I know you wouldn’t want me to be doing what I’m doing right now, sitting in a deserted dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen, having a beer with my former manager. Emphasis on the word former is what you’d say to me with a tug on my sleeve and a show of eyes, the first salvo in your soft-spoken plea to stay away from Ben, to let it go once and for all. But here I am, facing him on my own and ignoring the request you would’ve made because you’re not here and you never will be, a fact that is so achingly dark and real that this dingy bar burns as bright as a thousand-watt klieg light.
I can’t stop thinking of you, which means Ben gets half my attention, maybe less. I taste my beer, see his lips move, his face tight as drying cement, telling me what a dickhead I am for releasing the song. I asked you not to do it, he tells me, the beer in his mug slopping the table with agitation. One favor is all I asked, he said, after all I’ve done for you.
I threw a fuck you grin at the man who’d plucked me from obscurity courtesy of the Internet. Told him the new song’s had three or four million paid downloads and is still going strong. Hid my chuckle behind a hazy IPA. That song’s one of the top ten streamed tunes for six weeks running according to my new manager, earning me and him a shit ton of money and not a dime of it going to Ben.
I shift from half listening to not listening at all. Ben’s words cascade past my brain unheard and unprocessed because all I want to do is go to our apartment and flop on the bed with one of your sweaters or lacy summer tops draped over my face so I can breathe your essence and your perfume and maybe fall asleep and dream you’re still here with me. I’d let your whispers remind me how being an almost-rock-star or an almost-popular-singer or a lonely-artist doesn’t have to mean a lifetime of reckless choices. But here I am, leaning on my best poker face (the one you told me to never use because it was so lame) to face down Ben the Manipulator. I flash my best Cheshire grin. Tell him that next to marrying you, firing his ass was the smartest thing I’d ever done. I tell him he deserved a lot worse than being kicked to the curb. Part of me wants to drop the hammer in a big, big way. Tell him I know all of it but I think that giant, little secret might be the only thing keeping me upright these days, keeping me sane after all the shit he’d done. Creative differences, I lied. Creative differences, plain and simple.
Ben’s pupils spark at me like hard, black dots and the two quick swipes at his nose means he’s riding more than booze. But then, Ben always did like the taste of blow, almost as much as he liked manipulating others. Liked to brag about having the best coke on speed dial. Ben being the biggest reason I did three tours in rehab. It felt good to see he was still using. Comforting even. Especially when he told me the FBI had stopped by his office to ask a few questions, finger quotes in the air to emphasize the last two words.
“No way,” I said.
“Way,” he nodded. “One hundred percent, way.” Ben leaning in, sotto voice. “I did what I could to protect you but, you never know…”
“No, I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you spit it out?”
“They might be looking at you, Shakey.”
“Me?” I waited a beat, pretending. “For what?” At this point I was toying with Ben and having a blast and if you were here you’d have understood. You knew I’d lost faith. Respect. You knew I’d realized Ben was too dishonest and selfish and evil, but did you know that I knew he’d gotten to you too?
“You really need me to say the words, Hotshot?”
“I do, Ben. Tell me how my song implicates me when it’s someone else confessing.”
Ben’s eyes, jittery and buggy, say more than his lips. “Dealing with the FBI puts me on edge.”
“Atta boy, Ben. An honest statement from you to me. I’m impressed. Did not think you had it in you.” I raise my mug in salute.
“Smart ass.” Ben leaning back into the shadows.
I drained my beer, slid the mug off to the side, arcing a trail of wetness across the table. Ben looking like shit. Stressed and worn. Like maybe the walls were closing in. I slide to the end of the booth. “Glad we had this little convo, Ben. Glad you’re happy to see my career’s taking off without you even though I’d trade all of it to get her back.” I pulled my hood over my head, zipped my jacket and left.
Back at the silent apartment you and I used to share I dig the small package out from the back of a locked file cabinet. It was stamped and addressed to a P.O. box Ben favored. The P.O box I’d gone to many times before to ferry his buzz of the week back to him. Ben always insisting I leave behind the packaging with his name on it, me risking a possession rap if I’m caught with those small glass vials with black lids. There’d been a lot of deliveries and a lot of vials and one or two may have made it home with me. I’d stopped using by then, but I’d never stopped looking for an exit ramp, especially when fentanyl-laced coke was making the rounds. Did you know the city gives you instant fentanyl tests for free?
I pace the floor of my dressing room waiting for the tap on the door telling me it’s show time. Another sold out arena. The nineteen show tour is being extended across North America and then to Europe but I feel more empty and alone than I’d thought possible. The band waits in their dressing rooms. It’s been three months since Ben’s overdose death hit the news. Three and a half months since the video of him pushing you over the cliff blew up the Internet and the so-called news cycle and everything around me. It’s been nearly a year since you left me for him.
I still wonder if you knew it was me up in the sky, stalking you with a hired drone and a telephoto lens. You can do a lot from inside a cushy rehab center if you have enough money. Who knew that private investigators were really a thing, not just for t.v. shows?
I never expected to see you and him argue on the trail by the cliffside. You probably telling him we were trying to reconcile, him thinking he owned both of us. I wish you hadn’t challenged him because you might still be alive.
I’ve written a lot of songs since you left. Rick, my producer, says I’m channeling something heavy. Whatever. I still can’t escape the things Ben did to me. What he did to you. Worst of all, I can only face it when I’m clean.
The roadie leads me through the concrete passageways and beneath the stage and up the steel stairs to wait in the dimly lit place where everyone imagines they want to be. The audience thrums like a crashing ocean. I turn to the band, nod at each of them one by one. Let’s do this, I say. I plug the cable into my beat-up Fender. The guitar tech flips a switch and my stack of amps buzz with the sound that lets me breathe. For the next two hours I will be whole.
I stride out as the lights come up, the only guitarist I know of today playing with a cable instead of a wireless rig. I feel the rush, let out a whoop and whip the cable across the stage like a cowboy whipping a rope. Watch the cable writhe across the boards. Feel the weight of it in my hands and then I let it go. I strike the first chord, a mournful B minor. I step to the mic and begin singing Song of the Confessor. The song I wrote for Ben after I watched him shove you off that cliff. The song I sing for me after sending him his final high.
The music drops me into a place somewhere between dreams and nightmares. An aching space where I’m forced to endure. I sing and I play and I think about us falling side by side because that’s how it should have been. With my eyes closed, I reach down for the cable attached to my guitar, attached to me, the cable catching me as I fall.
G. A. Rivers grew up in a tiny town in the rural Midwest. These days he holds a PhD in the life sciences and has spent over two decades leading research teams in the pharmaceutical industry, many in the Northeast. He has authored or co-authored numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers, too many of them written in passive voice. He now lives and writes thrillers and crime fiction in the Midwest and is represented by Terrie Wolf, AKA Literary Management; his short fiction appears in Punk Noir, Bull Magazine, and the Texas Wind Anthology by Cowboy Jamboree Press; he can be found at FB (GA Glenn Rivers); BlueSky garivers.bsky.social and at gariversauthor.com.