11
Los Angeles
John cleared his throat across the table, bringing me back to the discussion at hand. Where had we even left off? Oh yeah, Rome leaving the band without saying goodbye.
"Listen, mate, I appreciate you saying that, I really do. But...it's not even like that, y'know? Things were different with uz. Believe it or not, he did actually tell me goodbye. Only me."
"Mm..."
"Yeah...it was all pretty fucked to be honest. But, uh, he reached out before he left the hotel, and then again after he got home."
"Then what happened? How'd you get here? The whole not speaking thing, for how long? Two years?"
"It’s when he didn't come back."
"Ah..."
"When he left at first, he promised it was just a break. That he'd be back in a couple of shows. But once we got to our next tour stop, everything fell apart. They Skyped uz—the head of the label…management…everyone—and just hit uz with the news. There was just no going back after that…"
"Did he reach out anymore?"
"He did...but only after I'd already heard the news from someone else, and that's where I got pissed, y'know? It's just not something you want to hear from a corporate suit over Skype." I took my hat off and ruffled my hair, becoming overly warm. "That your friend or brother—or whatever-the-fuck—had left and wasn’t coming back. And there’s just…no time to talk him out of it because he’s already across the bloody globe. Shit...if m’honest, it almost felt like he'd died—or like, uh, he'd been some kind of illusion all along. "
"You never told me this."
"It was bad, y'know? I couldn't really express myself for a while.
But...uh...now I can. And I just know you don't pull that shit, mate.
You don't just spring something like that on a person.
With that sort of finality." I grimaced.
"I wouldn't speak to him for a while. And by the time I was done processing everything...
I think his number had changed. I didn't take it personally, though.
It was like a week later, and I can only imagine the, uh, kind of heat he was taking from everyone.
Even the media. I would've changed my number too…
probably sooner. But for him to not reach out right away with the new number kind of pissed me off, if I'm being honest."
"So, he was under the impression you were done with him too?"
"Sure, I guess…" I shrugged. "So, I couldn't be too pissed, right? In a way I was equally at fault for whatever happened after. For uz not speaking so long."
"So... you were both being stubborn dicks?"
"Of course," I grinned. "And it just went on for weeks.
I think neither of uz wanted to be the first to call at that point.
Our pride or whatever got in the way." I laughed, remembering how dumb we were.
"We're so much alike, mate. He hated me for not answering after he left…
and I, uh, hated him for leaving in the first place. Mate, it's ridiculous."
"So, what'd you do?"
"I sent the email...in like August of that year.
But he ignored it, of course, and I, uh, I think that's when I decided it was time to let go.
Apparently he did too. He's happy, I think. And I didn't want to be the one who, uh, gave him grief for doing what he’d always wanted to do. No matter how much it hurt uz all as a collective...the band.”
"So, what do you plan to talk about when you link up? How weird he is now?" he chuckled. I lifted my hat and fixed my hair again, having asked myself the same question since I received the message a few hours ago. Also, I didn't think he was weird. Just different. A good different.
***
Tucked away at my dad's bungalow in late 2011, he and I stumbled on something cloying and insidious. A doorway to the profane. A transformation so atomic and all-consuming, we wouldn’t grasp its true measure for decades to come. The enormity of the consequences, however, were evident from day one.
That autumn, enticed by the allure of possibility and maybe more than a little delusional, I made the difficult decision to drop out of the academy and follow the enterprise.
The other boys had been fortunate enough to graduate on schedule, as they were all my elders by at least a couple of years.
Had I chosen to stay and pursue my studies, I would’ve gambled it all.
They bore zero incentive at the time to wait as I played catch up.
In those days, we were all varying degrees of expendable, and I was painfully aware of that.
Unwilling to fumble the opportunities unfolding before us like a clearing in a dense wood, I took a leap of faith, promising my parents I would finish my schooling someday online.
Although, that was before there was any indication how hectic things would become in a year’s time.
Or that I would be making so much money by the age of eighteen, conventional education had been rendered obsolete.
I was richer than my entire family tree.
It had been the ultimate dice roll. Even so, by no stretch of the imagination was I done learning.
The day Rome and I entered the reality of who we were, an ill-fated constellation aligned.
I stepped from the idle emptiness of my teens, into the blighting paranoia of secrecy and self-discovery.
In those days, we were starved for ourselves as much as each other, laying bare every cell of what had been internalized in shame.
Miscreations, dying for daylight, for recognition, for love without restraint.
From then on, I refused to let that part of me return to obscurity.
It was excised and became me. Now the person I was before Rome was dead.
To my horror, he was quite good at alternating between both versions of himself—the Rome before me, the Rome after.
I spent most days alienated, confronted with the idea that he didn't need me nearly as much as I needed him.
He didn't allow our union to subsume him like it had me.
If he never touched me again, he would move on with his life and prosper. I, however, would detonate.
This presented a problem for the collective.
For the entire band. The push and pull, the intensity, the casual intimacy—it didn’t gel with the brand.
I didn’t like men, I reasoned. I liked one man.
He sometimes liked me. It was situational for him.
Still, what would the fans think? The world?
Our parents? Their knowing was nonnegotiable.
Total nonstarter. On pain of death, it could never come to that.
Autumn of 2011, it all began. That strange, formative week set us apart from the others.
A radical bond was forged, even more meaningful than the one I shared with the bassist, Alexander.
Early on, we’d all formed alliances we believed would last. This was Survival 101 in an ecosystem as competitive and incestuous as Northbridge.
Alex and I had grown close in the early years, becoming each other’s unlikely guardians and closest confidants.
Thinking back, our parents’ role in bringing us together was nothing short of remarkable.
