(no subject)
writer's craft '07 con't.
other.
(more OMC! asdfghj. i love him. =])
Put your coat on, this city trembles. / Keep your chin up, as you untangle God / from cold blood and bruises.
We are X-rays of something broken. / Cursive bloodlines write every forecast: / An orchestration / of dissonance and innocent surrender. / When our color dies, / we will bury the ashes of time, / and we will earn new eyes.
Wrists get tired rewriting futures. / Our bodies beg us to be creatures of habit. / We are creatures of habit.
Only with careful hands / we'll turn their fangs into feathers and cures. / Only with careful hands / we'll divide the prisoner from the pioneer.
Clever beauty, / umbrellas folding. / In architecture, our lines will measure / a map to find us. / Blue ink will guide us home. / Cranes are creeping, lifting metal, / we will find new ways to settle, / tipping scales from the killer to its prey.
I can feel the weight around us, / climbing every rib inside us. / A sanctuary in a lion’s mouth.
Sleeping at Last - Careful Hands
The music bleeds through the steel-and-brick construction of the building in thick, arterial swirls of bass and treble and rhythm. The big guy at the door pulls it open to let in some half naked girl, and the music doubles in volume, and the pink-blue-yellow flashing of lights starburst into the night air, only to be cut off by the heavy thud of the steel door. Everything seems strangely silent after that.
He slips between parked cars and darts across the street, before the next stream of cars comes rushing across the blacktop between traffic lights, and skips onto the curb of the sidewalk. Imposing, dressed in black and sinking into the dirty brick wall, the bouncer suddenly springs forward and yanks the door open, nodding his head curtly.
“Evening, Erin with an E,” he drawls, flashing a wide, toothy grin. “Good to see you again.”
A nod and a slight smile, a mumbled ‘hello’, they’re the currency that gets him through the door, slipping through the crevice and sliding into the chaos of the bar. It’s dark, the air coloured slate with cigarette smoke, and the floor is sticky with spilt beer, gluing rubber-soled shoes to painted concrete floor. Steel beams run back and forth across the ceiling, catching and holding the sounds of billiard balls, dart boards, beer mugs. The bass is ear splitting, chattering and shouting roars overhead, and the noises form a rhythm, a pattern in his head. For all their dissonance, these are the warm, familiar comforts of a Saturday night. Everything resonates and vibrates with routine.
He sits on a cracked-leather upholstered bar stool, third from the end, hooking his heels on the faded rungs and pushing his coat sleeves up to the elbow. The bartender smiles and puts a glass down on the scarred wood of the bar, half full of ice, ready and waiting. He doesn’t even need to ask what Erin wants, just pours amber liquid from a black-labeled bottle, taking the soft thanks and hand gesture offered with a smile, and going back to wiping moisture away with a dirty cloth.
The ice clinks metallic against the thin walls of the glass and the melt water would make patterns in the whiskey, shimmering and dissolving, if he let it sit for long enough. As it is, it’s burning down his throat and into his chest before it rises half a degree, warming his insides and shocking his lungs into action. Breathe in, breathe out.
Pale fingers too long for his hands wrap tightly around the glass, and he remembers why he loves this bar, loves this bar, when Jeff Mangum’s voice comes cracking and static over the speakers, ‘the music and medicine you needed for comforting’, and never were truer words spoken, he thinks. Never.
He can smell her before she’s really there, a wave of perfume, anise, and peppermint, and then her cinnamon hair is falling in a curtain over his shoulder and her breath is sliding silky over his skin. He doesn’t acknowledge her warmth pressed to his hip, just drags hard on his cigarette and downs half the glass in front of him, pushing a hand through the front of his hair.
“Oh, come on,” she coos. “Quit ignoring me, Erin.” She slips her hand into the crook of his elbow, resting her chin on his shoulder and pressing her lips softly to his neck. “I want you to come home with me,” she purrs, and he presses his fingertips harder into the wood of the bar and closes his eyes, letting a few soft notes of laughter play in the air.
“Straight to the point,” he sighs, opening his eyes and turning to her, wet glass still clenched in his right hand. Over the speakers, ‘doors lean towards leaving, you know somebody's looking’, and the toe of his shoe taps idly against the paneled wood of the bar, one-two, one-two. “Jay,” he continues, “Jay, I can’t.” She flips her hair and puts a hand on one hip, bones in stark relief through the fabric of her t-shirt, fingers tapping skin pulled tight, threatening to split.
“No,” she sighs. “No, you can. You just won’t. I don’t understand you sometimes, Erin. When you’re alone you want someone, and when you can have someone, you want to be alone. Always what you don’t have or need, boy, and you can’t have it both ways.”
She’s right, and it stings a little in the back of his eyes, because he knows she’s right, feels it in his bones and the itch on his wrist. Always, always selfish. He turns back to the bar, feet bouncing on the rungs, and she touches the side of his face, gentle and sudden.
“Some other night,” she offers, voice light, disappointment masked by smiles with a question mark hanging unspoken: his life. “Some other night.” A statement this time.
“Some other night,” he agrees, swirling the ice around in his glass, and he feels the lie thick in his throat, he prays it isn’t audible. The speakers crackle, ‘I’ve been waiting for the silence all night long, it’s just a matter of time’, and his cigarette’s burnt down to the filter, a stub in the ashtray.
