My coffee table was taken up by Heath’s Ledger: bags of bubblegum kush, shrooms, vikes, Adderall, molly pops, ‘cid, and a tin of yay. On occasion, I let my friends use my house as their chop-shop. The Detroit Electronic Music Festival (DEMF) was one such occasion.
I didn’t mind the drugs, even though I was known to keep it exclusive with kush. I had experiences with the rest – some good and some bad. I took a ride down ‘cid row twice, but both times we were sold fugazi acid. My roommate at the time, Jimmy, and I ended up sitting in a room full of more anticipation than hallucination while waiting for something transcendent to happen. Deep breaths interspersed with hopeful questions: “Did you feel that?” and “That was definitely something,” followed by me frantically waving my hand hoping Jimmy saw trails. But in the end, nothing, no trails and no transcendence. I believed that God was giving me clues, a celestial tip not to fuck with acid, so I never tried it again. And yes, as arrogant as it seemed, even with African kids dying of starvation and Mitt Romney running for President, I honestly believed God was concerned with me OD’ing on acid. In retrospect that kind of belief would lead you to assume I was hallucinating and that my acid trip was more rewarding that I am letting on.
I was anxious to get the night going, even though it was 3 in the afternoon. Mostly, I wanted to get away from the molly. MDMA makes you feel the way white people did when they first heard The Beatles, the way Adele felt when Amy Winehouse died, the way Casey Anthony felt when she was acquitted. The first time I dropped molly was the night before a Differential Equations final during undergrad. I ended up running 3 miles to campus, breaking into the theatre building, and playing piano for 2 hours. I do not know how to play piano, but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that the music I composed that night was one of the greatest piano concertos ever conceived. So, I was a fan of molly, but I knew I had to escape her, because just like most women, molly will destroy your life. I also really needed to get out of my place because we were watching shit fall out of Sarah Palin’s mouth on Fox News, validating my belief that her Down’s baby didn’t really fall that far from the tree.
Plus there was the external motivation: I needed to get to my first electronic music concert. The computer-fueled squeals and schizophrenic melodies produced by Skrillex and Deadmau5 are not my usual cup of heroin-laced tea. I love music and I wanted to experience DEMF, but The Strokes and The Arctic Monkeys are more my flavor – which is why I talked Phlip into hitting up an Arctic Monkeys show prior to DEMF. I wanted to reinforce my allegiance; sort of like taking your girlfriend to a fancy restaurant before leaving for a business trip filled with unprotected sex with whores from the company’s Arizona office. DEMF was the whores in Arizona, in case you’re dancing with molly.
Phlip and I pulled into the city and were waved into 20-dollar parking spots by Mexicans who spoke no English. I’m always shocked when later in the night I return to find my car where I left it, because who knows what authority these vatos have over the lots they convert into parking garages. They’re incredible, those vatos. They can’t speak English, they’re predominantly illegals, but they masterfully run businesses converting pesos and the monopoly-money Canadians use into exact U.S. dollar quantities. The IMF prez is busy raping the world and the world’s underage daughters and we could hire Mexican immis to do his job twice as good for half the cost with a fraction of the rapes.
These issues are why I spend days and nights with the kush.
After paying Jose – I’m assuming his name was Jose – we spent the next ten minutes making a potential car burglar’s job a smidge more difficult. I hid my iPad in the back seat under a jacket because good luck finding that, assholes. Phlip dissembled his HK pistol, even though we needed it more on our walk to the venue than we had on our drive into the city. We almost forgot to hide the GPS, which could have been catastrophic. Leaving that thing out is the 21st century’s version of leaving a pie on a window sill – a crack-head bear is going to smell it and steal that shit.
We walked past a bum who was in the process of littering, throwing an Olive Garden to-go box on the ground. I realize that the bum is America’s litter so his littering is an exercise in redundancy, but where did he get money for Olive Garden? That restaurant, according to their commercials, has chefs in Italy creating flawless pasta and succulent béchamel sauces as we speak.
Phlip and I were wearing outfits worthy of a Facebook profile pic and the concert crowd was full of vaginally-hospitable women: emos, cutters, elfs, stoners, hippies, punks, traggers, spelunkers, wizards, and some out and out whores. I love these kinds of women; they are too emotionally damaged to eat, meaning they’re thin and they are too self-loathing to think they can do better than a night with me. The distressed state of the women significantly contrasted the Fillmore Theatre.
Detroit’s Fillmore theatre is breathtaking. The magnificent gothic architecture evokes images of imposing Catholic cathedrals, which makes sense considering boys are often molested at the Fillmore. We arrived early enough to be three rows from the stage. We looked around and decided that the white-ass demographic implied a town in Idaho rather than “the muthafuckin’ D, nigga.” We were standing a dick’s length away from the two girls in front of us; a dick’s length is the radius of most men’s comfort zone. Two emo gentlemen – perhaps spying the girls in front of us – walked up and asked to be excused, so we feigned movement and an opportunity for them to pass, but they instead squeezed between us and the women in front of us. My aforementioned dick’s length of comfort was gone as my dick was pressed against the emo cracker’s left ass cheek. Phlip is non-confrontational. As an Irish-Catholic he was ready to accept the abysmal predicament we were in and just drink away his misery later. I on the other hand was not. “What are you guys doing,” I asked the two emos. One of the emos, probably afraid of human interaction, scurried away in true emo fashion. The other emo tried to apologize and explain his actions, but in a rebuttal worthy of Johnny Cochran, I pointed to my violated penis as proof of his obnoxiousness. He apologized and moved away. Before he went and in an effort, I assume, to fend off any karmic retaliation, he gave me a sticker that read “The Kodaks.” He told me that they were his band and that they were pretty good. That’s how society should work. If offended, the problem should be dealt with and the offender should give the victim a sticker and walk away. But I dream. When I got home, I looked up “The Kodaks” on the world wide web’s vestibule of hell, MySpace, and the fucker lied to me, they were not “pretty good.” They were piss. I could hear his emo dick-violating voice behind the rudimentary guitar riffs. His music was the only thing more offensive than his concert etiquette.
