The whole crowd had quieted when we walked out onstage and picked up our guitars, and that quiet was still around us. Now we were motionless. We stood on opposite ends of the stage. We were thin as rakes, and our boyish faces shone with perspiration. The crowd, I believed, was too stunned to boo.
Jared made the first move. With one shaky swoop, he leaned down and flipped on his amplifier. There was a loud click, then the red light came on and soft buzz filled the air. Jared slowly turned the distortion and the volume all the way up until his V-shaped guitar was producing nothing but feedback. But he didn’t turn down the volume. He looked over and motioned for me to plug in.
In a stupor of nervous energy, I couldn’t even feel my hand as I turned on my practice amp and slowly notched the volume up. The feedback from my amp was somehow worse than Jared’s, more piercing. And I saw people all across the pews clap their palms to their ears. Jared inched his way to the front of the stage and calmly adjusted the microphone down to suit his diminutive posture. He hovered over it, sweat already dripping from the thick strands of his hair. I looked to him for a signal. He put a hand to his forehead and looked out over the crowd.
“Good evening, Methodists!” he said. “We are . . . The Rash!”
The only sound was the feedback, still screaming around him. He was taking pleasure in it, I could see. The noise dipped in register, already playing a deranged song of its own.
WeeeeeOOOHHH-WEEEEEEEAHHHHHWEEE.
Jared looked at me and grinned. Then he put his lips to the mike and shouted, “One-two-three-four!”
He strummed one time, a quick jerk of his forearm, and the feedback was instantly replaced by the opening note of “Stupid School.” It came out unbelievably loud and raw, like the last note sung from a hoarse throat. But it was in tune. He let the riff coast a moment, just like he had with the feedback. Then he started playing his part, frantically sending those sharp little notes into the crowd in wavelets of noise. My finger fumbled for the right fret, and I joined four beats too late. But we made our way through the opening somehow. Jared waited until we were on beat, then he took a deep breath and leaned into the microphone.
“Mom’s taking me to stuuuupid school!”
His voice was unsteady. He sang as loud as he could, but his range wasn’t there. I wondered if he could even hear himself over the guitar. We had not adjusted sound levels at all. He kept going and wandered in and out of tune on the next line. And when he screamed that long
“and I wanna dieeeeeee!”
his voice broke off because he was out of breath. I watched him cringe, but he didn’t start over. He just barreled into the next part.
“Teacher, teacher, teacher, and I want to die! Teacher, teacher, teacher, and she teaches lies!”
Jared looked at me and I leaned into the mike. I felt the heat rising up my neck until my entire face was flushed. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Jared glared at me. But then he just turned back to the mike and moved brazenly into the chorus, tapping out a rhythm with his foot as he sang.
“Everybody goes to stupid school, then the stupid rule the world
.
No. No. No!”
It was right after that third “No” when he broke a string on his guitar.
It made a loud pinging noise and flew back, barely missing his eye. He ducked out of the way, and his voice faltered, ending the song more like a question than a bold statement.
“Everybody goes to the stupid school, then the stupid rule the . . . world? ”
The music tottered to a stop on an accidental extra note from my bass, followed directly by more feedback from our instruments. Then we stood facing the audience, doing absolutely nothing. The song had collapsed out from under us, and it felt like we had played it in about twenty seconds. It had caved in quickly and we’d been lucky to escape from it alive. I knew this. And Jared knew it, too. I could tell by his dazed stare. Without even looking at his guitar, he reached up and yanked off the remains of the broken string. It made a terrible noise. Like someone snipping a piano wire.
What we needed now was some kind of response from the audience. Any kind. It didn’t matter if it was positive or negative, but I knew something had to happen before we could play our next song. I looked for a familiar face, but I couldn’t locate Meredith or Janice. For an agonizing five or six seconds, we had nothing. Silence. Maybe it took that long for people to recover and try to assess what they had just heard. But it wasn’t until those first agonizing seconds passed that we heard another noise coalescing with the feedback from our guitars. The sound of a small child.
