Not in a million years of misspent youth

       “-make sure you’ve…Okay…My name is Sammy Murphy and I was born November fifth, nineteen forty-three. My father was…in the army and fought in the war while my mother stayed at home and pretended it wasn’t completely obvious I was a bastard…Well, this was the forties, that sort of thing wasn’t…yeah. Well, I’m fairly sure that I have no idea who he is, that’s what I say. So after my father came back we started hop-scotching around the isles with the military and…of course it was hard for an Irish boy in English schools, but…well, after a while you learn some mimicry and then maybe a little more then you can fake it…Not until I was sixteen, no, but then no one could tell the difference, although I messed up when I got angry. I have that problem now, as you know, it’s always been, uh, a problem…
        “Because I like it this way. Because everyone else here sounds American and I have the right to also if I want…you can’t force me to be Irish, Maude, I know what I am and, you know, I…I think the way I sound reflects that. We’re getting off topic.
        “No, I’m not dodging.
        “No.
        “Turn that thing off, I need to talk to you. I said-“



        Anthony died of the sickness in the late seventies, but it had haunted his back for years before. To hear Sammy talk of him, he was a bright springy young man, eyes full of color, a brilliant tangle. Stories revolved around his carelessness or his joy, a serendipitous life.
        “Well, I didn’t know him when he was like that.”
        Took me long, too long, to realize who he was talking about but in my defense, Sammy’s memories were filled with failed youths and near misses, so that one actually made it seemed impossible. Not that Anthony is all that famous; he’s just…important.
        So magazine clippings showed me what he’d shown everyone: A dark haired little man with no fashion sense or naievity, tiny hard mouth, clutching the neck of his guitar like a child clinging to his mother’s hand in fear. Interviews had a stifled, suppressed feel, lots of semicolons and unanswered questions.
        I found a record in the bottom of the rummage store bin, under some Bowie. Listening to it made me uncomfortable, even when I didn’t know his connection to Sammy. It’s not shocking the way obscenity is. It’s awkward like a porno where both stars stare straight into the camera, expressionless, the entire time.
       “I told you, I didn’t know him when he was like this.”
        Sammy started writing out stories for me in long, loopy cursive before I got my tape recorder. Most of them were lost to this and that, left behind or crumpled up somewhere, but I do remember a few.
        Anthony was frequently a side character, a foil, a numerical addition. “And then Clive, Anthony and I went to check on him.” More often then not he was driving the car while Sammy was off his tits. When I read Sammy’s stories I imagined a permanent half-smile on his face…
        “…So Anthony carried me out of the house and buckled me into the car. He took a scarf from the back and used it to tie me round my chest to the seat. I threw up on myself and it was all stomach acid so he just covered me up with a blanket. We drove home slowly and he hummed the entire way. He carried me up to the apartment and laid me on the couch. He went down to his studio and checked periodically to make sure I wasn’t dead.”
       You can’t help but wonder if it was a misunderstanding and we were thinking of two different Anthonys, but no. There’s a single grainy photo of them together, Anthony leaning his head on Sammy’s shoulder while Sammy lights a cigarette. Never been sure how intimate that gesture really was, although Anthony’s face is wide and open. Sammy squints. He always squints while he’s smoking.



        Even after we broke up Alan held on to me, any issue of loving becoming inconsequential as the actual core of our relationship became clearer. Responsibility. In the public eye he was still my property. Any damage done to him or by him fell solely on me.
        Out of all my problems, this was one of the very few I could not relate to Sammy. No matter how many times I explained it to him, his face would skew and he’d say “That’s bullshit,” meaning the subject was closed. I’m not sure if he meant I was making it up or if he meant the whole thing was just ridiculous. Doesn’t matter.
        The night we broke up, Alan and I, Sammy was by my side. One massive old-man hand was on my back while I talked on the phone, moving slightly back and forth over my trembling shoulders. When I hung up on Alan I turned to cry into him and I fell asleep against him on the couch that night. Some people accused us of a Lolita-esc situation, an intense May-December romance, but that’s bullshit. Sammy was permanently non-sexual. He was like a genderless angel.



