They came from the other side of the street. I was walking down SE Division that night, contemplating my new life as a failure. Everyone had told me college would be easy and I felt like a fraud getting back that physics test with a 50% written shyly on the bottom. I walked aimless and angry, kicking rocks down the hill, humming “Holiday in Cambodia,” trapped in my own tumbling shell of self-pity. Everything sucked. It was then that I first noticed them.
They crawled from shallow darkness out of a crack in the sidewalk. They each stood as tall as a man and a half. Their bodies were covered in hazelnut fur and their nose tendrils writhed like skinned octopi. There were three of them, and one of me. I fell backward onto my ass in the street, whimpering and whining, completely expecting to have my brain eaten out backward from my skull like a stew by these terrible, loathsome, horror-inspiring…Psychic Moles from Outer Space!
But they didn’t want to nibble on my brain, not even a little. Instead, the big one in the center with the round red sunglasses too small for his face stepped forward and offered a paw.
“Thanks.” I mumbled, grabbing their pancake-like appendage. The skin was dry, warm, and cakey, the nails were thick and hard. The big one responded in a voice like a cicada being hit with a rubber band, “We still use pool floaties because we don’t know how to swim. I never really got the point of cream cheese. Fingernails are jelly to all that seek to consume religion compulsively.”
Now that I was standing, the urge to run multiplied. I should find my way away from these freaks as soon as possible, but then I noticed what they were wearing. Ripped denim vests, studded black leather, t-shirts, and patches with names like MDC, Discharge, Gang Green, Bad Religion, and Septic Death. Punk Rock Psychic Moles from Outer Space! The short, bored-looking one on the left flipping a butterfly knife around was even wearing black Docs with blue laces. I told them they seemed like cool dudes and I had mad respect for their lifestyle. I wished I could be so bold and asked if they ever got down to Battalion of Saints. The big one took my hand again and gurgled,
“Tropical fish smoothie. We shit porcelain toothpaste every afternoon at 5 o’clock. You can’t elope under the rainforest.”
Then they pulled me forward, it was a quick yank, not too forceful but the ground gave out from under me. The backlit sidewalk slurped open and then we were gone. We were so gone man. The universe rolled around us in a barrel loop. I was going underground, and the Psychic Moles were sending me there.
We landed in a totally buzzard cavern. Every surface possible was plastered in torn scratchy posters and graphic stickers proclaiming bands, brands, and politics so much so that I couldn’t even tell what color the walls were originally. There was a bad recording of some shitty band playing through wrecked speakers but nobody seemed to mind much about how much it sucked. The big one, who I’d taken to calling Infrared in my head, due to their little red sunglasses that glinted like the cherry-violence colored stage lights getting set up on a small battered stage off to the side, continued to drag me along to mingle with their brethren.
The place was packed! Many multitudinous moles mashed amongst the sting of anti-melodious music and raw rubbed hardcore vocals. I ended up squeezed between so many sweaty, furry bodies before finally getting pushed out into a lacuna by the sidewall. There in that same lacuna with me were the two other moles I had seen before on the sidewalk. They conversed with each other telepathically and held fizzling neon drinks and various colored crystals in their hands that seemed to have been plucked straight from the side of the cavern wall. I glanced over at the wall to find an area devoid of stickers and instead populated by pockmarks of varying sizes in the soft brown rock that may have once contained the jeweled stones. The butterfly-knife-wielding mole noticed me first and waved me over to them and their friend. As I approached and got a couple colorful crystals shoved into my hand from the jovial mole who’d waved me over, I noticed the third mole, the cop-killer’s buddy, wearing a tag on their shirt that said ‘Hi, My Name Is: THORIGOR’. After downing their drink and smashing the glass, Thorigor pulled out a thick, giant-mole-hand-sized guitar pick to fidget with, and whatever shock or fear that had been boring through me since getting here, wherever here was, dissolved into an animated excitement.
“Oh man, do you play? I do too! I’ve been trying to find a decent local band forever. Well…I guess you guys aren’t exactly local but-”
Thorigor looked up and glared as I had started speaking but before I could continue to assault them with questions about music, the Cop-Killer mole grabbed both my shoulders with their meaty pancake paws and physically drove my body back into the thick of the crowd shouting,
“Vampire orgies in the folds of a blue whale’s eyelid! Eczema on the spiritual plane! The devil’s testicles are full of tomato juice!”
I was once again put through a tumble cycle of mole hair and sweat, my whole life flashing before my oxygen-deprived eyes. It was mostly blurry and a little disappointing. I gasped for air upon finally being released yet again from the crowd only to find myself standing by the stage at the other end of the club-cavern. Cop-killer mole, still gripping my shoulders from behind, lifted one of my hands to my mouth. Inside my tightly closed fist was the assortment of small crystals I’d somehow managed to cling to, despite the fact that their rough edges were biting into the soft flesh of my palm. The message was clear: eat them. I considered for a moment, having no idea what these little rocks would do to me, but ultimately a swell of carpe diem mentality took over and I popped them all in my mouth. They felt like rock candy and tasted like salt. Overall, not a life-changing experience. Cop-killer mole, seeming a bit more satisfied now that I’d taken his weird cave drugs, continued pushing me in one direction, onto the stage.
