You Will Not Rattle Us Apart, Ryan Ross // Vol. I
(In case you missed it the first time: delighter's primer is an incredible addition to this story, and is only minorly spoilery: The Quick & Dirty Pre-read Guide to Seemingly Original Characters Introduced Within 'You Will Not Rattle Us Apart, Ryan Ross'
DON’T PANIC YET: Or, how Panic at the Disco Became Everyone’s Favorite Brooklyn Band // L. Goodman
JUNE 24, 2009: It’s dusk on South First Street in Williamsburg, and the members of Panic at the Disco are sitting down to dinner at Farm, a new rustic-themed vegan restaurant. The place is not officially open to the public yet, but the hostess greets front man Brendon Urie warmly (he was here for dessert the other night). Each band member - Urie, producer-bassist Jon Walker, drummer Spencer Smith and guitarist-vocalist Ryan Ross - listens attentively as the waitress describes the specials. In the end, each musician orders the beet salad to start, followed by a light entrée. When the salads arrive, they discuss how this move will appear to New York Magazine readers. “We should do an online poll: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how lame is it that they all ordered the beet salad?’ ” Walker jokes, aware of the incongruity of being foodie rockers. “It’s really good, though,” Urie says. “I don’t regret it.” cont’d-
VOL. I: Wednesday, June 15 2005
Ryan wakes up every morning with a boner, because he wakes up every morning with his crotch pressed against Brendon’s ass. Their legs tangled up, etc. And what can you do about that: Brendon has a fine ass, and he keeps their little twin mattress warm with his enthusiastic metabolism even in the middle of February. There’s not a lot to complain about, there. February’s fucking cold. Right now, though, it’s June, and Ryan’s skin is sticky with sweat, and so is Brendon’s.
Ryan slides out from under the sheets and goes to pee. He has to step over Olivia and a lump that might be Sara, might be Martina, in the living room, also pressed crotch to ass. He brushes his teeth. He drinks a few glasses of water and admires his lack of a hangover. He scratches his junk in his - or Brendon’s, they’re kelly green, they’re probably Brendon’s - brightly-colored underwear.
Then he goes back to bed and wakes Brendon up with his boner. This is the best part of his day. It goes downhill from there.
.
Later, Ryan gets his lunch from Jon at the Herk-n-Jerk, three blocks down the street from his job making preservation negatives at the film archives. It’s half past noon, and he hasn’t quite made it to work yet, but there’s no way he’s going to make it through six hours of a seven-minute Stan Brakhage short playing two inches from his face if he doesn’t eat a pound of deep-fried tofu beforehand.
He says so to Jon when Jon directs a meaningful eyebrow at the vintage Astroboy clock on the wall behind him. It’s busy. The lineup standing with their hips cocked on the red and yellow linoleum is all suits and hairstyles on lunch runs.
Jon says: “So you want that with green curry sauce or miso on the side?”
Ryan says loudly - because he just waited ten minutes in that same lineup while starving to death - “Does the miso still taste like you jizzed in it?”
Jon blinks and says, “Or does my jizz taste like the miso? Maybe that’s the question, Ross. You ever think of that?”
Ryan didn’t think of that. There’s a distinct possibility that Jon is right: he eats enough of it to affect the chemical makeup of his bodily fluids. Regardless, Ryan’s never tasted Jon’s jizz, so the argument is moot anyway. He puts his collected change on the counter and says, “I will take the green curry. And onion rings.”
He sits at the counter and eats and has half a conversation with Jon in between bankers. The half of the conversation that happens is Ryan’s. His monologue, while he gestures with a donut-sized onion ring in one hand, is heated:
“So then he says that those guys offered him a job composing the soundtrack for this thing. This like, movie or cartoon or whatever. Right in the middle of it, okay. Like, is that supposed to calm me down, or something? So I go, ‘as if that’s not going to interfere with the band. Like you’re suddenly going to be more interested in practice and songwriting and shit now that you’ve got these two fuckers to impress.’ And then he denied it, and said some bullshit about my priorities being way more screwed up than his, then I told him to quit - the job, not the band - and then he told me that he wasn’t going to quit either, and then I walked out.”
Jon shakes some chili flakes onto someone’s batter-dipped dog: “You didn’t get dressed first?”
“What? Yes. I’m dressed, right now, right?” Ryan pats down his sweatervest, his crumpled slacks.
“But you guys were naked at the beginning of the story. The story started with: ‘so I was giving Brendon this awesome blowjob-’”
Ryan protests through his onion ring: “You don’t have to be naked to do that.”
“I assumed this was before breakfast,”
“Why would you assume that?”
“You guys do it, like, every morning. It’s like a mandatory calisthenics routine. You’re like sailors doing jumping jacks.”
“Wait.” Ryan puts down the food on its way to his mouth and says, “Did he say that to you?”
Jon walks away and serves another customer. When he comes back Ryan makes forceful eyebrows and Jon says, innocent, “What?”
“Did Brendon say that fucking me is like getting forced to do a mandatory calisthenics routine?” His voice squeaks a bit on those last three words and he shoves another onion ring in his maw, and chews it viciously. They were fighting too much this morning to have breakfast, and grabbing a bagel on the way out the door would’ve been less climactic than just slamming said door in Brendon’s stupid face.
Jon, looking a little horrified, waves his hands, “No. No way. He never said that. I was just inferring. From the multiple mornings I’ve spent on your floor.”
“So that’s what it sounds like to you?” Ryan can hear himself getting worked up all over again.
“No. It sounds… vigorous.” Jon says, slowing down the words. He glances at the lineup, he glances at the clock. He glances at Ryan’s face, twisted and just looking for an excuse to unleash more wrath. “I’m pretty busy, here. I’ll see you tonight, man. Alright?”
Ryan stuffs three more onion rings into his mouth and watches Jon perk up as a matching set of androgynous scenesters step up and order the soy jerky. “Yeah, fine.”
He steps back out onto the sidewalk, irritated. Jon and his straight boy routine. So smug. Never keeps a girl around for more than a week. Always gives terrible relationship advice. Obviously Ryan should’ve gone straight to Spencer to vent. At least then he’d get the you’re-an-idiot-go-apologize speech, and be able to feel bad for being a crazy controlling jackass of a boyfriend, instead of just pissy and even more self-righteous.
Alas, the masochist in him waited too long to pipe up, and now there’s no time for emotional self-flagellation. Just the regular kind. The kind that funds the rest of the melodrama at a going rate of twelve bucks an hour.
Ryan tosses his crumpled napkin in a trash can and slouches towards work.
.
His boss, Joanie, is built like an English bulldog and is probably fifteen years past due for retirement. Ryan suspects she’s pretty anti-establishment for a woman who lived through a war and a depression and three middle-aged kids and two dead ones and an overbearing military husband, also dead.
The only reason she’s ever given Ryan for refusing to retire is that she likes seeing his skinny little ass in the preservation cubby twenty hours a week. That’s what she said: “Aren’t any behinds I’d like to see in jeans that tight in the old folks home, are there?”
Ryan had blushed and rubbed his hands down the front of his thighs and ducked out early that day promising himself that he’d look into state precedents for sexual harassment suit payouts. Which he did actually do, eventually, only to find that he’d make more money working the seven years it would take to settle it.
Still, ever since then he’s come and gone as he’s pleased, and Joanie’s made sure that he always gets the shortest shorts - which is what she calls them when she hands them over - on account of what she calls his attention span. He can’t figure out whether to be insulted or not. But she always seems to pick some quality films for him to go through, frame by frame.
This is why, instead of just skipping out on work entirely because he is that fucking pissed about his life and his friends and his dumb boyfriend, Ryan goes in for approximately 35 minutes. He doesn’t even clock in. He just gives a tip of the chin to Robyn at the box office, wanders into the theatre to catch 10 minutes of the public screening of a Russian-American documentary on miniature deer farming and then wanders down to Joanie’s office.
“Ryan,” she says when he knocks on her doorframe. She’s squinting at something on her monitor, back hunched, light reflected in her glasses.
He says, “Mrs. Eddington, I’m not going to come in today, if you don’t mind. I’ll make up the hours tomorrow probably.”
“But you’re already in,” she says, and looks over at him like maybe he’s a little drunk. She seems to dismiss the possibility: “Maybe if you don’t mind coming over here and fixing my emails for me.”
Ryan says, “Oh, sure,” and comes around her desk and clicks the sort-ascending-by-date button for her and she grunts in satisfaction. “Much better. I keep telling them that I’m not going to use this thing, but they say there’s no money in the budget for a secretary.”
“You don’t need a secretary,” says Ryan, “You have me.”
“You’re not around enough, Ryan Ross. Just this morning I got some sort of virus that showed me about a hundred pictures of kittens with psalms all over them, and I had to get the upstairs girl to get rid of it.” She gives him the eyeball: “You know they’d give you health care if you came in full-time.”
“Oh, well.” Ryan says - it’s what he always says - and looks down at his shoes because if he can say no to five days a week to Joanie then Brendon should fucking well know better than to say yes to those frigging cartoonists.
“Oh, don’t say it. Don’t reject an old lady again, it’s not polite. What was that about your hours?”
Ryan scuffles. “I’m - a little swamped right now. I’ll come in tomorrow and Thursday, though.”
“What, with your rock band, there?” Joanie smirks a little: her coral pink lips fold up at the corners. “I’m glad you’re meeting with so much success as an artist. You and your friends are such bright young men.”
“I wouldn’t say-” says Ryan, instantly guilted. His rock band. The way things are going, he’s going to make them exactly as trite and dull as Joanie makes them sound.
She interrupts: “No no, I won’t hear it. I have some Grekul shorts for you whenever you’re ready.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Eddington.” Ryan retreats out of her office. His hat is in his hands, which is no surprise because it always comes off his head without him even realizing it when he goes in there, a Dickensian orphan. She’s probably the only person he knows in this city that’s over 40, much less 80. He thinks it’s something about the way she wears her stockings and weekly hairstyle: she’s just so damn respectable.
He catches her watching his ass when he glances back, though. She smirks again, and he waves and ducks out of sight.
.
He catches the train back to Brooklyn. It’s not even 3:00 p.m., and they technically have this show tonight, but he’s heard that the organizer’s the kind of douche that requires you to not only already be kind of a big name around town, but then also act like he’s your friend before he’ll put you on the list. So if they go on - which they probably won’t, unless the hand of god swoops down to put a 9.8 review of their ancient demo on Pitchfork sometime this afternoon - it won’t be until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.
Ryan considers going home and taking a nap, but as he presses half his face against the dirty train window, he realizes that he actually feels entirely unprepared for this stupid show. Not the music part - thank god, they still get practice in three times a week, if nothing else - it’s just the sucking up to whats-his-balls till they get a spot while there’s still a crowd in the bar part. He dreads it.
