A Piece of the Pie (Chapters 20-21)

Chapter 20 – Is There Anybody Out There?

"Dude? Bro, you okay?" I heard Pete calling out and I felt a tap on my shoulder.

I opened up my eyes, Pete's hand waved in front of my face. I was holding some dude's leg up in a keg stand. Jake had the other.

"You're so hammered bro!" Pete laughed as he pat me on the back and walked off to the pong tables. We let the dude down, who mumbled something with a mouth full of beer as we exchanged high-fives.

"Let's go man," Jake said when I looked over at him, "Pete and Simon have asked us for a rematch."

"Yeah, I'll be right over," I replied. Must've zoned out there for a minute.

"Hey Dim," Holli hugged me from behind and held her head close, whispering in my ear, "I was going to get heading home... and was wondering if you wanted to join me."

Really, what are my options here? I could go with Holli right now or stay with the guys and...

"Peace boys!" I shouted to the guys as I followed Holli to the door.

"Dude," Jake threw his arms up in disbelief, "we've got two cups to go!?"

"Dave can take my place."

"Dave sucks at pong man."

"He gets better the drunker he gets, you'll be fine."

"Is that really true for anybody? You were cooler before you got a girlfriend," Jake muttered but couldn't keep the big smile off his face. Really he was happy for me.

"Hey Holli, don't tire him out too much, we've got a show tomorrow night," he hollered after us.

"No promises!" she shouted over her shoulder as she dragged me out the door.

"Hey everybody!" Holli greeted the living room as we entered her apartment.

Josie and Holli's other roommates were sitting on the couch, running through some old lectures for their bio final.

"Hi ladies," I said in my best I'm-not-drunk voice.

"Last final tomorrow, right?" Holli asked her roommates.

"Sure is, woo-hoo! We'll be able to come party with you again, finally!" Josie replied excitedly.

"We'll leave you to it, good luck!" Holli said as she abruptly shoved me toward her room. I think she damaged some of my vertebrae. Once inside she stepped out to take a quick shower, so I busied myself for a few minutes. I noticed an old guitar sitting in the corner of the room. I checked it was in tune and started picking the strings a little.

Holli sauntered back into the room a few minutes later, her hair dampening the shoulders of a little green dress/blanket thing she was wearing. She sat next to me on the bed and started drying her hair with a towel.

"Jake said you guys have a show tomorrow night?"

"Yeah, a little gig, it's just us, we don't really have the cred to warrant any openers yet."

"Would it be alright if I came to hear you? I might convince some of the girls to come out too."

"That'd be awesome. Terrifying but awesome," I laughed a little nervously.

"What kind of stuff do you play?"

"Pretty much anything we're feeling like at the time," I laughed again, a little less nervously.

"You could give me a little taster right now?"

"Ummm... sure."

Focus Dim. I started off with a little bit of gentle finger picking, some variants on the D chord – those always sound good.

"I'm not much of a singer now, and I'm having a bit of trouble with this seventh string that keeps moving, but here we go..."

♪One night an angel brushed against my hand,

Holli was already sitting up, staring at me with a look that said: Dim, you're so sensitive and thoughtful and deep.

Well I ruined that nice moment with my next lines.

♪Didn't know what was happening,

I was so drunk that I could hardly stand.

At this point I threw together some half-time chords that sounded cool.

To me anyways.

♪I didn't know,

still don't know,

what was going on but that's just fine,

even then I knew that things would soon fall in line.

Back to a little finger picking interlude, then some new double-time chords. Mostly because I had forgotten the last ones already.

♪I saw you from across the hazy room,

your heart was lighting up your eyes.

You caught my attention and I knew that I wanted to give you all of mine.

Holli clapped a little, smiled, and laughed a little too. I probably looked pretty funny when I kept missing that seventh string. I swear there were seven.

She continued giggling to herself.

"That was quite lovely," Holli said as she climbed on top of me. We started making-out, and she had already taken off my shorts.

I have explanations for a great many things – such as Stonehenge:

In the ancient land that is now the United Kingdom, the mighty Titans were holding their annual Beer Pong Championships. It was down to the finals – Rock and Lava Titan versus Ice and Thunder Titan in the BPC. A chance at redemption for Ice and Thunder was sitting on Thunder's shoulders.

Thunder drained it like it was nothing. Rock and Lava were back up.

Lava sunk his ball with ease.

Rock hit the rim and just bounced out.

"DAMMIT!" bellowed Rock as he slammed his fists onto the monolithic pong table, and proceeded to fling it across the land.

Today, the pieces of the gargantuan structure rest in an odd formation that many mistakenly believe to be some sort of ancient calendar device.

To this day it has not been determined if the game was ever finished, but due to his poor sportsmanship, Rock Titan was banned from participating in future pong championships.

It is speculated that Ice Titan's voice, saying "dude, just chill brah..." can still be heard echoing through the aether...

As for how Holly got my shorts off without me noticing – while I was sitting in them – I have no explanation.

But it happened, so I will not argue that little fact.

Holli lay next to me with her head on my chest, my arms wrapped around her as she fell asleep. I lay awake for a while, my thoughts drifting to the Milky Way, and the other shiny and gaseous things out there... Someone must have dropped me out of a keg stand earlier.

Chapter 21 – Call the Office

Luckily for us, Josie was kind enough to lend us her van, and with this fine family-friendly automobile we moved all our gear to the club. This is our first show where we are actually charging money for people to get in. Not that we will ever see any of that money. It's only two bucks, and it all goes to set-up and keeping the venue running for the night.

