I close my eyes, trying to fall asleep, but all I can see in my dreams is my mother, running down Tolka’s Main Street, crying hysterically with me in her arms. In my dreams, I’m tiny. Still a baby. And I’m bleeding all over. We leave a trail of blood as the entire village follows us, running.
They are chasing us.
And we are running away.
I wake up in a cold sweat and feel the familiar chill wrapping itself around me. I’m shaking so hard my teeth are chattering.
I maneuver myself between Mal’s arms and borrow his heat, but sleep doesn’t revisit me.
A NOTE FROM ASHTON RICHARDS
Despite what y’all think, I’m not a world-class idiot.
I can tell she broke up with Hugh Cunt or whatever that suited, English dude’s name is. I mean, when she and Pissy Poet are in the same room, you can cut the sexual tension with a butter knife. Also, I’m privy to the fact that Pissy Poet and Sex Slave want to spend the next few days going at it like the world’s about to end.
I’m a pretty decent human, believe it or not, despite how the media portrays me. I mean, sure, I love my drugs. MDMA keeps me happy and bursting with colors and inspiration, and that’s the type of shit I’m known for. I’m the smiley, carefree guy.
Weed is a necessity at this point—who doesn’t smoke it these days? And my doctor prescribes the painkillers, so it’s not like I played God and decided I needed to cram them into my body on my own accord.
Also, I’m not going to defend my cocaine usage. But you try to live in the public eye since age seventeen and see what it does to your self-esteem. Every single mistake you’ve ever made is recorded, documented, aired on TMC, and stored—ready to be thrown in your face at any given moment.
And don’t get me started on dick pics and public breakups and Taylor Swift-like starlets who write songs about how bad in bed I am. (Let the record show that I didn’t even try with that particular chick. Eat shit, Jordan Jackson. Come to think of it, you’re probably into that BS. You were always too kinky for my taste.)
But I digress.
So, yeah, I mean, okay. I may have had my own motivation for this whole staying-in-Greece plot that doesn’t have anything to do with Sex Slave and Pissy Poet’s sexcapade.
It simply made perfect sense for my master plan.
Them keeping each other occupied = less people on my case.
Less people on my case = more time to do drugs and get drunk.
More drug and alcohol time = less time to think about how this album is never going to materialize, because I’m never going to record it, because I won’t be alive by March.
Because I have terminal cancer, you see. Stage fucking billion cancer, which has spread to every single part of my body. And here I thought I was just permanently hungover, never expecting to find out that while I was partying, my body was eating itself to death.
It is all fun and games until the fat lady—in this case my doctor—sings the sad news to me, and I choose to go out with a bang, not like a faded version of my old self—a sad, bony, shadow of myself, lying in a hospice bed staring at a pleasant, generic picture on a wall.
Yeah, that’s the money shot I won’t allow TMC to ever have: me dying in a hospital gown, looking like a corpse.
Wanna hear the best part? With the amount of drugs I’m using, people are never going to suspect I’m anything other than a twenty-seven-year-old rock star who died from an overdose. A good ol’ tragic legend who worked hard and partied even harder. I’ll slip into the Amy Winehouse and Brian Jones club with a fake ID, so to speak.
If any of the goddamn idiots surrounding me just looked closely—not even too close, just enough to smell my sick-person’s breath and see all the rotting behind my eyes—they’d have realized nothing I’ve done makes sense.
Riding cows? Traveling to Thailand? All the other Jackass shit?
I’m seizing the day, one second at a time, because I’m not counting years, or months, or days. I’m counting seconds.
Yo, Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain—I’m coming for you. Make room on the couch and put a good record on.
Over and fucking out.
Rory
I wake up trembling from the cold and immediately know Mal is not in bed. I can