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Thom/Beck	By : VinylTap Category: Singers/Bands/Musicians > Radiohead Views: 2950 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not know Beck or any of the members of Radiohead. This story is a work of fiction, and I make no money or profit from it.

Chapter List
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Very soon, they’d give their lives up to the tour bus. The dreaded tour bus. Cozzie, I don’t like this game anymore.

Oh, Jonny, the game has only just begun.

But none of them really knew what to expect. They did, sort of, a little bit, from the last record, but it wasn’t gonna be anything like that now. The air crackled electric with what was to come. Whatever five feet and six inches that made Thom up would have to be ready for it, and he wasn’t certain how, and he squirmed uneasily in place, biting his nails, twisting his limbs, I don’t like this game, either.

He was embarrassed to have roadies. He was embarrassed when he was asked what food they’d like backstage. He sounded to himself like a douche when he mumbled about all the vegan specifications, but being vegan was important, so he couldn’t not. “Tour bus, it’s like one big sleepover, see?” Ed snickered as he climbed the set metal bars of the bunk bed he had claimed, the rail was secured to the wall , he imagined he would’ve loved something like this back when he were, say, eight. It was a very sad state of affairs. This was a much bigger deal than the last tour. There were curtains around the beds in attempt to create the illusion you weren’t in close confines with a bunch of other guys. There were TV monitors suspended from the walls so you could watch stuff during the hours spent on the road, about as much consolation as an in-flight movie.

Curtains on the windows. Bathrooms with fancy insides. The most affordable attempts at maintaining a rock band’s dignity, circumstances considered. They sat across the bottom bunks like frightened children opposite Tim Greaves, their tour manager. Thom did his best to straighten out to his full height while sat, top bunk above him just brushing the spikes of his hair, band frontman, still biting his nails. Twenty-seven years old. Really a child.

Greaves explained gently what the tour dates were like. Where they had to be each day, what they’d have to do between, when they’d set up. What they didn’t have to worry about. What they had to make sure to do. He’d work with them. It would be all right. Nigel was there, too, even though he wasn’t coming along. He could still sleep with Thom, if it made Thom feel better, but Thom said he was all right now, he thought he could do this.

All right. All right.

Jonny couldn’t quite fit next to Thom because of his height, he had to lean forth, legs crossed, body bent forward, he gazed over Thom to read the documents in his hands that Greaves gave him. Not daring to ask anything. Secretly grateful he wasn’t in charge. They would tour the UK till the end of March, then Japan, then North America, they were sold out already.

“Right, then,” Tim said, “you know what you’re doing? For this week, at least?”

Thom nodded, like the pre-adolescent left in charge babysitting for the first time.

“What if—” Jonny asked very quietly, then coughed, then spoke a little louder, bravely glancing at Tim, “—what if we get ill?”

Tim glanced back. “You get ill, then you get ill,” he said, “it happens.”

Jonny nodded, hair bouncing.

“You get ill, you’re out of the band,” Colin smirked, and Jonny gasped with mock surprise before Thom pushed Colin aside, both of them glad for a bit of release.

“Don’t get ill,” Phil said, one finger pointed good-naturedly at Jonny, and Jon said, okay. At Thom’s side, Jonny’s long fingers closed loosely in his, both afraid and uncertain what of. Having to deal with each other in the close confines of a tour bus would be even more suffocating than in the studio, but somehow they’d have to make do.

Beta Band did it. Soul Asylum did it. REM did it.

REM did it… word on the street—Thom wasn’t one to jump to conclusions, but word on the street was—REM had liked their video clips. It made Thom turn bashfully aside in search of a good place to burrow himself, it made his hands come over his face in the most exhilarating way. It put him in a flighty good mood the way Thom’s moods took sweeping hold of him and whirled him in vibrant cascades of emotion.

“You,” Colin said, “are an idiot.”

Thom turned from his journey halfway up the ladder to the top bunk he’d claimed for the night.

His brow was furrowed, mouth partway to questioning what this was about.

Colin held what appeared like a soaked cardboard container, about the size of a small CD cover. Colored blue, labeled Elixir.

“Why was this in the toilet?” he asked with genuine inquisitive curiosity, then opened the container it to reveal smaller packets within, still in good condition, if partly wet.

Thom remained frozen on the ladder; it was a good question, he had to admit.