Last summer, he would’ve been fine with it. He would’ve grinned and flirted and name-dropped and pressed discs into hands and made promises with his eyes. He was shameless, he was an embarrassment. He was single-minded and fucking thrilled with the results, because people like a kid with a goal in mind. That’s how deals are made. He slept around a lot. He made sure that he - that the whole band - got noticed.
Last summer he was on fire.
He had a list, a crumpled piece of graph paper that never left his wallet. When he peels open that wallet now, it’s still in there. Between register receipts and a driver’s license he only uses as bar ID. Ryan examines the scribbles, barely even words, numbered one through five.
First, he got the three of them out of their childhood bedrooms and onto the plane, which was the culmination of years of lust and despair and fervent hope, and sitting down in that tiny seat and doing up that belt buckle with Spencer on one side and Brendon on the other felt like simultaneously the best and scariest thing he would ever, ever do. They landed at JFK at 3:00 in the afternoon on a very hot day at the end of June, just duffel bags and bruised instruments and dirty hair.
Second, that very evening Ryan called a number he’d picked up from a friend back home, and convinced a very straight, very stoned dude from some experimental sound collective that played nightclubs in Manhattan to quit using his laptop to make airplane noises and join an unknown indie rock band of homeless gay vegans from Vegas, instead. And also, to put them up for a few nights.
Third, Ryan blew the last dregs of three years’ and seven retail jobs’ worth of hoarded cash to get his hands on a dubious copy of Pro Tools and the hardware to use it. The finished demo held all the dirty sounds of the living room they recorded it in, and the five fucking incredible songs they played straight through. Those songs, they are still the melodies that he sings in the shower, voice straining on Brendon’s high notes. They are the songs of his youth and his future. Ryan loves their demo, even ten months later he knows it is perfect and whole, and he has catalogued in his chest every brief acknowledgement that it received like a profusion of summer-blooming flowers, a treasure trove that he has tapped more times than he can count in order to take in the scent of success, of happiness.
Fourth, he convinced a review council to let the three of them into a family-friendly housing co-op on merit of their destitution due to having spent all their money recording a demo. His plea was accepted despite all the sex he planned on having once he had a bed of his own, because Brendon stepped forward in the interview and said, “You see, we’re musicians,” which sold half of the council, and Spencer quickly added, “Employable ones” to reassure the rest.
Fifth, with demo in hand, he persuaded half a dozen bars around Park Slope and one in Harlem (and also two in Jersey that everyone moaned about) to let them play those five incredible songs, and their many multiplying offspring, for real in front of paying customers.
And there - in a bar on Smith Street, in front of a grudging crowd of hipsters older than any of them - is where the list ended.
Ryan had assumed that the simple act of playing music for people in this city was a rebirth, that just getting here intact with music to share was enough. But he was wrong. And when he realized that it wasn’t, that was when he started to work.
He shopped around some shows in the neighborhood until he found a group of musicians that he liked, some guys that did four-part harmonies like wind in the trees, and then wriggled his way into a spot opening for them in some college towns upstate. Plus another two shows together in the city, and Ryan was outwardly smug and inwardly ecstatic when the spectacular, subversive opening act got six mentions in six reviews.
At the same time, he was spending his nights convincing guys with soulful eyes or string-calloused fingers that banging him was worth the risk that he might be lying about his age. He was also convincing Spencer that he was practicing very, very safe sex. He convinced himself that he was slutting it up for fun, intoxicated by freedom and success and the summertime humidity of a strange city on the ocean.
And at the very end of the summer, after the tour and all the shows, and when Jon was finally looking comfortable switching between banjo and bass mid-set, and Spencer seemed almost satisfied enough with the new songs to let them play the damn things in public, and their music was just getting better and better, Ryan convinced Brendon Urie that he was madly fucking in love with him and that they should be boyfriends forever.
In some ways, Ryan thinks, glaring vaguely at people as the train pulls up to his stop, it kind of sucks that he fell in love.
It’s a lot harder to be ambitious when your frontman-cum-boyfriend is offering you everything you want before you even roll out of bed in the morning. It’s harder to flirt your way into shows and it’s harder to boss your band around and it’s harder to write good songs and it’s harder to drag your ass over to Jersey, much less get it together for a real tour.
Because just waking up beside Brendon feels like success. And in comparison, the rest of the world - not music, never music - but the sweating and politicking and micromanaging and ass-kissing that goes with it, seems lackluster.
Ryan got lazy, is the problem. Last August, in the immediate aftermath of that first, terrifying sober kiss, he would’ve said he was happy. But in retrospect he can tell it was just a haze of contented laziness that cost the entire band all their hard work from the summer.
So he’s nervous about the open mic tonight. So he’s still ragingly angry at the quarter of his band that he puts his dick in, the quarter that he loves so much it sometimes feels like suffocation.
So he doesn’t deserve a fucking nap.
Ryan gets off the train.
.
Spencer works down the block from the housing co-op, so Ryan goes to visit Spencer. He thinks maybe he’ll poke around for some reassurance. Some unconditional love. That is what he needs right now. That is what Spencer offers, even if it sometimes comes in the form of a dirty look and a lecture.
At the frame shop, Spencer is standing at one of the massive work tables under the dusty windows with a measuring tape and a poster that’s trying to roll itself back up. Him and some other guy - dark hair, skinny arms, Ryan’s never seen him before - are measuring the thing and talking gold gilt: Spencer is taking notes with a pencil from behind his ear and the other guy is spread-eagled on the table, holding the resisting poster down. The frame lies in joints, ready to be assembled.
“That’s a lot of dinosaurs,” Ryan says, circling around behind them and putting his chin on Spencer’s shoulder. He puts his thumbs in Spencer’s belt loops and sends a mental plea into Spencer’s cranium for comfort and reassurance and maybe some of that leftover pie he knows is in the back room.
Spencer says, “Jonathan Safran Foer’s wife wants it framed for her niece’s birthday.”
“In gilt,” the other guy adds, lifting his face up so he’s not speaking directly into the table. “Because why would you frame something not in gold.”
Ryan peruses the poster. It reads: DINOSAURS. It has a timeline at the top, Cretaceous to Triassic. In between the crinkles and the marker-coloring the dinosaurs range from Prosauropods to Ceratopids. “She’s giving her niece a used dinosaur poster in a gold frame?”
“Yes.” says the other guy. He tilts his head and leans his ear on his outstretched arm. “You know she was shortlisted for the Orange Prize?”
“The what?” Ryan opens his mouth and grinds his teeth into Spencer’s sweatered shoulder, because the whole place smells like dust and woodchips and paint thinner and sometimes it makes Ryan feel a little woozy, but Spencer’s shirt smells like Spencer. He speaks through the fabric: “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“I guess if she won the Orange Prize we shouldn’t call her Jonathan Safran Foer’s wife,” says Spencer.
“Shortlisted,” the other guy corrects. “But that’s what she wrote down on the contact form: Jonathan Safran Foer, open parentheses, wife, close parentheses.”
Spencer finally twitches his shoulder, and says, “Ow, Ryan. Ryan, this is Zach.”
Ryan waves his hand in a wide halo around Spencer, elbow straight. He lifts his mouth from the damp spot on Spencer’s shoulder. Just being here has made him renege on a certain decision regarding naps: “Listen. Can I go sleep in the back?”
“You’re one hundred feet from your bed,” Spencer says, which means no. “Zach, this is Ryan. He’s in my band.”
“Or maybe you’re in mine,” Ryan suggests, kind of joking.
“Awesome,” says Zach. He lets the poster go and sits up on the table, legs crossed. “Spencer says you’re decent.”
“Well, yeah,” says Ryan, shooting the back of Spencer’s head a look. Like they need that kind of insecure marketing right now: Spencer needs to tell people that they are fucking magic-makers. “But we are way, way better than decent. Trust me.”
Ryan turns to go find the couch in the back, trailing a hand on Spencer’s belt that says you better come talk to me pretty quick, jerk, or I will eat all your pie.
Spencer says, “Fun fact: Zach is in a band, too.”
“Oh yeah,” says Ryan. He turns back, only half-faking his disinterest. It’s really important that he doesn’t ask which one, because that’s like asking where the kid grew up, how much rent he pays for his shitty studio apartment, where he eats his pho. The answer’s too telling. It’s judgmental just to ask. Ryan can’t help it: “Anyone I’ve heard of?”
“We’re called Beirut?” Zach asks, like the name could possibly be unfamiliar to anyone who ever took a high school band class and wished desperately that it was possible to be an indie-cool tuba player.
And now that Ryan looks a little closer, yes, this skinny little kid in natty cords and a plunging v-neck with wild black hair and a little bow mouth - barely older than him, really - looks familiar. Ryan doesn’t catalog Brooklyn hipsters the way he used to, the way he did last summer when he was deciding which ones he might consider banging and which he’d rather just talk business with, and on even rarer occasions which he’d like to play music near; but when he taps his memory, he knows he’s seen this guy with a ukulele and a fake moustache and half a freaking orchestra onstage with him.
Even as he struggles with what level of cool disinterest to fake, Ryan realizes that he’s backed himself into a corner. If he’s nicer to Zach now, he’s a cocksucker, if he continues to be rude, he’s ignorant. Probably both is better than neither, but he just kind of stands still and stares hard.
Zach glances away, “Yeah, we’re not a big deal or anything.”
“No, he’s heard of you.” Spencer puts in. “He saw you play three times in March. Cambrian House, Veer and that show at the park.” He ticks the shows off on his fingers and sends an arch glance at Ryan: “Am I right?”
“You guys are really good,” Ryan affirms instantly, given the excuse. “Good shows.”
“Yeah?” says Zach, looking kind of embarrassed and pleased at once. “Spencer and I were talking about how I should check you out some time.”
“We’ve got this thing tonight,” says Spencer without so much as a pause.
“Mmmm-nnnnnn,” says Ryan in a negating whine, all of his concerns about the douchebag organizer and the politicking and the cocksucking coming back at him in a rush. “It’s not-”
“It’s just an open mic thing” Spencer clarifies, “At the Drum and Monkey.”
“Sure, I’ve heard of it” says Zach. “I’ll be there.”
“Good,” says Spencer. He starts up on the framing job again like it’s no big deal, snapping his tape measure with a grin. Zach flattens back out on the table.
Ryan keeps his mouth tight in that line like he does when someone has done something insufferably dumb. They’re not even guaranteed a set. A set that’ll be two songs long, anyway.
He tries to shoot Spencer a glare, but Spencer’s back is turned, so instead he says, “Don’t forget to wake me up.”
And then he goes into the back and pushes aside a circular saw and lays down on the couch and falls asleep, pie-free, thinking that the churning elixir of dread in his stomach is at least a familiar feeling. Specifically, it’s a throwback from last summer in that half of that dread is actually thrilled anticipation. They’re doing a show tonight.
.
