Too Much To Contain

Too Much To Contain

‘Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.’

~ Tennessee Williams

His nefarious gaze made sycophants of us all.  His conscience, secretly as twisted as his wily grin, mislead a small devote crowd of admirers with a malevolent bombshell.  I was there.   I was one of the lucky ones who narrowly escaped, almost physically unscathed by the episode.  But, I will never be able to un-see what I saw, I will never fully recover.  The scars run too deep, they are too heartrending. 

Allow me to start at the beginning.

Rudolph Dandy rose to fame quickly in the early nineties, breaking barriers with his shock rock glam punk band, Vagrant Maniacs.  Known affectionately as Rude in those days, he was both revered and despised for his ostentatious stage antics, themed get-ups and objectionable props.  For example, one night he would regale his audience with a chainsaw wielding Geisha in a traditional Japanese kimono and a face full of deranged Kabuki make-up, another night he might walk on stage a gun-toting nun or renegade cowboy in sequined hot pants, black leather thigh high boots and a cape, then there would be the odd night where he’d appear as himself, sharp and handsome and openly vulnerable in jeans, a t-shirt, bare feet and a mess of flaxen hair pulled back exposing his cagey hazel eyes.  It was the popular opinion, those were the best shows. 

Vagrant Maniacs spoke to my teenage rampage.  They satiated my hungry heart with their raucous anthems, impressed me with their stunning rock ‘n’ roll spectacle, and sang straight into my young pliable psyche.  I was a lonely kid, frumpy, a face full of pimples and a mouth full of braces, an only child to a single mother who worked two jobs to make ends meet.  I spent a lot of time home alone after school and on weekends with stacks of books and music videos to keep me company.   Sometimes I would sneak my friends in while Mom was at work but if she caught me I was in for a world of hurt and I wasn’t a fan of her noxious wrath.  The only friend she ever allowed in the house without question when she wasn’t there was Cameron, my best friend, not a boyfriend friend but a best brother kind of friend.

I saw Vagrant Maniacs for the first time on Much Music.  Cameron, a total music nerd called me and said, “Sade!  Go turn on Much.  Quick!”

I was home alone and up to my elbows in stringent Sunlight soap suds doing dishes but I shuffled my Converse All Stars into the living-room and turned on the TV and there they were searing into my psyche, the band that altered my insides.  They appeared on my postage-stamp sized tube TV screen preposterous and hard-hitting but it was an immediate understanding.  It was like every song was for me, was me, from my guts outward.  Lyrics, saturated in rich rebelliousness, themes oozed of bravado and courage, their looks, outfits, hair, guitars and accessories oozed scandal and confident conviction.  Those songs, so infectious, some with burlesque beats and then some with contradictory treble tones and slashing guitar riffs pushed me beyond the periphery of my adolescent awkwardness, enlightened my slight wallflower carriage and unceremoniously blew my mind.  Chev was delicious with his booming bass, pink lips and shock of bleached pixie hair. Hash was haunting with his shiny olive skin, monster eyes and flying V guitar.  Stomp was massive, muscular and intimidating behind the drums and even more so when he wore a full feathered war bonnet.  And then there was Rude, front and center, strikingly androgynous, Bowie-esque but far more man than woman.   I was taken with is overt sexuality, his sidewinding and caterwauling, penetrating green eyes and magnetic charisma.  He was riveting.  They all were, misfit Svengalis; flashy, explicitly artificial, super hokey with a high moral concept.  As a band they were a contradiction at every turn and with someone so truly imperial leading the pack I couldn’t resist their power.  I was seduced and happily traded my school uniform on weekends for glittered cheeks and time spent obsessing over every little detail of their music and Rude’s superstar torso.

Cameron and I spent countless Saturdays poring over music magazines geeking out about our champions.  Cameron, far more articulate than I, would carry on long conversations about how much we loved our band.

“Rude is everyone’s unspoken desire, don’t you think, Sade?”

“He’s my Chico and I am his Muchacha.”

“His phenomenology is so amazing, don’t you agree, Sade?  Like, as a creative person, he’s so passionate and intense.  He’s a visionary and I think he will always be seen as someone who has a strong impact on our culture.”

“He has a strong impact on something. I feel tingly in my girly bits when I look at him.”

