The drummer is hot. He snaps his sticks down crisply, one-two, three- four, then pounds through an artillerial volley.Trouble is, Rasheequa is trying to tune, but you can't not listen to that machine-gun racket, it grabs you somewhere between the ears and makes your very brain cells fire in rhythm.
Fucking drum solos.
Rasheequa is on the point of saying something nasty when a well-aimed paper missile from Skids takes out the enemy gunner. There is blessed silence until Cyanide abandons his post and launches himself bodily at the other boy, fingers outstretched, and under the onslaught of tickling Skids is squealing and now they're both laughing too hard to move, rolling around helplessly. And they're so cute, and they look so happy, she can't be annoyed, or even jealous. Well, maybe a little. Not really of either one of them, so much as of both of them, for this thing they've found, this thing they have. Each other.
Harley nudges the CyandSkids pile with the toe of his shoe. "Ok, guys, I'm sure there are plenty of people who would rather see that than hear us play, but the audience is going to expect a band, so maybe we should practice a little music, huh?"
It's Skids who gets it, sitting up abruptly and dumping Cyanide unceremoniously onto the floor. "The audience is going to? Harley?"
Harley beams. "Happy Hanukah, guys-and-Sheequa. I've got us a gig.". There is much woo-hooing, but Harley speaks over it: "It's in twelve days, so we really need to get focused!"
Rasheequa grins at him. Harley has just given her the best Christmas present ever, whatever he wants to call it. And then the drummer is drumming and Skids is piping sweet tones out of his keyboard and she locks eyes with Harley and they're off, her loneliness temporarily forgotten.
***
"The Fruit Tree?" "We're playing a gay club?" "Called the Fruit Tree?". "It gonna be all gay men at dis club?" "The Fruit Tree?" Harley throws up his hands.
"Okay, guys, could you repeat after me: We. Have. A. Gig." They look at each other, uncertain. "C'mon..."
"We have a gig," they chorus.
"Harley has found us a gig."
"Harley has found us a gig."
"We are not going to make him regret it."
"We are not - look, Harls," this is Cya, "I don't have a problem with the gay part, but is it really our atmosphere? I've actually heard of it - " (he ignores inquiring looks from Skids and Sheequa) " - and I thought they were more of a singer-songwriter venue. You don't think we're a little hardcore?"
"Ok, yeah, they usually do a dinner-and-show deal, and it is a little more mellow. Celtic rock, folk-rock, I actually heard a great electric klezhmer band there once with Mik... but lately they've been trying to branch out, bring in a little younger crowd. I was there for the Screaming Weasels last Saturday, good show, good feeling from the audience, almost a full house... Josh had told me about it and I stuck around afterwards and he introduced me to the manager, who, it turned out, had heard us play at - "
"Our one and only previous gig?" interrupts Cyanide. "Hey, how come you didn't tell me the Weasels were playing?"
"You were a little distracted," says Harley, pointedly inclining his head towards Skids.
"Ok," Rasheequa puts in, "I know we can' be too picky, but there be women there? At all? I have some issues playing at a place I wouldn't be welcome."
"There's women at the Fruit Tree, but, well, lesbians." Harley braces for this to be a problem, but Raqueesha smiles.
"Ok, lesbians is fine," and when Harley looks surprised, "Yeesh, how many of my friends are gender sep'ratists?" She sniffs. "Dose of us who ain't the patriarchy don't always wan' to keep defining ourselves in relation to the prevailing power structures, huh?"
Cyanide and Harley both take careful steps back as if she had started babbling in tongues. Skids smiles at her. "But don't you think that a monolithic rejection of possibilities is just as oppressive as an unquestioning acceptance of conventional norms?" She blinks. "Hey, anyone want to watch the Simpsons?"
Raqueesha thinks, I just don't know about that boy sometimes...
***
The problem is, she thinks, she hasn't rejected any possibilities. There just aren't any. Take that party. She had stayed, watching the fratboys leap and whirl. Whee, music you could dance to just by bouncing... finally, when she and some young leaping lord had been mirroring each others' motions through at least five songs, she asked for his phone number. And he had smiled uncertainly at her and said he was gay.
Of course. Yet Another Gay Guy.
Rasheequa has asked out at least one classmate from every one of her five classes. Two from her comparative politics seminar, or 66% of the entire male enrollment. She has been on three blind dates in the past four weeks. That's nine, count them nine, attractive, well-spoken young men.
Of whom only one was straight, and he wasn't just taken, he was married. Married! I'm so desperate now I can't spot a ring? At least, she thinks, it means there are still straight people at this school... otherwise I might be having doubts. Nine out of ten, now??
It's like my punishment for reading yaoi, she thinks. It's stupid. It's unfair. It's statistically unlikely, is what it is.
Not that I have a problem with people being gay. But whatever happened to 10%?
The answer is obvious: she is not taking a random sample. Maybe spending all that time with Mostly Boy Band (and falling more than you want to admit for Skids, says a little voice) has influenced her tastes somehow? But the blind dates weren't her fault. Michael wasn't out to any of his male friends, including the boyfriend-of-a-friend who had set them up; Darnell had been flat-out bullied into it (and she should have known better than to accept a blind date with one of her mother's friends' sons). And Ryan, bi, flirtatious Ryan of the even white teeth and appreciation for ska, had actually gotten a tearful, remorseful call on his cellphone from his ex-boyfriend (now ex-ex-boyfriend) right smack in the middle of dinner. At least he had thought to pay before running out to hail a cab.
Damn, he looked happy, she thinks. Like Skids when he left that night. with Cyanide... but she is not going there, it's just not useful. She tries to tell herself to stop whining; every one of her lesbian friends has had to deal with more or less the same thing, and almost all of them have managed to find somebody. Her travails are probably evening out some sort of Orientation Karma right this minute.
