by Lewis Shiner
*
The Sigma party room had gray paint on the walls and checkerboard linoleum tile underfoot. The windows, Cole noted, were made of Plexiglas, scratched and fogged to obscurity, which struck him as odd. Other than a big kitchen, several bathrooms, the stage, and a few tables and chairs, the ground floor was empty. The stage was five feet high, two feet higher than the one at the Fillmore. Cole heard shouting upstairs where the brothers watched the ut-Arkansas football game on tv.
“Hope they win,” Ron said.
“You’re a football fan?” Cole asked.
“I prefer happy drunks to mean drunks.” Cole imagined he might see the same nervous cheer in a gung-ho Marine about to go into a firefight.
They loaded in the gear, set up the pa, tuned up, and were ready to go by 7:30. Some of the brothers had begun to roam the bottom floor, and Cole called out to one of them, “How’d we do?”
“Twenty-one twelve!” he said happily, extending his index and little finger in the Hook ’em Horns gesture.
“We need one of us to go fetch some burgers,” Ron said. “The rest stay here to watch the stuff.”
“That bad?” Cole said.
Nolan laughed and said, “Just you wait. I’ll go.” He held up one hand and Ron tossed him the keys to his truck.
While Nolan was gone, Ron reviewed the ground rules. “These guys may be drunks, but they’re sticklers for contracts. We start on time, we don’t take more than fifteen-minute breaks, and above all, we keep the music flowing nice and steady, like the booze. This audience doesn’t want a lot of stage patter. If the music stops for anything other than a scheduled break, the mood in here could shift and it could get ugly.”
Alex said, “It sounds like we should be getting combat pay.”
With complete seriousness, Ron said, “We are.”
After dinner they changed, one at a time, into their gig clothes. Cole wore his blue polka dot shirt and tie with a new pair of jeans and his boots. Ron wore a black turtleneck and brown leather jacket. Alex wore his flowered shirt from San Francisco, and Nolan wore a plain black shirt and tie and black chinos, saying, “I like to disappear.”
Cole thought about calling Madelyn. They’d had an awkward phone call on Thursday, not mentioning the gig, that had ended with her breaking their date for Friday, saying she might be coming down with something. The obvious lie had infuriated Cole, so he’d wished her goodnight, said he hoped she felt better, and hung up. He missed her excruciatingly every minute, had tossed and turned the last two nights, and wondered if this was going to be the end, with both of them too stubborn to back down. He wanted to say all those things to her, and yet he didn’t make the call because a part of him feared she’d take advantage of his weakness to reopen the argument.
They started at 9:00 sharp with “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore,” Ron on lead vocals, Cole playing the guitar part straight off the record. At the first notes of music, the lights went out except for two spots over the stage. Despite the fact that he was eating his heart out, Cole was glad to be on stage in front of an audience, playing loud. It had been two months. From the Rascals they shifted immediately to “Funky Broadway,” Alex on vocals, and then to their rather odd rendition of “Sunshine of Your Love,” where the organ did the second guitar part.
By their first break, the room had filled up. Almost all the men were dressed up in slacks, blazers, and ties. Their hair was short and their cheeks were shaved and they were ready to step into the boardrooms of America. Their dates were in high heels and dresses with hemlines above the knee, their hair sprayed into immobility and their makeup impeccable.
Sixteen-ounce plastic cups made their way around the room containing the Sigmas’ legendary “knockout punch,” consisting of various hard liquors, Everclear, and cheap champagne. Ron had warned them away from it, so Cole stuck with the free beer provided for the band. As they took the stage for the second set, Ron’s predictions of chaos seemed highly inflated.
Yet, as the set wore on, Cole felt a slow, creeping unease. First the dancers strayed farther and farther from the beat. Then he noticed that a number of the women on the dance floor were no longer moving under their own power. The makeup that had been perfect an hour before was now runny and smeared. Some of them were draped over their partners like sacks of produce. As Cole watched, one of the older brothers shifted a semi-conscious woman into a fireman’s carry and staggered up the stairs with her.
