Featherless Bipeds

by Richard Scarsbrook

  On cue, our disgruntled nemesis hits the floor. We receive the first smattering of applause we’ve heard all night. Akim strokes the opening chord to our next song.

  “Hey, Dak,” Jimmy says, as he straps on his guitar (which now has a battle scar just beneath the tone control knob), “You really saved my ass. I didn’t know you were a card-carrying black belt!”

  “Library card,” I explain.

  (Round Two)

  Things have picked up. A few of the Flexers are now nodding their heads along to the rhythm of our music; they have decided that we may be cool enough to warrant their attention, since we were able to emerge victorious from the conflict with the big drunk during our first set. This sort of thing impresses Flexers, I guess.

  Also, Tristan surprised all of them at the pool table during our break, but he bought a round of beer for the losers anyway, as a goodwill gesture. Buy beers, win friends.

  However, not everyone shares the Flexers’ newfound interest in the band. At the other side of the bar, the Barstool Critics are scrunching their faces into expressions of increasing hostility. “Play some country!” one hollers.

  “Hey!” says Akim, into the mike, “You know how they say that when you play certain rock records backward, you hear hidden messages? Well, when you play a country record in reverse, you sober up, you get your girl back, your pickup truck starts running and your dog comes back to life!”

  Silence. Then, another call of “Play some country!”

  We continue with the rock ‘n’ roll.

  Now that we’ve won the attention of a few of the Flexers, several Dance Floor Enigmas are wriggling around on the floor in front of us. One particularly well-proportioned thirtyish woman in a tight black dress is breaking the Rule of Indifference by dancing directly in front of my drums, facing me. She locks her liquid, boozy eyes onto me, swivels her torso, thrusts her hips, runs her hands over the contours of her breasts and hips as she dances. She blows me a kiss, which causes my rhythm to momentarily go off-kilter.

  Of course, I suddenly understand what’s really going on, when a guy the size of a lumber truck strides up beside the flirty dancer and encircles her slim waist with his massive paws. As they dance, she says something into his ear and points at me, and the bruiser’s face flushes red. Yikes! I’ve been trapped in the Make The Boyfriend Jealous game! I drop a drumstick in panic, but I quickly grab another one before Tristan can shoot another incredulous look at me.

  What am I going to do if this guy decides to come up onstage and pummel all the fluids out of my body? Whip out my library card again?

  Luckily, the woman in the black dress vomits a rainbow of semi-digested fruit-flavoured vodka beverages all over the front of her thug boyfriend’s muscle shirt. He shoots a sneer at me, then throws her over his shoulder and carries her away. Whew! Saved by vomit!

  Wow — we’re two-for-two on the Not-Getting-Our-Asses-Kicked scoreboard! This fills me with a sudden renewed sense of optimism. Women are dancing, nobody has thrown anything at us — maybe this gig is going to turn out okay after all.

  “Sorry about going off-time there, Tris,” I say, grinning stupidly.

  “You went off-time?” Tristan grins, “I just thought you were playing Jazz!”

  (Round Three)

  An hour ago, we could barely muster a smattering of applause; now the capacity crowd is hollering, stomping, pounding beer bottles on tables, chanting, “We want the band! We want the band!”

  I wish I could say that our fantastic musicianship that has brought all of these people in, but the real reason for the sudden population is explosion is the weather. A sudden storm has hit Theodore, with wind so powerful it blew down the beer tent at the Buttermilk Festival, and rain in such volume that the fairgrounds became an instant mud bog. It’s a storm that the residents of Theodore will talk about for months to come; a torrent that sends everyone, and even a few of their dogs, running from the fairgrounds, funneling into Ray ‘n’ Jay’s Superstar Bar.

  “Boy, are we gonna kick ass this set,” Tristan says, placing his video camera on the ledge behind the drum riser. “We’ve got to get this on tape.”

  I sit down behind the drums, and the boys strap their guitars back on. Lola clears her throat and gets her singing voice ready to rip. The noise of the crowd gets even louder when we appear on the stage.

  “Play some country!” hollers a Barstool Critic.

  “Play something we can dance to!” shouts an Enigma.

  “Show us your tits!” one of the Flexers yells at Lola. She gives him a one-fingered salute.

