In the Moment - In the Moment by Tait Mckenzie

Day One

We set out before the sun broke the horizon, driving across a map of the country. In the grey predawn light it literally looked like a map, all the roads and state lines drawn out in contrasting colors. It felt like we were searching for the soul of the country. That’s what I told myself while the rest of the band slowly woke up, from their beds on our instrument cases and amps. The Moment’s Dream Wars Tour. The rising sun changed the landscape; illuminated it looked older and more scarred than I remembered, the rivers beside the highway to D.C. swollen and pulsing as if they could no longer be contained. There’s a full moon tonight, which might explain it. That or the fraughtness we all feel from Mars coming to town with the war on Iraq. It doesn’t feel like it, but maybe there’s still time to keep things from getting worse. Time in which to sing. Eventually Flip Rogers leapt into the passenger seat, blunt dangling from his snarky-curled lips, and tried to tell me where to go. But whenever he suggested a direction it got us more lost. I knew the way though, in my heart. It’s impossible to forget how to get home, and that’s where our first show is tonight. Home. I tuned out the whine of Flip’s voice and the strange industrial mills jutting from the landscape, and we soon found our way to I-95, trees and mountains and real life.

The show was in the basement of a college dorm; they called it a coffee house, really just concrete graffiti-covered walls. After unloading the equipment I stood outside smoking cigarettes with my old friends Ami and Martin, who had come out for our set. They were telling me how much D.C. had changed since I left, Bush’s regime turning the whole town into one secure prison complex, when I looked up and almost swallowed my smoke. The full moon, it was eclipsed! What a rare sign. I ran to tell the band, and Flip decided to break out his secret weapon: mushroom chocolates! I tried to talk him down, we’ve only played a couple shows tripping before, but he promptly thrust a bonbon into my mouth before throwing handfuls out to the crowd. We took the stage, my hands melting on the guitar’s strings. Thankfully our fusion of hardcore, jazz, and funk has room for improvisation; the map of our songs illuminated, mutated by whatever chemicals Flip has convinced us to ingest. I still suspect it’s the wrong way to go. But the crowd lapped it up, heads and arms waving under the dingy sparkled Xmas lights. Minds expanded: our mission accomplished. Like thunders and revelations. The final act though, a group of young longhaired kids, had never hallucinated a set before. They only got through one song before collapsing in a puddle of laughter, which everyone promptly joined in on.

Day Two

In order to avoid the morning gridlocked at Ground Zero (the worst place to get stuck in traffic when bombs might fall), we stayed at Martin’s family’s farmhouse outside the city, a large country mansion with long hallways and old wooden rooms. I was still asleep when everyone else got up, trying to recover from the momentary madness of last night, when Ami curled up next to me on the futon. Though she and Martin are a sure thing (if currently on the outs), we never resolved our crushes on each other from high school. I don’t think cuddling for a few hours helped either, though it prompted Ami to ask what I was looking for in a woman. An angel, I murmured, an impossible mystery. When I finally roused myself I found the band drinking on the wide veranda, even though it was not yet mid-afternoon. With his usual aplomb Flip toasted everything in sight (especially Ami’s good looks), and when he spilled Martin’s homemade ale on the porch he immediately crouched down and began licking it up. Ami found this rather unsettling and I had to assure her Flip was capable of every imaginable social indecency.

We were going to head to our show after dinner, but by the time it grew dark the mansion seemed to have sprouted an opposing dark house, a maze of twisting shifting passages like our fiercest jams, that we were hard pressed to find our way out of. I kept seeing strange faces in the door and windows in brief red and blue flashing tableaux, cops or zombies it was hard to discern. We ran screaming through the deliriously distorted rooms, either the beer was bad or Bush’s prison had already spread this far, and eventually made our way out of the bizarre mess onto the streets. It was dark out, foggy with a little rain. The sky too cloudy to see the moon or stars. We walked to the warehouse district where we’d parked the van. Through the rising steam and flashing city lights we found an imposing building lit red and blue. Its sides were adorned with metal casts of meaty organs and intestines that in the play of light and rain looked quite real. I didn’t know what to make of the scene besides a low-level panic in my gut, and clutched to my chest a book I’d found on our escape from the house, which, when we finally collapsed in the vehicle, turned out to be a secret fakebook of magic songs censored by the government!