She’s gone before he can light another one, sashaying across the floor to drape herself over some boy with blond bangs falling in his eyes, black polished nails, and a ring in his lip. See, he thinks, it’s not me she wants. It’s him. It’s anyone. It’s anyone, so it doesn’t need to be me.
The whiskey is making his head float off, has suitably unraveled the threads of tension in his shoulders, and is starting to work on his sense of direction. He heads home, trip-stumbling along the pitted concrete with the echoed melody of some song he didn’t know playing over and over in his head, coat pulled tight with fingers crushing the life out of the cigarette filter. Headlights come from both directions, blinding and disorientating, helping him find his way beside dark red brick, coloured like coagulated blood. Streetlights cast garish shadows in their orange glows, elongating and twisting mailboxes into monsters, fire hydrants to felons. His shadow just looks like a bigger version of himself.
He makes it home, pushes up the dirty stairs, holding onto the purple-brown railing; pushes through his front door, with the paint-smeared doorknobs and the peeling Nirvana sticker; pushes through a pile of clothes on the floor and lands face first on his mattress. He holds his breath. He twists the sheets. He stares at the dirty, unfinished wall inches from his face. He flips, staring across the room, into corners darkened and shadowed, filled with secrets. If these walls could talk, he thinks, I’d rather be deaf.
The clean white surface of a prepped canvas is propped up against the wall across from him, sitting pure and perfect and primed on the mottled easel, waiting for an outpouring of anything tangible and oil-based. It taunts, mocks, ridicules with its bone white, gleaming perfection. He wants to cover it wholly in black paint, and then to break it, smash it, make it ugly, vein it through with reds and browns and glue on shattered glass and twisted metal. He turns on the radio, a mix CD that Jordan left last weekend spinning over the laser, ‘So long live the car-crash hearts. Cry on the couch, all the poets come to life. Fix me in 45.’
Radio bullshit, the kind Jordan secretly adores, but the words hit a chord. He must be tired.
He drags himself out of the bed, limbs sluggish and begging for sleep. He saunters into the bathroom, light bulb skittering when he flicks the switch, flashing into life. He avoids his reflection, not for the first time today, and bends his head to splash cold water on his face as it comes spurting and spluttering out of the tap. He twists the tap off again, tapping the pads of his fingers on the wall to the piano melody drifting through, one-two-three, one-two-three, ‘you would kill for this, just a little bit’, scrubbing his face with a towel.
He catches himself in the mirror out of the corner of his eye, and he’s caught between the metal and glass, has to look. His hair hangs damp and dark in his eyes, the colour of finally oiled wood, mahogany or cherry. His eyes stare dimly out at him, cerulean and veined with gold, offset by the purple bags forming under his eyes. He guesses he might have been good looking once, defined cheekbones, strong jaw, but he can’t be sure anymore. He’s gray under the fluorescent bulb, corpse-like, cheeks patchy with stubble and his eyes may as well be blanks, hollow.
He goes back into the ‘great room’, insufficiently named, and picks up a paint brush, spills black and gray and white and blue onto a palette, ruins the perfection of the canvas with the first thick stroke of ebony pigment. A warm sense of satisfaction blossoms inside and out of his chest at having massacred the stark beauty of the pre-paint canvas. To ruin something other than himself, that’s always been beautiful, just as beautiful as ruining himself is, has always been. ‘All that is beautiful will not be beautiful to me, unless it’s perfect.’
Good foresight, Jordan. You plan this mix for me? You’re a beautiful kid. I mean it.
He remembers everything, staring at the canvas, the image blossoming out of nothing. That’s what he loves about art. It comes from nothing.
He remembers everything from then until now, with a few black spaces in between, a few washes and fades for good measure, a few jump cuts, a few erratic scene changes, some grain and skip in the film. But he remembers. The gears click, shutter noise in his head.
He remembers the time his dad punched him in the mouth when he lays down vermillion, he remembers the way the blood ran down his barely pubescent chin, words echoing off the pitted walls. It tasted like copper, it tasted like salt, and it tasted like shame. Faggot, whore, wuss; no son of mine, no son of mine. When he splashes violet into navy, he remembers black eyes, the way they gradient into white skin and merge with copper fingerprints. It was just a kiss, twelve year old naivety and best friends. It was just a kiss.
He remembers the way the bite looked on his shoulder a day after Elliott’s party, a mark like a ring of roses around a grave, sharp red on white and dark bruises scattered on his hips. Something to hide from everyone, things to explain away, to cover with t-shirt sleeves so even Jordan couldn’t see; roses to mark the death of innocence, the beginning of nothing and the end of everything, the beginning of his father being right. Faggot, whore, wuss. Except the difference, he thinks, is that I was your son. I am your son. The lines blur, and he paints rain on the windows and alarm clock numbers, fingers shaking at three a.m.
He falls asleep on top of the blankets, curled on the hard mattress, still in his clothes. The memories play thick behind his mind, colouring dreamscapes and nightmares, and he forgot to shut off the stereo, it plays on into the night, flowing out the open window. ‘I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.’
