Not another fucking VG story! Oh noes!
Title: Someday I Will Write a Love Song for Goebbels
Author: Yesido
Pairing: C/B (OMG!)
Rating: PG13 for language, slight drug references
Summary: Curt has never been an optimist, and sometimes he has serious doubts about the future of their relationship.
A/N: Experimental fic written while seriously high on David Foster Wallace. Concrit, comments, feedback in any and all forms is adored and cherished.
When Curt met Brian, he was hungover as hell. And when, on the rare occasions when he subsequently had cause to refer to their meeting, he always and only meant the afternoon at the motel. Although he was aware (having been informed) that they had been introduced the night previous, Curt didn’t count it, and could only hope Brian didn’t either, as the snippets he remembered were embarrassing at best, although not enough to rank the night in his personal Top 10 insofar as personal humiliation/regret were concerned. At any rate, the first time that they met in a way Curt counted was a bit rocky owing to the fact that he was still woozy from the night before and could barely follow the conversation, mumbling responses he only could hope were coherent as some sort of English-like communication attempt. Not to mention his cosmic-level hangover, he had serious concerns over his living situation dominating his few coherent thoughts: his hotel bill, which he was supposed to pay for in advance every Monday, was overdue by nearly a week, and he had the sneaking suspicion that he would soon be hunting down other even less respectable places to set up camp, if it was possible to find a less respectable place that didn’t make you pay by the hour. He had his doubts. He had spent the last several days making daring and cunning efforts to avoid the desk clerks. Successfully, as well, which was uncharacteristically lucky. He didn’t have anywhere to go, and had just about run out of sympathetic friends. He was flat broke, three weeks count em three more or less clean, and he wanted a hit in a desperate, consuming, unbearably distracting kind of way.
So, all things considered, the meeting with Brian was an exceptionally fortuitous one. It didn’t take much convincing to talk him into getting the fuck up out of Dodge. Or really any. A paid flight, a free room, maybe some food, some sex, some drugs. All the essentials were covered. It was like God was up there, thinking, “Man, I’ve had a thing against Curt so long, I forgot what I was pissed about. Let’s give him a break.”
That’s what it felt like. He was suddenly living the Easy Life, which he had always wanted to live. They say the rich have their problems, too, but their problems, as far as Curt could see, are basically a joke. Poor people have all the same problems, of course, but in far greater quantity, because rich people only have to worry about things that can in no way be affected by money. And money really does make the world go round, so that’s basically nothing. And they say it can’t buy you love? Curt knows this to be patently untrue because his love has definitely been purchased on a number of occasions, ten bucks for a half hour, fifteen if you want to tie him up, twenty if you want to hit him, but not too hard and not on the face. And sure, okay, whatever, he is perfectly aware that’s not what they mean when they say that. But if you happen to have a lot of money and some girl swears up and down she loves you, and you love her, and she’s actually lying, what difference does it make so long as she waits till you’re dead to collect her earnings? Assuming, of course, that she is not behind the death.
When he first hit New York, everything was great. He was a bit of a hero then, his band having been influential and the members themselves likeable and charismatic, by and large the kind of people everyone wants to know, at least in a certain subcultures and sociopolitical demographics. The kids loved him. The scene loved him. All the bands wanted to be just like him, just like the Rats. Everyone wanted to fuck him, to give him drugs, to be his friend. At first, at first. The scene has the attention span of a rat with a substandard IQ score, which is about the same as Curt, so he shouldn’t have been too bitter but sometimes was anyway. And, after the sudden but predictable disbanding of his band, Curt played briefly in a handful of side-projects, mostly ill-advised and all drug-addled, which led to a rapid downscaling from “scene icon” to “pathetic but harmless” status. People no longer offered him drugs. They would laugh when he fell down. He hated them: those scenesters, they pretended to like him, admire him. They thought it was hysterical when he would come to, forehead dripping blood, covered with vomit and half the time semen (usually someone else’s, but not always) or piss (usually his own, but not always, but then, how could he be sure?). He fucking hated them. Dumb kids: anything was hot for a minute, and the next it was a pathetic joke. Empathy was unknown to them: and why shouldn’t it be? None of them had it easier. Fucking cannibals.