  “Play ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’!” screams the bottled-blonde in the undersized mock-velvet gymsuit. I can’t believe she’s still here.

  Jimmy T is in a panic. His eyes dart back and forth between Akim, Tristan, Lola, and me.

  “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?” Jimmy chants.

  “What the hell,” says Tristan, “let’s play the Elton John tune.”

  “You sure?” Akim says.

  “What the hell,” barks Jimmy T, “They want it!”

  “Are you guys sure?” I ask.

  Everyone nods.

  “Here’s a request from earlier tonight!” Lola calls out to the crowd.

  Feeding off the energy of the crowd, I count the song in faster than we normally play it. The band ERUPTS!I hunch over my kit, crack-crack-cracking my snare drum at assault-rifle speed. Tristan’s bassline throbs along like a monster’s heartbeat. Akim’s guitar is spitting buzzing chunks of sound all over the place. Jimmy leaps around like a young Pete Townsend, while Lola screams, “Saturday night’s alright for fighting, Saturday night’s alright!”

  A couple of the Flexers-turned-dancers start slam-dancing, their bodies careening off each other like pinballs against bumpers. Rockers and Cowboys are jostled by the Dance Guys, then cowboy hats and baseball caps begin flying through the hazy air, bodies are airborne, curses are hollered, fists are swinging, shirts are being torn off. Beer bellies swing forth, unrestrained. A large Country Momma rips open the blouse of a Dance Floor Enigma as another girl tosses the contents of her glass into the face of a Rocker Dude in a Metallica shirt, who up to that point had looked pleasantly dazed by the sight of exposed breasts.

  All of this happens within the twelve seconds or so of the warp-speed chorus.

  I try to slow the tempo to initiate a groovin’ little blues jam, and Akim tries to segue into some subdued, cool-drink-on-a-riverboat slide guitar playing, but it’s too late. It’s like pulling the handbrake to stop a speeding train that’s already careening over a cliff.

  A muscle-shirt-wearing Flexer is on Ray’s back like a bronco rider, his hands cupped over the cowboy’s eyes. The old cowboy throws wild punches everywhere but in the direction of his assailant. An Enigma, possibly the Flexer’s conquest of the evening, lands a kick squarely upon Ray’s Family Jewels, and he keels forward, sending his cowboy hat, along with the Flexer, flying directly into Jay, who is knocked right out of his Birkenstocks.

  People are shoving, hitting, kicking, and punching. The air is full of flying glasses, bottles, and chairs. A beer bottle smashes against the wall just inches behind me; I can feel the warmth of blood trickling down my face from where a shard of glass has cut my cheek, just under my left eye. Stinging sweat creeps into the cut as I duck behind my drums to avoid further injury.

  A guy mounts the stage and starts tugging at Lola’s shirt. She blasts him with a solid punch to the face, and he falls limply from the edge of the stage. Akim and Tristan grab their guitars and run for the back door. Inexplicably, as a whiskey glass streaks past the tip of his nose, Jimmy T stops to say, “Thank-you very much, Goodnight!” into his microphone. Then Lola grabs him by the sleeve and tows him through the back door, which is hit by a barstool half a second after the door closes behind them.

  I crawl on my hands and knees behind the shelter of my drums, behind the stack of PA speakers, then through the stage door into the parking
lot. I look back just long enough to see a mixed group of Cowboys and Flexers mounting the stage and throwing our equipment into the fray.

  The others are sitting on the back bumper of the rental van, shaking their heads.

  “Shit,” says Akim.

  “Shit,” adds Jimmy T.

  “Shit,” says Lola.

  “Yeah,” Tristan concurs, cradling his shattered video camera in his palm. “Shit.”

  As I mop the sweaty blood from my face with my sleeve, I agree with them all.

  Shit.

  THE BIG BREAK

  We’re all at the Deaf Man’s Garage, the band’s rehearsal space behind Akim and Sung Li’s apartment, trying to get our smashed-up equipment put back together in time for tomorrow night’s gig downtown at Twelve Tribes. Hardly enough time has passed since our disastrous gig at Ray ‘n’ Jay’s to heal anybody’s wounds. Nobody talks.

