It wasn't that I didn't know what to expect at the Metallica concert. I just didn't expect to get stoned. That's all.
It really all started a few days before, when I was stricken with a nasty attack of lethargy and general depression, marked by headaches, stomach cramps, and a tendency to sleep sixteen hours a day. Not to mention a great deal of suicidal fascination and wondering what the next life was going to be like.
This started Friday night. I went to bed around one-ish, didn't fall asleep until five, slept solidly 'til four in the afternoon, and found no good reason to get out of bed until about nine. A good choice, because Kristin C. had some decent weed and we got nicely stoned. I also took one of Julia's lithium pills, which she freaked out over but it seemed to have no affect on me except to lose my THC high! Also there were hardly any lingering aftereffects (colors superimposed, paranoid voices) the next day, but I was so tired after work that morning that I ended up blowing off the VoiVod concert. The first casualty.
The weekend slowly dissolved into the week, and I found it most difficult waking up for the most important events--the last Combat Zone radio show, work on Monday. My Circadian Rhythm was completely fucked up. On Tuesday I slept right through Religion class, and by five p.m. (when I finally woke up, another sixteen hours) I decided I wasn't going to Novel class either.
It was around 6:30 when Bernard called me for the "pre-Metallica" party, and that seemed to me like more fun than lying in bed staring at the ceiling. But first (after taking a shower in three feet of water--nobody called a plumber, dammit!) I drove out to Thousand Oaks to buy the new Candlemass CD and spent about $115 at Vons. It wasn't until eleven or so that I made it out to Bernard's.
The social event was about the best thing I could have done for my state of mind at that point. After about four beers and a steinful of homemade Margaritas laced with a good dose of Southern Comfort ("Hell, it's my body!" I told Jim/John/Joe) I entered a nicely lucid state--with my dopamine imbalance, getting drunk is like getting high, getting high is like dropping LSD, and dropping LSD is like...well, you get the point. We settled back to watch Pink Floyd's The Wall, and during "One of My Turns" I decided to go home--by that time it was 2 a.m., everyone else had left, and we'd already gotten busted by the R.A. once. I dropped by Malibu and presented my inebriated self to Bill and Sid before driving up the canyon by intuition alone to my mother's house.
On Wednesday I slept in 'til one or so, and only wrote two pages of the novel due in class next week--well, at least it was writing. Around two p.m. I called Bernard and Dan about the Metallica concert that evening, making driving arrangements and all that, and by then I was getting pretty excited about the concert.
I arrived at Dan's dorm room around 4:15--Jason, Steve and Drew didn't show up 'til 4:30, so we got a late start. Somehow I got elected to drive, but I didn't mind; considering the traffic we were bound to hit, I would have preferred to drive anyway. Not that I don't trust anyone else with freeway traffic--I considerably more skilled, that's all. :)
We stopped first at the Chevron station to gas up, and here's where things started to get weird--Dan, Jason, Drew & Steve mysteriously disappeared! At first I wondered if I'd inadvertently cross-channelled to another dimension, or that they had been all abducted by UFO's. As it turned out, they had chosen to walk across the street to the Versateller without telling me. Okay guys, you wanna fucking WALK to the concert? That's fine by me...
We bought two 12-packs of Miller Genuine Draft at Hughes, and then began our fateful trek to Long Beach. PCH traffic was nominally heavy, and we spent what seemed like hours trying to pass a septic tank on wheels; also a small three-car accident between Chautaqua and the California Incline slowed us up some. But it wasn't until we reached the Santa Monica Freeway when things really backed up like a clogged artery. The 405 was no better, we only made an average speed of 5 to 10 MPH and despaired at getting to the show halway through Metallica's set. But then--relief! An accident ahead! I was never so happy to see mangled bodies and twisted metal in all my life! (And that says a lot!) And once we passed the accident scene (this was just outside Culver City) we sped up to 30, 40, 50, SIXTY MILES AN HOUR! We were stylin', dude. (Good thing we hadn't come from the Valley!)
Traffic backed up again just past LAX, but fortunately it was merely stop-and-go the rest of the way to Long Beach. The 710 also had slow traffic due to construction, but we arrived at the parking lot decidedly early--7:05, dude! Break out the brewskies!