More specifically, it was the sound of a small child shrieking. We had made a toddler weep. And not just one, actually. Soon after the first, two other children started in. This set off a shuffle of mothers scooping up keening babies and whisking them out of the chapel. They were all athletes suddenly, sprinting with their progeny. They filed out, one by one. I watched for Lindsey to come back out and toss us off the stage, to beg everyone to stay. But she was nowhere to be seen.
The renegade bunch in front watched the evacuation with curiosity. But after half the original crowd was gone, they turned back around and examined us. And just when we seemed destined to sink into quiet defeat, a bearded guy, who was twice as large as the record clerk, jumped up in the air. I watched him leap, rising surprisingly high in the air, and spilling a beer on the church carpet (and himself) in the process. When he reached the zenith of his jump, he yelled one triumphant, “Hellllllll yeaahhhh!”
A moment of silence passed, as his friends seemed to gauge his reaction. Jared and I watched him, too. But not too long after he yelled, his yell was returned by a volley of other loud yells. A rejoinder of YEAHs. A real rallying cry. And then the stomping and clapping began again.
Stomp! Stomp! Clap. Stomp! Stomp! Clap
.
Jared walked cautiously back up to the mike. He cleared his throat. “Um, okay,” he said. “Thank you. Thanks. This next song is about naked girls, I guess.”
“Yeaahhhhhh,” yelled the big man again.
Jared looked at me and shrugged. He started to play again. At a higher volume this time, if that was possible. And I noticed a difference right away. He seemed more relaxed, and the sound was better. He didn’t try to speed things up; he just left the song at its original tempo. This made it easier for me to find my place, and from the beginning this time, I felt locked in. A to the E string. Seventh to the eighth fret. Then down to the ninth and tenth. We were on beat and in tune.
“Saw you on the sidewalk . . . lookin’ pretty cute.”
He sang farther away from the mike this time and it made a world of difference. You could actually hear his voice.
“How I wish you were . . . in your birthday suit!”
This line, the most intelligible one yet, was greeted with a handful of chuckles and hoots from the front row. I watched as Jared absorbed the sounds like nutrients. He almost cracked a smile as he launched into the bridge. And I could tell even before he sang a word that he was going to nail it. He took a long breath before his first perverse tirade, and then he was screaming in the Immanuel Methodist chapel about zapping girls’ clothes off. His eyes were closed and he strummed like a lunatic on the five strings he had left. And as he sang about the shirts and skirts he wanted to remove, he pointed to different women in the audience. Not girls. But grown women.
I still had to look at my fingers while I played, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see more people from the pews getting up to leave. Each additional second the song played, someone else stood up and walked to the exit. But it wasn’t disappointing. The show had never been for that audience. They were completely expendable. Irrelevant. The show was for us. And we still had twenty-five people at the front of the stage. They were nodding their heads and pumping their fists. They were clearly all intoxicated, with the lowest of standards, but it didn’t matter. And when Jared got to the end of the first chorus, I leaned into the mike to sing it with him. I yelled as loud as I could.
“ ’Cause I’m going mad. I’m going madddd. I’m going madddd up in my room.”
It was not in tune. But it felt amazing.
“Just keep playing those notes,” Jared yelled when I was close to him.
I nodded, and as I played the bass part for the chorus, Jared embarked on a squealing discordant guitar solo. He knelt down right in front of the crowd. Then he lay down completely on the stage. He bent the highest notes he could play, looking up at the gold cross and picking the strings. He writhed around on the ground, shaking and seizing. I stood above him, keeping the bass line going. I moved to the mike, and Jared stopped playing.
“
He’s going mad
,” I sang. “
He’s going mad
.”
My bass rumbled through the chapel.
“
I’m going mad!
” Jared screamed from the floor. “
I’m going mad!
”
“He’s going mad!”
“I’m going mad!”
“He’s going mad!”
“I’m so horny!”
“He can’t take it!”
“I’m the horniest man alive!”
“He’s disgusting!”
