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were actually quite nice and otherwise treated me well, but this
incident did point cut how utterly underestimated I was. Fatima
mostly brushed off these comments and maintained an almost
aloof down-to-earthness, but nevertheless I became determined
to explode him. I noted to Cedric Devitt, co-founder of the league
and certainly the most welcoming person I met that evening, that
I appreciated his cordiality in the face of what was otherwise a bit
of an alienating environment. “Of course/ he said. “You are part of
the air guitar family now." That being the case, lightning bolts of
glee still destroyed my brain the next day when Ben “King Richard
Laserheart III* Storey arrived. Ben is my best friend of 10 years,
and he was the winner of VHl's on-line air guitar championship,
and we instantly began our preparations for that evening's con
test. This consisted mostly of eating pizza, admiring the glimmer
of the real-life Gibson Flying V that King Richard won in the VH1
competition, and going over each other's routines. We didn't really
have adequate time to bask in the uncanny glory of the fact that a
pair of best friends from small-town Georgia both managed, in the
same year, to end up competing against each other in a national
air guitar championship, and that those best friends were us.
Yffjt headed to the Bowery Ballroom, the competition's venue,
WV a couple of hours early to suit up for battle. As I applied
zombie-warrior paint and tightened the straps on the Armlet of
Solaris, my brown leather gauntlet, I took note of the competition
gathering around me in the green room: John “Thunderpants the .
Destroyer" Rosacker from Austin, TX; Randy "The Big Rig" Strecker
from Tulsa, OK; Dave “The Rocktopus" Ayling from Columbus, OH;
Dave "Psycho Dave" Roberts from Miami, FI; and the performer
that most intrigued me, New York City's own Andrew “William
Ocean" litz, among nine others. We drew numbers to determine
Round One seeding, and I breathed a sigh of relief as I pulled 11.
Before me, King Richard pulled four, and standing just next to me,
Ocean cursed as he drew number one, knowing he'd have to be up
staged by everyone else.
We gathered near the stage as Bjorn Turoque walked on and
explained the scoring to the crowd: four judges each dish out
numbers in tenths of points, the lowest score possible being 4.0,
the highest being 6.0. The 10 lowest-scoring performers would be
cut from Round One, with the final five competing to the same as-
yet-to-be-determined song in Round Two.
Of course. Ocean completely slayed the sold-out crowd with
Prince's “Let's Go Crazy," but the judges had to hold back their
highest scores since there were still 14 more competitors to go.
The Rockness Monster came up next and made things even more in
teresting by basically dropping the air hall, clearly failing to defend
his crown with a score that was sure to bar him from Round Two.
King Richard drew swords from the sky with his air mastery of
a Dragonforce tune, but unfortunately these swords did not hit the
judges. They were less than kind to His Royal Laserness, to the
point of throwing in some confusing barb about his mother that
went beyond the realm of simple Simon Cowell wannabe-ness. It
occurred to me at this point that I had absolutely no idea what
the judges wanted, so I decided not to worry about it and just do
what I do best: head-bang. Fast. And so it was.
Riding a horse called Slayer, I entered Round Two tied for first
place with Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan" Billmeier from San Francisco.
Earlier, he brought the rage via some old-school Metallica, rep
resenting my greatest fear: a dark-horse metal master of the air.
However, when they revealed the song that we would be per
forming to in Round Two. I was sure I would be representing the
United States in Finland; I figured that it I can't win an air guitar
competition with Metallica's "Enter Sandman." then I can't win an
air guitar competition.
tit illiam Ocean—-who entered Round Two tied for fifth place and
^Vthus performed first—upped the insanity ante immediately
by doing a front-flip onto a can of Sparks, exploding it with his
back. He set the bar brilliantly; the crowd wanted to sex his body
and his score was one-tenth of a point away from perfect. I sud
denly felt that performing last, as I had been assigned to do, was
doom. Each successive competitor pulled antic after antic until
Huiahan topped them all by running through the crowd and up to
the balcony, where he made the most of his remaining 15 seconds
and also found himself one-tenth of a point away from perfection.
There remained room for me to beat him, but for the firs', time in
my air-guitar career, I was at a loss.
I considered rocking out completely naked, but stopped in mid
strip at the realization that this air guitar thing was not worth my
corporeal dignity. The res dting mediocre score combined with my
Round One performance landed me squarely in second place. My
dreams of Finland went the way of dull fireworks when I handed
Hulahan my sleeveless American flag T-shirt as he sat at his seat
of victory upon the shoulders of myself and Ocean.
At the after-party later, air-guitarring like mad along with most
of the other competitors and their friends to Motorhead’s “Ace of
Spades,* I realized what the point of it all had been: a chance
to spread the word of Kicking Maximum Ass, to show through a
tornado of hairmaggedon that life is not only worth living, but is
worth being massively psyched about. There is nowhere I can go
from here except everywhere, straight ahead and fist-first.
Jace Bartet
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Athens, Ga 30601
ytooin
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