Everybody lies.
That’s no great secret; on some instinctual level, we all know it’s true. Thanks to the career path I was thrust onto, I had to learn that lesson earlier than most.
Some lies they tell to make their own existence easier, I suppose. To offer simple explanations for things that aren’t easy to explain—war, hatred, disease. When people talk about depression, if they’re brave enough to even speak the word, they talk as though only types of it exist in the world.
The first type is the depression of television commercials. Are you feeling a bit blue, they ask? Something got you down lately? Are you just not getting enough sleep?
Yeah, right.
The second type, they romanticize–lives tragically cut short, potential left unrealized, dreams lost. The victims are always young, beautiful people who have it all, if only they could just realize it, but they’re lost to their dark secrets and demons.
Well, maybe they do get a few things right.
Another phone call. It seemed like these days we spent more time in pointless conference calls than we did writing, recording or anything else remotely related to creating music.
I was getting sick of it. One more phone call and I might kill myself.
There was a needle and thread on the table from where I’d tried to sew a cool new patch onto my jeans the day before, and I picked it up. I couldn’t handle these calls without something to fidget with, something to occupy my hands. And since it would be rude to grab my guitar and just start strumming while Lyor rambled at us, I settled for stabbing new holes in my pants.
“Let me tell you what I detected as an issue. Glen, I believe, he feels that you guys are questioning him on almost everything that he’s doing. He feels really positive about you guys but he’s saying he’s a very wealthy person and this is more a labor of love and pleasure.”
“Yeah.”
“When things become too deep, it becomes too difficult.”
Deep. Difficult. I rolled those words over in my brain as I pulled the needle through the army drab material. What did they mean? What was difficult to someone with millions of dollars? We talked about the torture the label was putting us through, but was it really? We still had our careers, I supposed, for whatever that was worth anymore. They hadn’t really taken anything away from us.
So why did it feel like it? Why did it feel like every day I sunk a little deeper into something I couldn’t say, into this strange numbness that was even worse than feeling?
“We’ve felt like we were very much leaves in a river, which is kind of interesting that—“
“So then I’m confused.”
The needle pricked my thigh and I winced. At least that felt like something. Physical sensation was all I seemed to have left.
A sudden urge overcame me to press the needle down, right into the fat and muscle, all the way down to the bone if it were long enough. Maybe that would open the floodgates and all the emotions I’d felt strangled by would finally come out. I knew it didn’t work that way, though.
But what if… what if it did.
“I think the concept of Glen charging three hundred thousand for four tracks is ridiculous.”
The phone made a series of beeps and I realized the call had ended. Had I contributed to it at all? Did it matter?
I pulled the needle back. The moment had passed. No blood drawn, no bodily wound to prove the thoughts I’d just entertained. I wasn’t sure if I had passed or failed that test. All I knew for certain was that I would take the same test again, and maybe next time I wouldn’t be such a coward.
The truth of it is so much more complicated.
It creeps up on you, slowly then all at once, until you can’t remember ever being any other way. This is just who you are. This is your life, for better or worse—mostly worse. Maybe those around you see it, but they can laugh about it, pointing to silly reasons for what they blow off as typical teenage angst.
And you… you’re strung out on a wire, torn between fear of death and fear of life. But you learn how to survive it. And you learn how to hide it. You walk the walk so well that no one can see through your smile at all.
Like I said, everybody lies.