No champagne in Champaign

Something told me to meet this person...

 

The only place with more cornfields than southern Illinois is Iowa. What most non-Illinois residents don’t know about Illinois is that northern Illinois and southern Illinois could very well be two very different states. In northern Illinois, there’s Chicago. With Chicago comes to the street tough exterior and love for heavy death metal. In southern Illinois, there’s nothing. You get south enough, the people will have a Deep South accent.

I grew up in northern Illinois. I visited Wisconsin enough to consider it just as much my home as Illinois. So, when a golden opportunity smacked me with a Paul Reed Smith in both southern Illinois and Milwaukee, I didn’t hesitate to play it. At the time, I thought screw that it’s in southern Illinois, screw it! Now, I am wondering if that Paul Reed Smith was aimed somewhere else and I just got in its way. I went to southern Illinois wondering if I would come back feeling any different. I came back more confused than ever.

That Paul Reed Smith came in the form of Scott Landes. I had seen him on Collide’s “Like the Hunted” DVD and was very curious about him. I found some information about him on the internet, but it was just enough to make me want to talk to him to pry more out of him. I knew Collide was in the studio, so I decided to just sit back and wait for them to go on tour. My spirit was not pleased with that decision. It told me to look harder for information on Scott.

It didn’t take long to discover that Scott was on tour with another band, one that would be in southern Illinois. Tossing aside the facts that this was a different band and would sound nothing like Collide, I started making plans to go down to the land of cornfields to see Scott in person. I didn’t care if I didn’t get the chance to talk to him; I just wanted to see him. My spirit was pleased with this result. Yet, it still bugged me. I gave in and found that Scott had written some music that he had posted up on his Myspace page. I started listening to it and found it shocking. One song hit me harder than the Paul Reed Smith. I listened to it once all the way through, went and found my mother and had her listen to it. We came to the conclusion that the song was aural candy to Empaths. This fed my need to see Scott. I had to ask him if he knew what an Empath was and if he had written that song to sooth frazzled Empaths… or if it was a pure coincidence.

A few days later, my creative writing teacher told the class that our next exercise had to focus on something that we had never written before. I got home and started thinking. I had written stories about werewolves, vampires, other supernatural beings, and had a very good start on a novel about immortals. Those topics were what I focused my writing on. What could I write about? I swore to stay away from romance and I hated mysteries with a passion, so what could I write about?

I listened to some of Scott’s music, not looking for any inspiration, but hoping to relax. Instead, two characters formed in my mind. A meager plot and conflict arose. I only had four songs to listen to, and the story was slightly stunted. I couldn’t see how it would end, unlike most of my writings. I found many parallels to one time in my life, and was bugged by that. Yet… was this a sign? Scott’s music had put a story in my head, even though I hadn’t expected it to. Could more of his music finish the story? I wasn’t sure, but went ahead and sent an e-mail asking if we could meet and discuss his music and my writing. I got a response saying sure.

As each day passed before I was going to see him, my senses dulled. I could no longer eat without getting sick, so I stopped eating. I had mild Insomnia that increased exponentially so I was only sleeping for about an hour each evening. Yet, I was still able to function at 100%. Hunger became something I was used to. My parents didn’t notice anything abnormal, just wanted to go down to southern Illinois with me. My dad went far enough to say that Obama was not going to win the election because I refused to let my dad drive down with me.

 The morning that I was to go down to southern Illinois, it snowed. Thursday had been so beautiful and warm and Friday, there was a good amount of snow on the ground. About an hour before I was supposed to leave with my friend Joe, it started to blizzard. My car was sliding around, not very happy with me. I wasn’t very happy, but I knew that to the south, there wasn’t a single flake of snow. My dad made one final request to have him go with, but I said no.

Joe came to get me and on the trip down, we got lost in the cornfields. We made it to the university town of Champaign after spending about an hour all but driving straight through the cornfields. After having dinner at a small café {where I only had maybe two forkfuls of food before admitting defeat} we walked around the town, me amazed at how warm it was, while back home, snow continued to fall.

When we finally went into the venue {a bar for 19+} we sat down along a wall. I stared at the stage and up at the lights, trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. I noticed that there were at least four moving lights. I didn’t recognize anything else.

My best friend had given me a camera to use for the event, so I went up towards the stage and started taking pictures of the empty stage. None of my pictures of the lights turned out, and I only liked one picture of the empty stage, so I deleted everything else. I went back to Joe and felt impatience creep up into my bones. Where was Scott? Would he remember a small nobody that sent him an e-mail, or had I fled his mind the second he had sent a reply to me?

I looked over at the stage and watched as two people walked up on the stage. I watched for a moment before something clicked.

“Holy frakking crap!” I grabbed Joe’s arm and he looked down at me with some amusement. “It’s him! It’s Scott!”

Joe looked over at the stage, though Scott had just walked off. We both froze until Scott walked back on stage and I pointed him out.

“Alright, you’ve seen him, so the drive wasn’t a complete waste… so far.” My dad had insisted that we drive my SUV {because of the snow in St. Charles} instead of taking Joe’s car and my car had given Joe a backache.

