ABOMINATE

(to hate or loathe intensely)

§

 

For a few long moments, you just don’t move, staring at the door that Bobby has just breezed through on his way to wherever he was going.  You are still on the bed, propped up on your elbows, completely dumbfounded by what has just happened to you.  You think back, but you can’t remember a single other instance in which someone has just blatantly walked out on you like that, let alone when you were actually being genuine.  You can’t decide if you’re shocked more than angry, or angry more than hurt.  The only thing you’re sure of is that you’re not sure of anything.  Except that you’re not happy.

 

You pull yourself to your feet, absent-mindedly brushing a strand of blond hair out of your face.  You get all the way to the door and have the knob in your hand before you realize that going after Bobby is the last thing you want to do.

 

It isn’t that you don’t want to finish what the two of you had started, although somewhere in your mind you know what a phenomenally bad idea it would be.  It isn’t that you’re angry with Bobby.  Hell, it isn’t even so much that you’re angry with Rikki; although the next time you see him you plan to make quite sure he thinks you are.

 

It’s that you know exactly where the bassist is going, know exactly whose room he’s running to, and you don’t want to see it.  You don’t need to see it.  You already know what’s going to happen.  The thought of the two of them together makes your stomach clench violently, and for a moment you have to resist the urge to run to the bathroom.  There’s nothing in your stomach, anyway, besides the bile that’s collecting as a byproduct of this whole vicious situation. 

 

Thoughts begin to swirl in your head, thoughts that don’t connect and don’t all make sense.  The only thing they have in common is that none of them are pleasant. 

 

The tortured, pleasured look on Bobby’s face when you had first put your mouth on him is still fresh in your mind.  You wonder if he makes Rikki make that same face.  You close your eyes, willing the image away, but it doesn’t work.  The idea just grows on itself.

 

What does Bobby give him that you can’t? 

 

But you know the answer to that.  The answer is love.  Bobby’s love for Rikki is written all over his face.  You had unknowingly witnessed it a million times: every time you were on stage, every time Rikki’s name was spoken, it was there.  From Bobby, Rikki got the kind of love you’d never been able to give.

 

And you did love Rikki.  You loved him more than anything else in the world – more than the fame and the fortune and the glory, and although you could never admit it, more than you loved yourself.  Why couldn’t he see that? Why did he need to run to someone else’s arms? Someone else’s bed? 

 

You take a deep breath and look down at your bare chest, your unbuttoned jeans.  For some reason, the sight repulses you.  You quickly shed your pants and go into the bathroom, where you turn the shower on as hot as it will go.  As the water heats up, your eyes light on the various pill bottles scattered on the counter.  One of the many perks of being a rock star is that there is no kind of drug in the world that is unattainable.

 

Not really caring what’s inside, you grab one of the bottles and wrench it open, dumping a dozen or so pills into your palm.  You look at them for a moment.  They’re small and blue, and some distant part of your brain remembers that small and blue means Valium.  You glance at yourself  in the mirror, which is starting to steam up.  There’s a look in your eyes so foreign that it almost scares you.  You toss a shrug at your reflection and swallow the handful of pills dry, letting the open bottle fall.  You watch, disinterested, as the remaining blue pills scatter across the tiles.

 

You step into the shower, and the water is so hot that it feels as though it is actually cutting into your flesh, but you don’t care.  You suddenly feel dizzy. 

 

Despite how much you try to fight them, thoughts of what Bobby and Rikki might be doing right now come into your head.  You wonder if Bobby will tell him about what happened tonight.  You wonder how the drummer would take it.  Would he yell?  No.  Of course not.  That’s not in his nature.  Instead, he would be happy.  Happy that Bobby had resisted you, something that very few have ever done.  Happy that when it was all said and done, Bobby had come back to his room. 

 

The idea of their mutual happiness increases your dizziness and you reach up with one arm to steady yourself on the curtain rod.  When the rush passes, you begin to go through the motions of cleaning yourself.  Once, twice, three times you lather your entire body and rinse the soap away, watching the bubbles swirl down the drain.  It doesn’t help.  You feel dirty.  More dirty than you’ve ever felt.

