“Victor, say something!” Vortecx continued.
“Jakob,” Vivika threatened, “if you don’t settle down, I swear I will…”
“You will what? Tell my mommy on me, will you? Call the fuckin’ Shtasi and have them lock me up?”
“N-no, Jakob…” Vivika backed off, slightly.
“What is your problem?!” Lena finally snapped, “Jakob, you need to settle down. We have to make a good first impression and then we have to load in and sound check everyone. We…”
“We?!” Jakob howled, punching the window, “What do ye mean we?! This ish your show! Why don’t you go do your own shoundcheck!”
“Would you please…”
“No, I won’t ‘please’! Fuck all of you! Thish ish my first time outshide of the wall, and damned if your gonna ruin all my fun!”
“Victor, do something!” Vivika shouted, to no avail.
Jakob, red-faced and sideways, slid open the door to the touring bus and stumbled out. He fell at first, and then fell again as he attempted to stand up. After several attempts at righting himself, he finally managed to calibrate his inner compass and bolt in an all-out sprint. He did so across the parking lot towards the large throbbing mob of women who danced to at least three completely separate beats and genres.
“A real help you were, Victor!” Vivika chastised him.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I… I just…”
“Some tour manager you are.” she responded, crossing her arms and pouting, “Now what are we going to do?! Our guitarist just ran off! We need to bring him back before we can check in!”
“How the hell are we going to do that?!” Vortecx interjected, “Look at him? He’s going crazy!”
Indeed, the wild Jakob did seem to be going crazy. He ran all over the parking lot, losing clothing as quickly as he seemed to be losing his mind, and flailing his arms about. He ran up to stranger after stranger, shouting obscenities and laughing raucously, before rocketing off into the distance. A few moments later and Jakob was nowhere to be seen.
“We have to go after him, Lena!” Vivika shouted, as she began opening a side door to step out.
“We can’t leave yet!” Lena cried, “We still have to check in, load our gear, and then… and then…”
Oh this was insufferable. Their first real show that just happened to be in the West, and also just happened to be the biggest show of their life, and Jakob had already taken major steps to ruining it all. Especially if he wound up arrested, or murdered, or… or… I mean, whatever else could befall a drunken guitar player from a foreign country. And Victor had been so uncharacteristically unhelpful. What in the world was the matter with him?!
“Oh, don’t worry about it, ma’am.” Victor spoke up quietly, as if reading Lena’s mind, “There’s always a way to make things work.”
He spoke with a note of stress in his voice, like a young man far out of his natural habitat. He sounded unsure of himself, as if his last statement was more of a hope than a certainty. And yet, when Lena turned her head to glare profusely at him, she could swear that she saw him wink at her.
Oh, this evening was just a disaster. What had only started with Jakob running off continued on into a flurry of misunderstandings and mistakes. As bad as those had been, they had culminated in a fate nearly worse than death: Nicht Zustimmen likely wouldn’t be playing tonight—in no small part due to Victor’s newfound inability to make friends with anyone. Sadly, this newfound ability was even less helpful in making friends with the show’s promoter: someone a new band really wanted to be friends with.
“You know who this is, right?!” Victor howled at the promoter, after finding out that Nicht Zustimmen’s set was getting cut two songs short so that The Dead Weights could play longer.
The cramped hallways and storage rooms between the loading bay and the performance hall were full of movement and conversation. Band members and roadies alike moved through each other like streams of water colliding, equal parts intoxicated, recalcitrant youth, and heavy amplifiers. Perhaps this wasn’t the best place for a shouting match; especially in front of the other opening bands. Yet Victor didn’t seem to be picking up on that one bit. He just hollered away at the promoter, who was a seven-foot, stooping, long-haired skeleton who looked like he used to run marathons before picking up a speedball addiction.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.” the promoter brushed it off.
“This is the Mad Bunny! That’s right! This woman right here! You know the one you hear about on the radio?!”
“Look pal,” the promoter responded apathetically, “I get hundreds of people like you through here a month. You all think you got some big break after finding out that you’re on a bill with a decent headliner, but in two weeks all your bands break up. Then it’s your new crappy band wanting to play a month later. So just take what you have, and get your act together for sound-check. Alright?”
“But it’s the Mad Bunny!” Victor insisted.
Lena had to admit that it was getting really annoying both hearing her nickname incessantly thrown around, and watching ‘Victor the undercover intelligence agent’ fail at diplomacy with a coke-head.
“Read my lips, pal!” the promoter shouted back, “I don’t care who it is! Some punk twat made it over the wall? Big deal! I get kids in here like that all the time, all with the same fake story. Go find someone else to bother.”
“But… but sir!” Victor yelled after him.
“Three songs!” the promoter yelled back as he lumbered away, “Three songs cut!”
“Damnit, damnit, damnit, damnit!” Victor shouted, as he punched a nearby wall, “The nerve of these people!”
“Victor!” Lena shouted at him, “What in the world has gotten into you?!”
And that’s when the worst thing happened… oh, this was just too much. The hallway, furiously a-bustle with musicians and roadies, came grinding to an awkward halt to stare at the two of them. Lena couldn’t place anyone from her quick, awkward glances about the room, but she instinctively knew that at least someone from The Dead Weights was watching her and Victor make a scene. She simply had to rope this in before they lost what little credibility they still had left. Unfortunately, Victor beat her to it.
“Stop yelling at me!” he gestured pathetically at her, “I’m doing the best I can, ok?! First your guitarist completely bails on you, and now this! I don’t know how to fix this!”
“B-but… but…” Lena stuttered, “You’re our tour manager! It’s your job to know how to fix situations like this!”
“I know but… b-but… I just…”
Oh, it was utterly infuriating seeing Patrick like this. And in front of everyone?! Simply everyone had paused to watch him break down in front of her, and it wasn’t even the ‘amused’ sort of watching—it was the awkward, ‘I-wish-I-hadn’t-seen-this’-sort. It took everything she had to keep using his pretend name. Whatever damage he had already caused, it didn’t bode well to create even more trouble.
“Just what, Victor?! Just what?!”
“I’m s-sorry…” he pleaded and stuttered, crying openly, “I just… I just need a moment…”
With that, Patrick (err, Victor) stumbled out of the hallway, out of the loading dock and into the night, leaving Lena to stare at everyone.
“What in the hell are you all looking at?!” she yelled at them all.
Sensing her feelings on the matter, the room went back to its previous shuffle, allowing the din of conversation to drown out the heat of awkward air that still fogged up the place. Yet she didn’t feel the slightest bit better. The night hadn’t even begun, and far more than it had been ruined. Not only was her show shot to pieces; not only would she have to break the hearts of her remaining band-mates; and not only was her view of Patrick irreparably damaged; but what would Grandfather do now that everything was ruined?!