"We are going to carry the children of Twin Falls to their musical apex, assisting them to be the notes, and march to our rhythms like the little cherub rats of Hamelin following their note-driven Piper away."
Where was I getting this stuff? The espresso maker 'whoowoowooshed' in response.
"So tonight, we drink in our music and our successes. We focus on what we are and what energies we have. We focus on everything we want to be because of everything that has come before us and drives through us. We do it tonight because Cobain can't."
From down the hall we heard a change in the atmosphere. The silence was immediately apparent.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Paul began, "Welcome to the Caffeine Machine's first show in what we hope will be a new perio...." I tried to stop paying attention so I could finish my speech.
"We will be going out there in a minute. But I wanted to just-"
"...and here they are, for the first time at-"
"I wanted to say, thank you for going on this journey with me. Let's go out and have some fun and really make some magic." I put my hand in the middle, and then Kurt, and then Steve, and then John. "We are-"
"Ladies and gentlemen,"
Paul, John, Steve, Kurt, and I said it together.
"The Dawn Ego."
We left the stockroom and turned down the hall. At the end of the hallway, a face appeared. Two faces. Three, layered. As the threshold approached and widened with perspective of the room, it became apparent.
We dove into a sea of bodies. Bodies on the floor sitting cross-legged, bodies against the wall standing, bodies layered on bodies. There were people from school - Jenny was front and center - but there were few I could recognize individually in this sea. The people were amass amid the scent of coffee and cinnamon, sweet cream and nutmeg. Was that hundreds of bodies? And fabric? And cologne?!
They clapped, cheered, and we walked awash in the cotton of applause. We entered this storm. There must have been seventy-five people in that tiny room. More?
The windows of the restaurant dripped with condensation, foggy like a late night drive. It was incredible. They were all here for us.
John sat at his drums, and began a beat as we pulled our guitars over our heads.
The hum of the amplifiers.
I turned to Kurt and nodded. He nodded.
I turned to Steve and nodded. He nodded.
I turned to John and nodded. He nodded.
The hi-hats counted out. One, I turned back to the audience. Two, I approached the mic. Three, I positioned my hand and raised my pick. A silent four, and I looked up.
My hand dropped through space.
The pick made contact.
Chapter 9
The sounds crept up through the black universe and down through the electric blue of existence. The notes communicated our souls into the minds of our audience, and we had control over them as they dematerialized before us, and regenerated through John's tribal beat.
They bowed down before us in utter cohesion, kowtowing gracefully to submit to our desires and our sound. We had them through the intensity of our performance, a twist of a head, a bend of a note, a foot on a monitor, and a wink from behind a microphone. We were terribly true to our audience. We kept them rapt with attention and devotion to our sound waves for an hour and a half.
The silence of the short intermission was broken by the trade of cash for merchandise and drinks at the counter, and we appreciated Paul's ‘thank yous’ and incessant hawking of our EP with every sale.
Our coven of admirers worshipped and bowed to the sounds of our guitars. It was our truth. We were the spark to the conflagration, huddled toward the middle of a room surrounded by frosty-needled condensed glass. A mean sizzle of caffeinated meat in our foreground just beyond the microphones stood receiving electrons firing from our heads. We all, audience and band, beamed with an electronic fuzz and narcotic buzz.
This was now, this was here, and this was everything.
We walked the tightrope of artistic endeavor, and as we played the final chords of the show, our heartbeats slowed. Our audience's hearts slowed. Everyone was in synchronization with the spinning charm of our universe. We wound the charm down with our eyes closed, adjusted to the darkness behind our eyelids, and we pushed this through our audience.
We were all...right there.
The final G, and the
tss
tss
tss
tss
tss
tss
tss
tss
tss
tss of the ride cymbal, and the cymbal and the bass faded,
and faded,
and faded,
and was tiny as a mouse before we breathed in, breathed out, and relaxed. The crowd hung, and then a roar of applause cantered through the small space in every cubic inch of air. Applause, a reciprocal gesture of appreciation for our art and our performance, echoed back among us.
"On drums, Johnny X," and a roar as he stood and a quick bow. "On bass guitar Steve Harvester," bow, cheer, "Kurt Lobel on lead guitar," nod, cheer, "And I am Todd Keefe and we are The Dawn Ego." One final resounding cheer. We put our instruments down, and played the mix tape in the deck hooked up to the PA system for the post-show music.
The energy in the room was enthusiastic and beautiful as friends and family of the band surrounded each member. The virtual line separating the performance space from the audience blurred to nothing. Waves of bodies congregated around each of them like networked nodes thirsty for energy.
Jenny sprouted up and swept her arms around me in an enthusiastic and warm embrace. Her strength and support was just as evident in her hug as her endearing lust and pride. Jenny put her lips next to my ear as a whizzle of chatter filled the room.
"You were incredible!" She whispered. She kissed my cheek, and continued up my jawline, "and hot!" She bit my earlobe and a tingle of warmth shot up my legs.
"What do you really think of it, since you've seen us in practice?"
She pulled back for her frank review.
