Food for Thought

During all this time, the Hitless Wonders had been ever so slowly getting ahead, despite the fact that the neighbours referred to us as Hitler's  wonders. Our rehearsals were only attracting an average five calls from the police but we still got regularly harrassed by the noise pollution crowd. One day they even wrapped the house in  old mattresses - covered every door and window in smelly old St Vinnie's reject type mattresses and roped them around the house.  It took us hours to get out of the joint.

We were not unconcerned that the neighbours were having treatment for shock but we had a job to do. We had set ourselves the goal of doubling our repertoire list. We had to learn another song!

Ronnie and I were getting along very well. When I say "well", I mean that we had become "really good friends". This caused a great deal of confusion for me because I had reached a stage where I wasn't sure what I wanted. I knew who I wanted but I wasn't sure what for. My hormones were begging to be let loose and sometimes I would have to wear my shirts hanging out, or big baggy jumpers to hide my ardour. At other times, I felt very liitle of that business but a lot of some kind of weird yearning for something that I thought could only be appeased by arc welding our hearts together. And then there was another feeling that used to creep up on me when I started to actually think about things, especially when I was with  her.

We would sometimes go out together and link arms, like compatriots, and sometimes we would even cuddle against the cool night and she would snuggle against me and tuck her body into our embrace.... you know what I mean. It was all so very close and sort of gut wrenching in a way that almost brought dimples to my chin and tears to my eyes … sometimes. And then,  when things got really close, I found that I used to start thinking about things like who I was, or wasn't, and what I didn't have compared to her group of friends, and then  my mother's warning about lusting over my station would echo in my head and I'd start to thhink that I shouldn't be doing what I was doing.

In those situations when I could not stop the confusion in my head, I often resorted to jokes and acting the goat - it seemd to be the best way to get things back where they were supposed to be. When I didn't have any jokes or funny situations to over-exaggerate, I took to over-exaggerating things that were going on in my hum-drum life away from Ronnie. I used to do this quite shamelessly, especially if I knew there was little chance of being caught out. And, as usual, when I nicked what I thought was a safe run, I lobbed a lolly.

At one particularly garrulous gum-flapping session,  I told Ronnie somewhat over-excitedly about how well the Hitless Wonders was going - and I got caught out.  I had finished telling her that the band was going really well, and that some bloke heard us and said we were terriffic (I looked up 'terriffic' in the dictionary  and felty quite safe saying this) and told her that we were considering doing some recording - like everybody does... with a portable cassette recorder. But the gist of it was that I was getting quite carried away and slightly out of breath with the size of the fibs I was telling, and then she got me.

"That sounds great!  You know, I think I could get the band a job," she said. "Could you play a day-time show?"

"Of course," I stupidly replied with my ten-gallon mouth,

"Have you got enough songs to play for an hour ?" she asked seriously.

"Of co-o-ourse.." I assured her, putting a fat foot in the ten gallon mouth. I figured we'd be ok with one more song, a total of three at a pinch. Any crowd we  played to couldn't possibly last an hour.

"You can entertain a large crowd....?"

I was cooling down a bit by now but I replied snappily,"We could do that eating a banana!" (Both big  fat feet in Grand Canyon mouth).

"Great," she smiled. "It's at the college canteen?" she asked. "It's my job to organise something for the students end-of-semester lunch. I'll say you'll do it."

In my egerness to look good in front of Ronnie I had done a stupid thing; I am used to over-committing myself but I should not have clinched the deal before talking ot the guys in the band.  True, with a run-of-the-mill audience we'd have our feet on their throats in five minutes, but — a college crowd might just last the distance. I was fairly certain we could not contain the sort of aggression that can be unleashed by a crowd of study-and-exam frustrated, world-weary higher education students.

When I told the guys in the band the details about the 'great' job I had accepted they appeared to experience similar feelings: they kicked my ankles and gave me rabbit punches to the kidneys. The drummer collapsed in the corner, mumbling over and over, "One hour of college students.  An hour. Students. One whole  hour. Sixty minutes. Sixty..."

"Can't we spend this time a bit more constructively," I shouted from the floor as the guitarist beat me with a telephone book covering my essential organs. "Shouldn't we be practising instead of having all this fun...?"

Soon, when they tired of beating up on me, the realisation of what I had committed the Hitless Wonders to sunk in and, being men of honour, we spent the next five minutes rehearsing fiercely until we  collapsed with exhaustion.