 “Quelle surprise!  You’re such a girl.”

He went on to read aloud part of an interview with Rude from Rock Talk Magazine:

RD:         Brilliance can be brutal, man.  Cleverness is a permanent affliction, at least in our experience.  But, we do what we do because it moves us and we are good at what we do. 

RT:          Do you think your audience understands what you set out to accomplish?

RD:         We don’t really think about it.  There’s no point in concerning ourselves with our audience when we set out to achieve something, or someone else’s standards or limits.  We do it and those who want to come along will.  We are interested in our own ideas, not barriers and norms.  That shit is boring.  And listen, we don’t have an unintelligent audience anyway.  They aren’t pretentious or fakes, the people who buy our records and come to the shows are shooting for perfection just as much as we are.  What we do is on our own terms, the (the audience) does it on theirs.  That’s what makes rock ‘n’roll so fucking miraculous, people come together for a communal high.  It has nothing to do with zooming in on an exalted figure to follow, I’m not exalted anything, I’m just doing what comes naturally, if people believe in it, that’s great, if they don’t, there is always the Spice Girls.

Vagrant Maniacs are currently touring Japan in support of their platinum selling record, King’s Barbarians.

“See, Sade.  He proved my point exactly.  Who needs the Spice Girls when you’ve got a band with chutzpah, a band who isn’t selling you merchandise and overpriced concert tickets, Vagrant Maniacs bestow upon us an opportunity to be exactly who we are supposed to be without condition.  They don’t give us something to dance about, they are the dance.   Right, Sade?”

Precocious little bugger, my pal Cameron.  He was right, he always was.  About everything.  Not just about our band but about things in general.  In addition to being a total Vagrant fan, he loved the news.  In 1997, he predicted that fourteen year old Tara Lipinski would become the youngest women’s world figure skating champion and she did, he was adamant that after Timothy McVeigh was convicted on fifteen counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing he would be sentenced to death, he was indeed sentenced to death.  And when the funeral of Princess Diana aired on television from Westminster Abbey, he sat in my living-room glued to the screen, blowing his nose into tissue after tissue, heartbroken along with two billion people worldwide, myself included.  It’s safe to say that my friendship with Cameron really opened me up, not just because he introduced me to Vagrant Maniacs but because he was so interested in the world at large, what was happening in it and how he planned to help.  It saddens me that he didn’t get the chance to share his big heart and broad ideas, my friend died suddenly in 2003 from a bee sting.  He was eighteen years old.  What we did have though was the wildest live concert experience together in 1999, the last stop on the tour before Rude disappeared from the world. 

Yes, he disappeared, vanished.  But, more on that in a moment.

Imagine us, fourteen years old, wide-eyed, swaddled in Vagrant swag, t-shirts, bracelets, buttons and a tour program held tightly in our black lacquered fingers, front row close to the center and sandwiched between some of the most infamous Vagrant rock groupies known for their buck wild behavior when Rude customarily squealed, “SHAKE YOUR TITTIES” as Stomp ushered them into their signature bawdy cover of ZZ Top’s ‘Gimmie All Your Lovin’ with a rousing double kick drum.  When the lights went down and the crowd’s animated cries and shrills rose to an epic decibel we held hands so tight in anticipation and from the excitement my pinky sprained.  By the third song we were drenched, in a mixture of sugary water Rude abruptly distributed with an exact replica of an AR 15 assault rifle and perspiration from being scared of the weapon and happy that we were so close to them all, drinking in the stagy theatrics, the dazzling light show and pyrotechnics, Rude was slinking around, dragging himself across the stage on his hands and knees preening.  It was almost too unbearable for us to take.  The whole show was an absolute blur, full of space-age lasers, dizzying strobes video screen eye-candy and colorful confetti.  Immediately after we poured out of the arena with six thousand other crazed fans and ran all six blocks to the Sheraton.  Cameron’s older sister Becky worked on the front desk and let it slip that they were expecting Vagrant Maniacs to stay there.  Cameron and I drew out our map from our exit door to the lobby of the hotel and mused about it until the second the show started.  We ran all that way just to meet Rude for thirty seconds who was surprisingly bubbly and sociable although more with the ladies than with us runts.  He ruffled up Cameron’s hair, shook his hand and Cameron jabbered away while Rude signed his program with a sharpie that said, ‘Be a brave Rock Apostle, Rude loves you’.  While Cameron studied the signature mulling over its meaning and the fact that it actually happened, my Chico turned to me, leaned down and kissed my cheek, gave me wink and said, “Beautiful girl, Rude loves you”.  Those words were nothing short of a marriage proposal in my youthful imagination.  Before I could reply or attach myself permanently to his leg he was approached by a scantily clad peroxide blonde, she drew her long painted nail along the underside of Rude’s chin and purred, “Darling, I believe you have my pearl necklace.”  And with that he was gone.  But we didn’t know it would be for a secret self-imposed exile.  Cameron and I floated off to the side in complete and utter awe, watching him be swallowed by a gaggle of merciless hangers on.  As we were standing by the revolving door, waiting our turn to leave, Stomp came through, saw us standing there like two little hobbits, sopping wet and awe-struck, he stopped, looked down at us and without a word placed a drum stick in each of our hands, nodded and was absorbed into the voracious crowd.  When Cameron died, I placed both sticks in his casket.  That night meant everything to him; I wanted to make sure he had something special to take with him to Heaven.  My fourteen year old logic, you know.   

