DOOM 94 Page 9

  I got out at the last stop. I didn’t see any death-metalers, not even a heavy-metaler. I’d seen the hospital Death had mentioned at the second to last stop. All I saw here was a lake or a pond beyond the road, the trolley hut and behind that a forest. I headed for the woods.

  It was sparse, and I could see the road all the way through on the other side. I looked at my watch (I’d thought of everything); it was a quarter after ten. Everyone knew the Stocks started at ten. But I saw nothing.

  Maybe I was lost in the time-space continuum? Or maybe the Stocks really didn’t exist? Had I ever been told first-hand that it would be here? It had only ever come through the friend of a friend or as legend. Seriously, why would people meet in the woods? Is a forest at all like a record shop?

  I sat down on a bench. But I didn’t get back on the trolley when it came around. Or on the next one. I wasn’t in a hurry. The air here was good. It was a place of solitude.

  Then, out of nowhere (there was no trolley in sight!), there appeared two longhaired guys a bit older than me, and they wandered past me. I ran after them.

  — Are the Stocks happening today?

  They looked back at me, neither surprised, nor unsurprised:

  — Yeah, yeah. But later, man.

  Everything I had heard was true. The Stocks really did exist. It took me only ten minutes to lose my faith, but I needed only a second to regain it.

  I bummed around and walked circles at the trolley stop. I walked to the strange lake and saw swans. Soon the scene I had always imagined started to take shape — I was joined by death-metalers, and heavy-metalers and even girls. It was exactly as I’d imagined, only ten times smaller.

  Which isn’t a bad coefficient, really. Our minds are bigger than the world. When you take a kid to the zoo, and I mean a kid who has read a lot and thought a lot, and this kid sees an elephant, the kid doesn’t say anything, but thinks — it’s not all that big. The kid thinks this to himself because he doesn’t want fantasy to begrudge reality. But the elephant seems small. Only later, when fantasy starts to fade and we look take a closer look at the elephant, which is snorting softly and scattering hay over its own head, when we’re suddenly face to face with this elephant, we finally realise: God, is it huge!

  The elephant was gathering in the woods, the woods that had just a minute ago been so empty. I joined the crowd that had stopped in a clearing among the trees. I’d finally made it.

  The time has come to describe the phenomenon of the Stocks with a little more detail. It really did take place in a small clearing in the woods. Around twenty people had showed up; now and then one of them disappeared into the shrubs and a new person took their place, but not at any specific interval. For convenience, there were several paths that led to the clearing. The biggest came from the trolley stop. A group of men in their fifties were chatting to the left of the path. One of them had laid out some records on the ground, as if to sell them, but without making a big deal out of it. I wanted to go over to them and look at the records. I had a real appreciation for older music. Like the Beatles. Earlier because they’d been so popular; now because they seemed so strange.

  But I wasn’t here for the Beatles. So I joined the other group, the one to the right of the path. And the people in this group could be divided into three subgroups.

  There were a couple of girls whose hair was almost as long as their skirts. But I got the impression that they weren’t regulars here; no, they’d probably tagged along with someone.

  I wanted to belong to the second subgroup. These were young guys with long hair and various other defining characteristics. Leather jackets, long hair, metal bracelets. They seemed more legit than the guys in Jelgava. Each of them was wearing a band T-shirt — Amorphis, Slayer, Cannibal Corpse, even Mayhem, Burzum among others. And their hair, the hair! One of them even had a beard, the longest I’d ever seen; it flowed into his hair in a downward stream, symbolizing a philosophical approach to the world and an internal rebellion. If you opened a dictionary to the word ‘metalhead’, this guy’s picture would be next to the definition.

  The third subgroup was odd. They were totally, completely normal people, older than the second subgroup, but younger than the hippies to the left of the path. They wore linen pants and patterned sweaters. Their hair was short. They were the most normal people in the world, but they stood around here like fish in water and seemed to embody some form of realness and belonging.

