Adult-FanFiction.org : Celebrity

Götterfunken	By : SolusNemo Category: Singers/Bands/Musicians > Good Charlotte Views: 843 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I do not know the members of Good Charlotte. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-One
- 2-Two
- 3-Three
- 4-Four
- 1
- 2
Title: Götterfunken
Author: “Solus Nemo”
Rating: PG-13 (adult language, degrading remarks)
Summary: It’s funny how one sentence can change the course of one’s life. Sometimes one stops and wonders if, out of the millions of possible phrases to say, the one one plucked out of the sky was the right choice?
Author’s Note: I don’t know where this is going, it just came to me in a sudden flash. The story title comes from Tanzwut’s “Götterfunken”.
Disclaimer: This story never happened in real life. Though some facts about the characters may be true, the plot and main events in this story are not. I do not own Good Charlotte and I have never met them. Everything goes to their respective owners, which would not be me. I only own the characters and plot lines I have created, that would be about it.

===Chapter One

The wind leaking in through the cracks in the window was like a thousand skeletal fingers digging into the man’s skin, the cold bone reaching through his flesh in search of something to steal to bring back muscle and skin to the frail bone. It was unforgiving and only another sign that winter wasn’t going to be loosening its grip on New England any time soon.

The land looked barren, raped and left to lie on the freezing earth until the warm blanket of summer came. It was by far the most depressing scene Joel Madden had ever witnessed in his life, one in which he was glad to leave behind on his long visits to Los Angeles, California.

Unfortunately the day of the jet ride back to the west coast was far off into the future, quietly laughing at him for being stuck in the time of year where so many people took their lives because of what his eyes were soaking in.

Joel turned away from his hotel room window and sighed deeply, drumming a random tune on his thighs with his hands as he thought.

If he and his best friends didn’t have to come to New York for a series of concerts, guest appearances on television shows and mindless interviews Joel wouldn’t have come. He would have gladly stayed home in his modest mansion by the ocean, buried under the covers of his bed, pitying himself for the relationship he barely got out of unscathed.

Four years he and Stacey Andrews had been together. Four years of something that resembled bliss, but under the surface wasn’t quite as wonderful as it had appeared…at least to the woman in the highly passive relationship.

While Joel thought that he had found the one person that completed him, that said chick had done nothing but say bad things about him when he had his back turned. She had never ceased to tell all her friends that she was sleeping with a rock star, though he wasn’t “all there in his head, off in some other world that he never let anyone else in”. Well, Joel had figured after Stacey barged out of their fancy hotel room, if she had voiced her complaints a little earlier or at least gave him some little clue that she was so unhappy she had to go screw one of the roadies, maybe things would have been different.

It wasn’t like he had purposely shut her out of his life anyway. Being a huge celebrity wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. If Joel hadn’t retreated into his mind on so many occasions he would have surely gone insane. Living life through the pages of hundreds of magazines in every language under the sun wasn’t in the least what he had signed up for when he scribbled his name down on the dotted line all those years ago. If he had been conscious to every last thing around him his head might have exploded.

Would she rather have had him go back to the bottle and whatever drug some stranger walked into the door with?

Joel had screamed that into Stacey’s face three nights ago, tired of her weak excuses of where she had been several hours earlier. She had started prodding him in efforts for Joel to drop the subject of her cheating, only causing him to bite back. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing to do, but he had had a rough day to begin with and by the time the relationship had self-destructed it had gone from bad to worse.

So Joel Madden, the lead singer of one of the most loved and hated bands in the world, was single again. There wasn’t really any surprise there, it was only a matter of time before he ruined yet another romance. He didn’t even know why he tried anymore, he couldn’t hold anything together to save his soul.

The entertainment news programs would find out soon enough and update on the singer’s dating status, the co-hosts making sorry jokes back and forth about possibly dating the star or going with him to the next Grammy Awards show. Like always, Joel would be leaning back on whatever piece of furniture he was sitting on and groan, wish for some kind of weapon to use against the writers of the television program for creating such horrid “jokes”. But he wouldn’t get the pleasure of having such an instrument of destruction. Instead, Joel would go about his life – or what little of one he had – and try to ignore the screaming fans which would make him deaf one day soon.

