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  “I am not as you think…”

  His face was now the color of dusk and his lips swelled like two broken ankles. I eagerly sank my teeth into the bottom one and pulled it off. It didn’t make a sound. Flaps of carelessly perforated skin dangled briefly from my mouth as I chewed it, but they too were consumed. I took the other lip in the same fashion exposing his flat yellow teeth. He stuck his tongue out and frantically waved it back and forth fruitlessly searching for the absent pieces of his face and as he did so I bit into that too, sucking it out of his mouth into mine. Once convinced I had the full extent of it between my teeth, I severed it from him. He had no air with which to carry a scream nor a tongue to crown it so he kicked and shook violently instead.

  I saw my mother and my father’s face with my mind’s eye. The inconceivable disappointment they carried in their fine lines. Their son now a hive on the lawn, cracked in half by a nasty child with a stick standing triumphantly above. An entire kingdom vanquished in an afterthought. A bird with one wing sat doomed in its tree.

  “I am only as I say.”

  A magisterial cry echoed. I recoiled my fingers from around his neck and as he stumbled back I fell upon him and straddled his chest, my thumbs pressing firmly into his eyes until they exploded at the back of their sockets. There is no crime without a witness. Tiller would go and take his idea of me as a liar and cheat with him and anyone that sympathized or saw me not as I said I was would have their eyes gouged out as well. There was no room in this world for opposite realities to coexist. Reality is not subject to interpretation. It just is, and everything else is not.

  He emitted an inhuman sound. I smelled his shit as it filled his pants. I laughed and bit off his nose, tossing my head back and letting it slip down my throat, chomping mightily. The blood was everywhere. I rubbed my cheeks against his, my forehead and chin and nose gliding across the gaps in his face, cackling madly all the while. The soul that left his body saw me clamped onto its former neck, now open wide, drunkenly consuming the fluid that spewed forth in a rhythm dictated by its useless pulse. Then, with an erection as hard as diamond, I cracked through his chest and chewed up his heart. I had never before in my life seen death, but there, in my head, in that room that day it appeared as real as my own face and I came to fear it on a level deeper than hell itself. My meeting with Tiller was the last time I would ever be so unprepared for dark to fall. In abject blackness an artist was born anew.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BEGINNING IN AUGUST I had about twenty shows lined up at a few House of Blues and other decently sized venues that would stretch as far as Los Angeles and back. I was supposed to have two shorter runs in secondary markets in the time in between the end of my scheduled Australian run and then, but with all the problems I had in the studio I knew I was in no shape to hit the road and therefore lost out on a significant paycheck and valuable opportunities to promote the new record.

  Though I was slowly recovering, there was still a part of me that went intentionally unexplored, the part where I had buried the humiliatingly vivid image of me laying bloodied and unconscious in a dimly lit Australian venue. Videos taken by onlookers were all over the Internet, so my embarrassment reached far beyond the borders of heavily guarded dignity and deep into the dark forest of public perception. If I chose to unearth it and stare at it for too long I knew that I might be moved backward through the loathsome caverns of wounded ego, relying solely on an irrational and all-powerful anger to guide me, so I felt it best to just let it be and distract myself in any way I could while I waited to be whole again. I could not let that awful weight cripple me any further, and as Dr. Singer said, there was no reason to remind myself of the past by holding vigil over those unnatural events, nor should I any longer devour myself from the inside out over the incredible weakness I had shown in being so easily bested or obsess over the fact that such unthinkable treachery had occurred in the proverbial public square after which the guilty walked, never to be tried. It did me no good in those weeks that followed to slink around and believe I was owed an apology, and even though it might have been the only thing strong enough to pull me from the canyon I was so eagerly racing toward the bottom of, it was not permitted by whatever horrible voices drove the man who pushed me there. I was out of his sight, and if I were to believe the things he barked at me as I passed in and out of consciousness on the floor of the venue lobby, I was certainly insignificant enough to be out of his mind. Whereas a few weeks prior I would have greeted death warmly and asked its help in finally ending my lonely descent, now I wondered if maybe I couldn’t recruit life to try to do exactly the same thing.

