You Will Not Rattle Us Apart, Ryan Ross // Vol. III
VOL. III: Friday
He leaves for work at 7:00 a.m. the next morning, after waking up perky and hydrated and with his boner pressed up against Brendon’s ass.
Getting up and going in so early means that he and Brendon take the F-train together. It’s one hundred percent possible that Ryan planned it that way. He is digging his fingers into the scree and climbing up, out of his backslide.
“Look at us,” yawns Brendon happily into Ryan’s shoulder, “Commuting.”
Ryan smiles and reaches into Brendon’s lap to play with the talented, dexterous fingers that are folded there. Being together like this - alone in a public place - it’s just like it used to be last fall, back when they were obsessed with each other’s every breath and professing their love in whispers and nauseating everyone around them - even the non-homophobes, according to Spencer - with their fondlings. Except now when Ryan kisses Brendon’s ear it’s not an invitation for some discrete crotchrubbing right there on the train. Still, the gorgeous, gleeful smile he gets for it is just as satisfying.
Ryan says, “Busy day coming up?”
And Brendon nods, thoughtful. “Probably.”
Ryan says, “Why don’t you come meet me for lunch?”
Brendon looks doubtful. “I don’t know if I’ll have time-”
Ryan elbows him gently in the ribs, “Make time.”
Brendon nods, still hesitant. “I’ll try. I’ll give you a call.”
“We should go see Jon at the Herk-n-Jerk,” Ryan says, like it’s already decided.
Brendon smiles and says, “Yeah, I could do with a tofu dog.”
Ryan is one hundred percent sure that Brendon will ditch out at the last minute. But it’s okay. Ryan’s pretty determined to patch things up, and he can be patient if he tries. Brendon’s not going to slide out of this relationship or out of this band. Ryan’s not going to chase him out, either.
They both get off at 2nd Ave and Brendon goes to catch his transfer uptown and Ryan walks the two blocks over to the old courthouse that holds the film archive.
He walks jauntily, hat tilted.
He strolls in - a full three hours earlier than he’s ever, ever showed up before - and apologizes to Joanie for yesterday, says hi to a few of the other techs, and then sits down in his cubby with his ipod and the Grekul shorts.
At noon, he calls Brendon and gets voicemail.
At 1:00, he calls again and Brendon answers in a half-whisper, practically drowned out by background noise. “Hey Ry, what’s up?”
“Dude - lunch?” Ryan prompts.
“Oh shit,” says Brendon, his voice sounds equal parts mournful and self-recriminating. There is a rustling, and then the background noise goes quiet. “I totally forgot. I can’t. I really, really, really can’t. We have musicians in the studio laying down tracks for the opening credits right now - I can’t just tell them I’m ditching. That would be so unprofessional.”
“Yeah,” says Ryan, even though he has no idea what he’s agreeing with. He doesn’t even have a decent idea of what Brendon’s job entails. Composing a soundtrack for an animated film based on an animated tv series sounds like the kind of work you do when your career is over and you’re trying to not admit to yourself that you’re old and irrelevant and retired.
Brendon is too young and too talented for that kind of shit, but if Ryan said that he’d be picking at the scab of this ongoing argument. So he just repeats the lie: “Yeah, I understand.”
Brendon still sounds eager to explain: “Seriously, there are like eight of them, plus Doc and Jackson and I shouldn’t even be out here right now, even though it’s Thirlwell’s music, I’m supposed to do rewrites and learn the style before I start writing my own parts. It’s just all totally on the fly and they’re going to want to make sure the edits are cool before we-”
Brendon pauses, and Ryan can hear a muffled something, probably through Brendon’s hand over the phone.
Distantly, Brendon goes: “Sorry? Yeah, I- no, that’s right. It’s okay. Just keep her up there. I’ll be in in a minute.” Then his voice gets clearer and he says to Ryan: “It’s just a shitshow, man. Fuck, I’m sorry.”
