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Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

I met Jonathan for a drink. At some dive in Hell’s Kitchen, which is a scary sounding name for a neighborhood but actually it was really not that bad. Not really all that different from a lot of other residential areas of Manhattan. Mine was non-alcoholic, his wasn’t.

I, of course, told him about my idea. “All acoustic, just him and me. No fancy production.”

“Pure…?” he said, swirling his glass thoughtfully.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

Tony knew where to park a limo temporarily at the airport and left the two of us in there while he went inside to stand around with the other limo drivers holding up a sign with Jonathan’s name on it. I was sure J would recognize him anyway since he knew we were coming to pick him up.

That left me and Ziggy alone in the back of a limo.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

I told her the rest over lo mein. It was weird telling laying out the whole thing, the whole trajectory of me and Ziggy, and I told her so. “I’ve never spilled it all at once like that, from beginning to end.”

“End? Is it over?”

“I sure as hell hope not,” I heard myself say.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

The next day, Jonathan walked around the house on the cordless phone, telling his parents, talking to his agent, telling a college friend who worked in film but was in London for a movie shoot for the next two months, all while he wrapped his cups and plates in newspaper and stacked them in a box.

“Can I ask you a huge favor?” he said, when he was between phone calls.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

(Site news: 1) Here’s the Saturday post I’ve owed you guys for 3 weeks! I’ve finally written far enough ahead I can post a bonus post! 2) Yes, yes, if you would like to see what happened during the J/Daron make-up sex, make a donation and I’ll write it and send it! 3) And tomorrow, there will be liner notes! -ctan)

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The next day I felt better but worse. Better because I felt like I’d gotten a lot off my chest, worse because I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. They use that phrase “through the wringer” to mean emotionally, but physically I felt about the same, tender and stiff.

I had one of those hot showers where most of what I did was stand there with my hands against the tile, letting the hot water hit me in the head. The sound of the water isn’t “soothing” so much as numbing. It blots everything out like static on the radio.

What the hell did you do, Daron? Did you really just agree to stay with him?

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

Jonathan called a little while later. I took it on the kitchen phone and Remo made himself scarce.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey. I…” He cleared his throat. “I wanted to check in.”

I kept it light. “Like to a hotel?”

He let out a little huff of breath and I knew he was smiling, though he hadn’t gotten all the way to a laugh. “You want to come get some lunch down here? I’m at the place down the hill.”

“Why, so I won’t yell at you like I did last night?” Well, so much for light.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

So, I was expecting a bout of insomnia, but I guess all the alcohol and turkey outdid the stress, and I passed out not long after J. and I got in bed.

Jonathan, on the other hand, apparently lay awake thinking about everything he had seen and heard, and Jonathan being Jonathan, made up stories to explain it. Which means when Remo came back at like four in the morning, and we got up to groggily receive the news that Digger was alive but his liver wasn’t in such great shape, Jonathan was basically bursting with theories.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the production company where Jonathan was working had their “holiday” party. (I think technically it counted as Christmas and New Year’s, too.)

I didn’t think of Jonathan’s company as very large, but apparently they were part of a group of affiliated companies, and each one of those companies had various successful (and not so successful) shows and films to their credit, which meant that the party was large and had a lot of A-list and B-list types. I pictured it as if Charles River Records and all the other small record companies that BNC distributed got together to throw a party.

J. and I went together.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

PART TEN: AUGUST 1989

I have a small confession to make. I had to reconstruct some of the sequence of events of these upcoming chapters with the help of dates in Jonathan’s diary. I never realized before how handy it might be to have someone writing things down all the time. Honestly. Because thinking back on it later I would have gotten things all out of order and made them seem like they went slower than they did. Or faster. As it was, I had pretty much convinced myself that I had moped around at home for a month or two before we went to Mexico, but no, they’d actually whipped me down there pretty quick. And of course Ziggy’s Betty Ford stint was supposed to be a month long, but it felt like six months to me.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

The Garden State Arts Center. Of all the places we played, this was the one I’d been to the most. When I was growing up, we lived so close, and there were always people with tickets, and when I was in high school there really wasn’t anything else to do besides go to the Shore or the mall. (One of several malls, actually, but in New Jersey all shopping malls are “the mall.”) Sometimes promoters even came and gave tickets away at school if a show wasn’t sold out.

Some of the kids I hung out with liked to go and party in the parking lot, so to them it didn’t really matter who was playing. In fact, they thought the worse the band was the better, because then there was very little incentive to bother going over to the lawn to see the show. I did go and see the bands sometimes, sometimes because I wanted to and sometimes because the guy whose car it was wanted to make out with his girlfriend in the back seat.