#a.m. ream

[no-where-new-hero]

Okay, time for the movie rant because Kilmeny needs more processing time—

So, a few weeks ago, I saw this movie called 비상 (Flight/Fly High), and it was one of those movies that was kind of mediocre but had just enough promise for good to stick irresistibly in my brain, because it was one of the most thematically rich movies I’ve seen in a while. Mind you, I saw it in about five pixels on someone’s YouTube upload because the movie is obscure and ancient, but analysis here we go (cw for discussing attempted suicide and death)

Plot: Boy meets Sad Girl. Boy falls in love with Sad Girl. Sad Girl attempts to kill herself because of some traumatic history with her parents that’s very poorly explained. Because Boy loves her, he makes himself responsible for her care as she recovers from her psychic break. Boy turns to a life in the underworld to get the money to support her, becomes a male escort, later joins a gang, and eventually becomes the Biggest Boss after a gratuitously long fistfight. He renounces his life of crime and resolves to build a life with Sad Girl (who is still Sad and suffering through reams of trauma that is never adequately resolved). As Boy and Girl flee in the middle of the night, a mysterious nobody jumps out of the shadows and stabs Boy to death. Exeunt dramatis personae, Finis.

Now, at like two a.m. when I finished watching this, I just kind of sat there for five minutes being like—what the fuck did I just watch? Is he really dead? And what was the point of crafting a hundred minute movie if it was going to end with him dying in the last two minutes of it?

But then the whole film kept haunting me, and I realized that the end really wasn’t random at all, that Boy had been doomed by the narrative from the start, and that this was, in fact, one of the better examples I’ve seen of that kind of tragedy. See, near the beginning, Boy—who wanted to become an actor before all the other things he was forced to do—acts out a scene in front of Girl that directly mirrors his actual death scene (getting stabbed and dying like a dog in the rain). Girl gets angry that he’s making light of death, as someone who was going to invite it herself, but already, Boy was taking the fall for her. He was the one knocking on the door asking for the devil, and finally, at the end, the devil decided to answer. The fact that it comes at the hands of someone unknown or invisible, only a shadow on the screen, makes it all the more symbolic: it’s anonymous, the striking force of fate. Once you walk into the darkness, the darkness will never let you go. Once you get your hands dirty, you can’t live clean again.

There was another suggestive scene about halfway through: while Boy was an escort, he befriended another sex worker who kind of shits on him for pretending he’s different from her and throws a glass of whiskey in his face. In defiance, he upends the entire bottle of whiskey over his head and flicks on a lighter, as though he was going to set himself on fire (yes, I was also like Sir Stop Being So Extra This is a Wendy’s.) “I have someone to protect,” he tells the worker. He has someone he’s willing to die for, as though Girl being an open flame in his hands would make him pure—as though having someone to be noble for would save him. He’s idealistic, stupidly idealistic for his life. Because nobility has no currency in this world. He makes bad choices for the right reason—love—but love is also insufficient here. Many characters tell him that, that love won’t be enough, and we see, repeatedly through side characters, that neither will friendship or loyalty. And they aren’t; true things can’t be. In this world, it’s the performance that’s important. It’s the illusion of violence and intimidation and power. The sex worker tells him this when she confesses her story to him early on. Even Boy lies to Girl about how he’s making his money in order to preserve her innocence or make himself look better. All of life is performance, and the performance is life. He was doomed to die as soon as he made a farce of it, before the whole weight of the story mowed him down.

There are other moments—the sex worker desperately wanting someone to love and being punished for it. Boy lying at the edge of the sea like Girl when she tried to die. The two actress who play the sex worker and Girl look eerily similar to each other, as though they represent parallel lives separated only by circumstance and bridged by Boy’s existence. The three of them are caught in a triangle of false hope and certain death. It’s incredibly potent and honestly some fabulous thematic structuring. There was almost a little too much theme and not enough else, in some ways, which is why some other aspects of the movie fell flat: it reduced motivation and character development, to have this insistent sense of fate and doom hanging over everyone. But as far as tragedies go, it was weirdly fulfilling.

[geidaicomposition]

Concert: Research for Electro-Acoustic Music  - REAM - Vol.5

Sunday, March 17, 2024, 18:30 (Pre-registration required. Admission Free on a "first come, first served" basis.)　

Application deadline: 10:00 a.m. March 12 (JST)

Venue: Tokyo University of the Arts, Hall 6

This concert will be streamed live on this site. (further details coming soon.)

LIVE STREAMING

Application (Japanese page)

Application for people in the inside (Japanese page)

- Inquiry (Japanese page) -

 

Program : 

The order is subject to change.

Toshiyuki ORIKASA, New Work (2024) for ensemble

Kenji TANOBE (graduate student), Circus Communis — piano & electronics (2023)

Terumasa SUGIURA (graduate student), Tsuikai Circulation —  shakuhachi & live electronics — (2023)

Ayane NAKASE (graduate student), The Exploding Whale  —   Heckelphone (& Oboe) & electronics (2023)

Performers: 

Kunitaka KOKAJI: conductor

Toshiyuki ORIKASA: dir. of machine operation & electronics in the concert

Takuto NAGAHORI: piano (solo)

Saori YASHIRO: shakuhachi (solo)

Gentaro SAKAI: heckelphone, oboe (solo)

Kenji TANOBE: electronics

Terumasa SUGIURA: electronics

Ayane NAKASE: electronics

Ensemble REAM

Violins: Kotoha KITAGAWA Violoncellos: Rei TAKATSUKI Flute: Yuri KAMAKURA Oboe: Gentaro SAKAIClarinet: Miu IGARASHI Harps: Moemi KOKADO

staff members: ◆concert management   Tatsuro NAKAJIMA (Adjunct Education and Research Assistant of the computer lab of Dept. of Composition)   ¥Yuka IMOSE, Natsuka KOJIMA (Adjunct Education and Research Assistants of Dept. of Composition)   Daiko Fujikawa (Lecturer, Dept. of Composition) ◆concert staff   Makoto OHATA, Michiru NAKAMURA   Yuto KOIZUMI, Rika HAYASHI   Satori HIRONIWA, Akane MAEDA, Yui AMANO (Master's students)   Koki Washiyama (UG student)

[sfnewsvine]

Legendary Actor Angela Lansbury Dies at 96 NBC Bay Area

Angela Lansbury, the big-eyed, scene-stealing British actress who kicked up her heels within the Broadway musicals “Mame” and “Gypsy” and solved infinite murders as crime novelist Jessica Fletcher within the long-running TV collection “Homicide, She Wrote,” has died. She was 96. Lansbury died Tuesday at her house in Los Angeles, based on an announcement from her three kids. She died 5 days shy of her 97th birthday. Lansbury gained 5 Tony Awards for her Broadway performances and a lifetime achievement award. She earned Academy Award nominations as supporting actress for 2 of her first three movies, “Gaslight” (1945) and “The Image of Dorian Grey” (1946), and was nominated once more in 1962 for “The Manchurian Candidate” and her lethal portrayal of a Communist agent and the title character’s mom. In Memoriam: Folks We have Misplaced in 2022 Her mature demeanor prompted producers to solid her a lot older than her precise age. In 1948, when she was 23, her hair was streaked with grey so she may play a fortyish newspaper writer with a yen for Spencer Tracy in “State of the Union.” Her stardom got here in center age when she grew to become the hit of the New York theater, profitable Tony Awards for “Mame” (1966), “Pricey World” (1969), “Gypsy” (1975) and “Sweeney Todd” (1979). She was again on Broadway and obtained one other Tony nomination in 2007 in Terrence McNally’s “Deuce,” taking part in a scrappy, brash former tennis star, reflecting with one other ex-star as she watches a modern-day match from the stands. In 2009 she collected her fifth Tony, for finest featured actress in a revival of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and in 2015 gained an Olivier Award within the position. However Lansbury’s widest fame started in 1984 when she launched “Homicide, She Wrote” on CBS. Based mostly loosely on Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple tales, the collection centered on Jessica Fletcher, a middle-aged widow and former substitute faculty trainer residing within the seaside village of Cabot Cove, Maine. She had achieved discover as a thriller novelist and newbie sleuth. The actress discovered the primary collection season exhausting. “I used to be shocked after I realized that needed to work 12-15 hours a day, relentlessly, day in, time out,” she recalled. “I needed to lay down the legislation at one level and say `Look, I can’t do these reveals in seven days; it should be eight days.‘” CBS and the manufacturing firm, Common Studio, agreed, particularly since “Homicide, She Wrote” had turn into a Sunday evening hit. Regardless of the lengthy days — she left her house at Brentwood in West Los Angeles at 6 a.m. and returned after darkish — and reams of dialogue to memorize, Lansbury maintained a gradual tempo. She was happy that Jessica Fletcher served as an inspiration for older girls. “Girls in movement footage have all the time had a troublesome time being position fashions for different girls,” she noticed. “They’ve all the time been thought-about glamorous of their jobs.” COZI TV will run a “Homicide She Wrote” marathon from Wednesday by Saturday, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Supply hyperlink Originally published at SF Newsvine

[katelynthecrazy]

Katsuki’s Homecoming - Part 3

Part 1

       Katsuki rose an eyebrow. "Getting mad," he warned.

       "I'll explain in a second, just please let me go make sure I turned the oven off."

       That had Katsuki off his lap in seconds, now infinitely more concerned with the oven as he flicked the kitchen light back on. "What the fuck did you do to my kitchen?"

       "Katsuki, it's not that bad," Eijiro followed, yawning as he checked the oven, surveying the messy countertop with a nervous hum. "See? The oven's fine."

       Katsuki checked for himself, opening the oven glass to find a very large pot roast resting on the rack, now cold. "You cooked?"

       Eijiro shrugged. "I tried. I turned it off when they called but, um... I thought the candles would last longer, at least."

       "Candles?" Katsuki demanded, catching his husband's guilty expression slide to the piles of goop across the counter and floor. Wax. "Jesus Christ, Ei, how many did you light?!"

       Eijiro flushed, still refusing to meet Katsuki's gaze. "One hundred? And... and eighty-seven. For..." his blush deepened obscenely. "For each day you were away?"

       Katsuki blinked, slowly closing the oven. Another wayward balloon drifted into the room.

       "I could only fit seven balloons in the car, though," Eijiro explained sheepishly. "And I dropped a bouquet. Twice. And they all broke so I just kind of... left the flowers on the floor?"

       Katsuki turned to flick on the den light. The lights came on at an extremely low setting to illuminate the chaos of the room, tinted kind of pink. He tried to imagine the room covered in lit candles and dinner on the coffee table, rose petals on the floor and the husband he'd been missing waiting for him. "Holy shit, Ei."

       Eijiro perked, eager to maybe not be in trouble. "There's also chocolates in the fridge," he offered. "I just... figured I could make up for all the time we missed since it's... y'know."

       Katsuki laughed, still surveying the damage to the living room. "God, I love you."

       "Oh? Uh—good!" Eijiro panicked, and the excitement caused Katsuki to snort at him. "I-I love you, too! Even if it's kinda late."

       The blonde rolled his eyes, chuckling, turning to find Eijiro right behind him with a tentative smile and those soft eyes only Katsuki ever saw. He grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him, letting Eijiro hold him closer by the hips. His back hit the counter when they moved, Eijiro managing to tower over him and broke away, only to trail hot, open kisses down Katsuki's neck. One of Katsuki's hands slipped on a hard wax puddle and he laughed when Eijiro had to catch him. "For fuck's sake, I love you. You're never too late."

       Eijiro grinned, broad and happy. "That's good. Considering Valentine's is over and all—"

       "What?"

       Eijiro cocked his head. "Uh... Valentine's Day? I thought it was really cool you were supposed to be back then, even if we don't usually celebrate it, so I did."

       Katsuki's eyebrows furrowed, trying to count days in his head. Eijiro was right that they didn't traditionally celebrate Valentine's Day the way normal couples did—especially not after Katsuki blithely reamed out a reporter on national television three years ago when she asked what kind of husband didn't buy chocolates for Valentine's Day. For fuck's sake, they're pro fucking heroes: why should they do special things only one day when they have more than enough resources to spoil each other every single day of their wonderful lives together?

       And to answer her stupid question: the husband that grilled a fucking wagyu steak for his beefed-up meat head instead, but he'd have done that anytime Eijiro asked.

       Still, today wasn't Valentine's Day. "Ei, it's the thirteenth."

       "Um... no? I checked."

       Gearing for a small argument, Katsuki pulled his phone from his pocket and flipped it around. "Ei, what's that say?"

       Eijiro's eyebrow twitched before he answered, responding in the same, slow, 'are you stupid?' tone Katsuki had used. "It says February fifteenth, two forty-seven A.M."

       Katsuki glared at him. Humoring him for just a second, he turned the phone to check for himself, and—

       February fifteenth, two forty-eight A.M.

       "How the fuck—?"

       Eijiro grinned, smugly victorious. Katsuki growled at him, knowing that the redhead couldn't have changed the settings on his phone in the fifteen minutes he'd been awake, but still wanting to find away to blame him anyway. Eijiro hummed while he waited for Katsuki to figure it out, tucking himself back into the nook of Katsuki's neck.

       Katsuki firmly remembered leaving Washington D.C. on the thirteenth of February. But it was nearly a twelve hour flight from D.C. to Honolulu, with the long layover delay in Hawaii and another nine hour flight to a Tokyo airport, but that would still land them on the fourteenth somehow, unless—

       Katsuki groaned. "The fucking time zones. We crossed the date line. Damn, this jet lag is going to kill me."

       Eijiro laughed at him, pulling back to kiss his nose, reveling in the way Katsuki had thoroughly embarrassed himself. He didn't get those moments a lot. "Do you still think I'm not too late?"

       "As far as I'm concerned, I'm still running on America's time, where it's still Valentine's Day. Does that count?"

       Eijiro's grin fell into a devious smirk and he lifted Katsuki off the counter. Katsuki's legs locked around his husband, wary and excited by that evil smile. "Oh, that counts," he drawled, in that devilish tone that made Katsuki's toes curl. He kissed Katsuki again while he walked, thumbing at his waistband.

       With seven long months to make up for and all the time to do it, he kicked the door to their bedroom shut behind them.

~End~

Link to part 2:  

[torikaku]

🐺 Jack Howl: Fluff Alphabet

A ctivities - What do they like to do with their s/o? How do they spend their free time with them?

Jack’s an active guy, so he will be happy if you want to exercise with him. He understands that not everyone wants to get up at 5 a.m. and jog, so he’s content if you just keep him company while he takes some exercises, and when you give him a bottle of water or a towel to wipe the sweat.

Also, if you like plants, he’ll happily introduce you to his cactus collection. He’ll be overjoyed to cultivate them  together.

​​​

B eauty - What do they admire about their s/o? What do they think is beautiful about them?

He doesn’t care much about how you look (he thinks you’re beautiful anyway), but your smile? Your genuine smile that makes heat rise to his cheeks whenever you grin at him. Jack admires when you genuinely smile at him -- it means that you’re happy being with him.

​​​

C omfort - How would they help their s/o when they feel down/have a panic attack etc.?

Jack’s unsure what he has to do to comfort you, but he tries his best. If you have a panic attack, he escorts you outside to breathe some fresh air. He will let you cling to him and hug him, if you want, giving your back some soft pats.

If you feel blue, he’s sad as well.  What should he do to cheer you up? Jack will try to treat you with your favourite food or cuddle with you until you feel better.

​​​

D reams - How do they picture their future with their s/o?

He’s a domestic kind of guy, so he’ll like to buy a house where you two will live and be able to fall asleep and wake up with you beside him.

Living a happy married life with you, looking after a small garden together – are the thoughts that visit his head when he tries to fall asleep.

​​​

E qual - Are they the dominant one in the relationship, or rather passive?

It takes two to tango, so Jack constantly asks your opinion on any topics or problems. He wants you to put as much effort in your relationship as him.

​​​​

F ight - Would they be easy to forgive their s/o? How are they fighting?

Fights are unavoidable, but the last thing the wolf wants is to be angry with you. You’re the closest person to his heart, so it’s hard for him to bear any arguments with you.  And Jack will never raise his voice on you (I hope, you will never shout at his boy as well).

He’ll try to sooth the situation, saying that you two should calmly discuss the problem.

​​​​​​

G ratitude - How grateful are they in general? Are they aware of what their s/o is doing for them?

Jack’s thankful to you that you’ve become his partner and filled his life with love. He sees how much effort you put to make him happy and loved, he wants to pay you by being helpful to you.

​​​​

H onesty - Do they have secrets they hide from their s/o? Or do they share everything?

But Jack is against any lying, he will never lie to you or hide anything, especially if it affects your relationship with him.

​​​​

I nspiration - Did their s/o change them somehow, or the other way around? Like trying out new things or helped them overcome personal problems?

Though he tries to be helpful to other students, Jack always has a guard up and seems aloof. Through layers of his attitude, you’ve seen that he’s actually a sweetheart. With you, he’s learned that he can let his guard down around and you will never judge him, and will ever love him unconditionally.

​​​​

J ealousy - Do they get jealous easily? How do they deal with it?

Jack doesn’t get jealous per se. He understands that you have your own life and want to spend your time with your friends. In these moments, he wants you to return to him soon and give him some hugs and kisses.

If the person you’re talking to openly harasses you, then Jack won’t hesitate to teach the said person a lesson on how to respect you.  

​​​

K iss - Are they a good kisser? What was the first kiss like?

Jack’s inexperienced, but his kisses are not bad though, they are rather sweet. He just needs some time to get used to kissing you.

He usually gives you small pecks on the lips or kisses the top of your head.  

Your first kiss was awkward for him. Jack was so nervous that he was completely lost. You took the initiative in your hands (literally), cupping his cheeks and making him lean toward you. Like a reflex, his arms embraced you, pulling you closer to him. Through the kiss, he felt you smiling, which made him blush even more.

​​​

L ove Confession - How would they confess to their s/o?

It took a lot of time for him to understand his feelings toward you. Wolfs choose one partner for the rest of their life. So, he ought to think out everything: were his feelings true? Did you like him back? How would your relationship be in general?

When he couldn’t bury his emotion anymore, Jack decided to reveal his feelings.

He invited you to the Botanical Garden, the atmosphere here calmed him. He sat you in front of him and told you everything he wanted to say with a bashful and flushed expression and a waggling tail. And the beastman hoped that you would reciprocate his feeling.

​​​​

M arriage - Do they want to get married? How do they propose? What would the marriage be like?

He sees the marriage as the logical continuation of your relationship.  Of course, Jack will never force you onto anything, and he’ll wait until your graduation or when you both are ready.  

He thinks that by marrying you, you two become even more closely as a couple.

Only thought of him being your husband makes Jack’s heart go doki doki.

​​​​

N icknames - What do they call their s/o?

You hardly can expect from him to give you any pet names. He needs time to get used to calling you “[Name]-chan”.

After marrying you, he’s more open to show his love this way, calling you “beloved”.

​​​​

O n Cloud Nine - What are they like when they are in love? Is it obvious for others? How do they express their feelings?

I think it’ll become obvious to everyone that Jack has some feelings toward you, even if he denies everything or himself unaware of his feelings.

He’ll try to impress you with his strength – carrying stuff for you; his intelligence – volunteering to help to study with you.

If you ever compliment him, he’ll try to cover his blushing face while his tail is waggling.

​​​​

P DA - Are they upfront about their relationship? Do they brag with their s/o in front of others? Or are they rather shy to kiss etc. when others are watching?

Jack thinks that your relationship is not for other people’s eyes, so all you can expect from him is hand holding. 

If you really nicely ask for a kiss once or twice, he bashfully let you kiss him on the cheek, which makes his cheeks burn. How can you embarrass him so easily when he should act cool?

​​​​

Q uirk - Some random ability they have that’s beneficial in a relationship.

Being some time with him and watching him, he’s become easy to read; whether he’s happy, sad, angry or anything -- his ears and tail betray his mood.

​​​​

R omance - How romantic are they? What would they do to make their s/o happy? Cliché or rather creative?

Jack shows his love toward you by doing acts of service and spending time with you. He already carries heavy stuff for you, helps you studying, doing tasks and preparing for an exam.

As for more romantic stuff, well, he gentlemanly opens doors for you, treats you to dinner.

Also, he really will like to brush your hair, if you allow him.

​​​​

S upport - Are they helping their s/o achieve their goals? Do they believe in them?

Jack constantly compliments you whatever you do. He will always encourage you to achieve your goals and support you in everything. He will help you go through all the difficulties.

​​​​

T hrill - Do they need to try out new things to spice out your relationship? Or do they prefer a certain routine?

He’s not the best when it comes to spontaneity, so Jack prefers to stick to the routine you two already have, like you two spending time together, playing games, hanging out with your friends. 

But he doesn’t mind going out to some new places to entertain from time to time. 

​​​

U nderstanding - How good do they know their partner? Are they empathetic?

Jack’s used to looking after his siblings, so he observes you as well. Please, don’t hide from him your moods or problems, everything he wants is to help you. Just rely on him, and he’ll do his best to make you feel better.  

​​​

V alue - How important is the relationship to them? What is it’s worth in comparison to other things in their life?

Jack knew that he would find someone who he would love and be loved back soon or later. He wants to spend the rest of his life with you as your significant other and as your husband later. He will do anything for you to be happy with him.

​​​

W ild Card - A random Fluff Headcanon.

