Spacing Out on Cocaine

I like Obama, I voted for him. Here's a short story in which Obama makes an appearance. I'm not making fun of Obama, I don't know why I added him as a character to this story, it just formed that was as I was writing it. I hope you like it.


Spacing Out on Cocaine
by Jason Earls, author of Cocoon of Terror & Red Zen
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711


“Where are you going?” Lars’ girlfriend asked.

“Be back in a minute,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit pensive and need to meditate in the bathroom before my last set.”

“But remember, you’ve got Cocaine coming up!” she yelled. “It’s your best song!”

“I know. I’ll be ready...” Lars said, heading toward the bathroom.

Jesus, give me some peace, bitch, he thought pushing open the bathroom door. His girlfriend was always on his back, bitching and moaning, pushing him to advance in his musical career so that he would make enough money to pay for the plastic surgery necessary to turn herself into a supermodel.

But now he was getting ready to play the last set of the night. Only 45 minutes of music left, then the gig would be over and Lars could go home and relax with a few cold beers. Lars was the lead guitarist in the band Diaphanous-Dolphin and one of his most popular cover songs, Cocaine by Eric Clapton, was next on the set list. Lars could solo over Cocaine all night long without ever running out of ideas: the simple E to D chord progression, the E minor pentatonic scale, and Lars’ naturally bluesy vocals were all he needed to set the crowd ablaze.

Lars had a ritual before the last set of every gig. A secret ritual. He liked to go into the bathroom to regroup and energize himself by snorting a couple of lines of cocaine. It helped him get through the nights when he didn’t feel like playing. Just two lines of coke would give him plenty of physical energy and open his mind to considerably expand his guitar phrasing. You see, while tripping out in the pentatonic box, a lot of guitarists have a tendency to repeat themselves; and Lars couldn’t stand playing any of the same phrases twice during the course of a gig. He always strived to unleash fresh stimulating melodies upon the crowd, thinking that he could improvise as well as saxaphone legend, Charlie Parker, even though as a musician Lars would not have even registered as a tiny pubic hair on the late great Charlie Parker’s buttocks.

Lars went into the bathroom stall and pulled a baggie from his front pocket, then he took out his wallet from his back pocket and sat down on the toilet. He noticed a Hunter S. Thompson book on the floor, reached down and grabbed it, placing it on his lap. He opened the baggie and poured out some of the cocaine. Next he took a credit card and a straw from his wallet, formed two lines of coke on the book, then snorted the cocaine up into both nostrils – first the right, then the left – with two powerful blasting inhalations.

Ahhh, whooo, that stuff really has some kick, Lars thought as he shook his head and squeezed the tip of his nose.

He put the drug paraphernalia away and threw the Hunter S. Thompson book on the floor. Then he felt something loosen in his lower stomach, so he leaned up and pulled down his pants and sat back down on the toilet. A good crap before the last set always helped him a lot too.

Lars sat there voiding his bowels, thinking about his present situation in life: Wow, I’m almost 40 years old and I’m still playing in a little rock band at these ridiculously small clubs. I can barely make enough money to even survive. I have no chance of ever recording an album, no chance of touring or getting a decent band manager. I play with guys who aren’t even creative enough to write one fucking original song. Not a damn song of their own, or who will allow me to play one of my own originals. I just perform other musician’s material every freakin’ night – promoting other people’s music, like a chumped-out loser working for free. I’ll never get anywhere with this crap. I’ll never do anything in music that’s worthwhile like the heroes that I grew up listening to: Metallica, Guns ‘N Roses, The Sex Pistols, Rick Springfield, George Thorogood and the Destroyers, AC/DC, Miles Davis, Slayer, Billy Squier, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Pantera, Ozzy, Megadeth, Aerosmith, The Swans, Van Halen, Black Flag, John Lee Hooker, Poison, Tone Loc, The Butthole Surfers, R.L. Burnside, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Black Sabbath, The Doors, The Beastie Boys, Junior Kimbrough, Nirvana... I’m just living a stupid wannabe rock star dream. You’d think I would have grown up by now. But no, not me. My day job at the nursing home is fucking horrible. I’m truly screwed, burnt out, wasted, dead, cynical, daunted, defeated, fucked over, jaded, destroyed, and pissed off. But you know what? I don’t care. Because I’m getting ready to go out there and play E.C.’s Cocaine after snorting some cocaine of my own and it’s going to be fantastic. I’ll lose myself in the music. I’ll trip out and fly away. Hell, I’ve played Cocaine a million times by now but I’m going to go out play it the best ever in just a few minutes. I’ll release every ounce of emotion and anger from my body and my mind and my transcendental soul to show everyone in the audience that I’m not a loser. I’m a damn good guitar player, I know that much. I’ll show everyone. Nope, I’m not going to sit here thinking about my shitty life and becoming more and more depressed. I’m going to go out there and kick ass on stage and then I’ll be a real man. No one will ever call me a pussy or a pansy ever again. Fuck it, I’m a man.