When he wakes up, the sun is already burning rays through the dust and the faded curtain, splashes of light across the hardwood floor, stars falling through the beams. His head hurts and blanket creases scar his cheek, hair stuck to his forehead. His fingers itch for addiction and creation, to dream his way out of here. He goes through the motions of making a pot of coffee, keeping his eyes averted from the disaster of a canvas on the easel in the corner. He drinks it black, bitter and strong, a burnt taste lingering somewhere near the bottom of the cup. He sits by the open window and smokes, staring at the clouds boiling on the horizon, even though he really should go outside. Inhale, hold, hold, exhale. Breathe in, breathe out.
Finally, some impulse gets the better of him, some morbid portion of his soul, and he lets his eyes wander along the poster-pasted walls to the painted canvas, last night’s explosion of feeling and failure. The sun slices a perfect third of the painting off, a shining diagonal band through the middle, and he circles warily, afraid to get close, to really see.
Finally, he moves into the path of the sun, casting a thick shadow over the painted canvas, and in the gloom he makes out hard lines and heavy shapes, barely noticeable changes in tone and texture, things he wouldn’t usually do, things he shouldn’t do. Streaks and smudges, globs and bits of primed canvas peering through. Not perfect. Not perfect, not beautiful. Nothing.
He moves closer, turns on the lamp overhead on the wall, and it all comes into glaring, frightening focus. His life, painted in angled lines and rough edges, reds and blacks and blues, bruises and abrasions, long nights awake. And then somewhere, somewhere in the top left hand corner, a white shape, graceful and bent, surrounded by curls and tendrils of white-gold light, spreading wispy into the darkness. A beacon, something he thought was missing, denying, that he thought he might find anywhere but here.
Everything tips and rights itself, and he pushes a hand through his hair, inching a finger through his belt loop. ‘Like blades sharpening, you've become aware of what's real…crashing comes the light into your eyes’. He makes a mental note to thank Jordan next time he sees him, to buy him drinks or something, and to make a copy of that mix before he gives it back, to add ‘Oh Comely’ and ‘Emblems’ and ‘Lazy Eye’ if he can get at the computer for long enough.
He grabs his coat off the bed and slips it around his shoulders, stomping his feet into his shoes, cigarettes and keys stuffed in his pockets.
Why wait?
[ending one]
[ending two.]
The door echoes his mind, creaking out a syllable sounding eerily close to ‘go’, wood and brass hinges with words. It shuts behind him, key grating in the lock, tumblers falling into place, securing what little he happens to own.
When he turns around, CD case in hand, Jordan’s staring up at him from fourteen steps down, wet from the rain he didn’t know had started, dyed black hair stuck to his face, khaki coat turned to chocolate by moisture.
“I was coming to give this back,” he says, bouncing it in his hand. “But I guess you beat me to it.” Jordan just hums in acknowledgement, and Erin bounces down the stairs, keys jingling in his pocket. “Been thinking,” he says, handing the CD over. “By the way, I want a copy of that.” Jordan laughs, slipping it into his coat.
“I heard about what happened with Jay,” Jordan says, voice punctuated by footfalls as they clunk down the stairs. “Thought you liked her, man. What happened?”
“I didn’t,” he says, flat, examining the pattern in the floor tile, hands shoved in his pockets.
“Oh,” Jordan mumbles, lifting his shoulders in a brief shrug. “Been thinking, too.”
“Yeah.” He pulls a cigarette out of his pocket, and then another, handing it to Jordan. “Outside?” He pulls open the door without waiting for an answer, stepping outside and pulling his hood up. “Wet,” he sighs, flicking his lighter, holding the dancing flame to the end of the cigarette, igniting it bright orange against the overcast day. “Thinking about what?” he mumbles through an outpouring of smoke, picking up where they left off.
“Oh, you know. Shit. After I heard about what happened with Jay, I was wondering if you were telling people.” Jordan scuffs his shoe against the concrete, dragging too hard and filling his lungs too fast, coughing.
“No, no. Well, one night I told her about my dad, y’know, because she saw that one painting.” He laughs softly, exhaling forcefully, rubbing his face. “But we were like, twelve, so I don’t know. And then I guess she assumed we were...but we’re not, never have been, so I told her about the other guys. Had to.”
“Hm,” Jordan sighs, flicking a strand of black hair out of his eyes. “You didn’t deserve that shit, you know, what he did. It’s not…it’s not wrong.” He stares at the ground, rubbing at his elbow. “I mean, it’s…it’s beautiful, no matter what.” He looks up, catches Erin’s eye, cigarette dangling limply out of his hand, and Erin sees that beacon from his painting, fleeting. “You told me that when we were younger, before, that it’s always beautiful, love, that it didn’t matter.”
And he doesn’t have the energy to argue, to explain how that applies to everyone but him, not with the throbbing behind his eyes, just throws his stub of a smoke on the ground and grinds it out with the toe of his Converse, shrugging his shoulders and pushing his hair off his face.
“Y’know, you,” he starts, fidgeting. “Sometimes I wonder, if it weren’t for my dad, if this would be different.” He coughs. “I fucking hate him for that.”
