Scalp Yourself with Lilac De Fleurs

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley

A cool day with no wind, the sun beaming down brightly but without heat, the air fresh, vibrant and clean, a light-brown squirrel on a fence post chewing a pecan, a butterfly glided over Ron's head. He jumped the chain length fence and landed in his parent's yard. He wanted to borrow a shovel to dig for worms, he needed to do a little fishing and knew fish oil contained lots of beneficial Omega-3s; he wanted to catch a few fish and extract the fish oil and consume it for his hypertension.

Ron saw his father bending down by the oak tree in the middle of the yard, not wearing any electrical equipment on his head or back this time (occasionally his father invented new things and tried to turn himself into a cyborg). Ron was relieved his father hadn't installed any new gear into himself. He heard his father whistling and saw him reach down for something. Ron walked up behind him and his father whipped around quickly and threw a dead frozen black-and-white dog toward Ron's head. He ducked and yelled "HOLY JESUS" and the frozen dog hit the top rim of the trash can, bounced around and fell inside. Then his father began speaking to Ron in a slow meditative voice,

"Oh, I'm sorry, Ron. I didn't see you there. I'm glad you came. I was just thinking about an old jazz bass player I knew a long time ago. Best jazz bassist you ever heard in your life. He could improvise with the best of them. Played wicked complicated bass lines over the most sophisticated chord changes. He could play them all day too. Never repeating the same line twice. Darrel was his name. I'll tell you his story."

* * * * *

practicing for hours in this hovel can barely take it anymore scale after scale arpeggio after arpeggio fingers tired and the tips burning with no callouses left on my hands rubbed away, tired and spent, hot sweat pouring down my back, my neck my arms mom won't let me have a fan out here who needs one

this bass bought two weeks ago at a pawn shop heavy strings, ridiculously high action, almost like pressing down heavy electrical cables seems like i have to push them down a foot or more have to save up for some new strings jesus this heat is killing me back to that new scale.

* * * * *

Ron sighed and leaned back against the oak tree, he felt the bark ridges almost cutting into his upper back, he moved his torso to and fro to scratch the dry flaky skin there and it felt wonderful. "I know the story, Dad. You've told me about Darrel a million times already. You don't have to tell me again."

"No, no," his father shook his head. "You haven't heard this one, Ron. I just remembered it the other day. You see, we played this gig once, when Darrel was in my band, Schizmo, at a sleazy skid row beer joint, a low down funky place, and Darrel played about twenty burning bass solos over the course of the night because our guitar player couldn't solo that well. We had to let Darrel sort of substitute for him, and he was really on fire this particular night. The audience loved his playing even though they weren't really used to hearing a lot of bass solos."

* * * * *

chord after complicated chord learning new scales and arpeggios memorizing sophisticated melodies where does this finger go where does that one go how about my pinky and thumb dont forget about them touching and dampening the strings below oh no you can't play that you have to be truly ambidexterous and full of juice and shrapnel which you dont have enough of yes i do

* * * * *

Anyway, after the gig, last set over, Darrel went upstairs in the bar to drink with the winos. You see they had some rooms above the bar that they'd rent out, it was sort of a cheap flop house, and someone could rent a room for only $1 a night, or $5 a week. It was a pretty scummy place but it worked out well for the bums and they enjoyed it. Well Darrel went up because he loved drinking and talking to bums and winos and he would listen carefully to their stories. He felt comfortable with them even though he was a great musician and in a much higher socio-economic bracket, they reminded him of his Dad and uncles. So all the drunks were up there drinking vodka and they were pretty trashed at that point and getting really wild and talkative and some were even getting a little violent. But Darrel hung in there and drank with them and laughed and told jokes and pretty soon they had finished off the last bottle of vodka and completely ran out of alcohol to drink. So the worst wino of them all, Dale Rapherty, pulled out his bottle of Lilac de Fleurs toilet water & aftershave."

"What's that?" Ron said.

* * * * *

dear reader, by now you know this is an experimental story, sorry but i'm the author and i have to interrupt and ask if you think it's working so far - i know, probably not, but i'm trying out a few new things since i'm bored with the basic structure of traditional short stories let's see what happens next

* * * * *

"Well," Ron's Dad continued, "when the winos up there would run out of beer, wine, or whiskey, they would scrape together some change and buy this cheap toilet water called Lilac de Fleurs aftershave and drink it instead. It had a lot of alcohol and really burned the throat and tonsils but they would tolerate it anyway since they had nothing else to drink. So Darrel and the bums started drinking that Lilac de Fleurs stuff and got really screwed up and they went out on the balcony to take some deep breaths of the cool night air, and the balcony had a strair case that led down to the alley. I was standing on the balcony with them (but I didn't drink any of that terrible Lilac de Fleurs garbage), when I noticed that Darrel was getting really drunk quite fast on that nasty toilet water, and he didn't want to help us pack up any of the band equipment. He couldn't have helped us anyway really, he was so plastered. So he had his truck parked in the alley at the bottom of the staircase, right up against the bottom of the stairs. He could barely walk but he told us he was leaving and took one last huge gulp of Lilac de Fleurs and stepped off the balcony leading down to his truck."