Lars grabbed some toilet paper and wiped his ass, then he stood up and pulled on his pants and fastened his belt with the large silver Guns ‘N Roses belt buckle. He went out of the stall and over to a mirror. Although Lars loved blues and classic rock the most, he affected a heavy metal look on stage: Faded jean jacket cut off at the sleeves to reveal his heavily-muscled arms; leather straps with long silver spikes wrapped around both wrists; a large silver chain with small golden guitars hanging around his neck; a big blue battleaxe tattooed across his whole throat; his hairy chest visible below showing his large pectoral muscles; long flowing black hair cut into a perfect mullet shape. “Looking good,” he said, smiling into the mirror.

He went out to the stage and grabbed his black Gretsch Electromatic solid body guitar and put it on. He turned to his drummer and counted off the tune and they started the E to D chord progression of Cocaine and the audience hooted and cheered. Lars took a brief solo at the beginning, bending some notes, adding a wide stinging vibrato ala Albert King. His guitar sound was that of a man mega-pissed off, on the brink of defeat, almost every ounce of life sucked from his haggard body, a person filled with almost homicidal despair and angst, and every person in the crowd could feel it, because each of them felt exactly the same way Lars did. He stepped over to the microphone, grimaced and puckered his lips, then started belting out the lyrics.

If you wanna hang out you’ve gotta take her out - cocaine... If you wanna get down, go down to the ground - cocaine... When your day is done and you wanna run on - cocaine. If you got bad news, you wanna kick them fuckin’ blues - cocaine... She don’t lie, she don’t lie, no baby she dont fuckin’ lie - COCAINE!

Lars sang the lyrics so intensely he started feeling searing pain in his vocal chords, but he kept on going, hoping he could make it to the solo section, where he could relax and forget about everything and trip out on his guitar with complete abandon and ferocity.

The solo section arrived and he began with some slow melodic phrases in the 7th position of the neck, bending and releasing and plucking the strings with his fingers, then he worked his way up to the 12th position and played some fast pentatonic quintuplets and transitioned into quick bursts of finger-tapping and trills. Then, for no reason at all, he moved up to the 22nd fret and bent the highest note on his fret board two full steps while leaning into the microphone and screaming “COCAINE!” in the highest falsetto voice he could manufacture; and as he did so, he felt something snap inside his brain – all of the cocaine he’d snorted earlier kicked in at that precise moment with complete force.

He blacked out for a fraction of a second, then awoke to see President-elect Barack Obama’s disembodied head floating before him in space. Obama’s head was surrounded by golden light coming through dark clouds with a few white feathers floating and descending. The music Lars had been playing earlier could still be heard faintly in the background, with him playing guitar somewhere down below.

“What’s going on?” Lars asked.

“I don’t know, what’s going on?” Barack Obama’s floating head responded.

“What are you doing here?”

“Nothing, what are you doing here?”

“What do you mean ‘nothing.’ You’re Barrack Obama and you’re floating here in front of me. I’m supposed to be playing a gig right now, but I’m somewhere in outer space. Let me go back down to where the music is.”

