Picture Perfect

same neighborhood as the fantasy. That would be a horrible idea because in all likelihood, the problem is mine.
    There are people who don’t enjoy having sex, and I seem to be one of them. I do just fine by myself, but when I do anything sexual with anyone else, it’s just a letdown. The only person I’ve ever felt sexually charged by is Flynn. My taste in men being what it is, I’m betting he sucks in bed. I started to laugh when I told myself that the bulge I’ve lusted over for years is probably nothing more than a few tube socks rolled together.

Chapter Three

    I hadn’t stopped thinking about the photographer since I saw that picture of her with The Chaps. When I got back to my hotel that night, I’d spent hours on her website looking at all of her photos. She had an incredible eye, and each picture told a story. Had I seen her work without seeing her as well, I’d still have wanted to hire her.
    I’d been to the site an embarrassing number of times since the first night that I bookmarked it. She had a series of black and white self-portraits that I just couldn’t stop looking at. She was beautiful, no doubt about that, but she also looked familiar. I could never quite shake the feeling that I’d met her before, but I was positive that I hadn’t. I would have remembered a girl like that. She seemed different, more authentic than what I was used to. I saw incredible depth in her self-portraits, and I wanted to know more about her. What was her personality like? What did her voice sound like?
    In just a few hours, I’d have my answer when I finally got to meet her for the first time. I was pumped for the tour general because this is a huge deal for us, but I was also ridiculously excited about seeing her in the flesh. Still, I needed to keep my eye on the ball so that I was professional and on point because there was so much to focus on with the band in the coming months.
    Since this will be our last tour, we agreed to let it be filmed as a documentary. We’ll also have a biographer with us who will be compiling information for a band autobiography that will be released in conjunction with the film and a live CD. It’s a big goodbye, and it will take just over a year from start to finish. Four months on tour, then six months putting the CD, documentary and book together followed by two months of publicity. After that, we’re free.
    I don’t know what normal life will look like, but I’m excited about it. We’ve all spent the last six years getting our shit back together, and now it’s time to move forward. For a long time, each of us went completely off the rails. Tyson had gotten heavily into drugs, and the rest of us were drinking, fucking, and taking risks with our personal safety. We sold CD’s by the million, but the quality of our work definitely suffered. Out of the ten songs on our third CD, there are three that we willingly play today. The rest is pure crap. We were totally phoning it in.
    I was the first to start to get my shit together after an epic blackout in Philadelphia. The next day I’d woken up with a new nickname and the certainty that I had to be better than I was. At the end of the tour, our manager sat us all down and told us that if we didn’t ALL get healthy, there wasn’t going to be a band left. Three of us went to ground in our hometown while Tyson went to rehab. We all got our shit under control before coming back together six months later to record our fourth album. The difference between the third and fourth CD’s is like night and day.
    It was during the making of that CD that the four of us started talking about getting out of the game. The whole rock star thing is an experience that we've both loved and hated, but fame isn’t what any of us care about. Each of us wants a real life. We all agree that we didn’t make all of this money to spend the rest of our lives anchorless and miserable.
    The other thing we all agreed on is that we didn’t want to quit the music business entirely. We got started on this ride because we love music, and now we’re going to take what we’ve learned in the past decade and put it to work with our own label. The contract with our first act was signed yesterday. They’ll be in the studio in a few weeks, and then they will be opening for us on the last leg of the tour.
    Everything is moving forward perfectly, at least professionally. As usual, I haven’t been successful finding anyone I want to spend a significant amount