Another band was supposed to play tonight, but they got stuck in a blizzard in Saskatchewan, and I'm not entirely clear on the details of how we were called to play...

I'll just be happy if we don't end up owing the club money. It's a little nightclub with a low ceiling, and it's perfect – there are photographs and posters on the walls from everyone who's played it, the people are super friendly, and we get free beer.

They Give Us Free Beer.

So I guess we are going to see some profit technically.

Just then Holli walked in with Josie and another girl I didn't recognize.

I waved them over to what is loosely referred to as the stage.

"What's up?" I asked happily as they got close.

"Hey guys," Holli said excitedly, "what time do you start?"

"In like, five minutes," I said, checking my watch, which hasn't worked since yesterday so really I was just guessing.

"Great, we're just going to go grab some drinks."

They made their way over to the bar. I got the bartender's attention and pointed to the girls and gave him a thumbs up to show they were with us. He nodded and grabbed three beers from the fridge.

"Alright, I think we are good to go," Jake said, testing out his high-hats.

"Where are we?"

"How are we headlining?"

"I can play guitar?"

The usual panicked thoughts we all have before playing a show spilled forth.

"You wanna start us off Mouk?" I asked him.

"Oh yes!" He kicked us off with a little wah-wah action, then we broke into a fun little punk song we started playing a while back.

"What's up everyone?" I asked to the crowd at large as the last notes of our song rang out.

I received a decent drunken raucous of cheers in response.

"So we want to have a little fun tonight, I hope you do to. You look like you do, so, I guess... how does this work? I guess we'll play some more music!"

This inspiring monologue was greeted with even louder and possibly even more inebriated cheering.

More club-goers keep streaming in until we had a nice crowd amounted in the venue. They even started singing along, I don't know if any of them even knew any of the words – but it's the thought that counts. And we tend to forget the words a lot anyway, so it works.

After our fifth song I had two broken strings and Mouk had run out of picks already, so while we headed to the back to restock, Sam and Jake busted out acoustics and did a little freestyle.

Mouk and I ruffled through our gear, finally finding our stash of back-up stuff.

I did unstringing of busted strings and stringing of fresh strings, all the while with a look of deep concentration etched across my visage.

"Alright, let's go!" I said.

"Dude, you should probably tune it first."

"Right, thanks bro. Wait, dude, those aren't your picks," I pointed at the little container Sam had mistook for his backup picks. "Those are m&m's. Toss me some of those!"

As we returned to the stage with perfect timing, Sam and Jake finished up their last improvised song, then we jumped straight in to a ska number and got people dancing some more. I caught Holli's eye and happily noticed she seemed to be having a lot of fun.

As we finished up the song, someone shouted from the crowd, "WHAT'S YOUR BAND'S NAME?"

"Haha." Uh oh. "We forgot to mention that, didn't we? Well we're the... uh... I..."

"We call ourselves Luno Pizza!" Sam came to my rescue. People cheered loudly, a few started chanting the name. I heard someone scream I LOVE COWS! Then people started demanding pizza. I looked at Sam for some enlightenment as to where this name came from but he just shrugged his shoulders.

Why not, right? Guess they were the first two words that came to his mind. I understand the pizza part of course, but what is luno? Like the moon?

We decided we would do one cover, and settled on More Than a Feeling. The crowd got into it as soon as they realized what we were playing, and it is such a fun song to play, even though the vocal part for me is a bit of work because of the fact that I suck at singing. I love the song.

Next we threw down a couple more pop-punk tunes, which people went apeshit for. To our complete amazement, people actually really liked us, and even asked for an encore. We had a short team meeting to decide what we would play. The crowd started chanting LUNO! again, which I have to say felt pretty awesome. We picked a song I wrote just a short while ago. It clocks in at just over three minutes, but we decided it would be a suitably feel-good way to end the night, complete with pick slides, harmonized vocals, a sizzling bass groove and an obnoxiously fast drum beat – basically another crappy punk rock song where we would get to do punk jumps and dance recklessly about.

I think I forgot to sing two of the verses, and I'm pretty sure I strained a shoulder muscle when Mouk and I crashed and nearly fell off stage – being awesome we kept playing of course.

"That was incredible!" Holli shouted, due to temporary hearing loss, as the three girls met us in the back room – which was technically the alley where we parked the van. She kissed me, and I was feeling pretty good – especially with the adrenaline still pumping through my alcohol/blood hybrid stream.

'Thanks," I smiled happily.

The guys and I started packing our gear back into Josie's van, sweating profusely from our performance.

"We'll bring your van back around tomorrow at some point," I promised Josie.

"Don't worry, take your time," she reassured me, "you guys were good."

'Yeah, you looked like you were having such a good time," the third girl – whose name we learned was Fiona – added.

"What're you guys up to the rest of the night?" Holli asked.

"Ah, you know, we gotta unpack, probably grab some pizza and wind down a little bit. My heart's still racing," I answered, still feeling lighter than air.

"Call me tomorrow, eh?" She pecked me on the cheek.

"For sure, we can go catch a movie or something."

Holli smiled and she, Josie and Fiona hopped in a cab.

"Dude... you're gonna give up hanging with her, to just chill with us?" Jake asked, nodding in the direction of the departing cab.

"Dude, we gotta go over our set, recap how freaking awesome we were."

"We were pretty awesome, weren't we?"

We all agreed and exchanged some high-fives.