fic: all of the principals, generals, admirals
The only way I was going to get in my word count for nanowrimo today was if I flogged my WIP folder for terrible shit. I mean, in the past five days I've tried to work on three separate so-called legit projects, all of which have serious failings (hello, first person account of the pervy lech greaser from 1962's Carnival of Souls, as played by Sidney Berger: you will totally find a home in a litmag of distinction I'm suuuuuure), but then as soon as I came home from my usual perch at the library, out came a bunch of words of that eternally ongoing Jon/Spencer makeout weddingfic and ... this.
Still, I refuse to believe that I am the only one who loves OK Go enough to write their tiny thrilling faces into fluffy travesty fictions like this. Where are the rest of you ninnies? Like, c'mon.
PS. And then there's the Ira Glass sex tape, so.
fandom: the far fringes of bandom; OK Go f. Spencer Smith & Ira Glass
pairings: Andy/Spencer Smith ; Tim/everyone ; Damian/his wife; Damian/Ira Glass ; Dan/feminism
word count: 3940
warnings: no sex, just some blushing and a bit of handholding and lots of, you know, suits getting tailored and some phone calls that happen
No excuses: OK Go had a song on the New Moon soundtrack. What the jesus eff, you guys. How did that even happen.
Damian calls Tim while Tim's at the optometrist sitting at the machine that blows air at his eyeballs. His phone, which he forgot to put on silent, announces the incoming call by playing the recording they made of the sounds that Bunny Carlos makes when he's barking in his sleep.
"Three Stooges, right?" the technician grins as Tim tucks the silenced phone away politely, and she does a dead-on impression of Curly's woo-woo-woo-woo-woop and pretends to poke Tim in the eyeballs, Larry-style. Alas, her aim's as good as her impression, and Tim ends up filling his messenger bag full of complimentary contact solution while she apologizes three more times and updates his prescription card, totally mortified.
Outside the clinic, he stands blinking in the sunlight and gets maybe five seconds into Damian's voicemail before he chokes and mashes buttons until he's called Damian back.
"You told them yes?" he demands, voice straining to keep on the downside of a holler.
"Hey, Tim. I just called you." Damian sounds pleasant and half-delighted, like he's making a sandwich or pulling cookies out of the oven. Maybe standing in his back yard in casual yet stylish clothing while playing tug with one of the dogs.
"Why would you do that?" Tim turns, helpless, side to side. He gapes at the parked cars. He gapes at his reflection in the windows of the optometrist's office.
Damian pauses, hearing the anguish in Tim's voice and obviously considering his words. "Well. We've done soundtracks before."
"Damian." Tim's mouth flaps open while he tries several times to begin to describe exactly what this is, in terms of the gravitational pull of its PR machine and the eons of radioactive half-life it imparts to anything associated with it and, also you know, maybe the fundamental literary tenets of the Twilight Saga, i.e., mormon - vampire - romance.
He can't get the words out. He flops a hand around in the air. "What did Shana say?"
Damian sounds mildly bemused by the question. "Nothing, yet. They called me maybe half an hour ago."
"Oh man," Tim mumbles. Shana will explain it. Damian's supergenius installation artist wife will at least be able to relay the basic facts in the Ivy League lovebird language they use for pillow talk (interracial anxieties, she'll say, gender role performance and consumption as identity construction) so that Damian can at least begin to see the maelstrom he has called down on them looming on the horizon.
But all that aside, something else has occurred to Tim. Something much, much worse. "Hey, Damian," he says, lifting his eyes to stare blindly down the street.
"Yes?" Damian sounds concerned. Concerned that Tim is acting weird, though, not concerned like he should be. Like he will be.
Tim can barely get the words out. He chokes, then manages to lift his chin bravely as he asks: "Who's going to tell Andy?"
--
"So all we need to do," Damian concludes, voice and face full of confidence at the ease and simplicity of the task, "is record a song with a celestial body in the title."
He smiles.
In return, the three of them facing him sit in sepulchral silence.
Andy's arms have not come unglued from where he knit them tight to his chest twenty minutes ago when he walked into the studio, his shoulders hunched so far over that he looks like he's at risk of popping a vertebra or two out of his t-shirt.
For his part, Dan looks like he's considering the relative freshness of the bok choy versus the green beans at the farmer's market on Third and Fairfax. He raises a contemplative hand to his chin. Maybe favoring the choy, then.
Tim came prepared: he is wearing his darkest sunglasses and largest hat. He tries to not make any discernable movements or facial expressions or sounds that could be construed as a verbal response in the negative or positive.
"So, any ideas?" Damian tacks on. It is admirable, the way that he refuses to look anything less than fully certain in the face of Andy's glowering crackle of repressed judgment. And Dan's telltale retreat into hey-don't-look-at-me-I-just-bring-the-rock. And Tim's own cowardly non-opinion, non-support, non-presence.
Eventually, Andy gathers his evident raging storm of thoughts into a coherent sentence, which he unravels for them, face thrust out to showcase his scowl.
"I think you mean," he says, "Do we have any decent songs that we want to sacrifice to the altar of inane bullshit in the temple of the god of preteen girls and their parents' wallets?"
Damian has the composure of an elementary school teacher. "Or that too, Andy."
