(no subject)
title: no rest for the wicked
author: chimneypot
a/n: part three. the antics tour, from daniel's point of view. gen. au. this bit has sex in it, so be warned!
III.
Paris, then. They’ve been on the road long enough that the novelty is beginning to fade away. On stage, Daniel is beginning to feel - not boredom, exactly, because how could you get bored of being a rock star? It’s something else. He just wishes that he didn’t have to play the same songs over and over. Not that it’s a waste of time, or anything. Of course it’s amazing to meet his fans and the interviewers are all very pleasant and all. But it’s living in a hamster-wheel on display before gawking tourists and it gets to you after awhile. An incredible amount of time is wasted on tour, sleeping off hangovers, or standing about smoking at truckstops, or just sitting in traffic staring at the rain. That’s what really pisses him off, all the hours thrown away like dead leaves. But he feels guilty about being pissed off, then, because he’s living the dreams of thousands. What right has he got to complain? They all slaved for this.
The crowds have changed, now, too. They care more, or maybe it’s just that he cares less. He sees boys dressed like them at their shows and he’s not sure if he likes it or not. Carlos is the one who points it out to him, a big goofy grin on his face, “Look, he’s wearing a holster. He’s copying me.”
“Are you annoyed?” Daniel asks, because he’s not sure how he’s supposed to react to this.
“Fuck, no. Look at that! Someone thinks I’m cool enough to try and dress like,” Carlos says. “That’s fucking awesome. I’m an icon.” His voice is enthusiastic, devoid of the usual carefully amused tone he shielded it with. Daniel had been slightly embarrassed for him.
“Let’s not get carried away here.”
“Fuck that. We’re getting properly famous now. I mean there were one or two people I noticed the last time, but now there’s lots more. We’re going to be style icons, I bet you.”
Daniel had rolled his eyes but the next time he was looking through the crowd, he noticed that there were a lot more people sharp and dark like crows dressed like a cross between a banker and an assassin. When he thought about it at all. And that’s fame, he guesses, it’s people giving a shit about you to the extent that they care about what you buy and they buy it for themselves. He doesn’t really understand it. The music was supposed to be the important thing, and even if the band does have an image, it’s only to further the impact of their sound. He doesn’t want people to buy his clothes or smell like him or play a Les Paul because then it’s like they’re following the Daniel Kessler Manual for Life, and where the fuck does that lead? To mythical rock star status, yeah, but for him that’s the day job, and the day job is about making music. No amount of sharp-creased suits is going to make the music for you. All of his favourite musicians, he doesn’t care about their private lives, or what they’re wearing. It’s not worth shit. He tries to explain this to Carlos.
“Yes,” Carlos had said, “But that’s because you live in a little bubble cut off from everyone else, and therefore your opinion doesn’t count.”
Yeah, but you’re the one getting excited about someone copying you. Who’s the winner here?
*
At soundcheck, he’s the first person there, which has become de rigeur, more or less. He sits down and balances the salad he bought in the town on his knee and tries to strike up a conversation with an irate French techie who eyes him suspiciously. Half an hour later and Sam shows up, Wayfarers balanced on his nose, grinning sheepishly.
“Where the hell is everyone else?” Daniel snaps, by way of greeting.
“Coming,” Sam says. “I tried to wake them, but honestly, it’s like trying to rouse Lazarus from his tomb, if Lazarus had a wicked hangover.”
“Wasters,” Daniel grumbles. “French techies are hell, did you know that? They keep giving me these patronising looks when I try to talk to them, like they think I’ve just learned French from a phrasebook or something.”
“They can go fuck themselves,” Sam says neatly. “If it weren’t for us they wouldn’t be here at all. My head feels like someone used it as a baseball last night. And then a toilet, maybe. Christ.”
“I have no sympathy for you whatsoever. None. Not a bit,” Daniel says, but he makes an effort to grin and offers Sam some of his water. They wait together equably, sitting on the edge of the stage, watching the sound guys rigging things up and talking about nothing in particular. Paul and Carlos show up a little while later, and if the Lazarus description was exaggeration in Carlos’ case, well, it was kindness in Paul’s. He looks absolutely terrible. His ever-present sunglasses are hooked over his face, but they can’t disguise his unhealthy pallor, like a Victorian lady’s poisonous leaden makeup. His hair has separated into oily strands that are pushed back in strings from his face. He looks rough, especially in contrast with Carlos, who is his usual pristine self, and Sam, who is working the morning-after look like a fashion statement. Paul looks like someone who just doesn’t give a fuck about how he looks, to an almost aggressive extent. He’s showing the world exactly how much he cares about its opinion. Carlos is saying something softly, but trails off when he comes within earshot of Daniel and Sam.
