Mabel didn’t have
the energy to land the plane,
so she kept
flying, or cruising, rather, while passengers
looked at each
other with bemusement and slight annoyance
at her playing
such terrible music over the tannoy,
as almost none of
them liked the genre of soft rock
and literally none
of them wanted to be Jon Bon Jovi.
However,
unbeknownst to those onboard, until this fateful day, Jon Bon Jovi
did want
to be one of them. Probably the person you’d least expect on the plane.
I mean if you were
looking at them all with a Columbo-eye, Rock
Hudson would be
the last choice. Not just because he’s dead, but as there were other passengers
who wore a permed
mane like 80s Jon Bon, liked the sound of their own voice over the tannoy,
donned tight
leather trousers and had a tasselled jacket flicking about, to everyone’s
annoyance.
But it was Rock
Hudson that Jon Bon Jovi wanted to be, the annoyance
and confusion when
the truth came out was widespread. What surprising taste Jon Bon Jovi
harboured, and how
had Rock Hudson come back from the dead, someone asked over the tannoy.
Then it became
apparent that it was, of course, the ghost of Rock Hudson on the plane,
not Rock Hudson
himself. Jon Bon had met the ghost, along with another of the passengers
at a little soirée
in New Jersey, where celebrities and ghosts of celebrities go to rock.
Jon Bon had never
met anyone like him. Boy that ghost knew how to rock!
Jon Bon prided
himself on his drinking, but Rock’s ghost was better, to his annoyance.
And, wow, his
dancing, had all the girls and girl-ghosts dancing to Iggy Pop’s ‘The
Passenger’.
The soft-rock God
had never seen such a thing. “Hey girls,” he said, “my name is Jon Bon Jovi.”
The girls didn’t
care. By then Rock’s ghost was telling an anecdote about flying a plane.
They were
laughing, gazing at him when “Call for Mr. Hudson’s ghost” came over the
tannoy.
How did all this
come out? What manifestation did it take years later over the plane tannoy?
For nearly a
decade Jon Bon had been disguising himself and following the ghost of Rock.
In many ways he
wished he hadn’t been there that night of his anecdote about the plane.
It was a hunch
that told him to follow Rock to take the call. Annoyance
wasn’t the word
for it. Red, then blue with more than a splash of green Jon Bon Jovi
turned, as he
listened to the conversation. Rock called the girl on the phone Passengers.
This was the name
Jon Bon’s girlfriend liked to be called! No one else was called Passengers.
It was too
unusual. The ghost of Rock Hudson had won his girlfriend’s affections. From the
tannoy
on the aircraft
“shot through the heart and you’re to blame” from the song by Bon Jovi
made the ghost of
Rock Hudson startle, ‘You give love a bad name.’ This soft rock
classic was no
coincidence, he thought, and turned. On seeing Jon Bon, the annoyance
was subsumed by momentary
fear. Jon had a gun and shot him, forgetting he was a ghost on a plane.
The aircraft went
down and the passengers were killed as they hit the rocks.
Jon Bon sang
‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ on the tannoy the whole way down, to everyone’s annoyance.
The ghost of Jon
Bon Jovi emerged to see Rock’s ghost flying away in his private plane.
Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, educator, critic, and editor from Bristol, now living in Edinburgh. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua Press) and Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022. Her most recent publications are Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), and Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla), which both came out in 2023. She has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham.