Shame, Shame, Shame!

Two things leaped out at me right away. The first was that the song wasn't one that we normally did. The second was that the band had never sounded better. I don't know what it was. It couldn't simply be the fact that I wasn't on the stage with them; could it?

"What the...?" began Betty.

"Shut the fuck up!" I hissed. I needed all of my faculties to examine what was going on. I needed to examine the sound. Danny and I often argued about out approaches to equipment. We had completely different tastes when it came to guitars and amps. I preferred Fender combo amps and liked to mic one amp and direct the output through the PA. I also only used vintage stomp boxes through an effects loop. I played only vintage Les Paul guitars.

Danny on the other hand preferred BC Rich guitars that were painted with different themes that ranged from women to cars. He used a full rack of all digital effects. His amps were vintage 50 watt Marshalls. And he loved using at least two amps. This time he had four heads and four cabinets. I had to admit that he had never sounded better.

The thing that astounded me the most was that I expected that the band would sound thinner with the missing guitar. Instead they sounded not only fuller, but tighter than ever. I realized instantly why that was happening. Danny had often experimented with running his guitar rig in stereo and directing one side of the feed to each side of the stage. It also allowed him to pan and sweep his guitar lines from side to side for interesting echo effects. He had also doubled the number of amps he was using.

John had also upgraded his bass rig and was placed a lot louder in the mix than ever before. The stage also seemed roomier with only the three of them in front instead of the four of us. Danny was running around like a man possessed and Mike was picking out women in the audience and singing to each one. God I wanted to be up there. By midway through the song which I recognized as Dokken's song, "Breaking the chains," the audience was singing along with them.

Then I noticed that a lot of the images on the screen behind them, blown up to more than twice life size, were pictures of Betty.

"Why are..." said a feminine voice from behind me.

"I told you to shut the fuck up," I growled.

"EXCUSE ME GREGORY?" she said and I immediately realized my mistake. I turned and stared into the angry eyes of my wife Amanda.

"Sorry Honey," I thought you were Betty.

"Why would you talk to Betty that way?" she asked.

"I was trying to concentrate and she was getting on my nerves," I said.

"The band sounds great," she said. "Why aren't you up there? Danny looks hot. Look at Rhonda. She looks like she's ready to eat him alive. I think she dropped her clipboard. Betty looks like she's ready to beat Rhonda's ass. Do they know each other?"

"Yeah, yeah," I said. "Whatever."

"What is this song about?" she asked. "Does it have something to do with slavery?"

"No," I said tersely. "It's about getting out of a relationship with a woman who treated you badly."

"Oh, I get it," she smiled. "That's why he's breaking the chains. But why are there all of those pictures of Betty on the screen?"

After the song was over they got the biggest round of applause I'd ever heard and then they launched into a favorite of Danny's. They ripped through an absolutely killer version of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid." I was even more upset then. Danny was going nuts. Usually I was the voice of reason. I held him back to keep him from turning every song into one long guitar solo. But without me there, he had to play all of the rhythm parts which only allowed him to throw in quick lead lines, here and there. It worked beautifully. Since he only had a couple of measures each time, it meant he had to be very frugal with his bits. Almost too quickly the song ended.

It left me wondering what they'd do next. Danny and John stood directly in front of their amps and aimed the pickups on their guitars towards the speakers. I know there'd be feedback and there was. John stayed facing the speakers and kept the feedback going. It was brilliant and the audience loved it. A spot light came up then and the video screen showed....Danny's house?

I wondered why he'd want to show his house. Then I noticed that it wasn't his car parked in front of the house, it was mine and I started to feel afraid.

"Honey, that's your car isn't it?" asked Amanda. I just nodded.

"Danny started to play a very bluesy opening line over John's feedback. It was just the two of them on that stage with the audience in the palms of their hands. Then the tone of Danny's guitar changed to a more distorted, more aggressive sound and he started riffing as Pete's drums kicked in and John started the heaviest bass lines I'd ever heard from him.

"Mike's voice actually sounded both nasty and pissed off as he began to sing.