Still. You would think that there would be a solidarity in desperation, in shared suffering. But that wasn’t the case. Nothing makes one bloodthirsty like hunger, like need, like a ravenous desire. Curt knew this, knew something about ravenous desire himself. Even no-attention-span-substandard-IQ rats occasionally learn something.
And when Curt met Brian, he was ravenous. And Brian, so naive, used to the cut-throat world of big business pop music, the elitism and cliquiness of up scale artistes, had no clue what he was getting into when he tackled the starving desperation of the streets. Curt clung to him; he would’ve clung to anyone. He needed an escape route, a ladder, a friend, a rope to hang himself. He would have cheerfully taken any of the above. With Brian, he figured he might have found all of them.
Brian was exactly how he liked them at the time: slender, boyish, almost completely hairless, face seemingly never touched by razor through simple lack of need. Now, he doesn’t mind so much, a change he largely attributes to aging; now he likes men who look like men, rather than androgynous man-woman hybrids, something that is only possible among the terribly young and the physically unfortunate. Tending to prefer people conceivably within his own age demographic and having a general disinclination towards the physically unfortunate, nowadays he tends to like men who appear slightly more man-like than Brian did then. Curt later suffered nobly through the unfortunately long-lasting bear fad, as well as the even more persistent leatherman fad, which seemed to him to be largely an alternative venue for bears once actual bear-ing had fallen out of style. These affronts to his aesthetic/sexual preferences he bore without complaint, as frequently other sources of satisfaction (those others who were neither amused nor aroused by the bear/leatherman phenomena) made themselves available to him. At any rate, at that point in his life, even more than now (in which he has matured but not dramatically altered his preference) be it due to genetics or upbringing or social conditioning or the pathetic/tragic circumstances of his own early life, which make him even now slightly wary of those physically larger and more powerful than himself (which, being on the small side, includes nearly everyone), Brian was about all you could ask for in terms of sexual desirability. And Curt was not in the habit of resisting temptation.
But what he was looking for in Brian was what he tended to always be looking for: a quick fix, a metaphorical band-aid, as it were, if one will pardon the cliche.
In an oft-repeated and almost certainly apocryphal legend involving a certain high-ranking Nazi who was perhaps Goebbels or Goering (Curt would attribute this to Goebbels, if pressed, but largely only because he doesn’t know who Goering is, his education leaving something to be desired), this aforementioned high-ranking Nazi attended a dinner party and for some reason decided to place his hand in the fire, or over a candle, at any rate into something exceedingly and most unpleasantly hot, for reasons that were either never explained to Curt or that he simply can’t remember. And this possibly apocryphal high-ranking Nazi who may or may not have been Goebbels kept his hand there for an impossibly long amount of time, burning himself, until a fellow party-goer said something that was probably along the lines of (in German), “Dude, what are you doing? Doesn’t that hurt?”
To which the man who may or may not have been Goebbels responded, “Of course it hurts. The trick is not to care.”
Curt was in his mid-teens when he first heard this story and already living in Detroit, and had a deep and abiding anti-fascist sentiment as well as a general disinclination towards persecution and/or genocide in general and therefore a serious problem with the Nazi party, but nevertheless was greatly impressed by this anecdote and immediately also attempted to repeat the trick, but couldn’t force himself to not care quite enough to be seriously burnt. However, he did take this as a bit of a guide to the way he should live his emotional life, and from that point on actively attempted to not care about any and every possible thing. To not care seemed like the perfect solution to all of his life’s difficulties, and he pursued this goal with relish. Heroin was a great aid in this project, as being on heroin is essentially the opposite of giving a fuck, up to and including whether or not your hand is on fire. The problem re-emerged, however, whenever he started to come down, something that he attempted to avoid as much as possible but was occasionally inevitable. He was, however, more or less successful in his attempt to at least convince people that he didn’t care (under the general idea that if you say something enough, you’ll believe it), that he was largely emotionless bar only certain exceptions for tantrums.