After Drew took a six-minute piss, we helped ourselves to a 12-pack of Miller Draft. I managed to put away four beers before walking to the arena around 7:45 (after Dan bought a contraband t-shirt and Jason bought ten hits of acid for his girlfriend) so by then I was feeling pretty quaffed. We herded across the street in a massive body of people while chanting the Wizard of Oz intro to "Frayed Ends of Sanity"--security backed us up at the entrance, but we just forced our way past those mothers. By then I'd lost everyone except Drew, and got separated from him somewhere on the arena floor.
I went to my seat--Riser, Section 12, Row O, but decided to sit closer--that is, as close to the yellowjacketed security numbfucks as possible. It was there that a dude paid me five bucks to trade ticket stubs with him--he was Floor, Section A, Row 24, so that wasn't a bad deal! (And I didn't plan to sit in that seat anyway!) Queensryche was almost on, but I ran out for a quick piss first, and got back a quarter of the way through "Queen of the Reich". Still drunk, I walked up the floor until the yellowjacket numbfucks pointed me to my row. I didn't feel like moving all the way down to my seat, so I just picked the first available chair. A girl behind me, leaning on her enormous boyfriend, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "That's my seat, but you can stand there for now." Either that or "Fuck you faggot, you're ugly and your mother dresses you funny," but I was too drunk to be sure.
Now, I want you to notice a pattern here. To get to this seat, I had to 1) sit in a seat near but not exactly my own, 2) got paid to switch tickets with someone else, and 3) seat near but not exactly on that seat. Sound familiar? The exact same thing happened at the Grateful Dead concert two years ago, when I got some free LSD--so I think it's a conspiracy, but I really can't be sure. It's certainly more than coincidence. At least it's not a "physical" conspiracy, I think, just Satan's agents on Earth harvesting apostles--ah heck, that's getting a little out there. Still, it was an interesting turn of events, so I really wasn't surprised when Steve showed up with a joint.
Well, it wasn't really Steve, but it could have been his double--same height, same Hispanic facial features, and he was dressed the same, too. He took my seat after security ousted two dudes next to me and I moved over. Halfway through "Spreading the Disease" he asked me, "Are you with anyone?" I said, "No." Then he took out the joint. We shared about three hits each, then he passed it to a couple people around us before I took a final hit. (I ran out of cigarettes around this time, too.) Then, he waved goodbye, climbed forward through the seats in front of us, and disappeared into the crowd.
The pot didn't hit me until the next song, "Breaking the Silence", but Jesus it hit HARD!!! I avoided the initial hot flashes and paranoid voices, but then my blood pressure dropped to about twenty over zero and I had to sit down FAST. The music was coming in and out in waves, and the colors all melted away to dripping streaks of yellow, with the shadows of bodies around me only forming a presence, an ominous thereness, rising higher and higher above me like I was sinking into quicksand. Seriously, I thought I was dying!
I almost did die too, I think. I sweated out about two gallons of water and was completely dehydrated. The only way I survived was by escaping to the Game Matrix. The initial Colors to separate were Blue and Red, which I combated by revealing my Purple Baseline. A bad mistake--never, never reveal your Baseline! But how was I to know? Eventually I managed to assimilate the omnipresent colors, but not before I wound up on a seven-tiered Death Rhythm, a Black void intersected with many Yellow branches. The large amounts of alcohol I had imbibed earlier staved off the Paranoid Rhythms, fortunately, but on the downside it lowered my resistance to the Colors and I had quite an opportunity to check out right there.
It took nearly all of my waning strength to drift through "I Don't Believe in Love" and "Eyes of a Stranger" without breaking into a Paranoid Spiral. Don't you want to die? Satan whispered to me. Yes, eventually, but not here, not now! I cried back. Sleep...luscious sleep, the voice intoned. I don't know what would have happened if I had allowed myself to pass out and succumb to that Death Rhythm, I probably would not be here today typing this. But I fought back with all my strength, and was successful. By the time Queensryche left the stage and the house lights came back on, I had won back nearly all my self-esteem.
