Destroy

by Jason Myers

  Yet still, some of these moments were easy to move past so long as the money and the opportunities kept rolling in. I mean, it was easy to make new friends to replace the ones I’d lost when so many people were requesting my friendship. It was easy to get over being called a jock and a frat boy and a plagiarist while I taught a creative writing workshop to underprivileged kids in Paris for three months. It was easy to laugh at being called an Ellis poser after Ellis himself wrote an article for the New Yorker defending my novel and ripping those same Ellis Light critics. And it was immensely easy and gratifying for me to move on after suing and breaking the backs of two hard-core religious publications for smearing my name and raising false allegations stemming from my arrest in Ohio once I was finally cleared (I then donated all the settlement money to Planned Parenthood).

  I was in Italy one week and Turkey the next. I dined with a Flaming Lip and got wasted with the Patton.

  But right now, all that is in the past. My status has been in steady decline. For almost three years, I’ve been trying to follow up PieGrinder, and the pressure has been immense. I’ve been silently suffering this entire time. There have been weeks and weeks of sleepless nights. Huge battles with depression. I’ve broken down in restaurants and movie theaters and elevators. Been put in the hospital for “fatigue.” Blown a ton of professional relationships. And pissed off some of those who were closest to me. Yet here I am, sitting in the back of a taxi, not even thinking about giving up, because I know that somewhere deep inside me, to the core of my being, I will be able to write the greatest story of all time. Just you fucking wait and see, critics.

  • • •

  I get to the party at Fell and Fillmore, and there are much better-looking people here. Some I know from local bands and the local art scene and have a ton of respect for because they’re actually doing shit and not just sitting around some smoke-filled room, jacked on blow, talking about the possibility of maybe doing shit. It’s a much more fun and rad vibe with a Gil Scott-Heron record blasting while some of the peeps from the Dwarves and Apache and Persephone’s Bees and Von Iva are kicking it.

  I mingle and walk and mingle and walk my way through this long hallway, when the door to one of the rooms opens and this girl, this almost spitting image of Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, charges out of it and yells, “You fucking creep! Don’t ever talk to me again!”

  Following her from the room is this guy with a handlebar mustache, wearing just a pair of jeans, and he asks me for a cigarette.

  I stop and bum him one and he goes, “Fuckin’ bitch lays on my bed and does my coke and then loses her shit when I try to make a move up her skirt.”

  “Damn,” I say, lighting his smoke for him. “Maybe she just thought you were a nice guy who’s into sharing.”

  “That’s stupid.” The guy nods.

  “You really think so?”

  “Duh.”

  “Bitch left your room, man. I watched her do it. And she’s not coming back. I’m not sure it’s all that stupid, ya know.”

  “You don’t know shit, blazer boy.”

  Smirking, I say, “I might not know everything, but I do know you just gave a girl free drugs all night and she’s not going to fuck you at all.”

  He flips me off.

  And me, me I continue my walk. I get to the kitchen and finally spot Daniel through this glass door. He’s sitting at a table on the back porch, so I move in that direction.

  I step outside and say, “Daniel.”

  Daniel flips his head around. “There he is. The published author. Alive. You’re really alive, man.”

  “Of course, dude. LA ain’t got shit on me.” I take a seat across from him and nod at the girl he’s talking to, Janet, and then Jimmy and Sebastian, the other two members of Daniel’s band, Killing Cowboys, emerge from inside.

  “Damn, James,” Jimmy says. “You missed an amazing show tonight. Fucking Vaz destroyed.”

  “Vaz always destroys,” I shoot back. “Tell me something I don’t already know, man.”

  And Jimmy says, “I’ve never had anal with a black chick.”

  “Thanks,” I laugh. “I actually didn’t know that.”

  “So where are you coming from anyway?” Daniel asks me.

  Taking a swig of Beam, I say, “This party on Twenty-First and Bryant. It was Nina’s birthday, so I had to pop in. But man, I wish that I hadn’t.”

  “That fucking bad?” Daniel snorts.

