Ziggy shook the box of hair dye in Christian’s direction. “How about you, Chris? Want some?”

“No thanks, I’m trying to cut down,” Chris said, pausing the VCR. “Besides, been there, done that, and my mother was the only one who noticed.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Hair’s dark enough, I guess.” He yawned. “Just clean up if you make a mess, all right?”

“Speaking of which, got any rubber gloves?”

“Look under the sink. I think we dug out a box when we de-junked and I stuck ‘em in there.” He clicked his movie back on and Ziggy and I went up the stairs to the second floor bathroom.

While Ziggy dug around under the sink, I opened the box and read the instructions. Inside I was surprised to find not one but two bottles, as well as a tube of something. This was clearly going to be a more complicated operation than I predicted.

“It says you’re supposed to make sure you’re not allergic to it first,” I said.

“They have to say that, so if you have an allergic reaction and die, your family can’t sue them.”

“People can die from dyeing their hair?”

“Will you quit worrying already? I’m one in a million but I’m not that one in a million.” He pulled rubber gloves on and then handed me a pair. There was a pair of flat, plastic gloves attached to the instruction sheet, but he ignored those. He also pulled out some hair clips that must have belonged to someone’s girlfriend. He covered up a bit of where his hair was white with some rolled up tissues and the clips.

Then he started to get undressed.

I think I actually put my forehead in my palm.

“Jeez, Daron, don’t take it the wrong way. I just don’t want to get dye on everything.”

“Okay, fine, should I get undressed, too?”

“yeah, of course.”

“Zig…”

“It’s not a come on. I promise.”

“This is the most blatant set-up you’ve ever pulled.”

“That’s because it’s not a set-up.” He was naked now, looking slightly ridiculous with his rubber-covered fists on his sharp hips and a twist of tissue clipped to his head like a strange headdress. “Honestly, Daron.”

“Don’t you ‘honestly’ me, Mister Ten Versions of the Truth.”

He closed his eyes like he was counting to ten. When he opened them he seemed to look right through me. “I’d rather it was you than Chris or Colin. You’ve seen the goods before, at least.”

“Fine. But I’m leaving my clothes on. If they get dye on them, so what?”

“Fine,” he echoed, then climbed into the bathtub.

What followed was a kind of alchemy, where two things got mixed together, and shaken, and then applied like ketchup out of a squeeze bottle. I had to do the applying, while he knelt in the tub admonishing me to make sure I got it everywhere except the clipped bit.

When his head was pretty well soaked, he told me to toss the bottle, which was still half full, into the trash. “Unless you’ve decided to do some of your own after all.”

“No thanks. It smells like a cat ate a bunch of chemical waste and then pissed on your head.” I put the bottle into the wastebasket. “What now?”

“Put that crappy shower cap that came in the box over my head, and there will be less fumes. Now we wait twenty minutes.”

“Great.” I put the shower cap on him and then sat on the toilet lid. “Can I take the gloves off now?”

“For a while anyway. Why?”

I stripped the gloves off. “Be right back.”

I went down the hall to my room and came back with an acoustic guitar. “I’ve been working on some things.”

“Yeah? Let’s hear it.”

Of course I still hadn’t worked out the rough spots in the lyrics, but the music was pretty firm on “Infernal Medicine,” so I started playing him the riff.

Everyone’s voice sounds better in the bathroom, even mine, which is nothing special to begin with. I got a little lick to work in the lead up to the verse, too, and then I sang:

Nothing tempts me like your lips
Lush as honey and twice as sweet
Your skin slips under my fingertips
As silvery cool as a satin sheet

I repeated the first verse again, then went on to the others, and forced the words to scan. Didn’t sound half bad now that I had to just go for it, even if my audience was just one person.

I repeated the first verse a third time to round it out and then stopped. “Still needs a bridge, and an actual chorus,” I said.

He was staring at me, looking somewhat glum. Or maybe that was his eyeliner being smudgy.

“What? You look like a kicked puppy. I thought you’d love it. I can’t do that slide the way you do, but it’ll sound incredible…”

“Daron.”

“What?”

He looked away for a second, having a short internal debate. Then he looked up at me again. “That’s really how you feel.”

“That it’ll sound ten times better when you sing it? Yeah.”

He frowned, then let the subject drop. “How long has it been?”

“Not even ten minutes.”

“Okay.” He looked like he wanted to say something more, but just shook his head.

Which version of the truth do you want, Ziggy? That I write this fucked up shit because of you, or that I write it for you to sing? Both things are true.

I didn’t say it, but I guess he got the message. Or he had to play at it like the whole thing wasn’t just a set-up. At any rate, there was no come-on after that, no pulling me into the shower or teasing me “by accident.”

Right before he rinsed, though, he ran his hand into the dye in his hair, and then reached out and pressed his palm against my chest, leaving a wet, black handprint on the cloth of my shirt.

–

“I can take him,” Ziggy said. “No need for you to go all the way in and back out.”

“Sure.” Louis stood up and I couldn’t think of any reasonable way to say no to that.

So it was that a few minutes later I was in the passenger seat of Ziggy’s electric blue hatchback, trying to figure out the fancy seat belts. He went around to the driver’s side and slid in, putting the key into the ignition and starting the stereo before the engine. A soft glow ringed the ceiling, and the dash lit up in various places… I couldn’t quite figure the details but the car was obviously tricked out in some fashion.

I couldn’t help but smile when the song that kicked in was a dance remix of The Cure, “In Between Days.”

He looked at me. “Could I come over and dye my hair in your bathroom?”

“What, now?”

“Yeah. I don’t need this ridiculous blue stripe anymore.”

“Oh, was that a film thing?”

“Yeah. It’s easier with two people, if you don’t mind helping.”

“Um…”

“I just need someone to do the parts I can’t see and help hold the plastic bag and stuff.”

“I’ll pretend I know what you’re talking about.”

“Great. Let’s stop at a CVS.” He put the car in gear and we zipped out into traffic.

“You know where you’re going, right?”

“More or less. The highway’s that way, and from there, your house is easy.”

“Okay.”

So far so good, I thought. Not weird at all.

We came to a 24 Hour CVS before we got to the highway and Zig pulled into the parking lot. I hate sitting in the car, so I went in with him.

“So how was New York?” I asked, as we went up the cosmetics aisle.