With another sigh, Joel pulled himself from his thoughts and grabbed his jacket from its resting place on the back of a desk chair. He didn’t have much time before he had to meet up with his bandmates and drive down to wherever it was the band was going to be at next. He didn’t even want to know anymore. What was the point of figuring out where one is going if one will only be leaving soon after, choking on all the questions force-fed down one’s throat? The less he could be aware of his surroundings the better. All he had to do was act like a good little boy, answer the questions with a smile or soft laugh and he’d be home free. Soon enough he’d be able to leave the building and go back to hiding in his wonderful hotel room with the springy white carpet and “gold” plated shower head and faucets.

He walked right passed the tacky bathroom, not caring about the dark stubble on his face or the nappy look of his blackish hair. If he was going to be one of the next people in a celebrities without make-up special, so be it.

Opening the only exit from the room save the small concrete deck five stories above the ground, Joel quickly left the stifling bedroom. The hallway wasn’t any cooler, but Joel made no visible indication that he was uncomfortable as he sauntered across the mint green carpet with the rose border, calmly mixing with the same color wainscot and crème painted walls. Occasionally he would pass a photograph or painting of a beach, a sailboat gliding along the Atlantic ocean with the help of a stiff breeze, a sandcastle made by children who’ve gone and left their colorful plastic tools behind.

Too bad all the money put into making all the hallways of each floor look exactly the same didn’t do the desired effect of relaxing the person walking down them. If anything it only made the unnatural heat trapped in the corridors more prominent, causing the man or woman looking at the artwork hanging on the bland walls yearn to throw themselves into the salty body of water captured in the frames.

Near sweating from the sticky heat of the air around him, Joel blindly pressed a button on the warm metal console to bring the elevator to him. He wasn’t worried about getting the other men in his band, they were most likely already hanging around the hotel’s bar waiting for the phone call telling them the town car had arrived to whisk them off to their destination.

This steady, never ending motocross race of a life made Joel plead silently for something to shake it up a little, to add some excitement to the daily rounds that only changed locations and faces. Of course, a shot like that into the arm of everything vanilla was far too much to ask.

Crème painted doors slid open with a crisp bing! Overhead, the number five glowed green, indicating that the elevator was on the fifth floor…unless, by some exiting twist of fate, the machine was really on the sixth floor and when Joel stepped into the cold rectangle in front of him he’d fall to his death. Now there’s a great news headline: “The lead singer of one of the most famous bands in the world today dies at 26!” “Joel Madden falls to his death in a ghastly hot elevator shaft five-stories up! Was it suicide or murder?”

Sadly, the crème and chocolate stripes on the elevator’s wallpaper proved that it was indeed where it should be and that no rock star would be plummeting to his demise this day.

Accompanied by a frown, Joel stepped into the transportation device and pressed the button on the console for the lobby. He leaned back against the wall opposite the doors which soon closed, lifted his head up to stare at the ceiling panel that served as a quick escape and maintenance hatch, his hands loosely gripping the chair rail fixed to three of the elevator walls. The music floating through the small space, absorbed into the walls and becoming more like white noise than something soothing, was a stripped down Michael Bolton song. A highly irritating clarinet tried to instill some romance into the lowering machine, but instead it only managed to hammer into the passenger’s ears and quickly gave him a headache. He thanked God when the elevator arrived at the lobby and the doors opened with another dinging sound.

Someone squealed off to Joel’s left as he escaped the lulling noise of the elevator, he shut his eyes and muttered an obscenity under his breath. The last thing he wanted right now was some little girl running up to him and professing her love for him in a chipmunk voice. Like 90% of the younger female fans, this one would have a pseudo-depressed air about her and black eyeliner applied by a blind woman with a horribly shaky hand. She’d smile and extend a hand with chewed fingernails, revealing the words “punx 4 lyfe” or some other nauseating slogan written all over her arms. He’d be her all-time favorite, in love with him the second she saw him wearing that suit in the Lifestyles music video. The little girl would have a look on her face that every other female had at her age when they ran up to him, the “I’m your biggest fan and everyone else is only a poser” stare. In reality she was only a snot-nosed brat with a wildly distorted view on life. He hated, no loathed, those kind of people. They weren’t why he had started singing and they wouldn’t ever be.

When no gnome punkster came racing his way, Joel opened his eyes slowly and turned in the direction of the excited yell. Turns out it was only a teenager laughing with some of her friends, waving her hands and nodding to whomever the voice on the other end of her cellular phone connection belonged to. Neither she nor any of her buddies had seen the man enter the main floor of the hotel a good score of feet to their right. He smiled bitterly at this comforting revelation.