Andy says, "You are going batshit."
Dan says to the room, "I probably have something."
And Tim can't help but inquire: "Timpanis?"
And Dan leans around Andy to nod at him, while Andy says earnestly to Damian: "I don't know if I'd rather we write a song that sucks because this whole thing sucks or if we should do our best not to suck because our name is now associated with something that sucks so much to begin with that we should do the unexpected and make it not suck."
And Damian says, "I know we'll all do our best."
Andy rolls his eyes and leans back in his chair so far that his head drops upside down. "Just promise me that whatever happens, we'll never have to play this song live," he says to the scattered array of cables hung like hula-hoops along the back wall.
Dan goes over to the space where all his stuff is and starts fiddling around. Looking for his autoharp, probably. He likes to rough things out with a fingerpick.
"Oh jesus, what if it's good. What if it's like, a crazy chart-topper single or something. Then we'll have to play it forever."
Tim says, "We should make it about astronauts."
"Christ, we need to stop and think about this, our fans are going to judge us so hard for this. Everyone over the age of fifteen is going to think we're total hack sell-outs."
"That's good." Damian shoots Tim a pointer finger of admiration. "Fake moon landing. What else?"
"Timpani," Dan repeats, because Damian wasn't listening the first time it came up. "I got this-" and he plucks out a lazy beat in sixes.
"Nice," says Damian, crossing the room to the keyboard, which Andy is obviously not going anywhere near. He drops a little splay of notes. "Something simple. No need to get worked up."
Andy moans in his chair. "This is going to be the worst."
--
They are invited to the premiere, of course. For a while, Tim didn't think they would be because of that MTV spot where Damian thought the movie was like Pretty In Pink but with witches, and Tim had to go along with it because it's a band rule that you don't disagree with each other in public, and yeah, the Berkeley student they hired as their PR intern gave them shit about that and wrote them a five-page annotated summary of the series so that when asked in the future they could definitively declare for Team Edward.
"But I don't want to be Team Edward," Tim had said after reading the heavily footnoted document, and skimming the bibliography.
"You'll alienate an eighty percent majority of fans if you pick Jacob," the intern told him.
"But if the vampire-werewolf conflict is actually a reiteration of genocidal imperialism and the patriarchal ideal of the noble savage-" Tim tapped paragraph seven, "-then saying I'm Team Edward is basically the same as handing out smallpox blankets."
"Look. You said you want this market. Do you need me to draw you a pie chart?" the intern snatched her paper away from him so she could pass it on to Andy and Dan.
And thus, later, when the girls from the website asked, Tim said some shit about vampires being cool.
The actual official invitation to the premiere - addressed to all of them, c/o Damian's basement office - comes with a giant basket of dark chocolate, novelty blood and some themed merch.
Andy scowls at the tetra-pak of blood juice and says, "This just makes me wish we'd gotten onto the soundtrack for True Blood." He punctures the foil with the bendy straw and sips at something syrupy and dark. "Also, ew."
Damian, who has stopped trying to perk Andy up after so many weeks of failing at it, just looks kind of sad as he glances over the velvet-embossed card. "Yeah, that would've been good, too."
Like he takes it as his own personal fault that the highest grossing film series in history asked them to do a song for their soundtrack and Andy doesn't like it.
Andy slurps his blood and waves away the invite when Damian offers it to him. "Don't make me look at it. Just tell me where to be and what we're wearing."
Tim decides to change the subject. And yeah, maybe he's feeling a little piqued on Damian's behalf when he says: "So who are you going to bring as your date, Andy?"
There is a moment then where conversation - Dan on the phone to an eBay vendor in Cleveland re: some vintage tracksuits they want for a new video; Bunny Carlos making let's-play-fetch noises at Damian; Shana upstairs trying to convince Dora to gnaw on a shoe that she wants to use in her next piece - halts.
Andy does a total full-body blush, as evidenced by the fact that his face, throat and biceps infuse with red, and his gaze takes a leaden drop to the floor and does not move from his sneakers. "Dunno," he mutters, not quite audible.
Tim feels instantly terrible.
Damian gives him this look, like, god, Tim, you know he's sensitive.
And so Tim changes the subject again, this time by announcing, "Well I'm going stag."
And Dan says, "Like that's news." And then, to his phone: "No, not you. Do you have peach? We're going for like, tropical fruity." And then, to Andy: "And by fruity I mean brightly colored." And then, to the room: "But also gay. If you take gay to be a synonym for super awesome. Which is what our video will be."
On the floor, Bunny Carlos gives his input in precisely enunciated yowls.
Anyway, the eBay vendor doesn’t pan out and they end up going to American Apparel for the track suits.
--
Tim and Andy go to their Costume National fitting for the premiere together. Damian already went with Shana, who is secretly terrified of couture and said she needed the opportunity to make the people there find her a decent dress for her upcoming solo exhibit at Susanne Vielmetter. And Dan went last night because he has to spend today choosing which sister and/or mother he's bringing as his plus one.
Standing on the little pedestal, Tim feels like a bride. The tailor looks simultaneously young and old in the way that people with good surgeons do, and Tim gets the feeling the guy would be really rude if they weren't semi-famous. And if Andy wasn't really attractive.
