Going Viral at Tomorrowland - Chapter 9 (Patreon)

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Going Viral at Tomorrowland - Chapter 9

by Zmeydros

(edited by Tiliquain and Journeymanic)

After putting on my panties, compression shorts, and a bathrobe, I checked my phone. Athena had replied to my message at two in the morning, "Kate, we're okay. I forgive you for snapping at me. I remember when I was first getting famous and how stressful it was. Please do the show with me, I don't know all your equipment and the crowd is coming to see you. Many of them bought their tickets to Tomorrowland planning to see you. The only way I know how to deal with the kinds of fears you have is to face them. I'd be a terrible friend if I let you just drop out on your set."

I started typing a message to convince her, but then I realized that she hadn't known me long enough to know that sometimes I just got too overwhelmed to function. It was early enough in the morning that it was before Neon Kelp went to bed, so I called her.

When she picked up, she said, "Hello, love, what's up?"

"I need you to explain to Athena that I'm too overwhelmed to go to the show. I think I'm as bad as last July when I tried to cut down on my meds," I said.

"Oh dear!" She asked, "Are you sure it's not just pre-performance jitters? You normally don't have much stage fright, but this is the biggest crowd you've ever spun for."

"I slept like crap, my temperature was all over the place and I laid awake worrying. Before that, I was angry and having an anxiety attack at the same time." Shaking my head, I said, "I even snapped at Athena."

"Huh, this reminds me of when your period was inconsistent, before you got on birth control to even out your cyc--"

"What? Are you just gonna chalk this up to PMS? Tell me I'm hormonal?" My hand was gripping my phone so hard that my phone case was digging into my palm.

Her voice remained calm and compassionate. "Kate, hon, you just got balls. Your testosterone levels probably haven't evened out yet. Herm Tail Virus victims often go through a short, but potent, second puberty."

A spike in testosterone would definitely explain the seething aggression I was feeling. Knowing the feelings had a source, that I wasn't losing my grip on myself without a reason, helped. "Even more reason why I shouldn't be on stage today."

"Huh, I want to disagree because I want to see you triumph over adversity and yada yada, but that's a very compelling point. Too much piled on your shoulders all at once." She clicked her tongue as she switched to crisis planning mode. "Okay, Tomorrowland is probably going to be upset at you, but will be understanding if you have documentation. Go to an urgent care clinic as soon as possible, tell them your situation and get a doctor's note. I'll work out stuff with Athena and try to get in touch with your management company."

"Try to get Ted on the phone. He's the lanky guy with a pointy beard you met at the New Year's party. I think you have his number already," I said. "Thank you for listening to me."

"You're welcome. I love you," she said. "Ted's the one who worked in a lab studying banana spider venom before he got into music, right?"

"Of course you'd remember that better than his beard." I rolled my eyes.

"Hey! It wasn't that pointy, I think you grossly overstate the pointiness of people's beards."

"Add that to your list of grievances with me, see if I care."

"Done, it's my only grievance to date."

I laughed.

"Just wanted to hear you laugh before I hung up. Good luck getting that paperwork!" she said in a sing-song voice.

"Love you! Bye!" I ended the call.

Relief poured through me like thick chocolate fudge. I just laid back on my bed feeling lighter than air. I didn't have to perform. I could just be sick and broken and alone. No one would have to deal with my flashpoint anger or obsessive worrying today, not even me. I could just say goodbye to Belgium, one Belgian chocolate at a time...I needed chocolate!

I went downstairs to the bowl of chocolates in the reception area and grabbed a handful while no one was looking. The whole trip, I'd been trying to control my love of sweets. No longer! I was going to celebrate being too fucked up to do my job. I opened the first one and popped it in my mouth. As it melted, the bitterness of the cocoa bit into my tongue, making the sweetness of the sugar sparkle like fireworks. I ate three of them by the time I got back to my room and tossed the other three on the dresser next to the TV before grabbing my laptop. I needed to find a doctor.

For a brief moment, I thought about trying to see one of the doctors at Tomorrowland, but then I thought about the thousands of people I'd have to trudge through to get to them. Finding the Belgian equivalent of urgent care wasn't a simple internet search. But once I found a place that would take my same-day appointment, it was easy since people in Belgium had such good English and didn’t like getting up early.

As I made my way to the clinic, I was very glad I had compression shorts on. They gave me a sense of security and a semblance of control over my appearance. My jeans still had a visible rise from the side, but it wasn't too bad.

The doctor, a slender woman whose white coat just kinda hung off of her, listened to my symptoms, took a brief look at my naked crotch, and then wrote me a note. I felt a little embarrassed when she was examining my junk for Tail-Virus-related complications, but she was professional and touched me as little as possible. At the end of the checkup, she came to the same conclusion that Neon and I had come to: my hormones were likely out of whack. She said if it got worse, I needed to come back immediately.

Just before I left, she asked, "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

"I'd rather keep my changes secret until I go back home and I don't want to wear pants that are so baggy that they're hard to walk in. The compression shorts help a lot, but I’m wondering if there’s anything else I can do." I was holding my hands in front of my groin, feeling very shy.

