Archive of Our Own ^beta

They stumble from the van like fucked up sunlight junkies, their bodies stiff and loose at the same time– Gerard’s leg has been bent awkwardly at the knee for the past four hours; Ray has a crick in his neck because Frank keeps on adjusting the driver’s headrest and not putting it back. Someone left an open bag of gummy bears in the console and now it’s full of gelatinous sugar, this disgusting rainbow of dismembered bears, and the entire van smells like sweat and plastic and smoke and sugar.

Nobody’s ever been to Arizona before, this square little desert with real-life Wile E. Coyote cacti and tumbleweeds and hot sun beating on them, making them all really wish the van had an air conditioner or even just a case of cool beers to press against their flushed necks and foreheads in between greedy sips. 

To Mikey, it feels like a different world. It feels like America without the bones, like this was the carcass spat up. New Jersey tries to kill you with miserable, bluefingered cold. Everything about dying in New Jersey is surgical and numb: you flail helplessly, through high school and maybe college before drowning in your parent’s basement or in someone’s attic apartment, watching smokestacks gag and choke, thinking, is this really the place Bruce Springsteen sang about? And then watching the neighborhood kid you grew up playing street hockey with get wheeled out on a stretcher– it’s sad, your Ma will say the next morning. Overdose, third one on the street this winter. Going down to the basement– Christ it’s freezing– and talking to your sweaty, anemic brother who feels both in need of salvation and like God to everyone but himself. He ashes out on an old painting and hums when he hears about the dead kid and then says, like a picture-perfect slash-film actor, who will survive and what will be left of them?

 Arizona feels like it could gut you from the inside out, like some messy knife fight. Gerard talks of cowboys and lonely nights spent ranching– what ranching entails, no one is really quite sure, but it sounds like some sort of humble spectacle when Gerard describes it, so they listen like kids in church during a particularly epic sermon. The only sound besides his voice is the click-track shudder of the van on rough pavement. 

They pay thirty bucks to fill up the van, and fork up ten more for an assortment of gas station delicacies: cherry-coke-banana-sprite slushies that melt into each other; Ray chases Frank around with a bag of pre-boiled eggs until he almost gags. They loiter for a bit. Their next show isn’t until Tuesday, and the van is hot and swampy and disgusting. The gas station has three weak fans going that feel like angel’s breath.

When they go back to the car, it’s Frankie’s turn to drive. Mikey sits shotgun, his knees bent awkwardly around the map.

“It’s upside down,” Frank says, one hand on the steering wheel and a smoke in the other.

Mikey flips the map, somewhat awkwardly, like a failed magician trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and Frank giggles.

“Fucking with you,” he says, smiling all big– it’s cute– and then his laughing fit dissipates into a coughing fit. 

A thought: Frankie should probably smoke less.

Mikey doesn’t know why he cares. His own lungs probably look like the fucked-up ones that they put on the outside of cigarette packages to scare little kids away. Mom’s been buying cigarettes for Gerard since he was fourteen, and Mikey’s been bumming them off of him since before then.

Frank is just… different, he supposes. The idea of Frank having even more fucked-up lungs is scary. Once, when they all got food poisoning in Oklahoma and had to go to urgent care in the middle of nowhere, Mikey had to find Frankie’s insurance number in a stack of paperwork. 

He hadn’t meant to read all of Frankie’s other healthcare stuff, but it was just… there was so much. Growing up, he’d only gone to the ER to take Grandma, or with Gerard the one time he accidentally inhaled too much turpentine. Frank had been in the hospital at least a week out of every year, and yeah, there was a bunch of medications that he was supposed to be taking, but Mikey knew for a fact (okay, he’d been looking for lube) that Frank only had aspirin and a half-empty bottle of percs in his bag.

