back to the heartland (1/5)
back to the heartland
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(one)
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i. california
There is a distinct aura of bitterness in the air as Adam raises his glass to his lips. Paula is crying freely, Randy is unusually somber, and even Simon is particularly stoic. Kara refuses to even be seen. The dark Hollywood club that the production staff rented is hazy with smoke, and Adam wonders briefly if this is all some fucked-up waking dream.
“To Idol,” Ryan slurs into a silver microphone, downing his fifth tequila shot of the evening. “It’s been one hell of a run, kids.”
The whole group goes crazy, floods and floods of wannabe singers, legitimate artists, and real-life superstars who have come together for one final hoorah. Adam fits in the latter category, or so he’s told. Sometimes it’s hard for him to remember that this is what he wanted for so long.
The DJ plays late into the night, and he dances with everybody from the season eight group (at least everyone who is there anyway), and hits shamelessly on David Cook for the rest of the night because, as he puts it when the shorter man chuckles and slaps his ass as they grind to some ridiculous dance beat, “he has a sort of thing for American Idols.”
The irony stings later, when he remembers that only seven of the eight winners made it that evening.
As the farewell party of sorts comes to a close, he slow dances next to a velvet couch with Allison, stroking her hair with his gloved hand.
“Don’t be such a sourpuss,” she says, giving him a much-needed hug around his waist as they sway to some big band track. “You’ll get wrinkles, and then Madonna won’t want to tour with you again.”
He laughs and presses a kiss to her bright hair.
Life goes on, he supposes as he sees Cook wink dangerously from the corner of the room.
It always did.
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ii. alabama
Kris doesn’t really want to, but tonight he covers Sweet Home Alabama in a crowded honky-tonk right outside Montgomery.
It’s been four years since his name faded from the headlines, faded from the charts, faded from even the divorce papers that are filed in the basement of the Conway Superior Courthouse. He’s the one who wasn’t, overshadowed by the one who was, and he’s been reduced to taking any gig that meanders his way.
Out of the blue, his manager had suggested a tour of the South. Nothing like a good pat on the back from decent Christian folk, he had said with a fake accent that made Kris cringe. But really, five years out from his Idol victory, he had nothing better to do. So he threw his guitars in the back on his old pickup truck (the Hybrid just seems blasphemous in the Bible Belt) and drove across the Gulf Coast with an amp and his cooler as his only companions.
Halfway through his set this evening, he breaks out his acoustic guitar to do a tired Bonnie Raitt cover. He’s not entirely sure that the microphone is on as he hits the chorus. They’re not listening tonight. They never do.
So when a broke-down cowboy comes up behind him ten minutes later and slaps his ass and asks for something homegrown, he’s really in no position to protest.
The piano is badly out of tune and he’s too drunk to properly hit half the notes, but judging by the ruckus, nobody cares. Even the bartender stops pouring and puts his hand over his heart as Kris snarls his way through the second verse, howling along with everyone else about Birmingham and the governor of this hell hole.
Afterward, all the girls in too-tight jeans and midriff bearing tops fawn over him. He keeps sipping on his brown bottle, occasionally feeling a hand flit too high on his thigh or too low on his back.
They leave him alone after awhile, all but one, a tall girl with coy eyes and freckled skin.
“You’re cute,” she says, brushing her sharp black hair away from her eyes.
“You too,” he whispers hoarsely, maneuvering her to a dark corner, his beer left behind with his guitar and the wedding band he once cherished.
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iii. hawaii
They did a concert together three years ago on Maui. Their productions teams had thought it was a great idea at the time; Adam was selling amazingly well, and while Kris wasn’t exactly smarting for numbers yet, he could certainly use the press after the bad reviews his second album was getting. So 19 pulled out all the stops, flew them on private jets across the Pacific, and the two met halfway down the escalators.
“Look what the cat dragged in!” Adam hooted, pulling Kris into a bear hug and then joking about the younger man was turning him straight.
Kris just shook his head as they headed toward the limos.
A beautiful native woman stood in between them and the exit to the airport. She placed a large white lei around Adam’s neck, and kissed him on both cheeks before murmuring “aloha.”
She reached to reciprocate with Kris, but a freckled hand stopped her. “Allow me,” Adam said wickedly, taking the lei from the woman and running his fingers over the delicate materials.
“Wanna get lei’d?” Adam whispered, dropping the dark flowers around Kris’s head. His fingers brushed the back of Kris’s neck, lingering at the base.
Before Kris could even shiver, Adam leaned over and left two kisses on his face, one on his nose, and one dangerously close to the curve of his mouth.
They didn’t speak about the incident afterward, but Kris felt the slow burn through his body until he and Adam boarded separate planes four days later.
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iv. connecticut
Once upon a time, Adam had aspirations to go to Yale.
He never told his folks, of course. No need. He didn’t have the grades to get into the prestigious university, and even though he was becoming quite the regional sensation, their theatre department wouldn’t take a second look at his impressive resume without that 5.0 GPA.
Out of the blue, Adam is asked to give the commencement speech at the university come May. His publicist thinks that it’s a bad idea; no real press opportunities and (Adam’s quite certain) he’s terrified that his client will make too many references to oral sex and heaven forbid some Yale Law alum come after them with some bogus obscenity charge.
But Adam is Adam, and so today he sits on the stage in front of the thousands of nervous- looking graduates with his head held high. His set of black robes billows in the wind as he comes up to the microphone and starts talking about psychedelic dreams and rough sex and how music is to him what life is to everyone else. He closes by saying that he hopes each and every person there figures out what they can become before they understand who the hell they are right in that moment.