We drove along a steep winding cliff through the sodden dark, twisting against the edge of the mountain and a dinky little railing while we practiced the new material. Eventually we got to a cramped library space to play our show, doing a joint set with our friends’ band, Fear is the Mind Killer. Hardly anyone showed up, and Kid Aries’s lead guitar was too loud as usual, but it seemed the punks had a good time. Afterwards we listened to the recording and were highly impressed. Everyone cheered for the new number, “How to Be a Superhero.” A magic song indeed, if the whole world heard it we could stop this absurd war! We are not a cancer, we are a medicine (what a great line). After we left Flip casually mentioned that my favorite band, Cerberus Shoal, was playing next, and to get moving we’d missed them! Curse Flip’s impetuosity! I actually didn’t mind, because there had been a mysteriously sexy woman at the gig who I wanted to savor in imagination for the rest of the night’s drive south.

Day Three

When booking our tour, Flip decided to bill us as a country-rock duo, asking for local musicians to sit in at each stop we played. Really though we are a small army: Kid Aries and I on guitar, Flip on upright bass and vocals, Jingo on jazz drums, Zack Parsafali and Fata Morgana on horns, RJ Plum on keys, plus a doowop section and a whole busload of dancers and fans. The point of this subterfuge is not just to push the boundaries of music, but to encourage the audience to participate, to get them up on stage and part of The Moment. If the government’s war breeds international conflict and civil rights violations we are instead fighting for freedom, to make all your wildest dreams come true. For instance, this afternoon’s matinee show in North Carolina was held in a large field crowded with children. With the help of the local teacher’s singing union we played an elementary school set! I used to love when bands came to my school, singing: you can be anything you want to be. But like all dreams, there’s always that moment where things don’t quite work out as planned. We had set up our amps by a rock wall and were tuning up when we discovered my amp was blown out. The van has a leaky roof! We managed some acoustic numbers for the kids before heading to Greensboro for the evening concert, with buckets in our laps in case it rained again.

When we got to the large warehouse showspace we had to drive around its squat bulk several times to find the correct bay to unload our equipment. There were lots of punks milling about, which boded well, but we weren’t scheduled to play for a few hours. This was good because we’d forgotten to figure out my amp situation. After searching the premises for a suitable replacement we had to drive to a music store so I could buy a new one. Add on my share of the gas and food fees and I’ll have to work overtime when we get home to pay Flip back. Back at the club we bumrushed the stairwell besides the parking lot and piled into a small wood-paneled dressing room lit only by the light falling down the stairs behind us. Before reaching consensus on the set list, Flip held his fingers in a triangle (the anarchist symbol for “ooh I’ve got an idea!”) and suggested that instead we unveil the Rock Opera: the story of a three-hundred pound transvestite graffiti artist named Tink, and her battle against hordes of robotic lumberjacks out to marshmallowize the world. The two of us wrote the music several years ago on acid, and I thought it lost to the vagaries of memory, but there it was in the fakebook! We discussed the opening and tried to recall our characters’ names. Mine was Jasper Axton, one of the good guys. When I tried to sing my part though, my voice came out all raspy and sore, and I couldn’t open my jaw the whole way! Thwarted again! Flip made me warm up extra long with the doowop singers until I could hold a note. It was probably our worst set yet, even with the two-hour encore.

Day Four

Back north. We seemed to be getting lost. Flip was leading the caravan and didn’t know where to go. To make matters worse, half our train was now police cruisers, chasing us through the back woods of Virginia. I was riding in Morgana’s little green Neon, with Zack and my brother Nim, who we’d picked up at William and Mary when we last stopped for directions. He still hasn’t heard my music yet, and looked like he needed to get out of the colonial theme park of Williamsburg. That’s when the cops set on us. It seemed like we were driving in circles, and at some point on the highway I realized where we kept getting back on the same road, which would eventually get us all caught. We had to take a new course, if it got us no further at least it would be on our own actions. So we took the next right and headed towards an Amish settlement where we might find sanctuary. But we were apprehended on the way! As we stopped, with the sirens flashing red and blue behind us, Nim grabbed the fakebook, my journal, and wrote his name and picture in it. I did the same, and when Morgana was unsure what to put I drew her a picture of a little fairy. I trusted Nim knew what he was doing; he’s a scientist and full of surprises. On the way in we were carrying the book on a wooden coffee table, a prop for our show the cops found highly suspicious, and sneakily dropped the book off into the bushes beside the road. At the station the other detainees, mostly political prisoners and children waiting to be processed, were awed that we’d managed to lose the book of our names. Without our true names and appearances we couldn’t be charged with anything!

