The Road Less Traveled

By Kat Waters

 

 

            Nikki stumbled out of the car and staggered a few feet in the high roadside grass.  He squinted up at the sun, and although he could tell by its position in the sky that it was only morning, it was already beating down hotly.  As he released his full bladder into the grass, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes, letting the warmth hit his face.  He’d always had something of a love-hate relationship with sunlight.  The warmth made him happy.  It was the light he could do without.

 

            He pulled his zipper back up and gave his surroundings a cursory once-over.  There wasn’t much to see.  The tall grass he was standing in seemed to stretch out in all directions until the end of the world, sprinkled here and there with the kind of tall weeds that small children mistook for flowers.  The only break in the seemingly unending expanse of grass was the road, long and plain with its single yellow line, and the car, sitting idle. 

 

            Nikki studied the car for a moment.  He was relatively certain he’d never seen it before.  Idly he wondered if they’d broken the law.  He couldn’t tell what kind of car it was, just that it was an eyesore; a huge boat of a car that may have at one time been white but was now a dirty grayish brown, flecked with rust spots.  He reasoned that the owner of such a car probably wouldn’t be too upset about losing it.  He could see Tommy’s form slumped over the steering wheel, his head facing out of the driver’s side window.  Nikki was only mostly sure that the drummer wasn’t dead.

 

            A glance down revealed that the jeans he’d just zippered were the only article of clothing Nikki was wearing.  No shirt, no shoes.  For a moment, he strained mentally, trying to remember if he’d been wearing a shirt before… but before what?  He didn’t know where they were, or how they got there, or what day it was.  Moreover, he didn’t know if he particularly cared.

 

            He patted the pocket of his jeans and felt the reassuring rectangular bulge that he knew was a pack of cigarettes.  He pulled it out and opened it, disappointed that there were only three inside.  Wherever he was, he figured it would be a while before they came across a convenience store.  Sighing, he shook one into his hand, and felt something else hit his palm.  Closer examination revealed a small baggie.  It must have been a pretty rough night if there were leftovers.

 

            Nikki put the cigarette behind his ear, then opened the baggie and dipped a long, black pinky nail into it.  He looked down at the tan powder for just a moment, allowing his brain to indulge in its customary fantasy that maybe this time, he wouldn’t do it.  Maybe this time, he could just watch the drug be carried away by the warm morning breeze.  He almost laughed at the thought before remembering that it wasn’t exactly funny.  Whatever had landed him and Tommy on this barren expanse of road must have been intense.  His entire body ached in a way he was all too familiar with, the sort of ache that could only be eased by one thing, and he was holding it in his hand.  Who was he kidding?  He was a slave to this like he was a slave to everything else.  Nikki inhaled the dope in a fluid motion, then dipped his pinky back into the bag and repeated the action. 

 

            Tossing his hair out of his face, he put the baggie back into the cigarette pack and shoved that back into the pocket of his tight jeans.  A check of his other pocket revealed a lighter.  He pulled the cigarette from behind his ear and lit it, inhaling deeply.  As he blew out the smoke slowly, Nikki looked back at the car.

 

            He was about fifteen feet from the monstrosity of an automobile.  He wondered if the car had died, or if they’d just simply been too fucked up to keep going.  Either situation seemed just as likely, and he realized dismally that the only thing that would make being stuck a problem was if they were out of drugs.  Nikki continued to watch, only moving enough to smoke his cigarette, as Tommy stirred and pulled his head off of the steering wheel.  The drummer looked out the driver’s side window, but didn’t turn the other way before collapsing back against the seat.  A few moments passed and Nikki was sure Tommy had fallen asleep again.  Well, at least he wasn’t dead.  That was something.

 

            Nikki took another drag on his cigarette and, to his surprise, felt himself getting high.  The stuff he’d found in his pocket must have been damned strong; after months on and off the needle, snorting it never did much for him beyond making him feel slightly less dead.  For a minute, he thought he might puke, but the feeling quickly passed.  He sank slowly to the ground, lying on his back.  He knew the drug was the only thing keeping the tall grass from being unbearably itchy. 

 

The heroin shrouded him like a blanket.  Bitterly, Nikki realized that it was a blanket that didn’t quite cover him anymore.  He’d outgrown it, like he’d outgrown everything that came before it.  He’d chased alcohol with cocaine, and cocaine with heroin, but what do you chase heroin with?  A gun to the temple?  At least the dope kept these morbid thoughts from being upsetting.  If nothing else, it was still good for that.

