24.
10,000 MANIACS
-ZAHLER-
The crowd was filling
the main room now—a thousand people, Astor Michaels said, but it
sounded like millions. Here in the backstage dressing room the
noise was smoothed to a hum, like a hive of bees just waiting for
someone to poke it with a stick.
The more I listened,
the more they sounded like they were ready to boo somebody off the
stage. Especially some lame bassist who’d only been playing for
about four weeks . . .
I swallowed.
Nobody had ever been this nervous
before.
This was real. This
was actual. This was happening right
now.
Under the dressing
room fluorescent lights was the worst place to practice, but I sat
there in my chair slapping at the strings. Maybe I would get a
little bit better, maybe just enough to save myself from
humiliation.
Sometimes, playing my
new instrument, my fingers moved more gracefully than they ever had
across a guitar. Lately I’d been dreaming of the whole world
expanding from guitar-size to bass-size, everything suddenly scaled
just right for me and my big, fat, clumsy hands. But right now, the
strings of Pearl’s bass felt an inch thick, dragging at my fingers
like quicksand in a nightmare.
Moz didn’t look much
happier. He was standing in one corner of the dressing room,
wearing dark glasses and trembling. A sheen of sweat covered his
face and bare arms.
“You look like you
got the flu, Moz,” I said.
He shook his head.
“Just need my cup of tea.”
“Almost ready,
Mozzy.” A teapot was plugged into the wall next to where Minerva
sat doing her makeup. She had some weird herbs waiting to be
brewed.
“Your cup of tea?” I shook my head. Living with a girl
had turned Moz totally lame. And it was all my fault, because I’d
told him to call Minerva, because I’d been so mad at him for
wanting me to switch instruments. . . .
It was all the stupid
bass’s fault!
Alana Ray stood right
in the center of the room, staring at her own outstretched hands.
Their rock-steadiness made her look incomplete, as if Moz had
stolen all her twitchiness.
She’d traded her
usual army jacket for this fawesome Japanese kimono over jeans. No
one had told me we were supposed to
dress up. I looked down at my same old unfool T-shirt. Would the
crowd boo me for wearing it? They sounded really impatient now. The
whole thing was starting an hour late, which Astor Michaels kept
saying would make everything really intense. . . .
But what if it just
pissed them off?
Pearl was in the
opposite corner from Moz, in the same dress she’d worn to Red Rat
Records. She looked fawesome, I could tell, even if my brain was
melting.
But she didn’t look
happy. She kept swearing under her breath: “Special Guests? More
like Special Retards. I can’t believe
we’re going out as ‘Special Guests.’ Why don’t we just call
ourselves Special Education?”
“The band going on
first is called Plasmodium,” Moz said. “How much does that name
suck?”
Pearl looked at him,
gave Minerva a two-second glare, then said quietly, “Sounds a lot
like Toxoplasma.”
“We should pick a
real name soon,” Minerva said, staring at her reflection in the
mirror, applying makeup with steady hands. She was wearing a long
evening gown, lots of jewelry, and didn’t look nervous at all. She
didn’t notice the looks Pearl had been giving her. “If we let Astor
Michaels choose one, it’ll have the word plasma in it.”
“What does
plasma even mean?” Moz
asked.
“It can mean two
things,” Alana Ray said. “Electrified gas or blood.”
“Gee,” Pearl
muttered. “Which one do you think he was going for?”
The teakettle
suddenly spit out a crooked screech, the sound fading into a moan
as Minerva unplugged it. She poured the boiling water into her cup
of herbs, and the smell of compost heap filled the room. “Here you
go, Mozzy.”
An explosion of sound
came from the walls, a thudding from the floor beneath
us.
“Crap!” I hissed.
“It’s the first band. We’re the second band. That means we’re
next!”
“That is correct,”
Alana Ray said.
My stomach started
roiling like that time when I was little and I swallowed part of my
chemistry set. We were going to face a possibly homicidal crowd in
. . . “Half an hour.”
“Plus changeover
time,” Alana Ray said.