He and Brendon walk up the stairs into the courtyard together. They see each other coming from a block away, each walking in from the opposite direction, and it’s kind of awkward from that distance because do you wave or smile or shout something incoherent at your stupid boyfriend who you’re mad at from two hundred paces on a crowded sidewalk.
Ryan settles for the cold shoulder, which Brendon melts with a wave and a grin so natural that Ryan can’t help but offer a lukewarm acknowledgement. Brendon says, “Hey, did you see Spencer? Is he cooking dinner tonight?” and Ryan has to say, “I think so? I didn’t ask.”
They go upstairs and through the gate into the courtyard where a lot of people from the compound - which isn’t really a compound but is actually called a co-housing project, which means that sometimes Ryan ends up babysitting kids named Llorona or Zooey (there are three Zooeys) on his hangover days - are gathered to discuss the group activity for the night.
Sara waves and repeats exactly what Brendon asked and Ryan says, “I think so?” much more politely this time. “He’s just closing up at work, he’ll be over in a second.”
“Awesome,” she says. Sara and Martina are the brains behind the whole project. Sara also chaired the council that voted to let Ryan and Brendon and Spencer move in last summer when they were not joking about being absolutely barefoot destitute. They weren’t a family, and they couldn’t make rent for the first two months, but they were young and vegan and artists, so Sara made sure the rest of the board let them in. Probably their being adorable didn’t hurt, either.
So now Spencer cooks up the village dinner like, every other night, and they always participate in compost day and Ryan never says a word about the babysitting and they pay their rent early, always.
Probably everyone heard Ryan and Brendon screaming at each other this morning, is the only bad part about living here with about twenty studios stacked up on top of the family units which are on top of the common area, so that sound carries everywhere. The good part is that it doesn’t matter: everyone here eats so much soy protein that putting up with the sound and fury of other people’s digestive/emotional systems is second nature. Ryan tries very hard to be good natured about everyone else: it’s just Brendon that gets him riled up.
Brendon knows that. They’re in the hall when Brendon says, “I’m sorry this morning happened.”
Ryan says, “Me too,” and keys open their door.
And when they’re in their kitchen, Brendon’s just a step behind him, hands slipping under Ryan’s rumpled shirts and in under his beltline. Ryan tenses even though Brendon’s palms are warm. The shock of flared nerves travels up his spine in a way that sets his whole body off in a shudder.
Stubborn, he doesn’t turn around, feeling Brendon step closer, the length of him and his arms around Ryan’s chest and his warm soft mouth against the cup of Ryan’s ear going, “I wish we hadn’t bothered getting mad.”
Ryan shivers again at the brush of air, the familiar voice so close that it sounds deep, like he’d picked up the sound waves through his vertebrae rather than his ear. “Me too,” he mutters.
And it’s true: he wishes they weren’t fighting about this, he’s sorry he got angry. He’s sorry Brendon isn’t smiling right now, or telling him a rambling story about his first day at this awful new job that Ryan hates already. Isn’t going to stop hating anytime soon.
Ryan twists in Brendon’s arms until they’re face to face. He can only glance at Brendon’s eyes, can’t keep contact for too long because he can feel all his anger and all his apologies and sorrow and anxiety struggling not to be buried. “Make it up to me,” he says into Brendon’s throat, and puts Brendon in between him and the chipped kitchenette formica.
Brendon does. He grunts when his ass hits the countertop, and squirms up to perch there, wrapping his legs around Ryan and pressing as close as the unforgiving stretch of their suddenly too-tight pants will let them.
It’s bad, Ryan knows, even as he opens his mouth to receive Brendon’s swiped tongue, but they haven’t had proper sex in months. Just this. Just this quick and dirty teenage fumbling that might’ve made sense when they were underage and surrounded by nosy Mormons, but now is just silly, with their bed eight feet away.
Even the aborted blowjob this morning: breakfast table. Brendon with a tea and his junk still damp from the shower, Ryan on his knees on the lino.
The memory makes Ryan groan as Brendon reaches two hands for his belt and button fly. Ryan is hard because his body knows Brendon, knows what Brendon’s hands and mouth can do, knows what it missed out on this morning. He gets harder with two strokes of Brendon’s fist, and buries his face in Brendon’s shoulder, huffing out breaths like a swimmer. He could come like this, easy.
“Stop,” he says, thinking he’d rather make this last, but Brendon just makes an encouraging noise, “Yeah, c’mon,” he says to Ryan’s ear, and keeps up a stream of encouragement that is not so much words as that same dark vocal timbre beamed directly into Ryan’s nervous system, a wave of reverberation that builds an orgasm up from the soles of his feet, the base of his spine, the bottom of his stomach.
Brendon is merciless. As Ryan whines a warning, he slips off the counter and resumes the last two strokes with his mouth. The wet and the warm finish Ryan; he puts his hands against the cupboards as his legs threaten to buckle, and he comes with his teeth pressed into his lip, a shout choked in his throat.
On his knees, Brendon swallows the whole mess. He pulls away, pauses, then licks off the rest, examining Ryan’s cock in a lingering way.
Ryan straightens, and Brendon helps him adjust himself back into his clothes. They face each other for a moment and, smirking, Ryan sends a questing hand to examine Brendon’s own state.
But Brendon steps away and shrugs. “Don’t worry about it.”
Ryan gapes, totally graceless. “What?”
“I’m fine.” Brendon smiles like he does when he wants to put people at ease. It makes Ryan feel like a total stranger.
“Just let me,” The demand in his voice is appalling. What Ryan really wants is to take a step after him, fit his hipbone against Brendon’s crotch and remind him what he’s missing, but Brendon is already turning.
“I’m just gonna shower,” he says. “Spencer’s probably finished making dinner by now.”
Ryan chokes back something totally unnameable, and when he calls into the bathroom, his voice sounds almost normal: “Hurry up. Food will go quick.”
“Yup,” Brendon says, and steps into the shower.
All of Ryan’s anger from this morning has come back in a wash of hot-faced red, but it’s a trickle compared to this new anxiety. Before, he was mad about Brendon screwing up the band with this new job, now he’s just mad about Brendon not screwing him. He doesn’t let himself ask the question that is screaming to be asked. He doesn’t let himself think about it.
He stumps down the stairs alone, thinking that at least the neighbors will be glad that the yelling and the cursing and the door-slamming didn’t start up again. Maybe that’s progress, he tells himself. But what it feels like is a backslide, scrabbling down towards a precipice he can’t see.
.
Open mic nights suck because there’s no sound check, there’s no prep time, there’s not even any kind of guarantee that they can use their own instruments. Once, Ryan saw an Islands show where Nick Diamonds broke his guitar’s output and had to borrow the opener’s. He peered out into the audience and said, low and apologetic, after a few minutes of fussing with the knob, “Sebastian, can I borrow your guitar?” Ryan nearly died of the polite Canadian rock and roll: if he’d had it with him, he would’ve totally handed over his own guitar to the guy. And then said keep it with a sly smirk and a flirty hip-cock that would’ve gotten him laid.
That was cool. Tonight will probably be way less so. Fucking open mics.
Also, Ryan didn’t really tell anyone that Zach Beirut is going to be there to like, check them out or whatever. To be honest, Ryan’s not even sure that Brendon and Jon would recognize the name. Jon’s never really fully committed to the scene, allowing himself to play the music but still keeping up with his experimental noise circles. And Brendon just isn’t good with names (probably the first of the many reasons he’s well-suited to long term monogamy). Anyway, Ryan’s playing it safe: he doesn’t want to make anyone nervous, just in case Zach does show up.
He texts Jon to ask whether he’s bringing his gear and gets a Fuck you ross back within thirty seconds.
Brendon duly lugs Ryan’s guitar out of the bedroom, along with Brendon’s own accordion and his autoharp and his keytar, and then lugs the guitar back in when Ryan decides that they really only need to bring the accordion, anyway. Two songs, and that’s if they’re lucky. The accordion is heavy and they’ll have to take a cab, which is inconvenient. Brendon’s instruments are always inconvenient, though, which makes Brendon a pain in the ass, but a worthwhile one, at least.
Spencer just shrugs when queried about his drums, not afraid of making do. Spencer could perform with a tambourine and his own shoe, to be honest. Worse things have happened. Spencer is a comfort to Ryan’s pained ass. This is why Ryan loves him.
So at ten, after a good five games of doubles ping pong with the stoner that lives in #312, Ryan and Spencer and Brendon take a cab to the place, which is one of those basement deals that’s better marked by the crowd of smokers outside than the shitty sign with a painfully interchangeable name like The Fox and Fiddler or The Drum and Monkey or the Drum and Fiddler or Fox and Monkey. Ryan hates pubs. They played their last show at a pub, too, way the hell back in February. Pubs always have these dumb little stages way in the back with broken lines of sight and shitty sound systems and shitty audiences who paid five bucks cover, or no cover, and resent the noise because they’re actually there for the potato nachos and the Guinness, which Ryan also hates. Or the Strongbow. Ryan doesn’t hate Strongbow, but that’s because he’s a little homo, according to Jon.
Jon’s already there, instrumentless, which is fine because Ryan was right and it looks like they’re all going to be playing the host band’s instruments anyway. Someone’s anonymous guitar and half-assed drum kit. Awesome. At least Brendon will have his accordion, thank jesus, so they’ll all still sound like heaven coming down.
This is the advantage they have: the music they play is so good that even pub crowds love them. And not in a drunken heckling way, but in a sudden wave of dropped conversations way. Ryan has faith in their music, if not the venue.
“Ugh,” Ryan says, sitting down with Jon at the table he’s staked even though the place is packed, and Brendon pats the accordion reassuringly, because he knows what Ryan’s thinking.
Jon moves his beer in protectively to keep it from the jostling, and says, “I saved these seats from a Swedish synchro team and Fred Durst’s posse. You guys owe me.”
Spencer says, “Sorry we’re late, Jon. I hope you didn’t feel like a loser sitting here all by yourself for two and a half minutes.”
“Actually, he must’ve been sitting here for a while,” Ryan observes. “Coming up with that.”
Brendon cranes his neck around for a server and then says, “I’ll get us a pitcher.”
“A pitcher of raspberry soda water for the princess, here,” Jon suggests to Brendon, who’s already navigated halfway to the bar, squeezing by on his shock of an apologetic smile, probably.
Ryan says, “Seriously, I’d apologize for being late but since when do you get here early?”
Jon shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I was nervous.”
Ryan doesn’t ask why, and rolls his eyes instead like it was a hilarious joke from Jon, who obviously never gets nervous. Because if you can get up in front of a crowd and make them listen to interminable synthetic noise that sounds more like gears grinding and pipes groaning and airplanes taking off and migraines starting, you don’t really get nervous about asking people to listen to a complicated raindrop banjo rhythm, especially one with Brendon’s groin-tugging choirboy whine smacked on top.
That’s Ryan’s reasoning, but now that he looks: yeah, Jon does look nervous, in his own way. Ryan realizes with a twitch of guilt that it’s his fault. Bitching at Jon about Brendon wasn’t exactly professional, or motivational, or good for morale. Or nice, even.