  The circulation of music, opinions and everything else took place with everyone just standing around and talking. There were no long counters or cash registers. There wasn’t even anything by the hippies with their records on the ground. I went and stood next to someone to join the conversation and get a better idea of things. I’d been warned about what the people in Riga could be like, so I felt confident in joining them. I needed to bring real music back to Jelgava. I was doing this for the good of my hometown.

  Everyone was only talking about metal. One guy with even longer hair came up and announced authoritatively that Cannibal Corpse hadn’t put out anything good since after Tomb of the Mutilated. He was wearing a Bleeding shirt, though, and Bleeding had come out after Tomb of the Mutilated. This guy with the curious shirt choice, the first guy I met there, was no regular guy. He turned to me suddenly:

  — You got a cigarette?

  His voice was languid, almost sleepy. His eyes, too, seemed to always be half-closed. After I gave him the cigarette he held out his hand:

  — Tom. Sinister.

  Yes, my friends, that’s how I met Sinister. Just like that. It was the same Sinisters who today has 1,835 friends and is known by all. But he’s not the only one I met that night! There was Cannibal, also known as Gints. He was so present at every metal-related event in Riga that I wonder whether he wasn’t the one who organised them. What’s more, Gints was always sober and photographing everything. He was also the singer for Latvia’s heaviest group, Denervation. I don’t know if the band ever played a real gig, it was that heavy. I also met Ēriks, also called Krabators, who was wearing an Amorphis shirt. He knew everything about music and responded to every world event with a sad smile, but at the same time was always telling funny stories from his own life. Then there was Venom, one of the grandfathers of Latvian black metal, who generously admitted that he had been put on this path by a man with the curious moniker Sonnenmensch — he was also always at the Stocks, a gloomy music connoisseur who listened to ten new albums a day. There was also a younger guy who went by Schnapps. What he was known for, though... I can’t remember.

  I stood with them in the clearing and had the sensation that I wasn’t standing on the pine-needle covered ground, but on the world. Now and then my new friends would proclaim some manifesto:

  — I’m so sick of Heaven Grey. It’s time for that band to break up!

  I couldn’t believe my poor ears. At the time, Heaven Grey was Latvia’s most notable death-doom group; they sounded almost like groups from abroad. They were our representatives on Olympus, proof that people could make it to the stars! I experienced a quiet horror at these words, but also a quiet giddiness thanks to my natural instinct to defy authority. These Rigans were unbelievable.

  But wasn’t it more unbelievable how friendly they were? They were none of the things Death had warned me of. No-one wanted to drink my money away for me, though of course I’d be happy to let them if I had an extra fiver, or any fiver at all. The two lats I had with me were going to serve a different purpose. One of the odd guys with short hair seemed to sense this and turned to me:

  — What are you looking for, young man?

  He spoke just like that, in that prissy manner of an old lord that normally pissed me off, but here in the woods felt legit, as if this form of address was being reinstated with a purpose — even though there was definitely a hint of irony in his voice.

  I didn’t know how to answer. Everything! At least — a lot. And then he came to my aid, handing me a blue binder filled with lists of bands a
nd album titles, most of them new to me. Thankfully, I knew what I was looking for. There, Asphyx’s Last One on Earth.

  — And for the other side?

  This may confuse the twenty-first-century reader, but I knew he was talking about the cassette. What did I want recorded on the other side? I hadn’t thought about what else I’d want. I turned the pages slowly, looking through the list until my eyes fell on something unfamiliar, but that left an impression. This — My Dying Bride’s Turn Loose the Swans.

  That’s how my collection wound up with this strange mash-up of a cassette, which had death metal on one side and doom metal on the other. It was an interesting genre. It wasn’t a favourite of the Latvian radio programme ‘Rockade’, which called it the ‘depressed rock of doomsday’. But the dictionary clearly labelled it ‘destiny’. The metal of destiny. And it had been recorded on this cassette.

