The words "Hard Core Logo, R and 900 words" might be considered warning enough. Darker than the movie, which was pretty dark and not only at night. _unhurt_ says that "not nice" is all the warning it needs. Beta by the incredible llassah.
Billy’s hands impossibly fast ghosting over the strings like the way he disassembles a gun again and again in Bucky’s kitchen. The room is full of dead men and only he can see them. All of them died for him. And it’s cool.
Los Angeles was beautiful, full of AMERICA’S lost children. Los Angeles is beautiful and always will be. He will always have Los Angeles.
Small town kids who thought singing the Star Spangled Banner at a high school football game meant they had talent. Playing Sandy in small town productions of Grease. Small things in small towns in small lives. They dream small dreams. They come to Holywood with all their simple dreams. And the dreams become wounds and begin to fester. Each of them bleeding away with a cut deeper than flesh, stripping away their hope until they meet a guitar player in the darkness. And he’s called TALLENT. He can’t spell it right, but maybe that’s just because he’s Canadian. Maybe it’s one of those smart irony things. They know fame is ironic. It’s like iron, hard and a blunt instrument to make everything they never dare dream come true. Everything they’ve ever wanted. He has that desperate cool. That total disconnect that their dreams of Love and Fame turn into as they watch themselves treaded into the dog turds on the sidewalk. Waiting tables as their hope eddies away.
And then he comes. Maybe he knows an agent. He lets them talk out their dreams. Makes them feel important again. Makes them feel safe. He’s like a mirror.
He’s always been a mirror. Since way before there was Joe Dick, since way before he called this thing inside him Billy TALLENT. You push and he pulls. He’s everything you ever haunted, everything you want to be turned slickly cool. He’s like a lantern to their fireflies. He’s like a man on a cliff holding a lantern. He’s not local.
Locals don’t lead ships onto the rocks with false lanterns. They don’t lie to get it all, they just beg and scrimp to get a little and hope it is enough. TALLENT gets everything. They are like the superglue on Billy’s fingers, holding the calluses together so that TALLENT can play them a little death song.
Lure them in with kaleidoscope dreams. Better than everything they’ve ever wanted, turned dark by everything that they have. They think they know all the tricks. They’ve become world weary in the glittering city of lights, but what they don’t know is that it’s their mind that is the trap.
He snares them up in TALLENT, steals them away onto back lots and darkness and he feeds. It’s not a craving, not a craving at all. He’s not a killer either. Guns don’t kill people. People do. And TALLENT is daddy’s gun in the nightstand, mommy’s security in her purse. All he does is gleam and talk to them.
There have been pretty boys with long hair who smell of Axe and desperate attempts at machismo. Girls with beautiful sad eyes who try to look different hoping to be pulled out of the crowds. They are searching for Cinderella shoes. Billy knows people in the glass slipper business. He never says, but they know. And what they find is the gun playing the pretty little death-song, telling them of the real American beauty. The way the AMERICAN DREAM really ends
The children, the children Billy plays with to make TALLENT’S flame grow brighter, named for a misspelt girl. They don’t know a thing. They admire his restraint. It would be tough, losing a friend like that. They don’t remark on the way he keeps away from the groupies or just talks to the shy girl in the back, who will be found dead in her bed tomorrow like a bleached rose. It must be tough losing a friend like that. They don’t know TALLENT. He pulls when they push, and they’re going to start pushing soon, pushing like Joe. They’ve already lost a guitarist to rehab and the best friends forever are going to start arguing about their plus ones and goodie bags and who looks the best in the magazines. And when they start pushing at each other. TALLENT will PULL. Like he pulled Joe, guided him right to the edge of the cliff and handed him the gun. He’s saving John for later, until the myriad directions of his mind begin to turn to darkness. He’s almost there. And Billy phones up and TALLENT checks him like a ripening fruit in an orchard. He pulls, moves the branches, so his prize gets more sun.
He doesn’t know what happened to Pipefitter. It doesn’t matter. He was only another mirror. A less than perfect image of everything Joe wanted in a friend. It’s enough that Tallent and Billy took the place that should have been his at the table. And at the table, they lean over and give Joe one last kiss and leave him despair in a bottle and a handgun from Bucky’s collection in his pocket.
Bucky. Bucky is the guy nobody remembers – pushed out by the Ramones and the British punks with their god-saved Queen – he’s just on the edge. Betrayal and no absolution. Maybe TALLENT should have Billy to invite him to a gig, let him sit in the VIP area at the back of the arena deafened by screaming children. That might be enough.
Except it’s never enough. TALLENT is always hungry.
Feedback should be sent here or left on the livejournal entry.
