Go On Forever (David Cook/Various, R-ish)
He used to act in high school. Musicals mostly. It was all oh-so-very routine. Just learn your lines and show up and say somebody else’s words.
And then:
Exit stage left. Curtain call. Take a bow.
Same thing, night after night. (And maybe some afternoon matinees.)
He dates Kim and around month three (or maybe it’s four?) he starts to slip into a routine.
He wakes up in the morning and eats two bowls of Captain Crunch while he watches CNN. (Two parts of that sentence are completely untrue. David really wakes up at noon and watches TMZ. He likes to tell it the other way, though.) And then he checks his voice mail. He calls back his mom and his brother.
If Kim stayed the night, he gets her up before he showers. If she’s at her place, he sends off a quick email or text or whatever confirming or making plans. Usually just grabbing dinner before he has to play a show.
He writes. He naps. He jerks off.
It’s boring as all hell and he’s never quite sure if he loves it or hates it.
When he goes on tour the routine becomes more of a sloppy science.
Tune guitar. Sound check. Tune guitar again.
Waiting offstage and he thinks back to high school. For about a second, he dated this way-out-of-his-league girl named Leah. She came to one of his gigs once and gave him a hand job and a hickey in some dirty hallway in between the back door and the bathroom. He would go on record (in court and under oath and on a stack of bibles) saying that he’d never played better than he did that night.
Enter stage right. Smile. The crowd goes wild.
(He shoots, he scores!)
He breaks up with Kim and spends the next day or two with a paper and pen and the promise of new songs about heartbreak. He gets as far as: “I can’t wait ‘til you try and come back girl” before he realizes he’s writing a White Stripes song. He gives up and works on a beer instead.
And now getting wasted is part of his new routine.
Strum a chord. Do an encore. Get drunk.
He breaks routine one night by kissing Neal.
(But to be fair he’s totally shitfaced when he does it. And being shitfaced is now part of the routine. So, he doesn’t break the routine at all. Not really. The second time he kisses him sober, so that probably counts towards routine breakage. Hey, gotta shake things up once and awhile, right?)
For a awhile the sloppy science of his tour routine is:
Do a show. Fuck a groupie. Lather and rinse and repeat if she’s still hot the next morning.
But it gets a little too old, too fast.
He meets Mandy when she’s already married. They exchange pleasantries pleasantly enough, even though what he really wants to say is, “Hi. You’re hot. I love you. Wanna fuck?”
Her husband wants to go on some multi-band, acoustic tour thing with him and the rest of his band. An outdoor festival sort of thing. Maybe a few colleges. It seems sort of hippy-dippy and not at all up his alley, but he says yes only because lately he’s not too fond of his habit of falling into routines. It’s getting stale. (As routines do.) And he needs some time to work on his new album.
And he goes from:
Get off bus. Play predetermined set list. Get back on bus.
To:
Get off bus. Goof around/Throw a Frisbee/Secretly fuck the headliner’s wife/Play a couple of songs/Sleep. Get back on bus.
He thinks he likes it. It’s something different, at any rate, and that’s fine by him.
Six years after winning American Idol and screw high school acting, David Cook sleeps next to a movie star every night. (Yeah, that’s right.)
He wonders if it was all supposed to turn out like this. If this oh-so-very-routine life is actually his. If he's not really just saying words that belong to somebody else.
He wakes up and takes a leak and then gets breakfast for him and the kid. They watch cartoons and he doesn’t ever snort milk out of his nose. (One part of that sentence is completely untrue. Guess.) He phones his wife on set just to tell her that he loves her. And he returns his emails and calls his agent. (And his mom and his brother.)
He writes. He plays with Tonka trucks. He smiles.
It’s good.
But maybe it was really supposed to go the way of the rock star. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. You know:
Exit stage left. Curtain call. Take a bow.