As the week went by and the job got closer, but the Hitless Wonders were getting no nearer to learning three songs, let alone an hour of stuff. I began to reflect pessimistically on the upcoming job and the college crowd. "They'll kill us ..." I said quietly  to myself. Then optimism toook it turn – Yes! We can do it. We were moving ahead – of course, it was at the pace of a crippled ant but, we were not dead yet!

I compounded my felony. I lied again to Veronica. I told her not to worry. I figured that after the crowd had mauled us to death they may not be interested in slaughtering a young, pretty  defenceless and mainly innocent girl. Or, looking for a brighter side, maybe we could just refuse the payament and maybe they'd let us off with an ear-bashing.

Anyway, I was getting into a negative thought pattern and it was beginning to rub off on to the band until Whacker, the drummer, snapped us out of it.

"Hey, you wimpy little dicks," he said nicely, "What happened to the Hitless Wonders of old? Brave? Fearless?" His voice was rising. "Since when did we become Arty-farty and Precious?" he was yelling. "FRIGHTENED? US? SCARED OF A BUNCH OF SHTEWPUD SHTEWDENCE?"

As we sat wiping Whacker's spit off our faces we realised he was right. The Hitless Wonders had nothing to fear except the roof falling in on our heads. We jumped to our feet, recharged with energy and enthusiasm, and launched into another five furious minutes of rehearsal. Then the roof collapsed on our heads. The vibrations had weakened the beams and popped the nails out of the wood.

It wasn't fatal. Our skulls absorbed most of the force, and we only had to have our noggins bandaged. Except for Whacker; his head was indestructible but his ears were badly grazed and shoulders were bruised. However, I still feared that was nothing compared to what was going to happen on Friday at the college gig and what might happen to Ronnie when it all inevitably turned to poo. I had some dark hours thinking about that.

I had to take the Friday off work at the carwash to do the job and when I told Tats his eyes lit up. "If you're takin' Friday off you can do the shoppin'," he suggested gently.

It was a bit of a nuisance, as I wanted to practice my escape running that morning, but it was better for me to do the shopping for the house — sending Tats was a severe financial risk. His idea of a meal consisted of steak, beer and packets of potato crisps.  So on Friday morning, I did the shopping. Two bags full.  I strapped them on to the carrier of my scooter and headed off to the gig.

So, we arrived at the college, the bandages on our heads covered with hats — except for Whacker who looked like he had shoulder pads under his guernsey and great white cauliflower ears — and me with two bags of shopping. I wasn't going to leave the bags out on the bike for that bunch of thieving students to get hold of so I took them inside and put them next to my amplifier.

The hire company who installed the sound system for us was sound checking the rig when we arrived. A member of their crew had his head inside one of the big speaker boxes during the sound check to see if a speaker was working properly. Every time a particularly loud noise was pumped through the system the part of his body hanging outside would shake and shudder like a rag doll with spasms and his legs would wave about in the air. When the sound mixer announced he had finished the bloke in the speaker box extracted his head and shoulders and imagine my surprise when I recognised, even through the rolling eyeballs and electrified hair... Hughie ! Ex Nullabor nut and 'Born Agen'.

He recognised me. "IS ZAT YOU, RAZZ?" he yelled as though I was suffering from the same temporary deafness that afflicted him. After some time his hearing partially returned and we managed a semblance of a conversation. He'd explained that he'd put in some dedicated service with the 'Born Agens' until he received the message that he had to accept some lugging work with a sound system rental company.

"A message from God?" I enquired.

"Nah," he shouted at me, "…from the fuckin' landlord. There's not much rent money in the God business — unless you're in the management side of things, or on the TV. So... here I am. I do the lights as well as check out the speakers. It's my first time doing the lights so bear with me, eh!"

Bear with him! I'm not much of a judge of artistic lighting but as far as I could see the only lighting experience Hughie'd had would have involved flicking a torch on and off under the sheets in the dark. Moving about on stage while he was at the console was inviting danger and possible death because of the sudden change from brilliant light to complete darkness, done in a manually-operated strobe effect, that had us practically blind in minutes.

The Hitless Wonders had ploughed half way through their first number when we had to stop because the singer had stepped off the stage in one of the dark patches. I'd nearly lost an eye from walking into a mike stand and Whacker had been hitting everything but his drums. He jumped off his stool and pushed his way through the crowd to the lighting desk. As we watched he sorted Hughie out in fairly quick time and with a minimal amount of blood loss and some form of normal lighting quickly flooded the room as well as the performance area.

