I open her up and let them look. Fender Precision, black. Two pickups. No other way. Ooh. Aah. Perfect. I smile. Their nineteen-year mugs smile back. I ask where the girls are. Laughter, easy laughter. The softer one looks tense but laughs anyway. Nicky shrugs. Random – know I am. What’s the harm? Mentions bad luck with pickups. Pity.

A little corruption is definitely in order.

“FUCK!”
The world always knew it when Charlie arrived.

Charlie looked around at the rest of the lunch crowd parked at The Culture Slut that afternoon. “So, when do I start getting recognized?” he cooed, primping his hair.

“I feel sorry for anyone who recognizes you,” Drey said, rolling his eyes. “Probably at the expense of virginity.”

“Hey Nicky,” said Charlie, blowing Camel smoke against a piece of college-ruled notebook paper. “This girl wants to dip you in chocolate syrup and lick it off.”

“Bullshit,” cried Alex, lunging for the paper across a pile of ripped envelopes. Upon obtaining the letter, he made a quick glance over it and said, “I knew it.”

Nicky let go of a clenched breath, but he felt slightly disappointed.

“She just wants to feed you chocolate kisses.”

Sometimes in those early mornings when your nonsleep has taken the place of Nicky’s worries, sometimes in the cheap hotels where the smoke smell has been sewn into the sheets, sometimes when your wide eyes attempt to pierce the blank boring calm while your ears have to focus on the rumbling vent – sometimes you can tell exactly what should be happening, and you feel like it’s right on your heels, and you want to tell him. But still, it’s not there, still, something’s gone. He yells, he breaks, calls people stupid bastards when they aren’t – and the moon hangs overhead, calling Ecstasy and Nicky’s whole attitude wrong. The weather, the sky, the stars change moods, they say. But nothing changes like people change.

Rose had absolutely no misconceptions about the nature of her rockstar. He was as human as anybody else, of course. She had planned no idol worship as part of the evening’s activities. Just connection. A quick, freeing connection.

And suddenly, it was made. Rose could feel the spark as surely as Nicky’s eyes on her. Both followed the curves of her face to the lines of her neck, lingered on the pink for a moment – bulls-eye, she thought – and finished their search, finally, at the hem of her skirt. She sensed his starvation, his perfect lack of attachment. Silently, desire was stated, and Rose took one step closer to the bus.

He kissed each eyelid over blue, then he kissed the mouth again, and he said, “Just for the record, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.”

Nicky had always been extremely adept at weeding his way around interview questions. There were certain things that needed to be said for a song to have any impact, however, and thus, the entire world knew that his father had committed suicide when Nicky was ten. But no one knew the reason. Just like no one, not even the other members of Ecstasy, knew exactly whom Nicky was addressing in the lyrics of ‘Natural’.

He wondered if Drey had ever figured it out.

Nicky put the lyrics aside and turned around. “Well, we could work on the new material without him,” he said, forcing it to sound like a suggestion rather than sarcasm. Nicky had penned a great deal of the new songs himself, but Charlie’s songwriting had become vital to Ecstasy’s sound.

A voice was trying to break through a barrier somewhere. Nicky thought he could hear someone shouting. —band, someone said. —circle.

But there was as much static in his brain as on an FM radio station in the middle of Iowa. Nicky ignored the voice’s inconsistent sputterings. They fell faint behind words that had always held sway. Even now, even in the air conditioned freeze of an L.A. twentysomething summer, they nicked at Nicky’s ears as he stared Drey down.

I’m not gonna get married.

Fuck you.

“So it’s different from what we usually do. So what?” Charlie argued. “Bands need to evolve.”

“Not into that. Unless you want to ‘evolve’ into a train wreck.”

There was a bad taste of reversal in the air. Nobody was trying to save anybody else, for once. They were thrashing around like sharks caught in a fisherman’s net.

“Have you ever taken a risk in your life?” Charlie hollered, keeping his distance but leaning towards Drey. Drey had backed up against the wall. Alex sat on his stool and stared at the floor.

