Keep the Faith

It wasn’t the same that night.

The glaring lights burned my eyes, searing neon swirls of red and white onto my retinas; the echoes of the previous bands rang painfully in my ears; the feverish screams of the crowd sounded more than ever like growling, bloodthirsty wolves, shrieking vultures circling overhead in anticipation of a fresh kill.

He gave it his fucking all, the straining muscles of his neck visible through taut, marker-and-sweat-streaked white skin, but his voice in the speakers, his alkaline lips on mine were dead, and when the show was over, he dropped the microphone without even a second glance and walked wordlessly off the stage, disappearing towards the dressing rooms while the rest of us were still wiping the sweat out of our stinging, bloodshot eyes.

I watched the tense angles of his shoulders receding, a sharp, splitting ache crawling up through the marrow of my sternum as I recognized the pain engraved across his body. Someone offered me a water bottle, but I pushed past them with a muttered apology and started down the hall, footsteps echoing his.

Barely able to breathe, I followed him around the corner and finally through a doorway, unprepared for his sudden stop, the twist of his shoulders as he turned abruptly to face me.

His eyes flickered briefly upwards, not even far enough to meet mine, and his hoarse voice mumbled “Why don’t they trust me? What am I doing wrong?”

I stared at him, answerless, and when he turned angrily away from me, anxious fingers pulling at his ebony hair, I felt a surge of white-hot shame and hatred crash down over me, raw violence ripping the breath out of my throat.

What the fuck was he doing wrong?

Wasn’t he a fucking human being, with flaws and faults and filthy black stains on his soul just like all of them? Wasn’t he allowed to fall too? Wasn’t he allowed to buckle under the temptation, to slip and fray and snap like a branch under the crushing weight of a constant spotlight, so much misplaced faith, an addiction that still had – and always would have – its black razor claws sunk deeply into the reddening flesh of his chest?

An addiction that still made it hard to breathe sometimes.

How many of them, thirteen, sixteen, nineteen, thirty years old, could claim to have overcome the way he did, stopped cutting, stopped cheating, stopped drinking, lying, stealing, getting high, fill in the fucking blank? How could they forget that the things he’d faced were the very things that made him capable of snarling the lyrics they loved so fucking much into the harsh mesh of the microphone, asking nothing in return from them except a little faith?

I could see it every waking moment, the tortured stare glazing his haunted eyes, and it made me sick to think that despite everything he’d learned about fame, everything we’d all learned, sooner or later, their ruthless spit and venom was going to seep through the stress cracks.

Pale skin, black hair, high cheekbones, tortured hazel embers burning in the back of each gaping socket, fueled like flames on gasoline by the whispers; he’s so cocky; God, the way he walks onstage, touches himself; he’s so stuck up; he’s changed—

All he was doing was what he thought they wanted, just reproducing the hundreds of little tricks they’d seen on Youtube, every stunt and tease and phrase they’d read about online, the things they had loved and screamed about, with their applause drowning out the thuds of hot blood pumping through our five feverish hearts, but now they were calling it arrogance.

I knew he didn’t understand.

Were these the same righteous people who didn’t want to see him drunk and hapless, sweat-soaked and staggering onstage with his jeans down around his ankles, complaining that the shows were too fucking polished now? Too much touching. Too little. Too many canceled shows, because since when is food poisoning; hospitalization, a good excuse?

He let us down. He doesn’t care anymore. He’s drinking again.

Jesus fucking Christ, I couldn’t kick a smoking habit.

He overcame cocaine.

Pills. Alcohol.

Why couldn’t they forgive him if he slipped again? Why wouldn’t they love him if he fell?

Was it because they thought if he couldn’t do it, there was no hope for anyone else? Had he become such a promise of salvation from so many pathetic little addictions that if he relapsed, none of them would ever be able to recover either? Was it really his fucking fault, that they had idolized him far beyond anything he had ever really stood for; transformed him from a boy out of Jersey who wanted to save lives – wanted to, but never promised he could – into the patron saint of their own redemption from vice? And fuck, even after he had tried so hard to make them understand; he wasn’t a fucking hero.

Where had he gone wrong?

When had he let them down?

I wanted to grab the fucking mic out of his hand and spill my bitter, churning guts, hot red liquid, frothy fat-yellow foam and boiling viscera—

Leave him the fuck alone.

It wasn’t whose lips he kissed besides mine, and whether I loved him in that way or not was never the point. It was the weak smiles, the trembling hands, the tense shoulders; all the pain that he didn’t deserve to go through, not after everything he’d already surmounted just to make it. It was the constant throb of an invisible gun pressed tightly against his temple, greasy black barrel wide like someone’s tar-stained mouth; hissing you’re not good enough, you can’t win, have a drink, and they hate you they hate you they hate you.

Why did they have to rip him apart at every turn he took, thousands of grasping hands separating cartilage and red muscle until his bones clattered hollowly to the floor like the limbs of a discarded marionette, leaving him sprawled facedown and twisted, tangled in the strings that had once given him life?

To me, he was more than good enough.

Had he really climbed too high too fast, crashed through barriers and ignored speed limit signs only to lose it all in a burst of flame and gasoline dreams?

Watching his tense shoulders tremble, hands clench into unsteady fists as he stared into the mirror, grinning numbly at his flushed, sweaty reflection, I felt the slimy muscle of my heart expand and contract, expand and contract, aching with every hot rush of blood.

He flinched when I wrapped my arms around his waist, crushing his body to mine so tightly that his ribs probably bruised blue and violet later, and I could feel the pulse of his heartbeat thudding fitfully in his chest, so close to cracking and losing it all.

I locked my eyes on his in the mirror, opened my mouth and said “Fuck them,” but his irises only flickered uncertainly in the dim light, the muscles of his face tightening as though I had done the wrong thing.

He couldn’t feel the same anger that I did; he loved too fucking much. Despite every lie they told, every poison word that splashed from their disgusting mouths, there was no forgetting that he needed them, like they had once needed him.

He was supposed to be their savior.

Broken. Beaten. Damned.

“Fuck them.”

He pulled away from me and my helpless, angry words, his lips parting silently and his throat tightening visibly as though he half-wanted to scream at me; he pulled away and slammed the cheap wooden door on the way out of the room, leaving me standing there alone.

Hands shaking. Guts still boiling.

The next night would be the same fucking charade all over again; the lights would burn and sear and blind my eyes, my heart would ache at the sight of his tortured white face, and his hot hands would shake ever-so-slightly as he touched me, playing it up for all the hungry eyes that were slowly shattering him.

No. No no no.

It had to stop.

I was counting down the days until the last show of the tour, hoping and begging and fucking praying that it wouldn’t be too late by the time it finally came.

It had to stop right here.

That gun against his skull… He was going to strain and finally rupture, explode like a punctured vein in a gush of lurid, oxygenated scarlet, and the rest of us would cave, crack, splinter right alongside him.

They had loved us, they had made us, but I couldn’t let them be the ones to kill us.

Because honestly?

I would rather put it to his head and pull the fucking trigger back myself than watch them break him.