High at a Rock Concert

Today, I’m high at a rock concert. Charleston Municipal Auditorium. Great White. Fourth time seeing them perform. First time while floating in warm salt water, buoyant and serene. My neck is dripping wax melted by candles burning in my cheeks. Distorted chords massage my body. Riffs run fingertips up my spine, or maybe those are small fish swimming close in this dreaming sea surrounding me.           Strange. Last week, I couldn’t swallow a Tylenol without gagging, spitting, and giving up. I took nothing stronger than baby aspirin—chewable, with somewhat of a candied taste. Then the oral surgeon caught me in his snare. (“Count backward from one hundred,” he said. At eighty-seven I told him, “I don’t think it’s working,” but had no memories of anything after that when I woke up.) He cut out my wisdom teeth while I was under, then sent me home still fried from the anesthetic. No pain existed for me yet, but it would come: a biting agony like sawing at my face with jagged knives. For that, he gave me pills. Lortab 7.5, hydrocodone and acetaminophen. Thirty of them. Oblong, white, and speckled with blue and brown. One refill. Take one or two every six hours as needed for pain, printed on the label. By the second day, I was swallowing them four at a time. I liked what they did to me: how I never really stopped feeling the pain, but didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything anymore beyond the euphoria and my tickets to the Great White gig the following evening.           Of course, I bought those tickets before I learned I’d be target practice for a scalpel blade or suspected that I could fill my mouth with bliss and have it infect the rest of my body. For thirty-six hours, those pills took me up on the space shuttle, shoved me out through the cargo bay, and left me adrift in the beautiful emptiness of everything. When I watched a movie on TV last night, the pixels brightened and swirled around my eyes, while actors spoke a symphony of notes in mostly bass and baritone. I hadn’t connected with anything so completely since I discovered heavy metal five years ago in 1986, grew my hair, lost weight, bought my first guitar. What changes would this new passion bring?           No time to think about that. First, I had to experience the moment when my two loves met. My third love—girlfriend Ellen—drove. She enjoyed the music, too, and had gone with me to at least one other Great White show, the band opening for whatever larger band (Whitesnake, Poison, Aerosmith) passed through town that day. So, I gave her my keys and she took me downtown. We showed our tickets, bought our t-shirts, found our seats, and waited for the opening bands to begin.           I barely recall those warmup acts now that Great White has been playing for what feels like three hours but only might have been three songs. Can’t even remember which ones. Something bluesy, grooving, sleazy. But aren’t they all? Each grinding chord becomes a warm embrace. My head is one tiny singularity of agony surrounded by a Big Bang of brilliant, radiating energy expanding. Stars ignite and die behind my eyes. The melodies shoot rays that penetrate me. I can’t hear them, though. There is no sound in space.           Even before the band comes out for its encore, I’ve seen what awaits me after the last song plays. I know I will swallow galaxies, trying to recapture a taste of this moment. I’ll build worlds and burn them down. I’m a god of my own delight, with power to create and destroy.