Time for another excerpt from my ever-expanding and hopefully-finished-this-summer memoir Bring Me To Heaven. Since I work on this every day, it only seems appropriate to post excerpts while I'm working (though it won't be out for some time).
While I've been purging junk from the basement, I ran across this backstage pass that made me think to share the following excerpt. (Though, to be clear, the pass isn't connected to the story. The pass came from a tour later that same year.)
This comes from about half-way through the book, where the narrative structure breaks down for about 15 pages and it just becomes a series of small vignettes. At the time, I was pretty close to proverbial "rock bottom," so my life didn't really have a narrative structure at that point--it was just a series of clusterfuck and dumbass antics.
Anyhow, this vignette is pretty self-contained, no set-up required.
"Put question marks on your knees," I said.
He took the stencil, found the question mark, placed it over his knee, and then ran the ink roller over the open stencil. After lifting it away, the left knee of his jeans had a silver question mark. A moment later, the right one had its own question mark as well.
"Why don’t you put an 'E-N-D' down here," I said, pointing to his cuff.
"No words," was his reply.
"Then try this," I said, taking the stencil and roller, and putting "L-M-N-O" and half of a "P" down his right calf.
I looked up and he almost smiled behind his sunglasses.
Seven days earlier I'd received a postcard from the R.E.M. fan club informing me of a string of tour dates that ran through the Midwest. Three days after that I woke up and impulsively decided that I was going to attend as many as I could. I took all the cash I could lay my hands on and took off, with nothing other some clothes, a warm six-pack, and that postcard. Two days later, I’d only managed to get into one show and only had thirty-five dollars left. I knew I needed to get creative.
I went to a local copy shop and, using some rub-on lettering and a logo taken out of a brochure I found in my backseat, I created an amazing looking press pass for WKSC. Of course, WKSC had no real press passes, nor would WKSC be considered, by any stretch, "press."
"I don't understand," I told the security dude at the next show at Wilberforce University. "I cleared this with the record company weeks ago."
I was polite but firm. I was the morning DJ at WKSC, and I had been promised a backstage pass and interview by R.E.M.'s label. If my name wasn't on that list, it was a big deal. The security guard called over a hippie-looking guy with round glasses who listened to my story while examining my fake press pass.
"Look, nobody told me anything," he said, pausing for a moment while he looked over the press pass again. "I'm really sorry about the mess up; I'll have Kim make you up a pass. We're just about to eat lunch, want to join us?"
"That would be great," I said, sighing with some faux relief. "If I didn't come back with that interview, I would be in such trouble."
Once we were out back behind the auditorium, we walked up to a few picnic tables out back of the school's auditorium. The four band members were there along with about six of the coolest looking roadies and crew I'd ever seen. The hippie-looking dude invited me to have some catered barbecue. I did my best to act as nonchalant as I could, but could barely keep my limbs from shaking. I took a seat next to Bill Berry, the drummer, and struck up a conversation about his hometown, Massillon, Ohio, which was right next to--and football rivals with--my hometown, Canton.
Despite my tendency towards darker music, R.E.M. was probably my favorite band at that time. While they would eventually lose me as they became more popular and less interesting, at that point they felt like my own private secret. R.E.M. was touring for their just-released Fables of the Reconstruction. Their first minor hit, "Can't Get There From Here," hadn't been released yet. Outside of college radio, they were still pretty obscure.
"Have you ever listened to your records, backwards?" I asked, Peter Buck, the guitarist, who indicated he had not. I explained that I had been trying to fix a malfunctioning turntable when I'd discovered that I could switch a few wires and make the turntable run backwards.
"It's kinda fun," I said. "Michael's singing sounds exactly the same. The guitar stuff ends up sounding like a sitar. Well, a fucked up sitar, because the turntable speeds up and slows down--I'm not sure why. But it sounds like a sitar, and I think you are probably the best backwards sitar player out there. You should try putting it on the forward playing versions, too."
I think they were amused by my mixture of weirdness and absolute joy at being in their presence. Most of my attempts to impress them made no sense, but after lunch they asked if I wanted to play Nerf football with a few of the band and crew, then the singer, Michael Stipe, asked me to help paint his pants with a stencil. No one ever questioned why I was there.
Back home, my world was imploding even further. I'd told no one that I was leaving. I hadn't made any arrangements to be gone from work. I really didn't attend classes any more. When I took off for the shows and no one knew where I was for days, everyone feared the worse.
I really didn't care. I was having the time of my life. I knew what a clusterfuck I was creating, but that just caused my sense of failure and doom to feed upon itself. I was a fuck-up who was in the midst of fucking up, plain and simple. It felt as natural as breathing.