“No, I understand,” says Ryan, surprising himself by sounding supportive and honest all at once. Not a twinge of disappointment, resentment, jealousy, or dismissive cockiness.
“I’m really sorry, Ryan.”
Ryan’s earnest when he says: “Don’t worry about it.”
“Really? I feel like such an asshole.”
“Brendon? Seriously. Go back to work. I’m fine, we’re fine. I’ll see you at home, okay?” Brendon makes more sorry noises, and by the time Ryan hangs up, he’s already walked halfway to the Herk-n-Jerk.
Jon is standing at the till reading a paperback because the place is empty because it’s 1:20 on the last Friday in June and all the business lunchers have fled to their summer homes. Or maybe it’s just a lull.
Ryan says to Jon, “I would like two tofu dogs and about a dozen people’s worth of onion rings.”
Jon looks at him for a long time. “That’s like, two thousand pounds of onion rings, dude.”
Ryan rolls his eyes, “What a comedian.”
Jon gets the onion rings: six orders is twelve pounds. That’s one pound of fried dough with thin rings of onion buried somewhere deep inside per person.
“Hey Jon,” Ryan says, as he’s rooting around for some cash, “Do you know where Brendon works?”
Jon draws him a map, because his instructions are vague and unclear and Ryan finally pushes a napkin and his emergency ballpoint at him.
“Why do you know and I don’t, is the real question here,” Ryan says as he watches Jon squiggle an unfortunate grid with a giant X marked ASTROBASE GO!
“Because I’m a sensitive listener who cares about his friends,” Jon informs him. “And you’re a self-righteous cockhole.”
“With a badittude, I know,” sighs Ryan. “So this place is like, a cartoon studio or something?”
“Brendon said it was a creative workspace for some guys who happen to make their living making a cartoon,” Jon makes everything even more vague than it was before.
“So it’s just like, their apartment?” Ryan raises his eyebrows, unimpressed.
“Or something,” Jon grimaces and taps the map. “Here you go. I guess they’re on the eighth floor. But the idea is that it’s a moonbase in orbit, or something, so. You know. Tread lightly.”
Ryan gives dubious thanks.
.
It’s one of those buildings that has a hair salon on the ground level and about fifty design firms and internet startups and niche software companies with inscrutable names like Siltt and Mass Leverage and Whom listed by the elevator. The uniform at the desk gives Ryan a once-over and dismisses him as a well-dressed delivery boy.
In the elevator, Ryan focuses on how thrilled Brendon will be to see him, cradling his biodegradable boxes of onion rings against his chest. He is the best boyfriend ever.
On the eighth floor, the only door that doesn’t lead into a vaporously lit lobby with ferocious-looking receptionists and retro-chic 50s décor is a door that looks like it leads to the maintenance closet, except it has a piece of paper stuck to it that says in sharpied comic book lettering: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING ASTROBASE GO! And then, underneath, in smaller letters on a smaller piece of paper: Prepare for decompression and gravity loss. Do not look directly into the nozzle.
Ryan frowns, because the piece of paper is a lame inside joke, and he doesn’t like inside jokes that he is on the wrong side of.
Still, he knocks.
The guy who opens the door is at least not wearing a spacesuit. He looks more like a vampire rock star from the 80s: rail thin, tattoos sleeving his arms, black and white hair layered down to his shoulders, a hawkish face and an INXS t-shirt that looks like it’s barely survived the intervening decades. He glances down at Ryan in irritation, “We didn’t order anything,” he says.
“I’m uh - is Brendon around?” says Ryan.
“He’s busy,” says the guy. “Who are you?”
“I’m um, his boyfriend.” Ryan is irritated by how cowed he sounds. “I brought onion rings.”
The guy eyes the Herk-n-Jerk logo on the grease-slicked boxes. His gaze makes Ryan feels strangely pathetic in his riding boots and too-low v-neck and jaunty cap. The guy says: “Look kid, we are seriously fucking scrambling today, I don’t know if Brendon told you. We’re not exactly taking breaks for human concerns like eating or making out with our boytoys, alright?”
