You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
This story relayed to me by an acquaintance about what he had to endure at a rock show.
As he was recounting this terrible tale, I couldn’t help but think he was the Titanic and his marriage an ice berg in the North Atlantic.
Somewhere in his soulless eyes I saw thousands of desperate passengers running for a life boat that was all ready gone. As I listened to his words I could only imagine four musicians on deck playing chamber music while the greatest ship ever built sank into a meaningless matrimonial oblivion.
Once upon a time there was a Kid Rock concert.
The husband wants to impress his wife so he drops close to 300 dollars to take his beloved to the show. The seats are close to the stage in an incredible venue with great acoustics.
Maybe he’ll get lucky the guy jokes as he recounts this tale of marital disrespect.
To make this story more intriguing, the man purchased tickets with his boss, so they had four seats together.
It was suppose to be a couple’s night out, perhaps even a chance to schmooze the boss in a setting without desks and computers.
The man bursts out laughing while reliving this atrocity. Perhaps he laughs so he doesn’t have to cry.
The day of the concert, the man goes home only to find that his wife has all ready started hitting the Hooch. The guy never knows for sure, but he guesstimates the woman has all ready consumed a couple of cocktails and it’s only late afternoon.
The husband tells me that he is nervous about how buzzed his wife seemed, almost 2 hours before the concert had even begun.
Why not get in a life raft right there? I ask.
“I’m out 300 bills, the boss is expecting me, I took off work early, and there’s still a few hours for her to get it together,” he says, his eyes glazing over like a man who is lost in a cave of mirrors.
The man says he is becoming more alarmed as the concert approaches. The woman seems heavily buzzed as if she has also taken medication with the alcohol. As they wait in line for the concert, the woman is unsteady on her feet, and she is antagonizing other members of the crowd. She is making snide comments about women’s dresses and men’s belly’s. She thinks she is being quiet, but she is neither quiet or polite.
Like a drunken-stoned Don Quixote the woman is punching at thin air, reportedly fighting demon windmills only she can see in her distorted mind.
The embarrassed man is now having to smile uncomfortably at other people in line. He describes it as a silent “I’m sorry, she’s kind of wasted look.” This look will usually get you a pass in a concert setting, but how will It play one seat away from the big boss?
As the man escorts his bride to their seats, 8 rows from the stage, he says he is growing nervous. He sees his boss and suddenly, what was suppose to be a chance for a career move is looking like a possible career ender.
The man says his wife is jelly and loose and smiling at apparitions only she can see. They move down the row of people and she bumps into each person. She laughs, running her hand suggestively up the chest of 2 college age men who will end up sitting next to her.
The men in their early 20’s eye the middle aged woman like a piece of sexual meat that the Gods of Rock and Roll have brought to them.
The man says he is sweating bullets as he quickly introduces his liquored up wife to the boss. He is pleasant and she smiles, he says, saying very little. The gravity of the situation is lost upon her, the man says. The man will describe his wife as lacking social grace, and melting quickly, like gum on a hot sidewalk.
“Pull it together,” the man reportedly tells his wife.
The woman’s brain has shut down. Normal thinking seems trapped behind a dam of reality and a floodgate of intoxicants.
The woman smiles, her eyes going in different directions like a stoned salamander.
The chance for small talk is thankfully diminished by a venue that is loud and a concert that quickly starts.
“Thank God”, the man tells me. The lights are low, the music is cranked. At least for the next two hours he thinks he can hide this crazy wench in the darkness of humanity.
That’s what the man thinks. That is not what will happen.
The show begins in a sonic eruption of guitars and drums. The crowd explodes from its collective seat standing as one, fists raised in the air.
The man describes the seating arrangements thusly. His lunatic fringe wife is to his left. His boss to his right. The 2 college men are to the left of his wife.
The man says by the 2nd song, his wife’s brain has seemingly shut down, checked out like luggage, left on an airport conveyor belt.
The man says he is trying to get into the show, but by the 2nd song, he can only check his watch and wonder how much longer is this son of a bitch going to play?
And then it happens. Somewhere in the darkness, in the electric flashing lights and banging percussion of the show, the man looks to his left and sees a sight he never could have imagined.
His wife of many years, has her hands on the college boy beside her. The man says his wife is dancing, suggestively, pelvis to pelvis, like she is a stripper and he is the pole. Up and down, gyrating salaciously, rubbing on the college boy beside her, like a cat rubbing on a man’s leg.
The college boys are smiling that Cheshire cat smile that only comes from thoughts of sex and easy opportunity. The young men look at each other, their eyes growing wide. They say nothing, but the look on their faces says it all.
“What the hell?” “Who is this hot woman giving us a lap dance right here, right now?”
The young man watches the woman like a lion eyes a pork chop. The man says his wife is moving up and down the young man’s body, sexually, suggestively, uncomfortably.
The husband says his wife slowly grinds on the college boy, then turns to face the stage, while poking her butt into his crotch, moving ever so suggestively. The young man’s hands touch her waist, her hips.
The husband says he is mortified. He says he wants to cry, he wants to leave, but he is standing next to his boss. He says he knows many other people in the audience. He has to calmly take control without raising any eye brows.
“What did you do?” I ask.
He says he put his hand around her waist and pulled her to his side. He says he leaned into her ear and shouted: “You are embarrassing me in front of my boss.”
The man says it was like talking into a cell phone without any battery. His words went nowhere, as the wife’s mind reportedly just shut down to the reality that was all around her.