  Akim is on the floor, performing surgery on his disabled Fender Twin with a soldering iron and a roll of electrical tape. He and Sung Li had been in the middle of a huge argument when the rest of us arrived. She wants him to quit playing in bars with the band and go back to university. She’s tired of worrying that he’s going to get killed one of these nights. From his hunched-over position on the floor, I can feel Akim radiating anger and frustration like a star collapsing in on itself; he could go supernova at any moment.

  Tristan is sitting in a corner quietly retuning his basses that survived the onslaught intact. His beloved Washburn five-string, though, with the purple metalflake finish, was smashed to splinters, and his video camera, along with the tape inside with the footage from our last two months of gigs, was trampled into shards under the heels of cowboy boots. Valerie also wants Tristan to quit the band. It’s all he can do to keep from crying.

  Lola’s swearing at the tangled mess of microphone cables and speaker wires she’s trying to sort through. She’s gone back to her military/vampiress mode of dress since that idiot tried to rip her shirt off onstage, and her knuckles are bandaged from slugging him. There have been murmurs around the offices of the Women’s Issues Commission and the Minority Rights Alliance that it might be time to replace Lola as president with someone with “fewer outside commitments”.

  The cut on my face hurts much more now than it did when that shard of glass first hit me. It will probably leave a permanent scar, as if I need another one. I’ve still got the remnants of the black eye that Jerry gave me at the Triple R, and the bruises on my chest from his boots have recently turned an evil shade of purple-black. I’ve been able to patch most of my drum set together with wood screws and duct tape, but my beloved old Ludwig snare drum somehow got thrown out into the parking lot during the fray, and was run over by an escaping car. I’ll have to play my backup snare for now, which sucks along with everything else.

  Maybe my father was right, that it was bound to come to this. Have I used up my nine rock ‘n’ roll lives? On top of the physical injuries, I’ve missed out on two years of university, the balance in my bank account has dropped to single digits, and I’ve lost Zoe for good. Long live rock ‘n’ roll.

  The only person who escaped without a scratch on his equipment, body, or ego is Jimmy T. He probably hasn’t been getting much loving from Lola for the past few days, but he’s able to find substitutes for that when he wants it. He flits uselessly around the garage, trying to cheer everyone up.

  “Let’s not let one bad gig get us down, okay?” he says, “This is it! This is the turning point for the Featherless Bipeds. Billy VandenHammer from Big Plastic Records is coming to hear us play tonight. This is our shot at the big time, kids. Can you feel it coming? Can you feel it? Can you?”

  Akim throws a roll of electrical tape at Jimmy T, which bounces off his forehead.

  “Did you feel that, Jimmy T?” Akim says.

  “Look, I know the last gig was rough, but tonight is a big, big night for this band, and we’ve got to get our spirits up. Whaddaya say, gang?”

  Silence.

  Sung Li pushes her face through a crack in the garage door. Her chin is wrinkled, her lips pressed tightly together, as if trying to prevent herself from screaming, or crying, or both.

  “Akim,” she says sharply, “there’s a call inside for you. It’s that Billy VandenHammer guy’s secretary.”

  Akim follows Sung Li out of the garage.

  “See?” Jimmy T says, “See? This is it! This is the turning point! We’re on our way now. Straight to the top!”

  The rest of us continue repairing our equipment in silence. Eventually Akim returns with his head down.

  “VandenHammer’s not coming tonight,” he says. “Something else came up. His secretary didn’t say what.”

  “Hey, come on!” Jimmy T says. “At least he called us! At least he’s still interested! He’ll come out to another gig — you’ll see.”

  Lola throws the knot of cables to the floor.

  “Screw this,” she says. “I bowed out of an important panel discussion on inner city race relations to go to this gig.”

  She turns and makes for the garage door.

  “Lola!” Jimmy calls after her. “Wait! This gig will be great! It’s at The Twelve Tribes, for crying out loud. The most legendary rock bar in the city!”

  “It’s been fun, boys,” she says from the doorway, “but I’ve got more important things to do than get my shirt ripped off in some redneck bar. I’m gonna make some calls and get myself back onto that panel. I’m the president of the Women’s Issues Commission and the Minority Rights Alliance. I am not a rock star.”

