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Some of Billy and Joe's past here was inspired by what's on the official Hard Core Logo website at http://www.hardcorelogo.ca/

This is the 200th fanfic I've posted. I'm going to go sit down somewhere now.

"No guts! No blood! No brains at all!

Now, my spine is the bass line
And the top line is the distant past
All the history of those better men
Dirty havoc's hand on the purse's strings
My fear of the passing time
Didn't magnify the dividing line
All that history could be blown away on a breath of lust
...
Trajectory
Synchronicity
How the choice is made with a fresh resolve...."
-- "My Spine (is the Bass Line)" by Shriekback


Can't believe we're spending the night in the fucking van. When I realized that's what we were doing, I brought it up to Joe, the bitch. Reminded him that part of my deal was that we didn't sleep in the van.

"Are you sleeping right now?" he asks.

And I had to say, "No. I have to stay up to make sure you don't run us off the road, fucking cokehead that you are."

"Then we're not sleeping in the van, are we, asshole?"

Prick liked to believe that he kept his promises. He did that by either not promising anything or by bending the rules. Same old shit, same old game. Just like my dad, but with fewer punches
and less booze. Just like the old days.

This piece of shit van takes me back, peels the years away. Further back than our last tour, when we were doing okay, had our own driver and some perks. I'm thinking way back when we first
started out on the road and lived in something like this, too dirt poor to afford better. Talk about time travel. This is probably exactly how he planned me to think too.

Joe in the driver seat? Oh yeah. And too fucked up to be trusted. That's my life with Joe fucking Dick all over, isn't it?

Put a little carpeting over the big hole in the floor, and nobody would notice. Until somebody steps in it.

Right back where I started.

A few days ago I was a man with a plan. Play the benefit, then go back to LA. To money, stability, respect. Jennifur. I'd gotten out, dammit. But Joe is after me as soon as I get off the stage, just being Joe. Grabbing me and leading me around like I'm a pet. Pushing and pushing because he knows I'm high and easy after a performance. Reunion tour, being a Hard Core again. Only for a little while. I knew it won't take too long before he decides it's permanent-like, but I ignored that.

I agreed to the tour without him even promising me a fucking thing. Then we went back to his hotel room and jumped one another.

How something could feel so comfortable and dangerous at the same time, I'll never know. He still knows what I like; I still know what he likes. But with us it's all teeth and edge with a little bit of tenderness thrown in now and then for the extra mindfuck points.

He still gets me off like nobody else can.

So easy. Joe's like coke himself. Everything sounds fine at the time. Buy now, pay later.

Think later.

Pay forever.

Shit.

Traveling like this leaves me too much time to think. Forgot how much nothing is out here, kilometers and kilometers of it. When I look out my window, even with the darkness I know there's nothing out there. Nothing. We're the only breathing things here. Okay, maybe there were a few critters out there that had an IQ point or two over Pipe, but that was it. Shit, give me good ol' American sprawl, and fuck the planet. Give me your huddled masses yearning for a split-level ranch-style house with a tiny lawn on a cul de sac.

The nothing here makes me dive down my own fucking brain to distract myself.

Nothing to do in the van except try to keep Joe conscious enough to keep driving, since I won't get the wheel away from him when he's high and being a bitch like this. Pry it from his cold, dead fingers maybe, but my fingers would be too cold and dead to do that in that case.

This van. Stereotype city. We are The Punk Rock Cliches. Thank you, you've been a great audience, good night!

Punk rock cliches....

Like how Joe and me met. Two juvies. A PR guy would give his left eye for a story like that. The Jennifur kids got put together by their label. They maybe have a few adult drug convictions to give them some tiny hint of danger. How could they beat the pure punk rock story of how me and Joe met? Joe up for vandalism and me for auto theft, each at the ripe old age of 12.

Sort of a metaphor there. Joe, firmly middle-class punk that he was, could afford to make a Statement and get arrested for it. He could afford politics and romantic ideals. Me, I was too busy
trying to survive, and jacking cars for money and for places to sleep was only one of the ways I did that.