“Rough night?” Daniel asks, but only half-listens because he knows what the answer is going to be. Paul’s hands aren’t shaking too badly for him to hold the guitar anyway, and that’s the main thing.
*
That night he goes with Paul in search of this bar that they both drank in when they were underaged and in Paris together for the summer. Of course Daniel knows that it won’t be there but they’ve both done enough E for it to seem like a great adventure.
“D’you remember that girl? With the, the fucking crush on you? She was mad after you,” Daniel says, laughing and falling into Paul’s shoulder. “She wouldn’t leave you alone and then when she found out how young you were she was disgusted!”
“Didn’t stop her though,” Paul says, self-congratulating. “Learned more than French that summer. This is it, right? Right? Is this it, Dan?”
They’re standing outside a big three-storey place, a tourist joint, crowded with Australians handing out fliers for free cocktails and young girls in short skirts.
“It’s not,” Daniel says uncertainly. “It… it looks a bit different, doesn’t it?” He’s trying to remember the old place through a fog of age and wine.
“No, look,” Paul says, pointing. “The Bon Vivant, remember? This is definitely it. Fuck, that’s amazing. It’s here. Come on. For old times’ sake.” Daniel tilts his head to the side, eyeballing the sign with its spiky letters, and then it suddenly all clicks into place in his head. The outside of the building, painted and moulded to look like an old chateau, with the doors open like gap teeth in an old man’s mouth, revealing sweaty girls like fruit flies swarming over the slimy tiles and pasted to the tongue-coloured walls. The bartenders are changed more frequently than the toiler paper, the shots are watered down, the cisterns of the toilets are grainy, the bouncers are few and far between. Daniel feels a violet wave of nostalgia , for how he used to think this bar looked, for the nervous anticipation of trying to sneak in, muttering the memorised details of someone else’s passport under his breath. Now he and Paul just walk in.
“Holy shit,” says Daniel. “It’s still here.”
“What a dive,” Paul says, looking around, and they both crack up, close with shared memories. Present Paul is superimposed over Past Paul, with his Nirvana records and his messy notebooks and his casual arrogance, projecting a persona that convinced no one. It seems they haven’t come so far after all. Fame and fortune and free fucks don’t sweeten who you were, and that bastard always has you by the throat. Maybe they’re still just the four guys who sat around a tiny space in New York trying to figure out how the fuck they were going to make a record. Maybe things haven’t changed after all. Or maybe that’s just the pills talking.
“It was just as bad back then,” Daniel says. “We were just too dumb to realise it.”
They order three drinks apiece for a grand total of fifteen euro and retire to a corner.
“I was so surprised at you agreeing to try and get in,” Paul says suddenly. Leaking words from a mouth that the drugs have unplugged. “You were always so perfect. Perfect Daniel Kessler. I was so jealous.”
“Of me? Why were you jealous of me?”
“You were so fucking smart. And, like, perfect. You know. With the films and all. You were so perfect. It was… weird.”
“Oh, thanks,” Daniel says, but the pills are playing a polka along the inside of his ribs and his fingers are fizzing and his mind has fallen into his heart. He can barely follow the conversation, let alone feel annoyed. “Weird, huh.”
“Just… I don’t know how to put it,” Paul says, and lapses into silence, considering. “You were so fucking… unflappable, it was weird, especially back then. It was like, you just genuinely did not give a shit about what anyone thought of you. Which is weird. In a teenager, I mean. You were always sort of poised.”
“You’re high as a fucking kite,” Daniel says, because really, him, poised? Is Paul thinking of the same Daniel Kessler? And what is he anyway, a fucking ballet dancer?
“You’re worse,” Paul says, and laughs. “You should see your pupils.”
“Let’s call Sam,” Daniel says. “Let’s go somewhere good.”
It turns out Sam is actually pretty close by, en route from one party to another. He’s lost Carlos somewhere along the way. Daniel and Paul are standing outside, finishing up the ends of their sickening sunshine drinks, when he staggers from the crowds eddying past like a drowning man carried to shore. He slings an arm around each of their shoulders, smiles wide, and says, “My two favourite men. What’s the plan for tonight?”
“Who knows?” Paul says, smiling back at him, relaxed and easy with the ecstasy, happier than Daniel has seen him in awhile. And even though his head is a helium balloon anchored to his body by the thinnest of rainbow ribbons and everyone keeps flickering and sliding in and out of focus before him, a little bit of Daniel thinks, he’s not really happy at all, is he. The thought is strange and hollow, like the crack of bones, and it falls out of his head before he can really consider it in any detail.
“I feel like this is a fucking Henry Miller night,” Paul says. “This is a night for Paris and all its whorish beauty. This is a night for singing and syphilis and sex and starlight! ‘The wheel is falling apart, but the revolution is still intact.’ I haven’t felt this good in years!”
