Moving to coupykins

Need me a clean slate and all.
Also, 'scissortheory' is old news. I'm all for trophy scars but I need a line.

They say we don’t live interesting lives. We’re the same old story on repeat, drug addicts/broken boys/fifteen-minute hometown legends, and if we’re lucky we get our music videos to play on MTV2, maybe once or twice, or maybe we do some time on a local radio show. We spend day after day driving across the country in a van that’s been broken into three times now, first time they stole the sound system, second time they took my guitar, third time they almost wiped us clean but left the unmarked drugs. We spend our nights in dive bars, drinking cheap booze and thrashing hotel rooms, scoring street cocaine and staggering around at night, hollering and laughing and being quarter-aged idiots like it’s expected of us. We're Professionals on the Murder Scene, we've got a cliche band name and we can shred our guitars and I can write a rock opera that'll make someone cry.

I’ve spent the last fifteen hours in this shitty van. It’s white, but the paint is chipping and there’s a dent in the bumper from when Cole ran into a telephone pole, trying to back the thing into a thin alley so we could unload it. I spray painted ‘PMS’ in red on the side. Like a cheap makeshift decal sticker. The paint dripped. It looks shady, now, like it’s a joke. A pedophile’s van, picking up little kids with promises of candy, except we pick up strangers with promises of buying them drinks if they agree to listen to a song.

We pack what we can—not clothes, we could care less about clothes and what we wore on stage, we’re not clowns, it didn’t matter, the music did, and every other cliché that guys in bands use—we packed our drugs our instruments our girlfriends our hearts and we stuffed my one gay friend with the tongue piercing between pieces of the drum kit and some amplifiers. He had a bruise from the throne jutting into his ribs. We all had the little quirky things, too, the little things that define us as people/the things that made us people/the things that separated us from other people, the things that mattered more than clothes. Pepper Blaire always brought his Mermaid Sparkle Barbie or whatever, I brought Aiden’s old guitar, plucked away at the rusty strings at diners or in a dirty hotel room or when we were sitting outside of clubs waiting to step on stage. Stan stuffed as many packs of cigarettes and as much instant coffee as he could into his bags. Drew had his camera, his MySpace picture machine. Cole brought his hair products—‘feminine care’, Stan and Pepper said, Cole was always the butt of everyone’s jokes—I brought my massive CD collection so I could catch up on the new Radiohead album or listen to those demos the college dropouts we play with made from back home. Twitch forgot her Tourettes medications, remembered the birth control. Claire made sure she had her sleeping pills, she said we were loud and annoying, and she's anal about the care of her violin. I ignored my ATM card sitting on the kitchen counter at home, pretending I didn’t hate money.

Being on tour wasn’t so much like a family trip than a sort of spiritual journey. Driving from coast to coast and back again wasn’t so much torture than a chance to realize this stupid tour was a waste of time and money from our pockets. Once I realized it was a fat chance I was going to make it as an MTV musician I had less doubt about the whole thing. It was like a hobby and not a job/something I was forced to do/something I needed to construct a profitable living out of.

I like playing little clubs because I get to see just about every face that’s willing to look at mine for a half hour, where the sweat that drips down my forehead is loaded with emotion, every face that’s willing to listen to me choke on the lyrics to songs they haven’t heard/probably won’t like/will never hear again. I like that we have a growing collection of pictures fans or general concert-goers had of Pepper bending over in his skinny tight sparkly girl jeans. (He’s mad ‘cause he says he’s gonna marry his girlfriend and then wears us down by pointing out he’s one of the few of us that even has regular attention from a lady. Sometimes I say I get regular attention from my gay friend with the pierced tongue and Twitch tells me I’m gay too but she does that all the time).

Last week at some show where only kids under eighteen came to see me stand on stage and swing my mic stand around like I was an abusive dance partner and I spent the last band’s set drunk and in a two-man mosh pit/light-hearted brawl and ended up with a black eye, some kid from the area handed me a CD he wrote with another guy on keyboards and a drum machine.