Those crystals started working fast. I stood for eons, swaying on that empty half-stage as the world turned around me, bathing in the slightly dank, sweaty underground smell of the cavern as the rest of the moles moshed around without care to me. My friends Thorigor, Cop-Killer Butterstyle (as I had taken to calling them), Infrared, plus another mole I’d not yet met wearing a Kikkoman shirt, bustled around my intoxicated frame, moving stuff that looked like silver bones and black soot snakes to my swimming eyes. By the time I could convince myself that color was a perceivable smell (and everything pink smelled like lobster or bread), I could hear them sound checking behind me as the audience began to take notice. Cop-Killer Butterstyle pulled a microphone in front of me and handed me a weird jar. It was pulsating and purple and warm. It smelled like the color of fresh-cut grass. Then, they once again put a hand on my shoulder, but this time, instead of hearing random garbage words, I could see their thoughts perfectly. In their mind, Cop-Killer said to me, “Wait and do nothing until you are cued. Oh, and you will have to announce our band.” I couldn’t see why not, so I took my purple jar by my hip like a bongo and leaned forward woozily into the microphone. Feedback whined and the audience all turned to look at me.
“Uh…hello? I guess I’m here with these psychic mole people and we’re gonna play some stuff for you.”
The mole audience did not break into irreverent cheers like they were supposed to, instead they kept staring at me, and a quick glance behind showed my improvised bandmates with similar disapproval splashed across their rodentine faces. I’d have to introduce myself better than that.
“So, our band’s got Thorigor on bass, at least I think that’s a bass, Infrared, yeah that dude with the glasses right over there on some cosmic lead guitar, Cop-Killer Butterstyle on rhythm guitar, or wait, maybe I’ve got them switched, but then there’s…Soy Sauce on drums too. And me. I’m…I don’t know…Laser dragon ninja?”
The audience did not budge in their silent stare. Any energy that had been building up in my intro died flat at that last sentence. Hundreds of beady black mole eyes bore into my soul.
“Alright, how about Captain Flame-Bolt?”
The continued deafening disapproval of a room full of psychic rodents. I took a deep breath and realized this was supposed to be the part of the story where I engaged with my weaknesses as a person through self-identification and shared vulnerability with the crowd. Fine, if that’s how this had to be played, I’d bite.
“OK, I’M THE HUMAN FAILURE AND THESE PSYCHIC MOLES AND I ARE GOING TO FUCK YOU UP!”
Cheers erupted and so did the music behind me. It was sublime. Even without the drugs I’m pretty sure it was the fastest, rawest, most hardcore shit I’d ever heard played. It was like getting hit in the face with sound listening to Thorigor gumming up bass and Soy Sauce having a fit on drums. Infrared even gurgled out lyrics that I thought I could make some sense of— or that could have just been the crystals talking.
“Rosary of razor blades!/ funeral for Pac-man!/smoke detector mouthwash/desolate heaven’s trash can!!!”
Ten songs later and it seemed like they were building up to something big. The crowd was in agony, thrashing and writhing in the mosh to our infection of sound, and suddenly, I got a look from Infrared that I didn’t need telepathy or drugs to understand. I took the warm, pulsing purple jar from its place on my hip and I grip it tight around the lid, unscrewing with all my might. Maybe they only needed me in this band for my opposable thumbs? Suddenly, and in perfect time to the bridge of the song, with the same sort of inner, pressurized pop sound you’d expect to follow an eardrum rupture, the jar was open and waves of purple energy spilled out like liquid mercury across the underground cavern. It rolled in the air and the room became wild insane at the prospect of touching it, with moles clamoring on top of each other in such urgency you’d expect they had the grim reaper on their trail. I, the origin of this all, stood basking in the sunburnt glow of the violet waves that continued to spill from the jar. I’d never felt so happy, so content, so purely invigorated by whatever tentacle of the universe happened to reside within this jar. That is, until the police showed up.
They came on bicycles. Of course they did, ugly fuckers. Each one, all moles as well, wore these pretentious-looking black goggles and had their hats placed just so on their stout, balding heads. They crashed into the cavern from a tunnel I didn’t know existed— maybe they’d dug it with their bikes that had curious drill attachments where the baskets should be. All of a sudden our purple bliss was drowned in a sea of red and blue, our punk rock fever squashed underfoot from the siren screams. One of the coppers came pointing at me, some sort of intergalactic stun gun waved at the stage and the jar in my hands. I didn’t want to find out what that thing did to human flesh, but the alternative, dropping the purple jar and running, seemed so much worse. The jar was my joy, my world, my reason for living as long as it emanated energy. I could close my eyes and float in its jelly-like stream of primordial gooey vibes. This made things so much harder then, when amidst the chaos, Thorigor smacked the jar from my hands and snapped his giant sausage fingers together.
“No!” I cried, but this came too late. The universe was doing a barrel roll around me again, and I could see my friends, the Psychic Moles from Outer Space, disappearing into their intergalactic cop kerfuffle without me. The surface world returned under my feet and I found myself kneeling on the same sidewalk of SE Division as when I had left. It was so damn quiet, as if nothing had ever happened. Nothing did happen. I ignored the feeling of heavy rocks sitting in my stomach and stood up, taking my time on the walk back, head lifted, ears ringing, watching the inconsolable stars as they hung in lonely cubicles against the heavy midnight.