 

Your eyes light upon a brush on the floor of the shower, the kind of scrub brush that is used to clean the bathtub and floor tiles.  For a moment, you just stare at it, and then slowly, mechanically, you pick it up, turning it over in your hand.

 

For the first time, you allow yourself to fully acknowledge the fact that what you have with Rikki is not what you want.  It is true that there is a certain satisfaction in owning the life of another.  It appeals to the greed and egocentricism that are as much a part of your wardrobe as tight jeans and bandanas.  It is true that there is nothing quite like the feeling you get when he says that he is yours, when you see that look in his eyes that encompasses fear and lust and submission.

 

But it is also true that these things, like so much of your life, are superficial and meaningless. 

 

You want to be able to tell Rikki that you love him the way that he loves you.  You want to be able to be with him in the way you were almost with Bobby tonight.  You want to run your fingers through his hair instead of pulling it, kiss his face instead of slapping it, vocalize your pleasure instead of your false disappointment in him.  You want to, but you can’t.  You can’t because that’s not how the game is played. 

 

But you’re the one who made the game.  You’re in charge of the rules.  And still, you cannot defy them. 

 

You glance down and notice you’ve been rubbing the bar of soap against the scrub brush for long enough that you’ve eroded nearly half of it away.  Slightly startled, you drop the bar of soap and it clatters against the bottom of the tub before sliding towards the drain.  You look down at the brush in your hand.

 

An image of Rikki and Bobby’s intertwined limbs flashes through your head.

 

And then you begin to scrub.  You scrub as hard as you can at your arms and your legs and your chest in a desperate attempt to wash away a million invisible layers of sin.  It doesn’t take long for your flesh to turn a bright red from the mixture of heat and pain, but you’re not paying attention.  It is only when tiny red beads of blood well up in the path of the brush that you finally stop, letting it fall to the floor.  You watch as the soap bubbles turn a soft pink before swirling down the drain.

 

Your head is a labyrinth of unanswerable questions all leading to a central point that you are incapable of grasping.  How did this start?  How did it get so out of control?  What are you going to do now?

 

Why can’t you just go find Rikki and tell him the truth?

 

What is the truth?

 

What if none of this was even real?  It doesn’t seem to make a difference anymore.

 

You don’t even notice as you turn the water off and climb out of the shower.  The mirror is completely fogged over, but you don’t want to see yourself, anyway.  A glance down shows a maze of tiny cuts from the bristles of the scrub brush, all still bleeding, but not too much.  Not that you’d care.  Ignoring the blood, you wrap a towel around your waist without bothering to dry off, and go back into the bedroom.

 

Before you have a chance to do anything, not that there’s anything to be done, the door to your room flies open and Smoothie walks in, looking concerned.  You regard him with a blank stare.

 

“You were screaming,” he says.  He sounds far away and it seems as though you’re looking at him through binoculars.  Dimly, you realize that such things should frighten you.

 

You realize that he’s expecting some sort of response, and you blink.  “Was I?”

 

His eyebrows furrow.  “Yes.  I heard you from all the way down the hall.”  His eyes sweep up and down your body.  “Jesus, Bret.  What happened to you?” 

 

He takes a step toward you, but you take a step back.  “Nothing,” you reply. 

 

“Nothing?  What the hell are you talking about?  You look like you’ve just had sex with a piece of sandpaper.”

 

You shrug.  The first slight effects of the Valium are starting to wash over you.  “I just got out of the shower,” you say, as if this is any sort of explanation.  You want to tell him everything, the whole convoluted story.  You want to close with admitting how much in love with Rikki you are.  But you say nothing else.

 

He shifts his weight uncomfortably.  “You sure you’re all right?  Is there anything I can get you?”

