Jameson // Metallica

SUMMERTIME

He didn't wake up that morning. Rolled onto his side and opened his eyes, but he didn't wake up. The world was different in its strange morning bathed hues, a little bluish golden at the margins, burning at his bare skin through veils of gauze and damask sheets.

He couldn't stop the heat. Radiating from the street, the molten asphalt and the hot car roofs he had watched from the balcony the night before. It poured into the room along with hordes of mosquitoes and twisted illogic dreams. Dreams he faintly started to remember under the yellowish blur of the morning, dreams his fingers scattered through the air like powder in the wind. They hung onto the ceiling for a while, then were ground into nothing by the big ventilator palettes.

He turned onto his back and watched their imperceptible turns; a flickering spiral on the ceiling.

It didn't take long for his dreams to creep back into the room, fully shaped again.

Dreams were stupid like that.

---

Pattern: vertical. What stands. The walls of his room. James tall in his room. The beer bottles next to a wall. The chair. The curtain being still. What is erect. What is true. What is tangible.

---

When he looked past the swirling lights on the ceiling, the moon had already risen and James was watching him from a chair across the room.

With every flicker of light trapped in the ventilator he knew a tram must've crossed the street and with every strand of James' hair across his face he knew nothing at all.

---

Next day. They sit on the hot asphalt throwing pebbles at the sparrows in front of them. James takes a long sip of his beer and Jason speaks, his toes wriggling in his shoes. It is, I love you, rolling over his tongue, almost darting out, or some equally cheesy line, but he didn't prepare that so he says "I think.." and after James takes another draw of his beer, "I think we're fucked."

Which is true.

"What do you mean?"

"I dunno."

Which is also partially true. But he doesn't feel like underlining that any longer so he shuts up.

---

James stood up after that, his long hair faintly glowing into the sun. "Like a halo, a golden crown," Jason thought, his own hair sticking to his skin like glue, ticklish behind his ear. He reached to scratch it.

"Well," James said, crushing his beer can and tossing it to the birds. They flew in all directions and James walked all the way back to his own hotel.

Jason watched him until he disappeared between the shrieking voices of children getting out of school.

He couldn't sleep. The heat was disgusting, stifling him in any rest attempts, bathing him in sweat and drying him in ventilator coolness.

Sometimes Jason thought he'll be sucked into the ventilator like a fly if he'd stare at it any longer.

---

Pattern: horizontal. What lies. The flat pavement full of sparrows. Full of girls and whistles. The flowers in the market. The distance between two hotels. The reflections in the passing windows. Jason on the bed. The ventilator on the ceiling. What lies. What is silent. What is deceiving. James.

---

Fondness as a display of love as a display of hate. And vice versa.

James smells like beer and cigarettes and his hair like a thousand threads of smoke, ticklish against his neck, but Jason doesn't dare to think.

He had called him. Said: "I'm in town. I'm in this sick, oriental town", and there was something obscene lingering in the air, under the skirt of every girl on the street, pearling sweat and musty dampness. An overall languid, sticky atmosphere and unbearable heat, and James never got back to his hotel that night.

Later, there were shadows on the ceiling, muted voices and the sound of a dripping tap. But most of all there was James not there in his bed and the feeling of some fleeting, undefined emotion he did not like or even want.

The next night he's dealing and un-dealing a set of thoughts like cards in a game. For it was a game, some sort of drunken, childish diversion that fucked with his head and sucked him into the ventilator each time he'd stare at it through half-closed lids, past James' moving shoulder and James' spattered fingertips all over his face, and James' breath, burning hot in his ear, and he didn't know if it was for Janis telling him not to cry--don't you cry--over and over again on the radio, or the scent of mango and papaya and Cuban cigars or any other smell his senses could not define, that he stuck to James like that, a little desperate, a little vulgar.

---

Semi-sleepless nights in bars on beer and drunken, lazy caresses under the table. Blindfolded by his palms, his fingers, his own closed lids. And it seems they only play Janis on the radio, and she says, don't cry. Over and over and over and over...

---

Sometimes, in the heat and the humming ventilator sounds and James sleeping next to him, he thought he was important. And as the morning lit the buildings in its lazy yellowish blur, he thought he could do anything, could say anything and it wouldn't matter. He was loved and that was that.

He thought that would last forever. He thought that had a meaning.

The sheer stupidity of that hit him like a car.

---

Pattern: crosshatch. The mess in between. The undecided. The hurt. The pain. The bottles scattered on the floor, under the bed; empty. The bass leaning askew against the chair. The fan turning and turning. The tiles on the bathroom floor when he's past out drunk or vomiting in the bathroom sink. The way vomit clogs the drain and his head rests against the mirror. The wrinkles in the sheets. The warmth that is heat that is warmth that is cold. And vice versa.

That what is but isn't but could be.

---

On the last day, there was rain and it was cold and lonely and James a thousand miles away and he thought that the ventilator seems so quiet, so simple, so less threatening and vulnerable in its four-paletted form he turned it on again. And in the cold, the rapping rain outside and continuous turning on the ceiling he thought he found some ghastly mimicry of that night with James.

It didn't seem vulgar now, just cold and shivering and summer so far away