Plush (11 page)

And he goes slow, then fast, then deep, then out, then all I want. We have the same rhythm – our rhythms rocking the earth – and right as he’s starting to shake and cum, I pull the elevator stop off, and we go up grabbing each other, clinging as we orgasm as one. He kisses me so soft. All over my mouth, outside my mouth. Everywhere. He carries me from the elevator to his suite.

The uppers are wearing off. Naked, hand-in-hand on his bed, we sleep. My head on his chest. Leg over him. A koala to a deep rooted tree.

Sleep.

Sleep.

So many dreams.

When I wake there is a full breakfast spread on the edge of the bed. “Boy, you sleep long,” he says as he comes over and kisses my forehead. It’s been so long since I’ve had someone so tender not wanting anything from me. So sweet, take care of me. I feel like a child. He puts some cartoons on – my favorite ones. How did he know I love the old school, 90’s, retro, MTV ones? Some fans on YouTube turned me onto Ren & Stimpy and Daria and now I download and watch them obsessively on the road.

His strong, working-man hands hand me a cup of orange juice and a lit cigarette. He pops another pillow under my back and head and lays next to me. These days, I feel like everyone I meet wants to use me for my body or for my fame, but I never know if they understand what lays underneath – except Jack, of course. But I feel Carter understands something deep in me, something hidden.

We laugh together at cartoons; he reads me some of his stories; I write poetry on his chest; we fuck; we cuddle; we do nothing; we never leave the room. I don’t even check my phone.

“Carter?” He strokes my hair so soft and slow. With so much care. No drugs. No ulterior motives.

“Yes sunshine?” His smile, oh, his smile. I believe I might believe in good again or that I could even be… good again.

“I haven’t felt this happy since when I was a kid. Right before my parents split. We had a pony with a big silk-ish bow on it. We had moved to a ranch. It was just Jack and I and the Wild West of our hearts playing however we wanted without the truths of what lives become and what becomes of love and drunkenness and bad parenting. We laughed so much then. So much.”

His lips are on mine again; he lifts me into him. I feel so small in his arms. I want to live in this dream forever. I want to believe that I can be normal and happy. But in the back of my heart, there is a tourniquet-pinch-syringe-twinge-twist as I know tomorrow I will go back on the road.

I cum. Again and again. Night. Day. He passes out. Moon and stars. The sun in the dawn. White bed spreads. White walls.

“What happens to us when this honeymoon is over?” I whisper into his sleeping ear. I can’t handle it. I don’t want to say goodbye. I can’t say goodbye. I better slip out now before he wakes up, and I don’t know what I want anymore. I worked so hard to be here. And I have to go. I kiss his forehead how he kissed mine so sweet before, put on my robe, and slip out the door.

In a few hours I’m back on the road. Silent. Crying inside. Looking through Jack’s pockets for some drugs.
Please kill this feeling of not knowing who I am or what I really want.

25

It’s 3 A.M. and we’re somewhere on an open night road in Kansas, nowhere upon nowhere upon nowhere. Passing sliver moon and fields, Jack and I lie side by side. He knows something is not right. He grabs his guitar: “Hayley, tell me what’s wrong.” He strums an open A on the beater acoustic with stickers all over it. Everybody else is passed out Helter-Skelter style across seats. Earplugs are in to drown out our endless talking and playing and the horns and the wheels and the pedal and the breaks.

“I’m searching for something in between the lines of love…

but I don’t know what,”
I sing say.

He hits a G, nods his head.

“Always needing here in this room called desolation, with a smile.”

Jack completes, then sings, fixing the melody a tad, then hits an A.

“The doctors of love are.”
Me.

“Poking my ribs.”
Jack.

“Telling me to spread.”
Me.

“And I just can’t say no.”
Jack.

He goes into a pre-chorus progression, playing harder and more angsty. I open and let it out all this pain of wandering everywhere.

“I just go, I just go, I just go…”

He goes back to the A. His hair falls in his face. He’s staring right at me as wheat or some kind of fields blur in the light of our bus and then get sucked in the black of the night without street lights, never to be seen again by us.

