by Cecilia Tan
"So, keep it as is until the last one, which ends with the stress on the last beat," Bart said.
"Yeah, I guess."
He was right, it did have a nice sound to it. "There’s a slight echo of a Pete Townshend song in it if you do it that way," I said, "but I like it anyway."
"Let’s do it like this," Bart went to the chalk board and wrote out the pieces of the song. "After the last chorus, instead of fading out on the chorus, let’s go back to the bridge and riff on that. We can keep going and keep going until the one time Ziggy does it the other way."
"That works for me." We tried it that way, through the whole song then to the bridge a second time, Bart and I trading solos until Ziggy brought it to a close. What was an almost martial and robust bridge in the center of the song became sort of melancholy and intense at the end. "Hot damn." I said into the ringing quiet. I let my fingers rip through the melody again, up the neck, trailing off with a few loose harmonics.
"Jeezuschrist you make that look easy," Ziggy said to me, his lips hanging open a little in silent wow.
The words in my mouth were "same to you," but I couldn’t quite say them. I settled on: "I guess."
Everybody Wants to Rule the World
We knocked off a little after midnight and Ziggy left us standing on Beacon Street with our heap of equipment, giving us a little salute with one finger as he crossed at a break in the traffic. Then Bart left me to watch the stuff while he retrieved the car from a nearby side street. A summery night breeze was blowing humid and I could still hear familiar riffs and choruses in the sound of the cars driving by. Bart pulled up at the hydrant and we loaded the car without saying anything.
Once we were rolling he asked, "You want to get something to eat?"
"Sure."
He started listing our options for food at this hour. "Chinatown, pizza, the Deli Haus, IHOP, Dolly’s..."
He said this last with a hopeful note in his voice.
"Dolly’s is such a fucking hike." I closed the air vent that was blowing on me. "What about Charlie’s?"
"Yeah sure. We’re going that way anyway. But I kind of worry about the equipment."
"Shit, you’re right. Maybe we should hit the IHOP on Soldier’s Field road, at least they have a parking lot and we can sit where we can see the car."
"Right."
The one problem with that IHOP was it was possibly the worst ventilated building in Boston. Don’t get me wrong, we were used to—and resigned to being in—a lot of smoky places. Most of the clubs and bars where we played and hung around were full of cigarette smoke, and Bart and I kind of hung on to our non-smoking-ness as a badge of eccentricity. This IHOP though, was even worse in the smoke-to-air quotient than most of the bars. The fact that we would be trying to eat in there, too, made it seem worse. But, on the other hand, it wasn’t the sort of thing either of us would make a big deal of.
Once inside, Bart negotiated with the hostess to put us in the window by the car. The place was crowded and noisy, but she took us into the supposed No Smoking section and put us in a booth. This was the only IHOP I’d ever been in that wasn’t shaped like a swiss chalet, with the peaked roof. We speculated that it used to be something else before IHOP took it over, like a Denny’s or something. We sat in a booth with our laminated menus and suddenly I felt sleepy.
"So I take it you’re happy with our new singer," Bart said then, just as I was about to lay my head on the table.
"What makes you say that?"
"Because I haven’t heard you complain or analyze or say much of anything since we left." Bart took a sip of water out of the amber glass in front of him. "Am I right?"
"I’d be lying if I said he didn’t seem like exactly what we want and need."
"So say it." He smirked.
"I would, but I don’t quite believe it myself."
"Believe it," Bart said, leaning forward conspiratorially. "I think we’re seriously, seriously onto something here."
The mental recording of ’Welcome’ played through my head again. "I think you are seriously right, my friend." I couldn’t help but smile.
Bart whooped and banged the flats of his hands on the table. A waitress appeared then, and took our order. When she was gone he went on. "Still need a drummer, though."
"Yeah." I felt like finding a drummer would be a piece of cake in comparison. "So, are you glad we waited?"
He wrinkled his nose. "Well, I concede the point. Seems unlikely we’d find someone like Ziggy through the ’musician wanted’ ads."
I voiced my concern. "You think he’ll stay serious about it though?"
Bart shrugged. "What else has he got to do?"