By this point, the man describes a strange scene of territorial behavior. The college boys are talking to themselves, as if to say, who is this guy, pulling this obviously loaded, hot woman, away from us.
The concert continues and after a song, the woman breaks contact with the husband. She steps back to the college boy and begins dancing for him, symbolically undressing him with her touch, with her actions.
The husband says his boss looks over and smiles, his gaze reverting back to the stage. It is uncomfortable as the husband once again corrals his wife and pulls her to his side with a more demonstrative attitude.
The woman tries to break free, but the husband tells her to please relax, please behave.
While the woman tries to dance, as if nothing has been happening. The man says he checks his wrist watch for the 9th time in 30 minutes.
When will this F-in concert end, he thinks to himself. Tthoughts of anger and a life time wasted fill his mind.
The man says he has only two options. Keep the present seating arrangement, and possibly deal with the college boys all night, or change places with his wife and stand next to the college boys and act as a buffer between the woman who wants to be their stripper more than she wants to be his wife.
The only problem with this switch he says? That puts this brain dead tuna fish of a wife next to his boss; the man who controls the purse strings. What if she does something crazy to him? The man thinks long and hard during a drum solo that hurts his brain almost as much as the pain in his heart.
The man says he makes his decision, and calmly steps behind his wife, and moves her to his right. She is now next to his boss and he is now standing next to the college boy who looks pissed.
That’s when, he says, one of the college boys leans over to him and says:
“Hey man. What’s up with the chick? Is she here with you?”
The college boy’s face was filled with disappointment. Who could blame him? Who wouldn’t want an attractive, experienced woman, to rub their hands up and down their body at a concert? Why wouldn’t he want to know why the seating arrangements suddenly changed?
“Hey dude, is this your girlfriend?” the college boy asks the man.
The man says he is so pissed he can barely contain himself.
“She’s my F-in wife,” he says over the roar of the amplifiers.
The college boys laugh.
“Well, man you better get a grip on her because she is gone,” one of them says, returning his attention to the show.
The husband is embarrassed and angry and disillusioned beyond belief. He wants to yank his wife out of the venue, but now she is standing next to his boss.
What excuse can he come up? What do you even say? The dog threw up? The kid has diaper rash?
The man decides to stay calm and let the show continue, hopefully without further incident.
The music is loud and the lights pulsing. The man says he actually manages to enjoy 2 or 3 songs, before his wife decides to antagonize 2 women standing in the row ahead of them.
The man describes his wife as cereberally void. She is a shell of a human, alive, moving, but her brain has disconnected from rational and societal thoughts. Only her autonomous nervous system is working, pumping her chemical laden blood throughout her body.
Like Don Quixote jabbing at his windmill, the woman suddenly begins touching the head of the women in front of her.
The man says it is like a red light flashing in his eyes.
“What Now?” He says to himself.
Like reaching out for a ghost, the woman’s trembling hand slowly moves forward, lightly stroking and then tugging on the pony tail of the girl in front of her.
The woman spins around with a curious look on her face.
“I’m sorry,” The man says he quickly interjects.
“What did your wife say?” I ask in utter disbelief.
“She smiled, almost laughed.” he tells me.
Another song passes and the man says his wife suddenly reaches her hands forward and touches the girl’s pony tail.
The girl spins around angrily this time, reportedly shouting over the concert din.
“Cut it out!”
The man’s wife reportedly looks up to the stage, pretending she didn’t do it.
By this time, the man says his boss glances over. The lights are flashing and the music is blaring. It’s dark and hard to gauge just what everyone is doing in a sea of bodies bouncing and dancing and moving back and forth.
The man says the actions of his wife are very pronounced and inappropriate. He knows it and the girl with the pony tail knows it. But thankfully, the area is a confused nest of stimuli and nobody else probably notices what is going on.
The concert can’t last any longer, the man thinks to himself. Please don’t play an encore, the man thinks to himself.
Finally the lights come on and its over.
The man says his ears are ringing and his heart about ready to explode with sadness.
The man says the ride home is a strange mix of anger and frustration.
“What did she say to you man?”
The man described it like this:
Her eyes danced around her head like a tad pole coming out of a fog. She was talking to her self and poking at visions I think only she saw. She was not sitting in the front seat as much as she was lying in it. The man says his wife’s butt was raised, almost on the dash board. Her legs were stretched out straight as her high heeled feet were dancing on the car’s windshield. All of this craziness at 70mph.
“How did you get home without wrecking?”
The man says it was absurdly hard to concentrate on the road. He says several times he tried to tell his wife to sit up and act like an adult. He says he tried to convey to her how embarrassing and inappropriate her actions were.
How did she react?
The man says the wife cackled like a drunk. He called it an out of body cackle, coming from deep within a wife he no longer knew or understood. He said the woman he married appeared to be in the car with him, but that woman’s soul was missing, replaced by something made of alcohol and narcotics.
Did your wife ever say anything to you on the ride home?
“You are so old. You are no fun,” is what she reportedly told him, as if he was the one who was crazy.
The next day the wife is sober, but doesn’t remember any of it. He remembers hearing her on the phone talking with someone saying how fun the concert was. How great Kid Rock was.
The husband closes his eyes to keep from crying.
He said he went out to cut the yard and let the roar of the lawn mower wash over his thoughts like a noisy blanket that he hopes will dull the pain.
POOR BASTARD!
And that is crazy.