Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,82

perfect tear going down his right cheek like the Native American in the litter PSA, Rufus Wainwright. We left again.

We didn’t know what to do but keep moving. By that time, people were starting to hang up signs with missing persons’ faces on them. Like lost dog flyers. Like they thought their loved ones had pulled themselves out of the pile and were wandering the city. Like they were just lost, with amnesia, waiting for a kind soul to point them home. You could start to believe that, too, if you watched these people hang these signs up, if you got a good look at their faces. You could make yourself think: It’s good that they’re doing this. It’s going to make it easier for everyone to find one another. It sobered us up. Ned and I went back to our respective apartments, alone.

The actual cloud reached the East Village the next morning. Everything was hazy, like it had a filter over it. A big group of us had dinner together that night, and someone in the restaurant dropped their fork, and everyone jumped. We all had private conversations about where we kept our weed and/or porn, so we could parent-proof one another’s apartments in case anything happened to us. I called one of the producers on Kidnapped out in Los Angeles to see whether we’d even continue doing the show, and he said we would eventually, though the set—a bombed-out warehouse space—would probably have to be rethought. We talked about the whole thing for a while and he said: “A bunch of us went out for dinner last night, and the waiter asked if we wanted dessert, and we all just went ahead and got some. This thing is really affecting everybody.”

The next day, I went up to the studio for the special TRL we did, and after it was over, I decided to get out of the city. There was nothing I could do but wander and sigh and feel heavy, so I just made the decision and was on my way thirty minutes later. I hopped on an all-night train to Chicago, walked to the first rental-car place I saw, and rented their last car, which was a red Mustang convertible. I drove it to St. Louis, hung around and hugged my family too much for a few days, and then drove the rest of the way out to Los Angeles. I had only the clothes on my back and my laptop, so I bought new shirts and jeans and underwear from Gaps along the way. John Mayer’s Room for Squares was re-released by Sony Columbia on September 18, so I picked it up in a Best Buy in Texas and listened to it over and over again. (“Your Body Is a Wonderland” is indefensible, but the rest of that shit holds up.)

When I got back to my place in Santa Monica, it was exactly as I had left it. I had bought a stack of newspapers the afternoon of the tenth. (I was either making a special effort to stay up on current affairs or just doing all the puzzles, but either way it was mostly to counteract whatever effect Shane was having on me.) I had the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today. And they were full of nothing. Stacks of pages of whatever we felt was important enough to talk about before all of this happened. They were like transmissions from another dimension.

I kept them. I thought: These will be valuable someday. These are the literal last messages from the old world.

I thought: we will never be this frivolous, this silly, this unserious ever again.

I think a lot of stupid things.

Rocky Horror came back after a few months, like the rest of the shows on Broadway did, and I had my eight performances, right after Cindy Adams, just before Sally Jesse Raphael. Sebastian Bach had his teenage son with him backstage a lot, and the kid had his nose in a book most of the time, and it dawned on me that that’s how you rebel against your dad when your dad is Sebastian Bach.

Right away, I clicked with one of the chorus boys, a gorgeous Irish-looking dude with a beautiful voice and perfect hair and teeth. We went out for an early dinner between the matinee and the evening show on Wednesday, and while we initially couldn’t get in at Ruby Foo’s, a manager came sprinting from the back and