"Obviously, you guys were ready for an audience. I know you were nervous...not for the performing part but for the songs. You really pulled it off."
"We did?"
"You did. Did you see Mr. Lloyd is here?"
"Who?"
"English? He came. He was beaming the whole show!"
"I didn't know he even cared - I don't mind being wrong."
"Yeah. He left right away, but you could tell he really liked it. Todd, your English teacher came to your show!"
Jenny's attention turned to Paul as he walked up.
"That was great," he said, sticking his hand out. I enjoyed it a lot."
"I am glad you did. Did you make a lot of money?"
"Best night I've ever had, as a matter of fact. You guys are welcome to come back whenever you want - next week, or two weeks to get a break, and in the meantime if you have any friends who want to come and do a show... whatever!"
"Thanks, Paul. I'll talk to the guys."
Paul nodded with a smile and watched the patrons slowly filter out.
"Take your time packing up. I still have cleaning and stuff to do, anyway." He turned and walked behind the counter.
"I suppose we should get out of his hair. Want to lend a hand?" Jenny nodded with her hands clasped in front of her, her breasts smooching out in her sweater. She looked amazing.
We began unhooking and crating cables, moving boxes and amps toward the mental door, organizing, securing, and making sure everything was in its right place.
John ran out of the cafe to fetch the van and pull it up beside the building. Once the band had finished with their goodbyes and we were the only people left in the building, it was only a matter of a half hour before the van was packed and ready to go.
I led the way back in, checking the floor for scratches, trash, or any other nuisance we may have caused. Nothing was left - we were spotless and left not a trace that we had ever been
there.
I approached the counter with the guys, and Paul was doing final wipe-downs of the counters and the cash register.
"Paul, we wanted to thank you again for all of your great work and being such a good host for us tonight."
"Thank you, gentlemen!" He held his hand out for us, and we each took a turn shaking it. "I would love to have you back again real soon. You are exactly what we need - not just my store, but to get the community out and engaged. This is exactly what I had in mind for these little shows. I would be totally willing to have anyone like you here at any time - so tell your friends or any other local bands. You did a smashing job with everything. Thank you."
"I’ll give you a call when we figure out what we want to do next," I replied, "but we absolutely want to be back soon."
We turned to leave.
"Wait!" Paul shimmied around the counter to meet us on the way out. He had the merchandise box in his hands.
"Oh, I almost forgot to grab those."
"These?" He opened the box, and it was empty, save for a pile of cash. "Sold them all. Almost a hundred and fifty bucks. Want me to get rid of the box?"
I reached in and picked up the wad of cash. I felt the band's eyes burning over my shoulders at the power of this money - money fairly earned doing what we loved. The power of asking, and exchanging our tapes for money. It was incredible. We earned this with art. Somehow, it was heavy in my hands, and it felt dirty, hot, stinging, and powerful to behold.
I was stricken as deeply as the other men.
"Thank you."
"You're welcome - you should have made more, I had to turn some people away."
"Amazing."
"Good night, boys."
And a smattering of 'good nights' and we were out the door standing next to the van with a wad of money. Me, Jenny, Johnny, Kurt, and Steve.
We were speechless.
Johnny was the first one to speak.
"BB's?"
Speechless, we piled in the van, and Jenny ran over to her car parked across the street.
The seating situation in the van was not ideal with only two legally seat-belted passengers. Kurt and I bounced on the equipment in the back of the van, our backbones bruised and our skulls rattled. When not trying to remain upright, we tried to prevent the heavy and expensive equipment from landing on us.
We always managed to make it in one piece.
BB's Breakfast and Biscuits was on the edge of town, far from everything, but it was one of the few twenty-four hour joints. Kurt and I clambered out of the back of the van, and Jenny met us at the door. It was eleven thirty, and the five of us walked in to the late-seventies halogen oasis like we owned the night.
We were masters of the domain with a hundred and fifty bucks to spend on anything we wanted, like being the richest people in the room. We were invincible.
We were the only people in the room.
We were brought to a round booth, each given a seventeen page laminated menu. We studied with our stomachs on our eyes, lapping up the coronary-inducing fare that didn't matter at eighteen years old. This was our moment.
I ordered a patty melt sandwich on rye that came with a little cup of coleslaw and a pile of fries. I ordered an extra side of fries, because even though Jenny was getting the grilled chicken salad plate, she would always eat my fries if I didn't order extras.
"I mean, you were standing with your legs apart, total rock stance, and you didn't give a shit, man!" Kurt was giving Steve a hard time about his stage presence after we ordered.
"That was badass," I interjected.
"I just, what?" Steve questioned.
"It's not like you, man, that’s all. The holy spirit of rock entered you and saved you," Kurt said.
"I want to thank you guys," I said. "This couldn't have gone any better, and I wasn't sure we were going to be ready. This was really awesome. I saw nothing wrong with our performance tonight. Really."
"He was freaking out." Jenny felt the need to clarify my pre-show jitters.
"Regardless of that, we gave it a lot, made some money, made a professional contact. It was awesome."
"What do you think about us going back?" Steve asked.
