by Fox J Wilde
“The humble safety meeting,” Matt rubbed his hands together, “is perhaps the most important meeting a band can have.”
“Oh?” Lena asked him.
The green room was everything you would expect from a rock venue: far too small, barely-painted and horribly furnished. The mirrors were stained with what looked to be the imprints of various body parts, and what was left of the soiled carpet was covered in cigarette burns and vomit stains, or worse. Several penises were painted on the walls and ceiling in what looked like finger-paint, and one wall was absolutely covered in stuck-on beer labels. A pile of de-labeled bottles sat in one corner, next to a white bucket filled with hand-towels for no apparent reason. Lena could swear she heard the wet, slurping noises of a particularly giggly make-out session coming from the tiny closet in the back.
“Oh yes!” he responded with a gleam in his eye, before reaching into a backpack and pulling out some rather wicked looking paraphernalia, “Here are the items of discussion…” he said as he pulled a pipe and a small bag of weed out of his pocket. “And now we wait for the Boss.”
She didn’t have to wonder about who the ‘Boss’ was for very long. Perhaps thirty seconds after Matt had stuffed the pipe full and lit it, the door to the green room swung wide open to reveal the sound engineer who probably should have been doing sound-related things.
“I see you started without me, asshole,” the engineer grumped in passable English.
“Well, if you had gotten here quicker, I wouldn’t have had to, jackass.”
“You Brits are all the same,” the engineer said, stealing the lit pipe from Matt.
“What the hell do you mean by that?!”
“What I mean is...” the engineer took a long drag on the pipe, and then began coughing furiously, “you Brits…cough…always…cough…show up late, and…cough…suck at your sound checks…cough…and then bring the weakest weed I’ve…cough…ever had.”
“Well maybe if you Germans learned to use your inside-voices once in a while and enunciate, we’d get our sound checks done quicker.”
“Stupid…cough…wunkers...”
“It’s wankers, idiot.”
Lena stood aghast as the two continued to spar through a thick cloud of smoke. She was beginning to wonder if the safety meeting would ever begin (or if it had anything to do with safety at all).
“Well, offer…cough…the lady some!” the engineer bawled.
“Are you even allowed to smoke?” Matt quipped. “Won’t they execute you for smoking this or something?”
“I can do whatever the hell I want.” Lena replied acidly.
“Whoa...” the engineer warned sarcastically, “don’t…cough...mess with this one.”
“Bah, what’s she gonna do?” Matt joked, “Call the Stasi on me?”
“Screw the Stasi,” Lena retorted, “and screw you.”
“You hear that, Matt?” Not just ‘fuck you’ but ‘screw you’ too. Little Lady is pulling out the big guns.”
“Oh screw...” Lena started, before figuring out the game, “Fuck you.”
“Be my guest,” Matt replied, “but first, stick this in your face.”
Lena did. She put the glass tube in her lips and sucked as hard as she could, yet nothing happened. She tried a few more times, becoming slightly embarrassed, before deciding that maybe this indeed wasn’t for her.
“No, dummy, you gotta light it.” Matt jeered, as he lit a match and leaned over, “Like this.”
As she put the glass pipe between her lips once again, Matt stuck the match in the other end and motioned to her. Lena inhaled as deeply as she dared. Almost immediately, she felt like she was smoking ten cigarettes at the same time. She wanted to stop, but she also didn’t want to look stupid. So, she drew for as long as she could stand it, and then began sputtering profusely.
“What…cough…the hell…cough…is this?!” she hacked.
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough,” the Engineer replied as he grabbed the pipe from her.
“It’s marijuana and it’s what’s gonna turn you into a real musician.” Matt responded seriously.
