Pop Singer: A Dark BWAM / AMBW Romance

by Asia Olanna

  On the right side of amphitheater, there were several of my crewmembers. They were acting as my guards, my cronies. It’s strange to say this, but I didn’t exactly know everyone specifically. The gang was somewhat large, so it wasn’t really possible to put a face to every person’s name.

  An outsider might’ve thought that dangerous. And it was dangerous not to know everyone. A good organization would be tight. No leaks. I guess I didn’t care if someone squealed. Maybe that’s what I really wanted.

  I did know I wanted to sing. And that’s all that really mattered in those days. Having a couple of hours connecting with actual human beings—no ulterior motives, no destruction, no posturing and riches and wealth. Just humanity and love. People swaying back and forth with their arms up in the air, rocking on their heels. Listening to my voice, the way my sonic amplitude carried out into their hearts. Swaying down their arms and into their very DNA. Unraveling all of their hurt, their pain.

  I gave it all to them, myself, me. I told metaphors through my music, detailing my life as much as I could, but never giving away too much.

  There were police in the area as well.

  Private police, not public police. I made sure our task force would only work for us. And never be in allegiance with local government. Mainly because some of my gang would hand out and sell hard drugs during the shows. I was not only known for my fantastic vocals, but also for throwing wild parties. Especially after an event.

  Heroin, ecstasy, black tar.

  Name any sort of drug, and you could find that at my shows. Which is why Hae-il was so filled with angst the other day about not having North Korean shipments on time. We had to be on point always, receiving incoming packages at specific times along the Korean-Chinese national boundary line.

  Then we had to ship it over and to the south, carefully, on boats or planes. Private planes, the ones we could afford. Landing them in the countryside, in hidden hangers. Everything secretive, quick, efficient.

  It was sort of like a positive feedback cycle: these pop shows and my albums helped prop up our drug trade, and our drug trade helped prop up my shows and my albums.

  An endless cycle that never seemed to end.

  I thought about maybe one day having the label to myself. Free from the constraints of the gang lifestyle.

  But that would be still for a very long time.

  A long, long time.

  My drummer started up a couple beats, and my guitarists strummed a couple of key notes. I listened to them, playing the songs that we would have to perform in my head. The show was about to begin. People were pouring in now through the gates of the amphitheater.

  I closed my eyes, thinking about how far I had gone, and where I was in life.

  How far I had to go.

  The day passed, and night came in full force. I stood in front of a massive crowd, yelling and cheering all sorts of nonsense.

  I had a shot of vodka by my feet. That always loosened me up properly. I bent down, grabbing the top, and poured a little down my throat.

  Some of the guys near the back—my crewmembers—waved at me using a pair of glow sticks. They were specifically colored to be a sort of blood-red crimson.

  There were different signs we gave to each other, constantly keeping the flow of information relevant.

  A blood red sign was never good.

  It meant there were other gang members, probably from the Twin Swords, although they would pose as people from NNN Fugitives.

  They creeped on our territory all the time, whenever we had a concert. They liked to poach business, selling their own drugs. Sometimes they pretended to be us, giving people toxic waste they considered “high quality material.”

  At the very least, I could say that when I provided heroin, it was good heroin.

  Clean heroin.

  The fugitives preferred to paddle around nasty shit. Practical industrial waste.

  Weed tainted with weird strains that could elicit psychosis from those prone. Dirty tar which could send someone into shock.

  Wads of crack (crap!) cocaine that looked like it was mined from the hills of South Africa.

  Just absolutely nasty shit.

  I shook my head. Then I raised my hand, giving a peace sign. My constituents followed in pursuit: they would go and eliminate the Fugitives.

  Wherever they were, they had to be gotten rid of.

  And the show had to go on.

  I wasn’t going to stop just because a couple of these stooges were running around. It wasn’t the first time either.

  We had so many encounters with the Fugitives that the signal my guys gave to me really meant nothing in the end.

  Or so I was thinking, standing there on stage, that it would all be over in a couple of moments.

  After my introduction to the crowd, I got on with it. My fingers groped my guitar strings, and I plucked gently, letting loose riffs of music. Gentle songs.

  Suddenly enough, I was singing, and my band played behind me, and we were jamming out to my latest album, If You Only Knew Me.

  Oddly, I never remembered playing music on stage. When you’re in the moment, everything seems to fade, and you enter a trance. A world different from earth. You escape the privileges you have, and you take on new shackles of the spiritual kind, of a loving, delirious moment.

  My skin tingled as I played on and on, one single after another. The crowd roared. I swayed my hands over my head, back and forth, in tune with my band. I wasn’t lip-synching, so I had to deliver my performance at full effort. I swear, there were so many people, that I could fill an entire coliseum. I stood on the stage, with the stars twinkling above, backlit by a surge of light. The music bounced across my body in waves, heating up my face, giving me a sense of meaning in my life.

