He Said He Had A Story

He Said He Had A Story
There was a silver circle sign
And she was standing at the door
We pressed our way right through the crowd
Our pace was quickened to her floor
There was a single feigning light
And there was silk all on the walls
She had a lot of love to give
I was prepared to take it all
(But what did she do next?)

She had disrobed and she was
Waiting on the floor
She asked me what it was I want
I thought that I wanted it all
(What did you say?)
I said, “Stand up
And move your body to the bed”
She quickly stood and slowly turned
And here’s exactly what she said

“Please be soft and sweet to me
This life has not been good, you see
It’s hard with such a history
Buried in misery.”
(And what did you do next?)

I broke a smile
Reminding that I paid her well
Her lips returned, and then I felt her hands
Unbuckling my belt
(So was it good?)
It felt like Heaven
But I’m sure she was in Hell
I made it clear I’d get my money’s worth
Out of the goods she sells

Break and bind yourself to me
Deliver what you sold, you see that
I will only take from you
And use it up, I’ll use you up
What was your name?

Break and bind yourself to me
Deliver what you sold you see that
I will only take from you
And use it up, I’ll use you up
What was your name?

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
During a moment of respite at camp, the soldiers tell stories of their romantic conquests. The leader of the regiment, The General, joins in by proudly recounting how he raped a prostitute at a brothel called the Dime. Hunter realises in horror that Ms Terri was the prostitute, and this man is his father.

What’s in a name?
He has a story! Let’s hear it.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter, listening to the General tell his story.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:04 Instrumental
The General swaggers over to a group of soldiers telling stories about their romantic conquests (the tongue-in-cheek joke about the First Lady at the end of Saved is our ‘conceptual’ transition into this; the soldiers are the type to have these conversations and make those kinds of locker room jokes). Off the bat, we can hear that he’s a very arrogant person, and sounds to be gearing up to blow the privates’ minds with something really juicy. The soldiers, including Hunter (who is likely still confined to camp for now), gather around to listen.

This is another song where the lyrics are extremely aggressive, blunt, and straightforward — even moreso than usual since it is literally a character narrating a story. Still, there’s stuff to note. A lot of stuff.

>There was a silver circle sign / And she was standing at the door / We pressed our way right through the crowd / Our pace was quickened to her floor
‘There was a silver circle sign’ -> The symbol of the Dime is a silver circle. As the General recounts his story, he’ll be noting the things that stood out to him — this one is the most important off the bat, since it establishes the setting of the Dime. Having been there himself, as Hunter listens along, he will begin to recognise the sights that the General is recounting.

‘She was standing at the door’ -> Ms Terri was soliciting punters to enter the Dime. Otherwise, the General targeted the first woman he saw upon entering.

‘We pressed our way right through the crowd / our pace was quickened to her floor’ -> Familiar scenes, huh? We got to see the Dime crowded full of patrons on the main floor in Bitter Suite II, with Ms Leading guiding Hunter upstairs in the same fashion. Note the use of ‘quickened’ — echoing ‘quickened cat’s feet’, the manner the General jumped on Ms Terri and raced to get to the sex was as aggressive and practised as TP&P is when he jumps on marks to exploit.

>There was a single feigning light / And there was silk all on the walls
Describing Ms Terri’s room. The attention brought to the silk answers the question of what happened to the flame in City Escape, as noted.

‘Feigning light’ sticks with me. I’m not sure what it’s pointing at apart from describing the atmospheric lighting of the brothel’s room, but since the phrasing gets brought up again later, I think there could be something to it.

>She had a lot of love to give / I was prepared to take it all
The General is here to fuck her raw and keep going ‘till she screams.

>(But what did she do next?)
The soldiers listening are invested in this story, urging the General to continue.

>She had disrobed and she was / Waiting on the floor
Interesting place to wait — is Ms Terri hoping to get away with, or at least begin with, just a blowjob? Either way it emphasises Ms Terri as reluctant and powerless before the General.

