Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/1726103.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive_Warnings, Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Rape/
      Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Original_Work
  Relationship:
      LeClaire_X_pretty_much_everybody
  Additional Tags:
      Yaoi, Rock_Stars, dubcon, Violence, Drugs, boys_in_makeup, Boys_in
      Skirts, Goths, Gothic, BDSM, Anorexia, Bulimia, Eating_Disorders,
      boylove, Drug_Addiction, sadist, Masochist, rock_musician, rock_music,
      Gay, Homosexual, Gay_Sex, Gay_Male_Character
  Stats:
      Published: 2014-06-01 Updated: 2014-07-17 Chapters: 13/? Words: 77204
****** Deathstyle ******
by XIX
Summary
     Don't expect plot, or resolution, or redeeming social values. It's
     just film of Deathstyle being Deathstyle. So, yeah. Porn. You're
     welcome.
Notes
See the end of the work for notes
***** Chapter 1 *****
GLITTER
He set the tape player in the sink. It was already blasting tinny Bauhaus.
"Funeral...of sores..." Kevin sang along to himself, under his breath. His face
was inches from the mirror. He studied his eyeliner, frowned, licked the tip of
his pinky and rubbed off a microscopic smudge. There was still coke under his
nail, chemical and numb on the tip of his tongue. He tugged at his stockings
with one hand, leaned closer to the mirror, still humming softly.
There. Perfect. Dressed and painted and once he was dosed he'd be ready to go.
He pulled the little box (tin, with a plastic latch, with a sticker that said
GOD SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS holding it together) out of his overnight bag
(black paisley with a smiley-face keyring hanging from the zipper) and let his
hands perform a ritual that they knew by rote. The spoon was from his mom's
set--antique, and therefore satisfying to use in this depraved way. The lighter
was from a truck stop, and it had a psychedelic yin-yang on it.
The heroin wasn't bad, actually. He'd gotten it from some kid in Boca Raton,
three shows earlier, in exchange for autographs and a videotape of their
Halloween show. Normally he didn't shoot up, but it was so much faster, and so
much easier to hide, that he'd fallen into doing it once a week or so. Snorting
didn't count, he'd cut it and put it in the vial where he usually kept his coke
and he could do that in front of the others without making anyone suspicious.
This was a tiny, baby dose anyway. He couldn't afford to space out while trying
to do a show.
Actually putting the needle in was the best part. It was sexual because it had
to be. He always thought of how similar these practices were, all the
preparation for this brief slick minute of pleasure. He got a the vein on his
first try, and the heat was instantaneous when he pushed the plunger in. He had
read that shooting up was never as good as your first time. He thought that was
bullshit. It was always better than the last one, and after it was over the
memory seemed to magnify the pleasure rather than dim it.
He drifted, looking at the syringe, at the geometry of its shape intersecting
his arm.
Someone banged on the door just as he was pulling the needle out. "Just a
minute," he yelled, dazed and clumsy and trying to shove everything into his
bag. He jabbed the shit out of his finger trying to cap the syringe. Blood. He
put his finger in his mouth, sucked hard on the mark, and stood thinking.
After a minute he frowned, groped in his make-up case for his lipstick, and
touched up the left corner of his mouth. More banging, hard enough to shake the
door. "Fuck off," he called, stuffing the tape player into his bag and trying
to pull it closed enough to zip it.
"This is the last time I tell you. Two minutes," Brian shouted back at him.
"Dickhead," Kevin mouthed to his reflection. He looked great. Such a pretty job
on his lipstick. He grinned at himself, picked up his bag, staggering a little,
and managed to heave it over his shoulder. He still had to stash it in the
dressing room. He shoved open the door with his foot. It rebounded, and he
heard Max swearing behind it. "Move," he said, and pushed it again. It didn't
swing back this time, and he pushed his way out into the narrow hallway.
Max was already dressed, thrown-together clothes of mostly black polyester. He
had his bass guitar over his shoulder. "He's pissed at you again," he warned
Kevin.
"Yeah, whatever," he said, edging past and throwing his bag into the dressing
room down the hall. "Is my guitar out there?"
"Yeah, you're set up."
Kevin did a double-take at Max's clothes. The shirt underneath the suit jacket
was fuchsia. With sequins. And he had on blue Converse sneakers. Light blue.
Really, honestly, a kind of babyblue. "Has he seen that?"
Max nodded and grinned. "He called me a fuckup and asked me what was taking you
so long."
Kevin flushed. The crook of his left arm was still tingly with what had taken
him so long. "Let's do this," he said, and walked past Max towards the stage.
PIT
It was the concert and Damien had been waiting for almost seven weeks. His
ticket was battered from his fingertips tracing the letters, and all four
corners were gone due to his weird habit of nibbling at them.
He had been disappointed when he'd heard it was a club show, but this was a big
fucking club. It was dark and crowded and shaken with hurricane fury and drugs
and kids. Everywhere was either pitch-black or blinding with dizzy lights and
clove cigarette marijuana dry-ice smoke. There were catwalk-metal balconies
here and there. Zippo lighters were gleaming in random places, like futuristic
votive candles.
The stage was set up at the far end of the vast dance floor. It was draped with
red velvet, with part of a cow's ribcage spinning lazily from a hook, still
heavy with meat. The backdrop was two male symbols linked in arterial red on a
black curtain shot through with crimson glitter. There was already one Doc
Marten on the stage, next to the keyboard stand. Its owner would be down front,
one foot covered with sock or fishnet, hopping and cheering and wild-eyed.
He looked longingly at the inferno of raging freaks smashing the shit out of
each other in their frenzy to get closer to the stage. You'll get annihilated,
he thought, his left irreplaceable chording hand curling in premonition.
Well, that was probably true. Damien was only five-four, and built like a
stick. But there were girls in there, for chrissakes, and they weren't worried
about getting annihilated.
Deathstyle's lead singer was named Brian LeClaire and he had black black hair
with an emerald-green streak gashing straight back from the part, and he would
be on that stage any minute now, and he was Damien's ideal, pornostar and Satan
all rolled into one long tall furious man.
Damien had spent hours getting ready. This might be The Night, and he had to
look perfect. His hair was half black, half blue, and he had it in pigtails
with pink ribbons. Full makeup, black and blue, his favorite Deathstyle shirt
and a long black velvet skirt that had been incredibly expensive, with fishnets
and his combat boots.
He looked, trying to get a feel for what his chances were. He was bracing
himself to shove his way in when the lights went out. Not down, just completely
OUT. There was a low grinding hum, and all the freaks were screaming in joy.
There was no guitar yet, no percussion, only a dark heavy synthesizer hum.
Brian LeClaire's voice drowned it all out...a whisper, amplified to an inhuman
volume. "I want world peace, but not too soon...."
LeClaire. Damien's erection was like some kind of Copperfield trick,
instantaneous and from out of nowhere. This called for desperate measures.
He drew in a deep breath, checked his shoelaces, and worked his way through the
fringe into the center of the pit.
 
"I want sex toys designed by Tim Burton and H.R. Giger...." LeClaire sang,
putting a nasty alley-cat twist on Giger that made several people scream in
appreciation. The percussion had started, now, deliberately off-rhythm, harsh
and acidic.
Damien kept thinking of a painting his roommate had. He thought the artist's
name was Anonymous Box, or something. It was of all these people in hell. He
figured the guy who'd done that painting had at least a vague understated idea
of what this pit was like. It was leather-and-technicolor chaos, hands dripping
gloves and bracelets and pewter rings grabbing and pushing and gesturing with
occult sigils. There was guitar now, distorted and enraged, falling in
discordant opposition to the sound of the drums. His left hand twitched again,
aching for taut bright strings and the smooth heavy neck of his Ibanez. And up
above all of them, looming over the smash of people was Brian LeClaire. He was
in vampire whore makeup with the emerald streak in his hair gleaming under the
stage lights. "I want to own the space inside my head..." he groaned into the
microphone, raking a hand through his dangerous hair.
Damien stared. It was like an optical illusion.
Then he was too close, blocked from viewing the stage by hundreds of heads with
elaborate hairstyles.
Damien couldn't really see individual people. It was just a mishmash of black
leather, multicolored hair, lipstick, piercings. It was as much as struggle to
stay on his feet as to move forward. He was shoving people all over the place.
One girl with a safety pin through her nose and fuchsia hair tried to punch
him. He grabbed her head and pushed her. She fell, and Damien saw a flash of
her getting kicked in the face.
"I want drugs that will erase all synchronicity..."
Damien thought of Brian with marijuana smoke trailing out of his nostrils, from
a bootleg of their second video he had. He squirmshoved his way forward and
prayed nobody felt his hard-on and wanted to fight him over it.
He had enough of a gap to really shove forward, suddenly. Something hit him in
the chest so hard it knocked his breath out. Damien grabbed it. He felt
somebody pulling him backwards. There were flashing lights all over the place,
and between that and the smoke he couldn't see a damn thing.
"I want an indestructible liver..."
He turned and struck out at the guy who was pulling him. It was messy, but the
guy finally gave up and edged left instead. He realized what had hit him in the
chest: the security barricade.
"I want x-ray vision and precognition..."
He was maybe three feet from Brian LeClaire.
He hung on as if his life depended on it, sucked in what felt like a lungful of
broken glass, and looked up.
Straight into Brian's terrible, beautiful face.
"I want a bloody end to American culture ..."
Me too, Damien thought, delirious with bliss. I also want your tongue in my
mouth.
He was blind to the rest of planet earth. His eyes were happily full. He
couldn't have told anyone his own name. He was suddenly overwhelmingly having
such a good time that his entire body tingled.
Some guy crowdsurfed onto the stage and started fucking with the bassist. Brian
saw him though, just before the guards got him offstage. He tried to pound him
with the mic stand, and when that didn't work he threw a broken bottle at the
guard, making obscene tongue gestures at everyone involved. It was pretty
funny. The whole band was watching, sort of cringing in thisoh-god-not-me-
nextsort of way.
LeClaire got tired of that. Instead he prowled his way over to the cow ribcage,
draped himself around it, ran his hand over it. He leaned his head into it,
still singing, tilted it back and forth, nuzzling at it. He rolled his eyes
back, as if it felt like heaven. He did more petting, then put his fingers in
his mouth and made more faces for the kids in the front row.
Damien had managed to move over to the right, and now Brian was directly in
front of them. Damien was close enough to see every scratch on his chest. He
shaded his eyes with his hand, pointed terrifyingly close to Damien, and
mouthed that one at someone Damien couldn't see.
And then someone hit him in the back hard enough to stun him, and someone
lifted him by shoulder and thigh and threw him onto the stage.
 
.... i want the norm to be a higher standard....
It would have been okay, he guessed, if he had just landed on the stage.
Damien smashed into Brian, and nearly knocked him over. That was, in fact, how
they met, a clattering gothic collision. He sort of kept going after he hit
him, so he ended up behind him, in front of the drum kit, in a heap like a bird
that had been hit by a car.
He couldn't really sit up. He pushed himself up onto his elbows. His boots were
skidding on the smooth stage floor, and he couldn't get his feet under him. He
suddenly felt like a guy who just fell in the tiger pit at the zoo, or some
jerk in a horror movie who keeps tripping over his shoelace when Freddy is
right behind him.
He looked up.
Brian was looking down at him.
He had on the full deadwhore-ghoul makeup, with red around his eyes, and
slashing painted eyebrows, and this was the godfather of all death looks.
Some stupid kind of instinct that apparently ran deeper than lust and hero
worship took over. He tried like hell to run.
About a tenth of a second after Damien got up, he fell over some miscellaneous
cord that was strung across the stage. He went down hard, on his hands and
knees.
He didn't get another chance to escape.
Brian grabbed him by his shirt--with one hand--and picked him up. His feet
weren't even touching the floor.
Damien said, "Help." He couldn't breathe, so he mouthed it more than said it.
Brian was wearing black leather pants, and no shirt. His face was inches from
Damien's. It was like looking into the eyes of a snake. It paralyzed him.
"Bitch," Brian snarled at him. Damien couldn't hear him, but he saw his lips
move. He had gorgeous teeth. Damien wondered exactly how he was going to kill
him.
Brian half-dropped, half-threw him to the floor, and ripped his shirt upwards.
Damien felt it rip at the seams. Brian didn't tear it all the way off. He
pulled it up, over Damien's head, leaving his chest bare down to the waistband
of his skirt, but his arms were still in it, now hopelessly wound.
Damien didn't have enough presence of mind left to even freak out. He just
watched this poster demon kneeling over him, watched him lower his head to his
stomach. Brian tugged at the waistband of his skirt, pulled it down until his
hipbones stopped it. Damien felt his long hair, brushing his ribs. His whole
body jerked.
Brian put his mouth on him, just below his belly button. His lips were slick
with black lipstick, and hot enough to burn him. Damien thought he was going to
bite him. He had this vision of the singer tearing out his insides, of pulling
out bright loops of Damien guts with his teeth. He'd seen how merciless he was
with inflicting pain on himself...the word "MURDER" was carved into his right
arm.
Brian didn't bite. Instead he licked him, up to his belly button and stopped
there, teasing at the silver ring he wore. Damien didn't have blood anymore.
Somebody had put liquid nitrogen in his veins. His breath hissed out between
his teeth as if he'd been punched.
Brian trailed his tongue in a long, slow line up his chest, pausing at the
hollow of his throat. Damien felt the edge of his teeth and cringed, hoping
he'd bite, praying he wouldn't.
He didn't. He licked along the tatters of fishnet Damien had on under his t-
shirt, up to the point of his chin, and stopped with his mouth so close Damien
could feel his breath on his lips. He stayed that way for years.
Just when he'd gotten the balls to lean upwards to kiss him, Brian drew back,
and looked down at him, with absolute scorn. His sick, starving, masochist soul
drank it in, loving it.
Brian leaned close to him again.
And spit on him.
Damien shuddered, licking at his lips, watching the singer glaring at him.
"Brian," he whispered. Or maybe he said, "God." He wasn't sure which.
He scratched Damien, a hard vicious slash with his pointed nails, from his
throat down to his waist. The bright flare of pain undid him. He closed his
eyes.
Damien felt Brian pick him up again, felt him throw him back into the pit.
.... i want stupidity to equal fatality....
"Hey, kid?"
The concert was over. That much he knew, because the music had stopped, and the
lights were back up. His shirts were back in place. Dimly, he remembered a girl
with kind eyes and pink hair helping him arrange them. She'd whispered, How was
it?to him, and he'd replied, Hell, with an idiot grin on his face and something
astronomical and preteen gleaming in his eyes.
There was a rhythmic noise, louder than the ringing of his ears, patiently
cycling somewhere to his left. Somebody was talking to him. He wondered who.
"Kid, you okay?" the voice said, for the fourth or fifth time. Somebody grabbed
his arm. He cringed. It was of the security guards. He turned to face the man,
expecting the Rushmore cop expression, but it was a gruff-kind buzzcutted blond
man, heavyset but short, with a dumb bushy mustache. He looked vaguely
concerned. "You okay?" he asked again, even louder.
"Yeah." It was a big fat lie, too.
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Because, the reason I'm asking you is he wanted me to give you this, if you
want it."
He conjured a pass from his back pocket, dangled it in the air like a
hypnotist.
 
PRIMROSE
How he'd gotten backstage was a complete blank. He only remembered whole crowds
of people, and seeing Max out of the corner of his eye, laughing at something a
security guard was telling him, and drinking chocolate milk out of one of those
tiny cartons like you got in grade school. Fucking surreal.
Damien stood around, looking lost and feeling like an idiot. He was in a dim,
narrow hallway...it was lit by red emergency lights, and decorated with
extensive and detailed graffiti. People were pushing past him in either
direction.
Finally, there were no more people. Out of boredom, he started opening doors.
Empty dressing room. Room full of boxes. Room full of metal folding chairs. He
kept walking.
Now there were barely any emergency lights, even, plus the next few doors were
locked. The far end of the hallway was really dark, but he headed in that
direction, out of stubbornness.
That was when he noticed that someone had the hallway blocked. It was probably
a security guard. He sighed, most of them were real jerks...he'd heard a lot of
comments with the word faggot in them over his shoulder.
The guy was sitting in one of those metal folding chairs. It was set against
one wall, and he had his feet propped high up against the opposite wall. He had
to be tall as hell to do that. Damien couldn't see him clearly, but he seemed
to be smoking a cigarette.
The guy looked up, pushed his long black hair our of his face, and pinned
Damien with his eyes. He wasn't smoking.
Brian grinned around the cardboard stick of the lollipop, then reached up and
took it out of his mouth. He stared at Damien, not bothering to pretend not to,
taking in the whole obscene outfit. "It's you," he said, after a moment,
sadistically making sure to use no particular tone of voice, so Damien wouldn't
have any clue about his actual mood.
Damien drew in the longest, shakiest breath of his whole life. "Um..."
"Come over here."
Oh god, oh god. What choice did he have?
He stepped closer. LeClaire wasn't happy with his little baby step, and he took
his feet off the wall, and glanced at the floor right in front of him, then
looked hard at Damien.
Damien went.
Brian reached for his shirt. Damien cringed, but it wasn't a grab this time,
only a not-so-gentle tug. He pulled Damien forward until he was standing
between his knees, then hooked his leg behind the boy's. He was stuck.
Brian was just looking at him, with sort of an amused expression, a faint
mocking smile, like he knew a secret. "Did I hurt you, when I pushed you down?"
"Um, no sir." Jesus Christ! Did you actually just say that, you fucking idiot?
"I mean, yeah...I mean, yes sir, I..."
He decided shutting up might be a good idea. Not that Brian hadn't already
concluded that he was a complete fucking moron.
Brian solved his speech impediment by shocking him speechless. He took the
lollipop he had, and trailed it along the boy's left cheekbone. It was green
apple. He could smell it.
He traced a circle around his eye with it, then leaned towards Damien so
suddenly he almost yelled. He was as tall sitting down as Damien was standing
up. Jesus.
Brian licked along his cheekbone, following the path he'd traced around
Damien's eye. It terrified him all over again, how warm his mouth was. Damien
closed his eyes.
Damien didn't realize right away that Brian had leaned back again, and was
watching him standing there with his eyes shut. He slid the candy along
Damien's bottom lip. " Didn't your mom ever tell you about taking candy from
strangers?"
The candy was still up against his lips. "She mentioned it once, I think," he
murmured, licking at it. Sadistic, Brian held it just out of reach of his
tongue, then traced it around his mouth again.
It was electricity. Brian still wouldn't kiss him. He only licked away every
trace of green apple stickiness he'd left on Damien's face. He was shuddering
like he'd been poisoned. He could taste Brian's lipstick.
Every so often he would put the lollipop back in his own mouth, to get it wet
again. He went over Damien's whole face that way, then back to his mouth. "What
did she say?"
"Fuck what she said," Damien told him, and bit at his bottom lip before he
could stop him.
It was a vicious, heartless kiss, slick with lipstick from both their mouths.
Brian made it violent, biting at his lips, driving his tongue so deep in his
mouth he would have gagged if he hadn't been so busy biting back when he could,
grinding his tongue against Brian's, trying to gash at his mouth with the stud
in his tongue.
He pulled away from Damien, breathing hard. Damien had a little smug ego flash
at that, Brian was turned on from kissing him. He was holding Damien's wrists
together in one hand...Damien didn't remember him doing that....and he still
had that goddamned lollipop in his other hand. His mouth was smeared red. He
looked like a Satanist, or a coprophage.
Damien leaned over and licked at his mouth. Brian pushed him back,
grinning. "You want to go to a party?"
 
SHELTER
Deathstyle had reserved the Red Dungeon, which was the entire second floor of
the club. The Sisters of Mercy were playing at a volume that could only be
described as criminal. It was their cover of an old Rolling Stones song, the
one about war andchildren, made mournful and desperate and dark. A vast print
of one of Salvador Dali's crucifixions faced the door, lit by black
floodlights. Only the privileged freaks had been invited here. They were
scattered in artistic little cliques, varied and paralyzing in alien beauty. A
massive black man in a shirt that said EVENT SECURITY was keeping everyone else
out.
Brian kept his hand on Damien's shoulder while they walked inside. Damien
almost fell down the two steps down. All his attention was devoted to
memorizing the intricacies of LeClaire's fingers against his flesh. There were
two layers of cloth between them--worn t-shirt cotton and the dress shirt.
Damien wished he'd left them off.
It was open bar, rum and coke and goldschlager the expensive kind of clove, the
brown ones with the little gold band. The dance floor was bigger here, smooth
and clean, but there were only a few people dancing, two girls doing the
serpent-goth thing in long funeral dresses, and what was probably a boy, tall
and hidden in a red velvet cloak with ratted black hair. He was standing almost
still, staring up into the lights, dancing only with short abbreviated
gestures.
"Hang on. I'll be right back," Brian said, and pressed his fingers harder
against Damien's shoulder for an instant, then moved away with long steps to
corner a man in lipstick and a business suit at the bar.
The guitarist came in behind Damien. He watched this exchange, caught Damien's
eye, and smiled. "Business. He's like that," he said. "I'm Kevin. Axes and
sanity for the hell that is this band."
Damien forced himself to smile at that. He mumbled his name, performed the
pseudoaristocratic handshake that was required. He was a confused mess. His
eyes kept going back to Brian. "Is he always like that?"
"You mean, such a dick?"
That one made him give Kevin a look, until he saw that he was mostly kidding.
"So...mood-swingy."
"Usually. Except when he's worse. You want a drink?"
Damien blushed, and mumbled, "I'm not...um, old enough..."
"You want a drink?"
He got it then. Two social mistakes in less than two minutes. He muttered
something and followed Kevin to the bar.
Kevin was only a little taller than he was, with gleaming chin-length blueblack
hair, black lace button-up shirt, and expensive boots with buckles from ankle
to knee. He was pretty enough to make Damien feel dingy and white-trash in
comparison. Kevin saw him looking, and smiled again. Try as he might, Damien
didn't see anything venomous or fake in it. It figured. This bastard had the
life he spent his nights dreaming of, and he was nice. Which left Damien to be
bitter and envious and therefore the bad guy.
"Purple Haze, and, um--" Kev looked at Damien, saw the blankness, and said,
"Two of those."
The bartender was a blonde in drag. He nodded and conjured two drinks with an
embarrassing Tom Cruise flourish. Damien tasted his as if it might have been
cyanide. It was like grape Kool-Aid with an alcoholic bite. He liked it, even
though it was probably crammed full of sugar and calories. He was about a third
of the way finished with it when Kevin gestured for two more. "So you like the
band?"
"Yeah. A lot. I've been trying to see you guys live since the Lustmord tape
went around."
"Jesus. That's what, a year? Two years?"
Damien nodded. He drew a bigger swallow through the little straw, not wanting
Kev to two-for-one him. "Do you always switch to the Ibanez for 'Biofuck'?"
Kev blinked, then grinned. "You play."
Play. Damien supposed that hours and hours of fingerkilling brainwracking
practice might be called play in some parts of America. "Kind of. I'm not all
that good. I can do most of what you do until you start with the solo work."
"You took lessons, didn't you?" Kev asked, and when Damien admitted it he said,
"They never fucking teach that right. There's a trick to it. There's a pattern
for whatever key you're in."
"You change keys, though, I know that much. And I can't read music."
"Me either," Kev said.
Damien decided he liked him.
They prattled about distortion pedals and sustain and improvisation and what
kinds of strings they liked, and how it would rule to string together six amps
and distort that and feed it through an extremely old Fender stack.
Kev stopped in the middle of a sentence, grabbed Damien's shoulder, and spun
him around. "Look."
An ugly luscious live Joy Division song was playing, and God help him, Brian
was on the dance floor.
He would write in a notebook, sometimes, usually in the margins beside sketches
of LeClaire, words like serpent, eclipse, osiris. It embarrassed him to do
this--he kept thinking of a Grease-era highschool girl in a poodle skirt,
writing Jane Presley instead of taking geometry notes. It embarrassed him, but
he kept doing it anyway. He wanted the notebook now, so he could write mantis,
Chernobyl, Snow Queen, and disaster.
The floor cleared, people staring, some of them pretending not to watch, all of
them enchanted. Brian danced like a damaged thing, half whore, half marionette,
arms tense and spastic, spine fluid and elegant. His painted mouth moved, in
singleframe flashes, shaping words that were unrelated to the lyrics. His eyes
were either closed or rolled back far enough to render him blind. He folded
himself into shapes that should have brought him to the floor, and did not
fall. He was alone. The eyes on him were jealous.
Damien watched this strangely intimate ceremony interaction of lights and music
and flesh, heartbroken. His heart was jittering the way it did when he took too
many diet pills. He glanced at Kevin once, remembering his presence, vaguely
afraid he'd been supposed to notice Brian, not stare at him for five minutes.
Kevin was looking at Brian too, with something like…it was that Sunday-school
word, the one Damien always thought of when he wanted to shoplift something.
Covet. Yeah. That was how Kev looked. Like he wanted to steal what he was
looking at.
Brian kept at it until the song ended. It was a photo shoot, with no cameras,
with a nonexistent photographer coaxing give me angry, give me hurt, give me
fractured, give me death, give me sex symbol.The DJ didn't cut the outro or
messily meld it into another song. Maybe he'd been watching too. After the last
note, Brian froze, crooked and impossibly posed, for several beats of silence,
then unfolded, and seemed to refocus his eyes. He walked off the floor, and did
not look to see if he'd had an audience. He could have been alone in the
building.
There were a few more beats of stunned silence, then the sudden crisp loud
nasal percussion of old Ministry, that one song that was so bad and yet so
catchy, wailing about how it's the same in the whole wide world.
Damien drew in a single breath, exhaled, very slowly. Art.
"You've got it bad for him," Kevin said, quietly.
Damien sipped at his Purple Haze--his third or fourth--and said, "I guess."
"I don't think he meant to ditch you," Kev offered.
That stung, both the words and the ungodly sympathy they were inked in with. "I
don't care. He's busy. It was great of him anyway to let me come up here."
Kevin analyzed this, decrypted it, and said, "Do you want me to talk to him?"
 
Brian flicked ashes onto the floor, ignoring the ashtray at his elbow. "So
you've got a fucking problem with this? What are you, some kind of moralist
now? And he fucking sends you over here to talk to me?" he replied, almost
shouting over the music.
Kevin sighed dramatically, leaning against the sticky bar, disdaining the
unoccupied barstool. "Look, he's a kid. You freak him out. I just don't want
you to take advantage. That's all."
"Take advantage," Brian repeated, and rolled his eyes. "He came with me by
himself. No gun to his head."
"Yeah, well. So you blow him off now?"
"I'm not blowing him off. I got him backstage and he's at the fucking
afterparty. What else do you want me to do?"
"Maybe talk to him?"
Brian pretended not to hear this. He glanced across the dance floor again, at
the little newgoth he had been carefully ignoring for the past two hours. A
skinny short kid in the required Deathstyle shirt, with fishnets over his hands
and over-the-top makeup and the classic slope haircut, half black, half blue or
green. It was hard to tell in the riot of lights. Pretty. And the kid was
trying very hard not to look towards the conversation he had instigated. "What
is he, like fourteen?"
"Seventeen."
"Jesus."
Kevin sighed. "Come on. Want me to let him down easy?"
Brian shrugged, blew smoke out between his teeth. He kept watching the kid,
taking his time. "Tell him he wants to talk to me, fucking come over here
himself." He turned away, back to his drink. Conversation over.
Kevin muttered something likefucker and went back to Damien.
Damien took twenty minutes to work up the nerve.
Brian watched him, amused, as he pretended to wander in the direction of the
bar, and just happened to stop right beside him. "Hey," he muttered, staring
fixedly at the top of the bar, tracing a scratch with one blue fingernail. "Are
you busy, or something?"
"Not really," Brian said, watching this boy. He was uncannily pretty, with a
kitten face and green eyes painted with illegal amounts of liquid eyeliner. The
lipstick was dark blue, presumably to match his nails. It was a nice variation
on the usual red-or-black. Other than that he was pure factory-issue
kindergoth, right down to the combat boots. He lit another clove, deliberately
blew smoke in the boy's face to test his reaction.
Damien closed his eyes, seeming to enjoy the smell, but he didn't comment. He
seemed to search for something to say, and came up with, "I like your hair."
Brian shrugged. "It's my insurance policy to make sure I'm never tempted to get
a real job."
The kid laughed, surprised. "I worked at Burger King for three weeks, once.
They fired me because they found out I was fourteen, but they paid me. That's
how I got my guitar."
A guitar. Brian studied him with new interest. "Are you any good?"
It was the kid's turn to shrug. "I can play stuff I hear but I can't read
music."
"Then you're better than my guitarist," he said, sending a disgusted look in
Kevin's direction. "He can't play anything, period. "
Damien grinned. "Then how come he's your guitarist?"
"He was the only guy I knew that had a guitar." Brian managed to tap the cherry
off his clove, swore, and picked it up off the counter with the tip of the
cigarette, took three quick puffs. "You smoke?"
"Kind of. Mostly, um, not cigarettes."
Marijuana. He wondered if the kid was saying that to impress him, or what. A
mental flash of two years of drug orgy, condensed and run at fast-forward. He
shook it off. "Can you smoke it this way?" he asked, making rolling gestures
with his clove. Damien nodded, without that hesitant sick look drug virgins had
when you caught them lying.
Brian studied him for another minute, then inclined his head towards the door.
Most of the crowd had left, but the parking lot was still crowded with various
unconventional cars, most plastered with stickers. Kevin's Cadillac hearse was
parked up front, near the doors. Max was sitting on the hood, talking with a
guy in a red leather jacket, looking weirdly amputated without Brian beside
him. Brian waved, casually, and Max waved back. There was significant eye
contact between them, though, quick but explicit. From Max, one eyebrow raised,
so subtly as to be almost unnoticeable--You okay? And from Brian,yeah, we're
good. Don't worry.
They sat on the curb around beside the club, passing the joint back and forth.
The kid hadn't been lying. He could smoke just fine. And he left a syrup-taste
on the joint from his mouth that was impossible to ignore. He did cough, but he
did so without any of the pathetic struggle to play it off. Brian found himself
admiring this almost in spite of himself. Insecure little stoner-freaks would
make a big production out of it--man, that shit is harsh--and then try to take
vast killer drags to re-assert their machismo.
"So what was your name?" Brian asked.
"Damien," The kid said, with a completely straight face.
Brian grinned. "Is it really?"
"Fuck my driver's license." His license said Alan Edward Keyes, JR.
They didn't talk after that, except for monosyllables, until the buzz was
coalescing around them. The wet asphalt and overcast sky gleamed, suddenly, and
the voices arguing Mentallo and the Fixer closer to the door crystallized. He
watched the kid, mostly. All angles and lines except for round eyes and
overpainted mouth. There was a streak of blue on his chin. Brian reached over
to touch it, stopped himself, and mumbled something aboutyour lipstick, and
didn't watch Damien rub it off.
The joint had been a big one, and there was a third of it left. "You okay?"
Brian said, finally.
The kid took one more, nodded. "Yeah. Thanks."
He took another hit himself, extinguished it carefully, put what was left in
the clove pack. Neither one of them moved to go back inside. Not yet. That
wasn't how it was done.
Damien leaned back on his elbows, rearranged his skirt. "What was that
with the guitarist? Backstage, I mean?"
"We just..." Brian searched for the least dangerous words, and couldn't find
any. "We don't really get along socially."
"You get along with the rest of them? The people in there, I mean?"
Brian shrugged. "They stay out of my way." He squinted at a streetlight on the
other side of the parking lot, to see the halo. "You want to get out of here?"
TETHYS
 
Brian insisted his way into Kevin's car keys, and took them both at breakneck
speed to the beach. The conversation in the car had been mercifully brief.
Brian had said, "Do you go to school or anything?"
"Not really. I went for like a year, but I ran out of money."
Brian had been driving too fast, passing other cars as if they were asteroids
in an interstellar dogfight. "Yeah. I dropped out with like a year left for the
band. College is useless unless you want to go corporate."
After that, speed and White Zombie, which Brian had turned down only briefly to
ask directions. It was so weird to be in a car with him. And he drove like a
crazy person. Damien had to close his eyes--tight--quite a few times. Brian
finally cut the lights and pulled into the parking lot of a weird church that
was just beside the beach.
The beach was strange at night, an alien Jupiter place that was unfamiliar and
uninviting. The sand was a cool bluewhite with moonlight and the gleam of
distant hotels. The chaos of a blues band was far behind them, from some
tourist bar, sounding tinny and synthetic.
Damien slogged along in his heavy boots towards the water's edge. The loose
sand made his feet heavy and clumsy. He stumbled, and Brian reached back for
his hand without looking, and their fingers closed together in a sweaty tangle,
and his hand was caught, drawing wrist and arm and shoulder and chest forward.
He didn't stumble again.
He had a mantra. His mantra was don't say anything stupid. He repeated it to
himself over and over again
Damien had been to the beach twice in his life in the daylight. He remembered
sunlight making everything into a commercial and women in fuchsia g-string
bikinis. He had been maybe eight, and he remembered mostly brainless, laughing
people. In the dark, the ocean was a different animal. Now, it lurked in a
devious navy-blue arc, a long writhing plain from the horizon down to the faint
gleam of breakers. Farther out, the textured graynavy deepened into black, the
edge between sea and sky uncertain.
The bottom of his skirt was wet and flapping salt-sticky against his shins,
water seeping into his fishnets in an itchy trail down to his squelching boots.
The wind was destroying all the effort he'd put into his hair. Brian stopped
and pulled Damien forward to stand beside him. He looked up at LeClaire, at his
hair snapping long black tongues in the air.
The pot made his mouth strange and his thoughts disjointed and sorcerous. He
wished Brian would look at him then, and he felt oddly startled when his wish
didn't make it so. Brian kept staring out into the water, out into the dark,
towards Africa or the edge of the world where a sheet of black water
guillotined down into a depthless void.
"What is it?" he said.
Brian shook his head, shrugged a little. He released Damien's hand, and the boy
left it in the air for too long, fingers flexed, his skin feeling cold and left
out and disconnected. Brian knelt down, picked up a jagged chunk of oyster
shell, and sidearmed it out into the water with sudden violence. His lips
pressed hard together, a black line drawn narrower and taut with unknown
gravitation. He stayed crouched, still watching the horizon. "I hate the
ocean."
Damien blinked. "Why?"
Silence, so long that he had decided Brian wasn't going to answer. Then, "It's
just...too much. There could be anything out there. No one can...control it."
He leaned over and hugged a clumsy circle around Brian's neck and shoulders,
out of some vague urge to offer comfort. Brian reached up, stroked his wrist
briefly, but his eyes did not move from the horizon, and his expression did not
change.
 
He isn't going to, Damien thought. He tried not to be disappointed. This was
already the most unbelievably wonderful night of his life. It was madness to
want anything more. This was so much more than he deserved.
They were halfway to the boardwalk, the blues band growing louder as the
distance between them closed, when Brian tugged him sharply to the right. His
heart gave one hard infuriated slam against his voice box. The beach and the
wind and the blues took away the sound he made, and Brian didn't hear. His
heart settled hectic and indignant somewhere in the vicinity of his windpipe.
Brian drew him closer by the neck of his shirt, and leaned in and sucked at the
boy's mouth. Damien made another sound, pleading and scared and Brian covered
his mouth with his hand and moved his kisses to the boy's neck.
Damien leaned, then sat, then was suddenly on his back with Brian's hands under
his skirt and then tugslide his fishnets were around his knees and his skirt
was pushed up so far the wet hem was brushing his chin. The sand was cold and
strange under his ass. He made a fullbody soundmotion and pushed up, towards,
closer, desperate.
Brian looked down at him, leaning up, hair still windsnapping, a dangerous
shadow against the sky. He tugged at the elastic leg of Damien's carefully
chosen underwear, then slid his hand under, all calluses and scars and ragged
fingernails. He leaned in and inflicted another kiss. Damien made a more
insistent sound, appetite instead of terror, and snapped his crotch up hard
against Brian's hand.
"Is it black?" Brian said against his mouth.
"Black?" he said, dazed.
"Your underwear."
"Bright blue," Damien said, eyes closing, hands clenching hard on either side,
fingers clawed into the sand. Brian held his shoulders, pulled him down,
sandscraping, pushed his knees apart and up. He fumbled his hand against his
belt buckle.
"Not like this," he said.
"No? Like what, then?"
Like dreams, he thought. "I don't know," he said, and he didn't resist again.
Brian's dick was against his thigh, now, hot and hard, and he tried to want
this, tried to make his flesh lucid and devoted the way it was when he was
alone with pictures and headphones pouring LeClaire's voice into his ears.
Brian's fingers pushed against him, then inside him, too dry, too rough. He
took them out, soaked them with spit, and pushed them inside again. The pain
was the magic he had needed, and he groaned again and hooked his feet behind
Brian's back and said, "Now, go ahead, now."
His eyes were closed. He felt himself pulled closer, friction with sand, the
strange tickle of pubic hair against his own, and a kiss that he was grateful
for. He was aroused in a new bright way that seemed to center not in his groin,
but his fingertips. Brian pushed in with his fingers guiding his sex, the
motion like rape, and left lipstick on his browbone. "Like this?"
Damien shuddered hard, his teeth grinding together. God. I've wanted you,
inside me for years. Years. He gasped in his breath and nodded. "However you
want to, I want you to," he said to the pictures on his wall in his room
thirty-six miles away, and pulled his bottom lip between his teeth.
He came too soon, splattered his own stomach and Brian's chest, and the guilt
was exquisite, worth every ache, worth every bruise. Brian kept driving inside
him until he thought the cramps would spasm through his lips into a scream, and
finally came deep and hot, far enough in to make Damien cringe, and left a
semicircle of teethmarks in his shoulder. The sensation brought him close
again. He had never done this before without a condom.
ARRHYTHMIA
There were only three other cars left in the parking lot of the Red Dungeon.
The van with the equipment was long gone. Brian pulled up beside the door,
squealing the tires of Kevin's hearse. The guitarist was leaning against the
wall beside the USE OTHER DOOR sign, smoking and frowning.
Damien fumbled for the door handle and climbed out, aching. His stomach was
killing him. It wasn't from the fucking. It was nerves. He felt like he was
going to puke.
Brian climbed out, tossed the keys to Kevin. "Hey, you need a ride anywhere?"
Damien shook his head. He'd expected that, but it hurt anyway. "That's my piece
of shit over there," he said, gesturing in the wrong direction, without
looking.
Brian walked around the car to him, put his arm around the boy's shoulder. "Can
I get your number?"
That made tears a very real danger. It hurt so much he thought it might have
been better if Brian had sucker-punched him. But Damien nodded, and Brian went
over to bug Kev for a pen while he found the chain at his waist like a zombie
and followed it to his wallet, looking for something he could write on. Brian
brought him a pen, and he put an old movie ticket-stub on the hood of the
hearse and scratched his number down in the faint green light from the
streetlamp, watching his hands do this as if guided by signals from space.
Brian pulled him close, kissed his cheek. He pitched his voice for only the
boy, and said, "Hey, I think we'll be back this way in like, two weeks on the
way to another show. I'll call you then." He kissed Damien again, on the mouth
this time, and made the scrap of paper disappear.
Damien's mouth said, "Okay." .
He went to his car, returned a wave from Kevin, got in and sat down, feeling
semen gritty with sand in the crack of his ass. Tears scorched up into his eyes
like acid rain. He blinked hard, turned the radio on as loud as it would go,
and started the engine. It took him three tries to find the headlights.
In Kevin's hearse, Max ran a red light and Brian leaned against the passenger-
side door, cutting lines with his old college ID on a dismembered Big Mac box.
Some punk band was mangling an Alice Cooper song on the stereo. Kevin sat in
the back seat, smoking a joint and frowning out at the city, his left hand
making occasional phantom chords to help the punk band along. "Did you fuck
him?"
"Yeah." Brian did a line through a piece of plastic straw that was stained pink
from Max's fucking Hawaiian Punch. He sniffed again, arranging the drug until
he tasted it in the back of his throat, and straightened the second line. "He
was scared, but he wasn't bad. Tight. Cute kid."
Kevin pushed up his unnecessary sunglasses, did a hybrid sniff-cough and
exhaled through his nostrils. "You going to call him?"
"Maybe," Brian said, and shrugged, streetlights cutting a graph across his face
through the bars of an iron fence.
"So where'd you go?" Kevin asked. He didn't want to know. He had no idea why he
was asking.
"The beach. That place down by that big motel."
Max laughed. "How much sand you got on your balls?"
Brian punched him, laughing, and they did a dangerous swerve that made Kevin
choke out a garbled profanity about the safety of his car. A police car parked
on the shoulder ahead watched this maneuver with little interest, and they sped
past him, invulnerable.
Damien got his key into the lock just as his roommate opened the door. "Hey,"
he muttered, and stumbled past her to the bathroom. He didn't want any of
Kate's disapproving looks or condom lectures. Not tonight.
He stripped off his clothes, peeling off boots and shoes and socks and shirts
and bracelets. He stopped with his t-shirt in his hands and held it to his face
and inhaled and held his breath, once, before he threw it on the floor with the
rest of it.
He touched the dampness on his thighs, licked his fingers, and stood crying
while the tub filled with steaming water. The bite on his shoulder was
darkening into a nasty black violent mark the shape of a solar eclipse. I
should get someone to take a picture of that, he thought. What the hell did I
think I wanted from him anyway?
He unrolled toilet paper and blew his nose.
Kate knocked. "You all right?"
"Yes," he said, weighting it with enough drippingsweet irritation to make her
leave him alone. After a second or so he heard her walking back to the living
room, and he sighed, spared the speech for at least a while.
The water was hot enough to redden the skin of his feet as soon as he stepped
in. He sat down by degrees, stretched out, and waited to feel clean again. When
waiting didn't help he attacked his skin with soap and fingernails, and when
that didn't help he pretended he didn't care.
After almost an hour, he climbed out, shoved the dirty clothes into the corner
with his foot, wrapped a towel around his waist. He made it to his room without
falling over boxes or shoes in the narrow hallway, and closed the door and
dropped the towel and climbed in bed with wet hair without turning on the
lights. His fingers found a smoothcrackle stain on his sheet, and he pulled his
hand away and made a sound in his throat like he'd been stung. He drew the
quilt and some assorted clothing over his head, curled up small and tight
against the wall.
He made himself go through every idiotic if-then fantasy he'd had, held each
one up against the reality of this night just to see the glaring merciless
contrast. He'd been more or less in love with something he'd built out of
pictures and two CDs and interview posturing, and he'd been just close enough
to right. He was so mysteriously hurt that he couldn't even figure out why he
was angry.
He resisted for almost another hour, then turned over on his back and started
to masturbate, with too-rough strokes, eyes counting pictures that were faint
variations in shadow on the walls. His favorite was in the corner, LeClaire in
a ruined white lace wedding dress with bared teeth, with LUSTMORD written
across his chest in violet lipstick. It didn't matter that the poster was an
abstract in the dark. He had it memorized.
In the end, though, it was the thought of the bruise on his shoulder that
brought him off.
***** Chapter 2 *****
FERVOR
The fight, really, was all Max's fault.
They were in Miami in a redneck bar watching bleacheblonde strippers do
ridiculous things to metal poles. Brian had on a black t-shirt and his old
leather jacket with all the zippers and the Throbbing Gristle patch and the
safety pins. Max had on a light blue trenchcoat and a pink terry-cloth shirt,
but he looked more like a psychotic seventies reject than a fag, and the
rednecks were leaving him alone so far.
They were sitting in a little nook that was too close to the door and not close
at all to the stage. Most of the tables around them were empty or were being
used to hold jackets and drinks while the occupants crowded together at the
foot of the stage. It was a tourist dive, with a fairly large ratio of truck
drivers and bikers.
"We should get out of here," he said, the instant they sat down.
"In a while. I want to get a drink," Max had said, flipping a dreadlock woven
with turquoise yarn out of his face.
Brian nodded, and that was his mistake, because forty-five minutes later Max
was extremely drunk.
"Max, you're drunk," he said, interrupting Max's too-loud inappropriate story
about a round of blowjobbing he and Kevin had done in Orlando at a party. Max
was telling this particular tale with a plethora of gestures. "Come on. Quiet
down."
It was too late. The looks getting shot at them were increasing in number.
Brian stood up, looked hard at Max, said, "We're leaving," and nodded towards
the door.
Max understood, finally, clarity dawning behind his oversized sunglasses.
"Oops," he muttered, and wobbled to his feet and followed Brian in a dazed
crooked line outside into the parking lot.
 
They had parked Kev's car far away from the door. They were halfway across the
parking lot and Brian was almost beginning to hope that nothing was going to
happen when a guy stumbled out of the bar behind them. He gave a messy
alcoholic yell in their direction.
"Shit," he said, hearing the footsteps speed up to a drunken run. With one hand
he palmed his sunglasses off his face and tossed them, and with the other he
shoved Max hard to the left, just in time to save him from a full tackle and
stepped between his bassist and their attacker.
It was a short, pudgy inbred fuck in a faded blue ball cap and a grimy
sleeveless shirt that said CARL'S TOWING. He had highschool football muscle
that was melting into flab, and he reeked of sweat and beer.
Brian squared off his body, gave the man a cold dead look. "The fuck is your
problem?"
The man's answer was like an ugly existential game of charades. He made
wavering indignant gestures, while yelling a garbled complaint. The only
recognizable words were fag, sick, and fuck.
The South can be so charming, Brian thought, and sneered and stabbed his middle
finger in the guy's direction, and rolled his eyes. He took a fake step,
pretending that he was going to walk away.
The guy fell for it. He made a sound like a pissed-off sea lion, and tried a
sluggish roundhouse. Brian pivoted in and threw out an arrowstraight perfect
punch as hard as he could with his right hand, the one that had all the rings.
He did this with no wasted motion, with exasperated speed.
It was like hitting a side of bacon wrapped around a cheap ceramic plate. A
greasy fracturing sensation traveled up his hand and into his chest. The guy
dropped. His hand was covered with snot and beerspit. He shuddered, lips
peeling back in disgust, flicked his hand in the air and then wiped it on his
jeans.
The entire incident took about fifteen seconds.
Max was standing breathless and shaken and scared, holding both hands up as if
he had been frozen in the act of shielding his head. He was a glyph that
spelled out the word cringe. "What just happened?"
Brian flexed his hand. A dull annoyed ache. Not bad. He probably wouldn't even
need ice. "Nothing, Max. Did you see where my sunglasses went?"
"You threw them," Max said, slowly lowering his hands, staring at the moron
squirming on the ground.
"Max, I know I threw them. I threw them so they wouldn't get broken. They're
Armani. Never mind," he said, spotting them. He went and picked them up,
gingerly. Not broken. He blew off the dust, cleaned them carefully with the
tail of his shirt, and put them back on.
"He called us fags, didn't he?"
"Something like that. We are fags, and it doesn't matter," he said, his cliché
sinking feeling warning him that extremely soon it was going to matter.
Max was standing with his hands clenched at his sides now, the stare colorized
into a glare, doing something like panting through his nose. "Is my bass in the
car?"
"Max, why--"
"Because it's heavy as fuck and I'm going to bash his fucking skull in with
it!" he screamed, at full serious volume. He drew back his foot and slammed his
sneaker into the redneck fast and clumsy, ribs, back, thigh. The guy kind of
whimpered with each feeble kick. He made no move to get up, and Brian suspected
his jaw was either dislocated or broken. Or both.
Brian let Max have four kicks, none of which connected all that well, before he
grabbed him. He tried to drag Max towards the car, but Max was his height, and
had a hulking kind of build, outweighed him by at least thirty pounds. He got
away twice. The second time Brian sighed, lit a clove, and let Max just kick
the guy. He sent one habitual look towards the bar. Loud country music. Nobody
was coming out.
Max was punctuating a lecture, now, kicking on each word for emphasis. "Fucking
stupid sack of shit. What do you care if I like to suck dick? Why does that
fucking have to give you a problem?"
"That's enough, Max," he said, in a quiet version of the lead-singer Fuhrer
voice. Max stopped.
He was grateful. He was also careful not to look relieved. Sometimes Max was a
very loose cannon, and he would have been utterly without surprise if he had
gone back for another round of yelling and kicking.
"Bitch," Max muttered, and covered his face with his hands and turned his back
on Brian and went to the car.
 
