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Gerard has never had his own place.
He spent time away at art school, but it wasn’t like, a real grown-up place, or…anything resembling a place where humans might dwell, really. And since the band, he’s just carted his shit between crappy vans and crappier motels and the bus and blessed, blessed hotel rooms, and it’s all well and good being a rock star, you know, but there’s nothing cool about living in your mom’s basement, no matter how many pairs of panties you might have received through the mail in the last week.
So he buys a place, okay, but then they’re on the road for a while and Gerard lies awake at night missing it, thinking about it all empty and alone. What if squatters move in while he’s gone? He doesn’t want to ask his mom to check, in case they’re armed squatters (it is Jersey, after all) so he just frets over it quietly and keeps an eye on the local news website.
He abandons his comic books and takes up poring methodically through home improvement catalogs. With a pad. And pen. Just in case. What? Gerard is passionate, ok, and thorough.
By the time they go home, the guys have taken to covering their ears and singing loudly whenever Gerard tries to ask their opinion about parquet floors, or coving. Except Frank, who doesn’t listen to anything anyone says when he’s playing videogames, so Gerard can sit by him and talk about screen doors to his heart’s content while Frank kills zombies and prostitutes and collects magic stars.
During their rare and precious time off, Gerard throws himself full-tilt into a torrid love affair with his new place. He hires men to like, come do stuff, and takes measurements and draws wildly idealized sketches of his dream bedroom and collects paint samples and goes grocery shopping.
Mikey comes over, and they spend an entire afternoon feeding stuff into Gerard’s garbage disposal, just to see what produces the biggest mess/grossest noise/most violent reaction. (Coffee grounds, watermelon rinds and chopsticks, respectively.)
Gerard sorts through boxes of crap from his mom’s house, unpacks his clothes, puts stuff up on the walls - he hammers in nails! And uses a spirit level! Every time he does something all by himself, he calls Bob, who is the manliest person Gerard knows, so they can have a gruff conversation about it. After a while, Bob won’t pick up anymore, so Gerard leaves detailed messages instead. (In Chicago, Bob listens to them, rolling his eyes. He catches himself smiling once or twice, though.)
He orders drapes and has his carpets taken up and paints all the woodwork himself, and he’s sitting in the backyard (he has a backyard!) washing paint out of…everything, when Frank comes over, holding a potted plant.
“Hey,” he says. He waves the plant around. “Housewarming.”
Gerard puts the plant on the windowsill in the kitchen, because he read somewhere that you shouldn’t have plants in your bedroom because they breathe out carbon dioxide at night and you could die.
Plus, he can look at it while he’s doing the dishes – which, by the way, gets really old, really fast.
He buys a dishwasher, and moves the plant into his studio – well, it’s the second bedroom, but it has huge windows and a high ceiling and if Gerard wants to call it his studio, he can. Because it’s his own place.
Maybe he talks to himself. Maybe he sings in the shower. Maybe he walks around naked. Maybe he watches porn whenever he wants. In the living room, even. Maybe he watches porn more than he’s really comfortable admitting, just because the novelty of having the volume as high as he wants is never, ever, ever going to wear off. Maybe he dances like a loser when embarrassing songs come up on iTunes – maybe he does all of these things on an alarmingly regular basis, but it’s his *own place* and he can do whatever the hell he likes.
It’s awesome.
Dishwasher, studio, garbage disposal, freedom to dance around naked, plant. Gerard is pretty sure he’s all set up. But something’s missing – he doesn’t know what, because he’s got all his books and DVDs and art supplies and stuff, and he doesn’t know where he would put more furniture, but something isn’t right.
He tries moving furniture, but it doesn’t help. He switches all the stuff on the walls around, and goes over to his mom’s to see if he left anything vital behind, and checks all the locks and re-organizes his kitchen, and still.
He just can’t settle. And dammit, he should be able to settle.
With a heavy heart, Gerard comes to realize that there’s only one thing for it.
He’s going to have to go to Ikea.
Gerard is of the opinion that everything is more fun if you force it upon share it with someone you love. Mikey’s in Brooklyn and Bob’s in Chicago and Ray has an actual *life*, whatever, and Gerard wants it to be someone he can reminisce with when they’re back on the road, so Gerard makes Frank go with him to Ikea, and pretends he doesn’t see Frank stifling a yawn when Gerard asks him which bookshelf he thinks will complete Gerard’s life – the one named after a girl, or the one that’s composed entirely from umlauts. Frank drags his feet a little until they get to the kids’ department, and then Gerard doesn’t see him for like, a half hour.
Gerard is examining fruit bowls when Frank reappears, wearing a stuffed python around his neck and holding a wall lamp shaped like a starfish under his arm.
“You have to get this,” Frank says, dumping it in Gerard’s cart. “It makes cool shapes on the wall, you’ll love it.”
“I’m an *artist*,” Gerard replies, meaning, of course, that he could paint cool shapes on the wall himself if that’s what he wanted from his interior décor (it isn’t), but Frank pretends not to get it and Gerard can’t be bothered to argue.
The lamp is the ugliest thing ever brought into being by man, but its okay. Gerard’s secretly planning to make Frank put all the flat-pack shit together when they get home, and this way, when Frank bitches, Gerard can say, “I let you have the lamp,” and Frank will have to shut up and do as Gerard says.
Gerard moves through the rest of the store, considering and discarding an endless parade of Stuff Named in Swedish, but he can’t find the One Thing he’s missing. He’s briefly tempted by an interesting pasta jar, but in the end he just ends up buying Frank’s stupid ugly lamp. And the python. And a CD cabinet, which is an impulse buy and Gerard doesn’t really need it, but he’s going to make Frankie pay for that wall lamp, one way or the other.
Of course, when they get back and Frank fixes the lamp to the wall, Gerard realizes that it’s perfect. He gets irrationally mad at Frankie for ten minutes, then gets over it and orders takeout from Frank’s favorite place and they eat while Frankie spreads all the pieces of Gerard’s pointless CD cabinet over his living room floor.
“We don’t need *these*,” he scoffs, flinging the instructions in the general direction of away. Except of course they do, but by the time Frank realizes this, the cabinet will only hold seven CDs and the instructions have been lost to the ether.
Whatever. Frankie gives up and joins Gerard on the couch and they watch a Robot Chicken marathon and Frank falls asleep on Gerard’s shoulder.
At two a.m., Gerard levers himself out from underneath, carefully because he doesn’t want to wake Frankie up, and goes to his own room and tosses and turns and can’t sleep.
After an hour, he pads back into the living room and sits in the armchair, smoking and looking at Frank, splayed out face-down on the sofa in the soft light of the ugly lamp.
“Oh,” he thinks, and feels completely at home.
A/N: I have never used a garbage disposal, so all the info about that is stolen without permission from Bill Bryson's Notes from a Big Country, which you should totally read.