  “I got called Captain Hipster by some kid wearing an extra-large Lagwagon hoodie. I mean, come on. Was it that bad? I would’ve rather played Seven Minutes in Heaven with some gnar pig at a nu metal show.”

  “That’s pretty bad.” Jimmy smiles.

  And Sebastian, who is wearing a black beanie and a blue thermal, says, “So you’re Captain Hipster. Nice. You should get some business cards to pass out that have different mottoes on them.”

  “How about this?” I say. “Captain Hipster: My girlfriend just dyed her hair black and wears sunglasses bigger than her chubby face.”

  And Jimmy goes, “How about this? Captain Hipster: My girlfriend is fat and has black hair.”

  Daniel takes the Beam from me and I say, “Nice. But check this out. Captain Hipster: I swear I’ve had this mustache for at least six years.”

  “Here’s a good one,” Jimmy snorts. “Captain Hipster: It’s just that it’s been so long since I’ve read all those David Foster Wallace books in my room that I’m having a hard time remembering what part you’re talking about in Infinite Jest. But I kinda remember now. Ya know, Joelle, yeah. What a great character.”

  Sebastian grabs the Beam from Daniel, and Daniel says, “Fuck business cards. You could make a Captain Hipster character into a comic book or a cartoon show. He’ll lash ugly people with his white belt and shoot dudes who wear flannel shirts with his special hair spray.”

  “Beautiful,” I say. “We’ll all make a million bucks in a year.”

  Daniel’s phone starts ringing, and he answers it and walks into the house right when this chubby lady with strands of brown hair, wearing a black leather skirt and jacket, comes up to Jimmy and goes, “Hey, guys. I’m serious about what I was telling all of you earlier. I can get you really awesome shows. I’ve booked huge stuff for the Tight Black Holes and Mirror Mirror in New York and LA and even Boston. I got the Highschool Bombsquad a showcase spot at South by Southwest. I just need some sort of a commitment from all of you.”

  Sebastian shakes his head and makes this loud grunting noise. “Listen, Becky. We already told you we’re waiting for the album to get mastered. Daniel told you where we stand. We know you can get us some gigs, but you want way too much. I talked to the dudes from the Bombsquad, and you didn’t ask for nearly as much when you first started booking.”

  “Because they were a smaller name when I first started working with them than you guys are right now. So if I’m gonna go out on a limb for you guys, I wanna know I’m getting taken care of and I’m not gonna get screwed. I mean, I’m not talking about booking Slim’s and the Independent, I’m talking about getting you guys on huge bills in New York and LA, Japan and London. I’m talking about getting you guys prime slots on festival bills.”

  “Whatever,” Sebastian groans.

  And Jimmy says, “Let’s just drop it for now. I’m sick of talking about band shit while I’m getting fucked up. It never leads to anything, and nobody ever remembers making any of the guarantees and promises. It’s fuckin’ stupid.”

  “I agree,” Sebastian says.

  “Okay. It’s dropped,” Becky says.

  She winks at me, which makes me shudder, and then Daniel pokes his head back through the doorway and goes, “Hey, guys, follow me.”

  So we all trail Daniel into a bedroom at the other end of this house, and like six people are already in there, including Marco, this pretty built and tough-looking Latino dude, who is one of my other sometimes dealers and who is also one of Ryan’s re-upper guys.

  “What’s
going on?” I ask Marco.

  “Just making the rounds, guy. You know how it goes. Phone’s blowing up. People inviting me everywhere, acting like they’re my best friend. Typical weekend night.” He grins, taking out a plastic sack full of baggies.

  I notice that his right hand is all scratched up and bruised and swollen. “What happened?” I ask him.

  Marco holds his hand up. “With this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened was somebody owed me too much money for too long.”

  “Radical.”

  Marco laughs and smacks me in the shoulder. “I love you, James.”

  There’s a loud knock on the door.

  “Shit,” this guy in a full-on red velvet suit groans.

  He walks over to the door and says, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Kat, Joshua. Please let me in.”