I saw an interview on Entertainment Today with Chev sometime after Rude’s disappearance.  Cameron and I were dumbfounded, absolutely devastated when it hit the news, especially after our amazing experience and the instant plans we made to see them again whenever they came back to town.  They talked about Rude and the band’s antics and the critics who called them hacks.  We sat down on the floor in front of the TV, snapped open a bottle of maraschino cherries and watched.

ET:          No one knows where he is?

Chev:    No one.

ET:          He didn’t even hint as to where he was going?.

Chev:    He did not.  We finished the show and went back to the hotel, had some dinner.  We all just thought he crashed.  We had no idea he had plans to vanish.  It really hurt us as a band and as his friends and brothers.  It took some time for us to figure out what to do and how to move on.

ET:          And so what are you all doing now?  You’ve all been flying under the radar too.

Chev:    Yeah well we needed some perspective and so we all just went home to our families to clear our heads and figure out the next step.

ET:          Not an easy task, I’m sure.

Chev:    Vagrant Maniacs as a band just doesn’t work without Rude, on that point we all agree.  Stomp and Hash have started doing some producing out of their studio and I’m still weighing some options.  I’ve got some things on the go.

ET:          What do you say to critics who have dismissed Vagrant Maniacs as regurgitated Alice Cooper or a bloated fey version of KISS or an unreasonably hand-drawn facsimile of Marilyn Manson.

Chev:    Alice Cooper is a great guy, I golfed with him once but we didn’t ever set out to be anything like him or KISS for that matter.  I love their music but our ideals were never the same.  As far as Manson, someone else’s work I love and I know Rude does too, our shows and songs and intentions were different.  I was at a show he did where they had this piñata hanging over the crowd.  He did this whole reverse psychology on them begging them not to smash it open and if they did there’d be consequences.  Of course the crowd went crazy and broke it open covering themselves with what was said to be festering animal guts.  Sure we had a bit of drama in our show but our message was never as dark as that.  We are not the first band to use theatrics to accompany our music and we certainly won’t be the last.  I think our music stands on its’ own without antics and playing dress up.  I think our fans do too.  People who love is have a good sense of humor and appreciate a bit of absurdity and great music.  At the end of the day, that’s what we were made of.

ET:          If Rude ever re-appears, do you think the fans will forgive him and welcome him back?

Chev:    I’m not even sure we can so I can’t speak for the fans.  Wherever he is, I wish him well.

Their posters still papered my bedroom walls but our band was broken.  Rude was off the grid, Chev eventually settled in to doing session work with Stomp and Hash and the old songs slowly stopped playing and the record store shelves filled up with other new and exciting artists but none of them spoke to me like Vagrant Maniacs, nothing moved me.  It could be that I was jaded and disappointed in my hero for bailing on all of the things he insisted we love and become and achieve.  He was our rock ‘n’ roll valedictorian and his graduation speech came up empty. And after Cameron died, I barely listened to music at all.  I felt like it was time to get serious, grow up, wear sensible shoes and focus on making something of myself.  So I became a bartender. 

