Sunset Ave.
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
Not that there is a Sunset Avenue in Belleville, but if there were... Rated PG-13 for some language. Written for fanfic100, prompt #32: "sunset".
2,296 words
Written April 28, 2006
… not, of course, that there is a Sunset Avenue in Belleville - but just say there were. Hypothetically speaking, and all. Imagine Sunset Avenue running parallel to the main street in town, down to the tiny park where Gerard used to bring Mikey to play, both of them wearing unlaced canvas sneakers and scuffing the soles on the sidewalk. Mikey wearing jean overalls, Gerard with his hair shaggy because he refused to let his mother take him to get it cut, despite the almost-summer heat. Sunset Avenue with the maple trees that turned fierce red. In the old Polaroids of them, Mikey is catching leaves in his fingertips, Gerard is wrapping his tiny chubby arms around thick trunks.
There's a little store by the intersection of Sunset and Hazelwood that is open sporadically, depending on whether or not the owner is on a month-long acid trip. She's a hippie gone to fat and age, selling potions mixed in saucepans, dreamcatchers woven with hemp and neon pink feathers tied on. This hypothetical shop on Sunset, it's called Dandelion Boutique even though they sell absolutely no clothes, and the owner calls herself Dandelion too and tells fortunes for five dollars a pop.
When Mikey and Gerard came by to get theirs told, Gerard nine and Mikey seven, she told them, "You two, only five dollars total - you're small enough to be one person," and she kissed the tops of their heads. Mikey, she told, "You've got a very, very old soul."
"Do I have one?" Gerard watched the tiny plastic beads on the curtains jangle together, casting flecks of rainbow light everywhere.
Dandelion held her hand on top of Gerard's head, nails digging in ever so slightly. "No," she said, not missing a beat. "He's the big brother. No question."
Mikey's tiny fingers entwined in Gerard's, their heels drumming against the couch together, Mikey said with a small smile, "I'll take care of you." Gerard pulled his knees to his chest and leaned against Mikey's shoulder. He didn't want to say thank you with Dandelion listening in but from Mikey's arm around his shoulder, he could tell he didn't have to.
When they went back, five years later, she said nothing about old souls but did say "you two belong together." Mikey combed his fingers through his hair nervously and Gerard shrugged, like, tell me something I don't know. Dandelion looked at them out of the corner of her tilty cat-like eyes and said, "Do you two want to buy any tulips, by some chance?"
Gerard, who had heard rumors, dug through his pockets and found a wrinkled ten-dollar bill. "Yeah," he said, and tried not to act amazed when she brought a little bag of pot out for him and Mikey.
"First-timers get papers free," she said, tucking in a little pack of rolling papers for them. So Mikey and Gerard smoked their first joints with that pot, sitting in Sunset Park, in the trees behind the swingset. They wanted to do it in the basement but feared their mother would smell the smoke, and there was a certain thrill to being outside, anyway. Gerard blowing smoke into Mikey's eyes, making them tear up; Mikey letting his laughter pour out in streams into the wide blue of the sky.
(Flash forward to the day Gerard's roommate in college sets off the smoke detector with his bong, and Gerard's first instinct is cover it with dirt from months of smoking with Mikey in Sunset Park, taking turns on the lookout for inquisitive kids.)
Down the block, the parochial school for the rich-kid Catholics, with the girls who swished their hips when they walked to show off their plaid uniform skirts. Gerard's first crush attended St. Anthony's - the patron saint of lost causes, Gerard used to say, though he was unsure if that was true or apocryphal.
His name was James Reed and he wore big clunky combat boots under his required dress pants and snuck out of early morning prayers to smoke in the stand of trees in Sunset Park, and one morning when Gerard was twelve and walking to school with a friend, they passed him and James said, "Sup?"
Gerard's friend kicked at the ground and tried to hurry on. Gerard nodded back and said "Sup", feeling really cool, and tried to get his heart to slow enough to let him ask for a cigarette. But his friend grabbed his wrist and dragged him on.
