The Televisionary Oracle (23 page)

I
force myself to open my dreamy eyes and sit up. The Eater of Cruelty gallery is empty except for two lesbians speaking with their lips barely an inch away from each other. Rapunzel-Clone is nowhere to be seen.

Checking my blurry watch, I see I’m scheduled to hit the big stage in less than two hours, and I haven’t even begun yet to conjure up the conditions necessary to pull off a masterpiece of chaos therapy for the audience tonight.

I stagger out of the place. My solar plexus is radiating superheated ripples in all directions, my eyes are detecting all the elementals and astral sprites they’re usually blind to, and my heart is utterly purged of waste.

As I trundle towards the Catalyst, I feel a mix of guilt and glee. I’ve been uncommonly irresponsible. For the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, I haven’t spent the last four hours before a show obsessing over my preparatory tasks. My stage props aren’t in order, nor are my various costume changes organized on the rack behind the stage. I haven’t done my yoga headstands and stretches, kundalini fire-breathing exercises, or meditations on how to translate the special mojo of this particular moment in time into specially-tailored shamanic tricks that’ll grab audience members in their guts. I’m very late if I expect to be able to complete my usual routine of vocal warm-ups, improvisational drills, and practice in the art of falling apart. (It’s always a good idea to annihilate my self-importance and divest myself of all my opinions before a show.)

All this feels overwhelming in light of the fact that my comrades and I have slotted a full two hours and forty-five minutes of entertainment tonight, including but not limited to money-burning, dirt-eating, puppet-fucking, and anarchist flag-desecrating. Also on the agenda are twenty-two beautifully outrageous songs scientifically formulated to blow minds, as well as an authentic sacred ritual (certified as such by a genuine native Slovakian-American goofball shaman, me), a radical new form of aerobics that requires participants to smoke cigarettes while doing half-naked jumping jacks, and the teaching to the crowd of a metaphysical cheerleader mantra based on both the linguistic theories and the political ranting of my hero Noam Chomsky.

It looks bad for the possibility that my ass will be fully in gear by the time these assignments come due.

On the other hand, I haven’t felt this emotionally ripe in weeks. And I know from experience that that’s an excellent omen. Any time I’m overflowing with googoo gaga, my acting ability soars, as do my improvisational skills. Ergo, I may not be as tightly-packed as usual, but I’m confident I’ll make up for it with limber surprises and a stirring performance.

Two blocks from the Catalyst, I happen by a telephone pole bearing one of the posters I made to advertise our gig. I stop to admire my handiwork, at the same time remembering how humiliated I felt at having to putter around town on my bike putting them all up myself. That’s what happens when you fire your corporate caretakers, your CBSs and Will Boehm Managements.

The image on the poster is of a television with a screen that’s blank except for the words “Your Face Here.” The text below the TV:

In two blocks I’m at the nightclub. I won’t be able to get in the back door at this late hour. The bouncers have no doubt locked it up. I’ll have to barge in through the front. Ahhh. A beautiful sight: There’s a long line of people waiting to buy tickets. Good chance there’ll be a sell-out tonight.

The ticket guy recognizes me and waves me through, as do the bouncers just inside the door. I bolt for the stairway leading to the dressing room, shouting hey and doing little dances to acknowledge the people that recognize me.

Once upstairs, I linger on the balcony overlooking the anteroom to the dance floor. Out there the mood is already cranked up halfway to pandemonium. Everyone in sight is holding a glass or bottle and gesticulating like an actor in the play “Marat-Sade.” This may be New Age, super-feminist Santa Cruz, but the vistas of exposed flesh are still vast and eye-popping. I don’t deny myself the pleasure of gawking (discreetly, because you never know when you’ll be busted for doing what you’ve been invited to do) at the cleavages and midriffs.

Mating games, though cloaked in nonsexist language and taking into account the critiques of leftist heroes like Howard Zinn and Susan Faludi, are nevertheless raging with the intensity of a college fraternity mixer. The buzz of myriad conversations, fueled by pheromones, is at jet-engine levels. Yum. I drink in the aromatic elixir of beer and sweat and cigarette smoke. (Do I also detect a tincture of marijuana in there?) Feels like home to me. I wonder how many orgasms will unfold later tonight because of what’s foreplaying here now.

Up in the dressing room, all the band members are primping and costuming themselves. Keyboardist and back-up vocalist Amy shows me her recent addition, a cobalt-blue tattoo of an old Celtic design stretching around a strip of shaved skull from ear to ear. She’s mixing goth with hippie styles tonight, long black funereal gown contradicted by a green and purple spangled vest and red leather army boots. Despite her talent for pulling off a royally bombastic stage persona with humor and elegance, Amy is one of the least pretentious people I know. There’s not a femme fatale bone in her body. She’s clear, trustworthy: an even-tempered friend.

That wasn’t apparent, though, in the beginning. Amy was a precocious seventeen years old when I discovered her singing and playing flute in a primitive little performance art duo at the Louden Nelson Community Center. At our first meeting she arrived bedecked with enough jewels for the Queen of Sweden, her purple and green hair stiffly sprayed and splayed like peacock feathers, and dressed in gauzy sexy layers of black and red satin. I knew immediately she wanted to fall in love with me. But I forbade it. Couldn’t indulge it. She was more useful to me as a versatile keyboardist, flautist, and singer than as an underage girlfriend. I soon became pleased with my restraint. Her versatile musicianship turned into the melodic glue that wove together the disparate quirky geniuses that comprised our band. While she unfurled on stage all the same glitz she’d invoked to try to seduce me, off stage she was earthy and wise.