"Your colleagues have chosen Italian cuts," the tailor informs them as he takes their inseam measurements, "Would you prefer two buttons or one?"
Tim and Andy make eye contact. This is why Damian is in charge of fashion. Anything that doesn't come in hot pink or paisley is beyond the rest of them.
"I'll defer to your judgment," says Tim. "Just make sure I look better than everyone else."
"Then you will want a waistcoat," says the tailor.
Tim is almost entirely sure that these suits are either free or rentals. "Certainly, my good man," he agrees.
The tailor disappears as Andy's phone starts vibrating in his pocket. It's near silent in the fitting room, and Tim can hear it distinctly.
He looks over. Andy is stolidly ignoring the fact that his pants are shivering. Another red flush is creeping up his face.
"You gonna get that?" Tim says.
The phone stops vibrating and starts playing a cheesy pop song that Tim doesn't quite recognize.
"Nope," says Andy.
"Who is it?" Tim asks.
Andy shakes his head.
Two quick steps over to the other pedestal, and Tim has Andy's phone in his hand. "Hello, Andy's phone, Tim speaking."
"Oh, hi," says a startled voice.
"Hello Spencer!" Tim chirps. He cheated: Spencer's face is on the screen, scowling and wearing bunny ears and aviators. The picture is easily five years old, from the tour they did together back when they were all infants.
"Andy called me but didn't leave a voicemail," Spencer reports, sounding breezy and maybe just a bit uncertain. "Is he around?"
Tim has to kind of skip across the room as Andy lunges for the phone. He narrowly avoids stumbling into a rack of thousand dollar suits. Tim is not the nimblest.
"Andy is half naked because he's getting his junk measured for his suit tonight," Tim says. "What are you wearing?"
"Tim!" Andy squawks. He spreads his arms hawkishly as if to demonstrate: no, I am fully clothed thankyouverymuchTimothy.
"Right now?" Spencer laughs. "Uh, board shorts and a pretty pathetic sunburn?"
"Sexy!" Tim approves. "But I meant tonight. We're going two-button Italian. I'll make Andy wear a red tie if you want to coordinate. Something in pomegranate?"
"What's tonight?" asks Spencer, who is doing an admirable job of keeping up as Tim does his best to keep out of Andy's reach.
"The Twilight premiere that Andy called to invite you to," Tim says, shooting Andy daggers for not doing this last month for christ's sake.
"Oh," says Spencer. There is a pause, and a breath that Tim hears even as he jerks away once more from Andy's hand. Spencer sounds suddenly distant: "Okay, well, I don't know if I-"
"As his date," Tim clarifies, because it is abruptly clear that Spencer and Andy don't have anything at all figured out between them and they are both idiots. He says it again, extra-clearly: "Andy called you to ask you to come as his date tonight."
He glances smugly at Andy, who has given up on trying to get his phone back, and is now standing tense and breathless with a panicked expression on his face.
"Oh," says Spencer again. His voice clears and Tim can hear the bemused smile on his face. "Sure. Pomegranate, got it."
--
Dan and Andy spend the whole limousine ride bickering.
At first the three of them sit in silence while Andy's nerves fray and start to show in the way he keeps making pissy one-liners about the books and their audience and their popularity and how he hopes the after-party isn't going to have soda pop and an ice cream cake with a unicorn on it, or, the other equally viable alternative: underwear models in plastic fangs and polyester capes.
But then Dan pushes his sunglasses up onto his forehead, lifts his eyebrows at Andy, and goes, "You haven't read them, have you?"
Andy's head goes back, affronted. "No. Why would I? They're crap."
"You're right," Dan says. "Anything to do with teenage girls is crap. True fact."
"That's not what I said," Andy says.
"No, you implied it."
Andy squints. "Are you accusing me of being anti-feminist for not liking anti-feminist books?"
"No, I'm telling you you're conflating the value of the books with the value of their audience."
"No, I'm not."
"Yes, you are."
"Actually, no, I'm not."
Dan's sunglasses go back down. "Let me give you some other examples of why you think girls like my sisters are stupid: Justin Bieber. Youtube makeup tutorials. Jeggings. The pink toy aisle in Walmart. Unicorns. Damian."
"Hey!" Damian says.
"Yeah, don't hate him because he's beautiful," Tim says.
"Okay," says Dan. "Andy's boyfriend's band, then."
"Hey!" Andy says. And then he mutters, "He's not my boyfriend."
"No fair," says Tim. "That band has made some truly terrible music."
Dan shrugs. "You only say that because teenage girls like it."
"Boys!" says Damian. "We're here. Smile for the birdy."
--
The red carpet is literally that and they kind of shuffle along blinking in the flashes and Dan is the only one who brought adequate sunglasses and MTV is really the only setup that cares who they are and so they tell the nice folks there all about their Costume National suits and how much they love Twilight and then Damian stops to talk to a couple of randoms with video cameras and Tim and Dan kind of lurk off-camera and Andy looks shell-shocked and nervous enough that Tim feels bad for ganging up on him in the limo and resolves to make it up to him as long as he doesn't puke or something awful in front of everyone, and as they keep shuffling Tim realizes they're behind Chris from Death Cab and leaps up to say hi, because it has been forever - like, seriously, five years, they toured together just after they toured with Panic! - and Tim totally wants to catch up and hear what Chris and Ben have been up to up there in the sodden northwest, until suddenly the light seems dimmer and it's because they've passed through the doors into the lobby and everyone on this side of the curtain takes a second to just breathe and blink and shake themselves back into mortality before their dates can come find them and accidentally see them coated in the filth and slime of this planet's terrible deluded cult of god-making celebrity-worship.
