Chris Krovatin is a twice-published teen author and a journalist for Revolver Magazine, as well as the singer for Queens-based metal band Flaming Tusk. He lives in New York City, which he loves even though he is almost positive it is trying to kill him.
Sunday morning. I shudder awake around eight-thirty with mild heartburn caused by overeating. The remnants of a cold hang on me, and I take a moment to lurch to the bathroom, my back aching from spooning my bunched blanket, and empty my throat of swamp-colored phlegm. This involves making a series of hacking, scraping, and gurgling noises that undoubtedly wake my roommate. In the apartment I shared with my brother, we had just enough room between our bedrooms that the purging process could go unheard, and anyway my brother is somewhat of a family celebrity for the suppurating noises he makes when hocking loogies in the kitchen sink before dinner. One doubts my roommate is as accustomed to them.
After coughing up crap for about ten minutes, I return to my room and sweat some more of the cold out. My room is heated by a pipe that leaves it either an igloo or a sauna. I prefer the igloo, which provides cool relief and the encouragement to bundle up in a snug little burrito, but I feel the sauna has been helping me get rid of the germs via sweating. Soon, though, it’s getting late, nine-forty, so I decide to get up. My room is a pit at the moment. On Friday night I came home at an odd hour and found my bed covered with stuff, clothes and books and fine baubles and all that sort of shit, and given the circumstances decided it fitting to fling it all on the floor in a dramatic sweep. Now, my floor and desk are covered with my niceties, either strewn about or precariously stacked. Later tonight, I have to get it back into shape. Not now, heavens no.
WHY HELLO.
In the bathroom, I wash my face, blow my nose, and check myself out in the mirror. Not bad. The past week has been a good one for working out—three runs, two days with the weights—and I’m in the shallow end of the Fat Spectrum. This is unexpected, seeing as yesterday was spent sitting and eating (this is pathetically true. From one in the afternoon until eleven-thirty at night yesterday, I did nothing but sit on the couch, watch Internet TV, and order takeout, except for a moment around eight-thirty at night when I ventured out to buy peanut butter and cupcakes). Normally, after that kind of Saturday, I awake looking more like Humpty Dumpty than Pan, but the consistent exercise has left me in the official Not Terrible zone.
On to the kitchen to make tea (still sick, and band practice later today) and do some dishes. The rack is full, and the kitchen is right by my roommate’s room, so I try to be quiet, which of course only results in my being clumsy and loud. I lose my grip on cabinet doors and they slam. Slow-handled silverware, usually only clattery and metallic, casually knock into things and make low, vibratory noises only emphasized by the silence. A swiftly-cleared drying rack, I decide, is a big clatter, but a slowly-cleared one is the soundtrack to an Asian scene in a 007 movie. Then, it’s wrist-deep in soapy water. I’m still careful with the glasses—on Wednesday, hours before a job interview, I shattered a beer glass around my hand, slicing it in four different places. All the cuts are superficial but lay on just important-enough finger fault lines that I have to worry about reopening them. Midway through the dishes, I grab a mug on the sideboard and begin scrubbing it, only to realize that it contains my pre-prepared teabag, and now my sponge is tea-infused. I toss it out, get a new bag, make the damn tea, and get out of this stupid room.
Back in the bathroom, I’m hocking up more flu jello. At least this means it’s leaving my body. This cold hit me without warning. Thursday night, I was out feeling great at the Lock-Up/Goatwhore show, and even went drinking at Lucky 13 afterwards. Friday morning, I was a full-blown carrier: aching muscles, clogged sinuses, hacking dry cough, complete disorientation. Somehow, I managed to run two and a half miles and go out to dinner and drinks without fainting in a feverish heap (between the run and the dinner, I did wonder if I was going to die). It slowly dawns on me that Tomas Lindberg was sick at the show—he was coolly apologetic about his half-there vocals, citing throat soreness and flu—and that the At The Gates and Great Deceiver frontman might have gotten me sick when he slapped me on the back to get past me earlier in the night. Silently, I curse the famed death metal vocalist for infecting me, because it was definitely he, not the four hours of hard drinking that followed the Lock-Up show, that destroyed my immune system. That Swedish bastard.
We have a pull-up bar now, so I do a couple of pull-ups, meaning literally two. They are still an exercise I have yet to master. I blame my muscles. I am achey like an old man these days, especially in my lower back. Lately, I’ve been talking a lot of shit about going to get a professional massage, but this week I might go for it. My muscles are all knots; sometimes, scratching certain parts of my body causes severe pain to run through my entire shoulder. My calves feel like they’re going to explode. More and more, I wonder if having the tension kneaded out of me would keep me from being so violent and compulsive. If it doesn’t work, I’m moving on to acupuncture. For some reason, that has always made sense to me—by piercing and tapping into a specific well of tension in the body, you can bleed the stress out like a pimple (I find it helps once you stop thinking of these practices as concerning chakras, crystals, and tantra, and instead personify them as corporeal purging, like lancing a blister. You feel less like a pussy when you imagine yourself literally squeezing congealed hate out of a sore on your spirit).
Eleven in the morning, and my roommate still sleeps. Out my window, south Brooklyn stretches like coral, squat red bulges etched with geometric lines, ancient in its architecture but flashy in its signs, dead trees poking up furry and grey-brown along the streets, exhaust vents and chimneys and gables reaching up toward the cloud-choked sun. In the distance, there’s the rise of the hill, the dropped skyline around the cemetery. The two gates of the Verazano loom, the connection of their cables hidden by buildings, so two of the same dinosaur herding together. My iPod doc screams grindcore. My room swelters, and I sit and drink hot tea and bead with sweat and stink, both from Friday’s extracirriculars and Saturday’s lack thereof. Soon, I’ll shower myself into a state of blissful cleanliness and head to band practice, but for now I’m content to sit and fester, just a dude, an electrical charge wearing a disgusting meat costume, staring out over the sprawling beer gut of Brooklyn.
Escape here for a U.S. tour. This is where all of us NYC metalheads can help out by coming out to the first of many events, to be held at The Trash Bar on October 6th, to help make this dream a reality. All of this will be best detailed by simply just pasting the email that I received from Tracey, From Unblock the Rock:
