"Over-careful?" Michaels said with a chuckle. "This ain't Madison fucking Square Garden. It's a shitty little club in a shitty little city that's widely heralded as a hemorrhoid on the rectum of the world."
"That may be so," Matt said calmly. "But there's still gonna be an audience out there, ain't there? Shouldn't a group of musicians always strive to sound their very best whenever performing?"
Michaels looked at Matt now. "Performing," he snorted, rolling his eyes upward. "That's a fuckin' laugh. Nobody gives a rat's ass what you sound like. You're an opening band. Don't you know your job is just to kill the time until we come on? You don't think these people are here to see you, do you?"
Jake tensed up a little, preparing himself to grab Matt if he decided to choke the skinny little singer into oblivion. The only thing Matt liked more than his music was brawling. But Matt stayed mellow. "I'll give you that," he said quietly. "They're here to see you tonight. But that'll change, my mediocre friend. That'll change."
It took about fifteen seconds for Michaels to realize he had just been insulted. When it finally came home to him he turned red in the face. "Just finish your fucking set on time, hackers," he said, pointing a finger. "When you're done, you got fifteen minutes to clear your shit off the stage. Fifteen fuckin' minutes. Understand?"
"Perfectly," Matt told him. "Unless of course, they ask for an encore. We can't really control that now, can we?"
Michaels, Hathaway, and Chuck all both broke out into laughter at this suggestion. It was clear they thought that Matt was joking, trying to mend the fence that had been so quickly erected between the two bands.
"Right," Michaels said, still chuckling. He actually clapped Matt on the shoulder. "If they do that we'll cut you a little slack, won't we, Hath?"
"Oh, you bet your ass," Hathaway said. "Do as many encores as you need."
"We'll do that," Matt told them with a smile.
The two Boozehounds members and the club owners then disappeared, heading in the direction of the bar, still chiding each other over the thought of their opening band getting an encore request.
Only Jake knew that Matt hadn't been joking.
Ten minutes after the doors were opened, D Street West was about three quarters full of customers, most between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, about an equal mix of males and females. Jake and Matt sat on either side of the back-stage door, looking out over the stage and the gathering crowd. Matt was smoking a cigarette and tapping the ashes into an empty soda can. Jake was fiddling with a guitar pick, dancing it back and forth across his knuckles, eyeing Matt's cigarette with envy. He desperately wanted a smoke to help calm his nerves but he didn't want to risk drying out his throat before taking the microphone. Neither of the young men deluded themselves that the crowd was rushing in so early because they were the opening band. It was simply an accepted fact at D Street West that if you wanted to get a good seat to catch The Boozehounds, you had to show up at opening and claim your seat.
"You know what I'm looking forward to the most?" asked Matt. "Now that we're starting to get gigs, that is?"
"We have one gig only," Jake reminded him.
"We'll get more," Matt said confidently. "How many times I gotta tell you? We fuckin' rock, dude."
Jake nodded absently. While he agreed that they did indeed rock, his confidence level was never quite as high as Matt's. Just because one rocked did not automatically make one a sure success. Though he didn't put much stock in Coop's conspiracy theories, he instinctively knew it wasn't all that easy to make it in the music business, that the chips were stacked against them by default. He didn't want to have this argument now though. "What are you looking forward to?" he asked.
"Groupies," Matt said greedily. "How long do you think it takes until they start fuckin' us just because we're in a band? I could see it happening just after one set. How about you?"
Jake chuckled, shaking his head a little. "Not spreading your message to the masses, not fighting for social justice with your newly acquired voice, but groupies. That's why you want to be a rock star?"
"Social justice?" Matt scoffed. "Jesus, Jake. You fuckin' kill me with that shit, dude. You're the one who writes songs about social justice and politics and love and respect. You ever hear me writing songs about that shit?"
Jake had to admit that Matt had a point there. They had both penned a roughly equal amount of the lyrics for their music but their styles were on quite opposite ends of the spectrum. While Jake enjoyed writing political and social lyrics-everything from songs about the proliferation of nuclear warheads to the angst one felt by growing up as a misfit-Matt favored hard-biting, almost angry lyrics about picking up women and using them for his own pleasure, partying until the sun came up, or taking advantage of society for one's own gain. When he did write songs about love, it was to put it in a negative context, such as his most poignant piece, Who Needs Love?, which was basically a rant about all the negative emotions a committed relationship would cause. "No," he said. "I guess I never have."
"Fuck no," Matt said. "Not that I don't respect your tunes, you understand? Your shit is just as good as my shit. Its good stoner rock, you know what I mean?"
"I know what you mean."
"So anyway, what do you think the odds are? One set and you get groupies? Some dingbat sluts that'll be so impressed with us they'll let you snort coke from between their ass cheeks?"
Jake laughed. It was hard not to when hearing how Matt described certain people, things, or sexual acts. "I suppose," he allowed, "that it's theoretically possible we might have an encounter with someone of the female persuasion who could technically qualify as a groupie, tonight. How's that for an answer?"
"It sounds like you been talkin' to Nerdly too much lately," Matt said, dropping his cigarette butt into the can. He immediately pulled out another one and sparked it up. "Next you'll be spouting off shit about how gravitational discrepancies prove the existence of Planet X."
"Hey now," Jake said in his oldest friend's defense. "I thought that was a pretty cool lecture. I mean, where else can you get that kind of entertainment when you're stoned?"
"On the fuckin' PBS channel," Matt said, though he was not serious. He enjoyed Bill's marijuana-fueled dissertations as much as anyone. "And speaking of stoned, my man came through for me this morning. I got an eighth of that bitchin' sensimilian for after the set tonight. The bong is already in my ride and ready for stoking."
Jake nodded happily. "Tell your man we'll save a groupie for him. I'll be ready for a nice bonghit after we get through this."
"That ain't no shit," Matt agreed, taking an especially deep drag off his smoke.
There was no discussion, or even thought of a discussion, about taking a few hits before the set. Though the members of Impertinence-in the tradition of musicians worldwide-enjoyed a variety of intoxicating substances with a regularity that bordered on addiction, Matt had long-since established and rigorously enforced a rule that they would neither practice nor perform under any condition but complete sobriety. In the early days of the band, before Jake and Bill had joined, when they were just a simple hard-rock garage band banging out simple covers of existing tunes, Matt had found that even a few beers, even a few bonghits of crappy homegrown weed, would seriously degenerate their performance. It was acceptable to write songs while stoned or drunk-in fact, that was the only way Matt could compose-and it was acceptable to jam a little after imbibing just for the sheer fun of it, but when they actually got together to rehearse or to put a new song together, it was straight heads only. It was a rule that was certainly not going to be tampered with on their first gig.