Circus Soul
Mar. 4th, 2005 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonSaturday night. The Chamber. I'm up in the booth working the decks, trying my best to drown the fear with shots of Jack and long hits taken secretly outside. The fear is always with me though, the fear that any second it'll all go down: Speakers blow, lights crash, wires unplug from the board, as it is our board is missing the switch on channel one and channel two sticks, and channel three's for the record player and channel four don't work at all and you pray that at least, maybe, just maybe the crossfader'll slide, then there's the CD's that skip, the train wrecks, missing your cue for a show, the request list full of songs you've never heard before, it adds up in a wave of bad math on me and I smile and cringe at the freefall rush of it all. You do your best and let the music do the work. I try not to forget that i'm a conduit, an outlet. I work with a baby faced metal head, fat smile framed by dirty blond dreads, his job is to take care of the lights and he huddles over the PC and each click of the mouse shifts the lights & strobes across the floor. Then there's the cat I'm spinning with, a physics student who attacks his set list with a laptop and a science lab precision. He want's to be an astronaut when he grows up and the music he plays sounds like an alien armada has just declared war on the planet Earth in German. He's very earnest about all of it. The Apollo to my Dionysus.
He's a beat matching scalpel. I'm intuitive; Jack Daniels Zen with a lucky guess segue.
At 12:30 the firebreather goes on. Thank god. Because while there's no predicting what kind of song Rubberella or Oni'll want for their performance, or what last second hail Mary the boss is expecting me to pull out of my ass for the one o'clock-("Y'know something Dead can Dancey but with a Drum N Bass beat")I can at least count on the Firebreather to do "Du Hast" or "Smack my Bitch Up". Thirty minutes before the show he'd pop his head up outside the booth which would occasionally startle me since the booth is roughly 12 feet up, and he'd smile mischeviously at me and train those beady ferret eyes down on me and say "You got 'Du Hast!'" and i'd be like "Oh yeah..." and the astronaut and baby huey would laugh and he'd pull away from the booth to circle the dance floor on his stilts, applying that strange tattoo alchemy he probably learned on the road with Impotent Sea Snakes on the Chamber crowd, adding an element of the carnival in what could otherwise be just another club night. He'd send one of his friends or coworkers and give me a one song warning and i'd light up another Camel, down my drink in a gulp and prep up the Rammstein.
The song i'm playing hits the last chorus, distorted vocals fading into the last rolls of the beat I lower the volume gently, gently, like your licking pussy for the first time, I nod at Baby Huey and he nods back and the floor goes dark for a second and then the stage lights start up, gradually I bring it in, those first synth keys ricochetting back and forth across the club, the crowd knows somethings coming, and the regulars know it's him and start up with the drunken shouts of celebration, then the guitars start up- Deep Crunching Power Chords unrelenting, the curtain parts, he steps forward stripped to the waist, the sheen of sweat reflecting the red stage light on him, and as soon you hear "DU... DU HAST.. DU HAST NICHT(?)...) he'd let out a wide burst of flame that you can almost feel the heat of from all the way back up in the booth and you hear the crowd go fucking nuts, like they found out the circus is in town and they got front row tickets free, they cheer and whistle and he stands there firing off bursts of flame from his mouth to the beat, without pause, without panic, a profesional and the floor loves it. The song fades and I mix out of it as the curtain goes down and the lighting shifts from stage back to floor and you can hear everyone still applauding.
Fearless, he pulls it off. A professional doing his job with neither routine nor anxiety but sheer exhiliration.
I wish I knew him better. Had more to offer than this vague memory. But maybe that's all we really know of people- what we remember and what we forget. The soul- the essence gets lost in the translation. But I will say this and then shut up and let the people who really knew and loved him speak, that on that night, watching him up there on the stage, I felt like I belonged to something bigger than a club night my friend promoted, something bigger than my adrenalin rush and drink tickets and hard on fancy's for people so beautiful it hurt to know the ways you wouldn't know them, it felt unique like I belonged to a different world, another planet that was dangerous, sexy and precious. That we all knew we were partying in a mutual dream from which we would soon wake, that there was a brief crack that opened up in our lives and for a few hours we were free to do it all- to be who we wanted before it closed back up in the first rays of Sunday morning. Watching him up there I realized that I had fulfilled my little boy dream of running away and joing the circus, there was nothing to be afraid of, times too short for that shit and you get up there and do your best and have a good time doing it.
I guess if I can't thank him for that then the least I could do with these words is be thankful.
I'll shut up now.
He's a beat matching scalpel. I'm intuitive; Jack Daniels Zen with a lucky guess segue.
At 12:30 the firebreather goes on. Thank god. Because while there's no predicting what kind of song Rubberella or Oni'll want for their performance, or what last second hail Mary the boss is expecting me to pull out of my ass for the one o'clock-("Y'know something Dead can Dancey but with a Drum N Bass beat")I can at least count on the Firebreather to do "Du Hast" or "Smack my Bitch Up". Thirty minutes before the show he'd pop his head up outside the booth which would occasionally startle me since the booth is roughly 12 feet up, and he'd smile mischeviously at me and train those beady ferret eyes down on me and say "You got 'Du Hast!'" and i'd be like "Oh yeah..." and the astronaut and baby huey would laugh and he'd pull away from the booth to circle the dance floor on his stilts, applying that strange tattoo alchemy he probably learned on the road with Impotent Sea Snakes on the Chamber crowd, adding an element of the carnival in what could otherwise be just another club night. He'd send one of his friends or coworkers and give me a one song warning and i'd light up another Camel, down my drink in a gulp and prep up the Rammstein.