I owed everything I became to my mum’s inexplicable faith in me, which she carried long before I’d ever stepped foot onto that stage to prove myself.
All five of our mothers had signed us up for the academy on a whim one summer, fiercely advocating to secure us a spot among tens of thousands of other hopefuls.
The result was the five of us being drawn together by some unassailable cosmic force, despite each hailing from different regions of the UK. Total serendipity.
The academy’s militant bootcamp style was known for making megastars out of mediocre talent after a grueling crash course in the art of live performance.
It was run by one of the UK’s most powerful music moguls, who many deemed a heartless ball-buster, but in reality was just a shrewd disciplinarian with an eye for potential.
A worthy mentor and captain of industry.
Fate had smiled on the five of us at the time, altering our lives in extraordinary ways.
Alex and I became codependent in the ultrarapid winds of change.
He was the brother I never realized I needed.
While I got along with the other three quite well—at least enough for us to build trust and form a band—Alex was the oldest and looked out for me with a diligence I came to rely on.
Nathan was the free-spirited one, and though he meant well, was quite oblivious when we were young.
He hailed from Wales and often felt like the odd man out in an otherwise English clan, boasting the most inscrutable accent of the lot.
Levi took himself far too seriously. He was the self-appointed frontman in the early days, which resulted in him butting heads with the lot of us.
To his chagrin, I naturally migrated into the role with time, once my charisma and rockier vocals became our unique selling point. The long, wavy hair didn’t hurt either.
And then there was Roman Jacobs. Total enigma.
Catholic, half-Italian, and for a while the bane of our collective existence.
When his hot-headed ego and truancy weren’t driving me mad, his silence warred.
Half the time I didn’t know why he even stuck around.
It was clear he despised the music we created and seemed more interested in girls than a career.
Although, I figured we were all just looking for a break that year—unwilling to squander the opportunity to perform for execs on the hunt for fresh talent.
We knew the prospect could be lifechanging if we played our hand well, and so we stuck together.
Bootcamp helped us gain a solid social media following, and once we announced that we five had linked up to form a band in 2009, the numbers kept leaping.
As far as marketing was concerned, YouTube was our savior.
It helped catapult us to the next level of stardom when we couldn’t afford marketing as independents, and gifted us avid fanbases in countries we couldn’t have dreamt of visiting before.
The fans watched us grow as a group, develop our sound and style, and blossom into young men in our weekly vlogs.
As a result of those videos, many of which went viral, as well as the response to our first self-published EP, we were signed by a major record label by 2011 and expected to produce a debut single by the end of the year.
It wasn’t without its setbacks, however.
In time, many of those young female followers began to overanalyze our interactions.
They speculated on our private relationships, cyberstalked and harassed our girlfriends, and even drove wedges between us by mischaracterizing our camaraderie as romance.
After the rumors were mainstreamed, becoming unbearably salacious, it left us reluctant to interact in public.
Eventually the fans concluded that my relationship with Alex ran deeper than what they saw onscreen, especially when he let me crash at his place for a few months.
Instead of two mates sharing a massive flat, it became a total fiction of secret matrimony and domestic bliss.
One in which we undoubtedly shared a bed, and our public-facing girlfriends were contractual beards.
These theories, more like the perverse delusions of fetishists, were invariably wrong.
Alex and I simply came to depend on one another throughout the chaos of establishing a new enterprise, something most people couldn’t begin to relate to at our age.
As the eldest and youngest of the group, it was only natural he’d look out for me and that I would look up to him.
Even so, the rumors took a toll on our friendship, and in a few years’ time, the bond was severed.
Sometimes I went back to those old vlogs, and although I couldn’t stomach how cringy we were, I liked to read through the comments of our supporters, who were largely responsible for the success we came to enjoy.
We would forever be indebted to them. Still, I couldn’t help but notice all everyone spoke about in those days was how adorable Alex and I were together. How grating.
To them, we were hopelessly and inviolably in love.
Somehow, they were laughably wrong yet worryingly precise.
I suppose the fact of my obsession was difficult to detect, but impossible to extinguish, consuming me in secret like hydrogen fire.
These obsessive, observant girls who advocated for my love and articulated it when I could not, sensed my truth because it was present and indisputable.
Overwhelming every moment of my waking life.
Informing my lyrics, addling my brain. Only, the object of my affection is where they tended to err, and this made me more miserable than the thought of no one noticing at all.
I suppose no one could perceive the thoughts pervading my mind day in and day out.
Ruminations that derailed every component of my existence.
Neither could Rome. He was clueless as to how obsessed I’d become.
He’d be repulsed to know: no matter how much time we’d stolen together—no matter how continually we fucked, no matter the nights I’d spent in total surrender, letting him kiss me until I convulsed—it was never enough.
I ached to carve his name into my flesh like stigmata.
Big gruesome letters across my brow, so that no one ever mistook who commanded my being.
Not Alex, but Rome. The beautiful, wroth-eyed boy. The moody aesthete. The silent one.
That stretch in late 2011, when the five of us gathered at my dad's bungalow to become better acquainted, stood out in my memory as unadulterated bliss. It was the verge of everything our lives were to become. Back then, many hadn’t suspected the full truth of my nature, despite it staring them right in the face and grinning.
But Rome had taken note, because what he sensed in me seemed to resonate with some dolorous thing he’d quelled in himself.
During that retreat, our new team from the record label set us up with a week's worth of food and every snack imaginable.
They invited a film crew to capture footage of us bonding and goofing off between interviews for our documentary.
The footage was supposed to be candid and endearing, and it was.
Everything about that week was uncontrived—from our on-camera antics to the evolving dynamics of the group to our fallouts and personal drama.
We genuinely adored one another, and dreaded for those days to end.