In what he considered a great tragedy, he had not actually ceased caring, only ceased giving the impression of caring, which is good but not the same. It was memories he wanted to lose, mostly, and while he had succeeded in erasing a good deal of his memory through his own psychopharmocological interventions and the ill-advised medically sanctioned interventions he endured during his early teens, most of the memory gap he noticed was either in the short term or else things that were in all probability positive experiences. Negative details he had unfortunately retained, some with mind shredding, terrifying clarity, occasionally more vivid than whatever events were actually transpiring. (It had been suggested to him that this could fall under the technical name of “flashback,” but Curt was not a technical person, nor did he appreciate his drug-related lexicon crossing into the realm of psychojargon.)
And, similar to his abject failure to successfully not care about his clichéd, tragico-pathetic childhood, he couldn’t stop himself falling in love, either. Perhaps if he’d known the warning signs he would have been better prepared, but as it so happened he didn’t know them. And then, suddenly, completely against his will, in what he considered tantamount to a massive security breach, he started finding himself wanting to talk to Brian, daydreaming about future things he and Brian might possibly do together, starting to miss him or worry if he were late, started to for the first time in his life actually want the person he had gone to bed with to still be there in the morning.
So at nights, when Curt would wake up and roll over and find Brian still there, he was always startled. Curt, accustomed as Brian was not to always losing, waited for the day it was over.
Brian would tell him, “Curt, you need to stop talking yourself onto ledges. You’re so paranoid.”
And Curt tried, but he couldn’t. Brian accused him of abandonment/attachment issues relating to early childhood events that had (according to Brian) forever and dramatically impacted Curt’s behavior vis a vis interpersonal relations, but Curt attributed it more to having what he liked to consider a relatively accurate perspective on Brian’s character. Not being rendered significantly stupider by having fallen in love, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living some sort of temporary reprieve. He didn’t think Brian would really intentionally screw him over. He expected it to be more of an oblivious screwing-over, like an elephant not even noticing it was squishing an ant into a flat little circle of ant-grease, grimy, crumpled antennae still twitching spasmodically. It ticked him off, too, just thinking about it, considering all the possible ways to be steamrolled. Of being so un-noteworthy that it would be possible to be steamrolled with obliviousness on the part of the steamroller. Of what you look like post-steamrolling. Splat like a little bug. Like a stepped-on tortilla chip, all pathetic and crumbly, just tragically and helplessly waiting to be swept up, not dissimilar (in extended contemplation) to the last groupie left unattached as the night winds down. Flattened like roadkill, skid marks from the speeding, heedless tires distressingly evident on the carcass. Crushed like other things that are flat and unfortunate.
People swear that you can’t have love without trust. Maybe they’re right. But Curt would wake up watch Brian breathe and would know he was completely, totally in love. And the sick feeling in his chest was entirely because he had seen too much to lie to himself. Both unfortunate and undeniable, up there with the Biggest Mistakes in His Whole Stupid Fucking Life, this one was: falling for Brian-fucking-Slade, Maxwell-fucking-Demon. Curt might not be a genius, but he shouldn’t be so dumb as to do something as silly as that. He’s no Einstein, but this was a move the average no-attention-span-substandard-IQ rat would scoff at. Curt couldn’t help it. Good choices were not his forte. He knew he was living on borrowed or possibly purchased time, that every second counted. And he would try to tell himself this wasn’t so, but every night, falling asleep with wrapped around his lover, his hand on Brian’s back, feeling the steady rise and fall of Brian’s chest, he couldn’t get over this feeling that he was someday going to look back on this with regret.