>She asked me what it was I want / I thought that I wanted it all
The General is greedy for sex and completely uncaring of Ms Terri’s limits or desires.

>I said, “Stand up / And move your body to the bed”
‘Move your body’ is a phrase we’ll see reused as a shorthand for taking actions that you are unwilling but forcing yourself to do, or more precisely that you are coerced into doing. For now, the General does not regard Ms Terri as a person and is cutting out any foreplay that could ease her into what’s about to happen — he’s going straight into the rough sex.

>She quickly stood and slowly turned / And here’s exactly what she said
Just wanted to note the really nice, subtle juxtaposition on ‘quickly stood’ to ‘slowly turned’. Ms Terri obeys this aggressive punter promptly and without question, likely aware that things will get even worse if she falters, then hesitates when she goes to request that he be gentle. She seems to know punters like him can be volatile, but is also so adverse to rough sex that she’ll risk making such a request anyway. Rather, she can probably figure from his demeanour that he’s going to rape her, and is simply hoping for him to see her as human enough to go easier than he first intended.

>”Please be soft and sweet to me / This life has not been good, you see / It’s hard with such a history / Buried in misery.”
Even in these circumstances, it’s nice to hear Ms Terri again. Apart from this being sung in her gentle, sad intonation, every word here is a landmark meant to twig us back to the conclusion of ‘oh my god, it’s Ms Terri’. ‘Please be soft and sweet to me’ = ‘The cavalier, she hopes of him / in dissonance with experience’; ‘This life has not been good’ = all of City Escape basically; ‘it’s hard with such a history’ = ‘with a fondness for cooking history, revealing thoughts of Ms Terri’; ‘Buried in misery’ = ‘The expiry of misery’ & ‘Fatal fascination breeds a bloom of misery’. The whole verse of course rhymes with Ms Terri, too.

Ms Terri divulges to the General the broad circumstances that led her to the Dime. Apart from her struggles in the Dime itself, I sense the ‘history’ she’s alluding to goes back to things even before that, suggesting her life in general has never been great, hence how she wound up here in the first place. She is hoping that knowing more about who she is as a person will make him pause and be more sympathetic.

>(And what did you do next?)
Love the energy of how the listening soldiers come back in after such a gentle verse. Yeah, don’t expect any sympathy — they’re all keyed up now to know how the General dealt with this conflict of the reluctant hooker.

>I broke a smile / Reminding that I paid her well
The General feels that energy too, growing only more aggressive and eager to dominate her, and more proud to inform his audience that he successfully did so. Beyond his amusement, he seems vaguely irritated that she even tried wheedle out of this, since she is a hooker, this is a transaction, and she should be prepared to take this kind of treatment. Whatever kind of sympathy or gentleness she’s looking to get here, she sold away the second she made this her profession. If anything, her plea has only aggravated his desire to punish her.

>Her lips returned, and then I felt her hands / Unbuckling my belt
Knowing this could get precarious, Ms Terri abruptly concedes the point and gets to business.

We’re getting the song version of this whole encounter, but remember that Hunter is actually listening to all of this as the General describes it. Do you think the General is going to neglect to brag about the way she screamed, or the faces she made, or whatever other bawdy indignities? Liquor in the front, poker in the rear… not nice things to be hearing about your mother.

>It felt like Heaven / But I’m sure she was in Hell
‘A failed life exposed the man / Who led her off into the flame / To cast her back to Hell again’ -> Entertaining clients in the Dime is Hell. The General is aware that Ms Terri hates this and is in pain, but he doesn’t care, since she is a hooker so he should have free rein to do what he wants. With money being involved, I’m not sure the General can even conceive of this being rape, or rather that if he was accused of raping Ms Terri he’d just laugh and note that she accepted the money.

Ms Terri is also an extremely proficient prostitute, I figure to mention, if she’s able to make him second-guess whether she was enjoying it or not even while she was in total agony.