You’re the only person who Jack allows to touch his animal parts. During your cuddle session, he adores when you pet him and scratch behind his ears.

His tail has knots from time to time, so he lets you brush it. Every time he’s overwhelmed with emotions when you do this – for him, it’s an intimate act, and he considers it’s a perfect bonding time for you two.  

​​​

X OXO - Are they very affectionate? Do they love to kiss and cuddle?

Behind closed doors, Jack’s quite touchy-feely with you. He gives best hugs – he’s so warm and fluffy.

Due to his height, it’s easy for him to be the big spoon. He envelops you in a hug, and your nights are always warm in his arms.

Except for quick pecks, he usually kisses you during your cuddle sessions. Trying to hide his blushing face, Jack buries his head into your neck and shower it with kisses, which makes you giggle due to his fluffy hair tickling you.  

​​​

Y earning - How will they cope when they’re missing their partner?

He understands that sometimes you two have to spend some time apart, but he can’t help his thoughts drifting to you, which makes him miss you even more. Jack tries to distract himself by doing sport or watering his plants.  

​​​

Z eal - Are they willing to go to great lenghts for the relationship? If so, what kind of?

As it’s been said, Jack wants to spend the rest of his life with. He loves you so much and will do anything for you to be happy with him. You appreciate how much effort he puts into the relationship, and you love him for this.

[xxtraord1nary]

Adore You

𝙵𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚘𝚖: 𝙾𝚙𝚎𝚗 𝙷𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚝

𝙿𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐: 𝙴𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚗 𝚁𝚊𝚖𝚜𝚎𝚢 𝚡 𝚏!𝚖𝚌 (𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚎 𝚆𝚎𝚜𝚝)

𝚆𝚘𝚛𝚍 𝙲𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝: 𝟷,𝟶𝟹𝟶

𝙰/𝙽: 𝚂𝚘 𝚖𝚢 𝚕𝚊𝚣𝚢 𝚋𝚎𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚍 𝚙𝚞𝚝 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚘𝚐𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚜𝚎𝚎𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚌𝚞𝚝𝚎 𝚍𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌 𝚓𝚞𝚗𝚔 𝚘𝚗 𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎 𝚖𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚔 𝚘𝚏 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚜𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚝𝚒𝚎𝚜.

𝚂𝚞𝚖𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚢: 𝙰 𝚜𝚗𝚒𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚝 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚊 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚍𝚊𝚢 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚁𝚊𝚖𝚜𝚎𝚢’𝚜 𝚠𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚔 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎.

𝚆𝚊𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜: 𝙵𝚕𝚞𝚏𝚏𝚢 𝚓𝚞𝚗𝚔. 𝚂𝚘 𝚜𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚝 𝚒𝚝’𝚕𝚕 𝚛𝚘𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚝𝚎𝚎𝚝𝚑. 𝚁𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚊𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚘𝚠𝚗 𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚔 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚘𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚎.

𝚃𝚊𝚐𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚝: @katkart122 @missmiimiie @romewritingshop @lucas-rennells @custaroonie @actuallybored @maurine07

Mornings at the Ramsey’s during off days were quite unpredictable contrary to Ethan's preference for routine which heavily contrasted with his lovers stark spontaneity. She’d either sleep well into the afternoon or she’d be awake at 7 a.m. following some cooking tutorial or almost always smothering Jenner with kisses and cuddles to which he loved more than anything, or with endless treats to his little hearts content much to Ethan’s dismay. ‘He spoiled enough already’ he more than often argues. Almost always her attempts at making breakfast fail miserably. She somehow was only bad at breakfast. She isn’t the chef in the household and rather enjoys her permanent position as expert taste tester. So he’ll dutifully take over and cook some elaborate feast that will unfortunately never include pancakes but thankfully as well because as good as the fluffy clouds of deliciousness are Ethan’s suck. And they’ll never get better no matter how easy the task is. After ruining the pancakes his rookie wasted no time in reaming him to her best.

“Alright rookie we’re having...anything other than pancakes.”

“It’s literally just powder and water, how on earth can you screw that up?” She teases with a knowing smile while trying to poke his sides and slowly coaxing that beautiful laugh of his out.

“I went to med school and not a culinary institute rookie.” He sighs while trying unsuccessfully to hide his grin as he basked in the sweet harmony that was her carefree melodious laughter.

“Yeah, judging by the charcoal taste, I can certainly tell.”

“Alright that’s it.” She takes off as he embarks on chasing her throughout their shared apartment and he has her when he grabs onto his white t-shirt donning her glorious figure; although she’s insisted and he’s accepted that his clothes are their clothes.

“Say your sorry.” He demands holding her arms above her head while attacking the sensitive and feminine column of her slender neck with his teeth and tongue.

“Okay!” She relented letting out a sound between a moan and a giggle.

“I’m sorry your pancakes are so damn soggy.” She managed to rasp out before he began to tickle her silly.

Tangling his large veiny hands into her mane of curls he ravishes her full pink lips that he’s found the utmost comfort in. Tongue sweeping past her pouty bottom lip he invites himself in the warm and welcoming home of her mouth. Biting down on her bottom lip coaxes a long and sensual moan from her and a groan as he hikes her leg up his waist and places her against one of their floor to ceiling windows.

“Charlotte Naelie Ramsey, you have no idea how much I adore you.” And she truly didn’t. She could never truly grasp the depth of his affections for her, the way all his happiness resided in her beautiful smiles or her angelic laughter. His entire world was placed right in front of him, it was all her. In the way she did simple things like mindlessly rubbing her manicured nails through his soft dark brown locs or the little pecks she always gave him passing. Or how she always made sure he ate throughout their long work days or her simply plopping herself in his lap at any given time and feeding him the newest goodie sienna baked. He simply loved her presence and the safe haven that was the love of his life. He had it bad, as Bryce might say but damn he’d be a liar if he said he didn’t love it.

But where he loved her she loved him more. She loved his protective nature and his genuineness, and how no matter what he was always was thinking of her in everything he did. Like when he passed a flower shop on his way home from Providence after visiting his dad and made sure to grab her some tulips and tiger lilies and her favorite chocolate turtles just to see the way her lustrous honey brown eyes lit up at the small mindless gesture that just seemed like second nature to him. And she loved the way she always felt appreciated by him even if it was something as simple as organizing his desk for him making it much easier to navigate her burdening workload or her leaving adorable flirty pick up lines in his lunch she always packed for him. Last week's one said,

“Are you a magician? Because when I look at you, everyone else seems to disappear.” Cheesy but always seemed to put a smile on his face that anyone could see came from the woman who was on his mind all day and every night. What seemed impossible but only made him miss her more.

Returning to the present moment with his rookie and coming back from his reminiscing he was only stirred back to life with her sweet words.

“Couldn’t ever be more than I love you.” She placed sweet kisses all over his face. From his chin to the outer corners of his eyes struck with lines from his constant smiling due to the ever present ray of sunshine in his life, down to his nose and over his cheeks and finally stopping at his chin which raised high into a grin from the affection he could never get enough of.

“Impossible.” He countered rubbing his rough calloused hands up and down her smooth thighs and then to the wide curvature of her glorious hips.

“Oh really, wanna convince me of that?” She targeted back with a salacious grin peeking out through her mock tough exterior.

“Gladly Mrs. Ramsey.” And with that he whisked her to their bedroom and wasted no time in shutting the door throwing her to the bed in a mess of rushed laughter and lust. A morning with the Ramsey’s not predictable but most certainly enjoyable. With the soothing smell of lemon citrus candles and bacon wafting in the air of the home and the comforting warmth coming from the vent coupled with the sensual giggles and pleasurable sounds coming from the husband and wife everything just felt right.

This was their normal and they loved it.

[justlookfrightened]

If no one else has said it. . . Fluff #2 from the prompt list you just posted #ily 😘✨⭐

From this prompt list: “Is there a reason you’re blushing like that?”

Set sometime in Bitty’s sophomore year.

Bitty thunked his head against the stall divider.

Why did he keep doing things like that? Jack was going to think he was … he was stupid an immature. After all the time he and Jack spent working on his checking issue last year, and again this year, after all the time they spent baking and getting coffee at Annie’s and becoming real friends, not just teammates, after all that, Jack had to come into the locker room, still dressed in his gear after talking with the coaches, to find Bitty doing the Single Ladies dance. In his underwear.

Sure, Ransom and Holster had been doing it too, and they were in just as much a state of undress as Bitty. But they had some kind of captain radar and had fallen silent and still in the split second before Jack entered the room, cheeks pink and hair sweaty and a glare raking everyone in his path.

Must not have been a pleasant meeting, then. Well, it wouldn’t be after that disaster of a practice, would it? With all the missed passes and poor attention and lack of effort, they were lucky Hall and Murray hadn’t called a halt to drills and bag-skated them for the rest of the hour.

But that led to a morose team in the locker room, and that wasn’t going to help anyone, So when Ransom and Holster decided to cheer the team up with a little Beyonce sing- and dance-along, Bitty jumped right in.

Now Jack would go back to thinking Bitty was an unserious player who didn’t deserve to crack the ice. 

That wasn’t fair. Bitty did care about the team, and the game, and he worked hard at it. Jack knew that; Jack was there for all those 5 a.m. checking practices. (Jack had insisted on all those 5 a.m. checking practices.)

The thing was, last year, when Jack laid into Bitty and told him that he should just quit if he wasn’t going to try, Bitty had been angry and determined to prove Jack wrong. Now he was just embarrassed.

Here he was in a room full of buff boys, all of them taller and heavier and more muscular, swinging his hips and raising his arms in nothing but his boxer briefs. His team might be tolerant -- welcoming, even -- to a queer person such as himself, but why had he made such a fool of himself showing off?

At least Jack had wasted no time stripping off his gear and heading to the shower. Yeah, also not something he should think about. Jack was his friend. Jack couldn’t help it if he was also the hottest person Bitty had ever actually met. Bitty just had to get a hold of himself.

Heh. Not that way. Bitty thunked his head into the divider again.

“Are you okay, Bitty?” Chowder asked. “You didn’t hit your head too hard, did you?”

Bitty stood up and pulled his shirt from the locker hook.

“I’m fine, Chowder,” Bitty said. “Just having a flashback to the day Jack reamed me for singing Beyonce too loud in the shower.”

“Which was totally uncalled for, dude,” Holster chimed in. “You weren’t that off-key.”

“But it was early,” Ransom said.

“Bitty,” Chowder continued, “is there a reason you’re blushing like that?”

*

The only person still in the showers when Jack got there was Shitty, singing loudly and tunelessly to something … that was probably not Beyonce.

“Hey, Shits,” Jack said, hanging his towel on the hook outside the next cubicle. 

“Jackabelle,” Shitty said, pushing aside his curtain and turning off the water. 

That, at least, was normal. Shitty could barely bothered to wear clothes in the Haus, and seeing him undressed in the shower did exactly nothing for Jack’s libido.

So why had he reacted so strongly to seeing Bitty dancing around in his underwear? Bitty danced all the time:  when he was baking, when he was cleaning, when he took his figure skates and got the ice by himself, at kegsters. Sometimes the clothes he wore didn’t conceal much more than the boxer briefs he was wearing in the locker room. So why had this time made the blood rush to his face and … other parts of him?

Jack resolutely pulled the curtain closed on his shower cubicle before hanging up his shower caddy and stripping off his sweaty underwear. He reached through the gap in the curtain to toss them near his towel.

“Did they rip you a new one?” Shitty said sympathetically. So he was still there.

“They weren’t happy,” Jack said. “And they were right. It was a terrible practice.”

In actuality, they coaches had talked to Jack about changing up the drills for the next practice, to try to break the monotony. Maybe starting with a scrimmage instead of finishing with one. The team was playing well, but this part of the season was always a grind. They also told Jack not to share their thoughts; the idea was for the surprise to spark a change in attitude.

“Is that the reason you’re blushing like that?” Shitty said.

“Blushing?”

“Your face,” Shitty said. “It’s all red.”

Jack just grunted.

“I figured I would hang in here and avoid the blame-fest in the dressing room,” Shitty said. “Besides, taking care of the flow takes some time. Were they about done?”

“They were dancing when I got there,” Jack said. “But they stopped.”

“Dancing?” Shitty said.

“Bitty was,” Jack said. “I think probably Ransom and Holster too.”

“Well, damn if that boy isn’t a ray of sunshine,” Shitty said. “Good on him to put that practice in the trash and move on. No need to let this fester.”

Jack shrugged, then remembered Shitty couldn’t see him, so he grunted something that he hoped sounded noncommittal. Maybe Shitty, and the coaches, and Bitty were right, and the team simply had to move on. The coaches had been clear that the last thing they wanted was for the team, whose cohesion had grown so much, to turn on itself because of one bad practice. But it had been a bad practice.

And Shitty was right about one thing: Bitty did illuminate any room he was in, his warm smile always made Jack feel better. So it was probably a good idea to encourage that instead of the self-doubt that Jack had seen last year.

“I think it’s safe by now if you want to get dressed,” Jack offered, hoping Shitty would leave him alone in the shower room. “I’ll be out in a few.”

“See you in a bit,” Shitty said. “Don’t beat yourself up too much.”

Beat himself … up. Haha. 

“Don’t worry about me,” Jack said, adjusting the water and pouring shampoo into his hand.

[tothevines]

tagged by: @wickerjulias! thank you Jessy 😘 tagging: @potato-awesome @stormscoming @canonicallyhugedick (only if y'all want to!) + anyone else who's interested! I love reading these & learning about frenzzzzz <3

gender: she/her star sign: gemini (taurus cusp - v. important caveat) height: 5′4" time: 10:26 a.m. birthday: may 22nd music: lately I've been listening to a lot of Baby Queen, Kali Uchis, & Sylvan Esso last show: ............ no comment when i created my blog: this particular blog, september 2016 (but I didn't start using it consistently until october 2020) last thing i googled: "how to get rid of diva cup" (I got a new menstrual cup and I was trying to figure out if there was a zero-waste option for getting rid of the old one lol - so far the options are "cut it up and throw it in the trash" or "burn it" (???) so plz hit me up if you know what the best option is) reason for url: The National's "I Need My Girl" is a gorgeous song that is v. special to me ("remember when you lost your shit / and drove your car into the garden / you got out and said i'm sorry to the vines / but no one saw it") following: 346 followers: 70 avg hours of sleep: 7 or 8 lucky number: I guess I don't have one, but my favorite number is 8 instruments: I've played the piano since I was 7 or 8 - I mostly play classical though favourite food: ughhhh this is so hard but my favorite food might genuinely be ice cream lol. or simply potatoes in any form favourite song: "Gemini (Birthday Song)" by WHY? dream job: unrealistic - writer; realistic - CEO of a nonprofit that serves youth experiencing homelessness nationality: texan american

[calumcest]

fight so dirty but your love’s so sweet

[ao3]

SO i participated in a fic event with a bunch of other very talented writers where we all took a prompt and had to include a phrase in the fic. my prompt was lashton - bad boy so...here is what i managed to come up with 

the masterlist of all the fics for this event can be found here 

this fic would be absolutely nowhere without @calumsclifford and @5sosnsfw i owe them an eternal debt of gratitude for their help with coming up with ideas and listening to me scream about it for days on end because i just could not write it and also to jex for betaing for me i owe you my soul at this point i think 

also i literally said when i started this i was going to struggle to keep it under 10k but honestly what do you expect from me? brevity? absolutely not. on the topic i want it to be known that i finished this fic at exactly 4:58pm and it is due at 5pm will i ever change? no. keep your expectations of me low and we will all do just fine 

-

Luke hates a good ninety-five percent of his job. 

A solid thirty percent of that comes from the fact that he works as a receptionist at a hotel, which he thinks is possibly the most thankless job humanity could possibly have created. A further ten comes from the fact that his desk is right next to the kitchen, meaning mouth-watering smells are constantly wafting under his nose, and Luke’s not allowed to eat on shift. 

Fifty-five percent of it, though, is Ashton.  

Ashton doesn’t work at the hotel, but Luke’s pretty sure he’s there more regularly than half of the staff who do. He’s Calum’s friend, or they live together, or they’re in a gang together, or something, because Calum is how Luke knows Ashton’s name. Ashton will always slouch against Luke’s desk, cigarette tucked behind his ear, and then Calum will come out of the kitchen and Ashton will push himself off the desk and walk out with him. Luke’s never spoken to Calum, but he knows Calum’s boyfriend Michael works as a concierge on night shift, and that Michael doesn’t like Luke’s organising system. Luke doesn’t like Michael’s, and especially doesn’t like that he has to rearrange his entire desk every day when Michael’s shift ends at nine a.m. Neither of them is willing to be the first to give in, although privately Luke thinks that if Michael ever said a word to him about it he’d fold and let Michael have his shitty system and probably, like, Luke’s house, or something. Luke’s not very good at confrontation or standing his ground. 

Here’s the thing, though. Luke kind of likes Ashton. He likes the way Ashton’s black curls fall into his face and he doesn’t seem to care, likes the way his hazel eyes light up when he smiles, likes the way he gesticulates a lot when he talks. Ashton’s hot, and Luke’s lonely, and lusting over hot guys from afar is pretty much how he’s lived his entire life.  

However, Luke doesn’t like people leaning against his desk, which is one thing Ashton does. He also doesn’t like strangers speaking to him outside of a professional capacity, which is another thing Ashton does. He especially doesn’t like when he’s trying to deal with a difficult guest and Ashton takes it upon himself to tell them to go fuck themselves, because then Luke’s job is made ten times harder.  

“I’m so sorry, sir,” he says, hurriedly, as Ashton leans back against the desk, leather jacket rubbing noisily against the wood. 

“Excuse me?” the guest says to Ashton, halfway between incredulous and infuriated. Ashton shrugs. 

“You heard me,” he says coolly. “Go fuck yourself.” 

“Sir, I sincerely apologise,” Luke says, almost begging. “Of course I can refund you for breakfast. Which room number should I process the refund for?” 

“Who are you?” the guest says, and Ashton pushes himself off the desk, drawing himself up to his full height. 

“You wanna know who I am?” he says. His tone might be lazy, his face might be carefully slack, but his hazel eyes are hard, an edge of a threat in the way he cocks his head. 

“I want your name,” the guest blusters. “I want to file a complaint for your behaviour.” Ashton’s lips quirk up in an amused smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. 

“I’d be happy to introduce you to my boss,” he says, taking another step closer to the guest. The guest takes a small step back, stumbling as he does, and Ashton edges closer, baring his teeth in a grin. “But I can’t promise you’d come back in one piece.” 

“Your room number?” Luke says, trying to diffuse the situation, and it only comes out as half-squeaky, which is pretty good going for him. 

“Uh, actually, it’s okay,” the guest says, words tripping over themselves in their hurry to leave his lips. “Um. Thanks.” With that, he turns on his heel and speedwalks out of the lobby. 

Well. Fuck. 

Ashton watches him leave, then grins, pleased with himself, and turns back to Luke. Luke swallows, feeling himself flush under the heat of Ashton’s gaze. 

“You’re welcome, pretty boy,” Ashton says, when Luke says nothing. Pretty boy. Luke hates when Ashton makes fun of him like that.

“Thanks,” Luke mumbles, even though he absolutely doesn’t mean it. Guests like that never just leave it; his manager will be getting a strongly worded email later, and Luke’s going to get fucking reamed for it. 

“You’re fucking cute when you blush,” Ashton comments casually, sauntering back over to Luke’s desk. Luke doesn’t know what to say to that, never does, so he says nothing, pretending to be completely preoccupied with making a note for James, the guy on evening shift, to process the refund for the guest anyway. He’s not sure why the guy waited until five p.m. to ask for a refund for breakfast, but whatever. James’s problem now, not Luke’s. 

With two minutes left to go on his shift and Ashton’s eyes burning into the back of his head, Luke busies himself with gathering his things together so he won’t have to look at Ashton. He can feel Ashton’s eyes follow him as he gets up and shrugs his coat on, and wishes Calum’s shift would hurry the fuck up and end already. Luke always has to wait an extra couple of minutes for James, who’s always late, and Calum’s usually out of the door at five on the dot. 

Sure enough, as Luke watches the clock on his computer tick over to five, the door to the kitchen bangs open and Calum strides out, face splitting into a grin when he sees Ashton. 

“How’d you get here?” he asks, and Ashton pushes himself off Luke’s desk again to fall into step with Calum.

“Took Michael’s bike,” he hears Ashton say as they walk out. “Mine’s still in the fucking shop.” 

“He’s going to be pissed if you get him another tick-,” Calum says, cut off when they walk out of the lobby. James passes through the door they’d pushed open as it swings shut, and Luke lets out a heavy sigh of relief. 

“Would it kill you to get an earlier train?” he asks James as he pulls his bag off the chair, even though this is early for James. 

“Maybe,” James says. “Haven’t tried it, just in case.” Luke rolls his eyes, shouldering his bag. 

“See you tomorrow,” he says. “I’ve left a couple of notes for you.” James nods, sitting down in the chair and pulling the keyboard towards him. 

“See you,” he says. Luke nods, starting to walk away, when James shouts- “Hey, Luke!” 

“Huh?” Luke spins around to see James holding out a scrap of paper. “What?” 

“You left this,” James says, waving the paper. Luke frowns. 

“No I didn’t,” he says. 

