Chapter Seven: Irony And Stupidity Do Not Mix
Jericho's blonde brows furrowed
as he looked doubtfully at the long, shiny, psychedelic orange contraption
that Morgan was squealing over, and muttered, "Hey, are you sure this...this
double scooter thing works?" Morgan stopped dancing around the long, pumpkin-orange
board on garish pink wheels and with twin red handlebars protruding from
the front and middle, long enough to reply, "Sure it does! We just both
get on, grab our respective handlebars, and start pushing forward with
one foot on the sidewalk!" When Jericho still looked skeptical, the tiny
purple-haired bassist pleaded, "Aw, c'mon, Jerky-Werky-Poo! Let's try it!
Don't be such a spoilsport!" Jericho frowned, before grudgingly giving
in.
"Fine, fine," he relented,
shrugging. "We'll try out this double scooter thing, so long as you stop
calling me Jerky-Werky-Poo."
"Okay, Jerky," Morgan replied
cheekily, and happily hopped onto her place at the helm of the thing. Jericho
pouted.
"Hey, I wanted to be the
one in the front!" he whined. "How am I supposed to pick up chicks if I'm
riding behind a tiny little purple-haired shrimp like you?"
"Well, how am I supposed
to see if I have to ride behind a big old guy like you?" Morgan
pouted back. Jericho sighed, reluctantly giving in.
"Fine, fine," he grumbled,
as he grudgingly got onto the back of the double scooter behind the only
female member of Ömega brave enough to have stuck with the band. The
two started to propel themselves forward, heading toward the coffee shop
where they were supposed to carry out their interview with some reporter
named Lola Lolita (or, according to Jericho, Lulu What'sHerFace).
Unfortunately for the two
band mates, however, they had gotten a total of eight feet forward, before
a bottled blonde schoolgirl crammed into a pretty pink minidress had spotted
them and squealed, "Hey, look! It's, like, that total hunkasaurus from,
like, the "Panama" video that they were, like, totally playing on MTV last
night!" One of her companions, a pixie valley girl with dyed pink ponytails,
replied, "You mean, like, David Lee Roth? Ew, he's, like, a thousand years
old now!" The blonde bimbo replied impatiently, "No, like, not that Van
Halen thingie! I mean the, like, newer video, by that band with, like,
the totally hot drummer who's never, like, wearing a shirt! Like, Ömega!"
At that, her pink-haired friend squealed, "Eee! Like, no way!" And before
the happily pedaling Morgan and Jericho had realized what was happening,
a swarm of teenyboppers had gathered from God only knew where, and started
to stampede after the hapless duo. Jericho peeked back, and gulped.
"Oh, crikey!" he cursed,
then suddenly stopped. "Hey, cool, I can do an Aussie accent!" While Jericho
gloated about his newly-found Australian roots, Morgan chirped cheerfully,
"What's wrong?" That brought Jericho back to Earth, as he glanced back
at the rapidly approaching herd of teenyboppers, and swore.
"Crap! There's a hoard of
screaming schoolgirls after us!" he wailed. Morgan tried to look back to
see what the handsome blonde drummer was talking about, but due to the
fact that she was a good three or four inches short of even five feet,
it was rather hard for her to see around a toned, well-muscled six-footer,
so she had to take Jericho's word for it.
"Go faster!" Morgan shrieked,
and the two started pushing forward as fast as they could. Unfortunately
for Morgan (yet again!), she found out too late that Jericho had played
soccer in his high school years, and was thus very familiar with increasing
one's speed to suit the situation, while she herself was far too tiny to
keep up with him.
"Eeeek!" Morgan shrieked,
as she promptly fell off the double scooter thingie, while the clueless
Jericho kept on riding on, unaware that his band mate had fallen off and
intent on ditching the teenyboppers.
"Jerky!" Morgan wailed.
Fortunately for her this time, Jericho had good enough hearing and just
enough of a conscience to jump off the swiftly moving double scooter and
run back to snatch Morgan up. Glancing back at the steadily approaching
swarm of teenyboppers, Jericho cursed, before grabbing Morgan's tiny wrist
and sprinting off. Unfortunately for Morgan, though, she was barely four
foot eight, whereas Jericho stood a good five inches above six feet. Therefore,
as Jericho ran like a madman from the teenyboppers, Morgan flew--literally--a
good two feet off the ground as the drummer dragged her along with him.
"Whee! I'm flying like the
majestic bald beagle!" the purple-haired bassist squealed in delight.
Lola Lolita examined her reflection in the mirror, satisfied with what she saw. Despite the fact that she was already twenty-four years old, most of her colleagues at the magazine seemed to think that she was a valley girl ditz who always found a way to screw up her assignments, and it had nothing to do with her poofy sprayed hair or the fact that she stood at barely an inch over five feet. Lola frowned. She'd show them, those snotty, stuck in the past, holier-than-thou journalists who seemed to think that any band to have come out of the L.A. club scene was crap, and the record industry had stopped producing good albums after the classic-rock era of the seventies. She'd show them, by running the biggest, bestest cover story ever, on a heavy metal band that fit the mold of the exact type that her colleagues hated: crass, loud, and obnoxious, storming up the charts from the New York underground rock scene with screeching guitar licks and amps that went to a minimum of eleven. Ömega. Lola frowned. She'd never interviewed a band with Ömega's hard-drinking and harder-partying reputation--her boss had always handed the nicer, softer bands to her--and since she didn't really listen to heavy metal or hard rock, she'd been forced to rent out tapes of live concerts to adequately prepare for the biggest story of her career. Unfortunately, however, metal bands seemed split down the middle when it came to concert crowds: there were the busty, bottle-blonde Poison groupies on one side of the camp, and the greasy-haired, drunken, dominantly male maniac metalheads who proudly wore their tattered Anthrax T-shirts on a daily basis. Lola had fretted over her dilemma, before deciding to merge the two camps into one. However, since the only interviews she'd been assigned to previously were pop stars, she had no real street credentials when it came to the underground hard rock scene, let alone any clue whatsoever as to how fans dressed. So, she'd decided to improvise with what she had, and in the end, she'd wound up plastering a giant blow-up picture of Dave Mustaine over a pastel pink Christina Aguilera T-shirt, donned a giant Jennifer Lopez-esque hat colored in Poison green and with the words Gums & Rosses glued sloppily onto the brim, and spent a fortune on a pair of white leather pants that Axl Rose might have worn during the "Paradise City" music video. Lola spared one last look to the mirror, satisfied with what she saw, before squaring her shoulders and going off to battle, armed with her trusty handheld recording device.
Jericho literally ran over an eight-year-old girl on Rollerblades, dragging Morgan with him as he made a mad break for anywhere that could provide some sort of refuge from the teenyboppers. He finally screeched to a halt inside an alley, panting and gasping for breath, while Morgan giggled, "Yay, that was fun!" and the flock of teenyboppers ran right past them, thankfully not one of them having noticed the two hiding out inside. Jericho paused to take a breath, before murmuring in relief, "Phew, glad that's over."
At that moment, a tiny little
woman--barely a couple of inches taller than Morgan (which was saying something!)--approached
the two.
"Scuse me, my name's Lola
Lolita, and I'm--" she started to say. Jericho's eyes bugged out, as he
noted the giant green hat, hot pink shirt with a picture of some blonde
pasted on the front, and hideous white pants. Teenybopper! his brain
screamed in alarm, all the while not realizing that the blurry blonde was
actually former Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine, and not Britney Spears
on a bad hair day.
"Run!" Jericho hollered,
and took off. Morgan, who'd been busy pointing at the little Lolita and
giggling, "Hey, cool, you're just as short as I am!" noticed that Jericho
had run off and whined, "Hey, quit ditching me, Jerky!" before taking off
after him. Lola blinked dazedly, wondering whether her metalhead costume
was so hideous as to have frightened off someone who'd actually worn purple
leather pants with tassels on a club date, and dashed after the duo, waving
her handheld recorder and wailing, "Hey, wait! Don't run away! I don't
bite!"
Five Minutes Later...
Morgan buckled herself into
the passenger's seat, then glanced back at the frantically running Lola
as Jericho revved the engine. Sinking back into her seat, she sighed comfortably,
"Aw, that was so nice of that officer to lend us his car while he wasn't
looking." Jericho drove on, speeding recklessly in his hijacked cruiser
and nearly crashing into everything he possibly could as he nodded at Morgan's
comments.
"Yeah. I must say though,
he was pretty dumb to have actually believed we worked for the FBI!" he
crowed, then nearly crashed right into a lamp post as he turned around
to exchange what was actually a low five to him with Morgan. Apparently,
the two Ömega band mates seemed to think that jumping an officer from
behind while he was busy slapping a ticket on a hapless speeding teen,
and then shoving an empty wallet into his face while shouting, "Jericho
Locklear--FBI!" before jumping into his police cruiser and driving off
in a great cloud of exhaust fumes was the same as borrowing. Just then,
the petty criminal who'd been arrested and locked into the backseat woke
up from his slumber, and slurred, "Hey, man, can you pull over?"
