GOD IS SEVEN

We met in a mosh pit.

Some man onstage issued a cathartic howl as if he were clawing the inside of his soul clean. He held his Telecaster like an appended child. My head was filled with cacophonous reverb.

“If Man is five!”

We were molecules in an eruption of pathos. It felt as I imagined being bled would feel. Watching the snake's poison pass back out of the slash in your ankle and into the mouth of your rescuer.            

“Then the Devil is six!"

I was half-naked, new in town, had friends somewhere in the mass of bodies that operated on its own internal logistics, flesh gears turning, latching into grooves and cuts. We were covered in sweat. Someone was passed over our heads, and each mosher offered to help the human sacrifice forward to the stage. Except me.

Rules of the pit are well known: Keep everything moving. But I was more entranced by the moment's machinery, how the sounds fit into my head and how we knew precisely when to stop pushing. When to give in. When to begin the press anew.

I lifted my arms to help to pass the crowd-surfer behind me.        

“And if the Devil is six, then God is seven! Then God is seven! Then God is seven!”

You could see the singer's mouth move, but the words nevertheless belonged to us. We chanted along and shouted him down.

The crowd-surfer behind me evidently wanted to be passed forward to the stage and, angered by the change of direction, kicked me in the head in compensation. I felt the dull thud of a combat boot against the back of my neck and, high on catharsis, flew into a rage. Without turning, I swept my arm violently skyward and grabbed for a shirt, ready to pull the asshole down to the club's soggy, beer-soaked floor.

My clutching hand missed the shirt and instead seized the large breast of my future wife.

An immediate shame, followed by another kick to the head, crept over me. Shoulders hunched, I turned in guilt to a hard, calculated slap, as she landed both feet on the floor like Superman landing on the Daily Planet's rooftop. She followed the slap with a capable punch to my left eye, before I grabbed her flying fists by the wrists, blinking hard to clear my vision.           

“Let go of me, you fuckin' prick!” she screamed. “How dare you fuckin' grab my tits, you fuckin' pervert!”

She started kicking me again, so I let her go and wandered over to the club's corner, where disinterested scene-goers kept apart from the possessed jumble crowding the littered floor. I picked up a plastic cup from a wobbly table and downed it, glad it was mostly water. My eye was killing me; on top of it being dark, everything was now completely blurry.

Bitch.

When I finally regained a fraction of my site, I noticed that my enemy had followed me to the table with a clumsy stack of napkins. I was already drunk, so it was with muted surprise that I noticed her pressing napkins to my eye, dropping the soaked red ones to the floor. With my good eye, I caught a glimpse of her right hand and spotted my skin flakes caught beneath the fake eyeball embedded into her middle finger's sterling silver ring, giggling at the pathetic irony.

I had never felt more alive.            

“What a night,” I sighed, tottering against the table loaded with half-empty plastic cups filled with warm, cheap beer. I spilled one after the other trying to right them. “Thanks for the napkins," I mumbled.        

It was then, Sheshie told me much later, that she fell in love with what she called my “good-natured ignorance of important things.”

It was a short ride from that bloodied eye to the rings that bound us legally for the rest of our lives. But in those days I could speak in lengthy, colorful structures for her, catching every detail with a word. I used to write her poems and drop them off at the Athletics office she worked at for the university, before passing quickly out of sight as various meatheads grunted past me in the hallways.

These days, I'm lucky if I can get to the period. These days, Sheshie gets the middle finger that says, “I love you.”

Scott is the publisher and editor of the alt-satire pusher otherwsie known as ...

...as well as a a contributor to suckers like Wired, LA Weekly, Salon, Alternet, XLR8R and onward. This excerpt is from his novel The Dangerous Perhaps. If you like it, let him know.