I started shaking with excitement. I had seen Scott. If I got the chance to talk to him, that would be so cool. Yet, just seeing him was good enough for me. Being at a concert was even better. Getting the hell out of St. Charles for a small period of time was priceless.

Scott came off the stage and started walking towards Joe and me. I nearly fell off my seat when he walked past to go to his bands booth. I watched him the way a cat watches a bird on the other side of a window. Could I go up to him and just say hi? I wasn’t sure. I started rocking back and forth.

“You know, if you don’t go up to him, I will drag him over here.” Joe whispered it just loud enough for me and I stopped rocking, yet kept my attention on Scott.

“You wouldn’t” My voice grated as I said it.

Joe got up and moved around the table and started walking towards the booth, this huge smirk on his face.

I leaned forward on my seat and reached out to grab him, “Joe! NO!” Joe looked over at me with a small smirk playing on his face and stopped. I jumped down from my seat and pushed past Joe. “I can do this myself.”

Taking a few steps towards the booth, I stopped. Everyone around me was at ease and looked natural. Me, I was a nineteen year old in a BAR! Not only was it a bar, I had made it very clear to everyone that knew me that I would never drink alcohol, even after I turned twenty-one.

Scott was by the side of the booth when I finally started moving and was close enough to him to make eye contact. He spotted me and gave me a look that said, “okay, how can I help you?” in the manner that employees in grocery stores have when someone slinks up to them to ask a question. For a moment I felt distraught, but I wasn’t discouraged. Okay, so I had just sent an e-mail, not a picture showing him what I looked like so he could pick me out in a crowd.

“I’m Christy…” I said and he leaned forward and I repeated myself.

“OH! HI!” He stuck his hand out for a handshake and let my hand slip into his. “Hey, I have to be up on stage in about ten minutes, but come find me later, okay?”

I nodded and instantly turned away from him, feeling my eyes bulge out of my head. I looked over at Joe and gave him a bouncy smile. Joe and I talked for a few minutes about how I shouldn’t be nervous or too excited; Scott was after all, just another human being.

The concert was something a bit more professional than what I was used to, but I hardly noticed it. I had grabbed Ben’s camera and gone to find a seat that gave me an excellent view of the stage and during the entire forty-five minutes Mankind Is Obsolete was up on stage, I was clicking away pictures. I didn’t realize how much time had passed until Natasha announced their last song.

I went back to Joe while MKIO got their equipment off the stage and he talked about how shocked he was at how good they were and that he was going to get their newest CD. He disappeared to go get the CD and I stared at the stage, waiting to see if Scott would appear again. He didn’t and I wondered where he had gone off to. I would give him a few minutes before I got up and started wandering around and possibly asking after him.

He didn’t appear, but I still waited, thinking that maybe he wanted to tune his guitar or whatnot. I finally got up and started wandering around, thinking that I had to be crazy. I spotted him and started to go after him, but he disappeared. He was not making this easier on me…

I finally gave up on tracking him down myself and asked the bassist, Gordon, where Scott could be. He found him by all but running into him.

Scott saw me and his eyes said “opps!”, but sat me down at the bar and I handed him my writing. He took it and went very still, with his hands in his lap and feet perched on the bar underneath the stool he sat on. I put my head on my hands and tried not to fidget. I was so nervous and lack of sleep had put me on edge; every time Scott made a small movement, I all but jumped out of my skin. He finished it and asked if he could take it with him; he said he couldn’t concentrate all that well with the music playing in the background. I said sure and we talked a little about sending each other e-mail. He asked if I had any questions for him and I did. I just couldn’t get them organized enough to actually say them out loud.

I got Joe to take a picture of us, and then Scott had to get back to helping out with MKIO. I don’t remember leaving the place, just that I squealed excitedly when we got outside and started babbling.

“He’s a drug user.” Joe said it as if he was commenting on the weather.

I tripped, and felt my eyes widen. “Uh, wha?”

Joe looked down at me, “Well, unless that was a zit on his arm.”

I backtracked to sitting next to Scott. I had noticed the huge callus on his right thumb, but every other part of his exposed skin that I had seen had been even more unblemished than mine. It had been unearthly and beautiful. Part of me had felt jealous, and the rest of me and wanted to reach out and touch it, just to see if it was real. I had not noticed any track marks from drug use; growing up in St. Charles tuned the eye to such a thing.

“Well… uh… I don’t care! I saw him, met him, he read my writing. He read the entire thing, I did not expect that!”

When we got home, I lay in bed, thinking. Nothing Scott had said or done had told my spirit that my meeting him had been fulfilled. I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t feel like I had learned anything new. So, why the hell had my spirit bugged the s**t out of me about meeting Scott?

I had my answer the following morning.

I woke up doing something I hadn’t done in years. Something that I had done when I had immerged myself into music and had believed that it would be something I would be doing for the rest of my life. Something that had been destroyed when I had started high school and had been “taught” by an instructor that had verbally backhanded me for even looking at musical instruments.

I woke up singing.

Author's Note

grammer? need a lil help there!