How to Kill a Rock Star Read Free

no one in their right mind would trust the aeronautical competency of complete strangers when the future they’d been waiting so long for was a mere four-hundred and sixty-seven miles away.
    I ripped my boarding pass in half and ran, stopping only to throw up on the feet of a dapper skycap standing near the curb.
    “Mother-of-Pearl,” Vera said when I cal ed and broke the news. “You were so close.”
    “I’m taking the bus,” I said. “I’l be there tomorrow night.”
    The bus left the station at 7:02 a.m. and stopped in half a dozen towns between Cleveland and New York City. I kept my forehead pressed to the window and felt like I was watching a slide show, one in which the projector was broken and the same two or three photos kept clicking onto the screen. Al the places looked the same: the same fast-food restaurants, the same strip mal s, the same Wal-Marts at every turn.
    I imagined the towns were fil ed with people like me—
    lonely people who wanted to fly away, who wanted more from life than a dreary existence of one-stop shopping, but either didn’t know what that meant, or didn’t have the guts to go out and find it.
    Doug Blackman had blamed my malaise, in part, on the homogenization of America.
    “It’s destroying our culture, it’s destroying our individuality, and it makes us feel dead inside,” he told me that night in Cleveland. “But we just keep letting it happen. And we don’t think about it because thinking hurts too much.”
1I asked Doug if we could talk about music and he got even more wound up.
    “I am talking about music,” he said. “Popular music is a microcosm of the culture, Eliza. It reflects the mentality of the population. Tel me, when was the last time you heard a truly extraordinary new artist on the radio?” Doug’s impassioned sermon meant one of two things to me—either the mentality of the population was soul ess, or its level of consciousness was on par with your average thirteen-year-old Wal-Mart rat.
    I never did relax on the bus, and when it pul ed in to Port Authority in Manhattan, an intimidating thought occurred to me: in a city of roughly eight mil ion people, I real y only knew two—Michael and Vera, who had moved to Manhattan two and a half years earlier, after Michael decided to give up his nascent career as a graphic artist to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a rock star.
    It had taken a lot of urging to get Michael to go. He’d been hesitant to leave me. But even Susan Cohen, the ther-apist I’d been seeing since my paltry suicide attempt at sixteen, thought it was a good idea for Michael to loosen the reigns. And I was okay when Michael left. I was okay until Adam ran off to Oregon with the girl who made us caramel macchiatos, and my head began to unravel like a bal of yarn tumbling down a staircase.
    Despite struggling financial y, Michael seemed happy in New York. He was playing guitar for a fledgling band cal ed Bananafish and working part time as a waiter in a famous SoHo restaurant cal ed Balthazar. He and Vera had been living on the Lower East Side, in a smal two-bedroom apartment with a guy named Paul Hudson, Bananafish’s lead singer and songwriter, but they had just relocated to a place of their own in a more affordable Brooklyn neighborhood,
which al owed me to become the new tenant in their old room.
    I exited the bus, lugging my overstuffed backpack across my shoulder, and the muggy July heat felt like a plastic bag wrapped around my head. I fol owed the signs to the subway, where everything was covered in a thin layer of grime and the pungent odor of pee and garbage permeated the air.
    New York was not altogether foreign to me. Michael, Vera, and I had visited the city dozens of times as teenagers, when Michael would tel our Aunt Karen we were going on field trips with our school and we’d drive to Manhattan instead. At night we’d sleep in the car; during the day Michael would browse guitar shops and record stores while