“She’s great,” he joked, “and wants to know when you’re coming to visit. Well, well, look at this.” He pulled a bottle of nail polish off the shelf that was so dark as to almost be black, just not quite. “Normally you can only get the black stuff at Halloween.”

“That’s not quite black,” I pointed out.

“Under colored stage lights, no one will be able to tell that, anyway,” he said, and stuck the bottle in his pocket and continued down the aisle. “I tell you, I have a good feeling about this tour.”

“You do?”

“Yes. My press schedule was absolutely packed, but no one wanted to talk about the movie. The publicity people from the studio were getting quite angry with me, actually. But you know, I don’t control what the reporters ask. We’d talk about the film for like five minutes and then Moondog Three for twenty, and then they’d kick them out and the next one would come in.” He paused at another rack of makeup and pulled another bottle of nail polish out–this one silver. “Now we’re talking. Glam is definitely making a come back if we’re finding stuff like this in a CVS in the burbs.”

“If you say so.” I couldn’t help but glance around. A security guard had meandered to the end of the aisle and eyeballed us, then moved on. I couldn’t blame him exactly. We looked like two punk kids. I wondered if the guard thought we were queer because we were two men in the makeup aisle. Then I realized probably plenty of non-gay punks get bashed just because people suspect they might be gay. So what did it matter if I was, or not? “Can we find the hair dye, please?”

“Over there, I think,” he said, pointing a few aisle over.

He picked up a bottle of black, I didn’t even see which brand. “What about you? Want to try a little color?”

“Not really.”

“Let me bleach a stripe or two down the side. Like highlights.”

“I don’t think so, Zig.”

“You could go to a spa to do it, you know. There’s a great one on Newbury Street. We could call the papers…”

“No, Zig, I said no, all right?”

He touched me on the elbow. “All right, I’m just pulling your leg, seriously, Daron.”

“You’re just pulling my leg, but seriously? Where does the joke end and the serious begin, Zig?”

“Calm down. I’m joking about it because you’re so serious. But your looks are serious, Daron. You’re going to have your picture on thousands and thousands of kids’ walls. I know you don’t want what you look like to matter, but it does.”

“Who said I don’t want–”

“And you’re gorgeous, you know that? You’re really a good-looking guy. Even to other guys. I mean, straight guys, you know?”

“Can we not talk about this here!” At some point I had seized him by the wrist and now I sort of shook it.

“Okay. Come on.” He pulled free and went to the cash register, paid, and then went straight to the car, me following.

Once we were in the car, and pulling out of the parking lot, he burst out laughing. “So you know that rent-a-cop who was keeping an eye on us to make sure we didn’t shoplift?”

“Yeah?”

“I forgot the two bottles of nail polish are in my pockets.”

“What?”

“I just stole them.”

“You did not!”

“I did. I didn’t even really mean to, but I got distracted by you.”

“Didn’t even really mean to?”

“I mean, you know, serves him right for treating us like scum. Why not meet expectations? We looked like thieves anyway.”

“But did you mean to, or not?”

“I forgot. I thought at the time it would be funny to steal them, but thought I’d pay when I got to the register. Then I paid for the dye without remembering.”

“Really?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters! Zig, there’s always ten versions of the truth with you and I never know which one to believe.”

His eyes were on the road, not on me, which was probably a good thing. But he said, “The important thing is which one you want to believe.”

“I want to believe you’re telling the truth,” I pressed.

“And I want you to believe I’m telling the truth,” he said. “So that makes it the truth. I forgot to pay. Should we go back?”

“Hell no.” I slumped back in my fancy, high-tech seat belt. There’s no going back. There’s never any going back.

–

I was thinking way too much.

We had a few debates about song order, nothing major. Which was fairly amazing. But maybe it was that we actually agreed on some things, and the warm-up tour had done its job in helping us figure out what worked. You try to build things up, pace out which songs are fast, which are slow, which are intense, which are well known. We knew, for example, it was a bad idea to put Candlelight after a song like Grenadier, because Ziggy’s voice needed to recover enough to handle it. Grenadier was even rough on my throat and I only sang the chorus.

The one thing we did debate, and didn’t settle, was whether Candlelight should be the first encore, or part of the main set.

“I feel like it’s cheap to hold it back for the encore,” I said. “Because people are going to be waiting for it, they’re going to demand it, so it’s like we ransomed their applause.”

“But what do you think the first encore ought to be, then?” Bart asked. “I’m assuming two encores at least.”

“I don’t know. If we get Why the Sky out of the way early… I mean, if we’re opening with Welcome, which just works on every level… I dunno.” My fingers picked through a melody while I thought about it. “We can come back from break big, or we can come back quiet and let it build slowly again…”

“In which case Candlelight actually would work perfectly,” Chris pointed out. “But I see your point about it being cheesy to hold it back.”

“What are they releasing next?” Ziggy asked. “I think we ought to know that before we figure it out. Maybe that should be the one we hold back.”

I didn’t see Carynne anywhere. “Last I heard we didn’t know.”

“We don’t? It’s not going to be Windfall?” Chris asked. “I thought that was the one Jordan was pushing as lead single.”

“Yeah, Windfall’s already out,” I said. “The question is whether they kick a second single out when we hit the road. I guess we better find out.”

Louis listened to all this keenly but said nothing until we were done. What he said, when I was putting the guitar in the case, was, “I’m meeting Shiree for a beer. You want to come along and talk about some stuff?”

“Um, sure.”

Ziggy crouched down next to me. “You mind if I come along?”

“Everyone can come along as far as I’m concerned,” Louis said. He pulled a beat-up baseball cap onto his head.

Bart wanted to get home to Michelle, Chris didn’t feel like it, and Carynne had to get up in the morning, so in the end it was just me and Ziggy and Louis who went for a drink. I rode with Louis and Ziggy drove behind us.

“Is it going to be okay to talk business with your ex-wife there?” I asked.

“It’ll be fine,” Louis said, with a little chuckle.

I admit I was picturing a typical wallflower woman who tags along with her “man” to band stuff. I’m not sure why, since none of us had a girl like that, but there was a type, and I was uncomfortable about how even women who weren’t that type got treated like it. Call it the Carynne Effect.

As we got out of the van, though, Louis clued me in on why I shouldn’t worry. “Sh’ree taught me everything I know about lights,” he said. “She’s the real genius.”

