Yo, all you metalheads. Been a while since I posted anything. Coming to you now straight from my newest fandom is a character-sketch ficlet of Toki Wartooth, of Metalocalypse fame. Enjoy, and please remember to read responsibly.
Title: What It Isn't
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Metalocalypse
Some musicians say music is a greater high than drugs. That no booze could ever get you this drunk. That it is better than sex, even.
Well, Toki couldn't speak to the last. But the other two, those were lies. He'd had amazing trips, especially on some of the stuff Pickles had let him try when he'd first joined the band, as an "initiation", he'd said. And Toki fucking loved being drunk. Not so drunk that his head wanted to explode and his eyes crossed painfully and he hurled what felt like his entire digestive tract onto the cold bathroom linoleum. No, just drunk enough to not care that he was giggling like the girls he'd avoided back in school. Comfortably drunk. Everything was so much warmer and fuzzier then, the whole world softly blurred. He could laugh to himself about nothing and lay around listlessly on a couch noodling a melody on his lifeless guitar to a rhythm only he could hear. No band required—no Skwisgaar to insult his playing, no Murderface to override everything he said, no Pickles to needle him about being a kid, no Nathan to eye him critically when he said something he hadn't meant to say the way he said it.
Booze and drugs were two of the best things that had ever happened to Toki. For all that Pickles could be a loudmouth sometimes, he was probably Toki's favorite bandmate to hang out with, and he knew he'd always be indebted to the offbeat American for introducing him to Dethklok's version of pop rocks and Coke. (Which were, incidentally, the two hardest substances he had ever imbibed before crossing the borders of Norway.)
So, no, music was no Ecstasy, and it was no Jack Daniels. It wasn't better, or even equal.
But it was different. Utterly and totally different. And, in its own way, far, far better than any multicolored high or drunken stupor or throat-constricting orgasm. Music was not a drug, but it did make you capable of things you could never achieve without it. It couldn't make you drunk, but it could make you forget there was anyone else alive. And though his guitar was as far from a bodily function as it could be, it had long since become an extension of Toki's body, of his clumsy arms and slow legs and useless voice.
Kids in high school had made fun of Toki mercilessly. He was hopeless at everything, though not for lack of trying. He'd run more miles during high school than the entire track team put together, lifted weights so often he had to start paying the wrestling coach. But he wasn't fast and didn't have the attention span for marathons, and he was too short and slim to topple even the freshmen wrestlers, so neither team took him. Years of practicing football had earned him a spot on the bench that was worn smooth from years of sitting during games. The only thing he looked more ridiculous in than shinguards was ice skates, and while the rest of his classmates excelled at speed skating and dated ice skaters and went skiing on holiday, Toki stayed at home making car models and airplane models with the only part of his too-small, uncoordinated body that seemed to work at all: his fingers. His fingers were impossibly deft and steady. And quick. He could make a model in half the time the box suggested. If there'd been a speed-model-building competition, it would have been the one sport Toki could have successfully played, and probably won.
But first-class fingers got you nowhere with girls, and made you look like a first-class dollbaby with the acne-ridden teenage descendents of Viking warlords. There was no model-building club at Toki's school, which put him firmly outside the reach of any ready-made clique of pals to rush to his aid should he find himself bullied. He got intimately acquainted with every trash can and locker in the building. Once, a particularly bold upperclassman dressed primarily in chains had caught him adding the last touches to a small, simple model he'd brought to school to kill time in study hall. When the bell rang the kid followed sixteen-year-old Toki from the classroom, through the corridors, into the bathroom. When he emerged fifteen minutes later, his eyes gleamed weirdly. When Toki came out fifteen minutes after that, he was paler than he would ever look in corpse makeup and had his hands stuffed in his pockets to hide the toilet paper he'd wrapped around his broken ring fingers.
In self-defense he'd tried to join the band, but his parents cut him off faster than a rabbi behind on his quota of circumcisions. Of music in general, and especially music involving any instrument more modern than a sackbut, they firmly disapproved. Toki joined anyway, and for the first time in his life lied to his parents, telling them he had taken up chess after school with some friends. It was hard to tell whether his father looked more incredulous about the idea of his son being sharp-witted enough to play chess or the idea that the boy had friends.
In band he first touched a guitar. Technically they were not part of the band, but the director wore his hair long and smelled faintly herbal, and he often sat in his office dreamily listening to AC/DC records. He tried Toki out on everything from flute to xylophone and in about five minutes decided he had no chance on anything and told him to go sit in the corner and keep quiet.
After class that first day the director eyed him narrowly and took down a beaten red electric guitar from a line of them on the wall. Several other boys and one creature who might have been female were also loitering after class, talking to each other in low tones and fiddling with small, flat, triangular pieces of plastic. As soon as the director handed Toki the ancient piece, the other five or six students clustered around him, saying nothing, but implicitly accepting him. They all edged past to take down the other guitars, then sat near a set of what the director told Toki were called amplifiers. Plugging in the instruments, the others all settled in and suddenly their hands jumped from the bodies of the instruments and the worst sound erupted from the amps. And then there was music, the kind Toki had heard coming from car radios and open shop doors as he walked down city streets. It was music that he would never have thought of as music but that somehow managed to cling to the word tenaciously—music by sheer force of will.
