“Do you think I would have ever gotten laid with a Megadeth tattoo?”
“Not by the type of women you’d want to get laid by.”
Seeing Megadeth, for Tim, would pretty much be the best moment of his life. I felt honored to be offered the chance to share a moment that would rival his baptism and college graduation. I also am always up for a freak show—I mean, cultural experience—even though I don't have any particular taste for eighties hair metal. I like bands like The Decemberists and Sade and sometimes, when I'm feeling really hardcore, a little Smashing Pumpkins. I also only drink microbrew beer.
On the drive down, while relaying to each other our mutual excitement, Tim turned to me and said, "Yeah, actually, I don't know if you knew but I'm in a band."
"Really?"
"Yeah. We just don't really play shows anymore."
"So you're a cover band or you write your own stuff?"
"We write our own stuff."
"That's cool. What kind of stuff?"
"Oh. I don't know. I've been writing a lot lately. Like lately we've been working on a song I wrote called Sea Hag."
Eruptive laughter from me followed this statement. "Sea Hag? Like two words? Sea and Hag?"
"Yeah. Sea Hag. It's probably gonna be our hit. Seeeeeaa Haggg! Seeeaaa Haaaaaggggggggg!"
I was thinking someday I might be talented enough to write something where that would be as funny to other people second hand as it was to me. Maybe I'll write a story one day about a hipster journalist who secretly wants to be a death metal singer but is afraid if he tells anyone, all of his friends who go to local rock shows and smoke hand rolled cigarettes and drink PBR will abandon him and he will have no friends because all of the other people who like death metal are hiding in their houses doing crystal meth. Except me. I guess I would still be his friend.
Anyway, since neither of us are very metal, we had to really try to look the part. I wore black and lots of eyeliner. Tim wore a ridiculous leather biker jacket and some beat up black cowboy boots. It made up for all the Halloweens of my adult life that I haven't dressed up for. In the end, we could never rival the real metal folk who had such impossible-to-replicate treasures as enormous white puffy sneakers and tight, faded black jeans and rocker perms and studded leather halter tops. It was just too authentic because they had actually been wearing these exact articles of clothing since Megadeth formed several millinia ago.
I never knew what it what it meant to people to go to a metal concert. As I stood in line to purchase a Megadeth flask - which I just felt I needed to own - I listened to a married couple in their forties, both wearing matching Megadeth t shirts, talk about how they were spending the last sixty dollars to their names on Megadeth belt buckles. I suppose you could interpret this as sad, but the feverish ecstasy with which they turned over those crisp twenty dollar bills was that of a pious man tithing to God. I had to envy them. There is nothing I believe in as much as these people believe in the metal.
And yet, soon I, too, was believing in the metal - head nodding and arms raised in worship like I was back in the Evangelical church. Maybe, I thought, this is where the Evangelicals got it from. I’m pretty sure that I saw some nice, Christian-looking housewives who could have only been former metalheads that had snuck out for the night to relive their mosh days. The pew and pulpit version of church is dying because who wouldn’t want to go to a church that’s kind of like a metal concert?
To the left are some impassioned Christian youth experiencing something called "jam worship" at a church. To the right are people living the metal as captured by my cellphone. I'm confused... didn't they use to think this stuff was Satanic? I mean, all the old people at Megadeth looked pretty tired by eleven o'clock. Probably because things like metal stop being fun when Christians start thinking it's cool.
After five eight dollar whiskey and diets each, we called it a night. Since both of us were really just posers with respectable jobs to be at in the morning, we had to pass on the optional add-on experiences like the communal joint and jumping off the balcony. It was disappointing that we couldn’t stay long enough to wake up naked behind a dumpster like real metalheads, but he was technically on the clock. I crawled into the front seat of his Honda Civic and fell asleep to some acoustic folky crap he had on his Ipod and we drove back to reality.
