Elements
by Xoverau
(website :: livejournal)

You wonder how this could possibly happen again. You're not the kind of person who gets into situations like this, riding shotgun in Nick's car with your bootheels screeking on his gleaming dash and your hamstrings protesting and "Iguana" the only soundbite you managed to give a virtual army of photographers camped on the steps of the hotel.

You see yourself as a frustrated jazz musician, one of those indie ones who knows the years of guitars by patina and wrote his most enduring song on a cocktail napkin. You like quiet nights in front of a roaring fire. You like long walks on milk-white beaches, and golden horses with platinum manes, and looking at books. Not so much reading them, but admiring the ranks of words and the fact that someone put them all in order. It's comforting. You'd have no idea how to organize words into a story, if put to it, any more than Shakespeare could sing.

Of course, he was considered a bard. Bards sang, didn't they? Maybe he was bad at it and had to write instead.

That possibility is strangely comforting. You feel a rush of kinship for Shakespeare.

"So where to?" Nick asks you.

"Iguana," you answer.

He ticks his tongue. Streetlights unravel past his head like fishing line. "What the fuck did you do?"

'Shrooms. Lots of 'shrooms. "Iguana."

"I meant with AJ," Nick says, as if you made a reasonable response.

You squeak further down into the seat, which seems to be shrinking, and regard the space between your knees. 'Lots of 'shrooms' is its own explanation, like Jack Nicholson and barf bags.

"Why are you hunched up like that?"

Rather than risk a reptilian answer, you just straighten your legs and slide erect. You thought Nick said 'get down' or something suitably Bond-esque when you leaped in, but maybe that was during the part of the night that was set to the Mission Impossible score--not the Lalo Schiferin one, but the Danny Elfman remix. There was a party. You remember thick carpet and sequins. You may have shouted at someone. It's coming back in flashes.

"I really thought you were going to make it," Nick says, overhanding the steering wheel. Cindery light slides toward you over the dash like a stack of bills. "Months, and nothing. Then you pull this."

You started dating AJ because he kissed his dogs. It was the watermark of his captive sensitivity and attunement to nature, a code that only poets understood. You watched him murmur endearments in falsetto at a party (you were drunk on Sangria, he on rum and Coke) and forgave him every pair of plaid pants.

You stacked ash-covered beer cans into a careful pyramid and sat on his end table. You made a witty remark about Sartre, or possibly Bruce Willis. He squinted at you with red-rimmed dark eyes and asked you if you got high.

You complimented his voice, an elegant cough like a Harley starting. If you were an indie jazz musician, you'd talk like AJ McLean.

You fucked on a pile of guests' coats. Neither one of you took your pants off completely. You remember having to clean a woman's red vinyl jacket with a wad of Kleenex. The avoidance of a dry cleaning bill was the first secret you shared.

Under his mildly tormented exterior, you discovered, AJ was extremely tormented. It presented itself in inventive ways, like vomiting in your pool and burning a satellite of holes your Egyptian cotton sheets. He rarely roamed the halls in pensive silence, and played blues in the dark even less. You never found him laboring over brilliant, half-finished lyrics blotched with crossouts. He said "dude" a lot, and more than once when he called you, you heard someone giving him sloppy head.

Sarah, you try to say to Nick. It's much easier to blame a woman than cop to a string of cumulative stupidities.

Sarah catalyzed the worst of your inconstant nature. There was something ready and lean in her lips and eyes, like a state trooper's, and her energy sprang from the same inexhaustible source. Have AJ she would, nicotine patch and diamond ring and a whole flight of steps. She was a rock, and AJ was an island, and you were something far more ephemeral. Saint Elmo's fire, maybe, flickering good luck as he headed for port.

You think you may be mixing your metaphors. Nick would know, if you could only express it. Nick has been very helpful over the years.

Your inner British comedy narrator is nudging you with his elbow and giving you broad winks. You remember him from the bathroom at the party, waxing with devastating humor about condoms and ready-mix creme brulee while a girl in a dragon-scale dress crumpled blotting tissue.

He notes that Nick has helped you out of tight spots, a few jams and even a pickle. You're not sure if you should get horny or hungry. The 'shrooms haven't entirely stopped making your stomach roll.

"He cheated on her, too, you know," Nick says. "Hasn't been released yet, so...quiz tomorrow to see if you remember this."

You're enormously grateful to Nick. You like him more than Shakespeare. You wonder if he'd want to collaborate on a song sometime.

"Oh, God," he mutters, slowing for a flashing yellow light. "Stop crying. Shit, is it that bad? You didn't even cry about Brian."

Collaborating on a song always moves you. Nick should know this. He met you at a free Starship show and you held his hand and welled up during We Built This City. At the moment, you're not thinking of AJ at all.

