“Torch’d Circular!”

this long-playing record, like all long-playing records, has a backstory=

Mick Mars of Motley Crue, alone in his unfinished condominium- the sun is setting, and there’s half an inch of rain lapping at his soles; i say “mickey, what’s with the state of your miserable digs?”; he says, “they ran out of money when the bottom fell out, couldn’t pay to put the glass in the fucking window-holes.”  “but mick, couldn’t you live in one of your other ones?”,  “i could yes i sure could but this one feels a little truer, and some mornings the birds just fly right in here and murmur to me with gentle coos and leave their downy feathers in my grim hair.”

a little later on, he plays me his legendary demos- and though the moment itself is awkward, and fraught with a clumsy sort of intimacy, the tunes passenger across the distance between us like wandering thunderclouds shot through with miniature fingers of gold, heavy as a drowned freezer, poignant as the beating of a squirrel’s heart, but ultimately (and tragically) square.  coughing into my sleeve, i scan the room, looking for exits.

eventually the silence lifts, and Mick Mars tells me the story about the time he strangled an english booking agent in the elevator of a midtown boutique hotel- “he had the type of potbelly that makes one think of pale weak lieutenants sending innocent boys to slaughter, like dull gluttony wed to lazy power.”, “but they all have potbellies like that.”, “yes, but this one had blonde streaks in his hair like a cruel teenage girl, and a dry clattering mouth that released foul-smelling winds.”  and then mick says, out of the blue, like a train bursting out of a tunnel somewhere quiet, with trees the only witnesses, just like that he says,  “goddamn, it’s hard to earn an honest living these days..”, and me, with my own wonderments and depressions in tow, i say “for reals, Mick Mars, for reals…”