Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

915 TRUE COLORS

TRUE COLORS

(Happy Passover to those who celebrate it, and happy Saturday post to all readers of Daron's Guitar Chronicles! Your donations made today's post happen! -ctan)
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That might have been the first time I ever heard Ziggy admit there WAS a "real" him. I didn't say anything about it, though. I just let the idea settle like a pebble tossed into a pond, sending out ripples across the surface but coming to rest comfortably at the bottom. A little kernel of contentment underneath it all.

We went on up to Jordan's loft shortly after that. I managed to forget his partner's name again. He was even more soft-spoken than Jordan so he never left much of an impression. I wondered if there were people who thought of me like that. Who was that guy who didn't say much? Especially if me and Ziggy were going to be a couple from now on, if we came as a package, who were people going to remember, him or me? Definitely him.

I realized I was comfortable with that idea. I wanted to be accepted, maybe even liked, for who I was, but at a big social gathering no one was going to really get to know me. Ziggy, on the other hand, wanted to be recognized for what he was—what had he called it, an avatar of free expression? Yes. An idol. An icon. And that was unmistakeable from first glance.

Honestly, if I was an icon of something, I didn't want to know about it.

The after party at the loft was a necessarily smaller group than had been at the club, with a lot of familiar faces in it. You could never really say Jordan's "inner circle" because Jordan himself stood in the overlap space of so many circles on the Venn diagram. Matthew had gone home to tend to Archie but I saw other people I knew were in the downtown art and photography scene. There were some A&R types and other record company employees. There were drag queens (and kings) and Greenwich Village personalities. And of course there were musicians and rock stars at varying levels of fame.

I finally caught up with Sarah there. We had a talk pretty similar to ones I was having with a lot of people, of the "oh my god, I heard you had a rough time in South America" variety. And then it was up to me to decide how much to tell them.

I had developed a kind of boiled down version of the story: "Yeah, a bad combination of meds for my hand sent me off the deep end and I ended up hiding on the roof of a hotel. It was bad. But Ziggy came and talked me down. And I'm fine now." The number of people who took it in stride was on the one hand weird, because you know, what the fuck happened was pretty extreme, but on the other hand was kind of reassuring. A lot of them told me stories about other people they knew who went insane and who turned out okay. You know, like "my brother took all his clothes off, painted himself green, and was found hiding in a cornfield, but he just graduated college and is starting a job in hospitality" or "I dated a guy once who was convinced aliens were sending him messages in the pattern of blinking lights we could see from the airport, which was fine until the messages told him to start building a bomb shelter in our neighbor's backyard."

Sarah's was, "They tried me on an antidepressant once and I had suicidal thoughts for the first time. Like really scarily detailed ones."

"Holy shit, really?"

"Really. But they took me off it and it went away." She had changed her hair again, to a really dark red, slicked down and pulled back in a severe bun. The dark red twist at the back of her head matched the dark red of her lipstick. "I'm glad you're back. In more ways than one. Although what's with the two of you shacking up in Boston? Are you trying to get away from all this?" She gestured at the loft full of people drinking and schmoozing.

"Yeah, pretty much," I said. "Although we had to come back for tonight."

"Did you have any connection with Queen or Freddie?"