697. Rock It

(There will be a story post on Saturday! Because the tip jar hit $100! Now we’re back to $1. Thanks everyone who contributed! -ctan)

—

Maybe I’m a moron but I kept forgetting I was the singer.

No, really, we went down to the basement and I tuned a guitar and then when I had just finished it and my brain moved on to “what’s next?” I realized I didn’t need a guitar… and I tried to sort of surreptitiously put it into a stand but by then the guys were trying unbelievably hard not to laugh and failing, failing, failing.

We laughed so hard I think that was what made my ribs hurt later, not all the pullups.

Or maybe it was something else. But I’ll get to that.

I had to wait for the rest of them to get themselves ready and I wondered if Ziggy ever got impatient with what all we had to go through to be ready to play. I tried to figure out what to do with the microphone for rehearsal and decided not to put in on a stand and instead to sit on a milk crate facing the guys. In fact we ended up more or less in a circle, or a square, I guess, since there were four of us.

Bart had to lower the drum stool way down and Chris and Colin faced each other. They were about the same height and it kinds of worked out well that way. They could see eye to eye.

We started with “Sex with an Ex” which was the song we knew best because it had been around the longest. The chorus was literally just the words “Sex with an Ex” repeated over and over, but the verses were these sets of couplets, ten syllables each–well, really each line was two five-syllable parts because of the way the riff went.

Well, here, look at some of the verses for yourself, just, warning, they’re raunchy.

Sex With An Ex
Now I remember / how you like to fuck
Familiar rhythm / tick-tock tick-tick tock

Do you remember / the taste of my cock
Am I forgiven / need you like a drug

Now I’m forgetting / how you broke my heart
When you let me in / I’ll tear you apart

It went pretty well, actually, and then I got to just sit there while the three of them worked out a drum solo for Bart and a bridge that was really just an excuse to do another round of the chorus. If the audience was really into it, I thought, I could lead that last part as a group chant. Assuming anyone was paying attention to us, that is. Who knows–maybe people would be schmoozing instead of watching the show.

The next song we worked on was a tune called Cow Tipping and it was kind of cowpunk so it was kind of a joke, but the whole band was a joke, sort of.

Apparently not only was it possible for me to forget I was the singer, it was possible for me to forget the lyrics, too. I think I can be forgiven, though, given that we had written it and recorded it in the spac of an hour and I’d forgotten it since then. We had to kind of recreate what we’d done and I got my notebook and wrote a fresh sheet of lyrics, including what any of us could remember and maybe filling in a line or two that we didn’t.

It took all afternoon for us to rebuild the seven songs we’d ended up with for the OKC soundtrack and by dinner time my voice was shot, so it was time for a break anyway. We ordered in two meat-lovers pizzas and I washed mine down liberally with cold beer as we sat around the living room.

“So what we have to figure out,” I said, by the time I was on my second beer and picking the pepperoni off a third slice of pizza to eat it with my fingers, “is whether we’re going to live with a twenty minute set or if we can pad this out somehow.”

“With what?” Colin asked.

“Cover songs, I guess?”

Bart crossed his ankles and leaned back in the worn-out recliner with his beer on his stomach. “I’m sure we could do some Ramones songs?”

“They’re not very long either,” Chris pointed out.

“But they’re not hard to learn,” Colin countered. “And we messed around with them once before, remember?”

“Yeah.” I honestly couldn’t remember which songs we’d messed around with but maybe it didn’t matter. I begged off singing any more that night but helped them figure out “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”–which we toyed with doing as a tribute by changing the line to “Billy is a Punk Rocker”–and “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

We made a plan to rehearse again the next morning and I went upstairs to my room to try to memorize the damn lyrics.

Memorizing words isn’t the same thing as memorizing a tune or how to play something. I couldn’t do it all by ear and muscle memory as quickly as I could with music. Words require some other part of the brain that I didn’t have time to train so instead I stressed myself out until I ended up in the kitchen at two in the morning staring at the lyric sheets with a half-finished beer until Colin came and rescued me.

“Come upstairs,” he said.

“Huh?”

He was leaning in the doorway. His hair was lank and sleek-looking, black. “I’m nervous as hell about tomorrow and I can only think of one thing that might take my mind off it, if you’re in the mood.”

“Um.” I shook myself. “Same here. I mean, about the nervous part. And the solution.”

“Then what are you waiting for? Your room or mine?”

“Uh, yours?”

“Sure. Come on.”

I followed him upstairs and let him undress me next to his futon. Fragments of “Sex with an Ex” floated through my mind as we reacquainted ourselves with each other. Oh yeah. Now I remember how you like to fuck.

I begged off giving head for the sake of my already overtaxed throat but I was more than willing to be the one who got fucked.

While Colin was on top of me, but before any penetration had taken place, I said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Mm, what?” He craned his neck to nibble on mine.

“Do you want to come to South America?”

“Hm. Doing what?”

“General sherpa-ing for me and Ziggy?”

“I’ll think about it. Right now I’m likely to say yes to anything you ask since I’m about to put my cock in you and you know how that makes me.”

“It makes you likely to say yes to anything?”

“Course it does,” Colin said, and consummated the deal with a low hiss of, “Yesssss.”

And a little while later, pounding hard, “Yes, yes, yes!”

Colin was a positive influence, I suppose you could say.

—

(OK, I know Herbie Hancock is not exactly musically coherent with the theme of this chapter but I like to give people musical whiplash. If you want something that sounds a lot more like what Whizbadger’s rehearsals sounded like, try “Carbs” by PWR BTTM below… -d)

SITE NEWS: Don’t forget the Spanish Nights ebook is live now! Kindle Unlimited folks can read it free–the more people page through it on KU the more of a kickback I receive from Amazon! And of course it can also be purchased for $2.99. It could also desperately use more reviews! http://amzn.com/B01BEQ14QC Tell your erotica-loving friends!