And the music thundered on, too loud for the human ear to endure without damage. I looked up at the people watching from the balcony, and considered them either scared or more interested in the music than the show. Most were just scared, but I added the last part because my friend who is in a band was up there, to get some ideas. Maybe he was scared too, though. I spotted these two really good-looking girls I knew, but they could not see me. I was lost in a swarm of nobodies, just a layman in a faceless clergy moving to the whims of the music. The music – that living entity that consumed all of us, embraced us, copulated with us, united with us – was in us. The music made us alive. And I will be damned if I was going to miss it from the balcony.
I turned around again and saw a few bigger guys. That topless chick was gone somewhere else. I asked them for a boost and they tossed me atop the roaring crowd that so closely resembled boiling stew or stormy seas. They all kept me on my back, which makes sense because I am male, but I could feel the feminine hands between my legs like lapping waves, gently violating my most sacred places. It was a show, however, so it made no difference. One time I went through a haunted house with some slutty chick I had met on the way in, and she stuck her hand down my pants. That was a lot more volatile than this, even though I now I had god-knows-how-many people feeling me up. I was now at the foot of the stage, right under the huge speakers, the guitarist’s sweat dripping in my face, a thrown pair of panties a foot from my head, the lead singer’s dreadlocks swinging in my face… and the bouncers pulled me down. I was in this little passageway between the stage and the crowd, made with an iron fence about a foot and a half out from the stage for the purpose of getting rid of crowd surfers. The bouncers rushed me out of there, right next to the enormous pulsing speaker that was so close I could not distinctly comprehend the sound belching from it, beyond the people sitting with their backs to the pillars smoking weed, and out to the bar that I was too young to use. I could move freely for a minute.
The music was inside me, however, and I could not stay that far away for long. I clawed my way past the people by the bar, who were standing so close together that anywhere else it would be most uncomfortable, past the people in the back who were yelling that they wanted to see the show too and could people stop pushing, and ran into the hardcore moshers. These people took more skill to avoid, because all they wanted to do was beat you, so I just jumped through, throwing punches and kicks with as little regard as a human can, some of them landing on wet, meaty things that might be faces, legs, or whatever, and then I was in the front again, swaying in the middle of everything, lifting my feet with no result, going deaf.
The music claimed my shoe. Someone somehow found it and passed it up to the bouncers up front, and I saw them do it. I swayed some more, a mob of people that could crush a herd of elephants with its force carrying me, led by the inexorable pulse, the command of the music. My toes were being smashed. There was only one thing to do, so up and over I went again. I saw the two, who had now become three, pretty high school gigglers, and they waved at my one-shoed self. I screamed a lost cheer of emotion induced by the music and acknowledged them the same way. The music was in me. The music made me breathe and sustained me, inflaming me with its passion. It took me to the front again, the lead singer’s sleeve-tattooed arms gleaming blue and red and orange in the now-white lights, the guitarist’s broken string waving around like a whip, the music simply noise that hurt and loved, sensually stroking my face with a branding-iron.
The music still called. I regained my shoe, was hustled past that huge speaker and the potheads and again momentarily had freedom of movement. But the music owned my very soul, and I was compelled, carried, back to the front. The front, ten rows back from the stage and the bouncers and the band, ten rows of people but only eight feet of floor space, crushed for the music, by the music. The mob fell, and we lay like dominoes. My leg was nearly torn off like a piece of grass, though I would emerge with no permanent damage. It was the music, and if it called for the sacrifice of my leg, so be it. So be it.
Again and again the music called me up to ride the waves of the crowd, and again and again I shoved and kicked and scrambled and bit my way back to the front. No five-mile race could compare to this – a set of a thousand pushups was easier. If I were to sprint from here to Canada, it might be similar. I could hardly stand when it ended. I could hardly hear, could hardly talk. I gulped down water and washed my bloody face, cooling and rinsing away all the sweat from a hundred bodies and the gel that had poured unending down my face all night.
