Music & Cough Syrup

I sat in a local coffee shop a few days ago, stoned and pondering my way through the evening.

I thought:

• I should not have to submit to authority or be put in a cage every time I do something police don't like.
• Police traffic stops violate my "rightful" freedom. In the words of George Clinton: freedom is free from the need to be free.
• Nothing I have ever voted for has passed into policy. Nothing, and that is fine. The voting system here in America is ultimately corrupt.
• Fuck, I'm stoned.

I pulled my mind together, stood up, and took a look around. There were a couple of lesbians entwined on a couch next to me, feeling eachother's tongues with their own, letting out deep moans. Buried underneath them was a young man, a grin naturally stuck on his face; he was stuck in ecstatic coma. Together, the three of them make up a whiny, emotional folk music band. I would never complain about their presence, it added a nice touch to the atmosphere and makes it easier for me to relax.

As they occupied the couch, lusting on each other, I heard one of them talk about the drugs they were on. They had ingested extraordinarily large amounts of cough syrup to achieve an altered mental state. It worked. The stuff had them fucked up and out of their minds and was likely responsible for their open sexual behavior.

They, the band, had a musical performance scheduled later that night. It was to be a quick, private musical set to compete in a local battle of the bands. There was a prize for the winner, but nobody had a clue what it was.

The ladies got off the couch and tried to figure out how much time there was before they were supposed to play their show. The young man stayed on the couch, with an expression on his face like there were still a couple of hot chicks laying on top of him making out.

Four hours remained until their music performance was scheduled to begin, and it came to light the trio had not performed together in over a year and had no collaborative knowledge of what songs they would, or even could play together.

They talked needing to practice before they played in front of any large groups of people. There was a hint of frantic fear and desperation creeping into their voices, and instead of practicing, they decided it would be better to go to a bar and try to hustle a few drinks and loosen up before their show. The manager of the coffee shop said he would drive them in his car and he asked me if I would stay and watch the shop in case anyone showed up at the door. Not customers, just anyone who happened to come knock on the door. Someone said a drummer might come knocking.

I have been good friends with the manager for years, and I was accustomed to overseeing the shop in his absence.

Everyone left, and I cranked up a little Slayer on the in-house music system.

Before long, there was a strong tapping coming from the glass enterance door. I moved the piece of plywood that blocked the enterance from curious eyes that may happen to be walking down the street. On the other side of the glass, standing in the light rain and cold wind was a large, round man of his early thirties, dressed all in black. His short, stringy purple mohawk stood at attention. Through the glass, I asked him, "Who are you?"

"Lucifer!" I heard him reply.
"Wait.. What?"
He told me his name, but I still had no idea who he was or why he was doing there. Some had told me a drummer may come. I wondered if this was him.
"Do you play drums?" I asked.
"No, I don't play any instruments. I wish I could, though."  he replied.

Having always been a man full of risk and short of caution, I decided to unlock the door and welcome the man to come inside. He said one of the girls had contacted him over the internet and told him to come over. He walked several miles through the cold rain to arrive at the shop. I told him the girls had gone somewhere and I was the only one around at the moment. He didn't seem surprised they had forgotten them. 

We hung out and listened to music while making bullshit conversation, trying to kill time. We slipped into a stoned-out mental state where time had no purpose. I have no idea what this man's state of sobriety was, but he was coherent and seemed to be mostly there upstairs. That is more than I can say for many of people I encounter through my day-to-day adventure that is life. As we talked, we smoked some pot and threw any problems we had in life towards the netherworld. We waited for the shop manager to return with the band, and by the time they they arrived, it was two or three hours later. One of the girls that had been making out with the other on the couch was no longer, and the two remaining band memebers had somehow gotten even higher.

"I don't know how I'm supposed to go onto a stage," one of them said to me in passing, as they came back into the coffee shop. "People are going to look at me and I'm going to have no idea what to do." He was right, the words out of his mouth and the look on their faces led me to believe cough syrup was rotting the two strange, alternative folk singer's minds out like hungry worms of the brain.

I walked into the back to pour myself a cup of coffee. The remaining woman from the band followed me, As I filled my coffee cup, she came up behind me and grabbed my hair and pulled it. Hard. It made me lean back and put me into a submissive position. She licked my face and rubbed her crotch on my leg. She didn't ask me, she told me to give her a kiss. "No," I told her. "I'm not going to kiss you. You've got a gig in just a little while, and you've no idea what you're going to play,and yyou're fucked up in the head. Go get prepared" If I had been feeling a little more frisky or incredibly sad or disgruntled about something, I probably would have let the sado-masochist beast I keep inside of me come out and play and done some very naughty, nasty things to her. I thought instead about the woman I am currently having a lovr affair with. She is someone else's fiance, but my feelings for the woman run deep. This other woman, the crazy bandmember who was tripping balls and grinding on my leg while pulling my hair in a coffee shop couldn't hold a candle to the other woman who actually consistantly keeps my stomach full and my balls empty.
I pushed the woman off me, and there was a new person tapping on the glass door. The manager of the coffee shop went to the door and moved the plywood to see who was tapping. It was another member of the band. This one, a bulky older man. wearing a backpack, was not tripping balls like the others. He was carrying a large djembe drum, looked like a seasoned musician who was ready to play music.

He took a good look at the two bandmates standing before him, who were laughing uncontrollably. He asked me if they were on something, as if it weren't obvious. "Of course they are," I told him. He opened his backpack and pulled out a zip-lock bag filled to the top with fluffy, bright green pot. It smelled delcious, and my stomach grumbled like the smoke was somehow going to end up there instead of my lungs. Hoping to calm his tripping bandmates, he packed a bowl and passed it around. Their staged performance for battle of the bands competition was supposed to begin in less than hour.

