Buy The Silent Hustler
by Sean Meriwether
[Lethe Press, 10.2009]

Originally published on GetUnderground.com [07.2003]

Into the Mouth (Becoming the Fly)

His manager yells at someone on the cellphone as LA whisks by the window. Vince wishes he was one of those nameless people on the street, no obligations, no third album due in a month. Back in the day playing shitty dives for beer and scoring with punk boys after the show, back when no one cared who he slept with, struggling to the goal of success when the music mattered more than profit margins and guest appearances.

Better yet, he wanted to step back and erase the fevered dream that started it all. Halfway through The Lord of the Flies while he was laid up with the flu, somewhere between conscious and unconscious, he was a timid Simon caught up in the awe of a new tribal God in the forest clearing. The pig’s head, swarmed by buzzing flies, granted him a voice, a chance, just sign on the dotted line. He woke up with the name of the band, invented a new name for himself, and it had all fallen into place: the gigs, the contract, the album, the boys smuggled into his dressing room, the parties, the drugs….

Now at the peak, when the world was supposedly his for the taking, there’s an emptiness that can’t be explained away. He’d made it in ways he’d never dreamed, but instead of being accomplished, he’d become a commodity. I’m not a fucking can of Coke, he wants to shout, but the exclamation dies on his lips.

Finish reading "Into the Mouth (Becoming the Fly)" in The Silent Hustler