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He plucks at the strings of his guitar absentmindedly, listening but not quite hearing the soft notes that reverberate from the instrument settled in his lap. He’d stopped hearing the music so long ago he briefly wonders if he’d ever hear it again. It all was just noise now, noise like the static in his mind that wouldn't cease unless he made it stop himself whether by smoking or snorting or shooting up. It didn’t matter, whatever made the buzzing stop he was happy to use. Whatever made it all stop.
Fingers brush two strings at the same time, producing something that could’ve been a chord, but Johnny paid no mind, like he hadn’t even heard it at all. He stared blankly at the wall opposite him instead as he sat on a pathetic old mattress with stains and dirt all over it. Pathetic like me, he thinks bitterly, and the twang of a string plucked too hard seems to accentuate his frustration. Fingers clench and release from fist to loose hand almost rhythmically, as if the motion itself was an extension of a beat unbeknownst to Johnny as he stares and stares and stares.
The love of his life had left him in a whirlwind of anger and regret, telling him to wake up , shoving him back and throwing reality into his face like she’d physically hit him and left him reeling and dazed. When he had come back to himself, she and her friends were gone, Johnny’s dealer St. Jimmy having vanished too, and Johnny was left alone to think. A fog had been lifted and Johnny saw the path of destruction he had caused, saw the people he had hurt and left behind - all from his own selfish anger and need for control over his life. He’d made it back to his apartment just barely before collapsing onto the mattress and staring up at the ceiling for a few hours before he rolled over and rummaged around for something, pulling out a notepad and pen a few moments later.
He sat up and began to write. It had been a while since he’d written to his mother, though he doubted she read his letters anyway, so what really was the point of it all? Maybe to organize his thoughts, or maybe it was just a pathetic attempt to make sense of it all. There it was again, that word. Pathetic. Johnny had scoffed and continued to write.
Dear Mom,
Do you remember when dad-
Johnny had made a face before scribbling that out.
Brad- said that I would never amount to anything?
He stares at the words numbly before continuing.
Well, I one upped him. I amount to nothing.
I knew you'd be proud.
Now he sat with his guitar long forgotten in his lap staring at a wall wondering what had happened to him, wondering where it all went wrong. Wondering how he had ended up where he was; sitting there with a broken heart and a static in his head that wouldn’t stop unless he made it.
Thin, moth eaten curtains billow lightly in a soft breeze that Johnny doesn’t feel, bumping into a small pile of seemingly unimportant things lumped together on a shelf underneath the window. One of these unimportant things gets knocked loose and tumbles to the floor with a metallic clatter. This finally drags Johnny’s attention away from the wall to whatever had fallen, dulled blue eyes blinking a couple times as his brain tries to register what had happened. He pauses, glancing around before setting his guitar down on the mattress and struggling to stand upright, swaying slightly as his head swims and his vision whites out briefly. When the earth settles, He walks over to the fallen item and bends down to pick it up before dropping it back down again with a harsh exhale of breath that seems magnified by ten times in the empty room.
His hand hovers for a moment before he moves to pick the thing up again, staring at it incredulously as if he’d completely forgotten this was an item he owned. A light metal chain was wrapped around his fingers and two heavier metal tags dangle in the air from where the chain hung, swaying like a pendulum on a clock ticking down, down, down. From what? Johnny supposed only the owner of this seemingly unimportant item would know.
He swallows thickly before turning and making his way back over to the ratty old mattress, even rattier old converse scuffing faintly against the hard floor before he manages to collapse back down next to the forgotten guitar, still staring at the chain and tags clutched tightly in his hand. His other hand comes up to lift the tags, reading the inscription carved into the metal with wide eyes.
He was seven, sitting on the porch outside his house in the suburbs as the sun set over the horizon, listening to his mother weep in the kitchen as she held a folded flag in her trembling hands. This would be the last time that flag saw the light of day before it was packed into a box and shoved out of sight and out of mind a couple weeks later.
He holds the tags in his small hands and rubs his thumb along the indentations in the metal that spelled out his father’s name and other things that were unimportant to a child’s mind, listening to birds twitter and chirp in the tree next to his bedroom window. Summer was coming to an end soon, and Johnny wondered if his dad would want to play baseball one last time before school began in the fall.
Johnny blinks and he’s back in the present, sitting on the same ratty old mattress he had been sitting on before, the dog tags held in his hand. The only difference now was that there was a wetness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, a hitch in his breath that was new. He closes his eyes and tries to swallow back the ache in his heart.