  And I’m thinking, I wonder if it’s one of the, like, ten Kats I seem to know in the city.

  “Okay.” Joshua opens the door, and it is one of the Kats I know. Kat York. This tiny black model/fashion designer/set designer/amazing Super 8 photographer/hairdresser. She’s the one who dressed me for the SOMA fashion shoot, and she also fucked my brains out in the parking lot of the Oakland Coliseum after the Raiders smoked the Jets during a Sunday night game on ESPN. And then again, two nights later, when she came over to my place with a suitcase full of clothes and wigs and dressed up like each of the female characters from my book and let me call her by their names while I smashed her.

  Kat, who is wearing this short plaid skirt with bright-yellow socks pulled past her knees and this tiny brown button-up coat, flips when she sees me. “Yes!” she screams. “My boy is here! Yes!”

  “I love this girl,” I say back, which is a total lie, considering I never talked with her after I scored with her the second time.

  But whatever. I deal with it. I lie.

  Again, I say, “I love this girl.”

  “So why don’t you just fucking marry her?” that Joshua dude snaps, like he’s pissed off or something.

  Whatever, man.

  Destroy.

  And she goes, “Where you been, baby?”

  “I just got back from LA.”

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “Taking care of the film rights for the book.”

  “Was it awesome?”

  “It was okay until this morning, when I was checking out of my hotel room. This fat girl kept asking me if all these things that happened in the book had happened to me in real life. It was so goddamn annoying.”

  And Daniel says, “None of it did, right?”

  “None of it except the part where my main character’s cousin gets kicked off Jeopardy! That part really happened to me.”

  “Wait,” Marco says. “Your cousin was on Jeopardy!?”

  “No. I was. It was before my book came out. And I got kicked off for threatening Alex Trebek.”

  “Shut up,” says Kat.

  “I’m serious,” I say. “The footage used to be on YouTube until NBC filed that lawsuit and all of their clips came down.”

  “Why did you get kicked off?” Kat asks.

  I light a cigarette and take another swig of the whiskey and say, “We got into it over some remarks he made to me after I got a question wrong.” Drag. Drink. “The answer was, ‘A term for a gardening tool that was also used to describe women in seventeenth-century England.’ And I buzzed in immediately and said, ‘What’s a hoe?’ Everyone started laughing at me. The answer was, ‘What is a rake?’ At that point, I was already down considerably, like by nine, ten thousand dollars, and then Trebek went, ‘Well, we’ve obviously figured out where Mr. Morgan’s head has been all afternoon.’ So I was like, ‘What’s that supposed to mean, man?’ And Trebek said, ‘It was only a joke. I was just making a reference to the fact that you’re lagging so far behind.’ And I said, ‘But that ain’t your job, man. Your job is to ask questions. That’s it.’ And he said, ‘You shouldn’t be angry at me because you’re so far down.’ And that’s when I threw my buzzer to the side and went, ‘What’s up, Trebek? You want a piece of me? Is that it?’ Then I started walking at him, and all these security guards rushed the stage and escorted me off and threw me out of the studio, and when the show came back on air, Trebek claimed that I had gotten ill and could not continue on, which was bullshit. I was in handcuffs in the back of a security car, trying to explain to some officer named Hank why Tom Petty is better than Bob Dylan.”

  “That is fucking awesome,” Marco says.

  And Kat’s like, “I love you. See. This is why I love you.”

  “So anyway,” I say with a grin. “Besides what happened this morning during checkout, LA was, ya know, fabulous.”

  Even that Joshua guy is laughing now.

  Marco hands Daniel two grams for eighty dollars, and Daniel surveys the room before stuffing the coke into his pockets.

  And that Becky girl goes, “Hey, Daniel, do you have any bumps?”

  Daniel looks at Becky really hard for a few seconds and says, “Marco has half grams for twenty-five dollars and full ones for fifty.”

  Becky blushes and rolls her eyes and says, “Forget it.” Then she walks out of the room.

  “Dude,” Jimmy bitches. “Don’t be mean to her. She might actually help the band at some point.”