“Doc, did you say you wanted Karen center-forward on the high end, or- sorry,” another guy pokes his head around a corner. Ryan can see couches, equipment, a dirty carpet as Doc turns back into the studio. “Who’s that?”
Doc says, in a tone that conveys exactly how crucial this information is: “Brendon’s boyfriend, apparently.”
“His what? Are those onion rings? Invite him in, jesus.”
Doc doesn’t even look back down at Ryan, just lets the door widen like it’s accidental.
Ryan scuttles in, pressured forward by Doc’s impatient huff.
The guy around the corner has a lick of magenta hair and old-timey aviator goggles strapped to his forehead. He’s sitting at a mixing board in a tiny room crowded with the nattiest-looking couch Brendon’s ever seen, a couple of other chairs, a bunch of sound equipment and a desk. All of it is very crowded because taking up at least half the space in the room is a comparatively tiny sound booth with at least five people in it, including Brendon.
The guy - who must be Jackson, always named in the same breath as Doc - says to Ryan, “Brendon never mentioned you,” and then he flicks a switch and says into the booth, “Hey Brendon, you have a visitor.”
Jackson doesn’t sound half as irritated as Doc, but when Brendon looks up from the sheaf of paper he’s making notes on, his expression is unmistakably mortified. “Oh shit,” Ryan hears him say through the speakers. And that’s the second time today that Ryan’s heard that phrase instead of the overjoyed hi, Ryan! he was expecting.
“I brought these for everyone.” Ryan tells Brendon as he squeezes out of the booth, and awkwardly proffers the boxes that he can’t actually remove from his own arms because there are too many of them. “I thought you guys might be hungry.”
“Oh god, Ryan. Um, thanks. Okay.” Brendon takes in a breath and looks around to find a place with enough space on it for 12 pounds of onion rings and two tofu dogs. “We’ll go in here-” he says, pushing gently towards another door, “I’ll just be a second guys, I promise.”
Doc lifts his eyebrows, and Jackson grabs a box from the top of the pile as Ryan slips past.
The next room is more monitors and more hard-used equipment and more mess: one corner has about eight gothy oil paintings of pretty girls in their brassieres in varying stages of completion. It smells like old cigarettes, paint thinner and various body odors.
“Brendon, are you recording music in there?” is the first thing out of Ryan’s mouth.
Brendon starts stacking onion rings on a countertop that’s obviously normally used to hold ashtrays and paintbrushes. “Yeah, the soundtrack’s getting done in stages, because we can’t afford to do it all at once during post-production. Fuckers at the network are holding the studio budget over our heads to make sure Doc and Jackson don’t do anything interesting, and we can only afford the rights to like, one good pop song so they’ve got me and Thirlwell composing everything-”
“And you’re playing for them?” Ryan presses. He has to clarify this one point: his frontman is playing music for someone else, and didn’t tell him. His boyfriend is spending all his time with a pair of aging punks in a studio the size of a bedroom, and didn’t mention how freaking intimate and close and professionally bizarre his job is.
Brendon shrugs, “Yeah, I mean, that’s what they hired me for originally. Until they heard some of my stuff. Then they wanted me to help out with the writing-”
“You mean our stuff,” Ryan can’t help but correct him.
“No,” Brendon says, his voice going quieter. His eyebrows crinkle apologetically. “I mean my stuff.”
Ryan doesn’t know what to say. What stuff?, maybe. Somehow he’d been operating under the impression that all the fiddling around on the laptop and the extra hours with the autoharp and violin were resulting in garbage. He’d assumed Brendon would share it if it was any good. That he’d spin it all into gold for the band, because the band was his first priority.
Brendon says, “I have to get back. It’s my third day, this looks really bad.”
