Sweet Little Sister

The guitar was being plucked smoothly, Snake’s fingers were carelessly running up and down the frets, producing a sweet melody. This picture and most importantly, the sound proved that when education failed you, you had a gift to help you along.

The notes kept getting higher and higher until it was a guitar solo, screeching and uplifting.
Poor me, thinking I could get some rest without all of them around. Rachel and Sebastian had gone out, seeing some producer or something like that. It was an early morning of the beginning of January, a few days after the Whisky incident.

We hadn’t been to the Whisky since, word on the street was that there was a warrant for our arrest, accusing us of fraud…

“Sound good huh?” Snake asked but was mostly talking to himself.

I gave a sound of approval and focused back on the old magazine in my hands. This motel room was too small for all of us, if the whole gang was here, there’d be relentless picking on me, flinging the magazine across the room, pinching me… it was as if all of them were fuelled by each other.

“It’s a song called Youth Gone Wild, sounds killer with electric guitars.”

My gaze wandered around the room until a cloud covered my thoughts. “Snake, where are Rob and Scotti?”

The only room left was the bathroom, hell, it was the only other place that wasn’t the place Snake and I were lounging at. Snake stopped playing guitar and seemed to be confused. He set the guitar aside and stood up, running to the bathroom door and pressing his ear against it.

He motioned me to come over, so I ran and did the same. Soon afterwards, two voices filled the silence. What the fuck? No seriously, what the fuck? Why in the name of god were they in the bathroom together?
They were talking about random stuff from what I could hear. Snake kept chuckling so I couldn’t hear everything.

Water started running.

“Oh my fucking god, I have to stop this!” Snake said and immediately opened the door, “Cease the fag fest you fuckers!”

I pushed Snake aside so I could see. Scotti was brushing his teeth and Rob was looking at us with a what-the-fuck expression, while he was rinsing a shirt with the shower head.
Snake and I retreated to our spots, I guess it was going to be just another boring, normal morning.

**

Cassandra and I were hanging out down at the strip, thankfully when she was off duty, or else that would have been awkward. The sun had just set and the whole city was buzzing with activity, ready to creep around us and engulf us into crazy situations.

My coffee was tasting very good for some reason.

The company was good, I found myself wondering how much stuff I had in common with Cassandra. We both liked bands like Bad Company and the New York Dolls, she quit high school and was trying to figure out life.
Maybe if I was living back in Jersey, I would have looked down at her, thinking she’s just another piece of white trash but this girl was smart. She knew how to work her way around bad influences and just did her job so she could eventually open a beauty salon of her own.

“Do you think ‘88 is going to be a good year?” she asked.

“Seems like it so far… I mean, I hope so.”
I was honest, these had been some wacky months, the ones in the past. So far, 1988 wasn’t disappointing me.

“I feel like we’re on the verge of declining,” she continued, “like this whole attitude and scene will slowly die, don’t you think?”

“The glam and sleaze? Please, it will never die, it’s the best thing around, could you imagine Madonna at age 50 dancing around in her underwear?” I questioned, laughing my ass off.

Cassandra seemed to be very skeptical today.

“Oh crap, not them,” she mumbled, bringing her coffee cup to her mouth, covering half her face in it. I turned around in my seat and saw a group of guys walking down the street, towards us.
They hadn’t seen Cassandra yet, but they surely would.

“Who are they?” I asked, examining the guys from afar, trying to distinguish their features. They looked pretty wild but not like anything I had ever seen. They weren’t glamsters, they weren’t punks… they weren’t normal.

“They’re a band, they have lots of fans here in LA, called Guns N’ Roses… and I made the mistake of sleeping with him.”
She carefully pointed to the guy at the far right, with long straight red hair, aviator glasses and snakeskin boots. Now they were close enough, he was going to see her.

“Cassandra,” he said in a deep voice and stood in front of her.
The rest of them stood around like disoriented chickens, wondering why the fuck they had stopped.

“Axl,” said Cassandra laughingly but the guy didn’t find it funny.

“Let’s talk,” he stated and grabbed her by the arm, taking her with him somewhere around the corner. I sat horrified in my chair, glancing at the remaining four who seemed to do nothing, or even try to initiate a conversation. This was the most awkward I had ever been in my life.

After a good minute of silence, at last it came.

“Aren’t you that girl who punched Candy?”
I took a better look at the guy talking and realized it was that weirdo who had sat by me and asked my name. Oh him… Jesus, what was wrong with his chest? His shirt was slightly open and all I could see was hair, no skin at all. Christ that’s scary!

