Nothing to Fear

Hello friends,

This is a one-off for the first day of K2 Week 2020. The first prompt is Festival/New Wave.

Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2XbL7TuYNkSIEBNuZUHNWr?si=V6tWLtleQIu8GxaPcUizlg

May 1983.

Kenny McCormick sits against his van in the desert, knees to his chin, playing with a piece of frayed string that hangs from his ripped jeans. It's three in the morning. He's been driving for the better part of three days and listening to the drivel of everyone sitting on the shag carpeting behind him. The carpet smells like piss. He pissed in the van when he was a kid and his dad beat him good for it. Kenny thought it would be funny. Urine washes right out anyway, right? Turns out, it lingers.

But to be truthful, all of them stunk, ripe with sweat, tongues swollen of booze, brains puffed with weed. The people in the back, his friends, he supposed, made no mention of the piss smell, or the rusted doors and taped up passenger window, and the bumper sticker that reads "GET OFF MY ASS" in all black lettering with a white background. Token Black, Butters Scotch, and Kyle Broflovski would sit cross-legged, on a tapestry bought by Token's father in a Mexican flea market (the thing was endowed by the Virgin Mary's porcelain face and hooded eyes), and talked about the girls they were seeing, the Soviet Union (Kyle said he heard places fly low over his house while he lay in bed, trying to sleep, and thought for sure, they're finally coming to bomb our asses). Butters piped up that the event they were just at, the US Festival (said like us, not U.S.) was broadcasted directly via satellite to the Soviet Union.

Maybe this way, they'll see Americans aren't so bad, Butters mused. They'll see that we just like to have a good time, you know?

Token shook his head. Your optimism makes me sick, Stotch.

There's a lot of political sexual tension, Kyle said so confidently. Indubitably a young man of culture, someone who has accrued several thousand frequent flyer miles at the library would feel comfortable saying such a thing. When you know enough about something, so much so that it makes you sick, you can make jokes. Or rather, if you fear something so much out of your control, you can only make jokes. Judging by what he said earlier about low-flying planes, Kenny gathered in a millisecond that Kyle's worst fear was seeing and feeling the skin melt off his bones in an explosion.

They spoke about the universe. Area 51. Aliens. Kenny chimed into this one.

Kenny lived on the poor side of the train tracks, where street lights didn't exist (the only lighting at night were the occasional red and blue flashing ones), and the sky oozed with stars and bright planets. Kenny swore up and down while keeping an eye on the road but also making sure to glance and their slack faces in the rearview mirror, that he had seen UFOs. Perhaps they were scouting the area to make cornfield art.

They also talked about the "good old days" of high school, though they graduated only a year before. Token and Kyle went away to Harvard and Cornell, respectively. Butters went to Colorado State. None of them, except for Kyle, asked Kenny what he'd been up to the past year. They had to figure he didn't do much apart from lug furniture for department stores. High-class women, clad in massive hoop earrings, layered pearls, and enough Aquanet to fumigate Hell itself, would gawk at him and his feathered, blonde mullet and sleeveless tee-shirts, fan themselves and ask the salesman if the delivery boy was included with the furniture. At least he had that going for him.

No, they didn't ask about any of that. It stayed in his head. No, they came home for the summer and asked Kenny to take his father's van to see this damn festival with the English Beat, the Divinyls, INXS, the Clash. This damn festival where the stage was painted as the world and her green continents, with a gigantic pastel rainbow hovering over them all. White gloved hands clenched the electric "'83" in the center. A woman with Bettie Page bangs introduced Wall of Voodoo and her baby sucked on the microphone.