Billy gets the red-eye back to LA, two weeks after Joe died and over a month after he came back to Canada for that fucking benefit gig.
He gets his car back at LAX - shit, he must owe a million dollars in parking fees. He just signs what they put in front of him and hopes that Jenifur will send him a paycheck soon.
In the parking lot he actually stands there and stares in surprise at his car for a minute. Shit, it's a nice car. He'd forgotten that he was the kind of guy who could own a car like this.
There's this thing called 'punk damage'. Kind of the punk equivalent to Catholic guilt. For some reason, there were people who thought that being a punk meant you had to renounce all worldly goods and take on a vow of poverty or something. If you hung out with them and played in their bands and read their zines then their weird morality system eventually seeped into your brain. Even if you got away from punk, you'd still feel guilty and defensive about buying a new car, or shopping at Walmart, or eating meat. Punk damage.
Billy thought he had shook all that off years ago. But a few weeks in Canada with Joe fucking Dick - who always operated with the smallest possible budget, who had more punk damage than anyone Billy knew - must have sent him right back to his old ways.
He puts his stuff in the trunk. He gets in the car and puts the key in the ignition.
As he pulls out and drives away, he flicks on the radio. Some idiot fucking DJ on KWEST is playing the Dead Boys.
Ain't it fun when your friends despise what you've become?
He slams the radio off, but he knows how the rest of the song goes.
Ain't it fun when you know that you're gonna die young? It's such fun...
Joe had that record. It's sitting in a box in the trunk of Billy's car now.
Ain't it fun when you've broken up every band that you ever begun? Ain't it fun when you know that you're gonna die young?
He used to think it was kinda funny. Used to think he'd never be a rock and roll cliché like those idiots. Goddamn dumbass Stiv Bators, dead by forty.
Joe was thirty-five.
Joe. So fucking smart, so fucking stupid, so deluded he thought he could take on the ultimate rock and roll cliché - blowing your fucking brains out - and make it work for him.
It hadn't worked for Kurt Cobain, and people actually liked Nirvana. How the fuck was it meant to work for some two-bit Canuck punk rocker?
How could he be so....
But that was Joe.
Even at 4am LA streets aren't empty, but it's early enough in the morning that the traffic isn't too bad. Unfortunately, this just means Billy has space and time to think.
Back in Canada, a couple people had looked at Billy like he was nuts when he said Joe had killed himself for fame. They'd gently suggested that maybe Joe killed himself because he was sad. Billy knew that wasn't right. Billy considered himself the world's number one expert on the workings of Joe Dick's diseased mind, now that the previous number one had succumbed to a DIY auto-trepanation from a smoking pistol.
Joe knew punk, and he could expertly manipulate its mythology. Why kill yourself in front of the movie cameras unless you're trying to ensure your death means something?
I hope nobody remembers you, Billy wishes. I hope nobody remembers your name but me.
You had to be really fucked up to not just see other people as objects, but to want to be an object yourself. You had to be pretty stunted. Fatally mistaken about life. Billy didn't want to believe that was who Joe was, but the reality of what Joe had done pressed down on his head and forced him to consider the possibility.
1: Joe aspired to know nothing, be nothing, and live purely in the moment.
It's not like Joe never had any finer feelings: he did. It's just that it seemed like he didn't want to have them. He acted like he was tougher than he was and cared less than he really did.
Or did he never really care?
2: Joe wanted to be an object more than he wanted to be alive.
Is that all Joe ever wanted? To be a photograph, an image, an event, a corpse? To transform himself into pure information, a symbol that would creep into books and zines and tabloids, get smeared on patches and CD covers? Surely nobody consciously wanted that. Not even Sid Vicious had wanted that.
Joe's punk damage went too deep. Whole body was scar tissue.
Billy has lost the thread of his own thoughts.
He just wants to get home and play those records and pretend that Joe's alive.