Outside, in the clean air, I could smell the different kinds of smoke pouring from the club: bud, cloves, cigarettes, etc. It was infused into my clothes and my hair, which still stood on end with the gel and the music, despite the hours of sweating and dripping. The three girls found me and I hugged them, because they were almost in the same nasty state I was. It was frigid, what with my being soaked through and it being March, but they helped keep me warm. Why was the one girl’s dad here? He was pretty cool, though, and realized it was all part of the show. Where was my car? Why would my legs not work? I had had nothing to drink, nothing to smoke. I had only had the music.
The music rang in my ears, and we had to shout to hear each other. They dragged me along, and dropped me in front of their car. But where was mine? Oh, right next to theirs. I forgot we had come together. This was better than being drunk, better than being high. It was the music.
I have always been something of a nudist. Especially when I have old vintage red leather in my car and dripping wet pants.
“Amber, would you mind if I drove home in my boxers?”
Of course she would. Oh, well. She was not soaked through like me, so I would be the only one ruining the seats. We drove away from the place, and I could still hear them playing in my head, could still feel the mob swaying with the music, could still feel the hands in my pants. I floated in the afterglow left by the powerful music, seeing the tattoos and dreadlocks and sacrificed lingerie as streetlights and road signs flitted by. I would go to school the next morning, and I would still feel it, but it would be just a memory, just words.
“So, how was the concert?”
“Did you go? How was it?”
“I heard you were up front the whole time!”
“How many times did you crowd surf? Eleven?”
“It was pretty cool,” I would reply. That is all. How can they know? How can I tell them that I was caught up by the music, lifted and brought to another world, transported through time to a place outside, where nothing has any meaning and nothing but the music was in control? I could not.
“Who opened?”
“I don’t know, but they were pretty good.” The opening band put on a better show than the feature, if that mattered.
“Which songs did th-”
I could not take it anymore. There was no way to tell them. I wanted to scream, but the energy that would sustain it was gone. I wanted to dance like I had with the punks in combat boots, but there was no more music to allow it. How could I explain to them that I had lived on a higher plane than they could comprehend? Few believed that that plane existed, except some friends who had been down there with me. Even those girls, who were now complaining that the smell of smoke would not come out of their hair, did not know. There were only a few that knew of that place, that supernatural place where power was, and only a few would find out.
“What was it like?”
I looked at her. She was so young and innocent, a Christian-school girl. What is there in the world of a Christian high school girl that could compare to the power of a show? The only thing of power she might know was… “It was like being with God.”
And then I knew what it was. “Have you ever been with God? I have. Have you ever been to a show? I mean truly been to a show? Have you ever witnessed Him in His majesty and glory, more glorious than a thousand rivers flowing from a hundred thousand mountains, each one of them as high as Everest and full of heavenly beauty? Have you ever been to a show? Have you ever felt His Mercy more blessed than a drink to a man facedown in the Sahara, more undeserved than if I were to win the Nobel Prize, more unending than the flow of water from sea to land and back to sea again? Have you been to a show? Or do you even think such a thing exists? Oh, it does. Ask me about it. I’ll say it’s pretty cool. But have you been to a show?”
Her eyes grew wide with surprise at my outburst, but I think she understood. She was a Christian, after all. That does not mean she has been with God, but it means she has at least heard about it. She thought about it as she walked away. I did, too. I wondered: was the show really that powerful? What was the show to God? I had been with God, and I had also been to a show. One changed my whole life; one entertained me for a while. Had I ever been to the true Show?
The music pulsed through me again, but I was not in a smoky club downtown. I felt the power that compelled people to sacrifice their very lives, the love that had reduced the strongest men to tears, the life that had raised the dead. Was it only music that brought down Jericho’s walls? Was it only music that flooded the earth? Was it only music that cleansed us from our sins? The music pulsed through me; only it was more, now. It was not just a show. It was real.