  This is really what I wanted to do for the rest of my years on earth.

  In the far back of the crowd, midway during the concert, I saw some of my gang holding up another sign: blue neon tubes. This was a stage II warning, a greater signal then the red tubes. I wondered what was going on back there. But I didn’t want to stop. I had no intention of doing so. The crowd wanted me, and I wanted them.

  I held up another peace sign, telling my crew to take care of it. Hae-il should’ve been on it, shouldn’t he? That was part of his job, to take care of all of the riffraff. And if he wasn’t, then what was he doing?

  The darkest of thoughts entered my brain: maybe now is the time of betrayal.

  Maybe now was my end. Would I be taken hostage? Were the Fugitives going to cause a big ruckus?

  I trusted my gang in the end though. This, like I said, had happened so many times before.

  Being disrupted by them was just nothing new. Plus, my gang had hung out flyers on the streets, spread word about my name physically and on the Internet. They were the ones who told everybody about my style, my fashion, my sense of beauty. The Double Dragons were good crew and not stupid.

  This is nothing, I thought. If anyone wants to come after us, then they can go ahead and try. I promise that they’ll lose. I promise that they’re gonna have nothing but hurt in the end. Go ahead, fuckers. Show me what you’ve got.

  “We love you,” a couple of teenaged girls screamed. “I want to have sex with you! I want your babies! Can you sign an autograph for me? Can you please come over here? Please, Jong-soo, I love you!”

  The longer the shows went on, the more ridiculous people got. Some of the women were clearly drunk. Gay men flapped their hands at me, and some of the more butch showed me their muscles. Laughing all the while. Everyone was laughing. Even I had to, knowing how wonderful my fans were. So fervent. So loyal. They followed me across Korea, no matter where I went.

  Occasionally, when I did shows abroad, they showed up there as well. Tracking me from city to city. Camping outside the various amphitheaters I played at. Displaying their love by making T-shirts with my face on the front, telling everyone about who I was, my ethos.

  When I thought harder about how larg
e of fan base I had, I figured I could leave the Double Dragons. I could just go and never look back. They could never catch up to me, because everything would collapse underneath me. No leadership, no gang.

  But then, all of those little guys out there, who needed a couple extra to make their lives easier. They weren’t bad people. They were simply people who had fallen into difficult times.

  I couldn’t leave them behind. I just couldn’t. I had to take them with me, not just take the gang out.

  Somehow.

  I walked along the edges of the stage, giving the crowd my hands, touching my fans. They tickled me, feeling up my forearms, touching my shirt.

  “We love you,” they said. There were other people talking in the midst of all of the confusion, but you could barely hear them over the constant blast and pound of drums echoing behind me.

  I couldn’t really blame them for all of the nonsense they told me. Most of the crowd was high as hell, dancing wildly, shaking their hips and gyrating against their spouses. Neon lights swirled in the air, strobes bouncing across the metal of the stage and the various faces of the crowd. People drank beers and hard liquor, some popping pills instead closer to the back. In the wings of the amphitheater was where you found those who were absolutely balls-to-walls zonked to hell.

  They’d probably find themselves dead within a couple of weeks, those junkies.

  Sold out, it looked like. People spilled over the top of the amphitheater seats, wrapping around the outside of the gates, stretching way into the blackness even beyond the parking lot lights. It was almost as if everyone in Korea had come to see one of the biggest names in pop music at his prime.

  We finished the eighth song. Everyone screamed, roared. I thought the entire theater would collapse from under the weight of everyone’s ravenous excitement. Their stomping feet, their constant voices bouncing into my head, causing a crush of sonic boom.

  “Thank you, Korea,” I said, bowing. “You want to hear more?”

  Yes, of course they did.

  Way out on the left side of the darkness, near a pair of people snorting coke, Hae-il finally surfaced. He looked sweaty—I could tell even from far away but he was dripping—and seemed as if he had just gotten into a fight.

  His skin looked marbled with bruises. He seemed really tired as well, haggard, crouching low against the ground, and catching himself with his hands against his knees. His face contorted into a frown, and then he glanced up at me.

  I spied him with my right eye, keeping the crowd in my peripheral vision. I couldn’t lose sight of them. But I couldn’t lose sight of him either.

  Something was happening, something big. Something wrong. I had one of those creepy feelings crawl into my soul, sort of like when you can tell when someone is looking at you—all of the hairs on the back of your neck just stand up. And goosebumps spread from your toes all the way up your legs, to the very center of your face.

  Something wrong. Very wrong.

  Hae-il wended his way around the crowd with a team of Double Dragons by his side. Normally, by this hour, close to midnight, they would be focused on distributing more and more product.

