CHAPTER 12

Life reached an incredibly fast pitch in a very short time for Kim and her grrls. Kim found herself missing more and more school, devoting herself to her band on one hand and to Gwen on the other. That created serious tensions, as Elke was still passionate about hating Gwen, and Gwen was starting to get madly jealous of the attention both Jessica and Chatha got from Kim. It came to a point where, if Gwen was mentioned when the band was gathered, or if the band was mentioned while alone with Gwen, all-out chaos would be set loose.

            With Jessica in the band, things were brought together. Practices were scheduled, instrumentations were dictated, and the word was put out onto the street. There was a group of young grrls ready and waiting to take over the world, armed with the mismatched instruments of total punk annihilation. (Chatha hadn’t been able to stop giggling when Jessica had been thinking up lines like that in order to sell the band.)

            Also with Jessica came something new and foreign to many of the grrls: gigs. Only a month after consolidating as Kim Kissably and the Red Lips Quintet, they got to play to their first crowd of drunken blokes at The Scythe and Dagger, a halfway fetish club filled with jeers and whistles (and many requests for clothes to be taken off). All Kim could talk about after that, barely able to get her point out through her anger, was how much she wanted anything with a prick to just bloody well die.

            “Just imagine,” she had growled, “a world where it doesn’t matter how long it is or how hard it gets. A world where they must be the submissives, if there’s any of them bloody well left! A world where the grrls live with each other and for each other, where the sluts and girls have been cast out in shame. Anything with a prick left behind could be our slaves, and it will be our time to rule and belittle and humiliate, our time to tell them they’re too weak t’ open a bloody door on their own!

            Elke had put a hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her. Kim just shrugged her away, muttering “bugger off,” and stalked down the street.

            Chatha had been confused about the difference between grrls and girls. When she asked Kim to tell her, she was told to wait for the next gig. This one, at Space Radio Tavern, opened with a rant; it was the first in a long line of rants.

            While her grrls were still doing instrument checks behind her, Kim strode to the mic in the middle of the stage. “How do you like your girls?” She purred it, her voice dripping with an obvious sarcasm that was still somehow lost on their audience of maybe one hundred. They cheered, slamming their hands on any surface they could to make as much noise as possible.

            “Do you like your girls ... hot?” She pressed into the mic stand, her mouth opened in a silent gasp, then she moaned and slid slowly down the pole. The audience cheered louder.

            She pulled herself back up by the mic, her left arm pressed against her breasts. “Would you beg for this?” Her voice was small, shivering. “Would you crawl for this?” She sighed sensually, drawing her hand down her stomach, pulling her shirt down far enough to really get the crowd excited. “Would you kill for this? Maybe even die?”

            Someone in the crowd, completely taken in, jumped to his feet and yelled “Take it off!”

            Kim tore the mic out of the stand and stalked to the edge of the stage. “I bet you’d all gladly take this body, wouldn’t you?” She held her breath as the entire club seemed to lean in towards her. “Well, I’m not your ordinary girl! Bloody hell, I’m not even a girl. I am a grrl! I am the goddess of bitches, and I am in control!”

            Kim came back from the edge of the stage, her face flushed red with excitement. “And these here are all grrls. I am Kim Kissably, their leader. I have one simple rule: if you want it, prove you’re worth it.” She pulled on the mic cord so it followed her back to her band. “What, you may ask, is the difference between a girl and a grrl?” She laughed, putting her arm around Elke’s shoulder. Elke gave her an uneasy smile, not quite sure what she was doing.

            “A girl--” Kim drew the word out in a sweet voice “--is weak. She wears tight little tank tops that cut off circulation to her breast implants. She never eats, ‘cause she has to stay her perfect 100 pounds for that boy down the street.” She giggled, fluttering her eyelids, then snorted in disgust. “A girl is used, abused, and tossed aside by all those things with pricks out there. Well, no more! I am the user! I am the abuser! Revolution has come, and the grrls are taking over the world! Bow down to me! Kiss my feet, and maybe I’ll let you kiss a little more. Mmm.”

            She dropped the mic down at her side and spun around, then whipped the mic up again. “Until that time, I feel obligated to tell you the four words I never want to hear again!”

            Chatha, knowing what was coming, picked up her sax and a low, moaning sound started. Kim screamed, tossed her head back, then spit her four most hated words into the microphone. “Nice shoes, let’s fuck!”

            Elke and Jessica had moved up to the other two microphones by now, and they shouted it rhythmically along with her. “Nice shoes, let’s fuck!”

            The bass was pulsing, the drum machine pounding, the guitars were going insane, and the keyboard sped out sounds that were barely notes.

            “Nice shoes, let’s fuck!”