They sat. Max stared fixedly out into nothing. Brian smoked, watching him, and
turned on the radio with the volume low. He turned it to disco to see if Max
would smile. He didn't smile. "Max?"
Max sniffed hard. "I hate that shit."
Brian nodded. He knew Max didn't mean the disco. He reached over and smoothed
one hand over Max's nest of dreadlocks. "I know."
Max shook his head.
"You gonna cry?" Brian asked him, quietly.
Max was silent. He sniffed again. "No," he said, dripping sarcasm that was
supposed to sound macho. Then he lost it, and covered his face with his hands
again, shaking.
"Hey," Brian said, and stroked his hair again. He couldn't think of anything
else to say, so he repeated it--hey, hey--in a voice that was as close to
gentle as he could fake. He pushed at the window crank with his foot as subtly
as he could and threw out the rest of his clove.
"I'm just sick of all that shit," Max burst out. He leaned forward against the
steering wheel and wrapped his arms around it, his hair swinging forward to
hide his face like surrogate hands.
Brian couldn't reach his head without sliding over now, and there was a fifty-
fifty chance that would make Max go berserk. So he patted Max's shoulder
instead. "I know," he said. "That's why we're doing what we're doing now.
Vicious--"
"--fag music," Max finished with him, and Brian could hear him smiling. "I'm
just sorry I fucked up. I'm just…drunk," he said, and sat up and started the
car.
"Only thing you did wrong is those shoes. Fucking nobody wins a fight in
sneakers. And, you kick like a girl."
Max punched him. It was a flimsy punch. Brian pretended to rub his shoulder,
and Max abused the transmission until they were out of the parking lot and back
on the road.
Back in the hotel room, Max took off the sneakers in question. He sprawled out
on the double bed. They could hear Kevin in the room next door, jamming on
distorted guitar, with their keyboardist, Casey. It was something the two of
them did as a hobby--within the band itself, what Brian said went. Musically
and otherwise. They got together when they could and played discordant, alien
music that was slow and unmelodic. This left Brian and Max to their own devices
once or twice a week.
They usually got high and watched television. Occasionally they had sex, or
performed vandalism for variety.
"It's fucking hot in here," Max said, and waited for Brian to find and decipher
the room's thermostat.
Brian jacked the AC down as low as it would go, pointing the little dial all
the way around to the snowflake. The other side, the heater, had a tiny sun
symbol. No rocket science here. He locked the door and turned the deadbolt, and
stretched out beside Max. "You still upset?"
"Yeah," Max said. He made a long, shuddering, pissed-off sigh. He clicked on
the TV with the glued-down remote control, and channel surfed until he stopped
on Space Ghost.
Brian turned over on his side, watched Max watching cartoons for a while. He
got bored, considered packing a bowl, then leaned over and kissed Max's chest
through his shirt.
"Pest," Max said.
"Oh, a pest, am I?" Brian moved up, settled under Max's chin, leaving wet
kissmarks.
"Your hair tickles," Max told him, without sounding terribly determined,
brushing strands of it out of his face and sniffling dramatically.
Brian switched direction again, backtracked down to Max's waist. Max ignored
him. He stopped there to stroke from Max's thigh to his crotch. "You won't
sleep if I don't. You'll lie there bitching about rednecks and doingmy coke
until four am." He chewed a wet spot in the tail of Max's shirt to pass the
time while he undid the snap and zipper and purple boxer shorts. "These are
really hideous pants," he said.
Max started to laugh, and ended it in a narrow groan. Brian had worked his dick
out of his pants and was stroking it in a teasing, friendly way. Sex between
them was an amusement and a convenience, a kind of obscene horseplay that had
gone on since they met in college.
Brian leaned up and licked Max's hand to make him giggle.
"You are a fucker," Max said, squirming and laughing. "Either suck it or quit
so I can watch TV."
"Go ahead. Watch TV," Brian told him.
He moved back down and took it in his mouth, toying with the head in a
deliberately inept way until Max groaned and smacked the back of his head.
"Queer."
"Whore," Brian said, muffled, and gave him a long hard lick. He did it twice,
just to hear Max stop breathing, and settled into the rough shallow suction Max
liked best.
"Queer," Max said again, much more softly. His head rolled back, and he sighed.
It never took long. Not between them. Brian kept it up after Max had come in
his mouth, until Max whined a complaint and pulled away from him. He sat up
with his mouth full of sperm and his lips pressed tightly together. He gave Max
a wide-eyed psychotic look, and swished the come around in his mouth.
"Gross," Max said, sounding genuinely horrified.
Brian raised his eyebrows, pointed to his mouth, gestured kiss?
Max yelled. Brian went for him. He had him pinned when the phone rang.
They both went for it, with Brian humming angrily. He shoved Max's hands away,
picked up, and said with his mouth still full, "Hello?"
"Is that you, Brian? It's Tristan.
He almost choked. He swallowed too fast, and choke-gagged. Semen in your
windpipe was no fun at all. "Hey."
He violently gestured at Max and the phone, mouthing Tristan.
"Oh shit," Max said, and sat up, trying to get his half-hard penis back inside
his clothes.
"Yeah," he said, waving away Max's frantic Well? gestures. "Thanks, yeah.
Okay."
He hung up. Max stared at him, in a truly priceless pose of complete
frustration.
Brian smiled. "Judecca Tree. With special guest, Deathstyle."
Max shrieked, and jumped, and grabbed and dragged at Brian, yelling. There was
a confused hectic rush to punch each other, shout, pack bowls, pour alcohol.
Kevin and Casey came over after the yelling went on for a minute or so. They
asked what the hell was going on, and Brian told them.
"We got the tour," he said.
 
STARVATION
Damien's first Deathstyle exposure had been two years earlier. He'd picked up a
tape from someone handing them out in a club parking lot, and had put it into
his Walkman three days later out of boredom. Halfway into the first song, he
was digging through his backpack for the tape case, desperate for liner notes.
DEATHSTYLE, lustmord. Color photocopied in red on black. It was a demo, and the
most of the songs had ended up on Blood Red Tangent.
The inside had a track listing, broken into three sections: dead, hard, and
spread. There were photos, of a tall narrow vampire-pretty man with long black
hair, a series of three. He was posing on a metal autopsy table, in long black
gloves and nothing else, with a Y-incision drawn on his chest in lipstick.
Smutporn poses, with knees or gloved hands hiding his sex. Below this there was
a stark listing of names. Vocals, Brian LeClaire.
Sobbing, growling, wailing, pleading, threats, gasping, moaning, screaming,
honeydark chemical evil: Brian LeClaire.
After two weeks of trying, he scored a third-generation copy of a fairly decent
camcorder tape of a live show. He'd watched it like a junkie watches the red
swirl in a syringe.
LeClaire had been wearing a torn black velvet shirt, a black g-string, a red
garter belt, shredded fishnets, and knee-high combat boots. He had demon eyes
and a pornographic mouth and a razor-straight confident viciousness that left
Damien vacant and groping for the remote to rewind it with the hand that wasn't
fighting with his zipper. Again. Again.
He'd been letting a stupid punker-goth named Aaron fuck him occasionally at the
time. No kissing, no discussing it. He would call. He would drive to Aaron's.
They would smoke a joint without looking at each other, pet each other with
practiced disinterest, and then fuck on the couch with all of their clothes
still on. Brian. Fuck me harder. He'd said it muffled into the sleeve of his
jacket so that the Aaron didn't hear. That hadn't been all he'd said, either,
but the rest of it had been--well, obscene. The violence he had insisted on
that night had landed him in the free clinic for persistent bleeding a week
later
At the clinic, he'd told two horrified medical assistants that he'd been raped
by the lead singer from some band. No, he didn't self-identify as a homosexual.
Yes, he was aware of the risks of unprotected anal sex. No, he couldn't
remember the guy's name, or the name of the band. No, he hadn't called the
police. Yes, he would like some painkillers.
He wasn't sure if they believed him, so he invented details. They either bought
it, or pretended to so that he would quit for chrissakes talking about it.
That became part of it, too, the disinfectant smell and the metal table
(the table, he would have felt like this, cold and naked and)
and the prescription and the half-disgusted, half-worried looks they gave him.
That, and the condoms they gave him.

Do you want an AIDS test?
No. Not right now. I can't take that right now.
Do you want some information on AIDS and the HIV virus?
…not really.

He'd used one of the condoms later, on a dildo he had made out of an oversized
candle. The video was playing, and the spermicide he didn't need was slick and
cold and stung inside him. He'd fucked himself bleeding again, and the drum
machine through the speakers told him how fast, how hard.
In the two weeks since the Deathstyle concert, and the luscious casual fuck,
Damien's life had been slowly and patiently fraying into a useless tangle. He
could not sleep. He could not play. The three guys he had been trying to scrape
into a band got frustrated with his drunken ineptitude and ditched him. He was
in serious danger of being fired from his job--the everything boy at a tiny
record shop.
Damien ignored this, nodding at his bassist and his boss with the same glassy-
eyed apathy that he gave the television and the red lights that caught him. At
night, he lay in bed with both Deathstyle CDs (Murder Deity andBlood Red
Tangent) and nothing else in his changer. He curled up naked in his old
blanket, drinking, mouthing drive infection through this cage, love me into
liquid rage along with LeClaire over and over. The bruise on his shoulder
faded, and even his rubbing over it hard with his thumbnail didn't make it
stay. He had wanted to get it tattooed over, but he hadn't been able to scrape
together enough money for that.
He had an AIDS test. Came up negative. He nodded and smiled at the nurse and
shoved the papers in his wallet crooked and careless, and went out and sat in
his car and stared at the sand still in the floor and smoked the same kind of
cloves as LeClaire did, feeling scoured out and disappointed.
He was lying in his room again, smoking the last of the weed out of a truly
shitty pipe when Kate knocked on his door. "Call for you."
"I don't want to--" He reconsidered his drug supply, and said, "Who is it?"
"Some guy, says his name is Brian."
Damien almost knocked her over trying to get past her.
 
He grabbed the phone, strung the cord behind the couch, through the kitchen,
and out the back door onto the porch, muttering don't hang up, don't hang up,
don't hang upunder his breath. He lit a clove, took a deep breath, and said
"Hello?"
"Hey."
Only that, dark and casual and amused. Damien felt a literal chill run from his
neck to his toes. His turn. "So…what's going on?" He was trying to smellthe
phone, for some ungodly drug-related reason, and he was damned close to licking
it to see if he could taste anything.
"We got this massive gig. You won't believe this. We open for Judecca, thirty-
six shows, nationwide."
He gasped, and felt an odd Christmas explosion of joy in his chest. Judecca
Tree was the goth-industrial band. This tour could make Deathstyle's career.
"That's great!" he said, and meant it.
"Yeah, we're excited. Anyway at this level it looks pretty stupid for us to be
setting up all our own shit, not having anybody around taking care of us, so we
wondered if you might want a job. You said you could play, so I figured you
might know enough to scrape by if we showed you how everything goes."
The bottom dropped out of his reality. Backstage. Makeup and vinyl and wheeling
heavy speakers and coiling wires and plugging in guitars. Tall angry guitarists
in sweat-smeared makeup drinking beer out of plastic cups. Cops loitering
around and exchanging glares with the band. LeClaire. LeClaire, for chrissakes,
was asking him to hang with them for a year. He bit his lip hard, and managed
to squeak, "A job?"
"Well, yeah. I need to know pretty soon if you're interested, though, because
we kick off in three weeks and I'd need you down here in a week."
"Down here?"
Brian made a sound like a cough, and said something away from the phone. "Yeah,
we're in Miami."
Damien's mind went into overdrive. His car was a piece of shit Nissan that he'd
gotten at a government auction for four hundred dollars, with an almost
completely non-functional coolant system. And he had a grand total of forty-
seven dollars in his bank account. Miami was a seven hour drive. "Um, I guess,
yeah, I'd love…yeah, I'd like to do it. Yeah."
He was babbling. He stopped. He could sell his guitar borrow from Kate donate
plasma suck dick downtown for yuppies in Lincolns. He'd find a way.
Brian coughed again. "Well, cool. You might want to get a pen."
Kate was watching him through the window, frowning. He frantically pantomimed
pen and paper. She rolled her eyes and brought him a marker and a notebook. He
nodded and umm-hmmed at Brian and wrote GREEN HEIGHTS, Room 415, scattered
directions, and the number for the front desk.
"This place is kind of a shithole, and we haven't made any money yet, we're all
crammed into two rooms. It's only for the two weeks, rehearsal and
everything…after that it's buses and it should get a lot worse."
"That's cool, don't worry about it," Damien said. That part, at least, was
true. He'd been homeless twice in his life, and lived in abysmal circumstances
for most of the rest of it. Being crowded into a cheap hotel with his favorite
band was no particular hardship. "Okay, well, I guess I'll--"
"Hey. About that night, the beach and everything."
Damien swallowed, pushed his hair behind his ears. "Yeah?"
"You're not upset about that, are you?"
He was shaking his head until he realized that was useless, and said, "No.
I'm…no, why would I be?"
"Yeah. Well, give me a call the day you leave…it's Saturday now…say next
Friday?"
"Sure, okay." A roadie. I'm going to be their roadie.
"Well, we'll see you then," Brian said, and disconnected.
Damien stood, listened to the silence on the line until the dial tone finally
came back. He debated screaming. Then he dialed his work, and told his boss to
go fuck himself.
"Kate, he wants me to work with them. Come on. Please."
"I'll lend you the money, okay? I already said that." Kate scraped her hand
through her short iodine-orange hair, and lit another of her awful Camel non-
filters. "What I'm saying is he's buying himself a fucktoy, and I'm not sure
you realize that."
Kate had rescued him from a rundown two-bedroom apartment, when the seven
people living there was threatening to expand to nine. She was thirty-two,
freak to the bone, and wonderful, but she got parental on him every so often.
Damien flopped beside her on the couch, stole her lighter, and lit another
clove. The TV was quietly muttering the 700 club at them. "I know that," he
said quietly. "I thought about that, and I know. I don't care." Actually that
was kind of inaccurate. He did care. He cared from his aching eyes down to his
aching erection, but he figured she didn't really need these kinds of
unpleasant details.
"Damien--"
"Please, not the And the Band Played On lecture, Kate. Please. I really just
want to be happy about this. Please."
She sighed, and blew smoke through her nose. "You call me as often as you can."
"I will."
"Promise me."
"I promise," he said, and leaned over and kissed a noisy smack on her cheek to
try and make her laugh, but she only gave him a tired smile, and said, "And
you'd better let me help you re-dye your hair before you go."
SOMNAMBULISM
"So you asked him?" Max said, sounding almost completely disinterested. He was
building a tower of fast-food cartons on the nightstand table, and he had a
messy joint rolled in a page of Ezekiel from the convenient Gideon bible
hanging out of his mouth.
"Yeah. Freaked, and then said yes," Brian told him, snagged his joint and took
a massive drag. "He'll be here by Friday or Saturday."
Kevin was sitting at the foot of the bed, scowling, but when Brian mouthed
shotgun? at him, he leaned over and pressed his mouth open against Brian's, and
drew in recycled smoke. "This is fucked up, you know," he said with caterpillar
puffs shaping his words in the air.
"Knock off that shit, Kev. We went through this. He's an adult. Makes his own
choices. Like you," Brian said, and gave him a smile too sweet to be anything
but a warning.
Kevin shrugged, and muttered something in a pissed-off tone of voice--but he
dropped his eyes. Max took back his joint, and hit it again, obliviously
setting a McDonald's cup on top of his artwork, with the finesse of a
Renaissance sculptor.
 
KEROUAC
Damien watched the gauge on the gas pump rolling closer to fifteen dollars. His
makeup was sweating off, and his Skinny Puppy shirt was sticking to his chest
and his back. Two frat boys in Hilfiger regalia were lounging against a decked-
out Mustang in front of the pay phones, elbowing each other and gesturing in
his direction, snickering. The car had one of those fake-gold chain license
plate frames, and a sticker that said TOO FLY.
TOO FLY, for chrissakes.
He thought of cold night sand under his back and the edge of the stage banging
into his ribcage.
He stopped the gas pump dead at fifteen, and gave the two idiots a cold dead
stare.
He walked into the store, got a scowl from the fat bleacheblonde behind the
counter, and gave her a ten and five ones. He watched, sickly fascinated, as
she keyed it in with chubby fingers, hitting the keys with the tips of
outrageously long fake orange nails. She had on so much mascara that her
eyelashes were sticking together in clumped gloppy spikes. He wondered if she
knew that was only attractive on men. Skinny men. Then he wondered if she knew
she looked like the women on sleazy Internet fetish sites, the desperate sites
that came up no matter what you typed into the search engine, or unfolded onto
the screen in unwanted pop-up windows. Those sites usually had descriptions
like XXX FETISH FAT LARGE BIG WOMEN LARGE TRIPLE D PUSSY SLUT, and were great
for gagging people out at parties. Especially parties where drugs were
involved.
He snickered, trying to picture her sprawled out on someone's fake tigerskin
rug like a beached whale in red leather. Or sitting on the face of some poor
misguided corporate fuck, drowning him in rolls of cellulite. She heard him,
and he ducked under her glare and out the door before she could say anything.
He went back to his car, and the three tries it took him to start it made the
frat motherfuckers nearly kill themselves with laughter. The only thing in the
car that did work was the stereo. He'd built it himself, and he suspected the
volumes it could reach were illegal. He Alien Sex Fiended them at noise-
pollution volume and gave them an elegant variation on the finger, and peeled
out.
He hated fuckers like that. They were the popular jock bastards, drowning their
probable fagness with an endless supply of homophobia and backslapping and
football jargon. Tough. He thought about how much it hurt to get fucked hard
and sudden and merciless, and figured both of them would probably scream like
girls if their pseudo-toughness was put to that kind of sticky test. He was
tempted to reverse, but one could only get away with so much immaturity in one
encounter. He'd save it for a cop or something.
He drifted off again into vinyl feedback daydreams, and had fantasized himself
into a physically difficult position against a blaring amplifier when he almost
smacked into a Lincoln. Both of them slammed on their brakes, and he cheerfully
flipped off this guy, too, swerved around him, and floored it to the on-ramp.
A green and white sign said: Miami--three hundred and twenty-seven miles. He
turned the stereo up louder, lit his last remaining joint after groping around
in his pockets, and forced his way into the left-hand lane. If he went
eighty…eight went into thirty-two four times which meant in four hours he would
be in a hotel room with Brian LeClaire. He couldn't go eighty, though. His car
would explode.
And, it had too many stickers. Somehow, FREEDOM OF RELIGION MEANS ANY RELIGION,
GAY AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO FAKE IT ANYMORE, and FOLLOW ME TO SODOM seemed to
get the attention of cops pretty goddamned quick. And that wasn't counting the
band logos and the big pink triangle, the one that was so big he'd had to fold
it up onto the top of the trunk.
Sixty-five, seventy was more realistic. Six hours.
He stabbed at the eject, threw Another Planet into the passenger seat, and put
in Murder Deity. The first track was a nasty furious rant called "Biofuck" that
made him drive faster. You will suck my fucking dick. You will be my heretic.
After that, "Horus," a sad discordant song that he usually skipped past on his
CD player because it creeped him out. The tape deck took too long, though, and
he let it run.
He had taken a long detailed shower that morning. Kate had watched him shave,
silently, watched him paint on eyeliner and change his mind three times before
settling on the t-shirt and black jeans with leather shoestring stitched
through them at random. She kept saying, "Just be careful. That's all I'm
asking. And please call me as soon as you get there."
"It's just to Miami, Kate," he told her. "I'm not even leaving the state."
"Still. I worry. A little queer with a big mouth like you, what if your car
breaks down?"
He grinned at that. She got him with variations on that one constantly. "Scott
looked at the car. He did a couple of things and said that as long as I don't
let it overheat, I'll be fine. Okay?" Damien frowned at his pencil-thin
eyebrows, dug in a shoebox for tweezers, made minute corrections an inch from
the mirror.
"You can call collect. I'll find a way to get you home."
He sighed, set down the tweezers and hugged her. "I know."
She'd squirmed away from him, and sniffed, and went into her room and came back
with the one thing she owned that he would have done anything to have--her
heavy leather jacket from her hardcore punk phase, utterly decked with
expensive studs and paint. "It gets colder than you think, around places like
Seattle and Detroit and shit," she said, in her abrupt cigarette voice, without
looking at him. She tossed him the jacket. It was so fucking heavy that
catching it nearly pushed him off balance. "I want it back when you get home,"
she informed him, and stalked down the hall to the living room, where she
settled down to chainsmoke and watch talk shows until he was ready to leave.
"And don't take my purple lipstick," she called.
"I won't," he yelled back, and cursed under his breath and took it back out of
his makeup bag.
The jacket was on the passenger seat, arranged over the back, studs snarling,
anarchy symbol jeering at him from the sleeve. It spread an aura of the Sex
Pistols and 1980 and black berets and heavy engineer boots all the way through
the car. He smiled. He'd tried it on, back home, and it looked great on him.
He hoped Brian liked it.
He hadn't taken her lipstick, but her silver eyeshadow and her skull choker
were in his bag. Damien didn't consider it stealing. He knew perfectly well
she'd be in his closet before the end of the week, and besides, he fully
intended to give them back whenever he got home. He figured she'd bitch about
it the minute he called, and he figured the words fuckwad and queer would be
used frequently. He couldn't wait. He missed her friendly abuse already.
"You have an imagination disease," he growled along with LeClaire, and edged up
to eighty-two and drew in a deep breath to smell the leather of Kate's jacket.
He drove south.
Four hours into his drive it ceased to be amusing. Damien couldn't remember the
last time he'd driven for so long--actually, he was pretty sure he had never
driven for this long. His back hurt, his neck hurt, and his right leg hurt from
toes to thigh from pushing down on the stubborn gas pedal. The car had a
particularity that involved steady pressure refusing to translate into steady
speed, and he had to constantly adjust to keep it at seventy-five.
Hunger and pain made him stop about a hundred miles short of Miami. He did as
Kate had asked, for once, and stopped at a rest area whose highway sign
advertised the dubious safety of SECURITY, and he kept on his sunglasses to
hide the eyeliner. Cloves and sweat had removed most of the rest of his makeup.
He parked, climbed out and stretched next to a station wagon that had
apparently been crammed full of screaming rich kids. The mother, a faded woman
with a bad perm and too much jewelry gave him a smile. "You coming south?"
He stared at her, startled at being the recipient of polite conversation.
Something from his mother kicked in, and he said, "Yes ma'am. I'm going to
Miami."
"We're coming from Fort Lauderdale. You're heading into some rain. Might want
to be careful," she said, and patted a wailing crew-cutted boy in a LANDSALE
CHRISTIAN ACADEMY shirt that had attached himself to her leg.
"Thanks," he said, blushing for some unknown reason. He felt he was supposed to
reciprocate somehow, and he said, "Traffic's not too bad farther north. Watch
the trucks, though. Those fuck--those guys think they own the highway."
She nodded, and smiled again, and her husband--stout and Rolexed in a Polo
shirt--gave her a disapproving look and telepathically signaled her to load
their litter back into the car.
"Bye," Damien called at her. He was strangely delighted when she waved through
the tinted window. He watched them pull out. Some kid in the back was hitting
another kid with an Elmo doll. He decided that aside from the obvious benefits,
that gayness got points for leading to no small children whatsoever. He didn't
ever want to look worn out like she did, or fed up and humorless like her
husband did.
He wandered to the concrete building that seemed to make up most of the rest
area, found the bathroom, and took a long satisfying leak. Then, he dug out his
wallet, and carried it in his hand with the chain swinging against his thigh,
and bought a Dr. Pepper with two quarters and two dimes. He drank most of it in
one gulp leaning against his bumper, burped at a volume that made an old lady
with a cane glare at him. When it was almost gone he set the can down and
crowded himself back into his car. All the aches returned, multiplied, and he
groaned and squirmed, fastened his seat belt, and tried the ignition.
Rrrrr….then, nothing.
"Fuck," he said, dismally. Not now. Not so close. The guilt was immediate-he
shouldn't have stopped. He should have known better.
He lit a clove, smoked it down to the filter, praying in an abstract kind of
way, and tried it again.
Nothing.
"Fuck," he said again, with more insistence. He put it in neutral, and tried
and tried and tried
and it caught.
"Hallelujah," he said, almost a whimper, and nudged the gas with painstaking
care until he was sure it wasn't going to stall. He backed out carefully, and
stumbled his way through the tourists back onto the highway.
Thirty miles outside of Miami the car began to rattle.
"Fuck, don't, I'm almost there, come on, don't," he said, trying to read his
torn-out notebook page of directions and drive at the same time. This caused
him to slow down to forty-five or so, and indignant yuppies in rented Cadillacs
roared past him. He gritted his teeth, tried to memorize left on and right at
and kept driving.
Damien parked at the Green Heights Hotel across from Room 415. He sat in his
car with the engine off. It would probably never start again, it had expanded
into a symphony of noise and a rhythmic vibration that got worse and worse. Who
knew. Broken. Who cared. He did manage to have the stereo running, and he sat
basically having a nervous breakdown, after which he did his hair and his
makeup again and dug in his lunchbox until he found a breath mint.
The door was beige, scratched up, with 415 on it in those metallic mailbox
stickers. He knocked. There appeared to be a red light bulb in the window, and
Ministry was blaring inside the room. Damien stood having a panic attack and
wondering if he'd packed his diet pills when someone yelled, "Who is it?"
"It's Damien. We met at the Red Dungeon show," he yelled. He eyed the parking
lot. There were people walking around and shit, and here he was in ripped pants
and red lipstick.
The door opened, the music poured out like smoke, and smoke poured out like
music. Kevin nodded at him, stepped back to let him in. There were two double
beds crammed very close to the door, and Brian was sitting at the foot of one
laughing and hitting an elaborate bong. Max was beside him, wearing Mickey
Mouse ears and a stunning green jacket blazing with sequins.
"The other bed's ours," Kevin said. "And he said God help us if we fall asleep
first."
Damien looked. He saw that Kevin was serious, and he must have had a weird
expression on his face, because Kevin laughed and pulled him inside.
"Hey. You're actually here on time," Brian said. "I don't think you really met
my bassist. Max 69, Damien."
"Hey," Damien said.
"Yeah, go ahead and ask him about the sixty-nine part," Kevin said, sprawling
out on the unoccupied bed.
"No, don't," Brian said, laughing.
Too late. Max grinned, and announced, "In 1969 cigarettes only cost seventy-
five cents a pack. In 1969 acid was primarily available on sugar cubes. In 1969
the foresting industry--"
Brian punched him in the arm. Max stopped.
Damien sat on the edge of the bed next to Kevin. He ignored his brain's
repeated attempts to worry about the math of who would be sleeping where. If
Brian wanted to sleep with Max, it was fine, dammit. Fine. Besides, he couldn't
even imagine ending up on the outside of the bed, with Brian two feet from him.
He would die. "Is that true?" he asked Max.
"Some of it. Some of it I just make up to keep it going longer. I forget which
is which," Max said. He was trying to pinch Brian, and they were getting
pretzeled together, endangering the bedside table. Max seemed to be getting the
worst of it.
Kevin was elbowing Damien, waving a bright-green ceramic pipe under his nose.
"Hey, hit it a while. We've all been smoking already," he said.
Damien took it, along with the day-glo purple lighter Kevin had, trying to look
casual. The panic was bigger now, a thick solid knot low in his stomach. He
could feel himself trying to breathe funny, that too-short too-fast pattern
that meant he was about to really freak.
He hit the pipe to camouflage it, but Max noticed. "Hey, dude, kid, you're
shaking, you okay?"
"I'm fine," Damien said. He was not fine. He was freezing cold and scared to
death and worse, he was getting hungry. And his pills were in his duffel bag
outside in the trunk of his car. He knew he'd never make it. He had to calm
down, he could not lose it, not now, not in front of them, not his first night
there.
"You want a Xanax?" Max asked him.
"I'm fine," Damien said again. He wasn't about to be anything else. Not in
front of Brian.
He hit the pipe again, staring at his shoelaces. Black, with little red skulls
woven into them.
Brian, in fact, had gotten up and was busy ripping the wrapper off of one of
the plastic hotel cups with his teeth. He picked up ice cubes with his fingers
from the bucket on the dresser and threw them in. Three Jack Daniels bottles
were sitting on the dresser--one empty, one full and still sealed, one a little
over half full. He opened the last one, sloshed the cup overfull, and held it
out to Damien, rattling the ice cubes like a question.
Damien took it. He took a swallow that was too long and too sudden, and gritted
his teeth to keep from shuddering. The alcohol exploded inside him, scorching
his empty stomach like sulfuric acid. He positively hated drinking that way,
but he would have rather bitten off his own tongue than said anything about it.
By the time Kevin had repacked the bowl twice, he was imagining he could taste
the sweat from Brian's fingertips in his drink, crystallized somehow with ethyl
alcohol molecules.
 
NEUROSCIENCE
Damien, Max, and Kevin were in an animated discussion. They had somehow ended
up discussing the relevance of Ziggy Stardust and Alice Cooper as Jungian
archetypes. The marijuana and the JD wound together and ambushed his panic, and
Damien found himself actually participating. And, to his amazement, they were
actually listening to him. They weren't just pretending, either--he was used to
that, and he knew all the signs. They were actually paying attention and
responding to his comments. He supposed this was what people meant by
conversation. He'd never experienced anything like it with anyone but Kate--
never with two people at once, and never with anyone whose approval he was
desperate to have.
That was what was apparently going on, at least. Underneath that Damien was
paralyzed by the extreme sensation of Brian sitting on the floor directly
behind him. Brian was ignoring the debate except for occasional laughter and
watching the local news. A transgendered teacher had been fired from the white-
collar Baptist highschool, and her appeal had been denied. A reporter with Ken-
doll hair was interviewing someone from the ACLU about it.
"Okay, then, fuck Jung. We'll do tarot, then," Max insisted. "The Magician,
man...Alice Cooper was definitely the Magician. Ziggy Stardust was like--fuck,
I don't know--the Fool, or something.
"Bullshit," Kevin said, smoking a cigarette now, obviously offended. "Ziggy
Stardust was this Messiah character. Like, innocence and all that. Like in
'Starman'." Kevin sang, startling Damien with a lovely tenor. " 'He'd like to
come and meet us but he thinks he'll blow our minds.' "
Max stared at him, kept the poker face for about five seconds, and then
surrendered, liquefied into helpless laughter.
"See?" Kevin said, loudly, to be heard over Max's hysteria. "Ziggy Stardust was
like this space Jesus."
Max was utterly unable to communicate now. He was laughing so hard his eyes
were watering. He made a helpless stop, stop gesture in the air with one short-
circuited hand. Even Brian was laughing, though he did not turn away from the
television.
"Fuck you, you know I'm right," Kevin muttered, but he was laughing too, a
little.
"Space Jesus," Max said, and lost it again. He ended up lying on his side this
time, giggling into the bedspread in an exhausted way.
"Damien," Brian said, still watching the news.
Damien froze, in an over-exaggerated deer-in-the-headlights kind of way, and
Kevin saw it and that set him off, which dominoed into setting Max off again.
Damien ignored them. He turned, watching the television strobelighting Brian's
face.
"So tell me about you," Brian said. It was too heavy on consonants to be a
suggestion.
Damien swallowed, gestured, stalled. The panic reservoir in his stomach jetted
a cold thin plume up into his throat. "Um, hang on, I have to get something out
of my car," he said.
 
A man in a blue jogging suit waved at him from one of the balconies. Damien
waved back, struggling to force the key into the trunk's lock. He persuaded it
open. The duffel bag had slid back so far he damn near had to climb in to get
it, and when he finally managed to drag it out and put it over his shoulder, it
almost unbalanced him. Brian had said the tour might run over a year, and he
had packed everything he could think of. His bag was heavy. Kate had loaded it
into the car for him.
Underneath his bag was the long smooth rectangle of his guitar case. Inside
that was a glitterblack Alvarez with active pickups and a black widow
airbrushed onto it, threatening to crawl up the neck of the guitar. He didn't
know why he'd brought it. Seeing it there gave him a little flash of mysterious
guilt.
He left the guitar, lugged his bag back across the parking lot and set it on
the doorstep. The pills were zipped into a little side pocket. He pushed four
of them through the foil, and worked his tongue in his mouth until he had
enough spit to swallow them. He could almost feel them vaccinating him against
hunger.
Brian opened the door just in time to catch him crouching there like an idiot.
He looked down at him, and said, "Christianity."
 
HABITUAL
 
Damien stood up, slowly, the pills trapped hard in his throat like a bruise.
The flash of Brian as a shadow with black light blazing behind him was
freezeframed on his retinas. It threw him into a loop of every rock video he'd
ever seen, like he'd stepped through a vortex into 1985.
"Christianity really is about love. Don't you think?" He leaned over, picked up
Damien's bag with one hand, and set it aside. He sat down, just as Damien was
standing upright again.
Damien sat down too, way too quickly. Almost a controlled fall. He forced
himself to swallow again, and said, "What?"
Brian shrugged, made eyes up at the streetlights. "Think about it. It's
obviously not about sex. And fear? Please. I know you have the Red Sea and God
smashing Sodom and Gomorrah and all of that--but when's the last time anyone
has really seen God do anything scary?"
A brief, ugly slideshow: the drag queens he had seen once back home, in
downtown Chicago. Three of them, one of them hardly older than he was, with
flawless lipstick and ancient eyes. The kid, who had sat behind him in ninth-
grade earth science, who would kick the back of his desk, lightly, in rhythm
with the wordqueer-queer-queer. Damien wondered if those counted as scary
things God had done.
He meant to reply, nod, anything, but Brian was sitting so close their legs
were pressed together. All he managed to do was exhale the word, "Sodom?"
"The way I see it," Brian said, startling Damien by reaching between them into
his pocket, and pulling out his cloves and a lighter, "is that Christians are
in love with what they call God. They're in love with eternal love and
permanent irresponsibility and a life without consequences. Not God himself,
because they have no comprehension whatsoever of what God is like."
Brian shrugged, and stared out across the asphalt. "I like that sticker on your
car--'Gay as hell, and not going to fake it anymore,'" he said, and smiled.
Damien realized he was high enough to actually catch the almost-telepathic
metaphor Brian had just handed him, and he said, "This is about me working for
you, isn't it?"
Brian looked almost-surprised, then slowly, hesitantly delighted. "Quick,
aren't you? Not as vacant as you look."
They almost communicated, but Max opened the door behind them, and said, "Dude,
you guys want a sandwich?"
Brian ordered something that made Damien wince.
Damien requested a veggie sub, no mayonnaise. The guilt was instantaneous. He
thought Brian looked at him funny for that, but he decided to dismiss that as
paranoia. He worried about money for a brief instant--he had eleven dollars,
and no idea when or how he was getting paid, but nobody said anything about it.
Kevin and Max prattled at them, climbed over them, piled into the hearse and
drove off at a ludicrous speed.
After they squealed out of the parking lot, Brian picked up Damien's bag and
brought it inside. He set it down, sprawled on the bed, and left Damien sitting
on the doorstep with the door still open. Damien watched this, and had a deep
hard spark of indignation at that, but he went in, and closed and locked the
door behind him.
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Summary
     Wow, my camera angles (or point-of-view, if you like a more
     traditional way of looking at this) are a fucking disaster. Here's
     the film anyway.
BENEDICTION
"What about your job?"
Damien went and sat on the same bed, between Brian and the television. "You
know what. Why me out of thousands of fans?"
Brian laughed. "We don't have thousands of fans. Not yet. Why not you? Who else
can I possibly ask? Every other friend I have is in the band already, and
anyone else I used to know hates me because I'm selfish and shallow."
Damien had to laugh at that. "You know what I mean."
Brian reached for him, stroked his fingertips along the ends of his hair, the
half that lay in a blue curtain against the line of his jaw.
You were right, Kate. Welcome to my job interview, Damien thought, and he
closed his eyes and leaned into Brian's hand, and smiled.
"Are you sure this is what you want?"
Soft, slow lure of words. Damien shuddered. "Like I have something better to
do?"
"It won't be what you think," he warned, fingers moving the design down to
Damien's neck.
That's what I want.
"Yeah?" He turned his head, chasing Brian's hand, wanting it against his face.
He moved his thumb along the boy's lips, then cupped the back of his neck, and
mouthed, Yeah.
 
TOXIC
 
"How long should we stay gone?"
Kevin pretended to ignore Max, made believe his entire attention was focused on
driving, then shrugged carefully, and said, "No clue. A while, I guess."
"He said 'get scarce when he gets here,' do you think that means all night?"
"Hell no. We'll go back in, like, two hours." Kevin turned up the radio,
hinting in the subtlest way Max would understand that he didn't want to talk
about it. He stared, and they passed Waffle Houses and gas stations and car
insurance joints and a funeral home with a blue neon sign. He was listening to
London After Midnight, which Brian hated. He was also chainsmoking, and he
desperately wanted to fix, but he hadn't dared do it in the hotel room.
Max studied this behavior, and said, "You're pissed off."
"Max, I am not pissed off."
That didn't settle it, but Max pretended to drop it. Sean Brennan sang about
love and rape. Max said, "Why do you think he's doing this?"
Kevin blinked hard. Makeup in his eye. "Look, I have no idea. I don't care why.
I just think it's fucked up, is all. He's just a kid, for chrissakes. He's not
even old enough to drink. Did you see the face he made at the JD?"
"So? You were seventeen once."
"Yeah, and I'm not anymore," Kevin muttered, and turned the stereo down. Too
late for subtle. They were talking about it.
Max looked at Kevin for an irritatingly long time, without speaking, just
smiling an not-quite-harmless smile. "Why don't you just tell him?"
Kevin edged up from sixty to sixty-five, and said, "It's not like that."
Max laughed. He kept on for a minute or so, and Kevin finally broke down. "What
is so funny," he sighed.
"You. You're sitting here in your hearse in full makeup, listening to fucking
London After Midnight, going to fucking Subway, moping over our lead singer.
You, man, are sooo goth.
Kevin punched him. Max punched back, and in the middle of the ensuing fight,
one of them turned up the stereo again.
 
GRAPHITE
 
The television was off. The stereo was moaning old Bauhaus. The blinds were
drawn.
Peter Murphy was talking about the cutting room floor and it was kissing and
hair-pulling and necking and hands under shirts and both of them kneeling on
the bed and neither one was talking anymore. Brian moved back, sitting with his
back against the wall and his knees up and pulled Damien closer, shoved at his
shoulders until he was pushed down low on the bed, his face close to Brian's
crotch.
"Stop," Damien said. Brian didn't. He squirmed, to get his attention, but Brian
was forcing his head down and he had to pull away hard to stop him. "Wait, wait
a minute."
"Why?"
"Because," Damien said. He was blushing so badly it actually physically hurt.
"I haven't...before."
Brian pulled him up, looked at him. "Never?"
"Well...like, to me, yes. Never me, doing it back."
"Why not?"
"Because we were late for class, and I had to get tights and a belt and a
wallet chain back on." Damien snapped.
Brian laughed long enough to destroy what little dignity Damien was pretending
to have. "Is that all?" he said, luring Damien into lying beside him.
"It's been..." He shrugged. He forgot what he was saying and rolled on top of
Brian and buried his face in all that hair. It smelled of marijuana smoke and
that too-sweet candy shampoo that cheerleaders used. God, sexy. He moaned, very
softly, confessing something, and pushed his tongue out and caught Brian's
collarbone. "I want to," he said.
Brian touched his face, his eyelashes, his bottom lip. "Open your mouth," he
said, and pushed his index finger in and drew a line along Damien's tongue.
"Lick hard. Watch your teeth," he whispered.
That scared him. That delighted him. Damien closed his eyes.
Brian's finger tasted of sweat and resin. He drew on it hard, forgetting to
watch his teeth, ground a line along his fingerprint with the top ball of his
tongue ring.
Apparently it was okay. Brian sighed, and rearranged them so that their legs
were tangled and Damien could look into his eyes. "Nice. Do that again," he
said. "Now deeper...easy...slow breaths. Stay relaxed."
God. He's teaching me to suck his dick, Damien thought. Brian withdrew his
finger, pushed at Damien's lips with two. He drew them in without hesitation,
and Brian pushed them in deeper, faster. "Relax your jaw more. Better," he
said, and rewarded Damien with a kiss close to his eye.
He was pushing his fingers in so deep Damien could feel his fingernails at the
back of his throat. That electrified him, tore him through years of secret
rituals and obsessive purity. Didn't he gag himself just this way, when it was
too much, the pressure of substance inside his stomach, dissolving into
chemicals and keeping flesh covering bone? The marijuana vertigo whispered to
him. His throat was callused. Brian's dick could choke him deeper, better,
might even make him perfect.
Brian had his arm around him, now, and was making soft insistent noises in his
ear. The weight of his arm, the hard lines of chest and elbow and jaw were
pressing in. He held the back of Damien's head, showed him how to move for
longer strokes, more pressure. "No. Like this," he said, and took Damien's hand
and drew his fingers in, etched long rough strokes, then introduced a flutter
against the kid's fingertip. He could do it so fast it felt mechanized.
Damien forgot the rule about teeth again. He bit, then pulled his mouth away
and hid his face against Brian's chest and left clumsy kisses there. "Want...I
want..."
Brian smiled, bit his fingers back, hard, and let them go, and pushed him down
on the bed again. "Do it, then."
Fingers, zipper, the plane of stomach and hips. Damien's eyes were blurring
everything, smearing his vision through his eyelashes, click click. Then
Brian's erection was against his face, against his mouth, against the roof of
his mouth. Open. Wet. Open. His throat closed hard, but this was a spasm he
knew. He could do it again. He could do it on purpose.
Brian leaned his head back against the pressed-wood headboard. He groped on the
bedside table, found another Gideon joint and a lighter, and lit it. He stroked
Damien's head with his other hand, murmured goodand yeah. Smoke, between his
eyes and the television screen. A late-night televangelist hawking the Bible
Diet.
Finally he made a long hissing groan, held Damien's head close, pressing his
cock in strangulation-deep.
Damien was lost, oxygen-deprived, moaning himself, feeling raped, feeling
choked. He was squirming, trying to press his dick against Brian's foot, the
bed, anything, friction. His eyes drifted open, once, and he saw Kate's jacket
lying on the floor between the bed and the wall, chrome studs gleaming at the
shoulder, Misfits pin jeering on one lapel. One empty sleeve was stretched out
with NO FUTURE written on it in white paint.
SOLACE
Getting the sandwiches took a grand total of about five minutes, and they still
needed to stay out for at least a few hours. Finally they pulled into one of
the all-night places, probably a Village Inn or a Denny's. It was redneck-chic,
with green vinyl booths and dumb Wal-Mart Halloween decorations. Next to the
cash register was one of those plexiglass tubes filled with water and little
platforms you could try to drop quarters onto.
Max ignored the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED and led Kevin to a booth in the
absolute back of the smoking section. He dug around in his purse--an ammunition
case, metal, that weighed a ton and was crammed full of makeup and candy--and
found huge ugly sunglasses with pink plastic frames and little palm-trees
rainbowed onto the lenses. He put them on, got diverted by strawberry lip
gloss, and by the time the waitress came over (making faces over her shoulder
at another waitress about these arrogant self-seating bastards) Max was
engrossed in the intricacies of eyeliner with the sunglasses pushed up on his
head.
"We should go back," he said.
"I'm not sitting in the goddamn parking lot waiting for slut LeClaire to get
laid, and it's too late for a movie," Kevin said.
Max shrugged. "Coffee," Kevin said, before the waitress could open her mouth.
"Bring one of those pitchers. Is there anything on this thing that doesn't
involve meat?" he added, gesturing at the menu he hadn't opened.
"I want a Coke," Max said, cheerfully complicating things, tracing a careful
line under his left eye in Paris Blue.
The waitress watched him do this, the way she might have watched someone
scratch their crotch through their pocket. She was white-trash skinny, with
stringy brownish hair, a beak nose, and thin Southern Baptist lips. She had a
cheesy crucifix on, proudly arranged to hang above her apron, one of the tiny
gold ones where Jesus was so small he was kind of impressionistic. This theme
was continued with a WWJD bracelet around her left wrist.
She already had her hands on her hips. The only thing left to do was roll her
eyes at both of them. If she had done that, she would have turned into a
cartoon. "We got t-bone."
Kevin pondered this, and decided the woman was too stupid to be reasoned with.
"I want a very large salad. And a beer." He wasn't looking at her. It was
pushing his tolerance to talk in her direction. Fortunately, that meant he
didn't see her expression.
He thought about Brian making demonic orgasmic noises. In his ear. He watched
his cigarette burn while Max ordered scrambled eggs and apple pie. He didn't
unknot his shoulders until she left.
"Bitchy," Max observed. "She's back there telling her friends what a fuckhead
you are."
So that's what Jesus would do, Kevin thought, about an eighth-note away from
hysterical laughter. "Yeah, well, fuck her." He hoped she overheard. He needed
to fix, now. His skin was crawling, and there was this.....pressure.....behind
his eyes. And Brian was somewhere else. And I'm the last thing on his mind.
Max went on, still at his projection volume. Kevin laughed. Heroin. Truckloads
of it. Fire hoses spraying it into the sky over a parade. Eight million
needles. God, his head hurt.
"No shit. God forbid their ass should actually touch the toilet. And why?
Because the stupid bitch before them fucking stood up and pissed all over the
seat."
"A vicious cycle," Kev said, in his Rocky Horror criminologist voice. He was
mostly ignoring Max's prattling. He was looking over his shoulder too much, but
he couldn't help it. He had this sudden conviction that someone was there that
he knew, someone that hated him and probably had a large-caliber firearm.
Kevin stood up, took an ashtray from another table.
"They're just stupid," Max announced, happily, getting glares from a black
woman in a nice corporate ensemble. "And they would buy the most dumbass music
on earth. Women are the reason that…shit…floods MTV. These pop bands, little
teenage boys done up in Hilfiger, and Lilith Fair crap. And they ask me if I've
heard this moronic CD, and whether I like it."
Kevin snickered, watching Max's new fan. She was muttering to her boyfriend
now, and rolling her eyes. "So what would you say?"
Max was through with eyeliner, and was patting powder across his forehead.
"Depended on whether a manager was there. Two days before I quit I told this
one bitch that I don't listen to that dyke shit." Kevin lit another cigarette
from his first one. "You should have seen her. All done up in those stupid
baggy pants and one of those little Courtney Love t-shirts."
"That's fucked up, Max. Seriously," Kevin said, and coughed and patted the
pocket of his jacket. It was the classic leather bomber jacket, like greasers
and assorted hoods had been wearing since the fifties, except it was blinding
magenta. He kept his kit in what Brian called the gun pocket, inside left.
Max drew the symbol for Capricorn in the sugar with his fingertip and shrugged.
"This is America. I can be a misogynist if I want to."
Max was cute, Kev reminded himself. Max was good in bed, friendly, kind, and
mostly legally insane. He had done too much acid, and most conversations with
him were something like this one. He just couldn't help it. The guy was weird.
Their coffee arrived. The waitress was steadily avoiding eye contact and
conversation, and Kevin took the pitcher and the cup from her and poured it
himself. He glared at the waitress until she went away, and drank half of it in
one gulp. His hands were shaking. His knees were shaking. Everything was too
fast, too fast. "Excuse me," he mumbled to Max, and he almost knocked their
beloved waitress over on his way to the bathroom.
 
