Before he left for the show, Frank had honestly thought that most of his fellow music loving freaks would be in possession of an average amount of common sense and help him out if anything went wrong. Not that he had expected things to go wrong, but if it actually did, he certainly hoped it wouldn't turn into something life-threatening. He could deal with a broken rib or wrist or nose, but despite the fact that he loved music with every fiber in his body, he wouldn't want to die by getting stomped to death while listening to music.
I mean, come on, he thought, snorting a private laugh at his ever growing, stupid worries, I'm kinda small and I'm kinda light, I could get run down and trampled to pieces in no time; of course people are gonna be considerate. Nobody wants to go to jail for something as stupid as accidentally jumping on some poor guy's head.
But as it turned out, they definitely didn't seem to mind that at all. Most of the so-called common sense belonging to these particular metal heads didn't even reach the tip of their tangled mess of headbang-ridden hair. But Frank couldn't know that, not a couple of days back, when he was unsuspectingly playing "Halo" with his friend; the mosh pit experienced Davey. He was the one who had offered him the challenge in the first place, saying something that went along the lines of "mosh pits are fucking awesome/they should be on your bucket list/I bet you're too scared to join in/why don't we go to a concert this weekend?" That was the series of sentences to which Frank had responded with the following "I guess they are/I guess they should/I'm not fucking scared/okay, cool". Challenge accepted.
The band playing this night was semi-known and fairly well-established but without any huge success - not before, not now, and certainly nowhere in the near future. They'd played at a few early and rainy festival slots, in addition to having given out one record and a couple of EPs, but that was pretty much it. This night they were playing at a local venue somewhere in town, which was not big enough to provide the ecstatic surge of the "We Will Rock You" worship, but big enough to turn you into canned fish without anybody noticing unless you were careful. Anyway, the band of the late evening was your average five piece, male, longhaired and growling metal band, someone who had thrown in as many 'O's and 'A's into their long ass band name as possible, just so they could slash and dot them, turning them into 'Ø's and 'Å's instead - a practice that could momentarily confuse most Scandinavians out there. They were the typical band who wanted to achieve the honorable status of "gut ripping, goat sacrificing and church burning metal" but who didn't really get any closer to that genre than "cut your hair before it tangles up in your bass, you moron". Still, the underground weather reports were predicting lots and lots of local cyclones and whirlwinds, specifically in that venue, in the shape of sweaty bodies hurling themselves at each other in a very non-orgy like way.
Frank had come to learn just that, because he was in the midst of this insane non-orgy right now, trying to go along with the flow as best as he could while he was uncontrollably getting shoved hither and pushed thither. He had no idea for how long he'd actually been caught in there but even though it was probably a matter of minutes, it still felt like a lifetime. Davey was completely missing, swept away with the personified hysteria that had erupted around him, no doubt. He'd promised on his tattooed neck that he'd stay close to him but nevertheless, Frank had been left to figure out how he was supposed to survive this thing on his own. He couldn't even remember exactly how he'd ended up in this miserable situation in the first place; in one second he'd been rocking out on the sideline, and in the next he was suddenly trying to keep his footing right in the middle of the action. Most likely, someone had dragged him or given him a push that had sucked him further into the moving mass, and whoever that had been, Frank hoped he would burn slowly in hell.
In the course of the chaotic moments that had passed, these following unfortunate events had already happened to him: somebody's hands - or somebody's spiked wristband - had managed to rip a considerable gash in Frank's t-shirt (that was his favorite Misfits tee, goddamnit); he'd fallen right against a blue-haired female mosher and accidentally grabbed her boobs, receiving a forceful shove and a bucket of swear words from some huge, burly-looking guy that was probably her boyfriend; some punk dude in a fucking kilt and no underwear had crowd surfed right past his head, causing his retinas to burn with things that no amount of brain bleach could ever remove; and, at the exact point where he forgot to put his arms up so he could protect himself, someone's skull had come flying out of nowhere like a bodyless ninja, painfully slamming into his cheekbone and undoubtedly planting the seed of a huge purple bruise. All that had required nothing but a few seconds in order to play out.