And that, he thought, would be the worst possible thing.
Author: Yesido
Pairing: C/B (OMG!)
Rating: PG13 for language, slight drug references
Summary: Curt has never been an optimist, and sometimes he has serious doubts about the future of their relationship.
A/N: Experimental fic written while seriously high on David Foster Wallace. Concrit, comments, feedback in any and all forms is adored and cherished.
When Curt met Brian, he was hungover as hell. And when, on the rare occasions when he subsequently had cause to refer to their meeting, he always and only meant the afternoon at the motel. Although he was aware (having been informed) that they had been introduced the night previous, Curt didn’t count it, and could only hope Brian didn’t either, as the snippets he remembered were embarrassing at best, although not enough to rank the night in his personal Top 10 insofar as personal humiliation/regret were concerned. At any rate, the first time that they met in a way Curt counted was a bit rocky owing to the fact that he was still woozy from the night before and could barely follow the conversation, mumbling responses he only could hope were coherent as some sort of English-like communication attempt. Not to mention his cosmic-level hangover, he had serious concerns over his living situation dominating his few coherent thoughts: his hotel bill, which he was supposed to pay for in advance every Monday, was overdue by nearly a week, and he had the sneaking suspicion that he would soon be hunting down other even less respectable places to set up camp, if it was possible to find a less respectable place that didn’t make you pay by the hour. He had his doubts. He had spent the last several days making daring and cunning efforts to avoid the desk clerks. Successfully, as well, which was uncharacteristically lucky. He didn’t have anywhere to go, and had just about run out of sympathetic friends. He was flat broke, three weeks count em three more or less clean, and he wanted a hit in a desperate, consuming, unbearably distracting kind of way.
So, all things considered, the meeting with Brian was an exceptionally fortuitous one. It didn’t take much convincing to talk him into getting the fuck up out of Dodge. Or really any. A paid flight, a free room, maybe some food, some sex, some drugs. All the essentials were covered. It was like God was up there, thinking, “Man, I’ve had a thing against Curt so long, I forgot what I was pissed about. Let’s give him a break.”
That’s what it felt like. He was suddenly living the Easy Life, which he had always wanted to live. They say the rich have their problems, too, but their problems, as far as Curt could see, are basically a joke. Poor people have all the same problems, of course, but in far greater quantity, because rich people only have to worry about things that can in no way be affected by money. And money really does make the world go round, so that’s basically nothing. And they say it can’t buy you love? Curt knows this to be patently untrue because his love has definitely been purchased on a number of occasions, ten bucks for a half hour, fifteen if you want to tie him up, twenty if you want to hit him, but not too hard and not on the face. And sure, okay, whatever, he is perfectly aware that’s not what they mean when they say that. But if you happen to have a lot of money and some girl swears up and down she loves you, and you love her, and she’s actually lying, what difference does it make so long as she waits till you’re dead to collect her earnings? Assuming, of course, that she is not behind the death.
When he first hit New York, everything was great. He was a bit of a hero then, his band having been influential and the members themselves likeable and charismatic, by and large the kind of people everyone wants to know, at least in a certain subcultures and sociopolitical demographics. The kids loved him. The scene loved him. All the bands wanted to be just like him, just like the Rats. Everyone wanted to fuck him, to give him drugs, to be his friend. At first, at first. The scene has the attention span of a rat with a substandard IQ score, which is about the same as Curt, so he shouldn’t have been too bitter but sometimes was anyway. And, after the sudden but predictable disbanding of his band, Curt played briefly in a handful of side-projects, mostly ill-advised and all drug-addled, which led to a rapid downscaling from “scene icon” to “pathetic but harmless” status. People no longer offered him drugs. They would laugh when he fell down. He hated them: those scenesters, they pretended to like him, admire him. They thought it was hysterical when he would come to, forehead dripping blood, covered with vomit and half the time semen (usually someone else’s, but not always) or piss (usually his own, but not always, but then, how could he be sure?). He fucking hated them. Dumb kids: anything was hot for a minute, and the next it was a pathetic joke. Empathy was unknown to them: and why shouldn’t it be? None of them had it easier. Fucking cannibals.