“Different,” Jordan muses, staring into the wet street, silhouetted by the weak light. “I…yeah, different.”
“I think I painted you last night, this white light in a fucking abyss, you know, and…” all in a rush, blurring, before he even knows he’s saying it, thinking it.
“E,” Jordan sighs. “Erin, what are you…”
“No, fuck, Jord, I did. You’re there; this gorgeous thing in all this wreckage. Always have been. And I guess…”
And oh, it was just a kiss then, and here in the rain, it’s just a kiss, still just lips and shyness colliding. It’s just a kiss, but it makes the pavement tilt out from under his feet, and he thinks he understands the hope in his painting, thinks he finds it here in the street in front of everyone, graceful and sweet. And even though nothing explodes, nothing lights up, lightning doesn’t come streaking out of the sky, it all kind of makes sense. The blood, the sex, the bar, the paintings. It all kind of makes sense.
“It’s been too long,” Jordan says, close, warm, familiar. “Like, eight years too long.” Suddenly fearless, Erin grabs his pianist hand in his own artists hand and twines their fingers into place.
“Too fucking long,” he agrees, and he kisses him again, there in front of everyone. “Fuck my father,” he says. “This is beautiful.”
&&&
(dudes...if you don't get this/how lame it makes me, i will be sad. =P)
The moon bred new Atlantic life tonight. The salt burned you right out of my eyes and secrets we're not proud of were taken with the tide. We were all newborns with blurred vision and no sense of direction. Today I saw cancer, cigarettes, and shortness of breath. This is why I walk to the ocean. Swim with the jellyfish. I may never get this chance again. This is why if you want to kiss you should kiss. If you want to cry you should cry, and if you want to live you should live. You don't have to love me. You already did.
At least enough to keep me smiling from South Carolina to Virginia.
It's for lovers (orjustfriends). This is why I do it.
Sunday, 25 June, 2006.
In less than a year, I will be famous.
I will be millions-of-records-sold famous in an era where a hundred thousand units is a good haul, and I will have friends just because I moved those units.
I will be MTV famous, billboard in Times Square famous, endorsed-by-MAC-cosmetics famous. People will wait in line and pay money to watch us, theatrical and on a grand stage, costumes and acrobats, moonlight and Liberace. People will drive for hours to listen to my words booming through amplifiers, to scream those words back even if they don’t understand what they mean, even if they think Aubergine Dreams is a reference to yesterdays’ eyeliner.
I will be loved, and hated by ten times as many; I will be judged and pigeonholed, and I will write songs about it, and the kids that beat me up in high school will sing them back to me and ask for an autograph. I will have a private jet, a first class tour bus, and I will have lost both a best friend and a father, to the pressures of fame and alcoholism, respectively. I will see cigarettes, cancer, and shortness of breath.
I will hear everyone sing my words, my words, about late night hospital visits, lying high school sweethearts, and the perils of the scene. I will be signed to a label by one of the few people I look up to, and he will become both friend and mentor.
I will be a god to some, a devil to others, and yet nothing to more than those combined. I will become the subject of theories and conspiracies, stories and rumours, and who knows what else.
I am nineteen years old, and I will handle this with all the grace, nerves, video games and Victorian literature that I can process and repeat. I will suddenly be a rock star, with three best friends on stage beside me, and a hundred more waiting in the wings, fingers green from counting dollars.
Already, the stage is set, the words are scrawled on notebook paper, and it’s time to meet the press, to become ‘it’, the next big thing you love to hate, or vice versa.
In less than a year, I will be famous, even if you, or I, don’t know it yet.
So come on already, strike up the band.
&&&
(this is completely and totally stolen from matthew gilbert. seriously. only two lines belong to me.
"lay in the grass until you're itchy.
smell the flowers until you sneeze.
daydream until you sleepwalk.
and, fucking read something.
your mind is capable of more grandiose,
vibrant images than any television set.
people speak of imagination
as if it were actually different from reality.
i find that funny.
sleep pretty; dream big; laugh loud; make art; smile a lot."
i have ink for blood, paint for skin, lens for eyes, music for thoughts.
your fucking bullets can't kill me.
chi dara fine al gran dalore?
&&&
started yesterday, never to be completed.
a tape played on repeat until it's shredded to ribbons.
a train of thought running in circles.
this blank box-page-sky is my canvas,
words are the paint.
read, take, interpret, twist;
fit, mold, rewrite, rethink;
denounce, accept.
take your pick.
make a piece of me a piece of you.
i expect nothing in return.
take what you want and leave what you don't.
i wrote this for me, and for you, and for you, and for everyone.
take what you need and leave what you don't.
it doesn't matter what it all means.
all you have is your own reality,
and what is right here, right now,
forever.
love is blood pain glass stone life loss hope healing death beauty.
take it or leave it.
&&&
love is a verb.
we mimic feeling,
turn it into a noun.
&&&
move like you know what to do,
and we’ll pretend we’re still in love,
just for tonight.
&&&
flashing lights and exit signs.
what happens, stays.
we need an end to this
desert heat.
give me a break.
&&&
“we got everybody singing”
songs of hope and
l u l l a b i e s
battery voltage shakes the floor.
and we are the ringleaders tonight.
dance until you blister,
scream until you bleed.
other.