Ron stood there staring at his father with an intense look on his face. He had never heard this story before. Finally his father was telling him one he didn't know.

* * * * *

my boss at this market research company invited me to his house once, he wanted to jam, I kept telling him music theory facts like E minor is relative to G major and such he eventually said 'hey darrel, grease up your fingers and come over to my house,' i know it sounded strange but he didn't mean anything weird by it, only that he wanted us to play guitars together, me on bass and him on lead, but i never found time to go and it was a waste because maybe i could have formed a decent band with him

but it's all the same isn't it, notes rhythms pitches, tonality chord progressions, melody tapping one's foot to a breakneck rhythm hey that riff sounds heavy doesn't it, but it's still horrible where is the spark in your playing, everything sounds flat and dead, i got the passion don't doubt me it's right here

* * * * *

"Darrel fell forward," his father said, waving his hands around, "just as he took that first step, but instead of actually falling, he started running down the staircase, bent over at the waist, his upper body almost parallel to the ground, leaning forward, his big bony head pointed right at his truck, he sprinted all the way down the stairs trying to keep from falling, his legs were pumping like hell, and when he reached the bottom of the stairs, he was still bent over at the waist, and his head RAMMED into the thick metal door of his own truck, KA-WHAM!, a really loud harsh metallic crashing sound, then he fell onto his back, laying in the alley, surrounded by old broken beer bottles and paper sacks and lids and other trash.

"We thought Darrel had killed himself.

"We thought his skull had been crushed.

* * * * *

what's wrong with me i can't play my bass anymore and my head hurts how could you do this to me God i can't remember anything at all what am i supposed to do now

* * * * *

"I went down three steps to get a better look, but stopped because I saw him get up and brush himself off. I noticed that where his head had made contact with his truck door, there wasn't any hair there. The impact from his head ramming into the metal had scalped him somewhat. Just as if somebody had sliced off a patch of his hair with a tomahawk. Darrel finally opened his truck door and got in and drove away without even taking his bass guitar. That was another thing, Darrel never seemed to care about his instrument at all, even though he could play it better than any other person in the state of Texas, he would just leave it in random places and get it a week or two later.

* * * * *

dear reader, i had to do something to spice up the story, since it's not the greatest in the world you know...

* * * * *

"But after that accident Darrel never played his bass the same way again. I don't know if drinking that Lilac de Fleurs aftershave gave him brain damage or him slamming his noggin into the metal door of the truck and scalping himself did it, but whatever it was something screwed him up so bad he couldn't play any sophisticated jazz lines or cool improvisations at any more of our gigs, hell he could barely even follow the chord changes to simple rock songs and couldn't remember any common scales. Matter of fact, after that tragic night with the Lilac de Fleurs and the head-ramming, Darrel lost almost all his musical ability and couldn't improvise or do anything even remotely melodic. So after a month he just stopped playing his bass entirely."

"So what happened to him after that?" Ron said.

"He turned into a drunk. He's probably up on that balcony right now swilling Lilac de Fleurs aftershave."

* * * * *

ahh, tastes really good to me, see ya

* * * * *

"Do you ever go visit him?"

"No way. He's totally insane now. Really violent. He could go on a murderous rampage at any minute. Don't ever go around him, Ron. If you see him, turn and run the other way. But the moral of this story is that you should never drink alcohol before or after a gig, and especially refrain from drinking any cheap colognes, since you never know how they might affect your brain. Always be extra careful descending a rickety flight of stairs as well. Got it?"

"Yeah, I'll do all that," Ron said. "Thanks, Dad."

"No problem, son."

-end-

Bio: Jason Earls is the author of the books Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Red Zen, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); } and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover's books, Neometropolis, Wretched & Violent, Mathworld, Chiaroscuro, Switchblade, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG's Speculative Fiction, AlienSkin, Escaping Elsewhere, Werewolf, Recreational and Educational Computing, Thirteen, Theatre of Decay, Nocturnal Ooze, Prime Curios, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, and other publications. He currently resides in Texas with his wife, Christine.