ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Last week two people I know from the internet, plus one of them brought his cousin, came to visit and with my boyfriend’s roommate we all went to a Type O Negative show Wednesday night. I was pretty tired by the end of the week, what with all the company we had here, but it was a good time.

About the show: I was kind of disappointed, although I still had a good time hanging with everybody. I saw them three years ago at the Granada in Lawrence, when they were touring for World Coming Down, and they were just about the best live show I’d ever seen. The show lasted about forever, and I was deaf for like a day afterward. The crowd was enthusiastic, but not annoying or shitty, and although the opening bands sucked pretty bad for the most part, it was a great experience. I liked them more after the show than I had before.

This show was a little different. For starters, the Beaumont was filled with annoying Kansas City goths, like this one chick in red vinyl whose side tittyfat rolls were actually larger than her breasts themselves, and this slightly balding mid thirties guy in black lace and vinyl. If you know anything at all about Type O Negative, you’re probably thinking that an obnoxious goth turnout is kind of an obvious given with any live performance of this band. I guess it’s just that Lawrence doesn’t have quite the population of goths who care enough about being goth to bother dressing up for functions like this, possibly because Lawrence’s demographic consists primarily of a) hippies and b) people who are just trying to get through college and mind their own business. This in mind, I think the main problem I had with enjoying the show was the crowd, which consisted of approximately eight decent people—including us—and one hundred million fruitcakes in black vinyl each trying to prove to Peter Steele that they were his only true fan in Kansas City.

I’m too short to join the crowd at any concert, unless it’s some kind of midget gathering, so my boyfriend’s roommate and I ended up smashed along with one of our internet friends against this rail near the back of the club. I discovered that despite the pain it caused in my ass, I could sit up on the rail and actually see the band decently. I think our internet friend was far too drunk at this point to care much about what anybody but the band was doing, but my boyfriend’s roommate and I spent most of the show pissed off as gradually the entire population of Europe pushed past us, traveling aimlessly around the club for reasons I still can’t figure out. Every seven seconds or so, another misunderstood sad kid in black would make us move so he see if the other side of the room was just as depressing to him as this one. Then there was the ass-rubber guy, who my boyfriend’s roommate and I informally dubbed “Randy” because of his uncanny resemblance to a guy we used to know back home. This guy was drunker than probably anybody else at the show, and was having a jolly old time rubbing his ass against my leg as I sat there on my now incredibly painful perch. Every once in a while I’d grab him firmly by the shoulders and push him forward and away from me, but when this happened he’d turn around and smile in this incredibly friendly way. I was getting pissed, but I seriously did not care to start any kind of altercation because both my boyfriend’s roommate and the internet friend were pretty drunk, and I didn’t want to drag them into a fight over some kind of ass-rubbing misunderstanding. I honestly couldn’t tell whether the guy was intentionally being a jerk, or if he was just so far gone he couldn’t tell that he was pissing me off, so I decided to give him the benefit of a doubt and thankfully he left eventually.

As for the band themselves, they were OK. They didn’t play for long, which was simultaneously disappointing and an enormous relief to me, because I was very uncomfortable and getting really sick of being groped by strangers. I thought it was too bad that they weren’t as kickass as they had been the first time, since I think for the others it was their first time to see Type O live. After the encore we made our way back over to the bar, where the internet friend purchased two of the worst-mixed Long Island Iced Teas I’ve ever seen and shared one with my boyfriend’s roommate. The other internet friend and his cousin met up with us as well, and after some gagging and video golf we managed to get everybody herded out the door with no complication. After that we piled into my car, and the only incident on the way home was a brief and heart-stopping (for me) moment in which the first internet friend didn’t realize that his red and blue flashing cigarette lighter looked just like a set of police lights in my rearview. I yelled at him a little more meanly than I meant to, apologized for losing it, and we eventually made it home, although my boyfriend’s roommate was considerably worse for the wear the next day, probably because he hadn’t eaten prior to getting badly smashed. On the way home the first internet friend and the second internet friend’s cousin dozed in the backseat while the second internet friend and I had a nice, somewhat relaxing chat.

The highlight of the evening for me was when the second internet friend’s cousin saw a bicyclist in Westport who looked very silly because of the giant tall helmet he had on. He said, “There goes the pineapple man!”