 

            Nikki struggled harder to try to figure out how he’d gotten here.  The facts that he was sure of didn’t amount to much.  It was summer, or at least it had been summer during the last moment he could remember.  He remembered a hotel room, packed with people, but the only person he recognized was Tommy.  He had a dim recollection of something flying through a window – a TV, maybe?  A guitar?  It didn’t matter.  It had been enough to send the two of them running out of the room, screaming and laughing, high as kites, down the stairs two at a time and outside into the humid Los Angeles night.  They’d driven off in Tommy’s car… but where?  What happened to the car?  Nikki furrowed his eyebrows, unable to come up with anything else.  Whatever had happened, they weren’t in L.A. anymore.  Whether or not they were still in the state of California was up for debate; the only states Nikki knew he was in were confusion and indifference.

 

            He tried to convince himself that they couldn’t have gone too far, that they couldn’t have been blacked out for too long, but it didn’t work.  Their drug and alcohol binges spanned days, sometimes weeks.  There was just no way of knowing how many hours or days had passed since they’d left the hotel.  No way of knowing how they’d ended up with the car.  No way of knowing if the other guys thought they were dead.  Hell, Nikki thought dully, there was no way of knowing if they were dead.  He guessed that they weren’t.  He was reasonably sure they didn’t have sunlight and smack in hell, and he and Tommy weren’t exactly destined for sainthood.  Besides, he doubted heaven was a field on the side of a winding road somewhere, but what did he know about that?  About God and religion?  As far as he was concerned, God was a shifty-eyed drug dealer in the back of a club, and heaven was a needle full of uncut, high-grade smack.  The only lights he’d ever seen at the end of a tunnel were the ones on top of an ambulance.  He sighed.  It wasn’t as if it mattered.  This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.  It wouldn’t be the last.  At least he didn’t wake up in jail this time.

 

            The thought of jail made Nikki wonder if cops ever drove down this road.  He doubted it.  Who wouldn’t do a buck ten on a wasted expanse of land like this one?  It didn’t look like there was a sign of civilization for miles.  There wasn’t even litter on the roadside.  Maybe this was the end of the world, or maybe purgatory.  Yeah, or maybe it was Nevada.  The last time they’d been in Nevada had been a trip.  After a show, he and Tommy had mumbled something about being back in a few minutes, hopped in the car, and drove the nearly three hundred miles to Vegas.  They didn’t have a reason to go there; they just didn’t have any real reason not to.  They’d spent four or five nights there, most of which was a blur.  Nikki vaguely remembered doing something very wrong with a couple of dancers and a champagne bottle.  He smiled at the memory, then frowned at the smile.  He wondered exactly when he’d undergone the transition from human being to whatever it was he’d become. 

 

            He turned his head and opened his eyes, just barely able to see the car through the grass.  The view was obstructed too much for him to see Tommy.  Tommy was still human, Nikki thought to himself.  He was just as wild, just as unpredictable as Nikki, but he always had one foot at least near the ground.  Nikki was the opposite; occasionally he was grounded, but he always had his head in some kind of self-destructive cloud.  It was what made them such a good team, ‘good’ being a relative term.  He didn’t doubt that neither of them could survive for very long without the other.  It was like being in love, but more like being in hate.  They validated each other.  Thrived off of each other’s shortcomings.  Fed into each other’s insanity.  They couldn’t live without each other, but how long would it be before they destroyed themselves?  Nikki thought that maybe they already had.

 

            Whenever there were tensions within the band, it was always Vince against Tommy and Nikki.  Mick never opened his mouth.  He had his own demons to battle; he was older, more wise.  He had more important things to do than mediate the selfish, immature squabblings of his drunken bandmates.  Tommy and Nikki were always two people fighting as one against Vince, and Vince’s cocksure attitude leveled the battlefield.  It was always the same old game, the same tired insults.  Vince would say something puerile about the pair being gay, and then the fists would fly.  No one ever won the fights.  They were always too fucked up. 

 

            Tommy and Nikki weren’t gay, so they took part in the tedious, drawn-out fights that Vince goaded them into.  Or maybe they were, Nikki thought, smiling again at the absurdity of the idea.  No.  They weren’t.  They weren’t anything.  Queer, straight, alive, dead… what difference would it make?  There had been a few drugged-up and lonely late nights in hotel rooms, but it was always a matter of running out of women and being too hammered to know what they were doing.  Of course, that couldn’t be entirely true, Nikki knew.  Being too hammered would mean not remembering, and he remembered.  He remembered clearly.  He remembered the fumbling excuses he’d made to himself on all of the hungover mornings after.  Too much liquor, too much coke, too much being a rockstar on the wild side.  He’d done everything else, after all; why not a little playtime with a member of the same team?  Sometimes he almost wished Tommy was a girl.  But gay?  No.  They weren’t gay.  They weren’t human enough to be classified that way, and besides, they’d never give up women.  Sex was just another high, like all of the others.  It was only chasing that evasive dragon that had ever led them to each other, and it was the same dragon that pulled them apart afterwards.  Love and hate.  You can’t have one without the other.  Sex is pain is love is heroin is music.  It all bled together in a sickening swirl, each component building on and canceling out the others.  What they did or didn’t do didn’t matter; nothing can matter when you barely exist.  Sometimes Nikki thought that only their names existed, that they were only made real because everyone thought they were supposed to be.  Sometimes he cared, sometimes he didn’t care.  Sometimes he cared that he didn’t care. 

