I have this theory that, if you know me, you’ve probably heard once or twice before. I believe that, if heaven does exist, and if there is a sort of heaven for individual species, which many people actually believe, that heaven for a dog is almost exactly like a normal dog’s life, except with one minor exception: that whenever the dog’s owner is in the kitchen and making him or herself something to eat, that, instead of placing the dish at the table, they just leave it in the middle of the floor. If you’ve ever actually gone out of your way to cook something for your dog, and if you do I must insist that you are the sort of person I would love to see put in prison, when you finish making the food and put it in a bowl and your dog goes over to it and takes a sniff and then looks up at you, you’ll see what I mean. If that dog could dance, it would.
A friend of mine, Speedicut, has a different idea of heaven, this one for humans, that, well, I think he should explain.
“You’re floating in a big vast warm sky/ocean and there are things swimming around you, and you can swim around too, and those things that are swimming around you are lobsters and crabs and shrimp and other seafoods, but they don’t have any shells and they’re fully cooked.” Speedy said dreamily. “And you can just sort bend your neck towards them and take a bite as they swim on by. Perhaps you’re swimming through warm clarified butter?”
I think Speedy might be onto something. After all, Speedicut’s brother has yet another idea of heaven that I also must confess sounds great:
“Heaven,” he said to me, “would be constantly peeing. You’d never stop. It would just be that lovely feeling of peeing, on into eternity.”
Like a never-ending contented sigh. Sounds wonderful.
Of course, there’s another acquaintance’s answer: “Two chicks at once.” There’s a lot to be said for that, I think. Just not on my blog.
You might be asking, why all this talk about heaven? Well, I have recently gone through a truly hellish experience. No, I’m not talking about the emotional torment of unrequited love (oh, Scarlett, you tease) nor the pain of loss (Death’s recent war on the celebrity), but it was a very real physical torment and it happened last Saturday.
It started innocently enough. We had a double-header of gigs lined up for the afternoon/evening with enough space between them to not need to rush. The gigs were an afternoon barbecue and an evening gig at a very nice little lounge at a casino only forty-five minutes away. I rode with my drummer, as I almost always do, to save the hassle of parking and because I enjoy being driven around. Gives me a chance to catch up on my alcoholism.
When we arrived at the first gig, and this is where the hellishness took place, we noticed a few things.
- It was beginning to get very warm outside.
- We were going to be playing outside.
- There was no stage.
- There was no real shade.
- The entire outside area was actually a hill upon which a house was perched.
- There was no flat area to set up, only slanted, knobby grass going from the edge of the house all the way down the hill at a pretty pitched angle.
- An area was picked out for us, underneath a tree that had lost nearly all of it’s leaves. It couldn’t be nicely referred to as ‘level’ under any circumstances.
Now, in order for a band to set up, you must have at least a level area. There was none to be found. We should have packed it up right then, but the band members are a hardy lot, and we resolved to do the best we could. This would be our downfall.
The temperature began to skyrocket as we unloaded our amplifiers and guitars and the drums, hitting around, I believe, 212° by the time we’d unloaded the vehicles. My genitals were quite ready to burst into flames.
As we set up, we realized that the drums couldn’t be set up without toppling over. The snare drum went down a few times, luckily being caught before it could roll all the way down the hill. Our drummer was… not pleased.
“If one more drum topples over, I’m going to pack up my stuff and go home. There I’ll have several cold, refreshing glasses of lemonade and a long and icy shower. Then I’m going to drive to my grandmother’s house, retrieve the machete from her gardening shack, return here with said machete and hack everyone into little tiny bits. Then I’ll set fire to those bits and piss them out, laughing.”
It was a little too specific to be taken as a joke.
I dug a trench with a small stick for my bass amp to sit in, which took me about 20 minutes. I accidentally dropped my electronic tuner out of my gig bag and it bounced merrily down the hill and slid under a bush at the bottom. I walked down to fetch it. By the time I made it back up, I was completely drenched in sweat.