Brendon leans forward and grabs Ryan’s hand and kisses him, but it’s just a brief press against his cheek because Ryan turns his face away.
Brendon pulls back to look at him, and Ryan doesn’t say anything. Instead, Brendon says, “I’m really sorry,” and opens the door.
Ryan doesn’t look at anyone on the way out. Jackson exclaims, “These are frigging awesome!” and Doc says, “Stop eating over the board, dick,” and Brendon goes, “Okay, sorry. I’m done now.”
Ryan lets himself out.
He walks the twenty blocks to work, and sits back down in his cubby with his ipod and the Grekul shorts. Even sitting still, silent, in the near dark with his flickering screen, he can feel the ground slipping underneath him, and his fingers hurt from scrabbling at the ledge.
.
Ryan stays at work so late that he’s the last one in the building. He doesn’t figure this out until he gets up to stretch after Autobiography Part 3: growing up Ukrainian in rural Iowa, which is a continuous seven minute black and white shot of long grass on the side of some road Grekul is driving down. The high point comes four minutes in when the camera passes over two kids standing in the ditch with a dead dog. Then it just keeps going with the grass.
Ryan thinks Grekul is a depressing motherfucker.
The lights are on in the stairwell, but upstairs the box office is closed and the only light is coming in from the street through the tall, arched windows. He pokes his head into the theatre, which is empty and black in a way that makes his eyes fill in shapes and colors that aren’t there.
He should go home. His phone tells him it’s 11:00 and that he hasn’t missed any calls.
If he goes home, though, then he’ll have to either talk to Brendon, or deal with the fact that Brendon hasn’t come home yet. He can’t decide which option is more unpleasant.
Instead, Ryan goes back downstairs and lets himself into the cold storage vault. He selects an armful of titles pretty much at random: names he doesn’t recognize, dates before he was born.
He’s fiddling with the ferris wheel projector - it’s kind of a touchy machine, but once you get it going it never tears a strip - when his phone rings.
He doesn’t recognize the number, but when he lets it go to voicemail whoever it is just calls back again. He answers because it makes him feel at least a little bit wanted, and someone asks, “Hey, uh, Ryan?”
“Yeah?” Ryan says.
“It’s Zach. From the frame shop.”
“Oh, hey.” Ryan says, kind of regretting answering.
“I got your number off Spencer, I hope that’s okay.”
Ryan’s honest: “It’s a little weird, I guess. I didn’t think you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry.” Zach’s voice makes Ryan instantly regret the passive-aggressive tone he’d taken. “I was just sorry I missed you after you played the other night. I had this thing I had to be at, and I couldn’t stay. But you guys were incredible. Chad was actually really pissed that you guys were that good.”
Ryan is kind of ashamed at how he perks at the compliment. “Yeah, who’s Chad?”
“You saw him play, he’s the guitarist for Newjack.”
“The host band?” Ryan makes a face.
“Yeah, that’s them.”
Ryan wants to make a comment about the quality of the guy’s guitar versus the quality of his music versus the size of his cock, but bites it back. Stay classy, Ross, he tells himself.
“So, listen,” says Zach, when it becomes apparent that Ryan has nothing good to say and so is not going to say anything at all. “I want to hear more. About where you guys are going and what you want to do. I’d like to hear the rest of your songs, too, but-”
“But we don’t have any shows booked right now,” Ryan finishes for him. And it’s only the fact that Brendon already destroyed his ego for him today that allows him to state another fundamental fact: “We are kind of a non-entity.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Zach says. He sounds so assured - like that’s such a small band problem, and since no one here is in a small band, it’s not even worth mentioning - that Ryan blinks. Zach says: “Maybe we could meet up and talk somewhere? What are you doing right now?”