  Fifteen years later I read a review of the My Dying Bride album, which said that no one who suffered from depression should listen to it. If only I’d known that back then! Then I would’ve worked extra hard to introduce this album to Jelgava, a city in which depression was everyone’s ultimate goal. My dying bride, what a name. The night they formed the band (beer, there had supposedly been lots of beer), the guys had considered My Dying Child. Why hadn’t they gone with that? A name like that may have deterred me. But to kill off your unwed bride... I couldn’t say no to that.

  Death got a hold of Last One on Earth (which he didn’t end up liking that much; he thought The Rack was better), but destiny made its way into Jelgava, as if there weren’t enough of it already, and I fell even deeper into this iron depression. I’d end up spending hours listening to this music, contemplating the world.

  But then, in the woods, I hadn’t yet listened to it. I didn’t even have the tape yet. This polite man took my empty tape and my money and put both in his bag without another word. I didn’t say anything either. The local order of things was clear: give them an empty tape and money (one santim per minute recorded), then come back a week later for your tape, now excitingly full. After that night, I went to the Stocks every Sunday, arriving with an empty tape and leaving with a full one, but also leaving with a new desire for what I had to wait a week to get. It’s an endless cycle, because I always showed up to claim my prize with yet another empty vessel in my pocket. It was like a cigarette, which Oscar Wilde described as ‘the perfect type of a perfect pleasure’, since it made you feel good by leaving you wanting more.

  Ēriks looked at me with a sad, teasing smile and asked:

  — Aren’t you that guy who’s collecting information about bands to write about Latvia’s metal history?

  It was a mysterious question, and I answered just as mysteriously:

  — This place has such a strange beauty to it! The leaves have some sort of bumps on them. Are the trees sick?

  The leaves of the maple trees really were covered with black bumps, like teenage acne. But then I was distracted by hair. Amazingly long hair; I’d never seen a guy with hair like this! It would make any girl jealous. And not just girls — any metalhead would be jealous, too. All the red in Ireland was there, washed with the blood of Cuhullin. That hair reminded me of something. Maybe something in my metalhead genes? None of my friends had hair like that. But wait, it’s the girl from the car that stopped for us, the one that then kicked us out on the side of the road on our first attempt to get to the Stocks. The same colour and style, the same intelligent shape of the skull. Look, she’s turning around, those are the same eyes that I’d seen in the rear-view mirror! What a coincidence. Now the girl was glaring at me, and I finally saw her entire face.

  What? It was chubby Nellija from the other class! I’d never looked close at her hair or eyes. In the best case you looked the chubby girls in the chest. She was dressed differently, in boots and a long skirt. She looked at me. Glared at me, aggressively. She could ruin everything. She could come up to me and say:

  — Did you finish your homework? And why aren’t you at Sunday school? Will you lend me your Imants Kalniņš albums? I know you like good, old-fashioned folk music like that. We’d never actually spoken to one another, but I felt like she could unmask me, reveal to everyone and to me that I was who I was, and that I wanted to be something else.

  — You’re that four-eyed nerd everyone makes fun of. Hey, everyone, let’s laugh at him! Go ahead, he’s afraid of everything!

  But she said nothing. She turned away and continued her conversation. She had things to talk about. The guy she was with looked full of himself. And was dressed very nicely, but enviably metalheadish — a long coat, lots of chains and other metal accessories. His expression was one of total awareness of his superiority, but his posture was one of an anxious fear that one of the nearby animals may touch him. He was even cautious while talking to Nellija. But how did she even get here? How did she get in? How can this be the real deal if even chubby Nellija is one of them? No, there must be some mistake.

  I’d finished my transaction. The clean-cut guy had my money — his name was Didzis, imagine that, just Didzis — and the following Sunday I had to come back to pick up my tape. Another of the clean-cut guys, who went by Oķec, said that I should look at what he had on offer, too. I already fit in. At the end of the night, when everyone parted after unspoken good-byes and headed home, I wasn’t alone. I walked out with Sinister, and we talked about everything in the world. That is to say, we only talked about music, but we hit it off.

