Nonfiction, Stephanie Ritzema
The green room is not green, I realize when walking in for the first time. I thought it would be green, as if the lacquered walls would perhaps mean something like a semiotic nod to the question “Am I Really Doing This?” and better yet, “Can I Really Do This?”. The room itself is instead covered with a layer of names of other bands who have been and gone. To calm my fearsome stomach, I pick out a few that I recognize. A friend’s band here, one my boyfriend knows there. It helps temporarily, and then our lead singer suggests we stretch. She tells us to copy her as she places her long, willowed arms parallel to the wall, pushing as hard as we can against it, yelling like pirates in a gale. I can’t even yell very loud. Quiet Stephanie, says my mother’s voice in my mind as my fingers crack into some names I do not recognize.
GIRL SCOUT
MUCK SPREADER
CUTTING THE PISS
That one I know. I take a deep breath and wonder if there is any time left to dip out to the bathroom. But the other lead singer nods and flicks her watch round to face me. She gives a kind smile and touches up her lipstick one final time.
I check the rider (another new word) for water, but then we are on.
On our way up to the stage, there is a line of hard-boiled men. They form a barrage, and I have to squeeze past two of them to get near the step-up blocks. My stand is broken, so I am on the floor to play. I swing one leg around to position my booted right foot against the large, yellow block in front of me, arching my head so close to the vast, black monitor that the sound of my organ track rattles my skull when I test a note. The lead strums a fervid strum, and the other taps her foot once, hard. With my body on the floor, I can feel their every move. The drummer raps her cymbal imperceptibility but I hear—I am glued to it, the aching burn of skin on stage. I am caught up in the ruffles of the quiet air in the drop before someone makes the loudest sound you have ever heard. I am all fizz, anchored in it.
But one chord in I shuffle, and one of the wrinkled eggs in front of me meets my eye -
He flicks it like a snake between the gap in my thighs (I’m not wearing cycle shorts; I’m in a long skirt; I’m sitting on the floor) and up back to my gaze with acute precision. I look away, above all the heads, then back, past the beat of the fourth chord. He is still looking, now at the faint round of my breasts (I am not wearing a bra; I am in a tight top; I am provoking, sluttish, risque, the Madonna). He looks at me like I am a present. I look away again. The song is almost over; I had been playing the whole time, but the music went around my body like a free-flowing stream, never touching the banks.
There were more that night. More looks, more hard-boiled men in the front row, and I felt like meat strung up to dry. I asked the rest of the band if it was always like this. They went quiet for days after.
It struck me most that when one of the booking agents came down to greet us after the show, and I bitched—pigeon-like and briefly—about the hard-boiled men, she only hung her head and apologized, saying simply,
Oh, when there’s women like you, it's always like this.
We come back up and the scene is as predictable as water: Some crunching lamented band stands (four men, of course), in a line at the front of the stage. Brunette by brunette by brunette, they all bend their heads over, craned at what seems to be an impossible angle down to flip their birdish barnets over their eyes. Eye contact is gauche these days anyway. The one on the left plays a double bass the size of a small whale; I think of 52 Hertz. He plays it like he is trying to walk, perhaps not for the first time but maybe for the fourth or fifth. He is having to do the swan dip of the neck extra hard to ensure he cannot see. A feat of endurance, truly, to maintain the shaggy, austere fringe over a head trying to place its hand at the notes parallel to his eyes on the long bowing fretboard against his cheek.
I am off the stage now, back to sweating, back to clammy from the night air and over-exercised breath. The half-drunk beer in my hand is warming gently, and our lead singer is in the bathroom. Our other lead fixes her hair across the bar from me. We stand well back. We are almost inside the sound deck.
The hard-boiled men now stand a little back from the stage, nodding at a respectable distance. They are enjoying bobbing their shining domes in time with the Thom Yorke offshoots as they sing of sex, death, and getting high in the feeble warbling tones of someone inventing something. The prurient men take it in turns to whisper astute observations at each other. Things to the effect of
Incredible use of the fourth diminished.
Not what I would’ve suggested but good to hear new stuff from these boys.
Back in my day, you had good shit like this…
Their eyes are a solid line to the instruments they play. No breaking, no languid deviation, only stepping over the warm vibrations to meet ‘these boys’ with respect.
And for the rest of the night, my mind beats a simple scream:
(their bodies are not seen)
(their bodies are not seen)
(their bodies are not seen)
Stephanie Ritzema is a poet and creative writer living in London and studying on the Cambridge Creative Writing Master’s. She is deeply interested in writing poetry & nonfiction that confronts perceptions of the female-presenting body, and its links to folk culture and modern life. Being half-Cypriot, she is also interested in exploring the intersections of place and identity.
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