The next morning Gerard walked past extra-slow, alone, watching the spiral of James's cigarette smoke against the harsh red of the maple leaves. James nodded at him again and Gerard said, heart in his throat, "Wanna give me one?"
James laughed but in a nice sort of way, for being a kid wearing combat boots and smoking. He dug through his pocket and pulled out the pack. "Lemme guess, don't have a lighter?"
Gerard blushed and shook his head.
James lit him a cigarette, real smooth and careful, holding it out with the very tips of his fingers. Gerard was careful not to crush it. It didn’t even hurt when he breathed in, didn't sting or anything, and he exhaled smooth and smiled at James. They smoked in silence with the creaking of the swingsets echoing in their ears, and when Gerard was done he stomped on the cigarette butt and said, "Seeya," still trying hard to be cool. James nodded like he'd forgotten Gerard was there.
They went on like that every morning for a week, until James said offhand, "If you keep this up I'm gonna start charging you, y'know." Gerard nodded so fast his hair flipped in his eyes.
The next day he took a different route to school in utter shame and pretty much never heard of James Reed again, except for offhand mentions, but in retrospect James is still something beautiful and bright. Gerard can still look at those few mornings watching the cars go by on Sunset, and he can think, that's when I decided to smoke Marlboros, and wear combat boots, and grow my hair out long and black.
(Also he can think that's when I figured out I was gay but that is a different subject entirely: something not related to Sunset Avenue, but to basements, and bedrooms, and inside closed-up spaces. Something that does not come back to Sunset until many years later.)
If Sunset were a real street probably there would not be room for shops and a school and a park all crammed in, but since it's hypothetical - well, if we want, we can fit in a restaurant here and there, too. Specifically, a block down from Dandelion Boutique. This hypothetical restaurant, it's called Ian's after Ian Curtis, and the inside is all black with neon lights up around the plate-glass windows, and posters from metal bands everywhere. (Plastered over one lone stall in the bathroom is a forlorn Woodstock poster - left up at first for humor value, then for irony, and finally because it was too glued to the wall to peel off.)
Ian's would be highly unremarkable, save for the bathroom stall next to the Woodstock one: the temple of underground gossip, in its own way. Sharpie'd to hell and back with a rainbow of blues and blacks and reds. Phone numbers and infantile song lyrics and, from the occasional poet, a reference - "manuscripts don't burn", "dean moriarty was here".
Best of all, Gerard and Mikey's message board.
It started with Gerard's first attempt at rebellion, when he scrawled in big letters across the back wall, "FUCK YOU" and hoped someone would want to start a fight over it. He was fifteen and his knuckles itched to punch something with solid bone beneath it. (Fight Club hadn’t been written yet; maybe it's for the best that Gerard didn't learn how to make nitroglycerin.)
Two days later he was back and scrawled underneath, in Mikey's spiky handwriting, was "i'll tell mom you said fuck."
Gerard could've gone home and punched Mikey - relieved his frustration in turning his brother's face to a mass of red and pulp - but instead he thought about the delight in Mikey's face when he wrote it, the hidden smiles Mikey had been shooting him all day. He looked at it for awhile and laughed and finally wrote, "I'll tell her you're the one who drank the last of the Jack Daniels".
Within six months, the stall was so packed with their tiny, incoherent writing that half the patrons had forgotten the stall had ever been a public forum. It seemed almost exclusively theirs: Gerard in red ink, Mikey in black. Tiny jokes and secrets, things no one else would know about or care about. And one day, in Gerard's tiniest writing, in the bottom corner of the stall - "don't tell mom but I'm gay."
When he came back, it was scratched out heavily in black, and the only remainder was a tiny "me too."
