Part 4: Xander

Xander Cross (real name: Alexander Michael Krassner) was half-sitting, half-laying on the couch, one arm behind his head, the other resting idly in his pants. Over the underwear. Nothing sexual. Just habit. The TV was on, and the volume was just too low for him to hear it, and just too high for him to be able to ignore it, and the remote was - well, he didn’t actually know, that was the whole thing. There was a chance he was lying on top of it.

The show was in twenty minutes, so he could do whatever he wanted until then. He needed to Save His Energy. And then once the show was over, he could do whatever he wanted because he had Fulfilled His Professional Obligations. And on the days when there were no shows, he could do whatever he wanted because it was his Day Off. It was an ingenious system.

Plus, the shows themselves, he could do with his mind turned off. They took no thinking or energy at all. They pretty much just ran themselves, at this point.

It was like anything. You do it enough times and you go into autopilot. Assembly line stuff. Marx was right about the whole alienated from your labor thing; he just hadn’t taken it all the way to its conclusion. But then, it wasn’t his fault that he saw a lot more factory workers than Post-Hardcore Neo-Emo-Revivalist musicians.

So Xander was free at all times (that he was fully conscious, at least) to do whatever he wanted. The problem was just that he didn’t know what he wanted.

Maybe he should be brooding, getting into character. Trying to remember how he had felt when he had written those songs about Death and Love and Pain and Life and all those other very important topics. It was bound to fail, but maybe he owed it to the fans to at least try. How disappointed they would be if they knew what he was really doing - kind of lying on a couch, kind of watching some cartoon or another.

Sure, it was a part of his public persona that he loved cartoons. But that detail, like every detail, was cultivated. It was the contrast that they liked. The serious, brooding rock star who also had a sweet, childish side.

So it wasn’t the cartoon that was the problem. But there was something about the image of himself right now that didn’t square with the image they had of him. Maybe it was the fact that he wasn’t particularly enjoying the cartoon. Or maybe it was all the self-conscious introspection going on. 

Or the fact that he didn’t care one bit about death or love or any of the big capitalized words, and cared much more about changing into comfortable clothes and having a nice snack tonight before bed.

Xander was wearing several layers of black eyeliner and was forbidden to put his hands anywhere near his face.

His hair was also black - dyed, with streaks of red. But he could touch that. Messy hair fit his aesthetic.

There was a knock at the door and then the door instantly opened, making the knock a bit pointless. Xander removed the hand from his pants, which was an unconscious habit just as much as putting it there in the first place. It was Bobby Melrose, who either worked for the record label (as a producer, or a manager, or an agent maybe - Xander wasn't clear on what all of those terms meant) or was Xander’s friend. According to Bobby, he was both, but he never bothered to tell Xander when he was switching from one to the other.

“Hey, hey, what’s up, how you doing, what’s going on,” Bobby said, in his usual jovial tone. None of those were questions, so Xander didn’t reply. “Listen, Xan, we’ve got to start conversating a bit about the new album, label’s on my ass about it, you know, they want it yesterday, so to speak, so what are we thinking, when are we going to have it.”

“New album? Already?” Xander replied. “Didn’t the last one just come out?”

“Six months ago, Xan,” Bobby said, taking a seat on the arm of the couch next to Xander’s feet, then immediately standing up again. “Black Carousel came out six months ago, we’re touring for it now, and for the next one - we’re thinking self-titled, OBM hasn’t self-titled yet, lots of bands self-title their first one, or at least their MLD, but both those ships have already sailed, I mean you’ve got The Angelic and the Damned and then ---”

“Bobby.” Xander sat up. “You don’t have to recite my own band’s discography at me. I know what albums we’ve released.”