I ushered into adulthood quickly.  I finished high school, worked nights at the local Laundromat to help make ends meet at home.  It was dingy, smelled musty and wreaked havoc on my allergies but it helped keep a roof over our heads.  I kept myself busy so I wouldn’t think of meeting life’s milestones without Cameron.  After graduation, I took my life savings and backpacked around Europe with every intention of coming home and applying to college.   I started bartending instead and acquired a more suitable and practical education.  I also learned how to ride a bicycle and bought a 1960s purple and white Hiawatha with a charming headlight, a basket, a cheesy bell and its original stickers, adopted a cranky cat named Mogwai after several failed attempts at romance, read the Joy of Cooking for fun and became affectionately known as a professional worrywart.  I always need to know where the emergency exits are, the location of the fire extinguishers, first aid kits and I carry mace in the side pocket of my handbag at all times.  When you work until wee hours of the morning it is necessary to be safe and prepared for anything.  That’s part of the education I took most seriously from working at Squeezebox and from being a latch key kid.  Thanks, Mom.  Thanks, Squeezebox.

Fast forward to 2009, I was nursing a Guinness and tackling a crossword puzzle after a long shift at the bar, the house band was tearing their gear down and my boss Jeff spilled his girth into the empty barstool beside me, sliding next month’s music calendar toward me.  Smiling like a Cheshire cat he says, “Check out who I got next month.”

Agitated by his presence and the interruption of my concentration I reluctantly scanned the page barely reading and slid it back toward him, “Nice.”

He persisted, “You didn’t even read it!  October 13^th, look at the date, see who it is.”

I sighed and followed the dates down the page to October 13^th and gasped, “Is this a joke?”

“No!  It’s one hundred percent true.”

“You booked Rudolph Dandy, thee Rudolph Dandy from Vagrant Maniacs?!”

  “I did.  Solo show.  A comeback I guess you could call it, from the dead.  He’s doing a small tour and he’s starting it here next month.”

“I don’t believe you.  Even if your tongue was notarized I wouldn’t.  Don’t mess with me.”

“I swear I’m not messing with you.  I have the press kit in my office; his publicist is a close friend of mine so we get him first.  This is HUGE.  The guy has been missing for ten years. It’ll be sold out in seconds, how much do you want to bet?”

“I still don’t believe you.”

“Don’t believe me, read it for yourself. Page 87,” Jeff threw the latest issue of Rock Talk at me.

Vagrant Maniac’s Lost Prophet

By Christian Collins

A self-described ‘lovable misfit loser’ vanished at the height of his fame baffling his band, fans and critics.  Will we ever fully understand why?  Will his bold antics make for a bittersweet comeback?

When Rudolph Dandy took the stage in Toronto at Massey Hall in 1999 with Vagrant Maniacs, the world was oblivious to the fact it would be his last show with the band that ripped through much of the nineties with outrageous gallantry, underlying angst and songs that inspired a rebellions generation to be bold and brave and poised.  On the first night of the seven week tour that kicked off at the Hollywood Bowl, Rude, decked out in ripped jeans, heavy combat boots, a faded Live Aid t-shirt, heavy uneven eyeliner and matted hair, told me between spoonfuls of Fruit Loops and swigs of imported beer that he was looking forward to getting back into the studio to record, “This time,” he said, “expect lots of go-go beats, spooky synth sounds, with a bit of stylish, amped up dance rock.  You’ll be pissing yourself with amazement before the first track fades out.  It’ll be the stairway to Heaven for shoe-gazers on acid.”  He appeared hair-brained, almost icy and full of willful ignorance.  He also ended the interview by throwing an almost melted bucket of ice all over me before taking the stage.  Dandy ushered out of the show that February night, the last of a sold-out run, threw himself into a taxi cab and literally disappeared.  For ten years.  He was a ghost, his whereabouts were a mystery, even those closest to him were in the dark, baffled and bewildered.  All these years later Rudolph Dandy emerges from the shadows with a new look, a new record and a new lease on life.  There are no visible signs of Rude’s flamboyant personae, the length of his dirty blonde hair is only rivaled by his mountain man beard and seventies rock attire.   With a miraculous comeback album and an explanation of sorts as to why he went off the grid, Dandy finally breaks his silence in his first interview.