Kevin pushed the needle in too hard and too deep and gritted his teeth and
pushed the plunger down anyway. He was wedged in the handicapped stall with his
back against the door. He could hear someone pissing into the urinal on the
other side of the door, rustle of zipper and jacket. A suit.
He didn't own a suit. He wondered when he'd last worn one. Highschool,
probably. Graduation. They made you wear one under the goddamned black gown,
even though no one could see it. He'd worn a black suit with a purple silk
shirt and a white tie. And combat boots. Polished. And eyeliner, a precise
waterproof line. The teacher checking them had made a disgusted face at him,
that particular twitch of upper lip and narrowed eyes that Heterosexual Persons
In Authority had been making at him since he was fifteen and started buying his
own clothes. Those aren't dress shoes.
Yeah? Kevin had said, handing him a sneer of his own. Tell that to the Marines.
He'd met Brian two months later, while working in a music store that sold
mostly overpriced pop. They'd talked, about Ministry and Coil and how fucked up
Florida was.
Somewhere between those early days--shoplifting and weed and all kinds of
dangerous fun-- and this, now, this strange band thing, it had gone bad. Brian
had demoted him from friend to employee with limited benefits. Sex between them
was occasional, and only happened when Brian couldn't get to anyone else. He
hated it. His quiet campaign of escalating behaviors that he knew would piss
Brian off didn't make him feel better. It just made him feel useless.
what….am…..i…..doing……shooting……up…….in…..a……denny's……
The heroin straightened out the angles of the room, pulled his thoughts smooth
and coherent again. He was nauseous, but he figured that was because he hadn't
eaten in at least twelve hours.
He fixed his clothes, checked the mirror before he left. He looked like shit.
He wasn't surprised.
LUCIDITY
The next morning, while everyone got ready, Damien was handed a stack of papers
in a manila folder with STAFF HIRING written on it in black marker. He filled
out a tax form, five or so copies of things that wanted his name and address
and references. Some things he didn't have, and Brian told him to leave them
blank. He was kind of frozen on the salary--almost four times what he had made
as a music retail clerk. He was also kind of stunned by the papers about
insurance. He'd never had medical insurance in his life, let alone all these
other incomprehensible things. His attempts at doing the math for what it would
cost him each month got him three different answers, all pathetic dents in the
crazy money he'd be making. Fuck it.
The other thing that stopped him was the birthday. He'd be eighteen in two
weeks or so. He flagged down LeClaire, who was drinking a rum and coke and
eating chocolate, and tried to ask the right question. LeClaire stared at him,
and politely suggested that he accidentally write the wrong date. Fine.
Whatever. By the time anyone noticed, he'd be legal anyway. He hoped.
He signed everything, and gave it back to LeClaire, who wrapped a rubber band
around it and left in a stack to go to their manager, a short friendly
hyperactive guy named Tim that Damien vaguely remembered seeing either last
night or that morning. He hadn't seemed like he managed much, or something. He
did, or said he'd do, whatever Brian said. Everyone seemed to be like that. It
reminded him of something.
Outmode was a too-slick techno hell, with a sleek sound system and a mutilated
dance floor. Max and Kevin set up, with Damien running hectic and desperate
from one to the other. Casey and Fathom showed up late, in sunglasses, ignored
everyone, and proceeded to vanish into the adjoining room and play pool.
Brian lay on the floor on his back with a clove in his mouth and his arm thrown
over his eyes.
Damien did what he could. (Hand me that cord. no, the other one. no, the other
one.) Kevin was patient with him, but Max kept hurrying them both, gesturing
with his eyes at Brian. Once they had everything running, Damien evacuated to a
barstool.
And sat.
And sat.
Twenty minutes later Brian got up, and wandered in a leisurely fashion onto the
stage. He tapped his mic, muttered check-check-check, deemed it unacceptable,
and made Kevin reset everything. That took another half-hour. After that, they
argued over which song to rehearse, until Brian settled on a new one. Finally
ready, he signaled, and they began it.
This was not the pretty, intricate, merciless wall of texture he had expected.
It started to be, but Brian stopped them constantly. Mostly he yelled at
Fathom; the percussion made him unhappy no matter what they did. They started
the song over from the beginning, and Damien saw Kevin give Brian a strange
look, and drop his hand flat and hard on the strings of his guitar,
deliberately making a crashing ugly noise that stopped them immediately, Max in
giggles, Brian in a fury, and Casey and Fathom ignoring everybody.
"Shut the fuck up," he ordered, pointing at Max. "And you," he said, at Fathom
now, "Get your shit together or I get a drum machine."
He didn't say anything to Kevin at all. He just gave him a look that would have
made Damien collapse in terror, and said to everyone present, "We open for
Judecca in seven days, people. This is our chance. This is probably our only
chance. You want national distribution, you want whores and nice hotels, you
want drugs--" He looked dead at Kevin here, too--"you fucking get it tight.
We're better than this."
He waited for almost a full minute, until he had silence and something that
resembled remorse, and handcounted two three four for them to start over.
Again.
In the hours that followed, Kevin missed the cue for his solo, dropped into the
wrong key, and missed his cue to start over. Damien was watching him closely,
now, and he was positive he was doing it deliberately. He was also watching
Brian, and the level of angry he was getting at was frightening. He finally
stood up, quietly, mumbled something about being right back that they all
ignored, and wandered until he found the bathroom.
DISPOSSESSED
The bathroom was almost as dim as the nightclub outside. The only real light
was a weak flat greenish bulb in a square plastic fixture that was very close
to the warehouse-type ceiling. In the wall just below this, there was one
narrow window, the kind you could slant open with a tiny crank. Damien was in
the first stall, leaning against the wall and shaking. He'd been trying to
puke. It wasn't working. He was only succeeding in giving himself a
stomachache. He hadn't eaten enough of anything to puke. The only thing he'd
had that day was the two shots of vodka Brian had insisted he have. That seemed
to have vanished directly into his bloodstream.
He stood up, knees weak and jittery, and wiped his mouth with the back of his
hand and spit into the toilet. He fumbled in his pocket, and took out two of
his pills, covered with fuzz, brushed them off and swallowed them.
He had to figure out some way of getting to a drugstore or something, to get
the kind that didn't have caffeine. Sometimes he would just be sitting, doing
nothing, and his heartbeat would kick into third gear for no reason at all,
going slam slam slam so fast and so hard that he was afraid he looked funny,
like he was blushing or something.
He heard the door slam open, and a smashing wedge of noise came in, hollow
percussion through too many speakers, then laughter and something breaking,
like a bottle or a glass. Then a shuffling few steps, and another laugh that
sounded either drugged or faked. Something or someone slammed into the
partitions hard enough to rattle the door of Damien's stall.
His brain did all the things it remembered how to do in reaction to noises like
these--it made his mouth dry, his hands quivery, and his heartbeat rapid. This
wasn't caffeine, now. That didn't come with free adrenaline.
He stood holding his breath, his back tight with the memory of bruises. He knew
what he was waiting for. He was good at this kind of math. He'd heard two
people--one dragging, and one more or less being dragged--and one laugh. He
wanted to hear the other person laugh. Because he was pretty sure that one of
them was Brian.
Another laugh, the same ugly laugh, and another slam, this time against the
tile across from the stalls, and a soft, ragged moan.
Damien took one careful, quiet step forward and put his eye to the crack.
Brian was holding Kevin up by his jacket. Kevin's lip was bleeding in a thin
line down his chin. Brian leaned in, kissing close, and murmured a soft litany
that revolved around bitch and worthless.
Kevin closed his eyes, shaking, and nodded.
Brian pulled him forward and threw him back against the wall again, and pulled
back his fist, but he didn't throw the punch. Kevin cringed back, waiting, his
hands flat and open. It looked like a ritual, like something choreographed. If
it hadn't been for the blood, Damien would have thought they were playing.
Brian threw two quick, hard jabs into Kevin's ribs, and a third, harder blow to
his stomach that drove an ugly sound through his teeth.
Damien winced, and sucked in a silent appalled breath.
Kevin would have fallen, but Brian was holding him up by his jacket. He looked
at Kev's face for a long time, expressionless, and then he took his cigarette
out of his mouth and threw it. It landed and rolled into the space between two
tiles, inches from Damien's foot. They were the kind of tiles that would blur
into a swastika if you squinted at them just the right way. The cigarette
gleamed there, trailing a hairline fracture of smoke.
Brian leaned in, whispering. Kevin nodded again, not so gracefully this time,
and choked back a coughing fit. Brian straightened him up, and slapped him
twice, with long full swings, and let him go. He turned and went out the door,
without hesitation, without a word. Kevin slid down along the concrete wall,
and kept going until he was curled close around his knees. He didn't move. He
made one sound, something between a sob and a growl, and then he was silent.
Damien's hand went to the latch, and stuck there, paralyzed. He could see
himself opening the door, going to Kevin, and….what? Giving him tissues?
Hugging him? And what if Brian came back? What then?
He took his hand away from the latch. He touched his own bottom lip, and then
crouched, slowly, and snuck his hand under the door and picked up Brian's
cigarette. There was maroon lipstick on the dark brown filter. He put it in his
mouth, and straightened.
Kevin didn't see him. He stood up after a long time, and walked like a zombie
to the sink.
Damien stepped back, carefully. He couldn't see Kev, but if he pressed his
cheek flat against the rear wall he could just manage to watch him in the
mirrors behind the sinks.
Kev was crying, quietly, and he took off his jacket with pain-jumbled motions.
Damien watched Kevin's reflection tying up, puzzled. When he realized what he
was seeing it gave him a dark, astonished terror. Heroin was a real drug. A
really real drug. This wasn't like pot, or the shitty overpriced opium you
could sometimes get. This was light-years different from doing coke once or
twice a month. And Kevin's hands were practiced and easy, and after he was
finished he put his kit away before he even bothered with his wounds.
Kevin folded his lip back, wincing, and examined the cut. He tore off wads of
paper towel and blotted the blood away from his chin, and cupped water in his
hands and rinsed out his mouth and spat pink water down the drain. Then, he
took a tube of black lipstick and a compact from his pocket, smoothed powder
over his face, re-applied his lipstick with meticulous care. He blew his nose
in another paper towel, arranged his hair with damp fingers, checked and
rechecked his image. Finally he left, satisfied that he looked fine, and no one
would see anything.
Damien stood in the stall, still afraid to open the door. He waited for two
full minutes, then threw the stub of Brian's cigarette into the toilet and
flushed it.
 
A wide hard throb of pain zigzagged into Kevin's stomach just under his
sternum. He had just stepped out into the hallway and he stumbled into the
wall, and made a very soft and very muffled sound that would have been a scream
if he hadn't caught himself. His arms threw themselves around his chest without
his permission, and hugged hard, as though he might explode if he didn't hold
the pressure in. He stood there panting, waiting for the pain to subside and
the room to stop flickering. He had never had anything hurt that badly so soon
after a fix, and for a moment he wondered if that hadn't been the sensation of
a rib puncturing a lung. He couldn't figure out whether he wanted to puke, or
faint, or crawl back into the bathroom and wait for Brian to come looking for
him.
The thought of Brian hitting himagain made him hiss through his teeth. He
opened his eyes wide, blinked hard, and forced his arms away from his chest.
The first step was the hardest.
 
Hell. I'm in hell, Brian thought. He was backstage, in the battered miniscule
booth that served as a dressing room. The owner had explicitly told them to
stay out of there. Fucking little pussy. There was a counter, with initials and
profanity decorating it, a scuffed mirror screwed crooked into the wall above
it, and that was all. It wasn't as if there was a hell of a lot there to
destroy.
He stared into the reflection of his own eyes, the mirror so close his forehead
was brushing the glass. He stared, breathing hard, and when he finally realized
that deep down in the absolute black of his eyes there wasnothing, perfect
flawless nothing, he drew in a long shuddering breath and leaned over the
trashy counter, and did a short thick line.
 
Casey, Fathom and Max were still fucking around when Kevin got back to the
stage. He ignored the looks he was getting and went up to the mic and slung his
guitar over his shoulder and went into "Coronary" all by himself, letting the
rest of them fall in however they could. He knew Brian hated it when he sang
anything with the band, even just fucking around. He was being careless. He had
no guarantee Brian wouldn't start in on him again, and he knew that if he did
get it twice in the same night while Brian was that coked up and he was that
strung out, somebody was going to the hospital. Probably me.
He sang anyway, because negative attention was better than no attention at all.
 
MEDIUM
They came back into the hotel room that night pissed at each other and
exhausted and crammed full of enough frustration to tear each other to bits.
Kevin pushed past everyone else and locked himself in the bathroom. Casey and
Fathom mumbled something about pay-per-view and vanished into their own room.
Max collapsed on the bed and covered his face with a pillow.
Damien hung back, so tired his eyes were gritty, and watched Brian fighting
with his shoelaces. "I'll do them," he said.
"No," Brian said, but he sat down and lifted his foot to let Damien untie them.
Max uncovered his face, squinted until he found the remote, and clicked on the
television. It was a hopelessly bad R & B show, with Internet comments running
in captions along the bottom. A woman with red extensions in silver Lycra shook
her tits above a banner that said
DMXTHUGZ: YA DMX ON TV IN DA HOUSE!
TeaSMOKE48: hey ya i would to if i was on TV
SaraFORny: 2222222222222222222229993333304
LAGngsta666: yo here with the beat goin on
TeaSMOKE48: is this that chatroom where you can get on the dance party?
DMXTHUGZ: IN DA HOUSE! IN DA USA!
 
The drum machine and overdone vinyl spindoctoring backed up this insipid
prattle. Max hit MUTE and yawned something about support bras. Damien picked at
the double-knots with his chewed fingernails until he untied one of them. His
fingers memorized the swishsnap of lace through eyelet, the smooth plane of
leather wrapped around LeClaire's calves.
Brian leaned back on his hands and sighed, flexed his foot, and watched Damien
lean back and pull hard and coax his boot off. It hit the floor, industrial
heavy.
Damien pushed that boot aside and started in on the other one. LeClaire looked
down at him, eyes heavy-lidded and amused, and he blushed and kept his eyes on
his work.
Max watched this, vaguely disgusted. "Thought you hired a roadie, chicken hawk.
Now you have a personal assistant?"
"Fuck off, virus," Brian said, and ran his fingers through Damien's hair. "So
he can multitask. So what."
 
MICROCOSM ONE: DAMIEN
 
When Damien was six, maybe seven, old enough to know that his Big Wheel was
stupid and too young to ride the too-big bike his dad had brought him, they
lived in a big ratty apartment with cockroaches and silverfish in a big ratty
apartment complex.
He amused himself mostly by excavating and then destroying as many species of
bug as he could find. Roaches didn't count. Killing them was work, not play.
His favorite things to squish were caterpillars. Those bastards were just
revolting, with their spiny twitchy backs and nauseating underbellies with all
the mechanics for their legs exposed. They splattered in a satisfying way,
without crunching, and besides, one had stung him once at another kid's
birthday party.
True caterpillar destruction didn't come until he found his dad's magnifying
glass. Some kind of kid-instinct taught him to focus the sun through it, and
the Damien Justice Laser was his new pastime of choice. Even roaches were less
work when you could make them explode. Bugs that were normally exempt due to
their ability to retaliate--like bees--were vulnerable. If you dribbled Kool-
Aid as bait the little jerks would land and stay, and then zzzzap! Vaporized.
It didn't last long, though. His dad found him doing it. Apparently he was some
kind of bug environmentalist, because he yelled, swatted Damien a few too many
times, took the Justice Laser and went inside to drink beer. Bored and hurt,
Damien wandered off to pursue his second favorite pastime--following Lloyd, the
maintenance man.
When Damien was older, David Bowie would remind him of this man. Lloyd had one
crooked tooth that managed to be charming instead of ugly, dark blonde hair,
and a beaten-silver ring that Damien longed to put on his own small fingers. He
would wander through the courtyards and parking lots until he spotted Lloyd's
faded red truck and then he would follow him around, quietly, often sitting on
the curb without making a sound, waiting patiently for Lloyd to fix the air
conditioner or kitchen sink inside somebody else's apartment.
Lloyd wore a white t-shirt and faded blue jeans and engineer boots with chains,
and he smoked Lucky Strikes and would stand over Damien pretending to be fierce
with a cigarette smoldering on his bottom lip, before he crouched down lower
and smiled and handed him something…funny long screws or little blown fuses
with the glass tube scorched and fogged. Once it had been some kind of circuit
board, studded with melted solder and wires on one side, plated a beautiful and
vivid green on the other. Damien kept these treasures in the box from his new
sneakers. The circuit board was the best. He would tilt it in the light from
his bedside lamp, wanting to fall into the color.
Lloyd was twenty-four. Damien's dad liked Lloyd, and sometimes he had Lloyd
come over and smoke pot with him and listen to records and drink beer. Damien
thought that Lloyd pretended to enjoy this for some reason, though he had his
own weed and he seemed to like the Plasmatics better than Deep Purple.
Sometimes Lloyd did drywall with his dad for extra cash. Damien pleaded to go
on these occasions, and his dad laughed and said, "He worships you, you know
that?" to Lloyd. Lloyd would give Damien a long look and then wink, as though
they had a joke Damien's dad couldn't get the punch line of.
When Damien's dad won tickets to Molly Hatchet, he took Damien's mom in the old
Ford and off they went, and Damien sat in front of the television drinking
chocolate milk and pretending to watch Superfriends while Lloyd sprawled on the
couch behind him, all jeans and boots and English Leather.
"You ever seen any horror movies?" Lloyd asked around his cigarette.
Damien shook his head, dizzy and hopeful.
"I have a VCR," Lloyd said, and leaned forward, sitting now on the very edge of
the couch. "I don't think your dad would mind as long as we don't tell him what
movie you saw."
 
Lloyd's apartment was dim and smoky and cluttered with records and books in
dusty stacks and there were posters of Sid Vicious and Jimi Hendrix and Che
Guevara. He made popcorn and put in Dracula with Bela Lugosi and he even let
Damien sit beside him on the couch, and didn't scream and yell about Damien
wiggling too much the way his dad did.
The movie was scary. The TV was the only light in the room and the music came
out of two huge speakers wired into the television and Damien was oh so scared
and he'd discovered he liked scary movies and his new purpose in life was to
see hundreds more.
Lloyd patted his shoulder when Bela waxed poetic about his wolves. He let
Damien hold his hand when the vampire women closed in on Jonathan Harker, and
by the time Renfield was crossing the library in that hideous feral crawl
Damien was more than happy to sit in his lap, blissfully scared, deliciously
scared, and Lloyd gave his fingers a playful bite with his almost-perfect
teeth.
 
After that, his relationship with Lloyd was kind of an itchy smear across his
memory. The events blurred together into one endless furtive session, Lloyd
lying between his legs and doing exquisitely gentle things with his mouth, his
hair soft against Damien's thighs, his eyes too-blue and delirious.
Nothing else changed. Lloyd was kind and abrupt and ultracool and even when
they....did....whatever it was you wanted to call that, he was gentle and
patient and kind and understanding. He never hurt Damien, never struck him at
all, unless you counted the dumb little fake punches he dealt out when they
were pretending to be superheroes. Damien wasn't afraid of him. He didn't have
nightmares, or trauma, or any of the other stuff they preached about on talk
shows, so he had no idea this was technically child abuse.
He...loved Lloyd, he guessed. He loved him more than anyone else, especially
his dad. He kept that love especially fierce and insistent, because in some way
he could feel like he had revenge against his dad if he loved Lloyd more.
Years later, Damien broke it off. He was twelve, finally old enough to realize
why he had to do it. It took him three weeks of crying. Then he stalled another
week, let Lloyd fuck him one more time, then waited till their usual wrestling-
turned-kissing session the next day, and said fuck you lloyd, get your hands
off me or i'll call the police.
He'd done it because he had to.
That night he'd cried about it again, hurting and already missing the closest
thing to a lover he'd known. Too dangerous. His father had been on him heavy
right about then, and some of the smacks landed with closed fists instead of
open hands, and Damien had been hearing faggotwhispered behind his back a
little too often at school. His dad drank beer and yelled about the queers on
TV, and if he had even suspected that his son was getting better head than he
was…from a guy who was now making more money than he was…he'd have broken
Damien in half. With a two-by-four.
There was more than that, though, wasn't there? The sex was still good, had
always been good, but it quite simply wasn't great, and it wasn't worth the
fear. That, and they had started to have differences of opinion. There was
this….boredom….now. There was this conviction that there was more to sex than
Lloyd's couch and watching The Hunger.
He wanted Lloyd to start being a little less considerate.
Four years later, he pushed the Deathstyle video into his VCR, and realized
what he'd been trying not to wish for.
***** Chapter 4 *****
EIDETIC
Damien lay in the dark, shaking. It was from pills. It was from nerves. It was
from having Brian breathing in the bed two feet away. It was from Kevin's warm
presence just beside him. It was from the ugly symbiosis between them running
through his hands and his throat and his lungs. He kept seeing them wound
together in that strange violent dance. He could not understand it. He saw the
same six frames, over and over; Brian's fist pistoning forward and back, and
Kevin's hand dropping down and his hair swinging over his eyes. There. Rewind.
Pause.
The look in his eyes, right there, before his hair hid his face. What was that
called? It was i knew it and finally and you bastard and please don't and
something else.
Whatever else it was, it was familiar.
Do I ever look like that? Damien wondered. Did I, before, when…
Damien turned his back to Brian. Kevin wasn't sleeping at all. He was lying on
his side with his arm wound under his pillow, watching Damien. They stared at
one another, caught, and then Kevin smiled and said, "Hey."
Damien said it back. He paused, tried for casual, and said, "You okay?"
Kevin sighed. "Now why would you ask that?"
Fuck. "I...um..since you couldn't sleep, I thought…"
"Did you hear?"
He blushed, and muttered. "Saw. I was in, um, the stall. When it happened."
"Jesus," Kevin said, and flopped over onto his back and covered his face with
his arm. "I had that feeling, but I couldn't exactly ask him to hang on a
second while I checked for feet."
"Does he...I mean…..are you okay?"
"Yeah," Kevin said. "I'm used to it. Usually he's more careful than to get me
in the face, though." He took Damien's hand and put it on his mouth. His lip
was swollen, and he ran Damien's fingertip along the inside, where it was split
and too warm. "I guess he wasn't watching himself, something."
Something weird and crawly went off in the pit of Damien's stomach, and he
pulled his hand away from Kevin's mouth and murmured something and tried not to
feel the dampness on his finger.
Kevin slid out of the bed, a narrow white shape with messy dark hair, and
started pulling on his pants and said, "You wanna go someplace?"
"Go?" Damien repeated like an idiot, confused. He was trying to convince his
brain not to check out what kind of underwear Kevin was wearing. If any.
"Just out. You're right. I can't sleep."
"Shut up, you guys," Max grumbled from across the room. Brian murmured
something in his sleep, and shifted, and Damien got up on tiptoe and snuck over
to his bag, unzipped it, and groped around for jeans.
 
They piled into Kevin's hearse and did about a hundred miles per hour the two
blocks to a gas station. Kevin went in and returned with cigarettes and beer
and a wide selection of candy. They floored it back and climbed the dumb four-
foot fence into the closed hotel pool.
"Peace and fucking quiet," Kevin said. He knocked the bottle caps off of two
beers and handed one to Damien. He watched Kevin and imitated him when he took
off boots and socks and jeans down to boxer shorts, but when Kev pulled his t-
shirt over his head and dropped it onto the pile, Damien got nervous. There
were blackviolet bruises fingerpainted on Kev's chest. Not all of them were
new. Some of them were so deep that the centers were livid white, pinpricked
with blood. His rings, he thought. He couldn't keep his eyes off them, but he
couldn't bring himself to stare.
 
He dawdled over arranging his socks inside his shoes on top of his carefully
folded pants. It was hot as fuck, and Kev was arranged sitting on the concrete
steps in the shallow end of the pool, stretched out wet and comfortable,
waiting for Damien to quit fucking around already and get in.
You live with them. Andheespecially isn't going to care. It's not like it's
your fault. Take your goddamn shirt off. Jesus, he told himself, disgusted with
his own weird shame. He pulled it off and dropped it, in something like
defiance, and stepped into the pool. The water was almost warm, soft as silk
and that clear artificial blue that made you want to duck under and open your
eyes. He couldn't make his shoulders comfortable. He couldn't decide whether to
push them down, hoping to somehow hide his back, or hunch them forward to make
himself seem smaller. He sat down, on the edge, without meeting Kev's eyes,
without offering explanation or excuse or even mentioning the long strange
scars he had.
Kevin let him go through this St. Vitus's dance for a minute or so, then he
grasped Damien's upper arm and made him lean over. What he saw didn't really
surprise him. It gave him a sick little sensation of déjà vu. He'd seen the
scars on this kid before he'd ever seen the scars on this kid. "Your dad?"
Damien pulled away from him with a gesture like a violent shrug, and did not
answer.
"Why?"
Damien slashed at the air with one hand, and took a long pull on his beer, and
said, "He found out."
"Oh," Kev said, and waited for the rest of it.
"It was…" Damien paused, and shuffled his thoughts again. He laid them out
again, chose more carefully, and said, "He didn't like the goth, and he didn't
like the me underneath it. I told him I was a musician. He laughed. He found
some things…"
He stopped.
Some "things" had been all two dog-eared magazines he kept in lieu of
pornography. One was Propaganda, with a special feature on Sean Brennan (lead
singer, London After Midnight, blonde, model-pretty, woman-pretty, fuck-me-now
pretty) and one was a copy of OUT he'd stolen because he liked one of the
models in one of the advertisements. He had come home, walked into his room,
and discovered his posters ripped from the walls, his bookshelf overturned, his
stereo destroyed, and fragments of paper printed with beautiful men scattered
all over everything like weird confetti. He'd had exactly four seconds to be
frozen and furious and terrified before his dad's fist had landed on the back
of his neck. He'd fallen forward, hitting what was left of his nightstand with
his face, and opening a bruise-cut along his hairline that poured blood into
his eyes. His dad kept a handful of his shirt, and dragged him out into the
living room. Where he had room to swing.
Kev waited.
Damien translated this ugly collage into, "He was pissed," and finished off his
beer. "So I left."
Kev saw the rest of it in the set of Damien's mouth. He lowered himself into
the water. He ducked his head under, and smoothed his hair back away from his
face. "You still talk to him?" he asked, moving to the side with long lazy
strokes.
Damien wrapped his arms around his knees. He only had his feet in the water.
"Before Christmas, last year. He asked me if I had AIDS yet."
Kev moved back towards him, and tugged on his ankle. "Come out. It's not that
cold."
Damien sighed, but he stood up and went down the steps. The water didn't look
or feel too dirty, and he didn't see the usual drowned wasps bobbing around the
edges, but he always worried that swimming pool water was full of little kid
piss and hair lice and shit like that. He started to protest, but Kev was
swimming out farther, so he pushed himself off the bottom and did a kind of
messy hopping sidestroke towards the deep end.
Kev was already waiting, on the opposite side, leaning on his elbows on the
edge. Damien managed to pull up beside him with a minimum of chlorine in his
eyes.
"Your mom didn't stop him," Kevin said.
Damien imitated Kev's pose. "By then, my Mom was gone."
Kev had his eyes shut. He made a gesture that was almost a shrug, and said,
"Mine stayed. You didn't miss much."
STERILE
Two weeks of this went by. Damien learned quickly, and by the end of the first
week he could set up everything without assistance. It wasn't much harder than
setting up his own amp and effects pedals. You just inserted tab A into slot B
about fifty times, and the amps were heavy as fuck. After the first three days
of bone-deep aches and pains, he actually noticed muscles in his arms and chest
kind of...tightening up. Stuff got easier to shove around.
He and Kevin became almost friends, and he quickly learned that Max was mostly
benevolent, and Casey and Fathom kept to themselves, and allowed only Kevin to
penetrate their tight binary relationship.
The awkwardness around Brian stayed the same. The sex was so good that Damien
kept waiting to wake up, but their conversations were surreal and sporadic. He
caught himself staring at Brian when he was supposed to be doing other things,
and Kevin's nudges saved him from humiliation more than once.
He had almost settled into a routine. Wake up. Do basically everything for
Brian, go to the soundcheck, set up everything, and sit and watch for anywhere
from two to six hours, making occasional frantic runs for alcohol or drugs to
placate LeClaire. The cacophony that had been the first sound check had
smoothed and tightened into eight songs, all of which sounded fucking awesome.
Damien didn't consider himself an expert, but he had seen a LOT of opening
bands, and he knew that most of the problem was that all the songs sounded the
same and none of them were all that good. Deathstyle was much better than other
"new" bands he'd seen. The songs were vicious. The fast ones were catchy in a
dark angry way. The slow ones were alternately sexy and creepy--sometimes both.
You could actually understand the lyrics--another skill that he'd noticed a lot
of rock bands seemed to lack, probably to disguise bad singing.
Judecca Tree was industrial, more or less, but their music wasn't quite
experimental enough to alienate the metal fans. This left them a niche bigger
than Ministry, smaller than Metallica, but their lasttwo albums had gone double
platinum, and just about every freak in America owned at least a t-shirt. They
were big, and this was a vast, expensive tour.
Damien felt like he was standing on the edge of….something. He thought about
standing in Kate's kitchen, on the phone, looking at her dry-erase board on the
fridge (EGGS, PAPER TOWELS, ASPIRIN) and at the wooden plaque by the back door
that said SPACE NEEDLE and had little hooks for keys. Then he thought again of
being backstage with kegs of beer and sound technicians and reporters. He was
between those worlds, and from here he couldn't quite believe either one was or
ever had been a real place.
 
That Friday, they had their last rehearsal. Tristan had called Brian and had
asked that they have a playlist ready, and trim their set by ten minutes. After
much debate, Brian looked at Damien, and said, "Which one should we cut?"
Damien was sitting on the floor, reading a paperback filched from Kevin about
gay vampires. He looked up, amazed that he was being noticed at all, and had
Brian just asked his opinion about their playlist?
"Um," he said intelligently, and followed that with "Uh…" It was hopeless, and
he said, "You wanted to know…?"
"Which one should we cut," Brian said, in that overly patient voice that is a
sure sigh of frustration. "Biofuck, or Horus."
Damien expected his throat to close and his brain to ice over like an old air
conditioner. His opinion? Brian wanted his opinion! He heard himself say,
calmly, and intelligently, "I would have to say cut Horus. It's a great song,
but outside of Florida you guys are in front of a hostile audience. If they can
mosh to it they're not going to care if it's new or not, but Horus is slow
enough to lose them."
Brian studied him, very briefly, then nodded. He turned back to his band, and
said, "Horus is gone." And he looked back at Damien and said, "Should we start
with Sexmagnet?"
Damien grinned, and nodded. "It's fast, it's heavy, and it has enough samples
for Judecca fans to like it. "
"Let's go over it, then. In order," Brian said.
Fathom had been staring fixedly at the ceiling during all this, but he tapped
out the percussion to let Max fall in. Kevin ducked his head so that his hair
swung into his face again, and dropped his high E to match the B string, and
waited for Brian to cue them.
Damien caught this, along with the look Casey gave Brian. Ah. Yeah. He'd just
convinced Brian in less than a minute of what Kev hand been saying for half an
hour. He sincerely hoped it wasn'thim they were going to hold that against.
 
Tristan Blade knocked on the door of their hotel room, two weeks and one day
after Damien had done so. Damien was the only one sober enough to feel like
getting up, and when he opened the door, his first impulse was to laugh. He'd
been watching this guy on MTV for two years, and Tristan was only about an inch
taller than he was--about five six. He was kind of relieved to know that the
guy who went to Mick Jagger's parties was his size. It made him feel validated.
This effect was destroyed by Tristan's full-length black suede trenchcoat, and
the machine-rolled joint in a silver cigarette holder in his mouth.
"Hey, I'm Tris. Brian in here?" he asked, looking bored. He stepped in past
Damien without asking, with a stunning redhead in tow. Damien tried to wave at
her. She ignored him. Defeated, he sat on the bed next to Kevin. Kev was
comfortingly looking just as disconcerted as Damien felt. What the fuck? he
mouthed. Damien mouthed back, I don't know, and they both watched to see what
Brian would do because he was, after all, their leader. Or something. This was
a rock star, and Brian was better equipped to deal with it.
Brian stood up, too fast, made handshakes and small talk and packed a bowl and
supplied drinks. He was charming. Tristan was bored but professional, and his
girlfriend ignored everything, waiting with a sullen look for something to
involve cocaine or sex again. She was wearing a white evening gown for some
reason, while Tris had faded blue jeans, Doc Martens, and an Atari Teenage Riot
shirt on under his expensive jacket.
Twenty minutes later, they were on their way to another party.
TIGERS
 
"...in fearful...symmetry..." Fathom intoned into his Big Gulp cup, in his best
death metal voice.
Casey was laughing so hard he could hardly drive. He pounded the steering wheel
and moaned, "You stupid fuck,"
Fathom grinned, and ran with that. "I am a stupid fuck...I am an anarchist..."
he went on, in a jagged Sex Pistols nasal wail.
They were pleasantly coked up, and were passing a fifth of Smirnoff between
them that Fathom had liberated from Tristan's party, and every time he exhaled
the taste of his breath was pleasantly chemical and inhuman. They were both in
the closest state to happiness they ever managed, because tomorrow was the
first day of the tour and Miami was theirs for one more night. They were
engaged in their best and only hobby, the dispensation of what they called
Karma Assistance, or Social Behavioral Modification.
In English: vandalism.
Casey was laughing so hard he was this close to a brain embolism.
They were in Casey's frightful orange Trans-Am, going eighty-five in a thirty-
five, looking for someplace densely packed with cars and sparsely packed with
people. A news broadcast was muttering away on the radio, something about
continuing genocide someplace that had probably been part of Transylvania
hundreds of years ago. Fathom jabbed at the tape deck, and it clicked and
whined and finally submitted and produced a furious Henry Rollins (a LIAR)
instead of a quietly horrified newscaster (racial cleansing continues in
Bosnia...)
"Bingo. Fucking bingo. There it is. Fuckin' Shangri-La," Casey said, pounding
on the roof of the car with his fist. It was a multiplex, one of the huge vast
glitzy theaters with twenty screens and restaurants and an espresso bar and a
full arcade. And there were no people outside, none at all, no cops, no preppy
bitches in Gap clothes, no security guards.
"Itty bitty bitches, itty bitty brains, in the big scary theater to see the big
scary mooo-vie," Fathom sang into his cup, in growling trashy imitation of
Brian.
"Look at the cars," Casey sighed.
"All those pretty, pretty cars," Fathom agreed, and grinned a mouthful of teeth
and threw his cup over his shoulder into the speaker-and-trash filled space
that was behind him instead of a back seat.
 
Casey parked around behind the theater, and he and Fathom grabbed their
equipment and snuck out of the car. They both wore plain black jeans, the
standard issue t-shirts--Biohazard and Front 242--but Casey had heavy
motorcycle boots, and Fathom had battered black Converse All-Stars with neon
green laces and pentagrams added in chipped white paint.
There were no people, not a rent-a-cop, not a preppy little bitch in
Abercrombie, nobody. And there were rows and rows of cars proclaiming their
owners' evil attitudes to the world.
"Jesus fish," Casey said, pointing.
Fathom snapped off the cap of the spraypaint and ran towards the target and
came to a skidding stop and gave Jesus Fish Car a sloppy hot-pink inverted
pentagram on the trunk. Casey was right behind him, laughing and almost
drooling with a screwdriver in his hand. He left long deep random scratches,
prying off the plastic fish, and when he had it off he took a cigarette lighter
to it until it was a very weird shape and threw it back on top of the car.
"Strike one," he said.
"Oh, man," Fathom said, closing in on a white BMW. "American Family
Association. 'I'm pro-life, and I vote...'" He ran his finger along the bumper,
eyes narrowed. "Here's my favorite: 'Christians aren't perfect--just
forgiven.'"
"Yeah. This guy gets a prize," Casey said, and put his hand in his front pocket
and came up with a Swiss Army knife. He folded out the corkscrew.
Four sets of tires, six tail-lights, and countless scratches, nicks, and
slashing paintmarks later, they found a treasure. It was a little brown
hatchback with a long rainbow sticker along the top of the back window, a
Misfits skull just beside the trunk lock, and a pink triangle hanging inside
from the rearview mirror.
"You know, these, we should bust into some yuppie fuck's car and take out his
stereo and put it in here. Redistribution of resources," Fathom said, shaking
his head.
"Too much time. Too much noise," Casey said.
"Yeah," Fathom admitted. "We make it with this band thing, we can just leave
cash."
"And a note."
"And a note. Dear sir or madam, we give you this money to buy a stereo or some
drugs or a shitload of CDs in appreciation for your brain activity."
"Seriously," Casey said, nodding. He discovered one of the windows was open
about a centimeter. He pushed a fat joint through the crack, thought about it,
and pushed a lighter in, too. "Best I can do, man. Peace."
 
It was Fathom who saw it. They were heading back to the hotel when they passed
it. Fathom went so crazy that Casey couldn't even tell what he was talking
about, but he deciphered pull over right now, and he did so.
 
He saw it then, and followed Fathom out of the car, panicked.
It was a cop car.
"Are you crazy?" he shouted. "There's a cop--"
"I knew it!" Fathom was shouting. "I knew that was too fucking skinny to be a
cop!"
Shangri-La.
They were in the middle of nowhere, under an overpass, and the cop car parked
there had amannequinsitting inside.
Fathom's eyes were wide and crazy and delighted. "Get the stuff. Get it," he
said, and unzipped his jeans. "I'm going to nut on this motherfucker's
windshield,"
"You're crazy," Casey warned him, paranoid.
It was two AM. There was nobody on the road but them. Nobody.
"Get it," Fathom said, gasping, already hard. He did a strange gymnastic jump
onto the hood of the car, a motion so bizarre and so graceful that it made a
thick knot of lust close up in Casey's chest. "Get lighter fluid."
"We're going to jail," Casey whispered, staring at the head of Fathom's cock,
slipping in and out of his fist, hypnotized. "Oh, we're going to jail."
 
Broken. Glass. Symphony.
They broke all the glass. Windshield, with Fathom's sperm still oozing slowly
down it, back windshield, side windows, all smashed completely out into a
glittering wreck on the seats. They smashed the lights on top. They smashed the
headlights and taillights and slashed the tires and kicked monstrous dents in
the sides. Then, Casey figured out how to pop the hood. Massacre. Handfuls of
dirt in every fluid reservoir they could find.
They dragged the mannequin out of the window. It was a white elongated thing in
a police hat and shirt, naked from the waist down. Casey held it in his arms,
did a spinning ballroom dance with it. Fathom had wooden hurricane matches, and
he struck and threw and struck and threw.
They left it on fire. Fathom stood there spraying more and more lighter fluid
into the broken windows, and Casey finally dragged him away, terrified the damn
thing would explode like a car in a Bond flick, and it probably did that, but
by then they were long gone.
Casey took all these crazy backroads evading imaginary cops, and Fathom laughed
and laughed with his pants still unzipped and his bleachwhite hair hanging out
of the open window, pulled out straight by hundred mile wind. The mannequin was
half in the floor and half in his lap, leaning its head on his thigh. He had
taken its cop hat and put it on Casey. He made this long delighted Peter Pan
crow, out into the night, and gulped vodka and strangled himself and choked and
coughed and laughed.
Casey watched him, driving loose and easy with the pedal floored and all the
night in the world to drive into. Modern English was slamming out of the
stereo, mostly bass, stopping the world and melting in you. There was only the
bluegreen gleam of dashboard lights and the wind and Fathom. "I love you," he
said.
"What?"
"I said, I love you," he yelled.
Fathom squirmed back into something like an upright position, turned the stereo
down, and said "What?" again.
Casey sighed. "I said, do you want to stop at Toxic Hell, or something? Food?"
"White Castle."
"It's called Krystal, here, you fucking Yankee," Casey told him. Fathom was
from New York, and had been in Florida for only three years or so.
"Krystal," Fathom said, and turned the stereo up again, and wet his finger with
vodka and drew a stinging line along Casey's bottom lip. He leaned over, and
shouted in his ear, "I love you , too."
 
POSTMODERN
 
Tristan Blade was set up in a two-room hotel suite about six times the size of
Deathstyle's rooms. There was a jacuzzi in the bathroom, a widescreen TV, and a
stereo system had been set up that had speakers that stood as tall as Damien
did.
Max had found a Tommy. A Tommy was, basically, anyone who closely resembled his
two-year crush named, you guessed it, Tommy. Or, a Tinkerbell boi goth with
cheekbone-length white hair and elaborate eyeliner. The tink in question was
letter-perfect, down to the white poet shirt and medallions and high leather
boots with narrow buckles from toe to knee. He was laughing, stoned, and trying
to hold his bottle of Kahlua upright while Max growled into his neck, pushing
him backwards. They were in the floor in front of the vast television. One of
theNightmare on Elm Streetmovies was playing, the one where the girl was
turning into a roach, but nobody was really watching.
Tristan and Brian were in the corner that had been the dining room of this huge
suite. The table and chairs had been replaced with beanbags, and they were
sprawled out there with the bong, lying on their backs and talking animatedly.
Everybody paired off around the zone of silence that was Brian and Tristan.
Inside this bubble Brian was going all Louis at Tristan like he was an
industrial Armand. Tristan was talking about his band.
Then Tristan was talking about Brian's band.
Then Tristan tricked Brian into talking about his band, and then tricked him
into talking about Brian. He was up to, "I feel like a...like a mystic, or a
priest, sometimes, like going this far and being this dark and pushing myself
this completely to be utterly flawless, is somehow...holy."
Tristan nodded, listening avidly. "I just see it as theater beyond theater.
You've tapped into this hate…people relate to that, even if they're not
gay…even the neopunks and shit will get into it. Trust me."
 
