The Man Who Would Not Be King

The noise was seeping inside the contours of his brain matter, threatening to crack it open from the inside. The noise, he couldn’t escape it. One thing after another, what followed him was the noise of it all. Ice on glass and glass sliding across wood. Sounds of too many things colliding. Too many people colliding.

And what made him sick was that noise was his profession.

Sick in the pit of his stomach, if he even had one anymore. He liked to pretend he didn’t, so he wouldn’t have to think about how much it felt like it had gone away. He half-heartedly wished he could go away, but his consciousness tugged at him and he knew that thought didn’t mean anything, not really.

What meant anything?

Not the guy who could somehow make throwing back a shot of tequila look graceful. Not the guy standing there cloaked in black and yet glowing, like some magic had taken a hold of him and made his insides burn bright. Not the guy who was in love with someone else. No, not him.

Tré pressed his glass gingerly to his forehead and closed his eyes. He could almost see the awkward triangle of wetness the cool condensation was imprinting upon his brow. The delicate arrangement of ice on the other side slipped, clanging sharply. Tré hissed slowly. That noise again.

His eyes, again open, plotted their course in a familiar direction. He’d been watching him all night. It made it harder, and easier. He needed more alcohol.

Tré reluctantly pushed himself up out of his booth and made his way over to the bar. “Scotch.” He waved his glass at the bartender, wincing as the ice scraped against the bottom. Waiting for the bartender to fulfill his request, he stole another glance, closer this time. He could just make out the fact of tattoos on his tapping fingers.

“Dude, seriously, give it a rest. People are gonna notice.” Pete squeezed in beside him, shooting him a warning look.

Tré shrugged. His drink was ready; he headed back to his lonely corner seat, determined to ignore Pete’s very solid existence in favor of the hazy realm of his thoughts. But before he could settle, Pete was seated across from him, thwarting his efforts to escape.

“You look down,” he stated, chocolate eyes boring into Tré, demanding an explanation with their hard gaze.

He meant it to be a growl, or in any case forceful, but he sounded like a child, small and unsure. “Go away.”

Pete rolled his eyes with his beer to his lips. “That was convincing.”

“Yeah,” Tré said, agreeing with the sarcasm. He shrugged.

“What is that, the shrugging? Are you like too good for words now or something?” Pete asked, exasperated.

Tré smirked. “Maybe.”

“Oh no, I get it, it’s not words entirely, it’s just sentences. But at least I got something of a smile out of you. So what’s up? Did you…?” He left the question hanging like his bottle, suspended by the neck between his fingers.

Tré’s cheek twitched in a telltale sign that Pete had grazed a freshly made wound. “No,” he replied shortly. “Just drop it, okay?” He brought his glass up to his mouth, taking a baby sip before setting it down again as if he no longer wanted it.

Maybe it was the alcohol, but the sound tech chose to be bullheaded. He took a deep breath. “Tré, man, it’s not good to let stuff like this fester. Why don’t you tell me and let it off your chest?”

“I said I don’t want to fucking talk about it,” asserted Tré from a jaw so tight his teeth seemed to be on the brink of fissuring. He fixed Pete with a glare that, despite its haphazard focus, made quite a powerful statement.

Pete looked down at the stained wood table, humbled. “Alright, sorry for bringing it up…” he mumbled. He took another swig of his beer to eliminate some of the pressure to speak. He turned his head, scanning the bar; it was an entirely different scene from the current one. Jason appeared to be telling a longwinded joke or a story, the others listening intently while silently willing themselves not to wobble too obviously. It looked like fun.

He peered back at Tré, who was consumed with the pattern of light shining through his drink. He considered the expression on his face, blank but speaking about pain like poetry can leap from the ghost of things.

His line of vision found Billie Joe next. The contrast between the two men was bold duotone. Pete hadn’t been around them long enough to really be able to say he knew them—really knew them—, but the long hours of idle time on the road did, however, provide him some idea of the band’s internal dynamic. This wasn’t it. One man’s mood was seldom independent of the others’. They rose and fell together. This polarized nonsense, well, was nonsense.