These days even though Dandy has rejoined the world he is sequestered in a non-descript recording studio on the outskirts of Nashville, with ample amounts of Kopi Luwak coffee, Old Crow bourbon, garlic laced vegetarian fare and Cuban cigars.  I sat down with him for a quick chat, his first since returning, which I consider a small declaration of peace after our encounter in the nineties.

RT:          Where have you been all these years?

RD:         Writing songs, studying the world.

RT:          Where?

RD:         Away.

RT:          For ten years?

RD:         Has it been that long?  I don’t know, man.  I didn’t keep track.

RT:          You disappeared from the public eye completely.  Without warning, why?

RD:         I wanted to be alone.  Elvis faked his death for a little bit of peace, same thing I guess.

RT:          Did you want people to think you were dead?

RD:         I didn’t want anyone to think about me at all.

RT:          But why not just say you’re taking a break or retiring, why just vanish?

RD:         I was tired.  It seems extreme to some but man, I was lost.  Lost in a fog of strangers, constantly pawed at by aggressive fans who would rip my clothes and come away with a handful of threads just to have a piece of me, touring with a bunch of guys who resented me and who were incessantly at each other’s throats made me feel suicidal.  I was so exhausted and jaded, from doors slamming, the infighting about money and what not to say.  At that time, I was looking at the world through a fractured mirror, all I could see after a while was a blur of hopelessness, despair, and darkness.  Bowie retired Ziggy Stardust.  I put Rude away, Bowie did the same thing. 

RT:          Is that how you regard your absence?  Shedding your impervious guise to reveal your true self?

RD:         I regard it as a very long nap, hibernation, to escape cold winter of my discontent.

RT:          Are you well rested now?  Feeling better?

RD:         Listen to the record and see.

RT:          Your record, ‘The Passionate & The Confused’, as a redemptive, ethereal theme, intentional?

RD:         In my studies, I came across wise timeworn story.  It was about an old Cherokee native who taught his young grandson that inside of us all there is a battle being waged between two wolves.  One wolf is Evil, decorated in anger, envy, jealously, sorrow, regret, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, false-pride, superiority and ego.  The second wolf is Good, representing joy, peace, hope, love, kindness, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.  He shares this information with his grandson and the child counters with, “Which wolf wins?”  The old Cherokee replied simply that it is the one you feed that wins.

RT:          Salt of the earth learning right there.

RD:         Yeah, it was a profound find.  A simple truth that came at a time when I was scrambled.

RT:          Essentially, the wolves inside of us running around are fed by the choices we make so that what you think of and act on appear in your life and influence your behavior.

RD:         Feed the Good wolf and good things will manifest, feed the Evil wolf and the poisons of your choices will slowly eat away at your soul.  My first single is based on the story.

RT:          Are you feeding the right wolf?

RD:         That remains to be seen.

‘The Passionate &The Confused’ is available in record stores and on iTunes today.

Disbelief.

Rudolph Dandy.  Playing at my bar, coming to employ old liberations for new exploits all these years later.  I felt a twinge of teenage delight, deep curiosity, the unmistakable accents of nostalgia and an extreme sense of sadness.  My former hero’s re-emergence made me miss Cameron and made me wonder who he would be if he hadn’t died.  I imagine Cameron would have grown into a man with unshakable convictions, rallying for human rights, disgusted by reality TV, and I am sure that 9/11 would have driven him over the edge and I just know he would have spent endless hours dissecting every conspiracy theory. He’d have hated Facebook for its superficial qualities, as an avid reader he would have continued to read every single book from Oprah’s book club, and he would have promoted random acts of kindness to contribute to the effort for positive change.  Cameron would have been an even better human as an adult, perhaps a little more cynical in his world view but still with a heart the size of Texas with every intention to save the world. This, seeing Rudy live again would be something he would love; we love to experience together, like the first time at Massey Hall.