        “Look, I realize it’s kind of perverse I’m just…I know. I know…yeah…Look, I understand what you’re saying, I just disagree, Maude, it’s…All I know is I’ve spent most of my life alone and sometimes I have to wonder if…If I would’ve made as many mistakes if I’d had someone with me…yes, I mean romantically…yes…I-no, it’s not that…you’re being unfair, really, I’m not…I’m not saying I’m a failure for not being married, I’m saying that I can’t help but think being so would’ve helped when…No, actually, it wasn’t like I had a lot of friends there for me, that probably would have…Well, because when you marry someone it’s not like you’re going to casually drift apart the way you do with…right, but…that’s true, but…Can’t you just accept that I have a romantic streak and leave it at that? I always have and I’ve not exactly been shy about it, just like you’ve always been pretty obvious about your own feelings on the issue. We all know you’re a cynic and a realist and a fan of platonic relationships, you don’t have to tell me that, I realize it, I realized it as soon as you opened your mouth…Well, it’s true.”

            He died in the winter and, thanks to a sudden thaw, was buried in the spring. If we’d been expecting it, if we’d already started planning, I think we would have been able to pop him in the ground lickidy-split, but that wasn’t the case, obviously.
Alan didn’t come to the funeral, and I’m telling you that because Maude won’t mention it. Not because she’s angry at him for it, but because she’s ashamed of it. She’s ashamed that she didn’t tell him Sammy had died and didn’t give him a chance to say goodbye. I held Maude’s hand at the service. I stood beside Alan as he cried over the grave. Sometimes being the second in command is boring, but it’s important and I’m used to it at this point.
            Take the night Sammy died, for example. We were out walking, nothing unusual, just the dark city and the occasional passing car. Maude, being Maude, had skipped out ahead to jump thorough rain puddles or who knows what. So I was left with Sammy, his hand wrapped tight around my arm. Whenever he stumbled in the slightest the hand tightened fiercely and I would pause for a moment.
            “I’m fine,” he’d say, a slight drawl on the vowel, frustrated.
            Which he wasn’t, of course, on reflection, because people that are “fine” don’t die within the end of the night. They die years later, alone in their beds, and no one has to see the deed being done.
            By the time we got to the bench, Maude was long gone, off in Maude-world, a place no one’s allowed into but Maude and even then only sometimes. In any case, I eased Sammy down and then sat next to him, my hands hanging over my knees.
            “You’re a good girl, Joy,” Sammy said, chuckling a bit at the end.
            I pursed my lips a bit and pushed my tongue against them. “Thank you,” I said.
            “Yes.” He drew a long breath in, too long, longer then he should need to. “Yes.” For a moment we just looked around our separate ways, heads pivoting like chameleon eyes. I stared up at the tree branches and listened to the sounds of the freeway behind us until Sammy spoke again, saying “Do you ever wonder?” but I never found out what Sammy wondered, because when I turned back to him I could see something was wrong.
            For months I had know it was coming, even if Maude wouldn’t admit it. I’d wondered which one of us would find him, which one of us would have to tell the other and every time we went out I thought of how many nights we could possibly have left. Sixty? Twenty? Ten? Part of me wants to think that’s what he was asking. “Do you ever wonder, Maude, how I’m going to go?” But at that point it was too late, he was already going.
            In the end I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cry, first of all, which isn’t surprising for me, but I couldn’t make the phone call. I dialed the number, she picked up and I said “Hi, Maude, um, Sammy wanted to go home, he was a little tired so I took him back.”
            “Oh,” she said through the static, “Are you sure I shouldn’t drop by just to say goodnight?”
            I bit my lower lip, squeezed shut my eyes, clenched my free hand for just a moment and replied, “Uh, no, he seemed really tired, he probably wanted to go right to bed.”
            “Okay. Well, then, I’ll go home my own way then, so don’t worry about me, okay?”
            I would worry about her. I would worry about her a lot. I would worry about her as I called the police to deal with the body, I would worry about her that night as I tried to sleep, I would worry about her the next day when I reported Sammy was found dead, in his room, by the landlord. But I hadn’t told her. It’s hard to be second in command. Sometimes you have to protect the leader for the sake of the group, and sometimes it cuts you like a goddamn stereotypical  knife.

