Hey, Gothboy Called Today

Thank you, smog, for inquiring about Gothboy. I haven't heard from him lately. I suspect I will hear from him soon from NYC. Not because he's that interested in politics but because the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations are fascinating to him. He sits on the side-lines and watches.
(We have a little inside joke about that: once I said that his hanging out on the fringes of large groups was probably a great way to pick up "chicks." He chastised me for flippant sexism. I conceded the point but if truth be known, he does have a knack with the ladies).
I'll tell him about the 12-year old girl you saw today, smog. He'll laugh about that. He's only 5'8" and a bit scrawny but he's wiry and been on the road for awhile. He is not a person prone to violence but, if someone were to back him into a corner, he will certainly come out fighting. He's had to do it a few times and he hasn't gotten beat up.

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Gothboy called me this morning. 6 am. Very early for me, probably quite late for him. He didn't mention where he was and I didn't ask. When he calls, I listen. I'm a pretty good listener.
He was upset. He talked to me about the shooting at the high school; the most recent shooting at a school. The media, as it fleshed out the story, noted that the young man involved was "goth." He dressed in black and seemed to spend a lot of time being sad.
Gothboy noted that this was a very troubled kid with a tough past and he may have drifted into some areas (naziism) that are quite alien to the goth culture.
That's it. Gothboy was crying. And Realjohnboy ended up crying also.

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I woke up this morning at 6 am, my usual time. Into the bathroom and then to the kitchen to get things cooking. I reckon it wasn't until about 6:45 that I got to my "office," the room where my computer is. It looks out over my front yard.
I looked out the window and there, in my front yard, was a tent. A green tent, perhaps six feet in diameter. In my front yard.
Strange, I thought, but not so strange that I would call the police or anything. I went back to doing household chores. An hour later came a knock at the door. It was Gothboy.
We haven't seen each other for a year or so and Gothboy doesn't call me as much as he once did. So we had a lot of catching up to do.
Gothboy was introduced to yall soon after I joined A2K in late 2002. He was involved in several stories in this Original Writing category. He tells me stories about life on the road in America, by thumb, that remind me of my youth in a much more innocent time.
We'll see what his new tales inspire.

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Goth-boy called me last night.

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drÃ²m_et_rÃªve wrote:

This is random, and lost (probably,) but here goes:

Well, Gothboy called me today. As you might now, he's been phoning me incessantly for the last week, sounding a bit out of himself, a bit blue. He's been avoiding telling me what it was, until to-day.

He was on the road, and Katie left. You asked me a while back what her parents are like. They are absolutely horrible. Katie undermines that old saying about apples not falling far from trees.

The first time that I met them was in 1996, and they've not got any better. I was touring the crappiest of cities with a band called 'The Brass Ménagerie.' Houston was the biggest city on the list. Katie wanted to show me to her parents in all my unglory, as the person who showed her around back in the day. When I walked in, looking knackered from all those days in the tour bus, the woman said to her husband (loudly, so that I could hear,) 'is it me, or did the air get more proletarian?' . I wanted to say something about her perfume, but I left it.

When they found out about her being in Memphis with someone called Gothboy and an old fellow with a suspicious sounding name, they blew their lids, and said that they were coming to stop her 'unacceptable behaviour.' It was just as well Gothboy was gone.

Gothboy was telling me all this in a dingy restaurant on a motorway, from an orange payphone. They ran out of petrol a few days ago, and-- both of them having no money-- couldn't get emergency supplies. So, Gothboy's been doing the washing at the Lackey Inn, and Winking Joe was singing songs and accompanying himself on an old acoustic. He loved Skip James especially, and lowered himself into all that blues. Fifty people or so gathered around to hear him sing 'Devil got my woman' in his own withered but striking voice.

They were working like this for a few days, for enough money to get back to Houston to get Katie. They slept in a cornfield somewhere on the way to the Dolly sods. Lying down on a bunch of tissue papers to keep their trousers clean, and looking up at the stars.

Drom wrote that

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drÃ²m_et_rÃªve wrote:

That was meant to be (; ), damn it.

Anyway--

Gothboy phoned me a minute ago, from some guy's mobile phone. Last night, some guy called 'The new Satchmo' came into the dusty old inn, and started speaking to them after the set. He was a guy who collected weird stats about 'used-to-bes,' and when he saw Winking Joe, he was over the moon.

New Satch said that he had a project going, but he needed a van. He was giving illegal copies of 'Catcher in the Rye' to people who'd never read it due to the ban; going all accross America. They struck a deal over rum in a few dirty glasses; he'd buy the van and drop them anywhere if they helped him, and Winking told him a few stories as they went along. G.B. wanted to go to Houston, naturally, but Winking Joe said that he had a plan, and that they'd go to Omaha, Nebraska.

