Chapter Text
1989…
“Isn’t that the same kid who showed up to our last two gigs?”
Tony poses the question to no-one in particular, and part of him hopes that no-one is listening, since it’s totally lame to notice things – especially things like other people, and especially kids who are clearly a couple of birthdays shy of legal. Still, it’s hard not to notice that hair – orange as an L.A. sunset, and so messy that Tony wonders how even manages to see.
(“You should let people get a look at you,” he’ll say later, which is funny because Tony’s been hiding behind his own hair for as long as he can remember.)
The kid wears his uniform well enough – the leather jacket, the earrings, the tight jeans with ripped knees – but Tony knows a fish when it’s out of water. Not that he thinks of people as fish, because he doesn’t – there’s just something in the eyes, like you can almost see the reflection of someplace that isn’t all concrete and glass and filth.
(“So what’s Wisconsin like?” he’ll ask, but Pickles will shrug and say, “I dunno – fackin’ cold an’ shitty and boring,” and a few months later he’ll have that long, city-stare just like everyone else.)
The first time the kid showed up – to a $5 gig in East Los Angeles – Tony tripped over his own aux cord, like just the sight of him had shorted the circuits in Tony’s brain and transformed him back into stumbling teenage Antonio, while Lenny – the singer and egomaniac behind Wide Wings of Death’s recent local success – glared at him and mouthed an acid “What. The fuck?” over his shoulder.
The second time was at a house show in Gardena – in a dank, smoky basement with a ceiling so low that Tony had to slouch or take off his hat. He figured it was a coincidence, except for this time the kid just stared at him, like he was waiting for Tony to turn into a fucking pumpkin or something. But when they finished their set, Tony looked up and he was gone, and he spent the rest of the night asking around to see if anyone knew the name of the skinny kid with the freckles and the crazy red hair. He didn’t know why he cared – he didn’t want to care, and Tony thought he’d finally stopped fixating on why other people did things. Nobody knew anything, though, except that the kid had puked all over Rosa’s brother’s sofa and then left the party with some other guy.
(Tony will finally touch that hair when Pickles starts vomiting miso soup and sake onto an empty Metro platform somewhere in Central Los Angeles.)
That house-show was three weeks ago, and just as Tony’s maybe managed to convince himself that he doesn’t desperately hope this kid shows up, there he is, pushing quarters into the pinball machine in the back corner of Pirate Jenny’s Pub while Wide Wings of Death sets up their gear on a riser the size of a coffee table. He’s charmed his way into a whole pack of cigarettes, apparently, and he pauses his play to light one up, eyes landing squarely on Tony, and Tony wonders if he ever looked even half that cool as a teenager.
Then the kid gives him this funny little smile, and by the time Tony finally regains his senses, the show’s over and he’s carrying his Peavey out to where Lenny’s got the van idling in the alley.
“Heey Tony – ya gat a light?”
Tony nearly drops the amp on his foot, and wouldn’t that be fucking typical. He’s always been a disaster like that – a wicked combination of jumpy and clumsy that his classmates at St. Bernard found endlessly amusing. (He’d only taken up the bass when a friend suggested he was too ham-fisted to be any good at guitar.) He’s nearly mastered his jitters by now – thanks to a steady regimen of weed, Quaaludes, and (more recently) heroin – but the kid stone-cold snuck up on him, and anyway, talking to people has always filled him with a kind of nervous dread.
The accent’s a surprise – that draw on the vowels that’s about as uncommon as snow in southern California – and even from several feet away, Tony catches a strong whiff of vodka, body odor and hairspray. He loads his amp into the van and pretends not to notice the glint of a zippo peeking out of the kid’s front pocket as he fumbles for his own plastic Bic, mumbling, “Uh, yeah, totally, sure.”
But the kid doesn’t take the lighter from his hands, only leans forward expectantly with a cigarette hanging between his lips, waiting for Tony to oblige. Tony feels a rush of relief when he manages a flame on the first flick, and prays to God he doesn’t accidentally set this kid’s hair on fire. He’s got a million questions, but the one he blurts out is, “How’d you know my name?”
The kid smirks at him and shrugs. “Asked around,” he says, looking at his shoes and then sweeping his hair out of his eyes for a few seconds. “I’m Pickles.”
“Pickles?”
“Yeah.”
(He’ll wait til they’re both strung-out to say, “I love you,” and Tony will reply, “I love you too, man.” And Pickles – who Tony has wanted since the moment they met, who looks like one of those beautiful places in a magazine that you know you’ll never be able to go – shakes his head and says, “No, dood – I don’t mean it like dat. I mean it like da wee girls mean it.”