Damien was ignoring this snobby musician talk. He was lying across the expanse
of living room, on the floor, laughing hysterically and struggling with Kevin.
His shirt was off, and they'd been doing some kind of inhalant so he couldn't
remember where he'd taken it off, or why he should care.
"It's a shotgun, you dummy, Jesus, what are you, a beginner?" Kevin said,
leaning hard on Damien's struggling knees and trying to grab his wrists.
"You're going to make me drop it,"
"Then get off me," Damien said again, struggling for breath. The laughter was
like a reflex. He couldn't remember how to stop doing it. And he was getting a
really bad headache.
"Ahh, fine," Kevin said, and leaned back and away from him so quickly it was
disorienting. He sat patiently and waited for Damien to sort himself out and
then handed him the joint. They were their own little clique, now. Damien
wasn't nervous. First, because he was violently stoned; second, because he
forgot that they were hanging out with Judecca. Well, they weren't, really.
Tris was the only member of the band there.
Damien had been vaguely nervous about their bassist, a guy named Kincaid that
was like eight feet tall and had a kind of chaos-punk mentality, and hobbies
like extreme hotel redecoration. The rest of Judecca was kind of nondescript,
and except for Kincaid they were basically hired help.
The only other people were three groupies, a guy who had brought the drugs,
John Carrone, Tim-the-manager, and somebody's stage assistant.
After a million years, they stumbled and dragged each other into cars, and
ended up in a scary industrial park where the buses were waiting. Someone--
Kevin, he thought--finally had the mercy to put Damien into a bunk. He dozed,
too drunk and drugged to get up even though he really had to pee. The bus
rumbled underneath him, shuddered, and started to move. He wondered, vaguely,
how long his car would sit at the hotel before somebody towed it. It didn't
matter. He'd miss the stickers, but he supposed he could get new stickers. All
his shit was loaded into the compartment under the bus. Including his guitar.
Anything he'd left behind, he'd learn not to need.
HALLUCINATION
 
Damien woke up with a hangover in the middle of the night.
He was in love with starvation. It was his oldest and deepest fetish. He lay in
his bunk and ran his hands along his body, very slowly, staring up into the
dark. It was not vanity, exactly. He didn't really see this flesh as something
he could take credit for. His careful, engineered starvation was more a
responsibility than an accomplishment.
Stomach: concave, with hipbones jutting out just below. Collarbone like wire,
skin stretched tight over all the bone, cups of bone just above his arms. He
performed this ritual by rote, hands moving by themselves. He had this pattern
memorized. He was still narrow, still angular. His hands closed around his
wrists with the same amount of air between as every other night. He displaced
only enough space to hold the shape of his head and heads and lungs and limbs.
He was like a coathanger.
He drew in a long, deep breath, as slowly as he could stand to, felt his
ribcage open, close. The bunk was narrow and tight, coffin tight, CAT scan
tight. An escape pod. A bunk on a bus in a fleet of buses roaring towards Fort
Lauderdale, carrying two rock bands, tons of equipment, sixteen roadies, twelve
sound-techs, and Damien.
He felt, trapped, or something. Caged. Helpless, and, uh...what was that word?
Shell-shocked? No, that was if you'd been exposed to bombs, or plutonium, stuff
like that. Traumatized. Yeah, traumatized. It was like Space Mountain on acid.
No getting off the ride now.
He got up, as quietly as he could, stumbling from the motion of the bus under
his feet. The others could do it. Damn it. He wobbled down the narrow aisle,
through the little section that was a toilet shower sink and into the booth of
a living room. Empty. A cooler of sodas and beer was wedged between the bolted-
down coffee table and the couch. He picked up a Coke, put it down again, and
picked up a beer. He spent almost a minute hurting his hand trying to turn the
cap. Then he thumped it against the edge of the table like he'd seen in a
movie. After two loud noises and one mashed finger, he managed to knock it
open.
There was a thump behind him, followed by profanity. Damien froze, mentally
cataloging his sins--not sleeping, drinking beer, making noise, wandering
around the bus, etc--but it was only Kevin, messy, no makeup, nursing one
banged elbow. There was a joint hanging out of his mouth. "Hey."
Two sensations--relief, and something else. He was--glad? to see Kevin.
Kev pushed at him with one foot, and Damien shoved over. Kev took a beer,
knocked the top off with one casual motion, and handed his joint to Damien so
he could light a cigarette.
They sat that way, smoking, the highway rolling away underneath them. Damien
said, "I just realized...it's my birthday. I'm eighteen."
Kev thought about that, nodded, kind of smiled. "Yeah, cool. Happy Birthday.
Now you can, um, still not buy your own beer."
Damien laughed.
"Yeah, well, you're not jailbait anymore."
"That's sixteen, isn't it?"
"Man, in Florida it's illegal no matter how old you are," Kev said.
They ran out of stuff to talk about. Silence. Two beats. Four. Then, "So, you
want to watch a movie?"
Damien shrugged, muttered yeah. The TV was small and shitty, the VCR built into
the bottom, the whole thing screwed into the wall. Kev put in Star Trek IV, and
they bullshitted about the movie and debated Star Wars ships versus Trek ships.
They both waited for the punk rocker, cheered and made noise at most of the
dialogue. By the time Spock said they are not the hell your whales, they were
so stoned it almost killed them with laughter.
Kev squirmed, trying to lie down, and said, "Um, can I lay on you, do you
think?"
"Yeah, fine," Damien said. Kev wiggled around until he was curled up on his
side with his head precariously on Damien's knee. It was awkward for about a
minute, then Shatner's acting got them started laughing again. This time, after
each time they would settle down, all either of them had to do was say Spock!
in an overdone Shatner voice, and the hysteria continued.
After Star Trek they moved on to Mad Max, then to Road Warrior. Kev was getting
less and less hyper, and by the time two men enter, one man leave happened, he
had fallen asleep. He was heavy and warm and kind of cute, and Damien's
attention wandered away from the post-apocalyptic future and towards the guy
sleeping on him. Kev looked about fourteen without all that makeup. He was too
pale, or something, and it was like his skin had a different idea how he should
look than his skull did. Weird. He was beautiful, though, even though he looked
kind of like he was made out of wax.
The road war thunderdomed on.
Damien drifted off, without even knowing he was tired.
Two hours later the motorcade pulled into Fort Lauderdale.
***** Chapter 5 *****
Chapter Summary
     Yay, baby LeClaire!
MICROCOSM TWO: LECLAIRE
The house Brian had grown up in was a sprawling tri-level marvel, the pinnacle
of the age of merciless interior decor, everything tasteful, everything
expensive. Every single room looked like a glossy untouchable magazine photo.
It was a Martha Stewart kind of exhibit--practically airbrushed, with Japanese
screens and chairs that nobody ever sat in and all kinds of pointless coffee
table books that had never been opened. Dad was an executive or a president or
something someplace that paid him a lot of money. Mom had been a nurse before
Dad made her stay home.
Brian was bought everything the other kids had, plus everything the other kids
couldn't afford. He had his own computer (this was way back, when most people's
parents didn't have a computer, okay) and his own elaborate antique double bed
and a huge room and his own pinball machine. His room had a walk-in closet and
its own bathroom.
He was not exactly happy. He was very carefully trained to be demanding and
difficult and self-absorbed, and he was great at it. He mouthed off at
teachers, hit other kids and did just enough in school to get by. Finally one
of his teachers got fed up and had the school counselor talk to him.
He told this guy that he didn't have to say anything without a lawyer or his
dad, and then ignored him. The guy was geeky, with imitation designer glasses
and a brown suit. He said, "We'll have to call your parents so that we can all
work this out together." That was supposed to be a threat. Brian rolled his
eyes. If anyone in the room had anything to lose it was the guidance counselor.
If he whined in the right tone of voice, his dad would have the guy fired.
His parents came in and swarmed him with worry and petting and sympathy for his
vocal and sincere dislike of the counselor. They met with his teachers, took
him to a doctor, had him diagnosed ADD, and got him a tutor and a therapist. He
sat through this with a handheld electronic game, his attention perfectly
focused on it for hours, learning complex and involved skills that would be
utterly useless in reality. They talked over his head. He ignored them because
he'd long since figured out that nothing they were saying would affect him in
the slightest, and he was right.
His mom did the PTA for a while, event coordinator, stuff like that. She worked
for a few charities, shopped, took a pottery class. Then she dropped the class.
Then she dropped it all, and dedicated her entire attention to her new hobby,
pills. She ate Valium and Lithium and Prozac and Xanax, and she usually added a
liberal dash of vodka. Eventually, Dad traded her in for a younger model, a
mailroom clerk with better conversational skills and D-cup breasts. He got hair
implants, bought an even more ridiculously expensive car, and started calling
himself Marty instead of Martin.
Brian had absolutely nothing but a vague kind of resentful hate towards his
stepmother. He had seen her a few times, met her once. She'd kind of crouched
down a little, in her nasty secretary dress and beige heels, and said, "Well
hello!"
He'd stared at her with deep, unflinching attention, without a word. She was
wearing too much perfume. She had long fuzzy blonde hair and a lot of mascara
and her lipstick was too orange, and was feathering at the edges. He liked her
nails, though. Too long, too red. Later that night, he'd stolen red polish from
his mother. He'd spent a wonderful two hours painting and repainting his stubby
bitten nails. It wasn't a girl thing. It had something to do with how ferocious
it made him look when he was finished, when he posed his hands around his face
and bared his teeth at himself in the mirror. Mom had taken off his messy paint
job the next morning, in spite of his yelling and beginner's profanity.
Trish LeClaire went through a metamorphosis of her own. She went from quiet and
depressed to quiet and drunk and depressed to drunk and depressed. Brian kind
of missed the quiet part.
When Brian was nine, he and his mom were moved from the tri-level beach house
to apartment in a somewhat decimated neighborhood. The new place was a hellhole
with two bedrooms and very thin walls, so there was basically nothing he could
do to escape her rambling. She was bitter and angry and whiny and terrifyingly
dependent on him suddenly.
Mom expected him to do things he'd never been taught to do, like carry on a
conversation, be affectionate, follow directions, and clean up after himself.
No more pinball machine. No more allowance, shopping sprees, cleaning service.
He responded by becoming violent, withdrawn, and increasingly hateful. He'd
been demoted, and he was secretly fairly certain that it was his fault, that he
had failed in some significant and invisible way. Obviously, his mother had,
too, otherwise maybe he would have been the only one who had to move for what
his dad called "Complex reasons, Brian, very....very, um, well, complicated."
He professed his hatred and his disdain for her the few times he saw his father
again after that. This was a clumsy attempt to get his dad to let him live at
home again. That was never even mentioned, and Brian couldn't outright ask for
some reason. Asking would have made him feel…weak, or something. Like all the
ugly and all the scared he had on the inside would be visible.
The worst time was a really one-sided trip to Disneyworld, in which he tried
too hard to be funny and charming and enthusiastic, and his father nodded and
checked his watch constantly, and handed Brian money, and ate Tums. Brian gave
up after about four hours. He walked alongside his dad, and he stared at the
kids that were actually...something, their parents were...more....he didn't
know.
He was missing something.
His dad was carrying five or six bags, now, toys and shirts and an Indian
tomahawk and rock candy and baseball caps. He saw other kids with less toys
being carried. Something twisted inside either his throat or his chest. He was
tired. He wanted to be carried.
He hated those other kids. He was better than those other kids. And then his
dad sat him down in one of the overpriced Disney restaurants and bought him ice
cream he didn't want and told him that he was going to be a big brother.
"You already have a kid," he told his dad, in something smaller than his usual
loud, insistent voice.
"Well, sure, Brian, yes. But your mother and I are no longer married, and,
Maggie and I wanted to have children together. You'll always be my firstborn
son," he said, kind of stiffly, like he was making a speech to get votes or
something.
Brian looked at him, trying on a new look that looked just like he felt in the
mirror at home. He made his eyes narrow and very mean, and his mouth thin and
hard and he didn't say a word. It was the perfect death look, one that would
serve him well as a rock superstar in a dozen years or so, but right now it
really didn't do him much good, since his dad didn't look him in the face. Not
once.
 
The next night, at home, his mother pestered him about his sulking until he
told her his dad had ignored him all day at Disney. She called Martin,
indignant and drunk and illogical, and after about twenty minutes of weird
fragmented ranting, she handed the phone to Brian. "Hello?"
"Son, your mother tells me you said I ignored you. I didn't ignore you. Didn't
I buy you ice cream, and that toy train, and--"
"I don't want them," Brian said, teeth pushed together too hard. And he didn't.
He wanted something else, but he didn't know what. He would have felt better if
his dad had yelled, or at least noticed he was mad yesterday.
"You wanted them yesterday, Brian. Your mother and I--"
Prattle. You're important to us, we want the best for you, blah blah. He
listened, and nodded, with all the gears grinding around inside him so hard he
thought he'd explode. They didn't want the best for him or they'd still live in
the old house. They didn't want the best for him or they'd listen to him when
he said something. His father, in particular, didn't want the best for him, or
he wouldn't be having new kids. He wouldn't need new kids. He wouldn't need
replacement kids.
When Brian's father talked himself out--nothing more than the same lame
concepts stated over and over, really--Brian was finally allowed to hang up. He
stomped into his room and tore the posters off the walls, upended drawers,
pushed and threw until he picked up the still-crammed-full Magic Kingdom bag.
When he was finished, he didn't have anymore Disney souvenirs. Not a single
one.
He was crying. He couldn't remember crying before in his life, not without
doing it deliberately to emphasize his point. It felt different when you meant
it. It hurt. This was a million, billion times worse than not getting something
he wanted. This was like not getting something he needed and not being able to
explain to anyone what that something was. He hated his father. He hated his
father's stupid girlfriend. He hated his mother. He wanted to know WHY his dad
needed a replacement kid. He wanted to know what was so wrong with him that
nobody wanted him.
He lacked the vocabulary to express this, much less the patience to do so, so
he trashed his room instead. His mother stood outside, tapping politely on his
door, asking if he was okay. He screamed at her, threw various shit at the
door. After a while, she gave up.
That made it intolerable.
That made all this the worst thing he'd ever felt, worse than skinned knees,
worse than the stomach flu, worse than getting an antibiotic shot at the
doctor. He cried himself to sleep, another first, in the middle of the wreck of
his bed. He hadn't wanted her to give up. He'd wanted her to at least keep
knocking.
PRESQUE VU
"Stick your tongue in my mouth," LeClaire whispered. He was holding Damien
completely off the ground and spinning with him in lopsided circles. They were
in the middle of a huge, vast, cripplingly large, the Rolling-Stones-Would-
Play-Here, BIG, arena. Huge. There were more seats than Damien had ever seen.
It was like a goddamn football field.
Hanging on the back of the stage was a gift from Tristan Blade--a vast,
intricate backdrop, black velvet with their Deathstyle logo on it in red
glitter. It was about, oh, twelve times the size of their old backdrop (Max's
mom had made that one). It looked really professional and thrilling and serious
and so Brian had picked Damien up in the middle of the center of the floor and
was spinning him in circles because there was so much space and they were so
excited.
Casey, Fathom, and Kevin were singing some old British not-yet-punk thing, the
chorus of which was we're gonna be rock stars, sung in a nasal growl in a
classic walkdown. Five, four, one, baby. This was punctuated by pogoing and
taking delighted swings at each other.
Max was standing farther back, staring up at the rows and rows and rows and
rows of seats, with his bass slung over his shoulder, missing two strings.
"Wow, I so do not want to play in front of this many people," he said.
Damien was kissing Brian, and laughing. His eyes were intricately made up--
Kevin had attacked him with access to four different people's makeup bags. This
shiny glorious sensation was hanging in the air, contagious, like the best new
drug, like the way you thought this moment always would be. Kids, standing on
back-porch stages wearing Mom's wig, singing into the end of a jump rope.
Lipstick liberally applied.
You mean it wasn't a phase? He didn't grow out of it?
Brian set Damien down, still laughing, still keeping him very close. Roadies
and techs and managers and Tristan and about forty other people were swarming
in behind them, now. The entourage was kind of fun. It made Damien feel like an
Imperial stormtrooper or a friend of the President's or something.
Tristan Blade came in almost last, in designer sunglasses, a black suit, and a
white t-shirt. "Go ahead and set them up, let them run their checks," he said
to the general array of personnel. Nine or ten guys closed in on the stage, and
carts were coming in with crates and amps and instruments marked DEATHSTYLE.
Tris pulled at Brian's sleeve. Brian let Damien go, instantly, his attention
totally diverted. He followed Tris out onto the floor, away from everyone else,
where they talked in whispers, heads leaning close together.
Just then, an act of God came crashing into the arena. Kincaid. Some of his
hair was long and black, and some of it was short and kind of an iodine color.
"Tris. Now," he said, pointing first at Tristan and second at the floor by his
own feet. "We've got problems."
"Shit," Tris muttered. He grabbed Brian's sleeve, dragged him in a zigzag
around his manager and the head tech, and jogged over to Kincaid.
Damien tried not to watch them. The sound techs and road crew were busily doing
his job, and now he saw that there was no fucking way he'd ever really been
intended to set up anyway. He was pretty sure he couldn't have pushed these
huge speakers around, let alone had any idea what to do with them once he had
them situated, or where they were supposed to be situated to begin with. He
felt disappointed and relieved and spookily flattered, all at once. He really
was here purely for sexual reasons. Brian's fucktoy, drink-maker, boot-unlacer,
and professional ego wrangler. Jesus.
Damien's throat hurt. God, he was being such a little pussy about this. Did he
really want to do that, anyway? It looked like a lot of standing around,
yelling, climbing, shoving, and taping. He would've felt better at least trying
to help, though. He walked towards the stage, checked to see if Brian noticed.
He didn't.
 
Kevin was watching this. He had a pretty good guess as to how the kid was
feeling. He'd felt the same way. Once they'd started getting attention, local
press and fans and god help them, girls, the band had gone from them to him.
LeClaire. Suddenly he'd had no say in what the band did, musically, and the
only time Brian was interested in what he had to say was when it involved them
scoring a gig at a particularly notorious club. It sucked, basically. It tended
to peel open all kinds of scars, too. The insecurity thing. The worthlessness
thing.
The kid was going to make an idiot of himself if he went up there.
Kev caught up with him, and said, "Hey, can you help me unload some things?"
The stormtroopers had already unloaded everything, but maybe Damien wouldn't
know that. It was pure chaos. People were running everywhere. There was
something weird and choreographed-looking about that. It was like watching
ants. He was kind of overwhelmed, too, he guessed, but he would live. This was
like, he'd...expected it to be. Dreamed that it was. He'd read every goddamn
rock and roll book and seen every goddamn rock and roll video, and he guessed
if he'd gotten any of it wrong, it had been because he'd underestimated. He
couldn't wait for the show.
He and Damien unloaded a few unnecessary things, redirected a few things, and
snuck into Judecca Tree's bus. They smoked a joint. Damien lost a thumbwar, for
which Kevin got to give him an Indian burn. They snuck back off the bus again,
giggling, and when they went back into the maelstrom inside the arena the
soundcheck sucked Kevin in.
Deathstyle was plugged in and ready in under twenty minutes, and Damien ended
up sitting in the wings, left side, smoking a cigarette that Kincaid handed him
because he was afraid to turn it down. There seemed to be some kind of secret
rule about sitting still. You could read, draw, play guitar, eat, drink beer,
smoke, or put on makeup, but sitting quietly without bothering anybody made
everyone ask you if you were okay.
The soundcheck seemed to go pretty well, even though it only took about forty-
five minutes. They did their first two songs, Brian looking drawn and jittery,
his voice tight but dead on target.
Kevin stood like a zombie, only moving enough to play, not really interacting
with the band at all. He was blissfully happy, stunned and captivated by the
sound of his playing in a place this size, and he had his eyes closed and was
trying to imagine the sound of ten thousand people filling in the quiet and the
space and the air.
Max was hyperactive and relaxed and cheerful and playing with a deep, rich,
together sound that drew various catcalls and applause from the people standing
around.
Casey and Fathom played. Sometimes they looked at each other, grinning.
Brian complained twice about too much drums in his monitor.
Things got ironed out, argued over.
And then, much too soon, Judecca Tree's manager sent one of the sound techs to
drive them all backstage because they had to do their own sound checks and get
the arena perfect because in two hours, the doors would open. And they filed
backstage in one crooked quiet line, with Damien trailing after Kevin, dazed
and scared and feeling either exalted or doomed.
They had their own, lounge, a kind of dressing room/waiting room for all of
them, and they were all painted and all shaking. And then, Max stood up,
grinned, waved byebye, walked out, and came back fourteen minutes later with a
portable CD player and a CD. He set these down on one of the tables, after
sliding a large quantity of food out of the way.
"Um, okay, you guys," he said, kind of patting his hands together like Spock so
he could make a speech more effectively, "My mom, right--you know this already,
Brian--was like, a professional groupie. And I talked to her last night, she's
gonna be here, yeah, and she said we were gonna be like this right before the
show, and she made me go get this CD. And I don't wanna hear any whining about
the music," he added, giving Casey and Fathom an elementary-school deathlook.
"So, um, this is from my mom, and it's supposed to, um, make us feel better. So
listen."
He loaded the CD, and pushed play. Track One, Alice Cooper, Billion Dollar
Babies.
1973.
Percussion, in a slow kind of thudding march, joined by stunningly unoriginal
but sincere guitars mimicking this march with glitzy chords so basic that it
was almost cute. All in major, too, these really bangy, glam, sunshine chords.
Then Cooper came in, scratchy enthusiasm, and said, hello, hooray, let the show
begin, i've been ready.
Max's mom was right, by the way. It did make them feel much better. In fact,
even before Alice kicked in with the vocals, LeClaire knew what it was, and
smiled. Not one of his photo-op smiles, either. A real one. And, together, at
the right part of the song from a bootleg of a live Cooper show, they made the
silly gesture that Cooper had made to shoot fireworks from each hand, out each
sleeve.
It was all right.
"That's cheesy, though," Kev muttered after it was over. He was smiling anyway.
He couldn't help it. The strange Mexican-tequila song "Raped and Freezin" had
taken over and been duly turned down.
"Shut up," LeClaire said. Then, to Max, "Play that one again."
INAUGURATION
This was a home turf show, so Deathstyle had quite a few admirers in the crowd.
They were screaming long before Brian stepped on stage. He went to the mic,
took it. looked out into the crowd, then to stage left, and gestured, well? The
rest of the band was hovering there, eyeing one another. Max went out second,
and the others followed.
The stage lights came up, and the noise diverged. More cheers from girls (and
boys) who had just gotten their first look at LeClaire. Underneath that, there
was a scattered complaint, mostly males, in reaction to the male-male backdrop
symbols. Deathstyle immediately drowned this out by dropping into the first
song.
For the first few measures, people were muttering about Ozzy and Bauhaus. About
halfway through the song, the handful of people still muttering were being told
to shut the hell up by a pretty even and devoted mix of old and new fans.
Damien was down front, between the barricade and the stage, protected from the
crowd by a formidable wall of security. By the time the drilling headhunter
percussion had stopped--the end of the song--so that LeClaire could sob vicious
fag into the microphone in silence, the crowd didn't give a damn about the
backdrop. They were being drowned in sheer testosterone heaviness, and they
loved it.
 
Brian gestured at Kev, chopping his hand skyward. More. Kev nodded, grinning.
More, he could do.
Their set got progressively more violent after that. The security guys were
kind of caught by surprise. They hadn't expected all-out chaos until the
Judecca show. They had to break up fights, struggle with the pit (growing
exponentially in both violence and insistence) and try to stop the smaller pits
breaking out in the stands. Bottles, shoes, sunglasses, lighters and cups of
beer flew like artillery. Casualties were dropping here and there. Damien got
clipped pretty hard with a full water bottle, but he ignored it. He was
watching LeClaire, and remembering what had made him fall so hard in the first
place.
LeClaire was in his element now.
He was unstoppable. He had them, and he knew it, and it was like somebody had
turned his voltage all the way up. People were scared. He was wearing a
significantly mutilated leather bodysuit, with the rips held somewhat together
with buckles and pins. An involved conglomeration of red chains, the kid you
could get in pet stores, was arranged over this like a harness, spreading an
uneven web across chest, groin, thighs. The makeup was particularly vicious,
mostly black, with red highlights in the eyeshadow that Max was probably
responsible for.
He paced the stage like a preying mantis, lurching here and there, stopping to
lean back impossibly far, twitching, pulling faces at the audience. Someone got
him with what might have been a bottle. It was a blur. LeClaire picked it up,
gestured towards its source. The crowd was egging him on, delighted. He sat on
the edge of the stage to see better. The people standing around the guy who had
thrown it were cheerfully pointing him out. Brian sidearmed it back into the
audience, hard, without missing a beat. Direct hit.
At the end of their set, LeClaire started in on Kevin. He swung the mic stand
at him, narrowly missing him and taking out innocent equipment and an innocent
tech with a videocamera behind it. Kev tried to hang onto his guitar and keep
playing, which was apparently not LeClaire's plan. The noise--a weird jittering
static from the overturned stands--sent a small horde of techs running.
LeClaire grabbed Kev, shook him free of his guitar. It made a great noise,
hitting the stage. Then he dove over the barricade into the pit, with Kevin in
tow, maybe two feet from where Damien was standing. The audience dragged them
deeper. Security was making a real try to get them back, but they had basically
no chance. He got a flash of LeClaire laughing, still making periodic lunges
for Kevin, and landing punches when he could. Kev's nose was bleeding. Then
they were both hidden under a blur of pulling, petting hands.
Damien managed to figure out which way they were moving from the flow of the
crowd. He shoved his way towards stage right, and made it past the swarming
security in time to catch a flushed and sticky LeClaire helping Kev over the
barricade. Kev was barely able to stand up. He was seriously battered. He was
panting and holding his bleeding nose. LeClaire cleared the barricade himself
by just stepping over it, brushing off the clinging hands. They were both
seized and rushed backstage before Damien could even get their attention.
Darkness. Noise. Then the house lights came up, and someone who didn't grasp
Damien's position tapped him, wanting him to help break the equipment down.
Deathstyle's first real show was over.
***** Chapter 6 *****
Chapter Summary
     You should check out some of their favorite bands.
AFTERMATH
Brian dropped Kevin into the waiting arms of the techs. They came at him with
tissues for his nose and a bottle of water. Kevin looked once at Brian, eyelids
heavy, mouth still.
Brian turned away from him. He pushed away all the hands trying to help him.
Tim, their manager, tried to hug him or something, and he said not now and went
past him, making a fake apology gesture.
He did something like a run directly to the bathroom, locked himself in a
stall, and threw up the insane junkfood he had eaten before the show, followed
by what felt like most of his internal organs. His knees were like bad folding
chairs. He banged his way out by the sink and rinsed his mouth, kind of hanging
onto walls and faucets and pulling himself along. His hands were shaking so bad
they were blurry. He looked up into the mirror, and his eyes were full. There
was some kind of reservoir inside him that had all that….energy had been
flowing into.
Still, there hadn't been enough of it. He hadn't wanted it to be over. And
underneath LeClaire the rock star, Brian the kid had been scared out of his
mind of all those eyes.
His lipstick, covered with Coty Kiss-off, was still fine. That stuff was
industrial strength. Literally. It took soap and a wet cloth and literal
scrubbing to get it off. He let himself smile at that. His eyes were bad,
though. He felt battered, still reeling under the ghosts of thousands of hands,
pulling and stroking and pinching, as though the crowd had been one animal with
countless limbs, one animal that had wanted either to fuck him or eat him or
bodysnatch him.
He lurched his way to the door and yelled out for help.
Finally some guy came slouching up. He was maybe twenty at the most. He had
bottlewhite hair, freckles, a nose that had been broken too many times, and
mechanically straight teeth, with ugly chapped lips, set in a heavy prehistoric
jaw.
"In my dressing room there's a black leather jacket," Brian started.
"And you are?" Completely unacceptable bored tone of voice.
I'll punch him. I'll punch him in his upper-middle-fucking-class orthodontic
teeth and they'll hit the tile like pieces of a coffee cup and he'll never talk
to me like that again. "Brian LeClaire. Deathstyle's singer."
The kid sniffed. "Well, I'm not floating crew," he informed him, rolling his
eyes. See the bitchy hetero. "I'm one of Judecca Tree's sound--"
Brian grabbed his shirt, pulled him into the bathroom, got a better grip on the
back of his neck, spun him around, and pushed him back out into the hall. "I
don't give a fuck who you are, bring me my goddamn jacket. Now."
The kid scattered.
He waited, hand on the door, to keep anyone else from coming in. He kept
searching the bodysuit for pockets, even though he knew there weren't any. In
his jacket were sunglasses, compact, lipstick, eyeliner, and Ativan.
"I'm not floating crew," he said to the air, in a nasal almost-soprano, and
snorted. Little fuckup.
"Sure, you're a rock star. Sure you are," he said to himself. One laugh got
out, and he stopped it quick. It sounded too, out of it. Nervous. Crazy.
The kid thumped on the door. Brian opened it. He slung in the jacket. Brian
barely caught it before it hit the floor. He stepped towards the door, almost
falling, and pushed it back open. The kid was gone. He pulled in one breath,
through his teeth. He wanted to follow, maybe explain a few things. Set the
brat straight.
There was plenty of time for that. He couldn't let anyone else see him like
this. No way, not even. Not now. Not yet.
He put on the jacket. It looked pretty good with the suit, but it would have
been too hot, too bulky for stage. And the sunglasses helped a lot. His hands
settled down, and his mouth did what it was supposed to. He swallowed two tiny
pills, gulped water from the sink out of his hand, shook his hands off,
smoothed his hair.
Somebody knocked.
If that's that fucking kid--
Tris poked head in. He was done up in leather shorts and a satin t-shirt, high
heavy boots, violet lipstick. "Great show from you guys. Really. Get me after
our set, I want to talk to you. "
The door swung closed. Brian exhaled. The door opened again.
"Oh, and Mike says your shirts are selling like crazy. Fucking A. " He made the
three-sixes gesture, grinned a purple grin, and vanished.
Brian lost it. He started with giggles and ended up crouching on the floor to
keep from sitting down, shaking with laughter. Great. He'd have to delay this
nervous breakdown for a while. Couldn't stop now. Their last minute, Paint Shop
Pro 4, overnighted to the arena, thrown-together t-shirts were selling like
crazy. Hallelujah.
There was still a hole, somewhere, not a big one. His dad would fill it in
nicely. He said to himself, in Martin LeClaire's slow cultured yuppie voice,
"That was a great show, Bri. I'm proud of you. At least you're making money off
of this…..homosexual thing you do."
It was a recording of what Mr. Martin LeClaire had said after the one and only
Deathstyle show he had ever seen. Brian said it to himself while taking a piss,
while showering, while trying to sleep. The last three words were the sharpest,
the ones that had cut the deepest and left the most crooked scars. Thing. You.
Do. As if gay were a hobby, like golf. As if his music and his career and his
goals and his life and his dreams were all mere pastimes, like yachting.
He laughed again, more ugly and less stricken, and started to feel a little
more like himself. Hate tended to do that for him. He pictured his dad in his
new, even bigger beach house, telling his friends on his cellphone that his son
was just finding himself. Yeah. I'm finding myself in a Fort Lauderdale arena
in distortion and feedback, in a collage of makeup. In the faces of fans.
Did you ever have fans? Did you, you corporate fuck?
Eat this, Marty,he thought, and flipped a bird with chipped black nail polish
in what he guessed was the general direction of the east coast.
The Ativan dissolved in his stomach, drifted into his bloodstream, petted his
brain until he felt hazy and better and loose and good, mostly. He wanted the
kid. A mindless dose of brainless worship would fix everything the pills
couldn't. Sure it would.
He stood up. He dusted his pants and his jacket down with his fingertips,
pointlessly. Straightened the lapels, ran his fingertips over the Deathstyle
pin.
 
DEMIMONDE
Damien spent a miserable twenty minutes trying dutifully to help the stage
techs. A guy in a Jets baseball cap told him to move a speaker ten feet back,
and he tried for at least five minutes. He couldn't budge it, not an inch. The
guy came back, and pushed him out of the way, disgusted.
He got yelled at repeatedly. He was scared, frustrated, and embarrassingly
close to tears when a bald, chubby tech in a Judecca Staff shirt tapped him.
"You Damien? With Deathstyle?"
"Yeah," he said, and pushed his hair out of his eyes. What had he done now?
He'd been taping cords to the floor, figuring at least there was no way he
could fuck that up.
"Yeah, Brian's looking for you. This way."
He sighed, more relieved than he wanted to admit, and followed.
 
Brian was on an ugly brown vinyl couch, with his feet in the seat and his arms
wrapped around his knees, still painted and wound in the terrible messy edible
leather bodysuit. The chains, he had taken off, and they were in a glittering
pile on the table in front of him.
He was watching Kev and Max, who were eating pineapple and crackers and cheese
and cookies, as though free food were a novelty that might not be repeated.
Both of them were still kind of….quivering, from the weird experience of being
onstage in front of that many people. They were talking, but seemed kind of
subdued, like they were shell-shocked.
Kev's nose had quit bleeding, but his lipstick was gone, and his eyeliner had
seen better days. His hair was pulled back, so that the shaved underneath was
showing, and the end of the short ponytail looked sticky. Blood, beer. Who
knew.
Brian unfolded and grabbed Damien before he was really through the door,
grabbed his arm too hard, pulled him over to the couch. "Some space?" he said,
pointedly, over his shoulder to Max and Kevin. Pulling faces, Max nudged Kev.
They evacuated, Max making off with a tray of junk food, Kev taking a salad
platter. He was limping a little, banged knee or who knew what, and he left a
sporadic trail of carrot sticks and broccoli that led back to the table. Max
buttonhooked back in, ducking and tiptoeing, overacting to make his point
abundantly clear, and shoved two beers in his waistband, and retreated.
Brian pulled Damien down beside him, almost in his lap, putting his hands on
the boy's hair, shoulders, face, something between clutching and slow-motion
hitting. "Where were you?" he said, furious, or something like it.
"I….somebody told me to break down, and I was trying to….."
"No. No. Okay, I want it like this. I'm your job. Okay? You stay with me, you
do what I need you to. Nothing else. Anyone else tries to tell you otherwise,
tell them to talk to me or Tris or Tim. You got it? I am what you do."
Damien felt like a cartoon character with his jaw turned into a drawer and
hanging open. He was blank for too long of a second. Then, "Sure, I mean…..I'm
sorry. Whatever you want. I'm sorry," he said again. A bitter, familiar feeling
was crawling up from his scrotum to his stomach to his throat. Guilt? Love?
Whatever it was, it was heavy, and strange, and it tasted….good, the way
penicillin tasted good about five minutes after you swallowed it, when the
initial chemical/bitter flavor became this icky kind of sweet aftertaste.
Was love supposed to be like that, like a medicine you knew you needed, but you
hated? He didn't know. He was pretty sure Brian was the first person he had
ever, really….
"I need…" Brian stopped. Rephrased. Just in time. "I need you to make sure I
have…..everything I need. If you can't do that, I'll find someone who can."
"I can, I can do that," Damien said, desperate now. He wasn't doing anything
right today. He had a deep, hard, odd wish: that Brian would hit him, mess him
up like Kevin, so that this feeling of failure would be kind of justified,
rectified. Under that, this nasty jealous tinge, this conviction that he would
be a better….punching bag, than….."I'm really sorry. I was trying to do
whatever they told me--"
"Only what I tell you," Brian said, emphasizing this by tightening his hands.
"Nothing else is important." His grip too was hard over the kid's collarbones.
Chemical reactions unfolded from these points of contact, and the future
modified itself accordingly.
Damien leaned in, drawn by this messy stage paint and leather and Brian's wet
hair. All of it was a hook in him, swallowed willingly, wound inside him. He
wrapped his arms around LeClaire, kissed his cheek, his neck, still apologizing
in broken sentences. It was still a miracle to him, however tainted, that this
wet-dream avatar was his, here in front of him, and that sometimes, when he was
lucky, he could touch.
Brian pushed at him, halfheartedly, and then leaned back, not really
interacting, just taking. That was exactly as it should be, and they both knew
it.
ABSOLUTION
Damien trailed Brian obediently for the next three hours or so. He felt pretty
invisible, especially after Judecca finished their set (and two encores) and
came backstage, followed by groupies in ever-increasing numbers. LeClaire
signed autographs, smiled, posed for pictures, made small talk. Tristan, of
course, got the lion's share of the attention, but the Deathstyle crowd was
bigger than Damien would've predicted.
He was mostly ignored, which was fine with him. He hadn't eaten since about
noon the day before, and that had been four pieces of celery and half the
chicken part of a grilled chicken sandwich.
One of the biggest worries he'd had about this job was that being so surrounded
might interfere with his non-eating habits. So far, the only person who ever
seemed to notice was Kevin. Damien usually said he'd already eaten, or was too
wound up, or something. Kev usually dropped it. Once he'd tried to tempt Damien
with a bite of some evil chocolate-and-cherry cake, held out on a swooping
fork. Damien had cringed, literally cringed, as if Kev had tried to give him a
spoonful of scorpion. On fire. Everyone had laughed, like it was a joke,
assuming he was just being dramatic. Kev had eaten his own bite of cake without
further harassment.
He had his arms inside his shirt, and was in an uncomfortable doze when Brian
put his hand on the back of his neck. He realized he was asleep, sitting in a
folding chair. The groupies were drifting away. "It's after one," LeClaire told
him. "There's a party."
Oh, great. Wonderful. Maybe at least he could be Invisible Boy on a couch,
someplace that wasn't freezing. He blinked, his mouth dry. "Um, ok--"
"Did you want to go?"
That was almost confusing. Damien thought for about fifteen seconds that
LeClaire was being considerate, until he realized that he was kind of being
uninvited. He flushed. "You guys can go, I'll get back to the room, somebody
must be going….back to the…."
Apparently he'd gotten something wrong anyway, because LeClaire was frowning.
He sighed, and said very slowly, as if Damien were stoned or not very bright,
"I don't want to go to the party. If you want to, go with Kevin. I'm going back
to the room."
He waited.
Damien got it, then. It would've been easier, but sleepy and hunger was making
everything seem about five feet underwater, like in a dream. "I want to go with
you," he said.
LeClaire touched his face, surprising him, put his fingertips under his chin
and tilted his head back. Damien looked up at him, same old wonderful bird/
snake dynamic. Brian was lit up from the inside, ego petted and drugged into
blazing satisfaction. "You were cute, sitting there sleeping," he said. His
hand moved down to Damien's shoulder, just under the neck of his shirt. "And
you're freezing."
"I'm sorry," Damien said. It didn't make any sense, but it usually seemed like
the safest thing to say to LeClaire.
LeClaire took his hand and pulled him up. He took his jacket off and thumped it
down around Damien's shoulders. It was so heavy it felt like armor. He put his
arms into it, surrounded by warmth and weight and the smell of clove smoke and
some kind of darksharp cologne and marijuana and leather. It was the scent of
something you should eat very slowly with an expensive spoon and chocolate
sauce. It threw the wrong switches in his brain, and his stomach stabbed him
with such an insistent hunger pang that he drew his shoulders in, teeth
clenched.
The jacket swallowed him whole. The sleeves were about six inches past the tips
of his fingers, the leather too thick to push up and the cuffs much too large
to catch on his birdbone wrists. He thought of the preppy girls wearing the
lettermen's jackets, strutting around in his long abandoned highschool, and
made himself straighten his shoulders and his back.
Someone came over in reply to LeClaire's gesture. He kept Damien's wrist,
through the jacket, which was nice. He wanted to lean into him. God, he was
sleepy. He let himself be led, through hallways, past roadies shoving huge
boxes with DEATHSTYLE and JUDECCA TREE stenciled on them, under a red EXIT sign
and into a parking lot. It was warmer here, but he was still cold.
He stumbled, and LeClaire laughed at him, not sounding mean, just amused. He
let go of his arm, did a kind of a lunge and picked Damien up, starting a weird
noise out of him.
"Quit yelling, or I'll drop you," he ordered, still laughing. He was high on
something, or several somethings. He held Damien like he was a kid, one arm
under his back, one under his knees. He jolted him deliberately, letting him
slip about half a foot. Damien clung.
He couldn't remember the last time anyone had held or carried him. Lloyd,
probably.
LeClaire wasn't even changing his pace, still moving at a fast walk towards
whatever car was waiting. It felt crazy to be carried. Out of control.
Powerless. Something. Like being kidnapped.
"God, you're so light. How much do you weigh?"
This Christmas feeling went off in his stomach, replacing the ache. "One-
twenty," Damien said. Maybe true, with his boots and LeClaire's jacket.
LeClaire leaned his head in and drew in a long predator breath beside Damien's
neck. It scared him. He loved it. He might never eat again.
 
OCCULTATION
Kev was in the women's bathroom with two girls, one of them tying him off and
the other one injecting him expertly with a generous fix of the best heroin
he'd had in a month. Then, kind of a cut to Scene Two, in which he was lying on
the tile floor and ineptly kissing one of them--blonde, probably a minor, and
the less horrifying of the pair. The other one, heavyset, in a fake leather
dress with hair dyed blue and orange, had been puking mostly in one of the
toilets, and somehow managing to giggle at the same time.
He tried to turn over to get this spectacle out of his view, and managed to
simultaneously pull the blonde's hair and lean his elbow hard into her ribcage.
She was whining, and he tried to apologize, and halfway through it she grabbed
his hand and put it up her shirt. She was warm, soft, really quite pretty now
that he was looking at her, and he petted her as best he could because it
seemed to make her happy, and either she or her friend had given him this
deliciousness spreading through him. He owed them something, he guessed.
After that, things got even more film school, and the next thing he was aware
of was being at the party. He knew it was a party because of the music, the
loud and confused conversations being yelled over the music, the smell of pot,
and the fact that he was looking up at a ceiling fan with glow-stars stuck to
it. A bedroom. The only light was the flickering cyan of a television somewhere
behind him.
He was lying down, he guessed.
He tried to sit up, and a pair of massive hands in cut-off vinyl gloves closed
over his shoulders and slammed him back down. Ah. That was an erection under
jeans his cheek was resting on. He wasn't sure whose. He squinted, turned his
face back towards the owner of the hands. He didn't know who in the hell it
was. Black hair, mostly dreaded on top, not as long as Max's, shaven close and
dyed orange from the temples down, and pulled up into a messy topknot with a
vinyl scrunchy. Makeup that looked like it had once been black lipstick and a
black horizontal bar across cheekbones and nose. Creepy eyes--so dark they were
almost black, deepset, emotionless. Silver septum ring, fairly heavy gauge, a
six or a four. It still looked pretty dainty on this guy. He was huge. Not fat,
just about seven feet thirty of solid muscle wrapped over prehistoric-sized
bones. The shirt was a minefield. It looked like three or four rotting punk
band shirts, patchworked together and held with rivets.
Kincaid. Bassist for Judecca Tree, Chaos-goth of doom.
"Yeah….hi," Kevin started.
Kincaid put one hand over his mouth (and most of his face) and said, "I saved
you. But if you can't be quiet so I can watch this, I'm going to have to kill
you."
Well. Ok, then. Great. He nodded, making the motion tiny. Kincaid took his hand
away. His eyes drifted back to the TV.
After about ten minutes of this, Kev was getting kind of nervous. The hard-on
he was lying on was still there, but Kincaid didn't seem to be interested
particularly in any kind of rape activity. Thank god for that--it felt like
this guy's dick was the size of Kev's arm.
Finally, he worked up enough courage to whisper, "Can I turn over a little to
watch TV?"
"Yeah, sure," Kincaid said, absorbed in whatever it was.
Kev wiggled onto his side, his head still in the guy's lap. It took him a
minute to realize what they were watching. A nature show. Apparently, the topic
was Bugs Eating Each Other. A praying mantis was ripping some other bug into
pieces and stuffing them casually into its mouth. This is making him hard?
A terminal case of the suicidal giggles threatened, somewhere between his
collarbone and the back of his tongue. He bit his lip, hard. What would that be
called? Insectophile? Insectosexual? He was quivering, now, every breath he
took leaving him in pained little puffs through his nose and between his teeth.
Kincaid patted his head, his eyes never drifting from the TV, as if he were a
housecat. The size and weight of the hand patting him killed the giggles pretty
quickly. He tried to give some kind of a damn about the tarantulas that were
chomping away now, and prayed that Max or somebody would come looking for him
soon. Preferably with reinforcements.
***** Chapter 7 *****
MERCURIAL
LeClaire didn't put him down, so in the back seat Damien ended up in his lap.
He expected gratuitous sex, but Brian only held him, looking out the window as
though he'd forgotten about him. He tried not to move. It was pretty
uncomfortable, because his brain insisted that he was heavy, that he would hurt
LeClaire or put his leg to sleep, something. He was troublesome in some way, he
had to be.
Once they got to the hotel, a new one that was about sixty times less ghetto
than the old one, LeClaire opened the door and pushed at him. He got out, and
Brian followed him, steering him with one hand on his back to their room.
One double bed, and Damien's bag and guitar case were nestled beside LeClaire's
stack of suitcases and makeup kits just inside the door. The room was three
times the size of their old one, with a huge TV and a stepdown into a smaller
section with a couch and a table with four chairs. Their room.
Damien put his hand over his stomach again, tried to do the alchemy that would
transfer this gluttony of wishes granted into something that would fill up the
appetite there.
He didn't have time to succeed. LeClaire pushed past him, and said over his
shoulder, "Take all that off."
This was new, and he was pretty sure he didn't like it. LeClaire sprawled on
the bed, clicked on the TV, but didn't watch it. Damien shrugged out of the
jacket, found a chair and put it carefully over the back. He felt this
unexplainable urge to stall. "Are you--"
Apparently in higher-class hotels the remote didn't come stuck to the
nightstand table. LeClaire sidearmed it at him. Hard. It struck the wall behind
him with a loud smack and shattered. LeClaire's expression didn't change.
A program that hadn't opened in his head since he left home overrode everything
else, and Damien's hands flew to the bottom of his shirt, pulling it over his
head. Too late. LeClaire did his eerie serpent-fast lunge and grabbed him,
swung him around and threw him down on his back on the bed. Damien landed hard
enough to almost knock out his breath. He made one sound, startled and hurt,
but not a protest. That wasn't a possibility.
LeClaire pulled his shirt the rest of the way off and threw it. He unsnapped
and dragged down Damien's pants and boxers in one rough motion, snagging him
hard enough to hurt. Everything hung up at his boots, and LeClaire yanked at
the laces and twisted them off without loosening them enough, hurting ankle and
knee bones indiscriminately. It dragged Damien almost off the bed. He wasn't
crying yet--he was still too shocked, still lacking in breath, but his eyes
were wet and stinging, and his throat hurt. The ring through his belly button
had gotten caught on something during this, and it was a bright flare of pain,
as if someone was holding a lighter to it. He was naked now, except for one
black sock that LeClaire hadn't bothered to pull off. "What did I do?"
LeClaire stood up, tossed the bundle of pants and shoes aside without looking
where it landed. This was the same look he'd given Damien an eternity ago when
they'd collided on a tiny nightclub stage. "You want to try again for how much
you weigh?" he said. His voice was all at one frequency, like a recording.
Damien wanted to fold up small, hide his face, something, anything. This bone
sculpture art that he had suffered for four years to build was laid out in
plenty of light with no excuses, now. "Last time I checked, ninety-four," he
said. He looked away, past LeClaire at the ceiling.
LeClaire leaned over him and grabbed his jaw with one hand and forced him back
into eye contact. He didn't say anything. He just stared, and tightened his
grip every time Damien's eyes wavered. He closed them finally, defeated.
LeClaire slapped him. Hard. He did a kind of shriek with his mouth closed, but
he didn't pull away. "Don't you ever lie to me again," he said. He closed his
fingers hard, one time, and let go.
Damien turned over on his side and pulled his knees up to his chest. It was the
first time LeClaire had ever hit him, outside of a few wonderful playful smacks
on the ass, or punching him in the arm during random horseplay. This was
different. It fractured the guilt inside him, made it drift around his
bloodstream in jagged chunks, tearing him in places. He wanted to cry, and his
eyes were wet and leaking, but his lungs and his throat wouldn't oblige him.
He could hear Brian moving, heard a strange and ominous click. He opened his
eyes. Brian had picked up the phone. He held Damien's gaze, and said, "Yeah, I
need room service."
Terror. Cold, heavy terror. Stomach full of fishhooks terror. "Please--" he
said, starting to shake, now.
LeClaire made one sharp diagonal gesture. "Yeah, I understand that… I don't
care what the normal hours are." A brief silence. He rolled his eyes and
interrupted with, "Look, sweetheart, get me your manager then. Yes. Yes, but
I'm not known for my patience." He put his hand over the mouthpiece and told
Damien, "Get dressed."
 
LeClaire charmed, bullied, and bought his way into room service four hours
after the kitchen had closed. Forty-five minutes later they brought a cart
laden with covered dishes. The smell was like heaven and hell together.
Damien sat in the chair LeClaire had ordered him into, at the table, and
LeClaire set a plate in front of him, heavy with steak and potato and steamed
asparagus. Don't make me,he thought, with zero hope of having his prayer
granted.
"New rules," he said, uncovering his own plate and handing Damien a knife and a
fork. "You eat three times a day, every day. You weigh no less than one
fifteen, and that's pushing it. After that if you want to eat three salads a
day, fine. Until then, you eat whatever I tell you to. And If I catch you not
eating, or taking pills, I will make you instantly sorry. Now eat."
Tears. He couldn't. His hands wouldn't move, his mouth wouldn't open. He felt
about five years old, and he wished he were either invisible or dead.
"Damien," LeClaire warned him. "I explained this to you at the arena. You're
mine. If I want you to starve, I will starve you. Eat."
Damien ate, after a while. It was hard. Chewing felt like this unbelievable
effort, and swallowing was almost impossible. It made his stomach ache almost
immediately. After a few minutes, it got a little easier. His hunger returned
with a vengeance, and he had to fight himself not to gorge. He even ate the
asparagus, and he hated every single kind of green cooked vegetable. It wasn't
as bad as he remembered.
His drive to obey LeClaire was stronger than the fear of food or fat, stronger
than the conviction that he had no right to consume food or take up space,
stronger than anything in him. But it hurt. He was crying. LeClaire ignored it.
He'd dropped his tolerance after so many months of near-starvation. He was
about halfway through when he put down his fork.
"You better pick that back up," LeClaire said, without even looking at him.
He'd finished eating, and was still sitting across from Damien, turned slightly
to watch television. It was on MTV. A redundant girl-with-guitar angsty thing
that wanted really badly to be the Indigo Girls. This faded into some kind of
commercial about dying of lung cancer.
"I can't eat anymore."
LeClaire stood up, pushed his chair under the table, and took two steps around
to behind Damien. He leaned in close, and said. "One. Two--"
Damien picked it up. He didn't want to know what three involved.
 
VERBOTEN
Kevin came staggering down the hall about two hours later, with Max in drunken
tow. Their room was beside LeClaire and Damien's. Damien was sitting in the
hallway with sunglasses on, between the two doors. He looked--odd. Like he'd
been crying. And he was sitting weird, like he was hurt.
"You ok?" Kevin said, kind of leaning Max against the door and fumbling for
their key. Damien shook his head without answering. Kev frowned, gave up on his
pockets, and dug through Max's. Bingo. "One sec, let me put this heavy bastard
in bed."
He got the door opened, and he and Max fell inside. Thumping, cursing, quiet,
and Kev reappeared and closed the door behind him. "There's a hot tub. Come
on."
Damien stood up, using the wall a lot. He followed Kev, but he still didn't
talk.
 
The hot tub was outside, by a pool, underneath a gazebo. Kev had to undress
Damien, more or less. He got him down to boxers and peeled himself out of his
clothes, and settled down beside him. He was looking for bruises, and he didn't
see any, but sometimes it took a while for marks to show up. "Did he hit you?"
Damien shook his head, still masked behind the sunglasses. He said something
that was too soft to hear. Kev leaned closer, nudged him, and he repeated it.
"He made me eat."
That wasn't on any of the lists of things Kev had expected. He fumbled around
it, blushing, his brain giving him a blurry menu of really terrible ideas.
"Um….exactly, what, did he make you eat?"
Damien went through the list, in that same almost-whisper. Steak, potato,
asparagus. He was cataloging very precise amounts of everything, down to
teaspoons of butter and calories-per-serving.
Kev still didn't get it. "Well, you look, like, he kicked the shit out of you,
or something, are you sure that's all he did?"
 