I shrugged back. "I don’t know, I didn’t ask."
"I get the feeling he’s an art school dropout," Bart said, accepting a mug of coffee from the waitress. She put a glass of tomato juice down in front of me and I drank it in one long series of gulps. "That party where he met me, it was an artist’s loft in Southie." Then he chuckled. "You were right. We ended up without someone we knew, sort of."
"Do you think he works?"
"What do you mean?" Bart stirred half-and-half into his coffee and stacked the emtpy containers one inside the other. "You mean, does he have a job?"
"Yeah."
"Why don’t you ask him? You’re the manager."
"I guess I am."
"You know what your problem is, Daron?" Bart said, his voice quiet but audible through the background noise of other conversations and kitchen clatter, "You just want everything to work out. You never want to have to push things, you just want them to fall into place."
"And they damn well better," I said, my fingers around my sweating water glass. "They damn well better."
I think it was April 25th we all got together at Bart and Michelle’s and Ziggy signed the contracts, and so I learned his last name, Farias. I didn’t even know what kind of name that was. We made plans to cut a demo and find a decent rehearsal space. Then he took off and I sat around and the three of us watched a depressing Australian film about heroin-addicted punks in the late 70s that starred Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS. Something of a downer of a film and I felt a little lonely after I left, as I caught the last trolley back in to Kenmore.
I usually masturbated in the morning when I first woke up, before a shower or coffee or anything. But that night I lay in bed and fantasized, trying to imagine someone there with me, not Matthew, not Roger, someone I couldn’t quite picture, someone who probably just did not exist. It had been a long time. I had once or twice been propositioned in the park across from my building, but the first week after I’d moved in someone had posted a flyer in the building foyer about a brutal attack in the gardens. A man walking home from a gay bar nearby had, apparently, been approached by someone who appeared to be cruising, but who actually had a lead pipe in his hand. I didn’t even walk through the fucking park at night if I could help it—on my way home from work I stuck to the sidewalk on the outside. My stomach clenched to think about it.
The thought that the last person who’d touched my cock in a loving way was Matthew seemed suddenly unbearable and I choked back the urge to cry. I beat my fist into the pillow and beat myself off and if the pillow was wet with tears later, I didn’t notice.
Unguarded Minute
It didn’t take long to get our first gig as a threesome—in early summer I sent out the demo tapes and had booked the gig within a week. So it was that a few weeks later we had our debut at this hole in the wall place in Jamaica Plain, one of those places whose legend is larger than the dance floor. It was a weeknight, maybe fifty people scattered themselves around the place. I barely noticed them. It was almost as if there were just the three of us, and yet it was nothing like a rehearsal. Ziggy came to life, howling and leaping off the low stage, then climbing back up like a four-legged spider, and never missed a note. I got so caught up in watching him that I almost missed hitting my footpedal before the solo in our third song. I closed my eyes
, then, letting the solo carry me through to the other side where I passed the strand of melody back to his voice. I opened my eyes. He was lying on the floor between my legs, making like the microphone was an ice cream cone. Or something else. I felt my breath go ragged as I closed my eyes again, felt him brush my calf as he crawled away.
"Love’s never what it seems to be," he sang. At that moment I couldn’t remember if I’d written that lyric or if he had. He might’ve. But at that moment my brain was so full of noise and music and lust I couldn’t think straight. I felt like my arms and fingers were part of some perfect machine, creating and recreating the music from the set list without my being involved. My eyes followed Ziggy around Bart, down into the crowd, back to center stage. If charisma was a magic spell, Ziggy was casting it far and wide. I could see a woman on the dance floor, swaying, her eyes on him like she was hypnotized. Other people nodded their heads in time and were caught up in it. I wasn’t the only one, I told myself.
Bart came as close as his cord would allow and I realized he had been trying to get my attention. His eyebrows pointed toward the clock on the wall. He mouthed something I couldn’t make out, but I saw his meaning, we were going to come up short. A set that had always taken us an hour in rehearsal was about to expire at 50 minutes.
