Chapter Text
The whiteboard is the catalyst, but it really isn’t. It tips over a series of dominoes that lead to Jay’s bedroom, get under his feet, and walk him out the door. But, in the morning after, when the whiteboard has that big, capital D ‘Don’t’ on it, and Matt won’t be honest about having written it, despite it clearly being his handwriting, the whiteboard isn’t the catalyst, because Matt gets up on the couch and erases it, and it’s almost like it wasn’t there to begin with.
“I wouldn’t’ve done that,” Matt says, rubbing at the board with his sleeve, “because there was a really fucking good plan on that board like 24 hours ago.”
“Well, I didn’t do it. That’s not my handwriting.”
“So, someone else came in here and wrote it?” Matt says, looking over his shoulder towards the front door. “Should we get a second lock?”
“We should start locking the first lock,” Jay says, sitting down on the couch.
From there, it’s the same old bullshit. Matt gets on one about lockpicking, and how, honestly, they should’ve already learned how to, because how often do they get locked places and don’t have any way out? He’s scribbling tiny on the board, to the point where Jay has to really squint to make out any of it, which kind of ticks him off, because he’s a part of these plans, isn’t he? And how is he supposed to take part if he can’t fucking see anything Matt’s writing?
“What does that say?” Jay asks.
“What — What does what say?”
“The thing at the bottom.”
“It says we should break into Valence’s house.”
“Why are you writing so fucking small, Matt?”
Matt turns to him. “It’s not even that small. The whiteboard is small, how am I supposed to write everything we have to do if I don’t write small enough for all of it? Maybe you need glasses. I can read it fine. Should we put ‘get Jay an eye exam’ on the list?”
“I don’t need glasses,” Jay says.
The yellow sunglasses are prescription. Jay hemmed and hawed over them, insisting on contacts until he fell asleep in them one too many times and decided if he was going to wear sunglasses indoors anyway, he’d be able to see through them.
“You need something,” Matt says, turning away. “Something to get the huge fucking stick out of your ass.”
He goes back to scribbling on the board, near frantic about it. Jay tracks the twist of his wrist, the grip he has on the marker. His hands ache for a controller, to have something to do to keep his mind from sputtering out. But he knows his job right now is to sit at Matt’s side and listen to him muttering to himself, or to sit at the piano until the muttering turns into something else, into the act, into something they can use.
He gets off the couch, pushes down into the give of it, and walks over to the piano. He taps out the melody from his dream.
E F# A B D D
Jay is sick of it. He’ll ride it out until he overdoses or gets killed by a deranged fan.
“Oh, yo,” Matt says. “I heard you playing that earlier.”
Jay frowns, turning to look at him. “I’ve never played this before. It was in a dream I had.”
Matt blinks. “You’re saying we dreamed it together? That’s kind of gay, Bird. Who dreams together? Probably, like, old queens who’ve been together for decades, or holocaust survivors. Or, like, the Manson Family. Do you think we could start a cult?” He puts his hands on his hips. “Do you think I have the potential to be the next Jim Jones?”
“Shut the fuck up, Matt,” Jay says, looking back at the piano, still playing the notes, one hand moving along the keys.
“Would you drink my Kool-Aid?”
Jay rolls his eyes, brings his right hand up to play the chords.
“It’s not bad, actually,” Matt says. “It’s not really up to your regular standards, but it’s not bad.”
Jay stays up late most nights at his piano and hits the random bullshit generator in his mind. He plays old western saloon, and spy-at-a-casino, and he plays coffee and sunset and sad and happy, and practices his scales like he’s a kid again.
When he’s done with that, he pops a Klonopin or two and plays rooftop and fireworks and skin and sweat and laughter.
“It’s kind of poppy,” Matt continues, shimmying his shoulders. “Is that where we’re taking Nirvana the Band?”
“I don’t know if it sounds right on the piano,” Jay says. He plays the melody staccato, “I don’t know if it’s anything. I feel like it’s nothing, but.” It came to him in a dream, so it has to be something. His thoughts will linger on dreams for days after they happen. He feels like there has to be a meaning behind them, something that can make the disjointed, feverish events come together. A throughline. A reason why Jay’s brain works the way it does. He’s locked in a padded room with his mother, and then he’s speeding down a freeway in a convertible with Matt, who’s a monkey, who’s chewing a big cigar, who’s got a furry hand on Jay’s thigh, and when Jay looks over at him he’s just regular Matt, but when he looks down at his thigh, there’s the hairy, opposable thumb of a macaque inching towards his inseam. Jay floors it.
