AS THE BIG DAY GREW CLOSER we improved just a little. One afternoon, when we had finished torturing the neighbours, we came upstairs to find Bruce smiling.

    “You guys are getting better,” he said. “You’re actually ending the songs all at the same time.”

    “Just a fluke,” I assured him. “We ain’t no rock stars, with fancy endings and guitar solos and all that crap. If you want fancy shit, you’ll hafta get somebody else.”

    “Oooooo, excuuuse me, I forgot what a Big Bad Punk Rocker I was talking to! Don’t get your safety-pinned, leopard-skin underwear in a bunch, I was just saying you guys didn’t suck as much as you usually do.”

    “Fuck you, too,” I told him. “And the horse pinned to yer leather jacket.”

    “Yer mother!”

    “Hey, leave my mom outta this!” It wasn’t that I liked my parents or anything; it just seemed wrong to bring my mother into it.

    Margot walked in the door with a bottle of wine, all ripped black spandex, spiky rat’s nest hair, and cowboy boots spray-painted purple and silver. “What’s going on here?” she asked.

    “Nuthin’,” said Bruce. “Cary here was just telling me how he wants to hire a limo to take his band to the gig.”

    “Huh?” said Margot.

    “Never mind, Bruce is just being a dickhead,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs and listen to some records.” I put my arm around her shoulders and steered her away.

    “It’s your turn to buy the gawdamn wine!” she said, shaking me off, none too gently. “Why don’t you give your brother a hand cutting his hair?”

    I looked into the kitchen where Jim sat hacking off clumps of hair with a razor blade. We went over to watch. “Why don’t you use scissors?” asked Margot, uncapping the wine.

    “Only sissies use scissors,” grunted Jim, slashing off another pinch. His mohawk had grown out, but his hair was still only an inch or two long. He wanted it even shorter, and I wasn’t going to argue with him. Who was I to stop him from mutilating himself? I grabbed the wine away from Margot and took a glug. Jim made a few more swipes and turned to face us.

    “How does it look?” he asked.

    Margot and I tried not to laugh. It looked like he had been run over by a lawn mower with very dull blades. Tufts of hair stood out in random clumps, defiant survivors in the war against fashion.

    “It looks fuckin’ cool,” I said, “but you missed a few places. Here, lemme give you a hand.”

    Jim seemed wary, but passed me the razor blade anyway. He probably figured I could make it no worse. Margot snatched the wine back as I moved in for the kill, sizing up my client like a purse-snatcher in the night. The first couple of cuts went okay, but it was much more difficult than I had imagined. I looked at the razor blade. The edges were dented, with rust completely covering one side. “Where’d you get this blade?” I asked.

    “I took it out of a window scraper,” said Jim. “Ouch! Take it easy with that thing!”

    I took a closer look. The razor had slipped and I had nicked the back of his head. Blood trickled down his neck to the collar of his T-Shirt. I kept going. If he wanted to be a tough guy, he could put up with a few nicks, and soon he had quite a few. Margot watched the blood running down the back of Jim’s head and laughed.

    “Remind me never to ask you for help,” she said.

    Finally Jim could take it no longer. He stood up, shaking hair from his head and shoulders. He touched his neck and examined the blood on his fingertips. “Thanks a fucking lot!” he said caustically. He went into the bathroom to see what kind of number I’d done on him.

     I didn’t know what his problem was. His new haircut looked very punk rock, in a Bill the Cat sort of way.

Finally the day arrived. The House of Noz was jumping as we got ready for the gig. We trudged up and down the scary basement stairs, carrying an seemingly endless number of drums and amplifiers out to the borrowed van. I was learning first hand that the amount of work that goes into putting on a show is phenomenal. With much cursing, drinking, and bitching, we got the van packed and sent a team off to the hall to get set up. Jim was working on one of our stage props, a life-sized sacrificial dummy. He stuffed a pair of blue jeans and a long-sleeved ‘Kansas’ T-Shirt full of rags, attaching gloves for hands with safety pins. He finished what he was doing and stood up to admire his handiwork. “Now you can help me make some fake blood,” he said.