"I don't eat!" Damien burst out. He shoved himself over to the other side of
the hot tub, and huddled there, breathing funny.
Kev waited. This was still a mystery to him.
Damien said, "I eat one time a day, maybe. I take pills. I just want to be,
skinny. It makes me feel weird to eat. It's not like I'm gonna starve. People
in China or whatever eat less than I do."
Ah. Kev seen stuff on TV about anorexia, but he thought that was when you puked
up everything you did eat. Or was that fibromyalgia?
He slid over closer to Damien, tried to pat him or hug him, something, but the
boy shoved his hand away, and rearranged his arms around his stomach again.
"You don't get it," he said, accusingly. "I never eat. Not like that. And he
stood over me. And he wouldn't let me stop, and I--"
He was crying, now. He pulled off the sunglasses and dropped them to scrub at
his eyes. He tried to get out of the tub, figuring he could go hide on the bus,
or something. Kev grabbed his wrist and dragged him back down. "Did you talk to
him about it?"
Damien shrugged. "You can't talk to him about anything. You know that."
Hmm. "Well, maybe it'll be good for you. You're skin and bone, now, you know."
Sniffles. Anger. "He wants me to be one fifteen."
"Well, I'm only like five inches taller than you, and I weigh one-forty. I'm
not fat, am I?"
Kev puffed out his twig chest, to make Damien laugh. He got a smile, at least,
even if it was on top of another sniffle. "It'd be different if he was doing it
because he, cared." Voice break on this, but he caught it and kept it under
control. "He'd doing it the way you'd take a dog to the vet. Like I'm property
that he doesn't want to get, wrecked."
Yeah. He understood that. LeClaire had hospitalized him, long ago, during the
brief time he'd been property. And he probably should have gone to the
emergency room a lot more times than that. Some of those, recently.
Kevin looked at Damien, at that kitten face and mournful eyes. All this over
perfectly normal food. It wasn't the food, though. That was, like, a symptom.
It was about control and the shadow of some dickhead sperm-donor of a dad. He
meant to ruffle the kid's hair, but he missed, and put his hand on the back of
Damien's neck. He thought,when he's through with you, do you think you might
let me have what's left of you?
It was too wide and broad to keep inside him, and he slid over and pulled
Damien's head closer and fucked up completely by kissing him.
Oh no, he thought, and then just system failure, some kind of electric, bright,
fusion sensation, spreading from his mouth down his neck into his lungs.
He'd never felt anything like it.
He'd had plenty of kisses that made his knees weak and his heart hammer, but
none that felt like this.
Nothing even close, to.
This.
Holy. Something.
This one brief tongueless kiss.
He leaned his head back, horrified by what he'd just done. "I didn't…mean
to…wow, I…."
"Yeah, I know," Damien said, pulling against Kev's hand until he let go, and
sliding a safer distance away. He wasn't making eye contact. He put one
(trembling?) hand to his mouth, then took it away. "Don't worry about it."
"I mean, I don't mean that I didn't want to, only that I don't have any
business, to, um. Fuck," Kev decided to end on that note. He patted around the
edge of the hot tub, found his pants and the cigarettes in the pocket. He lit
one, and it felt funny in his mouth for some reason, like another mistake.
Damien looked at him then, one stolen look, and then the sound of footsteps
stopped both of them.
"It's LeClaire."
"How do you know?" Damien was looking at his pants, his shirt, twitching
towards them, then away from them. He was allowed in the hot tub, sure he was,
it wasn't like he was being caught at anything, was it?
"I just know," Kevin said. He pulled on his shirt, gymnastics around his
cigarette. It stuck to him in triangular wet patches. Damien pulled his eyes
away from that, opted to settle down and pretend he was relaxing.
It wasn't LeClaire. It was a chubby white guy in a white shirt, some kind of
staff. He made a little perfunctory wave and smile, and Kevin waved back. After
he had walked past, they both did an invisible collapse of tension.
Damien climbed out, got dressed. Kev showed no signs of leaving, sitting with
his bare feet in the tub, hair dripping down his collar, smoking.
"Um, I'm going to, you know….." He gestured back in the direction of his room.
His and LeClaire's room.
"Yeah," Kev said. "Night."
He's beautiful, Damien thought, realized, wondered. Right down after that like
a program, a floodgate slamming closed, LeClaire is beautiful. Kevin is pretty.
But he looked at Kev's silver hoop earrings, at the choppy ends of his black
hair, and wondered if that might not be a lie.
 
KARMA
Damien walked around the hotel for a few minutes, touching his mouth until it
made him crazy and he shoved his hands in his pockets. He could still feel
Kevin's kiss--soft and gentle and threatless. It had made him want to, scream,
recite a list of every awful thing he'd ever done. Don't kiss me like that.
Don't kiss me like I'm clean. Don't kiss me at all. Don't.
He wanted to go back to the hot tub. He wanted to punch Kevin, maybe. Would
that fix it? He pulled one hand out of his pocket, balled it into a fist. He
didn't know how to arrange his thumb, whether to straighten his wrist or bend
it. Fag to the core. He'd have to watch how LeClaire did it, next time.
His hand balled itself up again, and he shoved it back into his pocket so he
wouldn't have to look at it. He wanted LeClaire. He wanted to have fewer things
rattling around inside his head.
Their room was darker, once he got back. The plates were gone, and candles were
lit, and two sticks of incense propped in a beer can were sending tendrils of
darkcherry smoke into the air. The television was off, for once, and the
Sisters of Mercy were singing about a black planet on Max's little boom box on
the table.
LeClaire was lying across the bed, in black vinyl pants and nothing else,
smoking a clove with his free arm wrapped up over his head, fingers tangled in
his hair. His eyes were closed. Damien stood with his back to the door, eyes
starved for this picture. Smoke like burning candy, stinging his eyes.
"Does it make you feel better to whine to my guitarist?" LeClaire said, without
opening his eyes. No particular tone of voice. Just this test making room for
itself in the air.
"I didn't whine," Damien said, flushing. "He asked me what happened."
"He's funny that way," LeClaire said, unfolding himself and sitting up in one
rolling arc, pulling his head up and opening his luminous eyes. "Thinks
everything I do is his business."
Was he mad? At LeClaire? Was that possible? This didn't feel like mad, it hurt
too much, and he wanted to feel the way healwaysfelt about LeClaire again,
goddammit Awe and lust and amazement and worship and awe and lust. "We were
just, talking, and I came back, because I want to talk to you instead."
LeClaire pushed himself back, propped on pillows with his legs crossed at the
ankle, illusion long, and dropped his cigarette butt in an empty Coke can. "So
talk."
Damien sat on the edge of the bed, gingerly. He was still wet. "I wanted to
talk about, what you did."
"It isn't negotiable, Damien. If you don't like it, leave."
That hit him like an axe in the chest. His goddamn stupid eyes filled up with
tears. "
"You'd just…you won't even talk to me about it? It's just, your way, or-"
"Or no way," LeClaire agreed, and untangled one foot and stretched his leg out
crooked and drew a line on Damien's thigh with his bare toes.
He wanted to push LeClaire's foot away. Instead his fingers wrapped around his
ankle, and he said, "Do you want me to leave?"
"I want you, to take off your clothes, and get in this bed, so I can fuck you,
so I can sleep." He pulled his foot away, unsnapped and unzipped and peeled off
his vinyl pants, threw them, shoved the covers down and slid under them.
He lay there watching until Damien took off his shirt.
Damien peeled off his jeans and boxers in one go. His mouth was dry, his mind
mostly empty. He wondered what Kate was doing, back in another life. Watching
TV. Smoking Camels. Putting iodine-red in her hair, without him there to make
sure she didn't miss any.
Who would help him dye his hair, now?
Kevin, probably.
Brief, drastic flash of Kev's gloved hands slick with dye pulling through his
hair, petting hard against his scalp. It made his teeth hurt. No, wait, that
was him grinding them together.
He climbed in, all knees and elbows and hipbones, the sheets dragging at his
damp skin. Brian pulled him over, and he ended up with his head on LeClaire's
chest, arms sprawled over him. It was always a shock, this. Skin against skin.
He always felt, disoriented, as if LeClaire should have been hotter, colder,
softer, something. He squirmed his way on top, buried his face in LeClaire's
neck. "I don't want you to be mad at me."
A sigh. He pulled Damien up, held him up to look at him. "I don't want to be
mad at you. Do what I fucking tell you, next time," he said, and kissed him.
 
This was instantaneous, an abyss of texture, wet hot tongue and dangerous teeth
and lips that were too full even without lipstick. Kissing Kevin had felt like
something you did sitting in a Chevelle in your parent's driveway, on a first
scared secret date. Kissing LeClaire was like something you did in the corner
of a nightclub, driven mad with alcohol and chemicals and percussion and the
sex in the air.

Can he taste him? On me? Can he?
No, but he knows.

Their mouths were sticking together. LeClaire pulled back just enough to speak.
"Turn around."
Damien hated this. He was pretty sure LeClaire knew it. But he sat up, moved
over onto his side with his head towards Brian's feet and then LeClaire grabbed
him around his waist and dragged him close and buried his face against his
stomach, pulled him up and bit at his damp tangle of pubic hair, tugging hard
with his teeth, biting deeper. He nipped at the flesh underneath, closed his
teeth brutally hard on a tiny fold of skin.
He whimpered, resigned. LeClaire curled up closer so that Damien could reach
with his smaller frame.
He liked sucking LeClaire's dick, or having the favor returned. He just didn't
like both at once. It was too much, too hard to coordinate or concentrate. He
usually passively resisted this until Brian got tired of his half-assed
blowjobbing and switched to something else. He didn't dare to try that now,
though. He had to make everything okay again. Even though he couldn't remember
why it wasn't. It had been his fault, hadn't it? Some unknown crime. Whatever
it was, he had this immediate drive to try as hard as he could, to do this as
well as he could manage.
He leaned into LeClaire's cock, rubbed his face against it. He kept his eyes
open for the collage of flesh and texture, trying to wire himself into this
reality. Brian was petting him, running his hand from the back of his knee, up
across his ass, up to his back. God, he's so much bigger than me, Damien
thought. Blur. It felt like falling, this, like peripheral systems were being
shut down, one by one.
LeClaire imitated his nuzzling, laughing, and then licked him with too much
awful tongue from base to tip. Damien hated that, more tickle than tingle, but
he moaned anyway and pushed closer. LeClaire rewarded him with deep, sudden
suction, careful friction of lips and tongue. Instant, agonizing erection. He
closed his eyes and drew the dick in front of him as far into his mouth as he
could, trying to set up a rhythm that didn't throw LeClaire off.
It was different this time, the frustration of it a little less acute. A lot of
the problem was how hard this angle was hard for him. He had to hold his mouth
open as far as he could, set up a complex pattern of relaxing and then tensing
his tongue. LeClaire was petting with his fingertips now, over his balls,
farther back to threaten him with penetration. It dropped him down another
level, and he got too enthusiastic. He felt the head scrape against his molars,
and LeClaire growled and pinched the inside of his left thighhard. It hurt
enough to make him jump, and he forced his jaw wider, trying to move more
carefully, faster.
He experimented with tonguepressure in different places. Apparently he stumbled
onto something, because LeClaire made an insistent, fervent noise, dug his
fingernails into Damien's ass, fumbled his sucking for a minute. After a few
minutes of this he stopped completely, wrapping his arms around the smaller
boy, chewing at his thigh, making an elongated mouth-closed noise that rose and
fell.
Finally he shoved his hips forwards, one snapping motion. His dick drove too
far into Damien's throat without warning, setting off some kind of reflex that
made him cold and shaky and faint, made a nasty heat unfold at the hinges of
his jaw. He put one hand up to resist, but LeClaire drew back, out completely,
and put one hand down and closed it hard over his own dick, and came in a long
vicious convulsion, on his face, his neck. Damien made a startled, almost
horrified protest, but LeClaire's other hand wound merciless in his hair and
held him still for this indignity.
Do I like this? Scary, deformed blur of other horrors he might like. Brief
flash of Brian sitting on the edge of a stage, one hand a fist pulled back, the
other wrapped casual around a microphone. Eyes nailed to some unknown accuser.
Tickertape fast haze of words from advice columns in leather magazines.
His eyes were scrunched tightly closed. He'd had no idea come was so warm, or
that there was so much of it. It was in his eyelashes, splattered on his mouth
and cheeks. He put his tongue out to investigate. The taste was as chemical as
ever, electric and saltsweetsour and evil, more vivid now that most of it
wasn't in the back of his throat.
He did like it.
He went limp, raised unresisting hands to pet LeClaire through the rest of his
orgasm, feeling like a whore, an object. Property. Perfect.
LeClaire reached down, stroked him hard, squeezing enough to hurt, and he came
himself, defeated, in a long mean hot blaze. He was trying to imagine how he
looked, lying there like that.
Silence.
LeClaire moved, still shivering, turned around to lie beside him. Damien felt
him touch his face, smearing their semen together, tracing forehead and
cheekbones and chin with it. It had gotten in his eyes anyway, burning like
seawater. LeClaire pulled him closer, licking the mixture off his, tongue
brushing eyelids, nose, bottom lip. He whispered, "Saving you….the calories…"
and laughed.
It took Damien a second to figure out what he meant. Then a long narrow blade
of embarrassment and hurt and something else that kept him from moving. No
point.
LeClaire was running his sticky fingers through Damien's hair, scratching his
scalp with ragged black nails.
From Max and Kevin's room, a stereo was playing. KMFDM. Brutalize me, I will
heal, and all that noise.
It was almost dawn.
 
The music didn't help, really. He could still hear them through the wall.
Kevin sprawled on his half of the double bed, fingers jammed firmly in his
ears. He'd stripped down to his wet jeans, packed a bowl, turned the stereo on
too loud. All this failing to keep his mind utterly blank.
Damn it.
He ran a bath and dumped in four teeny hotel shampoo bottles. He sat there,
soaking, running more and more hot water in. He had run out of heroin, and he'd
made one of his periodic decisions not to buy any more. And it had everything
to do with the kid.
I mean, come on, just the, potential of it had occurred to him.
A few times. In the past hour or so.
Damn it.
It was…luminous. This feeling.
 
It was disguising itself inside him, wrapping itself up tight in a rational
veil of some kind of protective urge. This kept the guilt down to a dull roar.
This…sensation was eclipsing five or six other things inside him. Panic.
Druglust.
He should have recognized it as a bad sign.
He put his hand to his mouth. Took it away again.
OEDIPUS REGINA
 
Brian was a long sleeping oblong. The hotel room was dark, except for a candle
burning in the ice bucket on top of the television. Damien was facing
LeClaire's back, chewing his fingers, afraid to wake him up.
Sleeping was completely out of the question. The guilt was everywhere,
sprinkled liberally with a weird fear that felt like being a kid upstairs when
your parents were fighting downstairs.
LeClaire had never been angry at him before, had never hit him, not like that.
He must have disappointed him. A lot.
He couldn't sleep.
The guilt was everywhere.
He stopped chewing his fingers, pulled one of the stiff locks of hair from the
black side (the blue side made his teeth blue) and chewed on it. Semen. He
gritted it between his front teeth, lightly, frustrated. His other hand came
up, and he brushed his fingers from Brian's shoulder to his thigh. Nothing. He
closed his hand around LeClaire's upper arm.
He woke up, one long electricity suddenly occupying that evil skin, and turned
over on his back. He made a sound like a tomcat stretching, but dropped a few
octaves into a bass-guitar timbre. "What do you want, woman?" he murmured, and
reached up almost before Damien could stop chewing his hair. Almost caught. He
groped over in the darkness, hand wandering from Damien's throat to his chest,
fingertips searching for his nipple.
"I'm sorry I lied to you," he said, words all run together, trying to ignore
LeClaire's hand.
"Are you." No particular tone of voice.
God, he hated when Brian did that.
"I can't stop thinking about it." He ran through that again, and closed his
eyes and said "I want you to make me….regret it."
The second he'd finished speaking Damien thought, what is the matter with you!?
and waited, horrified at himself.
Silence. Too much silence. Brian's breathing, unchanged, and the dull hum of
the air conditioner.
Brian moved, one slow coil, and settled down on top of Damien, one knee nudging
hard between his thighs. He did a slow, deliberate shiver, wrapping his arms
tight. Lean, predator velvet. "Tonight."
"Tonight?" Vertigo, then Damien looked at the yellow threatening to spill
through the vertical blinds. It was morning. "But the show--"
"Tonight, I'll make you regret it," LeClaire told him, and pinned him close,
and kept him trapped that way until they both fell asleep.
ABSOLUTION
They were on the bus again. Destination, Gainesville.
Kev and Max had to ball themselves up small to fit curled up together on Max's
bunk. Max pulled the weird elongated curtain, ignoring the obligatory catcalls.
He squirmed around, knees and elbows flailing, until their heads were at
whispering distance. Kev was lying on his back with his knees hugged close to
his chest.
"What happened?" Funny Max. Every time he tried to whisper, he sounded like he
wanted to be Bogart.
"I did, something awful."
"Like, jail awful?"
Well, yes, but that wasn't the thing that was currently keeping him awake at
night. "Like, LeClaire can NOT know, awful."
Max instantly drew the wrong conclusion, since what had happened Last Time
Brian Found Out had been one of the most traumatic events of his weird life,
and he had only been a spectator. "And this isn't, about, you know--"
"No, " he said. That fast. Solar flare of guilt, and a blush to match it. It
was dim enough in the bunk to make everything navy blue, too dim for Max to see
him. "I…Damien, I"
"You didn't."
"I kissed him," Kev said, to knock out that wrong conclusion before Max decided
to discuss it.
This dropped Max from visualizing a XXX sin to visualizing a PG-13 one, but he
was still plenty horrified. "No!" he said, forgetting to whisper. Three more
yell/catcall/whistles from the peanut gallery scattered in the rest of the bus.
Kev shushed him, gave him a clumsy feeble smack with the back of one hand.
"No," Max said again, whispering this time. "A real kiss? With tongue?"
God help me, my only confidante is a drag queen with the mentality of a fourth-
grader. "No. Without tongue."
"But on the mouth, right?"
Kev sighed, eyes dying to roll. He could see where this was just destined to
go, and he decided to spare himself the warmer/colder discussion. "This kind of
kiss, all right?" He squirmed over closer, both their heads at neckbreaking
angles, and tried to duplicate the kiss he had given Damien. Max's mouth was
warm, loose, with lipstick that tasted like kindergarten. Max giggled, but
submitted to this indignity.
Kev had kissed Max before, due to drunkenness, New Years, spin the bottle. He
loved him in this exasperated older-brother way, so the kiss wasn't unpleasant,
or awkward, or anything, but it gave him no tingles of any kind.
Great. So that was all Damien.
He moved back. Max was quiet, which meant he was analyzing. Kev could almost
make out his expression: quizzical, mouth crumpled, painted eyebrows crooked.
Max came up with, "That long? And gentle, like that?"
Except that I had my hand on the back of his neck, and he'd been crying, and…
"Yeah, um. Mostly like that."
The word neither of them used, or considered using, was tenderness.
"Oh man. Not good," Kev could feel Max shaking his head. "Were you drunk, or…"
"It wasn't….that kind of a thing."
Max made hmming noises about that for a second or two. Then, "Who, um, started
it?"
"….I did."
That confirmed Max's suspicion. "Man, you better not do it again. Or anything,
man. That little bitch is seriously, taken."
"I'm not going to do it--" Again. Or anything else.
He stopped. Laced his fingers together, pulled his knees up until they were
touching his collarbone.
More slight moving of the mattress that meant head-shaking. "Was he mad?"
"No. He left. He…no. He wasn't mad."
"Would he rat you out?"
"No." A pause. "No."
***** Chapter 8 *****
SYNESTHESIA
LeClaire kept his promise to make Damien eat.
They'd been at some godawful place….a truck stop, maybe, who knew….and he'd
been dragged from the bus, blinking and dazed, steered into a booth between
Brian and Tristan. Brian had ordered for him, a scary plethora of bacon and
eggs and toast and ham over fried potatoes. He'd eaten, as much as he could
stand to, letting the others talk over him.
Kev kept his eyes away from this spectacle. He was sitting across from Damien,
cutting up something for the hopelessly sleepy Max, who was dozing on Kincaid's
shoulder.
Didn't matter. Herded back into the bus, smoking, talking, the new city
unfolding around them, an ugly scattered grid of numbered streets and college
kids in Abercrombie crowding rundown sidewalks.
Damien sat in the L-shaped breakfast nook, with his battered Ibanez across his
knees. He'd bummed a heavy bass pick from Max and was toying with a heavy dark
intro that was secretly an alternate opening for Biofuck. LeClaire folded
himself in beside him, and leaned in kissing close until he caught his eyes.
"Come on."
He didn't wait, or explain. He stood up and stalked down the aisle towards the
back.
Damien followed him.
Of course he did.
Professional ego wrangler.
He passed Kev sitting by Max, and handed off his guitar, the strap catching his
hair and pushing blue wisps into his eyes. Kev took it with the ease of
familiarity, and started playing "Gimme Shelter" very quietly.
LeClaire led him into the weird bathroom/shower. When they were wedged inside
he shoved the narrow door closed. He pulled Damien facing him and picked him
up--Damien gasped, hands snapping tense, expecting--and LeClaire sat him down
hard on the almost-nonexistent counter by the sink. The faucet was digging into
his back. "Don't move."
He reached into the shower, and pulled out a red plastic makeup case.
 
EX NIHILO
Some artistic soul had darkened the arena for them, with colored lights
jittering out gyroscopes of red and emerald and gold. Either that, or some
stoner had left everything running. It was freezing cold inside, with enough
cigarette and marijuana and clove smoke drifting in thick patches to interact
with the light show.
It was almost below sixty degrees, cold for Florida, and in honor of this
imitation winter LeClaire was wearing a jacket Damien had never seen before. A
long sleek patent-leather trenchcoat, cut in long even vertical strips from hem
to shoulder, with each of these long slashes pinned closed again with a
stitchwork of safety pins. The collar and sleeve cuffs had been trimmed with
long elegant white feathers. He wore leather gloves with no lining that tied at
the wrists and one ring, a huge inverted crucifix, with exaggerated gothic
lines and set with gleaming crimson glass on his left pinky. His eyes were
painted in drastic black, skin flawless white, mouth whited over too, and then
painted in with ghostpale frosted pink lipstick.
He was monumental, mythological, unshakable. He had been distant to Damien all
morning, expecting him to follow, guiding him left or right sometimes towards
seats or doorways with light careless nudges of his gloved hands. He was being
a bastard. He knew it.
 
EQUILATERAL
Backstage in the lounge, Max brought Damien a confused heap of clothing,
deposited the entire armload into his lap, beamed, and wandered off.
LeClaire ignored his questioning look. He was talking about something with
Tristan and cutting lines with a gleaming new credit card on somebody's laptop.
He figured out where the actual dressing room was, went in, and dumped the
clothes onto a chair. Two heavy leather bracelets with d-rings set in them slid
out of the pile and hit the floor. Jesus. There was a Bauhaus shirt, with the
hem cut off, and the collar neatly snipped out generously enough to make sure
the neckline would slip over his shoulder. He pulled off his Spiderman shirt
and after debating briefly, went ahead and put the new one on over the fishnet
shirt he had underneath.
Next was brand-new black bondage cargo shorts. Drool. He'd wanted a pair like
this forever. These were insanely heavy when he picked them up, and he checked
the pockets. Collar to match the bracelets. The same fuck-me-red lipstick
LeClaire had put on him on the bus, and black liquid eyeliner. Apparently he
was supposed to touch up his makeup, too.
The weight turned out to be three feet or so of industrial-grade chain. He put
on everything else, quickly. People kept coming in and out--Kincaid, Fathom,
Kev briefly--and it made him nervous, even though the least he ended up wearing
was black boxers Kev had donated to him.
He had no idea what to do with the chain. Finally he stuffed it back into the
pocket, on the opposite side from his wallet and chains. It was still way too
damn heavy. Only the belt snagging on his hipbone stopped it from dragging his
shorts down. He had a brief pang of……what? anger? sadness? Soon his hip
wouldn't be such a blade.
Still. Anything for LeClaire.
The bracelets were too large for his wrists. They were floppy and loose enough
to spin around even buckled through the last hole. The collar fit, second-to-
last hole, with two fingers inside it. He vaguely remembered reading that was
how to wear it someplace, though it probably applied to dogs or something. He
checked himself in the mirror. Um, yeah. The lipstick was….just so red,
luminous and really overtly sexual. He was kind of, embarrassed by it, but it
did look good. Slutty, but good. The collar was awful, though. He was
superconscious of it, every time he moved his head.
Back out in the lounge, LeClaire gestured him closer. He tugged Damien forward
by the waistband of his shorts, reached into the pocket, and pulled out the
chain. Then he reached into his own pocket, and pulled out four tiny silver
padlocks, and a ring with one key.
Awful.
One at the back of the collar, one in the front for the chain, and one on each
manacle. Damien stood, letting Brian move his arms, his hair, tilt his head. He
wanted to, move. Complain. Something. But he didn't. Not really. Mostly, he
wanted to see what would happen next.
The bracelets were too loose to be acceptable, and Brian took these off and
poked a new hole in each one with a corkscrew scavenged from a champagne tray.
Better. He smoothed his hands once over Damien's hair, and said, "That's very,
very, rock and roll, and you look…..great."
STRING
Damien stood behind the vast speaker at stage right, painted and nervous. The
rest of the band was ready, the lights were all but gone, and Kevin was a
shadow that might have been looking in his direction. The shadow flickered,
hand moving invisibly to fretboard, and an E-minor like nuclear thunder shook
him from his teeth to his ankles. His hands came up, wanting to cover his ears,
but he stopped them for the sake of his hair. Max did a tricky voodoo bassline,
and then all at once the lights blazed on, hailed by Fathom's merciless
slamming across the drum kit. It was more deafening than the music, flooding
the entire stage in a blinding surgical white glow.
In the center of this mayhem Brian was holding the mic stand out with his right
arm, motionless and stunning. Tonight it was midnight blue vinyl pants as tight
as a tattoo with a wide heavy belt, a shirt that was a network of straps and
chrome buckles with fishnet tatters underneath, and platform boots that must
have brought him up to around seven feet tall. He looked like a defiance of
physics.
After a few minutes, he settled into that warm Zen state that was his favorite
thing about watching the show. There was nothing inside him but this music and
this eyecandy.
 
Kevin thought this show was going even better than the first. No nasty feedback
screaming away at random intervals. There was still the barrage of objects from
the audience, but the ratio was slanted in favor of underwear and weird
harmless shit like condoms and papers with notes scrawled on them.
LeClaire encouraged this, standing front and center, slamming himself in the
chest, to prove how invulnerable he was. He baited people into scavenging
through pockets and working up spit, twitching in exaggerated ecstasy when
anyone scored a direct hit.
A boy with light blue hair and religiously wild eyes, supported by two dyed and
pinned cohorts leaned way over the barricade, brandishing a handful of flowers.
He was wavering, but keeping his balance, and begging prettily by stroking his
own face and making ludicrous eyes.
This was more than LeClaire's ego would let him resist. He spent several
minutes in a messy crouch, vinyl knees bent almost to his chin, microphone
tilting in and out, darting his head in like a bird and snatching mouthfuls of
the bouquet between lines and spitting them back at his admirer. Finally there
was nothing but a crooked bundle of stems. He rewarded this sacrifice by
sucking on his fingers, wetting them generously, then leaning over and shoving
them deep into anime boy's mouth.
Kevin watched, amused and quietly jealous. Their eyes were nailed together,
this temporary intimacy magnified by light and crowd and music into something
as sticky as sex. The boy's throat was working, cheeks and jaw tensing until
LeClaire tired of it and shoved with the heel of his hand against the kid's
chin, hard enough to topple the pyramid.
(god damn him, damn him, damn him, i love him still and there's no hope at all,
can love metastasize, like cancer, can it)
A brief scuffle of boys and girls, swarming the bluehaired kid for second-hand
contact. LeClaire had been doing shit like that since they were a garage-and-
bender-party band. Since
(before the hospital thing)
they had been little more than kids themselves.
Dammit. He watched LeClaire's eat up the stage in wide crooked strides, cutting
across to stage right as if he could care less what had happened to this flower
boy.
Kev placed a mental bet in spite of himself.
Yep. There.
LeClaire turned around, body pointed at Max, mic flawlessly poised, sobbing
about retrograde, degrade you like a sex grenade, but those predator eyes were
searching for skyblue hair. Kevin, 1, Kevin, 0. And bet number two, and yep,
there it was: those Fuhrer eyes found what they wanted, making sure the owner
of that dyejob was upright and still more or less okay, and wandered away, no
longer interested.
He only wants to hurt people on purpose, in controlled and specific, ways….
Kevin noticed he was getting his own share of stares, his own little ration of
hands extended to close the space between himself and the crowd. He looked
again--normally he played while staring at an invisible point about ten feet in
front of himself--and yes, they were actually reaching for him. Forhim.
Like I'm a drug, or something.
Guilt. He was no kind of drug. He was baking powder in a bag that had once held
a peanut butter sandwich. LeClaire was diamond dust bright Colombian cocaine in
an antique silver pillbox.
When Damien was one of them, he--
He clamped down on that thought, hard, but it morphed itself into something
that almost made him step forward, ready to grab a mouthful of something
himself. For one brief instant he was almost certain he would do it, could
almost feel, someone….blur of ideas, of hair that he was pretty sure would be
dyed black, mostly black, and maybe jawline short, like--
(his)
The usual not-that-kind-of-guy thing stopped him. He was nowhere near ready to
play grabbing and licking games with strange teenagers. He'd leave that
rockstar stuff to LeClaire for now.
Forever, probably, he thought, and decided his ten-foot invisible mark was
still a pretty good idea.
There was at least one hot, shameful, dark-chocolate side effect of letting
Brian have the limelight. Now,
(as if you could take it from him, you stupid little fuck?)
the eye candy was free. Finally, once and for all, he could stare all he
wanted. Without sunglasses. Everyone would just think he was watching for,
cues, or something.
Of course, the fact that he could stare all he wanted meant that he would stare
all he wanted. At LeClaire. At LeClaire being a twitchy, package-stroking,
arrogant show off in full goth regalia.
He was pretty glad he'd always been a low-slung Ramones type of guitarist.
In a weird sort of way, the whole thing made him feel left out. He had to keep
some kind of brain activity going, fretting and strumming and occasionally
singing. The kids in the pit had no such constraints. They could stand there
blitzed and shrieking. They could squirm their arms inside their clothes and
pull them out again, hands full of torn-off underwear. They could space,
twitching and glazed, utterly hypnotized by LeClaire's vinyl-upholstered
package, lean sobbing against the barricade, gaze up into the bank of lights as
though the sequence was an encoded message. They could just, be rocked.
Funny, when he'd been on the other side he'd felt left out, too--like the next
row up was where it was really at. Later, when his paychecks (and his
dicksucking ability) had granted him entrance into the hallowed front rows, and
a backstage pass or two, it had been ON the stage, guitar strap cutting into
his shoulder, fret hand blurring, that had been the epitome of made-it, got-it,
there. Now he was there, leather and paint and all, and all he really wanted
was to be back in the pit again, even in the shitty seats, so he could just
gape at LeClaire's fury without trying to keep rhythm at the same damn time.
Fuck. He'd been Zen-playing and the song was over. His mind was terrifyingly
blank for a beat too long, but thank god, his hand pulled his fingers to the
right place, and the fingers agreed on what to do once they got there. Almost
over, he thought. It made him feel ungrateful as hell, but he was sort of glad.
He was dead tired, and had a serious desire to sneak into his last little
emergency bit of H--not enough for one shot, really--and then get nice and
drunk. Maybe then, do something utterly un-rockstar. Play Doom with Tris or
Max, maybe. Preferably while listening to something totally uncool.
He zigged left to check his high E in his monitor, and saw someone standing
just offstage, someone so beautiful it crippled his hand so that a string
plunked instead of wailing. Then the angel tossed his head, the gesture
bafflingly familiar. Damien. Damien, painted within an inch of his life for
(leclaire)
some reason.
He did the overexaggerated nod that was the closest to waving you could do with
both hands full of six-string. Damien's eyes widened, and he shook his head,
mouthing something, and stepped back, hands coming up in the universal gesture
for don't.
What the hell--
A sick, heavy, kicked-in-the-balls feeling drifted up around his stomach,
deleting his erection. He knew, before he saw LeClaire cutting over like a
shark through still water. Something bad was currently in progress.
ATTRITION
LeClaire turned, looking very……deliberate, as if something had cued him to do
this, now.
Damien faltered, then…..smiled, in spite of himself, delighted to be noticed.
LeClaire did not smile back.
He thought, shit, and stepped back, but it was too late. LeClaire was
targeting, and closing in.
He can't just LEAVE in the middle of a song, he'll be…..fired, or something….
LeClaire was actually offstage, now, and still moving closer. And he was moving
fast. Damien took one more baby step back, eyes teacup round, and started to
say oh my god.
It was too late.
LeClaire grabbed his leash and lunged back towards the stage. Damien went over
immediately, thrown forward hard enough to give his knees and palms a serious
bang into the concrete floor. The inexorable drag around his neck didn't even
leave him time to get to his feet. He had to crawl after Brian as fast as he
could.
He discovered he was terrible at fast crawling. Twenty feet, maybe thirty, and
multiple knee and elbow bangs later, he was crouched shaking in the middle of
the intersection of four floodlights, with ten thousand pairs of fascinated
eyes on him. He had never, ever, in his life, felt so shockingly visible.
Oh, the noise.
Everything was overcome by the boiling, relentless noise.
The world stopped moving. There was only the noise, and the supernova of
lights, and Brian standing over him with the chain wrapped twice around his
hand, like a statue. There was only that for days.
God, I am so afraid of him, god, I can't be out here in front of, everyone,
god, I can't be, this….not on the STAGE, for chrissakes…
Damien pushed himself up onto his knees, raising one hand, "Don't--"
Brian raised his free hand, made one diagonal in the air, and if there had been
noise before, this was some kind of catastrophe.
Fathom fell in, propeller fast, drilling out a drum line that left Kevin no
choice but to crunch out a rhythm again in, grinding ugly and messy in dropped
D, playing like he wanted to hurt the guitar somehow, and Casey and Max
followed.
Then there were six minutes of hell.
Brian jerked down and forward on the chain hard, before Damien had even
considered anything drastic like standing. He was busy mostly thinking ow. The
collar hit the back of his neck like a fist and he struck the stage again, face
first this time, because both hands had gone to the collar in some kind of
reflex.
The band stayed the hell out of the way. They were playing hard and heavy, with
Kev improvising a quick nasty melody around the driving percussion. The
floodlights clicked off, then, and there was only a bank of merciless strobe
lights, crashing from darkness to a flash like artillery at breakneck speed.
Snapshots of everything, and all of them a blur.
LeClaire dragged him up again, stepping back with illusion long legs, laughing,
and then he moved forward and stepped on the chain, hooking it just in front of
the heel of one awful platform boot, and he dragged it through, pinning Damien
cheek to stage, holding him there, the chain drawn tight. A randomized rack of
blacklights shimmered into the chaos, painting everything violet and green. Max
was making his bass do things like plane crashes.
Damien couldn't move. He was bleeding from chin and knee now, too afraid and
generally blown away to do much but kind of squirm, gasping. And did helike
this? His brain denied it, but his cock knew better, a throbbing aching blaze
of like. Another bruise.
The audience loved it. Screaming, slamming, pogoing, hysteria, shouting.
Brian waited, drawing all this adoration in. After a viciously long time he
nudged his foot into Damien's head until he looked up, and reached for the
buckle of his belt.
And Damien freaked. He knew, he just knew, that this was not the prologue to a
mouthful of dick. It was something in Brian's eyes, maybe, something, familiar.
This was not cool, this was not sexy, this was not what he meant by rock and
roll. No way. A belt was too much, a belt was too weird, a belt was his dad and
lying under the kitchen table with the forest of chairlegs that kept him safe
being dragged away one, by, one, and crying, a belt was, just no, oh no.
He freaked. He made a genuine and no longer fucking around effort to get up,
away, anything. It didn't help. The chain did not move. And Brian unbuckled his
belt with one hand, one tug and slip and then he had the buckle in his hand and
he was winding it around his palm, so he wouldn't hit him with the buckle, that
much was a mercy, wow, that was a lot more considerate than his dad had ever
been, his dad, who had once hit him in the spine with a college dictionary. And
seriously, was he watching this happen to himself in front of thousands of
people?
One slow, mean pull, and the belt cleared the loops and hung free. Two and feet
of evil. Strobelights again, suddenly. Snapshots of him doing this like the
film had gone wrong.
(tonight)
LeClaire looked at the audience, waiting. Raised the belt, giving Damien all
kinds of trauma, only to gesture a question at the crowd with it.
(i'll make you regret it)
Thousands of people said yes.
Five, maybe seven seconds of crowd noise, and that was it. That was all the
warning he got. Then LeClaire pulled back the belt and swung it, and he knew
damn well what he was doing. It thudded down and left a terrifying line of
pressure from Damien's shoulderblade across to his lower back. He felt his
shoulderblades snap up, still more startled than hurt, but in so much dread of
the next one, falling. It was so heavy. And he'd thought the screaming
maelstrom of kids was loud. This was loud.
There was another crack, and he heard it before he felt it, and this one hurt.
He still couldn't lift his head. The collar would choke him.
He pulled his knees under him, still thinking maybe he could just stand up,
which could lead to, you know, running. This really didn't help. It just
altered his position, badly, and then the belt wrapped around the back of his
left thigh.
It can't be that loud, I can hear it over the band, it really, just, can't be
that loud…owww, fuck…….
Too much. Too fast. Too many crooked rows of waspstings across his shoulders
and the small of his back, wrapping around his ribcage to his chest.
(you have to be quiet. do you want the neighbors to hear you? do you?)
He tried to inhale, thinking If he hits me one more time, I'll scream. And it
never stopped, and he didn't scream.
But he was getting there.
He felt his lungs vibrate, his throat move. One sound, maybe. He couldn't hear
himself. He felt it again, the vibration of a moan or a cry, but it was in a
void. Another breath. Still no screaming.
The band dropped the volume, spiraling into a deep loop of an interlude. The
hitting stopped. Damien twisted his head to look up. LeClaire was gesturing to
someone offstage, the belt still swinging from right hand, the leash held
casually in his left, chain wrapped twice around his palm. And someone brought
him his microphone, and put it in his waiting hand with the belt.
Damien really had no, tactical, plan, anymore.
Wicked, cheating, trick, that, he thought.
He closed his eyes. Whatever LeClaire said to him now would be heard by several
thousand people, and he was pretty sure it would be traumatic enough without
watching him say it. Except the devil made him open his eyes at the last
minute, and he watched this mouth he'd had memorized for years, and
LeClaire said, "Get your arms behind your back."
Um. Okay. Sure. Yeah.
Apparently, he didn't move fast enough. The belt slammed down across the back
of his neck, right above the collar, and the end swung around and got him in
the jaw. His arms drew themselves up, his hands behind him. He was afraid
Brian would hit his hands. His left hand. His chording hand. Trust,he thought,
and it didn't mean anything.
It took him forever to realize there wasn't another one coming.
He twisted his face towards the stage and pressed his forehead against it,
making some kind of tiny, invisible little short sound, over and over, with his
mouth pressed tightly closed. He felt like he was on a turntable, held down by
centrifugal force. He felt like he might fall, even though he couldn't get any
closer to the ground than he already was.
"Don't move." Terrible. So very Emperor Ming and all that, through all those
yards and yards of speakers. He didn't move.
Brian was doing something over him that he couldn't see. It made the audience
roar. I won't look.
The chain went limp. Dropped. It was lying right there on the floor above his
head. He was free now, but something held his forehead tight against the stage
anyway. He had been told not to move, and he wouldn't. You didn't antagonize
Him. It would only make it worse. There was much worse than the belt; there
were fists and wristlocks and broken fingers and fire escapes to
(not)
think about.
LeClaire tugged at his hands. He lay still, letting himself be moved, heart
firehosing blood through him so fast that it felt like pinpricks of red might
seep out through his pores. Cold, a weight against his wrist. A click. The
padlock.
(the key, they were yelling because he held up the KEY)
And now his arms had been removed from the equation. There was a nasty kind of
relief in that; he didn't have to fight himself not to struggle anymore. He
could wriggle all he wanted and his hands were staying put.
Four minutes, and counting.
Brian picked up the leash again, and pulled him towards the very front of the
stage, slowly enough to let him shuffle along on his knees. They were maybe
four feet from the barricade, now, and the animal crowd behind it was a haze of
hands held up by black leather bracelets, fingers spread spider-wide to catch a
piece of this atrocity.
LeClaire dragged him fast again for the last few feet and kind of, slung him
and then kicked him, oh my god, kicked him hard in the stomach with one awful
boot. An heavy sphere of vacuum just under his ribcage, a terrible sensation of
being emptied, and then the burning struggle to pull his breath in again, the
vacuum filling with dark red blunt-edged pain. He huddled shaking, wrapped
around this ball of hurt, thrown up against LeClaire's monitor with the metal-
plated corner digging into his cheek.
He thought, i, love…..
The sea of hands was boiling, now, and the longest arms were only just able to
brush at him, myriad insect-tiny tugs at his legs, his null-and-void hands, his
shoulder. Someone caught a wisp of his hair, tangled it in sweat-sticky fingers
and pulled hard, stealing a thin mesh of blue and black strands. He lifted his
head and saw a girl with chemicalwhite short hair, staring at this prize
snarled in her rings, and then back at him, looking--sorry? horrified?
grateful? And then she was gone, shoved aside and back and down, who knew.
One minute, thirty seconds.
He looked up, over his shoulder. One battery-acid inhale. Brian slid his hand
around the microphone and leaned into it, looking down through all that hair
like a demon. "Do you regret it?"
Not fast enough. Brian pulled the leash down until Damien was on his back over
the monitor, arms trapped under him and shoulders wailing. He slid his foot
along the chain until it was pressed against Damien's throat.
Behind them, Kev missed his fingering completely, hitting an atmospherically
wrong chord and catching himself badly. Nobody noticed.
Damien was trying to push himself up, somehow, hips raised off the floor,
bootheels slipping. Anything to relieve the pressure on his throat. His spine
was bent back hard over the corner of the speaker, and LeClaire's boot was
pushing the collar in so hard he could actually feel his windpipe compressing.
Black batshapes folded in at the edges of his vision, exploding into magenta
flares. He said yes yes yes i regret it i do, breath jagged and voicebox
wounded, and the noise swallowed it up. Nobody heard it.
But LeClaire saw his lips move, and smiled.
The pull of the collar and the shove of his boot was like a vise. He leaned
over, and said into the mic "I can't hear you. Can any of you hear him?"
Roars of no.
He held the mic down for Damien to speak. He still had the belt in that hand
and it fell against Damien's face, horrifying, as though it were venomous,
sentient.
oh god i can't, not into the, not so that everyone can…..
……no way out, get it over with, don't make it worse,
there are worse things
"……yes, I regret it," he said, as slowly and clearly as he could.
Cataclysmic. He'd expected, some kind of delay, but his words were right there,
everywhere, thrown back at him from miles of speakers, his voice weird and huge
and fragile and ragged and petrified, over a kaleidoscope of percussion and
power chords. Some stage debut, part of him thought.
Explosion of applause, stomping, chanting of something. More? Whore?
LeClaire pulled back the belt again, and drove it down, twice. Both landed
across his ribcage, one just above his nipples, one below, and if that wasn't
as hard as he could swing, Damien never wanted to know it. The microphone
picked up the impact, two dull bassdrum thuds, and the trailing edge of the one
stuttered cry Damien made. Then he threw down the belt and the mic--bang,
smash--and let go of the chain and pulled his foot off Damien's neck. He looked
down, tugged at the waistband of his pants, belt loops pointedly empty,
erection blatant. Damien's brain took a helpless Polaroid of that. LeClaire
statued at him, all mouth and arrogance. He decided something, then turned his
back and walked away.
On the way by Max he hooked the backup mic and said "Get this bitch off my
stage."
Zero minutes, zero seconds.
Well.
 
CASUALTY
It took Damien a long time to realize it was over, and to remember how to move.
He tried to sit up and succeeded in sliding over the monitor, scraping most of
his spine on the edge.
Somebody did the half-crouching weaving run to him from offstage. He looked up,
squinting. Security, Judecca Tree. Whatever.
He managed kneeling, then standing, and took two lurching steps on knees that
felt sprung and full of glass. The guy took him by the arm, then the shoulders,
and he shuffled and staggered until he finally made it backstage. The three
little steps-down nearly killed him, and he almost toppled them both.
It was so dark after the stage lights that all he could see was a blueviolet
haze with shapes hurrying through it. He couldn't hear. This was weird, creepy,
like something out of a war movie, and he looked up and tried to straighten,
realized again that his arms were still padlocked together behind his back.
The afterburn of the lights was fading into dark blue ghostcircles. One of
Judecca Tree's roadies--his favorite--had replaced the embarrassed security
guard at his elbow. Jason (Jay? James?) was gesturing in front of him, eyebrows
raised under his eternal ski cap. Something about the manacles. Damien didn't
get it. He shook his head. The kid went around behind him, still talking and
gesturing like a mime or a TV on mute, and kind of started trying to catch
Damien's wrists, hesitant. Like Damien might, Bruce Lee kick him, or something.
Or freak.
Oh. He wanted to unbuckle them. No. LeClaire had locked his wrists together,
and only LeClaire would unlock them. It made his scrotum crawl just thinking
about what Brian might do if he came back here and found him with his hands
free. Damien pulled away, shaking his head again, and yelled "No thank you!"
because he still couldn't hear himself at all.
The kid made drinking motions, and that got him an quick and serious nod. Yes,
fine, coolness. Bring me something if you have to, whatever. Just go away, god,
please.
The kid vanished.
He walked in what he was pretty sure was the direction of the lounge. The walls
were painted public-school green over public-school cinderblocks, covered in
Sharpie and paint and makeup graffiti from a thousand bands. He leaned his
shoulder against this because he couldn't trail his hand along it. Friction-
y drag of chipped paint and concrete trying to grab his tshirt.
People were walking past him in either direction. Lots of them stopped to talk
to him, or try to. A few of them touched his shoulder, worried, seeing blood on
his chin, his knees. He persisted in walking, ignoring them, nodding a little
and muttering thanks, i'm fine. Finally he hit the doorway of the green room
and turned right. He wanted to shut the door, and it took him a minute of
pointless trying with his foot before he gave up, backed into it, and patted
around for the doorknob with his hand to pull it closed. He ignored the
staring, but it made his throat hurt. Dammit. An entire goddamned concert hall
had just seen worse, what did he care if a couple of roadies saw this now?
Sluggish, draggy steps to the couch, then he kind of thumped over onto his
side. He wasn't waiting for his drink.
Serious hurting: stomach, collarbone, back of left knee, a wide swatch directly
up his spine. Little familiar jellyfish-trails of sting all over his back and
thighs and chest. His shoulders were killing him; he could almost feel them
trying to just pop out of the sockets and be done with it. Also, his nervous
breakdown meter was in the red. His arms were shaking so hard that he scooted
closer to the back of the couch to keep the padlock from rattling in the D-
rings. He was cold, after the drenching heat of the stage. He had no idea where
Kate's jacket was, but he wanted it badly, right this minute, even if he
couldn't put it on.
The crying was kind of a delayed reaction. There wasn't a whole lot of it. Just
tears for maybe half a second, no sobbing or anything. He was too drained to
make a production number out of it. He wished he could wrap his arms around his
knees. That would've been better. The humiliation seemed to be a permanent
fixture, rising and falling like a new kind of nausea, in bloodred waves that
made him dizzy and sick of himself. All those eyes.
The door opened.
He thought please godletitbe kevin and not Him…
LeClaire stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.
 