I was like, “dude, don’t give this to me.”
He asked “why not.”
“You don’t even know who I am.”
“I like your band, I want to play with you guys some time.”
“My band’s a piece of shit.”
“I want to play with you guys some time,” he said again, “when you come back.”

If we come back.

This kid had hair in his eyes and it was dyed black but not professionally, like some friend or girlfriend did it for him, there were patches where his red hair still showed. He wore a Zeppelin shirt like he was around when they were. He had skinny Pepper Blaire jeans and a gut, but it wasn’t the beer gut mine was beginning to become.

“I’m not an inspiring guy,” I said. “I’m just a dude that likes music. I write things in my basement. I rip lines from old album covers and books off the bestseller list and newspaper headlines. I send demos to record companies and they send me letters back telling me I suck at what I do, then I sing about how they can fuck themselves.”

He held out the CD a little further. "If you won't, then who will." He didn't talk in question marks. Everything was a little flat at the end. Not a question but a statement. A statement that struck a chord, one of those three chords that can make someone cry, one of those dramatic chords the boys in their pretty pop punk bands use when they play an acoustic set. I think I stared at the kid a while, enough to make it awkward. I was slick with sweat and he was biting his tongue. I was biting my tongue.

I took the goddamn CD, he grumbled a thank you, I shrugged and walked away, and when we were up at five am drinking coffee/smoking cigarettes/ignoring the stench from last night that came off of us in waves I put it in the shitty new sound system that hadn't yet been jacked from the van and we listened to it through without a word.

Then I told them we were stopping here again on the way back and we'd play a show for free if no one would book us for money or we'd play in the park or we'd play a house party and that we were gonna open for that kid's stupid little barely even a band. I am a business man, the CEO of PMS And Co. Me and my boys, we're not going to make it, but we're gonna waste our time in sin cities and we're gonna make a few smiles and we're gonna be okay with that when we die of liver failure/lung cancer/rock 'n' roll.

Some time ago me and Twitch had a fight because I could barely pay the bills, and she said that I was a man with two lives and I needed to pick only one and I didn't say anything, instead I got in my car and drove away and chose to be a man with no life/no hope/no money.

I drove down south and I caught up with this three man band we used to play with all the time back home, and the singer's got curly hair he tied into dreadlocks like they're still cool or something, and the drummer's always high and their guitar player has quit more times than I can remember. They were playing at some little club in a sad, sorry part of L.A., with blue neon lights tacked to the front of the place that reflected off of the sleek coat of rain on the polluted street. I stood in the crowd like a ghost/statue/creepy stranger with a beer in my hand and waited until it was over, and then we walked the ten blocks to the nearest coffee shop with our hoods up to save us from the rain.

We sat in the booth and we were the only people left, the barista wanted to go home and we put on our friendly faces but she shunned them like most everyone does these days. I was unshaven and I had too much booze/cocaine/painkiller pills in my stomach, and that didn't matter to anyone then. I was pretty sure the kids I left at home up north were worried, and I wanted to reach out to them and tell them I was alright, everything was alright, and I was in the process of getting through the situation, but I wasn't sure if was a lie. I guess I was overwhelmed. That's what Fritz told me, through the chemical haze in his eyes, and Rhoady said I cared way too much about my job and I just shrugged because I knew I did, I knew I gave too much of a shit about the stupid fucking music.

Back home, Twitch had said 'It's this or us, you're gonna have to choose.' I should've told her I picked the music, because I think I would, if it didn't hurt too bad. Either way, we ended up miles apart, even if I couldn't help it and that was/will forever be my fault.

