47 CARTER
C ARTER
I looked her up from time to time, wondering what her life might be like.
I couldn’t find much, which might have been a good thing.
A couple of photos from a local event or some such, often showing her standing next to her husband, smiling, his hand wrapped around her waist. Her Facebook profile photo.
I imagined her at dinner parties or playing with her kids.
I learned she’d returned to her hometown, which had surprised me.
I hoped she was having a good life. I didn’t dare to wonder if she’d sometimes thought of me, as well.
Maybe it was best she wasn’t there to see those early years.
After she was gone, this unrelenting darkness descended over me until I went numb.
I think the guys encouraged a kind of complete indulgence at first, hoping it might shake me out of it.
But everyone I met felt invisible. I’d tried over and over to reach her in those first few weeks after she’d left.
Leaving message after message. But I never heard back.
She was just ... gone. After that, I went off the rails.
Alex didn’t fare much better. Worse, actually.
Nobody had realized it at the time, but she’d been this kind of stabilizing force that kept us all on solid ground, an unnamed fifth member of the group, and when she was gone, it went to hell.
I just wanted to drown in my own misery, and I nearly did.
But then, after a while, those indulgences became the only thing that could make me forget for a little while.
The world became huge. The audiences roared bigger and louder every single night and in every single city we went to.
The decadence and availability of anyone and anything I wanted, right at my fingertips, became my drug of choice.
I just stopped connecting. It was easier that way for a long time. Being numb.
Eventually, I guess I became the person people expected me to be. I’m the lead singer of a rock band, right? The awards kept coming, the crowds kept getting larger, and the distance to her kept getting wider until everything about that time of my life was eclipsed by a new reality.
Michael has been asking about the rumors that have circulated over the years, the women who came in and out of the tabloids alongside my photo.
“After a while, you become less connected with the real world,” I tell him.
“It’s weird—you work so hard to become a success, but as the fame increases, the wall around you gets higher and higher until you can hardly see the real world anymore.
We have to protect our privacy so carefully that eventually it becomes impossible to just meet a normal person outside of the business.
One minute, you’re onstage with thousands of people cheering for you, and an hour later, you can’t find anyone to have a decent conversation with.
It can feel incredibly isolating. Fame becomes this incestuous little pool of celebrities who live in a fortress of their own making.
No one gets in and no one gets out, so we really just have each other most of the time.
Even if you do meet someone ... normal—someone who’s not talking to you because you’re famous or fit into their carefully curated publicity plan—there’s this weird moment when a look crosses their face and you can see them comparing the real you to the public version. ”
Inevitably, you feel like a disappointment.
“I guess it’s just easier to do the stereotypical Hollywood thing. Some of it’s been true. Most of it hasn’t.”