Colin sighed, these were guitar strings Thom used for his tele. He must have really been out of his element to toss them in the toilet, a clogged drain would be a grand way to set off on their tour.

“You sure it’s not bass strings?” Thom asked, “Maybe it was you…”

“It’s not bass strings, Thom.”

“Maybe Ed—”

“Thom, these are yours. Nanoweb, super light.” He tossed them at Thom before resigning to the bottom bunk and Thom dodged them, snickering, “Yech…!”

The driver walked through on his check, just barely dodging the packet before standing in place and sighing. He pointed one finger at Thom. “No horseplay,” he said, and Thom quieted down, murmuring sorry, even though it was Colin who tossed the strings.

Neither Thom nor Jonny pretended there was any secret to them getting together in Thom’s bunk that night. It was the sort of unpleasant understanding you’d have to resign to like in a college dormitory, where everyone knew there was just no way to have privacy and everyone wished there had been. Not enough room in a fucking tour bus bunk. Not enough room in a fucking tour bus, point stop. They didn’t even fuck, they just lay close together, cause both were terrified of being on tour.

Just barely enough room for their arms to go round each other. Just barely enough room for their legs to interweave. Thom’s stubble uncomfortably hot on Jonny’s neck, Jonny’s hair too everywhere, he shed like somebody’s cat, and Thom didn’t say anything the first few weeks because he knew Jonny would be very sorry. Didn’t help that Colin was on the bunk below. He would probably kill Thom for things Thom hadn’t even done.

It did both Thom and Jonny good to have each other’s company, that night and also as a general rule of thumb. They both were terribly nervous. They both lay with eyes open, feeling the bumps in the road even though the ride was smooth, breathing humidly on each other’s necks; counting in their minds the hours till the next day would come and they’d have to spring into action; the world expected things of them even if they really just wanted to hide.

Thom pressed his lips to Jonny’s neck in a light, prolonged gesture, hoping it wouldn’t make a sound; Jonny waited, when Thom withdrew he tilted his chin toward him, they regarded each other in the uncomfortable confines of the bed. They really had known each other so long, hadn’t they, even if it hadn’t been like this. Jonny was very delicate, he leaned carefully to kiss Thom on the mouth, Thom’s fingertips came just at the jawline of Jonny’s mandible. The kiss came audible. Colin must’ve heard. Fuck, in that situation, everyone must’ve heard. It was gonna be a long ride.

***

Lincoln Park in LA was all kinds of ghetto. You obviously weren’t supposed to drink and smoke out there, or tag or throw trash, but everyone did, and there still were all these enormous events there on weekends, birthday parties or whatever, with everyone’s five million relatives that they somehow had. The dried up patches of grass and dirty water fountains, palm trees with brown leaves, there were gangs there, too, you didn’t wanna walk around too late at night. Don’t let Beck tell you he grew up underprivileged, but it wasn’t a place he didn’t know.

Both Beck and Leigh were completely worn out. Work had been bad for them both, they were really exhausted.

“What do you wanna do for dinner,” Beck asked, his fingers tracing imperfections in the paint, on the bench where they were sat. Down on the pavement were scattered shells of sunflower seeds, tons of them, who knew how old. The road gave way to gravel. Up beyond the palm tree tops were telephone poles, thick wires stretching across the blue sky, the smog gray farther down where there were buildings in the distance.

“Dunno,” Leigh said, “You want Subway?”

She’d been telling him about people from work. Stuff that gets put on hold because you need to hear back from people you haven’t heard back from, and how you have to keep calling, how one person says to do stuff one way and then someone else tells you something different, and they’re both your superiors so you have to keep telling each of them what the other person wants. You have some creative control, but you still don’t really know what you’re doing.

When you finally got home for the day, you knew the realistically finite number of hours you had before the next time you’d have to be at work again, so you organize your evening, when you’d eat and what you’d do, and you go to bed early. That’s what it’s like when you have a bad schedule, and when you have a really bad schedule, you’re too stressed out even for that.

Beck got his wallet out from the back pocket of his pants, most of his jeans already had a rectangular dent in the back pocket cause that’s where he kept it. He looked through for a while before fishing out a small card and grinned as he flashed it at Leigh.

“Yeah, I need five more stamps,” he said, “then I get my free six-inch with chips and a soda.”