It had made him feel… strange. Mikey didn’t enjoy having big feelings the way that Gerard did, he supposed. Gerard felt everything like it was his birthright, like it was the only job that he could ever keep. He felt sad for old ladies and bunnies and missing posters and Unsolved Mysteries segments and character actors who would never make it big. Mikey had feelings, perhaps even large ones, but he tended to them privately, and didn’t notice them until they were burning at his insides, strangling his throat with his guts, making him choke on his tears in the backseat of the van or the rare privacy of a hotel bathroom. He would press his fingers roughly against his wrists, hard enough to leave a purple-yellow bruise, and bite his tongue until the tears smoldered instead of burnt and his breath was somewhat steady. 

He didn’t know how to worry about Frank in a way that felt okay. Mikey worried about Gerard, Ma had said once, like someone paid him money for it. Ray didn’t need much worrying, but Mikey still found his mind wandering: is he as okay as he says he is? But Ray had terrifyingly genuine contentment with just his guitar and his friends; a sort of wholesomeness that defied the sludge of sadness and dirty Garden State tap water that ran through everyone else’s blood.

Frank was an enigma. Falling apart but like a black hole, the kind that would explode about a billion years after you’d died. Mikey remembered visiting his great-great grandparents growing up, thinking that someone who was so old had surely just overcome a precipice and would simply never die, that maybe God had forgotten them, just as He’d maybe forgotten Frank. Frank wrote new songs and played his heart out and then spent feverish nights in the van sipping Gatorade and eating saltines. He wore two pairs of gloves in the winter and his lips turned blue when he got a cold and he never ever complained, like some sort of fucked-up loveable saint. Mikey wanted to tell him that he knew he was real, that if he fell apart for good they all would still love the pieces just as much as the whole Frank, that they could play more gigs and buy him medicine and burn all their joints and cigs in a field in fucking Oklahoma and never smoke again, if he needed that. That Mikey would do whatever Frank needed, whatever Frank wanted, because Frank didn’t want for much, and when he did, it was for all the right things: the band, his guitar, his friends.

“How are you doing?” Mikey asks instead. He glances into the backseat before Frank answers. Ray’s playing on his GameBoy; Gerard’s cheek is pressed against the coolness of the window and he’s fanning himself with one of those free Coffee News papers. 

“Sweating my ass off,” Frank says. He wriggles in his jeans to prove the point. His head is newly shaved, but Mikey imagines the glue dreads shaking.

Mikey imagines peeling the jeans off, too. How the sweat would stick them to him like a second skin, like the heaviness of a nightmare after sleep. How Frank would probably be all grossed out and want to do frivolous things like shower for a billion years and wash his jeans, even if it was just with bar soap in a motel bathroom. How Mikey wouldn’t care and Frank would laugh and call him gross in a way that made Mikey feel the exact opposite, like someone somebody wanted for all the right reasons, someone who wasn’t him.

“How are you?” Frank says, and Mikey blinks slowly, willing himself back to the real world. “You’ve been staying in so much. I thought you got replaced with, like… the Robot from Hardware, only instead of like, killing, you were obsessed with like, working on your paladin or whatever for Gerard’s campaign.”

“Elf,” Mikey corrects. Frank is the only one who doesn’t play in their campaign; instead, he perches himself practically on Mikey’s shoulder and offers ‘helpful’ tips and advice– are you allowed to pants characters? Because you should totally do that to Gee’s. Are there nunchucks in this world, Gerard? 

“Ah,” Frank says, his eyes on the road. “Elf.” 

“Usually Gee makes me be a paladin, though,” Mikey adds.

“Yeah, remember Richard the Unforgiven? And all the little cyber-droids he had to kill?”

“Dick,” Mikey says, smiling just a little. God, Gerard had hated that Richard the Unforgiven had turned from a total badass character to Dick, who kept cyber-droids as pets instead of killing them. “I didn’t realize you paid attention.”

“How else would I ruin your brother’s games?” Frank says, and merges into the left-most lane. Mikey’s not really an experienced driver; he only got his provisional license last year, but he knows that he enjoys the way Frank drives, smooth and fast. On the rare, serendipitous occasions that Frank is parking while Mikey’s riding shotgun, Frank puts his arm on Mikey’s headrest and it sort of absolutely totally kills Mikey. “I like paying attention to what you get up to.”