And then there was that snitty little spat in the cab about how Brendon’s shirtsleeves should be rolled up, not down. They’re too short, Ryan argued. Otherwise my strap chafes, Brendon retorted. Meaningless, but Spencer sat right through it, silent, on the edge of the seat.
Now, when Ryan glances at Spencer, he sees it there, too: a faint tinge of unhappiness at the corner of his mouth, accentuated rather than hidden by the beard.
Ryan drums his knees with his palms under the table. “Fuck,” he says into the noise of the crowd. Because he fucked up, and now it’s too late to fix it.
Brendon comes back with a plate of lemon wedges and a pitcher of - yep - ice water, because apparently this place only serves the mass market pale ale lite shit that none of them have touched since high school. Except for Jon. When Ryan looks accusingly at Jon’s beer, he shrugs and says, “It’s not as bad as it tastes.”
Brendon proceeds to go through his plate of lemon wedges, gargling a warning at Spencer when Spencer tries to take one for his water.
“You know those are terrible for your vocal chords, right?” Ryan says, “Dries them out or some shit.”
“I like them,” Brendon says, squeezing another wedge.
“Yeah, but-” Ryan says, and then realizes that he’s doing it again. Picking a fight in front of the kids. He closes his mouth and looks away.
Brendon squirts a seed at Jon, and then drinks half the pitcher of water.
At least Brendon’s not nervous. Despite Ryan’s best efforts. That makes one of them.
Fortunately, the host band is kind of repellently mediocre: it’s all guitar and drum, as close to cockrock as you get in Brooklyn. They have mediocre hooks, a mediocre drummer, painful lyrics made up for by decent delivery, plus a guy on bass dressed like Billy Idol. Overall a solid C performance. Ryan gets up and goes to find the organizer to sign onto the list.
Before he finds the guy, he finds Zach, standing at the bar and surrounded by so many people it’s hard to tell if he’s there by himself or if he’s the nexus of the entire crowd’s social solar system. He looks like he hasn’t even changed out of his clothes from work: a tshirt and a pair of cords. He is a little sweat-damp from the crowd, the air full of breath and bodies keeping his wild hair curled to his neck and his pale skin waxy in the orange light.
Ryan can appreciate the talent it takes to look so simultaneously noncommital and vital. Suddenly impressed, it takes him a second to work up the balls to say something. He has to put on a face.
“Oh hey,” he exclaims over the mediocre music, like he’s surprised. Like he hasn’t been straining his neck scanning the room for him since they got there.
Zach kind of nods and kind of smiles a greeting. Ryan notes that he is holding a cranberry juice, and approves.
Ryan says, “Good to see you here,” and Zach shakes his head and gestures to his ear. The cock rock is getting louder with every unbearable second. Ryan leans in close to repeat himself, and the gesture suddenly reminds him of himself ten months ago: he remembers how he’d brush his lips against their ears, how he’d pitch his voice to sound close and intimate in the crowd. Use excuses to stand closer, smile a little wilder, lick his lips and connect ears with voices with tongues with mouths.
He restrains himself. He puts his hand on Zach’s shoulder and leans in, but he keeps his tongue to himself. He wonders if this means he’s being chaste and loyal to Brendon, or just plain stupid for not furthering the band’s interests with this guy. “Good to see you here,” Ryan says again.
Zach turns his face and smiles at Ryan so close Ryan thinks chastity should always lose to flirting. “So when are you guys up?” Zach calls back. He doesn’t have to lean, Ryan’s already closed the distance for them.
“Oh, uh,” says Ryan, and darts another look into the crowd for this guy, who he hopes is wearing a sign that says DOUCHEBAG OPEN MIC ORGANIZER or something, because he has no idea who he’s looking for. Swallowing his pride, he goes for charm and makes a I-don’t-fucking-know face, complete with palms raised in the air and comical frown.
Zach raises his eyebrows and says something Ryan can’t make out, and turns around and bumps the shoulder of some middle-aged guy in plaid pants - like it’s 1992 - and yells in that guy’s ear.
Ryan watches the exchange: Zach gestures at him, Plaid Pants looks, Zach says something else, Plaid Pants nods, doesn’t even look at any kind of schedule and then Zach turns back and shouts, “You wanna go next?”
Ryan shouts, “Sure,” and he must have a kind of dubious look on his face because Zach laughs and pats him on the shoulder and leans really close to yell, “Have fun up there.”
They do, weirdly enough.
Their family melodrama must be some kind of musical aphrodisiac, because Spencer starts them off with a victorious flourish that Jon picks up on immediately, and with the two of them laying down a cityscape of support behind them, Brendon’s freed up to paint the foreground in vivid curlicues. Which is what he does best. Jaunty like a young lord, Brendon sings their two allotted songs - a cover of Spencer’s favorite terrible pop song; and then their best, their only, their world-shattering single, the one that even the hipsters love, the one that makes people remember them and ask for demos, a disc, a freaking myspace page with streaming audio, anything, afterwards - he performs them like a troubadour. Sleeves rolled all the way down, hands assured on the gleaming keys, elbows and mouth wide as bridges. Only the biggest gestures from Brendon. He’d swallow them all up into him, if he could. The crowd always knows it.
The only off thing, the one thing, that, when it occurs to Ryan, makes him feel for just a second that everything’s wrong - they’re a different band in a different city playing unfamiliar songs and no one told him - is that Brendon doesn’t look at him once, throughout.
Not a glance, not a touch. He’s nowhere near Ryan’s space. Ryan could be playing his part out in Jersey, beamed in via satellite. Brendon doesn’t come near him.
It scares Ryan, even as he knows he’s asked for it. And he sees how the energy that Brendon normally sidelines for him goes straight out into the crowd like the light off a bulb, refracted and enhanced by Jon’s mirroring grin, Spencer’s bouncing head, blurred arms.
Ryan just does his best to keep his wrists neat and to remember his part in the harmonies. Does his best not to fuck up the magic they all do.
.
After, they’re standing outside waiting for Jon and Spencer to come up. Jon was talking to some friends from his old scene, a couple who were blatantly using the opportunity to hit on Spencer. The night is getting a little too cool for Ryan’s liking, but he won’t huddle into Brendon and his warmth, his skin that’s still shining and damp from the hanging press of hot bodies downstairs. He danced through a whole bunch more acts while Ryan hung back, safeguarding the accordion like an old crow.
Part of him was waiting for Zach to come say, “You guys are magical,” because that’s the only word to describe them and their talent. That’s the word everyone uses.
But nothing. Maybe he left early just to avoid having to say that, or maybe he left because having to fake liking it would be too hard. Or maybe he was too turned on by Ryan’s flirting and didn’t trust himself to come say hi afterwards without getting a thorough eye-fucking and the promise of some kind of tryst in the alleyway out back.
Or maybe he didn’t want to tell Ryan that while his band is fucking incredible, the skinny guy on the left limping his way through the guitar parts is kind of a drag on their talent.
These are the thoughts Ryan tongued like a sore tooth while catching glimpses of his boyfriend bumping and hopping and grinning in a crowd of beautiful children.
Downstairs, he was bitter, but now up here in the night air, Ryan can suddenly feel how crushing his sadness is, like exhaustion. Like his whole body could flow down to the ground and pool there, a pond of self-pity so dark it sucks in glancing passerby. He’s sad for Brendon and how he’s treated him - the failed guilt trips and the petty arguments and the cold sex - but he’s more sad for himself.
He wants to say: I couldn’t do this without you. Or, this band is yours, not mine. Or, maybe it would be better for everyone if we broke up.
Brendon checks his phone, “Aw, jesus. I am going to be destroyed tomorrow.”
Ryan blinks, “What?”
And Brendon rolls his eyes and goes, “It’s Wednesday, dude. I mean, Thursday, now. And some of us are gainfully employed.”
Ryan says, “Oh. Yeah, I guess.”
“Are they coming up, or what?” Brendon leans to peer down the stairwell. “I might just grab a taxi. I don’t want to like, fall asleep in the studio right there in front of Doc and Jackson. You want to come home with me?”
Ryan finds that he can’t actually answer because his throat is closed up. Of course he wants to go home with Brendon. He’s been going home with the same grin, the same hands, the same warm body for the past year, almost. In most ways, Brendon is home.
But he remembers Brendon’s face when he turned away, saying I’m fine, and so Ryan just shakes his head, manages to mumble, “I’ll wait.”
Brendon gives him this look as he steps out onto the street, accordion in arm, hand raised. It’s not malicious or angry. It’s distant. Like Ryan is mysterious and ineffable as an ancient riddle, and Brendon is no Greek adventurer eager to test his prowess and be destroyed for his weaknesses.
Brendon’s face looks like regret.
Ryan goes back down into the pub as a cab pulls up.
In a pleasant turn of events, it turns out he doesn’t hate Miller Lite as much as he thought he did.
.
bridge: SPENCER
Ryan doesn’t remember this the next day, but Spencer certainly does, even if he never says anything about it. Spencer knows better than to poke sleeping dogs when they’re as scrappy and vengeful as Ryan Ross.
He never mentions that as they’re closing out the pub in the early hours there’s an embarrassing scene where Ryan gets in a drunken shouting match with that couple who were horning in on Spencer (who can obviously take care of himself, not that drunken Ryan cares, because he’s protecting his friend and his band and everything important in his life, evidently) and is so belligerent and incoherent that even though they’re leaving anyway, the three hundred pound kitchen porter has to come out from the back in order to escort Ryan (and Spencer, but not Jon - Jon disappeared a while ago) back up to the sidewalk.
Spencer says, “Okay, buddy, time to go home,” and Ryan hangs off of him like a lost child the entire way back to Brooklyn, and begs to sleep in Spencer’s bed that night because he’s so afraid that Brendon won’t let him in. “I’m such a fucker,” says Ryan, about a thousand times, wet-faced and bleary.
And Spencer (who is maybe slightly horny and maybe slightly drunk but overall just ten thousand times more exhausted than he thought possible) says, “Alright, alright” and they curl up together for a few hours.
But then the sun rises and Brendon comes and knocks on Spencer’s door - he’s dressed for work, slacks, tie, idiot sneakers, but his eyes have dark hollows and his hair is underperforming - and says to Spencer’s disheveled hobo face, “Ryan didn’t come home last night.”
Spencer says, “It’s okay, I have him.”
Brendon’s expression flickers: something like relief, something like pain.
Unable to look Brendon’s pain in the eye, Spencer turns back into the room, and they both look at Ryan curled up in a ball in Spencer’s sheets.
Silently, in concerted operation, they move Ryan from Spencer’s tiny-ass twin bed to Ryan-and-Brendon’s tiny-ass twin bed, and Brendon says, “Thanks,” in a heavy voice, to Spencer and Spencer doesn’t go back to bed because he suddenly feels awful, and worried, and irritated, but mostly awful.