Ziggy’s hair garnered a few looks as we scoped out a place to sit, but that was about it. In the city no one would’ve even looked twice, but we were jut into the suburbs here, where space aliens were rare. We’d already ordered when Sh’ree came in.

“Louis, you’re an incredible dork!” She had some kind of an accent, Australian maybe.

He stood up and kissed her on the cheek. “Why’s that, love?”

“This isn’t even the bar I told you to go to. But I saw your car out front and figured I’d look and see… sure enough.”

“Is the other place better?” he asked, pulling out a chair for her.

She plopped down in it. “That isn’t the point. The point is, if I didn’t know you’re the kind of dope who would just go into a place because he parked in front of it, instead of the place where he’s supposed to be meeting people, I’d still be sitting over there, wondering where the hell you are.” She reached a hand across the table. “Hi, I’m Shiree. Nice to meet you.”

She shook my, then Ziggy’s hand, then waved to the waitress and ordered something stiff.

“So you’re the guys he’s working for?” she asked.

Before I could say anything Louis jumped in. “Daron here used to be in Nomad, you remember, Remo Cutler’s band?”

“Yes! How is Remo, anyway?”

“He’s fine. Still living in L.A.,” I said.

“He’s a nut to live there,” Shiree said with a shake of her head. “God, I hated the West Coast. Plus the schools are terrible.”

“Oh, um, is that why you’re here?”

“Pretty much. It isn’t for the weather, that’s for damn sure.” She took the shot glass eagerly from the waitress and knocked it back, then daintily set the empty glass upon the still pristine napkin. “Plus there’s plenty of work around here, at least at my level.”

“Doing lights?” I guessed.

“Yeah. between my regular gig with the Wang Center and Boston Ballet, and all the moonlighting for Boston Center for the Arts, plus child support, it adds up to enough.” She punched Louis on the arm playfully. “So what do you got cooking with these guys?” she asked him. “Big arena show is it?”

“Well, that’s the challenge. This tour they’re on, three different size venues, and they go from being headliner, to one of four bands, back to being headliner.” He shook his head.

“Nowhere you haven’t worked before though,” Shiree said.

“No.”

“Piece of cake then,” she said.

“Yeah, we need to work out a couple of set pieces, two to three big effects I don’t want to overuse, and the rest standard.”

“That song you were singing this morning, that’s them?”

“Candlelight,” he said to me and Ziggy. “Yeah. That’s going to be one of the set pieces.”

He went on to describe our thoughts about the single overhead spot.

She shook her head. “Some of these venues, it won’t be enough. You don’t want to make it seem like, I mean… here.” She took a napkin and drew a candle on it, with rings of light around it like ripples. “Your downspot, it’s backwards. The place where it’s dark when a candle’s lit is right at the base of the candle, while the light goes everywhere else. You want something like this.” She drew beams of light emanating from the candle and then looked at Ziggy. “I take it you’re the candle.”

“I suppose I am,” he said, looking at her curiously.

“Are you talking lasers or something here, dear?” Louis asked.

“God, no. Too cheesy, too expensive, and fussy as hell to work with. Just do it with a Solar 250.”

“Hm, that could work.”

“What’s a Solar 250?” I asked.

Louis chuckled. “It’s…”

“Kind of like a light, kind of like a projector,” Shiree said. “And not expensive as these things go. It’ll make it look like sunbeams come out of your butt,” she said, raising an eyebrow at Ziggy.

“Suits me,” he said and crossed his legs.

“You got one at the Wang I can borrow,” Louis asked, “just to show these guys?”

“Yeah, I probably do, but it’s your balls in a sling if you break it. By which I mean all of your balls.” She looked around at the three of us.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

–
(By the way, thanks to all who donated in the past four weeks! Donations topped $100, which means I owe you all a WHOLE MONTH of triple-posting, three posts a week. So for the next month, there will be new posts Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday! Thank you all so very much! -ctan)
–

I laid the guitar case on the stage and then went to join them. Chris started adjusting drums. Ziggy prowled the edges of the space and the stage like a cat, checking everything out.

“Basically what I’m telling the boss here,” Louis said, as I stood next to him, “is that what I’m going to set up in here is like a toy piano, but when we get on the road it’ll be more like a Rick Wakeman set-up.”

“Okay.”

“What I’m going to do, basically, is learn your set, so I can, for lack of a better term, play along. Except I’ll be playing with lights instead of sound.”

Ziggy wandered into the conversation.

“There’ll be some specific cues you want, colors, or effects, and I’ll work those in, but you know, a lot of it will be mixed live.”

“Waitasec, you mean you do it by hand?” Ziggy said. “You play the light board like an instrument?”

“Yup.”

I was glad Zig was the one who asked that, since I hadn’t quite realized it was going to be that intensive.

“Some of the stuff, we really need to work out together, though,” Louis said. “Like you mentioned you had that one effect, Daron, some show with a single white spotlight? That you liked a lot.”

Ziggy and I both nodded.

“If it’s a spot from above, it can be a great effect, but only if you can hit your mark.” He said this last to Ziggy. “We’ll have a follow spot on you too, of course, most of the time. But this sort of thing, you have to get back to center stage, and of course every stage is going to be different.” He shook his head a little. “Come on up and I’ll show you the way I mark the stage.”

Bart was up there, chatting with Chris.

“Are we going to use fog at all?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I glanced around at the others. “Definitely not.”

“Good. You’ll be less likely to lose these then, too. Some guys just use an ‘X’ for each mark, or three parallel lines that show the angle of the front of the stage. I use your initials so if you wander around you don’t get lost.”

We chuckled at that–he’d said it like a joke–but I got the feeling it was no joke.

Next to my mic stand was a ‘D’ made with two different colors of tape stuck to the boards.

“You guys make it fairly easy since you’ve each got a stand, but just in case.” Louis pointed upward. “I hung some cans; I’ll play with them tonight. But ignore me. Do whatever you have to do; don’t be stopping or starting a song just because I’m screwing around. I’ll have plenty of time to figure out the whole set.”

I slung the new Stratocaster over my shoulder.

“One more thing, the song we need to talk about the most, though, is Candlelight.”

“You think?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think. It’s going to be the song the crowd knows best. It needs something special, and especially since it’s got so many mentions of light and dark in the lyrics. We don’t have to talk about it now, but we’ll need to soon.”

“Okay.”

“That’s my spiel. G’wan, get to it, I’ll get out of your way now.” He hopped off the stage and back to where he’d set up his “toy piano”–a control board about the width of a DX-7 but twice as deep.