“Not anything good,” Mikey says, sticking his tongue out because Frank will like it. This tour, they’ve mostly crashed at people’s houses that he knows, or slept in the van and drank until 3am while whoever was the DD bitched about having to drive in the morning. 

Outside there’s cacti and dust and all these fenced in fields– what’s in them that’s worth fencing in, Mikey wants to know– passing them by. Or maybe they’re passing them by. He imagines all the houses that would be there, if Arizona was the Jersey streets, dense and clotted with small houses, fences jutting into each others like crooked teeth. He imagines what it would have been like growing up with Frank as his next-door neighbour. Would Frank have been just another one of those overdose kids? The thought makes him sick. A movie cliche that Mikey watched changing through the window while Frank-- and in this dream, he's freshly 18 and newly tattooed, his body appearing in sharp flashes of candlelight-warm skin and black, spidery ink-- gave him a show, the both of them in on their shared, wordless secret.

Air catches in Mikey's chest and he nearly chokes. If it wasn't summer and he wasn't tan, his cheeks would be burning brighter than the sand outside.

“I thought you had that girl back in Newark,” Frank says. “Tara what’s-her-face.”

“She joined the freaking Marines, dude.” Mikey says. He hasn’t hooked up since they were last home, since he started blushing whenever Frank slept over and they woke up spooning or when Frank accidentally wore his underwear. It didn't seem to matter as much before. He could have anyone he wanted, for the most part, but nobody was as good as Frank, and everything felt so routine, so staged. They all felt like archetypes of the same three characters: Sad Jersey Guy, who was dopey and doe-eyed and would eventually either die tragically or write a really awful poetry book; Born In The USA Dude, who was hot and had some sort of respectable blue collar job and said at the end of hooking up, 'so, this wasn't, like a gay thing, because I'm not really into that' like he just hadn't came on Mikey's very-much-a-guy's ass ten minutes earlier; Born In The USA Dude thought that the aforementioned song was an elegy to the glory of fighting in wars and the beauty of the USA instead of its actuality, and he would either end up drinking himself to death or married with kids. Nice-ish Scene Girl had chunky highlights in her hair and smelled like perfume and gave sticky lipgloss kisses on the way out. Usually, she'd end up married to some loser guy who sat on the couch and drank while she vacuumed, but sometimes she ended up becoming an artist while being a bartender or a stripper, working so late at night that it gave the illusion of her being some vampiristic, otherworldly creature. 

"Fuck,” Frank says. “Like, actually?”

“Yeah,” Mikey says, and sinks lower into his seat.

“Was she bossy in bed?” Frank sounds gleeful. 

Mikey actually doesn’t remember, but he pouts for the fun of it. “Frank, I don’t kiss and tell.”

From the backseat, Gerard pipes up. “Exactly, it’s not chivalrous.”

“Mikey’s slept with half of New Jersey, and you’re telling me that’s chivalrous?”

Gerard shakes his head, too tired and weary to further defend his brother’s honor.

“I don’t kiss and tell, dude,” Mikey repeats. “That’s like, dishonorable and shit.”

“So she did,” Frank says, and Mikey grins despite himself. He leans his head against the window, and watches the red-orange rocks turn into blurs, waits for the hot sun to turn the entire world to ash.

Somehow, he thinks the four of them would still be there, in some way or another. Even if it was all rocks and cacti and motherfucking tumbleweeds, shady gas stations and dirty dented vans, they’d find each other, that it would be as easy as coming home. 

At a highway exit, Frank puts a warm, small hand on Mikey’s thigh. It could be a comforting gesture or a come-on or just Frank being Frank, but Mikey keeps his head against the relative coolness of the window and shuts his eyes. This is enough for now, he could live off of this forever. Frank’s gentle touch and the entire world, waiting. 

I spent a day dreaming of dying in Mesa, Arizona
Where all the green of life had turned to ash
And I felt I was on fire with the things I could have told you
I just assumed that you eventually would ask

...

I thought about my true love, the one I really need
With eyes that burn so bright, they make me pure

They make me pure
They make me pure
I long to be with you

 

- June On The West Coast, Bright Eyes. Letting Off The Happiness.