Ryan feels like maybe he should repeat himself: non-entity. No shows. They play open mics and open for bands built up on blog buzz and they went on one tour up through the northeast art college circuit, last summer. Their demo is a year old and doesn’t have half their good songs on it. He’s not - Ryan takes a breath - he’s not actually ready for anyone to take notice of them, least of all the scene prince of Brooklyn. Maybe he was ready a year ago, but now - now Brendon has a job and Jon misses breakbeats and Spencer sometimes seems like he misses the sun and the heat and his sisters.
“I’m kinda busy right now,” is what Ryan says. “But thanks.”
He hangs up.
He fiddles with the projector, scrapes his knuckle on the casing, swears, and then, while he’s sucking on the wound, hits redial.
“Fuck, I’m sorry.” Ryan says, squeezing his eyes shut and just forcing himself to talk. “I’m a dick and I don’t really feel like talking about my stupid band right now. Like, tomorrow - yes. Yes I would love to talk about it tomorrow. I don’t know why the hell you want to talk about it with me, but if you’re up for it, I’m game. We’ll talk about direction and process and all that other shit and it will be great. But tonight, I just want to sit in a dark room and watch about a hundred ancient art films and feel sorry for myself. Which is what I’m going to do now, so I guess I’ll call you tomorrow, if that’s okay with you. I will hopefully not be such a huge asshole by then, if it makes you feel any better.”
There is kind of a weird silence, wherein Ryan suddenly fears that he’s called Brendon or Spencer’s mom or some other person who was asleep up until ten seconds ago.
“I could watch some movies,” says Zach, “We don’t have to talk about anything.”
So Ryan gives him directions to the archive. And Zach taps on the big wooden doors half an hour later.
Ryan lets him in, and Zach’s taken him at his word because neither of them really says anything. Ryan just locks the door again and leads the way back into the theater. He clicks the projector on and follows Zach to a pair of seats in the dead center.
They don’t leave a buffer seat, even though it’s just the two of them. They just sit there side by side in the middle of the black room and watch the screen flicker.
When the reel ends, Ryan picks another film. The pile he collected has cinema verité from the 70s about a Soviet nudist colony in North Carolina, untranslated Japanese art films from the 50s, hours of research footage from the National Land Survey turned into an avant-garde meditation on human failure, all five parts of Grekul’s autobiography in succession.
They go through all of them. At some point the silence stops being weird and awkward, heavy with unspoken niceties between strangers, and becomes familiar. Ryan gets used to the sound of Zach’s body shifting in the seat, the bump of his elbow on the armrest, the sound of him breathing through the silent bits.
At points, one or the other of them falls asleep. If it’s Ryan, Zach elbows him awake when the next reel needs to go in. If it’s Zach, Ryan nudges his thigh with his knee.
When the last film ends, they let themselves out into the gray morning light. Ryan locks up, shaking the heavy doors twice, just to make sure, and then steps down to look up and down the sidewalk, across the intersection. It’s cloudy and there’s a breeze and no traffic.
Zach shoves his hands in his pockets and yawns. His hair’s a dark curling mess around his face. Ryan probably doesn’t look any better: sleepless but strangely aglow with a higher purpose. Eyes glassy but alert. Clothing rumpled, mind still viciously awake. This must be what art feels like: mountaintops, oxygen, footing only as firm as the next sentence.
“You wanna go get breakfast?” Ryan asks, screwing up his eyebrows.
.
bridge: BRENDON
Brendon doesn’t ever tell Ryan that his phone died in his jacket pocket in the middle of the afternoon that Friday. He meant to call - apologize, say thanks, make promises for some slow Saturday morning sex - and he would’ve, but Doc was getting pissier by the second and so instead of asking to borrow someone’s phone, Brendon just ducked his head and went back to work.
They let the musicians go at 6:00, but the three of them don’t get out of the studio until 11:00, at which point Doc flips from taskmaster to scene queen and starts listing clubs that serve decent martinis without attracting try-hard hipster shits, which is how he describes kids like Brendon.
Brendon pauses on the sidewalk outside of the building and says, “Guys, I’m exhausted, I’m just gonna head home.”
