Bläad Fugue

New York City. Saturday morning. Two a.m. Exam week for college students. Usually a slow weekend at Manny’s Rockorium, a fifties-style band venue that went unrenovated by such a long series of shabby owners that it had ended up back in style.

On this Friday Manny’s was holding a Battle of the Bands. Unmotivated students paid three dollars each for the hope of seeing at least one good band, or at least a few bad indie rock bands they could pretend to like so they could seem obscure and cool. Sweat dripped from Manny’s ceiling. The precipitation of youth and apathy. It dripped back on the crowd like a pop cultural echo chamber.

The contest was half way through and the standard was low. On stage was an unusual rock opera band from Germany. They wore matching ruffled shirts with their band’s name emblazoned across their chests in crimson: “Bläad”. The drummer beat the bass drum incessantly, driving the music forward like blood coursing through unclogged veins. The lead guitar screamed with the passion of a comely virgin, while the bass guitar was slapped like a fat pair of buttocks. The DJ did the occasional scratch; he was like a pair of breasts, there for show.

But what turned this group of musical spare parts into a crashing wave of moon-tinged luminescence was Kristof, the band’s charismatic singer. He stood proudly on the edge of the stage, one foot up on a speaker, revealing his manly attributes to the drunk co-eds. Kristof didn’t sing, Kristof barked. His harsh Germanic barking conjured up fever dreams of hard rutting. Yet his deep blue eyes hinted at sensitivity after the animal orgy. They hinted at candle-lit poetry, moonlit walks on craggy shores, hard rutting in the back of a taxi. His teeth were feral, promising an eternity of hard Germanic rutting to any woman who would give herself over. One snarl, one glimpse of razor sharp ecstasy could send the vision of symphonic rutting through a virgin’s mind. An opus to the moon, to love, to eternity coursing through your body.

Kristof’s eyes, ancient-yet-free-of-cataracts, scanned the mass of heaving flesh before him like a supermarket barcode scanner. An ancient supermarket barcode scanner that was scanning for that one special woman whose bosom was like the full moon. For on the night of the full moon Kristof was at his most powerful. And he longed to grab power. To squeeze it for all it was worth. But all he saw in Manny’s were sunken crescents, embellished by this century’s version of the whale bone breast-biggener. Nine ninety nine, red dot special. That red dot like a spot of blood on a white linoleum floor.

He stopped singing like a feasting wolf and sang softly for a moment, like a wolf crying for dinner. He sang a line he longed to say once more to his beloved Isadore: “Ve live in da muun forevaar. Ve live in da muun forevaar.” He was about to launch into the next line when he saw, spot-lighted by a horny lighting technician, the full moon. The bosom of his long-lost love. Unmistakable. The face matched too. “Isadore” he chocked, her name catching in his throat like a small chicken bone.

The band played on, but Kristof stopped singing. He turned on them angrily and screamed “HALT!!!!”. They stopped playing, unperturbed. “Ve vill naow play our balläd” he announced to the crowd.

The keyboardist switched to harp mode, the bass was picked with sensitivity, the guitar twanged softly like a snapped bra strap. The crowd milled around, impelled to rock their bodies back and forth by the drugs, not the music. But Isadore was entranced, frozen in entrancement, body stiff as a coffin, eyes alive like the night is if you to have a really bright torch. Something in Kristof’s eyes struck a chord with this Poly Sci major from Rutgers. It touched something deep in her soul, a soul that suddenly felt old without being musty. Kristof’s eyes were intense. Googly even. He sang:

En a tawn in uld Bavaria
Lived a maydun faer and tru
Her laver vas a man of da nite
His bady firm and taight
Boot shay waked da daye sheeft
Dey laved in da nite sheeft
Withoot sleep she become like da ded
Withoot her ‘e become like da ded
Buth of dem ded
Buth of dem ded

He looked deep into Isadore’s eyes, reached out a hand, and whispered into the microphone “Let oos live again”. Isadore longed to give her blood to Kristof. Longed to feel his animal power flow in as her mortal life flowed out. Blood rushed to the anatomically appropriate places in preparation.

Watching from the wings was the next band to perform; Randy Staker and the Heart Stabbers. They were good looking party boys who could cause trouble, but were wholesome at heart and dedicated to God. Randy Staker (the singer and best looking member, though the drummer had nice abs) smiled in wry amusement and said “Check it, the kraut’s trying to get that girl with the rack.”

“I wouldn’t mind sucking the helium out of those ballons” said the bass player who had beautiful, if under appreciated, ankles (which would one day feature in an US Weekly spread).
“Quiet. She’s a lady. And she deserves respect. As does her gigantic rack.” Randy retorted in the self righteous voice he used whenever someone said he wasn’t a good Christian. He turned to his band like a cheerleader; inspiring the inspired: “It goes like this men. Win the girl, win the Battle of the Bands.”
“I don’t think it goes like that at all. Who’s going to have her? Will we share?” Said the drummer, the one with the good abs (who would one day appear, ironically, in an obese celebrity spread in People).
Randy looking at the drummer defensively, thankful that those great abs were always hidden from view by the drum kit: “I will do the honours, for the good of the band” he said

Back on stage, the MC strode out with microphone in hand. “Wasn’t that great. Give a round of applause to Bläad.” The crowd cheered with little enthusiasm. Kristof grabbed the MC by the collar, “Ve are noot finashed”.