“Of course, of course, of course,” Bobby said, with the annoying air of a parent humoring his child, putting out a bowl of cereal for the kid’s imaginary friend with a glance at the nonexistent camera filming the scene for some documentary - that fiction which alone makes parenthood bearable. “But if you don’t want to go self-titled, then Label figures the other option is some sort of double-release. One album, two different covers maybe. Black and white, life and death, heaven and hell, something like that. If only you hadn’t already done Angelic and Damned, we’d do that, but that was before you joined Label . . .”

“I know,” Xander said firmly. Bobby had a lot of annoying speech habits - many of which, including this predilection for exposition, Xander speculated came from a childhood of learning how to be a person from movies.

“Maybe a re-release, two different versions, two different covers - collectors’ items, you know - and lots of those kids, lots of the Company will buy ‘em both. Note to self. But anyway - if we do go self-titled, then it’s got to be, like, well, not a re-branding so much as, like - you know when a couple gets all middle-aged and decides they’re going to get married again, renew their vows, it’s got to be like that, it’s got to be the most iconic OBM album, Label is saying they want it to be more you than you, you hear me, kid?”

Bobby was twenty-nine, three years older than Xander, but was willing to play any role from father to peer to representative of the youth. That was another advantage of being a professional actor - he could be anyone.

“So, I don’t get any say in this at all?” Xander asked. From a linguistic standpoint, this was a question - rising intonation and all - but in human terms it was no more a question than Bobby’s were.

“What do you mean, Xan, it’s your album, it’s your creative process, you write the whole damn thing,” Bobby said. “I mean, we all know, everyone knows that you’re the creative genius behind OBM and the rest of the guys, they’re just window dressing. You need them back there, you need them like the - what’s that sports thing? You need them like the quarterback needs the offensive line, or like Alec needs the other Baldwins, or like . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, you’ve done this routine before.”

“So what’s the issue, Xan, if it’s money I can talk to Label about it, but I can’t promise anything.”

“No, no, it’s not about money,” Xander said. He nearly rubbed his eyes with his hands, but caught himself. “It’s like, you all just want me to write more songs about death and pain and tragedy and love . . .”

“That’s what OBM is, Xan. That’s what you made it to be.”

“I know, but, like, is that all it ever can be? What about, like, artistic freedom? Creativity?”

“So what? You want to start spelling daemon and faerie with that jammed-together ae-thing? Start saying forged instead of made? Fealty instead of loyalty, that sort of shit?”

“No, no, it’s more than that, it’s . . .”

“Ooohhhhhhh, I get it.” Bobby looked visibly relieved, now that the pieces had fallen into place for him, and he understood what conversation they were having. “You want to grow as an artist, is that it? You think that you could find more fulfillment if you got to experiment with other types of music? Other modes of expression? Finally be an artist and not just some dancing monkey who makes teenage girls scream.”

“Yes, exactly! And I don’t even care so much if it’s popular . . .”

“Right, right, right, you want to create something that’s for you, not for them, yada yada yada.”

“Well, yes, but you don’t have to be so patronizing about it.” Xander felt himself getting annoyed, but wasn’t sure if it was with Bobby or himself for bringing this up to Bobby - who, after all, was just playing the part of the record executive flawlessly. His own role was just to go off on his own and make the damn creative thing.

Bobby sighed. “Xan, you know I’ve been in this industry a long time.”

“Six years.”

“Six years is a long time, Xan. That’s twice as long as JFK was President, it’s longer than Picasso’s whole blue period, it’s about the same amount of time as--”

“Yeah, okay.” Bobby didn’t stop unless you cut him off. His repertoire of references was both endless and limited, like the list of all the numbers between 12 and 13. “And I’ve been writing songs since I was a kid. Except I used to actually enjoy it. What’s your point here?”

“My point is,” Bobby began. He ran his hand through his hair and tried a different tack. “What exactly would you do differently, you know, if you had creative license and artistic freedom and all that jazz? Do you have any ideas? Subjects you want to explore? Fragments of lyrics you haven’t been able to use yet?”