“I’ve turned myself into a postcard something I can sell.”

I close my eyes as I sing.

“…to the tourists.”
Jack.

“People I don’t have to commit to.”
Me.

“I am loved but thirsty.”
Jack.

I feel the rhythm and let myself lose myself in the raw truths of my reality.

“With my panties half down, see the highways through the holes in my heart.”

Jack:
“See the men reaching through, trying to souvenir a part.”

Me:
“Just take what you want.”

We go into the pre-chorus together in perfect harmony:

“I just go, I just go, I just go…”

Jack stops. Licks his lips. “What now? What chord should we start the chorus on?” I tilt my head and feel and the words just come out: “Eleventh fret E-string and hold it there… It’ll add tension – then fourth fret, seventh fret, then eleventh fret for two rounds.”

He strums, tries it out; it feels perfect and strange. Always we complete each other’s thoughts. No one knows me more. He’s the body and I’m the wings. Together we really make something.

“Hayze… you should come in early with a little line so it starts on the E-flat and ends on the E-flat…” Ok. Well, huh – what’s true… what’s true right now for me? Hemmingway always said if you’re stuck just say one thing true…

“I’m losing myse-elf…”
I sing.

We try out the timing until it fits in the pocket.

Then he sings that part with me:

“I’m losing myse-elf”

Donnie wakes up and starts to drum on the arm of his seat, his tats dancing fast up and down on his arms with the rhythm.

“Do you wanna me?”
I sing.

“I’m losing myse-elf.”
All of us.

“Objectify me…. I’m a woman machine.”
Me.

We go for another hour and complete the song “Woman Machine” all with a wild solo and all. Diego yells from his perch, “When I add the base line, it’s gonna be a freaking hit.” We all agree: it’s going on our next album…

When the world has got you down and you can’t find the ground and everything is disappointing, sometimes I feel like the only thing that will understand me is a song with Jack.

All the pain can dissipate, even if only for a moment.

26
    Feb. 1, 2007

Hello new city. Hello same party. Hello, goodbye, wake up, disappear. Where is Hayley in the whole drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll life dream thing? I miss Carter. It’s been only 6 weeks, and something is clearly wrong with me. I can’t fuck anybody else – and not because I haven’t tried. It’s just when I look at them, all I want to see are Carter’s eyes. The insane poetry of our bodies screaming to each other for more. I want to sleep. I want to be taken care of again, made to feel whole. We are more than halfway through the tour, and I can see that our lives are rabbit holes. Jack and I grabbing whatever we can: drinking, smoking, dying, loving. I feel like a cliché. CARTER. CARTER. CARTER has rooted himself as a Prince Charming to save me from myself. There is no Evil Queen or Stepmother or Poison Apple, just my own desire devouring me whole.

But I don’t write to him or return his texts except maybe with just a smiley face – if at all – because I would just collapse hearing that thing that I can’t have. And besides… what if he’s not obsessive back? I need to be worshipped; I need love; I need softness; I need it all. He sent flowers to me at my hotel in Des Moines the week after we hooked up and the message said,
“my one, my all.”
I gave the flowers to Annie. She laughed at the note and said, “Well, I’m not going to put out.”

I don’t need love right now. I’m so confused and messed up and the last thing I need is to be involved with someone like this – to dive off a deep end. I need to focus on my career and writing songs and helping Jack stay a little closer to the ground. Sometimes I feel that if I weren’t around he’d be shooting bad drugs in some back alley in Cleveland and completely lose himself. I mean, if he weren’t here I wouldn’t have made it this far if at all; I’d probably kill myself from the insanity of living on a planet that doesn’t get me.

But it doesn’t mean I don’t notice Carter, and it doesn’t make me want him less. I just obsessively check his column online to see what he writes, Google him, and stare at his face on a screen. Empty visions of a life that won’t be.