The bowl went around, and several joints were also rolled and passed. The two who were tripping finally were calming down a little and picking up their instruments to try making some music. 

They each had a guitar, but one only had three strings, and the other had a broken neck. This led them into a chaotic fit of pacing around the room and mumbling to themselves. They were confused by everything around them. The time they had been scheduled to start playing came and went. Not long after that, however, the tripping singer/guitarist girl stopped her pacing mid-step in the middle of the floor, straightened her straightened her posture, and had some sort of moment of clarity causing her to exclaim:

"Alright! It is time for us to go!" Everyone stared at her for a second in silence, trying to figure out if she was serious or not. Someone asked her about the lack of functioning instruments,  It made her eyes go wide and it looked like she was going to have some sort of violent outburst. She took a deep breath, though and it was easy to tell she had to make a strong mental effort to keep herself orderly.

"We'll find instruments when we get there," she said.

People gathered their things and made their way outside to the cars. I picked up my skateboard and was going to avoid baring witness to the potential trainwreck that was on its way to the stage by heading back to my art studio, but it was cold, windy and raining; not good skateboard weather. I hopped in a car with the guy with the djembe drum and headed with the group to where the event was being hosted.

We arrived. Someone led each of the band members who were tripping balls by the arm through the rain. We found our way inside and there was a large stage set up in the back. There already a band on it and they were rocking out.  "Finally, you're here!" 

Someone handed one if the singer/guitarists would were out of their minds on cough syrup an entry form for the competition. She stared at it with a blank look. "I have no idea what this is,what it means, get this out now my face." She passed it off to the other one who has out of his mind. He held up in the air. The woman who was in charge of the event and judging looked at them, half unsurprised by their obvious mental state and half in annoyed disbelief. "Really?" she asked. She asked the manager of the coffee shop if he could fill it out for them. Although amazingly stoned, he was relatively sober compared to the members of the band except for the djembe player, who was somewhere else in the bar, trying to hide the fact he was associated with the group out of embarrassment of their state. 

He didn't want to perform with them in the competition for fear of soiling his name as a musician here in Daytona Beach, where word spreads quickly between bars about which bands are good and which are a joke. When the band was ushers up to the stage to play, though, he picked up his drum and followed them because he didn't want to hurt and possible chance he had screwing the female singer/guitarist later after the performance. 

I ended up filling out the entry form myself. It asked for the band name and contact information, which I filled out to the best of my ability. Where there was a space to write the "band's tagline, " I scribbled in "Worth the wait... and so much more." 

Up on stage, people working the event set up microphones for the vocals and the drums. They offered cables to plug their guitars into. The girl in the band walked up to one of the microphone stands and said over the speaks: "There are no instruments we have brought."  The woman who was hosting the event let out a deep sigh and looked like she had reached her limits and was about to kick them off stage and out of the bar. One man who had played earlier saw this and looked amused and like he wanted to see what other antics this band had to offer if they stayed on the stage. "I havea guitar you guys can use, " he piped up. "I don't know what kind of music you plan on playing, but here, give this a try." He walked up to the stage and offered them a hallow-bodieded acoustic/electric Flying-V apparently to share between the three of them.

The chick grabbed it and passed it to her fellow singer/guitarist who was sitting on stage next to her atop a bar stool tripping balls. He took it in his hand and held it in his lap like he had never held a Flying-V before. I found out later that he hadn't hadn't when he asked me "what was with that guitar and it's pointyness?"

While he sat shifting it around in his lap, trying to figure out a comfortable way to hold it, she spat out a long string of crazy psycho-babble into the microphone. 

Everyone in the bar looked a little unsettled and confused by the lack of music and the surplus of awkward vibrations coming off the stage. 

"Play some music or get off the stage!" the event manager yelled at them, sending the two with microphones into a giggling fit while the man with the djembe stared at the ground, pretending he was somewhere else and nobody could see him. The event manager rose out of her seat and began walking towards the stage to pull them off.

Suddenly, the young man holding the guitar pulled himself together and found a huge burst of energy that sent everyone in the bar to sit upright and look straight at him while he struck a musical chord on the guitar and let out a loud, harmonic, vocal wail. Now that he seemed to have everyone's attention, he looked around the room in an awkward moment, making eye contact with as many people as possible and giggling to himself under his breath. The low giggle, amplified by the microphone, rolled out the speakers across the bar and sent chills up people's spines making many shift in their seat uncomfortably, slightly disturbed. 

Suddenly he burt out into a song he had obviously played many times before. He sang with extreme emotional conviction in his voice and strummed the guitar and slid his hand up and down its neck like he was softly molesting it. The sound coming out of it said it liked being molested, though, and his voice lulled the guitar and everyone in the bar into an accepting submission. The event manager walked back and sat back in her seat at the judges table.

The music brought tears to some people's eyes as it was so emotionally charged. The man with the djembe held excellent rhythm and it tied all the music together. After four or five songs, the band manager told them to exit the stage, and someone from out group came and ushered the two of them to sit at the bar. Some people bought them drinks and tried picking them up for reasons ranging from sex to music, but they were too messed up in the head to do anything other drink, smile, laugh and nod.

It was late, still cold and raining. I rode back to the coffee shop with the djembe player to take a nap and wait for the rain to stop. The two band members came back, too. I fell asleep drifted to sleep listening to them have sex on a couch a few feet away from me, and I woke up to the female trying to forcibly remove my pants and and get her mouth wrapped around my cock. I tried to stop her, but Im only a man, and eventually I gave in. I took her shirt and came all over her little brown tits.

Everyone else was asleep, so I came back to my art studio and began writing what you have just finished reading. 

Until next time, don't do anything I wouldn't do,  and be sure to subscribe by entering your email on the rightside of the top of this page.