Gerard went home and knocked on Mikey's bedroom door and said, "I hear Dandelion's open again, you wanna go check out the new selection?" Mikey looked pale and sad when he opened the door but he nodded. They didn't talk about much at all while they smoked in the stand of trees, but Mikey held Gerard's hand, and they watched the cars go by on Sunset, headlights getting brighter and brighter like shooting stars in the increasing dark.
Also on Sunset Avenue: the street sign that Mikey stole, putting it in the first care package he sent to Gerard at college. Also the lilac bushes Elena helped them plant in Sunset Park, also the 7-11 where they ate Twinkies sitting on the curb, feeling summer heat sizzling up through the tar on the road. Also the pothole where they found the puppy curled and nearly dead, and they carried it in their bare hands, unafraid of diseases, all the way to the vet on Briar. Also the stretch of sidewalk where Mikey had his first kiss - a story all in itself.
(This is where Sunset Avenue catches back up with Gerard being gay. This is where, all of a sudden, Sunset Avenue becomes something more than fond memories. That is to say - if Sunset Avenue even existed.)
Mikey was sixteen and he came home angry, miserable, throwing himself onto his bed in a perfect imitation of typical teen angst. When Gerard asked, he just said, "Fucking Dana Hansen," and curled up into the fetal position.
Finally Gerard coaxed the story out of him: Mikey had been walking with her to her house to do some project for history, when in the middle of a conversation about Morrissey, she leaned over and kissed him. ("With tongue," Mikey said, so indignant that Gerard had to struggle not to laugh.)
"So you got kissed," Gerard said, rolling his eyes. "That must be so tragic, I'm terribly sorry for you."
"It was a fucking girl and I don't like her and now I'm never gonna get a perfect first kiss because she's such a dumb bitch who doesn't even ask before she kisses, and her tongue was all slimy and gross and Gerard, it was supposed to be with like, Charlie Miller from the football team, and - oh fuck you!" Mikey finally stopped for breath, clutching a fold of his blanket to him, glaring at Gerard.
There was a long moment while Gerard tried to process everything. Finally he touched Mikey's shoulder, very gently, and said, "But since she's a girl - you've still never had a first kiss with a guy, right? So it doesn't even matter."
Mikey looked at Gerard and waited a beat before smiling. "Yeah," he said, "well." Another pause. "Tonight, let's go get stoned and talk about guys and read comic books."
"Let's just go for a walk maybe," Gerard said. He pulled Mikey into a one-armed hug. Mikey didn't hug back but relaxed a little, maybe, imperceptibly.
And that night they walked up and down Sunset, when it was so late even the cars of drunken teenagers had ceased, so there were no headlights to break the stillness. They didn't talk about much. Gerard thought about the way Mikey still walked with his shoulders tensed up, like he was scared or pissed about something, and he wanted to fix it but didn't know how, and it was a real, physical pain in his chest - the not being able to.
When they got to the part of Sunset that was filled with houses, Mikey stopped in front of a tiny one with blue shutters and said, hushed, "This is it."
"Yeah?"
They were standing close, so their voices wouldn't have to carry far, elbows touching. Gerard turned in to face Mikey. "Yeah," Mikey said, eyes half-closed. "We were talking about fucking Morrissey, that's ridiculous."
"Hey," Gerard said, his laugh a mere few breaths. "Morrissey does make me horny."
"Shut the fuck up," Mikey said, laughing even more quietly. "You think I wanna hear that? That's so gross."
Another moment and the moonlight on Sunset Avenue, and the houses with their closed-up windows like peaceful sleeping faces, and the empathy swelling in Gerard's heart - another moment and the touch of lips to lips. The briefest second of a kiss. And then Sunset Avenue was more than childhood memories and a centerpoint to town, then Sunset became the beginning of everything, the place where messages on bathroom stalls transformed from 'fuck you' to 'ps i love you'.
There would be moments of uncertainty and fear and the reckless desire to erase everything, but ultimately that moment overcame everything: that feeling that came tumbling down on them, that night, when they kissed on Sunset Avenue.
(That is, if Sunset Avenue had ever existed.)