We finished the last song on the list, a fast, hard bang of a song called "Desire." People were clapping like they meant it. Ziggy turned to face us. "More?" he said, his eyes glassy and his face shining with sweat.
Both their eyes turned to me. "No, that’s enough. They liked it, let’s not give them some half-assed unrehearsed bullshit."
"Okay." Bart unplugged his bass.
"Why?" Ziggy frowned at me.
"I just said, we’ve done enough, alright? They’re impressed, let’s get while the getting is good." I unplugged the guitar, turning away from his dark, intent eyes.
He spoke into the microphone. "Thank you folks, we’re Moondog Three," but the life had gone out of his voice. I rolled up my cord, took a step toward him, but he turned away, toward the edge of the stage. He jumped down into the arms of a blond woman I’d never seen before. That was the last I saw of him that night and as I went through the motions of packing up I felt like there was an empty space next to me where he had been. I kept looking for him, hoping he’d come back, thinking we could grab a bite at Charlie’s, maybe, but he was gone.
Sweet Hitchhiker
I picked up our pay in cash from the club owner. Seventy five bucks. Michelle helped us load our stuff into Bart’s car. "Good thing you guys don’t have a drummer," she said, looking at the packed back seat. "How are we going to unpack when we get home?"
"What do you mean?" Bart said. "We’ll just go dump everything at the rehearsal space."
Michelle crossed her arms. "All three of us? I guess I can sit on your lap if Daron drives."
Bart nudged me. "Hey, Earth to Daron, are you in there?"
"What?" I didn’t feel like I was all there. Part of me was still on the stage, frozen in a moment in time. The other part was wondering where he was now. My mouth went on. "I can’t drive."
"What do you mean, you can’t drive? You never told me that." Michelle looked at me like I just said I came from another planet.
"You never asked." I’d never seen Bart let anyone drive his car before, not even Michelle, anyway. "I don’t have a license, I never learned."
Michelle raised an eyebrow and shrugged, "That must’ve been hell growing up in New Jersey."
"I didn’t go out much." I pointed at the front seat. "Well, you can sit in my lap if you want."
Once we had settled in, I sank back down into my daze. Michelle was curvy and good-smelling in my arms and I waited for the ride to be over with an anxious stomach. Loading in was easier than getting out of the club. Our rehearsal place had ramps instead of stairs and we rolled the amps right on up. When our cubicle was padlocked, Michelle bumped me in the arm. "Good thing you guys have insurance, huh?"
"Yeah."
"So, aren’t you going to ask me how it sounded?" She steered me back to the car where Bart was waiting. I got into the back seat.
"Sorry," I said, "I’m kind of out of it, now."
"I guess that means it was a good show for you," she said, rolling her window down a crack.
"You could say that." I leaned back in the seat. "Bart, how ’bout you?"
Bart gave us a short technical rant about monitors and not being able to hear me all the time and other things that had bugged him. Some part of my brain was taking it all in, storing it for future use, maybe, but I wasn’t processing any of it as it went in. "Yeah," I said at the end. Boston was going by outside the car windows. "Hey, you can leave me off right here."
"Here?" We were at the edge of downtown, nowhere near where I lived.
"Yeah, I’m going to get something in Chinatown." I guess I would have usually asked them to come along. I guess they knew that because they exchanged glances in silence. "Right up here’s fine."
Bart pulled the car over at the corner of the theatre district, all two blocks of it. He looked like he was about to ask if I was okay, but then switched to: "See you tomorrow for rehearsal?"
"Yeah." I waved to them. "See you." I felt their eyes on my back as I made my way down into Chinatown.
All the neighborhoods in Boston are small, much smaller than New York, for example. Chinatown is maybe four short blocks on either side. On one edge is the red light district, which is all of two and a half blocks on Washington Street, with one XXX theater, two or three adult bookstores, and one peepshow. I ended up in one of the bookstores, wandering up and down the aisles. They had almost as many books, magazines and videos for gay men as they had for straight men. I’d been in this place before, never bought anything; everyone in there always looked furtive and nervous. Including me. My eyes flickered over photo after photo of gigantic erections, Rock Hard! one title proclaimed. I reached out to touch the shrinkwrap, then pulled back as if it might burn me. I felt nauseous, then, like it was too hot in the store, like I was carsick, like my own erection was twisting my guts into knots.