The bar was down the hallway to the singer’s right, the large oak doors leading into the even bigger bar and restaurant hanging open on the north wall – facing Joel directly when he turned and ambled on down the corridor. It was pointless to go into that room and try not to listen to the alcohol calling his name, but they had good beer nuts.

Like he had expected the other members of Good Charlotte were sitting on forest green bar stools, glancing at the television mounted in a corner of the bar or spinning on their stools with blank looks on their faces. They all looked at Joel when he entered the room and smiled weakly at him, though that was understandable with the lack of sleep they had all received.

“You look like crap,” Benji Madden stated bluntly. Though he and Joel were identical twins, Benjamin was shorter and several pounds heavier than his brother and had a drastically different style as well. Over the years Benji had sported brightly colored hair in every cut under the sun, spikes, chains, safety pins, a great deal of piercings and a body canvas that was quickly filling up.

Joel was the modest one, hiding most of his tattoos under dress shirts, sweater vests, and long pants. He had no piercings and had only done something drastic with his hair twice: dying it blonde in his school days and putting green money sings in it during a drug induced state…at least he hoped he had some drug coursing through his veins when that fiasco took place.

“Did you talk to Stacey?” the fleshy twin asked when Joel took a seat next to him. “It worked like I said it would, right?”

Grabbing a handful of peanuts from a glass dish, Joel snorted.

Benji frowned slightly, briefly looking back up at the morning news reports. He moved his vision back to his brother, resting his chin in his hand. “How could it not work?” This question was spoken more for his sake and not Joel’s, for the older brother was stumped as to why his advice on women had taken a turn for the worse.

“I’m not you, remember? Said she wasn’t sorry for what she did, that it was my fault that this all happened. Apologizing didn’t work either, she said I didn’t even know what I was so sorry for,” Joel explained through his munching. “What is it with her, anyway? I tell her what she wants to hear and she bitches at me, I say what I mean to say and she bitches at me, I don’t say anything when she tells me to shut up and she–”

“Bitches at you,” Benji finished with a nod.

Joel sighed, frustrated. “She said she knew the second she met me that something like this was going to happen, can you believe that? So I told her, ‘Well, I guess you shouldn’t have started dating the rock star then’ and hung up.”

The heavy-set man said nothing.

“It’s not like I did all that to her just to do it to her. It’s not my fault I have to go all over the world constantly and didn’t have time for her. Hell, I told her that this wasn’t going to work out when we first got together. If anything Stacey should be blaming herself for all of this, she’s the one that wanted to give us a try even though we both knew that everything was against us!” Joel brushed his hands off on his pants, more in efforts to get the thought of his ex-girlfriend off of him than the peanut skin.

“I’m just going to swear off relationships from this point on,” he added harshly. “Never again will Joel Madden date anyone, not even a stick!”

Benji laughed softly. “That’s kind of a rash decision, don’t you think?”

Joel shook his head and got off the bar stool. “Not at all. It’ll save the both of us a lot of trouble. I won’t be ‘a million miles away’ and she won’t have to fall and let Greg’s dick break her fall just to get back at me.”

“Come on, Joely, don’t talk like that,” Benji said calmly.

“Let a man be bitter, will you?” Joel spat. “I’ll be outside waiting for the damned cars.”

He knew that if he stayed any longer he’d only take out his anger on his brother, then his other bandmates when they decided it would be a good idea to drop into the conversation. Fresh air would do Joel wonders, he figured. Though he’d turn into a human popsicle while waiting for the driver to show up, he could be alone in the cold with his thoughts and stew without getting anyone else hurt.

Shrugging into his jacket as he walked out of the bar and toward the main doors of the hotel, Joel wondered if it really was a good idea to never date anyone again. To date he had never kept a good relationship together, they all ended in fiery train wrecks so gory that people couldn’t help but stop and look at the scene. It just wasn’t worth it anymore to keep getting into things that would never last. If he could spare one person the agony of the fall-out then it really would be worth all the trouble of dying a lonely, greasy old man who took the water hose to anyone who so much as walked past his neglected house.

That little picture sent shivers down Joel’s spine, but he didn’t let the sudden chill stop him. If anything it only made him walk faster out of that hotel, not even looking back when the group of teenagers he had seen earlier finally spotted him. He knew well enough that they’d follow him out eventually and break down the door of his thoughts just for one measly autograph. Maybe when he screamed at them to leave him alone they’d tell the rest of the world how much of a bastard he was and do just that: let him be.