I turned to Ziggy. “What do you want to warm up with?”

He stood with his feet crossed, hands in his pockets, thinking. “How about ‘Walking in Time?’ An oldie but a goodie.”

We hadn’t played the song in approximately forever, but it was easy on the voice compared to a lot of our songs so it made sense. I doubted we’d play it on the tour, either. But, well, I had asked him what he wanted to do.

I turned to Chris. “Hit it.”

It’s a simple song, just a basic one-four-five blues progression, and a song any of us could’ve faked our way through if we didn’t remember. But that made it easy to remember.

And Ziggy took it as a warm up, just breezing through the lyrics without too much effort, at least for the first two verses. I started to noodle a little, playing a countermelody without really thinking about it, echoing off the last few notes of each line. When we reached the bridge, I had thought we might break off since I didn’t intend to play a solo, but he answered me right back, picking out pieces of the lyrics and sort of scatting them back at me, more melodic than a rap but less wordy. Chris and Bart just kept chugging along and letting us fly. And at some point we changed from me answering his vocal riffs note for note to unison, and I couldn’t have told you which one of us was leading that improvised melody.

When the song came to a close, the silence of the small theater seemed loud. So did my heart and breath. We were standing face to face, maybe a foot apart.

Yeah, I missed you, too.

Oh fuck.
–

“When are you buying a car?” he asked, while we sat in traffic at some intersection I didn’t recognize. Chris hadn’t figured out the best way to get there yet, either, apparently.

“Soon, I guess.”

“They say you ought to buy something with high resale value.” He had his sunglasses on, and his hair was still wet in the back but fluffed up in front, like he’d given up blow-drying it halfway through. He drummed on the steering wheel without realizing he was doing it.

“I’ve heard that before. Right? So when we crash and burn and aren’t making money any more I could sell it to live on?”

“Something like that.”

“Basically.”

“I think I better start with a car I can actually drive, instead of one I’m afraid of scratching, don’t you?”

“Suit yourself.” He eased us out into traffic, scanning left and right.

“What about you? When are you trading this van in for a better one?”

“Soon, man, soon. I just haven’t had the time to go out looking.” We made a right, and I suddenly realized we’d reached an on ramp to the highway. Huh. “Well, okay, that’s a lie. I’ve had the time but not the motivation.”

“Is car shopping as much of a pain as furniture shopping?” I asked, as we gunned it onto the freeway.

“Worse. You have to drive around to all different dealerships and once they figure out you have any money at all, they want to keep you there for four hours, trying to pry it out of you.”

“Lovely.” I wasn’t kidding when I’d asked if we were making enough to hire someone else to shop for us. “Well, I’m not buying one of those ridiculous sports cars with no room for people in it like that one.” I pointed at something small and red as it sped past us, then hit the brakes as it caught up to the knot of traffic.

“No?”

“No. Anything I buy needs room for at least one other person and two–no, three–guitar cases. And that person might be someone your size instead of my size.”

“You got your eye on someone my size?”

“No, no. It’s actually you I’m thinking of. When it’s my turn to drive to rehearsal, you’ll have to sit somewhere, right?”

“Daron, I think most people, when they dream of buying a car… how should I put this. It’s not rehearsal they’re thinking about.”

“But it’s the place I’d need a car for the most. When else would I drive? Seriously, Chris, if I want to… like… take a road trip up the coast of Maine or to California or something, wouldn’t it make more sense to rent something?”

“You take all the romance out of it,” he groused. “Cars are supposed to be fun. Especially when you can afford a really nice one.”

“Maybe when we can afford to live somewhere with an actual garage. If I had a super expensive car I’d probably be all anal about rain and snow and just ugh. You know how I can get.”

“That I do, bro. That I do.” He honked and moved us into the right lane, and then we were getting off the highway we had just gotten onto.

I gave up trying to figure out how we were getting there. “If traffic’s this bad for everybody, we’ll all be late.”

“Not like we’re in a hurry to get somewhere after,” he said. “Unless you’ve got a hot date or something?” Then he coughed. “That didn’t come out right.”

I sniggered. “Yes it did. Has Colin been telling tales out of school?”

“Er, kinda.”

“It’s not a secret. You remember that writer who did the Spin piece?”

“The one from New Jersey?”

“Yeah. How’d you know he was from New Jersey?”

“He had Jersey plates on his hatchback.”

“Wow, you really do pay more attention to cars than I do.”

“Yep. Anyway, what about him?”

“He came up for the weekend and we went out.” I didn’t know what to call it really. Spent the weekend “partying?” Not really. We weren’t “dating,” and calling it that felt like a bad parody.

“Nice,” Christian said in a neutral voice. “He seems like a nice kid.”

“Yeah, very Ivy League. But, you know, that means he never runs out of things to talk about.”

“It does?”

“Yeah, he told me so himself. Half the point of going to a big name liberal arts college is they teach you just enough about everything that you can keep up cocktail party talk on thousands of subjects. Politics, science, art, you name it.”

“So what you guys talk about?”

“I don’t know shit about that stuff, so music, mostly.” It was the truth, but I said it as a joke, and he laughed.

He pulled the van out of a side street and I was surprised to recognize the street the theater was on. “Hey, how’d we get here?”

“Magic,” Chris said with a laugh as he rolled us to a stop at an empty parking meter just behind a bright shiny, bright blue hatchback. As he pulled the keys from the ignition, the driver of the blue car got out.

Ziggy. Before I even realized it was him I had a kind of knot in the back of my throat. The moment passed, though, and I got out, too, dropping down from the van’s high passenger seat to the curb.

He was exchanging hand-slaps with Christian. His hair was short and completely white except for a blue stripe down the middle that matched the color of the car. He was wearing pencil-thin jeans and a T-shirt so thin and worn I couldn’t make out what it used to say on it.

I wondered if he would shake my hand, too, or what. I had my awkward greetings with Jonathan in the forefront of my mind suddenly and wondered why this was so hard to figure out. I’m just a space alien from another planet who doesn’t know how to get along with humans, I thought.

No, wait, I reminded myself. Ziggy was the space alien. I wasn’t the one with blue hair.

I dodged the issue by getting the guitar out of the back, and when I wasn’t looking he just clapped his hand on my shoulder.

“Come on,” he said. “Carynne’s inside already.”