"I'm knocking at your door but there's no answer." he ran across the stage and pretended to knock on the door of Danny's house even as my heart beat so loudly in my chest that it threatened to overwhelm Pete's cannon like drums.

"I hear the moans and groans of your nasty laughter," sang Mikey, as Danny punctuated each line with soulful atomic blues fueled guitar. Each and every note he played seem tinged with raw emotion. I could hear hatred, anger and pain pouring out of him through his guitar.

. Even louder though, was the sound of a woman's giggling and moaning her pleasure. And there on the giant screen was Betty. The moans were hers and she and I both knew it. We looked at each other in abject horror. There was a huge censored banner over Betty's naughty bits but everyone in the building knew that she was naked. Betty and I both knew who the man in that picture would be when he was shown and she screamed and tried to run. The crush of the crowd trying to get closer to the stage held us in place though.

Amanda looked at Betty and put her hand over her mouth in shock that her friend would allow herself to be filmed and shown in front of a crowd of strangers.

"I'm kickin' in the door as your breathing gets faster," sang Mikey on the stage. The audience was torn between watching the scandalous little scene on the screen and the band's performance.

"Your trail of clues is leading to disaster," sang Mikey. And I knew then that for my own good, for the future of my marriage and family, I couldn't let them finish that song.

Mikey and Danny came together to punctuate the changes in the music as they reached the bridge. Mikey had moved across the stage until he was directly in front of Betty, who didn't have a clue of what was happening.

"Once I looked into your eyes, I thought that they were true," he sang. Danny was riffing feverishly next to him in mute agreement with the sentiment of the lyrics. The pure pain on Danny's face cut through to Betty and she started to cry. But she had no idea how bad it was about to become.

"Innocence can turn to lies and now the finger points at you, baby," sang Mikey and his tone changed from pleading to chiding as he plowed into the simple repeated one word chorus.

"Shame, shame, shame," he screamed at the top of his lungs. "You should've known better."

He was pointing his fingers straight at Betty and the audience was beginning to put two and two together.

"Than to cheat on me," sang not Mike, but Danny directly to Betty. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that what was on that screen had actually happened. People around us were pointing their fingers at Betty too and she was trying to get away but again the mass of people trying to get closer to the stage wouldn't let her get away. She'd have been better off trying to get to the stage and sneak out that way.

Mikey summed everything up. "You've got your own self to blame. Now it's time to feel the pain, of your twisted little game. It's such a crying shame, shame, shame." As the audience started pointing fingers at Betty and laughing at her, I finally recognized the song. And I realized that my instinct was right. I had to stop them from finishing that God damned song. Danny had made his own wife the object of ridicule and scorn. They were humiliating her even now. If they made it through the second verse, my marriage probably wouldn't survive.

"Did you do your poses in the mirror?" sang Mikey, accompanied by lightning fast guitar lines from a now smiling Danny.

"Did you tell him baby, baby please?" Both Mikey and Danny looked me straight in the eyes and the faces that had always shown me nothing but love and friendship were devoid of any shred of compassion. I realized that they knew and there was no iota of forgiveness left for me. I dove for the edge of the stage. I figured that I could snatch out Danny's guitar cord or the main cord from Mike's microphone. Both of them used cordless transmitters, but Danny's transmitter fed to a receiver that was linked by guitar cables to his array of triggers and stomp boxes on the floor.

As I landed roughly on the edge of the stage, my fingers were only inches away from the chain of effects pedals that were linked by thin and extremely vulnerable quarter inch guitar cables.

Before I could manage to grab the cable and stop the guitar signal from getting through, Danny, my best friend, almost since birth stepped over and kicked me in the face so hard that I fell back off of the edge of the stage spitting teeth as I fell. I saw the look on his face just before he struck me and there was nothing in it but joy. He clearly had no remorse for what he'd done.

Before my body had even settled, the security men had grabbed me.