And that will fuck Tony up for good.)
But right now, having no idea how profoundly Pickles will destroy him, he just says, “Well hey man – thanks for coming to our shows.”
Pickles snorts. “Yer beend fackin’ sucks, dood. ‘Cept fer dat one sang – da one, ya know, about how Los Angeles is ganna fall aff into da sea an’ we’ll all be eaten by sharks. I love dat sang enough dat I’ll pay $5 to hear it.”
“That one’s mine.”
“I know.”
Tony waits uneasily for Pickles to explain himself. He’s got to have a better reason than that for showing up to three gigs in a row, for staring Tony down and then seeking him out like this, but then again, maybe it’s all totally normal, and it’s Tony who’s being weird, who’s reading into things, who’s making up a story where there isn’t one. In the few seconds of silence that pass between them, Pickles’ stomach gurgles. He looks hungry – tired – like he’s working on something, making plans maybe, but also like it’s been a while since he had a decent meal or a full night’s sleep.
“Hey, man – you hungry? They got pretty good food here. Why don’t you let me buy you some nachos or something at the bar?”
The boy’s green eyes narrow sharply, arms folding across his chest in a stance that Tony recognizes as defensive, no matter how flip Pickles tries to sound when he blows a cloud of smoke directly in Tony’s face and asks, “Fer what?”
Tony chokes back on a cough. “What do you mean, for what?”
“Like, ya get me nachos an’ den what?”
“And then we hang out at the bar and eat nachos?”
“An’ dat’s it?”
Tony doesn’t like the shift the conversation has taken, or the implication of it. He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Well, yeah. Or I mean, you could get like, onion rings or whatever.” He pulls out a small roll of tens – money he’d planned to spend on smack and gasoline. “They uh, actually pay us when we play here so, yeah… my treat.”
Pickles eyes the cash with suspicion and arches an eyebrow. He sighs, kind of exasperated, like Tony just isn’t understanding the question. “Jest nachos, dough? No fackin’ tricks? Y’ain’t ganna buy me a bunch’a food an’ den tell me I owe ya a fackin’ hand-jab er nothin’?”
The question makes Tony feel a little sick, and he thinks about his sixteen-year-old self, sitting in his bedroom at his parents’ house in Marina del Rey, practicing the dexterity exercises his guitar teacher assigned him while his mother made ravioli from scratch, and the closest he ever got to a hand-job was jerking himself off in the shower and thinking about the boy that sat two seats in front of him in Spanish class.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. “No. No weird shit. Just – I was gonna maybe get some food anyway, and your stomach sounds like a goddamn monster, so I thought maybe I’d offer. You don’t have to – I don’t fucking care – but I’m not like, some fucking creep, okay?”
Pickles smiles then, and grinds his cigarette out on the pavement with the sole of the saddest-looking Chucks Tony has ever seen. “Yeah, okee.”
He has a fake, Tony learns once they go back inside, and the name on it is Christopher P. McKinnon.
“Is that your real name?” he asks, and Pickles replies with a mouth full of hot cheese:
“Fer now.”
He’s from some fucking town Tony’s never heard of, and he’s been in L.A. five months and still hasn’t seen the ocean. He runs deliveries, he says, at a Chinese place that’s just a few blocks from Tony’s apartment, and Tony almost asks the kid if he’s got an okay place to stay, but it seems too personal, too soon, and so he doesn’t. He just listens to Pickles ramble – about the wildfire he saw out the window of the bus on his ride from Wisconsin, about the Les Paul he bought, the music he’s been listening to, this drum kit he played around on at a party last week, the secret he’s discovered about adding peanut butter to his Top Ramen – and Tony says a word here and there, but somehow Pickles is laughing and smiling like it’s the best conversation he’s ever had, and Tony just tries not to notice the way Pickles keeps licking his fingers and wiping them on his jeans.
(Five years later, Pickles will stop by Tony’s place on his way to LAX with that same black duffle he brought from Wisconsin, and he’ll knock on Tony’s door, but Tony will be too faded to do more than sit up for a few seconds before slumping back onto the sofa, so Pickles will say his goodbye through the streaky glass of the front window, hands framing his face as he peers inside and shouts, “Gaddamnit, Tony – if ya OD an’ die, I sweer to Gad I’m ganna tell everyone what a total fackin’ faggot y’are.” But all Tony can think about is the way)
Pickles grins when grabs a bar napkin and scribbles down the phone number of the restaurant where he works and says, “Gimmie a call if ya want me to hook y’up with some rice sometime.”