Still. You would think that there would be a solidarity in desperation, in shared suffering. But that wasn’t the case. Nothing makes one bloodthirsty like hunger, like need, like a ravenous desire. Curt knew this, knew something about ravenous desire himself. Even no-attention-span-substandard-IQ rats occasionally learn something.
And when Curt met Brian, he was ravenous. And Brian, so naive, used to the cut-throat world of big business pop music, the elitism and cliquiness of up scale artistes, had no clue what he was getting into when he tackled the starving desperation of the streets. Curt clung to him; he would’ve clung to anyone. He needed an escape route, a ladder, a friend, a rope to hang himself. He would have cheerfully taken any of the above. With Brian, he figured he might have found all of them.
Brian was exactly how he liked them at the time: slender, boyish, almost completely hairless, face seemingly never touched by razor through simple lack of need. Now, he doesn’t mind so much, a change he largely attributes to aging; now he likes men who look like men, rather than androgynous man-woman hybrids, something that is only possible among the terribly young and the physically unfortunate. Tending to prefer people conceivably within his own age demographic and having a general disinclination towards the physically unfortunate, nowadays he tends to like men who appear slightly more man-like than Brian did then. Curt later suffered nobly through the unfortunately long-lasting bear fad, as well as the even more persistent leatherman fad, which seemed to him to be largely an alternative venue for bears once actual bear-ing had fallen out of style. These affronts to his aesthetic/sexual preferences he bore without complaint, as frequently other sources of satisfaction (those others who were neither amused nor aroused by the bear/leatherman phenomena) made themselves available to him. At any rate, at that point in his life, even more than now (in which he has matured but not dramatically altered his preference) be it due to genetics or upbringing or social conditioning or the pathetic/tragic circumstances of his own early life, which make him even now slightly wary of those physically larger and more powerful than himself (which, being on the small side, includes nearly everyone), Brian was about all you could ask for in terms of sexual desirability. And Curt was not in the habit of resisting temptation.
But what he was looking for in Brian was what he tended to always be looking for: a quick fix, a metaphorical band-aid, as it were, if one will pardon the cliche.
In an oft-repeated and almost certainly apocryphal legend involving a certain high-ranking Nazi who was perhaps Goebbels or Goering (Curt would attribute this to Goebbels, if pressed, but largely only because he doesn’t know who Goering is, his education leaving something to be desired), this aforementioned high-ranking Nazi attended a dinner party and for some reason decided to place his hand in the fire, or over a candle, at any rate into something exceedingly and most unpleasantly hot, for reasons that were either never explained to Curt or that he simply can’t remember. And this possibly apocryphal high-ranking Nazi who may or may not have been Goebbels kept his hand there for an impossibly long amount of time, burning himself, until a fellow party-goer said something that was probably along the lines of (in German), “Dude, what are you doing? Doesn’t that hurt?”
To which the man who may or may not have been Goebbels responded, “Of course it hurts. The trick is not to care.”
Curt was in his mid-teens when he first heard this story and already living in Detroit, and had a deep and abiding anti-fascist sentiment as well as a general disinclination towards persecution and/or genocide in general and therefore a serious problem with the Nazi party, but nevertheless was greatly impressed by this anecdote and immediately also attempted to repeat the trick, but couldn’t force himself to not care quite enough to be seriously burnt. However, he did take this as a bit of a guide to the way he should live his emotional life, and from that point on actively attempted to not care about any and every possible thing. To not care seemed like the perfect solution to all of his life’s difficulties, and he pursued this goal with relish. Heroin was a great aid in this project, as being on heroin is essentially the opposite of giving a fuck, up to and including whether or not your hand is on fire. The problem re-emerged, however, whenever he started to come down, something that he attempted to avoid as much as possible but was occasionally inevitable. He was, however, more or less successful in his attempt to at least convince people that he didn’t care (under the general idea that if you say something enough, you’ll believe it), that he was largely emotionless bar only certain exceptions for tantrums.
