“Colostomy Hag?” Edgar sputtered. “What the hell is that?”
“Like, colostomy bag?” Fern said. I nodded, grinning.
“What’s a colostomy bag?” Edgar asked.
“When the doctors have to drain your crap out of you, because you’ve had surgery and can’t use your intestines, it gets drained into a colostomy bag,” I said.
He thought for a second, and nodded. “That’s damn gross. And hag?”
“Because there’s girls in the band,” I said.
Fern started laughing. “You know what, I love it! It’s disgusting and it’s hilarious. I vote for Colostomy Hag.”
Edgar smiled, shaking his head. “All right, I agree. It’s the best we’ve come up with.”
“All right!” I raised my hands in the air. “We’re called Colostomy Hag!”
xXx
And so that’s what the band would be called. I started sketching out ideas for band logos and artwork. I was definitely getting ahead of myself, but we did need a logo. I brought my sketches to the tea shop and ran them past Edgar and Fern, and they picked out what they liked. Deciding on a name for the band definitely made things feel more official, but we knew that all of this would go nowhere without the music. And we still didn’t have a drummer. Without a drummer we couldn’t play songs. We couldn’t even rehearse until we had the full band, so all our plans were pretty much hollow.
xXx
It was early August when Fern and I went downtown to look around at some stores. I’d been doing more around the house so that my parents would help me make some changes to my room, and they had upped my allowance as well, so I had a bit of money. Fern and I looked in a few of the thrift stores and didn’t find anything good, so we headed to the music store.
It had become a bit of a habit for us to browse the bulletin board by the cash register. There was rarely anything interesting: flyers for concerts we weren’t into, people selling instruments, offering piano lessons, stuff like that. I couldn’t think of a time when I’d seen anything on there that even came close to interesting, much less anything to do with heavy metal. None of us had gotten around to advertising on the board ourselves to find a drummer yet.
That day, however, we saw a new flyer. Drummer Needs Band — influenced by DED, Gurgol, Goreceps, looking for like-minded individuals to rock with. There was a phone number listed.
“Great!” Fern exclaimed, grabbing a pen out of her purse and writing the number down on the back of her hand.
“‘Looking for people to rock with’?” I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds dorky.”
“Well, it’s not like we’ve got tons of people to choose from. Let’s call him and see what he’s like,” she replied.
She was right. The flyer seemed almost too good to be true, despite its idiotic wording. We went to a pay phone on the street. Fern put in her quarter and dialled.
“Hi, yes,” she said shortly, “I’m calling about the flyer in Bee Music. About the drummer.” She paused, listening. I watched her face. “Yeah, we’ve got a band. Vocal, guitar, and bass. Doing original stuff.” After another pause she listed off a few bands we liked, mentioning DED and Gurgol. “We have a female vocalist, and I play guitar. So there’s two girls in the band.”
After chatting for a few more minutes, she set up a meeting with him at the tea shop for that evening. I tried to mentally calculate whether or not Edgar would be available, while she wrapped up the call.
Finally she hung up. “Okay, he sounded nice. His name is Socks.”
“Socks?”
“Yeah. He didn’t tell me his real name.”
“That’s not a very cool nickname,” I muttered. Pairing that with the I wanna rock flyer, I wasn’t feeling very hopeful. “He’s probably a complete moron.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Fern said. “I’m going to call Edgar and tell him to meet us tonight.”
xXx