Five More Minutes Later...
"Eeeeeewwww!" Morgan shrieked,
and the startled Jericho nearly hit the roof of the car upon hearing her
high-pitched whine.
"What?" he asked frantically,
taking his hands off the wheel as he turned around and causing a startled
blue Nissan to swerve out of his way. Morgan held her nose, waving her
tiny hands in front of her face as she whined, "Pee ew! That guy just threw
up all over the backseat!"
Ten Minutes After That...
"...Ready?" Jericho asked.
Morgan nodded tensely, tightening her hands into tiny little fists until
her knuckles turned white.
"One, two, three...Jump!"
Jericho shouted, and the two simultaneously opened their car doors and
dove out of the moving cruiser, leaving their drunken, barfing petty criminal
of a back seat passenger behind as they made a break for it in moving traffic.
"Jerónimo!" Morgan
shrieked as she jumped. Jericho made his escape silently...and promptly
wound up tackling a, um, big-boned fifty-year-old pedestrian who happened
to be crossing the street hauling a bag of jelly-filled doughnuts.
"Ick! My hair!" Jericho
wailed, desperately pulling at his sticky, jelly-covered golden locks.
Just then, a vaguely familiar
face peered into Jericho's, as its owner sang out, "Are you all right?"
Jericho leaned back, and his eyes widened when he recognized the speaker
as the pink-green-and-white-clad little teenybopper who'd called herself
Lolita.
"Hey, it's that teenybopper
girl from the alley," Morgan chirped up brightly, at the same time that
Lola drew back in surprise and sputtered, "But I'm not a teenybopper..."
Jericho, by then, had recovered from the trauma of his hair emergency,
and had already grabbed Morgan's hand and shouted, "Run!" with Lola sputtering
after them, "Hey, I'm just as hard-rocking as the next guy!" She then proceeded
to point to the next guy she saw...who just happened to be skipping along
wearing a pastel pink Backstreet Boys T-shirt and crooning, "Show me the
meaning of being lonely!" By then, Jericho and Morgan had long since disappeared,
chasing after their discarded hijacked police cruiser.
At the coffee shop...
"Ooh, ooh! I want an espresso!"
Morgan chirped.
"Don't listen to her," Jericho
quickly informed the waitress. "She doesn't need to be any more hyper than
she already is. She'll take a nice glass of seltzer."
Just then, Lola popped up from behind.
"All right, let's start
this interview by telling me the names of all five band members..."
Jericho and Morgan were out the door before she could finish her sentence.
On a second hijacked police car...
"Gee, I wonder when that
reporter lady's gonna show up," Morgan wondered out loud. "She's way late
for the interview."
Lola ironically peeked over from the back seat.
"Hey, is it true that your
new guitarists have been bouncing in and out of the detox center like proverbial
yo-yos?" she chirped brightly. Five seconds later, Lola let out an insulted
grunt of, "Oof!" as she clutched her butt, shaking her fist and glaring
after the moving cruiser as she hollered, "You can throw me out as often
as you like, but you'll never get rid of me! I'm harder to peel off than
Seran wrap! Mwahahah!"
At the park...
Jericho and Morgan, decked
out in identical beige trench coats, Fedora hats, and fake nose-eyeglasses-and-mustache
disguises, peered up from their newspapers. Seeing no dazed teenybopper
in sight, Jericho began to relax.
"Phew. I guess we finally
ditched her," he breathed. Just then, a third trench-coat-and-Fedora-hat-clad
figure who'd been sitting on the park bench beside theirs, leaned over,
took off her hat and shades to reveal her true identity, and trilled, "So,
can you share any hair-care tips with our readers, Locklear?"
"Run!" Morgan wailed.
At the punk shop...
Jericho shifted uncomfortably
under the tremendous load of clothing and accessories, as Morgan happily
worked her way through the entire store, throwing even more merchandise
into the hapless drummer's arms every other minute. Jericho grunted, before
whining, "This is boring! I wanna go home now!"
"Oh, you be quiet, Jerky,"
Morgan chirped cheerfully, casually throwing a thrift store tee bearing
England's Union Jack front and back onto Jericho's head. As Jericho sulked
and pouted, the tiny bassist added, "Now you've got an idea how long it
takes to shop for all our stage attire, Jerky!" Just then, one of the store's
"sales clerks" popped up and sang out, "So, your name's Jericho Locklear!