Earth

The Santa Anas layer the skyline like thicknesses of torn tissue, fading from oxblood to poppy to chinaberry. The city's blotted out beneath them, and a thumbprint of sun smears the sky. You roll down your window down. The wind's smooth as ice shavings, disappearing on your cheek.

Love with Brian hadn't even taken time. You were ridiculously young, and he had dimples. He could carry you on his back, even though your knees poked out like Olive Oyl's to either side of his hips and you occasionally rapped your chin on his skull. His laugh reminded you comfortably of Chris's and Justin's, borrowed from an endless store of characters he carried in his head. He liked strawberry ice cream and broke out a lot in the two creases to either side of his nose. In summer his skin was liquid to your grip, sunscreen and coconut oil with sweat seeping through. Wanting him saturated every song you heard.

The first time he kissed you, it was in a bus bunk, with honey-thick sun draped over your feet. You were both virgins. He was on top and moved like he was fucking you, bump-bump-bump-arch-bump with his hips, lean flex of thigh in your lap, his mouth open and the tip of his tongue pebbled against your slick lip. Your hair darkened at the roots and your chin numbed from razorburn and you were so afraid to come that you got cramps.

He wasn't afraid. He filled the space between you with musk, linking fingers, damp breath dabbing at your throat.

You heard I love you in those sounds. You saw it in his astonished eyes.

Once, when you were in junior high, a boy who looked almost exactly like Brian pushed you into the shower and threw your clothes after. You chipped a bone in your ankle. It was the first time anyone called you queer. When Brian got married, you wondered if that was supposed to be an omen and you missed it. You'd be just that kind of oracle.

"You okay?" Nick asks you.

"Where are we?"

"Palisades. Hey, you're making sense. I was starting to worry."

"I was thinking about riding horses," you say. Nick glances at you, determining that your sojourn out of the land of non sequitur isn't complete, and keeps to the right of the broken line.

Air

Now that you said it, with the curious ignorance of cause and effect that hallucinogens provide, you are. Pounding a grass-blotched trail after Kevin with half the forest intent on tearing out your hair and the other half trying to cling to it. Your teeth chattered spontaneously and your ass hadn't hurt so bad since you made the mistake of following Joey to a leather bar. The horse, freshly lathered, smelled like a nineteen-seventy-four Ford Fairmont owned by dog lovers, and the reins bit into your palms. You kept waiting for the lift that Kevin talked about when you were planning this over old fashioneds at the Russian Tearoom, but all you can think is 'air conditioning'.

Kevin slipped from his gleaming chestnut when you reached the far-too-remote clearing he described, streaking his hair neatly behind his ears. His eyes were like the very newest stars of evergreen, still frosted with birth. The sun gloved his bronze body. "Was that a ride or what? I didn't know it was so wild out here. We even had to do some jumping, you notice that?"

Because you were addicted to connecting with him, to being the lone object of his focus, you hid your wince when your feet hit the dust. You felt like a walking horseshoe magnet. "I noticed. That was--it was--" No worse than choreography for seventeen hours, you reminded yourself. Smile, smile, smile. Thank you very much, it's a privilege to be here. "Incredible."

He lit up just for you. "This," he said, spreading his arms, "this is perfect."

You had to agree.

"I did coke while I was with Kevin," you say.

Nick glances at you, eyes turning to two dropped dimes as the last of the sun invades. You remember reading somewhere that blue eyes have no more color than the ocean, or the sky. They're a conspiracy of natural law. "Yeah? Me too."

If you had a drink, you'd spit it. "You and Kevin?"

"No! Hell no!" You can picture Nick's feathers ruffled with disturbing ease. You blame it on his hair. "Not like that. But I." Swift shrug. "I know what it's like to want to be good enough for him. Be sharp, you know? On your game."

Forcing yourself to be charitable above the din of approval coming from various factions in your head is hard, but the primary you prevails. "That was mostly your imagination."

"Coming from the Lizard King, man, that's sound judgment."

'Love Her Madly' parts the oceanic hiss of radio static, then sinks back under. Don't you love her madly, don't you need her badly, don't you love her as she's walkin' out the door. You wonder if you imagined the song, Nick's hesitation, or both.

A minute later, you break down and ask, "Are you humming?"

"Like she did one thousand times before," Nick sings, just loud enough to be heard.

"Thank Christ. I thought it was just me." You sprawl in the bucket seat. You've spent years as a cheapskate among friends with unreasonable cars. You've defeated the wiles of foreign engineers with your extreme flexibility.

"Comfortable?"

"Very. Kevin was a bottom."

The outcropping outside your window turns from an oatmeal-colored blur to a gritty one. You actually made Nick slow down. "No way."

"What, you think all football captains are pitchers?"

Nick blinks. You've confused him. You try to unravel why, but time has spun on and hidden the loose end.