  If there was a karma, perhaps it would avenge me, and Frank’s actions would echo forever and the beauty around him would hear its awful call and wince and turn away from him while I was given strength to move out of earshot and back to the higher ground I inhabited until the day we met. Of course if karma didn’t, it would just reinforce my belief that karma wasn’t, and though I would lose in the same way I had always lost, at least I would still be able to say that I knew it all along. Being able to accurately predict a constant loss is more rewarding than being unable to predict a sudden win. Being surprised is being made to look stupid and there was no state of being more despicable than the one occupied while looking stupid.

  In the time I had at home to myself I found I was not as desperately seeking the company of friends as I typically would have been in the dwindling hours before I was called on by the greedy road. I was noticeably less frantic about consuming Eddie’s gossips and gripes and in this slowed jog I unearthed a surprisingly pleasant solitude—surprising because for as long as I could remember, fear of exclusion was the prevailing tendency that drove nearly everything I did. When I was young I more than once opted to piss in my own pants rather than go to the bathroom and miss a minute of the parties that my parents threw almost every summer weekend growing up. I refused sleep because it meant accepting the possibility that there was no more fun to be had, and as an adult that stubbornness translated into an appreciation for cocaine and other forms of speed. It was a stifling fear that without eyes upon me, without multiple witnesses to my existence, I had no alibi that proved I was alive. I would hoard experience in the basement of time like a deceased lover’s belongings, convincing myself that one day, in order to save my life, I may need to dig up the “Eddie Breaks Beer Bottle Over the Head of Some Guy At Father Baker’s” file. I hadn’t seen my small circle of old friends in a while, and soon I would be leaving again. So where was my unhappy hunger for their lives? How was I able to sit comfortably alone on a Friday night gently strumming my guitar rather than going to the bar and struggling to devour the city all in one bite? Why was there a significant but indefinable distaste for their impassioned sermons about the glory of our shared teenage years? It hurt my heart to look upon them and feel no lust. My soul whispered rumors of estrangement.

  It wasn’t that I felt urged to move beyond them, for I still loved them dearly and in many senses they were masters from which I was still learning. I admittedly had no one closer to me than Eddie, and probably never would. Our friendship went back nearly fifteen years and I was no longer the kind of person willing to invest that much time in constructing another bridge. Our connection, however, was not built on level ground. Intellectually he was far my superior. His knowledge flirted heavily with any historical or pop-cultural topic you could imagine, and his charisma and charm were immeasurable. More than just my friend, Eddie was the only one in the world so linked to my child mind. I respected him immensely and loved him without flinching, even when in the depths of the maddening hell summoned by the terminal sickness of his father. As far as I could tell, his otherworldly insight into the faults of those around him never pertained to me, nor did his flawlessly instinctual judgments of character. His enthusiasm for me particularly, and to a lesser extent our small circle of friends, was never betrayed as it was for most of those unlucky enough to find themselves on the fringe peering in. Eddie and I had probably been drunk together more often than we were sober, but there was a glory in our breed of drunkenness that put us apart from the locals that crammed themselves into the same dusty bar night after night. It slurred our speech but exacted our vision. We were surely to be plucked from our exhausting but noble journey around the familiar track of our small town and reassigned to an alien ocean of a life more profound. We weren’t like them, we told ourselves. We mattered.

  So in this brief hiatus between tours, the fact that there was no compulsion to walk out the door and accompany him at the bar where we had spent most of our adult lives confounded me as any new knowledge would. He was an old hero of mine, one I had long ago been given in exchange for a different version of myself, so the charge from him to me had always been deep and essential whether I was willing to admit it or not. But something now was nagging me to step back, to accept our spaces, and cherish the pause between frantic gulps of lifeblood. Maybe, as I had once thought while looking at my parents across the dinner table before I began down my own road, I could love him and simultaneously need him no longer. Maybe, but that conclusion was a terrifying one and I was not willing to accept it so easily. As if snapped from a dream, I resumed life as myself and quickly veered back onto the path I had always tread. There was an addictive danger outside and so, with all its flare and speed, the undisputed champion of this new internal bout was still desire—my desire for other people and for the attention they gave me and the comfort in our commonalities and in the safety that herd provided. I put the guitar down and quietly left my house, taking extra care not to wake Hannah who was sleeping alone in the bedroom upstairs. It was raining gently. I inhaled the shiny old air and though my mind raced, my betrayed heart thudded
heavy. I made the same right turn out my front door and headed up the same hill toward the bar, struggling with each step that I took away from the massive, immovable center.