  She walks out.

  “Fine,” Jimmy T says. “Screw her, then. It’ll just be us boys tonight. Just a little cock rock, then. We’re gonna blow the roof off the old Twelve Tribes tonight, just us guys. Just some good old fashioned . . . ”

  “Shut up, Jimmy T,” Tristan says.

  And now here we are at the famous Twelve Tribes, the place where the Rolling Stones used to play unadvertised gigs, where The Who once played under a different name, where Rush and the Tragically Hip and Neil Young and Blue Rodeo and practically every famous rock band in the country played before flying into superstardom. Here we are at the Twelve Tribes, a place where rock stars are born, and we’re stinking up the joint like the sewer just backed up.

  “You guys suck!” someone calls to us after a lackluster performance of Smog and Wire.

  “We’ll try to do better on this next one,” Tristan tells the critic, then he plays off-time throughout our wobbly version of Even the Waitress.

  “Get off the stage!” is the critic’s loud suggestion. “I can play better than you clowns!”

  “You think so?” Akim says.

  “A six year old with a toy guitar could play better!” the critic shouts back. His buddy beside him snorts with laughter.

  “Screw ’em,” Akim says to the rest of us. “Screw the set list. Who cares anymore. Turn everything up, and let’s just jam like we used to.”

  Yeah. Damn right. I start playing a throbbing beat on the drums, something the other guys can dig into.

  “Louder! Faster!” Akim yells. “ Let’s blow their damn heads off!”

  Tristan locks into the furious beat with a throbbing motorcycle-engine bass line, and Jimmy T thickens the sound with some chunky power chords. We’re roaring along like a full-throttle locomotive when Akim leaps from the stage and lands on the floor directly in front of the critic, staring him in the eyes. His fingers dig into the fretboard, the rage screaming from his amplifier with an intensity that makes Jimi Hendrix sound like Roy Clark. His fingers hammer and bend the strings, releasing the crazed notes out into the wild, notes that bite and claw as if they might make the air bleed.

  Akim then takes a step back, lets a single, perfect note fade away into nothing. The formerly indifferent crowd now roars. Akim holds the guitar out to the critic. We’re playing so loud that nobody can hear what Akim says to him, but it’s probably something like, “Your turn, maestro.” The guy lo
oks away.

  Akim mounts the stage again, grinning like crazy, soloing like he’s channeling the ghosts of Dwayne Allman, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and every other great guitarist who departed in their prime. Akim is playing like only Akim can, and he’s raising the rest of us up with him.

  Then, as the last chord of the jam dissolves, Akim calls out to the cheering crowd, “We’ll be right back, after we take a break so I can kick somebody’s ass.”

  The cheering gets even louder. The critic and his buddy decide to depart immediately.

  Ladies and gentlemen, the Featherless Bipeds are back.

  If we nearly stank people out during most of our first set, we nearly smoked ’em out with our second. Our playing was so hot and angry during round two, it’s amazing the Twelve Tribes wasn’t reduced to smoldering embers. There aren’t enough fire trucks in the city to extinguish us now. Songs we’ve played a hundred times before suddenly crackle with lightning energy. Even Jimmy T is playing with a new kind of intensity, despite the distraction of dozens of lithe young women dancing wildly at the foot of the stage. Sure, between songs he flirts with them, but during the songs, he’s playing his guitar. We are in the groove.

  Too bad Lola chose to miss this gig. Adding her vocals to our volatile playing might have made the Twelve Tribes explode. And too bad Billy VandenHammer decided he had more important things to do than come to listen to the Featherless Bipeds. If he’d heard the set we just finished playing, he’d have had us sign a recording deal right here on the spot.

  Admirers mob us the moment we leave the stage. Guys bring us beers and shooters. Smiling and swaying girls present themselves. Jimmy T immediately disappears with a scantily clad rock bunny. As the rest of us retreat for a corner table, I think for a second I see Zoe’s face in the mob. I’m so charged with adrenaline, I must be hallucinating.

  But no. I see her again. It’s her. She’s approaching the table. Zoe is here. Lola, Veronica, and Sung Li are with her.

  “Sung Li?” Akim says. “I thought you were never coming to another one of our gigs again.”