The road Kerouac never wrote about.

I open my floor to ceiling windows, everything is covered in Friday morning.

I'm in a hotel, doesn't matter where. I'd like to tell you there's a hot girl in my bed who's name escapes me, but I can't lie to you like that, because there are three. I call it "room cervix".

I look in the bathroom mirror and wipe silver eye shadow off my stomach. Just touching it set me off, and I'm staring wide-eyed down the toilet bowl, wondering if anything is going to come out. I see a bloody, brown coloured tampon, some of last nights Prêt-à-vonissement room service, and someone from the record company's business card,. And away I go...

I can't stand throwing up. Losing control, I get scared I'll choke. I am at my most vulnerable when puking. I have bulimia, so I'm pretty vulnerable.

I couldn't tell you what city this is if my life depended on it. I've been drunk since Canada, whenever that was, and I ain't stopping now. I go to the freezer compartment and unscrew a bottle of Jagermeister, and hoist it up. I feel so weak my arm shakes, so I hold it with two hands. Puke in the sink, try again.

You think you want this?

I'm looking at the city skyline for recognisable landmarks and see none. The tour manager walks in, and she's a woman. She doesn't blink at the girls through the open bedroom door. One of them farts in her sleep, no one even laughs. It's that kind of action. All biz.

She packs my bag for me, because I have a disability. I am utterly incapable of doing anything for myself when there is someone in my paid employment who can do it for me. She checks under the bed, in the drawers, everywhere for whatever small meaningless item I may have lost/discarded, and at a later date will decide to cancel the rest of the tour 'til I find it.

After everything is packed, she ushers the girls out with her cowboy boot, and says "Good morning."

She makes me take vitamins, makes me drink water. I puke again. She says she hopes a molecule or two of actual nutrition or health made it through the driftnet that constitutes my digestive system. She puts sunglasses on me and calls my guy. Technically, he's security, but all he really has to do is hang out and be extremely large at all times. He's good at this role, born to do it. He picks me up, and carries me to the limo. The rest of the band are having their regular waking up ritual around the buffet area, but we've learned from experience it's best to just keep me moving. Maitre D's tend to not love vomit in the bain-marie. It's a thing with them.

So I go sleep some more in the car, and wait for the band.

I'm having one of those falling dreams, powerless, terrifying, and I hear the most horrific sound. I realise it's someone screaming, and then I wake up, and realise it's actually me screaming, because I'm still doing it. The band are all there, we're moving. The singer throws me a look, because he's on the 'phone, and wants some quiet. The tour manager puts away her computer and rubs my shoulders, and I fall asleep again.

I'm a 26 year old baby.

When I wake up this time the limo is going into some kind of tunnel. It's a different limo. Apparently we've been on a plane since I last looked. New city. There are trucks everywhere, big, sweaty guys rolling cases. We're inside an arena. In the underworld.

We're ushered through a maze of corridors, until we come to a door with our faces on it, on AAA laminate taped to the door. Once inside, I see what I always see. A communal main area, that was a conference space for IBM or Jesus People USA yesterday. There is no one in this room apart from our immediate entourage, in a misguided effort to make us feel safe and special. It's just lonely.

I scan the doors for my dressing room, go in there and lie on the same sofa I always lie on, because the road crew take it with us. It was originally from the foyer (if you can call it that) from the Hotel Yorba in Detroit. More like a long corridor leading to drug dependency and a possible stabbing. If you're familiar with that particular place of residence, you know it's nowhere near as bouncy and upbeat as the White Stripes track of the same name.

I went in on a tour years ago, picked it up, and just dragged it out the door. The guy on duty wasn't gonna stop me, because that would involve coming out of the plexiglass safety shield he worked in, and nothing was gonna convince him to do that. So I dragged it out, and down the steps, and wrestled it into the van we were driving, and it's been mine ever since.

You'd think all the shit and piss and blood and drugs that have been leaked onto that thing over the years would put a person off touching it, but for me it was as real as it gets. The only real thing in my life. That sofa has seen some things, and I feel protected by its aura. The sacred leather.

I lay back into it, swung my legs up onto it, and closed my eyes.

They shot open again instantly. No more sleep today. My body decides these things. I look in my bag for my phone, and call my guy. He comes in, and I say "Hey Steve, can you get me medicine?"

His name is actually Marcus, but I call him Steve after Steven Segal, because he's "Hard to kill". He is actually great to talk to, an intelligent, affable guy. But he was in the Israeli army for a while, and is enormous. So he forsakes the kind of satisfying and fulfilling employment he could go for, in favour of the large sums of money he gets being a human wall for me. What a waste. I tell him so.

"Fuck off STEVEN!", and so he goes to fetch my medicine.

I instantly regret it, the swearing I mean. I don't know why I do it. Yes I do, because I'm a child. I'm a child, and I take advantage of the fact he's too nice/professional to hit me. So I cuss and throw things at him, and when I'm really drunk, I cry and say I'm sorry.

I'm adored by millions.

He comes back in an hour with my medicine, which he bought at the local place. It consists of one asian with black hair, a blonde euro, and a brown skinned dark eyed girl of indeterminate origin.

They have been briefed, so they know not to talk to me, not to introduce themselves, no words. I like to cultivate this loneliness. I lie on the couch, and the asian takes the blonde girls hand. The hand is holding a knitting needle. She guides the knitting needle into my ear, and pushes it in until it is resting softly against my eardrum. I do a line of coke, being careful not to deafen myself with the needle. The dark girl licks my balls and cock in the usual way, and the blonde girl chokes the asian with the heel of her stilletto. This continues until I start to climax, at which time the blonde girl bites my lips (while still holding the needle), the asian sucks the blondes breasts, and the dark skinned girl eats my load.

