Ok, so, cathartic, soothing conversation tonight with Rei over a slight artistic handicap which I now feel much better about.

This is good.

I've now learned that trying to make macaroni salad at two in the morning when you haven't made your recipe in almost a year and can't remember what the ingredients or procedures are is a very very bad idea.

Starting to write a bit with a character who's been itching to be written, and I couldn't figure out just how to start him off, only now I do.  SO, I'm just experimenting with it a little bit here is all, so I can go to sleep knowing I have a record of it somewhere.

NOTE:  This is a different universe entirely from what I was writing before and, though John does make brief appearances, it isn't really the same John.  There is no Simon.

As for setting: if you don't know anything about NYC, don't worry -- I'm no expert.  I reference more general areas, but the actual shops, buildings, etc, will be mostly fictional.

If you know everything about NYC (a.k.a., you frequent or live there), feel free to correct me, drop names for locations and such, etc.

----

(June)

William had fallen from the guys' Good Graces.

No.  Really.  The band had been on the verge of a breakthrough; the Village Voice had called them "up-and-coming", the local music magazines had said they showed promise.  They were even attracting a small crowd from the island, prepubescent tween and teenage girls who didn't know any better and a certain breed of teenage males who did.

After all, the three of them -- John, Will and Sammy -- did hail from that part of the city. 

But then, John had found an opportunity of his own.  He slept with a choreographer.  Which didn't really have so much to do with his career persay; the fact that he'd landed a minor role off-broadway three weeks later was completely unrelated, and no one in the show had so much as spoken to the highly gifted thirty-something Zhou, who John had found purely by accident at some bullshit yoga something-or-other in Central Park.   The fact of the matter was, the two were shacking up now, and it was looking to be long-term.

Which meant that William could no longer do anything with the frontman.

This normally wouldn't have bothered him.  They only really hooked up when the older man was single anyway.  Will was happy for John, really he was.  After the young man's veritable breakdown a few months before when another random jackass had up and left and the brunette had lopped off his own long trailing hair for no other reason than not wanting to be himself anymore, the keyboardist thought he was going to have to commit the poor idiot.

So this should have been a good thing.

But now, he was a third wheel.

Chris came to every fucking rehearsal.  Had he not known the order of things between Sammy and the thin whisp of a brooklyner, he'd swear that the latter had a goddamn stick up his ass.  He just sat there and frowned the whole damned time over the same cup of coffee he managed to pick up from the same cheap vendor every morning; didn't he have a job or something?

And now the choreographer managed to drop by every once in awhile in his fucking leotard and sneakers sweating like he'd run the whole way, rarely ever saying a word and just smiling at the lead singer until the break, when the two would invariably disappear somewhere and accidentally remind Will that he on his own.  This hadn't happened with any of the unfortunate flings the brunette had fallen into before Zhou.

It was too much.

He dropped them all.

He'd wished they were all more animalistic about it, but no, they were fucking peachy.  Good Graces fell apart the second he left, but the family bond hey had apparently didn't.  Will tried not to care.

As far as he was concerned, the second they'd announced that they were over to the very confused and crowded tavern, he was gone.


(October)

Sammy and John went back every Friday at the same venue they'd always played for the karaoke, the beer, and the fans, who showed up in hoardes despite the fact that, officially, the group was gone.  Will only stopped in once for a beer out of nostalgia nealry half a year after the band's last performance; what he found instead were the two onstage, John with one mic stand and Sammy sitting on an empty equipment pully with the other, banging at an overturned ice bucket with a set of battered drumsticks, the two very happily red in the face. 

Fine.  He saw how it was; they were perfectly fine without him.

He left too drunk to remember where he'd been, only to find himself evicted from his doorstop at three in the morning when he finally made it up the seven flights of rickety metal stairs outside his building to the now-padlocked door.  So he stopped off and had some more to drink somewhere else, with someone else a few flights down (who, he wasn't sure), and found himself awake at the foot of the winding staircase just inside the hall of his mother's high-rise in the most expensive gentrified cluster of Chelsea, the address he refused to lay claim to unless it involved a social security number and he couldn't get away with denying who he belonged to. 

After crawling to a bathroom so ridiculously ornate they might have flushed their fucking money down the toilet, he emptied his churning stomach until he was dry-heaving in disgust at ending up back home. 

His mother wouldn't care; she was a cold-hearted socialite who wore two-piece suits with skirts, shaking money out of people's pockets for something, Will was sure -- he never knew what his mother did for a living, and he never cared.  He did know that she owned a lot of hotels, was never home, had divorced his father and let him die after an HIV test came back positive and proved that he was cheating on her with a man at the publishing company he'd slaved over (Will had been nine, and they'd thought he was too young to understand these things), and that she'd hated -- hated -- her only child ever since she'd caught him in the middle of a friendly fling with John back in high school. 

He'd tried to spite her into loving him again by having a fling with every female he could find, even hooking up with a hooker for a week or so as if to ask his mother if this was what she really wanted, but all she did was leave a flyer under his door announcing HIV testing at a local clinic.

He'd left that day to shack up with John and build the band.  He never finished high school, and she'd never called him on it.  After a few stints with a few weak gangs, a short and questionable relationship with a guy working the ER and a brief addiction to pain killers, the band had picked up and left him with enough money to get the cheapest room in the most rundown building far enough from his mother and close enough to his friends to make him feel like his own person.

Both -- the guys and the apartment -- which he no longer had.

In the worst of tempers, hung over and loathing, William dragged himself up the stairs to the room that had once been his and threw himself into the door.  Nothing had been touched -- the same scribbled remains of Advanced Music Theory from what should have been the nineteen-year-old's second-to-last year of high school was still laying on his floor in front of his bed.  And within a few dizzy minutes of attempting to remove his days-old clothing, so was he.

---------


Ok, so we have the setting...I know what I'm going to be doing with him, sort of.  I've got one other character under my belt, not a major character persay but a steadily recurring one with a name and a personality of their own.  I don't know who Will will end up with, or even who he'll interact with.  Hell, I don't know what he's going to do from here.  Make suggestions about that bit, and I'll be sure to take them into consideration.

I just needed to get the beginnings out of my head.

The language is very course, but that's because it's somewhat from William's POV, so expect that.  It won't get too out of hand.


Sorry for the TOTAL LAMENESS AND SUCKINESS of this piece; it's very early, and I'm finally ready to sleep.  Just ignore the whole thing XD

Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.