LUPERCALIA
He went over to Damien and stood there, hands in his hair pulling it out of his
face, looking down with this criminally sexy disdain. Damien closed his eyes,
then opened them again, thinking he wants me to look at him. Six foot four of
vinyl and skin, gleaming. The straps and shirt were gone. Long wireline snaking
down along sternum and stomach, barred by cord necklace at LeClaire's throat,
by the oilspill pants hanging still-beltless at his hips, stretched into tight
contour lines over his dick.
I want…..this is…..dreaming, a game, a joke…….I want…….
Brian leaned over, put his hand on the back of the couch, and his hair swung
forward, dripping sweat and Evian, dragging a tentacle-damp line from Damien's
neck above the collar to his face. Nothing. Then he reached down and pulled at
Damien to sit up, and wrapped his arms around him and closed his hands around
the shackles behind him. Not exactly an embrace.
…..him to bite me so i can bite him back, claw me so i can bleed, slam my head
into a wall so i get a blue flash and then blackness and then a hospital where
i can lie to the doctors……this….is…an earthquake…..
One hard ruthless bonegrating squeeze, and then LeClaire's hands came up and
bent Damien's head so he could lick his cheek, his neck, his ear, just under
his eye. His chin, finally, the narrow crooked streak of blood, there, stopping
short of a kiss, as if it had been only the blood he wanted. Harsh, arrhythmic
breathing against Damien's face.
Damien wailed, a tiny terrornoise, half-expecting to be bitten, as though
LeClaire might fold into a wolf at any moment. He pressed his face into the
skin of Brian's chest, smelling salt and boy and rage and said "Don't put me
out there please oh please don't put me out there I won't do it again, I won't,
please Brian I love you, don't…"
He had never said that before.
Nothing changed.
Close-up blur of Brian's hand, unsnapping, unzipping. He grasped Damien's
bottom lip, fingernails digging in for one flash of sting, and drew a crimson
lipstick smear down his chin, pulling his head down. "Get me wet."
Damien had to tug LeClaire's pants open with his teeth. Delirious, the question
of how he might look, doing this. He drew in a deep, greedy breath.
Cheerleader-candy-apple scent again. All at once he realized it was
conditioner.
Vicious quicktime: LeClaire in the shower, slick and wet and alone with his
eyes closed, raking a generous handful of something slick and expensive into
that evil hair, then reaching down and smearing what was left into his pubic
hair.
God.
Seconds or hours, neither of them moving, the head of LeClaire's dick pressed
against his clenched teeth. He wanted to, needed to open his mouth, but
something like electricity was quivering all through him and every muscle he
had was knitted tight, vibrating, aching. Then he let go of whatever it was,
and opened his mouth, and the cock slid in, slick and swollen over his tongue.
LeClaire was pulling him back by his hair. Warm tangle of pain in his scalp. He
made some protest, the appetite in him wanting throat and mouth bruised and
filled, and he sucked hard, and LeClaire yanked his head away, furious, and hit
him backhand, sending him toppling against the back of the couch. It made him
cry for a second, suddenly. It hurt his…..feelings?
Brian had misunderstood, he hadn't meant to…
No, Damien had misunderstood.
This wasn't about his appetite, really. Only about the places where his desires
and LeClaire's happened to overlap.
LeClaire pulled Damien up, swung him around in a lazy arc and let him go at the
end of it. He staggered and fell into a rolling rack of costumes, mostly
painless except that a piece of the frame at the bottom caught him across his
shins. It threw him forward, facefirst, into a dense dark world of cotton and
leather and feathers and fur. He drew in one breath, so deep his stomach fought
it. Smells of sweat and paint and deodorant and cigarettes and marijuana and
(kevin)
and LeClaire.
A blue leather opera trench cascaded down, burying him in its weight, in that
dark religious scent. He was lying on his face, ribcage against the crossbar,
adding new bruises to his collection, stirring the tangle of fabric with his
feet.
Brian came down hard on his back, and he growled, and Damien could feel him
breathing in rapid angry bursts, exhaling hot and fast against his neck, his
shoulder. He was all elbows and ribcage and hair and vinyl.
This is lust, this fury. The phrase rattled into his head and pulled a switch
inside him and locked it down, and he was one vivid arc of desire, pushing back
against his attacker, wanting. LeClaire forced his hands up farther, and he
screamed, one bright runner of torture pulling through his left shoulder. Then
there was only LeClaire's hands, weighted with rings, nails ragged, fingers
swarming everywhere, hooking tight and angry and leaving gouges in their wake.
He felt his shorts and chains and straps and boxers, ripped down and added to
the general tangle. He kicked, something, trying pointlessly to get this knot
of fabric over his booted feet. This was interpreted as resistance, apparently.
LeClaire snarled. Shadow of a wolf, again. More hitting, fistheavy thudding
blows. Back, back, right hip, right thigh, each blow a little explosion of
confusing pleasure.
He'd had a fantasy, a wet dream, a pet jerk-off movie he'd stored in his head
for years, probably lifted from samurai legend with weird Roman trappings added
from some Bible movie. There would be some kind of vague, fight, and he would
be beaten down and conquered on a battlefield, pushed down on all fours and
(raped)
fucked, by someone beautiful and bloody, with armor digging into his back. All
that stored and cherished blaze rose up in him now, and he slammed himself back
so hard he almost threw LeClaire off him, and said in one thin plastic rush,
"…..now….."
There had never been anything, so, vivid. His own dick was jammed against
something jagged with sequins, and LeClaire hit him again, his hand spread
flat, fingers wide, and then spread him open with his thumbs and drove himself
inside in a blunt, mean sequence. All the nasty, gorgeous, frictionsick itch
and sting and sense of fullness and invasion and the low stomachdeep clench of
pleasure, compacted into seconds. It was too fucking much, like a strobe light
against a migraine, like he imagined it might be in a car crash, like being
knocked over by the shockwave of a ten kiloton bomb.
He didn't get time to scream about it; it went on and on, and LeClaire was
still hitting him, lazy messy crazy, sometimes the almost-painless side of his
fist, sometimes the knuckles in a short more specific hurt, sometimes the dull
sting of his palm, deathmetal fast. Both sensations were one synchronized slam
of abuse and delight. He was silent, all higher brain functions crashing,
burning, teeth driven into his bottom lip and still grinding tighter, hands
gripping blue leather that did nothing to steady him.
A wolf in armor, long jaws closing over the back of his neck. A centurion in
fur with overgrown teeth, bloodslick from chin to navel. And then this confused
system failure of fantasy was deleted, too, and all that came to fill the space
was LeClaire, LeClaire, LeClaire….and it, it was
over, it has to be over, it has, to be--
 
He'd come all over somebody's shirt. LeClaire was still inside him, lying
against his back, heavy and wet and soothing.
He was sleepy. He never wanted to move. LeClaire's cock, doing something weird
like, twitching, inside him. Brief reflex hipmovements, from either or both of
them, that made him groan in a tired kind of way. Brian opened his mouth
against Damien's back, drew a wide lazy circle with his tongue.
Knocking.
Damien was too tired to wish it was Kevin. Mostly he just wished whoever it was
would go away before LeClaire decided to move. He had never in his life felt
anything quite like this, this silence inside him, like every little voice in
his head had been drowned, gagged, shot.
Muffled, through the door: "Brian? It's important."
Tristan Blade. Brian shoved himself off, pulling out fast enough to leave
Damien with that sickening slide-grasping feeling for a second. Damien had a
half-second to turn over, all dazed and choppy, and drag an armload of clothes
over himself.
Tristan was already leaning into the room. He spared Damien barely a glance. He
was quite rock-star acclimated, and half-naked groupies in various positions
were about as amazing and unique as coffee tables. He was stagedecked, and
holding a beer. "MTV just saw every bit of that, and the crowd is going nuts.
Do you guys have any more?"
Damien spent a full ten seconds thinking this guy meant MTV had seen, that, and
it didn't help that LeClaire was as close to speechless as Damien had ever seen
him He had his pants mostly up, and more or less fastened, at least. "Any…more,
um--"
Behind him, Damien said, "MTV?"
"Songs!" Tris shouted, laughing. He reached in and clapped LeClaire hard on the
shoulder, almost a punch. "Anencore,you know, from the band, now get out there,
both of you, before they stomp through the motherfucking floor, yeah?"
"Both of us?" Damien tried to stir around in the clothes for his shorts without
looking away from Brian and Tris. Hell, at this point, anybody's shorts would
do.
"More." And LeClaire came back to himself, the startled posture melting away. A
werewolf,Damien thought again, chewing his ruined lip. Brian had vanished, and
LeClaire the frontman was back. Above them, several thousand pairs of combat
boots, insisting in 4/4 time that there be more, more, more.
***** Chapter 9 *****
VIBRATO
 
The encore was far less terrible than Damien had expected. LeClaire kept him
kneeling beside him, touching his neck, or his hair, once kicking him in the
thigh, but no further blazing torture occurred. He kept his eyes closed for
most of it, and that was fine. The worst part, really, was his knees killing
him.
Backstage, the party was serious. The general chaos had expanded its perimeters
to include most of the available space. Casey and Fathom had snuck to the
fusebox and disabled something-or-other so that only the emergency lights were
lit, as was their usual practice. Into this red, smoke-fogged Klingon hell of a
party came MTV, cameras blazing, armed with microphones and lights on sticks.
Groovy.
"I can't do an interview," Damien was protesting, mostly to LeClaire. Tim the
Manager was trailing along behind them in his mall-business-casual with a
clipboard.
Brian said, "I'll do the interview. You just sit there."
Tim started shaking his head. "Actually, it's likely that they'll want to talk
to Damien--"
"I'll do the interview,"
Tim subsided.
LeClaire took Damien's shirtsleeve and dragged him over to MTV's camera setup.
He hooked a roll of black duct tape, pulled off a four-inch strip, and stuck it
firmly and symmetrically over Damien's mouth. He tossed the tape back to its
startled owner. "Better?" he said, leaning close so only Damien could hear.
Damien nodded, bunted his face into LeClaire's shoulder gratefully.
Safely out of camera range, Tristan Blade lit a joint, grinning, and wandered
away to do some coke before he had to go on.
 
A line of six chairs were set up in front of the towering bank of instrument
cases, monitors, and sets. Lights on tripods and cameras on wheels were trained
on these empty chairs.
Max. Kevin. Casey. Fathom. Each of them had done a hectic-halfassed repair job
to makeup/clothes/hair. Everyone came in looking like they were facing a firing
squad and not an interview.
LeClaire came with Damien in tow and sat as if he owned the place, legs
sprawled out and endangering cords, smoking a clove. Damien's mouth was still
taped. Flashbulbs, here and there, and he pulled Damien closer, their heads
leaning together, making eyes and mouthgestures for the photographers.
Damien did his best to look eloquent and, um, soulful, or something, and to not
blink when a flashbulb went off, which was impossible. All in all the tape made
it far less deathsome to be photographed, since there was no risk of
accidentally making a goofy smile right as the shutter clicked. He wondered how
LeClaire managed. The whole thing was, dreamlike, really. The light was like
the stage, but compacted into so little space that he could almost feel the
weight of it. He felt, suspended by it, the pressure against him from every
angle, pinning him to the chair. Easy. He turned to look at LeClaire, hoping
for…..praise? And LeClaire had turned to look at him, in that exact instant,
and that photograph was all over the internet less than twelve hours later.
(The photograph: LeClaire, in three-quarter profile, mouth tensed in a nasty
dark kind of amusement, but his eyes, utterly…unmasked, and just, at utter
subzero. Like holes, sort of, except that behind the holes, was…)
and now, Damien was completely in LeClaire's lap. It was sort of liberating to
be unable to speak; he was more or less relaxed, though he felt like he was
blushing. He just listened to the interview going on over his head, and watched
the cameras. He turned to look at Kevin, once. A still of that shot ended up on
the hard drive of a thirteen-year-old boy in Minnesota. Since only Damien was
in the picture, it wasn't clear what he was looking at, and some of the meaning
was kind of, lost.
There were questions, but Kev didn't hear any of them. He couldn't, quite, see,
or something….just this white, pulsing blur. It was way, way too much rage for
him to deal with in any kind of legal way, so he had basically…left his hook
off the receiver, so to speak. He'd fixed, drank four cups of coffee, gotten
himself reasonably dressed and shown up, all on autopilot, all in less than ten
minutes. The really real Kevin was sitting in dreamspace by himself someplace,
twitching with loneliness. No, jealousy. Jealousy was better. Yeah.
 
Fourteen minutes later it was over. Max sprawled out almost toppling his chair,
sighing in exaggerated relief. Kev slid forward to the edge of his chair and
lit a cigarette. Casey and Fathom were whispering with their heads together.
Damien half-expected LeClaire to leave the tape where it was, but Brian
reached up and tore it off, almost the second the cameras were off. It wasn't
as bad as people let on in movies, but it made his chin and his lips and his
cheeks sting, briefly.
"I can't believe that worked," LeClaire said, low enough and close enough for
only Damien to hear him. "I wonder what else rock stars can get away with." He
leaned in and kissed one tiny kiss, just below Damien's bottom lip. That was
much more painful than the tape business.
Judecca slammed and wailed and machined along above them. Max's little boom box
wasn't much competition, but he had it playing at top volume anyway. Noise and
darkness and mess and laughter and drugs.
After midnight or so they split the party into five smaller ones and maneuvered
them onto the buses. Damien existed in a series of blurs. Cocaine--his first
time doing enough to get that lemon-aspirin-bleach taste trickling down into
the back of his throat. LeClaire on the phone with his free ear plugged by his
finger, with Max holding his rum and coke and tipping it so he could drink
every so often. Four girls and two boys on the other side of the chain-link
fence around the parking lot, begging for autographs. Tristan Blade, telling
Damien while casually holding a burning joint, that he'd "done really well,
been really together." Damien felt neither well nor together, but he suspected
he was having fun anyway. LeClaire, opening his mouth to inflict a series of
cocaine-numbed kisses, holding him up with his back against a wall and his feet
dangling a foot off the floor, both of them burning with triumph.
All a blur, as if he might be jolted out of it by his alarm clock at any
moment, as if he might stagger out of his bedroom and have coffee and a joint
with Kate and then limp his dumbass car to his horrible job. Except that the
alarmclock never came.
Only one bit of that night was really clear; the icewater blue instant that
they'd told him the good news/bad news. He was on the bus, maybe their bus, he
couldn't tell, on the couch dazed and humming, between LeClaire and Blade.
LeClaire was in his ear, holding both his hands, saying footage every hour for
at least two days and video and pivotal to the stage show. He realized they had
him cornered for a reason, and that the reason was so they could tag-team him
to convince him to endure this atrocity exhibition EVERY MOTHERFUCKING NIGHT
for the rest of the tour.
He narrowed in on LeClaire, and said, "You're not…..kidding?"
Brian LeClaire and Tristan Blade, both staring at him. Waiting for the
inevitable yes.
FAME
Then it was morning. All of them were hung over, crowded into the breakfast
nook/lounge section, staring at MTV because unfortunately that was the only way
to make sure they caught the news. Max, ever faithful, had the TV on MUTE and
had his stereo running so they could listen to music that didn't suck. At seven
AM the first news started with its idiot whirling logo. The music was killed,
the TV volume raised significantly, and the bus was silent.
 
The talking head was replaced by footage of Blade onstage, and a shiny-but-
serious voiceover, praising Judecca Tree's status as "integral to the evolution
of industrial music" ("Whatever that means, " Kincaid threw in, sending a
crooked burst of nervous laughter ricocheting through the group). Then it
plunged headlong into JT's rising-star opening band, who had just exploded onto
the music scene in a shrapnel-cloud of controversy. They rattled on about this
over a full-metal-assault collage. A nice artsy vibrato shot of Damien in black
and white, mouth replaced by a blacktape rectangle, like something censored.
Biofuck playing in the background. A floor-level choppy few seconds of the
onstage beating, the angle crooked and crazy.
Damien watched this through sleep-deprived eyes, hitting whatever sort of drug
delivery system was handed to him, his eyes positively superglued to the
screen. The usual, thoughts, one might have at a time like this, my god, I'm on
MTV, my god, I had no idea I was that TINY, holy shit, I wonder of Kate/Mom/Dad
will see it…
He looked over at Kevin, and Kev was watching the screen with his eyes
looking…..wounded, sick, something. He looked at Damien, with that uncanny Jedi
sense he had, and Damien had to look away from what he thought he saw, like,
telepathy: you poor kid.
He stared at the screen again, and something in his looking away must have been
too, abrupt, or something, because Kevin leaned over Max and LeClaire and poked
him and said, "You look great," and smiled, to sort of, apologize.
Damien smiled, feeling better, and just then Kev came on in his garter belt and
fishnet stockings and shinyblack shorts, and he could say "So do you," and they
were both telling the truth.
The cheering, punching, poking, and drinking was starting up again. LeClaire
was unmoved. His eyes never left the screen. He beckoned for Tim, and said "I
want a tape and a transcript of this."
PASSWORD
By nine or ten, people were drifting to sleep here and there, draped across
chairs or floor or other people. Damien was still awake, determined to keep
LeClaire company. He was afraid he'd, snap, from sheer hyperactive nervousness
if he tried to let himself sleep anyway. He stumbled to the bathroom now and
then, just to verify that he was still bleeding. That was sort of…nice, in a
psycho way, that proof that he'd been so thoroughly fucked.
Kevin was awake, sort of. He'd been vanishing periodically, and returning each
time more distant and dazed, and far more likely to trip over things. LeClaire
didn't look twice.
So the three of them were all watching when it happened. Their four minutes of
footage had almost doubled, and the Judecca Tree intro had been quietly cut.
Apparently in the three or so hours since the first air of their sex mischief,
four organizations--two religious, one GLBT, and one domestic violence
prevention--had made extremely negative statements to the press in general and
MTV in particular.
Religious: ChristCenter Coalition. Well, the obvious complaints: boys in
makeup, sodomy, Leviticus objections, garnished with a sprig of Paul-the-
Closeted-Fag-Apostle for flavor. Blah.
GLBT: a weird little pseudo-ACLU called Created Equal, publicly decrying
Deathstyle © and Mr. Brian LeClaire for their "inappropriate, stereotypical
portrayal of a sexual behavior engaged in by a small minority of GLBT
Americans." Apparently he had broken some kind of secret gay rule, in clearly
demonstrating his kink vicious topness with a rock band backing him up. Gay was
still A-OK, but s/m you could dance to was grounds for excommunication and law
suits.
Kevin: "Shit."
LeClaire: "Shhhh."
Max, sleepdazed: "But it's crazy--"
Kevin: "Yeah, and awful--"
LeClaire: "And part of the plan, and it's working, now shut up so I can hear."
Domestic violence: a crazed group called Not One More, with a rabid possible
lesbian fairly chewing off her tongue, claiming LeClaire was "glorifying,
sexualizing, and advocating same-sex spouse abuse." Coincidentally, same-sex
spouse abuse was getting very little press until the Deathstyle "incident" but
here was their web address and a phone number if you wanted to be counseled,
get rescued, get a lawyer, or make a tax-deductible charitable donation.
MTV finally got tired of this rabid haterness, and closed by rattling off
Deathstyle's next few tour dates (good) and segueing into coverage of some
dumbass corporate pop band whose token African-American had been arrested for,
oh, who cares.
"Now what?" Kevin said. He was talking to LeClaire, but looking at Damien.
LeClaire shrugged. "Now we play Jacksonville."
***** Chapter 10 *****
BIBLE (BELT)
 
Jacksonville was a twitching, festering colony of the sort of people that hated
the sort of band that Deathstyle was. They had never really heard of Judecca
Tree, and wouldn't have understood it if they had, but the name sounded plenty
Satanic to them anyway.
This wildly unplanned and confused sort of coalescing outrage was intensified
by MTV's constantly minutely altering the newscast. The rumors had hit the Net;
Fathom discovered a mind-blowing list of things that had been seen by kids who
were supposedly at last night's show. Hardcore fucking, LeClaire stabbing "that
kid" with a fake knife, a real knife, a real knife but with "that kid" wearing
a shield and a blisterpak of fake blood. A goat sacrifice. This was clearly
Blade's fault, since he did in fact have a goat onstage briefly. However, said
goat was on a bus in a huge crate being petted and fed junk food by drunken
roadies, so he's pretty much, fine.
"Wow, I missed all the best parts of the show," Max said, mournfully.
"Max." LeClaire was getting pretty tired of explaining this. "They're supposed
to do exactly this."
"Why?"
"You'll see why, once we get to the show." LeClaire drilled him in the
shoulder, punching one degree harder than playful, to emphasize this. Max
cringed, rescuing his chips, did the you're-a-fucker glare, hurt, and slid out
of reach with the entire bowl of chips in tow.
 
The arena wasn't exactly surrounded, but there was a medium-sized crowd in
front of it harassing the goodguys in monochrome black-clothes-whiteface. The
goths were patiently hitting the ticket window, handing over money for twoplus
hours of this socially unacceptable poison. The harassers were Christians in
Jesus t-shirts and Gap pants and queers in Abercrombie and Gap pants.
The queers kept trying to hand pamphlets to the Christians, and the Christians
kept trying to hand pamphlets to everybody. All of them stopped and stared at
the fleet of buses, looking either surprised, horrified, or delighted that the
band had actually shown up.
Kev and Damien had gone to that side of the bus to sort of scope out the
battlefield. Kev shook his head. "Man. And the show isn't for hours."
"Maybe they'll get sick of it and leave," Damien said.
"Oh, no," LeClaire said across the bus. He was painting his nails a deep
blueviolet. "Those are the especially rabid, gung-ho, self-help freaks.
Everyone else will join them. After they get off work at five." He sneered at
this, a general sort of disdain for day-job types and activists alike.
ELEVATOR MUSIC (UP)
 
They checked into a hotel, commandeered a corner of the mostly-empty downstairs
bar, and convened to plan their battle tactics.
"The police are already quite, interested," Tim was saying. "Several news
crews, independent persons….."
LeClaire was sitting on the edge of his chair, hands and elbows sprawled out
over most of the available table space, endangering a juice glass and Max's
pina colada. "Fine, fine, and fine," he said. "I need a limo for here to the
arena, and a staff escort. We're going in through the front doors for the
soundcheck--"
Tim looked green at that. "Aw, hey, man, Brian, seriously--"
Max loved it. He would, the drama queen. "Hell yeah, that would be so in your
face, awesome!"
LeClaire glared at them both, and went on. "Through the front doors, in full
stage deck, so everybody needs to be dressed." To Tim, he added, "And tell the
police I'll be free before the soundcheck. And tell everyone--press, rabid
Christian fucks, rabid queer sign-wavers, that we're going in, through the
front doors, at--" He grabbed Tim's arm to check his watch. "…three-thirty." He
stood up, a general who has given his orders, with Damien a half-beat behind
him, and booked for the elevators.
 
LeClaire closed the doors in the face of a gorgeous Japanese businesswoman in a
suit and heels. Damien was wavering in the back left corner, exhausted and
smack in the middle of that awful wasted/hangover midzone. Most people had the
luxury of sleeping through that part. LeClaire watched him wobble for a minute.
"You can have a break from eating for a few hours, if you want."
"A break--oh."
LeClaire was in satisfied-predator mode, amused and getting his way. So he
meant it about the break. Thank god.
"I, um, thanks. I feel like high shit," Damien said.
LeClaire laughed at that, not cruelly, for once, and to Damien's surprise
pulled him close and cupped his head and said "You are so cute," and kissed
him.
It wasn't a prelude-to-fucking-kiss, it was so…..alien, that Damien was almost,
unable to kiss back. LeClaire's mouth was gentle, tongue shallow and more
stroking Damien's lips than pushing inside.
Oh, god, he's kissing me like he
(loves)
cares.
He closed his eyes, melting, and LeClaire pulled back briefly and pushed at his
eyelids with his thumbs.
He opened them obediently, and they drifted into kissing again, LeClaire's eyes
making no sense, wound into one blurred sphere of dark magic.
The elevator stopped, pinging loud enough to make Damien's hangover mad. The
doors opened.
Damien moved, and LeClaire held his head still, murmuring at him, not missing a
beat. Somebody said something, shocked, and somebody else shushed him sounding
sort of like they thought it was, adorable, the awwww almost audible. The doors
closed without anyone stepping on. Go figure.
Damien wasn't sure what he expected when they got into their room. Assuming the
right bags had been sent up, probably two-plus hours of getting dressed. He was
sort of not thinking about the whole plan to walk through a mob of offended do-
gooders. That or….worse. He was guiltily hoping sex would not be involved in
the next day or so; he was getting pangs of agony from the costume-rack
fucking…..yesterday? Had that only been a day ago?
Surprise. LeClaire steered him towards the bed, toppled him onto it, and
unlaced his boots, punctuated by a hard pinch to his left Achilles tendon,
possibly to delete the bottom/topness of it all. He dug through one of their
bags--the right ones, actually left along the wall instead of in the middle of
the floor, and brought Damien two aspirin and a large bottle of water from the
tiny fridge.
It was too good to be true, but it looked like he was actually going to be left
alone to, sleep, for a while.
He lay back, drifting. Brian squeezed his ankle, dragged a blanket over him,
and said, "Catch a few, two hours, maybe. We'll paint you up last." And then,
probably Damien hallucinated this part, "You're so beautiful clothes and makeup
are easy on you."
He cracked open one eye, but LeClaire had already gone, the latch clicking into
the doorframe very, very softly.
 
Kevin was leaning against the wall in his and Max's room, watching LeClaire and
Max jointly doing their makeup. LeClaire had made him change three times, and
had finally approved a maroon mesh t-shirt and black leather pants with
padlocks down the seams. Max was wearing a black polyester knee-length vintage
dress, with neon orange feathers at the shoulders, and had his dreads defying
physics.
LeClaire gave Kevin a sideways look, eyeliner pin poised in his hand. "Come
here."
Jesus H. Christ in a sidecar on X. What the fuck now? Kev sighed, but he went,
and LeClaire pulled him in by the neck of his shirt and said "Your lipstick is
too perfect," and kissed him hard and mean and fast and let him go.
Too much. He wandered out of the bathroom, shaken, LeClaire laughing behind
him, and sat down on the bed and turned on the television. His mouth was wet.
He tried breathing in little puffs, lips barely parted, to evaporate this evil
toxic LeClaire spit, but his tongue betrayed him by darting out for a taste.
His lipstick wasn't too perfect now, he was pretty sure.
He'd always laughed, reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whichever
part it had been, when Ford Prefect was hanging out a window having a
stupendously fucked-up day, thinking, Maybe I'll get a farm, keep some sheep.
He had laughed, but right now, lying on this generic bedspread in his outfit
that Brian had authorized, he knew exactly what Ford had meant.
He clicked through channels, found a shitty censored version of Hellraiser 3,
and turned it up until he couldn't hear anything but Pinhead. It wasn't
working.
LeClaire. Goddamnit, fuck, shit, and hell. LeClaire.
He let his brain poke around the edges of the videofile from last night, the
way you might nudge at an aching tooth, just to verify that it was still
agonizing. He lay back, curled on his side, arm curved around his head to
preserve his carefully smoothed hair, stared at Pinhead in his rubber and
leather, with his religion of pain slash pleasure. His brain stirred that
together with LeClaire and the belt and the noise and that horrible magnified
left-out feeling and that unfulfillable wish double-edged to protect Damien by
taking his place, weird Aztec vibes, there.
Saint fucking Francis. Something.
And that mortifying, erection, that had made a quick (okay, yes, and damn near
effortless) jack-off part of his wardrobe change. Max squeaked in the bathroom,
saying "No, no!" and laughing. Brief thumps of some kind of struggle. LeClaire,
that voice like honey still buzzing with bees, saying "Just trust me, hold
still."
LeClaire. Goddamn, fuck, shit and hell. LeClaire….
 
MICROCOSM THREE: KEVIN
Six years ago, Kevin was standing behind the counter at Virgin records, halfway
through an eight-hour shift that his pissy little sorority-chick manager,
Vicki, had threatened twice might extend into a full twelve. He was wearing a
plain black shirt with his nametag, black dress pants (no jeans, in a record
fucking store, how corporate moronic could you get?) and his Docs, and eyeliner
that was carefully done so that he could just claim it was his eyelashes.
He had chewed a quarter hit of acid, before he came in, that he had torn off of
his little ten strip, hoping that would at least make the goddamn day more
interesting, even if only by making it more risky. All it had done was make him
paranoid and his skin crawly, before wearing off around noon. Fuck it. His
heroin habit was a year into the future, only a fetus now, a tiny dark
fascination that made him keep all his Burroughs in a neat row on the shelf,
well-thumbed and dog-eared at the especially nifty parts.
He had twelve pennies lined up, carefully hidden under the edge of a
pricechange Xerox, meaning he had thus far shortchanged twelve bucks from
various customers. He didn't steal from freaks, from kids, from anyone he could
tell was vaguely like himself. His main targets were yuppies, the morons who
came in, consulted the top-ten list and purchased accordingly, and that fucking
vomitous mass of a man who taught at the local college, who paid for everything
in hundreds and demanded that all his change be "new, clean, crisp bills"
though he never counted it.
He wasn't nicking off the top for drugs or CDs or anything like that. It was
mostly for food. He had the Cadillac hearse, and that purchase combined with
the unnecessary way his mother had discovered he was a card-carrying faggot
(opening his bedroom door in the middle of his first sixty-nine) had dumped him
out of his house before he was ready. He made about seven hundred bucks a
month, and that was if he got forty hours a week, and the rent for his tiny
little garage apartment was five hundred and ninety, and his car insurance was
eighty-six. He was stealing so he could eat, and possibly smoke. Also, in a
weird sort of Sex Pistols way, the whole complication of it made the day go by
faster.
He watched the little orange digital clock on the register ticking closer to
the time when he could supposedly step out for a smoke, and looked up towards
the door, already half-outside in his mind, leaning against a column out of
customer view with a Marlboro in his mouth. That was when he first laid eyes on
Brian LeClaire.
All the cheesy romance-novel things happened, too. His heart slammed, his mouth
went dry, his hands went damp, and he forgot entirely that he wanted a
cigarette, though he definitely wanted something, all right, and in his mouth
would be just fine.
He was so narrow, and so tall, so tall Kev's mouth would've been right at
nipple height, and he had on black vinyl pants tucked into Docs laced up to his
knee, paratrooper style, and a black t-shirt with a bloodred inverted pentagram
the size of a dinner plate emblazoned on the front. A little mom-daughter pair
in pastel tourist ensembles glared at that in unison, distracted from NEW
RELEASES--CHRISTIAN ROCK.
He was wearing black sunglasses, the smooth liquid oval kind, and his full
mouth was inked with black, a silver ring glittering on the left side of his
bottom lip. Cheekbones to positively die for, and that arsenicwhite complexion
that the newgoths fucked up so totally by glopping on white base. And his hair,
god, waterfall black so smooth that there was no texture to catch any light at
all.
Kev's hands tangled together. His cock jerked, actually jerked, hard enough to
move his cigarettes in his pocket. He thought I'm going to dream about him for
months.
This hellish vision of….loveliness?….slammed open the glass door with one hand
and sauntered inside, casing the joint with smooth reptilian motions. He saw
Kevin, and kind of, nodded, his mouth moving in what might have been a smile,
and did a course change to glide over to the counter.
…..oh god, he's coming over here, oh god….
 
…..of course he is, you idiot, he's a customer and you're an employee and you
will actually get to hear him speak, now settle DOWN and try not to act like
the idiot you are for once in your stupid life….
The perfect man stopped at the counter, leaned on it with one elbow, and took
off his sunglasses and tucked one earpiece into the collar of his shirt. He had
dark dark eyes, chocolate colored, Coke colored, and Kevin thought deep enough
to drown in, and this was what he got for reading his mother's dumbass bodice-
rippers, he supposed. Milkwhite arms, inked with a spiderweb pattern from his
wrist, up to where the lines vanished into his sleeves. Kev wondered how far up
they went, and whether might be able to feel the lines with his tongue in the
dark.
Fuck Virgin for making him wear thin light slacks instead of thick heavy jeans.
His new crush was wearing a black cord necklace, barring him just over his
adam's apple, and Kevin felt his own almost-identical necklace, un-tightened
and tucked into his shirt so that Vicki wouldn't bitch about "image", and
realized that you could loosen someone else's necklace like that with just your
teeth.
He opened his mouth and played the employee-recording. "Hi, can I help you?"
A grin, long straight vicious white teeth. "Probably not. Coil?"
Wow. Taste and everything, not that it would help him in this music store.
Kevin made the apology-smile, thinking, God, his voice. Deep and slow and calm,
like molten steel, somehow dangerous. The kind of voice that would scare you on
the phone in the middle of the night, the kind of voice that came with hands in
black leather gloves. "Nowhere in this city that I've ever looked."
"Alien Sex Fiend?"
"Nope."
He sighed, and rolled his gorgeous eyes. "Ministry?"
"Third time's the charm," Kev said, instantly wishing he could take it back.
It didn't seem to have gone over too badly. His crush tilted his head. He was
giving Kev the up-down-up look, eyes, lingering here and there.
Was this guy--this beautiful guy--cruising him? Wasn't that what that was,
mouth moving in socially acceptable phrases, but espresso eyes moving in
socially unacceptable directions? He didn't get out much, and when he scraped
up the cover charge the disco didn't seem worth the, gayness, of the two whole
gay clubs. In goth clubs the gay subculture rules didn't apply; not in this
town, anyway. The four whole out queers were paired off and had been for years.
He watched Kev trying to assimilate this, and said something with his eyes Kev
failed to understand. "Shall we?" And he gestured out towards the store behind
them.
"Um, uh….yeah, lets." His heart had found a whole new gear. He opened the
little swinging pressedwood door, and stepped out to go find Ministry, a child
sacrifice, the Hope Diamond, whatever this gorgeous piece of cruelty wanted.
Vicki was at his shoulder instantly, tan and bleached and looking her usual
pissy. She loaded her voice with pep-club beauty pageant glitter. "I'm sorry,
but we can't have employees receiving….visitors, during their shifts."
The guy turned to her, disdainful, letting her know she was interrupting. "I'm
not a visitor, I'm a customer, and he's got it under control, thanks."
Vicki wasn't going to be knocked over as easily as that. "Well, I'd be happy to
find you whatever you need." More fake perkiness. To Kevin, she said, "I need
you to stay here at the register," looking quite like she knew exactly what a
bitchy thing this was to do.
 
Doomed. You cockblocking little cunt. He opened his mouth to try and come up
with, something, anything.
"Actually," the guy said, and turned that wicked gaze on her, sliding down to
her nametag by way of her Wonderbra breasts in a way that made her spine
straighten angrily, "Vicki, I think…." He reached out and touched Kevin, moved
his hair back over his shoulder, almost making him squeak, but he was only
doing the nametag trick again, "Kevin, would know a little more about the band
I'm interested in. Don't you think so, Kev?"
"Um," Kev put in, since it seemed to be his line. Man, he was really showing
his fucking Harvard education today with his witty repartee.
"Maybe you could be a doll and watch the register for him for a second?
Thanks." And he stepped back, waiting for Kev to lead him, without the
slightest doubt that he would be obeyed.
Kev thought, I'm in love, with no idea what a prophecy of doom this was, and
android-staggered his way towards ROCK/METAL, with Vicki's deathlook promising
dire vengeance at his back.
 
"Is she always such a bitch?" the guy said, quite loud enough for Vicki to
hear. Kev thought, yep, official, I'm in love. He shrugged, hoping it looked,
noncommittal, knowing her eyes were still on him, thinking about his rent to
keep himself from saying Pretty much.
"Any particular album?"
"Whichever one 'Thieves' is on," he said, almost absently. They stopped and Kev
thumbed along behind the M card, finding A Mind is a Terrible thing to Taste
all too soon. He'd been kind of hoping they wouldn't have it, so he could try
to talk him into a special order, thereby getting name/address/phone number,
not that he'd ever dare to call. He handed it over, trying like crazy to find
something cute and intelligent to say about it, and drawing a goddamn blank.
The guy checked it out, looking at front and back, still, that weird
aristocracy vibe pouring off him, nodding. Then he held the CD in one hand, and
held the other out to Kevin. "Brian LeClaire."
"Um…." He shook, superconscious of how wet his palm was, how warm Brian's hand
was, and the heavy pressure of his rings. "Kevin Culley."
 
"Yeah. Sales associate." Brian reached out and flicked his nametag again, the
jolt sending the coldness of the pin against Kevin's chest perilously close to
his nipple. "Are you family?"
This wiped him blank, for a second he thought Brian was asking him if he was in
the Mafia, for chrissakes. Then he realized what he meant, from a book again,
or something, probably, and blushed furiously, stammering a song in the key of
uh, well.
Brian grinned, and saved him from it by saying,, "I thought so." And that
seemed to be it, really, he was turning towards the register.
Kevin followed, vaguely thinking, I thought so? Can everyfuckingbody TELL, for
chrissakes? He was utterly failing not to check out Brian's perfect almost non-
existent ass, the sculpture-elegant points of shoulderblade and spine under the
black cotton t-shirt and silkstraight hair.
He remembered very clearly, now, his wish for a cigarette, and spontaneously
had a plan that might actually, work. It was now or never, so he said to Vicki,
"Since you're up here, I'm gonna take my break," and ducked out the door before
she could say anything.
Brian watched him go, amused, maybe, and plunked down the CD. Kev overheard him
asking her something inane about discounts. Was he doing that on purpose, to
keep her off him, so he could go outside, so…no. No way. Nothing ever worked
like that, and he knew it.
 
Except, just this once, it did.
Brian did his hood strut out the door, nearly knocking over a prep-jock who was
Gapped from head to toe. He folded that delicious spidery frame to sit on the
curb beside Kevin, and arched his back, raising his hips. This confused Kev
utterly until Brian reached into his skintight pocket and wrestled out a pack
of cloves. He seemed to, situate himself along the way, sending Kev what might
have been a look or might have been nothing.
He put one black cigarette in his mouth, leaned over, and touched the tip of it
to the Marlboro Kev had in his mouth. Kev's lungs froze, with a painful half-
drag trapped inside them. He could smell Brian, clove and boy and sweat and
soap. He had time to think if he doesn't hurry I will actually fucking come in
my pants, before Brian leaned back, puffing, leaving Kev trembling, trying to
fruitlessly try to arrange his pants and his knees to avoid the tentpost look.
"So, do you have a band or anything? Kevin?"
He's just saying my name on purpose, to…..To what? Come on, this was like
fifteen jillion clues, surely as amazing, unlikely, unprecedented as it was, he
could actually go ahead and presume Brian was hitting on him? "Um, I play
guitar, but I haven't really, found, anyone…."
Brian's eyes lit up, interest and something, predatory, gleaming there. "Yeah?
We're trying to start one, me and this guy Max, you should come over sometime
and sit in, see how it works."
God oh god. "Yeah, cool, um…..when?" Too eager? Too soon? Fuck, fuck, fuck….
Brian shrugged. "When you getting out of this hellhole?"
"Five," he said, before he could reconsider. Fuck Vicki.
 
Vicki rolled her eyes and did her shrill bitching/whining about responsibility
and teamwork. Kev patiently told her he was leaving at five, so sorry, he was
scheduled to leave at five and he had somewhere to be. He heard her venting at
her brunette counterpart over in Classical about where that somewhere might be.
"Oh my god and I think they kissed outside, and it was so. Gross. Totally,
unbelievable. That should be, like, illegal, shouldn't it? I mean, out in
public. In front of, like, people."
He gritted his teeth and pretended not to hear it. He had fucking watched her
trade enough spit to irrigate a small field of marijuana with her fratboy toy.
Out in public. In front of, like, people. And usually this visitor showed up at
least once a day during her shift. He'd never been so horrified he'd had to
whine to a coworker. Breeders. It never fucking ended.
The four hours and forty-five minutes crept by with truly stupendous slowness,
and he spent the last two hours sneaking out for two-puff illegal smoke breaks,
absolutely convinced that Brian would not show, and that was provided he hadn't
hallucinated him entirely.
At four-thirty, Kevin waited till Vicki and her little flunky were out of
eyeshot, scooped seventeen pennies off the counter and dumped them into his
drawer, fished out a ten, a five, and two ones, and palmed them. He wandered
out of the cashier jail, pretending to straighten a Paul Simon display, and
pocketed it.
At four-forty-five, Kevin went in the bathroom, in the handicapped stall so he
could use the mirror, discovered that he had not in fact broken out,
hallelujah, dragged wet fingers through his hair, wishing he'd had it trimmed
so it was a neat A-line instead of a past-shoulderlength nothing. He touched up
his eyeliner to make it a little less subtle, and tried to sort of brush his
teeth with water and his finger and a crunched-up breath mint.
At four-fifty-five, with his hard-stolen seventeen bucks in his pocket and his
heart jittering around in the vicinity of his tonsils, he stood in the back and
stared at the timeclock until it said five oh oh, clocked out, shoved his
nametag in his pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and went outside, certain
that Brian hadn't shown up.
But there he was, leaning against a red Fiero, of all things, smoking another
clove. He did that lazy underwater goth wave, and Kev waved back, crossing the
parking lot and damn near getting flattened by a Volvo. "Hey."
Brian nodded. "You want to follow me, or what?"
Fuck. Kevin looked over at his beloved, cherished, ancient Cadillac hearse,
obscure band stickers and all, pondering its safety in the parking lot for god
knew how long. He wanted to be trapped in the teeny Fiero with Brian so bad he
could taste it, but his car, his gorgeous luscious hearse. "Uh, I better, you
know, the car is pretty much a target for the jerks…"
He gestured, and Brian got it. "Cool. I'll try not to lose you."
Kev went to his car, watching over his shoulder to see how the fuck Brian would
fold himself into a car that tiny. He got in, cigarette dropping a cylinder of
ash on his pants, and almost flooded it out in his nervous terror. He backed
up. Brian was cheerfully blocking traffic ahead of him, waiting.
They did a weird dogfight drive at speeds that made Kevin finally stop looking
at the gauge, concentrating on Brian's taillights. The sun had set and stars
were almost visible, when Brian finally turned into an old row of houses that
had been butchered into an apartment complex. He piloted into a parking space
in front of half a dingy house, black Halloween lights strung over the sagging
porch, and cut the ignition.
Kev parked beside him, muttering oh god oh god to himself, and lit his fourth
cigarette in thirty minutes. He opened the door, tried to climb out like an
idiot with his seatbelt still fastened, swore, unfastened it, and succeeded in
standing up and closing the door behind him without further embarrassment.
Tucked into the screen door was a sign that said NO SOLICITORS, and under that
someone had written in violet paint marker ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE SELLING JESUS.
Brian screeched this open, wrestled his keys into four successive locks, and
shouldered the wooden door until it swung inward.
They stepped in, Kev stopping just a few feet inside, watching Brian's shadow
grope his way to a floor lamp. A click, and a red lightbulb illuminated a
mostly empty front room, the walls a paint disaster, the worn brownish carpet
dappled here and there with books, black clothing, an amplifier and an octopus
tangle of cords. A stereo, with a turntable precariously attached, sitting on a
row of red plastic milk crates. Posters, here and there, over the patchwork
walls: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne, Joy Division, Vic Fiend grimacing
for the camera. Smells of weed and damp and pizza and beer.
He followed Brian through a bare doorframe into a claustrophobic hallway of a
kitchen, leaned against the wall out of the way while he opened the mostly-bare
fridge, pulled out a two liter of Coke, rummaged in a cabinet and drew out a
bottle of rum. He watched him scavenge for clean glasses.
I've been here before.
That was not exactly it; more like he'd known, all his life, that he would be
here eventually. That had to be why he had carried his second-best guitar in
the back of the hearse since he'd been kicked out of his mother's house.
 
He took the glass Brian handed him, watched him vanish and reappear with a
cigar box and a water bong, watched him pack a bowl, waiting to see what else
might seem familiar.
 
They smoked. Drank. Listened to scratchy Bauhaus on vinyl. Kevin wiped his
finger around the mouthpiece of the bong when Brian was in the kitchen, and put
this faint blacklipstick smear in his mouth, doing that sort of Zen thing where
you didn't really bother to analyze how creepy you were being. "So this guy
Max, does he live around here?"
"Down the hall. Second bedroom on the left. " Brian said from the kitchen,
returning with a fresh drink and the bottle, and topping Kev's half empty glass
with rum.
Oh. An ice age started at Kev's toes and left a trail of destruction on its way
to his stomach. "So, he's your, uh--"
"Bassist." Brian settled down beside him again, his knee brushing Kevin's, and
took the bong from him. "He's my….best friend, I guess."
He didn't look at Kevin, as if this were a goofy thing to say. Kevin could not
have named one single friend, best or otherwise, if a .45 had been pointed at
his temple. He thought it must be kind of, nice, to be able to say that about
anyone, but he couldn't figure out how to explain that to Brian without
sounding like an idiot, so he waited for his hit. He didn't realize he was
smiling.
Two hours. Nothing that earth-shattering really happened. They sat and smoked
and listened to Bauhaus and waited for Max to get off work and get home. Brian
told stories and made wild observations and went on riffs about world conquest
and gay conservatives and Kev laughed and had a good time in spite of himself.
They ended up on music again, god knew how, and Kevin said "So Max is your
bassist, do you do, um, synth…"
"Singer," LeClaire said, as if that were obvious. He looked at Kev funny, and
did this pose-thing with eyes and lips and shoulders, almost as if he was
getting ready to demonstrate his, singerness, and Kev kept a straight face for
about point eight seconds and then lost it.
(goddammit, leclaire)
And yeah, he was having generally a great time.
About twenty minutes later somebody did the cop-knock at the front door and did
this sort of sustained Sepultura/Deicide wail of the word cocksucker. Kev
almost ran into the kitchen, hands swarming out to collect and hide the bong,
but Brian just stood up and yanked open the door, revealing a six-foot
dreadlocked cutie with a septum-ring, still bedecked in Cinnabon apron and
laden down with plastic bags.
"Greetings," said Max. He grinned, staggered inside, and dropped several
armloads of six-packs and laundry and a notebook of sheet music and an ammo box
that rattled like he had makeup inside. To Kevin, "Oh my god, is that your
hearse? That car is fuckin brutal, hell yeah…" He made a grab for Kev's hands,
which was lucky, because he came this close to going facefirst over a bag. He
stepped over it, nonchalantly, prattling about Kev's car at breakneck speed,
and deedled his way over to take the bong from Brian.
Brian pointed in an X. "Max, Kevin, Kevin, Max."
So that was okay.
 
After half an hour of tangential debate they'd settled on Danzig. Just to give
everything a whirl they really needed a song all three of them knew, and that
seemed to be the only band they had in common that they could handle with
minimal equipment.
Kev had gotten his guitar out of his car without falling down the steps and
wrestled it into tune. He plugged it in without any of the wailing embarrassing
feedback you risked with everybody's setup but your own. Brian sat on the
wooden box that had been half of the coffee table, mic in his hand, just
chilling. Kev tapped his pedal, a nifty three-way deal that fit in his guitar
case and did a wide variety of tasty things to his sound, and they were ready.
Max was holding his bass low low slung, and he fell in first and did one of the
three songs Kev had been expecting, slow and bluesy and nasty and easy, and
before he could let himself be nervous or anything else he just let himself be
a guitarist and dropped in bright green and lush and wicked. Brian smiled.
He gestured for them to roll through the intro again, and he stood up,
uncoiling, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet just, feeling it,
and Kev did a mellow trill on the chord progression when he came back around to
it again, and Brian smiled again, eyes drifting closed, and his hand came up
and did a lazy yeah, more, gesture, and Kev was smiling, too, but he didn't
know it. And of course he changed the pronoun, and from he rides on, there was
nothing he could do but play, and keep it New Orleans and greasy and liquid
because oh, my, god,
let loose upon the world, he is the night
And he didn't hesitate on the wail, did it effortlessly and easily and without
a flicker of worry. Brian's voice was just…golden…gravel and Jim Morrison and
hell and death and sex and Satan. He knew exactly how much of it he had. He
knew exactly what to do with every bit of it.
Something like a meteor trail was lighting Kevin up from the top of his head to
the toes of his boots, and he dared to think, we're really fucking, good.
 