>I made it clear I’d get my money’s worth / Out of the goods she sells
Ms Terri may have tried to slow down the pace or ease the General’s rhythm down into something more resembling a romantic encounter, but he wasn’t having it and just molested and pistoned the fuck out of her. This aspect of control and domination was highly arousing to him and likely not something he could inflict on his !wife!, but prostitutes are sluts, so it’s fair game.

>Break and bind yourself to me / Deliver what you sold, you see that / I will only take from you
The General describes how he was looking to utterly destroy this woman, and violate her beyond her limits from the outset, while in an EXTRAORDINARILY ironic fashion describing the event of Hunter’s conception.

‘Bind yourself to me’ -> While ostensibly it’s the General wanting to make a permanent mark on Ms Terri by utterly traumatising her, it’s actually priming us to make the connection that this encounter leads Ms Terri to get pregnant with this man’s child, binding her to him in that fashion.
‘I will only take from you’ -> Exquisitely done how THIS is the line that tells us he got Ms Terri pregnant. Because he’s totally, totally wrong — in his single-minded determination to violate her, he didn’t take anything more than what others have taken, while instead giving her Hunter.

>What was your name?
Gee! It’s a mystery. Har har har.

Only after he has ‘used her up’ does the General think to ask Ms Terri for her name, in a total afterthought, as if to have a way to categorise this conquest. This is contrasting Hunter in Bitter Suite I, who asked for Ms Leading’s name right off the bat because he liked her and wanted to know more about her. Given how uncomfortable Ms Leading was with the question, we can figure that the General’s manner of name-asking is more typical.

In terms of the General recounting his story, I figure this is where he namedrops the prostitute as Ms Terri.

>2:13 – 2:24 Instrumental
Hunter is alarmed to hear this name, beginning to realise by the details of the General’s story that the ‘Ms Terri’ described might be his Ms Terri.

>2:24 – 2:36 Instrumental
Stress and realisation building. Oh my God — it is his Ms Terri. The connections form themselves as scenes from his childhood align with scenes he has himself seen at the Dime, and that the General has described — his mom’s silver circle necklace, her visits up north, her quiet exhaustion, the revulsion of the Lake people, her refusal to talk about it… his mom was a prostitute at the Dime.

>2:37 – 2:45 Instrumental
Furious anger towards the General. THIS is what she was hiding all this time… and maybe, for good reason! Hunter abhors this man for the pain he’s inflicted on Ms Terri, and for how casually he talks about it as if this isn’t the reason she killed herself. Hell, if he knew that, would he even care! Probably not, he’d probably brag about it and make it the punchline to his horrible little story. I think Hunter is already considering killing the General here, or at least is rumbling with a quietly murdery sentiment — the passage is extremely dark.

And the cherry to all this, really topping this tale off, is that this rapist is his father. How does Hunter know?

The dude’s son, the soldier who rescued Hunter, looks exactly like him.

(This is a stretch thing but it crossed my mind, I wonder if Hunter recognised his freakout towards Ms Leading in Red Hands is rather reminiscent of the way the General just talked about Ms Terri, at least in the sense of how willing he was at that moment to punish her by treating her like a tool and whore. Would make the whole thing even worse).

>Chorus Repetition
Hunter has recognised and processed exactly what the General has done, focusing back on the dialogue going on as the General continues to showboat and bask in the admiration of the privates. Hunter is furious and perhaps asks him more questions to confirm the General as utterly irredeemable.

>3:19 – 3:30 Instrumental
Hunter turns away from the circle, stewing in fury, as the story wraps up and camp breaks.

>3:31 – 3:33 Silence.
Small timeskip.

>3:33 – 3:39 Drumroll
Hunter is now well enough to join the regiment on the field. He is deployed back into duty with the General and the Son, marching out en route to the battlefield.

Saved | Act III | This Beautiful Life