And that was that. Welcome home, Major Tom.
–


(Admin note: I owe you guys an extra chapter, possibly two, thanks to all the recent donations! I’ll tally them up. I don’t think I’ll get the extra up this week, but I’ll make sure to give you the extra post(s) later this month! -ctan)

And by the time I was done with that, I was too tired to notice if anyone was in the bed or not.

I was woken at the crack of one in the afternoon by the phone ringing.

It was Digger. “So, how’s rehearsal going?” he asked.

“Um. Um.” My brain still wasn’t really awake yet. Well, no, actually, my brain was quite awake, but my lips and vocal cords weren’t. “We’re not really starting until tonight,” I finally managed.

“I thought you started last week?”

“Didn’t you know? I thought it was you who sent Zig to New York for a press junket. He’s not coming back until today.”

“Oh, right, right. Yeah, I did. I thought you’d started before that, though.”

“Not really, and it’s just as well given that he had to leave.” I yawned. “You’re up early.”

“What? It’s ten in the morning here.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“You’re my first call of the day.”

“I’m honored. But was that it? Asking about rehearsal, or are you working up to something?”

“What, your old man can’t call you up to find out how you’re doing?”

I cracked myself up thinking: How I’m doing? I’ve had so much sex this weekend I’m sore from it, that’s how I’m doing. I didn’t say that, of course. “Pretty good. The usual. There’s not that much to tell, honestly. Unless you want to know about the Yard Sale we had.”

“The what?”

“Garage sale, except here they call it a Yard Sale since nobody has garages. Come to think of it, most of the houses don’t have yard either.”

“Sure thing, kiddo, whatever you say.”

“How about this, daddyo, I’ll call you later in the week after we’ve rehearsed a little and I might acually have something to say.”

“Daddy-o, where’d that come from?”

“I just now decided I’m going to call you that every time you call me ‘kiddo.’”

He started to laugh. A real laugh, not a fake one. When he got himself under control, he said, “You know what? You turned out okay, kiddo.”

That made me laugh. “Thanks, daddyo.” I laughed pretty hard, actually. The whole thing was pretty ridiculous. And I had no idea how to feel about the comment. What did he mean, I turned out okay? Whatever.

I wrote not one, but two, sappy love songs that afternoon. I mean, why not? It’s not like I ever had to show them to anyone if I didn’t want. You never know when a pop ditty is going to come in handy, though. Or when you’ll find that ironic twist that makes it into something more. It was just so novel to be able to write something like that, though, with zero angst, that I figured I better do it while I could. I just felt good about Jonathan, just… happy. I wasn’t used to that. I kept expecting the other shoe to drop.

I noted some ideas about “the other shoe” to work into a song later. Then I worked a little more on “Infernal Medicine” to keep busy until it was time to go to rehearse.

–

(By the way, this video is an outstanding example of what a good lighting tech does, or did in those days, anyway. Which will be relevant in a future post.)

“Jeez, where have you been? And did you know it was me or do you always answer the phone like that?”

“I figured it was you or a telemarketer,” I told Carynne. “And I’ve been at the Sheraton fucking Jonathan McCabe’s brains out. Go on, tell me it was a bad idea.”

She snorted into the phone. “Unless he turns out to be a) psycho or b) blackmailable, that’s a terrific idea,” she said. “Well? Is he psycho?”

“No. He’s remarkably sane. But you don’t think it was a bad idea to sleep with a member of the media?”

“Not one like him, anyway.”

“Like him?”

“I.e. he’s not a muckraker, not a celebrity himself like a veejay or something, not a full-time employee somewhere and therefore not about to get fired if anyone finds out. Not a golddigger.”

I thought about how I’d paid his bill, how Jonathan would have gladly spent hundreds of dollars out of pocket just to see me. But I argued anyway because I wondered why she thought that. “How do you know he’s not a golddigger?”

“His family’s got money. He told me in DC. They floated him until he started getting enough gigs to pay his own bills. I was asking him about student loans and can you believe the motherfucker didn’t have any? Shit. I’m going to be paying mine off for years.”

“Oh, come on. No you’re not. We’re going to make enough to clear them. Aren’t we?”

“Well, maybe. I hate counting chickens before they’re hatched, you know?”

“Maybe we oughtta be paying you more, then,” I said. “Maybe you ought to be taking Digger’s share, too.”

There was silence at the other end of the phone. I wondered for a second if we’d gotten disconnected, but then I heard the sound of a siren. An ambulance or firetruck must have been driving past her apartment.

“I’m serious, Car’. Remember what we talked about in San Fran?”

“Yeah.” She was silent again for a bit. Then, “I’m not ready to take over in July though.”

“You read my mind!”

“Your mind is easy to read, Daron! Haven’t you been obsessing over the whole July first thing for weeks now?”

What was funny was I had put it out of my mind for quite a while, but last night it had resurfaced. I guess some part of me was gnawing that bone in the background all the time. “Yeah,” I said.

“I’ve been thinking. The middle of a tour is a crappy time for a management change anyway. And does Mills know that Digger was only on a six month contract?”

“No. We didn’t want him to think he could ignore Digger because he’d be out of the picture soon.”

“I think you’ve got to at least extend the status quo until we get off the road.”

“When’s that again?”

“Are you pulling my leg? Or are you really not paying attention? We leave on June fourth. You’ve got four dates as headliner and then we hook up with Megaton for ten shows, and then you headline a de facto best-of-alternative lineup–”

“I know, I know that. I just don’t remember the exact dates.”

“The last show’s at Great Woods. On August fourth.”

“So if I just extend his contract until August fifth, we’re only stuck with him an extra month.”

“Don’t joke like that, Daron. If you tell him you’re going to can him as soon as it’s over…”

“You’re right. Bad plan. So what should I do?”

“Tell him you’re re-upping him for another six months, that the band voted or something. Just make sure that contract has the clause in it where you can fire him.”

“I’m pretty sure the contract says we need a reason, though.”

“Playing fast and loose with band money before isn’t enough of a reason?”

I was sure Digger hadn’t left himself quite so vulnerable. “It’d look pretty bad, though, if we fire him in later for something that I knew about back in April, and he sues us for wrongful termination, and the judge asks, ‘why’d you take so long to get rid of him if that’s the reason?’ What do we say then?”

“I dunno. He’ll probably have done something else to warrant getting fired by then, though, don’t you think?”