Sorry if you're related to me and you're reading this, but that's just how it happens. I'd rather just be real about it.

Don't ask me why this works for me, or what the meaning is behind it, because I don't know. I'm just damaged. That's all the prognosis I need.

They get up and silently leave, and I think about what life was like before 'success'. When I cared about things, grew, evolved.

Times change.

The tour manager now, she's telling me to come to the stage. Soundcheck.

More corridors, more hairy men. No one says hi, even though I have probably seen most of these guys at least twenty times before. We're backstage now, it's dark here, but I recognise the familiar fairy lights and metal staircase that lead up. I proceed, and am in the space behind the backdrop. I walk to my right, around that corner, and I'm home.

Racks of guitars, my tech, and the stage beyond...the band waiting like they always do. My tech slips a guitar strap over my head, and I punch my right arm through the loop, grabbing the neck with my left. I feel connected now. The surge. I don't care if it's just a soundcheck, I have always loved taking my place stage right, owning that side of the stage, and the sound through the massive systems we tour with. Crowd, no crowd, it makes no difference to me, because, and this is an industry secret- I only play for me. I look the same in soundcheck as I do in a show- the passion is identical.

It's my stage.

We roll through three songs. The front of house engineer, monitors engineer, lighting cues, all good, all happy.

A new hotel.

I walk in and collapse. I need to drink immediately, because I'm feeling hungry. I take a bottle into the shower with me, and lay in my clothes in the bottom of the cubicle. My phone vibrates for the thousandth time today. I don't know why, I never answer. I take it out of my pocket and toss it on the floor, it breaks open and the battery falls out. I start thinking of a new song...I think it through and associate it with a theme, so I can remember it later. Much later. When the tour's over and I'm home in Australia. An hour passes.

The tour manager walks in with Steve. He holds me up, and she strips off my wet clothes and dries me off. Then puts new jeans and a tee shirt on me. New socks, new shoes. Throw away the old ones. She pulls a new phone out of her bag, slips my SIM into it, activate. She carries 20 or 30 spares.

She leaves, and Steve calls my room cervix. The girls arrive, remove their clothes and hang out. I don't know if they're strippers that get paid to do this, or hot groupies who volunteer. I never remember to ask.

I ignore them and watch tv, drink from the bottle, maintain the haze...stay blank. I realise after a while one of them is sucking me, then I fade again. Something about tectonic plates...ads for computers that automatically stop working after a specified time. She gives up and sulks on the armchair. I realise Steve is standing by the door, watching the scene. Of course he was, he always does.

Knock at the door, we go.

I do some press in my dressing room back at the arena. I basically mumble a lot and look confused, I do this all the time. But still they come. I have opinions, I look great in black.

One of the music journalists is from a kids tv show. She looked like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, so I face fucked her in the corner, dominating her with my cock size and the restrictive corner of the room. She looked up at me with those eyes thousands of kids looked into every day, I wished they could see her right now. When she left I cried. Why is everything so corruptible? Where is the everlasting beauty we're encouraged to believe in as children?

My self loathing is fully intact.

It's dinner time, as I walk out of my dressing room into the main dressing room, I see the usual trestle tables, stupid tablecloths (on a trestle table for fucks sake!), and dishes from 20 or 30 local restaurants. The band are there, taking a bit of this, a bit of that. It strikes me we could have a live giraffe brought in here if we wanted it, the money we waste is just insane.

I walk out and find the crew buffet, not because I want to eat, but because I like to hang with them. I don't know their names, or what they do, but they have the best jokes, and they don't look at me like I'm an alien. I should have been a roadie. And all too soon, just like every night, it's call time.

Steve walks over (because he's never more than 10 feet away), and we head back to the dressing room. The lonely cell. FML, I hate this shit. The tour manager has my dinner, and she basically feeds it to me, because I have no desire to eat it. I throw it up right after, just like she knows I will. But no one is angry. It's just a little dance we do. Ha-cha-cha!

I wipe my face, stare into the black pools of my eyes in the mirror. I get an hour alone in there, just to myself. An hour to hate myself, to wonder how I fell so far into this pit, and to know I'll never find a way out. More cocaine, helps me to not care, to get my game face on. It's always over too soon.

We play the show, I don't remember the faces. All the poor suckers who came early to get right up the front so they could see me. I looked right through them, and they never knew. They thought we were all on the same rock and roll ride, but we weren't. I was electrified by the feel of that timber on the palm of my left hand...the sting of the pick on the string, those wires cutting into my fingers. And the wall of sound that went up and out at the slightest movement of my hand. That's the space I played in, I may as well have been alone. It felt like it.

As I walk offstage I feel strange hands touching my shoulders, voices rising out of the dark, the flash of teeth. The vampires and the sycophants- the usual backstage animals.

Steve takes me to the hotel, I never do after parties.

I bury myself in room cervix until I pass out, never sure who's ass or mouth that is in the dark. Like it matters. They're all just graves to pump my dead desire into.

I sleep, and dream of a girl I lost a long time ago. Our flat, the dog, my rusty Plymouth Fury. The smells in the kitchen, warm embraces.

When I awake, I open my floor to ceiling windows.

Everything is covered in Saturday morning.



This is knifey, from 'the internet'.