“Well why didn’t you say so, Paulie?” Sam asks, patting Paul’s cheek, and then he says, “When a man feels better than he has in years and has all of Paris waiting with bated breath, there is only one place he can go, after all.”
And that’s how they end up in one of the finest strip clubs that Paris has to offer, in all its opalescent, crystal-studded glory, all its streets paved with onyx and gold and dirt, with the Milky Way stretching above and streams of piss trickling by below. Daniel wasn’t sure about where they were going until they actually got there. He just followed them airily, propelled by their planet-gravity, by their electricity. Paul and Sam are probably the closest to being friends of any of them. They are more frequently on the same wavelength, their personalities jagged and smooth in similar ways, and when they are together and happy they crackle and spark and start fires, so bright that Daniel has to follow them through the crowd or get lost in the dark.
If he were in spitting distance of sober, he wouldn’t be here. It’s not that he’s morally opposed to strippers; he just… feels sorry for these girls. And yeah, it’s a high-class place, one of the best ones. Crazy Horse has performed here. Burlesque, really, not stripping. He has no doubt that they fought tooth and nail, poisoned drinks and screwed judges to be a part of these dance troupes. But the fact remains that they’re taking their clothes off for men - for him - and there’s something about that that makes him uncomfortable. He tried to explain it to Sam, once, and Sam had shrugged and said that they could always quit if they didn’t like it. Which is true, he guesses. But on a purely emotional level, these places just make him feel creepy and sleazy, Humbert Humbert sweating in the corner while his broken infanta pirouettes for a few dollars and a trip to the cinema.
Sam and Paul have no such compunctions. “One of the few perks of a divorced man,” Sam had said, with that sharp edge to his smile that Paul shared in his more bitter moments. And Paul, he just wanted to see some tits. Daniel, too, once sobriety and civilisation was sheared away. And that was how they had ended up before a stage in a velvet-skinned club while girls with diamond-encrusted nipples pirouetted before them and made love to the cold steel poles.
“Look at her,” Sam said, pointing across the stage. His hand wavers like a priest’s integrity before spread legs. Empty glasses glitter before them.
“Which one?” Daniel asks, trying to focus on the girls, their skin feathered with light as delicate as lace, their breasts like iridescent jellyfish.
“Not on stage. There. Look, they’re alone.” Sam is indicating two women sitting opposite them. All Daniel has is a vague impression of dark, choppy hair and pale skin. The one on the left looks a little like a Victorian girl who grew up too fast, all eyeliner slashes and delicate, torn lace. The one on the right is a blonde, looking away.
“They’re probably lesbians, you know. Or off duty or something. Being here, you know.” He doesn’t feel much like talking; would rather dance, if he had his way. He feels a little like the operator of a glorious machine that runs on helium and mercury bubbles. It isn’t his body any more than the rainbow pulse of music is his, and the lack of possession opens up so many glorious possibilities, relieves so much responsibility.
“Whatever,” Sam says. “I’m going to talk to them.” Paul is talking to one of the dancers, hand wavering before her naked waist, and brushes him off when he tries to impart this information. He leers at the girl and if this were a cheap joint now is the time he’d be tucking a C-note into a tasselled g-string. Sam returns some time later (a minute? hours?) with the two women in tow. The antique relic of a girl with the raw cheekbones and ivory lace gives them both a faintly sarcastic smile eerily reminiscent of Carlos. The other one is a washed-out China-doll blonde, packed in Styrofoam worms and shipped all the way from a factory in Singapore. She doesn’t make eye-contact but instead tugs at her frothy chiffon dress which swirls about her thighs, as though she had lost her prince and her voice and had begun to melt into seafoam and chiffon.
“Odette and Amelie,” Sam announces with a flourish. “Very much heterosexual, English-speaking as far as I can tell, and ditched by the group they came here with.”
“Enchante,” Paul says, finally tearing his attention from the girl before him.
“I’m Daniel. Nice to meet you.”
“What are two ladies as beautiful as you doing here?” Paul asks delicately. His voice is mellifluous and fluid with alcohol, lending everything he says a faintly poetic, shambolic aftertaste. In this club, beneath its firework lights, surrounded by its soft, lingering scent of sex and sleaze, he finally sounds like he always wanted to. With the faded, sloppy geography of his face sharpened by shadow and a neon crown glowing on his colourless hair, he can be the man he’s always wanted to be. Paris has strangled the Paul that Daniel knows who hides from his own voice and uses a bottle as a telescope, and replaced him with a street-prince whose eyes are glowing like the Sacred Heart.
“Daniel?” Sam says, tapping him on the shoulder. He blinks and shakes himself from his reverie. “The girls were just saying that they know a dance club that will be open for a few hours yet. What do you think?”