Suddenly Madelyn and Denise were standing in front of the stage. Cole blinked to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. They both grinned and Madelyn waggled her fingers at him. Cole stared in shock.
The band was in the middle of “Hit the Road, Jack” and Cole had missed his vocal cue. Alex, in falsetto, stared at him and sang, “I said, you ain’t got no money and you ain’t no good whatsoever.”
Cole jumped back in. “I guess if you say so…”
They finished the song. Madelyn and Denise had retreated to an empty table near the stage, and they applauded enthusiastically. Cole looked at Alex, who shook his head, no, this was a surprise to him too. Before he had time to say or do anything, Ron started the lead-in to “Money.” Keep it flowing, Ron had said, or there could be trouble. Cole and Alex fell in behind Nolan, Cole playing stiffly now, fearing imminent disaster.
During the instrumental break, he looked at the girls and saw a drunk couple making out on the far side of the table. Denise was pointing to them and saying something in Madelyn’s ear when the woman turned and casually vomited onto the tabletop. Madelyn and Denise both jumped to their feet, though the tide stopped short of their side of the table. The man raised one hand in the air and shouted, “Pledge!”, the word barely audible over the music. A freshman in a maid’s uniform and a turban ran up. The man pointed to the vomit and the freshman saluted and ran off again. Denise was laughing and Madelyn was horrified.
Two younger frat brothers, in ties and without dates, approached the girls, offering cups of the anesthetic punch. Both girls refused. The boys kept talking. One of the boys put his arm around Madelyn’s waist. Cole, barely able to concentrate on the song, was torn between the need to rescue them and an angry desire to see them get taught a lesson—as long as it didn’t go too far. He wondered what Joe Gall would do.
Before he had to make up his mind, the man with the vomiting date stepped in and sent the boys away. The freshman in the maid’s uniform reappeared with a bucket and towels and cleaned the table, then was summoned to the other side of the room. The appearance of order was restored for the moment, but Cole now saw how fragile that order was, that the rules of society had been suspended in this place, and while there might be consequences later, that threat wouldn’t prevent anything from happening tonight. Denise was no longer laughing and Cole saw naked fear on Madelyn’s face.
Two more songs in the set, “Jenny Take a Ride” and then “Walk, Don’t Run” as a break song.
Next to the kitchen, a circle of brothers chanted “Chug! Chug!” as the man in the center upended a can of beer over his mouth, nearly strangling on it, the beer overflowing and running down his shirt, before he recovered and showered everyone around him with the last drops. A handful of brothers converged on a shoving match in the doorway and pushed it outside, where Cole heard angry voices and the crash of a garbage can falling over.
Cole plowed through the song and didn’t look at the girls. Then, as he started “Walk, Don’t Run,” somebody began pounding on the door of one of the bathrooms. Cole glanced up and saw a drunk yank open the door. In the brightly lit interior, a woman straddled the lavatory, head against the wall and face turned away, skirt hiked up to her waist, panties dangling from one foot. He couldn’t tell whether she was conscious or not. A man was taking her from behind, his pants around his ankles, and he shouted at the drunk, “Wait your fucking turn!” He had one arm around the woman’s waist and with the other he reached out and slammed the door.
Cole looked for Madelyn. She and Denise had backed ag
ainst the wall, faces grim.
Cole finished the song, jerked his strap loose, switched his amp to standby, and propped his guitar against it. Alex was already walking toward him. Everybody in the room seemed to be talking at the top of their voices, the noise level nearly the same as when the band had been playing.
“I’m getting them out of here,” Cole shouted to Alex.
Ron was on his feet. “Cole!”
“I’ll be back in ten minutes!” Cole called to him, and vaulted down to the floor. Frat brothers grabbed at him and pounded his back, saying, “Y’all are fantastic!” Cole smiled and thanked them and pushed his way past.
He grabbed one of Madelyn’s hands and one of Denise’s and began to drag them toward the outside door. One of the frat brothers asked what he was doing and another called out, “Don’t be greedy, man, share the wealth!” Everyone in the room was so drunk that they swayed in currents and eddies. Cole ignored his anger and fear and rode the waves onto the lawn and the street.