If Tré was angsty, it should follow that Billie Joe not be in the best of moods. Yet he was clearly enjoying himself. It was all about the timing, the interval between words, thought, and reply cut in a dramatic half from that of the Billie Joe caught in the throes of melancholy. If Tré had told him and been shot down, it was outside the realm of possibility that Billie Joe act this insensitively. He had to be unaware, or at least that was what Pete told the unease pervading his inner monologue.

He jumped, startled by a tap on his shoulder. “Scoot over,” a gentle feminine voice commanded. Pete obeyed, glad of the intrusion; he’d been wondering how to continue his interaction with Tré in a way that they’d both leave with their spirits intact. “What’s with him?” she whispered, climbing into the booth clumsily, rosy cheeks looming in close to Pete’s face.

Tré’s eyes narrowed, flicking upward in a darting, snake-tongue motion. “What’s with you?” he returned, defensively.

“Oh, someone’s touchy.” Annabelle tapped her fingers with no distinct rhythm on the surface of the table, openly studying him. “You gonna spill or what?” she asked, miscalculating the severity of Tré’s stubbornly occluded frame of mind.

Pete shook his head at her brusquely, an action which made his head swim slightly. “He doesn’t want to talk about it,” he emphasized.

Annabelle raised her eyebrows in delayed fashion. “Ohhh, I see,” she slurred, blinking slowly. “You mind if I sleep on your shoulder, Petey? I feel…kinda…sleepy. And my stomach’s a little blargh.”

He couldn’t help but smile crookedly in amusement as his fellow roadie wavered and leaned into him gradually, eyelids dragging her down.

“It would be hilarious if you moved and let her fall.” Tré’s voice rang oddly hollow.

The unsolicited suggestion unnerved Pete; Tré’s out of character behavior had him at a genuine loss. The only person he could think of as suitable for dealing with it was…Billie Joe. Who was unavailable, both in the sense of currently occupied and in the sense that he wasn’t sure Tré would accept his smoothing out of edges anyway.

“I heard that,” Annabelle informed him groggily, lifting her head back up and setting it down again, a loose strand of hair gliding down her face to come to rest above her nose.

Tré’s voice came out more harshly this time. “What of it?”

Pete couldn’t believe his ears. Tré was picking a fight. “Tré, man, what the fuck is your problem? You can’t go taking out your shit out on everybody else as you like,” he informed him, volume rising as he went on. “We all have rough patches, but that doesn’t mean it’s an excuse to be an asshat. Are you a grown fucking man or what? At least pick on someone your own size.” His tirade over, he waited for a response from Tré, feeling a possibility of the heat of irritation verging on boiling over to a more mature anger depending on his answer.

“I will act however I want,” Tré snarled, lip curling in resentment.

“Oh such an adult,” Pete fired back caustically, torn between an impulse to stand and shout and his gentlemanly instinct not to disturb Annabelle, who had somehow managed to pass out against him despite the noise of the conflict playing out above her head.

Tré apparently had the same idea, with none of the reserve; he stood, in the process banging his knee into the table and upsetting it enough to rattle his glass of liquor. The resulting clatter carried above the usual sounds of the bar, garnering the scene some attention, which, strangely, their raised voices had failed to do.

The other members of his band rushed to his side, noting the expression of fury carved into his features and expecting him to be on the right side of the law. Jason, boisterously, tried to assess the situation. “What’s going on, Tré?” He threw an accusatory look at the newcomer, making the wrong assumption.

Pete interjected. “Whoa, whoa, don’t I get a say before you make up your mind?” he asked, looking from one man to the next, the weight of Annabelle contributing to a feeling of impotence.

“Relax,” assuaged Mike, “you both get a say. Which one of you wants to go first?” He put forth the question impassively, hands in his pockets, and sighed; he’d been mediator in enough of Tré’s drunken squabbles to land him a job as a high school guidance counselor.