--
Spencer Smith is wearing a very nice, very fruity, pomegranate red silk vest with a navy blue suit. He has a brooch and a dashing hat. His beard is trimmed. Tim definitely forgot that the kid had grown up enough to start wearing facial hair.
He and Andy are ensconced at one of the tiny wobbly tables littering the lobby. The tables don't have chairs - they'd impede mingling! mingling is the point of these things! - and are bedecked with giant centerpieces with gold chrysanthemums, sparkling rubies, and palm fronds that make the place smell like a mortuary and look like a Christmas craft fair, and so these tables appear at risk of imminent sideways collapse whenever anyone is so bold as to place an empty glass on their top.
Andy and Spencer's centerpiece, in fact, is waving around like a metronome as the thrust of their low, grinning conversation pushes back and forth between them. The fronds at the top wave like antennae. There will be fake rubies everywhere when it tips.
Tim watches them from afar, quite satisfied. He himself has claimed one of the stools at the bar and is doing his best to not abuse the free liquor. Six years ago Damian bought him one of those little boards with the flippy numbers that reads ACCIDENT FREE FOR ___ DAYS, but wrote HANGOVER in sharpie on duct tape over it. Right now he's at 32. It makes him feel pretty adult. You know. Cutting back on the binging if not the drinking.
It's not too long before Shana joins him. She looks ridiculously good, as always. That woman. Costume National put her in grey, and not that Tim would be thinking this, but she's wearing the kind of dress that speaks to some pretty complicated lingerie underneath.
Tim sighs. "Buy you a drink?" he offers.
She smirks at him, "Don't break the bank."
He orders her a double gin and tonic and they perch and sip their pretty drinks and watch the famouser people mill around like goats at a petting zoo.
"Damian's been hanging off of Ira for like, at least an hour," Shana says after a while, conversational.
Tim takes a look around, and spots Damian and Ira Glass and Ira Glass' glasses up on the mezzanine overlooking the lobby. They are leaning on railings with their elbows and cupping their drinks and chatting with their heads close together. Ira's giggle floats down over the general rush of conversation.
Tim nods, sage, at Shana's observation. There's not much to say. The two don't see each other often, but when they do they sequester themselves like they've been sewn together, lips to ear, ear to lips. Damian's laugh changes around Ira, Tim's noticed. And he's noticed Shana notice it. It gets higher, a little shriller.
Shana spins around on her stool with an arched eyebrow and orders another drink from the lady bartender. Two limes, she wants. And she gets Tim another whiskey.
He takes it from her and smiles. She smiles back like she doesn't notice that it's a sympathy smile. A sickly smile. A this sucks for you but you're still the best ever smile.
Tim loves Shana almost as much as he loves Damian, which is maybe more, maybe less than how much Shana loves Damian, and no one loves Damian like Damian loves Ira. Ditto, how Ira loves himself.
But Shana, who does art that Tim totally does not get, is the best of all of them. She made a dream book once, everything typed up like newspaper articles. He asked if he could keep it in his house until she sold it. She said it wouldn't sell and he could keep it. He especially loves the dream entitled DANCETROOP COMES TO TOWN AND TAKES OVER. That one is his favorite. He tried to get Damian to make a music video out of it - white leotards, crowdsurfing - but apparently the two of them have a couple rule about using-slash-stealing each other's ideas.
"Why did you come?" Tim asks, maybe just so they can stop staring at Damian and Ira enjoying each other's company. And, while he's thinking about it, Andy and Spencer over there really, really, enjoying each other's company.
Shana eyeballs him sideways. "Are you kidding?"
"Yeah, no," Tim flounders smoothly. "Obviously I am -- not."
Shana smirks again and downs the rest of her drink. She could maybe answer him, she looks like she might be about to, but all of a sudden the crowd goes quiet and then murmurs rise up like a roar and four feet away a pair of gorgeous, emaciated, sulky hipsters in black-on-black sweep by like the marble floor itself has risen up to carry them along.
"Oh man," says Tim. "That was-"
"Seriously," says Shana. "That seriously was."
"Wow," says Dan, who has come up beside them. He has what looks like an orange juice in-hand and his fifteen year old half-sister Becka in tow. Poor Becka's mouth is dropped so far open that she looks like a deep sea fish trawling for krill. She doesn't say anything, staring after the modern day demigods who have disappeared into the red-draped cinema where the screening will shortly start.
The hall is clearing as people flow in after the two, inevitable and noisy as if the bathtub plug got pulled.
Upstairs, Ira is leaning over the rail and Damian is tugging him absently by a lapel towards the stairs.
And out of the swirling mass of gleaming folk Andy appears with his grim, flushed not-boyfriend tethered by a loose, low twist of fingers between them.
"So that was KStew, huh?" Andy says, not even bothering to crane his neck.