The hearse was parked at the end of the driveway so that no one could block him in. He hustled the meek, silent girls into the front seat as, up and down 26th Street, voices rose in drunken ecstasy, in anger and confusion, in sheer hormonal excess. Live music clashed against records, glass broke, primitive rhythms were pounded out on trash cans and car hoods. Cole had to stop repeatedly as crowds surged into the street without looking. Once he got past Rio Grande he was able to speed up, and he circled around to the dorm on Pearl.
He squealed to a stop in front of the dorm. Madelyn broke the silence. “Cole…”
Cole stared straight ahead. “I have to get back. Now.”
“Cole, I’m so sorry.”
He looked at her and felt one eye twitch. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
As soon as they were both out and Madelyn had closed the passenger door, he hit the gas. He managed not to run anyone over as he careened through Fraternity Row. Miraculously, his parking spot was still there. An officious drunk tried to tell him he couldn’t park there and Cole held up a strand of his polka-dot tie like a badge. “I’m in the band.”
He’d been gone for 16 minutes. “Shit,” he said under his breath as he pushed his way toward the stage. “Shit, shit, shit.” The band had already started “Green Onions,” their designated string break song. Cole ran up the steps and strapped on his guitar, easing into the lead guitar part.
Ron summoned him over to the B-3 with a jerk of the head. Cole leaned in and Ron, off-mike, said, “This is why I said no bimbos at the gig.”
Cole, his bloodstream awash with the chemicals of rage and panic, chose not to add still more regret to the mixture. “It won’t happen again,” he said.
Ron nodded once, dismissing him.
They had only begun the third set of four. Cole wondered how it could possibly get any worse. Gang rape in the middle of the floor? Gunplay? Instead the crowd became increasingly loud and increasingly incapacitated. Many of the women had either been dragged upstairs or returned to their sorority houses and dorms to make curfew. The increasingly male crowd began to focus more and more on the band, singing along, swaying glassy-eyed in front of the stage. Nolan occasionally threw drumsticks into the audience, far more of them than he could have broken with his mild playing. The brothers used the sticks to pound on empty whiskey bottles, cowbells, the mike stands, the stage.
Halfway through the fourth set, only a handful of women were left, and the brothers without dates had devolved into monsters from the Id, lurching, baboon-like incarnations of pure lust, howling and hooting and screaming. They no longer had any hope of sex, or of a kiss or a caress or so much as a friendly word. In their despair, they now strove only to make these last unattainable women look at them, if only in disgust, to force some kind of acknowledgement of their wretched existence. In turn the women were determined not to give them even that satisfaction as they chatted with their dates, sipped the last of the punch, shuffled to the music.
As Cole watched, one of these primate brothers picked up a chair and, taking a running start, hurled it at a window. Neither the chair nor the window was damaged, though the boy slid headlong into the wall. Cole now understood the reason for the Plexiglas.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Ron said, “we have been The Other Side, and we thank you for coming out tonight. We’re going to leave you with one last song.” Nolan counted them down into “Light My Fire” as another of the brothers methodically hammered one chair with another until he managed to break it. He stacked the wooden parts together, doused them with a cup of punch, and, kneeling before the pyre, threw a match on it. The chair erupted in blue flame and in its sudden light, Cole saw that the boy’s face was wet with tears.
Somebody walked over unhurriedly with a fire extinguisher and sprayed the burning chair with foam, and, as an afterthought, doused the boy as well. The boy toppled over and lay still.
Cole turned to Ron, who was in the middle of his solo, and raised his eyebrows, asking if they should do anything. Ron looked up, shook his head, and resumed playing.
The thirty or so people who were left made enough noise that Ron brought them back onstage to do “Johnny B. Goode” as an encore, and then, at last, it was over. The harsh fluorescent overhead lights came on. The boy was still stretched out on the floor next to his extinguished fire, and Cole was relieved to see his chest rise and fall. They walked around him as they carried the equipment out to the hearse, except for the B-3, which rode in Ron’s custom trailer. Then they made a last pass around the room and collected drumsticks, for Nolan to throw again another night.