But Jackson gives him this tragic look, and Doc rolls his eyes and says, “No. You’re not.”
So they go for cocktails at this place where everyone is over 30 because the drinks are all over $20, and, instead of asking to borrow Jackson’s phone when Doc goes to the washroom, Brendon gets all distracted by Jackson’s description of how he got started doing cartoon work back when he was Brendon’s age. And then when Doc gets back they start talking about how voice acting isn’t that much of a stretch if you have musical training (“I’d rather work with a vocalist than a fucking ACTRA jerkoff any day” Doc declares to the bar at large, and then reminds Brendon that he’s in a band, too - his third, actually - and it’s called Weep and they just put out their first album and blah blah brag brag, Brendon looks suitably impressed).
Then Jackson says, “Well fuck, Brendon, when this bitch of a movie’s done we should put you in the booth. Pretty much our entire audience knows it’s me and Doc doing half the voices every episode anyway. It’s getting embarrassing.”
Doc says, “Yeah, we could write you something in for the fourth season. It’s not like we can afford Stephen Colbert anymore, anyway. Fucker.”
So they drink to Brendon’s new voice acting career, and then some of Doc’s friends show up, and they think that it’s so adorable that Brendon is only 21 that they start buying him drinks too and eventually Brendon - who really does prefer a plate of lemon wedges to most any kind of alcohol you could name - is fucking plastered on citrus vodka and ginger beer.
He tries to tear himself away from the group throughout the night but he never even gets his jacket all the way on. Even all gothy and old, these people are awesome and nice and kind of hilarious. Suddenly, he’s enjoying being drunk. He’s enjoying spending time away from his regular crowd of child-bearing vegans and high-maintenance hipsters.
He can even admit it: he’s happy to forget about the band, about all the touring and recording they’re not doing, about Ryan’s daily heart attacks about their direction and their purpose and their sound. Because somewhere along the line being together and playing music stopped being enough for Ryan. And maybe that was the same day that Ryan started edging towards being too much for Brendon. Too much calculation and too much politicking. Sometimes Brendon doesn’t even know if Ryan’s having sex with his boyfriend or with his lead singer. It’s hard to tell the difference.
But right now, for the first time in a long time, Brendon finds himself grinning without looking over his shoulder to see a glowering taskmaster. Brendon finds himself relaxing.
The night ends in a tattoo parlor.
Doc has convinced Jackson that he needs to get a tattoo of Triana Orpheus on his right bicep. Jackson, while arguing that he doesn’t have a bicep to tattoo, does seem weirdly okay with having a pinup of a cartoon teenage goth girl that he himself invented permanently scarred onto his skin.
Doc threatens to get a tramp stamp on his lower back, but then settles for an addition on his right ribcage, seeing as room on his scrawny bicep is scarce. He goes for another one of their characters: the New Wave albino with asymmetric hair, pink stirrup pants and a brooch, also in a pinup pose.
And then, inspired by everyone’s lack of inhibition, Brendon says he wants one, too. To commemorate his work with them. He makes a fairly sentimental speech that ends with “You guys are the best,” and then signs off on a quick sketch Jackson does of a stylized monarch butterfly.
“Don’t make it look too much like a fairy,” Doc advises the artist, “This kid has a hard enough time not getting beat up.”
It seems like he blinks and suddenly he’s got a piece of plastic wrap taped to his hipbone and the three of them are stumbling back to Astrobase Go. He thinks to himself firmly, hoping that his hungover self will remember the admonition in the morning: “Do not regret this, this is awesome.”
Before Brendon passes out on the skeezy couch beside the sound booth, his jacket balled up under his head, Jackson snoring across the room, he tries to calculate how mad Ryan’s gonna be. The answer exceeds his debilitated faculties, though, and he falls asleep without ever making the call, apologizing, saying thanks, or promising slow Saturday morning sex, like he meant to.
VOL. IV: Saturday