Jamcracks

My brother had an in with the Hippiest street on the West Side, where all the coolest West Side cats lived, and if they were old enough, worked alongside us in the sewage and the bus-tubs, so were kind of part of the family, working in the restaurants and doing odd jobs or selling “scrap iron” to the shifty antique store owners. They wanted to put on a Giodenes Street Festival, and guess which bands were going to play? The Waxy Ensemble and a trio of super cute blondes who blew some really mean, smart West Side type jazz. My brother Fantasted was at his best, which is to say his worst, getting really picky about the snap of the many fiendishly clever tempo changes he and the kid drummer Bentansche worked out.

It came to pass that I finally was able to whine, bitch, complain and mumble about it enough that my brother got JamCracks, our “band,” a chance to open the Festival, by virtue of switching the PA on a half hour earlier.

Doc got nearly as crazed as Fantasted, but more about the sudden fame he imagined us all getting immediately.

“But wait a humping minute there Doc,” I said, “Now you know, and Ricodebool know, and everybody know, that what we need to do before we can even agree to this gig, is that we need to get us a Gio-odorous drummer or something because Rico can’t pucker up on that beat without one.”

“Slash, now, I love you like a brother,” Doc says back, with a wisecracking carney-con smirk, in full celebrity mode, like he’d been doing a lot lately. “But we have a few things to do first. We got to come up with a pucker-humping name for the band, JamCracks is too 1977, see what I’m mean? We got to address all our gorgeous lipsticked girlfriends as groupies and tell them that they are all groupies now, and then ask them, real quiet, if they know what groupies do? Do they know that? And then ask them if we can see? What them groupies actually do?”

“Shut up, Doc,” Ricodebool said, as the voice of reason tearing teen hormones a new waste hole, “What we got to do first, is cruise over to the West Side to buy some beer and sell a flower or two of chib to one my Hippies up on over there Now.”

So we piled into somebody’s car, maybe two, and when we got back we had to wake Doc up and drag him back up to the attic to party with us.

“Meet Malkamal, our new latin percussion player,” I told him, as we came into the room where there were excited girls smoking chib, and Ricodebool fluttering his fingers over his bass like a skittering critter, making very little sound since he wasn’t plugged in.

Malkamal was a Horghem mother-pucker, very hippie, very northern, you know the kind, the best, the pumping best at banging skins, shuffling, playing, and popping out heart-stopping crisp-shot tempos like a damn machine.

In Bum Shit City we were all the lowest of the low, nobody knew us as anything but northern, though we’d been living in Bum Shit City since the days of slaves and that waste and that terror. But put us next to a Horghem hippie and we all looked like West Side rich pups posing as hippie. So we were into this fortuitous discovery.

Malkamal was a little cracked from the first Now, I’ll admit that. I found him jamming with his bent silhouette against the midnight moon out there on the side of the MackArdo Bridge, and I stopped and brought him back over to the Play Pen, so I hate to admit it—but history proves it all out—so anyway, Malkamal was strange.

He liked to caterwaul during the jams, which could have been cool, if he hadn’t been so crazy. The worst of it was he used all these old slave words when he did it, and none of us were comfortable about that. It was weird, him being way more hippie than any of us, but he still liked rubbing that slave waste in our faces, and we knew that the West Side would like it even less. So we tried to talk him out of it, and he’d say he wouldn’t no more, but then he’d start doing it anyway, every damn time, slave words and everything, like he hadn’t just said he wasn’t going to, right before the song when we had asked him not to.

He never really stopped, so when we got up on the stage we didn’t give him a mic, we just mic’d his congas, but that didn’t stop him one bit. Hippie looked so damn slavish, blonde hair dangling, leaning over, bent near in two, bellowing his bullshit into the conga mic, saying really crude slave shit while the West Side crowd gasped in horror.

We kept playing, though, and Doc did his little theatrical show where we all started jamming some waste up and down, first Makamal, then Ricodebool, then me, and while we was jamming, Doc brings out this big scroll like a high school diploma, because Doc has this thing about not having one because his mom threw his worthless behind out of the house for not having a job when he was seventeen, and never getting his.

He was wearing this old military band jacket, pink and blue with white and gold piping, long tails in the back, fancy and fabulous, and a graduation hat up on his long haired hippie head. He had Fantasted’s old beat up solid body Guitbox, and he started nailing the “diploma” up on his drawing board where he sketched out his Now Filter ideas into the mad genius night, and I was sawing away grinning and wishing Doc knew how to drive a damn nail while I’m waiting and waiting, and everybody’s there in the crowd, including Dobbelker’s little sister Beeniebee, who was screaming and being a good little groupie like all our girlfriends told all they girlfriends to do.

Finally he gets it up and the power chords rip out the pinhead simplicity of “Coda to the Code (of Admirable Puff)” and we start playing and even Makamal’s keeping it simple. We got into a long guitbox intro to the next song and I’m starting to think Makamal’s gone be all right and not yell out any more slave shamers, you know, and we played another song too, and then we started ramping up to our anthem “Party Right Now!” but Makamal can’t restrain himself any more. That disco beat started to shaking everyone’s bones and it was just about as damn hippie as it could ever be on some street on the West Side, and he couldn’t stand it any more and bent almost down to the ground, where the mic on the bottoms of his drums was, his lanky locks dragging in the dirt and the cords and the spilled beer, and started caterwauling and moaning and groaning like the crazy man he was.

Doc hated that slave stuff and he cut that one kind of short after he started to hear the slave “Yowza!” between groans, and we made the biggest mistake of them all, that nobody had foreseen because foreseeing wasn’t what we was any good at doing, in any realistic way, that is.

We started playing what a hippie like me, with no regard for the offended feelings of the West Side slave-masters who had owned my great grand pappy and all that, would think was our funniest and most pointed song, “Throm-Boys Chugging Beer (On the East Side)” about all the West Side rich kids coming over and partying with us tough hippie trash over in Bum Shit City. It exposed, in a way that celebrated the essential otherness of hippie pride, the iniquities yet inherent in the mindless chugging of the corporate overlords contrasted with the voluntary, even eager self abasement of the hippie underclass smiling under they master’s heel.

We were screeching out “Throm-boys!” really loud on the chorus for the pumpity-umpteenth time when somebody with half a brain cut the pucker-pumping juice to the PA, with the hippie half of the audience still singing on, off key but intelligibly, and the West End half either worried to death or just plain disgusted.

It was like Civil Rights was still a sick racist joke as JamCracks retreated sullenly from the silent stage, with only a few half hearted confused yays here and there from the deflated groupies in the crowd. That was our big debut. Some pumper-mother cut us off, and we pretended it was a triumph, drinking ourselves drunk enough to fall, slipping on beer slick floors, passed out the rest of the chaotic impoverished night.

(Note: Set in my alternate world of Orora, during a time equivalent to the 1970s on Earth. The northern populations of this world were poor and enslaved by the rich southern people throughout history. I have chosen the word "hippie" to stand in for the degrading term used by the southern colonizers to label anyone northern, low-class or poor. Chib is a smoked drug, Throm is the ancient capital of the ruling south, Gio is their God, Bum Shit City is the nickname of their side of the river, a notorious slum, and the West Side a nickname for the expensive old town where they work for pennies.)