Gothboy was confused, but he was excited, speeding away at last like wild geese to the west.

And drom wote that one also.

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So the idea is, just to get yall up to speed, that goth-boy hitches around the country, meeting all of these characters. Your job. as creative writers, is to continue the story, Feel free to introduce new characters,

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Goth-boy on the road
A free spirit
Going where ever his spirit takes him
Moving on
Never looking back
I like that

Looking forward to reading more about goth-boy and the people he meets up with.
Here on Dartmoor, England (freezing, nothing to hear but the wind) - he is making quite a fan. Hope he'll be heading somewhere warm and sunny soon. I'll be following his adventures with interest.

Best,
Endy

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Welcome, ENDYMION. This is a communal effort at writing. You are invited to add to the story. Just don't kill off any characters.
Drom is, I believe, a Brit. No problem re the US. It is all fiction.

Gothboy wanted, of course, to go to Houston to try to get that back on track with Katie. Her parents, as Drom noted, are very hostile towards Gothboy.
There happened to be a severe cold spell in the South of the US. 25 degrees with a cold wind of 20 mph. Not good weather for hitching along an interstate highway ramp. When he was 19 or 21, Gothboy would have thought nothing about it when he was in love, But now he is a little older, perhaps 24, and he is a little wiser and a bit more cautious.
So he chooses to ride along with Satchmo and Winking Joe to Omaha. Satchmo is driving and Winking Joe is in the shotgun seat. Gothboy is in the back of the van. For awhile or so, the topic is music and old-time
musicians. Gothboy loves that.
But then, as they head across the long stretches of wheat fields and such, Satchmo and Winking Joe start exchanging stories (perhaps real but probably not) about their sexual conquests.
Gothboy gets weary so he lays out his sleeping bag and crawls in. Before falling asleep, he thinks of Katie, of course. But he also thinks of Omaha. He has never been to Omaha.

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I really like this thread. I'd like to jump in if you guys don't mind. Very Happy

I fit quite well into the story, actually.
_______________________________________________________________________________________

Well, I met Gothboy down in Texas a few months ago. He was passing through Dallas and I was in town visiting my Aunt. She happens to be about 50 something and single, so we like to visit her often. We met in a cafe, where I was eating my dinner at the bar; my mother and aunt were out shopping. Gothboy took the stool next to me and we began a conversation. Although we had about an eight-year age difference, we clicked right away. I think he liked the feeling of a little-bro kind of person around.

Like most of his friends, Gothboy and I shared the same kind of tastes in music (punk, indie, emocore, etc., etc.), and we talked for quite a while after we were both done eating. I learned a little of his interesting past, and I told him some of mine. I was from Nebraska; he was interested, never having seen the good old plains I speak so highly of. I told him I had an extra ticket to a small venue show featuring Coheed and Cambria and Thursday, for the next night, if he wanted it. He was psyched and thanked me many times over. Well, the next night we met up, went to the show, rocked all night, had a great time, then we parted ways. I gave him my cell number and told him to call me up any time he was in Nebraska and we could party.

So I got a call from Gothboy today from a gas stop payphone. He said he in Nebraska City on the interstate, making his way with some friends up to Omaha. He said he didn't know that Nebraska had some many damned hills, he said he'd thought it was flat as far as the eye could see. He told me the weather was strange, it was hot, then cold, then hot again, and windy to boot.

But he said he'd seen his first plains sunrise and loved it. It reminded him of some girl, said it made him wanna write a poem. About the sunrise or the girl, I'm not sure. I just laughed and told him it was nice to hear from him again, and that I'd maybe look for some concert tickets in Omaha; I said I thought Hawthorne Heights was coming to town, and he was already excited.

Well, so was I.

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Hi, CrazyDiamond. It is so damned cool that you met Gothboy and might run into hm again when he gets to Omaha. He is a talker, isn't he? Get him going about the kind of music he is into and he is unstopable. I am almost 60 years old and I like that sound. The Goth sound, the gritty industrial sound from places like Glasgow or Berlin.
Anyway, I hope yall hook up when he gets there. Tell us about the clubs and the bands.

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This thread brings up a lot of memories, many of them very pleasant, and others quite upsetting. I wish that I could hear one story about how dròm is doing...

Another memory that's painful to recall is what happend to Joel Krieger. It's been over a year and a half since he got on that bus. I had a writing teacher once who told me that every new author ends a story with the main character going to New York City or dying. Joel Krieger, no author himself, ended up doing both.

The City was too much, though, and he didn't spend long there. He didn't have the money and he didn't have the energy. By November, Joel had moved down to a rented house in Virginia Beach, in one of the run-down suburbs of a run-down beach town that didn't really deserve suburbs. Sure, some people would say that Virginia Beach is rather nice, but Joel had been around long enough to see the old foundations beneath every building, every boardwalk, every street.