           I get lost in the between places quite easily, not so much in the sense of lucid dreaming as it is a state of hyperimagination and paralysis. Some part of me shuts down and another slinks up to take its place, the fringe places pushing themselves forward to take over the mainland.
          If I sit still for too long, silent, it’s likely to happen.
          Dentist appointments are the worst, something about the anesthetic shots and the shine of the clean light. I close my eyes for a moment and I am gone, suspended as my mind goes elsewhere.
         In my head, I sit up. The bib is still around my neck, clammy, but the dentist and the dental assistant are no longer. Quiet smooth jazz plays softly from overhead. I can smell the scent of sterile medical things, tiny metal hooks and sweet fluoride foam.
          A young man sits in the corner, on the rim of a potted plant, dark hair falling in his eyes. He wears a loose vest, open, and a pair of pants cut off to show the tiniest flash of thigh above his tall socks. His hands rest on his knees, fingers awkwardly toying with each other.
          “Patrick Wolf,” I say in surprise, “What are you doing here?”
          He smiles at me shyly, not looking up, but I know it’s for me. “I’m here because you’re agnostic.”
          “What does that mean?”
          World weary, he makes a little sigh. “As much as I’d love to drag this out…You don’t believe in divine guidance, Maude. You don’t believe in saints or demigods or angels.” He gets up and comes over to sit beside me on the leg rest, making it squeak with effort. “But your subconscious still wants to tell you things, Maude, there’s a little…” With his fingers, he makes a small pinching motion: This little. “…part of you that you can’t quite think as part of you. Understand? And it wants to manifest itself, but you don’t believe in saints or demigods or angels.”
          I groan and lean forward. “My spirit animal is an indie musician.”
          “Oh that’s quite good!” he says, “Spirit animal. Yes. I’m you’re spirit animal.”
          My hands link together behind my heard, tangling in my hair. When I shift, it tugs the strands slightly with dull pain. “Something is so perverse about this, Patrick Wolf.”
          He shrugs. Meh. “I might as well be fictional to you, Maude, with what you know about me.”
          “Still, Patrick.”
          “Yes. Still. I know. Just let me articulate what I have to say and then you won’t think about me any more.”
          I sit up suddenly, shaking my head to loosen it. “Yeah, sure, go ahead, Patrick Wolf.”
          “Maude.” He drawls it, quietly, and I realize I have to look at him. When I do it hits me again; something about this is so perverse. “Maude.” He smiles a bit, one canine catching over his lower lip. “You have to finish your book.”
          I knew it was coming, of course, because it’s not like there’s anyone but me here, yet it still hits as if a blow to the stomach. “Sammy’s the only one who wanted to read it,” I said, “And he’s dead.”
          Kneading the bridge of his nose a bit, he sighs again. I am endlessly frustrating to myself. “There are other people who want to read it,” he spits out, and then suddenly softens, leaning over to my side. His hand lies on my knee and his mouth comes close to my ear. “They just have no way of knowing that,” he whispers. I can hear the giddy truth in his voice.
          “We’re going to finish up this filling, but then you’ll be done.”
          And I’m back, with the dentist’s hands in my mouth and the little drill whirring away. All that’s left is a vague feeling of guilt and I know that I will write when I get home.



          Aubrey’s cold is reaching biblical, plague-like proportions. None of the others will come near him, not even Ben, who shares the apartment. So he lies in his bed, blankets over the top of his head, naked feet sticking off the edge. He tries to smell for food, for Ben cooking, but his nose is completely plugged and all that comes out is a sorrowful honk.
          Something pings against the outside window and he turns to see it. Nothing, save a new tiny chip in the pane. Kids throwing rocks? His mind goes funny as he tries to remember if he’d ever thrown rocks growing up. That medicine doesn’t help his nose or throat, but it sure does make him groggy, doesn’t it? Hoo-ah! He rolls around in bed, kicking his legs with unhappiness.
          Being sick makes Aubrey painfully aware of how he lives in first person. Suddenly life seems all too immediate and the filament between his word and his mind breaks down all that much more.

