PART I
The Rendevouz Room, 1988
A young but frivolous group of slightly stupid musicians mount a stage covered in rotting orange plush carpet and old duct tape.
Their mission:
Entertainment.
It’s the first time the group has attempted to crack this smelly crowd of regular suds swaggers and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be pretty.
A cloud of stale cigarette smoke hangs face level and Tina, our singer, releases a dry, lung-damaged cough, buy it’s okay. She’s a smoker. She can’t sing that great anyway.
There’s a twist in my pre-gig martini and in the night. Our regular drummer is double booked. He took the higher paying gig, just like the rest of us would have. The keyboard player, Paul, asked one of his friends to sit in.
He assured us the guy was good and we all believed him because, well… we didn’t have anybody else.
The guy, we’ll call him the drummer, was alright. That was, until the end of the night when things started getting freaky.
We’d been on freaky gigs before, like when Andy, the 60+ year-old owner of the Bunkhouse would do a complete striptease in the middle of the dance floor. A gay, 60-something, overweight man suggestively removing all of his clothing in middle of biker bar in Garden Grove. Freaky.
I could tell this was going to be exactly the same, but different.
Stay Tuned.