“Well, it says Luke on the front,” James says, arm still outstretched. Luke hesitates for a moment, because he really hasn’t left anything behind - he’d checked meticulously when he’d been packing, anything to avoid Ashton’s gaze - before crossing the room back over to James and taking the paper from his hand. 

“Thanks,” he says. James makes a ‘don’t mention it’ hand movement, eyes already on the computer screen. 

Luke’s eyes flick down to the piece of paper in his hand - it does indeed say ‘Luke’, which kind of surprises him, although he’s not sure what James would have had to gain from lying about that. 

“You’re going to miss your train,” James says, not looking up from the screen, and shit, he is. Luke pockets the note and heads towards the doors of the lobby. 

“Wouldn’t miss it if you would fucking get here on time,” he says, pushing the doors open. 

“Fuck you!” James sing-songs after him, and Luke grins as the cool May air hits his face. 

 -------

 Luke forgets about the note in his pocket until he shoves his hands in his pockets to protect them from the biting wind on his way from the station to his house. He curls his fingers around the paper so he doesn’t forget about it, not wanting to lose it to the wind that’s howling in his ears, only letting go even when he has to unlock the front door.

As soon as he’s safely inside and has kicked his shoes off and chucked his bag down next to the sofa, he pulls the note out of his pocket and unfolds it. 

Golden boy, 

Golden curls, golden smile, golden heart. You burn me with how bright you shine, drown me out with your smile. 

What I wouldn’t give for you to see me. 

- AFI 

Luke stares at it. 

What the fuck? 

This has to be some kind of a joke. AFI? Like the fucking band? Luke doesn’t even listen to them. Or, actually, maybe there’s another Luke this is intended for. Luke does work as a receptionist, after all. Maybe someone dropped it off, wanting him to pass it on to a guest called Luke. It’s a pretty common name, so that’s not out of the bounds of possibility. 

Yeah, Luke thinks, folding the note back up carefully and putting it back in his pocket. He’ll check the list tomorrow morning, and see if there are any Lukes staying at the moment. 

 -------

 Michael’s always gone by the time Luke gets to the desk, even though Luke gets there ten minutes early every day. Luke often wonders how long Michael’s actually at work, whether he just fucks off at eight when things start getting slow after the early morning checkouts have gone. 

The start to the day is usually slow, which is good since Luke always has to reorganise the entire desk from the way Michael’s trashed it (seriously, who puts the returned room keys in alphabetical rather than numerical order?). It takes him until half-past to sort that out, cross-referring the guest database to the keys and hoping some deity takes pity on him and curses Michael to the ninth circle of Hell. By then, a steady stream of people are going in for breakfast, and Luke starts getting his first red-eye check-ins. 

The note completely slips his mind (again) until a lull at half-past three makes him decide to check his phone, which is in his jacket pocket. His fingers brush the paper as he reaches in, and he suddenly jolts, remembering he’d been meaning to look up all the Lukes currently staying at the hotel. 

Phone forgotten, he pulls the database up again, and does a quick search for Luke. Four names flash back at him, and Luke sits back, sort of satisfied, sort of disappointed. Some part of him had kind of hoped there weren’t any Lukes staying, and the note had been intended for him. The last time anyone had said anything nice to Luke was probably, like, a good three years ago. And it was probably his mum. 

He sets a note next to all four Lukes for himself, James and Michael to ask whether they’d been expecting a message when they check out, and then pushes the note from his mind and gets back to work. 

He barely even notices the time pass, so focused on answering emails, until there’s a tapping at his desk. He looks up, a customer-service smile already plastered on his face, only for it to slide off when he sees Ashton. 

“No need to look so happy to see me, pretty boy,” Ashton says, flicking a lighter on and off idly, but his eyes are twinkling. Luke swallows, and turns back to his screen. 

“Good afternoon,” he says politely, typing out a reply to a booking request and steadfastly not looking at Ashton. Ashton leans against Luke’s desk, leather jacket rubbing loudly against the wood, and Luke wishes he had the balls to tell him to stop. 

“I’m not a guest,” Ashton says. “You don’t have to be polite to me.” Yeah, but I’m kind of terrified of you, Luke thinks sourly, as he nods primly. 

“I’m on shift,” he says. “I’m polite to everyone.” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ashton’s lips quirk up in a grin. 

“I bet you are,” he says, pulling the cigarette from behind his ear and putting it between his lips.

“Um- you can’t do that in here,” Luke says, as Ashton flicks the lighter on again and lights the cigarette. Ashton looks up, arching an eyebrow. 

“Oh?” he says, around the cigarette. “Are you going to stop me, pretty boy?” Luke opens his mouth, and then closes it again, because who the fuck is he kidding? He’s not going to say shit. The fire alarm will speak for him, anyway. 

Ashton smokes in silence for a few minutes, and Luke thanks God that five isn’t a popular checkout time, so he doesn’t have to deal with guests throwing Ashton (and Luke) dirty looks. Five more minutes until Calum comes out, he tells himself. He can make it through five more minutes. 

“Do you smoke?” Ashton asks after four and a half minutes have passed, out of the blue. Luke blinks at him for a moment, realising Ashton’s talking to him. 

“Uh, no,” he says. Ashton cocks his head. 

“Shame,” he says. “Bet your lips would look good around a cigarette.” 

Luke has absolutely no idea how to respond, because he never knows what to say when Ashton mocks him like that, but he’s saved from answering by the door to the kitchen slamming open and Calum walking out, already grinning before he even sees Ashton. 

“Mate, I got a pay rise,” he says, as he and Ashton set off without a backwards glance. 

“Who’d you fuck for that?” Ashton asks, laughing as he dodges a punch to the arm from Calum. Luke just stares at them as they walk away, still bickering about Calum’s pay rise, wondering why Ashton gets such a kick out of making fun of Luke. His thoughts are cut short, however, when the fire alarm suddenly starts blaring. 

“Oh, fuck,” he says, scrambling to his feet and sprinting to the box to press the reset button before guests start piling down the stairs. 

Grace sticks her head out of the kitchen door, frowning. 

“Wasn’t us, I swear,” she says, seeing Luke pressing the reset button like his life depends on it. 

“I know,” Luke says. 

“Why does it smell like smoke in here?” 

“Uh, does it?” Grace’s frown deepens, and then there’s a shout from the kitchen and her head disappears again. The fire alarm finally stops, just as James walks through the door, giving Luke a confused look as he ambles over. 

“They burn toast again?” he asks, because none of them are ever going to let the kitchen live that one down. Luke shakes his head, and James wrinkles his nose. “Hey, why’s it smell like smoke out here?” 

“Don’t know,” Luke says as he shrugs his coat on, hoping there’s no ash on the carpet, or anything. “I’ve got to go, I’m going to miss my train. See you tomorrow.” 

“Hey,” James says, holding out another piece of paper. “Stop leaving shit behind.” 

“That’s not mine,” Luke says. James frowns at it, and then at Luke. 

“Says your name on it. 

“Yeah, I think it’s for a guest,” Luke says. “I made a note in the system. There’s four Lukes here right now.” James’s brow remains furrowed. 

“No, I think it’s for you,” he says. 

“I’m pretty sure it’s not,” Luke says. 

“Take it.” 

“I have to go.” 

“Well, take it with you.” Luke rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t have time to argue with James anymore because he really is going to miss his train, so he just snatches the note out of James’s hand and makes a mental note to bring it back tomorrow. 

“Don’t miss your train,” James calls, as Luke speedwalks towards the door. Luke just flips him off over his shoulder, hunching into himself as the cold May wind wraps itself around him. 

 -------

 This time, Luke reads the note on the train. 

Golden boy, 

I try not to look at you, as if you were the sun, but I see you, like the sun, even without looking.

Let me bask in your sunlight. 

- AFI. 

Luke frowns. 

He knows those words. That’s Anna Karenina, with the pronouns changed. Someone’s quoting Tolstoy to whoever this mystery Luke is that these notes are intended for, and Luke’s kind of a little bit envious. He wants someone to write him romantic, literary love notes. 

Whatever, he thinks, shoving the note back into his pocket with a little more force than strictly necessary. He hopes whichever Luke gets these notes appreciates them, and the effort Luke’s putting into getting them to him. 

 -------

 There’s a note in the system when Luke gets to work the next day. 

not luke evans - michael 

Okay, Luke thinks, clicking on the three remaining Lukes still checked into the hotel. Their checkout dates are all in the next couple of days, so Luke still has time to get the notes to whichever one it is. He’s put both scraps of paper in a corner of the desk, folded carefully so the name is clearly visible, lest James or Michael forget about them.  

He clicks off the Luke Evans note, and another note pops up. 

stop fucking with the room keys - michael

Luke’s kind of outraged at that. There’s literally nothing that makes any less sense than organising the room keys alphabetically rather than numerically. It takes more time to do anyway, because it means cross-referencing the key number to the guest database. He’s not sure whether Michael’s joking or just a masochist, but either way, Luke’s not having it. 

Stop putting them in fucking alphabetical order then. - Luke 

He presses enter before he has the time to second-guess it, because this is a topic that’s close to his heart, and if Michael actually fucking listens it’ll save Luke half an hour every day. He quashes the instant flare of fear that forces its way up his throat the minute he’s made the note, because he’s a little bit terrified of Michael, and clicks onto his emails, ready to make a dent in his already-full inbox. 

It’s a Friday, which is one of the busiest days at the hotel, so Luke’s checking people in and out for most of the day. His cheeks hurt from politely smiling by the time it starts to slow around four-thirty, and he has to stop himself from sighing when a shadow appears over him twenty-five minutes later. He’d hoped that was it for guests for today.  

When he looks up, though, he’s confronted with Ashton, leaning against his desk with a grin on his face. He’s not sure whether that’s better or worse than another guest. 

“Afternoon, pretty boy,” Ashton says. He’s got his usual leather jacket on, and his hair is all fucking windswept, and Luke doesn’t think he should be this attracted to someone he doesn’t know and is a little afraid of, but whatever. 

“Afternoon,” Luke says politely, averting his gaze and hoping Ashton doesn’t see the slight blush creeping up his cheeks. Ashton’s gaze flicks over to the pile of room keys Luke’s still got to wipe.

“Busy day, huh?” he says, indicating to the room keys with a tilt of his head. Luke just nods, and keeps typing. “Y’know, I sometimes wonder if I should quit the day job and become a receptionist.” 

“Oh,” Luke says, because what the fuck else can he say? 

“Yeah,” Ashton says. “Probably wouldn’t be nearly as much fun, though.” Luke purses his lips. He’s not sure whether Ashton’s trying to shit on Luke’s job, big up his own job, or get Luke to employ him. Luke’s not in charge of hiring, anyway, and if Ashton’s hoping he’ll put in a good word, he’s got another fucking thing coming. 

“Right,” he says eventually, when it becomes clear Ashton’s waiting for some kind of response. He kind of wants to know what Ashton does for a living, given that he seems to have the time to hang around waiting for his friends during normal working hours, but he’s far too shy to ask. Plus, what if the answer’s, like, assassin, or something? 

He doesn’t end up needing to ask, though, because Ashton supplies the answer for him. 

“I work at a bar,” he says, flashing Luke a grin. “Barback.” 

“Not bartender?” Luke asks in surprise, before he can stop himself, because Ashton doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be content to not be the centre of attention. Ashton laughs, and Luke’s stomach flips at the sound. He’s not really sure why it makes something warm fizz through his veins, why it makes him want to make Ashton laugh again. 

“Not trained,” he says. “I’m just working off a debt.” And, okay. Luke’s not really sure he wants to know what said debt is. No debt that needs to be paid off by barbacking sounds like one Luke needs to hear about.  

“Right,” he says again, hoping he doesn’t sound as flustered as he feels. 

“You should come by sometime, pretty boy,” Ashton says casually. “Bar’s on King Street.” 

“Oh,” Luke says. “Thanks. Yeah. Maybe.” Jesus Christ. His job is talking to people - why the fuck is he suddenly so bad at it when it’s a hot (and mildly terrifying) guy?  

“You can drink on the house,” Ashton says, eyes twinkling, “as long as you give me your number afterwards.” Luke feels his mouth drop open slightly, stuttering as his mind tries to both process what Ashton’s said and string together some syllables in response, but then the door to the kitchen slams open and Calum stalks out, looking furious. Luke jumps at the sound and shrinks into himself a little at the irate look on Calum’s face, but Ashton just looks over his shoulder lazily. 

“Afternoon,” he says idly, falling into step with Calum, who doesn’t even pause.  

“You come on Michael’s bike again?” Calum says, and Ashton nods. “Good. Fucking crash it on the way ba-” The door swings shut behind them, cutting him off, and Luke stares at where they’d been standing two seconds ago in surprise. What the fuck could Michael have done that was so bad Calum wanted Ashton to crash his bike?  

Luke shakes himself out of it and starts shoving his things haphazardly in his bag, because he’d been too distracted by Ashton to remember to pack, and as he’s wrapping his scarf around his neck, James ambles through the door. 

“Fucking cold out,” is how he greets Luke, from underneath his scarf. Luke indicates to his own.  

“It’s May, mate,” he says. James rolls his eyes, pink-cheeked from the wind, and tugs his scarf off as he walks behind the desk.  

“See you tomorrow,” Luke says, heading for the door. 

“Stop leaving your fucking notes behind,” James says, before Luke’s even got halfway there, and Luke rolls his eyes before spinning on his heel to face James. 

“They’re not for me,” he says. 

“They are,” James says, holding the note out. “Why else would whoever’s leaving them leave them here?” 

“Because they don’t know the room number of the Luke they want?” Luke suggests. James rolls his eyes. 

“They could ask.”

“Maybe they want to remain anonymous.” 

“They’d be anonymous to this hypothetical Luke, anyway, because they’re dropping it off at the reception,” James points out. 

“Well, I-” 

“Take the fucking note, Luke.” Luke scowls, but James isn’t going to let this go, and Luke doesn’t have the time to argue or he’s going to miss his train, so he just rolls his eyes and snatches the note from James’s outstretched hand. 

“Hope you make it,” James calls behind him as he starts to jog towards the door, and Luke just flips him off without looking back. 

-------

 Golden boy, 

Your lips are on my mind day and night, night and day. I wonder just how many other hearts they’ve sent racing. 

You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how. 

- AFI.

Luke frowns at it. Huh. Gone With The Wind. Whoever this AFI person is knows their literature, and Luke’s trying his best not to be impressed by it. 

Whatever, he thinks, shoving the note back into his pocket and trying not to be too sullen about the fact that some Luke out there is getting romantic, literary notes written for him. He’ll put it with the others on the desk on Monday. 

 -------

 Luke’s weekend is spent watching movies and eating junk food, with a little feeling sorry for himself sprinkled into the mix, so he’s feeling pretty well-rested by the time he gets into work on Monday morning. He steps through the door at ten to nine, shakes out his umbrella before slotting it neatly into the umbrella stand, and heads over to the desk that Michael has already vacated, as usual.  

There are two notes in the system for him when he fires it up. 

not luke johnson - michael 

alphabetical order makes it so much easier to sort through fuck you - michael 

Luke scowls at the screen, tapping out a reply before he can think better of it. 

How does it make it easier to sort through?! You have to cross-refer everything to the database!! - Luke 

He clicks off the notes, mentally crossing out a second of the four Lukes, which reminds him to set the third note on top of the other two in the corner of the desk for James and Michael to see. 

Besides Fridays, Mondays are the busiest days for check-ins and checkouts, so Luke’s face is already aching from the polite smile plastered on his face by ten past two. He’s idly rubbing at his cheeks when the door to the lobby swings open, and Ashton comes striding in, looking somewhere between furious and concerned. Luke starts in surprise, checking the time to be sure he’s not, like, missed two hours of the day somehow - nope, definitely ten past two - but Ashton doesn’t even stop at Luke’s desk, doesn’t even spare him a glance as he heads for the door to the kitchen. 

“Um- you can’t go in the-” Luke starts, but he’s cut off by the door to the kitchen banging shut behind Ashton. Luke stares at it, and then sighs. Whatever, he tried. 

He turns back to his screen, expecting to hear Calum and Ashton striding out of the door any minute, laughing and joking and nudging each other, but the door stays shut. Instead, after Luke’s read the email in front of him at least three times, mind elsewhere, he hears raised voices shouting in the kitchen, although he can’t make out what they’re saying. 

He clears his throat, and reads the email again. This isn’t any of his business, he tells himself, trying to focus on just what week Ms Barnet wants to book seven rooms. Ashton’s perfectly capable of looking after himself. 

(He vaguely registers that maybe he shouldn’t be more worried about a stranger than about his colleagues, but whatever.) 

The voices get louder and louder, still muffled by the kitchen door, and Luke strains his ears to try and hear what’s being said (he’s pretty sure he can make out a bunch of fucks). After a good two minutes, the door slams open again, making Luke jump, and Ashton walks out, Calum leaning into him, an arm slung over Ashton’s shoulders. 

“...can fucking look after myself,” Calum’s saying irately, as Ashton strides towards the door, Calum limping at his side. Ashton’s got his arm around Calum’s waist, clearly supporting his entire body, and Luke tries his best not to think about how strong Ashton must be to do that. 

“Look after yourself? You fucking fainted, Calum, and they let you keep working!” Ashton says furiously. 

“I’m fine, Ashton, I told you, I’m fucking fine,” Calum spits, and Ashton growls, like, literally growls. Luke swallows, hard. 

“Oh, sorry, Doctor Hood, want to show me the medical degree you’ve got to back up that opinion?” Ashton says sarcastically. 

“Fuck you, Ashton, seriousl-” the door swings shut behind them and cuts off their conversation, leaving Luke staring at where they’d been standing half in surprise, half in arousal. 

Okay, so he might have just discovered he has a bit of a thing for protective men. Or, maybe he’s just discovered he’s got a bit of a thing for Ashton. Which, frankly, isn’t much of a discovery, more of a confirmation. 

He shakes his head, trying to erase all the images this has conjured in his mind, and resolves to look into getting laid as soon as possible.

 -------

 Luke scours his desk before he leaves on Monday, but there’s no note. He finds himself a little disappointed for a moment, because it’s kind of nice to be able to kid himself that the notes are for him for a minute or two, before James finally arrives and he’s able to push it out of his mind in favour of shouting at James for being a whole ten minutes late. 

On Tuesday, Luke finds himself tensing up around ten to five, but Ashton never comes and Calum never leaves. There’s no note on Tuesday either, and Luke wonders whether maybe the fact that the mystery note-leaver isn’t getting any responses from the mystery Luke has disheartened them, and immediately feels guilty that he hasn’t tried hard enough to get the notes to the right Luke. The thought is forced out of his mind, however, when James arrives (half an hour late) announcing that the trains are all cancelled because of some signal failures and he’d had to carpool to work, so Luke needs to, like, call an Uber, or something. 

“Fuck’s sake,” Luke says, because he really can’t afford an Uber all the way home. 

“I know,” James tells him, sitting down in the chair heavily. “At least you’re not the one who’s going to be dealing with pissed off guests.” Luke has to concede there. 

Luke goes to the station anyway, in the vain hope that the Sydney Trains will actually fulfil their single function as a transport service, and is informed by an overwhelmed-looking station guard that it’ll probably be another three hours before they’ve sorted out the problem and got all the trains moving again. 

Great, Luke thinks, as he walks out of the station and into the cold mid-May air. Where the fuck is he supposed to spend the next three hours? 

He wanders around aimlessly for a while, sits down on a bench in Hyde Park for about ten minutes before the wind starts threatening to take his nose from him, wanders around some more, and then, because the universe wants Luke to lose the will to live entirely, it starts to rain. 

Great. 

Luke ducks into the nearest building - a bar, he can make that work - and shakes the water out of his hair, chancing a glance at the bar itself. Seven isn’t too early to order himself a shot, right? 

He stops short, however, when he sees who’s behind the bar. 

Ashton. 

He’s about to turn on his heel and walk out - he’s dripping wet, in a terrible mood, and Ashton’s terrifying on the best of days - but it’s too late. Ashton’s already spotted him, face splitting into a grin, beckoning him over to the bar. Fucking hell. 

Luke edges over hesitantly, trying to surreptitiously arrange the curls around his face - fucking rain, honestly - giving Ashton a hesitant smile as he gets to the bar. 

“Didn’t think you’d come, pretty boy,” Ashton says, still smiling, as Luke reluctantly sits down on the bar stool opposite him.

“Um,” Luke says, glad that the bar is poorly lit so Ashton won’t see the blush creeping up his cheeks. “It’s raining.” That doesn’t dim Ashton’s brilliant smile at all, though.

“I remember saying you could drink on the house,” he says, eyes twinkling.  

“Conditionally,” Luke says, without thinking. Ashton looks at him for a moment, and then laughs. Luke’s stomach flips, heat pooling low in his abdomen - Jesus, someone as hot as Ashton shouldn’t be allowed such a cute laugh.  

“Is giving me your number such a burden?” he says, grinning. Luke flushes, and looks away. He doesn’t get why Ashton gets such a kick out of making fun of Luke like this. He’d thought he’d left the days of people pretending to be into him for fun behind in high school. 

Ashton seems to sense Luke’s trepidation, and leans back from the bar. 

“Relax, pretty boy,” he says. “I don’t bite.” Luke can’t help the sceptical look he sends Ashton’s way, and it’s met with a dimpled grin. “Okay, I do, but you’ve gotta pay for the privilege.”  