Matt shrugs. “It might be nothing. It might be something. We could workshop it. Do you want to workshop it?”
Jay grimaces at the piano, at the thought of Matt’s voice joining something that came sprouting from the top of his head. This is his brainchild. That Matt was witness to it is painful enough. Jay stops playing it. “We should try something else.”
“Lockpicking, play lockpicking.”
Jay plays lockpicking.
He’s so tired by the time he lies down that he’s out like a light instantly. When he wakes up, early, too early, he stares at the ceiling and feels sick. He doesn’t remember his dreams. He remembers the dream, remembers Matt at his bedroom door, the sound of the song from downstairs, played diagetic in his dreamscape. Jay’s stomach aches. The one, resounding truth. He has to get out. If he doesn’t, this is it. This is the rest of his life.
It’s early, and he can hear the sound of the street outside, and he can hear Matt snoring down the hall, and he takes a walk into a future where things are different, where he’s made it big enough that people know his name, where he can’t walk down the street without being accosted by adoring fans and the paparazzi. He’s not just the biggest name in Toronto, he’s the biggest name in the world. He’s embarking on a world tour. He’s got his own tour bus, and he’s going to traverse the States with his band, and things are shiny and beautiful and golden bright.
All he knows is that he’s not going to get it if he stays here. If he stays with Matt. It doesn’t require a plan; this decision. He’s going to go downstairs and wait for Matt to wake up, and when he does, Jay is going to tell him that he’s leaving. And then: the rest of his life.
On a regular Thursday, between lines, Jay thinks about Matt Johnson.
It’s been an age. It’s been a terrible, wonderful age, and Jay rarely ever thinks of him, because why would he? He considers the probable truth of Matt, running on that same hamster wheel for the rest of time, with some other poor sucker sitting by his side watching him scribble the words I will play the Rivoli in a never-ending column on a sheet of paper.
Right now, Jay is thinking about him because there’s this awful twink sitting next to him (and Jay is allowed to say that, because he’s in the closet) who has the same nose as Matt, or at least the same nose that Jay remembers, and Jay is going to invite him to do drugs with him so he can imagine what it might look like to see Matt Johnson himself blow a rail.
The twink is hanging all over him, hand on his thigh and big, blue eyes batting at him. Everything about him is wrong, save for the ski slope of his nose. Jay tells him to do some of his coke. He says yes. Why would he say no? He’s Jay McCarrol.
“What?” Matt says, voice shaky.
Jay honestly didn’t think he would be so affected. Sure, they’ve been friends for a while, but friends don’t stay roommates forever. It’s just not natural. People grow up, and they grow apart, and if Jay is going to achieve any single dream that he’s set out for himself over the course of his life, and specifically the last 3 hours, it’s going to have to be alone, and more importantly, without Matt.
“I said —”
“I heard what you fucking said, Jay,” Matt spits. “Jesus christ, obviously I heard you.”
“Then what —?”
“I just don’t… I don’t understand. I don’t get why you’re doing this. Why you’re doing this to me. You’re the only person I can do this with. You know that, right? You know that by leaving you’re completely, utterly fucking me, right?”
“Matt, it’s not the end of the world.”
“No, Jay, it very much is the end of the fucking world,” Matt says, eyes so wide Jay can see the whites all the way around.
“I’m not the only piano player in existence, Matt.”
Matt stares at him. “Jay.” His lips peel back into an awful smile, more like he’s baring his teeth than anything. “You are not just a piano player.”
Jay feels bashful, like twirling his hair around his finger. But this is how Matt gets him, it’s how he talks him into doing shit he doesn’t want to, shouldn’t want to. “There are other people who could do what I do for you.”
“No!” Matt exclaims, hands up in his hair now, tugging at it. “No, there aren’t! There fucking aren’t! You are the only person who is willing to put up with me, Jay, do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t notice that you’re my only fucking friend and that I can’t do shit without you? You’re fucking shooting me in the foot, man. You’re fucking crippling me.”
“Matt,” Jay sighs.
“And you,” Matt says, angrier, now. “You’re such a fucking retard you think that you’re going to get anywhere without me. I have no one? You have fucking no one, Jay. You have no one. Without me, you have your fucking self, and that’s it. Your family hates you. They like me better than you, and you know that’s true.”