I was at the I-level now, a state where my body did not exist except for a band of space just in front of my eyes. If someone had asked me my name, or my vocation, or who I came to the concert with, I could not have answered. I was just barely conscious of where I was and what I needed to do, which was get a drink of water and buy some t-shirts.
Walking wasn't that hard--the cerebellum works wonders when it comes to coordinated activity. I wandered through the crowd, reminding myself I was okay, no one cared that I was blazing hard, it was not out of place at a rock concert. I had to avoid making eye contact with people, because the pupils of their eyes would swell out to six feet wide and suck hard at my soul. Eventually I found the drinking fountain, where after waiting briefly in line I drank approximately half of Long Beach Harbor. Then came the hard part--last time I tried to buy t-shirts while stoned (at Dio/Megadeth, ironically also at the Long Beach Arena) paranoia overwhelmed me and I had to bug out. But I adamantly decided to hold firm this time. I rehearsed the line carefully--"G and M, extra large, and a program"--over and over again, and when I got to the definitely sober white-clad attendant I focused directly on him (a good way to deal with sober people while on the Matrix--it hypnotizes them) and spoke my words and carefully counted out forty-eight bucks. I put on the two t-shirts and quickly began to regain my lost body warmth.
I should mention my dress here before going on, because it was very important in maintaining my Rhythmic Balance on the Matrix. The blue Jordache jeans, which had seen several hallucinatory excursions and never failed; the beat up Nike "air soles"; the yellow "Summerfest" t-shirt, which had never seen a drug trip before, so that was to my advantage; and my gold chain, which thank God kept me linked to my astral self. The Death Rhythm was long past, and the Light Rhythms during the intermission helped keep me on my feet. There was not a chance of locating my seat again, so I sat down somewhere near the middle of the floor and pretended to read the Metallica program. I could not focus on the words, the letters were all jumbled together and had a tendency to scatter to the corners of the page. I mostly flipped through the pages and spiked at the Demons which jumped between them, amorphous blobs of Grey, Blue and Purple.
Suddenly--WHACK! Somebody hit me with a pillow! It landed at my feet...a large square of foam rubber? How odd. Another foam square came flying past and bounced into the aisle. I raised my head and looked around me. The air was FILLED with flying oblong shapes! Everyone was hooting and cheering like a beach party. A seat-cusion fight? This had NEVER happened before! I was impressed, how my force through the Matrix Rhythms had sparked such an event to occur. For the next few minutes, I partook in the melee, mostly watching, and tossing out any stray foam cusions that landed near me. For a brief time, the Demons were forgotten and silent.
Then the lights went black.
Cheering rang out, and deindividualization struck like a thunderbolt. Deindividualization--the loss of self-identity--is practically impossible for me while sober, but in my drugged state the transition was effortless. Somehow I found myself in a small trickle of people cramming their way up front, flowing along like a drop of water in a slow-moving stream. Next thing I knew I stood at the edge of a great mass of thrashing bodies, a cluster of security guards huddling nearby obviously wondering what the FUCK was going on! Surely, they had never seen anything like it before--the LARGEST MOSH PIT ON RECORD!
And floating above the mass, as if right before my eyes, stood Metallica, six times larger than life! James Hetfield, TWO HUNDRED FEET TALL, leaned over the mike stand, crooning the words to "Blackened", as equally large Kirk, Lars, and Jason "New-Kid" thrashed around as well. The stage set--broken pillars and multicolored lights--created the most AWESOME demonic visage I had ever SEEN! It was too great to resist. I flung myself bodily into the pit.
A few minutes later, I crawled bodily out of the pit.
I don't know much about thrash pits, having been in only one before (at Megadeth), but I do know one thing (or at least I do now)--never, never go in stoned. Not that it wasn't wild--man, it was better than sex & Candlemass combined--but I had this terrible vision of laser beams drawing out my soul to be torn to shreds, another sacrifice to The Rock Machine. Maybe that's what these concerts do, and that's why Tipper Gore and others are so pissed off about it--heavy metal is the Devil's music, okay, but who's this Devil guy anyway? And as Nietzche postulated, who are we, this insignificant race of slimy creatures, to judge ourselves greater in light of the Grand Ecosystem? Are demons tearing out and devouring our souls any less natural than a lion ripping the flesh off a gazelle? It's Darwin, man, it's just Darwin!