“If we’re so sure he’s going to do something bad enough to warrant firing, we’re keeping him… why?”

“Because we can’t handle Mills without him and you’re going to be ON THE ROAD when his contract’s up, remember?”

“Right. Fuck.” I rubbed my eyes. The interrupted sleep was starting to catch up with me.

“Listen to me, Daron. I know you hate his guts because he’s a sucky Dad, but…”

“I don’t hate his guts.”

“You don’t?”

“That’s a little strong, don’t you think?” Maybe it was true, but somehow hearing someone else say it rubbed me the wrong way.

“Whatever. Look. He’s not my favorite person either. I’m just saying… don’t fire him in the middle of the tour, all right?”

“All right. You coming to rehearsal tomorrow?”

“Yeah. I want to have a look at Ziggy. Then I’ll leave you guys alone. I’m going to be sick to death of these songs by August.”

“No, you won’t,” I said, though what did I know? She might be right.

–

Not sure if I wasn’t much of a cuddler or if it was that I was still antsy about all the things I was thinking about. Or if I just wasn’t used to it. I just hadn’t done much cuddling up to that point. When he was well and truly conked out again, I slipped out of bed, got dressed, and went down to the front desk and paid his hotel bill. I made sure to tell the clerk how awesome the concierge desk had been.

On the way back up in the elevator I had a thought for a phrase in a song, and I had to scrounge around in the dark a little in the room for a pad of paper and a pen. I wrote it down, then wrote out a bit more, a story-song, where at first you don’t know what the relationship is between the two people, you gradually find out more, and at the end you find out you assumed wrong. But then I kept changing it from you think they’re a couple and then you find out she’s a prostitute to the other way around. I needed a guitar to get any further with it.

J yawned and patted the bed next to him blindly.

“I’m over here,” I said, but I was moving toward him as I said it.

“Where’d you go?”

“To pay the hotel bill.”

He half sat up, then collapsed back down. “Um, thank you. You didn’t have to, you know.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, now at the side of the bed and looking down at him. “But I’m under the impression writer pay is for shit.”

“You’d be right, which is why I’m telling my dignity and manhood to just shut up about it.” He opened one eye. “Mph. How long until check-out?”

“Another hour or so.”

He reached out and hooked a finger in the beltloop of my jeans. “That’s plenty of time,” he said, rubbing one eye with his other hand. “I mean, if you’re up to it.”

“So long as your manhood isn’t too deflated,” I couldn’t help but tease, as his thumb slid over my zipper. “I’m up to it.”

“After all,” he said, “I don’t know when we’re going to have the next chance.”

“No lie, bwana,” I said, and undid my fly.

We made the most of the hour that remained, and afterward cuddled again. I was much more relaxed this time.

He kissed me again. “Say goodbye to me,” he said, leaning over me and kissing me again so that I couldn’t say anything.

When he stopped, I licked my lips. “You don’t want me to come to the station with you?”

“No, I don’t, because I want a proper goodbye kiss. If you give me one of those stiff-armed pats on the shoulder on the train platform, I’ll never forgive you.”

“That’s kind of a severe penalty.”

“It is,” he said, nuzzling at my neck. “Which is why we should say goodbye now instead of at the station.”

“All right.”

We kissed again, and that somehow turned into a quick shower together, and me getting off again under the water. And then he had to hurry to pack and get the hell out or he’d miss his train entirely. I lay in the bed, soaking the sheets decadently, while he rushed around throwing his stuff into his bag. One more lush, chin-scraping kiss, and then he was gone.

I lay there for a few more minutes, then got back up and got my own clothes back on. I was making a last look under the beds just in case when I realized a pair of boxers was under the heap of the bedspread on the floor. I held them up. Definitely Jonathan’s. I chuckled. It wasn’t really like there was any hint of a conquest in what we had going on, but I couldn’t help but feel like I had a trophy as I wadded them up and jammed them into my coat pocket.

I got home to find three messages from Carynne on the machine. I called her back and got hers. Figures. “It’s Daron, it’s Sunday, and sorry I didn’t call you back before now, but I had a friend visit from out of town. I’m around tonight and we’re rehearsing tomorrow, right? I guess call me if there’s anything I need to know before then.”

I brought the cordless phone downstairs with me and worked on “Infernal Medicine” and the new story-song for a while before it rang.
–

Which led me to wonder, wait, am I freaking out over something he said?

We’d just agreed we weren’t in a serious relationship, hadn’t we? We agreed we were in the early days. The still-figuring-it-out days. Was that scary?

This whole concept that there was something to figure out was new to me. But not freak-out scary. I don’t think.

What I was thinking about mostly was the fact that the deadline for Digger was fast approaching. Six months we’d given him, and that would run out when the calendar turned to July 1st. We’d be in Memphis or somewhere then, I couldn’t remember exactly. I’d been trying not to think about it and I’d been succeeding, until I was lying there in the dark, under J’s arm.

It felt odd to be so sated physically, warm and comfortable under the covers with him, pressed together but utterly relaxed, and yet to have my mind racing. I kept waiting for it to stop and for sleep to come back around, but it didn’t.

I heard him snuffle sleepily and felt something damp on my shoulder. His mouth, kissing my arm affectionately. He shifted position and I settled even more under the crook of his arm.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He murmured. “Mm, bullshit. You’re tense as a string.”

“A guitar string?”

“Er, yeah. I think I meant to say bowstring, but I’m sleepy, and guitar string is more appropriate anyway.” He rubbed his face and propped himself up on one elbow. We’d left the light on in the bathroom and I could see his face in the dimness. “You need something?”

“Not something like that,” I said, knowing he meant sex. Not that I’d have said no if he suggested it, but he seemed to genuinely be asking. “Just, can’t sleep. Thinking about everything coming up.”

“The tour?”

“And, yeah. And the whole business with Digger.”

“You mentioned being kind of glad to be rid of him for the leg of the trip when I saw you in DC…”

“That’s not it. I really… did I tell you he’s my father? I can’t even remember.”

“You told me, but at the time you didn’t act like it was a big secret.”

“I didn’t?” I suppose I’d already decided to trust J that far back. “It’s not, not really. A big secret, I mean. I just don’t want it to be a… a thing. It’s just vaguely embarrassing, I guess.”

“Is it? Lots of people have family members working for them.”

“He’s just vaguely embarrassing, is what I mean, maybe.” I groaned. “He probably feels the same way about me.”