The winter air raped the exposed skin of his body when Joel pushed out of the revolving doors and finally made it outside of the building. His lungs frosted over when he took in a deep breath, the smells of all the other beings walking past him telling him that he really was alive even though he wished for the opposite.

Moving away from the glass doors, trimmed with more gold stolen from the bathrooms, Joel leaned up against the brick walls of the hotel. He closed his eyes and tried to fold in on himself until there was nothing left but his thoughts, nothing from the world around him.

If there were really such things as dopplegangers and if Joel’s double had walked right by him in that moment, he would have reached out and grabbed that exact replica. They would trade places forever and Joel would run off to a remote place in Canada and live with a moose he’d name Bullwinkle for the rest of his pathetic life.

That would never happen, but it didn’t hurt for Joel to imagine something like that happening. Joel no.2 would be the one in the spotlight after the switch, thrown to the wolves of the music industry and left to fend for himself in the deadly game of stardom. The real Joel Madden could do any number of things once his chains were destroyed. Maybe he’d become an author with an alias of John Doe, or possibly turn into the greatest ice fisherman the world’s ever known. Better still, Joel could become a hermit, writing instruction manuals for coffee makers with a beard down to his ankles and sweep his hardwood floors with ever step.

He must have had a grin on his face because when his eyes snapped open his jaw ached. His face now relaxed, Joel looked right and left to try and find the source of the noise that brought him out of his fantasies. It was the shutter click of a camera, but he could find no stalk-a-razzi or other crazed people taking pictures of him for money, which was odd because on a normal day Joel couldn’t go three feet without camera lenses being shoved into his face.

It wasn’t a figment of his imagination, that vivid clicking sound he had just heard. The infernal camera that had taken the picture of him was right in front of him, Joel knew, but it was lost in the sudden sea of people walking by him. It would snow on the mountains of Hell before he dismissed whoever had stolen that moment of time in which he was actually happy, he wanted it back and wasn’t about to let some dirty little photographer run off the the film and develop it, send it off to Star Magazine to make the front cover.

Joel was about to speak out to the person he already hated, though it had no name or face, when the group of young women from the hotel entered his line of vision. They were grinning and walking like they had ten pound weights wrapped around each of their ankles, each of the girls holding up notebooks or pieces of paper for him to sign. They looked just like something from Night of the Living Dead, stiff limbs and all. Joel would bet they were just as stupid as well.

They were still too far away from the rock star to hear him say “fucking Christ”, but close enough to soak in every detail of the man’s face. No doubt they were counting his pores, memorizing every inch and second of this part of the day so the women would be able to tell their friends exactly what happened with heart-stopping detail.

Right now the cameraman stalking him was the least of Joel’s worries. He forced a fake smile and shifted positions on the wall, turning so that his left shoulder was digging into the clay bricks. Though he didn’t say it out loud, he wanted nothing more than to run away from these girls and have a moment of peace. A few seconds, why was that so far out of his reach?

There was another picture taken as the group of teen girls stopped in front of him. Joel made a mental note to track down and kill the photographer when he was done.

“Hey, kids.” Joel faked kindness very well and used his ability to speed up meetings like this one as quickly as humanly possible, though it would never be quick enough. “How are you girls doing?”

They all giggled, every last one of them. The noise that erupted from their mouths congealed as one to form a high-pitched cry that could have passed of as an animal’s dead mewl.

“It’s cold, ain’t it?” Small talk always gave off the impression that the star wasn’t as big of a dick as he or she really was, allowed the fans to calm down a little and get down to what they really wanted.

Blonde hair, all varying shades of champagne and platinum, swayed up and down as the heads they were attached to nodded. “Yeah”s and “u-huh”s soon followed. Some of the girls didn’t get the memo that the time to giggle had passed.

Joel nodded toward the direction of Time’s Square. “You coming to the TRL set today? I’d really like it if you came, we all would.”

Now the group graduated to strange grunting sounds that were probably meant to be taken as laughter.

“The other guys are in there?” one of the girls asked softly, her voice hardly carrying over the wind and the chatter of the passing men and women on the sidewalk.

“Yep. We’re waiting for the cars to come pick us up. Do you want me to sign those?” Joel added, reaching out his right hand for the papers.

As if they had forgotten what was in their vice grips, the girls looked down and then back up at Joel – completely void of any brain activity. To Joel their eyes screamed “sign these? Why on earth would you want to do that?” He only smiled sweetly again, the effort to be a nice person sucking up all his energy.