  With an inspired enthusiasm wrested from an uninspired contentment, Eddie and I thwarted fate that night—as we had always done—by drunkenly reveling in our tales of atavistic conquests, feverishly assembling fortifications around our holy past in order to protect it from the oncoming dawn and its dangerous change. When together, we were suspended in brilliance; feral children, full of blind faith in glorious things. We drank and spoke to shadows and we laughed in voices not yet made tired by protest or sadness. We celebrated false a victory as we once had in the sixth grade when a bunch of us cornered a neighborhood kid named Daniel Whitfield in a street hockey game and ripped his dirty shirt off his body into pieces while laughing at the efficiency of our hybrid monster (though unbeknownst to Eddie and the others that joined us in our unprovoked tirade, I had returned to Daniel’s house the next afternoon and plaintively handed him my entire week’s allowance so that he might buy another shirt and begged his forgiveness as I wept for him and for the terrible pain the whole world would surely cause us). Eddie and I took our places under a spell we remembered fondly, one that shielded us from the itch sober men developed that foolishly leads them to gamble with a future that could bring new beauty as easily as it could death or failure. As aging men, we encountered our unfair present and uncertain futures, and we took a drink as if it were a cautious step backward before scampering behind the motherly leg of our pasts. Here, at Father Baker’s, we were hopelessly locked in a sacred intoxicated gaze with youth, and in its eyes we saw mutual simplicity. Here Eddie was not a high school teacher and I was not a musician, because our identities were drowned in the flood of the happiness we disingenuously told ourselves would last forever. If we broke from our huddle, we would find nothing but loneliness in the dark woods and there was nothing more horrific than that.

  At 2:30 the next morning I stumbled through my door and slunk into the bed next to Hannah, failing miserably at trying not to wake her.

  “Shhh sizzz jussa dream yer still dreaming shhhh,” I mumbled as I pulled the blanket up over my chest.

  “Honey, you smell like a hobo,” she laughed groggily. “Where were you? I was lonely.”

  “Me’en Eddie had one drink.”

  “One? That glass must have been a hundred feet tall. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have gone with you.”

  “It’s all-dudes-no-chicks,” I said as I turned my back to her in order to hide potential faint traces of perfume. I felt her sit up on her elbow as she spoke closer into my ear, her freshly washed hair cascading down the front of my neck.

  “Can it be one-dude-one-chick soon? We haven’t had a date in so long.”

  “I know, I promise.”

  “You promise what?”

  “I promise someday.”

  At this, she withdrew quickly and put her back to mine, frustrated that someday was all I could offer her. But the sad truth was that someday was all I had. After all these years, I still knew not what I could give her—and I still knew not when.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A JURY OF ADMINISTRATORS VOTED in favor of my guilt. I wasn’t present. I learned that Laura was never even contacted concerning the matter in the first place, so she wasn’t present either. This example of Virginia Tech’s ineptitude in relating to or communicating with their student body was second in audacity only to the early September death of a sophomore whose body was found in the bushes after falling from the tenth floor of her dorm building. Me and two of my friends had unknowingly walked past her on our way to a party as she lay mangled but hidden a few feet from the sidewalk. The next morning when she was discovered, the president made no mention of it, and when asked, teachers were “instructed not to comment.” Some said that it was an accident, that she rolled from her top bunk directly out the window, which was not likely but, given the set up of the dorm rooms, definitely possible. Rather than claim responsibility for faulty design, VT’s stance would be to call it an “unintentional” suicide, which sent her poor family into an emotional tailspin. There were no therapy sessions set up for her friends, no on campus vigil, and her roommate was given a 4.0 and sent home for the remainder of the semester where she could stay quiet. So, when I called my father to let him know that I had received a letter which outlined the results of a clandestine meeting and which politely asked me to either resign and take zero credits or stay and receive a 0.0 grade average and complete 300 hours of community service, he was not surprised.