Still, Joel liked the ocean, and he liked being around people. He started waking up every day at 4am, cooking two poached eggs on toast, and then walking the 3.4 miles to the beach, a novel in one hand, a walking stick in the other, his glasses around his neck, and his wallet in his back pocket. Inside was the only picture of Laura he had that, he said, "captured her spirit." It was taken in 1973, by Joel, in front of a wharf on Nantucket.

A few minutes after Joel got to the boardwalk each morning, runners and bikers began their daily exercises. A few rollerbladers were still among the mix, though even Joel knew that that fad had faded from popular culture. It was nearing November, the off-season, and the atmosphere was much more suitable for Joel. He liked being around people, yes, but sometimes the Virginia Beach summers can be overwhelming.

11am: Early lunch at the same small diner as every other day.
2pm: Walk back home.
5pm: Ham and cheese on rye, television.
7pm: Pills, sleep.

Joel wasn't registered to vote in Virginia, but he knew how the election would turn out for the state that year. He could see the old foundations beneath everything.

A little over two months ago, his daughter Mary went to Virginia Beach to visit him before Christmas; she was going to tell him that she was finally engaged. Joel had missed his morning walk that day. She found him still in bed. It had been years since they had spent quality time together, and she wasn't sure where to make arrangements; she had never so much as visited the Beach before.

Mary picked the first crematorium from the alphabetical list in the phone book: Auburn & Auburn. She didn't even think that the place wasn't named after the owners or founders, but after something that went back much farther in time. The next day she went to pick up the ashes; she wasn't sure which color the urn should be.

After she notified her father's landlady, Mary left Virginia Beach for good.

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(For the record, yeah, I recalled the story of Joel's death, but I can't go against what really happened. Besides, I felt responsible to give the ending to his story since I introduced him in the first place. And anyway, we now have three more characters to take his place, shall we want to discuss them: Mary, her fiancé, and Joel's landlady.)

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smog wrote:

This thread brings up a lot of memories, many of them very pleasant, and others quite upsetting.

/quote]

Upsetting, Smog? In what way?
Thanks for the story about Joel. I am not sure how or whether it will tie into Gothboy. No matter. There is only one rule on this or any of the other Original Writing categories I have started: don't kill off any characters you didn't create.
Your description of Virginia Beach was dead on target and your comment about the election in Virginia was a cool inside joke.
You say that you had Joel on a bus a year and half ago. I don't recall if he was on "my" bus. I started a thread called A Pompous Bunch Of Asses about a bus heading east from Denver or someplace. Writers were invited to add passengers. One of mine was this kid named Griffin. He was, in my mind, one of my better characters.
Alas, the thread died, as did the lady who muttered the title to the thread.
But it was amusing.
Thanks for participating. There are a lot of new folks on A2K. I hope we can get the Original Writing category in general and this genre in particular (where people build on a previous person's story-line or twist it around altogether) more active.

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And CrazyDiamond...You mentioned the names of some bands that you think Gothboy might appreciate when he gets to your city. I scribbled them down and showed them to Andy, one of my employees. He is the singer in a band named Bella Morte playing that kind of music (a horrible bit of phrasing, johnboy. You sound like Katie's parents: THAT kind of music). He knew of all three of them. His band has made several tours out west but I forgot to ask him if they had ever been to your town.
Thanks for participating.
Smog has introduced some new characters; seemingly unrelated to Gothboy, Satchmo and Winking Joe. Please pick up any story thread that amuses you. -John-

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realjohnboy wrote:

Upsetting, Smog? In what way?

I miss dròm...

Quote:

I am not sure how or whether it will tie into Gothboy.

This Joel is actually the same Joel from pg2 (first mentioned in passing by dròm on pg1), whose story I started at that time. I wanted to bring a bit more closure to it. He was only tangentially related to Gothboy to begin with.

Quote:

your comment about the election in Virginia was a cool inside joke.

Looking back over this thread, I realized that I sidetracked it a lot in the middle there--figured I should make some of that Virginia stuff worthwhile, many months later.

Quote:

I started a thread called A Pompous Bunch Of Asses about a bus heading east from Denver or someplace.

I actually never saw that. Maybe I should go a-searchin'.

Quote:

There are a lot of new folks on A2K. I hope we can get the Original Writing category in general and this genre in particular (where people build on a previous person's story-line or twist it around altogether) more active.

I've definitely noticed many new faces and names that I don't quite recognize among the new A2Kers. Hopefully I can get more familiar with them. And I agree that this kind of writing would be fun to get going again.

