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July 17, 2007

Tour Blog: Stockholm Syndrome

Written by Girth McDürchstein on July 17, 2007 9:47 PM
Permalink |  Cancer Crisis! Splitcock Tour -- Europe & Japan '07  | Digg It

Our intern, Jason Fields, called me on the road on Sunday to tell me our show at Arenan in Stockholm had been canceled because of poor ticket sales. We didn’t even get the message until we arrived at the hotel in Stockholm, thanks to poor cell reception. It’s pretty crushing to know that Abysmal Crucifix can’t sell out a large club in one of the few places we’re still considered “popular.”

Since we still had a hotel reservation and a few days to kill before driving up to Lund, I did what everyone comes to Sweden to do: drove to the beach. There’s a nice one at Långholmen, and I needed some relief from the cool night air and the pressures that came from such a disappointing tour. We’ve been on the road for over a week, and we haven’t yet played one show.

I just sat there on the beach, thinking. After awhile, I waded into shallow water, trying to cool off from the heat of the Swedish summer. When I returned to the beach, I fell on my knees. With my eyes closed and brow furrowed, I prayed, prayed to the gods of the Church of Rafelman, a divine order I belong to that believes many of today’s rock stars are reincarnations of ancient gods and goddesses; for instance, I am believed to be Paoponicheleus. Borne of a lesbian affair between Demeter and a water nymph, Paoponicheleus brought soil pH measurements to Greek farmers in the same way I bring the rock to anyone willing to open their ears. I prayed to the reincarnated gods I worship, and when I felt a cold gust of wind coming in off the colorless lake, I turned around and saw—

A man in a heavy black robe. His face was very pale and he kept his hands hidden in the wide folds of his cloak.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am Death.” He spoke with a light Swedish accent, in the deepest bass I’ve ever heard.

“Have you come for me?” I asked.

He smirked. “I have been walking by your side for a long time.”

“That I know…”

“Are you prepared?”

I rose to my feet and shivered. Death opened his cloak to place it around my shoulders.

“Wait a moment,” I said.

“That’s what they all say. I grant no reprieves.”

“You play with 12-year-old virgin girls, don’t you?”

A gleam of interest kindled in Death’s eyes. “How did you know that?”

“I wrote a song called ‘Death Fucks with a Scythe’ that—”

“Why do you ask these questions?”

“If I find you a woman to your liking, will you let me go?”

Death smiled at me suddenly.

“Then it’s settled!”

I walked toward the edge of the beach, acting like I wanted to get back on the street and catch a bus back to the hotel. Instead, I grabbed a heavy branch fallen of a spruce tree, whirled around, and knocked Death in the face with it. Head bleeding, he collapsed to the ground.

I ripped the hood off his cloak, and to my surprise and horror, the Death that stalked me was—

Click image for a larger view

Owen Autumn, my arch-nemesis for over a decade. He’s pictured above with bassist/professional fuck-up Skeet Chambers. We played a few sets with his band, Ghosts of Algernon, and when the audience gave a more favorable reaction to my kick-ass song stylings and performance technique than they did to his jumping and flailing like a jackass, he and I became enemies for life. What a son of a bitch.

“Youuuu!” I roared in terror, nearly doubling over with bafflement and surprise. Owen Autumn, reclusive singer/songwriter and terrifying albino, lay bleeding on the sandy of Långholmen. His fat face trembled.

His pink eyes opened with a sudden, audible click, and looked at me with the same rage and evil I had seen in his eyes so many years ago…

We had just played a show at the Spearmint Rhino Club in Santa Maria. I was back in the bus, sipping a drink and feeling fine, when I heard a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” I demanded.

“A friend,” the voice beyond the door croaked. I recognized it instantly and told the women who were pleasuring me to scram. As they ran out the door, Owen Autumn stepped in.

“Interesting set,” he muttered, taking a seat across from me.

“Is it true your brother is a near-insane Scientologist?”

“You’ve heard Typewriter in the Sky, right?”

“I’ve heard enough of it…” I sighed, glancing out the window. I hadn’t heard a measure of his twin’s disastrous L. Ron Hubbard-inspired concept album, and I knew Owen knew it. “What did you come here for?”