  “Whatever,” says Daniel, pulling his coke back out. “Until she does something for us, I’m kinda through with her, unless one of you two wanna fuck her. I’m sure that would be much more effective than giving her free cocaine.”

  “We were actually talking about that earlier,” Sebastian says. “How one of us might have to take one for the team to get her price down. And we thought it should be you, Daniel.”

  “Fuck that.”

  And I say, “I’m sure she’d buy you a leather jacket for your birthday or something.”

  “Fuck you, man,” Daniel says again, laughing, while Kat squeezes my thigh and winks at me.

  Then this Asian girl with fake tits and braces hands Daniel a mirror, and Daniel dumps an entire gram onto it, so I take a full g out myself and go, “Let me contribute to the fun,” and dump it all out as well.

  “You hit up Ryan, didn’t you?” Marco says.

  “Yep.”

  And Daniel snaps, “Dude, fuck him. That guy is such a fucking party killer. He’s a fucking loser. I won’t even talk to him anymore. I mean, the bullshit that spews out of that guy’s mouth—like him and his band are actually gonna do something because they brought some heads to 12 Galaxies on a Tuesday night. Yippety-yeah! We sold that shit out a week in advance the last time we played there. None of the shit him and his band claim is gonna happen ever actually does happen. None of it. Not the contact with the A and R people from Sub Pop. And definitely not the big radio interview on Live 105. But yet they claim they’re somehow, after like six live shows in one year, the best band in the city, and they talk shit on my band, but the funny thing is that every time I run into that asshole at a show or at a bar he’s trying to get on a bill with us that’s already been booked. Fuck him.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say, “I agree with some of the stuff you just said, but the guy cuts me major deals on coke. I mean, he slashes the price big-time.”

  “I know he does,” Daniel says.

  The Joshua guy walks to his record player and starts flipping through his records and asks if there are any requests.

  “You got any Ritchie Valens?” I ask.

  “I actually do.”

  “What album?”

  “Come On, Let’s Go.”

  “That’s the best one,” I say. “Put it on.”

  “Done.”

  A huge mirror gets passed around, and Kat hands it to me and I take a line and pass it to Marco, and Marco does one and passes it to Sebastian.

  And I’m really digging the feel of this room. Like, a lot. A whole lot. It has this striking aura of familiarity about it—the Buddy Holly and Al Green and Will Ol
dham posters on the wall—furniture pushed into corners and covered with cigarette burns—dirty clothes and spilled ashtrays and porn magazines and empty bottles of everything smeared all over the floor—dirty dishes on the computer desk—a collection of Melvins and Neil Young album covers pinned to the back of the door.

  The mirror and my Jim Beam keep going and going and at one point, this older dude, maybe late forties, missing some teeth from obviously grinding them out, who looks like he’s been up for a few days doing speed, pulls me aside and says, “Hey, man. I read your book. I really dug it. I mean, there were some things that I would’ve done differently, but I still dug it.”

  “Thanks, dude.”

  “My name’s Only Owen.”

  “You write?”

  “A little bit,” he says. “I’ve been working on this collection of haikus and a journal about ramen noodle recipes.” Pause. I watch him grind his teeth together super hard. Then, “I do have a great story idea for a screenplay I wanna get cracking on.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “What?”

  “Your story.”

  “What story?”

  “The one you just told me you were gonna start working on for your screenplay.”

  “Oh right. The screenplay.”

  “What’s the idea?”

  The guy slides his purple-tinted tongue over his white-caked lips and goes, “It’s about this guy who really likes this girl and becomes obsessed with her and starts, like, really losing his mind over her. He, like, wigs out and tries to kill that band the Darkness because she’s really into them a lot, and then he tries to burn down her house and shit.” Pause. “That’s it. What do you think?”

  “It’s pretty all right.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Anyway,” he says. “You know that guy Jared, the dude who plays bass for King Cobra and the Beershits? That’s what he told me. I used to live with him a few years back in the Loin.”

  “I know him. I haven’t seen him in a while. How’s he doing?”