This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,40

to just a bit of heartfelt detail. I know what your penis looks like. I know what it tastes like, so don’t pretend I’m a stranger.

Or are you really so complacent now that you have nothing left to say? I’ve heard that this is what domestication does to men, sometimes.

So Claudia’s a teacher? Well, now, isn’t that a respectable job!

“Take care” (I mean, really, Jeremy!)

aoki

Aoki—

You think I’m domesticated? Coming from you, I suspect that’s an insult. Trust me, underneath the happy-husband exterior I’m still the spontaneous guy who went train jumping with you across East Germany; the same guy who took peyote and then went camping in Central Park in a hailstorm. OK, so maybe I haven’t gotten arrested for streaking through Union Square in a while, but just last week I had ice cream for breakfast!

Anyway. Sorry if I’m acting a little gun-shy, but … well, it’s been a long time, and I am.

Jeremy

J—

Why? Are you still hung up on me?

a

Even now, some twenty years after the fact, Jeremy could still viscerally recall the first moment he stepped on a stage. His seventh-grade talent show was perhaps not an epic event in anyone’s memory but his own, but still, it was the night from which the rest of his life seemed to stem. All the other musical numbers that evening had involved lip syncing and dance routines—1987 was all about “Papa Don’t Preach” and neon-pink spandex—or else mediocre renderings of Beethoven on flute or piano. But not Jeremy’s. He and his new friend, Daniel, had stepped onstage with a song Jeremy had written himself to a tune that borrowed heavily from the Beastie Boys, dressed in a costume of Billy Idol-esque gel-spiked hair and shredded jeans that Daniel’s mother had gamely distressed for them. They were, of course, ridiculous, but Jeremy didn’t know that at the time. All he knew was that when he stepped out there and the spotlight fell upon his face, nearly blinding him, something clicked internally. Daniel was petrified, his hands fumbling at the strings of his brand-new guitar, but Jeremy strode straight to the front of the auditorium stage as if it were the place he most belonged in the world and belted out his song with the confidence of a veteran rock star. Banging away at his guitar, screeching vaguely off-key—his voice had just started the process of changing from soprano to mild baritone—he no longer noticed the school jocks chewing spitballs in the back row, the crackle of the ancient speaker system, or the unfortunate smell of pea soup and stale grease left over from the lunch period. After years of itinerant living with his mother, feeling slightly lost in every new place they landed, he’d finally found a place where he belonged. Up there, onstage, he was someone entirely new, someone electric, someone extraordinary. And he had power over his audience: He could seduce them, he could make them adore him, he could make them sing.

It was true. The kids in the audience loved the song, even if the panel of adult judges awarded the top prize to a Japanese girl who played “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on her grandfather’s violin. In just three and a half glorious minutes, Jeremy’s position at Martin Luther Middle School was elevated to something close to a rock god. Throughout the rest of junior high and high school, Jeremy and Daniel’s band—which eventually traded in Daniel’s synthesizer for a real, if spectacularly untalented, drummer, and picked up the rather uninspired name Purple Voodoo Smoke—was the school’s go-to group for parties and class events. No longer was Jeremy just a misfit kid whose mother dressed him in weird cotton clothes she’d picked up in India, he was a heartthrob, sensitive and artsy and just feminine enough not to be scary to the girls in his class. He lost his virginity by ninth grade.

In some ways, the rest of Jeremy’s life had been an attempt to recapture that first transcendent moment onstage. Each time the lights came up and he found himself there, with twenty or a hundred or a thousand eyes trained on him, he felt himself on the verge of some sort of discovery, as if each new song that he delivered to the people below might sanctify him, renew him, reveal something about himself that he’d never known before. Often, he was disappointed: Even during the height of This Invisible Spot, when the band was playing to enormous crowds in Tokyo, he’d never