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Copps Colliseum. 8:45 p.m.
We were feeling the effects of the beer, and we were checking out the crowd to see if we’d recognize any diehard rock’n’roll fans from our days at Irondale. Hamilton is a big city, but it also has a distinctly small-town feel; even in this town of almost half a million, it’s not uncommon to bump into an old friend, neighbour, or co-worker.
We bought some more beers from the concession stand and made our way down to the floor seats Reingruber had so graciously purchased for us. The place was packed. The crowd was mostly male, in their early twenties, leather-clad.
The place was jammed to the rafters. Dope smoke filled the air. Walking down the centre aisle, Valentini said into my ear, “I’m too old for this shit.” He was shaking his head, eyeing the crowd suspiciously. There were a few pockets of people our age, but we felt conspicuously old.
“Maybe we should have asked for wheelchairs,” I joked.
The opening act was called Scream Chamber. They hailed from New York City, and were decked out in bizarre leather masks and bondage gear. Kind of a cross between Hannibal Lecter and the New York Dolls. On either side of the drum kit, walls of Marshall amps were stacked twenty high—in school I’d fantasized about having the same set-up. The lead singer had a voice like a thousand electric razors that made you wince when he sang.
Reingruber was stoked. He double-fisted two extra-large cups, spilling beer over the edges, and he’d worn his vintage Led Zeppelin Houses of the Holy t-shirt. In the stadium washroom, he’d frizzed out his long brown hair and painted under his eyelids with Alice Cooper style black make-up. It had been years since I’d seen anyone this excited, this frenetic, as if he were still that hopped-up thirteen-year-old I’d once known, hot with puberty and daily injections of Rush, Ted Nugent, Kiss, and Robin Trower. I didn’t know whether to cry for this poor bastard or laugh my head off with delight.
We found our fifteenth-row seats and Reingruber immediately hopped up onto his seat with an uncanny deftness. He drained both cups, then dropped them to the floor with gusto. Soon he was jabbing his hands into the air high above his head, in the timeless rock’n’roll symbol of devil horns. “Aaaaawesome!!” he shrieked, his cracking voice barely audible above the din. “Aaaawesummm!!!!!”
He started head-banging to Scream Chamber. Thirty-Nine and going strong. March onward, brave rock’n’roll warrior. March on. But you are going to have whiplash in the morning, I thought.
Eventually, though, I couldn’t help myself, cheering lustily. Reingruber’s enthusiasm was infectious. Pappas jammed index and middle fingers into either side of his mouth and blasted a great Seventies-style call-your-kid-home-for-dinner street whistle. Valentini cracked a wry smile, and shook his head at the fiasco he’d found himself talked into. He probably felt like our chaperone.
All at once, and quite unexpectedly, Scream Chamber blasted into a psycho version of the Sex Pistols’ Liar. I couldn’t believe it! I loved that song. Chamber sounded pretty good playing it, too. The crowd went ballistic.
The singer, interestingly named Slightly Bigger, whipped off his mask, revealing a face painted with thick, dark make-up. His eyes bugged out just as Johnny Rotten’s had when he’d sung the song back in the Seventies.
“Liar, lie lie liar, you liar, lie, lie, lie, tell me why, tell my why, why d’ya have to lie? ... “
We pumped our middle-aged bodies up and down like well-oiled pistons, exactly like the metal freaks surrounding us were doing, as Reingruber’s hair whipped through the air like a fuzzy scarf. The beer was going down far too easily.
The next part was terrible.
I’d been so immersed in my head banging that it took me a moment to realize that a powerful spotlight had encapsulated me in its beam. The band that had kicked its way into the song with a gutteral ferocity now brought that same energy to an end with a screeching halt. Even the crowd of fifteen thousand stopped shouting. Only Slightly Bigger continued. But he sang with a softer voice now, a sinister, un-plugged voice. I knew that he was singing directly to me.
“You’re in suspension, you’re a liar ...”
I was shell-shocked. I wanted to yell back across the restless crowd, but my brain wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t have come up with words if my very life had depended on it.
Desperately, I searched my friends’ faces, but they wouldn’t look at me. They silently jumped and shouted to the music. I thrust out my hands in supplication, but Tony seemed to have moved just out of reach. I searched faces of the young metal heads around us. They, too, were ignoring me. I was filled with horror. I wasn’t even worth a glance of contempt!
“I’m not a liar!” I cried out. But I knew that no one could hear my thin, whining voice.
“Donny Love is a liar,” Bigger cooed in that gravelly, evil voice. “Lie! Lie! Lie! Lie! When you gonna stop? You gotta stop,” and now his voice was rising, rising to a terrible, blood-freezing hell-shriek, “or MegaFreak is gonna chew on your bones!”
I suddenly became aware of someone shaking my arm. In a daze, I found myself looking up at Valentini’s concerned face. I was on my knees in a puddle of beer at our seats. My mouth felt as dry as cotton.
“Are you OK, Donny? Are you gonna be sick?” Tony pulled me up to my feet. I distantly thought about how strong he must be, to be able to lift my weight like that. The sound of the concert was deafening.
Tony turned to Pappas beside him and yelled out, “I think Donny’s sick. I’m gonna take him to the men’s room!”
I managed to find my voice. “No,” I croaked, “I’m OK to get there on my own. I just need some air.”
Tony looked dubious, but I waved him back to his seat. “Enjoy the show. I’m OK, man.”
I don’t remember how I got to the washroom, exactly, but I do remember the violent vomiting that I did there. I heard more than a few men who came in while I was there comment with alarm.
“Holy shit!” one young guy said. “That guy’s puking up a kidney!”
One older man asked me through the door if he could bring the paramedics to take a look at me. I weakly thanked him for his offer but declined.
I sat out the rest of the concert on the cold, dirty floor of the Level Two bathroom, shaking and disoriented. I knew that what I’d experienced was an hallucination, but I was still terrified, the way you are after waking from a terrible nightmare. Oh, God, I prayed, please don’t let me crack up. Please just help me to fix this whole disaster. I just want Allison back, and our baby—I just want to finally straighten myself out. Please.
I managed to pull myself together enough to meet the guys as they shuffled out in the sea of humanity at the end of the show. Tony and John were craning their heads left and right, trying to spot me in the crowds. When they saw me weakly waving my arm, they pushed through, concern on their faces. Reingruber looked unaware of any drama, a blissed-out, exhausted expression on his painted face.
“Where did you go, Love? Are you OK?” Tony scanned my face. “We were ready to send Security out looking for you.”
“Sorry, guys, I couldn’t get back to our seats. The crowds were too thick, so I just watched the rest of the show from the top of the aisle,” I lied. My voice sounded foreign to me, faraway and thin.
“Can’t handle your pop anymore, eh, Donny?” John joked, but he looked sympathetic. “Ah, we’re not kids anymore, any of us. This is the last time I drink this much. I don’t feel so hot myself. And I think that I just lost most of my hearing!”
On the cab ride home, we were all sunk in our own thoughts. I saw Valentini glance in concern at me a few times, but I didn’t have enough energy left to reassure him that I was OK. Because I wasn’t.
