Chapter 2: RENT
The screen comes up on a small video feed. Images of random shoot across the screen. Images of people, the homeless, buildings, streets, neon signs and everything in between. The camera feed is old. Black spots litter the edges as though it was there for effect. While watching this, a voice is heard.
"December 24th, 1989, 9 p.m., Eastern Standard Time."
The video is still going. More images appear, but nothing is shown twice. Nothing has a set face or a stamen of important. It's all just random. Like life.
"From here on in, I write without a script. See if anything comes of it. Instead of my old shit." The voice continues.
The video feed grows into a real screen. The image it shows is that of a homeless man spraying the windshield of a car. The man inside of the car is yelling at the man on the outside.
"No, get out of here. Hey." The man in the car says.
The homeless one doesn't say anything, he just continues to spray the car. He soon changes to a wiper and wipes off the windshield that he had just sprayed. His intensions are now clear. He wants money for 'cleaning' the car. The driver was slowly but surely getting pissed.
"I said, get off the car!" He spat as he drove away, causing the man to spin out of the way into traffic.
Across the way, a man of 22 held a camera pointed at the scene in front of him. He held an old camera in his hands, a kind of camera that winds up on the side in order to record. After the winding stopped, he put the camera on his bike, shaking his head. He rode away into the night, heading toward his humble abode, his apartment.
"How do you document real life, when real life's getting more like fiction each day?" he said, traveling down the street, cars passing him for his slowness.
"Headlines, bread lines, blow my mind and now this deadline: Eviction or Pay. RENT!"
In a distant building along the way, a man in an apartment is holding a guitar, longing to play its gentle rhymes. For some reason, the notes sound so wrong.
"How do you write a song when the chords wrong, though they once sounded right and rare." He says softly to himself.
In this longing, the lights in his apartment turn off and with a grumble, he goes across the room to the switchboard, hoping for a Christmas Miracle.
"When the notes are sour, where is the power you once had to ignite the air?" He says to himself.
Down the road, the man is still riding his bike toward the apartment.
"We're hungry and frozen."
"Some life that we've chosen." The man in the house mimicked, turning the switch only to have sparks fly out at him.
"How we gonna pay?" Both men are saying by this time, the man with the bike walking the steps to his room.
He walks in the door, staring at the man still by the switchboard, his roommate, only to hand him a piece of paper. The man looks at it with an angered expression. It reads: Eviction Notice.
"How we gonna pay last year's rent?" they both looked at each other.
The man with the bike is a tall man with shoulder length pink hair and striking blue eyes. He has a scarf around his neck from the coldness of the outdoors with his mustard yellow jacket, bike still in hand. The man with the guitar is a 21 year old with fiery red hair that runs passed his shoulder that ends in spikes and also extend. With his piercing green jade eyes, an idea clicks in his head. He looks at his roommate who seems to have the same idea in mind. At that moment, the phone rings.
"We'll light candles." The red head says, running over to a drawer to pull out at least a dozen candles.
The pinkette, choosing not to ignore the phone, ran over to answer it.
"Hello?"
"Hey man, guess whose back in town. Its Riku, man, Throw down the key." A familiar voice echoed in his ears.
The man runs to the balcony window pulling a key out of his pocket in the due process. He unlatches the window, and opens it to see a man down below him, waving. The pinkette smiles and throws his key down below, the man known as Riku, dropping it onto the ground.
"Hurry up." The man in the window shouts and closes the window.
Riku picks up the keys and smiles. He is a middle aged man, around 25, with long silver hair reaching his shoulders. He walks near the door where three men are standing. One of them turns to Riku.
"Hey man, you got a light?"
"Yeah," He replies.
"Give me that shit." One of the bigger guys says, lunging at him.
Riku pushes him away, and sprints in the opposite direction, into an alley.
"Get that son of a bitch!"
The three guys follow after him full speed only to catch up with him. They push him down, one holding him and the other two punching him in the stomach and face. The one holding him pushes him to the ground and grabs his bags, while the other two run away. Riku, thinking they were done, starts to get up, only to receive a swift kick to the stomach. With a grunt of pain, Riku falls to the ground, but the man wasn't done there, he pulled the heavy jacket that clung to Riku like extra skin. Now he was on the ground, broken and beaten.
Back in the apartment, the two men are lighting candles, dozens of them little the semi-lite room. The both of them look extremely cold. Their burning everything they can get their hands on that they don't need.
"How do you start a fire when there's nothing to burn and it feel like something's stuck in your flue?" the red head asks.
"How can you generate heat when you can't feel your feet and their turning blue?" the pinkette asks back, hoping for an answer.
The two of them look at each other until an idea pops into their heads. The pink haired man reaches for a thick book while the red head tears a poster of him off of a wall. They both put them in a trash can.
"You light a mean blaze." The pinkette says, lighting his book.
"With posters." The red haired man says, sharing the flame with his poster in hand.
"And screenplays."
"How we gonna pay last year's rent?" They ask each other, in vain, as neither of them have an answer. They continue to stare at each other as the fire between them burns.
Back in the alley, Riku gains his footing and leans up against the ice cold brick wall. He touches his face to realize his bleeding all over.
"How do you stay on your feet when on every street its 'Trick or Treat' and tonight it's 'Trick'?" He quietly says to himself.
"Welcome back town Oh I should lie down, everything's brown and Oh I feel sick." He says slumping to the ground slowly.
"Where is he?" The Pinkette says, leaning out the window.
With a thump, Riku hits the ground. "Getting dizzy."
The red head joins the other man out by the window, looking out onto the city below them. Fire litters the streets. People all over are screaming and shouting about the latest new: Eviction.
"How we gonna pay?" the two men ask each other.
Down below their room in a blond boy, around 20, holding the Eviction paper in his hands, lighting it on fire. He, like many others are outraged about the notice.
"How we gonna pay last year's rent?" looking across the street, many people are lighting their eviction papers on fire and watching them fall to the ground. All of Avenue B is in an uproar over this. The two men go back in to the house grabbing random objects to put into their fire. The pinkette picks up a script of his, flipping through the pages, the red head copying his movements.
"The music ignites the night with a passionate fire." The older of the two reads.
"The narration crackles and pops with incendiary wit." The red head copies, almost mimicking.
"Zoom in as they burn the past behind, and feel the heat of the futures glow." The two men look at each other, seeking warmth from their massive fire.
"How do you leave the pas behind when it keeps finding ways to get to your heart? It reaches way down deep and tears you inside out till your torn apart. RENT!" they yell as they grab their lite trash can and hurl its contents into the street.
"How can you connect to an age where strangers, landlords, lovers your own blood cells betray?"
They watch as the city gets torn apart, one person after another. On the street below, a slick black car rolls but by their apartment. A new face comes out, he has brown hair with stormy blue eyes. He's dressed in a suit with a heavy work jacket on top of it. The people of Avenue B corner him again his car, all shouting the same thing.
"What binds the fabric together with the raging shifting winds of change keep ripping away?"
The man laughs at the crowd and looks up and the two men up top.
"Draw a line in the sand and then make a stand."
The two men laugh and look at each other motioning to each other.
"Use your camera to spar." The red head says.
"Use your guitar." The pinkette mimics.
"When they act tough you call their bluff." They shout at the man down below.
"We're not gonna pay."
People are still throwing charred pieces in the street, or more specifically, the man by the car.
"We're not gonna pay last year's rent, this year's rent, next year's rent." They shout, angered that their pleas were not heard.
"We're not gonna pay Rent. Cause everything is RENT!"
The people continue to shout and holler at the man in the suit, with flames littering the streets.