    We went into the kitchen and mixed red and blue food colouring in a big pot with some flour and   

 water.

    “Needs more red,” I advised.

    After heating the mixture until it thickened, we had a beer while it cooled. “Did you borrow the old 

 man’s Skil-Saw?” I asked.

    “Yeah, but we better not lose it, I kinda forgot to ask him.”

    “It don’t matter; what he don’t know won’t hurt him.”

    “What are you going to use for a cleaver during ‘Butcher’s Block’?” asked Jim.

    I went back into the kitchen and returned with a machette. “This aughta do the job, no?” I swung the big knife easily through the air.

    “Jeez! Take it easy with that thing willya?” said Jim, bringing his hands to his head to make sure he still had both ears. Satisfied all was in order, he finished his beer and stood up. “Let’s get Reggie Rocker ready to go.”

    We filled a thick plastic bag with the fake blood mixture and inserted it into the neck of the dummy. With his plastic head and long brown wig, the finished product looked like your average Windsor Park rocker on his way to an AC/DC concert. Held upright Reggie stood five-foot-five, and was much smarter than some of the idiots I’d gone to school with. Jim gave Reggie a good kicking with his combat boots, just to help settle old scores.

    “Let’s roll!” shouted Bruce, coming in the door.

    We grabbed Reggie, the machete, the Skil-Saw, our guitars, and more beer, carried them out to the van. It was time to make some noise.

The hall was already starting to fill as we arrived. I knew most of those present but to my disappointment many of the people I had expected to see had not yet arrived. Instead, some arty types I’d never much cared for, sat drinking white wine at the back. Oh, joy, I thought to myself, the music critics are here. Well, we’d give them a show to remember. Too bad they weren’t sitting a little closer so we could splatter blood on them.

    “Any time you’re ready,” said Bruce, tapping me on the shoulder.

    I looked around the hall. It was still fairly empty, with maybe fifty or sixty paying customers. “Yeah, okay,” I told him, but making no effort to rise. Jim and Norm sat on my left, casually smoking and drinking. As the opening act, we were already practicing a time-honoured technique still in wide-spread use today; namely to stall as long as possible until more people showed up. I had butterflies, but nothing I couldn’t deal with. At twenty years of age, I lacked concern for making a total ass of myself. In fact I was looking forward to it.

    Margot came over and booted my chair. “Get up there and wake the dead!” she said, glaring around at the quiet, well-behaved crowd. Her band, the Wurst, was next on the bill, so maybe she wanted to get the show on the road.

    “I dunno, what d’ya think?” I asked the boys.

    “Might as well,” said Norm, finishing his beer.

    We got up and walked to the stage. My nervousness increased. Instead of taking the stairs, I jumped up onto the three-foot stage and strapped on my shitty Fender Stratocaster copy. My axe had headlines ripped from the newspaper glued all over it. Headlines like ‘Husband Murders Family, Pet Dog’ and Hundreds Perish In Wedding Massacre’ completely covered the body, jumping out like canned nightmares from the past. I plugged in and cranked my amp as loud as it would go. Later on we would learn about things like soundchecks, but in the early days, the opening act was the soundcheck. I twisted the control on my guitar and hit a chord, the distorted blast echoing out over the room. Suddenly I felt charged with power, as if everything I had done prior to this really didn’t matter. Now I knew why bands toiled so long and hard, often at their own expense; being on stage was a better than drugs.

    Behind me, Jim ripped off a ragged drum roll, battering the skins with his usual volcanic force. Norm thumped his bass in readiness.

    “Awright, fuckers,” I bellowed into the mic. “We’re the Vacant Lot, and this one’s called ‘Heading For Trouble’!”

    “1-2-3-4!” called Norm.

    We launched into the song, hopelessly out of tune. I sang:

    There’s nothing left in the world today

    Everything stinks I don’t care anyway

    Gonna have some fun, and it won’t take long

    I’ll take my chances with the nuclear bomb

The dance floor was empty except for assorted members of the other bands. Margot stuck her fingers in her ears and shrugged her shoulders quizzically. At first I thought she was telling us we sucked, but then I realized she was trying to tell me she couldn’t hear the vocals. We finished the song and I tested the mic.