There was a full moon and a gentle breeze as I made my way to Squeezebox.  The city seemed to twinkle the closer I got to the front door, where people were already lined up to get in.  I was careful dressing myself for the show, dark skinny jeans, black flats and to be deliberately ironic, a Clash t-shirt and my hair down for a change.  Jeff knew how much I loved Vagrant Maniacs as a kid gave me the night off to enjoy the show as a member of the audience instead of an over-extended barkeep.  And he was right, once news of the show hit, it sold out immediately.  I arrived early enough to sneak up front and squeeze in close to the center of the stage where his microphone stand stood.  My heart was pounding, palms a touch sweaty in anticipation, the last time I was so close to Rudolph Dandy, Cameron was crushing my fingers and we felt like someone dropped us down in the middle of glam rock paradise.  That night it felt like an ordinary rock show that any singer/songwriter might play.  No staging, no theatrics, just a small stage full of instruments, a large wooden chest with beers sitting on top of it and a large Persian rug covering the floor.

When he took the stage he was nothing like I remembered him.  His chiseled cheekbones were no longer rouged and his concentrated eyes weren’t alive and heavily lined in shimmering kohl. Instead he bore a thick beard, his hair sat on his shoulders with a heavy uneven bang hiding the rest of his face.  He appeared shy and insular dressed in a well-worn flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbow, jeans and a distressed leather bracelet wound around his right wrist.  Even with the altered appearance I was struck by how beautiful he was.  As he slung a white falcon around his litheness I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that made him recede from the world for so long and without warning.  I hoped that his new music, songs no one had heard yet save his new single ‘Two Wolves’, would provide some answers to questions we all were longing to ask.

As you might expect, the room filled with of two hundred of his biggest fans was booming with applause and approval for our phantom hero who was finally back, flesh and bone in front of us, aged ten years, seemingly introspective and subservient.  He caught my eye, nodded at my t-shirt, curled his lips into a half smile and spoke into his mic but directly at me, “Rudie can’t fail.”  Some meathead behind me thwacked me on the back because of the rapport as if it made some kind of front row celebrity or something.  I blushed, sucked in a deep breath and smiled up at him.  Cameron would have loved it.  Something in his stare unnerved me, just for a split second, a cold iniquitous posture framed his burly face.  When the applause reduced to a hush, he finally addressed the audience properly.

“I took a really long nap.  I wrote some new songs and we’re gonna play them for you.”

Someone in the pulsing throng yelled, “Vagrant Maniacs rule!  We want Rude.”

Rudy lowered his eyes adjusting his guitar pedal and replied, “Oh, don’t worry you’ll get Rude so stick around.”

His homogenous guitar player whispered into his mic, “Let’s play some music, shall we?”

Rudy started to strum his guitar, “So if Neil Young, The Stray Cats and John Lee Hooker had a threesome, it would sound an awful lot like us.  At least, that’s what they tell me.  I hope you dig it.”

When Rudy started to sing, the sounds that came out of him were almost bluesy, somewhat sultry, a little sad and terribly urgent.  It was hard to believe that someone prone to a high pitched howl could sound so pensive, preoccupied and throaty.  When I met him in the hotel lobby as a kid, he smelled of crisp cucumber, Aqua-Net hairspray and a slight hint of sweat.  Being so close to the stage this time, the scents that wafted off of him were a mixture of heavy smoke and a boozy balm, the combination offended my nostrils and made my eyes water a little bit.

Rude’s long awaited return was loud and electrifying.  They botched the intro to the first song but once they got it right, an eerie synergy filled the stage.  I was surprised that the first song had a southern country feel with simple lyrics that could have been stolen from the lost notebooks of Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings.  The audience started to shout Vagrant song titles at him but he shrugged them off and instead treated us to a surprising foot stomping rockabilly hoedown number before slowing it down for a hair-raising hushed cover of ‘Lullaby’ by The Cure, “On candy stripe legs the spiderman comes softly through the shadow of the evening sun...”  He hissed, romped, rocked and crooned like a wounded animal for the better part of two hours without stopping before giving us we’d been begging for, a little old school nostalgia.

Rude teased pointing to the large wooden chest on stage, “What do you say we up the ante?  Get a little creepy?  Get a little Rude?”