“Does he? Why? You’re incredibly successful for… oh.” He looked at me and frowned. “Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ Not so thrilled about the gay part, I don’t think.” It still wasn’t easy to say the word “gay” honestly, but I didn’t want to seem like a wuss in front of him, besides it would have been kind of ridiculous not to be able to say it while lying in bed with him. I mean, I know I’m ridiculous sometimes, but that would’ve been too much even for me. Meanwhile I was kind of impressed with how he seemed to know what I was talking about, and I knew what he was talking about, when we hardly said anything. That was kinda scary, but really nifty at the same time.

“You don’t think?”

“Well, it’s complicated. He knows. I know he knows. He knows I know that he knows. And so we have kind of a truce about it.”

“Hang on. He knows that you know that he knows…” J blinked while he worked that one out. “I’m making some coffee if we’re going to talk about anything that complicated.”

“Okay.”

He slid out of bed and padded back and forth in the room, fussing with the coffee pot the hotel had provided. “Keep talking.”

“Anyway, yeah, I didn’t come out and say ‘Hey Dad I’m gay,’ but you know, it just feels like sometimes he goes out of his way to make gay jokes or…” I paused while I tried to remember what he’d said about Carynne. Digger thought I was sleeping with her, too. Well, or knew that I had. Which might kind of make the whole conversation we’d had in the strip club…. “Oh fuck.”

“Hm?”

“I just realized maybe the whole conversation we had about it without talking about it, he might’ve been talking about something else.”

J brought me a mug of coffee with cream and sugar that smelled fancy. Like hazelnuts, I think. I sat up to take it in my hands, crossing my legs with the sheet over my knees.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” I said. “The gist of the conversation was that who I fuck is none of his business regardless, and that much he agreed to, basically. Even though I never came out and said… I mean, I never ‘came out.’”

“But you think he’s still upset over it.”

“I think he’s still none too happy if I’m gay. He’s a homophobic, sexist asshole. You should hear the shit he says about Carynne when she’s not there to hear it. For that matter, the shit he says about me when I AM there to hear it.” I shook my head.

“Would you put up with that if he wasn’t your father?”

“What?”

“If you’d hired a manager, and he made disparaging comments about you or your other employees, would you keep him?”

I thought about that for a moment. “No. Except that he doesn’t think he’s making disparaging comments. It’s not like he realizes he’s being a sexist pig, you know? If he could tell he was, he’d already be way ahead of where he is now. Does that make sense?”

“That makes perfect sense,” J assured me. “But to play devil’s advocate for a second, you’re not going to find a lot of manager types out there who have embraced a feminist consciousness.”

“Um… yeah.”

“By which I mean guys who…”

“I know what you mean,” I said quickly. “You’re using big words but they’re not that big.”

He kissed me on the forehead then. “Sorry. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m coming across. They don’t teach you to talk like a normal person in the Ivy Leagues.”

“No, shit, Sherlock.” I reached up and traced his lip with one finger. “So anyway, my asshole dad is my manager, he might owe me money, and when his contract runs out we’ll be in the middle of a tour he helped arrange.”

“What do you mean by he might owe you money?”

“So, he quit his old job and started his own talent management company, right? That took startup money he didn’t have, to open an office in LA, get an answering service, all that stuff. There are a lot of technicalities in it, like he can claim that he was opening the office for the band’s management, but you know, I’d think he’d have asked me first if that were the case, right? Carynne had a lawyer friend of hers who had Mike Fink by the short and curlies draw up the contract, trying to make it airtight. She asked him about. Thing is, Digger didn’t outright spend much of our money at all, but he did use the band’s contracts and income as collateral… He established us a credit line based on the money in the bank, and he spent from that.” My head hurt a little just thinking about it. “So even this lawyer said it’s dicey ethically speaking, but not actually illegal, and not actually a breach of contract.”

“The part that sounds dicey to me is that he didn’t tell you about it.”

“I know! If it was legit, he should’ve just asked me.” I sipped the coffee. It was too hot and I scalded myself a little but I didn’t pay much attention to that. “But meanwhile, he’s the one who got Ziggy this movie deal, and who got Mills to let us hit the road when he wanted to bury us.”

“Waitasec, Mills wanted to bury you?” J actually stood up as he said that.

“Well, not in so many words, but…” I faltered under J’s incredulous stare. “Oh, come on, you know bands get buried all the time by their labels.”

“Yes, but…”

“And he was saying not to tour. To wait. But come on. ‘Candlelight’ was in the Top 40. Why wait?”

“Well…”

“Can you think of a good reason?”

He paced a bit back and forth between the two beds. “Well, there must be some reason. Had they already committed the touring budget to some other bands?”

“What would it matter if we supported ourselves?” I said. “I don’t even remember what his rationale was. Didn’t want us playing places that were too small because it’d diminish our image, was one line he used, but come on. The Police played a show to three people in Albany when they were in support of their first record. He did say he wanted us to wait until we had full tour support. But at the same time he wasn’t saying what kid of support they were going to give, yet.”

J wrinkled his face. “Okay. That’s kind of fishy.”

“He kept saying let’s get the new album on the shelves before doing anything bigger. And I said great, we’ll do something bigger, but let’s do something small first. We needed to do that B tour, J. We really did.”

“Yes. I agree. And you were only out for two weeks. It’s not like you took six months on the road when they were waiting for you to go in the studio or something…”

“Anyway, Digger made him see sense. So that’s all worked out. But…”

J sat across from me again, gulping his coffee and setting the mug down. “So that’s what Digger’s good for, I guess.”

“What, it takes a slime wad to talk to a slime wad?”

“I didn’t mean it like that…” J said cautiously.

“Yeah, well I did.” I set the almost full cup of coffee next to J’s on the nightstand. My stomach was churning a little and it might as well have been a cup of rocket fuel in my hand.

“So what happens if you fire him?” J asked.

I shrugged. “No idea. Worst case scenario, Mills eats us alive and we never work again, right? Best case scenario, we get someone we both like and trust and I get a source of stress out of my life.”

J looked at me kinda sideways. “Well, he might not be your manager if you fire him, but that doesn’t get him out of your life. It’s too late to change your name and go into hiding.”

“Tried that already,” I said, lying back and looking at the ceiling. “Didn’t work.”
–

A couple of notes about recent chapters that you might find of interest.

