by Jason Myers
“He’s just livin’ his life, ya know. The last time I saw him was outside Hotel Utah last week. He was walking back and forth between a light pole and a fire hydrant, and then he stopped and just leaned against the pole. His body was still maneuvering all right, it was just waiting for his mind to turn back on.”
“Sounds like the right dude.”
“I know, man. Totally. Sounds about right cos it is about right.”
“Absolutely,” I say.
• • •
I’m in the bathroom taking a leak when Kat walks in and locks the door behind her.
“Why don’t you ever call me back?” she wants to know.
“Jesus Christ, Kat. I’m pissing.”
“Just answer the question, James.”
“Do you even call?” I ask. “I don’t think you do. I don’t think you call.”
“Well, I haven’t for a little while.”
“So what the hell are you asking me a question like that for?” I say, zipping my pants back up and moving to the sink to wash my hands.
“Because I used to. A lot. And you never tried to get in touch with me.”
“Well, I have a lot of things going on. You know this, lady. My life is super hectic. Sometimes phone calls fall between the cracks.”
“Fuck that. You haven’t even come out with anything new.”
Whipping around from the sink, I say, “Fuck you, Kat. You’re gonna come at me about my writing now?”
“No,” she says, very defensively.
“It sounds like you are.”
“I’m only trying to point out how you’re not doing anything new right now, so when you use the whole, ‘Woe is me. My life is super hectic at the moment, excuse me for blowing people off,’ no one is buying it.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes I do, James.”
“What the hell are you doing with your life?” I ask. “Cutting hair at MasterCuts.”
“Good one, James. I’m actually at Edo in the Lower Haight now. Maybe you should come in and get a touch-up.”
“I would never let you touch my hair.” Quick pause. “And you know what else?”
“What?”
“I’m just getting started with my writing.”
“Right. Keep telling yourself that. If it makes you feel better, then go for it, but everyone else can see what I’m talking about. Everyone talks about it behind your back, James. How you’ve wrapped your entire identity into the fact that you wrote a book and got published, but now that people are expecting something better, you’ve decided to distract yourself with all this pseudo celebrity because you’re scared to do something else. You’re afraid to write. You’re scared of your own words because you’re not writing to write anymore, you’re trying to write to maintain your status.”
“Fuck you!” I scream so hard a line of drool blows out of my mouth. “You have no right to say what you just said. You do not know what it’s like to destroy yourself over a story. To put everything you have into something and then allow the world to see what’s inside of you. To really strive to write something that means shit to people. It fucking hurts, and sometimes it’s hard to do it all over again.”
“Don’t yell at me,” Kat snaps. “I’m not the only one who thinks this. I’m only one of the people who has the guts to say it to your face.”
“Oh yeah?” I tell her.
“Yeah.”
“How about this, Kat?”
“What?”
“I hate you. Okay? I fucking hate your cunt ass right now. I hate you.”
I fly out of the bathroom, down the hallway, and bump into Daniel.
“Yo, you doing all right?” he asks.
“I’m fine. What’s up with you?”
“We’re all gonna go over to Sebastian’s and hang out until Zeitgeist opens. Then we’re gonna have some Bloody Marys there, and maybe even hit up Amoeba later. You coming?”
“I’m gonna go home,” I tell him, patting his shoulder.
“What?”
“Yeah, man. It’s been a long day, and I’d like to make it home before sunrise.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m just tired is all. Long day. Long night.”
“Okay, dude. But call me tomorrow or something. Or maybe the day after tomorrow. I might be sleeping by the afternoon.”
“I hope you are,” I tell him, then make my way out of the apartment and hit the street just as a cab is pulling up to a stoplight.
“Nineteenth and Valencia,” I say, after climbing in.
“Sure thing, pal.”
I drop my head against the window and rub my eyes and notice that the fog is beginning to clear up.
• • •
Back at my apartment, I cannot unlock the front gate again. It still won’t fucking work. Shit! So I stand there, contemplating what to do, when this guy from my floor walks outside.
“Thank you so much,” I tell him.
“Lose your keys?” he asks.
“No. They just don’t work, and I’m pissed off about it. My keys don’t work.”
“Let me see them,” he says.
I hand them over and he goes, “I think I know the problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Look,” he tells me, pointing at the front gate key.
The thing is absolutely covered in cocaine.