My co-lead singer Darby is a ravishing earth momma-cum-diva, her long natural brunette shag and all-American good looks contrasting with her silver mini-dress and black fishnets. I’m sure that her voice tonight, as it is every night, will be a freaking miracle. Though I’m proud of my own singing and work hard on honing it, I’m always half-intimidated
by Darby’s seemingly effortless ability to send chills of awe down a listener’s spine. With both the torrid robustness of a Janis Joplin and the savvy class of an Annie Lennox, she’s a provocateur of rich emotion. Not that she has ever once acknowledged that her voice is in a class above mine. Like Amy, she’s eerily unspoiled and easygoing.

I always laugh when I think of where I discovered her. Resembling a Nebraskan hippie, with cut-off jeans, birkenstocks, and red and white checked shirt tied at the waist, she was singing in an old shed at a Sunday afternoon party held for the teams in the softball league I played in. Even then, as raw as she was, her voice surpassed that of every white woman I’d ever heard.

George the guitarist is just as gorgeous as the two women. With his huge mane of black hair, bushy eyebrows, and big Greek leonine face, he’s a charismatic king of beasts. He also has one of the most graceful characters of any man I know. Self-effacing, sensitive, and secretly compassionate as hell, he’s very lovable. Sure, his inexhaustible creativity is linked to his inveterate pot-smoking, but that’s not a problem. The world won’t be running out of marijuana any time soon.

Tonight he’s wearing an iridescent green waistcoat over a starched white shirt, black leather pants, and knee-high black boots that resemble the style of the men’s men who live on the island of Crete. I fantasize that in dressing like this he’s unconsciously paying homage to the father he never knew, a radical leftist Greek sea captain who was (so the story goes) mysteriously kidnapped by a cult of Turkish ecstatic dancers.

Rounding out the beauty contest up here in the dressing room is bassist Daniel, a strapping lad who unlike the rest of us always dresses on stage exactly how he does on the street, which tonight means he’s donned a rainbow-hued Peruvian vest and purple Tibetan lama hat to go with his black jeans and workboots. Of all the people in the band, Daniel is the one with whom I get in the most scrapes. We usually disagree on matters of discipline—I want more, he less. But for all that, my run-ins with him average only three or four times a year—a tiny amount considering how much time we spend together. And I really do love him. He’s a mad poet at heart, as tricky as me but not quite as enslaved by logic and reason as I can be.

As a musician, he’s a wonderworker, magically blending a flowing, melodic sensibility with a telepathic instinct for the killer groove. He’s one of those brilliant bassists who’s too harmonically serpentine to merely serve as the understated rhythmic anchor. And yet as much as he explores orchestral flourishes, he never lets the beat wander.

Drummer Anthony, a.k.a. Squint, embodies the strange mix of lunacy and integrity the rest of us share, though he took a different route to earn it. Raised by a born-again Christian mother in a redneck town in central California (where he comes from, Denny’s is the best restaurant in town), he was just thirteen when he began touring with a country band fronted by a gentleman cowboy who was trying to teach himself quantum physics. After years of nightclubbing, taking drum lessons with world beat experts, and doing stints with drone-metal bands, Squint landed a gig playing on the first two albums of Camper Van Beethoven, a band that achieved national prominence. When he joined World Entertainment War, he was already more famous than me.

Squint’s rhythms are wild but precise; his passions fiery but righteous; his loyalty to the cause unflagging and ever-fresh. He won’t even bother to wear a shirt tonight. This is wise, since he plays with such soldierly vigor that anything he wore on the top half of his body would be soaked with sweat after the first two songs.

I say a silent prayer to the Goddess to give thanks for these beautiful and talented people, who after all these years I still feel the most tender affection for. The bands I’d been in before this one were too often the worst mix of dysfunctional family and bickering co-workers. And before that, my collaborative group experience consisted of baseball teams crammed with posturing teenage macho jocks who would punch you out in a second if you were stupid enough to utter the prissy word “collaboration.” To match the playful goodwill of the group energy I enjoy now, I’d have to go back to the pick-up baseball games of childhood.

Yup, the members of World Entertainment War, though not without flaws and annoying idiosyncrasies, are by far the sweetest-tempered, most symbiotically coordinated troop of humans I’ve ever encountered. Having previously grown accustomed to believing that it’s the nature of
Homo sapiens
in groups to engage in endless politicking motivated
by egotistical drives and hidden agendas, I feel as if I’ve happened upon a utopian mix that disproves my cynicism.

“Want a drag?” Squint asks rhetorically, offering me a joint in full knowledge I’ll turn it down. I’m notorious for my abstention with the pot connoisseurs in the band.

In reply I hold up my own drugs of choice. First, there’s a tall-necked Budweiser, which all my pot-smoking friends deride me for ever since NORML, the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws, exposed Bud’s parent company as a big lobbyist for anti-pot legislation. Second, there’s a styrofoam cup full of 7-Eleven coffee—a ritual necessity for all my performances ever since I was fifteen, when I first noticed the way it perked up my baseball skills.

“I’ve got everything I need right here,” I announce. My formula is one bottle of Bud and sixteen ounces of the caffeinated stuff in the hour before the show, supplemented by one further beer and an additional eight ounces of coffee on stage. The beer isn’t enough to get me drunk, which I certainly can’t afford to be given how many tasks I have to concentrate on and coordinate while on stage. But it does serve as the mechanism by which I magically convert from a hermetic alchemist to an outrageous extrovert. Maybe someday I’ll learn how to wangle that transformation without the aid of my caffeine and alcohol cocktail.