The sweaty temperatures of his good-hearted tolerant fans elevated in the room as we collectively roared in approval.  We prepared ourselves for a bit of craven behavior when he lifted the lid on the box and extracted his signature AR 15.  The place went berserk.  He fiddled around a bit hunched over the box costuming up.  When he straightened and confronted us we were greeted with a pervasive oddity, a grotesque sight, even for him.  Rude had his face covered in a deranged clown mask, white scalp with a tuft of harsh orange fuzz jutting up, the clown face was anything but jovial, the eyes were outlined in ghoulish black, the face was bloody and gave the impression it had been sliced open and gouged and crudely sewn back together by a shaky hand.

The deep hum of droll bass led him into his new single, ‘Two Wolves’.  It was an instant chart topper and the crowd swelled with the earthy drums and the chant that opens the song.  With his eyes closed moaned, ‘Fortune’s tale from a Cherokee brave, two wolves wage a war inside of me, feed the one who fits you most, one will exalt you, the other … turns you ghost.’  It was eerie and the further he got into the song, the higher he raised the AR 15, the quicker the drums pounded the more excited we got, waiting to be sprayed, waiting for the climax.

And it came.

His disturbed gawk disarmed us in the split second where he snapped back the grotesque mask; his eyes cracked open wide, aimed the replica of the AR 15 at the crowd and engaged the weapon.  Only it wasn’t a replica at all, it was real.  Rather than dosing our blissed out faces with the anticipated sugary water he planted his heavily booted feet to the stage floor, leaned back to brace himself and felt the full throttle of the ammunition spraying destructively from the cold firearm blistering into soft warm human flesh.  The stuttering metallic clamor was more of a jolt than a warning because of the close proximity to the ferocious malefactor whose adrenaline kicked in so quickly it starved his peripheral nervous system and deterred his fine motor skills enabling him to conduct a mass murder with euphoric force, devoid of humanity. 

A single bottle of beer saved my life. I noticed that Rudy knocked over a pint with his foot and I bent down to retrieve it before the amber ale spilled enough to soak his petal board.  The reality of what was happening was a delayed reaction for me; it took a few seconds to understand we were under siege, the subjects of a deranged gunman and that the murderous hands belonged to Rudy.  The hail of bullets gutted chests and torsos, the hydrostatic shock wave pushed blood forcefully out of the entry wounds flooding organs, saturating the dance floor.  All I could here was the deafening sounds of the gunfire and Rudy belting out a battering wail of fury.  I snapped into an upright position in mind-numbing panic and raised my left arm up to instinctively defend my face, a hot searing sensation moved across my fevered skin, as if a tiger was shredding it into large meaty pieces.  A spatter of bullets grazed me leaving a scrawl of claw-like marks long after I healed.

It was utter chaos.  My life flashed before my eyes as I watched bodies fall and pile unconsciously on top of one another.  Screams curdled blood in my ears, fear feasted on concertgoers who were frantically running for their lives, the band was paralyzed and terrified, trapped behind the violence. I am sure they wondered when they’d fall victim to Rudy’s vicious insanity.  Everything moved in slow looming motion, why did I throw caution to the wind and usher to the front of the stage instead of staying in the back like I always did?  Why I didn’t I become a cabaret dancer or a brain surgeon?  I couldn’t remember if I turned off my hair straightener, did I feed Mogwai before I left?  Am I going to Heaven and if so will Cameron be waiting for me?  I don’t know if it was some kind of grace or some kind of luck that I made it out with a flesh wound.  And then, in an odious and gruesome turn of events, Rudy somehow turned the gun on himself.  I hit the floor.  Everything went dark.

Violence is ubiquitous, everyone knows that.  We are inundated by it on our TV screens in our news and our entertainment but you never expect the bad stuff to happen to you, especially when you’re in the throes of relishing an event that you’ve looked so forward to. A mass murder at a concert?  Preposterous.  That could never happen.  But it did.  We think we are invincible, that we are immune, that human sabotage only exists for those unfortunates we read about in the newspaper.  It’s a surreal concept we are unable to fully understand until it happens to you.  No one expects the trepidation, the terror, yet it has the ability to manifest right in front of us, like an evil genie slithering out of a temptingly rich lantern.

