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Glen cleared his throat. It was obvious he wanted to explode – and obvious why he couldn’t.
Because Derek was right: Glen was a weasel who would do anything for a story.
“Look, Derek – I understand you’re upset – ”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“And I understand you’ve had some bad experiences with the press in the past. But I’m not like that, okay? I respect you.”
“Really? You respect me?”
“Yes. Immensely.”
“Awesome. While you’re at it, have some goddamn respect for my girlfriend, since she’s the only reason I’m fucking talking to you at all.”
Silence on Glen’s side of the line.
“From now on, Glen, don’t call her. She’ll call you.”
And with that, Derek hung up the phone.
87
I loved him for that.
I loved him for standing up for me. I loved him for being my knight in shining armor. I loved him for ripping Glen a new one (even if Glen had a point, and even if Derek did it partly because he had his own issues with the press).
In that moment, all the other crap fell away, and I absolutely, positively loved him.
What bothered me, though, was that neither he nor I ever said it.
The ‘L’ word.
And the longer it went on like that, the more it bothered me.
I had wanted desperately to say it to him right after he hung up the phone –
…but…
…I didn’t.
I’d always felt that the guy should say it first.
Partly because guys are a whole lot more freaky about it in general, and you don’t want to spook the horse before he gets to the water.
Also, I’d heard plenty of horror stories about the girl going first. My favorite one (as in the most cringe-worthy) was a story in some national magazine – Esquire, I think. In it, the author has been dating this woman for a few months, and he really, really likes her.
Anyway, they go away together on a weekend trip for the first time. They get a room, and the guy opens the curtains, looks outside, and says, “Lovely view.”
The woman mishears him and says, “Awww – I love you, too!”
And the last line of the article was, “I broke up with her the next day.”
Stories like that were what kept me from saying anything at all.
Besides, it wasn’t like he hadn’t already said it… albeit four years ago.
I’m in love with your roommate.
Maybe you can’t LOVE somebody if you don’t know them, but you can definitely fall in love. You know how I know? Because I’ve already fallen in love with you.
What’s wrong? The girl I’m totally in love with is leaving next week to go a thousand miles away, that’s what’s wrong.
Have a wonderful life. I love you.
What had happened in the last four years?
What had happened that he couldn’t say it now?
Was it that we’d spent four years apart, and his feelings had changed?
Was it that I’d done something wrong?
Had our moment just passed, and now it was over?
What worried me most was that maybe he didn’t have any stories, or any insecurities, or anything at all keeping him from saying it. Maybe he just didn’t even think of saying it.
Because it wasn’t true.
That was the worst possibility of all.
88
Speaking of stories in major national magazines, I had one to write. So I got started on it.
It was, without question, the hardest thing I’d ever attempted.
Part of it was the pressure. When you’re writing crap articles for crap indie papers for crap money, you don’t place any particular importance on them. It’s not that you half-ass them (although, yes, I’ve done that once or twice); it’s that you’re waiting for your Big Break, so anything that’s not your Big Break, you don’t fret over. Most of the stuff I had written in the past I didn’t attach any world-shaking importance to, I just did it. Without thinking, without worrying – I just did it. Like a rookie quarterback who gets shoved into the game without expecting it at all, so he has no time to develop nerves and sabotage himself.
But the Big Break was finally here.
And I couldn’t stop fretting about it.
Glen was right, in his assholish way: despite the repetition and the grind of the Road, I was living out a sort of fantasy vacation. I was sleeping with the man of my dreams, I was hanging out with the hottest rock band in the world, and I was writing for the biggest music magazine ever.
It was the ‘writing’ part that was the problem.
There were sooooo many things to distract me. (One of them was tattooed and very, very sexy.) And so I let them distract me, because it was easier than gearing down and actually doing the work.
Because the possibility of failure was terrifying.
I was like the rookie football player in his first pro game ever – but they’d told him a couple of weeks beforehand. And he’d taken every opportunity in that time to worry, and obsess, and convince himself how bad he was going to suck.
And now it was time to dress out for the game, and he was a nervous wreck.
I tried to write the article. I did. I started it five dozen times, and scrapped every single one of them.
In desperation, I looked at other Rolling Stone articles online and… well… I’m not proud to admit it, but kinda, sorta copied their opening passages. As a way of jumping into the story. They fell into a dozen different categories: the Big Pronouncement. (“Bigger is arguably the hottest band in the world right now… and I am watching them implode before my very eyes.”) The In Media Res. (“We are walking down the concrete passageways of the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, and the roar of the crowd reverberates all around us like the crashing waves of the ocean.”) The Stolen Detail, with a bit of Poetic License thrown in for good measure. (“Derek Kane’s eyes glimmer in the late-afternoon sunlight as he reads the lyrics he has just written. His irises are emerald green, and breathtakingly beautiful – a fact which his millions of female fans do not know, because he’s never taken off his sunglasses in front of them. Until now.”)
And so on and so forth.
But none of it felt right. It felt… artificial. Fake. Blegh.
Now you know why I deleted them all. (Especially after you’ve read them.)
When I couldn’t get the beginning, I decided to try to write bits and pieces from the middle and patch them together later. I wrote huge swaths, thousands upon thousands of words – about the concerts. About the song-writing session I’d witnessed (and later got chewed out for). About the tour bus and the after-parties and the fans.
All of it felt like crap. Like I was a sophomore back at Syracuse, struggling through my first Journalism 101 class, trying to string together two sentences that didn’t sound like I was fresh off the high school paper writing about an ‘awesome’ pep rally.
So I put it off. With sex with Derek. With fights with Derek. With make-up sex with Derek. With talks with Ryan. With listening to Killian improvise. With concerts. With after-concert partying. With long, bored stretches of staring out the tour bus windows as rural countryside flew past.
And with the one last thing I felt I had to do, which was probably going to be even harder than writing the article itself:
Interviewing Riley.
89
It wasn’t like she wouldn’t talk to me. She already had, back on my very first day on the tour bus:
To fuck hot chicks.
I… what?
To fuck hot chicks.
What are you talking about?
Why I do it. To fuck hot chicks.
That wasn’t what I was going to ask.
Oh. Well, that’s the answer, anyway. To fuck hot chicks.
O-kaaaay… moving on. What’s the best part of being a rock star?
Fucking hot chicks. I mean fucking chicks that’re hot. Not chicks who are fuckin’ hot. I mean, I want ‘em fuckin’ hot, but if you don’t get to fuck ‘em, what’s the fuckin’ point, right?
She was perfectly willing to be interviewed… if you can call that an ‘interview.’
No, I wanted more. The real person, not the caricature. What Killian had given me on the ride out to the desert.
Which Riley was apparently willing to give me, too. But just like Killian, she had a price.
With Killian, it had been participating in a psychedelic holiday.
With Riley, it was a bit more… Rileyesque.
“I really need to do an interview with you,” I told her one afternoon, after her morning hangover had faded to where she was semi-coherent.
“Okay, shoot,” she said as she took a pull from a bottle of Jack.
“No, I’m serious. A real interview. One where you actually talk about real stuff, and not just – ”
“Yeah, yeah, I said okay, let’s fuckin’ do it,” she said crossly.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Had I hit on exactly the right moment to ask her? Had all her defenses dropped by the wayside long enough for me to get to know the real person beneath the insane punk-rock-chick-drummer persona?
“Okay… what’s your first memory of – ”
“Tits.”
“…what?”
“Tits. That’s my first memory.”
I sighed and hung my head as she continued on her reverie, holding her hands out in front of her like the ‘huge… tracts of land’ guy in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. “Big ol’ fuckin’ tits – firm ones, big as my head, with – ”
