perfidy

Voting on Round Three is now closed, with Johno the victor. Here is the first round of the final deathmatch between Johno and Buckethead.

The contest now stands at one-all. The fate of the world teeters on a knife's edge. Having conceded the second round to GeekLethal's diaper rash and frozen pants, I now offer the first salvo in the third and last round between myself and GeekLethal. Who is the bigger dork? You decide!

(Round 1, Round 2.)

My Space Camp stories (in which I prove to be the dork among dorks) may have to wait until the next round, assuming that with the story you are about to read I beat my esteemed rival into a fine dork-paste I can then smear all over my body. Even if I lose this round, I may write them up just for kicks. But now I am going to share with you a piquant delight from my musical past. Hopefully this amuse-bouche, this appetizer of shame, will please you.

THE RECITAL

Those who know me well know that I’m a music fiend. Before I could read, I would "play" my grandparents' Chickering baby grand. I would pretend two long Lincoln Logs were drumsticks and pound on any available surface. When I was seven and my parents bought us our own piano, I declared after a brief investigation that the triad E-G#-B was the “Spanish chord” because it sounded like Flamenco music.

I began taking piano lessons when I was about eight years old from a woman who taught piano out of her home. Every six months she would hold a recital for all her students. For a few years this was no problem: I’d learn “Red River Valley” or “Ode to Joy” or whatever other dead easy piece I’d been given by Mrs. Kowalski, waltz in there, and play the living shit out of it to rapturous applause from the assembled parents and students. I was a god.

About the time I turned eleven, everything changed. The pieces got harder; my Dungeons and Dragons addiction began to cut into my practice time; and I came down with a debilitating case of stage fright. I began breaking out in flop sweat hours before the recital time and made sure to shower just before getting in the car to go because, you know, audiences can smell fear.

Things only got worse. The flop sweat was joined by butterflies in the stomach, making it impossible for me to eat anything after breakfast on recital day. The pieces were getting harder, and when my turn came to play, the notes would sometimes swim in front of my eyes as my fingers forgot every move and turn they had practiced to perfection hundreds of times before. I would start and stop and start and stop before pulling myself together and playing the piece to the end.

The recital was on a Saturday. I woke up and did what I always did. I ate a shaky breakfast of cereal. I watched cartoons without joy as my younger sister – always the quicker study but lacking (I felt) in a sense of musical touch – briskly ran through her recital piece a few times. Then I tried my own piece: at home, on my own piano, everything was fine, except for the slight cramping in my gut.

It was a pain that only got worse as I showered off the flop sweat, changed into my white shirt and wool pants, and gathered my sheet music. The ride to Mrs. Kowalski’s house was an uncomfortable battle between my mind and intestines, and I writhed in my seat as suddenly my insides roiled and shifted. Things were moving.

The younger students always went first. The six year olds picked their way through “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” and the ten year olds did their own Odes to Joy. Parents looked on raptly as students waiting to play studied their music, mentally preparing for their turn at the keyboard. Karen was there; she didn't know I liked her. She was absorbed in her sheet music - she was an excellent pianist - and the warm afternoon sun on her brown skin and hair awoke new and fervent emotions within my pubescent heart. But I cared less and less about that as the pressure in my gut grew and grew. I crossed my legs. I clenched my cheeks. But just before it was time for me to play, I realized it was to no avail. I could not wait. My stage fright, always my bane and nemesis, had given me one final gift: diarrhea.

Mrs. Kowalski’s house was arranged so that the bed and bath were set just off the large living room in which she kept her grand piano. Chairs for parents and students fanned out toward them. Consequently, anyone using the bathroom during recitals had to be very careful, as every move was potentially audible to the people outside.

At first the bathroom was a cool, dark respite from the crowd. I began to relax slightly, a feeling which dissipated the moment I sat down on the bowl. The cramps were furious, bending me over, and then it started, waves of pain, waves of relief, and an astounding amount of noise. I tried to be quiet - and it's so hard to be quiet! - but there was no piano sound to provide cover. It was my turn to play and everyone was waiting for me.

Then came the snickers. As I sat there, every painful squirt and groan made it more obvious that I had a captive audience just outside the bathroom door, all of whom were doing their best to be polite and all of whom were failing horribly in spite of themselves. Every fresh body-wracking spasm elicited a new ripple of muffled hilarity from outside the door until the laughter reached critical mass and the chuckles continued quietly on their own regardless of the pace of my performance.