 

You shake your head, still regarding him with a blank, indifferent stare.  “I’m fine,” you lie.  “I’m just going to go to bed, Smoothie.  I wasn’t screaming.”  You don’t doubt that you had been.  Lately it had seemed as though there was at least one other person living in your head.  You wonder which one is the real you.  If either one is.

 

He frowns.  “Well… if you’re sure,” he says warily.  He looks at you for a moment longer before leaving the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

 

You stand there for a long moment, looking at the closed door, then you peel the towel off, wincing as it pulls away from your fresh cuts.  The Valium’s effects are increasing dramatically, and suddenly the room blurs dizzily out of focus, and you’re lucky the bed is right behind you as your legs go weak and you fall.  It takes all the energy you can muster to crawl to the top of the bed and climb under the covers. 

 

Somehow you manage to reach over and turn off the bedside lamp.  Darkness has never before seemed so tangible, like a force that is very much alive and evil.  You roll over on your side and feel something digging into the flesh of your arm.  Upon examination, you realize it is the remote control for the stereo that you carry with you on tour, and reflexively you pressed the button marked play.  A harmonica begins to play softly.

 

You curl into a fetal position, closing your eyes as tightly as you can, even though you know that doing this is effectively trapping the demons in your head and drawing them only closer to you.  You wonder if Rikki and Bobby are asleep by now, curled up with each other like some kind of rock and roll Romeo and Juliet, and you wish you had a warm body wrapped around you tonight. 

 

You’re Bret Michaels.  You can have your pick out of a million people.  And you’ve never felt so alone.

 

The onslaught of remorse and loneliness is like a kick to the stomach.  Guilt is something you’d learned to check at the door years ago; it had no place in your lifestyle.  You’d gotten through every night of bizarre sex with groupie after groupie by telling yourself that you didn’t have to feel guilty because of who you were, because they expected you to be that way, wanted you to be that way.  Rikki expected you to be that way, and until now you’d allowed yourself to believe that he wanted you to be that way, too.  You hate yourself for being so arrogant and foolish as to believe such a thing.  To believe that your best friend wanted to feel the sting of your palm against his cheek, to be told that he was a worthless queer.  And worse than that, you hate yourself for never telling him otherwise.  It was too late now, too late to tell him that he is just as important to you as you are to him.  Too late to put your hands on his face and express everything just through your eyes.  The only thing he had ever seen in your eyes was disgust and power.

 

Too late now.  You wrap your arms around your knees and bury your face in a pillow as the first hot tears spill from your eyes.

 

You have never felt this way before.  Ashamed, guilty, scared; all emotions that seemed distant and foreign, and on top of them all, empathy.  Suddenly you know how Rikki must have felt all those long, sweaty nights.  Suddenly you know what thoughts lingered just behind that terrified look in his eyes when your fist was raised.  It is a pain you cannot imagine and one that you’d give anything to take back.

 

Things hadn’t always been this way.  Rikki was your best friend.  Rikki was the person you could tell everything to.  What had happened?  Where had the road forked?

 

Where were you? Where’d you go?

 

Your shoulders shake with quiet sobs.  You know that he is just a few rooms away, but there is a vast ocean of unforgivable sins between your body and his.  And there is nothing you can do about it.  Nothing you can do about anything.  The emotions and Valium swirl in a nauseating spiral in your brain, and suddenly it feels as though you are falling, falling through layers of time and mistakes and broken promises.  The same nonsensical questions repeating itself over and over in your mind.  Who did this?  Who are you?  What have you become?

 

I didn’t write these pages

And my script’s been rearranged

 

You think that the volume of the music is growing steadily louder, but then you realize that the increase is only in your head.  The lyrics and the questions and the accusations all together in a steady, rising beat, speeding towards a terrifying crescendo. 

 

You can’t do this anymore. 

 

No there’s no one home in my house of pain

 

And then suddenly everything stops.  Your eyes open and you realized you’ve stopped crying.  It is just you, the dark, empty room, and the soft music.  All at once you notice how exhausted you are.

 

And I’m alone again

 

And you let go of the reins.