A Shortcut Through a Minefield
A short story by Mike Romard
We were backstage having a couple of beers before our set when I heard something wrong. Jason, our former lead guitarist, was the opening act for this tour, and he was at the end of his set. I didn’t catch most of his intro to the last song – blah blah about something he’d started writing before he left the band. But when he started to play the opening chords, I knew it immediately.
A Shortcut Through The Minefield was our most popular song to date. It was getting plenty of radio play, and was spreading like the flu across the peer to peer networks. A few hours before the show I leaked our forthcoming album onto a couple of those same networks from the tour bus when we’d been parked at some Middle American mall, where I’d come across an open wi-fi connection called Want To Earn $14 The Hard Way?
So anyway, that sack of shit was playing our song, and I was pretty sure that he’d taken credit for it. Which isn’t entirely a lie on his part. We did base the song off of something we’d heard him screwing around with before he left. But that was only part of the chorus, and I wrote the damn words.
“Cory, what are you doing?” Eric, Jason’s replacement, asked me as I started walking towards the stage.
“I’m going out there.”
And I did. I walked onto the stage behind Jason, I sat at my kit and I started to drum along with him. I was pissed, but I didn’t want him to know. Not yet, anyway. I used to like Jason. He was a good guy, and he left the band on good terms. That’s why we were all cool with him coming on tour with us. So it was a total slap in the nuts for him to pull something like this.
He looked back when he heard my drums. There was worry in his eyes, but I smiled, and I started to sing along with him. He smiled too, and the rest of the band came out and sang with us. The audience got in on it too, and I could see a few cellphones and small video cameras were out, so chances were good that this would be online before we even came back to the stage for our set.
I couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to save face. This could’ve been a huge disaster. We could’ve come across as being weak, or as a bunch of whining shitheads if we’d lost our cool. But joining him? Showing that we were big enough not to let something stupid like that bother us? Our fans would just eat that up. The story would spread wherever the video was shared, and we’d come out on top.
After the song the audience went mental. The little son of a bitch thanked us for coming out, and we fist-bumped like it was no big deal.
When we went backstage, Jason turned to the band and said, “I’m glad you guys were cool with that. I wasn’t sure how you were going to react.”
“Fuck it man,” Jimmy, the bass player, said to him. “What’re we supposed to do? Just lose our shit at you?”
“Hey,” I said. “Maybe you should come back out when we play it later.”
I cracked two beers and passed him one. He said that he might.
We played a great set, and he did join us for A Shortcut Through The Minefield. It would’ve normally been our closing number, but since he’d stolen the song’s spotlight, we relegated it to being the last song before the encore, and we finished up with I Play A Beautiful Tuba and If Brown Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right, a couple of fan favourites from our first EP.
Eric had the keys to a friend’s house for the night so we had a bit of a party there after the show. We invited Jason along, a few friends, and some of the fans that we knew. The party was nothing special, just a bunch of people sitting around, having a few drinks, playing some tunes. We had some of our gear brought into the house and played a quick set of ironic punk covers of old power ballads like More Than A Feeling and Total Eclipse of The Heart. Jimmy does a mean Bonnie Tyler impersonation.
We fed Jason a bottle of bourbon and he was passed out, sprawled across the kitchen floor. We left him there throughout the party, and as it wound down, I volunteered to get our gear ready to go back on the bus in the morning.
I lugged each piece of gear carefully past Jason, and set them all near the front door. All but one last piece, one of Johnny’s practice amps. I was carrying it through the kitchen, over Jason’s limp body, and I dropped it on his left hand.
Jason woke up screaming, sobbing, trying to pull his trapped hand free. I made as though I was trying to lift the amp off of him as quick as I could, but for a second I pressed down on it and twisted, listening to his bones grind before moving it.
“Shit man, are you okay?” I asked him.
He couldn’t answer through the screaming. I called an ambulance for him. I explained to everyone, the band, the party guests, the paramedics, that I’d slipped and dropped the amp. They never questioned me. Jason never even questioned me. I told him later that I was sorry, and the sad son of a bitch believed me.
Jason had to drop out of the rest of the tour. We picked up a couple of local opening acts for our next two shows, before we had another band join us for the remaining dates. Every show, we invited the openers onto the stage for A Shortcut Through The Minefield. The audience loved it every time.
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