He was saying something, about beer, or some Japanese restaurant, the bong
forgotten in his hand, when Brian reached out and tugged the necklace out from
under his shirt. He pulled until Kevin had to lean over and examined the double
knots, and looked into Kev's eyes, all amusement and recognition, and he pulled
with his fingernails to tighten it and kept going, moving his hair and setting
it tight around his throat, just over his windpipe, centering it and taking up
another half inch of slack here and there. Kevin spent this time mostly,
frozen, quivering, kind of, dumbfounded, and so confused by what the fuck this
was, flirting or just weirdity and should he, do something back?
"Um, Vick, bitches, if I wear it." He remembered to exhale, but he was still
holding his ribcage, tense, or something, and all it did was hurt, like his
lungs had slipped a gear. Brian, not quite smiled, but the shape of his mouth
changed and his eyelashes lowered and he leaned in with his finger hooked
through this choker and kissed just over the cords, and forced his tongue
between them and licked one wet comma.
That was really all it took.
Kev's self-restraint had been on red alert all fucking night and that threw his
circuit breaker, and he put his hands in Brian's hair and drew his mouth hard
against his neck. He wanted a bruise. He made a hum in the shape of a chord,
and leaned his head back to give Brian room. About. Fucking. Time.
"Not…in…the….living room…." Kev said, after long wet minutes. Brian stood up,
pulling him with him, and walked him across the room and down the hall.
Bootheels. Brian hitting the wall with his shoulder because Kevin's feet were
dragging because he was so, crippled with like, ……relief? awe? sheer jaw-
dropped amazement? Okay, no. Lust. Yeah. That was it.
Brian got the bedroom door open, and it creaked and spilled them into a dark
warm room. Kevin felt the edge of a bed behind him and a serpentpile of satin
comforter and he had this vague, worry that he should take his shoes off, and
then Brian was on him and over him pushing him back and his knees were apart
and it was much too fast and then it, wasn't, he was doing the, kissing, above
his necklace again, just leaning there on hands and knees like a spider above
him. the door was still open behind Brian, and Kev could see his shadow in the
green streetlight gleam from front door.
Brian was being so slow with his tongue like he was, waiting, for Kevin to
snap, and he had to say something. He toyed with saying harder, briefly, in
that marijuana-clear sort of tangential way, but lacked the essential, balls,
to try to pull that off just yet. Hmmm. He came up with, "I'm, new, at this…."
A hum, like Brian was pondering this. "How new? How old are you?"
Goddamnit, he could actually hook his tongue underneath the cord and pull it,
hard enough for Kevin to feel the of it at the back of his neck..
"Pretty…new….oh…uh…...twenty. Even."
A laugh for the sake of even. "Are you tired of being new?"
Now Kevin laughed. And he heard himself saying, "Pretty, much…"
Brian hooked his fingers through Kev's belt loops and pulled him up until his
head and his arms tangled into some kind of metal, bedframe, so that his mouth
with that prehensile fucking tongue and black lipstick was about an inch over
the crotch of his pants. "How about this? Is this, new?"
"This is…. Could he feel him breathing? Through his pants? Was that possible? "
…..please…."
"Just say when."
"…um…..now, is, good….or did you mean, when I'm….going to….."
goddamn, fuck, shit and
…hell…
…leclaire…
"No, when you've had, enough."
Brief, nightmarish analysis of how having enough and coming would be two
different things.
He wound his hands into the bedframe, pulling himself backwards, bent rainbow-
arched, and his belt was being unbuckled and his pants were being unsnapped and
his zipper was being unzipped and Brian leaned in and licked him through the
flap of his boxers and his toes knotted together. He wasn't new to head, per
se, but most of it had been from closeted drunken morons at parties. In some
girl's bedroom. Never, from someone so…beautiful, and……oh god……gifted…
LeClaire tugged his dick free of his pants. He was gasping. His eyes were
paralyzed wide open, pointed at the ceiling, recording zero. Brian was,
stroking him, with just his fingernails, making a low edgeless wicked sound,
and he laughed. "Well?"
"Well…..don't…..stop…" He felt like a starfish. His head was turned, almost
completely upside down, spine and neck aching. Brian licked from just above his
scrotum to the tip of his cock and pushed hard at the hole there, as if he
meant to tear him wider, and then he drew him in with one long pull, suction
and heat and his throat, wet and silken and hot and so, drastic. Such…pulling…
…oh…my…he can't have meant to do that so…deep…or so…
and he did it AGAIN, only, harder, the pulling almost tight enough to hurt.
oh my god, he's doing that on…purpose…
 
::static::
 
Hellraiser 3 was over.
Oh, the statue.
and he screamed, like Brian was hurting him, and his pants were around his
knees and he could feel Brian's hair on his inner thighs, and he was, licking,
and, constricting with his throat, and he could pull back to breathe just far
enough for Kev to feel the rush of air into his windpipe over the head of his
dick. Every time. He could hear this moist, friction, sound, so loud he was
certain Max could hear it, wherever he was.
Why had nobody ever told him that this was like, consensual, cannibalism,
surgery, that this was so intimate, that this was so, close to being something
that wasn't sex at, all….?
Brian drew back long enough to push his thumb into his own mouth, to wet it
with sweat and spit and precome. He was tugging at Kev's waist to hold him up,
his cock hooked into his throat again in a throbbing kinetic mess, and he
spread him with fingernails and shoved his thumb up his ass. Open heat itch oh
god ache slide and he was rocking his hand, mean, god, nobody had ever done
this to him, he had done it himself alone in the dark and he was positive now,
that didn't count at all.
Kevin came. Brian moaned and laughed and pressed his thumb in harder, fingers
cupped around Kev's ass, nails digging in. And he swallowed.
 
He was aftershocking hard. He sort of, fell, his skull rolling along the bars
and ending up more or less aligned with his neck.
Brian twistpulled his thumb free, and drew back, nipping hard just at the
underside of the head of his cock to make him squeak. He turned on the bedside
lamp without warning or mercy. His mouth was wet. He swallowed again, and ran
out his tongue just to be an obscene fucker.
"You didn't say when yet, but I figured I'd at least give you a breather." He
still had all of his clothes and most of his makeup on, though the lipstick had
seen better days. He put his thumb in his mouth and sucked on it, then patted
in his pockets. He lit a joint, helping himself to the green hit, watching
Kevin convulse, and then held it for Kevin to hit it.
Kev drew in christmastree smoke. He could smell, both of them, on Brian's
fingers.
He could do it. Please, oh please, just this once, let him find the James Dean-
ness to pull off this line.
"I hadn't had enough yet."
…..hallelujah, that didn't sound lame…..
LeClaire's eyebrows went up, and then he grinned smoke through his teeth.
 
They got high. Or, higher. Or whatever.
At some point Brian lifted Kevin's foot and unsnarled his shoelaces and yanked
his boots off, still talking, casually moving Kev as if he were a, doll.
"Stoned?"
"I'm good." Dazed. Why the fuck Brian was taking off his shoes, wasn't he
supposed to get dressed now, and could he possibly drive after all that?
Brian reached over and snapped the light off again, and took the joint out of
Kevin's hand and stubbed it out in the ashtray, and dragged him down again.
and then they were naked, and Kevin had his legs wrapped around Brian, and they
were sticking together, and Brian had set his cock just against Kev's ass,
sweatgreased sliding, nudging, grinding, asking, telling, threatening,
everything but fucking…and Kevin gave up on the whole quiet/mature/suave
business and he was out of his motherfucking mind, begging with little mangled
noises, scared out of his wits.
LeClaire said, "…well…enough?"
and he was asking, a lot, and Kevin looked up into the dark and said "No."
and that was, all, like he'd just invited Dracula, inside, and speaking of
oh…oh, god…in…side….fff….
 
::static::
 
(and it hurt, and my knees were up by my shoulders and i felt so, spread and
pinned like an insect on wax, like i had your entire, attention, and it hurt,
and i wanted it to go on, hurting)
(because it meant you were inside me)
(god…you…please)
 
::static::
 
he thought, oh god, I can't come again….
 
Later, Brian had said, "Do you have to work tomorrow? Today, I mean?"
He said, "Nah." He was planning to call in sick. And fuck Vicki.
 
LeClaire, in the bathroom, inquiring with much profanity as to the location of
his other hairbrush.
Oh, shit. Hard, in these fucking pants, with Brian twenty feet away, almost
finished putting on his makeup.
Goddamnit. Etc.
 
ELEVATOR MUSIC (DOWN)
Damien didn't really do all that much, as far as getting ready went. He spent a
dazed twenty minutes with Max blurring around him. He ended up in fingerpaint-
red vinyl pants and red platforms and a black silk dress shirt, unbuttoned,
hair artistically ragged, lipstick lush and metallic. Max proclaimed him
fabulous, wailing jealously about how tiny he was, and orbited him in a busy
prattling circle out into the hallway.
LeClaire was waiting there, leaning against the wall, smoking a clove in a
silver cigarette holder under the NO SMOKING sign. His chocolate eyes and the
emerald streak in his hair were the only things that kept him from being
monochromatic. He was in full black SS-style regalia, hat and coat and
jackboots, the lightning-bolt patches and various insignia replaced with the
Deathstyle logo in gleaming silver.
Max--well, squealed, and ran over and hugged him, delighted by this new
mischief. Damien was afraid to go near him, in that delicious Halloween way.
Hell. Yeah. LeClaire predator-birded himself closer, grasped the back of
Damien's neck with black leather fingers and steered him towards the elevator.
Was the elevator music actually the fucking Doors? It was, it was "Light my
Fire" with, steel drum percussion….gross….
There were two red-violet lines from the belt across Damien's chest. He kept
trying to persuade it to hang covering them, and Brian kept promptly pushing
his hands away and nudging it open again. "That's the point of it, Damien. Now
quit or you can wear no shirt at all."
He quit. His mouth was dry, but his headache was gone and the sleepiness was
actually fading into semi-awake. Brian kept fussing with his hair, and he
leaned in and said "You need a bruise."
Damien tensed, waiting for it, expecting maybe a punch in the face, who knew.
When LeClaire didn't do anything he realized he was waiting for, consent.
"Okay," he said, kind of, resigned.
"You need a few of them, actually, that'll show up on film."
He thought, I HAVE a few of them that would show up on film, but he didn't say
anything. He closed his eyes. LeClaire set to it, businesslike, bitesucking
hard just below his ear, leaving a gradual trail in the direction of his
collarbone. "Max…help me…get his other side…"
He squeaked at that, and struggled briefly, one heel thudding into the wall of
the elevator.
Brian clotheslined him back into place. "Shhh. Think of it as, makeup."
Max moved closer, eyes little-kid-bright and friendly. "Lean your head, like,
back," he suggested, and settled on Damien's right. His breath was warm, and
scented faintly with bubble gum. He did manage sort of a, tonguekiss, his fake
silver eyelashes tickling Damien's chin like fucking crazy, and then collapsed
with the serious giggles, as per his usual response to almost anything. Brian
made a disgusted growl, biting too-hard, and leaned his forehead into Damien's
shoulder, sighing. This made it worse for poor Max, who ended up sitting on the
floor, his face covered.
"Kevin. Can you come show this twit of a faggot how the fuck to leave a
hickey?"
A beat. And not a very long one.
Kevin said, "I'll show both of you faggots. Move."
Silence.
Well, Max giggling, but much more quietly.
LeClaire, motionless, his mouth sticky with lipstick pressed against Damien's
neck.
Damien looked at Kevin over LeClaire's shoulder, trying to telepathically go
are you crazy? what are you thinking?
Kevin had something still and cold settling across his face like, a guy playing
a serial killer in a movie. His only stared at Damien, sort of….blazing, at
him, and sucked him in with Venus flytrap eyes. There was no coldness or
stillness there. It was all fire and motion.
Damien felt himself flush or pale or, something, a solid freighttrain rush
of…something…
LeClaire shrugged, leaning back, doing his you little pussy smile. "So you got
all that? Well, lay it out." He stepped over by Max.
Now there was nobody between them. Damien shot LeClaire one desperate look,
wanting to be, protected, but LeClaire only looked, amused, and something else.
Um…furious. He'll get him for this, Damien thought, and prayed very briefly to
probably the same god who gave rock and roll to you, that Kevin would just blow
a raspberry on his neck or back down or sneeze or anything but give him this
promised lovebite.
He had time to inhale, and Kevin grabbed the back of his neck with one hand and
yanked him forward. He made one kitten noise, startled by this, passion?
He closed his eyes, and Kevin kissed his neck in lush liquid devouring
mouthfuls, drawing with lips and lungs and throat, leaving flawless magenta
bruises, leaving Damien unfolded and decimated and hard and scared with weak
weak knees, leaving him with the fragment, not even when LeClaire, leaving him
with the echo of tiny padlocks pressing against his hip.
 
Kevin knew exactly what he was risking, better than Damien did. He should've
kept his mouth shut, but all that left-out feeling and that singular kiss and
LeClaire fucking treating Damien like a mannequin and his hunger and his
hardon--all of that, shaken-not-stirred, had ended up a color between lust and
rage. He had something to, prove. Just this once he was not leaving the rock
star business to motherfucking LeClaire.
He watched LeClaire step back, and thought, fuck it, because I may never get
another chance.
He could not just bruise him. He would not. He knew that a nanosecond before
his spine curved itself and his hands came up and he moved like a soundwave and
pressed his mouth into Damien's throat.
Then, he knew, very little, really…just the taste of sweat and the tiny faint
metallic hint of blood if he drew hard enough. The muscles under his lips were
suspensionbridge tight, shaking, hard and frightened, and he wanted to
say…..something.
Damien, shh, It's just, me….
He felt this kinetic terror hit critical and then…..break…tendon and skin
suddenly liquid, and he felt Damien's hands twitch against his ribs, almost
winding around him, and his dick shuddered and powered up with a quickness and
sincerity that he'd thought junk had long since deactivated.
(i will, i will push him down right here and LeClaire can go fuck himself,
because)
This was too fast, too little time, ten seconds of passion before LeClaire made
a soft furious noise and grabbed Kev's shoulder and threw him off, hard enough
for him to stagger into the opposite wall.
Silence. Even Max had quit laughing.
LeClaire and Kevin, glaring. Damien, between them, his eyes closed and his neck
slippery sticky dappled with lipstick and abuse.
The elevator pinged for the ground floor, and the doors opened. Tim came
running, bald head gleaming, keys jangling at his belt like he was trying to
scare away birds.
LeClaire pushed Damien out first. He shouldered Kevin hard on his way by, and
didn't look back. Damien turned around and walked backwards briefly, green eyes
wide and sort of, blanked, until LeClaire took his upper arm cop-style and
turned him around and made him walk faster.
***** Chapter 11 *****
MATH
The rabid sign-wavers had managed to organize a small army of people in thick
glasses and non-black tshirts and blue Walmart jeans, men generally balding,
women generally permed within a chemical inch of their tiny little lives. The
PC queer cotillion was much smaller, distinguishable from their rightwing
counterparts only by their more expensive taste in jeans and t-shirts, last
week's haircuts instead of last decade's, and tendency to opt for designer
sunglasses instead of the Coke-bottle look. Police were scattered everywhere.
Droves of the standard black-clad concert kids were milling around in the
center of this silliness, outnumbering cops and other authority figures at
least ten to one. The kids looked mostly bored and irritated, or sort of amused
by all this attention. The fundys and queer conservatives looked mostly
desperate, crazed, wide-eyed with self-righteous horror, trying to talk anyone
who would listen out of seeing the show, or out of being gay/a fucking bigot,
depending. The cops looked mostly, er, bored, with a sprinkle of worried, kind
of like they were already fed up by this whole thing and wished they were at
home watching the shitty local football team and drinking shitty beer.
Into the eye of the hurricane slid thirty feet of limousine, drawing all these
sick, angry, hungry eyes like an electromagnet.
LeClaire watched all this with evil glee, just overflowing with satisfaction.
This was only the beginning; he wanted the entire world's attention, and
whether that attention was delighted or revolted was irrelevant.
All these twitching fundys, foaming at the mouth, waving signs and handfuls of
Kinko's manifestos and Jack Chick bullshit. Oh, they were so deliciously
desperate to stop him, wound him. And blissfully, mindlessly unaware that their
angry-mob-with-torches schtick was only going to illuminate him until he was
blinding, until he was strong and sleek on their hate. He had thrown a harness
around his enemies, and they would pull him to the top of the world without
realizing it.
He loved it.
He did fingertip waves and unnecessary hat adjustments, kisses and bedroom
eyes, drawing fury and laughter and lust.
He would call Marty LeClaire a little later, inquire coolly as to whether he'd
heard the news. Nonchalantly throw down numbers, head counts, profit margins,
names of accusers and defenders. He'd even send the bastard tickets, maybe. Not
that he'd use them. Not that LeClaire gave a damn if he used them or not. He
had thousands and thousands of people to love him, hate him, notice him now.
And counting.
Damien was huddled between him and Max, trying to look out all the windows at
once. He looked like he expected the crowd to surround the car, shake it,
something, like in a movie about the Beatles. They were creeping along so
slowly that the EVENT STAFF beefcake types were walking along beside them. And
there was Kincaid, for chrissakes, in navy and yellow staff drag, his insane
hair under a SECURITY ballcap, cop sunglasses and no makeup. Fabulous, just
priceless. He gave Deathstyle the three-sixes salute, grinning.
Brian thumped his knee into Damien's, jolting the kid out of his staring. If
his eyes opened any wider they'd fall into his lap. He grasped Damien's
shoulder--and wasn't that stack of triangles becoming awfully goddamned
familiar?--and tugged him closer, under the pretense of checking his bruises.
They were gorgeous, and very, very obvious. Perfect.
"Don't worry. I'll protect you," he said, as kind of a joke, and kind of, not a
joke.
Damien leaned into him, and the liquid gratitude in the weight of his head was
(darling)
sickening. LeClaire punched him to make him cringe, to hear him squeak. So very
pretty, that cringe, and the look that was half-hurt, half…addicted. He really
was, lovely. God, that red chrome lipstick. Ouch. He'd never noticed what an
exquisite mouth the kid had. Full smooth bottom lip, upper lip such a cupid's
bow that lipliner made it look, fake. He ached to smear his makeup, to see if
the flesh underneath really was that mathematically precise. Like with his
pubic hair, for instance.
Oh, yes. Kevin and his little elevator stunt. Kevin and his infuriating
combination of lazy, chickenshit, incompetent queer and tricky arrogant fuckup
instigator. Kevin and his tragic eyes and his fucking needles.
Brian had been very close to a degree in psychology before he came to his
senses and went with the rockstar plan. He knew Kevin's usual games were
negative attention plays; he used that tactic himself quite often. The elevator
thing had been different. Really different. Line-in-the-sand different.
Was he jealous of one of them? Which one? Both? Was this really an actual,
gauntlet thrown, or just a remix of the usual hit-me-please?
Probably he was reading too much into it, and the little bitch just wanted a
love tap or twenty.
Either way. Didn't matter which. The result would be the same no matter what
the reason--a whole lot of sorry.
It was fun, their….dysfunction. It was all the relationship they had left,
really. And, goddamn him for that elevator thing, anyway, because that had been
Brian's first attempt in a very very very long time to, uh, include Kev in the,
er, horseplay, and he'd had to turn it into whatever the hell kind of
testosterone thing that had been. See if he ever tried to include him again.
Even if he did miss him.
Sort of. Sometimes.
At least, he missed the Kevin he'd been (dating, fucking, etc, whatever) before
he'd found him with a needle in his arm. End Act one, dating, begin Act Two,
punching and occasional kicking.
If Kevin was jealous of, whichever, variable, it was his own goddamn fault.
Some weaknesses were attractive--fear, naiveté, innocence, uncertainty, that
whole subset that equaled twinkfemme. Smoking was still sexy when done right.
Chronic stonerness was sort of, cute. Coke was fabulous, and its tendency to
bite the brain it feeds was, weirdly just.
He was no Model Citizen himself, and there was plenty of room for vice in his
dayplanner.
But some weaknesses were, just, nasty. Like…..oh, being a rabid garbage-pop-
music junkie. Or a far-gone alky. Or a really bad liar, or a yuppie or a
Jaycee, or eating E nightly and rolling around smearing ugly strangers with
Vicks vap-o-rub.
Heroin was one of the latter; a crutch for a man with two perfectly good legs.
It was too much like Trish the Valium Queen LeClaire, too out of control, too
much about, not-experiencing, instead of indulgence or pleasure. It too much a
sign of an unfillable hole. A man who would do heroin would do…anything, would
end up a shivering twitching slave, disgusting, pathetic, ruined.
He watched Kevin leaning against the window. He looked tired, mad, bored,
frustrated. Not enough data to pick one, really.
What the hell. He was a great guitarist, despite LeClaire's professed disdain
for his talent. And he was a great punching bag. Wherever he'd learned it from.
 
Kevin wasn't actually looking out the window. His head just happened to be
pointed in that direction. He was doing his ten-inches-away trick again. Beyond
this invisible point, the crowd was a smear; fuzzy blue blobs that were
probably cops, pink blob faces with black-and-red blob mouths, like those
creepy kid masks in The Wall.
Damien, tense and stunned, tasting of child and sweat and LeClaire's shampoo.
No, no, no, no…….no…..
Heroin, goddammit Handfuls, truckloads, aircraft carriers piled with pyramids
of gritty white paradise, a Cenobite booth he could step into that would iron
maiden him with double zero gauge needles and ejaculate him so full of bliss
that smack dripped from his nose and eyes and dick and his goddamn pores, until
the pressure of it split him open in a drugquake, into little globs of flesh so
saturated you could chew them and nod. Nothing else was worth, anything.
Nothing else was safe, sure, unconditional. Nothing else…..stayed…
He rubbed the crook of his elbow with his thumbnail, hard. He didn't check to
see if LeClaire was watching. And he didn't look at Damien, didn't want to see
him as a smear.
LUCID
"I need to talk to you," LeClaire was pushing him in and closing the door. They
were in a really long...broom closet. Mostly concrete, exposed pipes overhead,
the works. Hmmm. There was a small radio on one of the metal shelves, quietly
playing Men Without Hats. "About your, stage, appearance, tonight."
"I'm, listening." A mop went over as he brushed by it. Clack. He stood it up
again, stepped on his own left shoestring with his right foot, and whammed his
elbow into the shelves. The radio jittered.
LeClaire waited until this was true, and he reached into an inner pocket of
that awful German trenchcoat, and removed a Manic Panic compact with a
pentagram sticker on top. He opened it. White powder, used down to the metal,
the puff inked on the back with fingerprints in black and red makeup. On top of
this was a tiny confetti scrap of paper rolled in a scrap of cigarette
cellophane. He picked it up with his fingernails.
 
"See, I really think, that it should be different each time. I don't want the
hook to be that you're screaming. I want the hook to be why you're screaming."
He pincered the tiny package, and held it up. "And why you stay."
Swallow. Stare at the paper. Stare at toes. Stare at Brian. "Um, acid, yeah?"
A nod. And that endless, snake-style patience.
LeClaire could be, mad, creepy, charming, when he wanted to. He was playing
that trick now, without even saying a word. Dammit. And he knew it.
"Am I supposed to take, that much of it?"
"The plan," said LeClaire, "is for you to take it now, and around the end of
our set, you should be, way up there."
Creeping horrors, and a brief little flashback of the Caterpillar from Alice in
Wonderland, which had scared the shit out of him when he was a little kid. "On,
stage."
A smile. The strip dragged out of the tiny wisp of cellophane, poised by
LeClaire's long black nails.
SKY
 
All the lights were up. The arena was still obviously for, hockey, monster
truck rallies, basketball. But it was being transformed. Kids in black were
filing in, generally improving the décor, in twos and threes and fledgling
actual packs of seven to fifteen. Twenty-two different people in CREW black
were setting up and finding out where the second pallet of drum kit had gotten
to. At stage left, sort of hanging just in front of a huge speaker, were
Kincaid, Damien, and a roadie named Chad.
Damien felt like he was…leaning, on the balls of his feet. He wasn't really; to
casual observers it just looked like he was in a big damn hurry to be someplace
else. Which was perfectly understandable, given the circumstances.
LeClaire was loitering at the opposite end of the stage, just out of the
audience's view, all gleaming and fascist, smoking a cigarette and holding a
beer.
He'd agreed to this. Agreed, partly because he had no idea what to expect. And
it was very, very rock and roll. And Brian had asked him to, and he was an
idiot.
He gave Brian what he hoped was a--brave?--look, and stepped back so that his
shoulders and his spine and his bootheels were pressed against the front of the
twenty-foot speaker, and spread his arms up over his head, and waited. Bonsai.
 
They left him to it for the better part of an hour, just taped at the wrists
and ankles in crucifixion posture, with generous amounts of silver tape. He'd
waited for a piece over his mouth that never came.
He wanted a cigarette.
Kids crowded near the barricade and pondered him, a few of them yelling Damien!
This was a new horror.
Autographs. He tilted his head to see his out-of-commission right hand, the
hand that had signed Damien LeClaire in….notebooks. And torn the pages up,
after. Hadn't he always been, practicing, really? Guitar, autographs,
cocksucking, makeup, vinyl, drugs. So he'd be ready for his, destiny, or
whatever….
That had to be the acid starting to work. God help him, anyway.
A strobeflare. Pictures. They were, taking, his, picture. A girl done up Cure-
style, camera blocking everything but a pouff of blueblack hair and orangered
lips.
He leaned his head into his shoulder, made himself look at her. He thought what
would LeClaire do. His pupils were huge, spreading wide open, the better to
accommodate revelations. He posed his mouth for her. She laughed, waved, a
shockwave of giggles and clapping and waving spreading around her in pond
ripples. He arched his back against the unmoving speaker and let the acid take
him
 
He wanted LeClaire to come back. He was getting hard. His shoulders were
getting sore. The crowd was a huge black blur in his peripheral vision, growing
all the time, louder by the second. The cameraflashes never ended.
He was getting glittering filthy premonitions of the Fear.
If he could draw in LeClaire through this, lens, it would ground him. It always
had before. And how much better was the flesh version, the LeClaire you could
smell and taste, than the paper-headphones-handful-of-lotion edition?
Where the fuck was he?
He thought, if I concentrate on, that….all that….it'll make him come…
Acid logic.
He was at the edge of the point where he would, cease, to realize that.
 
It worked.
LeClaire mantised up to him, all Ravensbruck and Pandemonium, with the house
lights still up, ignoring the roaring wail of worship that poured out of his
camp in the audience. Damien could only watch him getting closer, teeth
chattering and fingers jittering with tension. He thought, I love that man, and
the filthy tremor of The Fear climbed up around his ribcage and gave his
pounding heart a sarcastic kiss.
Bloodcolored paint, under his eyes. Gloves. He stopped about a foot away from
Damien, close enough to smell him, and did his predator-inhale like that was
exactly what he was doing. "Is it working?"
"I….feel…." Like a marionette that was very loosely and badly wired together.
Like hell. Like a suicide. "…..trippy."
That glove along his jaw, and LeClaire tipped his face up and looked into his
eyes, that penetration look, the one he only gave to lovers and cameras. He
reached inside his coat and pulled out a black silk scarf, folded it over and
over and settled it over Damien's eyes. He made a noise like a kitten that
doesn't want to be picked up, but he leaned his head so LeClaire could tie it
in the back. Still no gag. The press of a lipstick kiss---various screams of
lust, revulsion, random highness from random kids. And then he was gone.
Now he was alone in the dark with the noise as his wall. It seemed the speaker
was horizontal and he was lying on it, waiting for Aztec knives. He gritted his
teeth and let the chattering work its way into his jaw.
He couldn't remember if the soundcheck had been done or not, and prayed he
wouldn't have to sit through a redneck playing the first couple of measures of
Freebird ad nauseam.
He thought of his bedroom and his posters and his quilt he'd wished a thousand
times he'd brought.
He thought of LeClaire in that same costume that had made him sit through
Raiders of the Lost Ark countless goddamn times with a guilty erection.
He thought of opening his locker at school and finding his scotch-taped mosaic
of rock stars ruined with milk some wonderful upstanding Christian young man
had sloshed through the vents, of his first lush green hit of weed.
He thought, when you look at me like that can't you SEE why I stay?
 
DEMONS
 
The light was pointed right at him on purpose. Even through the blindfold he
could see it. When the percussion first started it was so seismically awful
that he didn't understand what it was. Then it happened again, and he thought,
I can't cry, the blindfold will be soaked when he takes it off. And then Kevin
fucking him dry and deep and merciless with a methamphetamine vibrato power
chord, and it was too fast fast fast, and he realized he'd probably better
worry about pissing himself, fuck crying.
The acid was total, the acid was loud, the acid was shaking him shaking him
(when he sings, I'll go mad)
he was, right.
 
…he sees, himself, opening his mouth, over and over, like it is being played on
a TV off to his left. It's annoying. Like, told-you-so, only repeatedly. No,
wait, that was a….strobe, light?
oh, yeah, the…
 
stage, the Jacksonville show, and he was still, up, there
 
He had been convinced for awhile that he had already died of a heart attack.
His mind was blown, but it insisted on continuing to take in information, even
though he could make zero sense of it. He'd lost language. It was,
transcendental, not that he was capable of being aware of it, which was what
made it so religious in the first place.
(……….)
The (noise) ground to a halt, and the only thing left was a…movie, he thought
he recognized. It sounded so familiar and so…..unlikely……that for a second he
couldn't place it. Oh….god. It was the, audio, of a porn clip. He'd had it
hidden on Kate's PC. How, the, fuck…
The sound was from this: a dungeon scene, a man suspended on his back with his
legs up and wide apart, the master below him, in a greased glove, working his
hand into the slave's ass. Neither of them had been anywhere near Damien's
type, which quickly ceased to matter. The sound had been the real dick torture;
the slave was making this, whine, growl, wail, groan, rising and falling
through gritted teeth, sounding like an, animal.
He'd lost language.
He was so decimated by what was happening, by something so unspeakable and
drastic and filthy and delicious, all he could do was make this lush feral
sound
He'd watched that clip over and over again, sick and hypnotized and sweating
and hard hard hard. If you could call it watching with your eyes, closed …it
was……déjà vu? Presque vu? That same dread, that same nauseous flushed certainty
that boot camp and The Story of O gave him. That conviction that anything that
drew him so effortlessly in and terrorized him with such totality was bound to
happen to him, eventually.
Then the mesh of the microphone hit his teeth, the tap amplified into a
gunshot, and he, stopped, and the fistfuck soundtrack wail out of his mouth,
stopped, too. A cold blade slipped under the silk along his right cheek, close
to his eye, and LeClaire cut the blindfold off.
MONKEY
When LeClaire slammed open the door to Deathstyle's dressing room only Kevin
was still there. His little stereo was at full attention, helping Iggy tomcat
about needing somebody just like you. Kevin jumped like he'd been tasered,
which should have looked guilty as all hell, considering all he was doing was
laying out a line.
LeClaire was too fucked up to notice. He came in and closed the door with a
sweeping grandiose slam and leaned sprawled against the wall. Did a long,
cocaine-snort and grinned like a jack-o-lantern. "I seem to, remember some
business between you and me."
 
Kevin looked at the red and yellow striped little piece of a straw, thought: if
i can get even half of it up before he comes at me, it'll help--
LeClaire did his Iggy Pop rolling strut closer, and sang I'm losing all my
feelings/and I'm running out of friends, in a truly fucking creepy imitation,
hands all tangled in his hair stripper-style. He. Was. Furious. And he was,
beautiful. He was as rockstar as Kev had ever seen him in that instant.
Devastation. The staring cost Kevin half a second of…hard drive failure….and
then it was too late.
One…more….step…..and LeClaire dragged Kevin's chair back from the table, leaned
over it himself, and held the straw between two black fingernails and drew the
line up in one long coke-cleared pull, his hair swinging forward just enough to
spare Kev the actual sight of his doom unfolding.
Lovely. It was too much, really. Come on.
Kev sat with both hands crammed against his mouth, his breath stuck in a bruise
right under his voicebox, trapped before he yelled "don't!" Because, LeClaire
would have turned around looking…..suspicious…..that straw pinched between his
fingers, wobbling it, and he'd say why not? And what the fuck would Kevin say
then?
He would have completely understood Damien's trip-deep revelation about destiny
and dread. Hell, he had probably done it to himself. A self-fulfilling
prophecy. They said addicts and serial killers did the same thing; they got
more and more careless, secretly longing to be, caught.
LeClaire was frozen.
Kevin had almost a minute to sit paralyzed thinking please-God-he-doesn't-know,
please-God-he-doesn't-know, voodoostyle.
Gloved fingers, picked up the mirror, tilting it, tapped the not-quite-white-
grains with one fingertip, and put them in his…..mouth….
He let the mirror fall.
Its own weight carried it end over end to the tile floor, crystalline little
arpeggio, and almost the very last bit of smack in the entire, room, was on the
floor with dust and microscopic glass fragments.
Um, yeah, he, knew.
Iggz: Well I was trying to leave this signal/ in a fury and it 's too strong
"You….son of a….bitch…" A step forward, more velociraptor than seventies
rockstar, now. His voice was, flat, as if he were reading off the wall and had
to puzzle out each word. He stopped. Wavered. "You, fucking--"
"It wasn't--I didn't have time to stop you….if you'll, just, listen--"
"Where's. The rest of it."
"There, isn't, really--"
LeClaire struck, then, crooked and crazy.
Kevin had this weird, movie-bit, like he was the poor fuck who hit a bear with
a tranquilizer dart. At such close range that he'd be mauled before his patron
drug could save him.
LeClaire put the flat of his boot high on Kevin's chest and shoved. The chair
whammed ninety degrees over onto the floor, backfirst. Kev lay flailing, breath
knocked out, and oh how that sucked, he hated that sensation. LeClaire
straddled him, hands vicious and efficient. The gun pocket of Kev's jacket was
the first place he looked. He pulled out the same old tin box, still held
together with a sticker that said GOD SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS.
"How can you tell when a junkie is lying?"
LeClaire opened it, slipped his fingernail under the tape holding Kev's
absolute emergency hit to the lid in a twist of plastic. He left it there,
closed the box and sort of, swatted Kevin with it, hitting chest and shoulder
and hands and arms, slamming it harder with each word.
"His...mother….fucking….lips are moving."
The heroin was rolling over him. He was fighting it with every gram of hate
inside him. He stumbled up and away from Kevin, taking the box with him.
That was all Kevin could see, was his box utterly out of his reach in
LeClaire's accusing hand. A suicidal flare of, rage. "That isn't yours--"
"Oh, it's all for you, whore. Don't worry." A step, messy, towards the door,
box gleaming like the Grail in his Nazi hand. He grinned, crooked and psycho,
and tucked the gearbox into his own gun pocket. His hand reappeared, came up to
cover his mouth. A scrabbling drag at the door, and he was gone, leaving it
swinging open.
Kevin lay panting. Sick. Dread and fury that was the ghost of his Mom going
through his shit helping herself to anything she didn't approve of. He waited
for something to happen. When nothing did he rolled onto one side. He didn't
bother to get up. Crawling was fine. He crawled the glass-strewn distance to
the main wreckage of his mirror, lay poking at glass, brushing it together and
nudging the heroin into a little pile with his fingernail. It was possible
there was microscopic glass dust in it. Fuck it. The straw had rolled, but not
so far he couldn't stretch out and reach it. Chunks of mirror were crunching
under his shoulder, gouging his leather jacket.
 
Meanwhile, LeClaire was in the bathroom going for the Olympic fucking record in
puking. Partly a side effect, partly due to him cramming his fingers down his
throat, partly because he would have been less disgusted all around if he'd
accidentally snorted powdered dogshit. He'd blown his nose repeatedly, until
all that he got was blood-tinged snot. The drug was unstoppable; he could feel
it trying to….disassociate him, calm and a warm weird plateau-orgasmic bliss
spreading at temples and spine. He groaned, just, appalled, and tried one more
time. Nothing but dry-heaves and spitting, now. He stood up, groped with his
foot to flush the toilet, holding onto the walls of the stall, wobbling enough
to shake the partition. He was trying to remember everything he'd ever heard
about how long this bullshit lasted.
Drugs, fine. Hallucinogens, stimulants, psychedelics, weed the pope of them
all, but he was strictly top-only. Fucker not fucked, rider, not ridden. And he
was being ridden, hard, now.
And it was all Kevin Cullay's fault.
 
Damien was sitting in a fenced-in parking lot with Max and Kincaid, with no
idea what was going on, frantically telling them both that all "this" (he
seemed to think some kind of disaster was in progress) had happened because
that stupid fucking comedy where Goldie Hawn joined the air force or army or
whatever the fuck had scared the shit out of him when he was a little kid.
Max was following this pretty well, since his own mutant brain made very little
coherent sense most of the time. It was like, existential, maybe.
Kincaid didn't care if he discussed the fall of fucking Communist Russia, as
long as he didn't scream, strip, convulse, or anything else likely to draw the
attention of the police. He nodded at the occasional truth and stared up at
Orion.
Due to the whole, panic-and-distress call thang, Damien didn't hear Kev and
LeClaire pass.
LeClaire had Kevin by the back of his jacket and one of his beltloops and was
half-pushing, half-dragging him so fast it was more like a controlled fall. The
Nazi thing lent the whole thing a sinister quality that Damien did not need to
viddy on LSD.
Max had the sense to distract him by cheerfully agreeing to help him with
whatever, uh, plan, this theory was leading him towards. Maybe he'd give the
kid some cliffnotes later. Or, um, not. It was looking pretty, classified.
LeClaire reined Kevin in, spared one hand to point at Damien for Max, gesturing
essentially babysit. Kev kept his eyes down. He looked sort of, apathetic about
the whole thing. Zombified.
Max was gonna salute or sieg heil or whatever the fuck it was, but he thought
better of it and just nodded instead. With all sincerity.
LeClaire shoved his prisoner on past the buses, towards Tim's idling rent-a-
car, while Damien explained how fear could bend reality the way planets bend
space to make, gravity.
Achtung, baby. Luckily the fit of giggles was status quo for Max, so he didn't
get asked to explain the joke. He still had zero idea what was going on, or for
once in his life he wouldn't have been laughing.
 
Back at the hotel LeClaire fought Kevin through the door of his room and kicked
it closed behind them. He let go, and Kev pooled on the carpet. He cracked open
one eye. He had a serious fear of being kicked in the face. Just, bring it on,
already. The utterly silent trip over here was too much. The suspense was
fucking killing him.
No such mercy. LeClaire piled on the bed and left Kevin on the floor like,
luggage. The heroin and the coke had turned on each other, slamming back and
forth clicking off the inside of LeClaire's skull like billiard balls. He could
not lie still, or restlessness would drive him insane. He could not buzz around
at hyperspeed to indulge the coke, because the heroin made him exhausted and
listless. So he would pace, or at least stand up and stumble, and forget why
he'd gotten up in the first place. The effect was like having a strobelight
strapped to your head facing your eyelids, flashing really, really slowly.
After watching LeClaire ride this for more than a minute or ten, Kevin started
to sit up, getting sort of, worried, or as worried as he could get in full
apathy mode. Brian was currently lying across the bed with his face covered
with one arm. He said "Don't fucking move." without uncovering his eyes.
Kevin didn't.
 
Maybe he was starting to come down, or getting used to this crazy nasty
sensation, because LeClaire managed to form a thought and hold it long enough o
come up with sort of a plan. He got up, holding it together reasonably better,
and made it to the dresser where his makeup/shaving kit was, groping his way
along furniture and wall. Once there, he dug out his little glass vial of coke,
his own normal good COKE coke. If either smack or blow was going to win this
one, he was sending the blow some reinforcements.
Paranoia made him dab the powder on his gums just over his top front teeth.
Only when he got the icicle banana-lemon numbness signal did he cut himself a
carefully conservative pair of lines.
He wanted to feel a lot more like himself before he dealt with the little
problem lying on the carpet.
The coke organized this new regiment, and waded into he battle. He was
coming….up….and…..oooh, that was, much more like it. "Boom," he whispered,
shaking. He looked at Kevin. Did a long coke pull-and-sniff.
 
Some of the road crew had just wheeled a rack of speakers past them, apparently
either the same one or the same kind as the site of Damien's recent
crucifixion. He wigged, and that was putting it mildly, begging both Kincaid
and Max to help him imagine LeClaire so he would do it "loud" enough to make
him appear, presumably to commute his sentence. Max was positively crippled
with giggles over this, though he was fast approaching the edge of hysteria.
"Go and...find….somebody to take us to the hotel?" he asked Kincaid, all
eyelashes and pleading. Damien was pulling at his sleeve, talking way over the
speed limit for a heavy traffic area. Kincaid nodded once, and took off towards
the arena.
 
Breaking somebody into many repentant pieces was like anything else. Almost
anyone could do it, but very few people had the talent or put in the practice
to elevate it to an art form.
Same shit as singing, really; every note had to mean something. Every blow,
every look, every advance and illusory retreat had to lend itself to the
desired effect. A fractured sobbing mess. Epiphany. Sincere and absolute
contrition. A very, very long period of extremely sorry. For starters.
Better to start this one off with a little verbal abuse. A cappella. He cut
another line, slopped Jack Daniels into a plastic hotel glass without polluting
it with ice, and drank. He loved that, the almost menthol effect as all this
sweet warm sting tried to burn his anesthetized throat. "Do you realize, I have
the dumbest, most disgusting, lame, boring, suicidal drug for pussy little
feebs ever invented in my bloodstream?"
He drank again, turned to lean against the edge of the dresser. Sparked half a
joint Max had stupidly left in the ashtray. He was going to want that
everything-feels-delicious vibe in a very few minutes.
"Brian, I…" A weird noise, like too many sighs crammed together. "Look, I'm
sorry, all right? I just--"
"You're nowhere near sorry, you junkie sack of shit." And coke in the lead.
Hallelujah.
He killed his drink, dropped the glass, laced his fingers together and
backfolded them, stretching.
Kevin stayed quiet this time. See, he was getting smarter already. "Two
choices, Kev. You stay here with me until we're through--" He picked up the
whole damn bottle and hit it because it was easier than picking up the cup.
"You can have the rest of your filth in the morning, if you still want it."
That should have been a large motherfucking billboard with IT'S A TRAP written
on it in neon yellow, but Kev had junkyvision, and LeClaire knew he couldn't
get past the little black print at the bottom that said have the rest of.
"Or?"
"Or, I give it to you now, and let you leave."
Even junkyvision told Kev to doubletake on that one.
"And call the police the second the door closes." LeClaire delivered this last
like a man throwing down a royal flush when he doesn't need the money. He
grinned a lot of teeth at Kev and leaned over to do a less conservative line.
He looked up twitching, said in a drugcrackle, "The devil, and the deep, blue,
sea….." and laughed, pleased with himself and this evil piece of work.
 
Kev found himself….considering.
Deep blue sea, yeah, of fucking pig fucking uniforms. Some choice. But he could
just book to a bathroom and do the rest of it. Walk away quietly. If he did end
up in jail it'd be pretty brief. The worst that would happen is that he might
have to nod and smile and suffer and lie his way through a week or three of
treatment bullshit. And in jail he had slightly less of a chance of boots and
fists and more devious shit. Here all of the above were SOP.
Vague will I/won't I lose my job, and a complete inability to wonder why he
cared. Guitarist was too distant a concept for carpet and the edge of the bed.
Right now was about the pros and cons of pigs and smack and the, Devil himself.
And did that last category have any pros? It did. It was time for foxhole
honesty, here. The love of bruises and tears was as narcotic as ever. And
essentially very little would…..change. Back to the familiar, mostly tolerable,
sometimes fabulous drugs/bus/stage loop. Home sweet home.
And what would it be like, that terrifying crosshairs centering on him, when
LeClaire was really, really mad?
Better the Devil he knew, and all that noise.
"I'll stay," he said. He thought he was broken already, though he knew that
once he really, was, he wouldn't think of much. "I'll do whatever you want,
just don't, call, anyone."
LeClaire set the bottle down, shrugged out of his long leather coat, and threw
it in an arc across the bed.
 
Max, Kincaid, and Damien were in Max's room. Max was sitting on the floor,
vaguely trying to do a whippet while groaning and leaning in boneless bliss,
because Kincaid was scratching his head.
Damien was staring at the TV in wide-eyed wonder. Max had managed to find
Troll, for fuck's sakes. He was getting warm fuzzies from the Malcolm bit,
still more or less tripping balls. It was a cozy place to be in. Kincaid patted
him now and then, like a sort of status-check, which was a thump with that huge
hand even when he was being supergentle. He drifted.
He'd figured Kincaid out, unless you were evil and/or hostile, you were pretty
much safe around him. More than safe, since any attack on anybody on, with, or
near the tour was likely to end in said moron being put to the ground by a
completely calm Kincaid. Stat. Sort of nice to have Klingon-style backup.
Not that he would ever do what Max was currently doing. He was half-sprawling
across Kincaid's knee, moaning in apparently agonized delight. Kincaid was
rubbing his neck patiently and watching Troll.
It was weirdly, domestic.
Damien got up, made it to the cooler, deciphered which way you had to tilt the
handle to open the lid, persuaded it into handing over a coke. He sat down
again on the floor by the bed, leaned his back against the cool plane of the
wall. It did something….new….and when he leaned his head forward to hear the
new thing better, it went away. This confused him utterly and he repeated the
experiment a few times before he realized he was hearing a noise through the
wall. He analyzed. It was his and LeClaire's room, and it
was…..talking…..LeClaire's obelisk-egyptian rumble, and Kev's crystalline warm
tenor. And then, dragging, and Kev making a noise like a pulsar.
Awww, he's fucking him, Damien thought.
Jealousy didn't even occur to him. Instead, this theory gave him warm fuzzies
again, and he smiled like a serious geek. He chased around something like
that's sweet, it's about time, Kev has been so, and sat with his cheek pressed
to the wall and his Coke going flat by his knee. Drifted.
Brian wasn't fucking him.
"Would I piss on a junkie if he was on fire, Kevin?"
LeClaire bent over and just casually snatched a huge handful of his hair and
dragged him. Kev made a gritted furious noise, bootheels scudding along the
carpet, and LeClaire swung him up and got a better grip around his chest and
pulled him into the bathroom in a kicking mess.
He didn't so much push or drop Kev into the tub as he threw him into it. Then
he was, gone, every movement so laden with rage that the door slammed into the
wall and the room seemed to vibrate in his wake.
Owww. Though, you know, he hadn't really hurt him yet, other than throwing him
into the motherfucking ceramic tub. He tried to fathom why, exactly, he'd
wanted him in the bathtub, of all places--it had sucked, yes, but there were
worse places to throw him. Into the television, for instance, or the window.
So, why, here?
The only answer he came up with was…impossible. One, idea, based on a
drunken…..no, he, wouldn't.
The door had rebounded almost closed. LeClaire kicked it open again. He had one
object in each hand. One was the rest of the JD, and one, wasn't.
He reached under Kevin and grabbed his arm and dragged him over onto his back.
More whams, bangs, and bruises. Kevin had his eyes scrunched closed, thinking,
if he does this to me, I'll never be the same.
He was so certain it would be piss that when the first few stinging drops
struck him he could smell it, and then he whooped in a hysterical breath and
got the taste and the scent and the burn of whiskey just before LeClaire
upended the bottle, soaking his shirt and hair and crotch and pants with it,
stopping with maybe a quarter left.
Kevin lay there feebly doing all the reflex things you do when your eyes, nose,
mouth, and clothes are drenched in eightyproof alcohol. Mostly coughing,
spitting, and suffering.
"Would I?"
Kevin was cupping his stinging eyes, his soaked hands not making it any better.
"Goddamn you, Brian…..fuck….." He forced his eyes open, just in time to see a
blurry LeClaire in that awful SS drag hold up object number two: a book of
matches.
"…no, that's….."
He opened the matchbook. Tore out a match. Closed the matchbook.
"…..too….really, really dangerous……I mean it….."
Struck it. Held it over Kevin.
Dropped it.
***** Chapter 12 *****
DEVIL'S NIGHT
Kevin screamed, pinwheeling with his feet trying to stand up, escape, anything.
LeClaire pinned him down with one hand, laughing, and reached between Kev's
legs and patted out the match, which was lying about one inch east of a runner
of whiskey, and about two inches south of Kev's (soaked) crotch.
Kev was wheezing. Something.
LeClaire sat up and opened the matchbook again. Kev saw this, and his feet just
wouldn't, grab, in all the, wet.
Brian was between him and the door.
He struck another match. The pinpoint of light was the only thing in the
universe, the blueorange glow filling all the space, eating all the air. He
kissed the matchbook with it until it supernovaed.
"Kevin?"
His mouth was just, locked. Rictus, he thought, and for a minute the matchbook
got so bright he realized he was close to fainting. He gritted out
"….wouldn't…"
He hooked Kev's cigarettes out of his pocket, making him squeak, put one that
was still dry in a silver cigarette holder, put it between his lips and leaned
into the tiny inferno and lit it. He dropped the rest of the pack back into the
tub, all painted eyes and blitzkrieg, tilting the burning matchbook to let the
flame climb higher.
He leaned over and snapped off the light.
The fire was everything.
He let it go and it fell so fast and it landed on his chest and his shirt went
alcohol blue in a rush like jetfuel burning, and he closed his eyes against the
flare, screamed, screaming
he let him burn long enough to, snap
and reached over and turned on the shower full blast, and staggered back and
sat sprawled on the toilet seat. He was laughing so hard he was barely making a
sound. He finally got himself under control enough to turn off the shower. He
pushed Kev's twitching hands out of his face and tucked the mouthpiece between
his teeth.
"That was foreplay," he said.
The cigarette holder jittered, tilted. LeClaire caught it and held it upright
before it fell. "Pussy. Smoke. You're not hurt. "
He wasn't hurt. He was wet and his shirt was scorched and he could smell burnt
hair, though his fingers seemed to think that his hair and eyebrows were more
or less intact.
My….stupid chemistry teacher…..said water wouldn't put out an alcohol fire……
He drew in a deep lungscorcher of a drag. The cigarette tasted better than weed
after a long, long dry spell, better than ice-cold beer after mowing too much
grass. It was knee-weakening how nice it was to be alive. He was crying.
Hades. The River Styx. That gorgeous bastard Nazi officer in Schindler's List.
His (gear) in LeClaire's pocket. Goddamn, fuck, shit and Hell.
"Why didn't you stop?"
Ah. Part two, Interrogation, also known as Confession.
"I did, I stopped…"
The cigarette holder was interfering with his tongue and his lips. LeClaire
didn't move it. "For what, a week?"
Kev was twisting his head, he wanted the cigarette out of his mouth, suddenly.
He had never pondered how much time you spent with it actually in your hand
when you were just…..smoking…."For, almost two years."
It was choking him. He couldn't take a breath without getting at least some
smoke, and it was streaming straight from the cherry into his eyes. The smell
was rapidly mutating from mouthwatering to nauseating. LeClaire's fingers
spread across his mouth, the heel of his hand digging under Kev's jaw to tilt
his head back, hold his teeth together. The gloves were motherfucking
unnecessary, dammit anyway. The cigarette holder was gripped between his first
and second fingers. One of Kev's feet thudded hard into the tub, tangled
briefly against the faucet.
"Your lips are moving," LeClaire said, dripping insincere, disappointment.
He held it for almost another minute. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe four seconds.
Then he took his hand away, bringing the cigarette with it. He didn't take his
knee off Kevin's chest. He put the cigarette back in his own mouth.
"I did." Lame. He was gasping and fighting not to gag, mouth and nose coated
with Marlboro goodness. "I quit after you
(almost killed me)
"caught....found out, that first time. I didn't do it again until after Blade.
That Christmas party was the first--"
(fuckup)
"…fuckup."
"Mmmhmm." Smoking. Expressionless. "And how often have you been fucking up,
since?"
Shit. A brief, hopeless attempt at algebra. "A, lot."
LeClaire reached down with the cigarette again; and when Kevin made a frantic
noise and gritted his teeth together, he pulled on his bottom lip until he
opened and put the mouthpiece back anyway. "Which brings us back to the
beginning. Why didn't you stop?"
Nothing. Kev's eyes were closed.
"Smoke."
He tried. It was car exhaust and burning rubber and hitting screen, and he
couldn't do it, had a positive seizure of not being able to do it, and LeClaire
laughed and held him down with knee and forearm in his chest and kept the
cigarette there until he went limp, just, gave up. He took it away, stood up,
and plucked it out of the holder and dropped it in the tub. It went out.
He held out his hand, waited for Kevin to take it.
 