Getting a pen from his jacket pocket, Joel took the papers from the women in front of him and took off the cap of the utensil with his teeth. “What’re your names?”

As wheels and sprockets suddenly began to turn, the girls all started speaking at once. A chorus of “Jessie”s, “Amy”s, “Nichole”s, “Sarah”s and “Jenny”s soon followed Joel’s question.

Not asking for the correct spellings of their names, not personalizing the messages further than “To ____, keep on rocking, Joel” he gave them all what they wanted. In less than twenty seconds Joel had signed all the papers and handed them back in a messy pile to the girls. He put the cap back on the pen and pocketed it. The strain of grinning like a good person was killing him. Joel silently begged his fans to get away from him and quickly.

They did, but only after thanking him and insisting on hugs with their body language. Joel complied and waved as they turned to leave adding in a “have a nice day” for good measure, rolling his eyes and groaning when they were far enough away to not notice his unhappiness.

The third and final picture of him was taken, which caused Joel to whip around as fast as he could.

“I wouldn’t do that, you might get whiplash,” a voice stated from a fraction to the right.

When Joel finally saw his stalker it was like a sappy movie moment from those horrible chick flicks. He knew that those scenes never actually happened in real life, but he still forgot how to breathe.

The woman who had given him the warning was standing a few feet in front of the musician, a camera hanging from a strap around her neck, Italian in every sense of the word right down to the faint accent she carried.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said sincerely. “It’s just that you were standing there with such raw emotion, I couldn’t pass it up.”

Had she been a lot less beautiful Joel would have ripped the camera right from that neck of hers.

She tapped her camera nervously, like she had just read Joel’s thoughts. “If you don’t want me to use the pictures of you, that’s quite all right. I assure you it’s only the three, no more and no less.”

Joel didn’t believe this. “Who do you work for?” he asked, his tone like venom.

For a moment or two this new stranger in the rock star’s life looked confused, both eyebrows raised slightly. “Myself,” she replied.

“No. I mean, what magazine do you take the pictures for or who do you give the pictures to to get your money.” He didn’t need this.

“That’s what I meant,” the beauty responded. “I’m just a professional photographer. I don’t take celebrities’ photographs and sell them to tabloid newspapers and whatnot, I don’t even work for one, never have.”

Still annoyed, Joel shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“That’s not much of an answer.” The woman sounded like she was purposely trying to send him over the edge.

After a drawn out sigh, Joel shut his eyes in annoyance. He made a mental note to stop closing them so often. “As long as they don’t show up one day on Access Hollywood, you could fuck the pictures for all I care. Is that a better answer for you, honey?”

The woman scoffed and shook her head, saying something in Italian that Joel couldn’t understand. “Thank you,” she said coolly soon after her little rant in a foreign language.

“My pleasure,” Joel replied just as disdainfully.

“If you’re all like this I don’t feel a stitch of guilt for despising your band, Mr. Madden.”

In the pit of his stomach, Joel’s hopes of ever having a chance with this stranger just went down the ladder even further. He might as well shoot himself right then and there. But instead of showing the sadness that he was feeling wrapping itself around him like a blanket, Joel smiled arrogantly.

“That’s very good to know, Miss–”

“Marino. Angelina Marino.”

Angel was right. Even the way she said it, full of perturbed anger, proved that this woman shouldn’t be on the earth, she was too good for it. Joel was starting to get rather sappy. What was happening to him? He hated all women, at least he thought he did.

“All right, Miss Marino, do whatever you damn well please with the photographs because I couldn’t care less. Now if you’ll excuse me,” he waved in the direction a black town car was pulling up to the curb, “I need to get going.”

Angelina moved aside, a small smile forming on her face – one of those “I hope you trip over your own two feet and fall to your death” smiles, though she said absolutely nothing about her sadistic wishes at that moment. However, when Joel pushed passed her, she muttered just loud enough for him to hear: “Vaffunculo.”

“I’m sorry?” Joel said, turning back to face Angelina momentarily.

“Have a nice day,” she replied cheerfully, mocking him from when he had been speaking to his small group of fans. Angelina’s eyes shone briefly, the light from the sun hitting them just right to turn the blackness into chocolate. Sadly for Joel, she turned and started walking away from him before he could memorize every inch of her face in that minute.

Forcing back his hundredth sigh of the day, Joel made his way to the town car and opened the back door, practically throwing himself down onto the leather seats of the vehicle before slamming the door shut. He just couldn’t win at life could he?
- 1
- 2
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Götterfunken