          Sammy was old when he died, by the way, since I’ve already given his death away. He was in his sixties. So, if you were worried that you’d have to read pages of teenage wank about a boy shot down in his prime, don’t. We all knew it was sooner rather then later.



          My name is Maude. If I were a boy they would have called me Lee. So far I’ve hated every other girl named Maude, but I’m not sure of I just expect to at this point and that’s what does it. Names are tricky business.
          Joy, for instance, is a mess. Joy Yamaoka, the whitest white girl I have ever laid eyes on, not even so white that she looks exotic, like the Swedes or something, but just white. She’s adopted, in case you hadn’t guessed, and it’s short for Joyce. Her mother and father are wealthy Japanese pseudo-aristocracy; her birth mother lives down in Alabama with a pack of children. One summer Joy went to visit them and this brush with what could have been was unsettling to say the least. I’ve seen pictures: Joy leaning against a burnt-out truck with snaggle-toothed boys hanging out the windows, Joy staring across the flat land with her hand over her eyes to shade the sun, Joy not smiling but standing next to an enormous woman that is positively beaming, her birth mother. When she came back Joy was even more scowly and bitter then usual. Took days to get her out of it.
          See, there, I’ve given Joy away too. Shit. I’m a failure at this foreshadowing business.

         With the last droplets of his strength, Aubrey rolls out of bed. He clutches and pulls the comforter around himself until it resembles some sad bulky monk’s robe. Waddling, he sets off down the hallway, bumping into walls, tripping over his own feet.
          There’s a noise in the kitchen, good. Ben is probably up and about and might be persuaded to make a sandwich, some that is always appreciated by sick hungry boys. Aubrey starts sniffling in anticipation.
          As he turns the corner, his foot catches. His fall is epic, majestic, a thing of sheer beauty as he tumbles over. Since his hands are wrapped up inside he has nothing to catch himself with. While the blanket provides some cushion he still hits hard on his side, pain tearing at him.
          For a moment it’s all he can manage to lie there with his eyes squinched shut, shaking with the effort of not crying out. He nips at his lower lip. As his vision starts to clear he hears the soft swooshing noise of fabric against linoleum. Straining, he looks at the man sitting near his feet.
          David.
          He’s all grime and matted hair, covering up what Aubrey grudgingly admits is a genuinely handsome figure. Just looking at his hands makes Aubrey remember the clammy, sticky feeling of dirt and suddenly him wants to shower. His legs are spread out across the gap between the cabinet and the counter. They stare at each other, Aubrey violently indignant, David brutally nonchalant. David breaks the contact first, as he gets up, grabs his bag and wanders out the door.
          Fuck ass fuckhead. Load of pretentious shit and cock juice. Aubrey frowns through a lingering pain and mentally curses. Sweet motherfucking Jesus. David might be a decent drummer, but the fact that Aubrey has to willing spend hours with him is beyond reason.

         I’m not one hundred percent sure when they stopped being mine and starting being his, I mean, naturally in a way they’ll always be “mine” as he never actually sat down to put pen to paper, as the kids say, and he never sat around thinking about them and what they did and how they acted but they certainly were his.
          When you start a project like that, writing a book, you start feeling around for support. People get taken up and nibbled away in your desire for something steady to work off of in the first place. But making people read your work is hard, not to mention rather mean, as it’s work for them too. Not so much physical labor as it is sheer emotionally tiring, trying to pull it apart for flaws, discerning the major problems from the odd stylistic choices, and that’s provided they even feel like being truthful to you. Asking for honesty is, quite simply, asking for a lot.
          So to have someone that was not only willing to help, but eager and seemingly thrilled by the entire process…that was a gift I couldn’t help but question. Still, I gave him draft after draft, notes written on scrap paper, names and diagrams drawn out on the back of my homework, clipped bits of research with comments scribbled in the margins. He accepted, digested, and regurgitated it all back at me. His presence became a comforting pressure, a ghostly hand placed on my shoulder while I typed.
          But as time wore on I grew aware of a growth within myself, in that same fringe that sneaks up on me in the between state. In my confusion, I described it physically. A rounded shape, high as my knees, like the worn-down tree stump in my backyard I used to lay on when I was little. Warm to the touch, glowing lightly and vibrating faintly. Smelled like coffee and pipe tobacco, mossy firewood burning and the hot stale air of a blow drier. Without my realizing it, Sammy had inserted himself in my subconscious. Whenever I went to write it was there, comforting but absorbing.
          And since he’s dead now, no longer of any immediate help to anyone, I can only imagine that it will always be with me. I carry a dead man inside me and it’s starting to pull me down as well.