  “That school needs to get its shit together and learn how to talk to its students instead of keeping them in the dark. Fuck ’em. Just come home. I know how much you hate the idea, but you can at least finish the semester here.” I was on a plane the next evening and was enrolled in Ithaca College by the end of the week. I didn’t look back at VT until almost a decade later when the entire world was forced to gaze somberly upon it and collectively wonder with tears in its eyes how chaos of such an ungodly magnitude could befall so many innocent, unsuspecting people. My father and I, sad and sick with anger, needn’t ask.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN AUGUST ARRIVED, AND I felt well enough to take the stage again, it was only Chet and Cube and I in the bus now that Frank had informally resigned or been dishonorably discharged, depending on how you looked at it—if you chose to actually look at it at all, which none of us really did. Cube was my tour manager, which meant he ran my entire life on the road, handling all things related to money and time. It also meant he was subjected hourly to a level of stress that has made men of less patience abandon their obligation to sanity and discover God. Cube earned his nickname because he was as tall as he was wide as he was deep—six-foot-six, and easily 280 pounds, with thick black glasses in front of his beady eyes and under his tilted flat-brimmed black snapback upon which was embroidered a different word seemingly every time I encountered him. Cube had been the doorman at a bar Frank and Evan and I frequented in our late teens and given how often we drank there, the four of us became friends through lack of other company. He was covered in tattoos, loved to fight, had a small dog, and when he laughed—which was often—he laughed willingly, convincingly, and deeply. He was also an encyclopedia of music trivia. On busy nights, I would stand at the door with him and help check IDs while he talked to me about his dreams of moving to San Francisco. On slow ones, he would sit at the bar with us and suck down beer as if he wasn’t even on the clock. When I decided that things on the road were happening too quickly and too often for me and Frank alone to properly attend to, Cube was the first person I called to help me handle all the responsibilities. After much convincing, he quit his job as the bar’s gatekeeper to start a life taking care of us on the road. Cube had a Zen-like calm to him most of the time, but could be, if prompted, responsible for absolutely stunning acts of violence. Once in Fort Wayne, Indiana I saw him grab a mouthy drunk by his collar and punch him so hard in the face that the poor man exploded out of the back of his own shirt like he had been spring-loaded inside of it and fell back against the bar, topless and flabby. Cube then calmly used the shirt to wipe up the beer that had spilled and went back to slowly sipping his refreshing Jack and Coke next to me while the entire place stood with their jaws agape.

  In stark opposition to my responsible tour manager, Chet—my sound engineer—gave me the impression that he burst into existence out of a timeless void as a fully-formed monstrosity in an upstate swampland with a cigarette in his mouth clutching half a tallboy of warm cheap beer. He was not the kind of person that you can imagine as an innocently curious young child doing things that normal children do in their early development like making friends, kissing girls, playing sports, or not putting their dicks in ant hills for money. Chet was a specimen, a ruthless and unrelenting explosion of senses. He desired more pleasure than joy and required more touching than feeling. I could discreetly observe him for hours and each moment would be more fascinating than the last. His brown hair was short and perpetually mussed, his eyes were enormous and bloodshot, his teeth were stained yellow, and he was speckled with horrible tattoos, but he was, despite all his mental instability, a remarkable sound technician. I had already begun touring when we met at a mutual friends house over a heaping pile of drugs after Father Baker’s last call, but when I told him, through clenched teeth, that I could really use a professional sound engineer on tour, it was serendipitously revealed that Chet moonlighted as the house sound guy at a biker bar in the suburbs and he lunged at the chance to tour with me full time. I liked to think it was a selfless act of kindness, but I knew as well as he did that beyond the confines of our small city there were prettier women to fuck and better drugs to ingest. Despite never really vibing with Frank, he had been with me at every show since that cold, blue early morning.