ceciliatan

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.

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?”

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.”

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?”

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.

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.

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.