And the guy goes, “That’s most likely your problem,” handing the keys back to me.
“You’re probably right,” I say, and walk inside after digging the residue out with my finger and rubbing it over my gums.
• • •
Sitting at my computer desk, smoking another cigarette, drinking a glass of scotch, I flip through my many crates of records really contemplating hard about what I should play.
I grab a Sinatra record. No. Then I grab the Replacements’ Tim record. Not that, either. I put that one back and keep flipping—the Del-Vikings—Mark Olson and the Creekdippers—Elliott Smith—when my eyes feast themselves on the Z album by My Morning Jacket. I pull that one out and put it on.
My favorite sound of all time is the soothing scratching sound that records make.
Beside my pile of records are even more crates. Crates full of magazines with something about me in all of them. I move one of them closer and start flipping through it. The Playboy issue. The adult movie zine that praised me for openly writing about stars like Jill Kelly and Sydnee Steele and Gwen Summers in my book. I glance over the Maxim with a write-up about me inside, and there’s the MOJO, the People, and I finally end up on my favorite one, Interview, the issue right after the one Jim Carroll interviewed me in, the one where I got to interview Jay-Z.
I light another cigarette and weave a finger through the haze of smoke lingering in front of my face, trying to understand what’s behind my current writing failures. Is it the drugs? The expectations? The fear of actually sitting back down and really doing it? Probably a bit of all that and some more.
And even though I pinned two sets of black sheets tightly over the windows, bits of sunlight have managed to pass through, a harsh reminder that things are coming to an end. But I’m still wide awake. My body is tired but my mind is at work. Every time I breathe, a drip runs down my throat. I’m exhausted and I’m jacked. Thrashed but excited.
The record twirls its beautiful way into song two, “It Beats 4 U.”
Damn. What a song.
It reminds me of this girl Savannah I used to really like. I mean, I had a huge thing for her, but she would never give me the time of day for the longest time. But I was so persistent back then, and she was so beautiful. She really was. Man, she was so fucking beautiful. She had this long, golden-brown hair that smelled like apples and cinnamon. Her eyes were bright blue and she had this Marilyn Monroe beauty mark above her upper lip, and her lips themselves were thin and licorice red and she always wore the cutest sundresses. I mean, damn, I had the biggest thing ever
for her.
So one day a couple of years ago, I’m at Golden Gate Park for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. Me and a few close friends bouncing from stage to stage all day, drinking the beers we brought in, eating corn on the cob and pork burgers and funnel cakes. Watching the Heartless Bastards and Gillian Welch and the Steep Canyon Rangers and Los Lobos kill it. It was so nice and warm and everyone there, hell, everyone in the city seemed to be wrapped in this universal box of optimism at that moment in time. Everyone was having a fucking blast and partying with no worries and no shame. That’s how the city was two years ago. When it was still so fun and not so steeped in cynicism and paranoia and absolutely stuck in the final throes of all these plastic trends the way it is now.
It was right after Gillian Welch was finished playing that sunny afternoon when I bumped into Savannah. She was wearing this red dress with tiny white lassos embroidered all over it, these fingerless black gloves that ran all the way to her elbows, and these white cowboy boots. She actually stayed with me the rest of the day, and when the festival wrapped up early that evening, her and some of her friends came to Zeitgeist with me and some of my friends for a birthday party and then to this BRMC show at the Independent. We were all having the best damn time. And after the show was over, Savannah invited a few of us back to her pad on Thirteenth and South Van Ness. We sat around her dimly lit kitchen table, drinking whiskey and beer, listening to records and playing cards. We even tried to play Trivial Pursuit but squashed the game after, like, the third question was asked. And eventually, I even gave up my pursuit of her and at some point, simply stumbled into the living room and laid myself out on the couch. I have no idea how long I was out for, but when my eyes opened, Savannah was standing over me. She told me everyone else was gone and then she put her soft hands over mine and pulled me to my feet and led me into her bedroom.
Her lights were turned down low and her windows were covered and she told me to lie on the bed. I was so tired, I remember. So damn tired.
Savannah closed her bedroom door, and she lit these scented candles that smelled like violets and country bouquets, before flipping through her iPod and playing the same My Morning Jacket album I’m listening to right now.