Jay swallows to keep from frowning, trying to keep his mouth a straight line on his face, chin up.
“I have my family to fall back on,” Matt says, pulling out the big guns. “Without you, I have people who love me. What do you have, Jay? What do you really have?”
Jay blinks at him. He blocks the blow and punches back harder. “I actually have talent, Matt. I could make something great. And I can do it without you.”
Matt’s brow furrows. He takes a thousand points of psychic damage. He’s dead on his feet.
“You were holding me back,” Jay says, knowing that it’s going to cut. “I could’ve already —”
“—played the Rivoli without you.”
His therapist blinks at him. “You said that to his face?”
“I had to. It was the only way that he was going to let me go.”
Stacy frowns. She’s disappointed in him. He hates that face she’s making. Like she wishes she had known him earlier, so she could tell him not to do any of the stupid shit he’s ever done. “What happened next?”
1V1
Matt launches himself at Jay. He wraps his hands around his throat and then pulls one back to punch him in the temple a bunch. Jay’s head spins as they fall to the floor. The wind gets knocked out of him. Matt doesn’t give him time to recover; he just whales on him again and again and again.
“You’re so fucking stupid,” Matt hisses. “You’re retarded, you’re literally retarded. Do you remember. When we were in school and you were failing aaaall of your classes and your mom paid me to tutor you so that you wouldn’t get left back another grade? Do you remember that? Do you remember how fucking bad that felt?”
“Shut up, Matt,” Jay slurs, his nose bleeding into his mouth.
“Or how about when your dad died and nobody told you? Because no one wanted Jay at the funeral, not Jay who dropped out of Berklee to go play house with his best friend. No one wanted to be the one who called you, to hear your stupid, whiny voice over the phone, crying and crying over your father, who, who — who actually didn’t give a shit about you, so they called me instead. Do you remember that, Birdie?”
Jay tries to fight back, tries to get his fists moving, but he’s pushed so fully into the ground, face to the carpet, a bright red pool under his cheek.
“Do you think anyone’s gonna call you when your mom dies? Do you think anyone gives enough of a shit about you to tell you fucking anything? You leave me, and you’re alone forever, Jay. That’s it.”
He lets go of him all at once, and Jay should take the chance to get him back, to push him face-first into the floor, to let him have it, to tell him of all of his many failings, but he feels weak and lame. He feels like if he tried he’d only feel stupider. So he just stays there, face down, and tries to catch his breath, breathing bubbles into blood.
1V1
There are clubs in a lot of major cities where a guy of Jay’s status can go and have the shit beat out of him. Jay is a regular at most. He walks in, and they try to dote on him, but he’s there to get treated like dirt, so he turns down the offer of a shower or a sparkling water with lime and goes straight to the guy with the dustiest blond hair they can find for him, the most hidden strength in an otherwise underwhelming body, and lets him shove him onto his knees.
Normally, he doesn’t ask for sex, but he’s got a weird itch, so Texas (whose name simply cannot actually be Texas — they’re in Boston) puts him down and kicks him a little (he’s wearing sneakers — that’s points for realism) and calls him a faggot and a retard (that had taken some convincing and an under the table tip) and then pulls him up by the hair and fucks his face. Jay isn’t good at giving head. This, pointedly, is not giving head. He’s just getting beat up more.
Texas comes on his face and then asks him for his autograph.
When he leaves, his throat hurts, and his voice crackles. He’s got permanent tears in his eyes. His manager gets pissed at him when he shows up and can barely sing, shoves him at a nebulizer, pours him a cup of honey lemon ginger tea, and calls him an idiot.
Jay hates to admit that Matt was right. He really, really hates it. But he does have no one. He has no one to help him move into his new place, has no one to beat him in Mario Kart (okay, the more pressing issue here is that he no longer has an N64). He has no one to play for. The piano sits like an eyesore in the corner of his new place (a studio, he can’t afford a one-bedroom). It needs to be tuned. The move fucked it in a major way. He taps out the dream song. Everything is flat.
Jay isn’t sure how he’s supposed to get started. He hasn’t written a single song. He could go to an open mic and play covers, but that isn’t how he wants to get his start. The Jay McCarrol story, when they write it, is going to start with a bang. In the form of an original song that has yet to be written. Possibly the dream song. Probably the dream song, given that it’s the only thing that he’s come up with.
He ignores the fact that the piano sounds like shit and plays anyway, plays through the dream song on repeat before realizing that it needs lyrics.