Wild Awake

the six of them, takes up the entire stage with all their gear. They’re all dressed in black. Four guys, two girls with ragged haircuts. Skunk’s center stage with his own mic. Whoever’s shooting the video is somewhere near the back of the crowded room, holding a cell phone camera high over the sea of heads to catch a bit of the show.
    In the first few seconds of video, it’s hard to tell that something’s wrong. Everyone in the band is playing their instrument, and the crowd is humming along. But slowly, you realize there’s something out of place. Skunk isn’t singing. He’s talking. No, he’s shouting. At first, it seems like part of the music, but the song ends and he keeps going: “STOP IT! GET AWAY FROM ME!”
    You can hear the person taking the video talking to their friend. “Whoa, dude. D’you think he’s tripping on something?”
    The harmonium player and the electric guitarist put down their instruments. In the grainy video, you can see them huddle around Skunk, talking to him, trying to walk him backstage, but he shakes off their hands like a scared animal, clutching his bass to his chest. The crowd’s buzzing now, that greedy, hungry thrum of excitement people make when something bad is happening and it’s not happening to them.
    “Whoa-ho-ho, man—are they gonna fight?”
    The camera tilts toward the floor, showing a dim swarm of sneakers and pant legs, and when it swings toward the stage again, Skunk is locked in a slow-motion wrestling match with the harmonium player, still shouting “STOP!” and “NO!” and all sorts of things in French.
    Everything happens in the next two seconds.
    Skunk wrenches free and staggers forward, swinging his bass like a club. Most of his bandmates get out of the way in time, but in the midst of the chaos, you can just make out the blond girl’s arms flying up to protect her head.
    “Dude, I think he nailed her!” says the person shooting the video.
    A second later, the video ends.
    I sit at the computer wrapped in a blanket, watching it over and over again, until every millisecond of crappy footage is burned into my eyes.

chapter thirty-nine
    “They were broadcasting my thoughts through the speakers,” says Skunk. “They’d been doing it the entire tour.”
    It’s Monday afternoon and we’re at the Army & Navy store on Cordova Street, shopping for cat supplies. As we talk, I grab things and toss them into my basket: a red-and-white bowl, a catnip mouse, bags of litter and food. Snoogie misses Doug, I can tell from the way she sniffs around Denny whenever he opens a beer, despite the fact that I have informed her in both English and cat-speak that we are not acknowledging his pathetic existence.
    “You mean, you thought they were,” I say.
    “Yeah. I thought they were,” echoes Skunk distractedly, as if to him the distinction hardly matters. “I realized they were using my bass as an antenna. I was going to smash it so they couldn’t do it anymore.”
    “And Tess got in the way?”
    “And Tess got in the way.”
    I throw another cat toy onto the pile, some kind of battery-operated ferret that squirms when you pull a string. Snoogie is going to rip its freaking head off.
    “Did you try to explain?” I ask him. “Did you tell them about the broadcasts?”
    “They thought I was on mushrooms,” Skunk says. “Nobody realized what was really going on.”
    As we wander the aisles, Skunk tells me everything. He tells me how the police and ambulance showed up at the Train Room, their carnival lights spraying all over Cordova Street. He tells me about the hospital ward, with its long, windowless hallways, where he bounced like a pinball in the doctors’ attempts to Stabilize Him.
    Ten medications. He tells me their names: Risperdal. Lithium. Seroquel. Haldol. Lamotrigine. Trazodone. Depakote. Celexa. Wellbutrin. Ativan.
    The doctors turned the volume up and down on Skunk, adjusted his bass and treble. Now he was the Messiah; now he was cold and dumb as a potato. He lost all emotion for weeks at a time. Couldn’t speak. Lumbered fatly down the hall looking for a window to look out of. Couldn’t find any. All communications suspended. The world went flat and fuzzy. Abort.
    I kiss him quickly. An old lady looking at salad spinners glances at Skunk’s tattoos and edges away. We’ve drifted into the kitchen section, all translucent plastic picnicware and lemonade pitchers. I gaze at a stack of cups printed with ladybugs. “What did