And Ryan doesn’t remember any of it, because Spencer knows to keep his mouth shut.
VOL. II: Thursday
DON’T PANIC YET: Or, how Panic at the Disco Became Everyone’s Favorite Brooklyn Band // L. Goodman
JUNE 24, 2009: It’s dusk on South First Street in Williamsburg, and the members of Panic at the Disco are sitting down to dinner at Farm, a new rustic-themed vegan restaurant. The place is not officially open to the public yet, but the hostess greets front man Brendon Urie warmly (he was here for dessert the other night). Each band member - Urie, producer-bassist Jon Walker, drummer Spencer Smith and guitarist-vocalist Ryan Ross - listens attentively as the waitress describes the specials. In the end, each musician orders the beet salad to start, followed by a light entrée. When the salads arrive, they discuss how this move will appear to New York Magazine readers. “We should do an online poll: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how lame is it that they all ordered the beet salad?’ ” Walker jokes, aware of the incongruity of being foodie rockers. “It’s really good, though,” Urie says. “I don’t regret it.” cont’d-
VOL. I: Wednesday, June 15 2005
Ryan wakes up every morning with a boner, because he wakes up every morning with his crotch pressed against Brendon’s ass. Their legs tangled up, etc. And what can you do about that: Brendon has a fine ass, and he keeps their little twin mattress warm with his enthusiastic metabolism even in the middle of February. There’s not a lot to complain about, there. February’s fucking cold. Right now, though, it’s June, and Ryan’s skin is sticky with sweat, and so is Brendon’s.
Ryan slides out from under the sheets and goes to pee. He has to step over Olivia and a lump that might be Sara, might be Martina, in the living room, also pressed crotch to ass. He brushes his teeth. He drinks a few glasses of water and admires his lack of a hangover. He scratches his junk in his - or Brendon’s, they’re kelly green, they’re probably Brendon’s - brightly-colored underwear.
Then he goes back to bed and wakes Brendon up with his boner. This is the best part of his day. It goes downhill from there.
.
Later, Ryan gets his lunch from Jon at the Herk-n-Jerk, three blocks down the street from his job making preservation negatives at the film archives. It’s half past noon, and he hasn’t quite made it to work yet, but there’s no way he’s going to make it through six hours of a seven-minute Stan Brakhage short playing two inches from his face if he doesn’t eat a pound of deep-fried tofu beforehand.
He says so to Jon when Jon directs a meaningful eyebrow at the vintage Astroboy clock on the wall behind him. It’s busy. The lineup standing with their hips cocked on the red and yellow linoleum is all suits and hairstyles on lunch runs.
Jon says: “So you want that with green curry sauce or miso on the side?”
Ryan says loudly - because he just waited ten minutes in that same lineup while starving to death - “Does the miso still taste like you jizzed in it?”
Jon blinks and says, “Or does my jizz taste like the miso? Maybe that’s the question, Ross. You ever think of that?”
Ryan didn’t think of that. There’s a distinct possibility that Jon is right: he eats enough of it to affect the chemical makeup of his bodily fluids. Regardless, Ryan’s never tasted Jon’s jizz, so the argument is moot anyway. He puts his collected change on the counter and says, “I will take the green curry. And onion rings.”
He sits at the counter and eats and has half a conversation with Jon in between bankers. The half of the conversation that happens is Ryan’s. His monologue, while he gestures with a donut-sized onion ring in one hand, is heated:
“So then he says that those guys offered him a job composing the soundtrack for this thing. This like, movie or cartoon or whatever. Right in the middle of it, okay. Like, is that supposed to calm me down, or something? So I go, ‘as if that’s not going to interfere with the band. Like you’re suddenly going to be more interested in practice and songwriting and shit now that you’ve got these two fuckers to impress.’ And then he denied it, and said some bullshit about my priorities being way more screwed up than his, then I told him to quit - the job, not the band - and then he told me that he wasn’t going to quit either, and then I walked out.”
Jon shakes some chili flakes onto someone’s batter-dipped dog: “You didn’t get dressed first?”
“What? Yes. I’m dressed, right now, right?” Ryan pats down his sweatervest, his crumpled slacks.
“But you guys were naked at the beginning of the story. The story started with: ‘so I was giving Brendon this awesome blowjob-’”
Ryan protests through his onion ring: “You don’t have to be naked to do that.”
“I assumed this was before breakfast,”
“Why would you assume that?”
“You guys do it, like, every morning. It’s like a mandatory calisthenics routine. You’re like sailors doing jumping jacks.”
“Wait.” Ryan puts down the food on its way to his mouth and says, “Did he say that to you?”
Jon walks away and serves another customer. When he comes back Ryan makes forceful eyebrows and Jon says, innocent, “What?”
“Did Brendon say that fucking me is like getting forced to do a mandatory calisthenics routine?” His voice squeaks a bit on those last three words and he shoves another onion ring in his maw, and chews it viciously. They were fighting too much this morning to have breakfast, and grabbing a bagel on the way out the door would’ve been less climactic than just slamming said door in Brendon’s stupid face.
Jon, looking a little horrified, waves his hands, “No. No way. He never said that. I was just inferring. From the multiple mornings I’ve spent on your floor.”
“So that’s what it sounds like to you?” Ryan can hear himself getting worked up all over again.
“No. It sounds… vigorous.” Jon says, slowing down the words. He glances at the lineup, he glances at the clock. He glances at Ryan’s face, twisted and just looking for an excuse to unleash more wrath. “I’m pretty busy, here. I’ll see you tonight, man. Alright?”
Ryan stuffs three more onion rings into his mouth and watches Jon perk up as a matching set of androgynous scenesters step up and order the soy jerky. “Yeah, fine.”
He steps back out onto the sidewalk, irritated. Jon and his straight boy routine. So smug. Never keeps a girl around for more than a week. Always gives terrible relationship advice. Obviously Ryan should’ve gone straight to Spencer to vent. At least then he’d get the you’re-an-idiot-go-apologize speech, and be able to feel bad for being a crazy controlling jackass of a boyfriend, instead of just pissy and even more self-righteous.
Alas, the masochist in him waited too long to pipe up, and now there’s no time for emotional self-flagellation. Just the regular kind. The kind that funds the rest of the melodrama at a going rate of twelve bucks an hour.
Ryan tosses his crumpled napkin in a trash can and slouches towards work.
.
His boss, Joanie, is built like an English bulldog and is probably fifteen years past due for retirement. Ryan suspects she’s pretty anti-establishment for a woman who lived through a war and a depression and three middle-aged kids and two dead ones and an overbearing military husband, also dead.
The only reason she’s ever given Ryan for refusing to retire is that she likes seeing his skinny little ass in the preservation cubby twenty hours a week. That’s what she said: “Aren’t any behinds I’d like to see in jeans that tight in the old folks home, are there?”
Ryan had blushed and rubbed his hands down the front of his thighs and ducked out early that day promising himself that he’d look into state precedents for sexual harassment suit payouts. Which he did actually do, eventually, only to find that he’d make more money working the seven years it would take to settle it.
Still, ever since then he’s come and gone as he’s pleased, and Joanie’s made sure that he always gets the shortest shorts - which is what she calls them when she hands them over - on account of what she calls his attention span. He can’t figure out whether to be insulted or not. But she always seems to pick some quality films for him to go through, frame by frame.
This is why, instead of just skipping out on work entirely because he is that fucking pissed about his life and his friends and his dumb boyfriend, Ryan goes in for approximately 35 minutes. He doesn’t even clock in. He just gives a tip of the chin to Robyn at the box office, wanders into the theatre to catch 10 minutes of the public screening of a Russian-American documentary on miniature deer farming and then wanders down to Joanie’s office.
“Ryan,” she says when he knocks on her doorframe. She’s squinting at something on her monitor, back hunched, light reflected in her glasses.
He says, “Mrs. Eddington, I’m not going to come in today, if you don’t mind. I’ll make up the hours tomorrow probably.”
“But you’re already in,” she says, and looks over at him like maybe he’s a little drunk. She seems to dismiss the possibility: “Maybe if you don’t mind coming over here and fixing my emails for me.”
Ryan says, “Oh, sure,” and comes around her desk and clicks the sort-ascending-by-date button for her and she grunts in satisfaction. “Much better. I keep telling them that I’m not going to use this thing, but they say there’s no money in the budget for a secretary.”
“You don’t need a secretary,” says Ryan, “You have me.”
“You’re not around enough, Ryan Ross. Just this morning I got some sort of virus that showed me about a hundred pictures of kittens with psalms all over them, and I had to get the upstairs girl to get rid of it.” She gives him the eyeball: “You know they’d give you health care if you came in full-time.”
“Oh, well.” Ryan says - it’s what he always says - and looks down at his shoes because if he can say no to five days a week to Joanie then Brendon should fucking well know better than to say yes to those frigging cartoonists.
“Oh, don’t say it. Don’t reject an old lady again, it’s not polite. What was that about your hours?”
Ryan scuffles. “I’m - a little swamped right now. I’ll come in tomorrow and Thursday, though.”
“What, with your rock band, there?” Joanie smirks a little: her coral pink lips fold up at the corners. “I’m glad you’re meeting with so much success as an artist. You and your friends are such bright young men.”
“I wouldn’t say-” says Ryan, instantly guilted. His rock band. The way things are going, he’s going to make them exactly as trite and dull as Joanie makes them sound.
She interrupts: “No no, I won’t hear it. I have some Grekul shorts for you whenever you’re ready.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Eddington.” Ryan retreats out of her office. His hat is in his hands, which is no surprise because it always comes off his head without him even realizing it when he goes in there, a Dickensian orphan. She’s probably the only person he knows in this city that’s over 40, much less 80. He thinks it’s something about the way she wears her stockings and weekly hairstyle: she’s just so damn respectable.
He catches her watching his ass when he glances back, though. She smirks again, and he waves and ducks out of sight.
.
He catches the train back to Brooklyn. It’s not even 3:00 p.m., and they technically have this show tonight, but he’s heard that the organizer’s the kind of douche that requires you to not only already be kind of a big name around town, but then also act like he’s your friend before he’ll put you on the list. So if they go on - which they probably won’t, unless the hand of god swoops down to put a 9.8 review of their ancient demo on Pitchfork sometime this afternoon - it won’t be until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.
Ryan considers going home and taking a nap, but as he presses half his face against the dirty train window, he realizes that he actually feels entirely unprepared for this stupid show. Not the music part - thank god, they still get practice in three times a week, if nothing else - it’s just the sucking up to whats-his-balls till they get a spot while there’s still a crowd in the bar part. He dreads it.
Last summer, he would’ve been fine with it. He would’ve grinned and flirted and name-dropped and pressed discs into hands and made promises with his eyes. He was shameless, he was an embarrassment. He was single-minded and fucking thrilled with the results, because people like a kid with a goal in mind. That’s how deals are made. He slept around a lot. He made sure that he - that the whole band - got noticed.