In what he considered a great tragedy, he had not actually ceased caring, only ceased giving the impression of caring, which is good but not the same. It was memories he wanted to lose, mostly, and while he had succeeded in erasing a good deal of his memory through his own psychopharmocological interventions and the ill-advised medically sanctioned interventions he endured during his early teens, most of the memory gap he noticed was either in the short term or else things that were in all probability positive experiences. Negative details he had unfortunately retained, some with mind shredding, terrifying clarity, occasionally more vivid than whatever events were actually transpiring. (It had been suggested to him that this could fall under the technical name of “flashback,” but Curt was not a technical person, nor did he appreciate his drug-related lexicon crossing into the realm of psychojargon.)
And, similar to his abject failure to successfully not care about his clichéd, tragico-pathetic childhood, he couldn’t stop himself falling in love, either. Perhaps if he’d known the warning signs he would have been better prepared, but as it so happened he didn’t know them. And then, suddenly, completely against his will, in what he considered tantamount to a massive security breach, he started finding himself wanting to talk to Brian, daydreaming about future things he and Brian might possibly do together, starting to miss him or worry if he were late, started to for the first time in his life actually want the person he had gone to bed with to still be there in the morning.
So at nights, when Curt would wake up and roll over and find Brian still there, he was always startled. Curt, accustomed as Brian was not to always losing, waited for the day it was over.
Brian would tell him, “Curt, you need to stop talking yourself onto ledges. You’re so paranoid.”
And Curt tried, but he couldn’t. Brian accused him of abandonment/attachment issues relating to early childhood events that had (according to Brian) forever and dramatically impacted Curt’s behavior vis a vis interpersonal relations, but Curt attributed it more to having what he liked to consider a relatively accurate perspective on Brian’s character. Not being rendered significantly stupider by having fallen in love, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living some sort of temporary reprieve. He didn’t think Brian would really intentionally screw him over. He expected it to be more of an oblivious screwing-over, like an elephant not even noticing it was squishing an ant into a flat little circle of ant-grease, grimy, crumpled antennae still twitching spasmodically. It ticked him off, too, just thinking about it, considering all the possible ways to be steamrolled. Of being so un-noteworthy that it would be possible to be steamrolled with obliviousness on the part of the steamroller. Of what you look like post-steamrolling. Splat like a little bug. Like a stepped-on tortilla chip, all pathetic and crumbly, just tragically and helplessly waiting to be swept up, not dissimilar (in extended contemplation) to the last groupie left unattached as the night winds down. Flattened like roadkill, skid marks from the speeding, heedless tires distressingly evident on the carcass. Crushed like other things that are flat and unfortunate.
People swear that you can’t have love without trust. Maybe they’re right. But Curt would wake up watch Brian breathe and would know he was completely, totally in love. And the sick feeling in his chest was entirely because he had seen too much to lie to himself. Both unfortunate and undeniable, up there with the Biggest Mistakes in His Whole Stupid Fucking Life, this one was: falling for Brian-fucking-Slade, Maxwell-fucking-Demon. Curt might not be a genius, but he shouldn’t be so dumb as to do something as silly as that. He’s no Einstein, but this was a move the average no-attention-span-substandard-IQ rat would scoff at. Curt couldn’t help it. Good choices were not his forte. He knew he was living on borrowed or possibly purchased time, that every second counted. And he would try to tell himself this wasn’t so, but every night, falling asleep with wrapped around his lover, his hand on Brian’s back, feeling the steady rise and fall of Brian’s chest, he couldn’t get over this feeling that he was someday going to look back on this with regret.
And that, he thought, would be the worst possible thing.