The song i'm playing hits the last chorus, distorted vocals fading into the last rolls of the beat I lower the volume gently, gently, like your licking pussy for the first time, I nod at Baby Huey and he nods back and the floor goes dark for a second and then the stage lights start up, gradually I bring it in, those first synth keys ricochetting back and forth across the club, the crowd knows somethings coming, and the regulars know it's him and start up with the drunken shouts of celebration, then the guitars start up- Deep Crunching Power Chords unrelenting, the curtain parts, he steps forward stripped to the waist, the sheen of sweat reflecting the red stage light on him, and as soon you hear "DU... DU HAST.. DU HAST NICHT(?)...) he'd let out a wide burst of flame that you can almost feel the heat of from all the way back up in the booth and you hear the crowd go fucking nuts, like they found out the circus is in town and they got front row tickets free, they cheer and whistle and he stands there firing off bursts of flame from his mouth to the beat, without pause, without panic, a profesional and the floor loves it. The song fades and I mix out of it as the curtain goes down and the lighting shifts from stage back to floor and you can hear everyone still applauding.
Fearless, he pulls it off. A professional doing his job with neither routine nor anxiety but sheer exhiliration.
I wish I knew him better. Had more to offer than this vague memory. But maybe that's all we really know of people- what we remember and what we forget. The soul- the essence gets lost in the translation. But I will say this and then shut up and let the people who really knew and loved him speak, that on that night, watching him up there on the stage, I felt like I belonged to something bigger than a club night my friend promoted, something bigger than my adrenalin rush and drink tickets and hard on fancy's for people so beautiful it hurt to know the ways you wouldn't know them, it felt unique like I belonged to a different world, another planet that was dangerous, sexy and precious. That we all knew we were partying in a mutual dream from which we would soon wake, that there was a brief crack that opened up in our lives and for a few hours we were free to do it all- to be who we wanted before it closed back up in the first rays of Sunday morning. Watching him up there I realized that I had fulfilled my little boy dream of running away and joing the circus, there was nothing to be afraid of, times too short for that shit and you get up there and do your best and have a good time doing it.
I guess if I can't thank him for that then the least I could do with these words is be thankful.
I'll shut up now.
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no subject
on 2005-03-04 06:28 pm (UTC)Its too bad they had to end.
It is sad to see that he is gone
I think he deserved more time
oh, and "beat matching scalpel" that's a good one, I'll have to remember that. We are our own worst critics I suppose. I always though you were better than you thought of yourself.
Maybe someday we can pair up again...
no subject
on 2005-03-04 06:35 pm (UTC)Its one of the few but many the various fond memories I have of him.
Its not on how long or well you may of known a person sometimes, its more on the possible or impression/impact they made on you be it brief or long time.
He was beautiful enigmic soul who shared various parts of himself in multiple and different and some same ways with allot of us.
He will be miised.
Anyway thank you for sharing this. I think it might bring a smile to a few peoples faces who knew him and run across this.
*Huggz*
no subject
on 2005-03-04 07:08 pm (UTC)well put....
on 2005-03-04 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-03-04 07:26 pm (UTC)Other's mourning....
on 2005-03-04 07:52 pm (UTC)I have had pictures in my head all day...
Being on stage with him and the Snakes as he carves my back with a scapel and lighter fluid.
Driving him to the hospital when he coughed instead of spit and got secind degree burns over most of his esophogus.
Drinking with him and being his punching bag bag when he had to sign the adoption papers from Sam.
Pulling him out of a brawl at 688 over some stupid chick.
A couple of weeks ago being hit in the back of the head by a bag of bagels as we both happened to be in ghtetto Kroger at 4 am...
And with all of this, I didn't feel like I knew him very well. Through the blood and the puke and the booze and the fire and the bastards and the beats...He and I were not close.
Now, I feel like there are a cluster of synchophantic high school chippies trying to mourn someone else's pain. It makes me angry.
Does that make me a bad person?
Re: Other's mourning....
on 2005-03-04 08:23 pm (UTC)I remember when one of my best friends died two years ago.
He was this guy who kept me off the streets when I was homeless, who would have my back at the shows, fed me when I was hungry, hooked me up when I was jonsing and as I wrote of him once-
"He would never let me fall any lower than he stood".
After his death I hated the outpouring of other peoples pain I heard, I hated the soap opera sentimentality and the casual acquientences who all of a sudden had a story to share about a man I didn't think they deserved to mention much less claim to know.
I wasn't a bad person then. I was angry at something I had no power over. I was angry at the fact that despite how invicible I thought he and my friends were, the fact is we weren't any different, we weren't special.
I think I've learned (or at least i'm beginning to learn) that whether I like it or not I belong to a small tribe of people that in some way have decided to go off the beaten path from the mainstream and that when one of us falls it opens up something inside us. Something that remembers that theres so much more to who we are than our outfits, our inks, the shows we saw, who we fucked and how cool the new invader zim dvd is. We remember that we're transistory, we remember that the thing we most want and need is each other, and sadly it is in death that we realize that and begin to reach to each other with akward gestures from our hearts.
I wasn't going to say anything else after that post. So i'm sorry if I sounded preachy or rambled.
To everyone else who posted above thank you by the way. I feel very small and akward and i'm going to go hang out with my best friend for a little bit and get out of my head for a few hours.
Re: Other's mourning....
on 2005-03-05 02:16 am (UTC)an irish boy
on 2005-03-04 10:46 pm (UTC)that fundimental to most things in his self-image, he was Irish.
Agood Irishman. And he'd love being rmembered and celebrated as
the quiet man, the entertainer, at times, the reveler...the puzzlement he was...please, when you think of him next in a bar, make a toast and spill a sip for him.
E
Re: an irish boy
on 2005-03-05 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
on 2005-03-04 11:47 pm (UTC)