Craig Manning tuned his guitar in a motel room. There were a vast amount of cheap motel rooms available as his band crisscrossed the country, playing their desperate little songs, none of them longer than three minutes. Things didn't quite turn out as planned, the deal with Leo blew up as Leo himself dissolved into a snow white pile of coke. His own foray into the world of drugs and rehab didn't help things, and the record deal was whisked away as quickly as it had come.
There was more to it than that, and he could feel the shadow of the mental illness nipping at his heels as he drifted from city to city, playing the songs in dark bar rooms night after night. But it wasn't drifting, it was dogged plunging forward, dissolving into his music. Screw record deals, screw success, it just wasn't about that anymore. He'd play these songs to an empty room. He had to.
There were other things from his past he was avoiding, but he didn't know how to do anything but avoid them. Sometimes late at night his mother's death would haunt him, and he could see her bones overlaid with the sagging skin and her pale face blending into the hospital sheets over and over again. Could he still remember what her voice sounded like?
Sometimes at any time of day he could remember the way his father's fists felt as they slammed into him, as the kicks landed squarely into his ribs. He could still feel the fear of wondering what kind of a mood his father would be in, and if he could escape unscathed. Then there was his father's death, the questionable accident after he had laid it out for him and told him things would never change. How culpable was he in the death of his father?
Then there was Joey and Angela, his remaining family, and he had certainly left them behind. He couldn't subject them to his screwed up past and his questionable present, so he had chose to go it alone. Play his music, write his songs, plunge ahead, avoid drugs if he could, take his prescribed meds despite the tiny oval reminder that he was broken.
He was in the cheap motel room with the bed that seemed to be comprised mostly of broken metal springs, covered with a thin bedspread that may have been new at some point in the mid 1960's. The sun tried to come in through the closed blinds, but only a few bright lines were able to fall to the bare wood floor. The rest of the band was out eating at cheap diners or chain restaurants, roaming the streets of a city they may never be in again.
He was startled when he heard the knock at the door, and prepared himself to send housekeeping away. He padded over to the door in his bare feet, his button up shirt hanging open, draping softly over him.
He opened the door and stared at someone he should have recognized right away, but the name escaped him. Serious face, short cropped blond hair, muscular frame under a neat dress shirt. He flashed on one memory immediately, the blinding metal of train tracks in a bright afternoon, the rush of wind as the train barreled safely past him, and the restraining arms that were around him. Sean.
"Sean," he said, the surprise in his voice and his eyes.
"Hi," Sean said, his voice thick, catching. Broken school boy voice. What was he doing here?
He stared at him for a full moment, feeling the fillings in his back teeth with his tongue. He was hundreds of miles from Toronto. No one really knew where he was, he was just on the road.
"Want to come in?" Craig said, turning around and sitting on the bed again, picking up his guitar and tuning it again. Sean came in and stood near the dresser, the cheap fake wood paneled dresser with the warped mirror above it.
"What's up?" Craig said, his voice casual, as though he was seeing him in the cafeteria or the hallways at school and not in some little town on the edge of nowhere, so completely out of context.
"Nothing," Every answer that Sean gave sounded like it was on the edge of tears, and Craig looked up at him critically. He remembered the times that he had turned to him in school, the times when his life was crumbling beneath him. Was there some kind of crumbling going on in Sean's life that he thought he could help him with? Craig shook his head. He couldn't help anybody with anything. He was the broken one. Didn't Sean know that?
"Haven't seen you in awhile," Craig said, glancing at him standing so awkwardly in the middle of his motel room.
"I know," Sean licked his lips, shifted his weight, ran a hand through his military short hair, "I know it's strange that I'm here, but, I had to see you,"
Craig's eyes widened. He played a few notes on the guitar to see how it sounded, and dissatisfied he went back to tuning.
"You did?" he said, looking at him from the corner of his eye. He stood there nearly trembling, looking like he was about to cry.
Sean sat heavily on the other bed, the springs groaning as his weight settled. He opened his mouth but nothing came out, and Craig stopped tuning his guitar and just stared at him. They were 25, and he hadn't seen anyone from high school in years and years. He hadn't cared if he ever did again.
"Okay, Craig, listen. I tried the army, it wasn't right, I tried getting married, it hadn't worked, either. I always thought of you, the intense times we had, and I, I don't know, no girl, no job, no anything could make me feel what I felt around you. Maybe I'm gay, maybe…or maybe it's just you. I felt empty, and I had to find you. Joey told me where you were, and I came. If you want nothing to do with me I'll understand, it's weird, I know. But I had to come and tell you, I had to spell it all out for you, I had to be honest for once, with you, with myself,"