Note: I don't know when this would take place because I don't know when the painting referred to was done, so on the safe side, say the early eighties.
_Abstractions_
by Vera
+++
No one knew what he thought about. It made him feel both happy and desperately lonely at the same time. No matter how many others he had accidentally or purposely coaxed out of hiding, no matter how many strangers emerged into daylight to follow him, Jack never found someone who really understood.
So he had given up trying.
Instead, he did what he was best at:be himself. And that meant dressing, thinking sideways and doing whatever the hell he pleased. It was an astonishingly easy way to go through life. He had missed being snagged by drugs like most of his contemporaries. He liked his own thoughts to much to screw with them. There were people on hand to screw or be screwed by, but that too he felt mostly indifferent to after a while.
There just was.
There was music too, powerful and raw, but not to be taken so seriously to believe that it was the last statement to be made. It was merely a way to pass the time, a way to connect. A way to communicate.
He admits to occasionally craving conversation. But being a mute has worked for him so well, it seems a pity to give it up now. Still. The abyss is there sometimes, threatening to consume him when his thoughts become to spread and strange to make sense at all and he lies in the smoky hotel rooms, sweaty and unable to sleep.
His fans think he must sleep in a coffin. The rooms come pretty close. And they are all the same. Unrelieved sameness. Well, until the band gets there. Then it's chaos and broken furniture.
A warm body slides next to him and out of the corner of his eye, it's Curt. The wild wolf he has taken off the street and put in his bed, to save him from total devastation. Of all of them, Jack thinks that Curt comes the closest to understanding. To realizing that sometimes there aren't reasons or grand words, but this kind of throbbing blackness that they are all trying to shine a light into.
They don't have sex. It would be a waste. Curt craves two things, always the addict: Brian and junk. There's nothing else to him though he may pretend and though he may have quit both cold. It is what he yearns for and anything else is just a substitute. So instead, Jack is something else to him. A friend, he supposes. They have shared enough to be friends. Someone who cares what happens to you or where you are the next morning after an all night binge in some German bar where someone ended up getting in a fight with some homophobic guy named Franz.
"I read this article about modern art." Curt tells him, breaking the quiet. "It reminds me of you." The magazine is dumped unceremoniously on Jack's thin rib cage and then Curt's slinking away to continue his restless pendulum of motion somewhere else.
After a long minute, Jack picks it up and looks at the pictures. Blocks of paint. Solid canvases. A urinal hung upside down in a museum. What he has done to music, done to painting. His fingers linger on the all white canvas with a single black dot. "Black Sheep" it's called. With long nimble fingers he folds and tears it from the glossy pages. It goes in his book of random things that he collects that make him smile. A rare enough occasion that the book contains perhaps two dozen things after a decade of collecting.
"Ready to jam?" Curt begs him from the foot of the bed. Jack nods wearily and sits up, letting the blood rush from his head. He picks up a blue and green lacy scarf and wraps it twice around his neck. Loves most of all the feeling that clothes have of binding, of tying him to reality. Tight, tight and tighter is his wardrobe, every piece of clothing making him look starvation thin. He barley eats anymore. Can't. Curt doesn't either. Heroin fucked up his appetite, so between the two of them they can't have more then a hundred and seventy pounds. No one helped either of them. They were worshipped as gods. But no one cared that their gods might be dying from malnutrition.
"Come on, Fairy, put your ass in gear, we're going to be late."
No, the world did not understand him, Jack thought, tucking away the picture of the painting, but then again, he didn't much understand the world.
_Abstractions_
by Vera
+++
No one knew what he thought about. It made him feel both happy and desperately lonely at the same time. No matter how many others he had accidentally or purposely coaxed out of hiding, no matter how many strangers emerged into daylight to follow him, Jack never found someone who really understood.
So he had given up trying.
Instead, he did what he was best at:be himself. And that meant dressing, thinking sideways and doing whatever the hell he pleased. It was an astonishingly easy way to go through life. He had missed being snagged by drugs like most of his contemporaries. He liked his own thoughts to much to screw with them. There were people on hand to screw or be screwed by, but that too he felt mostly indifferent to after a while.
There just was.
There was music too, powerful and raw, but not to be taken so seriously to believe that it was the last statement to be made. It was merely a way to pass the time, a way to connect. A way to communicate.
He admits to occasionally craving conversation. But being a mute has worked for him so well, it seems a pity to give it up now. Still. The abyss is there sometimes, threatening to consume him when his thoughts become to spread and strange to make sense at all and he lies in the smoky hotel rooms, sweaty and unable to sleep.
His fans think he must sleep in a coffin. The rooms come pretty close. And they are all the same. Unrelieved sameness. Well, until the band gets there. Then it's chaos and broken furniture.
A warm body slides next to him and out of the corner of his eye, it's Curt. The wild wolf he has taken off the street and put in his bed, to save him from total devastation. Of all of them, Jack thinks that Curt comes the closest to understanding. To realizing that sometimes there aren't reasons or grand words, but this kind of throbbing blackness that they are all trying to shine a light into.
They don't have sex. It would be a waste. Curt craves two things, always the addict: Brian and junk. There's nothing else to him though he may pretend and though he may have quit both cold. It is what he yearns for and anything else is just a substitute. So instead, Jack is something else to him. A friend, he supposes. They have shared enough to be friends. Someone who cares what happens to you or where you are the next morning after an all night binge in some German bar where someone ended up getting in a fight with some homophobic guy named Franz.
"I read this article about modern art." Curt tells him, breaking the quiet. "It reminds me of you." The magazine is dumped unceremoniously on Jack's thin rib cage and then Curt's slinking away to continue his restless pendulum of motion somewhere else.
After a long minute, Jack picks it up and looks at the pictures. Blocks of paint. Solid canvases. A urinal hung upside down in a museum. What he has done to music, done to painting. His fingers linger on the all white canvas with a single black dot. "Black Sheep" it's called. With long nimble fingers he folds and tears it from the glossy pages. It goes in his book of random things that he collects that make him smile. A rare enough occasion that the book contains perhaps two dozen things after a decade of collecting.
"Ready to jam?" Curt begs him from the foot of the bed. Jack nods wearily and sits up, letting the blood rush from his head. He picks up a blue and green lacy scarf and wraps it twice around his neck. Loves most of all the feeling that clothes have of binding, of tying him to reality. Tight, tight and tighter is his wardrobe, every piece of clothing making him look starvation thin. He barley eats anymore. Can't. Curt doesn't either. Heroin fucked up his appetite, so between the two of them they can't have more then a hundred and seventy pounds. No one helped either of them. They were worshipped as gods. But no one cared that their gods might be dying from malnutrition.
"Come on, Fairy, put your ass in gear, we're going to be late."
No, the world did not understand him, Jack thought, tucking away the picture of the painting, but then again, he didn't much understand the world.