You forge ahead. "He was romantic. Liked it to take hours, you know? Kissing, the whole thing. One time--I don't know if he ever told you this, but for my birthday, he hired a guy to take us up in a plane and fly us over the place where he grew up." He showed you near-invisible pleats in the green sheaf where some shiftless corporation had reforested with softwoods. You had too much champagne and threw up in the tiny bathroom, then bitched at the pilot for his unnecessarily steep spiral descent.

It turned out he was a friend of Kevin's from the third leg of the hundred hour tour. Kevin apologized for you and called you a cab at the landing strip, but due to his fondness for remote locales, the driver got lost and you spent three hours listening to Kevin and the pilot discuss lift and thrust whilst hammer-toting gnomes beat a slow path from your medulla to your cortex. Kevin would have made a marvelous indie jazz musician.

"Sex good?" Nick asks finally. You wonder if he's trying to be quiet for some reason, or if it's just the sound-chewing vastness of the sea.

"I used to fall asleep in the middle."

He roars with laughter. It sparks your own latent jollity. 'Shroom highs are like large, brightly colored circus balls; for the first few hours you balance them with a pounding heart, waiting to see if you're falling into tigers or clowns. You pass through a brilliant egoless glamour beyond, where you're in the spotlight and couldn't possibly give a fuck. After that, you find yourself laughing at dead baby jokes.

You slept through sex with Kevin Richardson. You hold your sides and fold up, howling.

"You piss your pants, you are buying me a seat," Nick says.

You'd suspect he's winding you up, but you actually did the time he took you home from Brian's anniversary bash. You were very drunk and entertaining the idea of hurling on a flower arrangement. "That wasn't my fault. You didn't tell me they were heated. Where are we going?"

"Mexico," Nick says. "You didn't pick a destination."

"You're shitting me." You can't read his eyes.

"So was Howie a bottom?"

You turn your face blankly toward the road. Wind crackles your hair. "I don't want to talk about that."

"I do."

Spirit

Howie is...

Fill in the blanks, you need to fill in the blanks, and there's a big one between you and Nick. A big one when you reach for whys. Howie is. Howie's. He's Nick's best friend. He's Nick's second crush. He's the only man you ever left.

"No reason," you mutter. You're conscious of how high up you are when the road turns from purr to rumble under the driver's side wheel. "Be careful!"

"He was fucked up about it. He didn't understand."

"I didn't understand! It was just one of those things! It didn't work out, it looked like it was going to and then we just grew apart--"

"Goddammit, you always do this!"

"Always do what?" You're stealing your lines from his script. The ocean is beautiful, mysterious, glimmering. It's all you can see out his darkened window, through the holograph of his hand. It could rush over you and put you out like a match.

"Play a part. Every single time." His voice cracks. "Who the hell did Howie love?"

"I don't know," you say softly. "I don't know."

Water

Nick takes you home. You knew he would; he always has, wherever home is. You ride with the window down, the mesquite-soaked air sluicing your cheeks, watching the streetlamps stretch over the curve of the bumper like rubber bands.

You wonder if you've ever smelled mesquite. There's a place near the Promenade that sells meat grilled on it, but for all you know, it's as different as grapes and grape bubble gum. There are other real scents you should be able to catalog, but they evade you like pearls from a snapped necklace. The mountain is leaving Mohammad.

On your only vacation, you and Howie went to a farmer's market on the Baja peninsula. You drove there in a very civilized SUV and thumped down a path as smooth as cocoa powder, using the steepness as an excuse to hold hands. Howie wore a shout-yellow shirt that ended up tucked in the pocket of khakis so old they curled, and you clipped weeds between your sandals and your toes. He cradled a bundle of fresh tomatoes, prying back the frost-green wood of the stem so he could smell it. Just watching him, sooty lashes on his cheeks and his lips slightly parted, you knew what it was like. That organic tang.

You couldn't possibly love someone with a nose that size, you decided, even if he did pick a white flower from the courtyard of your hotel and put it behind your ear with the dew still on it.

"What're you thinking about?"

He doesn't know. You've been hemmorhaging revelation, and he's sleeping in the last pew. "Kissing you."

"Are you nuts?"

"Why wouldn't it work?" You turn sideways, resting your head on the porch of the window. Your boots smirch the leather.

He laughs. "You want a list? Start with Brian."

"You're not Brian."

"You noticed. I'm flattered."

"But why?" Tiredness makes you petulant, but at least it's epic tiredness. You wouldn't be this petulant if you'd just stayed up til four writing lyrics. This is a special exhaustion reserved for 'shroom comedown with the only person left who might not say no.

"Fire and water," Nick says finally, running his hands through his hair. "Christ, JC. Can't you just go to bed?"

You suppose you can see the metaphor. You've never been a center-stage sort, Leo or not. You borrow faces that can stand the glare. "So I, what? I'm a wet blanket?"

Laughter glitters in his eyes, side by side with regret so old you know you'll never touch it. You're the last one who could.

"You're fire, you idiot. You're fire."