(more OMC! asdfghj. i love him. =])
Put your coat on, this city trembles. / Keep your chin up, as you untangle God / from cold blood and bruises.
We are X-rays of something broken. / Cursive bloodlines write every forecast: / An orchestration / of dissonance and innocent surrender. / When our color dies, / we will bury the ashes of time, / and we will earn new eyes.
Wrists get tired rewriting futures. / Our bodies beg us to be creatures of habit. / We are creatures of habit.
Only with careful hands / we'll turn their fangs into feathers and cures. / Only with careful hands / we'll divide the prisoner from the pioneer.
Clever beauty, / umbrellas folding. / In architecture, our lines will measure / a map to find us. / Blue ink will guide us home. / Cranes are creeping, lifting metal, / we will find new ways to settle, / tipping scales from the killer to its prey.
I can feel the weight around us, / climbing every rib inside us. / A sanctuary in a lion’s mouth.
Sleeping at Last - Careful Hands
The music bleeds through the steel-and-brick construction of the building in thick, arterial swirls of bass and treble and rhythm. The big guy at the door pulls it open to let in some half naked girl, and the music doubles in volume, and the pink-blue-yellow flashing of lights starburst into the night air, only to be cut off by the heavy thud of the steel door. Everything seems strangely silent after that.
He slips between parked cars and darts across the street, before the next stream of cars comes rushing across the blacktop between traffic lights, and skips onto the curb of the sidewalk. Imposing, dressed in black and sinking into the dirty brick wall, the bouncer suddenly springs forward and yanks the door open, nodding his head curtly.
“Evening, Erin with an E,” he drawls, flashing a wide, toothy grin. “Good to see you again.”
A nod and a slight smile, a mumbled ‘hello’, they’re the currency that gets him through the door, slipping through the crevice and sliding into the chaos of the bar. It’s dark, the air coloured slate with cigarette smoke, and the floor is sticky with spilt beer, gluing rubber-soled shoes to painted concrete floor. Steel beams run back and forth across the ceiling, catching and holding the sounds of billiard balls, dart boards, beer mugs. The bass is ear splitting, chattering and shouting roars overhead, and the noises form a rhythm, a pattern in his head. For all their dissonance, these are the warm, familiar comforts of a Saturday night. Everything resonates and vibrates with routine.
He sits on a cracked-leather upholstered bar stool, third from the end, hooking his heels on the faded rungs and pushing his coat sleeves up to the elbow. The bartender smiles and puts a glass down on the scarred wood of the bar, half full of ice, ready and waiting. He doesn’t even need to ask what Erin wants, just pours amber liquid from a black-labeled bottle, taking the soft thanks and hand gesture offered with a smile, and going back to wiping moisture away with a dirty cloth.
The ice clinks metallic against the thin walls of the glass and the melt water would make patterns in the whiskey, shimmering and dissolving, if he let it sit for long enough. As it is, it’s burning down his throat and into his chest before it rises half a degree, warming his insides and shocking his lungs into action. Breathe in, breathe out.
Pale fingers too long for his hands wrap tightly around the glass, and he remembers why he loves this bar, loves this bar, when Jeff Mangum’s voice comes cracking and static over the speakers, ‘the music and medicine you needed for comforting’, and never were truer words spoken, he thinks. Never.
He can smell her before she’s really there, a wave of perfume, anise, and peppermint, and then her cinnamon hair is falling in a curtain over his shoulder and her breath is sliding silky over his skin. He doesn’t acknowledge her warmth pressed to his hip, just drags hard on his cigarette and downs half the glass in front of him, pushing a hand through the front of his hair.
“Oh, come on,” she coos. “Quit ignoring me, Erin.” She slips her hand into the crook of his elbow, resting her chin on his shoulder and pressing her lips softly to his neck. “I want you to come home with me,” she purrs, and he presses his fingertips harder into the wood of the bar and closes his eyes, letting a few soft notes of laughter play in the air.
“Straight to the point,” he sighs, opening his eyes and turning to her, wet glass still clenched in his right hand. Over the speakers, ‘doors lean towards leaving, you know somebody's looking’, and the toe of his shoe taps idly against the paneled wood of the bar, one-two, one-two. “Jay,” he continues, “Jay, I can’t.” She flips her hair and puts a hand on one hip, bones in stark relief through the fabric of her t-shirt, fingers tapping skin pulled tight, threatening to split.
“No,” she sighs. “No, you can. You just won’t. I don’t understand you sometimes, Erin. When you’re alone you want someone, and when you can have someone, you want to be alone. Always what you don’t have or need, boy, and you can’t have it both ways.”
She’s right, and it stings a little in the back of his eyes, because he knows she’s right, feels it in his bones and the itch on his wrist. Always, always selfish. He turns back to the bar, feet bouncing on the rungs, and she touches the side of his face, gentle and sudden.
“Some other night,” she offers, voice light, disappointment masked by smiles with a question mark hanging unspoken: his life. “Some other night.” A statement this time.
“Some other night,” he agrees, swirling the ice around in his glass, and he feels the lie thick in his throat, he prays it isn’t audible. The speakers crackle, ‘I’ve been waiting for the silence all night long, it’s just a matter of time’, and his cigarette’s burnt down to the filter, a stub in the ashtray.