“Yeah you are buddy. Two songs. Not my fault you cut one in half.” The MC said, holding his ground. “Svine” Kristof spat as he stormed off stage. His band slowly walked after him, not acknowledging the beer bottles thrown at their heads.

Isadore had been pushing her way breast-first through the crowd like a ship’s figurehead through stormy seas. But with eye contact broken she stopped thrusting, and the crowd pushed in around her. She looked confused, unaware that in her hypnotised state she dropped her alcopop. “Where’s my alcopop?” she said to herself.

Off stage Kristof overturned a small folding table, which landed at Randy’s feet. “Too bad about your performance, Fritz” Randy said, “let me show you how we do things in America”. The Heart Stabbers sniggered at Kristof as they filed on stage to applause from a crowd who were happy to see a band of non-freaks. Fritz had a great comeback for Randy (“Shaat up pig”), but he couldn’t use it, his ancient senses were reeling as if someone with a lazer had sliced one side of the moon off and made it orbit the earth like a drunk Irish racehorse. Reeling because transposed images of Randy and his old enemy Randolph (the man who staked his entire family through the left ventricle) flashed in Kristof’s mind in a manner that works far better in movies.

“No! Ee’s da sputting imuge ov mai arch namasas” Kristof said to clarify the plot point for all within ear shot (this being his band who are obviously under some sort of mind control anyway, so let’s forget about them for now). “Vat ure de adds of dis maney loook-alaikes fram mai pazt beung un da saeme bär at da saeme taime?” In English, these look-alikes were the security guard who resembled the mule Kristof rode round Dusseldorf as a lad, his ancient nemesis, and Kristof’s ancient love. Kristof couldn’t believe so many coincidences. It was like some unbelievable story. And yet it was all true.

The MC made his announcement. “Next up, all the way from Los Angeles: Randy Staker and the Heart Stabbers’”. Kristof’s thoughts were violent: “’Haart Stabbers’, he’s macking mai. He knaows. De Yankee scuum. He knoawsssssssssssss.”

Kristof watched from the wings as the band started their first song. His lust for blood was intense, he had come close to the sweetest of drinks and his fangs were still sticking out uncontrollably like a teenager’s boner. The crowd were jumping around, screaming, some even making the effort of climbing on stage.

Kristof bared his fangs and hissed, but what would have been a shocking sight three hundred years ago  looked like a cheap Halloween costume in a room full of tattooed, pierced youth who were spazzing out. Kristof tried to get Randy’s attention so he could hiss at him by throwing a guitar pick, but its aerodynamics were unimpressive.

Then from the corner of his eye, his hate was interrupted. Pushing its way back through the crowd like a Finnish icebreaker were Isadore’s breasts. “EET CANNUT BAE!!!! NEIN” Kristof screamed. Randy was pointing at Isadore and making subtle thrusts with his hips. Isadore was doing a little shimmy, a move that was both a dance and a convenient way to clear a path with her impressive mammaries.

Kristof could not let this happen. He could not lose his love again. He had to use everything in his power to win her over. He started doing jumping jacks to get her attention. It worked, and as soon as she met his eye he exerted all the power he had. To an onlooker he was practising a party trick where his eyeballs bulge out of their sockets a bit, but the truth was far more sinister, more powerful, more lustful.

Kristof was winning. Isadore changed course and started plowing through onlookers to get to him. Randy came to terms with the fact that he didn’t really have to score her to win the Battle of the Bands, and concentrated on singing his way to the grand prize of the hundred dollar bar tab. “Yesssss, cam to mae” Kristof said, smiling like a snake that’s about to score. She was close, a group of frat boys were willing to boost her up to Kristof for the price of a grope to be taken along the way.

But, just at his moment of triumph, a tug on the arm. Kristof’s concentration lapsed momentarily. Standing beside him was a reporter for a local free newspaper, a dorky know-it-all who was hiding backstage from the cool kids. “Hey pal, anyone ever tell you that you look just like Octavia Schrempf. You know the singer from that ‘60s horror band, New Sons of the Full Moon of Atlantis.”
“Dü I?” Kristof asked, about to kill him but realising he didn’t want him hanging round for eternity.
“Yeah, you related?”
“I am he” Kristof said, in a pretty redundant revelation at this point in the story.

But the random plot point did its work. As Kristof turned back to the stage he saw that he was too late. Isadore was up on stage rubbing her ass into Randy’s crotch, rap video style.
Kristof’s horniness turned into a need to kill. That is where the other members of Bläad come back into the story. He sent his mindless drones out to start a brawl, maybe kill a few people. Kristof slinked out the exit, turned into a bat and flew to find a cosy cave in Central Park.

Kristof was immortal, and was not about to let himself get killed in a bar brawl. He would find it hard to even turn into a bat and hang on the ceiling due to the perspiration you probably thought I only mentioned earlier for the purpose of scene setting.

As Kristof sat alone in the cave he thought back over 500 years. Thought of all the times this had happened. Every twenty years the same scene was played out. Kristof found his love, she was taken away from him through some implausible plot twist. He could wait another twenty years. He could start another band and wait for the next cycle. For this was a cycle like the cycle of the moon is a cycle, but a lot longer. Almost so much longer that comparing the two is pretty pointless.