How to Kill a Rock Star (32 page)

No kidding, it’s spawned something of a cultural awareness in me. Or lack thereof, as the case may be. I’ve spent the last three and a half months traveling across America with my eyes pricked open, looking for a goddamn culture, looking for some meaning. But al I see are truck stops and golden arches and Big Gulps and a lot of little dreams crushed by big powerful men behind big desks.

Maybe that is the culture. Maybe it’s supposed to make me proud to be an American, but al it makes me feel is positive we’re doing something wrong.

Doug Blackman said it best—al that shit about America being homogenized. He’s right. Sacramento is San Diego without the beach. San Antonio is Tampa without the palm trees.

Miami is the Art Deco version of L.A. and Denver is Pittsburgh plus the Rocky Mountains. The suburbs are even worse.

Apparently sometime in the last ten years every suburb in America has mutated into an exit off the Jersey turnpike.

But you know what? Forget it. Forget everything I just said.

I’m no political scientist, I’m no sociologist, and I’m not smart enough to figure out who or what is to blame. Us lazy con-sumers? Washington and Jefferson? George Bush and his goddamn cronies? Sam Walton and that guy who played Moses?

Maybe the guy who signed Shitney Spears had a hand in it. I just don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m no threat. I’m a little Dixie cup floating in an ocean of molten lava. To Winkle and al his min-ions, I’m nothing, and sooner or later I know they’l see to it that me and my big mouth are six feet under where we belong, and when that day comes I expect the heathens and pagans to break out their expertly choreographed hip-shaking asses and boogie al over my goddamn grave.

One more thing I should mention—the girl. I met the perfect girl. So perfect she could have been manufactured at a How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08

5:00 PM Page 280

28sweatshop in Malaysia and purchased during a blue-light special at K-Mart. Her name’s Jil Bishop and she is completely devoid of any principles.

She thinks life is too short not to smoke. She thinks the reason music exists is solely for entertainment. She thinks Starbucks invented coffee. She thinks only nerds read books. She doesn’t know the words to any song released prior to 1980—incidental y, the year of her birth. And her mismatched bras and underwear look like they came from the goddamn lost-and-found.

I don’t feel much of anything at al for Jil Bishop, except maybe a little loathing. But that’s why I let her in.

Listen, I know I’ve been slacking here with the goddamn audio diary. I just tried to cram a lot of information into a little bit of tape and now the tape is running out so to sum it up, let me just say that the last few months have been horrible, amazing, and surreal, but most of al they’ve been disappoint-ing, and I’m glad the tour is coming to an end.

I’l check back in once I get home.

This is Paul Hudson reporting from the penitentiary of his mind.

Over and out.

A lot can happen in four months.

—
Loring Blackman, March 2002

The summer had started off relatively mild, but by the end of June the meteorologist on Channel Seven’s morning newscast warned that a suffocating July 4 was around the corner. I elected not to believe a word of it. I had no intention of acknowledging the imminence of Independence Day, hot or cold, because acknowledging Independence Day meant acknowledging the day Paul was scheduled to board a Boeing 737 at Miami International and, a few short hours later, God-wil ing, touch down at JFK.

As it turned out, Loring’s warning had been an understatement. A little over three months had passed and he and I were now sharing meals, recreational activities, as wel as a bed every night except for Fridays and Saturdays when the twins slept over and I hung out in Brooklyn with Vera.

“We need to talk,” Loring said that same June morning immediately fol owing the newscast. He’d just returned from a five-day video-filming trip to Los Angeles and was unpacking. There were clothes al over the bed.

“You wore short sleeves?” I said, partly to change the subject, which sounded deeply important, and partly because I was concerned for his safety. I tugged on his shirt. “Please tel me you didn’t wear this on the plane.”
28The two little lines creased in his forehead.

“For someone so smart, you can be a scatterbrain. Never wear short sleeves on a plane. In the event of a fire, your arms would be pizza crust.”

“In the event of a fire, my arms would be the least of my problems.”

I grabbed the shirt’s tag. “Synthetic. This is nothing but ground-up plastic. It would melt right into your skin.”

“My Kevlar shirt was at the cleaners,” he said.