He’s fourteen. He’s glaring down at his boots as his step-father, Brad, tears into him for stealing one of his beers the night before. Johnny barely hears the insults slung at him by the burly man, his body trembling with barely repressed hatred and rage that had been threatening to boil over for months now. His mother had met Brad a year after Johnny’s father had died overseas, and to the eight year old boy it felt like an utter betrayal to not only his father, but to Johnny himself.
The notion had cemented itself into his young mind that his mother no longer loved Johnny’s father anymore, and by extension did not love him. So he became angry. He became quiet and repressed and every therapist that his mother made him see said the same thing: he’s in denial. People have different ways of dealing with grief, which is why there were five stages or something like that, Johnny didn’t know or care. They told his mother to give him time and space, to let him adjust. She remarried a few months later to a man that Johnny couldn’t stand.
Brad was a mean, spiteful drunk that viewed Johnny as nothing more than a nuisance and a disaster waiting to happen. Johnny would sit at the top of the stairs and listen to his step-father’s drunken ramblings about how Johnny would end up like ‘those freaks at the convenience store’ if he didn’t ‘suck it up and face the fucking music.’ Johnny had ran away from home for three days before his mother even noticed he was gone.
There’s a thud that makes Johnny look up at Brad’s beady little eyes and he starts when Brad rears back and backhands him across the face, making the skinny teen stumble and fall to the ground hard. He’s struggling to stand when Brad pulls him upright by his jacket and yanks the chain around his neck, pulling the dog tags into view. Rage is blatant in Brad’s expression as he realizes what they are and he throws Johnny back again, screaming at him about how he was weak and stupid just like his deadbeat father. Johnny had enough.
“At least I can get laid without getting a girl drunk off her ass!” Johnny yells, and both he and Brad pause because this was the first time Johnny had ever snapped back, had ever spoken up. They stared at each other before Johnny turned on his heel and stormed out of the house, ignoring Brad’s shouts for him to get back inside. He walks for a long time, kicking gravel and staring at the grass underneath his feet before he finally makes it to the 7/11 a couple blocks from his neighborhood. There’s already a small gathering of people there, dressed in a similar fashion as Johnny as they loiter and smoke and wrestle as someone plays loud music on a radio placed nearby.
People notice him immediately and watch as the scrawny teen trudges over to two other boys who are leaning against the wall smoking and chatting. The first to look up was Will, Johnny’s best friend since they were ten. Will then nudges Tunny, a new friend they’d met that year. The two watch as Johnny walks over and Will pipes up once his friend stops and leans against the wall next to them.
“All good, John?” Will asks as he watches his best friend slide down the wall into a sitting position with his knees pulled up to his chest. Johnny doesn’t respond for a moment, fingering at the dog tags now in plain view. Tunny watches curiously but doesn’t move to ask what they were for. When Johnny speaks there’s an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before.
“I wanna start a fuckin’ war.”
A sob wrenches its way from Johnny’s parted lips and his head drops, eyes still squeezed shut as tears slip down his pale cheeks, shoulders heaving with every breath.
They call him the Jesus of Suburbia, say he’s the voice of a generation. He stands in the middle of a group of angry punks and preaches about the government and about war and about how if the old bastards weren’t going to stop killing people, it was up to the young people to stop them. Tunny and Will stand with him and cheer him on as Johnny rants and raves, dog tags swinging with every movement he makes. No one asks where he got them, but everyone knows they’re why Johnny speaks about the military with hatred in his eyes.
It’s almost one in the morning and Johnny was laying in the grass next to Will as Tunny told some story about a girl he met at a party who apparently only liked him for his stocky figure. Will giggled next to Johnny, high off his ass from the weed they’d scored from one of Johnny’s loyal ‘followers.’ Johnny was still working on his joint, staring up at the stars with a blank expression on his face as if he really wasn’t paying attention at all. Will was the one that noticed Johnny’s silence and turned his head to look at his best friend curiously.
“You alright, Jesus?” Will asks, rolling onto his side and staring at the other boy, big brown eyes filled with concern as silence from his friend was extremely abnormal, even when the younger was high. Johnny always had something to say, something to add. Buzzing with energy that the quacks deemed to be ADHD. They gave him ritalin, though Johnny never used the stuff for its intended purpose.
Johnny exhales, smoke rising up from his nose into the night sky, and his response takes both Will and Tunny off guard.