Phooey.
***
They practice hard.
***
And then they're out on the stage, and the drummer is drumming, the guitars are wailing, the whole front of the audience is starting to come alive leaping and dancing, and Harley is milking it for all it's worth, strutting along the front of the stage, leaning into the mike like... well, like it was Mik. Could that pun be stricken from my mental record? Rasheequa thinks hopefully, and then it is gone, as she blazes through the next passage. And she's gone, she's absorbed into the music, and she doesn't come out again until they've finished their first set and the audience is screaming for them.
Wow.
They take a breather, sitting down right there on the edge of the stage and guzzling water. People are coming up to Harley asking if they have a CD. Multiple people. Rasheequa grins and looks out over the audience, feeling connected. Lots of young punks - mostly boys, but some women too - but older people as well, corporate haircuts, she spots Mik, out of the way of the central seethe but obviously glowing with pride to be there... whoa, is that her anthropology professor?
And then the back of her neck crawls and she feels someone staring at her.
A man is leering at her - at her cleavage, she realizes - with a strange, hostile smirk. He tosses his red hair and glides forward on the floor, preening, like an elegant, arrogant swan swimming haughtily on his own little pond.
Nice hair, she thinks, but what a sharkey smile. Not a swan, a shark, circling for blood.
He comes closer, approaching the stage. There's a kid asking Harley the CD question who must have gotten in on a fake ID; Raqueesha isn't even sure he's shaving yet. As he turns to leave the red-haired man puts a hand on his shoulder and starts talking to him in a low voice. The way this guy stopped right in front of the stage, it's like he's staging this little tableaux, but for whose benefit? The red-haired man strokes his hand down the kid's back, and Sheequa realizes the kid is shaking. Out of the corner of her eye she sees that Harley has stood up and if she looked the other way she'd see that Mik is filling with fury and preparing to charge, but she's already off the stage and over there.
"Hey, this guy bothering you?" she says to the obviously underage kid. The kid looks too freaked out to speak. "I t'ink you're infringing on his narrative autonomy," she tells the red-haired man. He looks at her in disbelief. As soon as his eyes are on her and off the kid, the kid bolts into the crowd.
"Excuse me?"
Rasheequa grins to herself. The rhetoric of social justice is a tool with many uses. "Sorry, I was jus' tryin' to subvert da paradigm of dominance you were attempting ta establish in your lingui-somatic stance," she clarifies. "I know this space constructs a transgression against the heterosexual hegemony, but I don' t'ink dat means you got to go around performing a critique of Romanticism through da medium of an objectified Other." That's right, Sheeqs, lay it on real thick. Did that actually mean anything? Maybe Skids would know...
The man's poise has crumbled under his bewilderment. 'Sheequa judges him adequately neutralized and goes back to the stage, where all three of her band members slap her high-fives.
"I don't know what you just did," Harley tells her, "But we usually have to punch him in the nose to get him to shut up like that."
Rasheequa wants to ask who this guy is and how Harley knows him, but it's time for their second set and the music takes over again.
At some point Skids is soloing and Rasheequa thinks about the strange encounter and peace floats into her about the whole relationship thing. You know, girl, she tells herself. There are worse things than being single. Like being pathetic. That guy... does he have anything like this? Friends? Skids gives her the melody line and she gives it to Harley and Cyanide gives her the rhythm and maybe none of them are her true love, but they do have each other, all of them. And that's the best Chrismas present ever.
They wrap up with a love song, the kind of dreamy ballad Cyanide had always laughed at and refused to play, before recent events, the kind that brings all the couples close together. Rasheequa looks out over the room, boys with their arms wrapped around each other, girls holding hands proudly. Maybe it's easier with the light shining off of them, because she spots rings, golden rings on entwined hands, people married every way but legally. Harley is, not surprisingly, looking right at Mik, who looks like he's possibly about to cry, and nearby she is surprised and pleased to see Ryan and (presumably) the boy who had called him during dinner. They wrap up the song. Skids and Cy share a celebratory kiss which gets the audience. cheering (not to mention kissing each other). Rasheequa feels warm and fuzzy from seeing all the lovebirds out there. Yeah, she'd definitely play the Fruit Tree again, and from the way the manager is waving his hands at Harley it looks like they will be. Got to get working on that CD...
Harley and Mik have already gone off cooing at each other like turtledoves and she's helping Cyanide with his drum kit when this "excuse me" sort of curls around her ear. And whoa, wow. He looks a little like Sulu from Star Trek, and he's got that same sort of rich, deep voice. Raqueesha wonders what he wants; he's obviously gay, of course, given that he's in the Fruit Tree, and it's really too bad, because she's melting just from that voice... and then he asks for her phone number.
Rasheequa blinks, looks down at herself as if to ask, "What, you can't tell I'm a woman?" He smiles as if he understands perfectly (Rasheequa's knees liquify).
"I've heard a lot of great bands here." And then he looks sort of wistful... "Of course, if you're not interested... I didn't mean to assume you dated men, I suppose asking women out in places like the Fruit Tree is rather silly of me..."
Rasheequa feels very silly and giddy and lightheaded and, for a minute, can't remember her phone number. She scribbles it down and, in the name of gender equality and not letting this guy vanish, asks for his.
He hands her a business card. John Lee, Partridge Company. She asks about it, it turns out to be a publishing company focusing on illustrated books, before long they're having a conversation and trying to figure out where there's an all-night coffee place. And as they leave the club it's snowing, and Rasheequa feels like singing. Is it too late to change her mind about the best Christmas present ever?
::End::
Back