It’s completely silent until he turns back to his seat, and then each and every person in the auditorium stands up and applauds, the sound more deafening than an ocean during a storm.
It may not be selling out Madison Square Garden, Adam reasons as he shakes the Dean’s hand and accepts his honorary degree, but it’s just as orgasmic.
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v. oklahoma
Kris does all he can to not tear up the contract in front of his agent.
“I’m not doing it.”
The suit looks grim as he pulls out a monumental amount of papers from his briefcase. “Kris, we need to be realistic here. You’re not selling anymore. Less than 20,000 units for the last album! Your sound just isn’t marketable right now. It’s time to look to other options. It’s not a shame to be open to doing other things to pay the bills. Lots of Idol contestants do it at some point or another.”
He feels like an indignant child when he folds his arms across his chest. “I’m not singing ‘Surrey with a Fringe on Top!’ Not now, not ever.”
“Kris…” The older man is desperate now, pawing through the documents that Kris is sure he doesn’t need to see.
He’s already halfway out the door of the building when the gray-haired man gives up, the contract long forgotten on the table.
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vi. kansas
Dorothy, Adam thinks as he flips through LF. Baum’s seminal tale on a flight back from the Midwest, was a whiny little bitch.
She pretty much led a charmed life. All she had to do was sit down, look pretty, kiss her Auntie Em once and awhile, and play with her stupid dog. Life just didn’t get easier than that.
Adam knows what it’s like to sit at a crossroads, and know that everything around you is a bad choice. Left, right, up, down, there’s no way out of the loneliness that seems to consume everything. Sure, there are shiny people and things suffocating him daily, but in a way they just make the world seem all the more…empty.
He shakes his head in disgust and throws the book down in favor of Time magazine.
It shouldn’t have taken a whole excursion to the other side of Infinity for Dorothy to understand that she had everything all wrapped up with a sparkly red bow.
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vii. new mexico
“Oye, señor!”
Kris looks up from his cell phone (or what used to be his cell phone, it hasn’t worked for months now and he’s sure his mother is furious) at a young man across the street. He’s carrying a basket of bright red roses and has a sunburn spattered across his face that Kris knows will probably lead to melanoma if the kid doesn’t start using sun block.
The young boy reaches out and picks the longest-stemmed rose from his basket and holds it out to Kris.
“Por su amor?”
Kris was shit at Spanish in high school, but some words just stuck with him.
“Not today,” he replies after a moment, but gives the boy a five-dollar bill and the baseball cap he’s taken to wearing.
After he eats a lousy dinner at an anonymous Mexican restaurant, he turns on the ignition and just drives.
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viii. massachusetts
Adam is more than a little choked up on the day of Brad’s wedding.
“You gonna beg me to sing Whitney?” he had asked when Brad telephoned him six months earlier with the news that his oh-so-handsome thirty-something had finally popped the big question.
The man snorted obscenely on the other end. “That’s a joke, right? You think I’m going to let you and your shiny leather pants steal the attention away from me on the best fucking day of my life?”
They reminisce for hours about things that were, things that are, and things that they both hope might be. Brad manages to get Adam to agree to a duet on his next album (“your new one is crap, kid,”) and Adam gets Brad to promise him Godparent rights if that time ever comes (“you’re going to be a shitty parent, you know that?”)
“Hey Brad?”
“Yeah?”
Adam forces a smile he knows Brad cannot see. “I’m so happy for you.”
And that’s how he ends up walking his ex down the aisle in front of two dozen friends and family members, all of whom seem to be stunned that Adam is playing surrogate father of the bride instead of the more befitting groom role.
At the end of the walkway, Adam kisses Brad chastely before handing him off to his fiancée, who looks more relieved than anything else that his partner didn’t just jump into Adam’s arms and start fucking him in the middle of the ceremony.
The wedding is beautiful. All their friends cry. Brad barely makes it through his vows, and Adam can’t help but shed his own little tear or five when the two men kiss in front of the nondenominational pastor, their figures lit by the glowing Boston sun. A part of him will always be with Brad, that first person to break him and mend him and call him whole when he wasn’t.
After the reception, Adam watches as another man drives away from him.
It’s just one more battle he’s lost.
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ix. montana
Kris drives until his truck breaks down.
He’s some one hundred miles away from Broadus, or so said the bright blue sign his truck had finally died in front of. Now he’s stuck on the side of some dark highway with no way to call for help, and night rapidly approaching in the Montana foothills.
Kris really wanted to make it to Canada. He had brought his passport with him, but had big plans to leave it at customs and drive like hell until the United States was just a distant memory. It was a tantalizing glimpse at liberation, to think that one step over an imaginary line meant he could never come back.
He sits next to the front wheel of the truck, and grabs a bottle of water from the cooler. He notices that it’s the last one, and drinks the whole thing in one deep swallow.
He stands up as he notices a set of headlights speeding down the road, and he stands to wave the driver down.
As he settles in the front seat of the sedan, he notices a small crucifix hanging from the rearview mirror.
Maybe this was just God’s way of telling him to stop running.
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x. south dakota
“What the fuck is in South Dakota?”
Even though Adam is more than a thousand miles away, Kris still blushes.
“Um, nothing?”
“Then why the fuck are you there?”
The brunette flops back down on his motel’s bed, inhaling the scent of the rain outside until he can’t breathe.
“No idea.”
Adam sighs into the receiver, and looks at the plane on the runway that he’s supposed to be boarding. For a moment, he clutches the ticket in his hand and starts making a beeline for the chubby blonde who is checking passengers in.
Instead, though, he heads for the nearest ticketing counter and wonders how he’s going to explain his flight change from LAX to Sioux Falls Regional Airport.
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End (one)
read: ( two)( three)