I shut my eyes and
listened. The crowd wasn’t booing yet. Maybe they weren’t such a
nasty bunch after all. But Plasmodium sounded tight, not like
they’d been forced to switch instruments, say, in the last month or
so. . . .
“Listen to that,” I
said. “Their bass player is way faster than me. Everyone’s going to
think I suck.”
“You don’t suck,
Zahler,” Moz said. “And he sounds too
fast to me.”
“Be dead by tomorrow
at that speed,” Pearl said, staring down at her
fingernails.
“Dead?” I said. “What
do you mean?” Did people ever die on
stage? I wondered. Like from heart attacks? Or the audience killing
them because they sucked?
“Relax, Zahler.” Moz
was sipping his tea now, still trembling, Minerva mopping at the
sheen of sweat across his face with a towel. “You’ve got half an
hour to get yourself together.”
Great. I was being
told to chill out by a guy who looked like he was dying of Ebola
fever. Maybe Moz was about to collapse, and then we could do this
whole Special Guest thing after he
recovered—and I got some more practice in.
Alana Ray was still
staring at her hands. She’d hardly moved the whole time, like some
kind of kung-fu Zen master contemplating destiny. I was thinking
how maybe I should have worn something Japanese—then I’d at least
look fool. Well, actually, I already
looked fool. In the usual sense of the word.
“Time is a strange
thing, Zahler,” Alana Ray said. “If you focus your mind, thirty
minutes can seem like five hours.”
But it didn’t. It
seemed like five seconds.
Then Astor Michaels
came in and said that it was showtime.
A thousand of them
waited out there, all just looking at us.
Random shouts
filtered up from the audience—they weren’t heckling us exactly,
just bored and ready for another band to start. We didn’t have any
fans yet—the few friends Moz and I had invited were too young to
get in. The sight of the unfriendly crowd made me realize one big
thing missing from my rock-star dreams:
In all my fantasies
about being famous, I was already
famous, so I never had to get famous. I
never had to walk out in front of a crowd for the first time,
unknown and defenseless. In my dreams, this awful night had already
happened.
I looked over at Moz,
but he was staring down at his feet and still trembling, like he
was having a seizure. Behind her paint buckets, Alana Ray’s eyes
were shut, and Pearl was peering down at her keyboards, flicking
switches as fast as she could, like she was about to take off in a
spaceship. Nobody looked back at me, like they were all suddenly
embarrassed to be in the same band.
It’s not my fault! I wanted to shout. I never wanted to play the bass!
Minerva was the only
one who looked happy to be onstage. She was already leaning over
her mike stand, talking to a bunch of tattooed guys down in front,
flirting with them, flicking at their grasping hands with
spike-heeled black boots. Even through her dark glasses you could
see that her eyes were scary-wide and glowing, sucking energy from
the crowd before she’d sung a single note.
Pearl gave me a low
E, and I took a deep breath and tuned up. The sound boomed out from
my bass like a foghorn, rumbling through the club. A few howls from
the audience answered the noise, as if I’d interrupted someone’s
conversation and they were pissed.
The guys flirting
with Minerva had big muscles and tattoos on their shaved heads. I’d
read the night before about a big riot in Europe, a whole crowd at
some soccer game going crazy all at once, attacking one another.
Hundreds had died, and nobody knew why.
What if that happened
here, right now? The whole crowd turning into deadly maniacs? I
knew exactly who everyone would choose to kill first.
The half-assed bass
player in the lame T-shirt. That’s who.
When we were all
tuned up, the stage lights lowered. Total darkness, like I’d
suddenly gone blind from freaking out. More impatient shouts
filtered up from the crowd, and someone yelled, “You suck!” which
people laughed at, because we hadn’t even started yet.
We were so
dead.
I swallowed, waiting
to begin. . . .
“Zahler!” Pearl
hissed.
Oh, right. We were
doing the Big Riff first. I was
supposed to start.
My fingers groped for
the strings, and I heard the amps squeak with the sweat on my
fingers. I tried to remember what to play.
And I
couldn’t.
No, this wasn’t happening. . . .
I’d been playing this
riff for six years, and yet it had somehow disappeared from my
brain, from my fingers, from my whole body.
I stood there in
silence, waiting to die.