A Few Words: Okay, before you read this, I have a couple things to say. I'm gathering that the first thing many of you who were paying really close attention to Holding Onto Nothing when you read it are probably going to notice is the name of the other main character in this story (and when I say other main character, all I mean is the guy that's not a Hanson). His name is Julian Drew, which, if you can't remember from his brief appearance in Holding Onto Nothing, is the name of Parker's best friend. The two aren't meant to be the same person. Well, not quite anyway. I mean, they've got the same name, the same twin sister, and all that business, but it's not really quite the same person. Julian Drew is actually kind of a common name in my writings. I use him a lot. He usually shows up as the trusty (well, sometimes anway) best friend or something like that. So, just so you aren't confused, this is just me playing a little bit of Stephen King here. Blame my mother, she's the one who told me to read the Gunslinger novels. Grr...
Also, this was originally meant to be a long story, but I sort of condensed it, I guess you could say. Maybe someday it will be a longer story, but for now, this is it. So...enjoy. As always, any and all comments are welcome!
It was loud. Loud enough to deafen, even, though it wasn't for the reasons some people would think. Sure, the sound system was loud. That was true of most any concert. It was one of the reasons many people came to concerts at all, because God knew you wouldn't be able to actually see the person on stage because of various signs proclaiming love for that particular person and the people who get up and dance even during the slow songs and refuse to sit down no matter how many things you threw at them (he had already lost a good four dollars in quarters). If you didn't feel the vibration of the bass, there was simply no good reason to be there at all.
So the sound system wasn't the surprise (how loud could a guy with a piano be?). That was just expected to be loud.
But the crowd...
Well, the audience was loud
Well, okay, so maybe some people would expect that, too. Maybe a little over three-quarters of the people here in the audience had expected it. At places like these with a person like that on stage, if the audience wasn't making noise, and lots of it, there was probably something wrong. Like maybe it was time to stamp "Has Been" on somebody's forehead and flick them off of their current position at the top of the pop charts.
Maybe the only people in the audience who were actually even remotely surprised at this were the ones who could compare this to the level of noise in the garage back home, which had always been kept to a minimum because of the neighbor lady's baby or the fact that the neighbor lady's husband was working the B shift and liked to sleep during the day without any damn kids waking him up with their shitty noises that only a deaf person could appreciate.
The neighbor lady was not in the audience.
But one of the kids from the garage that the neighbor lady (who had earned that name because none of them had ever been able to figure out her real name) had so often yelled at (or the person they were so often yelled at because of) was in the audience.
The center of the fifth row, actually.
He wasn't exactly sure what he was doing there, so if you asked him, he might shrug and smile and walk away without really answering the question. Maybe he was rubbing salt in an old wound. Maybe he just couldn't waste a perfectly good, hard-to-find ticket that had been shoved into his hands by his older brother, accompanied by a look that clearly spelled death for he who dared not to take the obvious hint.
The guy on the stage, at the piano, was about fifteen years of age...maybe sixteen by now. He never was good at remembering birthdays even though millions of girls (and probably some guys, too) between the ages of thirteen and twenty-seven had it marked on their calendars and celebrated it like a religious holiday. He was not by any means tall (maybe five three in boots), had long brown hair and eyes the color of mud after a spring rain.
Most of his adoring female fans called him Jules, usually ignorant of the fact that Jules was the guy's twin sister, Juliet's nickname and that if you were going to insist upon calling him by one of his many nicknames, he preferred Lee, a name his now six year old stepbrother had come up with when, at three, he couldn't say his whole name. All the syllables tended to trip him up.
The guy's whole name, if you dared utter it in his presence, was Julian Michael Drew.
But, if you insisted on calling him anything at all, he preferred to be called just Julian.
Julian was the was his best friend.
Or had been at one time.
Most of all during those times where they spent all day in the garage (along with his older brother, Isaac, and younger brother, Zac) that had been the designated practice place.
Julian had had the words "piano prodigy" attached to his name since age five and Taylor had simply fallen in love with music the day his father had brought home those Timelife tapes of fifties and sixties rock and roll. Both felt that if there was no music, there was no reason for them. Both of them said this without arrogance. Both of them (along with Isaac and Zac) ate, drank, and breathed music and no one had ever thought there was any problem with that, least of all them. What could be wrong with a little bit of having fun with something they were all inarguably good at?
The band had been started through all that just having fun in the garage. At first, Julian had been a part of that band. None of the brothers ever questioned it, it just seemed natural to include Julian, who contributed work on all the songs and, even though the piano was his instrument of choice, he tended to add to parts of the songs they wrote by switching from instrument to instrument.
Mostly, the band was just for fun, an excuse to get together on hot summer days in order to avoid the long list of chores their parents usually handed to them (both came from large families, so long was long). There was rarely a day that one of them (although it was usually all of them) ended up on the floor, clutching their midsections, tears streaming down their faces from the laughter of kids who just didn't know any better. It was a wonder anything got finished, but, in reality, what would later turn into some very good songs came from those days.