  Getting out all of the methamphetamine we could.

  Our worst sellers, weed, had to be pushed to those who didn’t really like toking up in the first place. By now, their defenses would be down, and they would be in the spirit to light a couple of joints.

  But why wasn’t Hae-il doing what he normally did?

  Why wasn’t my crew working on charming the crowd?

  Why weren’t they…

  Well, why weren’t they working? It was a strange thing, watching people you had seen a thousand times over do nothing but what they weren’t supposed to do.

  “Are you having a good time tonight?” I asked the crowd. They waved their glow sticks at me, nodding in unison. “Good,” I said, “I want you all to know that you’re my friends and I respect you so much. We’re are all one big family here. One big happy family. Is that all right? I want to include you in my family. Because we’re all one on this planet. And in Korea, we are all one as well. It’s like we’re concentric rings, stacked on top of each other. One after the other after the other. Isn’t that right?”

  Just then, as we began our next song, a fire grew in the back. It started as a spark, nothing more than what you might see if you lighted a match. Just a tiny point in the blackness of the crowd. I thought it was nothing at first. Everyone lit up during these events. Everyone wanted to try and enjoy themselves a joint or something extra.

  You would have to know how it went down by now. Imagining the bodies pressed together, all around this single point of light, a multitude of them spread throughout the crowd.

  But this particular light grew in strength. It exploded as a lightbulb would if it suddenly were short-circuited. The light expanded, outwards as a nebula does, speeding towards the sky. An inferno in moments, a firecracker explosion.

  Hae-il went up in flames. His skin caught so much fire, he began to roll about on the ground. Women and men in the back screamed. Teenagers ran about in circles, clutching their iPhones and MacBooks. Others who were sitting down on the grass and enjoying the view of the stars sat up, staring at what was going on.

  Then feet in the course of a stampede steamrolled outwards back towards the gate. A wave of people spread outwards and stood away from me.

  I reached out into the blackness, as if that would do anything. As if I could psychically stop them all from panicking. But once the instincts kicked in, you couldn’t do anything at all. Gunshots fired out into the air, and then that was that.

  I pulled away from the microphone, dropping my guitar. My gang got around me, forming a cordon about my body.

  Was it another coup d’état that had started? Was I about to be disposed of?

  Were my gang members going to drop my body into the nearest river?

  They stayed by my side, without a hint of betrayal on their faces.

  My earbud exploded with noise. A cacophony of voices all of a sudden erupting out of nowhere.

  Hae-il screamed out loud, just as if he was right next to me. He kept saying, “I’m on fire! The Twin Swords are here! I’m on fire! Jesus Christ, I’m on fire!”

  The radio chatter picked up. For sure we had an infiltration going on, a serious breach in our affairs.

  “He’s got Hae-il, they’ve got Hae-il!” someone was saying. “They’re here, they’re here!”

  Bodies swarmed about me.

  I lost sight of the crowd.

  I lost sight of Hae-il.

  All of my fans dissipated into nothingness, yelling wildly, no longer cheering, no longer happy. Shrieking at the top of their lungs, as if they were riding a roller coaster from the top peak all the way down to the bottom trough.

  The fire spread across the crowd, consuming women, men, and teenagers alike. Hair was lit like wood. Like hay, spurting outwards with a cackling seizure of light. It seemed as if someone was holding a Christmas party early, in the middle of spring time.

  Fighting broke out. Fists were swung from left to right. The crowd turned into a chaotic fury, swirling flesh, nothing more than bodies killing each other over what I could not tell. My earbuds were useless now, shut off from the others.

  The Twin Swords were up to something bad, dastardly, and I was not sure if we would make it out of this all alive.

  My crewmembers took me away from the stage, hiding me in the back. I looked to one of them, a man wearing a bandanna. “What the hell is going on?” I said to him. “Do you know anything?”

  The flutter of wind in my ear whipped against my skin. Gunshots now rattled and took over the night, as many bullets as there were stars. Crying, lots of crying. People lying down on the ground, but no longer to rest. Their souls going up to heaven somewhere, or wherever you might think souls go. Maybe they didn’t even exist.

  “We’ve got to go and hide,” the man said. There was something very strange about him smiling in the middle of a
horror show. Really? “Come with me.”

  Suddenly, all of my crew surrounded me, swarmed me, and held onto me. A bag went over my head. A black bag that cut off the light.

  Then I felt a sharp knife against my spine. One that pushed me forward and against the ground.

  When my knees hit the floor, a rattling shook my world. An earth-shattering rumble that started out in the forest and swept across the land. Like an earthquake, it made my body turn to liquid, and my feet completely unsteady. I could do no more than to lay as if I were dead, feigning interest in life.

  Smoke curled around my nose. Even if I had a black sack around my face, I smelled smoke.