It was thanks to this interesting over-compensation with the lighting that I noticed the canteen at the back of the room. I had been feeling a bit peckish so I called out over the P.A. for Whacker to get me a ham, cheese and tomato sandwhich before he came back. A good idea is infectious. Fuller, the singer, called out from the floor (where he had fallen and remained for safety's sake) that he would like a tuna and lettuce roll, the Boogie Man wanted a pie with double sauce and Killer wanted a curried egg roll.

The audience, to a man, or person, turned to face the back of the room, their attention firmly fixed on Whacker who loaded up with a pile of food, which included a couple of custard tarts for himself, and made his way back to the stage.  When he had distributed all the food and collected the money we got under way again, starting where we left off, and the crowd recovered as though snapped out of a hypnotic trance.

We'd managed to use up about fifteen minutes with all this bullshit so far and no one had complained so we ploughed on. I was become nervously aware that we only had two and a quater songs to go and was wondering what we could do to fill in the time.

I suppose what happened  a bit later was my fault, in a way. We'd finished the second song which we'd stretched out with coughing and farting solos, but the crowd didn't look like giving in.  We had one song left to do and about 30 minutes to do it in.  I thought I would slow things down a bit by offering my second sandwich to someone in the crowd; a sort of 'cabaret comic' gesture, but it went a bit wrong. I had the sandwich in the pocket of the coat I was wearing and when I reached in to get it out my fingers slid in between the ham and the tomato. It felt a bit slimy, like I'd just goosed a frog or something (I've never goosed a frog, honestly, but I imagined that's what it felt like) and I withdrew my hand, with the sandwich attached, fairly quickly, and flicked it clean. The sandwich flew apart and bits of it splotched wetly on the heads and faces of a number of people at the front of the stage.

There was a pregnant silence while the incident slowly seeped in to the minds of the victims. Retaliation was swift but inaccurate — mainly because I ducked. A gob of cheesy tomato sailed past me and and splattered on Whacker's chin. A piece of sloppy bread winged its way through the air and skidded to a stop on the Boogie Man's piano keys. However, I was staggering around like the Hunchback of Notre Dame because I'd brained myself – through the bandages - on the corner of an amplifier as I ducked out of the way of the tomato, when a squished up ball of dough made from the other piece of bread hit me in the ear and I fell into the front of the drums.

Whacker had recovered from the shock of being cheese-and-tomatoed and let fly with one of his remaining custard tarts which disintergrated in the air and scatter-bombed about fifteen people. The Boogie Man flicked the offending piece of bread back into the crowd and then we witnessed an amazing spectacle. After the group of bespattered people caught their breath they surged like a living wave through the crowd towards the back of the room and overran the canteen. The refec hall came alive with the sound of cash registers as money quickly exchanged hands for food weapons.

The hitless wonders and the rest of the audience watched in silence as the growing, victually-equipped militia mustered in close formation in the centre of the hall. The silence was deafening and pregnant. Very pregnant. It was, in fact dilated and ready to pop. And pop it did!

The first signal that war was going to break was when I was 'skudded' by a well-aimed orange. I actually watched it arc perfectly towards me through the air from the back of the enemy camp, in the full knowledge that I was its target but completely paralysed by the inevitability of it . I braced myself for the impact and took it on the chest  like a man — I can do impressions.  I wasn't mortally wounded, merely winded,  but, war was declared. The now well-armed group of audience pushed from the back of the room to the front again, to get a better shot at us. We had the stage but they had the upper hand and more of them began to realise it! Soon, there was an army of students, bent on unloading an arsenal of munchies in our direction, marshalled in front of the stage.

We would have been practically defenceless in that first onslaught had it not been for my bags of groceries. I hid one bag as a reserve supply and, under a hail of jam and custard tarts, cream-filled buns and fruit, distributed some of my high-fibre goodies to the band to give them something to chew on. Violence, as we know, breeds violence, and soon, just like the pshchologist predicted, the whole thing escalated like a nuclear explosion.

My wholefood groceries, while being good for the intestinal tract and at least some defence against bowel cancer, were not an effective counter-measures against the highly-refined, fat and cholesterol-loaded lethal weapons the enemy had access to.  Junk food rained from the heavens on and around us. We receiveth more than we gav-eth and there were piles of good ammo lying on the floor around us but we needed time to collect it. I called ‘Time’ and we we raced offstage to loud boos of disapproval from the crowd and an up-scaled hail of lunch.  We dashed outside the building, commandeered and emptied some rubbish bins with lids and crept back on stage. Then, using the lids as shields, we began to fill the bins with as much 'chuckable' ammo as we could. The crowd peppered us with more snacks but they soon realised what we were up to and a great and earnest activity consumed them. The overturned tables and chairs, making them into forts and tunnels, and took over the managemnt of the canteen.