She’s gone before he can light another one, sashaying across the floor to drape herself over some boy with blond bangs falling in his eyes, black polished nails, and a ring in his lip. See, he thinks, it’s not me she wants. It’s him. It’s anyone. It’s anyone, so it doesn’t need to be me.
The whiskey is making his head float off, has suitably unraveled the threads of tension in his shoulders, and is starting to work on his sense of direction. He heads home, trip-stumbling along the pitted concrete with the echoed melody of some song he didn’t know playing over and over in his head, coat pulled tight with fingers crushing the life out of the cigarette filter. Headlights come from both directions, blinding and disorientating, helping him find his way beside dark red brick, coloured like coagulated blood. Streetlights cast garish shadows in their orange glows, elongating and twisting mailboxes into monsters, fire hydrants to felons. His shadow just looks like a bigger version of himself.
He makes it home, pushes up the dirty stairs, holding onto the purple-brown railing; pushes through his front door, with the paint-smeared doorknobs and the peeling Nirvana sticker; pushes through a pile of clothes on the floor and lands face first on his mattress. He holds his breath. He twists the sheets. He stares at the dirty, unfinished wall inches from his face. He flips, staring across the room, into corners darkened and shadowed, filled with secrets. If these walls could talk, he thinks, I’d rather be deaf.
The clean white surface of a prepped canvas is propped up against the wall across from him, sitting pure and perfect and primed on the mottled easel, waiting for an outpouring of anything tangible and oil-based. It taunts, mocks, ridicules with its bone white, gleaming perfection. He wants to cover it wholly in black paint, and then to break it, smash it, make it ugly, vein it through with reds and browns and glue on shattered glass and twisted metal. He turns on the radio, a mix CD that Jordan left last weekend spinning over the laser, ‘So long live the car-crash hearts. Cry on the couch, all the poets come to life. Fix me in 45.’
Radio bullshit, the kind Jordan secretly adores, but the words hit a chord. He must be tired.
He drags himself out of the bed, limbs sluggish and begging for sleep. He saunters into the bathroom, light bulb skittering when he flicks the switch, flashing into life. He avoids his reflection, not for the first time today, and bends his head to splash cold water on his face as it comes spurting and spluttering out of the tap. He twists the tap off again, tapping the pads of his fingers on the wall to the piano melody drifting through, one-two-three, one-two-three, ‘you would kill for this, just a little bit’, scrubbing his face with a towel.
He catches himself in the mirror out of the corner of his eye, and he’s caught between the metal and glass, has to look. His hair hangs damp and dark in his eyes, the colour of finally oiled wood, mahogany or cherry. His eyes stare dimly out at him, cerulean and veined with gold, offset by the purple bags forming under his eyes. He guesses he might have been good looking once, defined cheekbones, strong jaw, but he can’t be sure anymore. He’s gray under the fluorescent bulb, corpse-like, cheeks patchy with stubble and his eyes may as well be blanks, hollow.
He goes back into the ‘great room’, insufficiently named, and picks up a paint brush, spills black and gray and white and blue onto a palette, ruins the perfection of the canvas with the first thick stroke of ebony pigment. A warm sense of satisfaction blossoms inside and out of his chest at having massacred the stark beauty of the pre-paint canvas. To ruin something other than himself, that’s always been beautiful, just as beautiful as ruining himself is, has always been. ‘All that is beautiful will not be beautiful to me, unless it’s perfect.’
Good foresight, Jordan. You plan this mix for me? You’re a beautiful kid. I mean it.
He remembers everything, staring at the canvas, the image blossoming out of nothing. That’s what he loves about art. It comes from nothing.
He remembers everything from then until now, with a few black spaces in between, a few washes and fades for good measure, a few jump cuts, a few erratic scene changes, some grain and skip in the film. But he remembers. The gears click, shutter noise in his head.
He remembers the time his dad punched him in the mouth when he lays down vermillion, he remembers the way the blood ran down his barely pubescent chin, words echoing off the pitted walls. It tasted like copper, it tasted like salt, and it tasted like shame. Faggot, whore, wuss; no son of mine, no son of mine. When he splashes violet into navy, he remembers black eyes, the way they gradient into white skin and merge with copper fingerprints. It was just a kiss, twelve year old naivety and best friends. It was just a kiss.
He remembers the way the bite looked on his shoulder a day after Elliott’s party, a mark like a ring of roses around a grave, sharp red on white and dark bruises scattered on his hips. Something to hide from everyone, things to explain away, to cover with t-shirt sleeves so even Jordan couldn’t see; roses to mark the death of innocence, the beginning of nothing and the end of everything, the beginning of his father being right. Faggot, whore, wuss. Except the difference, he thinks, is that I was your son. I am your son. The lines blur, and he paints rain on the windows and alarm clock numbers, fingers shaking at three a.m.
He falls asleep on top of the blankets, curled on the hard mattress, still in his clothes. The memories play thick behind his mind, colouring dreamscapes and nightmares, and he forgot to shut off the stereo, it plays on into the night, flowing out the open window. ‘I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.’