“Of course,” Daniel says, and they stagger out into the flash and glitter of the two a.m. streets, the girls staggering like lepers on their blistered feet and the men throwing bottles like revolutionaries, the streets running with blood and vomit as though the city was oozing pus, trying to rid itself of the scabrous, flaking buildings and human infection scuttling and nesting in its hard, cobbled veins. Odette, the girl with the short, wild hair (woven through with silver beads, Daniel can see now, like the last air-bubbles of a drowning girl caught in her hair) and the hard Carlos smile, has caught a hold of his arm.
“Where are we going?” he asks her in French, though he doesn’t really care. Truth be told he could wander these streets forever; he could probably fly above the rooftops, too, if someone asked nicely, and bring the comets back to decorate the tea-time cake with.
“Just a club Amelie and I know. Your accent is sup - sup -” the word staggers and catches itself on the soft, drunken gates of her mouth. “Very good.”
“Thanks. I lived here as a child, you know. After England but before America. One of my brothers still lives here, but I don’t see him that much.” High, with his eyes hollow but his heart beating whole, Daniel is less scrupulously private. Sober, he doesn’t like casually giving out his history: it feels too much like handing out pieces of himself, pieces he can’t afford to lose in case it leaves him incomplete. But now he’s so high he doesn’t care. Odette is considering him with fearless feather-fringed eyes, her face soft and ripe, and when she kisses him Daniel feels a magenta honeysuckle burst of pain in his mouth and tastes hard-hearted pennies. He wipes his mouth and his hand comes away crimson.
“You bit me!”
“You’re mine now. Blood ownership,” Odette says, and when she smiles Daniel can see the faint reddish stain of his blood on one of her pearly little front teeth.
“You fucking bit me,” Daniel says, and he starts to laugh, and then Odette kisses him again, probing at the small flower-blossom wound. They stagger along the street like this, like drunken royalty, alternately embracing and laughing at nothing at all, their bouncing calls and jerky stop-motion footfalls forming a broken tune for the beggars hunching like hyenas in the black shadows. At the club they meet a gaggle of Amelie’s friends - at least five girls, more than enough for Sam and Paul to choose from. In the bathroom he drops more E with Paul, who is staring at his reflection as intently as a sinner at an icon of Mary, and won’t speak. It feels as though he’s only been there for a half an hour or so when Odette is pulling at his sleeve, dragging him away from the dancefloor.
“Yeah?” Daniel says, feeling his jaw begin to chitter and making an effort not to chew at himself.
“I’m bored,” she says. “Come on, let’s go. It’s closing time soon.”
Out in the streets again, and it’s the witching hour this time now, when the ghouls come out to smoulder in the eyes of the drugged, when the streetlights hit Odette’s face so she seems like an unreal incantation, like the poison spirit of Paris come to lead him into its dirty depths. A putrid princess with a tinfoil tiara perched on her hair and Daniel’s blood in her mouth. Beneath a wrought-iron lamp-post, her fingers curl and press into the soft flesh of his neck, as though she were trying to strangle him, and she presses herself up against him hard. Her hair shimmers like an oil-slick in the orange glow. One hand lingers below his belt, and by the time they get to her apartment he’s just about ready to throw her down on the floor and fuck her right there.
They don’t even get to the bedroom. In the sitting room with the dirty windows staring vacantly she pulls him down on the floor and pulls his hair and pulls her dress up. The shine of the moonlight paints her thighs silver and her dark foreign eyes are hungry black holes waiting to swallow him whole. She wraps one hand around his cock and jumpstarts his electric heart and sends the symbols of the zodiac racing down the meridian lines of his body, coming to rest at the tropics of cancer and capricorn, sealing his drug-seared mind in one hemisphere and the animal thrusts of his body in the other. He buries his face in her neck so he doesn’t have to look at her and she can’t see him and when he comes the Eiffel tower shoots champagne and ticker-tape from the twenties rains down on his bare back.
Afterwards they lie careless and primal and half-naked in a half-made mess of their clothes and sweat, with sap oozing from between her thighs and wet warm beads of sweat standing to attention on his back. She leans into him with her face scribbled out by shadows and her back all full of splinters from the raw cold floorboards. Daniel’s brain is a burnt-out bulb after the riot of raving shimmering sensations slamming into his head one after the next, but he hugs her close on animal instinct. Her breasts still covered by the antique lace of her dress but her cunt and the ripe curve of her ass naked and glorious. He puts one hand on the soft v of fur, just resting it there, and she moves her head so that her hair is spread and starfished across his chest and they fall asleep like that as the heavy-hearted dawn struggles with the night.
*
He remembers Nice only because it’s the first time that he sees Paul drinking in the morning. Aside from that it’s just a seasick rush of faces and endless, ugly roads.