“Joke al you want. If I were you I’d wear a race car driver’s suit. Leather is your best bet. After that, pure wool, then untreated cotton.”

Loring kissed the top of my head and laughed. “Can you imagine the field day the press would have if I walked through JFK in a racing suit?”

I wished he hadn’t mentioned JFK. JFK reminded me of Paul.

“Eliza, can we talk seriously for a minute?” I felt my face twist into a grimace. Talking seriously, to Loring, meant asking questions that seldom provided him with the answers he wanted. And it was too late to start lying to him, he knew too much.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like you just bit into a lemon.”

I was sitting on the bed with my back against the head-board, hoping Independence Day would never come, and trying to adjust my sour face so as to appear normal. “You’ve been gone almost a week. Can’t we just fool around?” He finished separating his dirty clothes from his clean ones, dropped what needed to be washed into a big bal on the floor, and then sat down. “What is it we’re doing?” The question suffused me with inexplicable sorrow.

And Loring was slouching. Usual y he had excel ent posture, but he suddenly seemed depleted of al upper-body strength. “I found myself talking about you a lot while I was gone. Of course it never failed that someone would ask who you were and I didn’t know what to say—she’s my friend, she’s my roommate, she’s the girl I’m sleeping with? What am I supposed to cal you?”

“Last weekend, Vera and I met a guy in Prospect Park who, for a dol ar, made up a rap using our names. He told us to cal him Yo-Yo. Why don’t you cal me Yo-Yo?” Loring neither smiled nor laughed. “Help me out here, please.”

“Sorry. What do you want to cal me?”

“Mine.”

I sighed, and Loring’s expression grew even more staid.

“At least tel me this,” he said. “Tel me what’s going to happen on the fourth.”

“I’m not going to the show, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s the least of it. Eliza, I need to know if it’s real y over between you and Paul, or if I should be prepared to watch you pack your bags, hail you a cab, and wave goodbye while you drive back to your own personal Jesus down on Ludlow Street and out of my life for good.” In a mil ion years Loring could not have realized the significance of his word choice. If he had, there’s no way he would have said it.

“
Reach out and touch faith
,” I mumbled.

But Jesus didn’t live on Ludlow Street.The fol owing night I rode the train down to Second Avenue and walked by my old apartment, and it looked so completely Jesus-less I couldn’t believe I’d ever been fool enough to think otherwise.

For at least ten minutes I stood outside the building. And then, more or less unconsciously, I headed in the direction of Rings of Saturn, jaywalking at the intersection, almost
28wishing a car would turn without looking and flatten me.

John the Baptist stopped what he was doing. “Wel , if it isn’t Miss American Pie.”

His eye was disconcerting. I couldn’t tel , from where I was standing, if he was looking in my direction. “Are you talking to me?”

“Yeah, I’m talking to you. Who else would I be talking to?” He fixed me a drink and said he’d missed me. “So, how’s our boy? He enjoying the life of a rock star?” I knew, by way of Vera, that Paul had spent a lot of time drowning his sorrows in Rings of Saturn after our breakup.

There was no doubt in my mind John knew the score.

“Don’t be gay,” I said.

“Whatever you say, Miss American Pie.”

“Why do you keep cal ing me that?”

“It’s a good name for you. Know where Don McLean got the title for that song?”

“No.”

“Supposedly, American Pie was the name of the plane that crashed and kil ed Buddy Hol y.” If John was trying to be funny, he was failing. “That’s a
horrible
name for me. And anyway, what kind of idiot gets on a plane named after a pastry? He should’ve known better.”

“We should al know better, Miss American Pie.” Leith was having a wrap party for the cast and crew of an indie film he’d just cut, and I’d promised to meet Loring there at ten, but it was after eleven when I left Rings of Saturn and started walking toward Leith’s place on Leonard Street. Halfway there, I took out my phone intending to cal Loring, to tel him I was on my way, but when I passed a wal of fliers advertising the upcoming Drones show at Madison Square Garden, something possessed me to cal Paul instead.