Last summer he was on fire.
He had a list, a crumpled piece of graph paper that never left his wallet. When he peels open that wallet now, it’s still in there. Between register receipts and a driver’s license he only uses as bar ID. Ryan examines the scribbles, barely even words, numbered one through five.
First, he got the three of them out of their childhood bedrooms and onto the plane, which was the culmination of years of lust and despair and fervent hope, and sitting down in that tiny seat and doing up that belt buckle with Spencer on one side and Brendon on the other felt like simultaneously the best and scariest thing he would ever, ever do. They landed at JFK at 3:00 in the afternoon on a very hot day at the end of June, just duffel bags and bruised instruments and dirty hair.
Second, that very evening Ryan called a number he’d picked up from a friend back home, and convinced a very straight, very stoned dude from some experimental sound collective that played nightclubs in Manhattan to quit using his laptop to make airplane noises and join an unknown indie rock band of homeless gay vegans from Vegas, instead. And also, to put them up for a few nights.
Third, Ryan blew the last dregs of three years’ and seven retail jobs’ worth of hoarded cash to get his hands on a dubious copy of Pro Tools and the hardware to use it. The finished demo held all the dirty sounds of the living room they recorded it in, and the five fucking incredible songs they played straight through. Those songs, they are still the melodies that he sings in the shower, voice straining on Brendon’s high notes. They are the songs of his youth and his future. Ryan loves their demo, even ten months later he knows it is perfect and whole, and he has catalogued in his chest every brief acknowledgement that it received like a profusion of summer-blooming flowers, a treasure trove that he has tapped more times than he can count in order to take in the scent of success, of happiness.
Fourth, he convinced a review council to let the three of them into a family-friendly housing co-op on merit of their destitution due to having spent all their money recording a demo. His plea was accepted despite all the sex he planned on having once he had a bed of his own, because Brendon stepped forward in the interview and said, “You see, we’re musicians,” which sold half of the council, and Spencer quickly added, “Employable ones” to reassure the rest.
Fifth, with demo in hand, he persuaded half a dozen bars around Park Slope and one in Harlem (and also two in Jersey that everyone moaned about) to let them play those five incredible songs, and their many multiplying offspring, for real in front of paying customers.
And there - in a bar on Smith Street, in front of a grudging crowd of hipsters older than any of them - is where the list ended.
Ryan had assumed that the simple act of playing music for people in this city was a rebirth, that just getting here intact with music to share was enough. But he was wrong. And when he realized that it wasn’t, that was when he started to work.
He shopped around some shows in the neighborhood until he found a group of musicians that he liked, some guys that did four-part harmonies like wind in the trees, and then wriggled his way into a spot opening for them in some college towns upstate. Plus another two shows together in the city, and Ryan was outwardly smug and inwardly ecstatic when the spectacular, subversive opening act got six mentions in six reviews.
At the same time, he was spending his nights convincing guys with soulful eyes or string-calloused fingers that banging him was worth the risk that he might be lying about his age. He was also convincing Spencer that he was practicing very, very safe sex. He convinced himself that he was slutting it up for fun, intoxicated by freedom and success and the summertime humidity of a strange city on the ocean.
And at the very end of the summer, after the tour and all the shows, and when Jon was finally looking comfortable switching between banjo and bass mid-set, and Spencer seemed almost satisfied enough with the new songs to let them play the damn things in public, and their music was just getting better and better, Ryan convinced Brendon Urie that he was madly fucking in love with him and that they should be boyfriends forever.
In some ways, Ryan thinks, glaring vaguely at people as the train pulls up to his stop, it kind of sucks that he fell in love.
It’s a lot harder to be ambitious when your frontman-cum-boyfriend is offering you everything you want before you even roll out of bed in the morning. It’s harder to flirt your way into shows and it’s harder to boss your band around and it’s harder to write good songs and it’s harder to drag your ass over to Jersey, much less get it together for a real tour.
Because just waking up beside Brendon feels like success. And in comparison, the rest of the world - not music, never music - but the sweating and politicking and micromanaging and ass-kissing that goes with it, seems lackluster.
Ryan got lazy, is the problem. Last August, in the immediate aftermath of that first, terrifying sober kiss, he would’ve said he was happy. But in retrospect he can tell it was just a haze of contented laziness that cost the entire band all their hard work from the summer.
So he’s nervous about the open mic tonight. So he’s still ragingly angry at the quarter of his band that he puts his dick in, the quarter that he loves so much it sometimes feels like suffocation.
So he doesn’t deserve a fucking nap.
Ryan gets off the train.
.
Spencer works down the block from the housing co-op, so Ryan goes to visit Spencer. He thinks maybe he’ll poke around for some reassurance. Some unconditional love. That is what he needs right now. That is what Spencer offers, even if it sometimes comes in the form of a dirty look and a lecture.
At the frame shop, Spencer is standing at one of the massive work tables under the dusty windows with a measuring tape and a poster that’s trying to roll itself back up. Him and some other guy - dark hair, skinny arms, Ryan’s never seen him before - are measuring the thing and talking gold gilt: Spencer is taking notes with a pencil from behind his ear and the other guy is spread-eagled on the table, holding the resisting poster down. The frame lies in joints, ready to be assembled.
“That’s a lot of dinosaurs,” Ryan says, circling around behind them and putting his chin on Spencer’s shoulder. He puts his thumbs in Spencer’s belt loops and sends a mental plea into Spencer’s cranium for comfort and reassurance and maybe some of that leftover pie he knows is in the back room.
Spencer says, “Jonathan Safran Foer’s wife wants it framed for her niece’s birthday.”
“In gilt,” the other guy adds, lifting his face up so he’s not speaking directly into the table. “Because why would you frame something not in gold.”
Ryan peruses the poster. It reads: DINOSAURS. It has a timeline at the top, Cretaceous to Triassic. In between the crinkles and the marker-coloring the dinosaurs range from Prosauropods to Ceratopids. “She’s giving her niece a used dinosaur poster in a gold frame?”
“Yes.” says the other guy. He tilts his head and leans his ear on his outstretched arm. “You know she was shortlisted for the Orange Prize?”
“The what?” Ryan opens his mouth and grinds his teeth into Spencer’s sweatered shoulder, because the whole place smells like dust and woodchips and paint thinner and sometimes it makes Ryan feel a little woozy, but Spencer’s shirt smells like Spencer. He speaks through the fabric: “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“I guess if she won the Orange Prize we shouldn’t call her Jonathan Safran Foer’s wife,” says Spencer.
“Shortlisted,” the other guy corrects. “But that’s what she wrote down on the contact form: Jonathan Safran Foer, open parentheses, wife, close parentheses.”
Spencer finally twitches his shoulder, and says, “Ow, Ryan. Ryan, this is Zach.”
Ryan waves his hand in a wide halo around Spencer, elbow straight. He lifts his mouth from the damp spot on Spencer’s shoulder. Just being here has made him renege on a certain decision regarding naps: “Listen. Can I go sleep in the back?”
“You’re one hundred feet from your bed,” Spencer says, which means no. “Zach, this is Ryan. He’s in my band.”
“Or maybe you’re in mine,” Ryan suggests, kind of joking.
“Awesome,” says Zach. He lets the poster go and sits up on the table, legs crossed. “Spencer says you’re decent.”
“Well, yeah,” says Ryan, shooting the back of Spencer’s head a look. Like they need that kind of insecure marketing right now: Spencer needs to tell people that they are fucking magic-makers. “But we are way, way better than decent. Trust me.”
Ryan turns to go find the couch in the back, trailing a hand on Spencer’s belt that says you better come talk to me pretty quick, jerk, or I will eat all your pie.
Spencer says, “Fun fact: Zach is in a band, too.”
“Oh yeah,” says Ryan. He turns back, only half-faking his disinterest. It’s really important that he doesn’t ask which one, because that’s like asking where the kid grew up, how much rent he pays for his shitty studio apartment, where he eats his pho. The answer’s too telling. It’s judgmental just to ask. Ryan can’t help it: “Anyone I’ve heard of?”
“We’re called Beirut?” Zach asks, like the name could possibly be unfamiliar to anyone who ever took a high school band class and wished desperately that it was possible to be an indie-cool tuba player.
And now that Ryan looks a little closer, yes, this skinny little kid in natty cords and a plunging v-neck with wild black hair and a little bow mouth - barely older than him, really - looks familiar. Ryan doesn’t catalog Brooklyn hipsters the way he used to, the way he did last summer when he was deciding which ones he might consider banging and which he’d rather just talk business with, and on even rarer occasions which he’d like to play music near; but when he taps his memory, he knows he’s seen this guy with a ukulele and a fake moustache and half a freaking orchestra onstage with him.
Even as he struggles with what level of cool disinterest to fake, Ryan realizes that he’s backed himself into a corner. If he’s nicer to Zach now, he’s a cocksucker, if he continues to be rude, he’s ignorant. Probably both is better than neither, but he just kind of stands still and stares hard.
Zach glances away, “Yeah, we’re not a big deal or anything.”
“No, he’s heard of you.” Spencer puts in. “He saw you play three times in March. Cambrian House, Veer and that show at the park.” He ticks the shows off on his fingers and sends an arch glance at Ryan: “Am I right?”
“You guys are really good,” Ryan affirms instantly, given the excuse. “Good shows.”
“Yeah?” says Zach, looking kind of embarrassed and pleased at once. “Spencer and I were talking about how I should check you out some time.”
“We’ve got this thing tonight,” says Spencer without so much as a pause.
“Mmmm-nnnnnn,” says Ryan in a negating whine, all of his concerns about the douchebag organizer and the politicking and the cocksucking coming back at him in a rush. “It’s not-”
“It’s just an open mic thing” Spencer clarifies, “At the Drum and Monkey.”
“Sure, I’ve heard of it” says Zach. “I’ll be there.”
“Good,” says Spencer. He starts up on the framing job again like it’s no big deal, snapping his tape measure with a grin. Zach flattens back out on the table.
Ryan keeps his mouth tight in that line like he does when someone has done something insufferably dumb. They’re not even guaranteed a set. A set that’ll be two songs long, anyway.
He tries to shoot Spencer a glare, but Spencer’s back is turned, so instead he says, “Don’t forget to wake me up.”
And then he goes into the back and pushes aside a circular saw and lays down on the couch and falls asleep, pie-free, thinking that the churning elixir of dread in his stomach is at least a familiar feeling. Specifically, it’s a throwback from last summer in that half of that dread is actually thrilled anticipation. They’re doing a show tonight.
.
He and Brendon walk up the stairs into the courtyard together. They see each other coming from a block away, each walking in from the opposite direction, and it’s kind of awkward from that distance because do you wave or smile or shout something incoherent at your stupid boyfriend who you’re mad at from two hundred paces on a crowded sidewalk.
