By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Friday, August 18
Sex, death and cute furry animals. As a name Bleed Monkey has it all.
They’ve got gelled hair, the right friends (if I do say so myself) and parents that can bankroll their every disaster. They’re made and they are money. (Not that they’ll ever necessarily make it as musicians. No one can have everything.)
So, for months all of us roommates have been saying that we’d go see a Bleed Monkey show. At first it was very casual, a “you know we should really make a plan to go see one of Kerran’s shows,” but it had soon morphed into a kind of hysterical, “we keep talking about a plan to see one of shows. Let’s just do it and get it over with already.”
I think that, if we were in bands and it was Kerran who had to decide to see us, he’d do it if he did it (he’s very zen that way). There’d be none of this obligation crap. It wouldn’t cross his mind for a second that there might be an obligation involved.
So, tonight is the night:
Jean and Brenna are downstairs getting ready. Brenna is whistling, which is what she does when she wants you to know that she’s getting ready and that there’s no need to bug her to get ready.
Dani is supposed to meet us here, but her message said she’d be here at 5pm and now it’s 6pm and...no sign of her.
A few minutes ago I went back to the answering machine, but the message is already erased. I’m left to wonder if I misheard, if she’d said 7pm and I’d heard 5pm, or if she said she’d meet me at some particular place (a particular place that isn’t this particular place), but I don’t think so. I remembered her saying very clearly that she’d meet us here.
Saturday, August 19I was kind of hoping that Jean and Brenna would take their time. I walk down to the 2nd floor. The bathroom door was open and Brenna was tempting gravity, standing with a towel wrapped around her and her arm cocked upwards so that she could put a little brush through her eyelashes. At any second, the towel was going to open and fall away.
“Do you think it’ll happen?” she asked without looking over, surprising me a little, though it shouldn’t have. I certainly made enough noise on the stairs.
“What?” I asked, wondering if it was possible that she was reading my rather obvious and embarrassed mind.
“That my towel will fall off,” she said.
I was caught not sure what to say and so just stood there and at the moment when I should have been speaking, the towel did almost open, but she caught it as it did and redid the knot so that her modesty was better protected.
I went downstairs and turned on the TV. Jean was already ready, wearing a little plaid skirt and a t-shirt that said This Is Not a Fugazi T-shirt. Brenna got down there not 5 minutes later, her brown hair looking shiny and newly clean.
Still no Dani. If I leave her, she’s going to kill me. If I stay and I was supposed to meet her somewhere else, she’s going to kill me. Either way, I’m looking at getting killed. I tell the girls my predicament and they’re very sympathetic.“So after weeks of planning we’re supposed to be late because your girlfriend can’t read a watch?” Brenna said looking at Jean, who responded with, “It’s nothing against Dani personally, but this isn’t actually fair. It is our night too.”
“How about 10 more minutes, then I’ll leave her a message and we can go?” I said.
“I’d rather us go now,” Brenna said and she stuck her tongue out at me and made a scrunched up face to let me know that a maximum of pain and discomfort would be inflicted for this inconvenience.
“Maybe if we start walking, we’ll run into her?” Jean asked.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, annoyed at Dani for being late, partially just wishing I could go without her, knowing that it would be more of a production if she was there, yet missing her and wanting her to hurry up and get to our house already. How could all those things war at each other in the same person?
At 7:30pm, two and a half hours after she was supposed to get here, Dani rang the bell. “Sorry, I’m late,” she said as she came in. Her face is particularly expressive when she’s put upon and it was scrunched up and she was shaking her head slightly.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“OK,” I said.
“My Mom called and she wouldn’t let me off the phone. I had a bunch of stuff to do and then my Mom called,” she said.
“Why didn’t you just tell her that you had to go?” I asked and was surprisingly glad to see her. I think that there was actually a little lump in my throat, but, and I’m not making a joke, it could also have been the groat and lentil stew that Jean made us for dinner.
“Because she’d never understand that,” Dani said. “We’re much too co-dependent as a family.”
If she knows that they’re co-dependent, can’t she stop it? And what does co-dependent really mean anyway? Does categorizing herself like that make her self-aware?
The walk down to the Black Cat was hurried and I think that Brenna was in a snit over us being late. She barely talked to Dani. Part of me wanted to say something about how long we were waiting, but Dani has this way of turning everything around. The 2.5 hours could easily become my fault and she would argue it so emphatically and with such anger that, in the end, I might even believe that I’d made her 2.5 hours late. Better to pretend like it didn’t happen.
The show didn’t start at 8pm. It didn’t even start at 9pm. At 9:30pm, Kerran came upstairs and led us back to the bar and ordered a round of car bombs.
“What’s a car bomb?” I asked.
“You drop a shot glass of Bailey’s into a pint of Guinness, then drink the whole thing as fast as you can.
Three rounds of car bombs later, Sam, who I don’t remember seeing earlier in the evening, walked up behind Kerran as he ordered us yet another round.
By this time, Dani had her head in her hands, Jean was talking and I couldn’t hear her because her mouth was too slow and Brenna was saying that 4 rounds of car bombs were nothing to her because she was descended directly from Matilda The Hun on her father’s side and someone named Madagascar Willy on her Mother’s. I hadn’t the foggiest.
Sam was looking down at us. “You caaan’t keeep hiiim drinnnnkkking,” she said and it occured to me that I was drunk and that I would have to listen to Sam with my special drunk man’s hearing. Things were instantly better: “Wayne says that he needs him. The show’s about to begin and Kerran’s got to go on.”
“But Sam,” Brenna said, standing. “Kerran can’t stand up.”
And it was true. I turned around to see that he’d gone concave against the bar. This was a pit of badness. Brenna and Jean were laughing. Dani just kept repeating over and over, “This is so bad. We’re so bad.”
A solution was found. A chair was pulled up on stage and Kerran played his first show at the Black Cat while sitting down. With his head lolling and the bassline occasionally going completely arhythmic and twangy, Kerran, physically seemed to be doing a Keith Richards impression. Musically, it was less describable.
I was a little better than Dani. I had my arms around her, half out of affection and half holding her up. We were leaning against the black painted wall to our left of the stage. I was starting to sober up and realized that Bleed Monkey hadn’t gotten much better than last time I’d heard them. There was just too much noise and not enough song.
Bleed Monkey’s sound was like the crash of one of those huge army supply planes if it had been full of non-free-range chickens being chased by a lawn mower and roosters caged during mating season (chickens probably don’t have a mating season) so that they’d become immobilized and had to express their frustration only be crowing.
“They’re really really good,” Dani said and licked my ear twice. I think she’d meant to kiss me on the lips. Her head had kind of veered the wrong way just at the last second.
The place was about half-full and I recognized other friends of the band. Wayne might not be all the musician he could hope to be, but he did know how to make friends.
And up on stage, he was groaning and swinging his hips and gyrating his torso. He tore off his own shirt, shook his head as if he were shaking off sweat (there just didn’t appear to be any sweat) then he mopped his brow and jumped into the crowd, who caught him and carried him with his arms stretched out Jesus-style. There weren’t enough people to pass him very far. He got midway back and then they passed him forward again.
“We should go pinch his butt,” Dani said and stumbled forward towards him. I caught her and walked her towards Brenna and Jean who were standing near the bar.
“Sorry guys, It’s time for me to get Ms. Bleed Monkey 1995 home for oatmeal and a long nap.”
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