“I’m a chronic masturbator!”
In the midst of our improv yelling, I let my eyes wander the crowd again. Aside from the front row of hopping drunkards, there were only a handful of people left in the crowd. I saw the baton girl, watching and smiling. The dance team was at the very back, two of them covering their eyes. One middle-aged couple was inexplicably dancing in the aisle. But at the very back, standing in the doorway, was Janice Whitcomb.
She was staring right at me.
I thought at first it was a look of mortification and shame, in response to our performance. She was hard to see clearly from so far away. And my powers were too weak to read her. But after a couple of seconds, it didn’t appear to me that she was even listening to our song. She was just watching me. And it wasn’t shock or embarrassment. Her mouth was tight, and her eyes were blank. She was rubbing the end of her scarf between two fingers. I saw no images from the depths of her soul, but I understood anyway. It was a look of fear.
My fingers were going around and around, bouncing over the frets. I wasn’t watching myself play anymore, but the notes kept coming. Meredith walked up behind her mother, and I saw her face over Janice’s shoulder. She looked equally concerned.
“What are you doing?” Jared yelled from the floor. “Don’t stop. That was awesome!”
The crowd nearest to us was still clapping. Jared rose.
“Something has happened,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I have to leave,” I said.
I didn’t say any more. I stopped playing, and Jared immediately started again, picking up the slack. I lifted the bass off my shoulders and laid it on the ground. It moaned out feedback from the floor. I hopped down into the aisle and the noise seemed to follow me as I plunged into the crowd. My ears hummed with it. The crew parted for me when I made it into their midst. I looked up into drunken laughter, sweaty T-shirts, and crooked teeth. I felt claps on my back, but I kept walking past our new fan club and past the few people left in the pews. Jared continued playing onstage. I didn’t turn around to see what he was doing. I just proceeded up the red carpet toward Janice and Meredith. When I got to them, Janice reached out her hand and I took it. Her grip was ice-cold.
“You’ve seen her,” I said.
Meredith stepped forward and put a hand on my arm.
“Something’s really wrong.”
“She won’t go to the hospital,” Janice said. “You have to talk to her.”
The noise from Jared’s guitar echoed around the room. Then I heard it come to an abrupt stop. My bass was still braying from the ground. We all looked at the stage. Jared stood there alone, his thick lenses reflecting the makeshift stage lights.
“Wait!” he yelled. “Wait for me, you dickheads!”
He pulled the guitar over his head and set it down next to mine.
“Thank you very much!” he yelled. “We’re The Rash!”
The two instruments began a loud shouting conversation with each other. The crowd by the stage cheered and screamed. Jared bounded down into the thick of them, and the cheering got louder. A beer can flew through the air and crashed onto the stage, erupting in foam. Janice looked on without a word. Meredith watched with mild astonishment. Jared walked slowly down the aisle, but before he made it to us, he stopped in front of Holly Halverson, the baton girl. She stared at him, her eyes wide. Suddenly Jared slung an arm around her and pulled her toward him. She didn’t resist, and he planted a big kiss right on her lips. Their eyes met for a moment after, but then he was running to us, leaving a dazed Holly behind in the chaos. The crowd was now shoving one another, clapping and screaming. The guitars were possessed.
“Where are we going?” asked Jared, smiling.
“Home,” I said.
“To our house?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Back to the dome.”
We watched everything in the chapel for one last moment. It looked like the place was on the verge of collapsing. We left to the sounds of the record clerk and his gang howling like wild dogs.
Outside, the air was clear. No snow this time. The van was waiting, already running. We piled in like usual, Meredith in the front, Jared and me in back. Janice adjusted her scarf and put the van in drive. The tires skidded over the sand on the asphalt before they caught and found some traction. The van lurched forward out of the lot, and I watched the small church recede behind me. The dim light through the stained glass cast an array of pastel colors on the grass. Warm air poured from the vents under the dash as we passed one block after another. Jared blew into his hands for the first few moments, then put his arm around my neck. He held it there tight.