The Bus

It was a Sunday. After the Rhea concert. We were driving down to Houston to see Paul Rivers. He had the best equipment, best speakers, best booth. It was gonna be all free too, Jimmy knew Paul from L.A. 
         The opening act was following us down there, they said it was cause they had a gig playing at a club in Houston none of us ever heard of. I always thought that was bullshit though, I think they just wanted to tour with us as long as possible, but I understood that. The noise when we got to the hotels, or the bars, or the shows, it was nuts, they musta' felt like superstars. Now, I'm not delusional enough to think that crowd circling around us was for me, even for the band I was in, it was all for Jimmy. He was the band.
         It was just the five of us in the bus. The band, Jimmy's girl, and Gregg the driver, thats the way it always was. Jimmy never hung around with a lot of people, and I know it sounds crazy cause he stood up in front of thousands of people every week, but I swear he was shy. And he was quiet, unless he had a guitar in his hand, then you couldn't shut him up.
         And by "Jimmy's girl" I meant Vicky, just to clear that up. Jimmy had a few girls.
But he didn't cheat. He just picked up girls at our concerts, but unlike me an Rich, he didn't wanna leave em. He tried getting serious with the kind of girls you really don't wanna get serious with. He was naive like that, bad to say, but it was kinda funny, seeing a rock star like him getting his heart broken by groupies.
         Vic was cool though, she was a bartender at this dump in Vegas. We walked in there by accident thinking it was a different joint. We tried to get out, but Jimmy saw her behind the bar and wouldn't leave.
         Jimmy walked up to the bar where she was bent over getting a bottle of JD for the guy in the corner booth, and made some stupid remark, I forget what he said, but I know it was stupid. She got up with a look on her face like she was gonna say something bitchy to him, then she saw who he was, and the look on her face changed to the look that girls usually gave Jimmy.
         
         We took the exit to a suburb where another friend of Jimmy's lived. I only ever knew him as Jeff. Jeff the acid guy.
         Jim never wrote any of the lyrics to the songs we played while he was in the band. He wrote all his songs as poems when he was tripping face as a kid.
          I remember when he stopped taking acid, he was about twenty years old, this was before the band but me an Jimmy were close before that, he only had two kids at the time, and one night, after the chick agreed to share custody, he tried to introduce his boys to me an some other guys, but he couldn't remember their names. He didn't take L for a while after that. He drank a lot less too.
         We were going to record the third album so, of course, Jimmy was thinking about the fourth album. That was the problem, after making songs with RAV for three years and us for four, he was out of poems to make into lyrics. He tried writing without acid, and, I don't know, it just didn't sound right. It wasn't our style, not to mention it took him a month just to finish writing this one song. So we were going to see Jeff the acid guy to help Jimmy get over his writer's block. 
         Jimmy got the acid for free. The drummer and the guitarist from the opening act got into our bus when we stopped at Jeff's house. They said they had some "killer shit" and wanted to party.
         That's another thing you gotta understand about Jimmy. People would give us drugs for free just to party with us, and when someone handed Jimmy anything he didn't stop to  ask about what he was taking like a normal person would. He would just take it.
         Me, Jim, Rich, Vic, Frank the guitarist, and the drummer sat in the back of the bus, in Jimmy's room. Jimmy picked up his acoustic and started playing. He just played, not really songs, just notes, the music he heard in his head at the time.
         It was still another thirty-six hours till we reached Houston. Jimmy was a hyper guy, he got bored easily and he hated having to wait around. If he had to kill time, he wanted drugs to kill it for him.
         I remember watching the moon set, and the sun rise through the blinds of the window in Jimmy's room. I fell asleep for a few hours, but Rich woke me up when he needed a smoke. Jimmy was sitting on his couch with Vic. She was sleeping. He was tapping beats on the end table with the drummer.
         Rich told me that Frank went to the can and didn't come back for a while and he went to look for him and he saw Frank passed out on my bed. Jimmy started cutting lines from this bag the drummer gave him. I told Rich I didn't think I'd need my bed for a while.
         After those lines Jimmy started playing again. Vicky woke up and said something none of us understood and rolled back over. Jimmy threw her in his bed.
         Jim took a tab from the drummer and put it in his mouth and sat back on his couch. The drummer talked to me about Richie's new set, I wasn't paying attention. Jimmy found himself another bottle of Jack.
         Thats another thing, his fans, and the press knew him as JD Wilson. But his middle name was actually Charles.
         Back when he would play bar shows, he'd grab a bottle of Jack an hour before going on stage. This one bartender starting calling him JD, and one night when Jimmy was playing I guess a fan must of asked this bartender what his name was, and soon after that the crowd was chanting "JD", and the name stuck.
         The sun was going down and the drummer fell asleep and Jimmy sat back up. I felt sick, like everything was moving too slow, my heart was beating too fast, when I sat up the room started spinning and when I sat back the blood rushed to my head and I felt like I needed to sit up again.
         After a while he started talking. He said "What do you think happens when you die?"
I said "I don't know, probably nothing bad, life sucks enough, right? Death should be easy."
         He laughed, but not really, just kinda that nervous laugh you do when you didn't think something was funny, but you knew you had to laugh cause it was your friend that told the joke. We stopped talking for a while, he had a look on his face that he got sometimes. Like he was thinking really hard about something.
         He sat up again and told me that when he died he would wanna be cremated. "I don't wanna get burned." I said.
"But it's reincarnation." He told me. "You get set on fire, and basically turned into ashes, and smoke, the ashes are useless, but the smoke goes into the air, and the air gives life to birds and trees and everything else."
I said "Wow man, you're fucked up. I need some of whatever you just took." He laughed.
         Jimmy leaned forward and snorted a line. He pointed at the drummer passed out on the small couch. "This proves it, man." He said. "I told you drummers talk a good game, but can't party for shit."