Crawling into bed, this pretty girl curled up next to me, and we just lay there listening to the sound of our breath and the Z album. Neither of us spoke for those first few moments, because sometimes it’s just better not to say anything. Sometimes the silence is all you need. Sometimes it can really be golden. And it wasn’t until that opening drumroll of song two that Savannah craned her head around and said, “This song destroys me, James. It makes me fall in love with the past all over again.”
She said, “Just listen to the lyrics of this verse, James. Listen to how goddamn pretty they are.”
She was talking about the lyrics of the second verse:
“Words will come and words will go, make believe and overthrow, just believe and you can do, You know my heart it beats for you . . .”
“They’re good,” I remember telling her, and five minutes later, we were fucking.
It was pretty rad. To finally be fucking this grade-A babe I’d been pursuing for so long. But the thing is, I got kinda irritated. She wouldn’t suck my dick for some reason. I can’t actually remember what she said. But she wouldn’t. It was kinda this big turnoff.
And when I woke up later that afternoon, she was still asleep, so I carefully pulled my body away from hers and slid out of her warm bed and bailed. I never saw her again.
It was perfect.
Recently, someone told me she was living in New York now. That she’d moved, like, six weeks after our night together and was working as a bartender. Or maybe it was Portland now. And she was doing some sorta Chuck Palahniuk stalking.
The album spins into song three, and I squeeze my forehead and take a huge breath and rub my eyes.
Goddamn.
Nostalgia can take so much out of me sometimes. It really can.
My phone starts ringing.
It’s Nina.
“I’m in,” she says.
“What are you talking about?”
“Me and you. I’m in. Come over right now.”
“You’re serious?”
“Come over right now,” she says again.
Click.
I scramble to my feet and leave my place immediately. I love this girl. I have never been in such a hurry in my entire life. Never. Ever. Ever. I fucking love this girl.
I spot a cab right away and flag it down and hop in. “Laguna and Hayes,” I tell the driver.
“Yes, sir.”
Breathing heavily, I try and relax for a minute and rest my head against the window, closing my eyes after telling the driver, “Tell me when we’re there.”
A wave of calmness washes over me. My mind drains all the way out, and soon it feels empty. There is nothing but the blackness of my eyelids as I feel the cab slowing down for a stop.
And then something happens.
BOOM!
An orgy of bright lights emerge in a flash. It’s like this circuit board with thin sheets in front of it and my mind takes off, my body pounds forward, but my eyes are still closed. They feel locked down. I cannot open them even though I’m trying to.
And then the sheets part and it’s so beautiful.
It’s the entire outline of a novel. My second novel. It’s all right there as one page flips to another. Character names. Plot points. Subplots. Resolution.
And when the cab begins to accelerate again, my eyes snap open and sweat is pouring out of me.
And the driver goes, “Are you okay, sir?”
And I go, “Take me back.”
“But we’re almost there.”
“I don’t care,” I tell him. “Take me back now.”
“Yes, sir.” The driver flips the car around and takes me home.
Back inside my place, I grab a brand-new notebook, notebook number forty-eight, and I start writing the outline down. Ten, twenty, thirty pages get ripped before I wipe the sweat off my face, and then I go right back into it. Line after line, page after page, I fucking nail it. It’s all there. As clear as it’s ever been.
And then it’s over.
I finish the damn thing.
A forty-five-page outline with everything I need in it.
This is my second novel: DickPig: Confessions of a Heavy Metal Groupie.
Jumping to my feet, I let out this massive scream and do a dance around the room and then check my phone.
Seven missed calls from Nina, with one voice mail stating, “You really blew it this time. I hate you, James Morgan. I really do hate you.”
But honestly, I haven’t blown shit. Nothing. This is what’s really important. My writing. This is really the only thing I have that I can control, that I’m absolutely obsessed with. And now I’m moving it forward again.
This is by far the most important thing in my life.
After I pour myself another drink, I chop myself another rail from what I have left, slam it, light a cigarette, and then I get a text message from Daniel that says: Just left Amoeba with a Pyramid record. Going home. Puttin’ it on. And passing the fuck out.
Shaking my head, a huge smile on my face, I type back the only thing I can think of. The only thing that makes sense right now.
Laughing out loud, I type: Destroy, man! Fucking destroy!
DON’T MISS JASON MYERS’S NEWEST NOVEL—
READ ON TO GET A LOOK AT HOW THE STORY BEGINS. . . .
1.
