gray ghost (the dead trilogy)

capitol city

"stick hot when the machine starts up again; the sky is still pink.
all hail the new flesh."
-strapping young lad

There did come a point in the few days afterwards where I wondered if there was more beyond there, and perhaps that proved to be the reason for the stillness around me. That meeting with Alex had done something to me. I had worked my way to where I could live there in downtown with a bit of extra left over, and thus I needed to set my money aside for a plane ticket.
If Scott and Charlie had made their way out of Queens and the Bronx respectively, then I needed to make my way out of Boston, even with as much as I held the Eastern wing of the country close to my heart. It had taken me almost six months to do so, and the last I had heard, Anthrax had been pulled from their label. I only heard of it by the time I bought myself a plane ticket for the next flight out to California. The Bay Area was where it had all began for me, and yet for some reason, the stewardess told me the flight had been diverted to the capitol, Sacramento.
I asked her if it was because it was Halloween, and she told me that it came from the sheer amount of thick fog forecast for the area.
I figured that as long as it got me away from the Northeast for the time being. I thought about Alex and his desire to relocate, and I had my questions about Testament at the very moment I stepped on the plane. As I passed through the gate, I peered into my own reflection in the final glass pane on the right. My own deep eyes gazed back at me. The deep eyes that locked onto Alex's own.
Even as I took my seat near the front of the plane, the hole in my heart had still found its place within me. I missed Scott and Charlie, because they had given me some sort of leeway when we were starting out back home in New York. They were my first friends, but I yearned to see Alex again. An embrace with him felt as though it had only lasted for a quick flash and a drop of the hat.
I left Boston with some of the clothes from my wardrobe plus my guitar case slung over my shoulder, and we took off at around sunrise: the orange rays of sunlight washed over the skyline as it fell away behind the plane. We stared straight ahead into the darkness.
The pains in my chest returned once again, because I knew Alex was down there somewhere in the shadows, like the big gray ghost as he had shown himself to me. Tomorrow was Halloween after all: as gray as the sky over his head there in California, as soft and lush as the beaches on the coast, as big as the deserts on the eastern side, and as lovely as I remember him.
I landed in Sacramento at around sunrise, and when the thick tule fog had collected all around the northern end of the valley. I left the airport given the sheer amount of waiting time for the busses to and from between there and San Francisco. I stood there at the street corner with the guitar case on my back and the cool autumnal breeze to my face. Even there in the heart of the Central Valley, I could smell the ocean before me.
I was in a place new to me, and full of people who had never heard me play my guitar before. I was away from Satch, and I had no one to speak to. I set down my guitar case and opened it up. I slung my guitar over my shoulder and strummed with the two tips of my fingers.
I lifted my head and the breeze billowed my blonde hair back so it resembled to the tentacles of an octopus. Just me and my guitar, and my raw vocals. I didn't have a microphone by me, either, but I could sing for the people of Sacramento as if I stood upon a full stage in a coffee house in Boston. I could project all the way to the far curb of the street. I was alone, with my guitar case plunked open on the sidewalk right next to me. Every so often, someone dropped a piece of change in there, but not a lot. It also happened every so often, rather than all the time.
I played more and I wondered if it was my playing or the very sound of my voice that threw off all of the regular city walkers around me.
At one point, during a jam session of an untitled song I wrote, a tall slightly heavyset man wrapped in a dark blue track suit strode across the street towards me. He had a thoughtful look on his face and he raised his eyebrows in surprise when I opened my mouth to sing it out for him. Thick spidery dread locks made up his inky black hair, and I made out the sight of a handful of silver piercings on his ears, the side of his nose, his eyebrow, and one in his lip.
He nodded his head at me as I played a spiraling, swirling psychedelic riff akin to the jam sessions of years gone by, and he seemed to really like that one, and so soon following the passing of Jerry Garcia as well. I played on for ten minutes, when my hand finally got tired of playing the same chords ad infinitum. He gave me a bit of applause as did some people awaiting a round of taxis in front of me.
"I really like your voice," he told me, "very twangy, and weirdly subtle, which I like because everything need not be screams all the time. So it's not like over the top. And I like your grit, too. Kind of reminds me of PJ Harvey a bit. PJ Harvey with a little bit of Janis Joplin."
"Thank you," I said with a lick of my lips: a full few hours on a plane and then a round of singing until the sun came up, and I hadn't had a drink of water yet. "I've been doing it for a long time now so my voice has deepened quite a bit."
"How long you been playing?"
"Since I was a kid. I studied under Joe Satriani."
"Oh, wow. The man! At least you're actually properly taught. I had to teach myself some things before." He glanced around the place. "Where you headed, by the way?"
"San Francisco."
"Love San Francisco—almost too much, I'd say. That town saved me for the most part, like it got me out of Bakersfield where I'm from originally. Long way outta there, if I do say so myself." He said that last part with a shrug of his shoulders. Even with the piercings all over his face and his ears, he still had a smile as sweet as sugar cane. He then extended a hand to me.
"I'm Jon," he introduced himself.
"I'm Kris," I said back to him as I took his hand: good strong grip like that of a monkey's paw.
"Kris—as in Kristen?"
"Kristina. I'm originally from New York and I also obviously have roots out here in California but now I'm based out of Boston."
"Cool," he remarked with a nod of his head. "Maybe—just maybe—my band'll play Boston at some point."
"You want me to come and see you, don't you?" I teased him, and he shrugged his shoulders.
"If you want." He then knitted his eyebrows together. "Where you staying?"
"Well, for now—I'm just staying in a piece of shit hotel over in the Bay Area. It's better than sleeping in a car or something like that."
"Oh, for real," he said with a nod of his head; but the thoughtful look on his face remained firmly intact. "I have a couple of friends up here—they might like you. They're in a band together, too, and they—I think they did? They just put out their very first record, like just a couple of weeks ago. They had been jamming together for about seven years."
"Wow," I muttered as I tucked my pick into the guitar strings.
"Yeah, so—don't give up. It took my band a couple of years to get on a label ourselves and even well before that, we had been jamming together. I dunno what it's like for a solo artist, and a female one at that, too, but as a band, it took us a string of years to do it. But anyways, I'll give you their numbers—and their names, too. The first guy is Stephen and the other is Chino. You might like him, he's really into girly stuff. Me? I'm more of a funky guy. I mention them, though, because I can tell you've been through so much. Like I can feel it in my bones. I've been through quite a bit myself, so—" He paused for a second, still with that thoughtful look on his face, and for a split second, I thought I was meeting Alex again. "I know that type of soul when I see one."