  — If you’re into death-metal, you should really check out this band, Torture. It’s two brothers. One of them died in a car accident.

  Sinister knew how to talk about music.

  — Another good one is this band from Australia, Deströyer 666. The frontman was convinced he was a vampire. But his girlfriend didn’t believe him, so he bit her.

  In turn, I could only repeat what I’d heard from Death. I could, of course, always make something up. Like Gilkins used to make up movies. “Guys, guys, I saw Predator II. At my cousin’s in Riga. It was awesome. Schwarzenegger stands there smoking a cigarette, a grenade launcher in the other hand. Then he looks out the window and...” And so we listened to a detailed description of the entire movie, without realising that it hadn’t even been filmed yet.

  But Sinister’s knowledge seemed encyclopaedic and iron-clad, so I tried to tread carefully:

  — I also like this band called Paradox...

  I’d never heard of a band like that, but it seemed like an appropriate name for one. Sinister was unflappable:

  — Which Paradox? The one with one ‘x’ or the one with two?

  — With two.

  — They’re pretty good.

  I checked later and, paradoxically, there really were both a Paradox and a Paradoxx.

  We were smoking my cigarettes, and had already made it out of the woods. There turned out to be a little window in the hut at the trolley endpoint from which they sold beer. A group of women was milling about the window. One of them was visibly pregnant; in one hand she held a beer in a jar labelled ‘Green Peas’, and a cigarette in the other. But she looked at us as if we were the most unnatural aspect of this scene, and even elbowed her neighbour, a woman holding a jar of beer with a ‘Mayonnaise’ label on it. They both had flowers on their dresses.

  The trolley pulled up like a limo and we got in, obviously ignoring the issue of tickets. I glanced around to see whether that lunatic Nellija wasn’t in it, too, but she wasn’t; maybe her dad had come to get her. But the pretentious guy in the long coat and chains was here; he was sitting up front by the window, his body language broadcasting that he wanted to be left alone to despise the world. Sinister kept talking in that relaxed way of his, already making plans.

  — The best would be if we could have a radio station, a station for metalheads. We’d talk about new and old groups, about the philosophy of metal. Then we wouldn’t have this complicated process of getting music, then they’d be sending us their music themselves. From all over
the world.

  For a moment, the pretentious guy tore his attention away from despising the world and looked at us. He looked sceptical of this plan.

  Sinister thought for a moment. He started to rummage through his bag; it was full of tapes and a carton of Quattro cigarettes. He pulled out a tape:

  — Mortiis. Man, do I like this guy. He had plastic surgery done to elongate his nose and ears, so he’d look like a troll.

  Then Tom looked at me, remembered who I was, and asked:

  — You got any cash?

  — One lat. You want to get a drink?

  He tugged on a lock of his hair and closed his bag.

  — No, I don’t drink. But we need a lot more than that. Like a hundred lats.

  — I know where we can get it.

  — Yeah?

  He looked me directly in the eyes, deep into my head, which at the moment was totally empty, and said in a quiet voice:

  — Then we need to form a band.

  Back then a lot of people wanted to form bands. Whoever suggested it usually offered the first person the lead guitar role and also knew someone who could play the drums, but they’d find a bass-guitarist along the way. And if you asked the guy who suggested it in the first place what he’d do, the answer was logical:

  — Me? I’ll sing.

  Sinister was far more serious about it. He always seemed to be halfasleep, but in a constant state of excitement, almost like van Gogh. He talked about the necessity to say what no-one else would say, what no one else thought of; he said the exact things I was thinking in my mind. And there and then, he said that we’d need an electric guitar — someone would have to find the money to get an electric guitar. A guitar like that will translate everything you want to say.