Tim shrugs a careless affirmative and offers an arm to Shana. Seeing as they're all paired off anyway. "Shall we?" he asks.
--
And then they sit through the movie. And Tim thinks that every movie theatre should serve cocktails, because, seriously. This is civilization.
Still, I refuse to believe that I am the only one who loves OK Go enough to write their tiny thrilling faces into fluffy travesty fictions like this. Where are the rest of you ninnies? Like, c'mon.
PS. And then there's the Ira Glass sex tape, so.
fandom: the far fringes of bandom; OK Go f. Spencer Smith & Ira Glass
pairings: Andy/Spencer Smith ; Tim/everyone ; Damian/his wife; Damian/Ira Glass ; Dan/feminism
word count: 3940
warnings: no sex, just some blushing and a bit of handholding and lots of, you know, suits getting tailored and some phone calls that happen
No excuses: OK Go had a song on the New Moon soundtrack. What the jesus eff, you guys. How did that even happen.
Damian calls Tim while Tim's at the optometrist sitting at the machine that blows air at his eyeballs. His phone, which he forgot to put on silent, announces the incoming call by playing the recording they made of the sounds that Bunny Carlos makes when he's barking in his sleep.
"Three Stooges, right?" the technician grins as Tim tucks the silenced phone away politely, and she does a dead-on impression of Curly's woo-woo-woo-woo-woop and pretends to poke Tim in the eyeballs, Larry-style. Alas, her aim's as good as her impression, and Tim ends up filling his messenger bag full of complimentary contact solution while she apologizes three more times and updates his prescription card, totally mortified.
Outside the clinic, he stands blinking in the sunlight and gets maybe five seconds into Damian's voicemail before he chokes and mashes buttons until he's called Damian back.
"You told them yes?" he demands, voice straining to keep on the downside of a holler.
"Hey, Tim. I just called you." Damian sounds pleasant and half-delighted, like he's making a sandwich or pulling cookies out of the oven. Maybe standing in his back yard in casual yet stylish clothing while playing tug with one of the dogs.
"Why would you do that?" Tim turns, helpless, side to side. He gapes at the parked cars. He gapes at his reflection in the windows of the optometrist's office.
Damian pauses, hearing the anguish in Tim's voice and obviously considering his words. "Well. We've done soundtracks before."
"Damian." Tim's mouth flaps open while he tries several times to begin to describe exactly what this is, in terms of the gravitational pull of its PR machine and the eons of radioactive half-life it imparts to anything associated with it and, also you know, maybe the fundamental literary tenets of the Twilight Saga, i.e., mormon - vampire - romance.
He can't get the words out. He flops a hand around in the air. "What did Shana say?"
Damian sounds mildly bemused by the question. "Nothing, yet. They called me maybe half an hour ago."
"Oh man," Tim mumbles. Shana will explain it. Damian's supergenius installation artist wife will at least be able to relay the basic facts in the Ivy League lovebird language they use for pillow talk (interracial anxieties, she'll say, gender role performance and consumption as identity construction) so that Damian can at least begin to see the maelstrom he has called down on them looming on the horizon.
But all that aside, something else has occurred to Tim. Something much, much worse. "Hey, Damian," he says, lifting his eyes to stare blindly down the street.
"Yes?" Damian sounds concerned. Concerned that Tim is acting weird, though, not concerned like he should be. Like he will be.
Tim can barely get the words out. He chokes, then manages to lift his chin bravely as he asks: "Who's going to tell Andy?"
--
"So all we need to do," Damian concludes, voice and face full of confidence at the ease and simplicity of the task, "is record a song with a celestial body in the title."
He smiles.
In return, the three of them facing him sit in sepulchral silence.
Andy's arms have not come unglued from where he knit them tight to his chest twenty minutes ago when he walked into the studio, his shoulders hunched so far over that he looks like he's at risk of popping a vertebra or two out of his t-shirt.
For his part, Dan looks like he's considering the relative freshness of the bok choy versus the green beans at the farmer's market on Third and Fairfax. He raises a contemplative hand to his chin. Maybe favoring the choy, then.
Tim came prepared: he is wearing his darkest sunglasses and largest hat. He tries to not make any discernable movements or facial expressions or sounds that could be construed as a verbal response in the negative or positive.
"So, any ideas?" Damian tacks on. It is admirable, the way that he refuses to look anything less than fully certain in the face of Andy's glowering crackle of repressed judgment. And Dan's telltale retreat into hey-don't-look-at-me-I-just-bring-the-rock. And Tim's own cowardly non-opinion, non-support, non-presence.
Eventually, Andy gathers his evident raging storm of thoughts into a coherent sentence, which he unravels for them, face thrust out to showcase his scowl.
"I think you mean," he says, "Do we have any decent songs that we want to sacrifice to the altar of inane bullshit in the temple of the god of preteen girls and their parents' wallets?"
Damian has the composure of an elementary school teacher. "Or that too, Andy."
Andy says, "You are going batshit."
Dan says to the room, "I probably have something."
And Tim can't help but inquire: "Timpanis?"