Ryan settles for the cold shoulder, which Brendon melts with a wave and a grin so natural that Ryan can’t help but offer a lukewarm acknowledgement. Brendon says, “Hey, did you see Spencer? Is he cooking dinner tonight?” and Ryan has to say, “I think so? I didn’t ask.”
They go upstairs and through the gate into the courtyard where a lot of people from the compound - which isn’t really a compound but is actually called a co-housing project, which means that sometimes Ryan ends up babysitting kids named Llorona or Zooey (there are three Zooeys) on his hangover days - are gathered to discuss the group activity for the night.
Sara waves and repeats exactly what Brendon asked and Ryan says, “I think so?” much more politely this time. “He’s just closing up at work, he’ll be over in a second.”
“Awesome,” she says. Sara and Martina are the brains behind the whole project. Sara also chaired the council that voted to let Ryan and Brendon and Spencer move in last summer when they were not joking about being absolutely barefoot destitute. They weren’t a family, and they couldn’t make rent for the first two months, but they were young and vegan and artists, so Sara made sure the rest of the board let them in. Probably their being adorable didn’t hurt, either.
So now Spencer cooks up the village dinner like, every other night, and they always participate in compost day and Ryan never says a word about the babysitting and they pay their rent early, always.
Probably everyone heard Ryan and Brendon screaming at each other this morning, is the only bad part about living here with about twenty studios stacked up on top of the family units which are on top of the common area, so that sound carries everywhere. The good part is that it doesn’t matter: everyone here eats so much soy protein that putting up with the sound and fury of other people’s digestive/emotional systems is second nature. Ryan tries very hard to be good natured about everyone else: it’s just Brendon that gets him riled up.
Brendon knows that. They’re in the hall when Brendon says, “I’m sorry this morning happened.”
Ryan says, “Me too,” and keys open their door.
And when they’re in their kitchen, Brendon’s just a step behind him, hands slipping under Ryan’s rumpled shirts and in under his beltline. Ryan tenses even though Brendon’s palms are warm. The shock of flared nerves travels up his spine in a way that sets his whole body off in a shudder.
Stubborn, he doesn’t turn around, feeling Brendon step closer, the length of him and his arms around Ryan’s chest and his warm soft mouth against the cup of Ryan’s ear going, “I wish we hadn’t bothered getting mad.”
Ryan shivers again at the brush of air, the familiar voice so close that it sounds deep, like he’d picked up the sound waves through his vertebrae rather than his ear. “Me too,” he mutters.
And it’s true: he wishes they weren’t fighting about this, he’s sorry he got angry. He’s sorry Brendon isn’t smiling right now, or telling him a rambling story about his first day at this awful new job that Ryan hates already. Isn’t going to stop hating anytime soon.
Ryan twists in Brendon’s arms until they’re face to face. He can only glance at Brendon’s eyes, can’t keep contact for too long because he can feel all his anger and all his apologies and sorrow and anxiety struggling not to be buried. “Make it up to me,” he says into Brendon’s throat, and puts Brendon in between him and the chipped kitchenette formica.
Brendon does. He grunts when his ass hits the countertop, and squirms up to perch there, wrapping his legs around Ryan and pressing as close as the unforgiving stretch of their suddenly too-tight pants will let them.
It’s bad, Ryan knows, even as he opens his mouth to receive Brendon’s swiped tongue, but they haven’t had proper sex in months. Just this. Just this quick and dirty teenage fumbling that might’ve made sense when they were underage and surrounded by nosy Mormons, but now is just silly, with their bed eight feet away.
Even the aborted blowjob this morning: breakfast table. Brendon with a tea and his junk still damp from the shower, Ryan on his knees on the lino.
The memory makes Ryan groan as Brendon reaches two hands for his belt and button fly. Ryan is hard because his body knows Brendon, knows what Brendon’s hands and mouth can do, knows what it missed out on this morning. He gets harder with two strokes of Brendon’s fist, and buries his face in Brendon’s shoulder, huffing out breaths like a swimmer. He could come like this, easy.
“Stop,” he says, thinking he’d rather make this last, but Brendon just makes an encouraging noise, “Yeah, c’mon,” he says to Ryan’s ear, and keeps up a stream of encouragement that is not so much words as that same dark vocal timbre beamed directly into Ryan’s nervous system, a wave of reverberation that builds an orgasm up from the soles of his feet, the base of his spine, the bottom of his stomach.
Brendon is merciless. As Ryan whines a warning, he slips off the counter and resumes the last two strokes with his mouth. The wet and the warm finish Ryan; he puts his hands against the cupboards as his legs threaten to buckle, and he comes with his teeth pressed into his lip, a shout choked in his throat.
On his knees, Brendon swallows the whole mess. He pulls away, pauses, then licks off the rest, examining Ryan’s cock in a lingering way.
Ryan straightens, and Brendon helps him adjust himself back into his clothes. They face each other for a moment and, smirking, Ryan sends a questing hand to examine Brendon’s own state.
But Brendon steps away and shrugs. “Don’t worry about it.”
Ryan gapes, totally graceless. “What?”
“I’m fine.” Brendon smiles like he does when he wants to put people at ease. It makes Ryan feel like a total stranger.
“Just let me,” The demand in his voice is appalling. What Ryan really wants is to take a step after him, fit his hipbone against Brendon’s crotch and remind him what he’s missing, but Brendon is already turning.
“I’m just gonna shower,” he says. “Spencer’s probably finished making dinner by now.”
Ryan chokes back something totally unnameable, and when he calls into the bathroom, his voice sounds almost normal: “Hurry up. Food will go quick.”
“Yup,” Brendon says, and steps into the shower.
All of Ryan’s anger from this morning has come back in a wash of hot-faced red, but it’s a trickle compared to this new anxiety. Before, he was mad about Brendon screwing up the band with this new job, now he’s just mad about Brendon not screwing him. He doesn’t let himself ask the question that is screaming to be asked. He doesn’t let himself think about it.
He stumps down the stairs alone, thinking that at least the neighbors will be glad that the yelling and the cursing and the door-slamming didn’t start up again. Maybe that’s progress, he tells himself. But what it feels like is a backslide, scrabbling down towards a precipice he can’t see.
.
Open mic nights suck because there’s no sound check, there’s no prep time, there’s not even any kind of guarantee that they can use their own instruments. Once, Ryan saw an Islands show where Nick Diamonds broke his guitar’s output and had to borrow the opener’s. He peered out into the audience and said, low and apologetic, after a few minutes of fussing with the knob, “Sebastian, can I borrow your guitar?” Ryan nearly died of the polite Canadian rock and roll: if he’d had it with him, he would’ve totally handed over his own guitar to the guy. And then said keep it with a sly smirk and a flirty hip-cock that would’ve gotten him laid.
That was cool. Tonight will probably be way less so. Fucking open mics.
Also, Ryan didn’t really tell anyone that Zach Beirut is going to be there to like, check them out or whatever. To be honest, Ryan’s not even sure that Brendon and Jon would recognize the name. Jon’s never really fully committed to the scene, allowing himself to play the music but still keeping up with his experimental noise circles. And Brendon just isn’t good with names (probably the first of the many reasons he’s well-suited to long term monogamy). Anyway, Ryan’s playing it safe: he doesn’t want to make anyone nervous, just in case Zach does show up.
He texts Jon to ask whether he’s bringing his gear and gets a Fuck you ross back within thirty seconds.
Brendon duly lugs Ryan’s guitar out of the bedroom, along with Brendon’s own accordion and his autoharp and his keytar, and then lugs the guitar back in when Ryan decides that they really only need to bring the accordion, anyway. Two songs, and that’s if they’re lucky. The accordion is heavy and they’ll have to take a cab, which is inconvenient. Brendon’s instruments are always inconvenient, though, which makes Brendon a pain in the ass, but a worthwhile one, at least.
Spencer just shrugs when queried about his drums, not afraid of making do. Spencer could perform with a tambourine and his own shoe, to be honest. Worse things have happened. Spencer is a comfort to Ryan’s pained ass. This is why Ryan loves him.
So at ten, after a good five games of doubles ping pong with the stoner that lives in #312, Ryan and Spencer and Brendon take a cab to the place, which is one of those basement deals that’s better marked by the crowd of smokers outside than the shitty sign with a painfully interchangeable name like The Fox and Fiddler or The Drum and Monkey or the Drum and Fiddler or Fox and Monkey. Ryan hates pubs. They played their last show at a pub, too, way the hell back in February. Pubs always have these dumb little stages way in the back with broken lines of sight and shitty sound systems and shitty audiences who paid five bucks cover, or no cover, and resent the noise because they’re actually there for the potato nachos and the Guinness, which Ryan also hates. Or the Strongbow. Ryan doesn’t hate Strongbow, but that’s because he’s a little homo, according to Jon.
Jon’s already there, instrumentless, which is fine because Ryan was right and it looks like they’re all going to be playing the host band’s instruments anyway. Someone’s anonymous guitar and half-assed drum kit. Awesome. At least Brendon will have his accordion, thank jesus, so they’ll all still sound like heaven coming down.
This is the advantage they have: the music they play is so good that even pub crowds love them. And not in a drunken heckling way, but in a sudden wave of dropped conversations way. Ryan has faith in their music, if not the venue.
“Ugh,” Ryan says, sitting down with Jon at the table he’s staked even though the place is packed, and Brendon pats the accordion reassuringly, because he knows what Ryan’s thinking.
Jon moves his beer in protectively to keep it from the jostling, and says, “I saved these seats from a Swedish synchro team and Fred Durst’s posse. You guys owe me.”
Spencer says, “Sorry we’re late, Jon. I hope you didn’t feel like a loser sitting here all by yourself for two and a half minutes.”
“Actually, he must’ve been sitting here for a while,” Ryan observes. “Coming up with that.”
Brendon cranes his neck around for a server and then says, “I’ll get us a pitcher.”
“A pitcher of raspberry soda water for the princess, here,” Jon suggests to Brendon, who’s already navigated halfway to the bar, squeezing by on his shock of an apologetic smile, probably.
Ryan says, “Seriously, I’d apologize for being late but since when do you get here early?”
Jon shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I was nervous.”
Ryan doesn’t ask why, and rolls his eyes instead like it was a hilarious joke from Jon, who obviously never gets nervous. Because if you can get up in front of a crowd and make them listen to interminable synthetic noise that sounds more like gears grinding and pipes groaning and airplanes taking off and migraines starting, you don’t really get nervous about asking people to listen to a complicated raindrop banjo rhythm, especially one with Brendon’s groin-tugging choirboy whine smacked on top.
That’s Ryan’s reasoning, but now that he looks: yeah, Jon does look nervous, in his own way. Ryan realizes with a twitch of guilt that it’s his fault. Bitching at Jon about Brendon wasn’t exactly professional, or motivational, or good for morale. Or nice, even.