“I…cough…very much…cough…doubt that...” Lena sputtered. They didn’t have drugs of any kind in the uber-conservative little country of the GDR. Heck, they didn’t even have them in the underground movements. What would any of her punker friends give to get their hands on this? And yet, Lena couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. Almost as soon as she had thought the words, however, her head began to dance. It was a faded sort of wooziness, like being drunk, but far more pleasant and far more relaxed. Come to think of it, it wasn’t anything like being drunk at all. It was a sort-of dizzy—but only sort-of—and her skin tingled ever-so-slightly. Suddenly, she felt just amazing. Like no matter what happened, no matter what bad befell her, it was all gonna work out. Suddenly, she felt like laughing at everything.
“See?” Matt laughed with her. “This is the secret to being a musician. Just get as high as you can and love the hell out of everything.”
“It’s…cough…its different...” she motioned for the pipe back, throwing caution to the wind.
“We’ll turn her into a pot-head yet!” the engineer snorted.
“I doubt that,” she replied indignantly, as she took a drag.
“Oh, trust me…” Matt chuckled as he stole the pipe from her, “you’re gonna want to be high for this show. Everyone out there is positively baked off their ass. You might as well be too.”
Suddenly, the door to the green room swung open, as if it had been kicked in. Matt, the Engineer and Lena all turned to face whoever stood on the other side, although no one but her seemed particularly concerned with it. Fear raised in her heart, but it was immediately assuaged as Vivika walked brazenly into view. She was clad head to toe in hand-sewn leather, with patches everywhere. Half her face was painted in a garish black, and the other an even more garish white; and her boots…oh those were much too high.
“Someone forgot to invite me to the safety meeting,” she said, with genuine upset in her voice. With an audacious gait, she walked over to Matt and stole the pipe. Then she expertly lit it before taking an utterly massive drag. Both of the men watched in awe, as entire seconds passed.
“Now that is how you hit the pipe,” the engineer exclaimed.
Vivika released it from her lips, held the smoke inside of her until Lena felt like she would burst herself. Suddenly, Vivika exploded into a coughing fit, bowling over and cough-laughing profusely.
“That…cough…is…cough…terrible…cough…terrible weed,” she exclaimed, with tears rolling down her painted cheeks.
“Shut your damn mouth!” the engineer replied. “Do they even have this stuff on your side of the Wall?”
“You’d be surprised what we have,” she winked at him, handing the pipe over.
“Well,” Matt exclaimed, “it looks like the party has finally started! West-side boys meet East-side girls.”
The room became choked with smoke—so choked, in fact, that the engineer walked over to the door and began fanning the room with it. This seemed to only push the smoke back into the room, which caused the other three to erupt in laughter. Still he stood there fanning the door with one hand, while attempting to smoke with the other. Not having much success, Vivika pranced over to him and helped hold and light the pipe, which caused even more laughter to erupt. After several minutes of fanning, and smoking, and laughing, however, the engineer finally realized that the feedback loops going on outside the green room in the amphitheater were something that he should probably do something about.
“Alright, time to go pay the bills,” he said gruffly.
“Yeah, go do your damn job!” Matt yelled after him.
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep the pipe safe for you!” Vivika shouted out the door.
After the door had closed and
Lena heard the feedback loops begin to die down (much to the applause of the crowd), Matt, Vivika and Lena got back to smoking.
“That,” Matt began, “is a true professional.”
“A man who has found his calling for sure,” Vivika agreed.
Lena didn’t have much to say. She was far too busy sinking back into her chair and feeling wonderful to really care about anything in particular. As the smoke pleasantly filled her senses, another sense came upon her: the sense that she was safe here. Regardless of the reality of that feeling, and regardless of the general austerity of this small closet in this new country, she felt as if she were home.
This may have been the first time that Lena had ever experienced stage-fright in her life. By now, she was a veteran of performance. Well before all of this had started, she had been lauded as one of the up-and-coming vocalists in the Berlin punk scene, and even with her underground status, she had still managed to gain an aura of infamy. But even the largest shows she had ever done were...what, thirty people? The shows were in small churches after all, and punk rock still wasn’t nearly as huge as the hip-hop scene was.