          Sometimes I think that if he had been younger I could have been the one true love Sammy spent the latter part of his life looking for. Mentally, I scale him down.
          Could I have been with thirty-something Sammy? At the time he was living in America with prematurely jaded college girls, shooting heroin and staying up to all hours of the night doing nothing. So, no, I don’t think I could.
          Could I have loved Sammy in his twenties? A bright faced but blurry-eyed Irishman, bouncing from bed to bed and drug to drug. When he spoke of it there was this sense of The Reach, grasping and pulling frantically at nothing, like a seizure victim. Even if we could ignore the chemical use, I don’t think I could handle that sad desperation.
          In the end, it would have to be the boy, barely grown and hardly bruised, sixteen or seventeen and living as a social afterthought. I can’t help but shave the layers of experience and shame off him until he’s a manageable size, until he’s just vague enough to be intriguing once more.

          I go to school, but you’re not going to hear about it much. Not to say that school isn’t important. If this ends up being my masterwork (now there’s a scary thought) and it’s exsumed by future generations, I don’t want teenagers to write papers on how I trivialized education. It’s not like that.
          One of my nastier base personality traits is my sheer passive-aggressiveness. My fear of alienation simultaneously dilutes and compacts this, meaning I can be needlessly bitter and still hate myself for it.
          When you get right down to it I’m just no good at school. I’m sure this will come up again, later, the more I try to explain the way I am, but for right now we’ll leave it at that. I’m no good at school. My consistent failure hangs over me, a constant tinny whine in the back of my head, and thusly I’m not going to tell you what it’s like. This particular shortcoming can take my real world, but it’s for fucking sure not going to ultimately be what defines me.
          So there.

          Wait, wait, I’m confusing things.
          I know I said I was writing for Sammy, which is true. But I wasn’t talking about this, this comes from a whole other set of questions I carry with me.
          Because that’s why people do this shit to each other, isn’t it? To answer questions? Or are we really just a bunch of vain, introspective martyrs. God, I hope not.

Only four out of ten are worth dealing with. And they're not even finished. I'm just so damn proud at having written something.

 

          "Your restless legs acting up again?"
          I nod, defeated.
          "Stress?"
          I nod again. While I've never been sure if it really is restless legs syndrome, sometimes if I'm anxious and trying to sleep, my legs will get the uncontrolable urge to move. Like all that emotional, angry energy has to get out somehow and this is the way to do it. Or like they want to dance and remind me who I am. Either way, really.
          "So...writing?" The light from my bedside lamp hits her face at an angle and only illuminates half of it. 
          "Um, yeah."
          "About me?"
          "About you."
          She smiles.
          Slowly, carefully, she comes forward to sit at the head of my bed, which is where my feet are. For some reason, being inverted helps me to sleep. I don't really like to sleep in the first place; wasted time, you know. She fits neatly behind my knees and rests a hand on my legs. Something so innocent about it that I almost make a noise.
          "Are you wondering," she asks, "If anything will ever come of you? Eighteenth birthday, so old?"
          She brushes her hand lightly up and down my blanketed calf. Oh, the innocence of it...Simple, happy touch has always meant the world to me. I have to remind myself to let go during hugs, to try and keep track on how much I've loved on someone in one night, so that it doesn't seem romantic. It's never romantic.
          "So old," she repeats, thoughtful. The idle hand flutters to her lap, then rests. "Too old," she whispers, "To have imaginary friends."
          Protective, I pull my blanket up a little. "You're only an imaginary friend if

 

          Feeling fated is a strange, bizzare thing. One of my most persistant emotions, it's also one of my most distressing. My life feels like it's cumulating to something. As I push up against it, I've gotten a clearer idea of what it is.
          I'm supposed to mean something to strangers.
          Of course, that still leaves a lot up in the air. I could be role model, or I might be murdered by a serial killer. A household name or a flash on the news. I could write the Great American Novel, or I could accidentally torture someone to death. Either way, someone I've never met will think of me
          It's part of my great dicotomy. Double think is one of my great personality traits. Somehow I manage to believe myself to be the best and worst of everything. I am beautiful, hidious, brilliant, idiotic, kind, callous, witty, awkward. I hate the sound of my own voice, but am always talking.

