Open Mike

    And everyone here is so damned nice. Nice fucking nice. The Mad Poet is furious intense in the back of the room in smoky mad scientist writing into a beaten spiralling notebook. In his blackest beret literary heart he plots the hideously ironic death of each of us who fail to see his anguish. The black coffee crowd hovers around a table and concentrates on stroking their goatees and little titties and pities us all. Infinite compassion or infinite pitiful pitying. On stage, a middle age crisis of epic proportions named Les is strumming a heavy metal guitar and twanging wrong and desperate afraid and sensitive stupid "Oh I shouldn't have gotten that damned mortgage so I'll cry for the Earth" words, but no-one is listening. Then he stops mid strum and sweats his cardigan and says "I haven't practiced this song enough to play tonight" and half takes his guitar strap off but hesitates unsure. The true believers in the audience start clapping hard to encourage him to go on. I am not one of them. I want him to go home and practice his guitar. The Mad Poet wants us all to feel sorry for what we've done to him. The Crisis finally gets off stage and is replaced with a political poet who thinks he's funny and topical, but I want him to STOPical and after twenty minutes and plenty tidbits of loser humor and unfunny rumor he leaves the stage satisfied and makes me feel mortified. God I want to kill him with my tender fingers ripping and tearing away his skin to get to the meat of his chubby neck. I want to scream, "Lose some fucking fat you blubber shit loser. Then maybe you'll get laid and stop killing me with your goddamned poetry!" Poetry should be fucking outlawed. And I'm trying not to look at William because I know if our eyes meet for even a flash, we will both slip off our chairs and laugh our asses off. Then we are introduced last as the "Dirtbags" and I jam my pick hard into the strings the instant my amp hits the "ON" position and WHAM! the poets and singer-songwriter heads all snap backwards in whiplash panic to get away from the shock waves of rippling crunch and searing feedback. We are playing WAY too loud for such a small room and we don't care. Cause by this point, we don't want to entertain these people, we just want to hurt them. Dave is beating and kicking his drums and I am slamming my hand into my guitar and finally just throw it on the ground KACHUNG CHOING to beat and force noise from it. I want my guitar to be a weapon. I want it to be a sonic assualt rifle. I point the headstock at a gentle poet and snap the strings - BLAM! you're dead. I point to another - Gugga Gugga CHANG! Dead fucking dead fucking dead. I rake the pick down and up and down the neck and strangle it till it screams. Sean's drum kit is becoming a junk pile. Tom toms and snares and metal cymbol stands are strewn around the floor of the delicately carpeted stage. Our songs are just an excuse to unleash a screaming reverberation bomb blast into this small space and destroy everything inside. We are alien exterminators making way for a meltdown. This room will be stripped to the bare walls when we are through. The sensitive open stagers and folk acoustic gentle people are falling over backwards and almost beating each other to crawl for the fire exits. Finally, after whipping out our set at lightening pace, my ears are ringing in concussion waves. But there are still some diehards left in the crowd. They give us the supportive spattering of applause that everyone gets and William leans on me panting sweaty and dead weight to hold himself up and says, "Man, these open stagers are true believers. They'll really listen to ANYTHING." The Gentle-Walker MC even comes up to us and says, "Thanks for playing, guys. I hope you'll come back again."  And the Mad Poet stops William from puking in the men's room to say, "Hey man, I liked your set. It's really cool when you all fall down on the ground and keep playing. Just like the Sex Pistols." And we are now thoroughly beaten. We tried to kill them and they swallowed us whole.