“I don’t have any money,” Luke says, because it’s true. That’s the whole reason he’s here in the first place; he can’t afford the fifty dollars it’d cost him to Uber home. 

“Well, lucky for you, I’m in a generous mood,” Ashton says, leaning against the cupboard behind him. “What’ll it be?” Luke hesitates. On the one hand, he really doesn’t have any money, and if Ashton reneges on his offer, Luke’s kind of fucked. On the other hand, he’s had a shitty day, he’s still got an hour until the signal failure might be fixed, and he wants a fucking shot.  

“Tequila chilled, please,” he says eventually. “But I thought you weren’t a bartender.” Ashton’s lips quirk up in a grin, as he reaches for the tequila and a glass. 

“I’m not,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “But what are you going to do, tell on me?” His tone is both amused and challenging, and Luke swallows. They both know Luke’s not going to do shit. 

“That’s not chilled,” is all he says weakly, when Ashton pours the tequila straight into the glass. Ashton laughs, and pushes the glass towards Luke. 

“Try it,” he says. Luke stares at it, wrinkling his nose, and Ashton grins. “C’mon, I’m not trying to poison you. You’re far too pretty for that.” Luke bites his lip, but picks up the glass and glances at the clear liquid in it warily. He doesn’t even know Ashton, he thinks. This might be, like, straight hydrochloric acid, and Luke would be none the wiser until his oesophagus disintegrated. 

Despite his better judgement, though, and largely due to the heat of Ashton’s gaze, Luke raises the glass to his lips and tips the tequila down his throat, wincing as it burns down his throat. It’s warm, and it really does burn, but it burns in a good way, kind of peppery in his mouth, and Luke finds he doesn’t actually mind the aftertaste. 

“Huh,” he says, as he sets the glass back down, staring at it in surprise. 

“Told you,” Ashton says smugly. “Want another one?” Luke hesitates, and Ashton rolls his eyes, but he’s grinning. “On the house, pretty boy. You look like you could do with one.” Luke nods, and Ashton pulls the glass back towards him and pours him another shot. Luke watches him pour, trying not to think about the way his fingers are curled around the neck of the tequila bottle. He blames it on the alcohol making its way through his veins, ignoring the fact that it’s far too soon for it to have had an impact.  

Ashton pushes the glass towards Luke, who takes it and downs it without a second thought. Ashton laughs again when he sets the glass back down on the bar, eyes crinkled at the corners. 

“Rough day, huh?” he says. Luke, fingertips tingling, cheeks a little warm, nods. 

“Yeah,” he says. 

“Guess that’s what happens when I don’t show up for a day,” Ashton says, eyes glittering, and there’s something behind the humour on the surface that Luke can’t quite put his finger on. 

“Is Calum okay?” Luke asks, without thinking. Ashton looks at him for a moment, surprised, and then nods. 

“Took him to hospital,” he says. “Doctor said he should rest for a few days, but he’d be fine. He’s kind of pissed about it.” Luke can’t help the snort that escapes him, and Ashton’s lips curl up in a smile. 

“He sounded pretty pissed at you,” Luke says, as Ashton pulls the glass back towards him and pours Luke another shot. Jesus. Luke’s not even going to make it on the train at this rate. 

“He was,” Ashton says nonchalantly. “But Michael would have been more pissed if I hadn’t picked Cal up from work, and I’d take Calum’s wrath over Michael’s any day.” Luke wrinkles his nose. 

“Michael has a terrible organising system,” he says, swirling the tequila around in the glass. 

“He says the same about you,” Ashton says, which makes Luke start in surprise. 

“He knows who I am?” Ashton gives him a funny look. 

“Of course he knows who you are,” he says. “You’re day shift.” 

“Oh,” Luke says. “Day shift. Yeah. That’s me.” 

They lapse into silence for a while, Ashton gazing at Luke like he’s trying to work something out, Luke staring through the bottom of the glass and wondering whether he really should take this shot or not. 

“Are you afraid of me?” Ashton asks, eventually. His tone is even, and his face is calm, but Luke sees the tension in his posture, the hardness in his eyes. 

(Luke takes the shot.)

“Uh,” he says, when he sets the glass back down on the bar. “I’m afraid of everyone.” It’s not technically a lie, and Ashton considers it for a moment before shrugging. 

“I’m not trying to trick you, pretty boy,” he says, and he’s aiming for casual but Luke hears the seriousness beneath it. 

“I didn’t say you were,” Luke says, now definitely a little buzzed. Ashton cocks his head and narrows his eyes, gazing at Luke.  

“You don’t trust me,” he says after a moment. Luke shrugs uncomfortably. 

“I don’t know you,” he says. Ashton scrutinises him for another moment, and Luke desperately wishes he had something that wasn’t Ashton or his hands to stare at, before Ashton grins. 

“Let’s change that,” he says. 

“Huh?”

“Ask me anything you want to know,” Ashton says, putting his elbows on the bar and leaning forward. His hazel eyes glint in the dim light of the bar, and Luke parts his lips to respond, but finds himself too caught in the brown-gold-green. 

“Uh,” he says intelligently, shaking himself out of it when he remembers that hello, staring at hot and intimidating guys is kind of a bad idea. “What?” 

“C’mon,” Ashton says, eyes sparkling with amusement. “There’s got to be things you want to know about me.”  

“What’s the catch?” Ashton laughs, tipping his head back, and God, Luke wants to mark up that throat. Jesus. He makes a mental note for the future that tequila at seven p.m. is a no-go. 

“You really don’t trust me, huh?” Ashton says, grinning. “Well, I was just going to let you ask, but...how about I get to ask questions in return? Quid pro quo.” Luke swallows. 

“Okay,” he says, because what’s he got to lose? 

“But you have to be honest,” Ashton says seriously, and Luke nods. He’s a shitty liar, anyway. “Alright. You first.” Luke’s eyes widen, and Ashton looks at him expectantly.

“Uh. What- what’s your favourite colour?” he asks stupidly. 

“Seriously?” Luke shrugs, averting his gaze to the glass still sat between the two of them. “Okay. Green. Why don’t you ever speak to me when I’m at the hotel?” 

“I’m on shift,” Luke says automatically. “What’s your favourite food?” 

“Carbonara. Do I bother you?” Luke hesitates. He’s tipsy enough that he can’t lie, but still sober enough that he doesn’t want to potentially aggravate Ashton by being too honest. 

“Yes and no,” he says after a moment’s consideration. “When’s your birthday?” 

“Sixteenth of July,” Ashton says. “What do you mean, yes and no?”  

“Yes, because I’m trying to work and you’re really fucking distracting, no, because you’re-” Luke coughs, feeling himself flush. “Uh. Do you have any siblings?” 

“A brother and sister,” Ashton says. “Because I’m what?” Luke swallows. 

“Give me another shot,” he says, and Ashton laughs.  

“I think you’ve had enough,” he says, grinning. “You still need to get home in one piece, pretty boy.” Which, shit, what time is it? Luke pulls his phone out of his pocket - fuck, ten to eight, the trains might be back up and running by now - and pushes himself off the bar stool. 

“I’ve got to go,” he says, steadying himself against the bar as his vision spins from standing up too fast. “Uh. Thank you? For the drinks.” 

“Hang on,” Ashton says, catching Luke’s arm as he turns away. Luke’s skin burns red hot under Ashton’s warm, calloused fingers, and he tries not to let it make him even giddier. “You owe me a number.” 

“I don’t know my number,” Luke says, and Ashton frowns.  

“Hey,” he says, sounding a little concerned. “You can say no.” 

“I’m not saying no,” Luke says. “I’m saying I don’t know my number.” Ashton blinks at him for a moment, and then drops his arm. 

“You’d say no if you meant no?” he says, like he’s not quite sure he believes Luke. Luke nods. 

“That’s why I’m not saying no,” he tells Ashton, and then his stomach lurches, because fuck, that might have been a bit too forward for Luke, even in his mildly inebrieted state. “Uh. I really do have to go. Thanks.” Ashton nods, leaning back against the cupboard behind him and folding his arms. Luke closes his eyes so he won’t have to stare at Ashton’s biceps. 

“See you around, pretty boy,” Ashton calls, as Luke turns on his heel and heads for the door as fast as he can without looking suspicious.  

The cool May wind crashes over him when he stumbles outside, and Luke gulps in the crisp air like a drowning man. 

Jesus Christ, he thinks, tipping his head back and letting his eyes flutter shut. Hopefully Calum has to stay home for a long enough time that Luke can legally change his name and move to Perth, or something. 

 -------

 On Wednesday, Luke checks a tired-looking Luke Newham out. 

“Thank you very much, sir,” he says politely, when Luke Newham hands his room key over. “Oh, by the way - we had a number of notes arrive for a Luke in the hotel. Were you expecting anything?” Luke Newham looks surprised.  

“No,” he says. “Definitely not for me.” Luke frowns, and nods, and mentally strikes Luke Newham off the list. 

Well. It’s got to be Luke Byrne then. 

On Thursday, Luke arrives to find a note in the system from James on Luke Byrne’s guest data.  

Told you they were for you. - James 

Luke frowns, and reaches for the three notes folded carefully in the corner of the desk. 

Golden boy. Surely that’s not Luke? Okay, he thinks, looking at the first note - golden curls, yeah, he’s got blonde hair, but besides that? Golden smile, golden heart? If whoever is leaving these notes thinks Luke’s customer-service smile is golden, he’s going to have to recommend a lobotomy. And, he thinks, shuffling to the second and third notes, nobody could think he shone like the sun, nor have their hearts sent racing by his lips. Luke just isn’t that person for anyone, never has been.  

He spends the whole day puzzling about it, so consumed in trying to make sense of the situation that he doesn’t even realise how fast the time is going until the door swings open at ten to five, Ashton already grinning as he walks over to Luke’s desk. 

Oh, fuck. 

Luke hasn’t seen Ashton since the night at the bar, and he’s been trying his best to keep Ashton out of his mind, too. He’d nigh-on had a panic attack when he’d thought back to their conversation in the shower the next morning, so he’s counting the repression as being for health and safety reasons, which is definitely permissible. 

However, he can’t avoid Ashton at work. 

“You look happy to see me, pretty boy,” Ashton remarks, leaning against Luke’s desk, that one fucking curl falling in his eyes, and Luke forces the trepidation off his face. 

“Long day,” Luke says.  

“Need another pick-me-up?” Ashton asks, lips quirking up in a grin. Luke wills his blood to remain where it is and not rush to his cheeks, and averts his gaze back to his screen. 

“No,” he says, and then thinks it might have come out a bit curt, and adds, “thank you.” 

“Well, you know where to find me if you change your mind,” Ashton says. Luke nods tightly, and taps out a response to an email. 

“Michael says someone’s been receiving mystery notes,” Ashton says after a moment, far too casually. Luke’s eyes snap to him, and narrow.  

“What?” he says. Ashton shrugs. 

“Says someone’s been leaving notes for a Luke, and you’re trying to find who it is,” he says. Luke hesitates, then nods. 

“Well, they’re for a Luke, but I’ve checked with every Luke that was staying here when they came,” he says. “So. I’m going to check whether there are any Lukes due to arrive soon.” 

“You ever stop to consider it might be you?” Ashton asks, amused. 

“Well,” Luke says. “I mean. No? Like, I’ve thought about it, but- I’m not, y’know. That kind of person. I mean. Nobody, like.” He shrugs uncomfortably, wishing he’d never opened his mouth in the first place. 

“Nobody what?” Luke sighs. 

“Nobody would do that for me,” he says, all in a rush. Ashton raises an eyebrow. 

“Oh?” he says. “Says who, pretty boy?” Luke opens his mouth - to say what, he’s not quite sure - but they’re interrupted by the kitchen door banging open, Calum striding out, beaming. 

“I’m going to do it,” he says to Ashton. 

“Good,” Ashton says, pushing himself off Luke’s desk. “Only taken you a decade.” 

“Are you fucking mad, as if he would have said yes when we were sixte-” 

“See you tomorrow, pretty boy,” Ashton calls, and Luke starts in surprise. Ashton never says goodbye, forgets all about him as soon as Calum comes out. 

“Uh,” Luke stammers, “bye?” Ashton throws him another amused glance over his shoulder, and falls in step with Calum, who’s saying something about how he had to wait for the right time, okay, sixteen is way too young, even if he already knew back then. 

Luke stares after them for so long after the door has closed that his eyes start to water. 

Ashton doesn’t say goodbye to Luke. It’s one of the universal laws of, like, life, or something. The sky is blue, the Earth is round, and Ashton doesn’t say goodbye to Luke. Luke’s honestly not sure what to make of it - does Ashton think they’re, like, friends now, or something? Is he just trying to unnerve him? Yeah, it’s probably that, he thinks. Ashton clearly gets a kick out of making Luke flustered, and throwing him a curveball like that is a surefire way to do it.  

When Luke finally tears his gaze away from the door and back at the desk, he notices another scrap of paper to the left of his computer screen. He reaches for it, frowning at the Luke on the front, and opens it. 

Golden boy, 

Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love. 

- AFI. 

Hamlet. AFI is quoting Hamlet. Not just that - he’s quoting a lesser-known part of Hamlet, which means he’s either googling ‘romantic quotes to put in anonymous love notes’ or he’s well-read. Luke decides to choose it’s the latter, because the idea of that makes his heart skip several beats.

Although, to be fair, that might just be him jumping in shock when James slams his bag down on the desk. 

“Got your daily note?” James asks, seeing the piece of paper in Luke’s hand. Luke flushes, and folds it back up. 

“It’s not mine,” he protests weakly, getting to his feet, and James rolls his eyes. 

“We checked every Luke in the system,” he says. “Who the fuck else is it going to be?” 

“Maybe it’s for a Lucas,” Luke suggests. “Maybe Luke is a nickname.” James pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“You’re fucking impossible,” he says, holding his hand out. “Let’s see it.” Luke hesitates, and then drops it in James’s hand and busies himself with getting his things together so he won’t have to see the look on James’s face as he reads. 

“Put it on top of the pile,” Luke says, his back to James as he shrugs his coat on. 

“Luke,” James says, like Luke’s the stupidest person alive. Luke resents that. “This is about you. This is about you doubting the notes are for you.” 

“It’s not,” Luke says. 

“You’re doubting a note written about how you shouldn’t doubt the notes?” James says, eyebrows raised. Luke scowls into his bag. 

“Fine,” he says, turning around to face James. “And what if they’re for me?”

“Then we find out who’s leaving them,” James says, swinging himself into the chair and spinning around. 

“How?” James shrugs. 

“You’re going to miss your train,” is all he says. Luke scowls, and flips him off. 

“Get an earlier fucking train,” he calls, as he jogs towards the door, because shit, he really is going to miss his train. 

“No can do,” James shouts after him, and Luke flips him off again, almost shutting his finger in the door as it closes behind him. 

 -------

 Luke can’t sleep. 

He’s been lying in bed for two hours, tossing and turning, but he can’t get the notes out of his mind. 

What if they are for him? Luke’s barely even stopped to consider the idea - no, he’s actively stopped himself from considering the idea, because there was no way they were for him, and it would have been stupid for him to build up that kind of hope only for it to come crashing down. 

But now that they’ve checked every Luke in the system, he has to toy with the idea that maybe, just maybe they are for him. Sure, they could be for a Lucas, or for a Luke that’s still to arrive, but the rational part of his mind tells him that the likelihood of that is incredibly low. Logically, he knows he’s looking for other explanations because the idea that they could be for him just doesn’t compute. Luke’s not someone who gets romantic notes. Luke’s not someone who gets romance full stop - the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for him is pay for his cab home from their place. 

(He still thinks about Nick fondly.) 

And if they are for him, that opens up a whole new can of worms. Luke’s barely even given any thought to who AFI might be, because he’s been telling himself the notes aren’t for him. But now that he’s starting to entertain that notion, that question is crowding into every corner of his mind. 

Is it a reference to the band? Is it some kind of cryptic musical reference that Luke’s somehow supposed to understand? Or maybe it’s someone’s initials? AFI are pretty unusual initials, he thinks. He doesn’t think he knows anyone with a name starting with F, or a surname starting with I. Maybe it’s double-barrelled? 

He sighs, and rolls over onto his side, trying to put all thoughts of the mysterious author of the notes out of his mind. There’s nothing he can do about it now, and running in circles in his head clearly isn’t helping. He’ll just have to pay better attention tomorrow, see who’s dropping pieces of paper on his desk. 

You know, a little voice in his mind tells him as he’s on the verge of falling asleep. Ashton starts with an A. 

Luke pushes the thought away and allows sleep to envelop him. 

 -------

 On Friday morning, Luke pushes the door to the lobby open, yawning from his lack of sleep, and stops short. 

Michael’s there. 

He’s standing by the desk, hands on his hips, looking distinctly irritated. 

“Oh,” Luke says, completely bewildered. Michael’s never there. 

“I’m specifically supposed to give you this,” Michael says, thrusting a hand out. As Luke edges closer, he sees a piece of paper in it, the same scratchy handwriting spelling out his name on the front. 

“From who?” he asks. 

“Can’t tell you,” Michael says shortly, dropping the note in Luke’s hands and hoisting his bag over his shoulder. “I’ve left the keys in alphabetical order, and if you fucking mess them up again, I’m going to have Calum commit a fairly serious crime against you.” Luke clenches his teeth, watching Michael as he saunters out of the room without waiting for a response from Luke (not that he would have got one anyway), only dropping his gaze to the note in his hand when the door closes behind Michael. 

Okay, he thinks, unfolding the note, and trying to ignore the way his heart is racing and his fingers are fumbling with the paper. So the notes are for him. 

Golden boy, 

Maybe I’ve been too subtle with these. Maybe you needed the pomp and blare, and not the old friend through quiet ways, the seeming prose. 

- AFI. 

Luke frowns at it, sitting down in his chair and pulling up a browser on the computer. He’s not really sure whether these are AFI’s own words, or whether it’s a quote from something he hasn’t read before. However, a quick Google informs him it’s a (very butchered) line from Anne of Avonlea, which immediately makes Luke’s heart jump a little, because who outside of bookworms reads any further than Anne of Green Gables? Jesus, Luke’s already a little in love with AFI, and for all he knows it could be James playing a prank on him. 

And, like, okay. The notes are for him, and it makes Luke’s palms sweat a little just to think about. AFI thinks he’s a golden boy. AFI thinks he’s worth sending romantic literary notes to, and wants him to know they’re for him. 

And, more importantly, Michael knows who AFI is. 

Luke stews on that all day, thoughts stumbling over each other in their haste to get to the forefront of his mind. Why wouldn’t Michael tell Luke who it is? Why is AFI so keen to remain anonymous? Are they embarrassed to like Luke? Actually, that would explain a lot, and Luke can’t really fault them for it. He’s not exactly anyone to show off to friends and family. 

He’s so preoccupied that by four-fifty he’s only about two-thirds through the emails he should have answered, but as soon as he feels the familiar presence of Ashton looming over his desk, he knows he’s not going to get anything more done. He sighs, leaning back, and looks up at Ashton, who’s grinning at him. 

“Afternoon, pretty boy,” he says, looking particularly pleased with himself for some reason. Luke decides not to ask. 

“Hi,” he says. 

“You look pensive,” Ashton remarks. Luke shrugs, a little uncomfortably. What the fuck is he supposed to say to that? Yeah, you wouldn’t happen to know who dropped a note off for Michael to give to me this morning, would you? Cheers, mate. By the way, I’ve wanted to fuck you for, like, six months, and your presence is getting a bit unbearable, so would you do me a favour and not show up again until I’m out of this dry spell? 

“Uh,” he settles for. Close enough. 

“Heard you met Michael this morning,” Ashton comments, examining his fingernails. 

“Yeah,” Luke says, even though he’s met Michael before. “He’s, uh.” Bitchy? Luke’s not sure insulting Ashton’s friends is the best idea he’s ever had, so he says nothing. Ashton seems to get it, though, and just laughs. 

“Yeah, he’s like that,” he says. “But he’s lovely when you get to know him.” 

“Right,” Luke says doubtfully. Ashton just grins, and reaches for the cigarette behind his ear. 

“Uh,” Luke says. “You can’t smoke in here.” 

“Oh?” Ashton says, raising an eyebrow, cigarette already halfway to his lips. “What are you going to do about it?” Luke opens his mouth, and closes it again. Then, suddenly-

“I’ll give you my number if you don’t,” he blurts, and then immediately feels himself turn an impressive shade of red. Ashton’s hand stills for a moment, and then he grins, and tucks the cigarette back behind his ear. 

“If I remember correctly, you owe me your number anyway, pretty boy,” he says, but he’s still smiling. 

“You almost gave me a hangover,” Luke says, but he’s reaching for the phone in his coat pocket anyway, if only to spare himself from having to look at Ashton. Jesus Christ. What the fuck came over him? 

“Not my fault you’re a lightweight,” he hears Ashton say, and he scowls, unlocking his phone and pulling up his own contact. He spins back around to his desk and pulls a piece of paper towards him, scribbling the numbers down at the top. He hesitates, and then writes Luke at the top, even though Ashton clearly knows his name. He’s not sure how many numbers someone as attractive as Ashton must be receiving on a daily basis, so it can’t hurt, right? 

He pushes the piece of paper towards Ashton, who takes it with a grin, reading the numbers at least three times. 

“You know, I know your name,” he remarks. 

