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Page 2 We did three shows in New York. The first two nights Jeff kept looking around the auditorium like a paranoid politician trying to spot snipers taking aim. I tried talking to him after the show, but he just mumbled something about the white dudes and how I must be blind. Then on the third night in the Big Apple, I saw them. You won't believe this. I had a hard time with it and I was right there watching. During the title song from "Hellsight", the ceiling started to quiver and glow. A dark hole opened up and these white dudes started dropping through. They'd drip down, dangle for a second, then let go and disappear into the kids at the show. I screwed up the bass line as I stared. The creatures were white--not Caucasian--I'm talking white. White as bone. White as the paint on that wall. Blindingly white, okay? They had oversized heads and elongated fingers that ended in broken claws. Their eyes were two drops of ink on a sheet of paper. I don't even want to think about their teeth. I watched them drop from the ceiling to land inside the kids, who went into spasms. They kicked their heads back as if they were getting into the rhythm of the music, but their eyes turned black, as if their pupils expanded to erase the white. The kids' skin paled and their teeth grew to points. Sounds like an awful horror flick, I know, but I swear that's what happened. Jeff looked back at me and the look on my face told him what he wanted to know. I tried to ignore what I was seeing, let my eyes go out of focus. Each time a white dude dropped, I made sure I was looking elsewhere. That got me through the rest of the show. Then Jeff and I sat down to talk. For the sake of the kids, we wished we were just going insane. We didn't know what to think about it or what we could do. We went back to the hotel to talk to Tommy. We didn't think he'd seen the white guys, but if he had, he wouldn't have said so. We knocked on his door and heard a crash. We broke in and saw a room service tray lying on the floor and a groupie perched atop Tommy. She turned. Her skin was pale, her fingernails had been shoved up to allow claws to break through. She met my gaze with the eyes of a shark. Blood dripped from her mouth. I stepped to one side and saw that she had chewed Tommy's face off. I dropped to my knees and lost my lunch. Jeff grabbed a lamp and brained the bitch. Her head exploded and blood splattered all over the walls. The tabloids had a ball with that one. Funny thing is, the death of Tommy and the girl only made us more popular. People get off on sick shit. That's why Alice Cooper faked beheadings on stage. That's why Ozzy bit the heads off of doves. Sick shit sells. Look at the six o'clock news or the ambulance chasers or the passersby who rubberneck at car wrecks. The record company hired a slick lawyer who convinced the jury that Jeff had killed the girl in self defense. Then we got a new drummer, named Vince. He played with a vengeance and although he never saw the pasties, he never really looked. Jeff tried to back out. He didn't want to do any more shows. He stopped writing songs, but the record company would have none of that. Threats of lawsuits from both the record company and the beer company that sponsored our tour made Jeff cave in. We hit the road and played Columbus, Atlanta, New Orleans. And everywhere it was the same. More of the pasty white dudes dropping from the ceiling. In Oklahoma City, Jeff set up a camcorder on stage and aimed it at the ceiling. We were afraid that either the bastards wouldn't show up or that they couldn't be captured on film. You can imagine how we felt when we watched the tape. At first the ceiling seemed normal. Lots of supports running to and fro. Lights and such. But as we started in on the "Hellsight" material, the ceiling started to glow. It wavered like heat distortion, then opened and the pasties started jumping through. Some caught the supports to swing out and land further into the crowd, some just dropped straight down. We knew then that our songs had opened some kind of gateway to another place. You might call it Hell, but I don't go for that religious crap, so I'll stick with the "other place" label. We knew we had to do something. We showed the tape to a friend, but unfortunately, all he saw was an hour and a half of a boring old ceiling. We were the only ones who could see the pasties live and on film. We didn't want any blank stares or talk of drugs destroying our minds, so we gave up on that front. We tried dropping the "Hellsight" material from our act, but our contracts didn't allow that. We were stuck. "I'll think of something," Jeff said. |