“You guys ever wonder if there’s somethin’ bigger out there?” Johnny asks, and Will snorts while Tunny shakes his head before turning away. “No, seriously,” the younger protests, sitting up and looking at his two closest friends. Will’s eyebrows are raised as he watches Johnny, then he shrugs.
“Fuck if I know, man,” is his elegant response which makes Tunny laugh. Johnny glares at Will before looking at Tunny.
“What about you, Tunny. You think there’s somethin’ bigger out there? Somethin’’ other than this shithole?” Tunny turns to look at Johnny, who was watching him with a glint in those blue eyes of his that always signaled trouble. Tunny shrugs as well which makes Johnny groan and flop back down into the grass much to his friends' amusement. He stares up at the sky and raises a hand to touch the dog tags that lay against his chest, rising and falling with every breath he took. “I think there is,” he says quietly, something in the tone of his voice making Will and Tunny turn and look at him once more.
Johnny takes a final drag from his joint before putting it out in the grass next to him. “We’re meant for somethin’ bigger and better than stupid fuckin’ Jingletown.”
He finally opens his eyes and looks at the dog tags, looks at them for the first time since he arrived in the city. Before he met St. Jimmy, before he fell in and out of love. Before he became a shell of himself. He remembered who he was, and he remembered who wore these tags before him.
She’s curled up next to him on the mattress, fingers tracing nonsensical patterns onto his skin as they lay together in comfortable silence. Johnny was playing with a strand of her hair, watching her with adoration in his eyes. He paused when he felt her hand brush against the chain around his neck, jerking slightly and making her startle and blink up at him.
“You okay?” she asks softly, and something about her voice always seemed to calm him down like no amount of drugs could. He relaxes a little and nods, smiling when her face brightens at his response. He’d never been in love before, so he had no idea what it actually felt like to be in love, but whatever he was feeling right now in this moment, and what he felt in every moment he spent with this girl? That had to be love, right? Johnny watches as she plays with the chain for a moment before he speaks.
“You can look if- if you want.” His voice is quiet and small, making her pause and look at him again. “Really, I mean it. I-” He pauses, then smiles. “I trust you.” Her face lights up in a blinding grin that’s contagious and Johnny can’t help but return it as she pulls the tags from under his shirt. They stare at the metal pieces for a moment before she opens her mouth to speak, but he cuts her off. “They’re my dad’s,” he says, and she looks at him for a moment before understanding widens her eyes slightly. “He, uh..” Johnny clears his throat awkwardly, averting his gaze. “He died when I was seven.”
He waits for the pity, the embarrassing stupid pity everyone used to give him in grade school when they’d learn about his dad. But it never came. A hand was pressed against the side of his face so gently he startles, blinking a couple times and meeting her gaze. She’s looking at him and Johnny can’t detect a trace of pity in her eyes and this alone confirms in his mind that what he’s feeling has to be love, because if it isn’t he doesn’t know what it is. She kisses him and he feels like he’s invincible.
It was getting dark out now, the sounds of the nightlife beginning to start just beyond the fire escape, the only light in the small apartment from a streetlamp that cast an eerie orange glow over everything. The chain rattles as Johnny slips the tags around his neck for the first time in months, shivering when the cool metal touches his heated skin. He wonders when he’d even taken them off. Was it when he met Jimmy? Was it when he shot up for the first time? He couldn’t remember anymore, but putting them on now felt like a piece of himself had finally come home, and he felt almost complete for the first time since leaving Jingletown.
“Why do you never take them off?” she asks one day when they’re sitting out on the fire escape, smoking and watching the world go by. The question makes Johnny pause, turning his head to meet her curious gaze. He shrugs and takes a drag from his joint, the dog tags rattling against his bare chest as he moves.
“Guess they just remind me of the real important shit in life.” She stares for a moment before taking his free hand in hers and lacing their fingers together as she turns her head back towards the city skyline. Johnny doesn’t try to hide his smile when she does.
There was a long, drawn out pause before Johnny picked up the acoustic sat next to him and settled it back in his lap, fingers finding their places on the instrument like they had never left. He plucks a string once.
Then twice.
Then he strums the guitar and it’s like he’s hearing music again for the very first time, his heart racing and a twist in his gut making his body hum with energy he hadn’t felt in so long. Johnny blinks back tears as he plays a few notes, something familiar yet foreign all at once, and the words come to him naturally like they’d been there all along.
“Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last- ”
A pause, quiet, a hitch in soft breaths.
“Wake me up when September ends. ”