“I know.” Ashton glances back at the numbers again, and looks like he’s going to say something else, when the door to the kitchen opens. 

“You come on your bike?” Calum asks Ashton, who nods. “Good. I’ve picked out a few places I think might have good ones.” 

“In your budget?” 

“Fuck you,” Calum says, as they start off towards the door. “I got a raise, remember?” 

“And you still think Michael’s going to say yes when he hears how you got it?” Ashton says, sounding amused. 

“He already knows,” Calum says dismissively, pushing the door open. “And it’s not like he’s above threats of violence himself.” 

“I’ll text you, pretty boy,” Ashton calls over his shoulder, just before the door shuts behind him. 

Luke’s glad the door’s between them, or he might do something stupid like shout yes, please do, and please fuck me while you’re at it after Ashton. 

Jesus, he thinks, putting his head in his hands. Ashton’s got his number. He’s given Ashton his number. He, Luke Hemmings, had the gall to give the hottest guy in the entirety of Australia his number. 

Whatever, he tells himself, packing his things together. Ashton’ll probably forget to text him, anyway. Luke’s not exactly high up on anyone’s to-do list. 

 -------

 Much to his surprise, Luke’s first text from Ashton comes on Saturday evening. 

0491570156  Evening, pretty boy. 

Luke looks over at his phone lazily when it chimes, not intending to answer his mum when Mike Ross is about to get found out as a fraud by Jessica, and jerks upright when he sees the nickname. 

Hi. 

Hey. 

Hi :)

Hi! 

Hi 

Luke types and erases each one. Too serious, too enthusiastic, too childlike, not cool enough. By the time he’s decided to just bite the bullet and go for Hey, Ashton’s typing again, and Luke erases it all and waits with bated breath. 

0491570156 You typing an essay or something?

Shit, Luke forgot Ashton could see when he was typing. God, he’s going to have to start typing on Notes, or something. 

Me Sorry. Hi 

It’s terrible, but so is Luke, so it’s fitting. He clicks off the chat so he won’t have to see Ashton typing, and saves him as a new contact, by which time Ashton’s sent another message. 

Ashton You sound pleased to hear from me 

Luke swallows. He’s not sure whether it’s just because it’s over text, but Ashton sounds kind of pissed. 

Me I am!  

He erases that immediately. 

Me I am, I’m just surprised 

He bites his lip, and then thinks fuck it, takes another gulp of his wine, and adds a line. 

I’m also pretty bad at talking to people. 

Ashton’s reply is instantaneous. 

Ashton You’re cute when you’re flustered 

Ashton Although honestly, you’re cute all the time

Me I’m flustered all the time

Luke stares at the screen, willing Ashton to respond, heart beating wildly. He’s not exactly known for his flirting prowess. 

Ashton Damn...thought I was special 

Luke inhales deeply, and types without letting himself think about it. 

Me Never said you weren’t the reason I’m flustered all the time 

This time, Ashton replies immediately. 

Ashton Good :) I was starting to think this was all one-sided 

Luke lets out a shaky exhale. What’s that supposed to mean? 

He’s halfway through typing out a message along those lines when another text comes through. 

Ashton Sorry, my shift is actually about to start. Wasn’t expecting you to reply so quickly 

And then another: 

Ashton See you around, pretty boy 

Luke stares at it, and then puts his phone down, slightly dazed. 

He’s not going to think about this until he absolutely has to. 

 -------

 ‘Until he absolutely has to’ turns out to be about ten p.m. on Sunday night. 

Ashton Hey, pretty boy

Ashton I’m on my break 

Luke jumps when his phone chimes, and grabs for it with fumbling fingers. 

Me How’s work?

Ashton Oh, you know 

Ashton Only had to kick out one guy so far 

Ashton So pretty good 

Luke huffs out a laugh. 

Me Pretty sure that’s a bouncer’s job, not a barback’s 

Ashton I’m a good multitasker 

Okay, Luke doesn’t have, like, a thing for bouncers, but the idea of Ashton squaring up to some drunk guy and throwing him out is kind of doing something to him. He blames it on the fact it’s late, he’s tired, he’s desperate, and Ashton’s far too attractive for his own good. 

Me Clearly, since you bartend too 

Ashton Hey, you said you wouldn’t tell 

Me Telling you doesn’t count as telling 

Ashton You don’t know who might be watching over my shoulder 

Luke grins. 

Me Who’s watching over your shoulder? 

Ashton No one, but it’s the principle of it 

Luke doesn’t really know what to say to that, but he’s saved from having to come up with anything by another text from Ashton. 

Ashton You should come by the bar again soon 

Me Bars aren’t really my scene 

Ashton The way you knocked back those tequila shots says otherwise 

Me I said bars, not alcohol 

Ashton Come after closing, then 

Luke hesitates. 

Me I have work during the week. I can’t be out at three 

Ashton Then come on Friday 

Luke exhales heavily. 

Me Maybe 

Ashton You can say no

Me I’m not saying no 

Ashton :) 

Ashton Break’s over. I’ll see you soon, pretty boy x 

Luke throws his phone down on his bedside table, pretending for the sake of his sanity that he hasn’t seen the fucking kiss at the end of that message, rolls over, and goes to sleep. 

(And if his dreams are filled with dimly lit bars and hot guys in leather jackets, that’s a total coincidence.) 

 -------

 It comes to a head on Tuesday. 

On Monday, Luke’s note had read: 

Golden boy, 

Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others. I think we are the latter. 

- AFI. 

Luke hadn’t had to look that one up - it’s Sense and Sensibility, anyone would know that. It might have made his heart race a little, seeing those words in the rushed, scratchy writing he’s come to associate with AFI, and knowing that they’re for him. Someone out there thinks that despite the fact they’ve only been leaving him notes for a little over a week, that’s enough. 

Ashton doesn’t show up until a minute before Calum’s shift ends on Tuesday, which is unusual for him. He’s got bruised knuckles and a black eye when he does turn up, and he can only throw Luke a slightly half-hearted smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and doesn’t even call him pretty boy. 

“Hi,” he says, sounding tired. 

“What happened?” Luke says, frowning. Ashton shrugs. 

“I owed someone a favour,” he says simply, and there’s a tone of finality to his voice that tells Luke not to pry. Luke swallows, and nods. 

“You should put ice on that,” he says instead, nodding at Ashton’s eye, and Ashton huffs out a laugh. 

“Yeah, I-” he starts, and then the door to the kitchen bangs open, and Calum’s striding out, looking stricken when he spots Ashton. 

“What the fuck?” he demands, coming up to Ashton and cupping his face in his hands. “Jesus, was this Leon?” 

“Ben,” Ashton corrects, and Calum drops his hand. 

“Ben?” he says, an edge of fury to his voice. “Which Ben?” 

“You know which Ben,” Ashton says uncomfortably, turning away from Luke and heading off towards the door. Calum jogs after him, making a noise of anger. 

“Ashton Fletcher Irwin, what the fuck did I tell you about going after Ben?” he says dangerously. 

“I know, but Sam said-” Ashton says, cut off by the door swinging shut behind them, and Luke never gets to find out what Sam said. 

It doesn’t matter, though, because he’s gaping at the spot Ashton and Calum had just been standing in. 

Ashton Fletcher Irwin, Calum had said. Ashton Fletcher Irwin. 

AFI. 

Luke barely even notices he’s on his feet until he’s at the door, tearing it open and looking around wildly. The cold May air heads straight for his nose and ears, but he can’t even bring himself to care, rushing down the steps when he spots Calum and Ashton arguing by two motorbikes. 

“...owed him, Cal, you and I both knew he was going to call the favour in at some point,” Ashton’s saying. 

“Ashton,” Luke says, and both Ashton and Calum turn to him in surprise. 

“Yeah?” 

“Ashton Fletcher Irwin.” Realisation dawns on Ashton’s face, and he swallows. 

“Yeah,” he says, a little quieter this time. 

“You?” Ashton squirms a little, and nods. 

“Holy shit,” Luke says, because he doesn’t get it, can’t wrap his head around it. “Fucking- you’re AFI.” 

“Yeah,” Ashton says. “Look, I’m sorry, I just-” 

“You read Anna Karenina?” Ashton glances at him in surprise. 

“What? Yeah, it’s one of my favourite books.” 

“And Hamlet?” 

“Who hasn’t read Hamlet?” 

“Gone With The Wind?” 

“I- yeah? I just-” Luke takes a deep breath. 

“You’re AFI,” he says, again. Calum’s watching this entire exchange with something between bewilderment and amusement, leant back against his bike. 

“I just said that,” Ashton says. 

“You wrote me romantic notes.” 

“I- uh, yeah. I did.” Luke blinks at him, and takes a deep breath. 

“You- did you mean them?” 

“Of course I meant them,” Ashton says, sounding surprised. “How could I not? Jesus, Luke, look at you. You’re a fucking fantasy come to life. I’ve wanted nothing more than to kiss you since the day I first saw you. You think I was coming to pick Calum up from the hotel to be a good friend?” Luke stares at him. That’s the first time Ashton’s said his name, and Luke wants to hear it for the rest of his life.

“I’ve wanted to fuck you since the moment I saw you,” he says, without thinking. Ashton chokes on his next breath, and Calum sniggers behind his hand. 

“I’m going to go ahead,” he says, still smirking, throwing a leg over his bike. “Be safe, boys.” Ashton flips him off as Calum kicks his bike into gear and rides off, leaving Luke and Ashton alone in the deafening silence that follows Calum’s roaring exhaust. 

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Ashton says, after a minute. Luke bites his lip. 

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he says, “but I have no idea what I’m doing. I almost never do.” Ashton laughs at that, amused and fond, before his face falls again, like he’s just remembered something.

“Luke,” he says carefully. “I- look. I like you, but I’m- I’m not a good guy.” 

“Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?” Ashton sighs. 

“No,” he says. “I- look. I’m trying to be better, okay? But I don’t want you to get caught up in all this. I’m trying to end it.” Luke hesitates, and then nods. He’d kind of known Ashton was mixed up in something, and he finds that it doesn’t really bother him. 

“Okay,” he says easily. 

“No, Luke, you don’t get it,” Ashton says, sounding a little frustrated, and Luke takes a bold step forward, because what the fuck does he have to lose now, and places a hand on Ashton’s forearm. 

“Hey,” he says, summoning all his courage. “You owe favours, you’re repaying debts. You don’t have to tell me what they are. I’m okay with that.” Ashton frowns at him.  

“I’m ending it,” he says again, like he doesn’t think Luke believes him. “These are the last few jobs. I’ll be out of the bar in a few weeks.” Luke nods again. 

“Okay,” he says. “I can wait a few weeks, if you want me to.” Ashton tilts his head, and stares at Luke. 

“You’d do that?” 

“Well, I’ve waited six months, haven’t I?” A slow grin spreads across Ashton’s face. 

“You don’t have to wait,” he says. “It’s not- like, I’m not in the fucking mafia, or anything. I just don’t want you to get caught up in my business.” Luke shrugs. 

“I’m good at lowkey,” he says, and Ashton huffs out a laugh. 

“Yeah, I can believe that,” he says. “So. How about mine on Friday, instead of the bar?” Luke blinks at him. 

“Don’t you have to work?”  

“Not if I call in sick,” Ashton says. Luke hesitates, and then a small smile spreads across his lips. 

“Yeah,” he says, grinning. “Yeah. I’d like that.” Ashton grins back at him, swinging a leg over his bike and pulling his helmet on.  

“I’ll text you,” he says. 

“Yeah,” Luke says, a little dazed. “Text me.” Ashton kicks his bike into gear, and Luke sees his eyes crinkle, which means he’s smiling.  

“See you around,” Ashton says, “golden boy.” 

[kvetchlandia]

Richard Meltzer     Lester Bangs Passed Out on Meltzer’s “Highly Uncomfortable Living Rm. Chair,” 104 Perry St., Apt. 4, West Village, New York City     1972

On December 14th, this December 14th, Lester Conway Bangs, while probably not the greatest writer of his generation, arguably its most vital so far to die, would have been 36. Haunted and driven by demons, so- called, a cheerless many of whom/what/ which — or their kindred ilk — he directly sought, found cum stumbled upon, or was inadvertently ensnared by on the demon picnic grounds of Rock and Roll, he never made it to 34.

Following the lead of a handful of babes in the rock-critical woods, one of which I'll admit (if sometimes reluctantly) to having been. Bangs at the dawn of the seventies played as prominent a role as anyone in both expanding the expressive boundaries of rockwriting as a form and giving it a voice that played the newer, more mannered and cautious, mass-market rockmags like Rolling Stone and Creem — the latter of which he even edited for awhile — as on the dime as it had played the catch-as-catch-can, limited-edition fanzines whence it came. Though he also served as the burgeoning genre’s most prolific scribbler, a mission he sustained with relative ease for the bulk of his days, it is to the man’s lasting credit that he rarely delivered copy on anyone’s dotted line. In fact, he probably “got away with more’’ in major- publication print than all his rockwrite brethren combined, conceivably (however) because it merely simplified matters to have a single Designated Outlaw, one entrusted with a blanche enough carte — and unmonitored options galore — to spike with “authenticity ’’ a rock-media stew of bogus Freedom and ersatz Candor.

Retrospectively cliched or not, there was an existential purity to the sheer commitment evinced by Lester’s prolonged wallow in (and about) the rock- and-roll Thing-in-itself. It was, in many ways, the critical headbang to end all critical headbangs; it would be hard to even imagine, for instance, a professional art-film bozo, a jock-sniffing sports jerk, or a food-review lunatic more uninsulatedy gung-ho vis-a-vis x — either as primary experience or typewrite wankery. His patented shameless multipage gush, coupled with an unswerving advocacy of certain conspicuously over- the-top rock genera (Velvet Underground offshoots; Heavy Metal; Punk Rock), made him a must-read favorite with both cognoscenti and dipshits alike, and he came as close to encountering idolatry per se as any non-musician in R&R. A good deal of which — natch —could not help hitting the self-consciousness fan, but while a man’s life was ultimately undone in the process (“I’m Lester — buy me a drink! ’’), the integrity of his art/craft was essentially unaffected. For, while he might have been a tad too glib-messianic those last couple years, he was by no stretch of things an opportunist, never really giving a hoot for what in squaresville would be known as a career. (Or, perhaps, unlike his role model Kerouac, he simply didn’t live long enough for that, too, to be strenuously tested.)

In any event: dead, cremated, literal ashes. California born (Escondido ’48), bred (El Cajon, ages 9-23), and traveled (I first hung with him in San Francisco, last in L.A.), Lester bought the big one on the opposite coast — his final home, the fabled Apple — April 30/82, ostensibly from a hefty pull of darvon employed, in lieu of aspirin, to placate the flu. Since his death, variously interpreted as a mile-radius teardrop’s once-in-a- lifetime terminal burst, a joke and a half on both himself and his precious chosen whole damn Thing, and — by occasional uncouth louts — the final glorious triumph of his excess, the spectrum of Bangs-in-ongoing-print has dwindled from monochromatic /sparse to colorless/ nonexistent. Of the two books in his name which appeared during his lifetime, quasi-coffeetable numbers on Blondie and Rod Stewart, neither a particularly representative Lestorian effort (or even particularly good: the former admittedly hacked out “in two days on speed,’’ and looking it, i. e., ad hoc and forced; the latter disowned as a clumsy, if innocent, foray into “writing as whoring’’), both are either out of print — officially — or on the back burner of barely having ever been in same, at least as regards this coast, where I’ve yet to see either in bookstore one. Nor have two posthumous whatsems. Rock Gomorrah, cowritten (early ’82) with L.A.’s Michael Ochs, and a projected collection of unpublished fragments scrounged from Bangs’s apartment a day or two after his death, gotten more than inches off the publishing ground — the former for reasons which if herein revealed would get me sued but good, the latter because, in the words of editor Greil Marcus, “the stuff is less tractable than I thought at less than 5000 words or so.’’ Also stalled, and/or abandoned (and/ or nonspecific pipedreams to begin with) : all known plans to reissue out-of- print Live Wire LP Jook Savages on the Brazos, recorded, Austin, TX, Dec. ’80, by Lester Bangs & the Delinquents, lyrics and vocals by guess who. In fact, the only anything by L. C. Bangs readily available where availables are sold is his liner copy for The Fugs Greatest Hits Vol. I, released by PVC/Adelphi some months after he’d croaked, for which he (or rather his atoms) later copped a Grammy nomination, and for which, reliable word has it, he never was paid.

Well, I’ve been proven wrong; it hasn’t been easy recollecting Lester in even half a toto in so much tranquility. Didn’t seem like such a bad idea back when obits were appearing left & right and at least two- thirds of ’em smacked of revisionism at its well-intentioned worst; having ridden the range with the guy, having been as intimate with his daytime/nighttime revealed essence — I would bet my boots — as anyone in or out of various possible beds with him, I had fiery goddam galaxies to say in his behalf that were simply not being said, at least not in print by his designated peers; and, although my no longer living in New York couldn’t help but delay my shot, remote and after-the-fact seemed like the ticket, y’know anyway, for some major necessary rerevision.

But here it is two, two and a half years gone & more, and whuddaya know if all the raw goddam pain (at the loss of, yes, a brother) and jagged fucking anger (at a waste of life, life-force, and relative inconsequential like “talent” and “genius”), an unbeatable duo which for weeks, weeks, months gave the Lester totality so cosmic a shape, scale and intensity, have by their own inevitable burnout given way to the contemplation of standard-issue mere data, of the skeletal remains of a larger-than-life life which have come to make sense (or not) in too neat, too linear, a manner. Well — hey — fuggit: Even if grocery lists, chalk diagrams and hokey storytellin’ are the forms ongoing life-as-life has imposed on the mission, there’s still a heap of essential Lester information that could use, uh, exposure to printed-page light.

What too many write-biz intimates sought to do in the wake of his death was debunk the Lester Legend (solely) by reciting evidence that his bark was worse than his bite. While I’m sure he’d have “wanted it done” (i.e., have the saga-as- litany scraped of treacherous barnacles, or at least of their treacherous vogue), I can’t imagine the projected post-life intent of such a wish as in any way entailing cosmetic overhaul, especially in the service of moral/experiential object lessonhood. Lester’s day-to-day transaction with post-adolescent life-as- dealt was — let’s be conservative — 94 % anything but pretty. If he’d have wanted his entire whatsis to serve up viable scenarios for intimates and non-intimates alike (gee, would the Pope prefer to be Catholic?), there’s no way the deal’d come out even provisionally Lester-functional without interested non-intimates having retroactive access to as hefty an eyeful of the not-so-pretty — in all its hideous, non-Clearasiled blah blah blah — as intimates galore regularly managed to cop and, in their various personal ways, have already learned from. To deglorify an earlier incarnation of shit (which the man himself was clearly hellbent on doing in his waning days on earth) you’ve got to at least speak its name — loudly! — for the whole entire planet: c’mon now, one & all. A solemn responsibility (I call it) which, credibly/incredibly, the smelly sumbitch’s closest associates have, to this day, all but refused to consider.

To wit: For every time anyone saw the defanged, declawed Lester teddy bear rear its cuddly li’l head (see obits 2, 3, 5 & 7) the man was uncountable times the asshole, the buffoon, the sodden tyrant; been those things myself — in semi-prior lifetimes — so I know. Back in ’73, for inst, the soon-to-be-dead Lillian Roxon gushed shameless love for the s.o.b., in New York on Creem business, ordering up a Lester button and leaving it in his hotel box; response to this purest of offerings was “What’s that fat cunt want from me?” About a year later I get this call from Nick Tosches requesting that I please take Lester, who’d shown up at his door on acid, “off my hands”; took him to a party at John Wilcock’s place, during which he verbally brutalized Wilcock’s wife (in green Fingernails) for being a “hooker,” snapped at an affable Ed Sanders for being “the only alkie in the counter-culture,” and had nothing more to say to Les Levine’s Asian girlfriend (wife?) than “Yoko is a lousy gook”; further into the night, at Vincent’s Clam Bar in Little Italy, he literally bellowed ( more than twice), “There’s a lotta tackin’ wops in this joint.” And how can I forget the way he treated me and Nick, his closest approximate friends f'r crying out loud, as our wonderful editor while at Creem? He’d call us each up at 3 a.m. to urgently solicit various (rather specific) reams of pap, needed via Special D toot sweet; we’d climb outta bed, peck away bleary-eyed to whack out the closest possible takes on what he’d claimed he wanted, whereupon he’d reject ’em with a vengeance (“I won’t print beatnik shit”), then run thoroughly like-minded i. somethings — under his own byline — or with our words, usually verbatim, laced throughout. Just a few “examples,” dunno if they sound like big stuff or small, in any event typical Lester, with plenty, plenty more where they came from — y’know times n-plus-many.

In spite of such anticommunal upchuck, or quite possibly because of it — post-adolescent of a post-summer-of-love feather & all that — I did have deep affection for the bastard during my final years in New York; he could really piss me off (and I, I’m assuming, him) but bygones were always eventually ditto. In those days I generally shared his affection for The Edge, and might even’ve gone extreme slightly ahead of him; in January ’72, this is true, he actually dubbed me “the Neal Cassady of rock and roll.” But by fall ’75, when I split New York to at least simulate an escape from the Frantic and Hyper (and he subsequently arrived, ostensibly to embrace same), I was feeling the first stirrings of apprehension re my own prolonged massive intake of Edge Substances (emotional, cultural, but above all chemical) and was on the verge of an early series of attempts to, y’know, cut down, to maybe get off my collision course with all sorts of walls, both metaphoric and real. Lester, meantime, seemed on a rapid upswing in the intake dept.; what had so far served as mere horizon or frame for his trip, or at most been its semi-essential fuel, was now lunging headlong for the foreground of his life ... or should we call it the twin foregrounds (life as Mythic Construct; life as physical/emotional/cultural Hard Mundane Reality).