When he wakes up, the sun is already burning rays through the dust and the faded curtain, splashes of light across the hardwood floor, stars falling through the beams. His head hurts and blanket creases scar his cheek, hair stuck to his forehead. His fingers itch for addiction and creation, to dream his way out of here. He goes through the motions of making a pot of coffee, keeping his eyes averted from the disaster of a canvas on the easel in the corner. He drinks it black, bitter and strong, a burnt taste lingering somewhere near the bottom of the cup. He sits by the open window and smokes, staring at the clouds boiling on the horizon, even though he really should go outside. Inhale, hold, hold, exhale. Breathe in, breathe out.
Finally, some impulse gets the better of him, some morbid portion of his soul, and he lets his eyes wander along the poster-pasted walls to the painted canvas, last night’s explosion of feeling and failure. The sun slices a perfect third of the painting off, a shining diagonal band through the middle, and he circles warily, afraid to get close, to really see.
Finally, he moves into the path of the sun, casting a thick shadow over the painted canvas, and in the gloom he makes out hard lines and heavy shapes, barely noticeable changes in tone and texture, things he wouldn’t usually do, things he shouldn’t do. Streaks and smudges, globs and bits of primed canvas peering through. Not perfect. Not perfect, not beautiful. Nothing.
He moves closer, turns on the lamp overhead on the wall, and it all comes into glaring, frightening focus. His life, painted in angled lines and rough edges, reds and blacks and blues, bruises and abrasions, long nights awake. And then somewhere, somewhere in the top left hand corner, a white shape, graceful and bent, surrounded by curls and tendrils of white-gold light, spreading wispy into the darkness. A beacon, something he thought was missing, denying, that he thought he might find anywhere but here.
Everything tips and rights itself, and he pushes a hand through his hair, inching a finger through his belt loop. ‘Like blades sharpening, you've become aware of what's real…crashing comes the light into your eyes’. He makes a mental note to thank Jordan next time he sees him, to buy him drinks or something, and to make a copy of that mix before he gives it back, to add ‘Oh Comely’ and ‘Emblems’ and ‘Lazy Eye’ if he can get at the computer for long enough.
He grabs his coat off the bed and slips it around his shoulders, stomping his feet into his shoes, cigarettes and keys stuffed in his pockets.
Why wait?
[ending one]
[ending two.]
The door echoes his mind, creaking out a syllable sounding eerily close to ‘go’, wood and brass hinges with words. It shuts behind him, key grating in the lock, tumblers falling into place, securing what little he happens to own.
When he turns around, CD case in hand, Jordan’s staring up at him from fourteen steps down, wet from the rain he didn’t know had started, dyed black hair stuck to his face, khaki coat turned to chocolate by moisture.
“I was coming to give this back,” he says, bouncing it in his hand. “But I guess you beat me to it.” Jordan just hums in acknowledgement, and Erin bounces down the stairs, keys jingling in his pocket. “Been thinking,” he says, handing the CD over. “By the way, I want a copy of that.” Jordan laughs, slipping it into his coat.
“I heard about what happened with Jay,” Jordan says, voice punctuated by footfalls as they clunk down the stairs. “Thought you liked her, man. What happened?”
“I didn’t,” he says, flat, examining the pattern in the floor tile, hands shoved in his pockets.
“Oh,” Jordan mumbles, lifting his shoulders in a brief shrug. “Been thinking, too.”
“Yeah.” He pulls a cigarette out of his pocket, and then another, handing it to Jordan. “Outside?” He pulls open the door without waiting for an answer, stepping outside and pulling his hood up. “Wet,” he sighs, flicking his lighter, holding the dancing flame to the end of the cigarette, igniting it bright orange against the overcast day. “Thinking about what?” he mumbles through an outpouring of smoke, picking up where they left off.
“Oh, you know. Shit. After I heard about what happened with Jay, I was wondering if you were telling people.” Jordan scuffs his shoe against the concrete, dragging too hard and filling his lungs too fast, coughing.
“No, no. Well, one night I told her about my dad, y’know, because she saw that one painting.” He laughs softly, exhaling forcefully, rubbing his face. “But we were like, twelve, so I don’t know. And then I guess she assumed we were...but we’re not, never have been, so I told her about the other guys. Had to.”
“Hm,” Jordan sighs, flicking a strand of black hair out of his eyes. “You didn’t deserve that shit, you know, what he did. It’s not…it’s not wrong.” He stares at the ground, rubbing at his elbow. “I mean, it’s…it’s beautiful, no matter what.” He looks up, catches Erin’s eye, cigarette dangling limply out of his hand, and Erin sees that beacon from his painting, fleeting. “You told me that when we were younger, before, that it’s always beautiful, love, that it didn’t matter.”
And he doesn’t have the energy to argue, to explain how that applies to everyone but him, not with the throbbing behind his eyes, just throws his stub of a smoke on the ground and grinds it out with the toe of his Converse, shrugging his shoulders and pushing his hair off his face.
“Y’know, you,” he starts, fidgeting. “Sometimes I wonder, if it weren’t for my dad, if this would be different.” He coughs. “I fucking hate him for that.”
“Different,” Jordan muses, staring into the wet street, silhouetted by the weak light. “I…yeah, different.”
