Pulphead: Essays Read Online Free Page B

West Virginia guys’ occasional truculence might appear to gainsay what I claimed earlier about “not one word spoken in anger,” et cetera. But it was playful. Darius, at least, seemed to be performing a bit for me. And if you take into account what the guys have to be on guard for all the time back home, the notable thing becomes how successfully they checked their instincts at Creation.
    Whatever the case, we operated with more or less perfect impunity from then on. This included a lot of very loud, live music between two and three o’clock in the morning. The guys were running their large PA off the battery in Jake’s truck. Ritter and Darius had a band of their own back home, First Verse. They were responsible for the music at their church. Ritter had an angelic tenor that seemed to be coming out of a body other than his own. And Josh was a good guitar player; he had a Les Paul and an effects board. We passed around the acoustic. I had to dig to come up with Christian tunes. I did “Jesus,” by Lou Reed, which they liked okay. But they really enjoyed Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” When I finished, Bub said, “Man, that’s really Christian. It really is.” Darius made me teach it to him; he said he would take it home and “do it at worship.”
    Then he jumped up and jogged to the electric piano, which was on a stand ten feet away. He closed his eyes and began to play. I know enough piano to know what good technique sounds like, and Darius played very, very well. He improvised for an hour. At one point, Bub went and stood beside him with his hands in his pockets, facing the rest of us, as if guarding his friend while the latter was in this vulnerable trance state. Ritter whispered to me that Darius had been offered a music scholarship to a college in West Virginia; he went to visit a friend, and a professor heard him messing around on the school’s piano. The dude offered him a full ride then and there. Ritter couldn’t really explain why Darius had turned it down. “He’s kind of our Rain Man,” Ritter said.
    At some juncture, I must have taken up my lantern and crept back down the hill, since I sat up straight the next morning, fully dressed in the twenty-nine-footer. The sound that woke me was a barbaric moan, like that of an army about to charge. Early mornings at Creation were about Praise and Worship, a new form of Christian rock in which the band and the audience sing, all together, as loud as they can, directly to God. It gets rather intense.
    The guys had told me they meant to spend most of today at the main stage, checking out bands. But I’d already checked out a band. My task was to stay in this trailer, jotting impressions.
    It was hot, though. As it got hotter, the light brown carpet started to give off fumes from under its plastic hide. I somewhat light-headedly tumbled out the side hatch and went looking for Darius, Ritter, and Bub.
    In the light of day, one could see there were pretty accomplished freaks at this thing: a guy in a skirt wearing lace on his arms; a strange little androgynous creature dressed in full cardboard armor, carrying a sword. They knew they were in a safe place, I guess.
    The guys left me standing in line at a lemonade booth; they didn’t want to miss Skillet, one of Ritter’s favorite bands. I got my drink and drifted slowly toward where I thought they’d be standing. Lack of food, my filthiness, impending sunstroke: these were ganging up on me. Plus the air down here smelled faintly of poo. There were a lot of blazing-hot portable toilets wafting miasma whenever the doors were opened.
    I stood in the center of a gravel patch between the food and the crowd, sort of gumming the straw, quadriplegically probing with it for stubborn pockets of meltwater. I was a ways from the stage, but I could see well enough. Something started to happen to me. The guys in the band were middle-aged. They had blousy shirts and halfhearted arena-rock moves from the