Hanging by Mike’s side and studying a scratch on one of his fingernails, Billie Joe registered an unbidden impression of guilt surfacing within him. The day had been loaded with drama, and he was having a hard time not pinning Tré’s sour mood on his earlier actions—most specifically the kiss, but then again there had been whatever conflict had set off the kiss, and he couldn’t begin to guess what that had all been about. He squirmed inwardly, awash in uncertainty. How did that scratch get there?

The surly drummer, by contrast, knew with blinding clarity the exact nature of his torment, and it was standing too close. The proximity erased all concern he had for Pete, whom he realized too late he had no real inclination to fight. In fact he was right, something Tré had to begrudge him. None of this was Annabelle’s fault, but rather the unfortunate effect she had on Billie Joe. And the effect he unfortunately did not have on Billie Joe.

Seeing him absorbed in something so mundane—his fingers!—over the fuss he’d created, Tré swallowed back budding tears. He didn’t have the energy for this. He was done.

At Tré’s strange silence, Pete volunteered himself. “Tré’s being bitchy, basically.” Probably not the best way to bring them over to his perspective, but sometimes things needed to be said in crude terms.

Mike arched an eyebrow, Jason coughed, and Billie Joe didn’t look up. “What say you, Tré?” Mike inquired lazily.

Tré took a shuddering breath. “Nothing. I don’t care. He’s right. I’m worthless.” He brushed past Jason roughly, headed for the exit.

“I didn’t say that you were worthless, Tré! I—” Pete yelled after him uselessly. He grimaced at the door as it swung back closed slowly in a battle against air pressure.

The resultant atmosphere, while it fell short of acrimonious, left those remaining not sure how to return to what they were doing pre-scene, or in any case in the same spirit. There was some head shaking, a few groans, and much disquiet, but those closest to the heart of the matter spoke nothing of what they knew.

The warmth of the sunless southern breeze wrapped Tré’s exposed limbs in its comfort as he blundered out into the night, as if to say that, yes, it was okay. As one fleeing anywhere, he was confronted by the vastness of the world, or in his case, Houston. Where to go?

He fished around in his pocket while he walked away from the bar, briskly. He had brought it with him. He closed his eyes in relief as he wrapped his fingers around it, the familiar metal shape cool and smooth against his skin.

Tré pulled out his iPod and unraveled the cord to his earphones. Some days he was merely glad for music, and others he credited it for his continued breathing. Tonight he couldn’t be bothered to categorize it, it just was, in and around his eardrums, beating and living beside his own heart.

Tré walked, he didn’t travel. That wasn’t important. He went undisturbed, going the length of dead outer city with nothing to distract him from the chords that were inexplicably intertwined with the litter of the streets. Crushed tin cans winked up at him from their place beneath the streetlamps, and bright guitar tones sparkled above the rest of the mix. There was no time. No thought. Just music and wasteland.

Eventually, he came upon a train yard. The darkness crept more easily here, obscuring the edges of towering, rusty box cars and leaving only surfaces. He finally felt truly alone, the satisfying solitude that was hard to come by, usually tainted by the fact of someone else having put one there. Tré inhaled the sweet summer air, filling his lungs with the scent of it and the peculiar tranquility of the place.

He wandered through it, stepping around obstacles with an absent-minded determination, if there could be such a thing. Something drove him onward, although he didn’t know what it was or where it was leading him until he stopped, a foot away from a set of steel tracks.

He heard. The song’s beat slowed, leading its listener tenderly to the end, the coda a soft lilt.

Tré retrieved his iPod and clicked the pause button, then removed his earbuds after some deliberation. He listened carefully. A playful flurry of wind whipped up a tuft of Tré’s hair as he stood there, waiting; a distant whistle carried over it. He would linger a while.

When it came, the headlight was dazzlingly radiant as it burst over his body, tendrils scorching out the shadows that had taken root in his heart. The roar of its motion was deafening up close, a chugging rhythm to obliterate all others. There was power in it. Sacrifice in it.

And he lost himself in the noise.