It wasn't until Taylor's parents managed to get some studio time in a small garage studio that the brothers and Julian went theirs separate ways. Taylor suspected that the separation had a lot to do with the divorce of Julian's parents and the emotional problems that came with that.
But they didn't drift apart. They were still too young then to know what it was to drift apart and continued to stick by each other's side, supporting each other as much as possible. Julian almost always made sure he got to all their local gigs, though it was harder when the Hanson brothers began going out of town in search of someone with a record deal handy.
Julian had never been into looking for record deals as much as the brothers were. Maybe it had never occurred to him or maybe he simply had no desire to be famous at the time. Maybe he knew, even without experience, the types of things fame tended to do and just wanted more to preserve the innocence of their times in the garage, playing as quietly as they could so as to not bother the neighbor lady.
All that crumbled when, somehow, both the band and Julian managed to get record deals. The details of how Julian got his was never quite clear to the brothers, but at the time, it didn't really much matter. All that mattered was the excitement of travelling to Los Angeles together and the very distinct possibility of fame. If the idea of fame had bothered Julian before, it didn't seem to now.
And so, they made their separate albums. Hanson in the studios at Mercury and Julian at the studios of the much smaller Magic Music, which was not all that far from the Mercury building.
It was not uncommon for Julian (along with his parents and his manager, Arthur Quinn) to drop in on Hanson's sessions. The professional people (as Julian called them because he never was one to take the time to learn the names of the people he didn't like) tended to not really like it when this happened, mostly because Julian never hesitated to put in his two cents on things. He was rarely actually listened to, although a few songs that never quite made the album were turned inside out for the better because of him.
Likewise, Taylor and his brothers came in for quick visits during some of Julian's sessions It proved much less difficult for them because the atmosphere at the Magic Music was so much less professional due to its much smaller size and notability (at least then). Though the people there didn't care for it much when one of the brothers gave their opinions on some of the songs either, they seemed much more apt to actually listen when they did.
Hanson's album Middle of Nowhere, came out nearly a whole month before Julian's Evil Men Do, but both caught on quickly, turning what the offical people had originally thought would be a long, slow trek from mall gigs to small venues to larger ones if the two were lucky into a dizzying trip to the top.
Soon, the two separate promotional tours were joined together into what became a slightly bigger than expected tour. Before they knew it, not only were their names almost always associated with each other, but they were in demand everywhere and the summer days in the garage were gone forever.
At first, it had been nothing but friendly competition between the band and Julian, mostly because each drew large amounts of enjoyment and excitement out of each other's fame. Every time one or both albums rose up the charts (even if only to fall back the next day), they held little celebrations, consisting of no more than excited high fives, except for when one of them reached number one for the first time. That night, the celebratoin had consisted of tears and hugs and julian's father's announcement that he was finally marrying his girlfriend of two years, Diana Adams.
No one could really recall the exact point where the competition turned unfriendly and why it had. Maybe it was when the magazines and music television shows began holding polls asking who people thought was better looking and had the better music. Maybe it was just one of those things that happens for no reason at all.
Either way, if they hadn't known what drifting apart was before, they found out what being ripped apart was now as Taylor and Julian began to fight like no one had ever heard them fight before. The "you're just jealous"'s began to fly. You're just jealous my single got to number one faster than yours did. You're just jealous that they said I had better music than you do. You're just jealous that that girl wanted to sleep with me and not you.
It got worse as time rolled on. One time one of them even threw something at the other (and missed), though neither of them cared to think about who had thrown it and what it was they had thrown.
You couldn't cut the tension with knife, but you could try.
No one understood it at all, especially not those who could compare their attitudes toward each other with the attitudes they had had before. Things were certainly much different. It didn't take an idiot to sense that.
That was how the rumors had gotten started. Rumors of how, due to as many absurd reasons as people could come up with at the time, the two had become mortal enemies. Many tried to play that divide up as much as possible, even starting contests for people to come up with reasons why one was so much better than the other.
The professional people hadn't liked that one bit and so they were forced to be with each other, smiles pasted on their faces, as close to the public eye as possible in order to stop these rumors.
But that had been kind of hard since the conclusion all those rumors drew, that they had become each other's nemesis, was simply true.
After a while, they had just stopped trying to convince the people they weren't right when, in truth, they were just right.
Eventually, whatever relationship they had had at all just faded way. They stopped supporting each other. It was questionable whether or not either of them even remembered those innocent days in the garage.
Now Taylor found himself here, in the center of the fifth row at one of Julian's concerts. He would say that it was the first time he had seen Julian in person in almost two years, but he couldn't actually see Julian at all because of the rather bouncy girl in front of him.
He didn't know what he was doing there and didn't really like to think about it. The point was that he was there at all, and as far as he was concerned, you could take that to mean whatever you wanted it to.
In his heart, though, somewhere, he felt like getting up on stage with his best friend and pretending like it was the old garage with no one watching them. When it was them just doing it for them and no one else.
He wondered what the neighbor lady thought now.