User blog:FailedToRise/Several Sins

I've been jamming out to The Birthday Party a lot.

In an attempt to share some of my writing with you folks, I'm going to post bits and pieces of various things I write here. I'll update it occasionally. If there's any short piece you'd want to be written, preferably relevant to the characters in this RP, feel free to ask. This first thing I'll be posting is about Killing Rowland, where the synth player Bee is looking back at a dark point in the band's career in an essay, which is written for the 30th anniversary of their debut album.

There was a point where we all hated Nik. Every single one of us. Even KC, even Christ. It was a little bit after we started touring for "Catasrophe!" back in late 2014. We were playing shows daily, and Nik was overwhelmed. He fought to get out of performing. Everything he did was to avoid getting on stage. I don't know what got into him. Until then he loved to put on a show; that's why he started the ridiculous scene he made, with the leather and the hair, the makeup and just, everything. Nik was an entertainer, and an artist, and he acted for the sake of art and the sake of entertainment. That's why it was such a shock when he told us, "I'm not going out there." It was me, Harvey, and Anarchy, in Vegas. Four months into the tour. Naturally, Anarchy brushed it off as another of Nik's breakdowns. But Harvey, he looked so...lost. Him and Nik weren't too familiar then, but one thing Harvey knew about Nik was how much he loved his art and his performance. The look in his eyes was dead. He didn't say anything to Nik right then. He walked out onto the stage, where everyone else was setting up, tuning and whatnot, and said something to Christ. I'm not sure what it was. Christ dropped his guitar and ran to Nik, Anarchy, and I, looking very frantic. He asked Nik what was wrong, to which Nik shrugged and sat down on the concrete floor. He pulled his knees up to his chest and put his head down. Christ stood and stared at him for what had to have been five minutes before asking Anarchy the time. Anarchy shrugged and cluelessly walked out onto the stage. He seemed ashamed to have been in the presence of that occurrence. Maybe not ashamed, as much as purely uncomfortable. After he left, it was just Nik, Christ, and I. Nik was mumbling incoherently to himself, and Christ continued to stare at him. After a minute or so he asked me to go get Raider, a roadie who was touring with us. Raider is one of the few roadies who I clearly remember. His name was Will, but no one called him that. He was this short Russian dude whose accent sounded somewhat Cuban, if anything. Strange guy. I looked around for him and called out for him. I found him in mid-conversation with Francis, another roadie. Raider was holding a mop for some reason and threatened to beat me with it when I acknowledged him. As I wasn't trying to get beaten by a sociopathic roadie, I pointed him into Christ's direction. He calmed down instantly and nonchalantly followed me back to where Nik was weeping and Christ was standing. When we approached them, Christ was sitting next to Nik, with one arm around his bare shoulders. I noticed puddles of vomit on the ground before Nik. I gagged a bit myself. Christ and Raider seemed unfazed. That was the point I realized we weren't playing that night. My heart sank in that moment. That was also when a gut-wrenching distaste for Nik formed inside me. It was the first set ever to be cancelled, and literally ten minutes before it actually started. In an attempt to entertain the thousands of people anxiously awaiting this icon of music who was busy sobbing and throwing up we threw Harvey, Barron, and Kyle out there as Raider and Francis drove Nik to the hospital, of course with Christ by his side. The makeshift concert deteriorated after about a half hour of poorly improvised playing. People didn't want to hear some guys jamming on weird custom instruments, they wanted that whole act Nik put on. We had to have everyone's money refunded, another thing we'd never had to do. Later on that night, after we dealt with Nik at the hospital, we were in the basement of a friend of Lou's. Nearly all of us were there, except Nik, who was probably unconscious at the time, and Christ and KC, who were at the hospital with him still. The group of us were having a few beers and getting over what happened earlier that night. It was silent until Jerry spoke up, making some remark about Nik needing to put down the needle. Kyle laughed and asked me more about his breakdown. There wasn't much I could say about it that they didn't already know, but I ended up giving them a lecture on my growing hatred for Nik. I expected them to freak out, though it turned out they were past kneeling before the work of Holy Frontman Nik. In fact, they all pretty much agreed with the points I made, notably the prediction about the tour being cancelled; which, it was, less than a month later. For the next few years we became a studio band because Nik wouldn't leave his fucking house. Our career as a band started falling apart. We had to turn to solo acts and side projects, because Killing Rowland was no longer supplying us with what we needed. Not even Christ and KC even spoke to Nik about anything but the music. Over time they softened up to him again, and we started recording all together again, and as friends, at that. I don't think, though, that Nik was even aware of the extent to which we had turned against him. Which is ironic, in retrospect, considering how paranoid he had become. Sometimes I wonder if Nik had ever felt the same distaste towards us that we did towards him, but then I realized he was way too shot up to be capable of logical emotions. -Bee Stevenson on Nik Rain before their hiatus, December 2041