People began to arrive. Let me get this out of the way: They were all developmentally disabled or caregivers. There’s nothing wrong with that, in any way. I myself coached Challenger league baseball (mostly so I could tell women in bars that I coached baseball for handicapped children during my free time) and found it to be a hugely rewarding experience. Speaking in general terms, you won’t find kinder souls anywhere. The fact that we would be playing a party for this lot was the only real reason any of us stayed through the whole miserable experience.
We began playing, the rivers of sweat running down our faces, and that’s when I noticed that the tree above us was dropping little things down on us. One landed on my hand.
“What the-EFFING HELL!!” I exclaimed, accidentally into my microphone.
Fire-ants. Rather large ones. Every few minutes an ant would land on one of us and there’d be a small commotion as it sank it’s mandibles into the back of a hand or neck or earlobe and then a furious self-flagellation would ensue. Then that person would resume playing. Once, the wind blew and I could see the ants falling and bouncing off of the snare drum, our drummer adding a few extra 16th-note triplets trying to smash them before they could make the leap onto his crotch.
We reached a break in the sets and attempted to eat some barbecue. My chicken breast resembled a hockey puck. The potato salad, I could see, had been left in the sun. This was our free meal. I passed.
When we went back to playing, I notice we’d been joined by a rather enthusiastic dancer. She came over to me as I played and leaned in. I smiled. She smiled. She let loose a prodigious torrent of drool onto my left hand, which dripped down my lovely vintage fretboard and into the small gap between the neck of my bass and the body, a place I knew I would never be able to clean properly.
My smile became a bit strained at this point. I looked over to the singer for help. He was staring cross-eyed at a fire ant that had landed on his microphone, trying not to let it latch onto his lip as he sang. I looked over at the rhythm guitarist, who seemed preoccupied with his impending heat-stroke. The drummer was smiling maniacally, trying to hold up his floor-tom/cymbal stand.
I’m man enough to admit that I think a tear sprang to my eye at the sheer hopelessness of it all, but I couldn’t tell if it was emotion, fire ant bites, or just stinging sweat that had caused it. At that moment I would have given absolutely anything to be spirited away from this place and gracelessly dumped upon the windy, arctic plains of Dante’s Inferno.
Then, near the end of the second set, we were sent an angel of mercy. The nice woman who had put on this shindig (who had been hiding in the air-conditioned house this whole time) told us that since it was too hot to dance, we could wrap it up. I could have kissed her.
As we packed up, I began to think about the worst gigs I’ve ever played. We played once for a motorcycle club (gang) who never clapped, not even once. We once played at a bar where I was vigorously molested by an older woman for most of the night, who came over and sat on my lap and told me she wanted to rock my world. (I told her politely that I was a married and she stated that she’d be “real quick”. Ugh.) I once played a house-party with another band where I was the singer, while I had walking pneumonia (they call it that when you’re too dense to lay down and get better), and the audience was more interested in watching reruns of “Friends” than seeing the band. This gig one was definitely up there with the rest.
Despite how badly this gig had gone, it had been worth it. The guests were having a great time, not dancing so much as tapping feet and clapping and smiling. No one actually fell down the hill, just bits of equipment. It’s these sorts of things that can redeem a bad gig.
It was with this thought in mind that I loaded my equipment onto my little collapsible dolly that my mother-in-law had gotten off of the home shopping channel and I tilted it back and started dragging it toward the drummer’s car. I got it all the way back to the car, righted the dolly, walked around to the front and bent down to lift up my speaker cabinet.
As I lifted, a hitchhiking fire ant bit down hard on my left forearm, causing me to drop the cabinet down hard on the lip of the dolly, which, just like if you step on a rake, sent the back of the dolly forward at high velocity. It cracked me right on the top of the head. It was like being hit with an aluminum baseball bat right across the top of the skull. I slumped against my drummer’s car, woozy, and tasting copper in my mouth.
No, I thought to myself, not ‘one of the worst gigs ever’. This one definitely takes the hundred-degree, ant-infested, heavily-drooled-upon cake.