I loitered on the corner of Canal and Broadway looking at the posters, looking at my phone, trying to work up the courage to send the cal , and reasoning that it came down to one basic fact: Loring deserved an answer to his question, but I couldn’t be Yo-Yo or anything else to Loring until I learned where I stood with Paul.

At the last second I almost abandoned the cause, but then I realized I had nothing to lose that wasn’t already gone and I pushed “send.”

Paul picked up on the third ring. The sound of his voice was like a defibril ator to my chest. I wanted so badly to hate him, but his voice had the power to flood al my enmity and water it down to nothing but a steady stream of longing.

Despite everything, I swore I could stil hear a burning supernova of hope and truth and love inside that voice.

It wasn’t until his third “Hel o” that I final y spoke.

“Please don’t hang up.”

He cleared his throat. Behind him, a girl’s voice said,

“Baby, who is it?”

Paul told the girl to go back to sleep. Into the phone he said, “You stil there?”

“I’m here.”

“Hold on.”

I listened to what might have been a sliding-glass door open and close. I pictured Paul shirtless, a sheet wrapped around his lower body like a holy shroud, leaning over a hotel balcony.

It was beyond heartache, imagining Paul like that. It was heart obliteration.

“What do you want?” he growled.

“I’m not sure. I was just walking down the street, I saw posters for the show, and thought I’d cal and see how things were going.”

I heard him drag a lengthy stretch of smoke into his
28lungs. “I’l ask one more time. What the hel do you want?” I stifled the urge to cal him a bastard, and another one to cry
I love you
. My eyes were fixed on a water tank atop the building across the street. “I need to know what I am to you.”

He laughed, but the sound translated into contempt.

“What’s the matter, you and The Thief have a spat?” I heard him take another drag. “By the way, you’re affectionately known as The Liar.”

His voice was sharp as spit and every word that came out of his mouth was thicker and more venomous than the last.

“Can you be civil for a minute?” I pleaded. “We used to be friends, remember?”

“Friends don’t lie and cheat.”

“What if I told you the truth is a lot more convoluted than you think?”

“Is it true you lied to me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Can you take it back?”

“No, but I can almost explain it away, if you’d give me a chance.”

“How about how you’re fucking someone else? Can you explain
that
away?”

He kind of had me in the corner there. Nevertheless, I found his position staggeringly hypocritical. “Can
you
?”

“We’re not talking about me. The question is: can you or can you not change the fact that you suck Loring Blackman’s dick?” He waited, and when I didn’t respond he said, “
Answer
me.”

I sighed. “No.”

There was a loud bang in my ear, like Paul had taken the phone and hit the wal with it. “I can’t do this, Eliza. I can’t talk to you.”

“I answered your question. At least answer mine.”
“Fine. You want to know what you
are
to me? You’re my guitarist’s sister. My old roommate. After that, you’re nothing. Zero. Naught. Nil. Zip. Zilch.

Don’t cal me again.”

“I won’t, you—”

He hung up before I could get the rest out.

In mutiny, I dialed Leith’s apartment.

A male voice answered, party static behind him, and I asked to speak with Loring. I heard the voice yel something about Loring being wanted on the phone. A second later the voice got back on the line and said, “Who can I say is cal ing?”

“Tel him it’s his girlfriend.”

July 4, 2002

Because of the security measures implemented after 9/11, we arrived for our flight out of Miami ridiculously early, but the weather was shitty, there were thunderstorms and hurricane-force winds al over Southern Florida, and they told us it would be at least an hour before we’d take off.

I didn’t feel like sitting around the lounge so I hit the sundry shop. I got a bag of pistachios and a carton of cigarettes for myself, and a bottle of perfume for Jil —she went back to San Francisco to restock her suitcase and is planning on meeting up with me before the show at the Garden.

At the newsstand, I stopped for some reading material. I picked up a novel cal ed
Hallelujah
, written by some guy who, according to the inside flap, had died in a drowning accident before the book’s publication. I opened the book to a random page and read the first sentence my eyes landed on:
“I couldn’t give in to them because I knew that if I did, I’d
be giving away the part of me that belonged to her.”
I bought the book. I also bought a few magazines:
Sonica,
Time,
and with the acme of reluctance,
GQ
.