Any relationship to Heather Locklear?" Jericho, unable to see too well
with the Union Jack tee tangled in his precious hair, grunted cluelessly,
"Huh? Who's Helen Lockhart?" Morgan, busy examining a pair of leather pants
small enough to fit her, sang out nonchalantly, "Oh, that's the blonde
actress who married that rock star guy." Jericho lit up.
"Oh, you mean that Baywatch
hooter that Bret Michaels and Tommy Lee got to boink around on camera?"
he asked innocently.
"No, Heather Locklear's
the non-skank who married Richie Sambora from Bon Jovi," the "clerk" who'd
asked the question prodded. Jericho shrugged.
"Naw, we ain't related,"
he told her. "We must be like Eddie and Alex Van Halen--you know, they
have the same last names, but they're not related at all!"
"D'oah!" The "clerk" looked
like she wanted to smack her forehead for his stupidity. Just then, Jericho
finally managed to toss the Union Jack tee off his head and onto his lap,
and finally got a good look at the "clerk" who'd asked him that question
about...what was it again? Oh, yeah, the Brothers Van Halen! Jericho scrunched
up his perfect nose. Although, if they weren't related, then how
come they looked so much alike, and everybody called them the Brothers
Van Halen? Hmm, maybe they were related after all, like Joe Perry
and Joe Piscopo...Fortunately for the spaced-out Jericho, Morgan turned
around at that moment, and finally got a glance of the "clerk" who'd asked
them the question.
"Wai! It's that crazy teenybopper
stalker chick!" she wailed, and quickly pulled Jericho out of the shop
while the "crazy teenybopper stalker chick" was busy writing down Jericho's
quote about how he and Heather Locklear were just like Alex and Eddie Van
Halen.
At the gas station...
Lola observed the duo of
Jericho and Morgan stealthily creep into the convenience store, and grinned
victoriously.
"Gotcha!" she gloated, and
crept in after them. Throwing open the swinging glass doors wide open,
she shouted, "All right, Ömega, spill the dirt, and spill it now!"
Her eyes widened, as she noticed all the tough biker-types glowering down
at her and her silly teenybopper attire, and she eeped.
"Uh-oh..."
Meanwhile, Jericho and Morgan not-so-discreetly snuck out via the bathroom
windows. Jericho, lodged halfway out and with his long legs dangling from
the inside, grunted, "Ouch, Morgan, quit poking my butt already! It's not
gonna help get me out any faster, 'kay?"
Five minutes later, after Jericho and Morgan had this time hailed a
taxi rather than going for the usual hijacking a police car routine, a
black-and-blue Lola stumbled out of the convenience store, gingerly rubbing
one of the numerous bumps and bruises on her head.
"Ouchy..." she whined, tottering
dazedly about.
Jericho and Morgan arrived
in front of their apartment, with the latter whining, "I can't believe
Lola Lolita promised us an interview, and then never showed up! How rude!"
Jericho grimaced, plucking at his hair.
"I know," he agreed. "Between
that Lulie reporter chick snubbing us, that wacky teenybopper who kept
on chasing after us, and all the damage done to my gorgeous hair, I am
ready to just go straight to bed and try to forget this day ever happened!"
The two unlocked the fence surrounding the apartment complex and proceeded
to enter...then stopped dead in their tracks when they found the human
heap collapsed in front of a building. Tangled on top was Rikki Stixx,
flailing feebly about as he clutched at his eyes and wailed, "My eyes!
My eyes!" Apparently, he'd witnessed a highly horrific sight very recently.
Underneath the flailing Rikki, Pietro Maximoff was whining, "My hair! My
hair!" terrified that his precious platinum locks had been damaged somehow
in the fall. And finally, lodged at the bottom of the heap, was the highly
unfortunate Lance Alvers, who grunted painfully, "My spine! My spine!"
Morgan's eyes lit up, and she squealed, "Ooh, this game looks like so much
fun; lemme play!" She then cleared her throat, and proceeded to shriek
at the top of her lungs, "My piercings! My piercings!" Suddenly, Jericho,
who'd been staring dumbfounded at the human heap before, gasped out, "My
gum! My gum!" Morgan stopped screeching about her piercings long enough
to turn around and chirp brightly, "Oh, so you've decided to join in too,
huh?" Jericho shook his head adamantly.
"No!" he replied emphatically.
He then whined, "I swallowed my gum!"