And then there was that snitty little spat in the cab about how Brendon’s shirtsleeves should be rolled up, not down. They’re too short, Ryan argued. Otherwise my strap chafes, Brendon retorted. Meaningless, but Spencer sat right through it, silent, on the edge of the seat.
Now, when Ryan glances at Spencer, he sees it there, too: a faint tinge of unhappiness at the corner of his mouth, accentuated rather than hidden by the beard.
Ryan drums his knees with his palms under the table. “Fuck,” he says into the noise of the crowd. Because he fucked up, and now it’s too late to fix it.
Brendon comes back with a plate of lemon wedges and a pitcher of - yep - ice water, because apparently this place only serves the mass market pale ale lite shit that none of them have touched since high school. Except for Jon. When Ryan looks accusingly at Jon’s beer, he shrugs and says, “It’s not as bad as it tastes.”
Brendon proceeds to go through his plate of lemon wedges, gargling a warning at Spencer when Spencer tries to take one for his water.
“You know those are terrible for your vocal chords, right?” Ryan says, “Dries them out or some shit.”
“I like them,” Brendon says, squeezing another wedge.
“Yeah, but-” Ryan says, and then realizes that he’s doing it again. Picking a fight in front of the kids. He closes his mouth and looks away.
Brendon squirts a seed at Jon, and then drinks half the pitcher of water.
At least Brendon’s not nervous. Despite Ryan’s best efforts. That makes one of them.
Fortunately, the host band is kind of repellently mediocre: it’s all guitar and drum, as close to cockrock as you get in Brooklyn. They have mediocre hooks, a mediocre drummer, painful lyrics made up for by decent delivery, plus a guy on bass dressed like Billy Idol. Overall a solid C performance. Ryan gets up and goes to find the organizer to sign onto the list.
Before he finds the guy, he finds Zach, standing at the bar and surrounded by so many people it’s hard to tell if he’s there by himself or if he’s the nexus of the entire crowd’s social solar system. He looks like he hasn’t even changed out of his clothes from work: a tshirt and a pair of cords. He is a little sweat-damp from the crowd, the air full of breath and bodies keeping his wild hair curled to his neck and his pale skin waxy in the orange light.
Ryan can appreciate the talent it takes to look so simultaneously noncommital and vital. Suddenly impressed, it takes him a second to work up the balls to say something. He has to put on a face.
“Oh hey,” he exclaims over the mediocre music, like he’s surprised. Like he hasn’t been straining his neck scanning the room for him since they got there.
Zach kind of nods and kind of smiles a greeting. Ryan notes that he is holding a cranberry juice, and approves.
Ryan says, “Good to see you here,” and Zach shakes his head and gestures to his ear. The cock rock is getting louder with every unbearable second. Ryan leans in close to repeat himself, and the gesture suddenly reminds him of himself ten months ago: he remembers how he’d brush his lips against their ears, how he’d pitch his voice to sound close and intimate in the crowd. Use excuses to stand closer, smile a little wilder, lick his lips and connect ears with voices with tongues with mouths.
He restrains himself. He puts his hand on Zach’s shoulder and leans in, but he keeps his tongue to himself. He wonders if this means he’s being chaste and loyal to Brendon, or just plain stupid for not furthering the band’s interests with this guy. “Good to see you here,” Ryan says again.
Zach turns his face and smiles at Ryan so close Ryan thinks chastity should always lose to flirting. “So when are you guys up?” Zach calls back. He doesn’t have to lean, Ryan’s already closed the distance for them.
“Oh, uh,” says Ryan, and darts another look into the crowd for this guy, who he hopes is wearing a sign that says DOUCHEBAG OPEN MIC ORGANIZER or something, because he has no idea who he’s looking for. Swallowing his pride, he goes for charm and makes a I-don’t-fucking-know face, complete with palms raised in the air and comical frown.
Zach raises his eyebrows and says something Ryan can’t make out, and turns around and bumps the shoulder of some middle-aged guy in plaid pants - like it’s 1992 - and yells in that guy’s ear.
Ryan watches the exchange: Zach gestures at him, Plaid Pants looks, Zach says something else, Plaid Pants nods, doesn’t even look at any kind of schedule and then Zach turns back and shouts, “You wanna go next?”
Ryan shouts, “Sure,” and he must have a kind of dubious look on his face because Zach laughs and pats him on the shoulder and leans really close to yell, “Have fun up there.”
They do, weirdly enough.
Their family melodrama must be some kind of musical aphrodisiac, because Spencer starts them off with a victorious flourish that Jon picks up on immediately, and with the two of them laying down a cityscape of support behind them, Brendon’s freed up to paint the foreground in vivid curlicues. Which is what he does best. Jaunty like a young lord, Brendon sings their two allotted songs - a cover of Spencer’s favorite terrible pop song; and then their best, their only, their world-shattering single, the one that even the hipsters love, the one that makes people remember them and ask for demos, a disc, a freaking myspace page with streaming audio, anything, afterwards - he performs them like a troubadour. Sleeves rolled all the way down, hands assured on the gleaming keys, elbows and mouth wide as bridges. Only the biggest gestures from Brendon. He’d swallow them all up into him, if he could. The crowd always knows it.
The only off thing, the one thing, that, when it occurs to Ryan, makes him feel for just a second that everything’s wrong - they’re a different band in a different city playing unfamiliar songs and no one told him - is that Brendon doesn’t look at him once, throughout.
Not a glance, not a touch. He’s nowhere near Ryan’s space. Ryan could be playing his part out in Jersey, beamed in via satellite. Brendon doesn’t come near him.
It scares Ryan, even as he knows he’s asked for it. And he sees how the energy that Brendon normally sidelines for him goes straight out into the crowd like the light off a bulb, refracted and enhanced by Jon’s mirroring grin, Spencer’s bouncing head, blurred arms.
Ryan just does his best to keep his wrists neat and to remember his part in the harmonies. Does his best not to fuck up the magic they all do.
.
After, they’re standing outside waiting for Jon and Spencer to come up. Jon was talking to some friends from his old scene, a couple who were blatantly using the opportunity to hit on Spencer. The night is getting a little too cool for Ryan’s liking, but he won’t huddle into Brendon and his warmth, his skin that’s still shining and damp from the hanging press of hot bodies downstairs. He danced through a whole bunch more acts while Ryan hung back, safeguarding the accordion like an old crow.
Part of him was waiting for Zach to come say, “You guys are magical,” because that’s the only word to describe them and their talent. That’s the word everyone uses.
But nothing. Maybe he left early just to avoid having to say that, or maybe he left because having to fake liking it would be too hard. Or maybe he was too turned on by Ryan’s flirting and didn’t trust himself to come say hi afterwards without getting a thorough eye-fucking and the promise of some kind of tryst in the alleyway out back.
Or maybe he didn’t want to tell Ryan that while his band is fucking incredible, the skinny guy on the left limping his way through the guitar parts is kind of a drag on their talent.
These are the thoughts Ryan tongued like a sore tooth while catching glimpses of his boyfriend bumping and hopping and grinning in a crowd of beautiful children.
Downstairs, he was bitter, but now up here in the night air, Ryan can suddenly feel how crushing his sadness is, like exhaustion. Like his whole body could flow down to the ground and pool there, a pond of self-pity so dark it sucks in glancing passerby. He’s sad for Brendon and how he’s treated him - the failed guilt trips and the petty arguments and the cold sex - but he’s more sad for himself.
He wants to say: I couldn’t do this without you. Or, this band is yours, not mine. Or, maybe it would be better for everyone if we broke up.
Brendon checks his phone, “Aw, jesus. I am going to be destroyed tomorrow.”
Ryan blinks, “What?”
And Brendon rolls his eyes and goes, “It’s Wednesday, dude. I mean, Thursday, now. And some of us are gainfully employed.”
Ryan says, “Oh. Yeah, I guess.”
“Are they coming up, or what?” Brendon leans to peer down the stairwell. “I might just grab a taxi. I don’t want to like, fall asleep in the studio right there in front of Doc and Jackson. You want to come home with me?”
Ryan finds that he can’t actually answer because his throat is closed up. Of course he wants to go home with Brendon. He’s been going home with the same grin, the same hands, the same warm body for the past year, almost. In most ways, Brendon is home.
But he remembers Brendon’s face when he turned away, saying I’m fine, and so Ryan just shakes his head, manages to mumble, “I’ll wait.”
Brendon gives him this look as he steps out onto the street, accordion in arm, hand raised. It’s not malicious or angry. It’s distant. Like Ryan is mysterious and ineffable as an ancient riddle, and Brendon is no Greek adventurer eager to test his prowess and be destroyed for his weaknesses.
Brendon’s face looks like regret.
Ryan goes back down into the pub as a cab pulls up.
In a pleasant turn of events, it turns out he doesn’t hate Miller Lite as much as he thought he did.
.
bridge: SPENCER
Ryan doesn’t remember this the next day, but Spencer certainly does, even if he never says anything about it. Spencer knows better than to poke sleeping dogs when they’re as scrappy and vengeful as Ryan Ross.
He never mentions that as they’re closing out the pub in the early hours there’s an embarrassing scene where Ryan gets in a drunken shouting match with that couple who were horning in on Spencer (who can obviously take care of himself, not that drunken Ryan cares, because he’s protecting his friend and his band and everything important in his life, evidently) and is so belligerent and incoherent that even though they’re leaving anyway, the three hundred pound kitchen porter has to come out from the back in order to escort Ryan (and Spencer, but not Jon - Jon disappeared a while ago) back up to the sidewalk.
Spencer says, “Okay, buddy, time to go home,” and Ryan hangs off of him like a lost child the entire way back to Brooklyn, and begs to sleep in Spencer’s bed that night because he’s so afraid that Brendon won’t let him in. “I’m such a fucker,” says Ryan, about a thousand times, wet-faced and bleary.
And Spencer (who is maybe slightly horny and maybe slightly drunk but overall just ten thousand times more exhausted than he thought possible) says, “Alright, alright” and they curl up together for a few hours.
But then the sun rises and Brendon comes and knocks on Spencer’s door - he’s dressed for work, slacks, tie, idiot sneakers, but his eyes have dark hollows and his hair is underperforming - and says to Spencer’s disheveled hobo face, “Ryan didn’t come home last night.”
Spencer says, “It’s okay, I have him.”
Brendon’s expression flickers: something like relief, something like pain.
Unable to look Brendon’s pain in the eye, Spencer turns back into the room, and they both look at Ryan curled up in a ball in Spencer’s sheets.
Silently, in concerted operation, they move Ryan from Spencer’s tiny-ass twin bed to Ryan-and-Brendon’s tiny-ass twin bed, and Brendon says, “Thanks,” in a heavy voice, to Spencer and Spencer doesn’t go back to bed because he suddenly feels awful, and worried, and irritated, but mostly awful.
And Ryan doesn’t remember any of it, because Spencer knows to keep his mouth shut.
VOL. II: Thursday