“WHY ARE YOU SO ANGRY?” she asked me.
We were sitting on a green park bench, and she looked so anxious and so pretty. I’d known her for three weeks.
“That guy is so fake,” I said. “He’s a phony. How can you like that? He looks so generic and he’s not cool and he never will be. He’ll never like good music or good books. Who cares if he has a fucking car? He’s not real. He doesn’t have a soul.”
“I wasn’t just talking about
right now, Jaime,” she said. “I was asking why you’re so angry all the time?”
“I’m not.”
She threw her arms into the air. “Oh my god! Yes, you are! You are an amazing boy. You’re cute and so talented and so fucking sweet. But you’re also the angriest boy I’ve ever met.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “Why don’t you go climb back into his car and listen to that bullshit music and listen to him lie to you? I thought you were better than that.”
“And I thought you were better than this,” she said, before standing up and walking away.
I never saw her again.
And I’ve thought about her every day since that afternoon.
2.
I’M FOURTEEN YEARS OLD NOW. And I set an Oxycontin 30 in the middle of a sheet of aluminum foil the size of my hand. I’ve had the Beach House album Teen Dream playing on my computer for at least twenty minutes, and I hold the lighter underneath the foil. When the pill starts to smoke, I chase it back and forth and back and forth with the hollowed-out Bic pen in my mouth.
I close my eyes as the smoke slowly releases from my mouth and nostrils.
Everything is very different now.
I feel like fog.
It’s so perfect.
When I open my eyes again, the world is glass and it’s beautiful and I’m happy.
I’m so fucking happy here.
In my castle.
All alone.
This glass castle.
I set the foil on my bed and stand up and grab a blue-and-gold-striped tank top off my floor and slide it on.
Stare at myself in the mirror that hangs on the back of my door.
I flex both my arms for a second and then wipe the sweat off my face with the bottom of my shirt. Then I sit down at my computer and open my notebook up to the page my pen is sitting on.
I read over the poem a couple of times and decide it’s ready, so I turn the music off and turn my webcam on and adjust the screen, making it just perfect.
I look fucking great.
I’m ready now too.
So I start recording.
I go, “I dreamed that I was made out of wood and glass one night, it was on the same day I chartered a tugboat to find this island of rare parrots and elk . . . when I woke up with her arms around me, she asked me what my biggest fear was and I told her that I didn’t have one until I realized that wasn’t true . . . there was mystery to everything we did, from the puzzles we built with the teeth of sharks and the Twin Peaks VHS tapes that I carried in my backpack for a decade . . . on the radio, the commercials ended and Nirvana played four songs, my mind was full of pictures of shredded jeans and cardigans and the lyrics to “About a Girl” . . . One time she asked me when she would ever get all of me and I told her that it wasn’t so complicated, that I’m a simple boy and that a smile and the perfume she wore and that baby-blue sundress she was wearing on that afternoon behind the ice cream store she was spray painting was just that . . . well, kind of, it was all I needed . . . the time moved so fast and I began to distrust the numbers on the clock and the snooze button one of us would hit . . . I never liked time, it kills those afternoons on the couch watching Chinatown and daydreaming about Cuban beaches . . . she refused to answer the same question she’d asked of me, and that was okay because we were already answering it . . . we each had all of each other, it was just that we thought it meant something else . . . six years later I was at a Mobb Deep show on a big boat and I bumped into her, I asked her about the dress and she blushed and smiled as I told her I’d never seen someone wear something so good . . . Back on the land, I got a hotel card in the mail one afternoon . . . I stared at it for hours until I realized I didn’t have to go, I didn’t need to go . . . I wanted to keep the memory of that day in my head, it was perfect, and how on earth can a person live with themselves when they go out and they destroy the lasting image, shred the gorgeous memory and make it irrelevant, because talking about work and your basic cable package is how it all ends up . . . it was then that I sought out the beach, every girl there was something but none of them wore a dress like she did . . . It’s been ten years now, and if I ever run into her again, I’ll ask her to meet me at the drive-in and I’ll buy the tickets for Point Break and the popcorn and the cherry Coke, and then I’ll ask her to never wear that dress again, and then, just maybe then, I’ll finally be able to tell her my biggest fear . . . someday forgetting exactly how she looked on that day, during that moment, and how I forgot what her name was and how she never asked me mine. . . .”