And Dan leans around Andy to nod at him, while Andy says earnestly to Damian: "I don't know if I'd rather we write a song that sucks because this whole thing sucks or if we should do our best not to suck because our name is now associated with something that sucks so much to begin with that we should do the unexpected and make it not suck."
And Damian says, "I know we'll all do our best."
Andy rolls his eyes and leans back in his chair so far that his head drops upside down. "Just promise me that whatever happens, we'll never have to play this song live," he says to the scattered array of cables hung like hula-hoops along the back wall.
Dan goes over to the space where all his stuff is and starts fiddling around. Looking for his autoharp, probably. He likes to rough things out with a fingerpick.
"Oh jesus, what if it's good. What if it's like, a crazy chart-topper single or something. Then we'll have to play it forever."
Tim says, "We should make it about astronauts."
"Christ, we need to stop and think about this, our fans are going to judge us so hard for this. Everyone over the age of fifteen is going to think we're total hack sell-outs."
"That's good." Damian shoots Tim a pointer finger of admiration. "Fake moon landing. What else?"
"Timpani," Dan repeats, because Damian wasn't listening the first time it came up. "I got this-" and he plucks out a lazy beat in sixes.
"Nice," says Damian, crossing the room to the keyboard, which Andy is obviously not going anywhere near. He drops a little splay of notes. "Something simple. No need to get worked up."
Andy moans in his chair. "This is going to be the worst."
--
They are invited to the premiere, of course. For a while, Tim didn't think they would be because of that MTV spot where Damian thought the movie was like Pretty In Pink but with witches, and Tim had to go along with it because it's a band rule that you don't disagree with each other in public, and yeah, the Berkeley student they hired as their PR intern gave them shit about that and wrote them a five-page annotated summary of the series so that when asked in the future they could definitively declare for Team Edward.
"But I don't want to be Team Edward," Tim had said after reading the heavily footnoted document, and skimming the bibliography.
"You'll alienate an eighty percent majority of fans if you pick Jacob," the intern told him.
"But if the vampire-werewolf conflict is actually a reiteration of genocidal imperialism and the patriarchal ideal of the noble savage-" Tim tapped paragraph seven, "-then saying I'm Team Edward is basically the same as handing out smallpox blankets."
"Look. You said you want this market. Do you need me to draw you a pie chart?" the intern snatched her paper away from him so she could pass it on to Andy and Dan.
And thus, later, when the girls from the website asked, Tim said some shit about vampires being cool.
The actual official invitation to the premiere - addressed to all of them, c/o Damian's basement office - comes with a giant basket of dark chocolate, novelty blood and some themed merch.
Andy scowls at the tetra-pak of blood juice and says, "This just makes me wish we'd gotten onto the soundtrack for True Blood." He punctures the foil with the bendy straw and sips at something syrupy and dark. "Also, ew."
Damian, who has stopped trying to perk Andy up after so many weeks of failing at it, just looks kind of sad as he glances over the velvet-embossed card. "Yeah, that would've been good, too."
Like he takes it as his own personal fault that the highest grossing film series in history asked them to do a song for their soundtrack and Andy doesn't like it.
Andy slurps his blood and waves away the invite when Damian offers it to him. "Don't make me look at it. Just tell me where to be and what we're wearing."
Tim decides to change the subject. And yeah, maybe he's feeling a little piqued on Damian's behalf when he says: "So who are you going to bring as your date, Andy?"
There is a moment then where conversation - Dan on the phone to an eBay vendor in Cleveland re: some vintage tracksuits they want for a new video; Bunny Carlos making let's-play-fetch noises at Damian; Shana upstairs trying to convince Dora to gnaw on a shoe that she wants to use in her next piece - halts.
Andy does a total full-body blush, as evidenced by the fact that his face, throat and biceps infuse with red, and his gaze takes a leaden drop to the floor and does not move from his sneakers. "Dunno," he mutters, not quite audible.
Tim feels instantly terrible.
Damian gives him this look, like, god, Tim, you know he's sensitive.
And so Tim changes the subject again, this time by announcing, "Well I'm going stag."
And Dan says, "Like that's news." And then, to his phone: "No, not you. Do you have peach? We're going for like, tropical fruity." And then, to Andy: "And by fruity I mean brightly colored." And then, to the room: "But also gay. If you take gay to be a synonym for super awesome. Which is what our video will be."
On the floor, Bunny Carlos gives his input in precisely enunciated yowls.
Anyway, the eBay vendor doesn’t pan out and they end up going to American Apparel for the track suits.
--
Tim and Andy go to their Costume National fitting for the premiere together. Damian already went with Shana, who is secretly terrified of couture and said she needed the opportunity to make the people there find her a decent dress for her upcoming solo exhibit at Susanne Vielmetter. And Dan went last night because he has to spend today choosing which sister and/or mother he's bringing as his plus one.
Standing on the little pedestal, Tim feels like a bride. The tailor looks simultaneously young and old in the way that people with good surgeons do, and Tim gets the feeling the guy would be really rude if they weren't semi-famous. And if Andy wasn't really attractive.
"Your colleagues have chosen Italian cuts," the tailor informs them as he takes their inseam measurements, "Would you prefer two buttons or one?"
Tim and Andy make eye contact. This is why Damian is in charge of fashion. Anything that doesn't come in hot pink or paisley is beyond the rest of them.