 

          He had the rare gift of loving everyone until the proved that he had absolutely no right to. Most people were taken with it at first (Perhapes if he wasn't so small and non-threatening it would be different) but as the spent more time, they grew discontent. His brown-eyed love, completely unasked for, slowly made them feel guilty and pinned. Two months was the limit. Perhapes less.
          He was a halfway decent guitarist (nothing spectacular, to say the least, as he almost never practiced) and drifted easily in and out of bands. The time frame was a little longer here. Six, seven months. A performer who genuinely adores his audience will draw a crowd. Just the way he looked at them, joyful, would have been enough.
          But his bandmates were not immune to the cycle of shame. While they always took care of them as they were kicking him out, he was passed from group to group as a kind of autistic little brother. Everyone felt responsible. No one knew why.

 

          I'm very keenly aware of my obsession. I feel on the edge of something and if I give in one more time, if I take one more step, I'll crack and they'll make a VH1 special about me. "Fans Gone Wild" or the like. No, that makes it sound as if I'd be flashing the camera or something. I mean like they'd drag me out into the daylight to meet my objects of affection, and I'll scream and cry and make them horribly embaressed. I don't want to be that girl. I do want to be on a VH1 special, but I want to sit in an armchair and comment on some concert in some venue that influenced some band. To disect my passion rather then blindly embrace it. To effect, to alter, to teach.

 

 

            Carla realized that David was getting out of bed when her leg hit the cool sheets. Her hand flopped over the edge as she stretched and bent her head back to look for him.

            “I can’t come back,” David mumbled. He searched around on the floor for his pants; their clothes were mixed together on the carpet and in the dresser. Biting her lip, Carla stared. “Where, where are my pants?”

             She flipped over onto her back and rubbed the palm of her hand over her eyes. “They’re…um…they’re next to your guitar.”

            The guitar was leaning against the hallway wall, by the door. It never came into their bedroom; in fact, it usually sat in the front entryway by their shoes and coats. Last night had just been particularly fevered and it’d been pitched aside at the last minute. David had remembered just in time to ditch it. Guitar and Carla did not go together. They’d never gone together.

            He traipsed back in, shirtless and jeans not zipped. As he reached over the bed to pull the sheets over Carla’s bare breast, she grasped him, and he fell graceless. Legs went round his waist, arms looped to meet behind his back and she heaved him over until he rested beneath her.

            David waited, and sure enough, she let go after a moment. Sometimes she just had these flashes of moods, and he knew not to fight it. He left her soon with a kiss on the forehead and a reminder of where he was going to be that night. For a long time after, she laid in bed, positioning herself like he was still there with her.

            Meeting up with David after shows was never easy for her. Most of the time, she could fool herself into thinking their arrangement was okay, but standing outside bars, waiting for him to come stumbling out, she wondered. She wasn’t part of his world. She didn’t want to be part of his world. The music scene was a sad, sorry place; full of ghosts and waifs. When they met, it was when she was a waitress and he was a busboy. They spent their breaks kissing in the back alley.

            He didn’t need to be a busboy anymore.

            Just as Carla was getting down into a really strong mood, David pitched out into the street. She grabbed at his hand, feverishly, and nearly pulled him down the sidewalk.

            “Did it go well?” she asked him.

            He shrugged. “I had a drink before I went on. That wasn’t good.”

            Carla made noises like she knew what he was talking about. In all honesty, she had no idea how he sounded singing. Every time he’d try to sing to her she’d kiss him, and eventually he realized that she didn’t want to know. When he left notebooks open around the apartment, she flipped them closed. She was never violent, rude, anything like that. She was just trying to be passionately disinterested.