The house fell silent. I sat there in the dark. My heartbeat grew fainter in my ears. It was time to sit down at the piano and pretend I still knew how to play. So I finished up, carefully washed my hands, let out a deep breath, and emerged to greet my adoring fans.

[wik] And so it’s come to this. Two fighters, each now understanding his opponent’s strengths. I know that I can never overcome Johno’s gamedorkery; he, no match for my deepest, darkest schoolyard horrors. Each of us continually rolling polyhedral dice in our heads as we attempt to land imaginary hits on the other.

Going into this final round, my opponent leads with another nasty 1-2 punch: music wanker and public evacuation. Such a combo might be deadly to those of lesser constitution, but I wield…

The Hammer of the Grods

There is a lot about high school I wish I could lobotomize away and never be allowed to remember. Most of the people; all of the smells; even the look of the place, which was as if Foucault designed and built it himself with his own two Crisco-slathered hands, to prove his ideas about what such structures did to people’s minds. But the regional slang and stupid adolescent patois from that era still make me laugh sometimes, and I’d rather keep them.

One word in particular was used as a noun, to name anyone with whom the speaker wished to express distaste: “grod”. The instances whereby proper usage of “grod” might be explained are far too numerous to cover in this forum. It was pretty much anyone at any time for any reason, but always bad, and used interchangeably with “nerd”. I’d been a grod more times than I can remember, and figured after graduation that was the end of my grodhood.

And I was right… for about 5 years, until my band played out for the first time.

The hell of it was, there were all the ingredients to being cool. I was just out of the Army, energetic and cocky; the band was tight; high school seemed a nightmare I’d had when I was a kid when I thought of it at all; shit, I even had a girlfriend who was way hotter than I thought I deserved. Things had come together not so pretty bad, thank you very much. But it wasn’t gonna be enough.

I won’t share the name of the band; you could Google it, find it, and laugh even harder at me. It was a local metal-type outfit, is all I’ll say, and we kinda sucked. But we all knew our parts, and wanted to get out there and play. First gig: the high school where the lead player went.

None of us really knew what the event was and the singer, who had set up the gig, was being a little evasive. I couldn’t understand any conceivable scenario of what a semi-metal act with 20 minutes of material was supposed to do in a high-school setting, but I was jazzed to be playing out and it didn’t gnaw at me. We humped our gear and set up in the dark, musty auditorium. I tried not to dwell on the ugly memories that the sights of forlorn, endless rows of sheetmetal lockers brought, and ignored the ball of tension forming in my gut.

As I recall we were supposed to go on at 7, and we had about an hour to kill so we ate a bit and hung around backstage. By then I’d seen some friends and their girlfriends, and heard some rustling and voices drifting backstage from the seats. I figured there’d be alot of people judging from the sounds, but I couldn’t be sure with the curtain down. I was getting pumped as we closed in on 7, and starting to get a little anxious about my backup scenarios: what do I do if I break a string (on my bass with brand new strings); how will I look if I fall (ridiculous, that’s how); if I really flub my parts, will I be able to recover (likely not); will I throw up the McNuggets I just ate (no, as it turned out)…and a thousand other stupid situations I was by that time dwelling on JUST to freak myself out.

Seven hits, we fire up and start our little intro piece, feeling for the groove, the pocket; things start to come together, and everybody’s feeling and feeding off each other’s energy; I see the lights hit the curtain and am so amped I’m on stage I've wanted it for years and doing the thing and all the stupid shit I was thinking about was stupid and we’re gonna kill because we’ve been rehearsing so long and doing it and when this curtain goes up I’m gonna be looking at a packed house of 200 hot chicks and dudes who want to be me…

…and that’s a shame, because if I had instead been excited at the thought of playing live for two dozen retarded kids and their parents, I’d have been in Nirvana.

Turned out there was a late after-school program for all the special ed/special needs students. We got this big room at this big school basically to amuse these kids. And when the curtain went up, that’s who was there. All of two rows’ worth. Oh, and the friends who had come to support us had left as soon as they figured out what was going on; it took days to get them to even return phone calls.

So it all kind of crashed in on me, on stage, at once. I’m in a high school again. I’m trying so hard to be cool but failing again. I have only the lame kids for company again.

And instead of rock God, rock grod. Again.