Fortunately, at that moment,
Roxy and Jennifer returned from their promotional meetings with radio stations
(actually, Jennifer had simply sat back and watched while Roxy bullied,
sweet-talked, and manipulated the DJ's into playing Ömega's first
single off of their upcoming debut album). The two women drove up in the
rental car Roxy had obtained while she waited for her trashed SUV to be
repaired, and found the five members of Ömega acting like the motley
crew of screwballs that they were. Jennifer got out, staring boggle-eyed
at the band, while Roxy removed her silver shades and surveyed the scene
with calm almond eyes. She strode confidently past the band, heading to
retrieve the mail, while Jennifer reluctantly rolled up her sleeves and
went to work, pulling Rikki off of Pietro and Lance first. She guided the
dazed band into their trashed apartment, and filled up a kettle of water
to be boiled for tea in an effort to calm them down, as she inquired, "So...what
happened?"
"Our reporter never showed
up," Morgan huffed first, obviously insulted as she crossed her arms and
legs and kicked her feet about.
Before anybody else could
speak up, Roxy returned from where she'd retrieved that day's mail, calling
out, "Hey, looks like Lance and Pietro's cover shot to be used in next
month's issue of that local guitar magazine has arrived!" Jennifer stood
up, eager to get a peek.
"Let me see," she requested,
to which Roxy quickly whipped the envelope behind her back.
"Uh...I really don't think
you want to," she muttered. Jennifer's heart sank, before she turned around
to fix a stern look on Lance and Pietro, still going on about their bad
hair and bad back.
"What did you do now?" she
grilled, to which the Toxic Twins shot back clueless looks.
"Huh?" they wanted to know.
"The magazine cover!" Jennifer
prodded. "What did you do to screw that one up?"
Lance shrugged.
"I don't know," he muttered,
at the same time that Pietro chirped innocently, "We don't remember.
"We got lost on the way
to the shoot," Lance added, "and since Pietro broke the electronic map
in Roxy's SUV by using it to try to spam some loser kid called Evan Daniels,
we had to stop for directions at some liquor store."
"Oh, no," Jennifer groaned,
as Pietro added cheekily, "Yeah, and how can you not buy as much
strawberry daiquiri as you can afford with all the money you could find
in Roxy's SUV?" Lance grinned.
"Yeah. Guess we kind of
got carried away. The next thing we knew, Roxy had dragged us painfully
up from our hangover/sugar high-induced coma for hijacking her precious
Benz," he chirped cheekily. Jennifer swallowed hard, as she braced herself
for the worst and reached over to take the magazine from Roxy. The pretty
brunette manager needed take only one good look, before her mouth dropped
wide open and she nearly hit the roof.
"You...you...you..." she
sputtered, her face red as she waved the glossy magazine wildly about.
The others found out what had set her off soon enough, as they finally
got a peek of the infamous magazine cover. Gracing the glossy page, splashed
in full color underneath the guitar magazine's name, was a full-frontal
cover depicting Lance and Pietro in all their naked glory--literally. The
two self-proclaimed guitar gods, obviously drunk out of their minds and
grinning goofily into the camera, were posing like rock stars for the magazine
cover, wearing absolutely nothing except their guitars, which were hanging
too low anyway and just barely squeezed by to make the picture non-pornographic.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty,"
Morgan clucked, as Jericho shrugged, completely unfazed as he took a calm
sip of his beer, while Rikki grimaced and averted his eyes, whining, "Oh,
God! As if that thousand-year-old woman wasn't bad enough! I didn't want
to see this!"
"You're naked!" Jennifer
finally shrieked in dismay, absolutely horrified. Lance and Pietro looked
defensive, as Pietro grouchily defended himself, "Hey, they told us to
be natural! So...we did!" while Lance gave a silly laugh and quipped, "Yeah,
this is as natural as you can get!" Meanwhile, as Jennifer struggled to
keep herself from having a mental breakdown and/or a heart attack, Roxy
was already busy on the phone.
"Hi, is this the editor
for Playgirl magazine?" she was saying. After a brief pause, she
began her sales pitch. "Yes, hi, this is Roxy Oyama of Red Zeppelin Records...I
was wondering, would your magazine be interested in cutting a deal for
a photo spread of two up-and-coming rock & roll guitarists?"
Will Jennifer have a mental breakdown? Will Lola Lolita get back at Jericho and Morgan for setting her up at the gas station? Will Roxy's proposal for a Playgirl spread of Lance and Pietro go through? Will I ever shut up? -_- Huh, I can answer that last question...