“Well, not yet,” Xander admitted. “It’s kind of a new thought. But like, I don’t know, I want to, evolve and grow and . . .”

“Xan, every musician hits this point in their career, I’ve seen it hundreds of times, I just didn’t realize you’d be hitting it tonight,” Bobby said, perching back on the edge of the couch, seeming like he was in the vicinity of giving Xander a paternal pat on the shoulder. “And you know who I blame, I blame the Beatles.”

“The Beatles?” 

“Yeah, the Beatles, the English rock group made up of---”

“Right, I know who the Beatles are. I just don’t see how this has anything to do with them. I don’t even like the Beatles. Hell, no one actually likes the Beatles anymore.”

“No, no, of course they don’t, they just pretend to,” Bobby conceded quickly. “But they were the first ones to do that whole thing where it’s like, okay, we’re sick of just being pop stars and playing songs that people can enjoy, we want to be real artists, we want to go to India and meditate, and lie in bed for three months straight, and drive around the desert in a van and kill a couple famous actresses for some reason, and . . .”

“I’m not sure that last one was actually the Beatles."

“Oh, and I suppose Stalin never actually killed anyone, either, just said some words, is that it. But that’s not the point. The point is,” Bobby continued, reaching a fever pitch, “the point is that they thought they were going to be more fulfilled and satisfied creatively, spiritually, artistically, whatever you want to call it-ally, if they did weird shit instead of normal shit, and look where it got them. Within a couple years they hated each other, broke up, and John was dead, and really dead not like Paul-is-dead dead. And you know why John is dead?”

“Because he got killed,” Xander said flatly, wanting to bring this conversation to a close. “Listen, the show’s about to start and I should really . . .”

“Because he got way too into that voodoo occult peace shit! Paul’s still alive because Paul stayed boring. You ever listen to ‘Yesterday.’ And I don’t mean hear it in the grocery store in the background, but actually sat down and listened to it, start to finish, not doing anything else but that. It’s like two minutes long, but it’ll be the longest two minutes of your life. The most insipid nonsense anyone’s ever written. But that’s the thing about life, Xan . . .”

If there was one thing Xander Cross felt certain about, it’s that nothing insightful ever followed this phrase, especially not when uttered by people who worked for a record label.

“The thing about life is this, Xan.” Bobby glanced at the imaginary camera. “You’ve got your quality, and you’ve got your quantity, and you might think those are two different things, but that’s just man’s way of looking at things, women too, it’s not a sexist thing, man like mankind, you know what I mean. But in the real world, the actual world, it’s not like that, they’re just two parts of the same thing, it’s a zero-sum game, you get some more of one you lose a little bit of the other. That’s why there’s the twenty-seven club, Kurt Cobain and the rest of them, that’s why JFK died young but Jimmy Carter’s going to live to a hundred, that’s . . .”

“That’s your second JFK reference this conversation.”

“Do you see where I’m coming from, though, Xan. OBM is a success, you found a formula that’s working, and only an idiot would turn their backs on that. And besides, where are you going to go? Your first album was about how Life Has No Meaning and We Are All Going to Die Someday and All We Have to Comfort Us In The Face of that Black Empty Void is Love, and if I’m not mistaken those were the song titles. Where do you go from there. How do you get darker or deeper than that.”

This was a point Xander actually hadn’t considered. Seventy-percent-accurate Beatles history was one thing, easy to dismiss as irrelevant nonsense, but it was true that he had started at the dark end of the spectrum of human emotions. True, he hadn’t actually felt any real darkness or despair at the time, besides the usual amounts that come from being sixteen, but it was what you wrote songs about. He started to think that maybe he should have started off a bit lighter, to give himself something else to do later. Now he was stuck repeating the same old cycle.

“It’s just . . .” he said, groping for the right words, but not finding them. “It’s just all so fucking dumb.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. And for the first time - definitely today, possibly forever - the two of them were having the same conversation.