Sub Low Heartbeat
“Guppy has a new toy.” Kenny said as I walked into the
Filthies studio for the first time tonight.
“Guppy! Show them your new toy.” Kenny exclaimed.
And Guppy started beating out the beat of a song on his drums. A beat that was propelled through his new toy, a ‘Sub Low’, and reverberated through my ribcage like an explosive heartbeat. That beat almost knocked me down. Kelley’s bass joined in and suddenly my heartbeat had depth, structure. Kenny layered guitar melodies over the echoing beat lending a story to my heart to tell. Ba bum, ba bum, ba bum… went the beat, went my heart-- crying out to my Uncle’s heart that I had just learned in a phone call minutes earlier would fade before the week’s end. Ba bum, ba bum, ba bum… a beat so strong, so full of life, so unlike that of my dying Uncle. I stood, I listened to the beat, I felt its rhythm in my bones, I felt the life of music being created, sprouting wings and flying to freedom. I felt my Uncle’s fight with cancer coming to an end. I felt the balance of life hanging in that Sub Low heartbeat.
I sat on a furry couch and listened to the
Filthies play music. An orange, green and white parachute hung from the ceiling and walls, it had something to do with the acoustics I was told-- but to me it looked like a giant kite that I wanted to grab hold of and fly away to
Neverland. Fly away on the strings of music and live gracefully within its harmonies. Fly away from the coffin propped up in the corner of the studio and a coffin I would soon be facing. The fifth coffin I would face in the past three years. I looked for the kite’s tail half expecting it to be dancing to the beat of the music above my head.
The music engulfed me like water and I was drowning in it. Drowning in the memory of a kiss from the past, so like the present, a kiss that made my heart beat like Guppy’s Sub Low. A kiss that knew me as a
memory. A kiss, a memory so alive within the music. A kiss-- that was all I could think about at that moment… reliving the feeling of that kiss with each ba bum, ba bum, ba bum of my Sub Low heartbeat.
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