t h r e e
It’s ten pm on a Saturday night, so naturally, Benna Lui is teeming with hippie tourists hungry for hipster pubs and cheap weed.
We’re walking to the Green Door because Mikaela is stingy when it comes to stuff like diesel. I’m trying to keep my head down and go unnoticed but that’s tough when you’re walking with a pink-haired girl in a minidress and a grunge-band member who’s making teenage girls gasp and giggle with every fucking step we take. I’m just walking beside them awkwardly. A few people point at me because that’s what people do, they point and they get some sort of sick pleasure out of it so I just let them. I wish I was wearing my maroon socks but I’m not. Mikaela made me take them off. She forced me into a dress and tights and I put on flats before she could take any more ridiculous steps. She left my face alone because I think I would’ve hit her if she’d tried to do anything with it. I know I’ve taken my meds but hey – what’s the point of being psychotic if you can’t abuse it a little?
But even now, I feel naked as we walk along the beachfront. I pull my dress over my thighs as I walk. I can feel myself looking at the waves again and again. I wish I were more covered up. This dress makes me feel uncomfortable, I don’t like it, I should take it off –
“Hey. Eve.”
It’s that bloody Jake, saying my name like he owns it.
“What?” I snap.
“We have to turn here…”
His voice trails off. I turn to face him and Mikaela and they’re standing at the crossing to the side-road that leads to the Green Door, looking at me. I feel like laughing (I would look so wonderfully psychotic if I did). I can tell from Micky’s face that she’s terrified of me. She can be all bossy and tell me to go take my meds but inside I know she’s afraid I’m going to wake up one night and stab her in my sleep and go try to drown myself again. Even I wouldn’t put it past myself.
I cross the road with them. The cars stop for us and I wish they didn’t.
There are a couple of hookers on the street corner. They’re stoned as hell and they give Jake the eyes as we walk past, but he’s all business. One of them seems young as fuck, younger than me, with huge doe eyes and blonde hair. Bet guys love that. She looks me right in the eye as I walk past. She doesn’t say anything, she just looks, takes a drag from her joint. Then she puffs out a breath. Her lips are swollen. As I look away from her, I wonder idly who the lucky winner of the back-alley blowjob was.
Jake takes us into the Green Door through the rear entry, which leads backstage. I don’t want to go in like this because it means encountering sweaty, cocky male band members and navigating around amps and tangled wires but I think that’s exactly the reason Micky’s following him this way. She loves it, the glamour and show, the musicians, the sex. If this was the seventies, she’d be a full-time groupie and put Lori Maddox out of business. I’m not saying she’s a slut or anything. At least she has decent standards – you gotta pick a guy, pick a guy who plays the guitar or the drums or something. I’ll give her that much.
Jake’s band is already backstage. The gig’s going to start in ten minutes. I have no intentions of hanging around so as soon as we enter the dingy back room I look for the exit that leads to the main pub. I can’t find it immediately. Jake starts saying things in a loud voice as soon as we enter and I can hear slurred ‘aye captain’s in response. Then I hear a ‘who are the girls, man?’ and I panic a little because I really don’t want to be introduced.
Thankfully then Micky trills, “Oh, we’ll see you guys later! I think we’ll just go get seats right now.”
I turn back to look at her and she gives me a small smile, gesturing for me to keep walking ahead. As I look back towards the front I take a look at the room with the various band members. Jake’s standing in the middle talking to a tall blonde guy wearing a Ramones shirt and jeans and is nodding as if he doesn’t give a fuck about what he’s being told. In the corner of the room there’s another guy leaning against the wall and picking at a bass. Opposite him the fourth and final band member is slumped on a couch, smoking a joint. He’s not doing anything and I can’t see his face. He’s just sitting there, smoking.
Whatever. These guys will probably suck. I mean, local bands rarely go beyond the usual generic covers and when they do come out with their own stuff you can tell they’re never going to get farther than playing in pubs where everyone is more concerned about getting high than listening to their music.
The exit of the room leads to a small corridor. Micky and I navigate through the couples dry-humping against the walls and we emerge into the small seating area in front of the stage. Here the dance music from the dance-floor is muted. I take the first empty table I see, close to the wall and not too close to the speakers just in case Jake and his band are in a metal-ish mood tonight. Micky dumps her tote down on her chair and says she’ll get the drinks and be right back.
The place hasn’t changed much from when I last came here – I don’t even remember when that was. They still have the kitschy wrought-iron tables and chairs and antique chandelier. There are more posters on the walls – the original vintage ones are framed in this cool artsy way and I feel a bit depressed as I look at the posters on the walls because I never once see anyone looking at them the way they’re supposed to be looked at. They’d probably get so much more attention somewhere else but instead they’re stuck on the walls of a hole-in-the-wall pub in Benna Lui. Shame.
The other tables are pretty much full. I wonder what stuff they’re passing around. I can’t see it anywhere. I guess it’ll appear once the show starts.
Micky comes back with our drinks. She’s gotten me some cocktail that reeks of tequila and curacao. I pick it up and have a sip.
“How is it?” she asks, sitting down with me.
“Good,” I say as the tequila burns my throat. I feel it hit my stomach and I take another sip. “It’s good. What are you having?”
Reciprocate, my shrink says. If someone asks you a polite question, try to ask it back to them. And for heaven’s sake try to look like you’re interested in their answer.
But I’m not, I’d told him.
“A screaming orgasm,” Micky informs me. I blink. She giggles. “It’s the name of the cocktail, stupid.”
“Oh,” I say. “What’s the name of mine?”
She puts her glass down, nose wrinkled after her first sip. “Uh…Blue Sunrise or something like that.”
Blue Sunrise. How gay. Typical of Mikaela to get a cocktail called Screaming Orgasm for herself and to get me a fucking Blue Sunrise.
“Ooh!” she says suddenly. “They’re on!”
I turn to face the stage. Jake and the blonde guy in the Ramones shirt are lugging amps onstage. The blonde guy is flipping drumsticks in his hand and after he sets the amps down he takes a seat behind the drums in the middle of the stage. Jake is fiddling around with the mikes and then the bass player and who I assume must be their lead guitarist come onstage. They’re taking a long time to set up. What divas. Everyone watching seems to be in a placid mood though so they’re waiting. The semi-silence is almost awkward. Micky is sipping steadily from her Screaming Orgasm and I take another swig from my tequila thing.
Tequila is good to me. It’s too strong, but I like that. There’s no point in resisting it. It burns through my insides like phenol, and then I can do whatever I want however I want and wake up in the morning and not remember any of it, and that I think is such a huge blessing because it’s like a break from life, so if I can’t have death as a break from life, I might as well have tequila.
“Hey.”
It’s Jake’s voice on the mike. He’s standing looking perfectly at-ease and he’s greeted by a few whistles. He grins and jerks his head up as acknowledgement.
“So uh, we’re Atlanta’s Heel – and um, we’re playing here for the first time so – um, yeah. I’m Jake, that’s Dexter on lead guitar, Calvin on bass and Mason on drums.”
Atlanta’s Heel. They don’t look like band whose name would be some sort of fucked up neo-Shakespearean reference. One of them must be a failed English major or something. Or maybe they were just high when they thought of it.
There are a few whoops and whistles and Jake shifts around a bit. Micky has this dumb grin on her face. Jake informs us that their first song is going to be a cover of some pop-punk band I’ve never heard of (but I know they’re pop-punk because their name is preceded by a ‘the’ and there’s a generic animal thrown in there somewhere). I take a healthy swig of my drink. I’m gonna need the tequila to get through this.
*