“I think I painted you last night, this white light in a fucking abyss, you know, and…” all in a rush, blurring, before he even knows he’s saying it, thinking it.
“E,” Jordan sighs. “Erin, what are you…”
“No, fuck, Jord, I did. You’re there; this gorgeous thing in all this wreckage. Always have been. And I guess…”
And oh, it was just a kiss then, and here in the rain, it’s just a kiss, still just lips and shyness colliding. It’s just a kiss, but it makes the pavement tilt out from under his feet, and he thinks he understands the hope in his painting, thinks he finds it here in the street in front of everyone, graceful and sweet. And even though nothing explodes, nothing lights up, lightning doesn’t come streaking out of the sky, it all kind of makes sense. The blood, the sex, the bar, the paintings. It all kind of makes sense.
“It’s been too long,” Jordan says, close, warm, familiar. “Like, eight years too long.” Suddenly fearless, Erin grabs his pianist hand in his own artists hand and twines their fingers into place.
“Too fucking long,” he agrees, and he kisses him again, there in front of everyone. “Fuck my father,” he says. “This is beautiful.”
&&&
(dudes...if you don't get this/how lame it makes me, i will be sad. =P)
The moon bred new Atlantic life tonight. The salt burned you right out of my eyes and secrets we're not proud of were taken with the tide. We were all newborns with blurred vision and no sense of direction. Today I saw cancer, cigarettes, and shortness of breath. This is why I walk to the ocean. Swim with the jellyfish. I may never get this chance again. This is why if you want to kiss you should kiss. If you want to cry you should cry, and if you want to live you should live. You don't have to love me. You already did.
At least enough to keep me smiling from South Carolina to Virginia.
It's for lovers (orjustfriends). This is why I do it.
Sunday, 25 June, 2006.
In less than a year, I will be famous.
I will be millions-of-records-sold famous in an era where a hundred thousand units is a good haul, and I will have friends just because I moved those units.
I will be MTV famous, billboard in Times Square famous, endorsed-by-MAC-cosmetics famous. People will wait in line and pay money to watch us, theatrical and on a grand stage, costumes and acrobats, moonlight and Liberace. People will drive for hours to listen to my words booming through amplifiers, to scream those words back even if they don’t understand what they mean, even if they think Aubergine Dreams is a reference to yesterdays’ eyeliner.
I will be loved, and hated by ten times as many; I will be judged and pigeonholed, and I will write songs about it, and the kids that beat me up in high school will sing them back to me and ask for an autograph. I will have a private jet, a first class tour bus, and I will have lost both a best friend and a father, to the pressures of fame and alcoholism, respectively. I will see cigarettes, cancer, and shortness of breath.
I will hear everyone sing my words, my words, about late night hospital visits, lying high school sweethearts, and the perils of the scene. I will be signed to a label by one of the few people I look up to, and he will become both friend and mentor.
I will be a god to some, a devil to others, and yet nothing to more than those combined. I will become the subject of theories and conspiracies, stories and rumours, and who knows what else.
I am nineteen years old, and I will handle this with all the grace, nerves, video games and Victorian literature that I can process and repeat. I will suddenly be a rock star, with three best friends on stage beside me, and a hundred more waiting in the wings, fingers green from counting dollars.
Already, the stage is set, the words are scrawled on notebook paper, and it’s time to meet the press, to become ‘it’, the next big thing you love to hate, or vice versa.
In less than a year, I will be famous, even if you, or I, don’t know it yet.
So come on already, strike up the band.
&&&
(this is completely and totally stolen from matthew gilbert. seriously. only two lines belong to me.
"lay in the grass until you're itchy.
smell the flowers until you sneeze.
daydream until you sleepwalk.
and, fucking read something.
your mind is capable of more grandiose,
vibrant images than any television set.
people speak of imagination
as if it were actually different from reality.
i find that funny.
sleep pretty; dream big; laugh loud; make art; smile a lot."
i have ink for blood, paint for skin, lens for eyes, music for thoughts.
your fucking bullets can't kill me.
chi dara fine al gran dalore?
&&&
started yesterday, never to be completed.
a tape played on repeat until it's shredded to ribbons.
a train of thought running in circles.
this blank box-page-sky is my canvas,
words are the paint.
read, take, interpret, twist;
fit, mold, rewrite, rethink;
denounce, accept.
take your pick.
make a piece of me a piece of you.
i expect nothing in return.
take what you want and leave what you don't.
i wrote this for me, and for you, and for you, and for everyone.
take what you need and leave what you don't.
it doesn't matter what it all means.
all you have is your own reality,
and what is right here, right now,
forever.
love is blood pain glass stone life loss hope healing death beauty.
take it or leave it.
&&&
love is a verb.
we mimic feeling,
turn it into a noun.
&&&
move like you know what to do,
and we’ll pretend we’re still in love,
just for tonight.
&&&
flashing lights and exit signs.
what happens, stays.
we need an end to this
desert heat.
give me a break.
&&&
“we got everybody singing”
songs of hope and
l u l l a b i e s
battery voltage shakes the floor.
and we are the ringleaders tonight.
dance until you blister,
scream until you bleed.