Read Online This Is Where We Live by Janelle Brown - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Janelle Brown
Ads: Link
Slovenian anarchists.
Aoki’s life was a never-ending art project, lived as if an invisible audience were judging her work for originality and intensity of performance. Jeremy dutifully stepped into the role of muse and sidekick, a Zenlike counterweight for her unpredictable psychosis, the only person in Aoki’s life who took her stunts in stride. She saw him, she said, as her savior, a role that both thrilled and exhausted him. After her second rehab stint, a brief period of freedom and sanity when Jeremy considered but ultimately rejected the thought of sneaking off to a foreign country before she returned, a freshly committed Aoki began a series of oil portraits, all of Jeremy—his hand, his torso, his neck, but never his entire face: intensely violent, quasi-spiritual, ten-foot tall paintings that finally launched her into critical art-world fame. There were shows in Tel Aviv and Rio. She cut her hair in a spiral around her head and took to wearing only clothes that were silver. Life with her was an amusement-park ride Jeremy couldn’t seem to get off, even as the loop-de-loops nauseated him and the constant adrenaline threatened to give him a heart attack.
Besides, This Invisible Spot, too, was coming into its own. The band fired their atonal lead singer and promoted Jeremy from backup to lead; they hired an old friend of Aoki’s, a manic Belgian named Anton, to write new material for them; they abandoned their melancholic slow-core sound, added a DJ, and began playing their songs at double speed. In 2003, they were signed to a prominent indie record label and released an album, Feeling Fantastik . It sold eighty thousand copies in the States, garnered raves from previously dismissive music critics, and briefly launched them to number two on the college charts. In America, they were respected; in Asia, they were huge. During that illfated February, the band toured in Singapore and Seoul and Tokyo, where they played to a crowd of ten thousand screaming harajuko girls and Aoki signed with a prestigious gallery. On a train to Kyoto, with his bandmates listening to their iPods in complicit silence and Aoki asleep with her head on his lap, Jeremy decided that he would propose to Aoki at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, just so that this hallucination—the frozen rice fields spinning past, the world unfurling before him—would never end. Except that when they got to Kyoto, Aoki disappeared for two days and returned so hung over that she spent the last leg of the trip vomiting blood in the bathroom. On the plane home, Aoki confessed that she’d been sleeping with Anton since Singapore. “He was seeking artistic inspiration, and I knew I could give it to him. It was really for the good of the whole band, including you,” she explained to Jeremy, as if he would understand.
Considering his history, he might have given in to her twisted logic, if it hadn’t been for the message on his answering machine when he finally arrived home, bleary and jet-lagged and shell-shocked. The message was from Jillian, his mother, informing him that she’d been diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer and her boyfriend had moved out because he couldn’t handle the pressure of watching her die and would he mind coming out to Los Angeles to take care of her?
He moved a week later, quitting the band and breaking up with Aoki in an epic six-hour screaming match that ended with her threatening to jump off the Williamsburg Bridge if he got on the plane. He went anyway, and as he flew over the Great Plains toward the West Coast, looking down at the golden-brown fields that covered the country like a warm patchwork quilt, it was as if he’d expunged a poison from his bloodstream and was waking up, slowly, from a very long intoxication.
Things changed in LA, so rapidly that it felt like his years with Aoki in New York were a dream sequence from someone else’s biopic. Reality was his sick mother, wasting away in her stuffy bungalow
Aoki’s life was a never-ending art project, lived as if an invisible audience were judging her work for originality and intensity of performance. Jeremy dutifully stepped into the role of muse and sidekick, a Zenlike counterweight for her unpredictable psychosis, the only person in Aoki’s life who took her stunts in stride. She saw him, she said, as her savior, a role that both thrilled and exhausted him. After her second rehab stint, a brief period of freedom and sanity when Jeremy considered but ultimately rejected the thought of sneaking off to a foreign country before she returned, a freshly committed Aoki began a series of oil portraits, all of Jeremy—his hand, his torso, his neck, but never his entire face: intensely violent, quasi-spiritual, ten-foot tall paintings that finally launched her into critical art-world fame. There were shows in Tel Aviv and Rio. She cut her hair in a spiral around her head and took to wearing only clothes that were silver. Life with her was an amusement-park ride Jeremy couldn’t seem to get off, even as the loop-de-loops nauseated him and the constant adrenaline threatened to give him a heart attack.
Besides, This Invisible Spot, too, was coming into its own. The band fired their atonal lead singer and promoted Jeremy from backup to lead; they hired an old friend of Aoki’s, a manic Belgian named Anton, to write new material for them; they abandoned their melancholic slow-core sound, added a DJ, and began playing their songs at double speed. In 2003, they were signed to a prominent indie record label and released an album, Feeling Fantastik . It sold eighty thousand copies in the States, garnered raves from previously dismissive music critics, and briefly launched them to number two on the college charts. In America, they were respected; in Asia, they were huge. During that illfated February, the band toured in Singapore and Seoul and Tokyo, where they played to a crowd of ten thousand screaming harajuko girls and Aoki signed with a prestigious gallery. On a train to Kyoto, with his bandmates listening to their iPods in complicit silence and Aoki asleep with her head on his lap, Jeremy decided that he would propose to Aoki at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, just so that this hallucination—the frozen rice fields spinning past, the world unfurling before him—would never end. Except that when they got to Kyoto, Aoki disappeared for two days and returned so hung over that she spent the last leg of the trip vomiting blood in the bathroom. On the plane home, Aoki confessed that she’d been sleeping with Anton since Singapore. “He was seeking artistic inspiration, and I knew I could give it to him. It was really for the good of the whole band, including you,” she explained to Jeremy, as if he would understand.
Considering his history, he might have given in to her twisted logic, if it hadn’t been for the message on his answering machine when he finally arrived home, bleary and jet-lagged and shell-shocked. The message was from Jillian, his mother, informing him that she’d been diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer and her boyfriend had moved out because he couldn’t handle the pressure of watching her die and would he mind coming out to Los Angeles to take care of her?
He moved a week later, quitting the band and breaking up with Aoki in an epic six-hour screaming match that ended with her threatening to jump off the Williamsburg Bridge if he got on the plane. He went anyway, and as he flew over the Great Plains toward the West Coast, looking down at the golden-brown fields that covered the country like a warm patchwork quilt, it was as if he’d expunged a poison from his bloodstream and was waking up, slowly, from a very long intoxication.
Things changed in LA, so rapidly that it felt like his years with Aoki in New York were a dream sequence from someone else’s biopic. Reality was his sick mother, wasting away in her stuffy bungalow
Similar Books
