He stumbled between the tables toward the bar, eliciting the curses of old men as he passed. They were watching a couple slow-dancing in the middle of a square patch of linoleum apparently reserved for the purpose of curling up at the edges and bubbling up in the middle. Something slow by Dolly Parton was playing on the jukebox. The sound of machine gun fire emanated from the television in the corner. Pipes in the wall rattled as somebody in one of the rooms upstairs was drawing the last bath he would ever take.
"Can I cut in?" Garrry asked with a rasp that testified to the shot of scotch he had just taken. He was feeling brave now that the phlegm was taken care of and his voice didn’t crack so much.
"Sure!" the man said, grasping him roughly around the waste, his breath making Garrry’s stomach lurch.
"I meant with the lass!" Garrry winced.
"Hey now, that’s my sister you’re talkin’ about!" the stranger shot back. "My name is Kyle Fitzsimmons and I’m the best damn harmonica player in this town!" he said, then slumped to the floor, weeping. "I gotta get outta here. That a guitar?"
The two men sat down and began to drink seriously. By the time they stepped out of The Wasted Time Hotel it was dusk and they had told each other enough about themselves not to let each other out of their sights.
"No question about it," Kyle said, "we’ve gotta go east."
The ride they hitched scared them sober by the time they arrived in Georgetown. Outside a coffee shop, they came across two men fighting over a corpse.
"How ‘bout I just cut that in half for ya," Kyle volunteered.
"Yeah," one of the strangers said as he grasped the other’s neck, "and who the hell are you?"
Garrry interjected, "Looky here. Now I’s been around, I’s seen things. The thing to do is one of yous cuts it in half and the other gets the first dibs on which half to take."
"That’s pretty good," the other man wheezed. "That a harmonica?"
Their names were Ben and Brendan and they were musicians too. Ben played keyboards and Brendan was a bassist. They laughed at the fact they had almost killed each other for a dead man’s organs.
It was decided there and then that the four men should form a band. Drawing as they did from their collective tastes in the genres of death metal, psychedelia, jazz, classic rock and robot circus music, it was decided they should play folk music because it was making a comeback, and due to their estimations of each other none of the members were thinking beyond making a quick buck. Now they just needed a name.
"How ‘bout TheHellmouths?" offered Garrry.
"Yeah."
"Whatever."
"Sounds good."
From then on it was a blur of booze, guns, fast cars and post-modern cynicism. The highlights of their performance career included a concert in the town of the band’s inception at the Acton Leathertown Festival. There they drew the largest crowd out of a line-up which included two ugly sisters who sang country-pop along with a karaoke machine and a three-piece jazz band that played "Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland" under the August sun.
Another event was a marathon New Year’s Eve show for which nobody showed up and the owner was too drunk to care.
To make ends meet, Kyle and Garrry played in front of liquor stores and farmers’ markets to great success and with only a minimum of fake prostheses.
Their song-writing efforts revolved around themes of death and disappointment on a generational scale and continue to elicit a toe-tapping response to such sentiments as "I saw you hangin’ over the ground, my friend," "Everybody’s gonna die," and "Nobody loves you anymore," all in harmony!
It is worth noting that the Acton gig was played in the parking lot of a funeral home. Says lyricist Kyle Fitzsimmons: "Death is infectious."
As far as anybody knows, bassist Brendan McCallum has never said anything and his moods are expressed exclusively by the amount of tension in his jaw muscles when guitarist/vocalist Garrry and keyboardist Ben Apgar argue over chords while harmonica player/vocalist Fitzsimmons pretends to understand what they’re talking about.
Ben hopes that any ensuant fame the band engenders will enable him to find the parents who abandoned him that fateful night the Harry Houdini museum in Niagara Falls burnt down (so many unanswered questions). Garrry is a hobby vandal who hopes to write the Great Swedish Collection of Pocket Poetry. When not fastidiously practicing the harmonica, Fitzsimmons spends his spare time driving children mad with insane paradoxes. Brendan seems to like pants.
As of 2002, this entirely likely quartet hopes to make a go of the festival circuit or die trying, if they can agree on who gets to shoot first and die last.
In the time I have spent with this group, I have seen things that would make your blood run cold, things that keep me awake for fear of the dreams I will have. As thrilled as they are that I have agreed to write this brief biography, they are immeasurably more pleased about the frequency with which they have been mentioned by name, both as a group and individually, in my weekly confessions.
Please remember me in your prayers . . .