It is van darkness, pretending to be miles away from people whose cold sweat mingles with your own, wet clothes pressed against wet clothes, leftover beers and squirreled-away whiskeys, the despair of comedown and the existential considerations incumbent on the absurdity of the project. There could be stifled laughter, sing-alongs, tears, anger; it is a bad place to throw a punch or slap a face, and the pilot is usually the most beleaguered of the bunch. You want to scold, you want to console, you want to wind up, you want to calm down, you’re just shy of euphoric or inches from despair, so you cling to whomever is closest, literally or figuratively, or you look out the window at nothing, because whatever is out the window is simply and only what is between you and the next stop. Tonight, you listen to a ballad as it is being written, and you fill in the gaps in your head. Moist will lob, Feli will volley.
“We gotta kill it tomorrow!”
“Kill it? We’re gonna kill them! There’ll be nothing left of ‘em!”
“That’s what I’m saying. That we have to kill it, so how are we gonna do it? It has to be perfect, you guys. Really, really, really good.”
“Well let’s figure it out. We know there has to be destruction. Like, carnage, blood and guts kind of stuff.”
“That’s a little gross, I just want us to kill it. I don’t know about blood and guts…but you know what? Fuck yeah. Blood and guts it is, let’s do it, how do you wanna do it?”
“You really want to know? Because I have ideas. This is the kind of thing I think about all the time.”
“Yeah I wanna know! Everybody needs to know! We have to figure this out, we’re gonna kill it, and you know how to kill it, so you gotta tell us how to kill it!”
“You know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna tell them a story.”
“A story? How the hell is that going to work? We gotta kill it.”
“Oh, we’ll kill it. We’re gonna lure them in with a premise.”
“A premise? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course not, we don’t have the premise yet.”
“The premise should be a prodigal.”
“A prodigal? That’s a great idea! But none of us has any money, what kinda premise is that?”
“She won’t spend money. She’ll spend all her cred, and then have to go back to Detroit.”
“That is genius. How did she get all this cred?”
“She was in a really cool band, obviously.”
“Well that part is obvious, but where did all the cred come from? There are a lot of cool bands.”
“She beat up the haters.”
“You already have all this figured out. I can’t believe what I’m hearing, it’s perfect.”
“Yeah, she beat up the haters. And the misogynists—”
“—they call that misandry—”
“Yeah, misandry. So she’s all tough, and she beat up the haters and shut up the misogynists. And she fucked up all the homophobes too.”
“We can do better than fucked up.”
“She shamed them. She shamed all the homophobes, and shut up the misogynists, and beat up the haters.”
“That’s a lot of cred.”
“Yeah, so much cred.”
“So how does she lose it?”
“She ends up in a lame band. What else would it be? It’s gotta be the same way.”
“We can do a lot better than lame.”
“Yeah, not lame. Just boring. There’s a lot of drugs, and they aren’t that much fun, and so she plays boring music and people get tired of it, so she’s the prodigal. And that’s the story, and she’s back in Detroit and she is gonna have to beat up all the same haters, all over again!”
“That’s the premise then.”
“Yeah, it’s a premise. And a moral.”
“A moral? We could definitely kill it with a moral.”
“Actually, two morals!”
“Jesus, that’s an extra moral. That’s two more than most people get! What are they? What are the two morals?”
“Screw the haters, and nowhere is really home.”
