Bigger? Like an orchestra?” The ball proceeded to roll until, finally, it tapped to a stop against Steve’s sneakers.
“Not in size, asswipe. I'm talkin’ stars. No more local bar bands, we need a big fish.” Bill leaned down and scrounged around in his desk drawer until he found what he was looking for. A single, unassuming Manilla folder. He held it up and tossed it across the desk to Steve. “Which brings me to your next assignment.”