Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
The next morning we were awakened rather early by the phone ringing in our hotel room. It was Barrett and it was urgent.
“There’s a rehearsal you have to be at and the only flight out that makes sense is two hours from now, so you need to get going.”
“Two hours from now?” Ziggy’s voice cracked with morning roughness. “You know I’m like an hour from the airport, right?”
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
Court had her own room at the motel. Now that Christmas was like a week away the place had emptied out, so there were plenty of vacancies. I said good night to her at her door and said I’d see her in the morning to head over to Janine’s.
Ziggy was waiting up for me, reading a book in bed. He was in nothing but a bathrobe as if he’d just gotten out of the shower. “I was just starting to worry,” he said, setting the book on the nightstand.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
We got into a cab in front of the hotel in St. Louis. The weather was a hot drizzle, with the temperature around ninety and the air like soup. The cab driver was a black guy who definitely didn’t seem to think he had anyone but maybe a couple of college kids in his cab. Ziggy was still in stealth mode and I didn’t gel my hair or anything, just pulled it back in an elastic which meant the red streaks weren’t all that visible.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
Ziggy and I went home and fell easily into bed. The only time in my life I’d had this much sex with this little effort or argument about it for this long was while I’d lived in Spain. Well, maybe right at the beginning with Jonathan, too, but as we all know, the easy part didn’t last.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
(So close to revealing the cover designs for the new omnibus! We’re now at $2,441 in the the Kickstarter and when we get to $2,500 I’ll post them! Have you been meaning to back it? Clicky Here… -ctan)
Ziggy waited until we got home from Limelight that night to say “I told you so,” and then he told me in very very gentle terms, while wrapped around me in bed like a glitter-covered octopus.
He whispered. “You.”
“Hm?” I had been drifting in a post-sex daze, not asleep but not all there either.
“Can.”
“I can what?”
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
I don’t smoke and I never liked cigarettes. I think one reason I was never tempted to smoke despite my desperate teenage attempts to fit in was that I associated smoking with my parents being stresspuppies. They chain-smoked while they fought.
I form associations easily, though, and the way cigarette smoke smells when it’s leaching out of two toxic individuals like poison gas is completely different from the way your lover’s hair smells when you come home from a club. Or my own hair, for that matter. When cigarette smoke is mixed with the sweat from dancing and hair conditioner and the sweet vestiges of clove and weed and fog machine, it becomes heady incense. Tastes like it when I lick it right off his skin.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
I crashed hard. I slept something like twelve hours, maybe a little more. I’m really not sure. When I woke up and was really awake, though, Ziggy was in the shower.
I got in with him and we washed each other because that felt familiar and grounding. He was right: I felt like I’d been to the moon and being back on Earth felt weird, took some getting used to again.
When we got out, he said, “I have an idea.”
“I’m starting to like it when you say that,” I answered. “Is the idea about food, sex, or music?”
“Ask me about food and sex again in a minute because I have ideas about those, too, but this one is about music.”
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
Ziggy and I rendezvoused that Sunday, our “day off,” at the same hotel in the middle of nowhere as earlier in the week.
When I got to the room I realized it was a different one. I said something witty and observant like: “Hey, this is a different room.”
“Course it is,” he said, stripping his shirt over his head and making an utter wreck of his gelled hair by doing so. “The microwave was shot in the other one. I want you to touch every inch of my skin.”
Well.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
I paged Ziggy from home one night and then sat there without taking my eyes off the phone while fucking around with an instrumental I’d been working on.
Later I had a pretty good song worked out and the image of the white plastic cordless phone burned into my retina. I just about jumped out of my skin when it rang, though. I picked it up quickly. “Hello?”
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
(Happy US Thanksgiving, everyone who celebrates it! We’re offline today, cooking and eating, but we’ll get back online over the weekend! -ctan)
–
I don’t know what genius invented it, but let me say for the record that meatball pizza is awesome. Maybe it was a stroke of necessity: maybe one day a pizza guy was out of pepperoni and he thought, well, damn, maybe I should just slice up the meatballs I have for meatball subs, and put that on there? But I prefer to think it was a stroke of genius.
We got slices to go from the window on the street at the pizzeria and took a walk while eating them. The meatball was a little tricky to eat and walk with since it couldn’t be folded in half as easily as plain cheese, but it was worth the extra work.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
We left the club in a stretch limo, Tony driving, and headed up the West Side Highway. No, maybe it was the east side. I don’t know. I was too busy kissing Ziggy.
I know. Sarah was sitting there, looking smug and watching. But I had reached some limit on my patience or my sanity or something. Do you think I had been able to keep my eyes off him while he was dancing? When every twitch of his hips and curve of his hands was so obviously aimed at driving me out of my mind?
So I was out of my mind, kissing him in front of someone he’d just met, in the back of a car with blackout windows, with no idea what I was thinking.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
I woke up in the morning to the smell of coffee. I pulled on a pair of jeans. They were on the floor with a couple of other pairs and Ziggy and I are about the same size but I’m pretty sure they were mine.
Out in the living room he was perched on the odd, claw-footed antique chair, with a mug next to him and his notebook in his lap.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
I meant it when I said that “compromise” is part of the package if you’re going to be a professional musician, if what you mean by compromise is you accept that you might not just be able to scream the word “fuck” two hundred times and call it a song. Or any other thing that you might want to do. Understand, you have every right to scream “fuck” two hundred times if you want: It’s that no one gives you a right to make a living doing it. If no one wants to hear you, that doesn’t mean your art isn’t valid or important or good, just that it isn’t commercial.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
I’ll confess I got a little anxious when I tried to call Ziggy before going over to his place and got a recording saying the number was out of service. I know he had said his phone service was probably off, but I had this moment where I suddenly worried that he had left the country again. It felt like poison slowly coating my insides. I told myself I was being stupid. I was halfway there on the train when I realized I probably should have brought his bag with me. Whatever. He could get it later.
It was about half past three when I buzzed his apartment number from downstairs.
Up there I found him with a black and brown smudge on his cheek, wearing a T-shirt inside out, running shorts, barefoot. He had a paint brush in one hand. The artist kind, not the house-painter kind. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry. I found a piece that was half-finished and the next thing you know I started working on it, and is it after three already?”
( Read the rest of this entry » )Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.
The room was a corner suite. I stepped into the parlor room. The furniture looked like it was someone’s grandmother’s house. Someone’s rich grandmother, I should say. Tony waved me toward the door to the bedroom, which was open.
“I’ll be right outside in the hall,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll knock three times if Digger’s coming.” And then he–very thoughtfully–left the room completely.
I stepped into the doorway, my hands jammed into the pockets of my denim jacket, and leaned on the doorframe.
( Read the rest of this entry » )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