"It's a great idea - we could be The Caffeine Machine house band or something. Hell, we could practically hold practice there every week. If you count our jams in between songs, we basically had practice tonight, right?" Everyone chuckled. "The only thing that I think is a bit rough is being able to keep up that momentum about getting people to come out."
"True." Kurt changed tone, "Which makes me want to say, and I can't speak for everyone, but I think you should keep the money since you invested the time and money on the tapes and posters and got that gig. It just seems right."
"Yes," John and Steve replied simultaneously.
"Come on, though, really?"
"Just reinvest it in us or something. Use it to make more tapes and things."
"That is reasonable. But dinner tonight is on The Dawn Ego."
"You bet your ass, it is," John replied.
And the food came and we ate, jokingly revisiting the moments, enthusiasms, and successes of the past twenty-four hours.
When we finished, our plates were those of soldiers after the wars. We had shoveled food down our gullets to make up for the famine of the battlefield, and the stoneware was bone-clean.
Ours was the battlefield of pop; the battlefield of taste, and rock, and everything that is good in this world against the forces of evil. It was the battlefield of corporate greed and tasteless sheep-feed they stuffed down our throats on the radio and television and the department stores selling boxes and boxes of faded dreams. In the face of living, the machine shoves these broken dreams of youth in big boxes at us for the money we willingly pump into their pockets. Nightmares. Once you bought the dream, it faded quicker than your years.
I enthusiastically paid the waitress, and we clambered back to the van. Jenny stood on tiptoe next to me and whispered in my ear, "see you in bed," and walked back to her car. I felt carnal looking at her ass. It shook under a flannel shirt as she stepped into her driver's seat.
It was nearing one in the morning. Our energy, enthusiasm, youth, and rock and roll remained coursing through our veins. I would never sleep again.
Steve and I piled into the back of the van this time, and Johnny drove with Kurt up front. Everyone was parked at my house, and we would quickly unload the van as soon as we got home before everyone left to go back to their houses.
He started up the van and began to pull out. The tape deck continued to play bootleg college radio station playlists featuring incredible bands whose sounds shook the foundations of regular radio. One moment, the young announcer mentioned Sonic Youth, and in the next breath he presented a song by Guided By Voices - or at least it seemed like a snippet of a song only moments long - incredible, hard, rocking, low-fi power grunge unlike anything I had ever heard.
"Who are these guys, John?"
"I have no idea. Don't you love it though? I love these tapes I get."
"You should sell them or something. Or keep them. It is an incredible mix the college kids put together."
"I know."
We were driving on fifty, and ahead a pair of bounding high-beamed headlights bounced and bounced and bounced toward us in the opposite direction as we neared the bridge over Snake River Canyon.
The song on the cassette stopped halfway through, and the hiss of the end of the tape, and a ka-chuck, and the hiss of the beginning.
"They've got to put a CD player in this, soon," John said as we drove over the bridge.
Snake River, I thought.
The approaching vehicle was a Bronco, bouncing on an overcharged suspension. It seemed hastily attached, raising the truck almost too high for its bizarrely small wheels, and the headlights grew in the frame of our windshield.
Snake River.
The bronco moved quickly like a train toward us, staggering on the suspension, faster, faster.
Lights. Brilliant lights, before,
the truck slammed into us,
and everything seemed willing to be studied in a moment.
I saw the grey form of the driver, as if he wasn't there but was a shadow. The sound of the impact, spa-crackle of glass, slowly, and the front fender of the Bronco travelled into the corner frame of the truck, John's head moved forward with momentum but stopped only by the arriving bumper smashing through the frame and the glass and his head travelling backward again with the glint of chrome. Steve continued forward, and forward, and forward, horizontally swimming like a pencil through the air, and straight through the broken windshield, and he was gone. I didn't move, stuck behind some the amplifiers jamming into John's seat. I was pinched like a vise somewhere.
The Bronco heaved above us like a hinge as we began screeching sideways in a reciprocal opposing force. It was natural. The physics of it all seemed to make sense in the calm, slow motion study. My appreciation was beautifully magnified in this trance of time's elongated terror.
Kurt, seat belted, jerked to the left and now down, rag-dolled into the seat and up, and down again as if he were in one place and the van moved around him. My forty pound fender amplifier finally bounded forward with kinetic energy and slammed into the dashboard.
There was a hiccup of steel, and I noticed the amplifier remained suspended in the air rather than falling to the floor. Kurt's arms involuntarily hung in the air as if he were on a roller coaster. The van had begun to spin, and I realized through the windshield that the horizon was all messed up. The headlights, still functioning, reflected on pavement, and then steel guardrail, and then dark spring-night sky, and then nothing, and then trees, and then the underside of a bridge. My rising organs choked me, and my muscles tensed in reaction to my dire situation.
Wind. It picked up. It whooshed.
Then an impact-clap as we hit the brick wall of water on the bottom of the van, and I watched the amplifier come down hard on the floor just as I felt gravity pull and pull and pull and pull and pull down down down down down, folding me down like a piece of flat paper and my face flatte-
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