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We rocked out yesterday night. Gothboy and I met up in a restaurant. Well, it was a KFC, but that's a restaurant and besides, neither of us had enough cash for anything better. So, we met, we talked, and we ate some goddamn chicken. I heard about the friends Gothboy was traveling with. I could tell he had a bond with them. He was his usual self, talking nonstop. I explained what I had planned for us: a big, rockin' night, because I knew he wouldn't stay long, he never does.

So, I told him, we were gonna hit a small-venue place to watch local indie band The Desaparecidos. Then, we were heading over to the big Hawthorne Heights show. He was excited. He tried to pay for both of our meals, but I told him off, and we each covered our own; I knew he didn't have too much money.

Now, if you didn't know, Omaha has a surprisingly big indie rock scene, and I take full advantage of it. We headed over to the little bar/club thingy and listened to The Desaparecidos roll out some mellow tunes. Desaparecidos are a little band run by Conor Oberst, lead man for Bright Eyes. He does a great job, and we had a good time.

Afterwards, we went over to the Qwest Center and got settled in our seats about an hour before the show. By rock-fan standards getting there an hour early is pretty late. Hawthorne Heights was amazing. They were in town promoting their new album If Only You Were Lonely. They did a full run-through of the album, and added a few fan-favorites. When they played Ohio is for Lovers, Gothboy and I sang every word.
After the show, a couple of girls (good-lookin', I must say) wanted us to come with them to a party, but Gothboy bowed out. He didn't seem interested in the girls (like I was anyway Wink

), which prompted me to ask him about his love life. I got the short story, and found out a little about Katie. He was a little reserved, and simply assured me: "It's all good, man. I mean, I'm holdin' out for someone. Ya know?"

So, awhile later, very tired, we parted ways. He said he had a hotel room dowtown, so I said goodbye. I stayed awake the rest of the night, and watched the sun come up over the skyline. I had a feeling Gothboy was looking out his window, doing the same.

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Thanks, CrazyDiamond for the report, and thanks for showing him around your town. I am sure that, the next time he calls me, he will tell me about you, the clubs and the bands.
The only thing that troubles me, and 'troubles me" is probably the wrong wording, is his fib to you about having a hotel room. I reckon when he heard that you were going to continue to party with some girls yall had met, he did indeed back away (the Katie thing). But I doubt he had a hotel room. If I know Gothboy, and I think I do, he wandered the streets or perhaps passed the hours in some all night diner and got to talking with the bored staffer(s) and got coffee and perhaps breakfast for free. And so he would have seen the same sunrise that you saw.

It is important for yall to realize that Gothboy doesn't beg. And he is not manipulative. People take him to shows, or give him a place to sleep or offer him coffee and food because he is a good talker. He amuses people.
Gothboy learned that when he first started hitchhiking. Folks didn't pick him up to do him a favor; rather he did them a favor by riding with them, keeping them entertained. Once, when he was 18 or 19 or so, he was hitching east and was somewhere in Arizona. This big car stopped and Gothboy got in. This old guy, older than Johnboy, said, "I just put the last hitchhiker out because he had the f*&%+#@ b$%S# to start reading a newspaper." Gothboy talked about anything he could think of for six hours. Hitching is hard work.

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And this little story might amuse you, CrazyDiamond. My employee. Andy, the guy in a band, stays in a lot of hotels when they tour. He went into a bit of a rant the other day about check in/check out times. Typically check-in is something like no earlier than 3 pm and checkout is no later than noon the next day. That doesn't work for them. They arrive in a town at 5 pm and find the club and do a sound check and then supper and perform at 10 pm and then wind down and get to the hotel around 4 am and sleep until noon. or whatever.
Anyway, this promoter booked them into a very swank hotel that had a check out time of noon and they had not gotten to bed until 6 am. They tend to dress up pretty wildly for their performances, dyed mohawk hair cuts, makeup,; the whole goth thing. Anyway, after only a few hours of sleep the group of them looked pretty rough. Spiked hair wilting, makeup running but they had to check out before noon.
So they step out of the elevator into a lobby full of very well dressed people. Conversation stops. There is a bit of a collective gasp from the assembled group as the band walks through.
As they get to the door one of the band members says, loudly enough to be heard. "We're never going to stay in this dump again."

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Thanks RJB, I should've known Gothboy wouldn't stay at a hotel. I feel kinda bad about it now, I'm sure my mom would've let him sleep on the couch.

Ah, it's always funny to make uppity rich people mad. But yes, I am interested in your rockstar friend. I've heard some of they're stuff and it's pretty cool (though it's a little too hardcore for my style). I've always wanted to be a guy like that, playing music for a living. It's like a dream of mine. I'm intrigued, impressed, and interested.

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Hey, Gothboy Called Today

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