Strangelove
Chapter 10
"I can't stand to watch your"
"Comet coming fast..."
"Everywhere you go, it seems..."
"Lightening strikes and then you crash."
"I don't know how you do it..."
"It always ends the same."
"Everywhere you go, it seems..."
"Lightening strikes and there's no rain."
"No rain..."
"No rain..."
Numbly, Tommy shut off his stereo and stumbled blindly onto his small patio. The dying rays of the golden, setting California sun shot their sparks onto him. He felt neither their warmth nor their beauty. To him, even the strongest sunlight was ironic. Potentially combustible, except nothing remained inside him to ignite. He had surrendered all that, weeks ago in Toronto.
"Jude..."
He had turned off his radio; it hadn't mattered. It never did. Her music could not be so easily muted. It played constantly in his mind, an appropriate soundtrack to an otherwise barren existence.
Here in LA, people remembered him. They recognized his name, his face and recalled his celebrity, the years of infamy. These same persons were now stunned now by his asceticism and monastic behavior. The once irrepressible party boy never dated, never socialized at all. He left his small oceanfront bungalow only to perform necessary errands or to work.
His new job at the fledgling, small and unknown record company constituted a real change, comprised as it was of gopher work and engineering. He was constantly at the beck and call of less renowned, less experienced persons. Vapidly, he indulged all their whims. It did not upset him; he did not feel degraded, having already demeaned himself. Producing or creating great music no longer mattered.
Once a connoisseur of all forms of beauty, of passion, he now could not comprehend or even recognize it.
He stood every evening on the edge of this sand, watching the tides roll in and out. Each wave disappeared into an unknown future, leaving nothing behind. It was as if they never existed at all. Countless nights passed in this bleak, unrelenting fashion.
And this one constituted the darkest of them all. He checked his watch with increasing frequency as the midnight hour approached.
"12:00... Happy 18th, girl..."