    “Check! Check!” I shouted, thumping the mic with my thumb. All I could hear was feedback from my guitar. The P.A. was completely dead. It didn’t matter though, I wasn’t going to stop now; hopefully the problems would soon be sorted out. We started our next song, ‘Blank & Dekker, with a noisy bang and powered forward, running the riff right into the ground. As a middle eighth in this tune I planned to run Dad’s Skil-Saw for  dramatic effect, and when the time arrived, I reached down and picked it up. I pulled the trigger, and could feel the vibrations of the saw run through my hand, but due to the volume of our equipment, I couldn’t hear it at all. Shit. Was the fucking P.A. totally out of order, or was it just kinda screwed up? Still running the saw, I held it closer to the mic in an attempt to order to make some noise. It was difficult to wield the saw in a safe manner with the guitar around my neck, and I knew if I wasn’t careful, the fans would get more of a show than any of us had bargained for. Show biz blood ran through my veins, and I didn’t want any of it to get out. Cautiously, but not cautiously enough, I moved the saw yet closer to the microphone. Suddenly I felt rather than heard a loud snap and saw something fly through the air. Looking around, I noticed that the top of the mic was completely missing, and must have been what I’d seen fly through the air. Fortunately, and due to the fact that P.A. was still dead, the missing mic made no difference at all to the sound mix. We were completely without vocals. Still, it seemed useless to worry about something as trivial as a P.A. system, so we plunged forward, unstoppable as a bad case of the shits.

    I was hoping we could make up for the Skil-Saw disaster with our next song, ‘Butcher’s Block’. This was the number in which Reggie the Rocker got his head chopped off, and I was looking forward to making a big splash. We stumbled through the song, with me blowing out my vocal chords trying to sing over the guitars and drums, unaided whatsoever, by the dead P.A. Mid-song, I picked up the machete and waved it over my head for all to see. For Reggie the Rocker, the end was at hand. I brought the machete down hard, completely severing his head. I smiled triumphantly and held up the machete, fully expecting to see it covered with blood. To my dismay, the knife was dry as a bone, and when I looked down, I saw that Roger had bled not a drop at his decapitation. I had been cheated again. Still wearing my guitar, I bent down to examine the dummy. The blood bag we had stuffed into his neck was nowhere in evidence and seemed to have disappeared completely. How could this be? Pissed off beyond belief, I dug around inside Roger, pulling out his rag guts and throwing them all over the stage. Finally, deep inside, I discovered the missing bag of blood. It must have slipped down into the chest cavity during transport. Even in effigy the rockers were taunting us. I brought my boot down hard on Rogers head. I would teach him for making a fool out of me. Then I pulled the bag of blood from his chest and threw it out onto the dance floor, where several souls had gathered to have a good laugh at our expense. My luck, however, was consistent and the bag failed to break on impact, aggravating me further with its stubborn resiliency. But before I could reflect on just how badly things were really going, the song kicked back in, and I jumped forward to sing the third and final verse into the mangled microphone. Margot tried to avenge my humiliation, jumping on the bag of blood and finally releasing the red red splatter. It was far too late for us, though, and we limped to the end of our set like the Germans leaving Russia, demoralized past caring whether we lived or died. Jeers, scattered applause, and cat-calls followed us as we left the stage. I figured at this rate, it would be a long time before I got to sign for any beers. Had the Ramones ever suffered such humiliation?

A week later, in an arty, subculture magazine, I read a scathing review of our performance. One of the reviewer’s griefs was that he thought we were trying to be British because we had draped a Union Jack over the guitar amp. If the reviewer had looked more closely he would have seen the big, black ‘X’ spray-painted on the flag. It had been out intention to be anti-British and pro-Canadian, but this effort, like all our other efforts, had backfired miserably. Apparently the reviewer, a skinny little art fag, was terrified we would beat him for his frank journalism, and hid from us for months afterwards.