“Uh, yeah, that’s me.”

He laughed. “She still has a bump in between her eyes! Fucking awesome!”

Okey-dokey…

One guy took the empty chair beside me. He must have been shit-faced for days now because he looked the part. His hair was the craziest hair I had ever seen on a human, wild, curly and covering his eyes.
He had a top hat on, which was a bit eccentric if you asked me. And the cigarette hanging from his mouth of course. Whoever this dude was, he had something going on, he was unique, I had to admit it…

“Don’t mind him, he’s comatose,” the guy with the black, shoulder-length hair told me, rolling his eyes.
His style was very bohemian-meets-Hanoi-Rocks, he looked like a cool motherfucker that could go on for days without talking to anybody. For some reason, I had no idea why, he subliminally appeared to be a very sexual person without being considered repulsive. He was like a pervert… who wore perversion well.

Last but not least was a freakishly tall guy with blonde hair. His hair was very bad-ass, I could see and I liked the way he dressed, like an elegant hobo, with t-shirts falling apart and dirty pants, along with the padlock hanging from his neck. I’m sure he’d have a weird name like Damian or something.

“Maybe I should find Cassandra…” I mumbled and went to get up but Damian grabbed my arm.

“Just let Ax talk to her and sort things out!”

“What’s the guys problem anyway, she’s a hooker for heaven’s sake!” I shouted, getting a few weird looks from people passing by.

“Axl is a long story,” they all said in unison. I stared at them for a while.

“Excuse my language but… who the fuck are you guys?”

“I’m Steven!” the retard screeched happily, jumping up and down.

Damian took a seat beside the comatose guy, “I’m Duff and the sleeping beauty is Slash. The dude that looks like a little kid cleaning chimneys in England is Izzy.”

“Shut the fuck up Barbie,” the guy called Izzy said.

I laughed, it was fun watching these guys pick on each other.

“And you are…?” asked Duff.

“The name’s Anna and that’s about all you need to know because let’s be honest, you guys give me the creeps.”

“Hey!” the guy sleeping suddenly yelped. “…where are we? And whose hooker is this?”

Pissed off by the last comment, I punched his stupid hat off his head. Everybody held their breath for some reason. I looked back at them, wondering why they were all so serious.

“Never touch the hat,” Izzy said through gritted teeth, pushing me behind his back. He went over to Slash or whatever his name was and spoke to him as if he were a child.

“Now she didn’t mean that, look its all okay now,” he whispered and picked up the hat off the ground, dusting it off and placing it carefully over his friend’s head.

I was given a very severe look by Duff. So I just stuck my tongue out at him, I couldn’t think about anything else to do.

Just then, Cassandra came back, with a pissed off Axl right behind her tail. Thank god she had come back, I wouldn’t have lasted much more with these guys.

“Let’s get out of here,” Cassandra said, holding my hand and glaring at Axl. They all mechanically waved by to me, everybody except Slash, who was staring at his hat and talking to himself.

We left quickly, deciding we were better off without these weird people.

“So what did he want?” I asked her.

She laughed. “He was rambling on about how we should be together and shit like that.”

“Well, he’s not hard on the eyes, why not give it a go?”

“Anna that guy is cuckoo I tell you. I heard he pushed a girl down a flight of stairs just ‘cuz she didn’t want to sleep with him.”

Wow, now that’s not what a sane person would do.

“And plus, he’ll probably end up looking like shit in twenty years.”

“They all do,” I laughed.

“Your brother probably won’t, he has good genes!”

I cringed. “Hey, let’s not talk about Rachel… I’m still trying to get over the fact that he fucked some slut while I was sleeping right next to him.”

“Let’s talk about Sebastian then…”

I gave her a look. “You are on a roll today, aren’t you? Is it the let’s-solve-Anna’s-problems day?”

“Okay then, maybe you don’t want to know something I know.”

Bulging eyes. “What?”

“There’s this chick that wants to bag him. She saw them play a gig around here last week and is head-over-heels for him.”

“Who’s that bitch? I’m gonna kill her, no scratch that, I’m going to m-”

“Stop. Problem is, Sebastian has been talking to her…”

My face dropped and I stopped walking. I knew this day would come eventually, I just hoped that it wouldn’t have been so soon… shit. Fuck. Shit. Could it really be true.

“She’s blonde isn’t she?”

“Yeah…”

We continued walking in complete silence. Just around the corner of this block was the motel we were staying at. I couldn’t handle that right now.

“You know what… I just remembered I had something to do,” I told Cassandra.

“What?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Find Joe.”

Before she could even oppose, I was gone.