Seven years ago a kid stepped off a bus from Tomahawk Wisconsin to LA with a guitar case and a dumb hairstyle. He proudly introduced himself as "Pickles." I didn't believe it for a second but I decided to humor him. That might've been my biggest mistake.
Maybe if I asked his real name and called him by it there'd be a kid left for me to save now. But I didn't, I let the kid that came off that bus forget ever being anyone but Pickles. Me and Sammy just let him stumble into the club scene without an anchor. No girlfriend, no kid, no family he cared about, not even a fucking goal outside of the music. He just wanted to play rock n' roll and we let him drag us along.
When Pickles was still just that kid we were hardly a band. We all lived in Sammy's shitty apartment together and we all played music but we didn't really play together. Then Pickles found Bullets and we started playing together and I traded in my guitar for a bass because Pickles was in love with his Les Paul and suddenly we were a band. And that kid that breezed into our life was suddenly our leader—our frontman.
I planned to follow around some stupid punk from Wisconsin about as much as I planned to start fucking one. But when good things fall into your lap you learn to just take them. Pickles was a good frontman anyway—excited, charming, talented, pretty and passionate. He loved the music we made, he believed in it like only a small-town kid could. All those things that Pickles had that made the band work in the beginning, ruined it in the end.
Pickles was too fucking naïve for LA. He was too impressionable, too eager, too driven. I never bothered to protect him, neither did Sammy. We were too used to him leading us around, we figured he knew what he was doing. Even when me and Pickles were more than bandmates—more than family—I still didn't protect him. That was my second mistake. I knew he was just a kid but he was so fucking sure of himself, he had to be fine. He wasn't. Underneath all that energy and passion was something fucked up, something empty and angry and broken. And the more wasted the rest of us got, the more that part of him came out.
That's why Bullets is gone now and why Sammy is too fucked up to realize how bad Pickles has gotten. That's why I'm waiting to really, truly hate him. So I can leave without my stomach feeling like it's free-falling and the rest of me is too heavy to move. Because right now there's still a part of that kid left in Pickles, still a part of whoever he was before LA and before us. I can see it when we're onstage. Even when we're fighting—the vicious, seething kind we do over my drinking or his control issues—we play like always. Pickles works the crowd and presses his back up against mine so it feels like that first night when he slid over my body and pressed his lips all over until he was content that I wasn't leaving. Now I know that I am. I just don't know when.
Once we're off the stage all of that energy and charm drains out of him. It's like he leaves a little bit of that kid on every stage and we've played so many shows now. And I can't stand that dead look in his eyes that he gets afterwards. So I corner him after the show and just grab him, pull him into my chest and hold him. We both tense for a moment and I wonder if he's going to do that spitfire thing that he always does with me but he doesn't. He buries his hands in my vest and clings to me like a little kid, sobbing furiously. We're not fighting but it feels almost as bad as fighting because he's crying and I'm drained. And we're both so fucked—over and up and any other kind.
I want to ask him his real name, finally because it feels like the last chance I'm going to get to save him. But it also feels like the last time I'm truly going to be able to break him. This is the last time he's ever going to show me any vulnerability. And I don't want him to break. We're all so broken already that I can't.
So I do nothing. And hope that it's the right answer.
A/N: I'm kind of embarrassingly proud of this one.