They turned a table right side up and had one last beer while Ron collected their pre-signed check from the social director, and then sat down and wrote them all checks on his personal account for $180 each. It was the most money Cole had ever made in a night.
“This is just the beginning,” Ron said. “Once word gets around, we should be making two-fifty apiece, maybe three hundred. Despite a few… distractions…” He smiled indulgently at Cole. “… it was pretty damned good for a first gig. I believe we’re on our way.”
Nolan rode to the Castle with them to pick up his car. Lights were on all across Fraternity Row and cars weaved drunkenly down the street. The neighborhood did indeed look like a battle zone, with unconscious bodies strewn across the lawns and smoke rising from half a dozen small fires.
On Castle Hill, they piled Nolan’s drums next to the amps on the basement floor, and Nolan waved as he drove away. Cole watched him from the front steps, smelling the smoke and alcohol fumes and sweat that saturated his clothes, listening to the crickets, and watching the traffic down on Lamar Boulevard.
Alex sat down next to him. “Well,” he said, eventually, “that was interesting.”
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Cole said.
“Maybe we’ll get used to it. It’s a fuck of a lot of money.”
“It is that.”
“Did the girls say anything?”
Cole shook his head. “I don’t think they’ll be attending any more frat parties.” After a minute he said, “How’s it going with Denise?”
“Well. It’s not Romeo and Juliet, like you and Madelyn. She’s fun. She’s up for anything, and I like that.”
“I don’t know where me and Madelyn are after tonight.”
“I’ve seen the way she looks at you, pal. You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Another pause. “Me and Denise, we’re going to do acid together. I’ve got enough for you and Madelyn to join us if you want.”
“I’ll think about it,” Cole said. He knew, and Alex knew, that it wasn’t going to happen.
“It’s nearly three,” Alex said. “I’m going to hit the rack.”
“I’ll be up in a minute,” Cole said.
Alex went in. From where he stood, Cole could see 26th Street, dark and silent at last. If he were to drop acid at that moment, he thought, he would see an entire world populated by drunken, desperate boys, with needs so overwhelming that
nothing could satisfy them.
Satisfy us, he admitted.
Maybe he was just exhausted. He undressed in the basement and left his reeking clothes in the hamper by the washing machine, then, naked, climbed two flights of stairs and stood under steaming hot water until he felt almost clean.
*
Cole woke up at noon, starving. He washed the crud out of his eyes, brushed his teeth, and dressed in old jeans, a white T-shirt, and a plaid flannel shirt. As he came down the stairs he saw that the front door was wide open. He went to close it and saw a body on the couch, wrapped in the multicolored afghan they left there. His first thought was that she was somebody Sunny had kicked out of bed. Then he saw the strawberry-blonde hair hanging to the floor.
He knelt gently beside her and inhaled the sweet smell of her neck. She woke slowly, saw him, and started to cry. She had no makeup on, and her eyes were swollen and bloodshot. How beautiful she is, he thought.
“Cole,” she said. “Oh, Cole, I’m so sorry.”
“Shhhh,” he said. “It’s okay.”
“Oh, Cole, that horrible place. Those horrible men. I was so scared. And then you were so angry at me…” She broke down in sobs. “I couldn’t sleep for missing you and I got up at six and walked here…”
Cole was crying too. “I’m sorry too. I love you, Madelyn.”
“Oh, Cole, I love you too.”
They’d never said it to each other before, and the words were a powerful aphrodisiac. He kissed her, tasting both of their tears, and she threw both arms around his neck. “Can we go upstairs?” she whispered. “Oh God, Cole, please, can we?”
In Cole’s bed, their naked bodies wrapped around each other, they generated an intensity beyond anything Cole had felt before. Nothing existed in the universe beyond the two of them. He seemed to move inside her for hours, and when he finally came, he still wanted her. He was all hunger.
He grabbed some tissues and mopped up the wet spot, and then, still drunk on desire for her, he began to trace the edges of her labia with one finger. She shivered. “Oh God,” she said, “please don’t stop.”
