Page 39 of A Crazy Kind of Love
He pointed out a plastic baggie filled with small cookies. “Can’t carry food into the venue.” He indicated a trash can. “There’s food available in the concessions.” He sounded bored like he was repeating a script from rote. He didn’t even make eye contact.
“This is emergency food. I’m type 1 diabetic.” I said as sweetly as I could muster.
He lifted his eyes, and I could see him processing me as a human for the first time. He tilted his head toward the lobby like it made no difference to him. “Go on in.”
“Thanks,” I called from several feet away as Zion shoved me inside.
The lobby bustled with people milling about, buying tiny clear plastic cups of beer or wine. We found the main doors, showed our tickets again, and entered another world.
What struck me at first was the fluidity of the crowd. We had assigned seats, but nobody sat. Some people stood in the aisle, not entering or exiting, just dancing. We located our seats near the front and slid across to occupy them. I fell into mine, and nearly fell back out. The seat was broken and stopped about two inches below level. I jumped up. Zion did the same and complained that his seat was crooked.
I started to put my pocketbook on the floor, but my feet stuck to some syrupy glue. I wrapped it over my neck the opposite direction as my camera strap. I immediately hunted for something to eat. This experience promised to be far more draining than an evening with Eden Sinclair.
The theater was dark, but spotlights crisscrossed on the stage. The music coming from the speakers had a distant quality. Maybe the sound system sucked, or maybe the band did. A mass of black bangs obscured the lead singer’s eyes, and he sang with his mouth crushed against the microphone so that his lyrics came out muffled. Every so often, he’d bounce and spring in sharp angular motions. The rest of the band concentrated on their so-called craft. I couldn’t make out a melody at all.
When those sounds came to a stuttering halt and the audience applauded, the lead announced that they had one song left. He must have spoken the title or else people knew what to expect, but they started the next song to a roar. After a few bars, I realized the song sounded vaguely familiar.
“Who is this?” I yelled at Zion.
He reached into his back pocket and produced our tickets. “Halcyon?”
I’d definitely heard the song somewhere. It sounded awful live, and I wondered if all their music sounded better in a studio. I had low expectations for Micah’s band.
As the lead singer waved and ran off stage, a red curtain dropped, and the lights came up. I had a chance to take in the theater. After the last performance, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a burned-out shell of a hole in the wall. But in fact, the place was old school classy, with a focus on old. The seats were all red velvet but less posh and more scary. A pair of once shiny gold balconies peered down on us, now dull and decaying. I wouldn’t have trusted my life to the stability of those structures. The crowd in the venue would have looked more at home on a field at a festival. And they smelled like it, too.
After another fifteen minutes or so, the lights double flashed, and the people to either side of us pushed out of the row and into the aisle. At first, I thought they were taking advantage of intermission or maybe leaving before the show even started, but they moved forward, jamming in with others who now pressed against the stage. Security ineffectually directed people to move back. The crowd amassing in the aisles had to be a safety hazard.
“Don’t shout ‘fire.’ ” I whispered to Zion.
“No shit. What’s going on?”
I shrugged. My experience with rock concerts was practically nonexistent. My mom would never have let me blow out my eardrums and brain cells on rock music. Once, in an act of rebellion, I went with some friends to see a Nine Inch Nails concert, but I didn’t know their music and regretted the decision. We left after three songs. I had a suspicion tonight might be a repeat.
The lights dropped. A moment later, loud music broke out through the speakers at the same time the red curtain opened. Micah stood at the mic, wearing a ridiculous pair of bright blue pants and a ratty T-shirt. Somehow they’d fixed whatever technical issues had plagued the first band. The sound system functioned perfectly. Micah’s vocals came through clear.
I sucked in my breath at the sight of him. It was one thing to sit beside him while he was just some other guy, but seeing him onstage, lit from above, in complete control of his audience made me want him in a weird, visceral way. I wondered if that was the feeling other people got when they went to church. It was nearly spiritual, and Micah was the cult leader.
And the mystery of the crowd behavior resolved itself as Micah grabbed his mic out of the stand and walked to the edge of the stage, touching all the outstretched hands and then pulling one person up on stage with him. This guy immediately fell backward off the stage into the waiting arms of the fans, who carried him on a wave all the way to the back of the group. When it happened a second time, I noticed Micah wasn’t pulling people on stage. He would give a tug, and whatever guy climbed up on his own. But every time someone had surfed to the middle of the crowd, Micah would choose the next volunteer victim.
“You should go up there,” Zion yelled.
“Hell, no. You go.”
It was a moot point. When the song ended, many people in the crowd returned to their seats. Clearly this was an insider first-song-only stunt. But when the second song started, an inflated ball appeared out of nowhere. I craned my neck up to the balcony and watched as another dropped into the audience.
Micah’s band was living up to its name: Theater of the Absurd. I remembered my press pass and slung my camera around to start shooting. The show went on, half rock concert, half performance piece, with more crowd interaction. Zion followed me as I moved around the venue, trying to get the best angles. I almost considered testing out the structural integrity of the balconies but decided I didn’t need to risk my life if I wasn’t getting paid.
When Micah announced the last song of the night, people moved up to the stage, and Zion and I returned to our once-upon-a-time seats. I expected more of the same crowd surfing, but they all jumped up and down in time with the music—until Micah started into his last verse. At that point, he fell backward into his sea of fans, completely trusting them to catch him and deliver him unharmed to the back of the theater. And he continued to sing. When he finally landed on his feet again, he said, “Good night!” and walked out the door.
The band stopped playing without winding down or fading out. They just stopped and walked off stage. Then the theater erupted in a chorus of “Encore.”
Zion leaned over. “Is that the same guy who sang with Eden last week?”
“That is a guy who does whatever he wants.”
“Probably a guy who gets whatever he wants, too.”
It took me a minute to process what we’d just seen. Now I understood why Micah had asked me if I’d ever seen him perform after I told him I loved theater. His band had taken a page from some of the musicals I’d seen where the stage actors moved through the crowd or where they came in and exited from the back of the theater rather than the stage. What I’d interpreted as a non sequitur so he could talk about himself made sense now. He knew I’d appreciate his show. And I did.