Hey, the guy was beginning to scare me. Certainly as an advanced — or rapidly advancing — version of what I no longer wanted to be and could (possibly) imagine once again becoming, but more as this vivid, palpable spectre of specialized human decomp not just out there but right there: a pal & a buddy headed (willy nilly?) for the sewer. From late ’75 immediately onward, on those unlikely occasions when separate coasts — underscored by far fewer rockwrite junkets — any longer allowed for it, I was usually unable to handle being in the same room with him, knowing I’d have to witness whole new increments of what could really no longer be passed off as anything but (gosh) misery and (dig it) horror. Where in the earlier ’70s it was almost cute — once in a while — the way Lester would stumble into classic self- directed drunk jokes (like the time he called me from the Detroit airport to tell me he was headed for an Alice Cooper show in London, presumably England, only he’d drunkenly got it wrong and was on his way to London, Ontario), there was this half-week in ’79, for inst, during which he hung out at Michael Ochs’s house in Venice with no daily design but to get skid-row-calibre gone and stay there, that was just fucking grim. Looking an unhealthy as I’d ever seen him, basic shit-warmed over with an ngly bump on his forehead (which he claimed he was “treating with Romilar”), he refused to eat without an Occasion. When, one evening, Michael and I pretty much dragged him to a Mexican restaurant, he refused to actually step inside until he’d fortified himself with the cottons from six Benzedrex inhalers — the local pharmacist was out of Romilar — busted open on the sidewalk with a shoe.

Washing down their remnants with a Dos Equis as his enchilada sat there staring at him, he quoted (or claimed he was quoting) Sid Vicious: “Food is boring.”

So, inevitably, when Billy Altman rang me up from N.Y.Clearly on a California morn, to let me hear it straight from a friend — “instead of from a creep” — my immediate response to no more Lester, steps ahead of all the pain & anger & whut, was holy fucking shit, the fucker finally did it; it’d been in the real-world cards for long-long times for Lester to cease to be. Though even on his gonest days he was no way a classic cornball suicide-romantic — heck, I don’t really think he was all that clinically suicidal (big-sleep fantasies never overtly/covertly lured him, not even metaphorically, from the darkest sub-basement of his World of Dread; nor was Danger, though he often nonstop lived it, itself the merest tickle of a ripple of a thrill for him, a context before the fact) — he’d sure staged more corny, frightful dress rehearsals than Jim Jones plus Judy Garland (squared) for simply ending up dead.

Biggest of which I ever saw was January ’81. I’m at Nick’s place in New York, en route back to L. A. from Montreal, when who should pay a surprise visite but Mr. Bangs, cassette in hand. It’s a tape of these tracks recorded during an Austin romp I’d heard about second or third hand (he’d planned to “live there forever,” it was said, ’til a night in the local drunk tank — on top of who knows what else — totally changed his mind), and in the course of the next 12-15 hours he played it, for us and at us, many times. Also during this stretch, after boasting, rather proudly, that he no longer drank, he managed to ingest at least 36 cough- suppressant tablets (three 12-packs of Ornical — we weren’t always watching) washed down with sizable slugs of bourbon, as there was nothing else but water to wash ’em down with.

All stages of this ordeal, in which Nick and I were little more than foils for surge upon surge of what we’d come to regard as typical Lestorian bathos, were hardly bearable in the state we were in (after far too many “nights with Lester,” going back to the days when we even could dig it, we’d opted for a change to take this one straight), but the morning-after phase was literally one for the books. On the umpteenth playback of what was soon to hit the racks as the Jook Savages LP, Lester insisted that one particular vocal was pure Richard Hell (in Lester’s cosmos an a priori yay); my dogtired no-big-deal of a response was it sounded existentially neater than that, more on the order of Tom Verlaine (a Lester nuh-nuh-no). Suddenly hair-trigger sensitive — in a performance-trigger vein — he tapdanced back with “Then I might as well go sell shoes in El Cajon.” Next cut he compared himself to somebody (very contempo) else, prompting me to comment, for non-pejorative, sleep- denied better or worse, that his vocals (across the board; in general) had the same basic flavor as those on such country-western parodies as Sanders' Truckstop or the Statler Brothers’ Johnny Mack Brown High School LP. Affecting grievous offense, as if any of his b.s. actually mattered (the Lester of ’73/’74 — in any chemical state — would merely’ve giggled), he took things up a full notch of indignant/sarcastic: “Well I guess I’m just no fucking good. ”

But he wouldn’t stop playing the crap, not with every cut looming as a supercharged occasion for kneejerk call- and-response, a challenge for him to goad Nick and/or me into goading him, in turn, into mock-self-deprecatory one-liners ad nauseum — a dress rehearsal, as it were — his puke-stained sweater seemed appropriate — for his triumphant appearance on Johnny Carson, which he had no doubt the worldwide success of his Blondie book would imminently require . . . along with a shot of his mug, cleanshaven, on the cover of People (over which he whined “fear” of besmirched personal image).

Ultimately Nick and I, weary of further compliance in so shoddy an interpersonal number, old buddy or not (and/or old bud in particular), found ourselves laughing in his face; enough was enough, and the sight of this bumbling mammal going gaga for an audience of two-who-knew- better was kind of otherworldly amusing. The object of our yuks, however, took it as us laughing with him: Great Moments in Standup/Audience Rapport! Swollen with illusory (or whatever) whacked-out self, Lester then proceeded to announce his program: (1) to save Rock & Roll; (2) to become president (presumably Oi the U.S. of A.); (3) to move to England and in turn save their Rock & Roll. As mere dipshit goals, nos. 1 and 3 meant topically little to either of us — geez, we’d all but buried the Anglo-Am mainstream as even an idle, y’know, sometime hobby or whatnot — but (2) hit us firmly, instantaneously, in the breastplate.

Lester’s neurons, no recent model of health to begin with, had made the short-circuit of Lester Bangs . . . [tenor saxophonist] Lester Young . . . (latter's nickname] Pres . . . Pres/U.S.A. per se!!!

Guffaw, guffaw — we guffawed — though I guess we could've gasped (or shuddered). Then: a heavy silence, as cosmic (or whatever) as it was awkward, filled presently by the man himself:

"Hey! I'm gonna buy some import albums! I'll get a whore I know to lend me her charge card! Cab fare too!" And he was off; no amiable nudging, no “Get the fuck out of here" could take the place of timeless vinyl hunger. Gone at last — and we gave him (in all solemn, empirical, non-jive reckoning) six months to live.

But of course he fooled us, by (nearly) a whole damn calendar year. Surprise, surprise: but an even bigger surprise was the extent to which he managed to actually turn things around — well, almost — during that extra annum, especially during its. and his. final months. Not only was he still among the living, not only did he no longer seem conspicuously earmarked for premature exit — the Lester with whom I spent a rather refreshing week in February '82 gave every indication of having already gone beyond mere survival (as an issue) and appeared, astonishingly, to be thriving on the theme.

In L.A. following his mother's eventually fatal stroke and staying with his 56-year-old half-brother in Studio City, he accompanied me one night to a low-stakes poker game attended by members of the Blasters, the perfect setup, you’d figure, for Lester to revert to type. But no, he just minimally fun-&- games'ed it like anyone else — no lookin' for opportunities to “be Lester," no showing off for rock-roll peers either verbally or intakewise. no diving for the evening's jugular and letting 'er rip — and after two beers (!). without so much as a grimace, he declared he’d had enough. Postgame he engaged Phil Alvin in a lively musical dialogue, but at no point did fightin' words fill the air, or were axes even poised for grinding. The pair agreed to exchange tapes — a wholesome friendship in the making — and next day Lester complained (true, true) that reefer had been smoked.

As the week wore on in consistent, low- key fashion. I was struck by the fuckload of inner capacities the guy was perceptibly calling on, left, right and center, to extend his defiance of Death to the domain of just plain living, capacities I hadn't caught sensory evidence of — all previously told — for more than 11 minutes total. A far cry from anything as cheaply benign as, let's say, more frequent eruptions of "Lester washes the dishes" (see obit 04), what I got to witness was kind of on the order of a whole new Lester, one who'd finally found a non-lethal, functionally less jagged (though in no way “benign") rhythm for his life. Engaging him in tight quarters with more open-heartedness per se than I*m sure I’d ever mustered (sharing an Edge does not always make for brotherhood-by-numbers. let alone by pure, unedited inclination), I willingly submitted to his rap/rant and bought its tenor if not its verbatim transcript; by the time he returned to New York, his mother still hanging on. I’d seen and heard a New Lester series pilot that could credibly have played — prime time — on the Pro- Life Network.

For starters, he’d learned to slow down, to proceed apace through a given experience without easy reliance on everpopular on-off switches. He'd gotten far more selective about the company he kept, seeking out, for the first time in his known adult life, social interactions stressing soulwarming interpersonal comfort over thrash-trigger me-you tribulation. A good deal less insistent upon strapping each day to an emotional chopping block (as recalled, for inst, in that old chestnut of his, “I need to be in love!"), he'd begun to let his life embrace emotional motifs of greater duration and resiliency. And. as stuff like this fed back to his theoretic apparatus, even Lester's ideas (as stated) began to display an unexpected day-to-day congruity; no longer, it seemed, would he write an anti-racist wowser for the Village Voice in one breath and scream, "Fuckin’ niggers!” at Village Oldies the next. Lester-as-flux had had its thoroughly engaging run. and for this to give way to a “maturer” unpredictability was not the worst of possible outcomes.

Even the drastic reduction in Lester’s intake of physical poisons bore little trace of on-the-wagon-or-bust — y'know, as if any day, minute, second the tension of it all would cause him to snap right back with equal vengeance — particularly with its status as but part of a whole-body package that included both eating at regular intervals and a radical olfactory modification: He now took baths. (One afternoon in ’74 Nick and I met Lester at some ritzy midtown hotel. Though he’d been in the room all of an hour, the smell was like a dog had died there, and been left to rot, weeks or months before. Consequently, we vetoed his offer to call down for drinks on Creem’s tab, suggesting, to his consternation, that any dump of a bar would be more, uh, whatever. Many of his heterosex liaisons had foundered on the rocks of precisely this issue.)

In terms of cultural orientation, no longer was he monomanically enslaved to rock & roll (-or-perish). For virtually the first time since the sixties he didn’t need, burningly, brand new Big Beat LP’s in his mail slot each (and every) day; the state of the Art, wobbling on a multi-year terminal gimp, no longer served as his external psychic barometer, his armband of first-person pride (or shame); having finally produced Music of his own, to severe personal specifications (regardless of the giggles it inspired in jerks like me), he no longer needed to prove anything with it or through it. Crucially, though some would probably like to deny it. he no longer saw Rock’em-Sock'em as a viable metaphor for his (or any, kindred or otherwise) state of being, viewing it as the all too easy — and ultimately, revoltingly, unsatisfactory — crystallization of (mega-numerous) blank and scattered lives. Lester's break with rock-roll mythos as his be-all/end-all of etc., which I have no doubt (had he lived) he’d've sooner rather than later made official, was as profound, and profoundly moving, as his break with the Myth of Lester. As one committed jackass who’d made the same painful transition — goodbye, Rock-Automated Self! — I knew how tough a bond the chronically intermingled personal/cultural can be to crack (and my heart went right out to him).

It also warmed my cockles, considering his record in the mere civility dept., to see him relate (graciously) to his half- brother’s wife, this unaffectedly pretty 21- year-old rural Mexican the macho blusterer, a stuntman by trade, had recently acquired, maritally, while on location Down South. Though she knew pun near zero English, my first sight of her she was watching some random English-language crap, while hubby rested for a shoot of the Fall Guy series, on the tiny TV in her fussy suburban kitchen; materially cozy for the first time in her life, she seemed lonely, disoriented, far from home. Silent and solemn, she visibly stiffened — shyly? menially? — at the intrusion of Lester, my girlfriend Irene and me. only to be put at ease by Lester introducing us, without missing a beat, as, well, friends of the family. Like it mattered to him that she feel like family — and thus shared in all aspects of etc. — and for a moment the loneliness left her face; she smiled broadly, shook (or at least took) our hands, went back to her tube.

But what came off as so genuine when he was dealing with his family, his friends, kind of sputtered into the ether when he tried to branch it to the family of Man. Whenever he got to talkin' Hard Humanism, which had all the earmarks of being his preoccupation of (Rock- replacement) record, he’d make these broad, lecture-ish, relatively flavorless statements which often didn't wash.

Never wholly credible 'cause once again he seemed to be performing — without booze/etc. but surely with a script — he’d say thus & such about human courage and folly that not only had an artificial ring, it tended to run in direct opposition to what had clearly been his experience. Even his word choice sounded stilted, alien, not his own; when he spoke of "women" he could easily have been reading straight from a column in Cosmo.

A lot of which suggested a Lester so hellbent on being a good boy once and for all that to merely work overtime cleaning up his own act was scarcely sufficient; he had to render a transpersonal commentary that made his good intentions “universal,” even if the topical universality he’d taken an option on was simply the first he found it comfortable song-&-dancing a provisional connection to. There were moments when his bill of particulars made me uneasy, realizing that to intellectually challenge any of this would be like kicking mud on some kid’s newest/truest pastime, 'specially when it was one so socially redeeming, so non- self-destructive. one which, for all intents and purposes, I basically shared with him anyway. What really counted was the miracle of Rock Tough Guy #1, after 15 years of rocknroll plug-in and little else, during which he'd come to thread that needle upside down (and asleep), to the point (even) of smugness, flipness, pomposity, out on a goddam limb over something else: a neophyte at last! (I could dig it.)

Anyway, finally, on the last night of Lester's stay — which worked out as our last time together, period — we did something we’d previously never found the appropriate nexus for: trading rants (in earnest) with blank tapes a-rolling.

For something like five-six hours we went apeshit re such topics as: the sellouts & prejudices of mutual colleagues; novels and novelists; New York as (quite possibly) the coldest outpost on Emotional Earth; the usual standard rockish garbidge (plus some un- and some non-). We also hit on shrinks-we- have-known, with Lester's rap on this rooty-toot of a subject being the single one, from the four-and-a-half hours I’ve so far transcribed, which most tellingly nutshells the excruciating self- examination he had to've undertaken — and undergone — just to be sitting around discoursing as fluidly as he was, to’ve transcended whatever the fuck en route thereto:

“Like I went to a psychoanalyst, one in New York and one in Detroit, for a total of, I dunno, three-and-a-half years. I finally concluded, I mean yeah I’m insane, I’ve got my problems, my sicknesses are fucking me, yeah, I’m sure they both probably helped me, y’know, I know the last guy in New York, it's like everybody I know was totally appalled by my drinking and drugging, well like you, right, and everybody else had the same reaction, y’know, except my shrink. He’d say, ‘No, that's alright.’ I went out to this, he had a country retreat, a whole bunch of us would go out there on weekends. And the first time I went there like I got drunk on Friday night, and Saturday morning I got up and washed down a bottle of Romilar with a bottle of beer while sitting on a slick rock by the stream. I got this great idea for something I wanted to write, I stood up on the rock in boots like these and whoosh, went like that and smashed, see it, the scar on my nose? That's how I got it, smashed my face open.

“And he thought my druggin' and drinkin' was great, y'know? He said, in fact he kind of told me I'd be not as great of a writer if I gave all this stuff up. And I said, 'Yeah, but look at all these people, they rot away, they end up like self- parodies like Kerouac and Burroughs and all that sort of shit.' And he said. 'No. no, not everybody's like that.' I said, How could I someday be 55 years old and have to take a handful of speed to sit down at the typewriter?' Well he said, 'People do it. heh heh heh!' Well both my shrinks, especially this guy, they had real great humanist compassion and empathy and all that, but I know what both of 'em did, and in the long run in essence they were no good for me, because they were getting off on me being there. It’s like they’re so bored, one housewife alter another, 'I don’t love my husband, I don't know why.’ Then they get someone like you or I that's actually interesting, that has ideas, and so it's fun time for 'em. I mean if I hadda follow this guy’s advice I’d be dead, uh, pretty soon.”

Hmm: one effing eery end-of-quote as, alas, all is now dust — reactively acquired caution or no. Possibly possibly possibly, any tonnage of prudence would inevitably have proven insufficient for the autopilot courses he was still, evidently, all too capable of flying. Or, reversing horses and carts, maybe his tortured shell was already jus’ too beat-to-shit, with even a radical lessening in his scale of abuse being too little — archetypally — too late. And then there’s this pharmacological biz about purified cells succumbing to doses they’d have been more than up for when poison was all they knew. (And can we ignore the Wrath of Influenza?)

Even if, to some bitter-enders, his death remains as shrouded in formal “mystery” as those of Eric Dolphy and Warren G. Harding, all-of-the-above can't help but provide a not-unlikely profile of how Lester came to die. Throw in a few more mainline Causalities (cultural: rock-roll glut, esp. coupled w/ too literal an intoxication with Kerouac, Celine, et al; primalpsychological: a childhood more woeful than most, his Jehovah's Witness mom — pushing 50 when she had him — mind-setting, almost singlehandedly. a chronic “inability to cope"; geographic: the Apple, even when it wasn't absolute Edge Central, affording him. given his makeup, scant opportunity for inner peace) and you'd easily have an explanation that 'd hold up in a court of his cronies/cohorts/camp followers.

But if Lester was the pawn, victim, and (indeed) fellow traveler of such easy- Aristotelian a-implies-b, he was also, in those last fitful months, a scatterer of all such shit to the winds, a man who showed his true destiny muscle by throwing all the elements out of on-the-head mythopoetic sync just when they threatened, conspiratorily, to reduce him to merely another Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. Mr. Kerouac. Screamingly, courageously, he committed himself, as wholly (really) as possible, to a counter-causal gameplan which even if flawed — and accidents, y’know, happen — did actually manage to defuse (at least where I live & breathe) the mythic oompah of any time-delayed rat-trap he may subsequently (or previously) have fallen in. If there's anything almost pleasing about the timing, the anti-drama, of Lester's death, it's the monumental Mythic Disjuncture factors he'd set in motion were thereby — implicitly, explicitly — to forever effect.

LESTER’S (WRITERLY) LEGACY — “One of rock’s most colorful characters, Bangs made his reputation as a pugnacious, participatory journalist who was not above picking fights with rock stars in pursuit of a good interview." So wrote one voice of prevailing wisdom, Patrick Goldstein, in the May 9/82 L.A. Times; nothing — latter part — could be farther from the truth. If Lester (the writer) more than once battled Lou Reed into (and beyond) the wee hours of etc., it was not to get a story, it was to live a story: to encounter all the rock-related being his writerly credentials (as a wedge) were able to afford him (as a person)'. Nor was he in any way enthralled by the sickening spectacle of stars being stars; artists, maybe, but stars, fug 'em. When he as mere citizen found himself face-to-face with the pose, pretense, and professional guardedness of such gaudy, extraneous creatures, Lester could not (for the life of him) deal with such crap but to cut right through and speak, directly, to the mere citizen in them, or (failing that) force the situation into functional self-destruct — before the fact of anything so dispassionate as actually “writing it up."

That his eventual write-ups tended to display utter contempt for the entire food chain of music-corporate life, often biting, intentionally, a grimy hand that could not’ve been more willing — his mighty Credentials & all — to feed him, heck, fatten him, was but half the take-no-shit of Lester's essential statement as a writer de rock; forcefeeding the stuff, his stuff, the stuff-as-writ, to the only marginally less corporate (or grimy) running dogs of rockwrite publishing was at least as pugnacious a gesture of this-is-what-I-am/this-is-what-I-do/take-it-or-be-fucked. Since the extent of his success in shoving it down so many otherwise unyielding editorial throats may have had less to do with his willful intent than theirs — camouflage, for inst, for their being life-deep in major-label record company pockets — its significance at this juncture is, at most, merely ironic; the reciprocal influence, in any event, of his ease at getting published upon subsequent moments of raw critical-expressive spew was procedurally nil. In fact, what may most enduringly matter about Lester's approach to his chosen profession, way ahead of dandy journalistic touchstones — "courage," “integrity,” “pride in craft" — that he ate for breakfast like so much broken glass (but which, really, you can still get from Nat Hentoff and Howard Cosell), is the “anti-professional," forcibly non-dehumanized square-one struggle he by design submitted to — and could not. with any kernel of his humanity, avoid - in order to pump out critical prose of any scale of note. (Pugnacity with form; with ritual creative context; even — especially — with roleplaying writerly/critical self.)