We land in Tokyo wearing faux-fur and destiny. Jack and I walk hand-in-hand off the plane to thousands of screaming fans: little girls with my hair cut, boys with his, girls wearing the ‘key to the broken heart’ that Jack wears. Thunders of voices, loud and louder, shrill and giggle. We step between barricades, white-painted with orange kanji on them, and tall security guards in suits push us through – an ocean of fish drowning in the oxygen. I’m not in my body. The noise. There’s so much noise, never silence – except the painful kind when I try to sleep at night and the world closes in. All I feel then is the failure and uncertainty and impending doom and worms crawling though all the holes I put in me or my family put in me – so silent I can’t breathe.

There’s a break in security! Ah! Will we get elephant-stampede-trampled?
AHHHH! GO, GO, GO, FASTER, FASTER, FASTER
. We’re running away from all those little school girls. Chase, flash, scream. Skirts waving. White knee-high socks. Louder and louder. Jack opens the door, and we get in the black Escalade, just in time.

I am nauseous and throwing up, though I’m not high or drunk. Maybe I have the bird flu. I puke into a bag Jack hands me, then he throws it out the window. We drive from Narita with green hills and endless tall trees, to the outskirts of Tokyo, to the heart of the city: endless, gray, stacked buildings with rainbow neons and big, painted advertisings; trains speeding; mini construction cars; skies of man forever; laundry hanging from tiny squares. Jack is rubbing my neck and downing champagne. I’m too sick to drink.

FLU, FLU, FLU! The radio is playing J-pop. Squeaky clean, auto-tuned choruses jump about, singing to the beat of the what lays just outside the windows of our souls: giant screens, endless dreamers working away, and all what for? Tokyo makes me feel manic glee and like a cockroach on a shit pile of unimportance. Tokyo makes me feel how big the world is and how many of us are on it all trying to find a little meaning.

Limo stop. Hotel up. Puke, puke, puke. Upstairs. I want to crash, but I’ve got a nagging feeling that something’s up with my body – and not drug wrong, but seriously, seriously wrong. I haven’t had my period, but I think I’m too skinny to get it anymore anyway. But I’m not sure, and I’m so fucking hungry. I go down to the ‘souvenir n’ drug n’ snack’ shop in the lobby and grab toothpaste and a pregnancy test – no it’s not that, but just in case. Just in case. I’m not freaking out. Nothing’s wrong. NOTHING’S WRONG. And some octopus jerky thing.

Upstairs, cry. I pee on a white stick. Time is a fly trying to get out of molasses. Like that last death scene in a 13-hour film, it goes so slow and slower, and I just want to know what I already know – that I’m not pregnant and everything is fine. It will be fine; it will be fine… FINE!

The toilets buttons mean so many things: wash your ass, make noise so people can’t listen to you peeing. I love the fucking Japanese.

Time! You FUCKER! HURRY UP!

Pink starts to come through on the pinky-tip-sized screen. Double lines.

I’m FUCKED. I’m FUCKED. I’m FUCKED. I’m FUCKED. I’m FUCKED. I’m FUCKED. I’m FUCKED. I’m FUCKED. I’m FUCKED. I AM SO FUCKING FUCKED. I am BEYOND FUCKED. FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, AND MORE FUCK! .

Wait.

There’s only one person who I’ve slept with in the last 6 or 8 weeks. HOLY SHIT. Fuck. Carter. It’s Carter’s. Fuck me. My world is crumbling all around me. Nothing ever makes sense or goes right, and life is never what you plan it to be. AND WHO THE FUCK IS RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THIS INSANITY?!

I hold my finger to the sky and scream!
RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? FUCKERS!

DO you REALLY HAVE IT IN for me?!
AHHHHHH
. SOB. GASP. SOB.

I crumble to the floor and crawl out of my head. Everything hurts. Go. Curl up in bed. I will finally call him. Shit. If he doesn’t pick up… it’s a sign to not tell him… and to get an abortion. I start punching through the address book. Carter, Carter, Carter. Green. The phone is ringing. Flower bed spread – I’m falling in a world of flowers with sharp teeth devouring me.