         It was silent for a long time again. It was dark out. We stopped for a while at a truck stop.
         "Acid doesn't do to me what it used ta'." Jimmy said. "Well, at least not this stuff."
I didn't answer him cause I didn't know what to say, and I was thinking about something else.          After a few minutes of not talking I asked him. "How come you came from a band as good as RAV and started playing with me an Rich?"  He started laughing and said;
" Those guys were assholes, I didn't wanna play with them. People used to tell me I was never as good as I was before, I was never as good as I could be. Well, it was cause I was out there with guys I didn't wanna play with. You and Richie are like family, there's no one in the world I'd rather be making music with than you guys."
         It was about midnight when Vicky woke up and sat next to Jimmy on the couch. A little after that I fell asleep.
         That night I had a dream. Me an Richie an Jimmy were all old, real old. And we played only a couple shows a year and for a ton of money. Jimmy's kids were grown up and some of them were in bands, and one of em was an actor or something. We never traveled to shows on the bus. We flew. We had a private jet. It was cool but we couldn't have any drugs an we couldn't drink. We were flying on our jet to this big show, with all the old bands, like the really old bands, the ones me an Jimmy listened to when we were kids. The captain came out of the cockpit and told us there was a storm and we had to buckle up. I looked outside the window and the clouds were all black. Then lightning flashed, and I turned away because it was bright. When I looked back I saw the lightning had hit the wing of the jet, and we started falling.
         When I woke up it was light out. Jimmy and Vic fell asleep next to each other. I got up and walked to the spare bed on the bus and fell asleep again.
         I woke up and someone was yelling. Vicky was screaming at Jimmy to get up. I walked into his room and saw her standing over him.
         The sun was setting. It was red, bright red, the kind of sun you get at the end of a really hot day.
Vicky ran up to the front of the bus to Gregg and said we needed to get Jimmy to the hospital.
         The moon came up full. In the desert you can see so many more stars than the city. You know, the stars are the only lights in the sky, when you're in the desert.
         Jimmy was already gone. I think Vicky knew, but couldn't face it. At the hospital they tried to bring him back. But you could see it on the faces of the nurses and the doctors, they knew.
         I could see Orion's belt in the sky outside the window of the hospital. I remember learning that stars are so far away that the light doesn't get here for hundreds of years, so the stars we see could already be burned out, and we wouldn't know till the light stopped shining.