"I'll defer to your judgment," says Tim. "Just make sure I look better than everyone else."
"Then you will want a waistcoat," says the tailor.
Tim is almost entirely sure that these suits are either free or rentals. "Certainly, my good man," he agrees.
The tailor disappears as Andy's phone starts vibrating in his pocket. It's near silent in the fitting room, and Tim can hear it distinctly.
He looks over. Andy is stolidly ignoring the fact that his pants are shivering. Another red flush is creeping up his face.
"You gonna get that?" Tim says.
The phone stops vibrating and starts playing a cheesy pop song that Tim doesn't quite recognize.
"Nope," says Andy.
"Who is it?" Tim asks.
Andy shakes his head.
Two quick steps over to the other pedestal, and Tim has Andy's phone in his hand. "Hello, Andy's phone, Tim speaking."
"Oh, hi," says a startled voice.
"Hello Spencer!" Tim chirps. He cheated: Spencer's face is on the screen, scowling and wearing bunny ears and aviators. The picture is easily five years old, from the tour they did together back when they were all infants.
"Andy called me but didn't leave a voicemail," Spencer reports, sounding breezy and maybe just a bit uncertain. "Is he around?"
Tim has to kind of skip across the room as Andy lunges for the phone. He narrowly avoids stumbling into a rack of thousand dollar suits. Tim is not the nimblest.
"Andy is half naked because he's getting his junk measured for his suit tonight," Tim says. "What are you wearing?"
"Tim!" Andy squawks. He spreads his arms hawkishly as if to demonstrate: no, I am fully clothed thankyouverymuchTimothy.
"Right now?" Spencer laughs. "Uh, board shorts and a pretty pathetic sunburn?"
"Sexy!" Tim approves. "But I meant tonight. We're going two-button Italian. I'll make Andy wear a red tie if you want to coordinate. Something in pomegranate?"
"What's tonight?" asks Spencer, who is doing an admirable job of keeping up as Tim does his best to keep out of Andy's reach.
"The Twilight premiere that Andy called to invite you to," Tim says, shooting Andy daggers for not doing this last month for christ's sake.
"Oh," says Spencer. There is a pause, and a breath that Tim hears even as he jerks away once more from Andy's hand. Spencer sounds suddenly distant: "Okay, well, I don't know if I-"
"As his date," Tim clarifies, because it is abruptly clear that Spencer and Andy don't have anything at all figured out between them and they are both idiots. He says it again, extra-clearly: "Andy called you to ask you to come as his date tonight."
He glances smugly at Andy, who has given up on trying to get his phone back, and is now standing tense and breathless with a panicked expression on his face.
"Oh," says Spencer again. His voice clears and Tim can hear the bemused smile on his face. "Sure. Pomegranate, got it."
--
Dan and Andy spend the whole limousine ride bickering.
At first the three of them sit in silence while Andy's nerves fray and start to show in the way he keeps making pissy one-liners about the books and their audience and their popularity and how he hopes the after-party isn't going to have soda pop and an ice cream cake with a unicorn on it, or, the other equally viable alternative: underwear models in plastic fangs and polyester capes.
But then Dan pushes his sunglasses up onto his forehead, lifts his eyebrows at Andy, and goes, "You haven't read them, have you?"
Andy's head goes back, affronted. "No. Why would I? They're crap."
"You're right," Dan says. "Anything to do with teenage girls is crap. True fact."
"That's not what I said," Andy says.
"No, you implied it."
Andy squints. "Are you accusing me of being anti-feminist for not liking anti-feminist books?"
"No, I'm telling you you're conflating the value of the books with the value of their audience."
"No, I'm not."
"Yes, you are."
"Actually, no, I'm not."
Dan's sunglasses go back down. "Let me give you some other examples of why you think girls like my sisters are stupid: Justin Bieber. Youtube makeup tutorials. Jeggings. The pink toy aisle in Walmart. Unicorns. Damian."
"Hey!" Damian says.
"Yeah, don't hate him because he's beautiful," Tim says.
"Okay," says Dan. "Andy's boyfriend's band, then."
"Hey!" Andy says. And then he mutters, "He's not my boyfriend."
"No fair," says Tim. "That band has made some truly terrible music."
Dan shrugs. "You only say that because teenage girls like it."
"Boys!" says Damian. "We're here. Smile for the birdy."
--
The red carpet is literally that and they kind of shuffle along blinking in the flashes and Dan is the only one who brought adequate sunglasses and MTV is really the only setup that cares who they are and so they tell the nice folks there all about their Costume National suits and how much they love Twilight and then Damian stops to talk to a couple of randoms with video cameras and Tim and Dan kind of lurk off-camera and Andy looks shell-shocked and nervous enough that Tim feels bad for ganging up on him in the limo and resolves to make it up to him as long as he doesn't puke or something awful in front of everyone, and as they keep shuffling Tim realizes they're behind Chris from Death Cab and leaps up to say hi, because it has been forever - like, seriously, five years, they toured together just after they toured with Panic! - and Tim totally wants to catch up and hear what Chris and Ben have been up to up there in the sodden northwest, until suddenly the light seems dimmer and it's because they've passed through the doors into the lobby and everyone on this side of the curtain takes a second to just breathe and blink and shake themselves back into mortality before their dates can come find them and accidentally see them coated in the filth and slime of this planet's terrible deluded cult of god-making celebrity-worship.