But then, Darwin also said, "The fittest survive." And survival's a good instinct to obey. So I got myself out of that pit pretty damn quick. Good thing, too, because no sooner than I picked my position about twelve rows back from the pit, the yellowjacket fuckheads finally got their thumbs out of their asses and started throwing people out of the arena left and right. I don't know if I would have been one, but it was safer just to sit back and watch the show.
From then on I played the Game Matrix, on a level far higher than I had ever played before. There were several hundred levels to combat, but since I was familiar with most of the dangers I wasn't too much afraid. I also had Protectors, two kids on either side of me, about 11 or 12 years of age, one in the aisle in a black shirt, the other standing on his seat and wearing green. Plus an Arabic dude in a white-tassled leather jacket stood in front of me, so all three of them provided great protection, drawing fire from the soul-sucking green lights and the blasting explosions aimed at disrupting my sanity. The security guards hardly touched me, even though they were throwing people out right and left, and whenever they made a sweep to clear the aisle I crouched as far back into the row as I could.
The song titles were marginally significant--"For Whom the Bells Tolls", "Sanatarium", "Leper Messiah", "One", "Eye of the Beholder", "Fade to Black", "Seek and Destroy", "Harvester of Sorrow", "And Justice for All", "Battery" (now THERE'S an interesting implication!), "Creeping Death", and "Whiplash" (not even close to being the proper order), with encores of "Helpless/Last Caress/Am I Evil?" and "Breadfan"--six encores, in total. I managed to restrain myself from the extreme left/right tiers in the Matrix, ignoring such urges as to punch out a security guard or grab some chick's ass. I did consider lighting a fire in the piles of foam seat cushions, and though that would have been a scream, alas I chose not that oft-begotten path. Finally, the concert ended, and I exited with at least half of my sanity. I rejoined with my friends and didn't bother telling them I was tripping, it would have only made them nervous which would have disturbed my concentration further. And hell, it had been three hours since smoking that joint, and by now all I felt was the aftereffects of all the Colorful Sludge I'd drawn forth from my cruise on the Matrix, which would take a few days to completely burn off. They say oil & water don't mix, but in reality water separates the oil into a rainbow of colors, creating psychedelic effects as the demons scream and writhe away in the bosom of the Grand Design...
I didn't really sleep that night, I simply entered a deep trance and dreamed extremely vivid dreams as the Rhythms realigned themselves. As I write this, I've been off the Matrix for twenty-four hours, and the visuals have long since disappeared (except for an occasional hallucination, like thinking the blowing tarp on the fence outside was a dead body) while the body trip is taking more time reassuming itself. I also wrote five pages of the novel today, with more ease and confidence than EVER before, so just screw all that bullshit that drugs and writing don't mix! They do, they do, but only if you know how to use them wisely...
Another interesting facet, I might add, is the retroactive nature of this Demonic Matrix-Wander, like Dio of last March. I was burnt out for five days BEFORE the concert, and got drunk twice--also Roy Orbision died, did you know that? And I knew him...remember also that Andy Gibb and Divine died before the Dio concert, so there has to be some significance to that, the way I retroactively caused their deaths... As for the joint, Julia thinks that it must have been laced with PCP, which is probably true because I'm still feeling quite buzzed & wired 24 later. Whatever it was, it absolutely CURED my depression, although that was probably retroactive to start with...
But I expect very little Fallout from this trip, since there were hardly any Paranoid Rhythms, and I fared pretty well about every level I dealt with. Most fearsome were the spinning six-poled orb-shaped gyroscopes, six colors in the quadrants, with double intensity colors at the axes. Those suckers were nasty! I got sucked into a few of them against my will, but at least I knew they were there, having learned about them during the Halloween pot party. The black/white, purity/sludgity balance I'm still having trouble with, which isn't surprising considering how long I've toussled with THAT sucker...of course, maybe it's just a MEASURE and not so much of a WEAPON. Anything else? Not right now...except Metallica did begin their second encore with a riff from "Symptom of the Universe", which Candlemass included on their "Black Sabbath Medley", an extra CD track, so that was a sweet Gold Rhythm there.