But this…oh this was overwhelming. She had made the mistake of looking out at the crowd while performing her sound check, and she became dizzy almost immediately. It may have only been several hundred; but it looked like a throng of thousands. The crowd below the stage was a swelling mob of hooligans, and the balcony (they had a balcony!) was filled to bursting. Perhaps worst of all, the second she looked up and saw them, the crowd seemed to pick up on this with a wild cheer that shook her to her core.
“Mad Bunny!” a voice exclaimed from nowhere in particular, which made the crowd holler even louder—although not nearly as loud as when Lena responded with an awkward wave. It seemed like everything she did made the crowd cheer.
“Alright, Lead Vocals.” The voice of the engineer cut through the monitor speakers in front of Lena as he motioned from the sound booth, “Show me what you got.”
“T-test…t-test one two...”
The room fell silent as she spoke, and she immediately sensed the raw power she now wielded, echoing into the eons like the horn of the Archangel Gabriel.
“Give me a little more.”
“Test…t-test...”
“I need to hear your loudest voice, ok? Gimme the loudest scream you got.”
She swore she had never heard such a sound in her life. What started out as a tiptoe into the waters of sound as she struggled to find her voice, coalesced into an unearthly crescendo of noise that grew louder, more powerful, and bloody more insane by the millisecond. The sound of her own voice in her head found control of the one coming out of the speakers. The crowd’s response was indescribable.
Suddenly, Matt ran over to her, guitar clutched in a death grip, and leaned into her microphone, screaming, “The Mad-fucking-Bunny! Wooo-oo-ooo!!!” The crowd responded so loudly, Lena swore she would pee herself.
As the crowd began chanting, “Zust-immen! Zust-immen! Zust-immen!” she looked beside her to see Vivika blowing kisses at everyone. She looked behind her, to see Vortecx twirling a stick with a wild grin on her face. Matt, of course, was egging the crowd further on by pointing his guitar out from his crotch, like a…well, you know…and pumping it as if…well, you get the idea.
“Zust-immen! Zust-immen! Zust-immen!”
“You folks ready to rock it?” the engineer’s voice cut through the monitors.
“I g-guess...” Lena said, hoping the crowd didn’t pick up on that.
“Well, get to it then. You’re all good to play.”
Lena stood there, holding her microphone awkwardly. Her feet were nailed to the floor—where did she even begin?! She felt wholly unprepared for this experience. Sensing her disquiet, Matt strolled over, full of swagger and confidence, and leaned into her with a smile.
“Just shout, ‘hey assholes’…they’ll love that.” he whispered.
“Hey assholes!!!” she shouted, on autopilot.
The roar of the crowd filled her soul then and she easily fell back into her familiar role. She was now absolutely in charge of the situation, and everyone in the crowd would pay homage to her, or else.
“Das ist mein fickin lied!”
As if a scene from a military movie, Lena the general dropped her arm. It was in no ways less violent than the way an executioner would drop an axe, or a nuclear warhead would drop molten fallout onto the heads of an unsuspecting public. Within milliseconds, the pent-up violence of the crowd surged into a wanton display of pure, unadulterated Armageddon. Hundreds of bodies smashed into each other, with less and less living onlookers by the minute. Matt’s guitar wailed in a cacophony of dissonance as Vortecx slammed his drums with the force of Odin himself. And those keyboards…oh, they were so perfect, it hurt.
With no warning whatsoever, Lena was upside down. Overcome with emotion, and refusing to let the crowd establish a pecking order without her royal permission, she launched herself head over heels into the seething mass. Between five and fifty pairs of hands grabbed her, groping and supporting her frame as she threw ankles and elbows their way. She felt a solid connection with a skull or two, and she noticed a few fists reciprocate. This wasn’t going to be easy…but it was a fight she was fully prepared to win the living shit out of.