--
Spencer Smith is wearing a very nice, very fruity, pomegranate red silk vest with a navy blue suit. He has a brooch and a dashing hat. His beard is trimmed. Tim definitely forgot that the kid had grown up enough to start wearing facial hair.
He and Andy are ensconced at one of the tiny wobbly tables littering the lobby. The tables don't have chairs - they'd impede mingling! mingling is the point of these things! - and are bedecked with giant centerpieces with gold chrysanthemums, sparkling rubies, and palm fronds that make the place smell like a mortuary and look like a Christmas craft fair, and so these tables appear at risk of imminent sideways collapse whenever anyone is so bold as to place an empty glass on their top.
Andy and Spencer's centerpiece, in fact, is waving around like a metronome as the thrust of their low, grinning conversation pushes back and forth between them. The fronds at the top wave like antennae. There will be fake rubies everywhere when it tips.
Tim watches them from afar, quite satisfied. He himself has claimed one of the stools at the bar and is doing his best to not abuse the free liquor. Six years ago Damian bought him one of those little boards with the flippy numbers that reads ACCIDENT FREE FOR ___ DAYS, but wrote HANGOVER in sharpie on duct tape over it. Right now he's at 32. It makes him feel pretty adult. You know. Cutting back on the binging if not the drinking.
It's not too long before Shana joins him. She looks ridiculously good, as always. That woman. Costume National put her in grey, and not that Tim would be thinking this, but she's wearing the kind of dress that speaks to some pretty complicated lingerie underneath.
Tim sighs. "Buy you a drink?" he offers.
She smirks at him, "Don't break the bank."
He orders her a double gin and tonic and they perch and sip their pretty drinks and watch the famouser people mill around like goats at a petting zoo.
"Damian's been hanging off of Ira for like, at least an hour," Shana says after a while, conversational.
Tim takes a look around, and spots Damian and Ira Glass and Ira Glass' glasses up on the mezzanine overlooking the lobby. They are leaning on railings with their elbows and cupping their drinks and chatting with their heads close together. Ira's giggle floats down over the general rush of conversation.
Tim nods, sage, at Shana's observation. There's not much to say. The two don't see each other often, but when they do they sequester themselves like they've been sewn together, lips to ear, ear to lips. Damian's laugh changes around Ira, Tim's noticed. And he's noticed Shana notice it. It gets higher, a little shriller.
Shana spins around on her stool with an arched eyebrow and orders another drink from the lady bartender. Two limes, she wants. And she gets Tim another whiskey.
He takes it from her and smiles. She smiles back like she doesn't notice that it's a sympathy smile. A sickly smile. A this sucks for you but you're still the best ever smile.
Tim loves Shana almost as much as he loves Damian, which is maybe more, maybe less than how much Shana loves Damian, and no one loves Damian like Damian loves Ira. Ditto, how Ira loves himself.
But Shana, who does art that Tim totally does not get, is the best of all of them. She made a dream book once, everything typed up like newspaper articles. He asked if he could keep it in his house until she sold it. She said it wouldn't sell and he could keep it. He especially loves the dream entitled DANCETROOP COMES TO TOWN AND TAKES OVER. That one is his favorite. He tried to get Damian to make a music video out of it - white leotards, crowdsurfing - but apparently the two of them have a couple rule about using-slash-stealing each other's ideas.
"Why did you come?" Tim asks, maybe just so they can stop staring at Damian and Ira enjoying each other's company. And, while he's thinking about it, Andy and Spencer over there really, really, enjoying each other's company.
Shana eyeballs him sideways. "Are you kidding?"
"Yeah, no," Tim flounders smoothly. "Obviously I am -- not."
Shana smirks again and downs the rest of her drink. She could maybe answer him, she looks like she might be about to, but all of a sudden the crowd goes quiet and then murmurs rise up like a roar and four feet away a pair of gorgeous, emaciated, sulky hipsters in black-on-black sweep by like the marble floor itself has risen up to carry them along.
"Oh man," says Tim. "That was-"
"Seriously," says Shana. "That seriously was."
"Wow," says Dan, who has come up beside them. He has what looks like an orange juice in-hand and his fifteen year old half-sister Becka in tow. Poor Becka's mouth is dropped so far open that she looks like a deep sea fish trawling for krill. She doesn't say anything, staring after the modern day demigods who have disappeared into the red-draped cinema where the screening will shortly start.
The hall is clearing as people flow in after the two, inevitable and noisy as if the bathtub plug got pulled.
Upstairs, Ira is leaning over the rail and Damian is tugging him absently by a lapel towards the stairs.
And out of the swirling mass of gleaming folk Andy appears with his grim, flushed not-boyfriend tethered by a loose, low twist of fingers between them.
"So that was KStew, huh?" Andy says, not even bothering to crane his neck.
Tim shrugs a careless affirmative and offers an arm to Shana. Seeing as they're all paired off anyway. "Shall we?" he asks.
--
And then they sit through the movie. And Tim thinks that every movie theatre should serve cocktails, because, seriously. This is civilization.