“Practice totally fucking sucks,” I huffed into my White Nihilist (just your standard White Russian with like, double the alcohol). “We’ve been going at it for a couple of days now and somehow we sound even worse than when we started. It’s like, a sunk cost fallacy or something. But the thing that’s sinking is our average IQ. It’s bimboification, is what it is.” Alright, sure, I’d had more than a few White Nihilists. What can I say, they’re delicious. 

Captain Nemo's was, without a doubt, the best bar in this shitty little college town. For one, the mixed drinks were a little more expensive than say, Don't Call, which kept some of the college students away. Alright, to be more specific it kept the frat boys away. Which was a win in my book. And also they had a really queer atmosphere, which I know Baph appreciated. Also free pool. You can never turn down free pool. I want nothing more when I'm drunk than to be handling a stick and smacking some balls around. 

“Mm, don’t let Kevin hear you say that. You’ll get hanged, drawn, and quartered.” Baphomet was dressed up for the dive, wearing this cute black striped crop top and skirt combo that showed off her soft curves in the absolute best way. She told me she always wore this top when she played pool because it was the perfect distraction, since when she leaned over it almost gave anyone a complete view of her chest. Whatever hormones she had smuggled down from Canada didn’t just work on her body, they put in more than overtime. 

 One time, when she was really drunk, she showed me this old photo of her, and it was hard to reconcile the man in the image with the woman that she was today. She said she showed it to me to give me “a little hope” and I told her that it did. If humanity could take someone as plain looking and boring as Baph used to be and turn them into this walking hot mess with an emphasis on hot, then maybe there was hope for us yet. Not like, enough hope to believe that the end of capitalism was possible, or that we could stop climate change. But at least enough hope that our bodies didn’t completely determine our fate. That there was a way to carve some personal change that made you happy out of the miserable swirling oasis of modern day life. 

I could never properly vocalize that to Baph, so instead I just told her that she looked dope and so much happier now. She always had this sly little smile painted on her lips, like she was privy to some joke that I would never be able to decipher. It probably was because she knew very well how hot she was. She didn't need some walking disaster like me to inform her about it.

“Fuck Kev, he’s being such a task master, and not even in a funny way. He's not like 'destroy this cake in a creative way in five minutes or create a cool dance based on a cellphone ringtone.' No, that would be sick as hell. Instead we wake up, play the same few songs over and over again. Have some lunch. Try out a new song that he’s crapped out, and then keep practicing the same songs. It’s only been like, two days and I’m so mentally exhausted I feel like I could scream. Aaaa.” I gave a half-hearted attempt at screaming, but being indoors, it didn’t really come to much. I wasn't going to be that person. “Look at that. I can’t even scream right. There’s just not enough time in the day, and if we make it to the concert we’re all just going to be so exhausted that we’ll just collapse on the stage.”

I paused to take another swig of my drink, which had become alarmingly low. This had to be my last one. I’d promised Kev and Chris that I wouldn’t go too hard tonight. Although from the fuzzy feeling, I realized that the number of drinks don’t really matter when you order the second most alcoholic beverage on the menu. Could have been worse though. Could have gotten the dirty bong water.

Baph was looking at me with an odd look on her face. She was debating something, I could see it in her eyes. Part of me wanted to wrap her up in a hug and just shout at her to tell me her secrets or whatever, but I could wait. I could be patient. I could be--

“Hey, Baph, what are you thinking about?” Okay, I could be a huge liar and just blurt out the first thing I thought of because I have no impulse control when I’m drinking. It's not like I have much when I'm sober either. 

“Oh, it’s just. Well it’s kind of crazy really.” She bit her lip; obviously it had to be something really out there if she was worried about talking to me about it. She wasn’t necessarily known for her restraint. 

“You know I’m crazy. Wild and crazy guy, at least that’s what my parents tell me. Well actually they call me a ‘failure of a son’ and ‘a waste of resources’, haha, but fuck those guys.” That’s right, Justin. Play that trauma off as a goof. You’ve got this. Wait, no, Baph is looking at me with that upset look on her face. Oops I probably went a little too far. “I’m joking. Totally joking.” I wasn’t. “There’s no way a parent would say that about their kid.” They would. 

“Well, my first crazy idea is some therapy,” Baph said in a joking tone with eyes that said ‘I’m definitely not kidding about this.’ “But I think I might know something that could help you with your concern about not having enough time and energy to fully get ready for the show. But it’s a little unorthodox.” 

“Are you going to talk to Kevin and have him not be a complete and total dick?”

Baph playfully shoved my shoulder, “You know that even I’m not that powerful. He has to change himself. You can't just have life changing situations forced upon you like magic. No, what if I told you that I knew a way that you could stay up all night if you wanted to and not get tired?”

“Is it an energy drink?” I asked. “Because I’m not really allowed to have those anymore. I drank too many of them in high school and my heart apparently can’t take that much of it. There probably should be a limit of the amount that you can sell to a teenager because wow I definitely wasn’t responsible enough for that. I was like an Elvis impersonator at the end, and not the young hot Elvis with the illegal sexy pelvic movements. I'm talking fried peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich-died-on his-toilet Elvis. Thank you very much." 

Baph shook her head, letting out a soft giggle that made my heart flutter. “No, dick. Although from what Kevin said, you totally checked out of the actual work portion of school once you hit high school. Even if you could still do a decent Jailhouse Rock. What did you need all those energy drinks for?” 