"I have some trans patients that tuck. It can hide things quite well, but it can damage your genitals if you're not careful. Don't do it for extended periods. I'm also not certain whether it would work well for hermaphrodites because the anatomy is more crowded down there." She smiled. "I think the compression shorts and slightly baggy pants combination is working quite well. I think you are greatly overestimating the probability of being discovered."

"Isn't that how worrying works?" I raised an eyebrow.

"I suppose it is," she said.

About half way through my bus ride back to my hotel room, I got a call from a number I'd labeled "Tomorrowland Staff" and when I answered it, a young guy said, "Hello, is this Kate?"

"Yes," I replied.

"We're calling to confirm that you're too sick to perform," he said.

"Yeah, I just got a doctor's note. I can bring it in within the next hour." My chest tightened. I'd been feeling so much less stressed, but now the reality of what I was doing was catching up with me.

"No need to come in, just photograph the note with your phone and reply to the email I'm about to send you with that image attached." He was being pleasant, but there was no warmth in his voice at all. I felt like I was letting him and the entire event staff down. At least all my doctor's note said was that I had an acute hormone imbalance and didn't specify the reason.

"Okay," I said.

"Have a good day and I hope you feel better soon."

"Me too."

He hung up.

When I checked for his email, I found an email from Ted which was somewhere between sympathy and bargaining with me to still do my set. I didn't have the energy to reply and try to convince him that it was for the best.

I'd have to wait to take a picture of the doctor's note until I got home. The bus was a bit crowded due to the Tomorrowland crowd. A deer mosaic standing near me had a perfect round ass and was wearing yoga pants. I kept covertly staring at her wondering what her reddish-brown fur felt like. Then my dick started to stretch my compression shorts and I looked toward the back of the bus instead of at her back end.

My phone vibrated to inform me that I'd gotten a text from Athena. "I'm going to be at your place in a half hour and I'm going to need you to go through the entire set you planned and explain how everything works. I want people to hear your music the way you intended it to be heard."

"Thank you so much!" I sent back, realizing it wasn’t even ten in the morning yet.

"I don't like this, but I'm trying to make the best of it," she replied.

"Sorry," I sent. 

"I've got to get ready. See you soon."

Back in my hotel room, I set up all my equipment for when Athena would arrive. Then I looked up tucking and tried it only to find out that it caused my package to rub right against my pussy, which made me start to get hard and wet. It was a good way to get horny, not a good strategy for hiding my junk. Just after I gave up on it, Athena knocked on my door.

When she entered, she said, "God this is scary. I've never done a set with someone else's equipment."

"I'll try to explain it as clearly as possible." I grabbed my phone. "And I'll take lots of notes to send to you."

I'd half-expected us to have sex before I showed her stuff, but she was all business and had this flat expression that made me nervous. When I was showing her how I used the end of one track and the beginning of another to make a whole new song and layered an automated sequence of notes over it, she had me explain how the sequence worked three times in a row. When she asked me to explain it the fourth time, I said, "It's okay, you don't need to get it perfect."

"I know, I'm just trying to understand how you do it."

"You don't have to do everything the way I do it," I said.

She put her head in her hands and sighed. "It's just...I need to understand how you do things so that when I do variations on them it fits into the style. I was watching the set you did for Dubstep Gutter and want to bring that same playfulness and live creativity to this set."

"Oh, I doubt I do things that differently from you," I said.

She grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward her. "You're going to stop selling yourself short right now or I'm going to call in sick too."

"What?" I said, my chest tightening to the point I felt short of breath. Were we going to get into another fight? Had she been mad at me all morning?

"You want to know why I'm overwhelmed? You. are. fucking. brilliant!" Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes. "I can't come up with catchy melodies that I can play across two whole tracks combining them into something greater. I have no idea how you can come up with variations on your lyrics live and have them work every time. And you--I don't know how to describe this--you make musical puns! Like, you play a dark brooding song that uses one chord progression and then play another song that uses the same chord progression and has a squirrel voice. I've never seen an audience laugh so hard!"

My eyes were getting wet and my arms were shaking. "Don't other DJs do stuff like that?"

"No! Not like you. You see similarities between songs that no one else sees. Similarities that are so surprising that people actually laugh."

I started to cry. "But I'm not as successful as you."

"If all that mattered was the number of views, movie review sites would go belly up. Success is the same way. It can't be gauged simply by popularity. I know you know that." She hugged me. "I just don't know why it bothers you so much."

"I don't know. At first, all I wanted was to live off of my art, but once I was making a living off my art, I just wanted more people to hear it," I said, sniffling.

"But so many people are listening to your art that you nearly fainted when you realized how big that number was. Once you're reaching millions of listeners, reaching a hundred thousand more listeners isn't all that satisfying, but if you go back to when you were starting out, a hundred thousand listeners felt like an impossible number." She nuzzled the nape of my neck. "I'm worried about you because I know from experience that focusing on fame as a number makes it so you never feel satisfied."

"What should I focus on, then?" I asked.