Fritz asked me when I was going back and I shrugged and barely answered. "Tomorrow," I said, and I wasn't sure if I would, and then I was quiet and Rhoady said something about Vegas, something about continuing their cross-country tour. Me and Twitch had our honeymoon in Vegas, after our wedding, the one I couldn't afford/the one I got shitfaced at/the one where I passed out so we didn't catch our plane. I smiled half-heartedly, staring into my coffee, and wished them luck.

We ended up scattered about a cheap motel room, and Rhoady snored but I couldn't sleep. There were questionable stains on the sheets and the bathrooms were a little less than pristine, but we were accepting of/used to/contributing to it. I probably couldn't have afforded even that room on my own at that point, so we agreed to split the cost for a night or two. The next morning I woke up just when the sun was barely beginning to light up the sky, and I left without a goodbye and reluctantly took the California highway up north with cheap gas station coffee in my hand and warming my stomach, listening to whatever came in clearest on the radio.

I reached town at night, and I didn't go home. Things were too fuzzy, too unorganized and hectic, reasons and emotions and the future, mostly, I guess. Everything was raw. I knew some guys, though, and they lent me a couch for a few nights, which was all I needed.

They had this gig they were supposed to play, and I showed up with my hood up and stood in line and said nothing to anyone with my hands in my pocket like I was a stranger/a ghost/someone who didn't belong. I wasn't sure they'd be able to pull the gig off. I knew these kids, and they were all a little broken, and I guess they thought I was like duct tape and kept them together. I don't like to think that's me. I think it scares them to know I'm a little broken/dysfunctional/completely fucked up too. I think it makes them mad to know that I am certainly capable of fucking up, like I'm their roll model.

I stood in the back like I didn't exist, and I was still and silent and I had absolutely no idea why I had been compelled to go in the first place. A part of me figured it was because those kids were my duct tape, too; they kept my broken pieces together, they kept my head from jumping ship, they kept me from ripping my heart out from my ribcage, they kept me from crumbling to the floor like a useless ugly doll.

When they played, they sparkled on stage, and though the crowd was thinner than usual, Pepper Blaire had no problem with engaging them in our art. They'd brought back the guy who used to sing for what this band originally was, before Aiden died, before Jack left, before Stein had a kid, and he played guitar and he had this goofy smile on his face. I guess he missed it. I missed it, too, and it reminded me that I had no idea what I was doing, so I met them out back after they played so maybe we could hug it out but Stan punched me in the face.

I ended up with a broken arm and a new story and some songs to sing but I smiled through the vicodin and felt like a hero. Covered in patchy bruises and dried blood running from our noses, drunk and high and not regretting anything we ever did/would do/fucked up, we all felt like heroes.

Tomorrow night I'll be screaming on a stage in Houston, I'll be obscene and laughing and Pepper Blaire will have his eye on his girlfriend in the crowd and Drew will have his back facing them because sometimes he gets stage fright, Twitch will be at the merch booth jerking her head to one side every now and then and she'll be calling me a fag at those down times when I try to have sentimental talks with my audience through the mic wire.

Tomorrow night I'll be shaking hands with little high school punks in hardcore bands, they'll tell me I'm awesome or that I suck and I'll tell them that that's absolutely fine with me. Pepper Blaire will be bending over to pick up his pedal or something and some girl will snap a picture of his butt and he'll have a fit about it. Me, I'm a businessman, I run my company based on my heart and I'll preach that money isn't the profit but the music is, and I'll be the same damn cliche on repeat. Me, I'm the CEO of PMS and Co, and I have a wife and a dysfunctional relationship and I drive a pedophile van.

Tomorrow night I'll be reminding myself why I'm there. Tomorrow night, Rhoady's voice will play over and over in my head and he'll say that I care too much/work too hard/waste my time-- but me, I'm the CEO of PMS and Co, and I'm going to die of all these painful/gruesome/sad and sorry things but I'm gonna go smiling from ear to ear. Tomorrow night I'll be another hero.

I like people, though, so. Comment and I'll add you back. IT'S A DEAL.
And you can e-stalk me. Awesome.