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April 21, 2008

Tour Blog: Traverse City — Milligan & Strosby

Written by Girth McDürchstein on April 21, 2008 11:27 AM
Permalink |  Happy Heartland Tour -- The Midwest '08  | Digg It

There Carl and I sat, at the classy Amical Bistro on Front Street. We’d just come from a local department store across the street, where we’d bought some new clothes. Matching Hawaiian shirts, in fact. You see, he and I planned this tour for a Midwestern spring—meaning nothing but parkas, sweaters, and long pants. We were left in the lurch when it started to get warm earlier than expected.

Across the street, the department store loomed, casting a deep shadow across the street and into the restaurant. The only source of light was its dim red sign: STROSBY-MILLIGAN.

We ordered some food and sat, casually talking as we waited. Getting more excited than usual describing my daring entrance at the Atwaters’ compound, I ended up pounding a fist on the table, sending my fork flying. Fortunately, we came at an off time, so there were literally no other patrons. Like a ball boy at a tennis match, a waiter—but not our waiter—ran after it. He fetched the fork, set it carefully back on my napkin.

I said, “Thanks.”

The waiter nodded in deference. “Thank you very much, Dr. Milligan.”

Carl and I swapped confused glances.

“It’s…no trouble?”

The waiter nodded again, then backed into a shadowy corner of the bistro.

I looked back at Carl, rolled my eyes, and we continued eating.

Afterward, walking along Front Street, I noticed a lot of people casting their eyes away, as if I were a god. I hadn’t received treatment like that since we went to Japan. Carl whispered, “What’s the deal with these people?”

I shrugged.

“Excuse me!” shouted somebody across the street. “Dr. Milligan! Mr. Strosby!”

Carl and I turned. Carl gestured toward himself and mouthed, Me?

The man across the street, a middle-aged fellow in a dark suit, checked for traffic and ran toward us.

“Dr. Milligan, surely you remember me,” he said. “Mayor Pawlak?”

“Of course,” I said cheerfully. “How are you this afternoon?”

“Can’t complain, sir,” said Mayor Pawlak. “But I’d be much better off if I could convince you to speak tonight at a campaign fundraiser.”

“Tonight…? I don’t know, Pawlak. I have plans.”

“The Crucifix show?”

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“Everyone knows,” Mayor Pawlak said.

Carl gave me an uneasy look, which I ignored.

“Well, I tell you what. If we’re finished early, we’ll drop by.”

“Fantastic!” Mayor Pawlak gasped, then continued on his way.

“What the fuck was that?” Carl wondered.

“There’s only one place we can go to find the answer,” I said, turning back along Front Street toward Strosby-Milligan. The menacing Gothic structure seemed to leer at us.

“If nothing else,” Carl said, “I guess this explains why they gave us the Hawaiian shirts for free.”

“You mean it wasn’t because I’m legendary rock star Girth McDürchstein?”

“Stranger things have happened. Don’t they usually charge you extra when they know you?”

I sighed. “Yeah…”

We crossed back and entered the department store.

“Welcome back, Dr. Milligan,” the perky store clerk screeched.

“Thank you…Connie,” I said, checking her nametag surreptitiously. “What’s on the agenda for this afternoon?”

“Isn’t that why you have…him?” Connie said disdainfully as she cocked her head in Carl’s direction.

“Of course,” I said. “Now, Mr…” I couldn’t remember what the mayor had called him, so I trailed off. “If you’ll escort me to my office.”

“Shouldn’t you be in your underground lair?” Connie asked. “Big night tonight.”

“Of course,” I said. “The…underground lair. But first, if anyone needs us, we’ll be in the can.”

Connie gave me a strange look. I grabbed Carl’s hand and pulled him to the men’s room. As I took a crap, I talked to Carl through the door. “Something really weird is up, man. First, this Milligan and…other guy—”

“Stroger,” Carl said.

“Was that it?”

Carl didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I shrugged. I don’t know.”

“Well, they apparently look exactly like us, which is weird enough. But then, they’re hellbent on going to the show tonight. I mean, I can understand why somebody would be really excited about us going to town, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone dress like us or act like us. I’m a true original, and you look like Brian Wilson circa 1985.”

“Hey!”

“Just saying it’s suspicious. Hold on, I’m almost done.” I unraveled some toilet paper, did my thing, and pulled the flush handle.

A low rumble accompanied a hole suddenly opening in the floor. “Carl!” I shouted. After it flushed and refilled, the toilet suddenly angled itself so that i slid off, into the dark tunnel below.

Just before the hole got too small to even see, I saw Carl’s baffled-looking face appear over the hole.

After awhile, I landed comfortably on a fluffy mattress. It was less comfortable when Carl landed right on top of me. I shoved him away, then sat up. We were in some kind of cold, gray, concrete bunker.

“This just got weird,” I said.

“Just?”

