December 22, 2007 - Brazoria, TX
This one time Josh got kicked in the throat. It was the first time I threw a show myself, a process that involved meetings with city managers, a bake sale at Walmart for a made-up youth arts organization, & finally ended when my dad knew someone who knew someone who could get us the old Brazoria Elementary gym. It still had the same map of the U.S. on the floor from when I was a kid, when we’d try to make a shot from all fifty states. We managed to get The Massacre at Sundown to reunite—Will was in town for the holidays & they’d only been broken up for four or five months, so everyone remembered the songs. But then we also booked this band from Angleton whose vocalist’s last name was Slaughter—he had it tattooed across his chest & would take his shirt off when they played. They went over their set time & we said one more song & halfway through the second song after that we turned the gym lights on, tried to play them offstage, & then, a few minutes later while TMAS was warming up on the other side of the gym—we had two stages, though both were really just spots on the floor blocked off by monitors—all the power in the place shut off. It turned out this redneck dude from school was friends with those guys & didn’t like how we’d treated them so he & two guys he was with snuck around outside & found the breaker. They were running back through the gym when Bryan stepped in front of them, this 6-foot-5-or-something-like-that dude who played guitar for Mother Superior. I’m not sure what happened from there, except that one of the guys jump kicked Josh in the throat & he dropped to the ground & the dudes took off, sprinted through the doors, jumped into a truck—Seth tried chasing them down, might have thrown a water bottle at them as they turned into dust. We had no choice but to call the cops on our own show—we were high schoolers, didn’t know what else to do, Massacre still over there warming up, ready to play, a reunion that would never happen.
Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press). His work has appeared in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, HAD, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.
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