"That's something that you're going to have to answer for yourself. For me, it's people. If I am hanging out with amazing people every day and getting to share my music, that's success. If I inspire another artist or get someone excited about making their own tracks, that's one more unit of success," she said. "Same goes for each time I collaborate with someone to make art. It's about the journey, not the endpoint. That way, each day is precious and worthwhile."

"Neon Kelp said something similar a few years ago and I keep telling myself that if I create something each day, that day is worthwhile...but I guess I still look at the numbers." I sighed. "I guess they still mean something to me."

"They mean something to me too, but I try to keep that in the background and not dwell on it."

"I'm such an idiot! I thought I was satisfied with my career, with my number of listeners, before I got here." I frowned. "I still feel inadequate."

She let go of me to look into my eyes. "Don't beat yourself up. It makes perfect sense that you'd feel inadequate here. You're just entering the big leagues of EDM and you're seeing acts that have ten times as much pull as you do. People that can ask for millions of dollars to do a show."

"Yeah, the crowd Martin Garrix drew was unbelievable," I said.

"Well, he'd be just like you and me if Tiesto, the god of trace music, didn't reach down and lift Martin up to his level. Sure, he might have reached that high on his own, but it would have taken a lot longer."

"I don't even know if I want to be in shows as big as his." I laughed. "I have no idea what I'm so upset about."

"You want to be seen by the world under your own terms and you want the world to love you." She stroked my cheek with the back of her hand. "This is going to sound corny, but you can't look to the world to give you that love. It's gotta come from you. You gotta love what you do, love the people you're with, and love yourself."

I scoffed. "Like I'm going to figure out how to do that."

"First step is to have the same compassion when you talk to yourself as you would when talking to a close friend. Each time you tell yourself that there's something wrong with you, that you're a burden, or that you look like shit in the morning, you're being your own bully." She smirked. "And that's all I remember from sessions with my last therapist. The rest of it is just habit now."

Hugging her, I said, "Thanks."

"Just relax, in time your hormones will calm down and you'll be used to having a cock and used to people tweeting images of your crotch."

"Not sure I'll ever get used to that," I said.

"Well, that's what I thought, now it turns me on to see images of my bulge floating around the internet."

"That's so you," I quipped.

"Yep, it totally is." She went back to what I'd been showing her.

All the stuff she'd said swirled around in my head a bit until I got an idea. "This isn't a good way to teach you how I do things. How about we just use my equipment to do a set right here, for just you and me?"

She made a happy squeaky noise. "I love that idea!"

I smiled and then started playing a hard-thumping beat from a track that I'd made a few years ago. I let her watch me start layering a melody atop it and then I brought in a loop from a song that had a chirpy-sounding synth playing a fast melody that fit in. As I did this, I explained how the synth function on my Novation Circuit worked. She loved the sound of it so much that she started tweaking the knobs to get even more out of it.

Soon she had a rough growling synth and was using it to lay down a grungy bass line. I mapped short clips of my voice to the 128 buttons of my Launchpad and added some glitchy vocal textures to the music.

Grabbing a little midi keyboard out of her backpack, she hooked it up to her laptop. It had dips where keys should have been and she could wiggle her fingers in those dips to make the notes tremble. She piped the sound into my equipment and then used the keyboard to add a thrilling electric guitar solo.

For the next hour, we did music just for us while cuddling whenever our hands weren't busy. Sitting there, with her arms around me, listening to a track we'd created together live in real time, I said, "I really am my own bully. I was so busy doubting myself that I forgot why I love performing. I don't perform for the numbers, I don't perform because I'm expected to, and I don't perform because I wanted to portray a specific image of myself. I perform because I love discovering new things along with my audience."

"Wow, that describes your performances perfectly." She chuckled.

“I’m feeling a lot better.” I shifted so I was turned toward her and then kissed her on the lips. "Thanks to you."

She groped my ass and my whole body started to warm. It swiftly got to the point that we were stroking each other's dicks through the fabric of our jeans.  

After my prick made it a few inches down my leg, I stopped making out and said, "Before we have sex, can we make our music have sex a bit more?"

"Sure! Want me to unpack all my equipment so we can play with my songs too?" she asked.

"Yeah!" I said.

Once Athena got her stuff hooked up, we shared a constant stream of awe and delight that obliterated my malaise. Eventually we turned toward each other with our mouths hanging open in disbelief.

When Neon and I collaborated, we met each other in the middle. It was a beautiful compromise. When Athena and I collaborated, the tension between our styles created astounding music with a depth I could barely describe in words. Her sharp dark stabs hit harder when they were preceded by my hopeful melodies and vocal textures, and my candy-like giddy melodies soared higher when preceded by her brooding chord progressions. We'd captured lightning in a bottle. 

In that moment, we shared a vision so compelling that we could barely talk fast enough. No one was going to do my set. We were going to do something that neither of us had thought of before that day.

END OF CHAPTER 9

I’d like to acknowledge my $20 patrons, Navajo Demar and Warialinth for helping make all this possible. Thank you! Thanks to all my other patrons as well. Every one of you rocks!

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