I walked. I walked back through the theatre district, passed hotels and dark shops, across empty streets. I came to a familiar bench facing a closed jewelry store, and there I waited. Come on, I thought, Mister Bomber Jacket, where are you tonight?
You’re All I’ve Got Tonight
My butt was numb against the bench by the time a punk in blue combat boots took up a position across the street. I crossed to his side, and walked up next to him. There was probably some elaborate ritual we were supposed to go through, like in a bar but more complex. I didn’t know how to ask for what I wanted or how much to pay for it. But I had seventy five dollars in cash, I figured that was good for something.
"You’re just a kid," I said.
He looked at me like he’d just seen me now, like he hadn’t watched me cross the way. His eyes were blue, but I could see the burnt strawberry tinge to his hair — bad bleach job. "Yeah, so are you," he said back, tapping a cigarette against his leg.
"Don’t light that." I leaned against the smooth stone of the building. He looked annoyed. "Tell me what you’re worth."
He folded one leg under him like a flamingo, pressing his back into the wall. His answer was long in coming. "Depends on what you want."
I took hold of the collar of his leather jacket. "I want to take you into the bushes in the park and fuck you until I can’t stand up."
He let out a little laugh, tight, nervous, his hands shook as he twiddled the unlit cigarette. "Um."
I pressed my advantage. "You new at this?"
"Yeah," he admitted, and I felt relief flood out of him. "Trying to work my way through school," he added.
I had to smile at that, whether it was true or not, but I kept my hand on his collar. "Alright then, seventy five dollars. Nothing fancy."
He hesitated.
"And I’ll let you smoke the cigarette."
He pulled
a condom out of his pocket and raised an eyebrow.
I let the collar go. "Sure."
"Then it’s a deal." He held out his hand. "Give me the money."
I jerked my head toward the Public Gardens. The voice that came out of my mouth hardly sounded like me. "I’ll give it to you when your pants are down and I know you won’t run away."
I took him deep into the gardens, to where ten foot tall evergreen hedges stayed thick and full all year round. He turned his back on me and dropped his jeans to his ankles, I stuffed the wad of money into one of his jacket pockets. He seemed to relax a little and, inexplicably, I wanted to smack his face. But I took the condom and a little tube of lube out of his hand, and bent him over.
He gave a little grunt as I entered him. I held tight to his hips and pulled him all the way onto me. And then my arms were working like pistons, pumping him as the sensation burned hotter in my groin. I fucked him so hard my balls began to smart as they slapped against him, but the pain seemed like nothing. I needed to fuck this punk stranger like I was going to die if I didn’t.
It was over pretty quick. We were both panting. I tossed the condom into the bushes and wiped my fingers on my shirt. By the time I finished zipping up my jeans, he was gone.
I sat on a rock in the park, shivering like a junkie, for a long time after that. I didn’t feel angry, I didn’t feel sick, I didn’t feel anything, like my body shut down in protest. I wanted to cut myself, I wanted to play until my fingers bled, I wanted to do anything but sit there and hate myself. I couldn’t stop my brain from going off. I kept thinking about castration, flagellation, being burned alive, as if the Saints had all the fun. Eventually, I made myself feel sick again. I wanted to claw the skin off my body, but instead I walked home. To that nice quiet apartment where that nice Daron boy lives, keeps to himself, and doesn’t bother anyone. I imagined tying my cock up with rope, mummifying it in tight cords, keeping it in check all the time. I threw down my coat. I was getting hard, again. I lay down in my clothes, pushing my underwear down and pulling my erection out over my zipper like I’d done with the hustler boy. My fingers were still a little sticky from the lube. I licked them and stroked myself hard, until my palm had almost gone dry and I was making myself sore. I kept on like that, rubbing and squeezing as hard as I could, feeling my skin burn with friction until precome started leaking out of me. I came onto my stomach, semen making the sorer spots sting. I fell asleep thinking so this is what they call self-abuse.