That he was ofttimes a great writer/critic, so-called, was but icing on the cake. That scant few others, on the hottest days of their lives, have even approached him — or particularly cared to, considering the requisite gravity and passion of the chore he’d set — probably says as much about their investment in lesser quals of cake as it does about the relative inadequacy of their writerly follow-through. Rockwriting is, and nearly always has been, the trade of simps, wimps, displaced machos, brats and saps; of, in Lester's own words, “ass-kissers of the ruling class”; of fuddy-duddy archivists with cobwebs on their specs; of pathetic idealizers of a lost youth no one has ever (even approximately) experienced or possessed; of sycophantic apologists for chi-chi trends, musical and extramusical alike, without which (so they've always claimed) “rock is dead”; of binary yes/no cheeses with the cognitive wherewithal of vinyl, shrinkwrap, the physical column- inch. Rockwritin' Lester, like anyone else in the trade, was certainly each of these things from time to time, though (probably) none of 'em, singly or in tandem, for longer than the odd off review. Sadly, though his untradelike comportment surely tantalized mere tradefolk while he lived — at least in terms of Style — and even begat a not-half-bad (early-’70s) clone in “Metal Mike" Saunders, his actual abiding sway among such clowns, beyond the occasional liftable riff, was — as it continues to be — infinitesimal.

Finally: the twin silly questions (1) where a still-living Lester might hypothetically've taken it (i.e., beyond the rockwrite fishpond) and (2) what such imaginary newstuff could/would conceivably’ve meant to his basic audience. Second one first. Okay, that Lester's rockstuff generally read so hot as personal testimony is one thing; for it to have been perceived by so many as being eminently, genuinely about something — something rather specific, in fact something "rear’ — is something else. When you get down to it, the gospel of Lester's radical about-ness rested largely on a big hunk of readerly illusion, the illusion of a functional one-on-one between the guy’s fertile imaginings and the psychic infrastructure of rock & roll as dealt; there could be harsh discordance, of course, but as long as a firm relationship could (for whatever readerly vested interest) be consistently inferred between Lester’s mindgames and rock’s g-g-games per se, you at least had the stamp of a viable — if totally simulated — one-on-one. But, really/truly, while Lester’s psychic playground may surely have been one drastically twisted maze, its actual correspondence (sympathetic, hostile, whatever) to rock's own labyrinth, one so airtight and dank as to make his seem like wide open etc., was far too often naught but a matter of readerly convenience. Everyone loves a cipher, a living/ breathing anagram or two. even some — hey — with flaws more rampant than Lester’s, but for the man’s writerly service to’ve been gauged (almost solely) vis-a-vis his reliability as a stand-in cipher-of- x, y’know for readerfolk too lame — or lazy — to suss out x themselves, is the real tragedy of the trip, particularly when the first-&-final glue of most folks’ attachment to his writing was never much more than their own desperate attachment to an x they could, and should, have been accessing more independently (and less desperately) to begin with.

So, anyway, here's the rub. Had Lester lived long enough to both sever his own desperate rock connection — officially, in sheets read by his fuckheaded fans, simply by writing other stuff — and, furthermore, to back it up with an equally official rejection of the Fount of Neurosis from which he'd sung its tune (and they'd listened), it ain't really much of a longshot to imagine him losing a huge percent of the fuckheads — certainly the most gung-ho among 'em — in, well, no time flat. And, c’mon, how much of an immediate, uh, new audience was he likely to yank in writing up (as he insisted he would) such transcendently pivotal mere-humanistic trifles as the dearth of love (as we know it) in scene X or Y . . . how this set of new-age culture jerks uses that set of new-age culture jerks as props in regards to bluh . . . New York editors who pull rank (pshaw!) along collegiate lines [a hard-hitting exposé] . . . or, I dunno, something about shams and follies in clothes and/or grooming?

Plus, well, though, um — (even if) — then again: Aside from loss of ad hominem authority due to the fickle scumbait nature of the pop-world Beast, aside from the fact that many of his generic partisans would prob'ly now be targeted, topically and even personally, in scathing printed-page rants, aside from the limited run such goulash (Sensitive Ties His Laces, w/ Brass Knucks & Footnotes) has ever had — hey — can ever/will ever have . . . aside, aside, aside — the most glaring fact fact is how few times, as of his death, he'd as yet even aspired to the heights (or whats) or non- rock journalism. Four-five-six, some number like that, in the Voice and wherever else, all of ’em still pretty much rockwriterly appendices to the rockwrite “adventure," meaning he had a good ways to go before he'd’ve got the wings/chops/ legs for a total-pulp plunge (or at least a regular shift) at full oldtime capacity (but with newtime thrust and content). Which would’ve been no fall from grace no matter how you scope it — give the boy time (for fuck sake) to stumble and bumble and get it right — but how would any possible Lester have dealt with a (previously amenable) shithook book co. like Delilah telling him not now, sonny when he handed ’em a ream of copy on (let’s imagine) friends who’re fuckups? Personal persona limelight Lester had learned to live without — but writeperson limelight? (It would not’ve been easy.)

Okay, he's dead. All this brand new grief and hardship never befell him; never will. But words on pages remain: What is their lot? Lester's standard fare was so paradigmatically “of the moment" that he was the rockmag shootist. But books of the stuff? Nah; it’s kind of nebulous how even his best mag outings will wear when inevitably (??) anthologized. For someone so public in his orientation, both as input and output, he was — don't laugh or even smirk — one of rock’s more precious and fragile "private moments.” Private moments you can always document — coercively, of course — but try and play ’em back and. well . . . we'll all see, I reckon.

LESTER LEAPS IN — Y’all know all by now how Lester leapt out of New York; lemme just finish with how he leapt in. His first night in town, just a visit, fall "72, he stayed with me and my girlfriend Roni, West Village, 104 Perry St., apt. 4. Arriving semi-direct from JFK, he split pretty quick for the nearest grocer, returning with three six-packs of Colt 45. What he did for the next day and a half — all he did — was wade through 18 big ones, half quarts, as follows: start can, drink fast, get tired; fall out, dropping remainder; awaken following can’s impact with floor; stagger to fridge for fresh one; repeat cycle. What he mumbled or muttered during any of the 18 pre-fallout phases I simply do not recall.

So like hey y’know wo hey hey wo-wo hey, OLD SPORT: love ya, hope I didn’t cramp yer style, g’bye.

--Richard Meltzer, “Lester Bangs Recollected in Tranquility”  Dec. 6, 1984

[theavengerfairy]

“The safest place I’ve ever known is in your arms.” - A.M Ream

Betcha weren’t expecting two Runora posts in one day! Well, neither was I! 🤣🤣🤣

Thank you to the wonderful @dragonanalei on DeviantArt & IG for this adorable piece! I’m absolutely in love and it fills my heart with so much delight!

‼️ Disclaimer: This ship takes place in an alternate timeline from the TDP canon where Runaan is single. Runaan’s orientation is also left ambiguous in order that each individual viewer may interpret him in their own way. Please be kind and respectful for one another and allow one another to enjoy this post or merely move on if they so choose. Thank you.‼️

[shipahoi]

- A.M. Ream

[thedevilnamedlola]

"Usually, I lie. At a party, someone asks the question. It’s someone who hasn’t smelled the rancid decay of week-dead flesh or heard the rattle of fluid flooding lungs. I shake the ice in my glass, smile, and lie. When they say, “I bet you always get that question,” I roll my eyes and agree.

There are plenty of in-between stories to delve into; icky, miraculous ones and reams of the hilarious and stupid. I did, after all, become a paramedic knowing it would stack my inner shelves with a library of human tragicomedy. I am a writer, and we are nothing if not tourists gawking at our own and other people’s misery. No?

The dead don’t bother me. Even the near-dead, I’ve made my peace with. When we meet, there’s a very simple arrangement: Either they’re provably past their expiration date and I go about my business, RIP, or they’re not and I stay. A convenient set of criteria delineates the provable part: if they have begun to decay; if rigor mortis has set in; if the sedentary blood has begun to pool at their lowest point, discoloring the skin like a slowly gathering bruise. The vaguest criterion is called obvious death, and we use it in those bizarre special occasions that people are often sniffing for when they ask questions at parties: decapitations, dismemberments, incinera- tions, brains splattered across the sidewalk. Obvious death.

One of my first obvious deaths was a portly Mexican man who had been bicycling along the highway that links Brooklyn to Queens. He’d been hit by three cars and a dump truck, which was the only one that stopped. The man wasn’t torn apart or flattened, but his body had twisted into a pretzel; arms wrapped around legs. Somewhere in there was a shoulder. Obvious death. His bike lay a few feet away, gnarled like its owner. Packs and packs of Mexican cigarettes scattered across the highway. It was three a.m. and a light rain sprinkled the dead man, the bicycle, the cigarette packs, and me, made us all glow in the sparkle of police flares. I was brand new; cars kept rushing past, slowing down, rushing past.

Obvious death. Which means there’s nothing we can do, which means I keep moving with my day, with my life, with whatever I’ve been pondering until this once-alive-now-inanimate object fell into my path.If I can’t check off any of the boxes—if I can’t prove the person’s dead—I get to work and the resuscitation flowchart erupts into a tree of brand-new and complex options. Start CPR, intubate, find a vein, put an IV in it. If there’s no vein and you’ve tried twice, drill an even bigger needle into the flat part of the bone just below the knee. Twist till you feel a pop, attach the IV line. If the heart is jiggling, shock it; if it’s flatlined, fill it with drugs. If the family lingers, escort them out; if they look too hopeful, ease them toward despair. If time slips past and the dead stay dead, call it. Signs of life? Scoop ’em up and go.

You see? Simple.

Except then one day you find one that has a quiet smile on her face, her arms laying softly at her sides, her body relaxed. She is ancient, a crinkled flower, and was dying for weeks, years. The fam- ily cries foul: She had wanted to go in peace. A doctor, a social worker, a nurse—at some point all opted not to bother having that difficult conversation, perhaps because the family is Dominican and the Spanish translator wasn’t easily reachable and anyway, someone else would have it, surely, but no one did. And now she’s laid herself down, made all her quiet preparations and slipped gently away. Without that single piece of paper though, none of the lamentations matter, the peaceful smile doesn’t matter. You set to work, the tree of options fans out, your blade sweeps her tongue aside and you battle in an endotracheal tube; needles find their mark. Bumps emerge on the flat line, a slow march of tiny hills that resolve into tighter scribbles. Her pulse bounds against your fingers; she is alive.

But not awake, perhaps never to be again. You have brought not life but living death, and fuck what I’ve seen, because that, my friends at the party, my random interlocutor who doesn’t know the reek of decay, that is surely one of the craziest things I have ever done.

But that’s not what I say. I lie.

Which is odd because I did, after all, become a medic to fill the library stacks, yes? An endless collection of human frailty vignettes: disasters and the expanding ripple of trauma. No, that’s not quite true. There was something else, I’m sure of it.

And anyway, here at this party, surrounded by eager listeners with drinks in hand, mouths slightly open, ready to laugh or gasp, I, the storyteller, pause. In that pause, read my discomfort.

On the job, we literally laugh in the face of death. In our crass humor and easy flow between tragedy and lunch break, outsiders see callousness: We have built walls, ceased to feel. As one who laughs, I assure you that this is not the case. When you greet death on the daily, it shows you new sides of itself, it brings you into the fold. Gradually, or maybe quickly, depending on who you are, you make friends with it. It’s a wary kind of friendship at first, with the kind of stilted conversation you might have with a man who picked you up hitch- hiking and turns out to have a pet boa constrictor around his neck. Death smiles because death always wins, so you can relax. When you know you won’t win, it lets you focus on doing everything you can to try to win anyway, and really, that’s all there is: The Effort.

The Effort cleanses. It wards off the gathering demons of doubt. When people wonder how we go home and sleep easy after bearing witness to so much pain, so much death, the answer is that we’re not bearing witness. We’re working. Not in the paycheck sense, but in the sense of The Effort. When it’s real, not one of the endless parade of chronic runny noses and vague hip discomforts, but a true, soon- to-be-dead emergency? Everything falls away. There is the patient, the family, the door. Out the door is the ambulance and then farther down the road, the hospital. That’s it. That’s all there is.

Awkward text messages from exes, career uncertainties, generalized aches and pains: They all disintegrate beneath the hugeness that is someone else’s life in your hands. The guy’s heart is failing; fluid backs up in those feebly pumping chambers, erupts into his lungs, climbs higher and higher, and now all you hear is the raspy clatter every time he breathes. Is his blood pressure too high or too low? You wrap the cuff on him as your partner finds an IV. The monitor goes on. A thousand possibilities open up before you: He might start getting better, he might code right there, the ambulance might stall, the medicine might not work, the elevator could never come. You cast off the ones you can’t do anything about, see about another IV because the one your partner got already blew. You’re sweating when you step back and realize nothing you’ve done has helped, and then everything becomes even simpler, because all you can do is take him to the hospital as fast as you can move without totaling the rig.

He doesn’t make it. You sweated and struggled and calculated and he doesn’t make it, and dammit if that ain’t the way shit goes, but also, you’re hungry. And you’re alive, and you’ve wracked your body and mind for the past hour trying to make this guy live. Death won, but death always wins, the ultimate spoiler alert. You can only be that humbled so many times and then you know: Death always wins. It’s a warm Thursday evening and grayish orange streaks the horizon. There’s a pizza place around the corner; their slices are just the right amount of doughy. You check inside yourself to see if anything’s shattered and it’s not, it’s not. You are alive. You have not shattered.

You have not shattered because of The Effort. The Effort cleanses because you have become a part of the story, you are not passive, the very opposite of passive, in fact. Having been humbled, you feel amazing. Every moment is precise and the sky ripples with delight as you head off to the pizza place, having hurled headlong into the game and given every inch of yourself, if only for a moment, to a losing struggle.

It’s not adrenaline, although they’ll say that it is, again and again. It is the grim, heartbroken joy of having taken part. It is the difference between shaking your head at the nightly news and taking to the streets. It’s when you finally tell her how you really feel, the moment you craft all your useless repetitive thoughts into a prayer.

At the party, as they look on expectantly, I draft one of the lesser moments of horror as a stand-in. The evisceration, that will do. That single strand of intestine just sitting on the man’s belly like a lost worm. He was dying too, but he lived. It was a good story, a terrible night.

I was new and I didn’t know if I’d done anything right. He lived, but only by a hair. I magnified each tiny decision to see if I’d erred and came up empty. There was no way to know. Eventually I stopped taking jobs home with me. I released the ghosts of what I’d done or hadn’t done, let The Effort do what it does and cleanse me in the very moment of crisis. And then one night I met a tiny three-year old girl in overalls, all smiles and high-fives and curly hair. We were there because a neighbor had called it in as a burn, but the burns were old. Called out on his abuse, the father had fled the scene. The emergency, which had been going on for years, had ended and only just begun.

The story unraveled as we drove to the hospital; I heard it from the front seat. The mother knew all along, explained it in jittery, sobbing replies as the police filled out their forms. It wasn’t just the burns; the abuse was sexual too. There’d been other hospital visits, which means that people who should’ve seen it didn’t, or didn’t bother setting the gears in motion to stop it. I parked, gave the kid another high five, watched her walk into the ER holding a cop’s hand.

Then we had our own forms to fill out. Bureaucracy’s response to unspeakable tragedy is more paperwork. Squeeze the horror into easy-to-fathom boxes, cull the rising tide of rage inside and check and recheck the data, complete the forms, sign, date, stamp, insert into a metal box and then begin the difficult task of forgetting.

The job followed me down Gun Hill Road; it laughed when I pretended I was okay. I stopped on a corner and felt it rise in me like it was my own heart failing this time, backing fluids into my lungs, breaking my breath. I texted a friend, walked another block. A sob came out of somewhere, just one. It was summer. The breeze felt nice and nice felt shitty.

My phone buzzed. Do you want to talk about it?

I did. I wanted to talk about it and more than that I wanted to never have seen it and even more than that I wanted to have done something about it and most of all, I wanted it never to have hap- pened, never to happen again. The body remembers. We carry each trauma and ecstasy with us and they mark our stride and posture, contort our rhythm until we release them into the summer night over Gun Hill Road. I knew it wasn’t time to release just yet; you can’t force these things. I tapped the word no into my phone and got on the train.

I don’t tell that one either. Stories with trigger warnings don’t go over well at parties. But when the question is asked, the little girl’s smile and her small, bruised arms appear in my mind.

The worst tragedies don’t usually get 911 calls, because they are patient, unravel over centuries. While we obsess over the hyperviolent mayhem, they seep into our subconscious, poison our sense of self, upend communities, and gnaw away at family trees with intergenerational trauma.I didn’t pick up my pen just to bear witness. None of us did. And I didn’t become a medic to get a front-row seat to other people’s tragedies. I did it because I knew the world was bleeding and so was I, and somewhere inside I knew the only way to stop my own bleeding was to learn how to stop someone else’s. Another call crackles over the radio, we pick up the mic and push the button and drive off. Death always wins, but there is power in our tiniest moments, humanity in shedding petty concerns to make room for compassion. We witness, take part, heal. The work of healing in turn heals us and we begin again, laughing mournfully, and put pen to paper.

Daniel José Older"

[sciencespies]

How Apollo 8 Delivered Christmas Eve Peace and Understanding to the World

https://sciencespies.com/history/how-apollo-8-delivered-christmas-eve-peace-and-understanding-to-the-world/

How Apollo 8 Delivered Christmas Eve Peace and Understanding to the World

It was the final months of 1968 and throughout the year, the stability of American democracy had been called into question again and again. When Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April, civil unrest erupted throughout the United States. The “confidence of America’s allies and friends around the world” had been shaken, Leonard Marks, the United States Information Agency (USIA) director told President Lyndon B. Johnson. “We have suffered a blow from which it will take a long time to recover.”

Two months later, on the other side of the country, presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot shortly after he made his California Democratic primary victory speech. Then, in late August, violent clashes between protestors and police at the Democratic National Convention broke out in Chicago, casting more doubt on the U.S. political system. Parallels were quickly drawn between the Chicago riots and the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Prague Spring that same month. At the end of the year the USIA concluded that the Vietnam War, protests, assassinations and upheaval throughout the country led “many persons abroad to question whether the vaunted American system might be on the verge of decay and disintegration.”

Tear gas, body counts, protests and riots all appeared on television sets around the globe and in international newspapers. The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee observed that “the mental picture that many foreigners have of our nation is increasingly that of a violent, lawless, overbearing, even sick society.”

Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo

Since July 1969, Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon has represented the pinnacle of American space exploration and a grand scientific achievement. Yet, as Smithsonian curator Teasel Muir-Harmony argues in Operation Moonglow, its primary purpose wasn’t advancing science. Rather, it was part of a political strategy to build a global coalition. Starting with President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 decision to send astronauts to the Moon to promote American “freedom” over Soviet “tyranny,” Project Apollo was central to American foreign relations.

Buy

Read More About Apollo 8

Then, in late December, Apollo 8 offered an antidote: an image of a nation striving for grand goals, inclusive and focused on peace and unity. The crew’s broadcasts from the moon would capture the attention of a billion people worldwide. Inclusive language during the broadcasts, as well as the soon-to-be-iconic photo Earthrise, amplified the USIA and State Department messaging that the American space program was “for all mankind.” When the world felt divided—between democracy and Communism, among generations, races and genders—it would be Apollo 8 that would offer a moment of unity and a sense of connection.

From the start, Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman understood his flight and then later promotion of the space program abroad as part of his service to the country, not as a purely scientific pursuit: “If you think I would’ve devoted that much of my life simply to exploration or science, I wouldn’t have, I’m not built that way, that’s not my thing.” The cold war threatened the security of the U. S., and his role as an astronaut was part of confronting that threat, lessening Soviet influence on the geopolitical landscape.

Shortly before his launch, as Borman engrossed himself in training, his phone rang. It was Julian Scheer, NASA’s deputy administrator for public affairs.

“Look, Frank,” Borman recalled Scheer explaining. “We’ve determined that you’ll be circling the Moon on Christmas Eve and we’ve scheduled one of the television broadcasts from Apollo 8 around that time.” Scheer pointed out that more people would hear the crew’s voices than had heard any voice in history. NASA estimated that a billion people around the world would be following the flight. He then added the simple but imposing instruction: “So, we want you to say something appropriate.”

One in four people on Earth—roughly a billion people spread among 64 countries—listened to the broadcast on Christmas Eve from Apollo 8 (from left: James A. Lovell Jr., command module pilot; William A. Anders, lunar module pilot; and Frank Borman, commander).

(NASA S68-50265)

For help, Borman turned to his friend Simon Bourgin, the USIA science advisor. The two had become close during the Gemini 7 diplomatic tour of Asia. When Borman prepared for interviews, he would ask Bourgin for advice.

Bourgin suggested a simple and short broadcast. “With six television transmissions, you are overexposed . . . and with that much time you could be tempted to pad, ham it up, or try to entertain. Avoid all of these.” In other words, he explained, “Keep your audience hungry.”

For the Christmas Eve broadcast, start with a description of what you see, he suggested: “I have a feeling that any direct message that you might compose reflecting on Christmas Eve, conditions on Earth, and the way you feel about it at the moon, could get awfully sticky; it would be difficult not to sound pretentious or patronizing.” In its place, end with a quotation.

Bourgin had called his friend Joe Laitin, assistant to the director of the Bureau of the Budget, and his wife, Christine, for advice. Christine came up with the idea of reading Genesis. “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?” she asked.

The first ten verses of Genesis from the Old Testament would have “universal appeal and a sense of reverence that is called for,” agreed Bourgin. As he told Borman, “About the only thing I can think of to match the majesty of the occasion, and the evening, is to read the opening lines of Genesis.” When Borman shared the idea with crewmates James Lovell and William Anders, they also agreed. The passage, typed on fireproof paper, was inserted into the Apollo 8 flight plan.