A loud, metallic click accompanied the lights shifting from blinding fluorescents to dim, flashing red. One of the walls suddenly pulled open from the center, revealing an enormous, futuristic laboratory brimming with activity.

“Holy asspipes!” I gasped.

“Dr. Milligan,” an attractive young woman in a lab coat said, stopping at the door. “We didn’t expect you back so quickly.”

“Well, I…am speedy,” I said.

“And articulate,” the young woman chuckled.

“Hey, fuck off.”

She looked puzzled, then shrugged it off and said, “Come on. We have news.”

Carl and I shrugged and followed her through the maze-like lab until we reached a high wall filled with giant screens, all broadcasting different images. When we entered the area, the screens congealed into one huge image—the empty stage at Northwestern Michigan College, where we were scheduled to play that night.

The woman in the lab coat said, “It appears the band will go on promptly at eight o’clock. We don’t have much performance data because they’ve played surprisingly few shows—”

“Hey!” I yelped.

“—but we do have enough to roughly estimate the show will last for one hour and 37 minutes, at which time Mr. McDürchstein will retire to the dressing room with his wife, and Mr. Davenport will go and try to…” She cleared her throat. “…’score’ with ‘chicks.’”

She looked at us eagerly.

“So…?”

“So you have an added objective. You must find a plausible way to distance yourself from Ms. Atwater. Getting her involved won’t help us one iota. She was KGB. Bloc KGB.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow the distinction,” I said.

“Please,” the woman said. “Strosby’s rubbing off on you, it seems.”

“In more ways than one,” Carl said. He was trying for seductive, but when he realized what the words meant, he grimaced.

“Bloc KGB agents are purely black-ops, off-books, by-any-means-necessary badasses. Margo Atwater was trained by The Nested Egg, Cyril Ivanovich Abramovsky, the single most dangerous threat in the entire Bloc. She knows a shell game when she sees one, but more importantly, she’s adaptable and unafraid to kill, whether you’re innocent or not. She’s kidnapped, tortured, and often murdered countless citizens for acts as inconsequential as cutting in the breadlines or as extreme as domestic terrorism. In her glory years, all she needed was a firm set of orders. Since she went rogue in ‘95, she only takes orders from herself.”

“And her loving husband,” I added.

The girl in the lab coat laughed. “Good one, Dr. Milligan.”

The screen shifted to an image that looked like a default PowerPoint presentation template, all bulletpoints and clip art graphics.

“To reiterate, you will incapacitate the targets at 1800 hours. We sent marked blueprints of the motel to your PDA. Once they’re out of the way, assert their authority. Go to the concert. Play it as they normally would, only with the scripted between-song banter. If all goes according to plan on this end, you’ll be broadcasting live on every satellite-based channel on the planet.”

“The Abysmal message will finally be heard,” I said longingly.

“I’d hardly call it Abysmal,” Lab Coat said. “Stick to the script. You’ll go from virtual unknown to hero and benefactor in less than two hours. And from there…well, you know the rest.”

I checked out the bulletpoints. Below PERFORM CONCERT BROADCAST THROUGHOUT WORLD, it read:

• Lull the public into a false sense of security as they learn more about you.
• Run for U.S. President, win.
• World Domination Plan #417B.

“Of course,” I said. “Awesome plan.”

Lab Coat chuckled. “Awesome. Already in character, I see.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Carl—I mean, uh, Mr. Strosby and I are just going to, um…go for a walk. How do we leave?”

Looking at me like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, she said, “The porthole.”

After getting lost four times trying to get around the enormous lab, we finally found the porthole in question. Apparently, the lab extended so far underground it butted up against the lake, where researchers studied fish activity and underwater plant life.” It wasn’t actually a porthole so much as a small door leading to a sealed elevator that, apparently, went up to the lake surface.

“This place is fucked,” Carl said as soon as we got into the elevator. It rumbled to the surface, where it opened on an otherwise empty pier.

“You’re not wrong,” I said, stepping out on the pier.

Following, Carl said, “Why, exactly, are they using you to do this world domination scheme? You’re not exactly FDR. You know how much shit they can dig up on you? There’s a thing called electability—”

“Maybe Dr. Milligan realizes I’m a uniter, not a divider,” I said. “For the moment, I’m more popular internationally than I am in the States. That gives me world confidence—I can bring the world together.”

“Not the way you act,” Carl said. “Unless the strategy is ‘unity through a common enemy.’”

“Come on,” I said. “‘Rolling in It’ hit #98. A few people are bound to remember that.”

Carl shrugged. “You do leave a lasting impression. We’d better get to the motel if we’re going to stop these guys.”

So we took a walk back to our motel on the edge of town. Using the PDA Lab Coat gave me, I checked the layout of the motel.

