Chapter Text
“Here’s to the crazy ones,” he begins on stage in Greenwich Village, and the crowd goes wild. They had never been this far from home, not yet, and this is their first stop in the continent. This is America of their dreams as a band, the America that Damiano is doing his best to cater to, the audience that apparently expects to hear a mixture of Steve Jobs and beat poetry, so he feeds them the misfits, the lovers and those who would burn, burn, burn, exploding like Roman candles across the stars, just as his manager advised.
The crowd is clamoring for prey, and everything between his heels and his eyeliner now belongs to them. Damiano is wondering if they have ever tried translating their lyrics. He has been feeling cynical, detached, as if he was hired to play a rock star on the stage, and someone else used to be that twenty-year-old kid who wrote songs like he would stop breathing immediately without a pen in his hand, without Vic and Thomas competing with each other, without Ethan grounding them all in the drumbeat, playful and menacing in turns.
Damiano stays out on the balcony all night, unable to sleep, watching the city lights flicker in the fog, turn to a glimpse of dawn over the skyscrapers and the garbage bags being brought into the streets in the morning, and they need to leave, again.
The schedule is brutal, fifteen shows in a month, and the rest of the days are spent traveling until all airports blur into a single maze of grey carpets, Starbucks stands and boarding announcements, until their bus first becomes a refuge and then threatens to strangle him inside.
So Damiano rides in front, alone, over the long night on the highways heading South. The windows are open, there is a smell of jasmine and dogwood, and lightning bursting through the clouds on the horizon, and he has been living on coffee and cigarettes, champagne in the evenings, and he feels he could walk away into the storm, sell his soul at the nearest crossroads, as long as he had his guitar.
What would he ask for? A mega-hit, a festival, their words on everyone’s lips? That’s what that twenty-year-old kind would have answered. Now, Damiano thinks, it will have to be the chance to take away the loneliness he has begun to carry like a luggage that he cannot seem to put down. Their concerts have been a haze since New York, though they perform with well-trained vitality, but the only time he feels truly alive is when he is watching the endless road through the bus window, alone. Until Ethan joins in.
“Can’t sleep?” Damiano asks.
“Not really. Was looking for you.”
“Well, you found me. What now?” It comes out more irritated than Damiano feels, but then, he has not been properly sleeping or eating in days, and now they have a show in Atlanta, and then they will have to fly to New Orleans to make up for the cancellation due to a tornado, and he feels so foreign in this land that is routinely ravaged by nature, tornadoes, forest fires, earthquakes, and yet everyone seems to be cheerfully accepting of them all. He realizes his thoughts have drifted away as he catches Ethan mumbling something.
“Sorry, I’ve been a bit lost in my head. What did you want to say?”
Ethan snorts. “Exactly that. And also, that we all have decided, if you don’t go to sleep this instant, we will have to stage a proper intervention. You’ve been a shadow of yourself the moment you’re off stage. What happened?”
Damiano doesn’t know what to answer. Because what happened – what truly happened – is that his wishes have come true, and now he needs to learn to live with them. Also, he might be not much more than twenty, but, paraphrasing his own song, he can no longer afford to create drama, and perhaps, he did not realize how soon that would happen. But now, he needs to tell Ethan something so that he and the rest of them would get off his back.
“OK, mom. I will go to bed shortly.”
Ethan rolls his eyes. “And actually be able to fall asleep?”
Damiano cannot promise him that, and feels too tired to explain, so he only sighs and leans against the window, and startles when he feels Ethan’s palm on his back.
It is calm. Quiet. Ethan keeps rubbing circles around Damiano’s lower back, kneading his shoulders, delivering occasional scratches to the back of his neck, as the bus keeps on barreling over the increasingly poorly paved roads. The mumbled sounds that leave Damiano’s lips were supposed to express gratitude, but he is suddenly finding it very hard to form words.
Ethan does not stop, refusing to get into a conversation, intent on Damiano actually getting some rest, and as Damiano starts falling asleep, he is pulled into a hug and vaguely thinks that he has never felt this safe.
He wakes up in a few hours, alone, already feeling the lack of Ethan’s arm like a physical pain, and crawls to his hotel room, barely pulling covers over himself before he falls asleep again.
The following day they are on the plane, bumping and shuddering in the air currents of the Gulf, and Damiano is so glad of the seat away from the rest, because he can turn to the window to hide his face and let himself give in to the anxiety churning in his stomach, knowing that the few passengers who notice him will simply think that he is a nervous flier. The worry about another interminable set of shows and sleepless nights, and the feeling he cannot name yet, the desire for silence and safety, and another pair of eyes on the open road.
When they arrive, the anxiety remains, and Damiano still cannot sleep, and after they are back on the bus, after the photo-ops and the reporters and the inevitable crowd of visitors in their dressing rooms, and more drinking and flirting than he feels he can stomach, he finally asks Ethan to come up to the front with him.
Ethan agrees, and Damiano does not have time to think about how readily he had accepted the offer, because he is too busy falling asleep huddled up to Ethan’s side, again. And again he is trying to make himself decide to do something about his newfound need for their drummer, but his thoughts are clouded by exhaustion, and he feels so far from home that he is unmoored, about to get lost in this strange land like a stray balloon bouncing across rooftops.