            “Simon quit,” he sighed, ran a hand through his hair. Carla could smell the bar off him, like the smell of a hospital on the ill. “I mean, it wasn’t a surprise, but, you know.”

            Again, she nodded and made noises.

            Simon, as the weeks went by, would be replaced by Justin, who would be replaced by Steven, and so on and so forth. David got progressively skinnier and somehow more cheerful. He spent more and more time away from Carla, as he could finally tour, but he called. And it only made their times together more frenzied and pure.

            Their first record, their first real record passed with hardly a blip in Carla’s world. She remembered the night he was signed, and then the night the record was released, but in her head nothing had changed. To her, he was still a struggling musician that wasn’t going to be able to keep it up much longer. The deadbeat that she loved.

            It wasn’t until she heard him talking to an interviewer on the phone that she knew something was different. For one thing, he didn’t sound like David. His speaking voice was different; higher, slightly faster, with this funny clipped undertone she couldn’t place. She listened to it and it gave her shivers, but when he came back and kissed her neck, she forgot.

            When she saw the poster, she called him and asked “Did you realized that they’re putting giant pictures of you around town?”

            “Yes, I know. I was kinda there when they took the pictures.”

            She frowned at him, even though he couldn’t have seen. “When did you start going by Davy?”

            “I’ve been Davy for years. It’s just you don’t know the people that call me that.”

            This suddenly, more then anything else, affected her. “Do, do they call you Davy in interviews and shit?”

            “Yes. Are you driving?”

            “I might be.” She was.

            “Hang up; I don’t want you in a car crash.”

            Carla, driving home now too fast for safety, wanted desperately to think of David and Davy as two separate people, but she knew that wasn’t the case. They were both her boyfriend. She brooded desperately at home, and was prepared to break it off up until the point when he walked into the door and she remembered who he was. He was hers. No music could take him away from her.

            He was gone even more now. David was home for a few weeks at a time, smiling and flushed. Something had changed now; he was bolder, he would snuggle up behind her as she tried to do laundry in their new apartment. He spoke quicker in general, there was an eagerness to him she hadn’t seen before. No one had quit in months.

            The second album came out. It was marked by long periods of his presence for nights and absence in days. Better then him not being there at all, but Carla slightly resented being woken up by a slightly tipsy man with loving on his mind. Fortunately, she could smack him and he’d desist.

            First award. Carla didn’t know what it was from. She had to dust it sometimes, otherwise it sat there like the useless hunk of wood and metal that it was. Pointless.

            World tour. He was gone. Always gone. David bought them a house in the country, because people recognized him now. Carla hated the house; it was big and sterile like a house in a magazine, a house where people don’t actually live. Since she was the only one ever there, she shuffled around in her socks and grumbled.

            As another year passed, bleak and joyful, a fear grew in Carla. David was, she must admit, the same man he ever was. He treated her the same way, treated himself the same way, but she didn’t think of him the same. It was, really, a simple matter of falling out of love with him. With anyone else, it would have been easier, but this was David and he wrote songs about things.

            They broke up messily, suddenly, when she said “I’m not…I’m not sure if I love you anymore.” He’d snapped his head up and stared at her with violently sad rage. In the end, they promised to be friends, to stay in touch, yadda yadda yadda, but it was meaningless and they both knew it. She could see the bitterness in him when she shook his hand goodbye.

            From then on, he was an abstraction at best. Before, when she’d been actively avoiding him, it had been easy. Now he was everywhere. Billboards, magazines, record store posters. Davy, Davy, Davy.

            Eventually, as she’d always known she would, she swallowed her pride and did it. She picked out the CDs at the most mainstream chain store she could find, and went home before even opening the packaging. Headphones seemed necessary, almost like armor.

            She couldn’t tell, as she’d expected, which songs were about her. She couldn’t connect the shivering busboy in thrift-store pants to the man in her ears. After all the effort of the disconnect, she found the music didn’t matter in the first place.

            David married a starlet. Carla was invited, but she'd never dream of going.