She snorted and quirked an eyebrow. “Is that your Subway card,” she asked, aware he’d been hoping to get stamps for both her and him on his card. “Yeah, okay, let’s do that.”

He had sunglasses on even though it was starting to get dark. His shoelaces were tied, but in a way you could tell he just took off his shoes without untying the laces, then put them back on without redoing them. The knot was all the way to the left in one, with the laces sticking out all short.

You could still hear the sound of rush hour traffic from the surface streets, still a crappy time to be out on the road. “Did you hear about how they found Richey Edwards’ car,” Beck asked, biting absently at a hangnail on his thumb. He was referring to the singer from Manic Street Preachers, who’d gone missing a couple of weeks before.

Leigh blinked. “Really?”

“Yeah, it turned up at a gas station in England or something.”

“What, just by itself? Abandoned?”

“Yeah, I guess. Like he wasn’t in it.”

They watched the ripples in the surface of the murky water, the mess of brown and green palm tree tops protruding down into the lake. The dirty gray pavement corroded down with irregularities, fishermen standing on the other side with their rods.

Famous people going missing, stuff like that made you wonder what was really going on. It was almost exactly a year, wasn’t it, since Kurt Cobain, they both were thinking it though neither had said it aloud.

“That’s so weird,” Leigh said.

“Yeah, there was all this stuff on the news, like they were supposed to tour, but he took out all this money from his bank account instead and then had a taxi drive him all over the place... I dunno.”

“Yeah I knew about how they were supposed to tour.”

You never really knew what was going on; but someone like that couldn’t have been happy. You stopped thinking about it and went to go get dinner.

Beck may or may not have been privileged, but Leigh certainly wasn’t. She also wasn’t a Scientologist, Beck didn’t care about that. What was it that Bono had said? If you wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel. There was little glory in trying to get somewhere. When you had a goal, you kept in mind, this is the most important thing, and you’d sacrifice other things for that. A lot of people wanted to be designers, only few really made it, and you worked hard with that in mind.

It’s a lot of busywork and menial tasks and stupid shit you did to get your foot in the door, jobs far beneath your level of skill and beneath what you were educated for, and long hours all for the realization that, one, you were doing everything wrong, and two, the sole benefit you reaped was learning you did everything wrong. At first you told yourself you could take it because you were still young, then you’d watch people younger than you get farther ahead, and you’d struggle to find something to make yourself feel better in the face of that so you won’t be discouraged.

Confidence is something that rides on a lot of illusion, just as attention rides on the automatic capacity to drown other things out, even while they’re there and very real. She took her work very seriously. It was something Beck loved her for, as well. No one paid for her to go to school. No one paid for her rent or her bills or her groceries, no one helped her up the corporate ladder. She was just a kid, like him.

She wasn’t graced with an intrinsic eye for business, or success, or talent, it all rode on blind trial and error and work. She remembered quite vividly people who told her explicitly not to go on and to do something safer, either with uncomfortable compassion or cold manner of business, two devastating favorites among people who had to deliver bad news. It remained in the back of her mind in the general context of warnings to be heeded, and haunted her through her fight to focus on work, her hands were so small, so small on the sketch pad.

God, help me, she whispered voicelessly after hours when no one was left but herself, except that she didn’t believe in God.

In the real world, there’s no endearing charm to being small. She had only her own broken hands to carry her. Even the smallest person can change the course of the future, Tolkien wrote in Fellowship.

Beck had loved how devoted she was to her work. He bought her the soda she liked when he dropped by at her lunch hour, knew what commercials she thought were funny, he understood her political opinions and knew she liked her sandwiches cut into triangles. He didn’t care that she always got the same thing at Subway, he knew what to get her when she was sick.

They walked hand in hand down San Vincente, an old and knowing gesture, each lost in their own thoughts. Only a few hours remaining that evening before they’d have to go to bed early, to get up for work the next day, they both were really so tired.

He didn’t care if she chose to do this or that, so long as she still stayed with him. She didn’t mind if he remained a loser the rest of his life.

“That’s the best liquor store,” she said, pointing to a shop they passed by, “because it’s pink.”

(On to Chapter 29)

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A/N: Book: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)

Song: Mysterious Ways by U2 (Achtung Baby 1991)
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Thom/Beck