Back on the stage Mikey threw another knife in my back. "Did you twist his tongue and bend his ear up?" he sang. "Did you have him begging on his knees?" That was the worst moment of my life as my sweet innocent wife looked away from me for just a second when she realized that the naked man cavorting on the screen with the new town whore was none other than her own husband. She launched herself at me and scratched the shit out of my face before the security men snatched me away from her in their haste to throw me out of the building.

Since Amanda couldn't get to me, she turned her fury on Betty. Betty is at least four inches taller than Amanda but Amanda has thick arms and thighs. She forgot about being a lady and just threw the hardest and best pure punch I've ever seen at Betty's unprotected face. All I remember before they threw me, bodily, out onto the hard concrete surface of the parking lot, was Betty's head snapping backwards as Amanda's fist hit it.

* * * * * *

Betty

I couldn't believe that one song had put my entire life in jeopardy.

But the fact was that the past few days had been off. I don't know why I never sat down and thought about it before now. But lying there flat on my back while two security guards prevented an enraged Amanda from stomping me into the ground obviously wasn't the time for deep thinking.

I struggled to get to my feet with my head spinning. All of the people in the crowd who were near enough to see what was going on were jeering at me and someone spit on me.

It was hard for me to believe that this was the town I'd grown up in and worked in and had raised my son in. I looked towards the stage and saw that my husband was still there performing with his band while half of the women in the audience screamed and tried to get closer to him. Before this moment I'd have laughed at them because Danny had never loved any woman except me. I'd grown up kind of wild, but my Danny had always been a boy scout.

I screamed his name out. I needed to look at him and see the expression on his face. Danny was easy to argue with because even when he was so angry at me that he didn't want to talk to me, I could always just look at him and he'd melt and forgive me. That was how much he loved me.

We made brief eye contact as he launched into his guitar solo. It felt strange. It was as if an alien consciousness had taken over my husband's body. As our eyes met, I felt nothing coming from him. There was no love, no forgiveness and barely any recognition. It was almost as if I had looked into a stranger's eyes.

But before I could even begin to think about what had happened I was pushed away to the side of the crowd by people trying to get closer to the stage.

"Hey!" I shouted angrily.

"Shame, Shame, Shame, stupid bitch," replied an obviously drunken woman. I looked closer at her and realized that she was the mother of one of my students. I had to get out of there before more people started to put the pieces together. I was hurt. I was angry and my face was throbbing where Amanda had hit me. I needed to talk to Danny. I had to beg his forgiveness and try to put this behind us.

I figured that the smartest way to handle it would be to go backstage and wait for him. Then I'd convince him to go somewhere that we could talk this all out. I also needed to figure out exactly what he knew, so I could determine what to say about it. I also wished that I had some way of getting to Greg so we could synchronize our lies and avoid tripping over each other. It would also be good to know what Amanda knew and when she found out. But I think it was pretty obvious that Amanda had only found out during the song. If she'd known any earlier she wouldn't have defended me when Greg told me to shut the fuck up.

Then I remembered that today was my birthday and that after the concert, Danny and I were supposed to be meeting my parents for a birthday dinner at my favorite restaurant. I didn't want my parents brought in on this if it could be avoided. At that moment something else came to mind; my son Jordan. This morning when I'd reminded him about the birthday dinner, he'd looked at me crazily. I should have realized something was off then.

Jordan was so much like his father that it was uncanny. He'd flipped me one of those cryptic remarks that teenagers are known for and I hadn't understood it at the time.

"Jordy make sure you're not late getting to the restaurant," I'd said as I tried to hug him. He'd moved away from my hug and threw a sarcastic comment over his shoulder as he left.

"Like I'm going to be anywhere near there," he'd smirked.

At the time, I'd chalked it up to a nearly eighteen year old boy trying to assert his independence. My little boy is growing up, I'd thought. He was trying to distance himself from his mommy as part of him getting ready to leave the nest and go off to college. I'd smiled at the time and thought it was funny. But now I understand that even my son knew about this. I wondered then if he had played a role in his father's humiliation of me in front of all of those people.

