The Wet Spot

The wet spot. Something you don't want to roll over into. Jimmy on guitar, Lester on guitar. Kevin on the other guitar, but no one ever pays any attention to Kevin. Dave on bass, slapping it around like it's his ex-wife. Not that he ever slapped around his ex-wife. When they were married she outweighed him by 50 pounds and he was more or less constantly terrified of her. After they split she joined the Cross Fit and lost 75 pounds and now if she and Dave went to blows she'd kicked his ass thoroughly and her instructor would say, "Sorry Linda, I'm going to need another 15 minutes with the medicine ball or the climbing rope before I can give you your points today." Paul Fabrizio on skins.

What are they playing. The stage is dark and the floor is darker and the crowd is a cave-squirming organism. Hillbilly rockabilly psycho surf with the reverb and machine gun plectrum and Paul Fabrizio's tight-as-tight cymbal work. Kevin working the neck of his guitar like a five-year inmate with his first stroke book, but no one pays any attention.

Lester and Jimmy are doing what they do. Lester with his scruffy mustache and Jimmy with his scruffy beard. Together they play goatee guitar. Its electric acid, purple kool-aid in your veins. It makes your teeth ache after eating cake that's got too much icing. Jimmy sneers, Lester grimaces. Dave frowns like when his ex-wife kept asking him why his zipper's unzipped all the time. Paul Fabrizio Paul-Fabrizios.

They move from song to song without a pause. Lemmy's Sisters, Mister Jelly, Jester's Lament. All the hits. The walls vibrate and the beer cans sweat and the air glows an invisible blood-colored glow. Everyone in the crowd tastes copper. Kevin's standing on the bar, feet stuck permanently in the primordial ooze of spilled vodka and peanut dust. No one notices.

The songs don't have any words so the crowd sings along. Work grease, construction site dust, bruises, cuts, scrapes, cheap cologne, cheap perfume, quick mac-n-cheese dinner breath and too many car payments left to give a damn about. Everyone's there. Kate Winslet, not the famous one, whips her masses of red hair around, drenching everyone around her in tequila sweat and rhinovirus. Jackie Chan, the girl not the boy, is strutting through a modified hippie version of a Charleston, free-basing on her own stomach acid and a mouthful of saliva. Chuck Yeager, just a kid, no relation to the astronaut, is wide eyed and goggling at Lester's fret work and Jimmy's hammer-ons.

Packed into the Chicken Shack on a Friday night that might be a Saturday night or even a Thursday night. No one's got cell phones. No one's got automatic door locks. No one's got a reliable baby sitter, just an oldest kid old enough to bully the younger kids while mom and or dad slam Chablis and lick the sipping edge off boilermakers and cans with pictures if mountains on them. Lester and Jimmy sword fight arpeggios and waltz through Paul Fabrizio-conducted axe marches. Kevin's dry humping the sound board but the engineer doesn't see him, high on a fried egg sandwich and the high school's 47 to 13 route of the prep school from across state. Dave's perfectly balanced on one foot with the bass acting as an upside-down pendulum ballast. The crowd's moshing as if there was no word for moshing and Buddha approved.

Jimmy breaks a string but just Paganini's that shit. Lester's pick is cracked and he'll never get such an exotic twang out of his guitar ever again. Their fingers are not human. Tight bundles of iron cables run down their strumming fore-arms, up their fingering fore-arms, an architecture of terpsichorean engineering, and the licks and chord shifts are like having sex with a fat pat of butter on dirty white sheets. Paul Fabrizio's arms are a blur, the high hat's a Theremin, the toms are bdsm survivors, the crash is ninja and the snare's Woody Woodpecker's rage pillow. Kevin's off to the side of the crowd, performing a Satanic blood ritual in 3/4 time on a pair of acne-scarred teenagers, neither of whom realize what's going on, chewing gum so fast and hard they're burning calories. Dave's got jaundice and his bass has got the gout.

A whoop whoop outside, it's the cops, one of 'em smelled pot. Jimmy and Lester don't stop. Paul Fabrizio attacks the bass drum with double and triple kicks. Dave walks up and down his fretless like an OCD gramma on a damp beach boardwalk. The crowd twists down and around on itself, perspiration lubrication. Doug Henning's hand finds an ass in the morass of bodies and starts to grope it, not caring if it's a man's or a woman's, not realizing it's his own. Larry Hagman's bald head is a strobe light as he bobs it to the beat, making his chiropractor richer with ever note. Jill St. John is all shoulders and firm jawline, stare-gazing at Jimmy/Lester and so ready fuck one or both she's actually actively ovulating.

The cops bust in. They're immediately absorbed by the crowd. Their guns end up on stage. Jimmy and Lester kick them back and forth, callused fingers greasing up a few remaining guitar strings and baking overtones into close-encounters style soul punches. Dave's bass is on cold fire. Kevin's got both guns in one hand while the other finger-fucks an e-minor chord, shoots himself in the head three times, drops to the stage, splashes blood, falls off, is instantly forgotten. Paul Fabrizio is standing on the snare and pissing on the crash. The cops lose their shirts. The bartender doesn't even bother with the register anymore, throwing cash onto the floor as soon as he gets it and throwing beer cans out at outstretched hands

Jimmy and Lester fuse into a Japanese Space Robot, a double-necked guitar with only one string left. The Marshall Stacks achieve self-awareness and rewrite the first four books of the new testament. Dave's Bass turns into a fish. The crowd picks up and without conscious thought eats Kevin's remains. Lisa Whelchel gets an arm. Nancy McKeon gets a leg. Kim Fields and Mindy Cohn share the torso. The cops arrest themselves. No one has any pot. Party lines across the county start to ring as scared children too young to take care of their siblings back away from the suddenly vibrating am/fm stereo. Dave's wife shows up with the rest of the Cross Fit crew and arm-fulls of axe-handles. They all start racking up bonus points. Kevin scream over the crowd that he's not Paleo. Paul Fabrizio's playing seven against nine and summoning numerology demons.

It's the beginning and the end of the universe. Its so loud you can hear with your molecules. It's your brain stretched out of your ears and pulled down over your whole body. And then, and then, and then...

The crowd dissolves into a puddle of its own satisfaction. Jimmy and Lester hit final chords while Paul Fabrizio tamps down the crash to a trickle. Dave plucks a low D flat and sits on it for a while, eyes at half-mast. Kevin's remaining hand mutes his strings against the speakers' feedback. The cops drift away as if they'd never been there. The bartender counts out his register for the night deposit.

And then that fuzzy sound right before a guitar is unplugged from an amp and Jimmy and Lester say thank you, walk off stage. The lights come up. Paul Fabrizio tosses his sticks into the crowd, but they miss and bounce around on the floor. Dave sets down his bass, pulls a picture of his ex-wife out of his pocket as he walks off, one of the good pictures from when she was pretty, before the divorce. Kevin's giving an interview to the local college rag, the kid writing down pretty much the opposite of everything he says. The crowd murmurs and slugs a last few swallows of warm beer, disperses into the cool night air. LTDs and Camaros and Plymouth station wagons rumble off into the darkness, tail-lights bobbing on pock-marked roads.

A pretty good gig. Paul Fabrizio goes back to the bus with a couple of groupies. After the girls leave, he makes sure to avoid the wet spot. Something you don't want to roll over into.