“I’m not holding you here. You’ve chosen to be talking to me. This is your fault, Lars... Don’t worry though, your gig is still going fine down below with you still playing guitar. You’re just having an out-of-body experience at the moment... By the way, I’m not Barrack Obama.”

Lars looked down at his fingers. He was still holding his guitar, a few white feathers fell on the fretboard, he could hear music faintly in his style of playing, but his fingers were not moving. “You are too Barrack Obama. I may be spaced out on cocaine right now, but I’m not crazy. Of course you’re Barrack, you look exactly like him.”

“Perhaps I do resemble him, but it’s only because our brains have been swapped. I’m really Eric Clapton.”

“What.”

“A doctor swapped our brains. My brain – Eric Clapton’s – was put inside Barack Obama’s skull, which you are seeing now, and Barack’s brain was put into my head. You’re actually talking to Eric Clapton right now, not Obama. Can’t you tell by my British accent?”

“I thought that was a little odd. Still, this is ridiculous. Way too confusing. I can’t talk to Eric Clapton when he looks like Obama. Aren’t you going to be our president soon?”

“I guess so. I’m the President-elect.”

“Do you know anything about politics?”

“Of course not, I’m Eric Clapton. I only know how to play blues guitar.”

“Wow, the United States is really going to be fucked up soon.”

“Yes it is, but I can’t help it... Let’s change the subject. I’m here to give you something.”

“What’s that?” Lars said.

“The essence of all music summed up in one melody.”

“Pardon?”

“I am going to give you a melody that will contain the essence of all music.”

“Yeah, sure. What would I do with that?”

Obama’s face fell into a scowl. “Don’t you realize how powerful that would be? The melody will contain the essence of every musical phrase in the universe, every prior one congealed into it. This melody will be an otherworldly divine phrase so mesmerizing when it’s played audiences will become hypnotized and fall in love with you and become your greatest fans for the rest of your life.”

“Uh huh, right,” Lars said sarcastically. He was now in a slight stupor, but could still hear himself playing electric guitar down below on Earth and he was losing interest in the conversation. He turned around and tried to see through the dark clouds to where the gig was taking place, but only blurry images of the people phasing in and out were visible. “I really need to get back down there. Is this almost over?”

Barrack Obama’s floating head continued, “If you record the melody on an album of your own, realize that it will instantly become the best-selling record of all time. And I mean OF ALL TIME.”

“I could certainly use that. But what happens when other musicians hear it, they’ll have the melody too.”

“No they won’t. I’ll make it so that no other musician will be allowed to play it because they’ll be blocked from fully hearing all the notes – one tone will automatically cancel out in their minds and they won’t be able to receive the full musical phrase.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No. It’s weird, but not impossible.”

Lars hung his head in thought for a few seconds. “All right, I believe you, Mr. Clapton. But I just want to get back to my gig now.”

“So you’re ready to receive the melody?” Obama’s head said.

“Yeah.”

The floating head began humming in a soft whisper but Lars couldn’t hear the entire melody before the whole world turned black, then surreal science fiction images appeared in his brain, pictures of quarks melting into gigantic noses, skinny nude supermodel-androids doing back flips on floating tramplines, gluons exploding into ferocious balls of fireworks, and Obama’s face transforming into a geometrical 24-dimensional crystal lattice representation of God – every one of the macabre images freezing inside of Lars’ mind. He looked down at his guitar and saw how quantum chromodynamics drove the inner workings of the electronics and he instantly understood every substance in the universe on a subatomic level; but he also received Clapton’s divine melody in the midst of all this outlandish information, without ever realizing it.

He awoke on stage in his own body, still soloing away on his guitar. He turned around and signaled the band to end the tune, then he hit a final E major chord with the drummer who pounded a loud crash on his cymbals.

But after finishing the song, everything that had happened was still too much for Lars to digest: him soloing too intensely, screaming Cocaine in a ludicrously high falsetto, talking to Eric Clapton’s brain inside of Obama’s skull, seeing the disturbing science fiction images, Lars could not take in all of this material, so he fell back on the stage and blacked out from total shock and exhaustion.