 

            With exaggerated effort, Nikki pulled himself into a sitting position and retrieved another cigarette from the pack in his pocket.  He eyed the small amount of dope that remained in the bag and decided to hang onto it, nearly laughing at himself for rationing drugs the way a man in a desert would ration water.  Lighting the cigarette, he pulled himself to his feet and stood for a moment, swaying.  He wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten, how long he’d been asleep before waking up in the car.  He puffed on the cigarette lazily, wondering if it was really true that smoking made him more high, or if it only worked because he believed it.  Either way, a cigarette or two always seemed to increase the experience somewhat.

 

            He made his way across the grass, closing the distance between himself and the car.  He wondered what combination of activities and chemicals had rendered Tommy unconscious, and with that contemplation he also wondered if he should wake the drummer or not.  The pair rarely slept; sleep was something you entered into willingly.  Sleep was what you got after a tough day at the office, when you came home to a glass of red wine and the comfort of your starched linen sheets.  For Nikki and Tommy, unconsciousness was rarely a choice.  It was what came suddenly after days or weeks of snorting and swallowing and fucking.  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d decided it was time to go to bed.  Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he woke up and didn’t wonder how the hell he’d gotten there.  He’d always assumed that it was okay, that eventually he’d just get sick of it all and cut out the bullshit, but he never got sick of it.  He just got used to it.

 

            Before Nikki had to make a decision on what to do about his sleeping friend, Tommy’s eyes fluttered open.  With a groan, he pulled his head up off of the seat and turned towards Nikki with a questioning look on his face.  Nikki shrugged, motioning with his cigarette at the seemingly endless landscape.  The drummer sighed and climbed out of the car.  By the time he’d done this and walked around to where Nikki was standing, Nikki had pulled the remainder of heroin from his pocket.  Wordlessly, he placed the baggie in Tommy’s palm.

 

            The drummer eyeballed the drugs for a second, and Nikki knew that he was having the same pointless mental debate that he’d been having a short while before.  Sometimes he thought he should say something, or wished that Tommy would say something to him, but neither of them ever did.  What would be the point?  Silence worked much better, anyway.  Silence was the embodiment of everything that could possibly be said, the good and the bad, the right and the wrong.  Without words, they could express everything rather than making the choice of what to express.  Silence meant support and disapproval, acceptance and denial, and so Nikki did not speak.  He simply watched as Tommy opened the baggie and dipped his nail into it.  He knew that by remaining still and quiet while looking on at his friend’s actions, the air he gave off was one of interest and permission.  It said all that needed to be said; he would speak if spoken to, would play any part Tommy wanted him to play, or no part at all.  He took a long drag on his cigarette before tossing it to the ground, then, thinking better of it, crushed it into the dirt with his bare foot.  He didn’t feel a thing.

 

            Tommy finished off the remainder of the dope and lit a cigarette of his own.  Nikki was relieved to see that he had nearly a full pack.  He watched the drummer smoke for a moment, studied the angles of his face as he sucked on the cigarette and then slowly exhaled a stream of grey smoke.  He felt an urge to reach out and touch Tommy’s lips, but instead jammed his hands into his pockets.  They weren’t anywhere near that high.

 

            After a few minutes, Tommy climbed onto the hood of the car, leaning his back against the windshield.  Nikki did the same, turning his head to watch as the drug changed the younger man’s features.  Heroin was strange like that.  During the high, it was a veritable fountain of youth; it seemed to erase the physical signs of the way life eroded the body and soul.  It was later, after taking too many sips from the fountain, that you realized how much it aged you. 

 

            Tommy’s features softened as the smack took hold, smiling the trademark junkie half-smile.  He allowed his half-smoked cigarette to fall from his hand.  Nikki watched as it hit the hood and rolled over the side.  For a moment, he imagined a gas leak and the car being engulfed in a sudden burst of flame, heard a news reporter’s expressionless voice saying, “Two famous musicians found dead today on a stretch of land outside of…”  Nikki thought for a moment, and skipped that part.  “The bodies were so badly burned that the rockstars had to be identified by their dental records.”  He smiled.  A few seconds passed, and he was relatively sure there would be no explosion.  He turned his attention back to Tommy.