The Vaselines opened for The Arctic Monkeys and, well, there isn’t much to say about them. They were elevator music. But they did provide a nice soundtrack to the six Words with Friends games I was playing.
While Googling “words that start with ‘X’,” I was blinded by a gust of wind. Some cat had made his way behind Phlip and I. He was on coke, a conclusion I came to because his head was tilted backwards to alleviate all barriers to “the drip.” This contortion left his nostrils aimed directly at us. That, and a heightened heart rate raised the pace of his breathing to levels usually only observed at the end of a turbine, leaving Phlip and I in the path of a man made tornado. He had whatever the opposite of asthma is.
He and his tyrannosaurus lungs were exhibit A in the case against general admission. A case in which I would argue for the defense. For while general admission, like any microcosm of society, has it’s plebs and its aristocrats, the mouth-breathers, the Einsteins and all that falls between, it is the only place to be if you consider yourself a fan of the artist, and I was a fan.
The Arctic Monkeys were great live; they were loud, so loud that I could taste the guitar riffs, but not so loud so as to drown out vocalist Alex Turner’s irritated, sometimes-garbled, Pete Doherty-on-PCP vocals. Recently, Turner proclaimed that he is “not a voice of a generation,” but anyone who has to tell us he isn’t our voice is at the very least an adequate facsimile of what our generation’s voice would sound like, or what it should be. Fuck, the voice of a generation should be singing songs like From the Ritz to rubble, Leave before the lights come on, Mardy Bum, Teddy Picker, Fluorescent Adolescent, and the lot.
Watching those songs performed live only made me love the Monkeys more, and allowed me to go to Phoenix, er, DEMF with a clear conscience.
Three o’clock and we were on our way, off to what I’m sure George Washington envisioned when he stepped off the Mayflower and discovered America, off to what Marilyn Manson pictures when he masturbates, off to human pieces of shit tripping their balls off to music that not only makes no sense but actually eliminates sense. DJs taking away what little logic we have left through music best described as what a rapist uses for motivation – and I was salivating at the opportunity to become part of it.
Implementing the buddy system, we paired off and peaced out. I was stuck with Phlip because he’s a square who’s never used any drugs and is deathly afraid of contact buzzes. He had grown to accept my marijuana usage, because I was functional, and not a moronic-Dorito-addicted-Mountain-Dew-sipping burnout; I smoked trees, not like those Sonny Bonos out there who were smoked by trees. He questioned my guests’ fascination with hallucinogens but my proclamations that “drugs are cool, man,” did not quell his curiosity or disappointment. So I tried to appeal to his techy side and said, “You know when you press your cell-phone screen really hard just so you can watch the psychedelic concentric circles form around your fingertip, you understand that it is damaging to your phone, maybe permanently, but you can’t help yourself because it so fuckin cool… well, that’s why people do drugs.” He proceeded to press his finger onto his iPhone creating vibrant gripples until we got to the ticket counter.
80 Dollars
I was ready to buy a weekend pass, but Phlip thought it would be way “rock and roll” to sneak in. I just wanted to get into the show, the half-pill of molly I had succumbed to was beginning to kick in and I needed to dance. Otherwise the pacifier I was sucking on would be for naught. Phlip pleaded with me to try, I obliged, not because I wanted to sneak in, but because the air was beginning to taste like purple and I needed him to shut the fuck up as not to ruin my MDMA trip’s infancy. His type of nagging, his naïve insolence creates bad trips, leading muthafuckas to try and imitate Superman by flying out of a 4th floor balcony.
We walked around the concert’s outskirts looking for a spot to sneak in. Naught. I struck up a convo with a large black security guard, hoping my candor would weaken his resolve, but he wouldn’t turn around, ‘wink wink’ and ‘let’ us sneak in, even though I quoted as much Lil Wayne and Jay Z as I could. Our desperation caught the interest of an opportunistic scalper who offered us two wristbands for 20 bucks. I was done waiting, so I acceded. He asked us to follow him around the corner, and then down the road, and then away from the white people, and then, well, then I was standing at an alley’s entrance contemplating how much I was probably going to be raped by the ticket scalper in the alley and if he would at least give me the wristbands after the rape, but then I remembered that I needed water and ran to the party store as fast as I could.
Phlip and I sat on the curb as I sipped on an Aquafina. I dropped the cap and it rolled into a puddle of rain water. I was stoned, so a bit of Detroit-mud-water wasn’t going to detour my cap-dependence. As I reached for the cap I found a discarded wristband.
A free wristband, I tell you!
For the conclusion to Silent Acquiescence, click here.
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I know you will take this criticism in the spirit of universal brotherhood when I tell you that reading this piece was a stimulating adventure. Picking through, and then lingering over the staccato series of dense pop cultural allusions, I am prompted to suggest a style akin to Dickens mated with Tom Wolfe and edited by Hunter Thompson – if Dickens had access to crystal meth and Tom Wolfe were not so stylistically inhibited by comparison.
In short, excellent writing and it made me feel the sweat and panic as if I were there with you.
Which in this case beats the real thing.