She worships at his feet. She doesn’t care that I exist.
She stands at the foot of the stage, looking up at him with adoring eyes, his face stretched in monochrome across her little round breasts, the knots of her nipples poking through at his illustrated cheeks. She submits her lithe body to the rhythms of his sound, her slender midriff writhing, head rolling, hair flying in orgasmic supplication. She leans levered over the barricade, a flower reaching for sunlight, her bronze skin shining with the heat of his rhythms, the heat of the venue, the heat of the lights and the dimmers and the pumping amps, the heat of 5,000 other bodies, just like hers, surging to the rhythmic trance of his music.
He stands in his exalted place, before her on the thrust of the stage, his guitar the scepter in his hands, his pulpit the semicircle of monitor wedges I arrange for him each day and mix for him each night, his mixes the ones most frequently in the cue wedge beside me as I listen for any problems, any feedback, any ringing in his vocal mic. The two wedges at his sides feed him the sounds of his backing band and his own guitar. The two in front of him—between her and him—carry nothing but his own voice, bone dry and carefully tuned, with a 31-band equalizer all to itself in the rack beside my elbow. At his feet, the printed set lists taped to the stage each night by his guitar tech, the name of tonight’s town handwritten in magic marker block letters, blue this time. His high-end tube microphone handled only by his tech, set up on the boom stand that I provide, a respectful distance from his guitar and decorated with colorful scarves, the mic cord wrapped discreetly, a friction clip loaded with guitar picks, which he flicks out to his fans as if coins to a crowd of beggars.
Even though she is almost at his feet, he doesn’t pick her out of the crowd, doesn’t appreciate her glistening beauty as I do, doesn’t deserve her focused attention, her nipples poking at his cheeks. He has all the attention in this great hall, 10,000 eyes caressing his rugged face, his beaded locs, the wiry muscles of his arms and chest exposed by the colorful vest that serves as his shirt. Even I, lurking black t-shirt in my shadowy corner, serve to exalt him, my desk of dials, knobs, and faders solely dedicated to making sure he and his band of hired guns can hear themselves, can hear each other, can hear him, his guitar, his voice, the unexpected orders he sometimes calls out, cueing his assembled musicians to make sudden turns in new and unexpected directions. He has their full attention, the backline hanging on his every whim. He really should have my full attention as well, although the hard part of my job was done before the doors opened and the crowd surged in and the rows of seats were rendered obsolete. Maybe he does see her, right there at his feet. But she is just one of 5,000 here for his show, easily a 100 of whom, on any given night, as on so many nights before, would follow him at a crook of his finger, out to the buses gleaming behind the building, beside the eight-bunk bus for his backing band, into his own bus, the most luxurious, tucked closest to the building, tied into the venue’s electricity and water and sewer, and would follow him into the stateroom where he rests in satin-sheet luxury while I collapse in a console lid—or a truck sleeper, or a hotel room if I’m really lucky—and would give themselves to him for the taking, if only so they could say they had done it.
Maybe she is one of those women. Those girls. Maybe she’s old enough that it wouldn't be illegal. Maybe she isn’t old enough, and it would be illegal, but the weed smoke thick in the air, intoxicating us all along with his music, hints that maybe illegal doesn’t matter all that much. I watch her bouncing, grooving to his rhythms, worshiping him with her eyes and with her body, and I grip the edge of my desk as I picture her doing the same in the luxurious stateroom of his bus, his face no longer screen-printed across her round little breasts, her torso writhing just like that, her nipples knotted like that between his strong fingers, her skirt discarded, or perhaps draped around her legs and his pelvis, tented around the place where his body thrusts into hers, while she grooves and sweats to his driving rhythms, raises her arms, and lifts her hair to cool her hot nape. Yes, just like that, as the song comes to an end and she drops out of her wild dancing to fan herself and catch her breath.
“Yo! Monitors!” The bassist’s voice shouts my de-facto name on this tour, on any tour really, dragging my attention away from her, back to this stage, which is my job. I see him gesture a what-the-fuck, the drummer beyond him also looking at me with panic in his eyes.
Something sounds wrong. The stage sounds wrong.
I scan my rig in a panic, the bridge gauges illuminated as they should be, the rack of equalizers and compressors still lit up beside me, and I’m about to look underneath at the racks of amplifiers at my knees when I see the row of bright red lights, one at the fader for each channel on the board, activated by the illuminated red button forgotten beneath my thumb, the button labeled “D”, the programmable scene mute that a lot of us set up as a sort of parking brake, one button to mute every channel on the entire board. The button that I seem to have accidentally pressed as I gripped the edges of the desk, while she was riding him like that, there in the climate-controlled stateroom of his bus.
I press that illuminated red button and the row of bright red lights goes out. The stage sounds like it should again. I look up to grimace an apology as the star of the show—the man whose name is on every poster, on every ticket in every pocket, the man whose art and charisma carries the entire six-figure economy of tonight’s show—glances at me over his shoulder from his pulpit of monitors.
The girl who is watching his every move, her eyes follow his, and for the first time, she sees me, at my electronic desk in my shadowy wing, sweating in my filthy t-shirt, my face hot with shame.
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