            On top of all this was the saxophone, blaring amorous, almost animalistic sounds. Kim let out a long scream, then jumped into the first verse.

            “I’ve heard it before!” she screamed, feeling as it tore at her throat. Her voice dropped to a broken murmur. “I’ve heard it all. Ya’ really think I need you for fun?” Caressing the mic stand, she continued in an almost musical whisper. “I want it intense. I want the control.”

            The bass rose above everything else, angry and pained. Kim’s voice followed it, crying out her next lines. “Get back to the wall and try someone else!”

            The gig was a relative success for being filled with such strange material. Kim had gotten the entire audience to go deathly silent as she moaned “crawl for me,” and had been able to whip them up into a screaming frenzy as she crooned and teased her way through Danger Bitch.

            Space Radio Tavern was where the grrls really got a feel for how to play off of each other. Everything they did relied solely on how much mania Kim felt like putting into the songs at that one moment. They had to be listening to each other to see where things went, but especially to her, in case she felt like she wanted to switch around the order of a song, or even stop halfway through to pick up another rant. The shows were empowering for every grrl under Kim’s wing, and for any grrl (though there weren’t many) who happened to be in their audience.

            Throughout May and June, Kim and her grrls got themselves banned from their fair share of clubs, but also begged back to others. There were times when Kim ruled the stage (most of the places they had been kicked out of were subjected to this), but also times when her grrls could talk just as avidly to the audience.

            Chatha insisted on being able to tell every audience they came past that “I’m th’new Lora Logic!” Kim told her no one remembered X-Ray Spex or their little saxophone player, but Chatha ignored her, and had religiously told every gig since. Once, at Broken Nails (a relatively new club that spent most of its time playing industrial mix tapes over their too-loud speakers), a person at the bar actually called out “Who’s Lora Logic?” Chatha had gone bright red and backed away from the microphone, unable to continue addressing the audience once she realized they really were listening.

            By mid-July, Kim Kissably and the Red Lips Quintet were an underground legend (and the three who should have graduated had all flunked out and given up), and everyone who believed themselves to be truly part of the rebellion had seen at least one of their gigs. It had started to become dangerous for any of the grrls to leave the clubs on their own. It seemed that the blokes they taunted and egged on really did want a piece; each band mate had their own to ward off.

            Jessica spent a lot of her time trying to talk Kim into cooling down the act a bit. Every gig was getting closer and closer to a strip-show. Kim brushed her off, laughing. “None of those l’il buggers have the guts to get close enough to do real damage.”

            She sighed, knowing that Kim was going to be severely stubborn about this. “The men in the audience are projecting your image onto the rest of us.”

            “And?”

            “And, what would you do if our little pink girl ever got raped?”

            Kim responded only with cold silence for the longest time. She finally said, more viciously than any of the taunts thrown off from the stage, “if anyone so much as touches Chatha, or any of my grrls, they will be paying with their lives. Simple as that.”

            Since then, there had been no questions asked about the severity of the stage show. More songs were written by Kim, to be promptly arranged and put into some semblance of sanity by Jessica. It was apparent that the two were becoming quite a team. It came to the point where Elke accused Kim of dumping her as best friend for the new girl, and Gwen wouldn’t acknowledge Jessica as a person. She became, to Gwen, “the one who shall not be named,” and wasn’t really brought up again after being dubbed that.

            Geneveve and Ebony had taken full advantage of their spot in the limelight. Both had brand new boys. Geneveve’s was a reformed grunge named Trebor who would do anything she commanded. Ebony’s was a dark, mysterious, moody goth-boy who called himself Raine and respected the entire over-the-top women’s rights thing that the band stood for.

            It was early August when things really hit. Jessica came running into the dressing room (this place actually had a dressing room!) of Spirit Voyager, holding a piece of paper above her head, waving it in the air. “Grrls, we got an Archer on this one!”

            Chatha, falling out of her chair, stared at her. “Wha’?”

            The rest of the grrls had turned around to stare at her. They shared Chatha’s sentiment, but were too shocked to speak.

            Jessica spread the piece of paper out on the counter. “I went over the calculations with the manager. He’d heard offers going up around London for all of a thousand pounds to reel us in--”

            “I never heard any o’ those offers,” Kim murmured.

            “Yes, well, he heard rumors thereof, so he decided he’d have to pay us top dollar. An Archer...” Jessica took in a breath. “In one night.”

            “Four hundred bloody pounds each.” Kim was pale, not quite able to grasp it. “One night.”

This chapter includes the lyrics to Nice Shoes, Let's..., off the grrls' first album, Torn Horses.
The lyrics were written by 'Kim Kissably', and are © LL Hager, 2000.

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