FAST AND LOOSE
I played fast and loose with a couple of dates and live shows and I should come clean about that.

First, apologies to Treat Her Right/Morphine for using them as a prop here. See, here’s the thing. My roommate Mac and I went to a show one night at Venus de Milo. We had gone there to dance, I think, and didn’t know there was going to be a surprise show. He and I moved in together in 1990 so technically that was a year after when the scene with Daron and Jonathan takes place at Venus. So I transposed the show a year earlier.

The really fudgy part is that I don’t know what band we saw. It was someone well-known locally who had a national breakout of some kind in the offing. I remember guitars. I don’t remember much else. It’s possible we never found out who it was, or that I just forgot.

I decided to make it into Morphine because that would fit the time frame and is my best guess for the type of band it was. I don’t think it was the Del Fuegos, or No Man, or Scruffy the Cat. I don’t think it was some J. Mascis production–I don’t think it was Buffalo Tom. I just plain don’t remember now. And of course there’s nothing Googlable about it.

The other transplant in time I made is the Basque/Garmarna show at the Middle East. In reality, the show was at the Middle East downstairs, not upstairs, in 1994. Both are real bands and the show really happened as described, just a few years later than depicted here.

Hi-Fi Pizza, on the other hand, was exactly as depicted in real time.

BASQUE
Basque really is ethereal female vocals over electric bass, like a mellower and less brittle Cocteau Twins. They’re still around, and have a website: http://www.basquemusic.com/. Their CD “Radiate” is often in my writing music when I’m working on things other than DGC. (I’ll reveal my DGC playlists at a later date…)

GARMARNA
And Garmarna really is Swedish murder ballads rocking out with the hurdy gurdy. In this video it looks like they replaced the hurdy gurdy with a fiddler though:

Here’s a live clip where they’re rocking the hurdy gurdy. I remember this song from the Middle East show! Clip isn’t very good but within the first minute you’ll see what I mean about ROCKING THE HURDY GURDY.

While we’re setting the Way back machine, check out this 1989 ad for GE cellular phones:

STD TESTING
Several readers have commented or written about the scene where Carynne forces Daron to go to see a doctor. I used to live around the corner from the medical center they visit. And in those days it really was sort of dicey as to whether you’d keep your insurance if you tested positive. My doctor gave me the same speech Daron gets, only he really convinced me to go get an anonymous test.

So I went down to the Fenway Community Health Center (which is still there, by the way) and got tested, and then had to go back and get the results on a different day. I wasn’t even engaged in risky behavior (…much…) at the time, but the anxiety the whole scenario created was very real.

The woman who did my testing was a very earnest young activist with kind of stringy hair and a stressed-out sort of body odor. And she really played it serious, coming into the room when she had the results, totally somber, and giving me this kind of short speech about the importance of safe sex practices and how regardless of what the results might show, that I’d keep my commitment to practicing them… etc… I literally felt faint by then. There’s a scene in Sex in the City, actually, where Samantha faints at the clinic when she mis-hears her results, isn’t there? So maybe things haven’t changed that much…

Anyway, my earnest young tester was then like, “Okay, sorry to keep you in suspense. You’re clean.”

Jeez.

GUITARS
I hear from some readers that you’re learning more about different brands of guitars than you ever thought you’d know. I try to make it easy. Some Ovations are really easy to pick out by both their look and their sound, like these semi-acoustics:

So far Daron has stuck to mostly brands you *might* recognize:
Fender, Gibson, Epiphone, Takamine, Ibanez, Yamaha.

Here’s a pretty representative image of the type of Fender he buys:

And here’s the Yamaha he found in the junk room:

(He insists I tell you the photo doesn’t do it justice and that the back is gorgeous.)

Pretty soon, though, he’ll be getting into Veillette and Maton, I bet.

EBOOK NEWS
Some news about ebooks. Although I’ve kept the volume one ebook free on Amazon and other places, and I intend to keep it that way for a while as it keeps bringing new folks to the site, the “2.99″ sale is over on books 2 and 3. They should now (or soon) be showing the regular price of $4.99.

I checked the “standings” on December 9th and DGC Volume Two had climbed back to No. 5 on the Amazon “Coming Out Books” bestseller list! Just two slots below Dan Savage’s “IT GETS BETTER” book. Hot damn. Meanwhile volume one slipped to #16 on the Gay Kindle Books (Free) list, after peaking at #2. (At least, I never saw it at #1.) All I can say is that it continues to be very exciting that people like Daron so much.

REMINDERS FOR READERS
And now a couple of reminders about the site.

1) If you think of awesome tunes from the 1980s, especially the late 80s, post them here: http://daron.ceciliatan.com/archives/1121

2) Lots of readers discover us through Top Web Fiction. Your votes every week are important to keep us in the standings! Click up to once a day! Vote here.

3) Amazon reviews definitely help move the ebooks which then bring people to the site when they run out. Volume Three currently has only one lovely but lonely review. Please, if you’re an Amazon customer, consider praising the ebook here: DGC: V3.

All of the above are great ways to support the site that require no money.

However, speaking of money… it’s not too late to get the latest sexy “bonus chapter,” this one involving D and J, or any of the previous “incentive” chapters. For new readers just discovering DGC, I keep the old bonus chapters live, too. I try to email the bonuses within 24 hours of getting the Paypal notification, but if more than 48 hours go by, don’t hesitate to drop me an email to ask if the notification went into spam or something. I definitely want everyone (who is 18 or older) who wants the bonuses to get them! Here’s the list of them so far:

Bonus chapters available:
• Heat of the Moment
  Ziggy in Los Angeles, between chapter 56 and 57
• No More Words
  Ziggy in Chicago, between chapter 71 and 72
• Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
  Jonathan in Boston, between chapter 213 and 214

To get any of the above bonuses, use Paypal to “send money” to ctan.writer@gmail.com, choose the “Personal Payment option,” and be sure to put in the “notes” at Paypal that you are 18 years of age or older and want the chapter(s). We’ll email you back with the files!

These bonus chapters happen specifically because readers initially requested them! So let me know if and when there are scenes you’d like to see, erotic or not. Chances are you’re not alone. Daron won’t always tell me everything I want, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

And remember, if you love DGC, or have a friend who does, you could sponsor having yourself or them appear as a cameo character in an upcoming chapter! Check out the sponsors page: Sponsor Info.

And now back to our regularly scheduled story posts. Happy Holidays everyone!