“I needed to hear you myself, live, before I passed judgment,” Owen explained quietly. “Now that I have—”

He lunged forward, mouth open, and would have taken a chunk out of my ear or neck if I hadn’t ducked out of the way. I was in much better shape back then, with much quicker reflexes. I ran into the can in the back, then locked the door.

“You son of a bitch!” he spat, and tore across the bus at me. He pounded on the door, but thanks to Little Riffs Nicky’s bouts of paranoia and diarrhea, the restroom doubled as a panic room. He’d never get inside unless—

I listened as he ripped the face off the electronic keypad that opened the bathroom from the outside, perhaps a senseless feature considering the dual function of the room. A metallic chung followed as he stuck a finger into the electronic guts. The lights flickered for a few seconds, and then the door popped open. There stood Owen, giving me that menacing stare.

“Please,” I said. “I’ll do anything—anything!”

“Is it true you and Sarah Goss are to be married?”

“Well, not officially, but—”

“I WANT HER!!” roared Owen Autumn.

“Whatever, man! Take her!” I snapped. “She’s not even that hot anymore, since she got that breast reduction.”

Owen Autumn raised his fists to the sky, not quite accounting for the low height inside the bus. His fists slammed against the plastic ceiling, but it didn’t stop him from laughing maniacally. I never saw him again, until—

I grabbed the bloody spruce branch again and waved it at him. Owen recoiled and danced in place, goading me forward with his hands. As soon as I swung the branch, he stopped it with one flabby arm. In a single swift motion, the spruce branch was flying through the air in the direction of the grove of trees from which it had originally fallen.

“What the hell, man? Isn’t Sarah Goss happy with you anymore?”

“She ain’t been happy since I left without finishing the job—”

“What, you’ve never heard of Levitra?”

“YOU BASTARD!!” Owen Autumn roared, tackling me, slamming my head back against the dirt, pounding it over and over. My mind got a little hazy, and I almost vomited as his hot, sour-milk stench of his breath slid into my nostrils and his doughy white flesh blocked my chest from expanding.

“Sarah Goss has cervical cancer!” he croaked, then collapsed beside me and started weeping.

“You followed me all the way to Sweden to tell me that?”

“And to kill you,” Owen breathed.

“Yeah, but—”

“It all your fault, brotha!” he roared. “HPV.”

I looked at him blankly.

“Human papillomavirus.”

“Uh…”

“Cock warts!”

“Oh, those.”

“They make the cancer!”

“She wasn’t on the pill?”

“It’s spread… It’s spread too far, man. She’s not gonna make it. They’re giving her, I dunno—you’ll be able to see her when you get back, at least.”

“Jesus…”

“She gonna need you, Girth. She gonna need all of us. When you get back to the States, you gotta—”

“But Margo…she gets jealous. You should’ve seen what she did when she caught me fucking DJ Koko. Again.”

“You ain’t gonna explain to her about the cancer?”

“I could give that a try, but with us honesty isn’t usually—”

“Just do it. She needs all the support she can get, and I know I weren’t exactly fair about stealin’ her from you.”

“You won her fairly.”

“Be there for her, will ya, chief?”

“Of course,” I said.

Owen Autumn shed the black cloak and walked to the street. The instant his feet hit the sidewalk, a stretch limo pulled up to the curb. When he got in, the limo blasted off like a rocket.

So Sarah Goss, my former fiancée, had cancer. The news troubled me nearly as much as the Arenan gig getting canceled.

I’ve never known anybody with a terminal illness before. I found myself sitting on the beach once again, looking out at the gray lake, contemplating mortality. I’ve been getting older and fatter and stupider—I know that, but I never took the time to think of it until now. I found myself wanting to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come.

When I finally left, the sun was just as it had been for six hours: red ball shining shimmering pink lines down on the lake. I went to the bus stop and as I waited, I thought about cervical cancer, wondered if I could have done anything to prevent it—wondering, even worse, if I really had done something to cause it, like ultra-deep penetration or some sort of weird tantric exercise.

Suddenly, losing the Stockholm gig felt less important.