As I tried to move myself towards the door, the song ended and the crowd went crazy trying to get the band to come back for one more song. As I looked towards the stage, I could see that John had already left the stage and Pete was walking away from his drums. Mike and Danny were talking to that little bitch Rhonda. It gave me a chance to catch him.

I pushed my way through the crowd, forgetting all about politeness and decorum. This was an extreme situation. Outside of the building, I noticed that a crowd was watching as Greg whined and begged for Amanda to talk to him. They didn't notice me as I made my way around to the back of the school. I walked up to the door and opened it.

"Hi Ollie," I said with a smile to the man seated just inside of the large metal door. "I have to talk to Danny. We're going to dinner with my parents for my birthday. Which way should I turn?"

Ollie was short for Oliver Wendell Douglass. Ollie was both the school's armed security guard and bus driver. He also coordinated security for larger events like the adult evening.

Ollie and I had been friends for a long time, but I sensed something different about him then.

"You can TURN your ass around and go back the way you came," he said evenly. "No one is allowed backstage unless they're on my list and you aren't."

"But Ollie," I whined.

"Butt, is what I call my ass," he spat. "Do you remember Nina?"

Nina had been Ollie's fiancé until she ran off with a salesman who'd been passing through town. It had taken Ollie a long time to get over her and what she'd done to him. The funny part about the story was that he'd moped over her for more than a month. No one could cheer him up though we all tried. Danny and the guys had taken him fishing. They'd bowled with him and tried to teach him to play golf, but nothing worked.

What finally got him over her was the one thing that none of us had thought about. It was closure that brought him back to life. Nina had dragged her sorry ass back into town about six weeks later and begged him to take her back. She'd had all kinds of stories about how she'd been lied to and how she just wanted to see what life away from a small town was like. She swore to him that she had her head on straight and it would never happen again.

Ollie had smiled at her, but it was a weird crooked smile. Then he'd told her, while smiling that same smile, to get the fuck out of his life and stay there.

From then on he was back to being the same gentle, kind man that everyone knew and loved. He'd married one of the local farmers' daughters and they had a couple of kids. Ollie did have one blind spot though. It was women who left their men. I guess he'd extended his description to include me, although I would never leave Danny.

"Yeah, I remember her," I said quietly.

"Shame, Shame, Shame," he said.

Nothing else needed to be said. I turned around and left the building in time to see Greg getting into his car and spinning his wheels trying to get out of there. Someone had painted the words "Cheater, Backstabber, and Asshole," on Greg's prized muscle car.

I felt a vibration coming from my pocket. I reached down and looked at my phone. My mother was calling me. She probably wanted to make sure what time we were meeting.

"Hi Mom," I said.

As I'd predicted she wanted to verify the time and make sure that nothing had changed.

When I ended the call, I called Danny. I was shocked. He answered the phone and he didn't sound depressed or upset.

"Danny, Honey, we need to talk," I said. He didn't reply.

After what seemed like hours he said, "Maybe we should talk after the dinner with your parents."

"Perfect," I said. I knew that gave me a chance. I'd spend the dinner being as solicitous and charming as I could. I'd do all of the things that I knew Danny loved. I'd make it extremely hard for him to just write me off."

"I'll be waiting for you out front, Honey," I said.

"You're going to have to get there on your own, Betty," he said. "I drove the Mustang."

"Danny, I know that car rides rough, but you love it so much that I don't mind riding in it. Maybe we could talk a bit on the way to the restaurant," I said.

"No, Betty," he said. "You can't ride in my car anymore."

"So that's my punishment?" I asked. "I don't get to ride in a car that I don't like anyway?"

"Betty, I'm not trying to punish you," he said. "You're a grown woman. You can make your own decisions. It's not up to me to punish you. I just said that you can't get in my car. It has nothing to do with punishment."

"Then why can't I ride..." I began.

"Because it'll void my warranty," he said.

"Hunh? How?" I asked.

"Apparently it's a new thing," he said. "Ford sent me a letter saying that riding around with a whore in your Mustang renders the warranty non-valid." He hung up then.