They say there was a record turnover at the refec canteen that day. Even the left-overs from weeks before were sold at extravagant prices. The only thing that spoilt their day was when one of the canteen staff was beaned by a near-frozen Mars Bar and dragged over the pie oven when he fell. It wasn't so much the knock that made them mad it was the undignified rush by the crowd to grab the hot pastries that had spilled onto the floor, thus cheating them out of some more valuable revenue.

Meanwhile, down the front, the war was well under way. We even tried to play our last song from behind the piles of speakers, drum cases and rubbish bins while being constantly battered by a form of trench warfare from the opposition. They were crawling through tunnels made by the arrangement of tables, unloading their artillery and quickly retiring under the shelter of the tabletops to re-load and regroup. They were a frighthening adversary. I was witness to Hughie having the smile completely wiped from his face by a pastie with hot sauce and would have laughed a lot longer if my mouth hadn't been practically shot off with an overripe banana in an ironic and poetic retribution.

I looked at the clock..if we didn’t stop soon we’d be running overtime. The crowd had a full head of steam and was unlikley to call it off if I said something like: Thank you ladies and gentlemen… we’ll be off now”. We need to grab the wheel! Take control! Claim the high ground and all that stuff.  All it needed was a hurculean effort to get on top of the situation. And ‘Hercules’ was our middle name. True, the Hitless Hurcules Wonders wasn’t on our business cards but neither is my middle name on my lunch box. So, as a ripe peach cut itself into thin slices through Killer's guitar strings we abandoned our musical efforts and, like gladiators of old, with rubbish bin lid shields and head-bandage helmets, we unloaded our massive collection of half-spent ammo into the crowd at a murderous pace. With our height advantage from the stage, firing like gatling guns, the effect was devastating. We had them cowed. We were winning.

Then the bell rang and the canteen staff pulled down the shutters. They’d sold everything and made enough money to retire in New Zealand. The enemy fatlered; fell back, weaponless. Armistice was at hand. So was an apple and custard pie. I let it fly just as the skirmish strangely ground to an almost magical, silent halt. Over the heads of the defenseless enemy it flew on its pre-ordained flight path to my undoing. The first copper that kicked open the refec doors saw it coming and ducked. The campus security guard who was hiding behind him had his head taken off the the collar.

Serves him right for panicking and calling the cops. But Christ, didn’t he go for me! Yelling and pushing and spitting apple custard all over the place; then the others -  everyone from the college Principal down to the cleaner - started yelling and poking fingers at us and spraying spit in our faces. It looked like we’d won the batlle and lost the war. And thn I started to think about what sort of a job they would do on Veronica. As I got more worried about her I herd less and less of what the white shirt brigade was hurling at me.

But… blue-collar calls to blue collar when the chips – and the pies, fruit, buns and sandwiches – are down. Just as things were reaching a fever pitch and the hanging party was looking for ‘the person responsible’ the canteen manager struggled back in dragging a bag of money bigger than Santa’s sack on Christmas Eve. The principal’s eyballs popped.

When the canteen manager happily pointed out they’s made enough money to refit the whole refec and probaly put some new low-profile tires on somebody’s BMW there was tentative talk about dropping a few of the charges they were trying to level at us. Then head of the Student's Union bubbled in like aerated jelly, screeching sweetly and earnestly that they had never had such a successful lunch-time concert with so much positive audience response and she already had advance bookings with deposits for the next one even though it was free to students and so on and so on.

I smiled behind my stoic expression.

We won. I won. Ronnie won; she was vindicated.

I was going to look up what vindicated meant as soon as I got home but I thought it was nothing to worry about just then because I was a champion - in her eyes, anyway. Creamed, sauced and be-spattered and bruised by every snack known to western civilisation — a war hero of sorts - I basked briefly in my own small share of glory And I had managed to retrieve the one bag of groceries that had been forgotten behind the drum riser. I packed my music gear in the band truck, said goodbye to Hughie who was cemented to the lighting console with a thick coating of pie filling and hot sauce and enveloped in a fizzling halo of electrical sparks, gave Ronnie my spare crash helmet and we headed off on my scooter for an afternoon picnic with my bag of victuals.

And it probably would have been a fantastic afternoon if it weren’t for the hordes of flies that lit upon me everywhere I went.

o-0-o

To: Chapter 15 - Sad Movies