"…please," Kevin started again, pulled himself into a ball with his cheek
smashed against the corner of the bed. "Please, let me explain."
"I don't want to hear any fucking excuses. There's not a single thing you can
tell me that'll make me--"
"I don't want to make you anything!" There, on anything, he was fucking crying,
and the pain hadn't even started yet. He didn't feel it coming, didn't get the
luxury of having it ripped out of him or beaten into him, he just, snapped.
Sobbing. Sobbing, that chest-deep ugly fucking crying that he hated, that had
become so goddamn familiar in the highway of years, from thirteen or so till
now, god damn it. "I don't want you to stop, I don't want to ask you for--
I just want you to wait a second and hear what I want to tell you and then…" A
break, for all the crying he'd had to tab past to even get that much out.
Another measure to suck in some breath. "And then, whatever, you, do, this
time, just, please."
He either had his eyes closed or was too blurred with tears to see anything. He
felt LeClaire's weight settle on the bed, but he didn't see him unpocket and
light another joint, didn't see him study the dead-eyed TV and the deadbolt and
the bedside lamp wishing he were somewhere else, anywhere else. He cried,
waited, sniffled stinging whiskey, smelled his burnt shirt.
"So?"
A hooked-in breath, metronomed with bits of sob. Had he thought LeClaire hadn't
hurt him yet? What kind of wrong bullshit was that? LeClaire had been hurting
him since he first laid eyes on him, since that first synaptic recording of
sunglasses, lipstick and leather.
He couldn't speak. He could feel this wonder of imperial audience closing fast.
This, one, chance, to
(plead)
make some kind of case for himself. To lay out his sins, to make this penance
something that might earn him
(salvation)
forgiveness.
MICROCOSM TWO: KEVIN
After LeClaire, Kev lasted at Virgin (yeah, irony) for a grand total of nine
days. Vicki's coven of Gap-headed bimbos spent all nine days trying to make his
life hell. Lots of giggling, snickering, conversations stopping pointedly when
he walked into earshot. It would have been a lot more devastating if he had,
oh, noticed, any of it.
He was too
(love)
lust-dazed to have any idea he was the object of such interest. Oblivious. He
spent most of his time staring off into space. He was reasonably competent and
polite to customers, but most of them went away with the distinct sensation
they'd been talking to an answering machine. He was just, not, home. He was in
LeClaire's house in LeClaire's bed that reeked of boy and smoke, spread and
butterfly pinned, mouth open, thighs shaking. He was on the kitchen floor in
the middle of the night with the refrigerator door open behind them, so very
Cold Ethyl, his arms pinned behind his back, LeClaire's teeth in his neck. He
was too preoccupied to even shortchange anyone.
Showing up two hours late with a rainbow of suction marks from the nape of his
neck down into his tie-less, rumpled work shirt was apparently the last straw.
Vicki cornered him by the time clock before he even managed to punch in.
Apparently the outraged whispers he'd left in his wake on the way to the back
had tipped her off. She called him into the corner of the stockroom that passed
for her office and fired him.
He listened to her smug little speech, nodded, not really giving much of a
damn, except a tired vague rejoicing that he could drive the fuck home, take
aspirin, and go the fuck back to bed. She handed him a packet of "exit papers."
He tweezed them out of her hand with his thumb and forefinger, smiled, and
dropped them with just the smallest touch of wrist-flourish. They made a very
impressive fluttering of mess.
He kept the same distantly amused smile on his face through her sputtering,
interrupting once to suggest she go fuck herself. He took off his nametag and
dropped it with the pin still open. He unbuttoned, peeled off, and dropped his
corporate-issued work shirt onto the snowdrift of printouts.
She was assuring him no chance whatsoever of re-employment short of web porn if
her reference had anything to do with it when he walked out, shirtless, thereby
ensuring that every wanna-be valley girl in her entire coven that had drawn
first shift that day had visual proof that the mauling on his neck was far from
the extent of the damage.
 
Moving in with LeClaire just, happened. It wasn't exactly a decision on his
part.
He would lose the apartment, of course. If you could glorify that shithole by
calling it an apartment. He was probably two to three months behind, total, on
his rent. Very little cushion of patience left for his landlord to give him. On
some underneath level he was pretty scared about that, too. He certainly
couldn't go back home. He had no idea where he WOULD go. Stay in the apartment
till the landlord finally kicked him out, stuff what he could fit into the
hearse, live in his car awhile. He said something along those lines to LeClaire
and Max that night, after telling them about the Vicki incident.
LeClaire said, "Well, I'm off Thursday. Max can trade keys with me, since he
has that big-ass boat. We'll just bring all your shit, here."
And that was that. Kev passed the bong to Max, and the one single Arctic-pang
of oh. my. god. that he had, he kept to himself. He never even really, agreed.
The only one who decided, anything, was LeClaire.
That was his official notice that he was Deathstyle's guitarist, if anything
was.
He only remembered one image from Moving Day: closing the back of the hearse on
a span of boxes overflowing with guitar junk, ashtrays, dishes, his own long-
disused bong, trashbags fat and round with clothes, his black-and-green
bedspread flopping over his deflated air mattress, pillows in mismatched cases
stuffed around the edges of things.
He thought, but we'll LIVE together.
He got into the driver's seat noticing how the tip of his ignition key wouldn't
leave an impression in the callouses on his fingertips.
 
And they lived together. There was a bright stretch of days like the sixties in
Hell. He remembered, stopping in the bathroom and looking for one full minute
at their toothbrushes in the same cup by the sink. It was pathetic, really, how
in-love he'd been.
If he had been telling this story to anyone but LeClaire he might've said he
was ashamed of it, now. All starry eyed, lying in the leather crook of Brian's
arm, staring up into the ceiling fan. Grinning like an idiot. If he wasn't
careful, it still made him grin like that. Insanity.
Still, it made for a wonderful blur. Stoned in the screened-in porch paralyzed
with stupid laughter, Brian beside him in the same sad state, hair tangled
together. Black Sabbath playing on the turntable inside. Pizza at four am, with
LeClaire sitting on the bare little cut-out bar in jeans and nothing else, bare
feet pressed into the wall. Arguing metaphysics through mouthfuls of of
breadstick.
There was a very clear set of the three of them alking through the street, in
the middle of the night. Max was on one side and Kev on the other and Brian in
the middle like a tiny little coven, hands chainlinked, when he'd first heard
Casey and Fathom through the wall, and they'd gone out listening from garage to
garage till they found them. That had been one of the best ones, the door going
up and the wedge of green-and-red light from their goofy band set-up, and Case
standing there with his hands hovering over his keyboard, wide-eyed, like he'd
been caught doing something illegal. He'd felt it then, that, click, that new
sense that he was exactly where and when he, belonged.
Brian hadn't let go of his hand.
 
He'd ruined it himself not two months later at a dumb-ass party.
Their first encounter with Tristan Blade had left him stranded on a couch
staring at football on a projection TV. Half jocks and half hardcore, punks?
What the fuck? But it was some kind of party for some kind of a punk band,
maybe. Yeah. LeClaire had vacated, Tristan's hand on his back, steering him,
and he had watched them go and thought, Shit, and now he was left to trying to
figure out how the fuck football worked. He'd have gotten a drink but he didn't
trust himself to walk. His knees were like vibrators at this point. Scared out
of his wits. But thinking about it, yeah, would jinx it, probably, and
meanwhile he was too nervous to, walk.
A guy sat down next to him--L shaped couch, so not too next to him--and set
down a tray on his knees. He had a driver's license held between his teeth,
which he removed to say "You want one?"
Granted, they were in the--den? and nobody else really seemed to be around--the
party had mostly moved itself to the pool. Still, it was awfully, rock-star
jarring. The guy was of the punk variety, magenta-haired, a lil too Seth Green
to be part of the actual band. Seemed mostly harmless. "H. You want one?"
Nothing. He sort of, erm, shrugged? He felt terribly lost, a la Arthur Dent, as
if he were in a strange alien land with bizarre customs. "Excuse me?" he said,
finally.
"We know why they're in there. You must be freaked. You want one?"
He had to decipher that. When he thought he had most of it figured out he
wondered if he might not be wrong about why they were in there, The resulting
visual made him stare off into space for a little too long, and the guy laughed
and leaned close and did things with the edge of his license and said, "That
one, man. Ain't much. Just, like coke man..."
Um. Well. "Um, don't...aren't you supposed to, uh, shoot it?"
A lot of laughing and "No, no..." and "You get hooked like that. Like coke.
That's all. Painkiller, like, to, relax you." Polite offer of the ubiquitous Mc
Donald's straw, cut-down edition.
Kev arranged himself and pulled his hair back and did it without looking like
too much of a dumbass.
Medicine-y. Not like coke, no banana, no lemon, no nose-disappearing. Weird.
Very, uh, non-threatening. Wasn't this stuff like codeine and Vicodin, sort of,
anyway? LSD, now, there was some vicious drug. This just seemed so, sleepy. And
opium was good, yeah, so, why not?
He closed his eyes. He said, "thank you," or, something. Then he said, for
reasons he could not possibly go into with LeClaire, "Why are they in there?"
Snorting. Laugh. "Tris wants him."
Uh. Flare. "He's taken."
Lots, and lots, of laugh. Kev started to hate this junkie, that relaxed blues-
laugh. It didn't matter. "No, for the label."
....oh...
 
"And then it started to, like, work....."
LeClaire took back the joint he had been passing him--for almost five minutes,
without him noticing--and lit one of Kev's cigarettes and gave it to him in
exchange. "What was it like?"
"Like...man, I'm explaining it....like....ahhhh....like, getting in a hot bath
when your back is killing you....like, yummy." God. He just couldn't put it
into English. It didn't fit.
He was curled up at the foot of the bed, eye too close to the bedspread.
LeClaire hadn't moved from sitting against the headboard.
"And it was like, we'd just won the lottery...."he added, and thought a long
time, and the marijuana made him smile. "And it got so, busy, and it made it,
much better. Better than Xanax, even. Just....better. And he'd said, you won't
get addicted, yeah, if you don't...you know, the, needles...." Quiet.
LeClaire's boot was a blurry comma in front of him. Temptation to burrow into
it with his, face. "And then you found, out."
It wasn't clear exactly how he had found out. Someone in their circle of club-
kids and drug friends had, talked, probably just to make fucking conversation,
probably while DOING drugs with LeClaire. Kevin hadn't even know he had,
hangups, about opiates in general, courtesy of Trish LeClaire. True, he hadn't
woken up the next morning and gone Hey, I snorted heroin, it was groovy, but in
the general rush of oh-my-god-we're-going-to-be-signed, it sort of didn't seem,
important. Kev hadn't expected to do it again, it just, kept, finding him. And
it just kept, helping, in some obscure way, in this maternal-warm-womb sort of
way. It wasn't a secret. The subject never came up. LeClaire ate everything
from acid to peyote and did rivers of coke whenever he wanted to, what was the
problem?
He found out that LeClaire had found out, about precisely when the small of his
back connected with the edge of the bar, the pizza-at-four-am bar, very, very
hard, probably harder than he'd ever hit anything in his, life.
He'd sort of, exhaled, arms still pinwheeling, trying to grasp that Brian had
come home, come in, grabbed him by his tshirt, and thrown him into the fucking,
bar. LeClaire hadn't even put down his jacket, for fucks' sake, no grabbing a
bowl, no Kevin, let's talk, just, wham.
He was about to--laugh? between, embarrassment, or something, and the really
excruciating pain. His eyes were teared up from sheer, hurt. But he felt almost
like he'd fallen all by himself, and it had made him look a little, uh, dumb.
He still didn't realize that it wasn't over, still didn't realize that he was
in, um, danger. Maybe LeClaire was drunk. Maybe he was playing. Maybe he would
yell and yell and yell, if he was pissed off about, something, whatever the
something might be.
He didn't understand it until LeClaire, punched him. Really punched him. Just
pulled one hand back and threw it in a terrible arc at his jaw, fast and
totally unpulled, rings splitting his cheek open in three precise little nicks
and a bruise. This time it was the back of his head that hit the bar, kind of
on his way to the floor, um, yeah. He'd never thought about that, reach, in
this sort of pissed-off six-foot spider, application. Flicker of lying in bed
with his cheek cradled against LeClaire's, and marveling that his toes only
reached the middle of Brian's shins. Toes over flat bone.
"Goddammit, LeClaire, what the...fuck...." That was when he touched his face
and the back of his head, and realized both were bleeding. His head, in
particular, was bleeding rather, quickly. The first real and serious heart
triphammering bolt of afraid. Half of a thought: he really, means it
And LeClaire picked him up by his shirt, again, until he could get a better
grip on his, arm
 
There was a hospital involved. And morphine. He kept saying, I fell, until they
finally wrote something down and quit asking him. Whee. Max drove him and
stayed with him, the whole time. When they got home in the extremely wee hours
of the morning, Kevin discovered his pillow and his old bedspread thrown onto
the couch.
So he, quit.
He puked and shook and took Tylenol and Imodium and Xanax and Sudafed. He drank
tons of black coffee, chainsmoked, smoked so much weed his coughs had a
permanent green flavor. He cried on the couch, shaking and sick, more than a
handful of nights, but he made it to every single scheduled rehearsal, and
every single gig, and played as well as he ever had. He gained five pounds and
then lost twenty. He sweated so that he had to wash his sheets almost daily,
started putting anti-perspirant/deodorant all over his chest and palms and not
just under his arms. He showered at least twice a day. He still felt
constantly, dirty, sticky, itchy, infected. He scratched sores into the insides
of his elbows.
It never made him Trainspotting hallucinate. Afterward he decided it was a lot
like, oh, quitting smoking while having a serious goddamn case of the stomach
flu. It sucked, hard and completely, and was a long span of the shittiest days
of his life since chicken-pox-with-pneumonia when he was eight, but he
survived.
He did NOT backslide.
LeClaire said nothing outside of business to him--try it with just you and Max,
have you seen my Biofuck notes, pass the bowl.
He slept on the couch for the next five months.
Five months and four days after That Night, he was clean and skinny and mostly
sober. He ran his ass off, playing, practicing, promoting. LeClaire, ignored
him. Someone offered him some at an afterparty, and this time he did it with a
needle.
 
"So it's my fault?"
That wasn't it. He circled around it for a second, noticing LeClaire was
actually letting him think about it. "Not that at all....that, I did it to...."
"...get me back?"
"No!" he said, thinking Brian meant, like revenge, and then "Yes!" when he
caught it. "Yes, the quitting, to make you like me again, and you didn't,
care...but no, I didn't start again to like, win, or something. I wanted...."
He shrugged, back to words like womb and that dumbass bathtub metaphor. Heroin
was like nothing but heroin, and it was pretty good for bad cases of
heartbroken.
Nothing. LeClaire watching him with those luminous espresso eyes.
TRINITY
 
Max and Kincaid were getting more friendly all the time. Damien watched them
kissing with the same awww warmness for quite awhile. The realization that this
was not a movie and he was being terrifically rude fractured over him for no
real reason suddenly, and he flushed and stood up.
Um…he thought about it, and tried to apologize but what came out was "Hey!"
like he'd just had an idea or, something. Fortunately neither one of them heard
him, because he had no idea what he'd have said after such a retarded
introduction.
He decided to leave it at that, opted instead for a tactical retreat. He
thought maybe one of them said something behind him when he unlocked the door,
but he sidestepped out and wandered into the last bit of night, empty Coke can
still in his hand. He noticed it after awhile, studied it, having almost
forgotten what it was, and trying to analyze what he should do with it, getting
caught in the red-and-silver hieroglyphs instead.
The world had stopped making sense to Damien entirely.
He found his hotel key. It squirmed around in his hand like a beetle. He
halfscreamed and lost his hotel key. In the process of trying to relocate it he
discovered he had lots of money in his jacket, and since when had his Coke been
empty? He started wandering around for a vending machine. He would see a place
that looked likely--the end of a hallway, a juncture of corridors--but when he
got there it wouldn't be what he thought it was. His feet were, um, hurting? He
stood on one foot to investigate and discovered he was barefoot.
The pilgrimage went on for quite some time. Finally he wandered past the room
again, recognized it due to the White Zombie thudding through the wall. Here
was his key again, little bastard had crawled back into his pocket. He opened
the door.
It threw him utterly. Max and Kincaid weren't here. He couldn't remember that
he'd been in their room next door. This room was an entirely different animal.
Kev was lying on his back across the bed with his hands over his face,
groaning, trying to talk, whatever he was doing hopelessly muffled. LeClaire
was sitting up beside him, his left hand tangled and bony under the waistband
of Kev's pants. In his right he had a stranglehold on the neck of a bottle of
Jack Daniels.
Damien was a disaster of flailing limbs, blushing the color of a taillight.
Mentally he was falling over himself to leave the room. He opened his mouth,
fearing for some reason the last thing he'd said--the enthusiastic hey--would
just say itself again. "Oh…sorry…didn't…"
"Close the door," LeClaire said.
He started to, pushing it back in. It hit his bare toes. He did a pretty
drastic wail. It hurt like holy fuck.
A sigh. "You poor idiot. Come in and close the door."
He stopped his agonized hopping. His hand was glued to the doorknob. The acid
electroplated everything, edges so sharp they were hurting his brain, and the
thudding nexus of holy-fucking-shit impaled him from the top of his head
straight down to his dick.
He took one ripping step forward. It felt like, tearing through a membrane, and
the wrench freed his other foot and his hand and he stepped inside. The door
clicked closed behind him, six gajillion miles away, brushing his
shoulderblades. His teeth clicked closed in his mouth like an instant replay of
the latch.
"Lock it," LeClaire suggested, smile dragging his mouth into a bow with a
flicker of tongue as the arrow.
Kevin was spread out sacrifice-style, pinned under his hand.
Damien groped behind him till he managed to get his hand into the dimension
where the deadbolt was and at that third and final click Kev did a cellophane-
thin moan, eyes open and hopeless, looking past LeClaire at Damien, pleading
maybe help me or i'm sorry or what-the-fuck-is-happening?
Damien couldn't translate it.
Everything was running through a splitter--he could see them, he could smell
alcohol, the air thick with it like a new kind of smoke. He thought, why is he
wet? and did a weird graceful falling stagger and put one knee and one hand on
the bed, head tilted, examining the two of them like some kind of outré museum
exhibit.
LeClaire hooked the back of his neck with the hand that wasn't busy with
Kevin's crotch, pulled him lazily closer, so that it was climb onboard or thump
into bed facefirst. He picked climb. The bed was too spongy, like he was
sinking into it up to his elbows. More like swimming than crawling. He knelt
up, squicked, looked away from Kevin for the first time to see if liquid
bedspread was smeared on his arms. Nope. He shook his hand like it was wet,
just to make sure, and LeClaire laughed at him and shoved him, and he fell and
hit the bed about an hour later. Little noise of terror till he grasped that he
wasn't going to drown in the mattress.
He felt himself dragged, arranged, and the terrible sudden thump against his
back and his skull. Oops. Eyes closed again. He opened them, found himself
sitting against the headboard, watched Kev's turn to be rearranged, sucked in a
noisy breath that hurt like fuck because he'd forgotten about the lung thing
for so very long.
Kev was making a sobbing kind of noise, face almost expressionless, one
vertical tension line between his eyebrows, eyes closed, eyelashes a smudge.
Acidflicker of a saint fallen into hell. Maybe Paul was the queer one? And
tonight the part of Lucifer was being played by Brian LeClaire, one corrupt
arch over him, laughing, dragging him by his hair and his twisted arm over onto
his face.
"Go on," he said, leaning close to Kev's ear, voice that mechanical
throttlegrowl that sent the needles in the bass range clicking over into red.
"I thought you wanted some, junkie. Grab some." Hand and rings in one lecherous
knot in Kev's hair, furious lines of tension in his forearm and shoulder.
Damien squinted down at Kev, trying to grasp that LeClaire's guitarist was
facedown in his lap, trying to grasp that this was the same pretty tragic sweet
boy that went swimming with him in a hotel pool eons ago. Brian's hand, between
them, doing the zipper-and-snap thing, Kev's cheek turned into his thigh, that
one continuous moan buzzing against his knee.
….what, is, he…..
"Open your fucking mouth."
…and he pulled Damien by the waistband of his shorts, shoved at Kev's head,
intersected them, and Damien's cock thumped against Kev's chin and his bottom
lip and then then slid all the way into his throat with a scream frictioning
against the head. His skull connected with the headboard again, with that same
impossibly kitchenware thump, and he insisted in pieces of thought
hallucination….what, the…..
LeClaire was doing the zippersnap thing to Kevin, now. Lovely white span of the
small of his back--could he really, be, that, tiny?
i am so, fucking
The room was so quiet he could hear it when LeClaire shoved his fingers inside
Kevin, the velvety dark noise like leather being folded
hard
and Kevin was really crying, now, and it was doing such delicious things to his
throat, doing such delicious things to the shape of his eyelids.
Time was all fucked up. He felt the scream from cock to balls to brainstem
before he saw LeClaire make a terrible, stabbing wrenching gesture, leaning
into it from the shoulder, pulling his hand away murderously fast, fingers in
his mouth before he did the zippersnap thang one last time, to himself,
staggercrawling forward, thudding bonerattling hard into Kevin's back, slamming
in somewhere in the tangle, sending a shockwave through Kevin in the middle, so
Damien's head thudded into the headboard one, more, time, and he couldn't
fucking, come, everybody knew you couldn't, fucking, come while you were on
LSD, he, couldn't
and LeClaire opened those evil chocolatecolored eyes, looked up at him
halflidded and mean with his hair pooling on Kev's back and his mouth, wet.
Damien's hand tangled over LeClaire's and he shoved into Kev's throat as hard
as he'd ever wanted to fuck anything in his life, and the whole goddamn thing
was an LSD illusion, maybe that was why he could, god, fucking…..come….
WAKE
It was the sense of being watched that woke him up. LeClaire opened his eyes to
find Kevin's own looking back at him. For a sleep-blurred instant, it was the
terror of the mirror having finally betrayed him. These eyes were far from
empty.
They hung there. Damien was a tiny warm sleeping ball between them. Sunlight
was painting the room in mustard and green through the hideous drapes. Kevin
looked--what? Mild? Sad? Sorry? What the fuck was that? A, soul--
"Morning," Kev said, quiet and cautious, almost toneless. Dark circles under
those terrifyingly un-empty eyes.
Whatever LeClaire had expected, it wasn't, that. "Morning," he said back, and
for the first time in his life, he looked away first.
Damien murmured, unwound, wound tighter again.
He got up and staggered towards the shower. He kept his back to Kevin. He,
felt, sick. Standing upright bleached the room for much longer than a blink. He
covered his face, navigated his way into the bathroom by thudding his shoulder
along the wall till he hit the doorframe. That goddamn song was stuck in his
head, another Cooper golden fucking oldie…the one
(with the heartbreaking, mournful guitar)
the one from Dada, that album nobody liked. Yeah, "Pass the Gun Around." He
chased the lyrics for a second or ten till he found the line. No wonder his
brain had put that one on repeat; if he had ever in his life felt a little
hotel paralyzed, it was now.
He fumbled the bathroom door mostly closed. His SS jacket was hanging from the
towel rack on the back. He didn't remember putting it there.
His knees hit the carpet; he crawled a foot or two, did long pointless puking
gestures over what was hopefully the toilet, soundlessly, hurting from the pit
of his stomach to his very teeth. From there he did a wobbling half-crouched
stagger into the shower, turned both knobs in varying ways till it wasn't icy
and wasn't burning him, the reek of alcohol making him retch again till the
shower sluiced it away. He leaned against the wall, mind mostly empty,
listening to the silence in the other room.
After a very long time he felt less, polluted. Clearer. He turned it mostly
off, eyed the pale androgyne in the mirror, pulled his SS jacket on out of a
vague grasp that he was naked. Sort of amusing, line of flesh from throat to
cock, all this wool and embroidery framing it. Fuck it. The pocket crackled; he
investigated, pulled out Kevin's emergency heroin, stared at it stupidly. If
anyone had asked him to describe his facial expression, he would have said
furious, and he'd have gotten that question wrong. It was really more like,
heartbroken.
When he came back out, intending to throw it at him, Kevin was gone. He hadn't
heard the door open or close. He stood there with the same look on his face,
until his hand had mercy on him and put the little cellophane back in his
pocket. Fine. As long as he didn't have to look at it anymore.
Damien was in the same tiny ball, shifted left into the warm spot Kevin had
presumably vacated. It made him…no, that was just more, furious. Or tried to,
anyway, but he was too tired for an emotion that demanding.
He sat on the edge of the bed, watched Damien sleep, naked and tangled in the
green and black bedspread and pseudowhite sheets. Leaned over him to
investigate the rise and fall of his ribcage architecture. Smelled him,
sniffing predatorstyle under his jaw, at the hinge of his shoulder, at his
waist where cloth and skin intersected. Electric LSD sweat; sex, tongue
chemistry, sleep. Kevin. Nothing, goddammit, nothing.
He buried his face in the convex of Damien's stomach. He, wanted
(nothing)
Damien to wake up, to wrap his arms around him. He didn't know why. He'd have
unleashed with both fists at anyone who told him that was what he wanted.
The kid didn't move. That was fine.
He would let him sleep. He would get dressed. He would NOT go look for Kevin.
Carry him onto the bus in that blanket if I have to. Let them bill us. Fuck
this hotel.
Nothing after that.
Finally he got up, sniffed, head and throat and sinuses poisoned by the
Damienscent. Did tiny hairthin lines, one after the other, till he couldn't
smell anything but cold. Dressed. Had JD and ice for breakfast with hotel
coffee chaser. Brushed his teeth. Checked his eyes in the mirror over and over.
LeClaire found Kevin on the bus, sitting by the window with his arms around his
knees, heels hooked on the edge of the seat. Something in this stack of angles
startled him; the kid looked
(broken)
sick. This pang of not-emotionless ricocheted through him, did a funny
unwelcome thing to his heartbeat. It was like the feeling when a cop passed
you, but tighter, smaller, more localized. It was completely, completely
uncool. It made him not want to do what he did next.
He ignored this little urge to be merciful, reached into his gun pocket, pulled
out Kev's emergency stash, sidearmed it at him without pausing. It hit him in
the chest, just over Joey Ramone's face over his heart. He didn't look to see
what Kev did with it.
He was angry the little bitch hadn't stayed, and he didn't know why.
He booked straight for his bunk, collapsed inside, dragged his feet in, boots
and all, pulled the curtain. Pretended to sleep until it was true.
There was a thump, and a pouff of his curtain. The corner twitched back. He
glared up at Damien's profile. He didn't let his face show anything, not
relief, not disappointment, nothing but sleepy and irritated. "What?"
Damien sounded sort of thrown by this. "I, wanted, to….um…." A gesture. Wounded
lonely little expression. He waited for LeClaire to bail him out, to save him
from asking.
"So find an empty bunk."
He reached up, yanked the curtain closed. Didn't listen to find out what Damien
did next.
***** Chapter 13 *****
MICROCOSM TWO: LECLAIRE
Brian remembered his last year of highschool in terms of two sudden insertions
in his life: The Skater Boy, and his New Fucking Stepdad.
The Skater boy was five-six of freshman eye candy. He had taffy brown hair with
drugstore yellow bangs. He was fey, so narrow and all-eyes he looked like
something drawn by somebody Japanese. He wore shorts that fell past his brown
scarred knees in grimy denim fringe. His calves were perfect sharp-edged
trapezoids. He was like that everywhere, all wire and bruise, a coatrack of a
boy in last year's summer tshirts.
LeClaire had discovered the sanctuary that existed inside a pair of headphones.
Fourplus years incubating with his brain situated between two speakers and a
book Marty wouldn't have approved of in front of his eyes. He'd progressed from
Metallica and Kiss, King and LaVey to Skinny Puppy and Alien Sex Fiend,
Nietzsche and Machiavelli. He wore eyeliner with black permanent marker so the
teachers couldn't make him wash it off. He wore a black motorcycle jacket his
mother hated. He wore sunglasses so that nobody saw the eyeliner unless he
wanted them to.
He had concluded at around thirteen that he was gay. He read books, he found
his various opinions and theories mostly verified, and went back to Clive
Barker and Sagan without any particular concern. He hated almost everyone,
gender irrelevant. There was nobody in the small clique of misfits he sat with
that would have interested him even if they were gay. He had never wanted to
fuck anyone he saw outside of television until Skater Boy, so gay had hardly
been an issue.
He read different books this time, bought condoms, sidled up to Skater Boy
behind the gym, lit a cigarette. They were more or less alone. Couple of kids
sitting on the bike rack across the street, the occasional passing car. "You
party?"
The kid shrugged, smoking a Marlboro red, looking at him with glassblue eyes.
LeClaire lit a joint and passed it, and the kid took it.
Two days later they were both in the backseat of the Cavalier Marty had bought
Brian as a sixteenth birthday present. Skater boy had his left foot on a front-
seat headrest, ankle decorated with black denim shorts and red CK boxers. He
slid down so far his back was flat on the seat.
LeClaire was kneeling in front of him. He grabbed under the kid's knee, bent
it. His sneaker thumped into LeClaire's back. He got everyone arranged, and
even managed to successfully install a condom. He'd been practicing, but there
was no accounting for being under pressure.
The kid squirmed underneath him, breathing like he'd been running, reeking of
sweat and marijuana and skateboard and dirt, and he said no…no….and then Brian
pushed inside him, managing not to hesitate even though the…squeakiness of it
startled him. And it was a long shaken quiet, and kind of a seizure of wrapping
his arms around Brian, hugging hard hard, not exactly out of affection but more
as if he thought he would, fall, drown, if he didn't, and a tiny little oh
 
That was the good part, of the last year of all…..that. Most of the school year
and maybe half of the summer passed in this agreeable way, smoking and chilling
and cheating to pass meaningless exams. Driving up and down by the beach,
stoned, with all the windows down and Black Sabbath in the tape deck. Fucking
in sand, in the back seat with the doors open, in the parking lot of a church
with the ocean roaring just behind them and the UFOs flickering in swoops over
the water.
He learned Skater Boy's name was apparently Poe, less than a week later, when a
creature named Filch, one of the motorcycle-jacket acquaintances he had
lumbered up to him and leaned one shoulder into a locker and said "So, you and
Poe?"
Brian had nodded, picking up Algebra and the tape case that had his lunchtime
Coke-and-joint package. Gave Filch the same wanna-smoke-one two-alphas cool he
usually did. Waited to see if he would get to leave early by fighting this
elephant of a JD in this narrow brick breezeway of a fucking hallway. He was
hoping for at least a few seconds warning, a threatswing or some pushy-pushy to
let him do something terribly fucking harsh to put a stop to this, hospital be
damned. That was really his only chance.
Filch shrugged. He waited till Brian got his shit situated, and they left
together, walking in the general direction of the courtyard. That was all.
 
Unfortunately, that was NOT all as far as the Stepfuck was concerned. He was a
repulsive pale under-a-rock sort of yuppie, with a strawberry-reddish fringe of
hair and a mousy little face and gold wire-rimmed glasses. He tended towards
the pale-yellow-polo-shirt and khakis sort of stupid. He was an accountant with
a penchant for self-help garbage and the occasional spasm of born-again.
He was pathetic, and to make up for the powerless little nothing he was in the
rest of his life, he subjected Trish and Brian to his best tries at
assertiveness and leadership-ness or, whatever. It was sad.
 
Kevin wound himself onto one of the vinyl couches, moving like he was
underwater. Everything was shitty. Oh, my god, was it. It wasn't bad shit. He'd
gotten bad shit before, once, and that had been a nasty sick feeling like he
imagined snakebite would be, electrical and awful and instantly tasting of
exhaust fumes. This was a different feeling, one that he recognized as a
variation on this is cheap shit. This sensation was more like, this is REALLY
cheap shit. The heroin had been badly cut or badly produced or something, or
he'd left his works dirty despite his best efforts. Now Kevin felt like he had
an incredibly mean virus and an incredibly high fever.
Oh, yes, and he wasn't onstage.
Mmm. Lovely. There was a nice memory to turn over and over in your mind while
you were already nauseous. Brian, looking at him like he was some kind of
exotic insect life, and saying You are just fucking worthless, aren't you?
Oh, how outraged he had sounded, how furious, how disgusted. And then You.
Damien. Check over his set-up. I need you to go on. Just that, without a second
thought.
Damien had looked at him, speechless and sorry and horrified and sympathetic.
Oh, and silent. Yeah, silent. And Max had done the kind of eye-mouth-shoulders
gesture that said, ouch, that sucks. Then, he'd turned and followed Brian.
And whatever Damien had said, Kevin hadn't heard it. He'd been too busy saying
Go, go on, just go. And here he was, sulking and miserable and sick. He was
freezing. He thought he was hungry until he realized that he was mistaking
nausea for appetite. He wanted to cry, but he couldn't even get his eyes to
sting, so he gave up. He swallowed, gagged, groaned, and scooted onto his back
and pulled his knees up and lay curled up like a dead spider. He had a tiny
blowdart thought about what Brian was going to do later, and groaned again,
before settling into his chosen coping mechanism, apathy.
"Hey. Hey, yo, your name is Kevin, yeah? Hey."
This person with the West coast accent and superfluous slang was shaking Kev's
arm, gently, but goddamn persistently. He failed to ignore it, put on his James
Dean expression, and peered up through his hands at his tormentor. It was one
of the Judecca roadies. They had almost forty employees, for chrissakes and all
but three of them were redneck, wanna-bes, or the roleplaying Led Zeppelin
type.
This guy was one of the lucky three. He had the graver look down. Ripped Tones
on Tails shirt--tres obscure, oversized lowriding black jeans with massively
baggy legs and white stitching and a knit cap that had O.G. embroidered on it
in white calligraphy.
Kevin grinned, bemused, feeling as if this were a hallucination he had conjured
to entertain himself, and reached up and tugged the cap off, gently. Chestnut
hair tumbled out, straight and thick and with just the edges of the front
shaved. He looked like Jay, Silent Bob's friend from the Kevin Smith movies.
The guy laughed, like awkwardly, and said, "Yeah, man, that's um….that's ok.
You want to sit up? Yeah? This is coffee, yeah?"
The kid pressed a warm styrofoam cup into his hands, and sloshed Kev with
coffee that was too transparent. Kev pushed his hair out of his face and drank,
two long deep pulls that scorched his tongue and his throat and settled in a
hot slam right under his sternum. "God," he said. The kid nodded, still looking
that amused kind of tolerant reserved for very young children and people who
were on too much acid. Something about his cheekbones and his dark eyes made
him a little like LeClaire, not much, but enough for him to be interesting.
"Yeah, man," the kid was saying, watching Kev's coffee intake very carefully.
"Tris said you was done up kind of bad and maybe I should check in on you.
Rough shit? Yeah, is there anything I can do to help you out?"
"Help me out," Kev repeated. Tris had sent someone to babysit him. Lovely. How
incredibly fucking humiliating. And to top that off, it had been Tris who had
done this, Tris who had said maybe two sentences to Kev (both polite) the
entire tour, Tris and not Brian. Tris had been the only one who gave a damn,
not anyone from his own goddamned band, not even Damien.
And speaking of Damien, wasn't that him, the sound from the stage above,
playing the solo intro to Sexmagnet?
"God," he said again, and set the coffee down and held his aching head in both
his hands. He patted around for his cigarettes until the kid put them in his
hand, lit one, and sat up a little more and pushed his hair out of his face.
His babysitter. He looked at the kid again. He really did kind of look like
Brian. Vaguely. "Are you gay?"
The kid stared, then laughed. "Hey, we were talking about that. So that's true,
that all you guys are gay? That's so cool, yeah, you're going to get banned, I
just know. No, though, like, I'm not. Not really."
Not really. Nice. Kev decided to stick with blunt. It was working pretty well
so far. "Do you want to make some money?"
"Man, hell," The kid said, chewing his thumbnail. "For what?" He interrupted
before Kev could answer and added, "Because, you know, I don't want to do
anything really weird--"
"That's fine," Kevin told him, cutting him off without mercy and not dropping
his eyes. He waited until he was sure the kid was waiting, and then he tilted
his head and his eyes towards the door.
The kid's name was Chad. He was a film school dropout and by the time he'd
smoked most of a joint Kev stole from Brian's stash, he had forgotten the rest
of his life story and they were kissing deeply with his hands cupped under
Kev's jaw. On someone else this would have looked like tenderness. They were on
the bus, alone, on the couch that was wedged in the living room section or
whatever it was supposed to be. The kid had his eyes open, and he leaned back
and said, "Man, I don't, you know? This isn't me. But you're pretty, man, you
are."
"Thanks," Kevin said, and tried not to make it catty. The kid tasted like gym
class and his first fight that had actually drawn blood and he wasn't too bad
of a kisser for someone so young. He leaned in for another taste, and kissed
the kid's jaw and bit lightly just below his ear. He tugged with his teeth
until the kid made some kind of sound, or maybe he just moved, and Kevin said,
"I need you to be….less…gentle, than this."
"Less gentle?" the kid said, uncertain now, though not entirely baffled. "I
mean...you don't want me to hit you or something, do you--"
"No, " Kev said, too fast, and he didn't like how it sounded. And he felt his
face fill up with blood in one quick swoosh, because he damn well wouldn't have
minded, had this kid decided to backhand him.
Along with heroin, Kev had lately picked up the habit of occasionally paying
someone to….well. His sex drive was dropping faster, now, but he still had
needs, and in theory it seemed so uncomplicated. In practice, though, it was
awkward and mostly unsatisfying. He supposed he needed someone into domination,
but paradoxically he was afraid to ask, and fairly certain that wouldn't help.
He didn't want to ask or it didn't seem….well, submissive.
He kept promising himself he wouldn't do this anymore, and here he was. It was
the same look what you fucking did again feeling he had every time he finished
tying up. This weird, amusement, sickness, dread, dismay. That was it, that
Victorian word dismay.
"Look," he said, "I just want you to fuck me, okay?" He sounded too bored and
too irritated and he knew it, but the fact that this kid would never dream of
slapping him for it was the worst part. He started pulling off his shirt,
peeling down to skin that didn't really have any bruises right now except one
on his left hip. This was one he'd gotten himself from the corner of a table,
for walking in the dark while stoned. The kid stared, until Kev unsnapped his
pants. He started taking off his own shirt.
 
Great. Halfway there. Kev pulled the kid closer again, vaguely excited, because
with skin against his skin it was easier to pretend.
Basically the kid just did not get that rougher did not mean harder. He was
giving him kisses that were leaving inelegant bruises, and he chewed on Kev's
nipples with enough pressure to make him squirm in misery. He wasn't even hard,
for chrissakes.
He leaned back, and let the kid leave his bruises. He conjured Brian sitting in
the chair beside them, instructing his tormentor. Bite him. Yeah. Pull with
your teeth like that. He kept this running for maybe five minutes, and his dick
finally twitched, and sluggishly got hard.
Kev could settle for this. He also wanted to put an end to the foreplay. The
junk was wearing off, and he felt sick and depressed and mostly wanted to
sleep. He leaned back away from his assailant--Chad, was it? who cared?--and
gave him a bright charmschool smile, and whispered again, "Fuck me," just to
see if it would help. The kid looked stunned, but still horny. He obviously had
no idea how to proceed. Kev turned over, arranged himself on his hands and
knees. He reached back, patted till he found the kid, kept patting until he
found dick, and tugged. The kid muttered something, gasping, and unbuckled his
belt.
The vertigo and pressure and general sickness pressed in on him again. He'd
turned over too fast. The kid was tugging uselessly at Kev's black vinyl pants
and he sighed, and unsnapped them, and struggled to pull them down because they
were sweaty. He arched his back, and mumbled, "Spit on me," almost as an
afterthought. He heard the kid laugh, sounding like he almost didn't believe
this was going on, and felt warm spit fall on his lower back. The kid did it
again, and Kev reached back and took his hand and traced long wet lines down
along the crack of his ass. The kid shied away from that. Too gay, he guessed.
"Just fuck me," he said, frustrated, bored. Whatever.
A RED DOOR
The Plan, which had evolved itself capitalization early into
this….adventure…was as simple and as essentially unoriginal as it was
brilliant. The first half had gone pretty smoothly. They were no longer
unknown--they had all the "bad" press to thank for that, along with the cherry
position as Judecca Tree's opening band for most of the North American tour.
Step Two was a single from the almost-finished Hellbound CD--the Deathstyle
cover of "Paint it Black." A cover was a tried-and-true way to get airplay. The
empty-vee sheep loved them some song they already knew the words to. They loved
updated oldschool rock; it made them feel superior to past generations, made
them feel pleasantly modern and gave them the illusion of progress, a false
sense of evolution. Cheap tricks, these, but the oldest cons were oldest for a
reason; they worked.
LeClaire had laid this out for Tristan with gestures and smirks and simple
declarative sentences. He punctuated the twenty seconds or so of speech with
the plastic impact of a CD case hitting the McDonalds table between them.
Tristan did a come-hither over his shoulder, and one of the Judecca Tree slaves
immediately brought him a Discman, considerately removing the Prodigy CD from
it before he presented it to his lord and master.
LeClaire handed the jewelcase over and lit a clove, pretending to be
nonchalant. He poked his Egg McMuffin apart with a spork and arranged it into
art. He felt very much like the guys you saw in movies, sitting terrified and
motionless in the driver's seat while their car seesawed, creaking, on the edge
of a cliff.
Tristan sat listening, headphones air-traffic-controller huge on his ears,
blocking out everything, pouring in Deathstyle, player humming with Blade's
small hands cupped around it. His eyes were closed for a long time, and he
nodded-kneetapped with an invisible beat. This was a good sign. Then his eyes
opened, staring at LeClaire round and dilated in spite of the goddamned
sunlight pouring through the transparent ad on the window beside them.
After four minutes and forty seconds he touched the little button marked with
the ubiquitous STOP square--and smiled. Teeth and all.
This was a very, very good sign.
It was the teeth that made LeClaire sure, and the expression of glee Blade was
failing to conceal.
"It. Is. Perfect," Blade said, like an actor playing God might say Let there be
light.
LeClaire smiled back, finally, also teeth and all, even though he knew that
already. "You want the video?"
Tristan actually laughed. This was as rare as Florida snow. "Give it to me."
LeClaire gave it to him. Hard.
 
Deathstyle had done very little, really, to "Paint it Black." The stones soft,
eerie guitar intro was there, given a sexy exotic Middle Eastern feel with
hammer-on, pull-off, bends from Kevin's clever fingertips. The percussion was
the same, but different; thudding, relentless, jungle drums, hellish. It was
the same song through a dark future's lens; it was to the Jagger/Richards
masterpiece what fucking is to making love.
LeClaire sang in bitter, wounded tones. This was the voice of a man ready to
climb a clock tower and pick off pedestrians. He'd only played with the lyrics
a little--I see the boys go by dressed in their hustler clothes--and when he
told Blade the video, drawing a terrible passionplay in the restaurant air with
his hands, Blade only stopped him once, to tilt one headphone back to his ear,
to listen to this line again, to smile like a bank robber who's figured out how
to crack Fort Knox.
"They'll go crazy," he said, finally, when the idea was an invisible hologram
between them and half the road crew had retreated back to the buses and the
shiny happy McCollege students behind the counter were eyeing them harder,
whispering longer.
"Good," LeClaire said. Careless, very James Dean, but it wasn't because he
didn't mean it. Exactly the opposite. He wanted them to go crazy, wanted it as
badly as he had ever wanted anything, wanted it as the cursed diamond set in
this rock n roll crown. That was almost the entire point of this. To make Them
crazy for a change.
End Notes
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