I paused for a moment, mulling over how I really wanted to respond. What do you say to that? Yeah, I was a total burnout and spent all of my time hiding at Kev’s house listening to music because that was the preferable alternative to the terse conversations with my parents? That I would go out for long caffeine-fueled walks around neighborhoods, crossing the street in the hopes to get randomly hit by a speeding car taking a corner way too fast? 

That I would pedal my bike up and down random country roads hoping that I’d get lost enough just to collapse and disappear. That the next time most people who knew me saw me it would be on the back of a milk carton asking, “Have you seen me?”

“Y’know, massive video game addiction. The local library was full of comics that I could check out. Shows to check out. No other responsibilities besides letting down my family, so I had time to spare. I got used to the taste of Monster and then boom, it was all over for me.” 

I laughed, hoping it would be convincing enough. Inject enough of the truth to make it mostly believable, but pave over some of the rougher stuff and nobody would be any wiser.

Well, Baphomet wasn’t just any nobody. She gave me a bit of a stink eye before moving on. “No, it’s definitely not energy drinks. It’s something a little more, uh, potent. But it’s kind of hard to believe.”

I leaned over conspiratorially, catching the faint whiff of Baph’s perfume, a subtle lavender. 

“Alright, hit me. What is it, do we have to sell our souls or something?”

She laughed while shaking her head. “Nah, nothing that extreme. Although it’s going to take a little bit of a leap of faith, okay? You know the guy at the farmer’s market who comes every Saturday. The one with all the crystals and shit?”

“Yeah, New Age dude, has those just awful white guy dreads. The ones that make you want to just get some scissors and go to town all Clocktower style? Go all XTC 'snipping snipping snipping goes the Scissor man. Putting ends to shitty white boy dreads.'” I mimed a snipping motion with my fingers while singing a terrible parody of one of my favorite new wave songs.

“Yeah, that’s the one. His name’s Zerick, because of course it is. Well, he has a guy, a supplier named Tony. Tony is what you’d call an, uh, entrepreneur? Anyway, he finds things from all around the country and sometimes he sells shit to Zerick, but I know through a guy who knows Tony that he has some legit supernatural shit. Like I’m talking real Wizard of Earthsea stuff, dude.”

“So a guy named Tony is going to give us some potion to be good at music? This sounds a little off, Baph. I mean we suck but that'd be cheating.” I shook my head; there was no way any of that could be true. It was too good. If there were people actually selling supernatural shit, it would at least be all over TikTok. Maybe not on the mainstream media, but Tony would definitely be the character of the day on Twitter if that shit was legit. Or maybe not, who knows, maybe there are whole magical societies out there under our nose and we just don’t realize shit. I want to believe, and the truth is out there, and all that. It would make sense that the people with power would try to keep it out of the hands of the hoi palloi. They were assholes like that. 

“Nah, see, I sell to a friend who buys stuff regularly from Tony. And they’re pretty reliable. Both the friend and Tony, and I was talking about you guys today and how much I was worried about you, and they tell me about how Tony has this thing that could help if you were willing to try it. Just got a whole shipment of them in, but he needs to try it out on some willing test subjects first.”

“And that’s where we come in.”

She tapped the side of her head, “Yep! That’s where you come in. If you want, tomorrow at noon you and the rest of the band should show up at their place. You know where the Biscuit Kitchen is, off of 15-501.”

“The one that was in the--”

“Yeah the one that was in the Naughty Grandpa movie. The same film that you bring up every time I bring you a fried chicken biscuit to help you deal with your fucking hangovers. Well, Tony works out of the back of a thrift shop near there. And I’ve got an appointment set up with y’all if you want to give it a shot.”

“But give what a shot?” I raised my voice a little before quickly lowering it down. Something about this conversation demanded hushed concentration, as much as my brain just wanted to shout. “You aren’t making any sense.”

“I don’t know, dude, I don’t know. But I do know that whatever it is, my friend said that it’ll give you as much time as you need to not only get ready for the show, but to really wow ‘em. Or at least give you all the time and energy you need to practice without having to worry about the constraints of the human body.”

“Sounds like snake oil.” I huffed. 

“Look at you, what are you, some kind of ol’ timey prospector? Yee haw, don’t sell me none of that there snake oil. There’s a snake in my boot.” She did a little jig with her hands, swinging her arms back and forth like a refugee from an old black and white cartoon. I tried to be a gentleman and not say something about how those movements made her braless chest go fucking crazy, but part of me feels like she knew already and was doing that on purpose just to fluster me. Rude. Just a rude girl, that Baphomet. "But seriously, as far as I can tell this is some A-1 on the fucking level magic. So if you want to try to help your band succeed by any means possible, I think you owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot. Please? For me?" 

Rolling my eyes, I looked at Baph, trying to see if she’d break and say “Psyche!” any time soon. But she was dead serious. I could see it in her hazel eyes, complete and total belief that some Sopranos wannabe operating a spooky thrift store had the answers to all of my problems. Baph had never seriously steered us wrong before. Okay, there was the thing with the acid and the spaghetti, but that was also partially Kev’s fault too. 

“Mmkay,” I mumbled, feeling just as tired from the booze as I was from the conversation. “Talk to the other guys. See if they’re in. I’ll give it a shot. It better not be anything too weird. Or if it is, I mean I guess that's cool too. Anything's better than this.