The screaming mass slowly rocked her over towards the stage, practically launching her back on. Recovering onto wobbly legs, she nearly threw herself out again. The crowd raised their hands to catch her...and she smiled at her joke. Grabbing her microphone, she began howling into it with all the ingloriousness of a rabid banshee. She threw all the force she had into it, fully intent on shredding the sound system. As if sensing her challenge, the engineer boosted her vocals—he wasn’t the least bit afraid of her…yet. But she noted his response to confirm their newfound rivalry. By the end of the night, he would be licking her sneakers in tribute. Vivika was in the crowd now—she had missed a section, but no one cared. As she flitted over the groping mob, she grinned wildly, immensely pleased with herself. Lena shouted happily at her, but was nearly shocked when Vivika disappeared under the surface, “She can take care of herself.” Lena thought. She was a fighter, that one.
“This is awesome!!!” the voice of Matt screamed into her ear.
She turned to witness him flailing his guitar about as if struggling to kill the thing. Realizing quickly that his instrument wasn’t going to die that easily, he kicked his leg out, and slammed the strings so hard, she feared it would snap in half with sheer force. It didn’t die—he slammed harder. Yet his face told a story that his guitar must have feared, that by the end of the night the poor instrument would lay crushed and broken onstage—along with four others that would likely meet the same fate.
Vivika finally surfaced. The crowd had attempted to spread out so she could safely recover, yet she was having none of this. She made her disapproval clear by pushing, shoving and other general acts of sweaty misbehavior. Luckily, she had seen fit to change her shoes beforehand and was well prepared for her dance in the melee. She was bleeding from somewhere on the side of her head, and she winced as if a rib were broken. Yet she stood in the middle of the frozen mosh pit, beating her chest like a gorilla and screaming at the top of her lungs. It dawned on Lena that she might now have a worthy challenger. By the end of the night, she aimed to disprove that roundly.
As the sonic onslaught charged on, gaining steam by the second, a profound realization dawned on Lena the way the smoke had dawned in the green room less than a half-hour before: This right here…this was exactly where she wanted to be, and precisely what she wanted to be doing. This moment, this feeling…nothing else could possibly compare. Not sex, not drugs, not any interaction that a human was capable of manifesting with people, creatures, nature or otherwise, nor any amount of profundity gleaned from any spiritual practice would taste as savory sweet.
Once Vivika wa
s back onstage, the four musicians fused. Lena looked to her left, to her right, and behind. Four had become one entity, separated only by the individual parts they had to play. But just as a note is never separated from the parts that bolster it, they fought as one, assailing the crowd with small-team tactics worthy of any military unit. They were the elite; they were the powerful.
The guitars preyed upon the unwary few, slicing them to bits for a readily digestible meal. The drums smashed through the many blockades of inhibition set up by years of vile repression. Behold, a brazen he-bitch brandishing battle-drums for the violent and un-appeased. The keyboards were much less a thing of wire and wood, and far more the harp of a fifth-dimensional being who pulled at the strings of its lessers, forcing the flat earth down into the dawning of a new, more three-dimensional age.
She looked out to the crowd now. They knew her, and she knew them. No, she didn’t know their names, but names were meaningless anyway—they were nothing, but decrepit titles designed to denigrate the oneness of bodies colliding in tandem, “There...” she thought as she spied one young man flipping and turning on a pile of elevated hands, “That one has found his place…he is just like me.” Like a puppet attached to musical strings, Lena realized that she had complete control of the man. If the beat thumped harder, so would he; so would everyone. If the tone soared, they would all reciprocate in kind. Here, in a temporary existence forged with every second of the past leading up to it, the only thing worth fearing was the future. For this was the cult of the moment—the religion of the now.
As she sweat and screamed, pouring every ounce of her soul into the performance, she straining her vocal chords and her body to the limit. Yet she relished every bit of the moment. Like the church performances before, and against all odds, she had rejoined her commune, her kin, and her clan. Soaked to the bone with the apparition of fate and wanderlust apparent, the divines had catapulted her into a stark coalescence—one of marked simplicity and subliminal refuge. She was home once again. The prodigal daughter had returned. This…this…was how she wanted to feel for the rest of her life.
