« Last Post: Tour Blog: Stockholm Syndrome |Main| Next Post: Tour Blog: Persona Non Grata »

July 18, 2007

Tour Blog: Cancer Crisis

Written by Girth McDürchstein on July 18, 2007 10:45 AM
Permalink |  Cancer Crisis! Splitcock Tour -- Europe & Japan '07  | Digg It

When I got back to the hotel, I told the rest of the band exactly what had happened: my ex-fiancée, Sarah Goss, had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Prognosis? Terminal. My arch-nemesis, musician Owen Autumn, confronted me on the beach and Långholmen to give me the news. Grief-stricken, Riffs ran into the bathroom and locked the door.

Mikey and Carl sat on a love-seat, trying as hard as possible to not actually touch. Mikey muttered, “Serves that whore right,” which prompted Carl to smack him in the back of the head. Then he looked at me, shrugged, and said, “I didn’t know her. I mean, I feel bad on a general ‘wow does cancer suck’ level, but it doesn’t go any deeper.”

“That’s what she said,” Mikey said, trying to avoid eye contact with me.

Carl smirked. I ignored it and went to Margo, lying on the bed with the latest issue of Slut-Wrench. “What are you thinking?” I asked.

Margo sighed. “I guess that depends on what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “You gotta know I don’t have any feelings for her anymore—”

“That’s not what you wrote in If I Did It…,” she snapped.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Look, I don’t know what you want from me. You want me to not see a dying woman who needs help, just say the word. If nothing else, I have a lot of sympathy for her, even if she did leave me for Owen Fucking Autumn.”

”’If nothing else’? You son-of-a—” She edged forward on the bed, arm raised. I grabbed her wrist and kissed her. She swung her leg around and kicked me in the face. I felt a burst of pain and vision loss, followed by numbness.

“Haven’t I been beaten up enough in the past few days?” I sighed, rolling onto the floor as I temporarily lost equilibrium.

“No,” Margo said, crawling back into bed with her magazine.

“You think I wanted this to happen?”

“Maybe you did,” she said. “Maybe a little bit, you wanted some reason to reenter her, and her life.”

“Bullshit,” I said, trying to figure out a way off the floor. I felt trapped, like the world had closed in on me. I decided to just lie there and look at the dust bunnies under the bed. “Come on, I left her, got with you, and haven’t seen her since. Well, except at Kelleystein stuff—”

“Yeah, I noticed there was a lot of Kelleystein stuff involving her—”

“Her band was our biggest seller! What the hell did you expect?”

“Fine, Girth,” Margo said. “I’m sympathetic to her for whatever reason—call it ‘sister solidarity’ or whatever. It’s got me thinking about my own mortalit—”

“Me too—”

“Fuck you. I trust you, Girth. As long as you take me with you every time you go to see Sarah, I’ll be fine.”

“Oh yeah, that’ll be loads of fun.”

“More fun fucking me than her.”

“Well, yeah, ever since she got that breast reduction—”

“Hey! I got a breast reduction!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t get them, like, little-boy-sized. There’s still something there to hang on to.”

“That’s what she said,” Mikey repeated. I realized he and Carl had been sitting there, watching our conversation with endless amusement. It disappointed me that Carl got along so well with Mikey. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me much. For all the rumors that I brought Carl into a band as a “yes-man,” what with him being my best friend since childhood, in reality I brought him aboard for the same reason I needed Mikey: because he’s willing laugh at me, mock my ideas, and keep my feet on the ground. I need that if I want to write more high-quality hits like “Rolling in It.”

“Hey Girth,” Margo said quietly.

“What?”

“What if her dying wish is to bone you or something?”

“I don’t know…”

“What will you do?”

“What do you want me to do?” I said suggestively.

Margo groaned irritably. “I want you to tell me what you’ll do.”

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “Probably invite you to join us so I can actually get it up.”

Before I knew it, Margo was on the floor and on top of me. Mikey and Carl quietly sidled out of the room. They understood we needed some alone time on the floor.

When I got inside I moaned and said, “I just want to keep doing this until we have to go to Lund.”

“Maybe we should get separate rooms,” Margo breathed, rubbing my doughy, fuzzy chest.

“Maybe we should…” I said.

They didn’t have any, so Carl and Mikey decided to spend the next three days in Stockholm’s famous “kidnapper-owned bar alley.” Riffs still wouldn’t come out of the bathroom.

See you in Lund!