But we still had to go through the system. It felt like we were being held by Nazis, RJ and Flip and I waiting in a huge crowd on the ramparts of a fortress surrounded by a moat and woods, with searchlights cutting through the now black skies. After filling out long complicated forms (the ridiculous technicalities of the State) we snuck inside the towering precinct to smoke while waiting for our names to be cleared. I stared out the thin barred windows at the city and countryside, wondering what the hell they thought we had done. Eventually we were found not guilty, they couldn’t pin the fakebook on us, so our room was opened up and a stage built so that we could play a show for the inmates. Nim wasn’t being released though he did applaud our set; I promised to come back for him later. Afterwards Flip suggested we just leave, since we were free to do so. We wandered out into the halls and found a storeroom packed with shelves of food. Since we couldn’t be caught we stuffed a lot of this in our bags, fruit, tortilla chips, rice, a feast! and hightailed it down endless stairwells to the street. On the way Morgana climbed into an exhaust tunnel, hoping it was a way out. But there was some sort of toxin in the air, something rotting in the heart of the prison, the country, so I forced her to come back before she died or went mad. I couldn’t keep from peering down the tunnel myself though, and was shocked to see a young naked woman with large feathery wings chained up and passed out in the gloom. I have always wanted to be a hero, so we took her with us. The angel is now sleeping in the back of the van, curled around my soft guitar case. I am almost afraid of what she might say when she wakes.

Day Five

We drove through the night, the angel tossing and turning and muttering what time is it in her sleep. The stars wheeled like a broken compass overhead. The day broke on violent stormy ruins: the countryside decimated around us, trees torn down, roads exploded, everything gone wrong since we headed out on tour. Maybe I was imagining it or still half-asleep, but is this what it will look like when the war comes home? We drove through the wastelands under the cruel violet sky; shocked to find each city we were supposed to play a show at destroyed. Every mile was a moment slipping by in which we could no longer save the world. Eventually we reached Philadelphia, also in ruins, but our friends there had constructed a tent city around the grounds of an ancient crumbling castle, in frost-covered woods by a river. Even if the world is going to end we can still offer the hope of entertainment, though a pale hope that is: we had to reconstruct our entire set, a daunting task now that we’ve lost the fakebook. After hours of practice in the castle’s lavishly decked basement I collapsed under a blue tarpaulin in the tent city, where I left the angel. She was awake now, huddled in my black army trench coat with short-cropped hair and a gorgeous smile. Though she still didn’t say anything, the angel curled up to me and stroked my beard, as if she too understood everything that was at stake. Jingo had thrown down his drumsticks in disgust during practice, threatening to quit as if it was our music reducing the world to ashes. I caressed her long silk-skin legs, wondering if there’s answer, and what it’s like to fuck an angel, but before I could find out Flip appeared, howling that we had to get ready to play and why wasn’t I helping out.

I grudgingly got up and went down the corner steps to the cavern basement, back up and down in confusion over where we left the equipment, all the time trying to avoid this one obnoxious pudgy dude who kept trying to get me to talk about our proposed set. I finally told him he wouldn’t find out anything if he didn’t let me go play it. By the time we got all the equipment set up everyone had gathered around the long picnic tables, eating and drinking and carousing toasts over the feast we’d stolen from the government, as if it was going to be our last meal. It’s always a blessing to get a hot meal at a show. Since it was our final gig Flip and I both tried to say a few words, but they all just wanted us to sing. So we did. The basement was filled with light and smoke and pink and blue balloons. We played all our old material and whatever new riffs hadn’t vanished completely from memory, but still they wanted more. Jamming out a dark driving riff to kill time, the angel suddenly stood up and took the microphone from Flip and began to sing. It was harrowing, haunting, beautiful. Beyond words. Though it was in some ineffable alien language we all understood: the angel was announcing the end of time.

Unsettled, we took a break, standing outside for a smoke on the balcony of the castle. Kid Aries pointed upwards, saying: see those strange symbols in the stars. I moved from behind the bare branches of a tree to get a better view, shapes like a white forked trident and blue chaos stars, as if someone had spilled a jumble of runes into the bowl of the heavens. I knew it immediately, I’ve been waiting (in trepidation) all my life for this, since when I was a child on long night drives home and my father would point at the stars and talk about the signs that would appear there before the apocalypse. The band whispered, the angel smiled inscrutably but was crying. Flip said it was like something out of my dreams, and I told him it was like something out of the world’s dreams, a much larger war than any man has waged. The stars were all falling now, in a swirl of bright purple lights. We rushed to the top balcony and gasped. It was a flock of angels, who swept by waving and cheering. If this was the retribution it certainly was a joyous one. I guess we’ve plagued ourselves enough already. The angels passed like a school of fish, and my angel flew off after them, leaving the Moment standing alone in the dark. The tour was over, time to go home. Come on, I told them, even with the band’s inevitable breakup, we have to write a song about this. There is another moment beginning.