The incident filled me with alarming dread.  Rudy’s hateful disdain hurt parts of me, of us all, we didn’t even know existed.  The grim series of events that took place, the atrocity, was nothing no one could have ever predicted, one no one could have stopped.  We will never know why he did what he did, what hurled him into such a fit of hate to slay his fans in such a grisly fashion.  The act of killing human beings is impactful, witnessing it even more-so.  It’s like being on a freight train that hurtles into the brick wall of oblivion and the breaks are gone.  I keep thinking of a Helen Keller quote I kept tacked up behind the bar that said, ‘Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them.  Do not let them master you.’  It seems Rudy may have met and accredited his but he allowed them to dominant him and in that so many others suffered senselessly.

The only member of Vagrant Maniacs to make an official statement after the shooting was Stomp:

“The bleeding edges of his reclusive behavior are disturbing enough on its own but to execute his fans like that, point blank and in cold blood, doesn’t make him evil, it makes him the Antichrist.  This disturbing act, by someone I once called brother far exceeds the well-worn clichés of celebrity and its limitations of power.  It is simply unfathomable, abhorrent.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to those affected by this terrible tragedy.”

Speculation about Rudy’s heinous act of terror instantly surfaced in the media, revelations that range from the obvious to the absurd.  Drug addiction, multiple personality disorder, satanic studies, one madcap newsperson reported he was aligned with the Westboro Baptist Church and was helping them rid the world of more fags.  They hailed him the Prophet of Doom and in turning the gun on himself after the massacre it seemed an inexplicable admission of some kind of inner revolt that destroyed his humanity. The gloom of his life adding up to nothing but failure, the scenario he concocted in his head, the epic struggle that consumed him, the breakdown of his mental state.  It is true that what we saw was the decline of man and the rise of a monster.

I have to re-learn how to have courage again in a world that feels so much more dangerous to me now.  After the extraordinarily stressful events, I needed help trying to make sense of the senseless.  My therapist told me that my reactions are normal to abnormal circumstances and advised me to talk often to the people I trust the most but the truth is, I have no one.  Jeff is dead.  My co-workers are no better off than I am and we can barely look at each other in the eye.  My therapist, in her Ann Klein attire and tapping an expensive pen importantly on her notepad encouraged me to create feelings of safety and tranquility in my immediate environment.  You know, sleeping with the lights on to ease fear of falling asleep which is hilarious since I can’t even close my eyes without seeing his lascivious twisted expression as he stood there blowing everyone away.  She suggested listening to soft soothing music but music, even just elevator music has become a belligerent offense.  I prefer the sounds of silence so that nothing can startle me or trigger the memories.  I almost jump out of my skin from backfired tires, slamming doors and any kind of raised voice.  Even the first pop of microwave popcorn jars me, I’ve become exceptionally skittish.  My neatly manicured therapist tells me the key to healing is to resume the routine of my daily life.  I’d love nothing more than to do so but I no longer have a job, my nerves are frayed and I am afraid of everything.  She assures me that in time I will be able to see a light at the end of the tunnel and that healing is a process and I need to be patient with myself.  I know that she’s right but it’s tough to swallow when you’re so broken.

I limped out of the agony Rudy inflicted, a harsh show of greed, hatred, intolerance and his unquenchable need for some kind of barbaric revenge, but for what?  What was it about his life that was so terrible it triggered an obscene and cringe inducing bloodbath?  To even ponder, to try and rationalize it repulses me.  The sad reality is we’ll never know.  There were no clues left behind, no letters, no blogs, posts, tweet, text messages to indicate he intended obliterate a room full of innocent people and kill himself.  The irony is, I now live in self-imposed, fear induced exile.  I spend my days drinking coffee, nibbling honey mustard pretzels, playing solitaire with a deck of cards, and praying that at some point I’ll summon up the courage to life large again. To ride my bicycle and ring the bell, to pour the perfect pint of Guinness; actually the Guinness analogy works perfectly to sum up the dream for the future:  to settle, breathe in a moment, and break on through to a distinctly sustaining reward.  I am referring to that reward, you know, to live again, to go easy, and to be unafraid; I long to find the audacity to laugh again, to exhale without consternation, and move around in the world without fear of falling flat on my face.   My therapist says I’m making progress, whatever that means. 

If I feed the right wolf …

Nicole D. Myers

September 30, 2013

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