On December 21, like much of the nation, the first thing on President Lynden B. Johnson’s agenda was to watch the early-morning launch of Apollo 8. At 7:51 a.m. EST, Borman, Lovell and Anders became the first humans to ride the huge Saturn V rocket into space, one of countless firsts that the astronauts would claim on the mission. Susan Borman, Frank’s wife, found it “awesome . . . like watching the Empire State Building taking off.” As the spacecraft glided out toward the stars, the astronauts departed the Earth and stopped experiencing sunrises and sunsets. Another first.

An entry pass to the viewing stand for the Apollo 8 launch at Kennedy Space Center, December 21, 1968, is held in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

(NASM)

Also in the museum’s collections is Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders’ spacesuit, engineered to provide a life-sustaining environment during unpressurized spacecraft operation.

(NASM)

Lunar module pilot William Anders wore this intra-vehicular glove during the launch of Apollo 8.

(NASM)

The Genesis scripture that the astronauts read on Christmas Eve 1968 can be found neatly typed in the pages of the Apollo 8 flight plan.

(NASM, courtesy of the Alder Planetarium and Astronomy Museum)

When Apollo 8 astronauts splashed down on December 27, 1968, they were airlifted safely aboard this rescue net to hovering Navy helicopters.

(NASM)

The image Earthrise, taken aboard Apollo 8, swiftly became a culture touchstone, appearing on this bumpersticker and elsewhere across the American landscape.

(NASM)

The mission would prove a boon for American ambassadors and other officials, who were invited by local media for interviews on the flight. “An excellent opportunity to get positive exposure through a variety of media in many countries,” the USIA advised. The agency would record the heaviest placement of its media material in memory, providing hundreds of photos, thousands of feet of TV film, and “reams of copy” to local newspaper, radio and television outlets around the world.

The Voice of America radio network provided live coverage of each stage of the mission, from launch to splashdown, in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. American embassies in Eastern Europe assembled exhibits in their windows with pictorial explanations and a step-by-step schedule of the flight. As the crew completed stages of the mission, embassy staff would post announcements. The U.S. Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, reported that the window display “drew exceptionally large crowds, despite cold and snow.” In warmer climes, inhabitants of Martinique followed radio coverage of the flight so carefully that consulate personnel reported walking down the street and hearing status updates from shopkeepers and acquaintances.

Apollo 8 reached the moon three days later. The crew fired the service module engine, slowing the spacecraft down just enough to put it into orbit around another celestial body, another first. On the fourth orbit, Borman rotated the spacecraft, tilting its nose back toward Earth. Its small windows framed the Earth seemingly rising above the lunar horizon. The view caught the crew by surprise, even though mission planners had anticipated that the moment would come.

“Look at that picture over there!” Anders called out. “Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” With a Hasselblad camera in hand, Anders snapped a photo. Most of the photography scheduled for the flight focused on the moon. NASA needed detailed images of potential landing sites for future missions. As Anders watched the Earth rise above the lunar horizon, the black-and-white film magazine mounted to the camera’s boxy body would not do. Only color film could capture the contrast of the gray moon and the bright-blue Earth that Borman called “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” Anders called out, “You got a color film, Jim? Hand me that roll of color quick, will you . . . hurry up!” After a swift swap of film magazines, Anders started snapping again.

“Look at that picture over there!” Anders called out. “Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” The image Earthrise became one of the most famous of the Space Age.

(NASA )

He caught the Earth above the gray-chalky lunar horizon, the sun illuminating parts of Africa and South America. Eddying clouds suggested an alive, dynamic planet. Earthrise, as the photograph would come to be known, amplified the beauty—and rarity—of humans’ home planet. Shortly after the crew splashed down a few days later, this photograph would grace the front page of newspapers around the world and become one of the most famous images of the Space Age.

Food packed for the crew that day was tied up in fireproof plastic green ribbons and labeled “Merry Christmas.” Inside Borman, Anders and Lovell found turkey with gravy and a fruit-cake coated with gelatin to prevent crumbs from floating into the spacecraft’s systems.

At 9:30 p.m., during the second-to-last lunar orbit of the flight, the crew began their last broadcast from the moon. Taking a cue from Bourgin, they turned the camera toward the moon and took turns describing their perspectives. Borman called the moon a “vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing, that looks rather like clouds.” Lovell agreed, commenting that “the vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” Anders added, “The sky up here is also rather forbidding, foreboding expanse of blackness, with no stars visible.”

“We are now approaching lunar sunrise,” Anders explained to the television and radio audiences around the world. “For all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 have a message that we would like to send to you.” Minutes before the spacecraft slipped behind the moon for the last time, the crew took turns reading from Genesis.

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth,” Anders read.

Borman ended the passage, adding “and from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”

Around the world, television sets glowed with the broadcast. One in four people on Earth—roughly a billion people spread among 64 countries—listened to the reading. Within 24 hours, recorded broadcasts of the address from the moon reached people in another 30 countries. Audiences in North and South America as well as Europe tuned in live thanks to the recently launched Intelsat 3 satellite. Comsat put the satellite into operation a week ahead of schedule so that international audiences could follow the flight.

Frank Borman had at first been skeptical about the addition of heavy television equipment on missions because weight and time were at a premium. But the broadcast, and world reaction, would change his mind. “Probably [the] most important part of space,” he later reflected, “in view of [the] impact on people of the world.”

Reactions to the telecast were unprecedented, and the USIA won a significant public diplomacy victory with the carefully chosen, inclusive wording of the Christmas Eve address. A BBC correspondent commented that the reading “struck on instantly as a stroke of genius.”

In Latin America alone, 1,353 stations carried the VOA broadcast, breaking records. Even Radio Havana picked up VOA coverage, an anomaly for the official Cuban-government–run station known for transmitting programming created by the North Vietnamese, North Koreans and Russians. The station cheered the mission as “a total success.” Borman received some 100,000 letters of appreciation for the Christmas Eve broadcast from around the world, with just 34 letters making complaint.

The Apollo 8 crew had traveled farther and faster than any humans in history. They saw what no other eyes had seen: the far side of the moon, and the Earth from a great distance, blue and white and shining. They became the first humans to ride the mighty Saturn V rocket, break the bonds of Earth’s physical pull, and enter the gravitational field of another celestial body. But the mission, and the program more generally, “did much more than just advance the country scientifically and technically,” Borman, argued. “It advanced it—in my opinion—diplomatically just as much. It cast the country in a favorable light, at a time when there were many things that cast it in an unfavorable light.”

On Christmas Day, the front page of the New York Times carried an essay by the poet Archibald MacLeish inspired by the mission: “To see the earth as it truly is, small blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

Expert from Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo, by Teasel Muir-Harmony. Copyright©2020 by Teasel Muir-Harmony. Published by Basic Books. Reprinted by permission.

#History

[xxtraord1nary]

Adore You

Fandom: Open Heart

Pairing: Ethan Ramsey x f!mc (Charlotte West)

Word Count: 1k

Summary: A snippet into what a morning day off with the Ramsey’s would like.

Warnings: None, just fluff.

Taglist: @openheartfanfics @katkart122 @maurine07 @romewritingshop @custaroonie @lucas-rennells @omgfheishot @missmiimiie @schnitzelbutterfingers @openheartfanfics

Mornings at the Ramsey’s during off days were quite unpredictable contrary to Ethan's preference for routine which heavily contrasted with his lovers stark spontaneity. She’d either sleep well into the afternoon or she’d be awake at 7 a.m. following some cooking tutorial or almost always smothering Jenner with kisses and cuddles to which he loved more than anything, or with endless treats to his little hearts content much to Ethan’s dismay. ‘He spoiled enough already’ he more than often argues. Almost always her attempts at making breakfast fail miserably. She somehow was only bad at breakfast. She isn’t the chef in the household and rather enjoys her permanent position as expert taste tester. So he’ll dutifully take over and cook some elaborate feast that will unfortunately never include pancakes but thankfully as well because as good as the fluffy clouds of deliciousness are Ethan’s suck. And they’ll never get better no matter how easy the task is. After ruining the pancakes his rookie wasted no time in reaming him to her best.

“Alright rookie we’re having...anything other than pancakes.”

“It’s literally just powder and water, how on earth can you screw that up?” She teases with a knowing smile while trying to poke his sides and slowly coaxing that beautiful laugh of his out.

“I went to med school and not a culinary institute rookie.” He sighs while trying unsuccessfully to hide his grin as he basked in the sweet harmony that was her carefree melodious laughter.

“Yeah, judging by the charcoal taste, I can certainly tell.”

“Alright that’s it.” She takes off as he embarks on chasing her throughout their shared apartment and he has her when he grabs onto his white t-shirt donning her glorious figure; although she’s insisted and he’s accepted that his clothes are their clothes.

“Say your sorry.” He demands holding her arms above her head while attacking the sensitive and feminine column of her slender neck with his teeth and tongue.

“Okay!” She relented letting out a sound between a moan and a giggle.

“I’m sorry your pancakes are so damn soggy.” She managed to rasp out before he began to tickle her silly.

Tangling his large veiny hands into her mane of curls he ravishes her full pink lips that he’s found the utmost comfort in. Tongue sweeping past her pouty bottom lip he invites himself in the warm and welcoming home of her mouth. Biting down on her bottom lip coaxes a long and sensual moan from her and a groan as he hikes her leg up his waist and places her against one of their floor to ceiling windows.

“Charlotte Naelie Ramsey, you have no idea how much I adore you.” And she truly didn’t. She could never truly grasp the depth of his affections for her, the way all his happiness resided in her beautiful smiles or her angelic laughter. His entire world was placed right in front of him, it was all her. In the way she did simple things like mindlessly rubbing her manicured nails through his soft dark brown locs or the little pecks she always gave him passing. Or how she always made sure he ate throughout their long work days or her simply plopping herself in his lap at any given time and feeding him the newest goodie sienna baked. He simply loved her presence and the safe haven that was the love of his life. He had it bad, as Bryce might say but damn he’d be a liar if he said he didn’t love it.

But where he loved her she loved him more. She loved his protective nature and his genuineness, and how no matter what he was always was thinking of her in everything he did. Like when he passed a flower shop on his way home from Providence after visiting his dad and made sure to grab her some tulips and tiger lilies and her favorite chocolate turtles just to see the way her lustrous honey brown eyes lit up at the small mindless gesture that just seemed like second nature to him. And she loved the way she always felt appreciated by him even if it was something as simple as organizing his desk for him making it much easier to navigate her burdening workload or her leaving adorable flirty pick up lines in his lunch she always packed for him. Last week's one said,

“Are you a magician? Because when I look at you, everyone else seems to disappear.” Cheesy but always seemed to put a smile on his face that anyone could see came from the woman who was on his mind all day and every night. What seemed impossible but only made him miss her more.

Returning to the present moment with his rookie and coming back from his reminiscing he was only stirred back to life with her sweet words.

“Couldn’t ever be more than I love you.” She placed sweet kisses all over his face. From his chin to the outer corners of his eyes struck with lines from his constant smiling due to the ever present ray of sunshine in his life, down to his nose and over his cheeks and finally stopping at his chin which raised high into a grin from the affection he could never get enough of.

“Impossible.” He countered rubbing his rough calloused hands up and down her smooth thighs and then to the wide curvature of her glorious hips.

“Oh really, wanna convince me of that?” She targeted back with a salacious grin peeking out through her mock tough exterior.

“Gladly Mrs. Ramsey.” And with that he whisked her to their bedroom and wasted no time in shutting the door throwing her to the bed in a mess of rushed laughter and lust. A morning with the Ramsey’s not predictable but most certainly enjoyable. With the soothing smell of lemon citrus candles and bacon wafting in the air of the home and the comforting warmth coming from the vent coupled with the sensual giggles and pleasurable sounds coming from the husband and wife everything just felt right.

This was their normal and they loved it.

Fin.

Thanks for reading.

[from-the-clouds]

Everything You’ve Come To Expect II - Quentin Beck/Reader

Part I | Masterlist

Summary: A former employee of Stark Industries hides in solitude from her past, until she is forced to confront it years later. After all the time away, she realizes still hasn’t recovered from her heartbreak. 

Words: 1.9k

A/N: Thank you to everyone who reblogged/liked/gave me feedback. I’ve been in a creative rut and it was such a boost of confidence to see all your kind words :) I put out the first part without really having an idea of where this was going, so I don’t know how good this part will be. Next chapter things will get going, I promise, I’m thinking this might end up being 5-ish parts! I also would love to do some pre-FFH little fics about them, so let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like to see :)

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Quentin must have been exhausted. That was the only explanation, as it was 9:45am and Y/N had yet to hear him stir. He had always had a strict routine - early to bed, early to rise. He’d plan his day out ahead of time down, writing schedules on pieces of paper that ended up scattered around their apartment. Organized chaos. She had been the only one who could get him to break from his customs, only after reams of convincing.

As the clock crept closer and closer to 10 a.m., and she had yet to hear him stir, it dawned on her that whatever had happened last night couldn’t have been an act. If he was really so worn down he was letting himself sleep in, maybe whatever he’d come from had been more serious than she’d thought, not a dramatization of a desperate plea for attention.

On the other hand, she’d tossed and turned all night. She couldn’t find out what was more unsettling - that the man she’d spent several years of her life with had showed up on her doorstep without warning, or that he was now sleeping only meters down the hallway in her guest bedroom. It was probably both. The whole situation was confusing, and she’d been awarded very few answers. Knowing Quentin, he’d probably figured out some way to manipulate the truth, so looking online wasn’t going to help. And some small, immature part of her wanted to know absolutely nothing. How comforting the idea of ignorance was.

She stared out at her backyard, curling up in the deck chair as she finished off the mug of coffee she’d been nursing, her only hope to function that day. Her mind was still spinning as she gazed absentmindedly at the forest in her backyard, trees packed so thick you could hardly see between them, the ground bedded with fallen branches, moss, and brush. Birds sang, insects chirped. It was the picture of peace, solitude. And yet, she couldn’t seem to find an echo of it within herself.

Leaving the coffee pot on for Quentin, she laced up boots over her jeans, and pulled a flannel on to keep the morning chill at bay. When she stepped onto her front porch, she stared at the winding dirt road that snaked through the woods into town, wearily eyeing a beat-up blue car that served as an explanation for how Quentin had gotten here.

It wasn’t until she’d made it about a mile into her hike that the full force of every emotion she’d been feeling since his arrival hit her, the weight of it knocking into her chest and squeezing so tight she could hardly breathe. Staggering sideways, she steadied herself against a sequoia, it’s solid trunk and elephantine branches hanging overhead provided some sort of momentary stability. But she was still reeling.

Memories had been flooding her conscious since their eyes had first locked the evening before. Eating takeout on the floor of his apartment after she’d had a bad day at work. His cheek pressed against hers as they swayed along to a slow symphony, the night she’d foolishly spilled her feelings for him after too many flutes of champagne. Her back pressed against the wall of a secluded hallway, pinned there by his hips, his stubble on her neck. Shuddering, her fingers clenched into fists, bark from the tree scraping off amid the friction. What did she owe him, after everything? There was a time when it was easy to believe it was nothing.

Clearing her throat, she straightened up, she couldn’t allow this to tear her apart. She was better than this. Taking in a deep breath, she tried her hardest to force air through her lungs and steady her heart rate. Glancing to her side, she took a moment to appreciate the view, in front of her, where the path dropped off and spilled into a shallow valley of trees, a babbling brook curling through the bottom.

After spending so much time outside the past few years, she should have noticed the birds around her silencing, scattering, twigs snapping, the shift of rocks underfoot. It was too late when she realized she was no longer alone.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

Quentin was standing a few feet back, arms hanging limply at his sides, the space between them measured, certainly ...testing his luck. He was still dressed in the clothes she’d given him the night before, hair looking a little mussed from sleep. The shiner on his left eye was much more prominent it had been the evening before, a rainbow of purple, black, and yellow. He still managed to look so ruggedly handsome, but she was sure he already knew that. She could only guess how long he’d been following her, but she hoped he didn’t witness her meltdown only minutes ago.

“It looks like you already have,” she answered, and rolled her shoulders back.

The sarcastic response that should have been his was never spoken. Instead his eyes remained on hers, pleading. Reluctantly, she gestured for him to follow.

He fell into step beside her and they walked in silence. She was thankful for that, as she was still trying to work through what she needed to know. Some things, she decided, were better left unsaid.

The climax of the hike was the view over the vast valley where she lived, any signs of humanity below covered by the towering evergreens. It was breathtaking, vast, open. Pictures, she had found, could never do it justice. And as much as she had tried to commit it to memory, it was better to see it in person.

“Well,” she heard Quentin mumble from beside her. She turned to look at him as he took in the view, thick eyelashes, ski-sloped nose, and sharp jawline covered by stubble. There were lines around his eyes, from years of smiling, that goofy, shit-eating grin that had first caught her attention when she’d begun working with him years ago.

He’d been indifferent when she’d first been assigned to the project, and she observed his standoffish, almost cruel aversion to the others on their team. But she recognized it wasn’t hostility. He was focused, passionate, dedicated. He was difficult to crack. She could have her fair share of partners, but some unknown force had drawn her to him. And after a spell, he revealed a sort of reluctant kindness, which ultimately blossomed into something else entirely. Seeing how it all played out, she wondered if she should have known better.

“This is everything you’ve always wanted,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” she answered. Not quite everything.

When she turned her head back to the view, she instantly felt his eyes on her, burning with intense focus. “I hope you’re happy,” he said, voice delicate. It was clear to her he was trying to take her emotional temperature, gauge her mood, but she was done with the pleasantries. It was forced, fake, and Quentin of all people should have known better.

“Why did you come here, Quentin?” she asked, turning around. “Because I know it wasn’t for an ice pack and a good night of sleep.”

He considered her question for a moment, expressed relaxing. “I fucked up,” he confessed. “In more ways than one, and I-” he cleared his throat. “I needed a place to regroup, to….figure things out,” her eyes narrowed as he spoke. This frazzled, uneasy man was not the Quentin she’d known before she left.

“I’m assuming master plan didn’t work out?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“I tried, okay?” he raised his voice slightly, enough to know she’d hit a nerve. His frustration wasn’t directed at her, but it didn’t matter. It was always someone else’s fault. Because Quentin could do no wrong. “And I was almost successful. But I’m not finished-”

Y/N took two steps forward to close the gap between them. “What did you do, Quentin? What details have you conveniently left out of the story? Whose blood is on your hands?” A harsh gush of wind accompanied her movement, her hair falling in her eyes.

“No one’s!” he insisted, raising his hands. “And I can explain everything. But no one died, okay?”

“So what do you want?” she asked. “You think you can just show up on my doorstep and have a place to stay?” all the words she’d been longing to say were pouring out, and she couldn’t seem to stop them. “So I can help with whatever delusional idea you’ve conjured up to save yourself? That’s why I left you in the first place. You’re obsessed. And now that you’ve failed, you come back like everything is supposed to be okay? And I’m supposed to let you back in?”

“Listen to me!” he shouted, cutting her off, and she clearly the fire in his eyes. It had always been there, but it burned differently after Tony had fired him. She staggered backwards, startled, and he immediately lowered his voice in response. “I fucked up. But I need help. I just need some time….a place to stay. I’m in danger, and I can’t show my face in public until I can figure out what to do next. I have no other options.”

The next part was coughed up reluctantly, a defeated admission.

“You’re all I have left.”

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Quentin could see the conflict in her eyes as she took in his request, he’d always been able to read her. He was a master manipulator, and he’d taken pride in it, but for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to hurt Y/N. Over the years, the line between good and evil had blurred considerably, but he had always known where to draw it when it came to her. That had been easy. In part because she’d never done anything to deserve it. But now, it was as though she was testing him.

It almost angered him, that he was unable to lie to her with the same ease he had to lied to others. She probably knew it, too. How clever she was.

She withheld her answer. Instead, she turned away to look at the horizon. He didn’t like this cold, indifferent version of the woman he’d once loved. In his life, there were several things he’d thought he’d never find, one of them being comfort. But she had given it so freely to him, and now she was holding it over his head when he needed it most.

Her hair splayed in every direction as she took in the view beyond. Quentin took a moment to acknowledge how beautiful she looked, even in her clear frustration.

He had considered, in their time apart, finding someone else to fill the space she’d left in his life. Of course, he was too busy for anything serious. But the rendezvous he’d had left him with a bad taste in his mouth. It made him furious, that he’d allowed her to crack his resolve, to open a space in his life that had always been closed, and then she’d left it empty, vacant.

Quentin lowered his voice in a final, desperate plea. “Honey, please. I’ll tell you everything.”

“I can tell when you’re lying,” she answered finally, but didn’t give him the courtesy of turning to face him. “So you’d better tell the truth.”

Her eyes lifted to lock with his, and he almost smiled when he recognized the blaze inside them, ferocious. Throwing his tricks right back in his face. He had to admire what she’d let rub off on her.

“And then, you can stay.”

Brushing past him, her shoulder grazed his. The olive branch had been extended. It would be enough....for now.

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PART III

TAGLIST (let me know if you’d like to be added!): @mgikwangminwoo @belles-garden @kusooi @ssskeletonsoffun @robynthesavior @yourbiggestspiderfan  Thanks again ya’ll for the kind words!