 

            Tommy, like Nikki, was shirtless, but he was wearing a pair of black boots.  Again Nikki wondered what happened to his shoes, in that way that one wonders about something they don’t care at all about.  He moved his eyes up the drummer’s body.  Tommy’s hand was resting on the hood of the car, his fingers drumming a slow, doped out rhythm.  The nails of his hand were painted black; perfect, without a single chip. Nikki self-consciously looked down at his own black-painted nails.  His were badly in need of a new coat.  He wondered how Tommy did it.

 

            “Good shit,” Tommy said suddenly, breaking the silence.  His voice was slow and thick.  The sound made Nikki realize just how quiet things really had been.  He nodded, although Tommy’s eyes were closed. 

 

            A few moments dragged on in silence.  Nikki rested his head on the roof of the car and closed his eyes, soaking in the heroin and sunlight.  He realized how quiet it actually was out here in the middle of nowhere, and with that thought also realized how long it had been since he’d heard silence.  Years ago, he would have laughed if someone had used the phrase ‘heard silence’, but things were different now.  Everything was always so loud, so raucous; the music, the screaming, the crowds.  Now, when it was quiet, the silence was overwhelming, sometimes downright uncomfortable.  Nikki could hear the blood rushing through his head, could feel his heartbeat reverberating through his body.  If it weren’t for the dope, the feeling might have bordered on frightening, but given the circumstances, he found himself grateful for the change of scenery.

 

            “So,” Tommy said then, and Nikki rolled his head to the side to look at his friend.

“Any idea where we are?” the drummer continued.

 

            For a long moment, Nikki merely looked at him, taking in every inch of his face.  Then he closed his eyes and pointed his face back towards the sky.  “Well, it’s not L.A.,” he said finally.

 

            “Thank you, Toto,” Tommy said dryly, and sighed.

 

            Nikki sighed in response and opened his eyes again, turning his head to the side and staring out into the grass.  “Do you remember anything?”

 

             “I remember you throwing a guitar through a tenth-story window at the Plaza,” Tommy replied, chuckling a little.  “I’m not quite sure who it belonged to.”

 

            Nikki frowned.  “Is that why we left?”

 

            “Probably.”  Tommy paused.  “I don’t remember why we were at the Plaza, though.   I don’t think we were staying there.”

 

            Nikki chased and finally caught a glimmer of memory.  “That girl,” he said.  “What was her name?  With the big tits and the black hair?”

 

            “Oh, right,” Tommy said, “her.  I don’t know her fucking name.  I just know she had a lot of coke.”

 

            “Well.  Yeah.  And a lot of tits.”  Nikki closed his eyes again, now able to picture the girl a little better.  He still couldn’t quite remember her face, but that was hardly the important part.  He was pretty sure he and Tommy had tag-teamed her.

 

            Another moment dragged on.  “Are we out of supplies?” Tommy asked then.

 

            “There’s nothing in my pockets,” Nikki offered.

 

            “Not much to do out here in the middle of nowhere.”  There was something in the drummer’s voice that made Nikki turn.  The two men remained quiet for what seemed like hours, just looking at each other.  Nikki wondered if something was going to happen.  He hoped it would. 

 

            Just when it seemed that Tommy was about to move closer, he grinned.  “We should probably get out of here, huh?” he said, quickly pulling himself off of the car and onto his feet.  “I think we’re supposed to catch a plane today for the East Coast leg of the tour.”

 

            Nikki couldn’t will himself to move at first.  The drug-laced sexual tension made him feel as though he were glued to the hood of the car.  It was a good sixty seconds before he found the strength to pull himself to his feet.  “Yeah,” he said then.  “That sounds right.”  It didn’t, but Tommy was usually right about these things.  He tugged open the passenger door and crawled into the car.  It was hot and stuffy, and Nikki could feel his skin sticking to the leather interior.  If it weren’t for the heroin, it would have been bordering on the unbearable.

 

            Wordlessly, Tommy climbed into the car as well and reached for the keys in the ignition.  “Hope this beast can get us back to L.A.,” he commented.  He was clearly trying to be jovial, but his voice betrayed him.  It was the voice of someone who needed something, and Nikki wondered if it was something besides drugs.

 

            Miraculously, the car started on the first try, the engine roaring to life.  Tommy laughed nervously as they began to drive.  Nikki pulled a cigarette from his pack and lit it, puffing lazily as he watched the dull scenery rolling by.  After a few minutes, he turned slightly, covertly looking at his friend.

 

            Tommy’s hand gripped the steering wheel tightly and his eyes squinted in the late morning sunlight.  Nikki thought that the drummer always looked hungry, like he was searching for something always just out of his grasp.  The way his lips pursed made something inside of Nikki ache.  It was going to be a long drive back to the city.