Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Volume One
Page 14
Bring Me Some Water
The next day was a gray wash from the moment I crawled into the shower onward. I stood there with the water running down around the my ears and swore myself to celibacy. It seemed the only sensible option, the only possible way to avoid the self-loathing, the anxiety, the worst of the loneliness. I declared myself at the moment to be separate from, above, and beyond sex. It was the only way to divert the freight train of badness bearing down on me and the band if I even contemplated the incestuous act I wanted to. I wasn’t even going to fantasize about it. Even thinking about not thinking about it produced nightmarish flashes of blackmail, tabloid headlines, bitter midnight arguments, other vague shit I couldn’t even picture but knew would be horrible.
I got out of the shower and concentrated on getting to work. I was passably on time. At four pm, I was taking a break in the coat room when Michelle came in and greeted me with a sleepy smile and a peck on the cheek. "How are you?"
I resisted the urge to reach up and touch where she’d kissed me. "Uh, fine."
"You look kind of tired."
I gave back an automatic, neutral answer. "So do you."
She just kept smiling and went on through to the office, and I breathed a sigh of relief. She was only being friendly, I told myself, and I knew it was true, but I still felt a little prick of worry—the last thing I needed to make my life even more complicated was a come-on from Bart’s girlfriend. I reminded myself I was celibate now, not a sexual creature at all, not even for a nice, normal pretty girl like Michelle.
And what was I going to do about Ziggy? Nothing, I wasn’t going to do a thing. Nothing had changed, and nothing would, either. Now I just had to prove it. I had to prove to myself that my hands weren’t going to shake when he came near, that my tongue wasn’t going to go silent at the wrong moment, and that those feelings weren’t going to get the best of me again. He’d never know. I both hoped and dreaded that he would come into the store.
He came in often, to browse both the albums and the customers. Last week he’d sidled up to a red-haired girl and picked up a tape. Within minutes they moved out of my sight together, his smile now on her face. God he works fast, I had thought. And thinking about it now made me wonder if anyone would ever sweep me off my feet that way, with such utter surety that they wanted me. But then I thought of Carynne and something in me shivered. Ziggy did not come into the store that day.
I spent the afternoon working the cash register. Michelle did not pass by again. I wandered through Kenmore Square with the idea of getting something to eat on the way home, but I didn’t feel like stopping, like sitting alone, like eating.
From the door of the apartment I saw my answering machine’s message light blinking. As it was rewinding, I wondered if it could be Remo, but I hadn’t left him a message, had I? The machine clacked as the tape reversed to play.
"Daron, this is Artie in New York." Artie. That A&R guy Remo had introduced me to. "I received your demo and would like very much to speak with you about it right away. Give me a call on my direct line tomorrow, or leave me a message when you get in." I scrambled to copy down the numbers he gave, as if they were the words of a magic spell that would disappear with the dawn.
Want more of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles?
Check out the DGC website at http://daron.ceciliatan.com to read the full serialized Chronicles for free! In addition to many chapters beyond where Volume 1 ends, readers will also find "liner notes" explaining cool stuff about the story, bonus stories, links to cool music and videos, and Daron answers comments that are left for him.
NOW AVAILABLE FOR KINDLE!
Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Volume Two
Picking up where DGC Volume One leaves off, volume two carries through the next tumultuous year of Daron's life, as major label interest in the band sharpens, and Daron's growing attraction to Ziggy does, as well.
Pick it up in the Kindle Store today!
About DGC
Daron’s Guitar Chronicles received the inaugural Rose & Bay Award for Crowdfunded Fiction in 2010.
Daron’s Guitar Chronicles is by Cecilia Tan, the author of many books and short stories. She first began writing about him when she was 16 years old, in high school in suburban New Jersey in the early 1980s. Fragments of stories came and went, and Daron figured in several short stories she wrote for classes in college, though never as the central character. It seemed for many years like Daron’s story was being told to her by the characters all around him. It wasn’t until 1992, in graduate school for a masters degree in writing, that she buckled down and started writing from his point of view.
What followed was six years of work, as Cecilia worked on the tale on and off while finishing grad school and starting up Circlet Press. It had quickly become clear that the story was not a traditional 80,000 word novel in the same way that a road movie is not a traditional three-act film. The story was more of a bildungsroman. The original final draft was mammoth in size. Several editors and one agent persuaded Cecilia to cut material equal to the size of a whole novel from it, but what was left was still more than twice the size of a commercial fiction novel.
And so the material–much praised by editors who nonetheless rejected it as unsalable because of its size and scope–sat on Cecilia’s hard drive for about ten years. Until November 2009, when web serialization became a viable reality. Daron’s Guitar Chronicles began posting at the end of 2009 and by November 2010 had over a hundred chapters live, with many more to come.
The story was not written as a “period piece” of the late 80s/early 90s–that was when the bulk of it was conceived and written. That’s how it was, then, before cell phones, before “alternative music” became hip, before there were out gay celebrities.
About the Author
Cecilia Tan has been writing professionally since she was Daron’s age in the 1980s. She sold her first fiction in the early 90s, and her short stories have appeared in Nerve, Ms. Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Best American Erotica. She is the author of many books, most with fantasy and science fiction themes, including Black Feathers, The Velderet, White Flames, Mind Games, The Siren and the Sword, The Hot Streak, The Tower and the Tears, and Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords. She is also the founder and editorial director of Circlet Press. Find out more at http://blog.ceciliatan.com