The director didn't so much teach as lurk around the edges and snap at bad hand positioning and disrupted rhythms. Toki was not allowed to plug his relic into an amp; he was instructed to watch, and copycat. He did. He learned, over those first few weeks, the most basic of basic riffs—"Smoke on the Water," "House of the Rising Sun," "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution". Then he learned to play them faster. Then he learned to play them faster still. Then the director let him plug in his guitar, and his fingers raced over the strings so fast the tunes were unrecognizable. And then, right after the director swore heatedly and right before he kicked Toki's plug out of the amp and kicked Toki's ass out of the classroom, the fast-fingered modelmaker played something new. Something that had been hanging around his brain for days, something that was supposed to be played fast.
After that he was allowed to stay.
The next time he found himself suspended headfirst over a trashcan, two of the guys and the girl he played guitar with suddenly appeared. The two bullies were outnumbered by at least one, and really it only seemed fair to say they were outnumbered by two just because the dyke was twice the size of either of them. That afternoon Toki played something new again, and taught it to the others.
Model-making was a lot of fun, but it had only gotten Toki into trouble. Music protected him, like a shield. The other guys said it relaxed them, or got them high, but it never had that effect on Toki. He thought at first maybe it was a comfort, but it wasn't like his teddy bear-which-he-never-told-a-soul-he-owned. There were times he hated music, just couldn't get a riff right no matter how many times he tried it, no matter how fast he played it. It stressed him out, made him sweat and swear (something else he learned to do in band). Playing fast came naturally, but playing correctly did not, and though half the time his director couldn't even see his fingerings because they flew by too quickly, he always knew when something sounded wrong, and he'd lay into Toki all the faster for the boy's fast playing. Playing did not soothe him (the threat of his parents discovering his secret gave him nightmares every time he fell asleep), did not release his creative demons (he had none), did not make him suddenly popular (because no one knew he was in band except his fellow bandmates). But it was the only thing in the world he was good at that didn't get him a whole new set of enemies. In fact, it actually kept him from getting killed. And when he played he felt smart, talented. It was his thing, the thing he did right.
He never had the opportunity to abuse it, like a drug, because he had to keep it such a secret. When he graduated high school and moved into Lillehammer, he suddenly found that, though he no longer had to conceal his playing, he also no longer had any bandmates or director. He had even less opportunity to play now than he did before. But he bought a guitar and an amp with that month's rent money because without an instrument he felt like he couldn't defend himself against the bullies he knew still had to be out there. His upstairs neighbors, for instance. When they came complaining about the noise, Toki played louder. Then they left. The next-door neighbors, who wore fake Rolexes and had refused to look at Toki when they passed in the stairwells, left, too. Toki thought of his guitar as a weapon he could use against his enemies, a sword to drive them all out, a barrier to keep anyone unfriendly away and protect nice people who came near.
It only further proved his theory when the other next-door neighbor, an American man who always dressed in nice suits and ties, left a note on his front door with an American address scribbled on it. Right below was an American name Toki wasn't totally sure how to pronounce—"Naa—Nah…tahn…"—and the words "…Explosion—looking for guitarists for new band. I'm here scouting. Send demo tape to this address."
Later the man came back and wrote down Toki's name. He was a really nice guy, if a little stiff, and his Norwegian was pretty good. He said he'd heard Toki practicing through the wall and told him he was the fastest guitarist he had ever heard in person. Toki asked him what a demo tape was; the man gave him a business card of a place he said could help him make one.
After that, Toki got to play all the time, more than he'd ever gotten to play in his life. He wasn't sad to leave Norway, but he was scared that music wouldn't be enough to protect him anymore if he was far away in America. Luckily, he had new bandmates, now, and they tended to act like his old ones had, though they were often as much bullies as the bullies they scared off. Still, none of them tried putting him in lockers, and they only put him in a trashcan once, when they were all really drunk. And they never hurt him more than he could hurt back. And when they got meanest, he just went to his room, plugged in his guitar and played as loud and fast as he could, and they didn't come around to bother him because his amp was right in front of the door and turned up to eleven.
When the rest of the guys were nice, Toki would rather get drunk with them or high with them or talk about girls with them. But music was a different activity, not for losing control like with drugs, but for regaining it, keeping it. And though his friends in Norway had never seemed to understand, his bandmates now did—music could never replace Pickles' marijuana or Murderface's knife or Skwisgaar's mirror or Nathan's voice recorder. It wasn't meant to. It was something else, different. It was what came after the drugs and the booze and the egos and the work. Or maybe before, Toki had never quite got that bit straight. It wasn't part of. It caused and resulted from.
Music was as much a part of them as their drugs of choice. Toki could now build all the models that he wanted to without getting picked on. But playing guitar was his life now, too. Not his relaxation or his fun, but something more than just his job.
Not a drug, but still an addiction.