It was one of those nights where you have a bad feeling from the moment you wake up. It continues through the day and you just can't shake it, you just have to hope it's a completely unjustified. Just a feeling. Unfortunately, that night the feeling was for a good reason, my life changed forever with a single mistake from a person I still to this day haven't met. As I walked out on stage for the first time I felt the rush, the feeling of pure fear, but at the same time pure adrenalin, and that was only the sound check. Waiting in the wings of an arena that can fit more people than you've ever known in your life is a strange feeling. You sty there for hours just listening to the noise build, the people filing with their excitement levels always heightening. The weirdest feeling was knowing that 2 years before, you we're in the crowd, not on the stage.
We were first up that night; you can't expect much more than an opening slot from five kids, ranging in age from 17 to 19. We only had a 35 minute set to prove that we were worth the effort off flying us in from the other side of the world, signing us before we finished high school, putting us on a tour with the biggest bands of the year. We had to do more than just prove to other we were good enough, we had to prove to ourselves that it was worth not seeing our friends or families for up to eight months at a time.
It was 7:41pm exactly when we stepped out onto the well lit stage for the first time in front of more than a hundred people. This time it was more like five thousand. The next half an hour passed in a blur, everything was going so well I couldn't believe it! No-one messed up on their instruments, there was no awkward "Oops I forgot the lyrics to my own song" moments, it was out best performance yet. When I came back down to planet earth, I was saying goodnight to a crowd that barely knew who we were an hour ago, but who were now begging for one more song, a song we couldn't give them. The time constraints were pretty strict, and we didn't want to cut short the sets of others.
Even after our momentously successful set, I couldn't shake my feeling. If anything it came back stronger as a sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach. I felt like I couldn't walk without my legs just giving way to the huge weight somewhere between my liver and my intestines. It was really starting to bug me, and the only thing that made it better was watching from the wings, as older, much more experienced performers eclipsed us. It was when I was watching Panic at the Disco perform their newest song, 'Nearly Witches', that I first saw it, that ominous puddle of water right next to Jon's pedals. I can't believe it took me so long to notice something like that! I ran back into the large backstage area, desperately trying to find a tech to fix the problem. Then I heard it. The simultaneous gasp, five thousand people screaming in unison, that's when I knew I was too late.
The hospital waiting room was an eerie place at 4am. With no one except the occasional tired and stressed nurse dropping in to give updates, updates that told us nothing new hour after hour, except that surgery to repair a damaged heart-lung system takes a long time. There were a total of twenty-five people in a room probably designed to hold ten at the very most, even ten would have been incredibly uncomfortable. But no one minded about trivial things like having to sit on each others laps when a friend was hanging on a thread between life and death. I couldn't believe it was only 12 hours ago that I was messing around in our dressing rooms, stealing Jon's suitcase and telling him Brendon threw it into Lake Michigan. Just as the tears resumed their path down my cheeks, a middle aged, harassed looking doctor walked in. Everyone stood up and looked at him, but the doctor's expression gave nothing away, even to people who could get information off a blank sheet of paper. Dr. Masen told us the fate of our friend who had become like a brother to most people who knew him; Jon was alive, but only just. Only time would tell whether he would wake up, the doctor continued to explain, but if he did wake up he would be fine.
IF he woke up.
Looking back on that night thirty years on, it still feels like yesterday when one of my closest friends almost lost everything. Not to mention the night everyone who knew him almost lose him forever.