Lena did. She put the glass tube in her lips and sucked as hard as she could, yet nothing happened. She tried a few more times, becoming slightly embarrassed, before deciding that maybe this indeed wasn’t for her.
“No, dummy, you gotta light it.” Matt jeered, as he lit a match and leaned over, “Like this.”
As she put the glass pipe between her lips once again, Matt stuck the match in the other end and motioned to her. Lena inhaled as deeply as she dared. Almost immediately, she felt like she was smoking ten cigarettes at the same time. She wanted to stop, but she also didn’t want to look stupid. So, she drew for as long as she could stand it, and then began sputtering profusely.
“What… cough… the hell… cough… is this?!” she hacked.
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough,” the Engineer replied as he grabbed the pipe from her.
“It’s marijuana and it’s what’s gonna turn you into a real musician.” Matt responded seriously.
“I… cough… very much… cough… doubt that…” Lena sputtered. They didn’t have drugs of any kind in the uber-conservative little country of the GDR. Heck, they didn’t even have them in the underground movements. What would any of her punker friends give to get their hands on this? And yet, Lena couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. Almost as soon as she had thought the words, however, her head began to dance. It was a faded sort of wooziness, like being drunk, but far more pleasant and far more relaxed. Come to think of it, it wasn’t anything like being drunk at all. It was a sort-of dizzy—but only sort-of—and her skin tingled ever-so-slightly. Suddenly, she felt just amazing. Like no matter what happened, no matter what bad befell her, it was all gonna work out. Suddenly, she felt like laughing at everything.
“See?” Matt laughed with her. “This is the secret to being a musician. Just get as high as you can and love the hell out of everything.”
“It’s… cough… its different…” she motioned for the pipe back, throwing caution to the wind.
“We’ll turn her into a pot-head yet!” the engineer snorted.
“I doubt that,” she replied indignantly, as she took a drag.
“Oh, trust me…” Matt chuckled as he stole the pipe from her, “you’re gonna want to be high for this show. Everyone out there is positively baked off their ass. You might as well be too.”
Suddenly, the door to the green room swung open, as if it had been kicked in. Matt, the Engineer and Lena all turned to face whoever stood on the other side, although no one but her seemed particularly concerned with it. Fear raised in her heart, but it was immediately assuaged as Vivika walked brazenly into view. She was clad head to toe in hand-sewn leather, with patches everywhere. Half her face was painted in a garish black, and the other an even more garish white; and her boots… oh those were much too high.
“Someone forgot to invite me to the safety meeting,” she said, with genuine upset in her voice. With an audacious gait, she walked over to Matt and stole the pipe. Then she expertly lit it before taking an utterly massive drag. Both of the men watched in awe, as entire seconds passed.
“Now that is how you hit the pipe,” the engineer exclaimed.
Vivika released it from her lips, held the smoke inside of her until Lena felt like she would burst herself. Suddenly, Vivika exploded into a coughing fit, bowling over and cough-laughing profusely.
“That… cough… is… cough… terrible… cough… terrible weed,” she exclaimed, with tears rolling down her painted cheeks.
“Shut your damn mouth!” the engineer replied. “Do they even have this stuff on your side of the Wall?”
“You’d be surprised what we have,” she winked at him, handing the pipe over.
“Well,” Matt exclaimed, “it looks like the party has finally started! West-side boys meet East-side girls.”
The room became choked with smoke—so choked, in fact, that the engineer walked over to the door and began fanning the room with it. This seemed to only push the smoke back into the room, which caused the other three to erupt in laughter. Still he stood there fanning the door with one hand, while attempting to smoke with the other. Not having much success, Vivika pranced over to him and helped hold and light the pipe, which caused even more laughter to erupt. After several minutes of fanning, and smoking, and laughing, however, the engineer finally realized that the feedback loops going on outside the green room in the amphitheater were something that he should probably do something about.
“Alright, time to go pay the bills,” he said gruffly.
“Yeah, go do your damn job!” Matt yelled after him.
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep the pipe safe for you!” Vivika shouted out the door.
After the door had closed and Lena heard the feedback loops begin to die down (much to the applause of the crowd), Matt, Vivika and Lena got back to smoking.
“That,” Matt began, “is a true professional.”
“A man who has found his calling for sure,” Vivika agreed.
Lena didn’t have much to say. She was far too busy sinking back into her chair and feeling wonderful to really care about anything in particular. As the smoke pleasantly filled her senses, another sense came upon her: the sense that she was safe here. Regardless of the reality of that feeling, and regardless of the general austerity of this small closet in this new country, she felt as if she were home.
This may have been the first time that Lena had ever experienced stage-fright in her life. By now, she was a veteran of performance. Well before all of this had started, she had been lauded as one of the up-and-coming vocalists in the Berlin punk scene, and even with her underground status, she had still managed to gain an aura of infamy. But even the largest shows she had ever done were… what, thirty people? The shows were in small churches after all, and punk rock still wasn’t nearly as huge as the hip-hop scene was.
But this… oh this was overwhelming. She had made the mistake of looking out at the crowd while performing her sound check, and she became dizzy almost immediately. It may have only been several hundred; but it looked like a throng of thousands. The crowd below the stage was a swelling mob of hooligans, and the balcony (they had a balcony!) was filled to bursting. Perhaps worst of all, the second she looked up and saw them, the crowd seemed to pick up on this with a wild cheer that shook her to her core.
“Mad Bunny!” a voice exclaimed from nowhere in particular, which made the crowd holler even louder—although not nearly as loud as when Lena responded with an awkward wave. It seemed like everything she did made the crowd cheer.
“Alright, Lead Vocals.” The voice of the engineer cut through the monitor speakers in front of Lena as he motioned from the sound booth,“Show me what you got.”
“T-test… t-test one two…”
The room fell silent as she spoke, and she immediately sensed the raw power she now wielded, echoing into the eons like the horn of the Archangel Gabriel.
“Give me a little more.”
“Test… t-test…”
“I need to hear your loudest voice, ok? Gimme the loudest scream you got.”
She swore she had never heard such a sound in her life. What started out as a tiptoe into the waters of sound as she struggled to find her voice, coalesced into an unearthly crescendo of noise that grew louder, more powerful, and bloody more insane by the millisecond. The sound of her own voice in her head found control of the one coming out of the speakers. The crowd’s response was indescribable.