Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [144]
how far these lads are into s&m, after all. For which one is thankful. But whatever the state of each housebrother's private relationship with the beer machine, they loved us, and why shouldn’t they? We were the geek show! The whole band except me had on all kinds of makeup, glitter, masks, beards, weird shit to the max. Add on top of that everybody being stoned and drunk and you had a Halloween surely to be remembered even if you forgot all the exact details. I was so fucked up that at one point, wandering out into the smog of the dance floor, I saw Andy's girlfriend, and thought we were now in some kinda local New Wave club fulla more or less relatively normal people, and further that the band had been playing for at least eight hours, that it was 6 A.M.,I could see dawn breaking cerulean and pink through the ceiling, and I thought Jee-ZUZ do they work these bands hard in these places. Man, I thought, I could never be a rock ‘n’ roll star, I haven’t got the fortitude. I thought the band looked terrible onstage, five poor wasted haggard manikins on a numb treadmill killing themselves in liege to dreams of a train to nowhere, oh I was bathetic, except of course nobody else knew even though I thought they all could see ‘cause it was all happening inside just like always with psychedelics. To everybody else I’m sure now that I just looked like some old drunk stumbling around the place: “What's that old wino doing hanging around with that band?” “Shit, I dunno, maybe he's one of ‘em's uncle or something. You know how these musicians are.” “I think probably we should just throw him the hell outa the house.” “Nah, fuck it, he's about half passed out anyway. He's probably just their mascot or grampa or something.” So I lurched back around to the dressing room, where I’d managed last time I’d been there to plop myself down on the card table, knocking it off the boxes and spilling beer all over the place four times in four minutes. Now my New York Rocker was all soggy and I was in no condition to read it anyway.Life was hopeless. I snored beneath a monolithic wave of existential despair. Sartre was right in Le Nausee: I was now on that rack at the precipice's edge where one may shudder with horror to actually find oneself unable to pick up a simple glass of beer. Then again, one may not. The Pacific Ocean broke through the ceiling and froze, backing up on itself. Actually I made that up. I was too stupefied for hallucinations. The band called me back up at some point and I must have sang something though I can’t imagine what, then I remember coming to again to find myself standing in the middle of the stage with my guitar strapped on and plugged in, playing sparse fills that actually fit. What a pro! Then I blacked out again, came to 20 or 30 minutes later just in time to be called up to sing “Louie, Louie,” which ever since Animal House has been appropriated and crowned the Frats’ Official International Anthem in Perpetuity; it brings a tear to the pudgy shelf of cheek as the notes and those perhaps a bit sentimental but always stirring lyrics conjure up sad remembrances of beerbusts past: The night they gang-raped the ugly girl nobody liked in Gamma Delta Phu. The memory of making one puking little pledge eat a bloody Kotex and smack his lips after each swallow squealing “YUM YUM, FINGERLICKIN’ GOOD!!!” The night they homosexually molested, physically abused, and then sodomized collectively those creepy little pledges they didn’t wanna let in anyway ‘cause they dressed Robert Hall's and came from some crummy little town in Pennsylvania where they talked funny and were Amish or something. Something different anyway. Something no good. And how after that they told the sniveling little cunts that they better not tell anybody or they, the frat honchos, would see to it that word was spread all over school these new enrollees were nothing but Queers. Come on, who would believe it of US? No one. A joke. But hell, that's all it was in the first place, was just a damn good joke. Well I got on up and commenced to sing “Louie, Louie.” At