Photo of the artist as an old man.
It ain't. I have been told, as an artist, that I should write about that which I know. I know about waiting.
Being a performer is all about waiting. It is like, 23 hours of stress and an hour on stage. Some say that that hour makes it all worthy, yet most of the folks who said that are dead.
It can be a worse to almost have it and then not have it. It is worse to have had recognition and lost than to never have been recognized at all.
When The Singer's band got signed, it hit him like an accident. When he started doing the music that he did, ten years prior, there was absolutely no market for something like that. There just was no niche in which to sell something that was evil and sweet and dark and unapologetically simultaneously loving God and celebrating narcotics. That demographic was somewhere, but to a the "tin-eared, graph-paper brained accountants" who make the decisions in that sort of thing, there is no room for, no audience for and no darn way to get that cat to stick into the bag.
But things changed. Somewhere the artist was nodded out and stirred his head and noticed that the world had caught up with his twisted and cool vision. There was a way to suddenly sell evil. It was fun and beautiful and shimmery and bitchin. I mean, you couldn't snowboard to it and it wouldn't sell Coca-Cola. You could barely dance to it. But you could fuck to it and you could dream waking-dreams while dying to it.
Marketing geniuses sent the weirdest upstarts on the payroll (like that funny-haired kid who was hired because he was somebody's nephew, but seemed weird enough to actually understand what the kids like, even if he did have no business credentials) out to sniff at the Singer.
All da sutten, all the Singer's friends were telling him that he was gonna be a star. He didn't really believe them, but if they believed in him that much, the smallest he could do would be to confer the possibility that they were right. So he began to act "as if," interpreting the distortions of what he believed to define a star. Some of these actions pissed folks off, but never the mind. If it were to be, it were to be, and it was. soon, the Singer found himself in full-possession of the mythical beast of musician-yore, a RECORD CONTRACT.
He did his darn-bestest to fulfill all of the obligations. The record came out and it was fucking great. Critics and fans alike loved it, at least the critics and fans who heard it. Yet there was no marketing push. No one knows why. Well, someone knew, but they didn't tell me. Oh well, fuck it. I was and am a good friend of the Singer. I adore that little sawed-off fuck. And I love the twisted sinews of his uber-evil beauty. It is the fluff-puff on my marmot. But he lost his deal. And he lost the band. I watched the needle screech another man.
Addiction in general and heroin in specific is not about going anywhere. Even drugs that make you go fast, kill inertia and screech one to a ground-out halt. Stimulant addicts are spinning on that rusty wheel, going nowhere, fast. Heroin junkies are asleep next to the wheel.
The Singer did both.
The Singer believed his hype. He slept and dreamt of stadiums while the clubs he played were becoming emptier. He dreamed schemes to bring more into the barns, to corral the chattel and cattle into his little rodeo. "If only I was presented in the right way," he thought, forgetting the number-one rule of show business, "If it has wings, it will fly. You can't polish a turd." His whole act was loosing his wings. they were being sucked up into his arm and replaced by the water wings-sprouted out his fucking back.
He also forgot the number-two rule of show business, "You meet the same people on the same way up that you meet the way down." He had been cocky and off-handed with everyone on his balloon-ride up. He behaved in a manner he felt to be befitting of a star. He did your drugs, he fucked your girlfriend. He was rude, crude and nude. but he wasn't yet a star, only a star-in-training, so it failed to fly.
Eventually he lost all and nailed his hopes to the door of nothing. He lay there for another year or two, then stopped killing himself. He then spent 4 years scabbing his way back to nothing, back to zero.
He prayed. He meditated, he helped old ladies across the street. He fell in love with one beautiful lady, and was true to her. He slowly wrote some more powerful yet happier songs. At the age of thirty-five, God gave him a break and let him love himself until he could love himself. He put together his fourth little nothing group. Only this one got a series of little breaks. The Singer became solvent and had a long, small, but important career in the arts.
The end.