“Not if it’s pointless, dangerous, or otherwise moronic,” Drey said, keeping his shoulders upright against the padding on the wall for support. “I don’t even think we should play that. And you know I don’t give a shit what the public thinks.”

Nicky’s mind was racing. This was interfering with his love. His Ecstasy. He would have to smooth it over.

Charlie had raised his voice one more notch. Nicky wondered if it would soon soar past the sound padding into the outer hallway. “Jesus, Drey, how about you trust me for once—”

“I think I’ve trusted you enough times as it is.”

“Shut up!”

Nicky moved between the wall and the rhythm section, fists raised.

“Shut up!” he shouted again, this time directly at Drey. “I know we all can’t agree on things. I know some of us like certain songs and styles better than others. I know.” Nicky lowered his hands and began to pace back and forth. “That’s why you always listened to me. That’s why we needed a unifying member of Ecstasy. Fuck compromises. They never work. The results are always wussy and uninteresting. And they never accomplish anything. This is practice. If we’re going to get anything done, everyone’s going to do what I say, and nothing else. Okay?”

Drey and Charlie said nothing. Alex nodded slowly, obviously desperate to get the whole scene over with as soon as possible.

“Okay,” Nicky continued, “we’ll quit work on Charlie’s song for now, as it’s obviously not the right thing to start with. But we’re not ditching it completely. With a few more practices it’ll probably end up on the album.”

Charlie looked slightly triumphant, though his eyes still darted everywhere and there were tiny beads of sweat at his hairline.

“It’s back to ‘Bleached’,” Nicky said. “Unless anyone has a problem with that.”

No one did.

He had no idea what page it would be on. He didn’t even need to look. The spread was laughing at him within minutes, against fan comments, critics’ jeers, three thin columns of theorizing, and a reprinted photograph that almost brushed him off the tips of his steel toed boots and swiftly into the arms of the cheaply tiled floor.

1989 was the year beneath the caption. The names were self-evident, and Nicky didn’t need anything more. His other self had gotten all it could take from these two boys with such smiles on their faces.

He stumbled backwards, quickly shut the magazine, and tossed it clumsily back into place before any more of Nicky Mason could try to tell him just how horrible all of this really was.

“Listen,” Alex said then. “I know what things are like right now – for you. And for us. But I also know how important this is.” He paused and collected his small voice. “And I swear I won’t lose steam. I swear I won’t stop until the last song is over. I swear.”

Nicky smiled. The fact that it wasn’t a promise made him feel that much more that it might be true.

(Then Nicky saw the song. Not the crisp, Sony, studio version that had ended up on the album, but the very core, the perfect heart of it. And it was bitter. Lemon-sour-brussel-sprout-day-old-dentist-toothpaste bitter. And Nicky Mason didn’t feel like pretending that it wasn’t, anymore. If he fell apart the crowd would catch him. And if he lost his cool the beauty of the breakup would be, in fact, nothing.)

Bitter, finally, he sang. It bleached him out.

It suddenly seemed to Nicky that Charlie was staring directly through him, turning his soul to cellophane, melting his facade without even trying.

In light of that stare, it was pointless to pretend. To ignore. So Nicky decided not to try anymore. It all came crashing. He put two hands over his face and felt every shred of rockstar slip away.

“You knew,” he said, and it came out as a squeak. “You knew everything, didn’t you?”

Charlie nodded. “Yeah.”

“How?”

“Well, Christ, Nicky, you’re easier to read than neon restaurant signs in Santa Monica.”

Charlie didn’t die. Not him. Not ever.

Delirious in his poetry, Nicky pulled the lamp cord over the sink mirror, illuminating his black glassed eyes, shining like bruises underneath the light. They were the only solid dark spaces against the rest of his washed-out skin. The skin of his face was as pale as the wall.

He watched. He looked at himself. He said, glancing down, "I love you." He wasn't even sure whom he was addressing. Drey, his mother, his father, the world.