His girlfriend was watching out in the audience. She shrieked when she saw Lars hit the floor and slowly made her way through the crowd, the room was now filled with awkward silences and embarrassed looks, which she tried to ignore. She climbed the stairs and went over to Lars, unplugged his guitar so that he could keep it on, then hoisted him up, throwing his now lifeless body over her shoulder. She carried the poor unconscious bastard off the stage toward the dressing rooms.

Lars awoke while riding on his girlfriend’s back. He glanced around still in a deep daze. “Where is he?”

She didn’t put him down, but walked faster to the dressing room. “Where is who?”

“Obama’s head. Did he give it to me? Do I have it?”

“Have what? What are you talking about?”

“The melody! It’s really important, the greatest melody of all time. An instant best seller if ever recorded on an album.” Lars paused and looked around as he passed a few audience members who were staring at him with their mouths open.

“You’ve gone crazy, Lars,” his girlfriend said, stilling carrying him on her back through the club with her powerful legs. “You’ve been snorting cocaine again in the bathroom, haven’t you? Goddamn it I told you never to do coke before playing Cocaine again. The double whammy effect from it is way too dangerous. You know you can’t handle heavy drugs so you better knock it off. You’re going to fry your brain and never be able to play another song again.”

Lars looked over his girlfriend’s shoulder, he stared down at the ground, bouncing as she carried him back stage. He heard a faint melody begin somewhere deep in his brain. A nice slow phrase, hypnotic and ethereal, which gradually came to full fruition in his mind. It was the divine melody that Eric Clapton had given him from Obama’s head while he was spaced out on cocaine, the greatest melody of all time. It slowly gained in volume and intensity, the phrase picking up in tempo until the entire thing played out entirely in his addled mind. He started humming it a little as he rode on his girlfriend’s back, but he was careful to leave out a few notes so she wouldn’t hear the full thing. He felt now that the musical phrase contained the true secret of the universe and the meaning of life and was more powerful than a hundred nuclear explosions combined.

“THERE IT IS! I GOT IT! HE REALLY GAVE ME THE MELODY! ALL RIGHT! I KNOW IT’S GOING TO GIVE ME A MAJOR WORLD-WIDE HIT SOON! FUCKING A! SHIT YEAH! OH. MY. GOD. I’M GOING TO BE A TRUE ROCK STAR SOON.”

“Shut up and calm down!” his girlfriend said. “You can lie down in a minute.”

But Lars was not sick, he was only excited about the melody, although he knew better than to play it on his guitar that day, or even the next. He was going to save it. For better times and greater things to come. Soon he would be making millions of smackaroos, hypnotizing audiences, making ladies chase him through the streets, wrecking hotel rooms, raising hell on airplanes in mid-flight, receiving insane fan letters, breaking into casinos, swilling hard liquor and doing every drug known to man, yeah, soon Lars would have the whole fucking world by the balls.

His girlfriend set him down in the dressing room, he leaned back and fell onto a cool leather couch setting behind him. He still had his Gretsch Electromatic around his neck. He slid his hand up and down the fret board, trying to get the feel of his guitar again and pull himself out of the lingering cocaine daze. He played a few blues licks and strummed an E9 chord, then fingered an A7. Everything was quiet in the room, his girlfriend had left to get him a glass of cool water.

Lars heard movement outside in the hallway. Footsteps getting louder.

A man walked into his dressing room. It was President-elect, Barack Obama. Wearing a black suit with a red tie. Lars stared at him with his mouth open. Obama came closer, holding out his hand. Obama said, “Hello, Lars, how are you?”

Lars’ mouth fell open even wider and his fingers stopped moving on his guitar.

He noticed Obama was not speaking with an English accent now. But he still didn’t know whether it was Eric Clapton in there, or the President-elect.

“What are you doing here?” Lars said.

“Play me the melody you were given...”

-end-

http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711

Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Red Zen, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Heartless Bast*rd In Ecstasy, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Neometropolis, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.