Taking the advice of last year’s Best Picture winner, No Country for Old Men, we elected to rent the motel room opposite ours and sneak through the heating ducts to our own room. It turned out the ducts were far too small for us to fit inside, so we decided on the more direct approach. We noticed the tour van was gone—Mikey had been whining about breakfast, so I figured Margo and Lacey took them out to eat. That meant Milligan and Strosby were either in the motel room by themselves…or they were out with the others. Carl went to the door of our room, knocked gently.

The door open, and to my surprise—I answered it. I know it was Milligan, but the man looked so much like me I couldn’t help but be impressed by such a fine specimen of masculinity.

Milligan’s surprised turned to rage as he grabbed Carl, yanked him into the motel room, and slammed the door. I heard thrashing, glass breaking, screaming, and finally a loud groan from Carl. All the while, I pounded against the door furiously. After a moment, it opened, and I literally fell into the room. Strosby, a doppelgänger for Carl, crouched, waiting. He dragged me by the arms into the room and Milligan slammed the door behind me. I don’t remember much after that, but I’m pretty sure they drugged us.

When I finally awoke, I was lying in a bathtub. Carl was on the floor. Groggily, I leaned over and shook him awake.

“What the fuck?” he wanted to know.

“They’ve infiltrated the band,” I said. “I don’t hear them now. We have to get out of here and think of a plan.”

We helped each other to our feet and, after practicing walking for a little while, left the motel room and holed up at Good Harbor Coffee & Tea, a few blocks from where we were staying.

“If they haven’t found the impostors,” I said, “there’s a possibility—a likelihood—that they won’t believe us if we show up.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Carl said. “They might just be going along with it because they have no clue what those guys have done with the real Girth and Carl. Hell, they could have them tied up or tortured or—”

“No,” I said. “They need the band to sell the illusion. We need to sell the illusion that we’re incapacitated. We won’t contact the rest of the band. We just have to think of a way to somehow get on the stage and…what?”

“Mac-10?”

“Margo’ll kill us where we stand.”

Carl shrugged. “I’m fresh out of ideas.”

So was I. I sighed, sipped my coffee, and looked out on the harbor. Dozens of boats sat docked in various slips. “Boats!” I suddenly exclaimed.

I had a plan.

Late that afternoon—long after the sound check but before the concert—Carl and I hit the stage. Per my specifications, the on-site crew had set up our hydraulic lift with the old canoe. We climbed up on the catwalk and took a look at it.”

“This is a 1075 RPM motor,” I said. “It’s usually about 50 feet high and it takes about two minutes to lower completely, which means…” I tried to do some quick mental math but failed.

Carl piped in, “Each revolution lowers it about two inches.”

“So what would happen if we cranked it up to 10,750 RPM?”

“Won’t that burn the motor out?”

“It’d drop completely in about three seconds,” I said. “Long before the motor burns out. Plus, our weight, combined with the force, will crush whoever’s standing underneath it.”

“Let’s do it,” Carl said.

After we overclocked the motor, Carl and I sat in the canoe until showtime. We had some brief, whispered conversations about our childhood in Cedar Rapids and how much things have changed. It was kind of a good time.

Milligan took the stage, but the bastard stood too far out to get a clear hit with the canoe. We waited through Phone Sex (which he butchered, I might add). When he finished up, Milligan finally backed up and I got a direct hit.

“NOW!” I roared with exceptional manliness.

Carl flipped the motor to life. I can’t describe the experience of it dropping at such tremendous speed. My life flashed before my eyes, it knocked the wind out of me, and then—there we were, standing in front of Margo, Mikey, Riffs, and Strosby. Carl went after Strosby immediately. I helped the stage crew get the canoe off the stage, then surveyed the damaged.

Milligan was pummeled. He lay there, groaning.

“So much for world domination, motherfucker!” I shouted over the approving roar of the crowd.

“This…isn’t…over,” Milligan managed to say before a couple of kids pulled him offstage with a stretcher.

I turned around in time to see Margo firing her Mac-10 into Strosby to save Carl’s life. I felt more horrible than ever for all the terrible things I’ve done, and at that moment I gazed at her with as much love as I’ve ever gazed at a person. Margo and Carl—my two best friends—never got along terribly well, but here she was, publicly executing someone to save him.

I rushed over to her and kissed her with more passion than any human has ever felt in the history of mankind. She gasped, “I love you, Girthy.”

I grinned and said, “Come on, let’s rock.”

I stepped to the mic and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the real Girth McDürchstein is here to rock the fucking planet!”

The audience howled with approval.

“Right now, we are broadcasting through hijacked satellites to every single channel on the planet Earth,” I said. “I’d just like to say to our six billion new fans: put it where it doesn’t belong!!”

We blasted into the eponymous song and played the greatest set in Abysmal history. I could just feel it—Abysmal Crucifix, finally back on the map. Tommy Janofsky nearly decimating my career felt like a distant memory.

Abysmal Crucifix is on the rise. In more ways than one.