Sleeping in cars then, sleeping in this fucking van *now*....

I took what I could get after I ran away from Mum and her latest boyfriend. Guy was more insistent about me making nice with my new daddy then most of her dicks were. As usual, it involved me making nice with his dick. Mum sure could pick 'em, and her judgment got even better when she was drunk enough. Funny how they always went for me and left my older brother alone.

That Vancouver courthouse was the last place I saw Mum. Can't say I miss her.

Joe, the fuckhead, saw poetry in my life. I looked at his bourgeois stability and wanted it bad. Funny. I started jamming with him in his basement more to have a warm place to go than out of any artistic drive. That came later.

His dad hit him sometimes, but I wasn't just trying to one-up him when I said my Dad made his look like a pussy. I might not've survived to see twelve if he hadn't skipped out when I was seven.
Besides, Joe provoked the shit out of his parents, so maybe his dad should have hit him harder earlier. The Mulgrews lost control of their son way before I met him and helped him along.

I could've gotten on with them fine. I learned to go along to get along early.

Still, Joe lived in those squats with me later on, so he wasn't all talk. He got to know the life. He just, for some fucking reason, decided that he liked it anyway.

And wanted me to keep on living it with him.

How the hell could he get this old and still not realize that poverty *sucks*?

So he's a deluded idiot, but what does that make me? Because I'm back now, just as if I never said "Fuck this shit" four years ago and got myself away from Joe Dick as cleanly and completely as I could.

Guess it hadn't been as fucking clean or complete as I thought, huh?

It's not like I can't say no to him. I have said no; I do say no. It's just that he wants so much so often I can never say no *enough*.

"Uh-oh, Billiam. I feel the coke taking over. It's making me turn the wheel...." Joe said.

Fuck. I drop my coffee in my lap and quickly thank God I wasn't smoking as I lunge at the steering wheel. You never knew how far Joe would go for a joke, especially when he was hopped up and bored. I grab it and turn it to the right to swerve us back into our own lane. But then Joe grabs my wrists and pulls me toward him until I'm face to face with him in extreme close-up, leaving me sprawled halfway across his lap. While he's steering with his knees.

"Can you even fucking see the road?" I ask, trying to keep my voice steady, because he liked it when I showed fear. It was hard when my heart's pounding from the scare and the feel of his blunt fingers stroking up and down the tendons of my wrists keeps jacking me up.

He enjoyed my anger too. Found it funny. If he kept this shit up, I'd be tossing aside my Zen equilibrium. He knew that.

"Just fine. Thanks for asking."

"If you don't give a fuck about our lives, at least think of the film crew in the back with us."

"They're all asleep. Nobody here but us chickens."

"I wasn't paying enough attention? You need an audience 24 hours a day?" I tried to figure out how much struggling I could do to get free without killing us.

"It's a start."

"You need a fucking babysitter, and you don't pay me enough for that." I'm so damned aware of what his hands are doing. And of the coffee going cold, but mostly his hands.

"It's just us, Bill."

"If you think I'm going to blow you while you drive coked up, you're brain damaged. Oh, right, you are brain damaged." I feel my bones grinding under his fingers.

"That's what I like to keep you around for: your great ideas. That one will have to wait."

"How fast are we going?"

He grins. "How fast do you want to go?" He presses his foot down hard on the pedal, and the van lurches forward even faster.

Shit, shit....

Struggling's doing about as much good as it ever does against Joe, so I change tactics. It's hard climbing into his lap when I can't use my hands or arms but I manage to drag myself up, feeling like a trick-riding cowboy out of a movie. Finally I'm straddling him. Bastard was hard even before I got here; I can tell. Not that I have much moral high ground when feeling his legs moving to steer, rubbing against me, is making me crazy.

The van thumps as we run over something. I don't wanna know. My heart pounds. Fuck, are we in the flat part or the mountainous part of the middle of nowhere? I really don't want to smash against anything.

I could be safe and sane in LA, but I'm here instead.

Joe's always overpowering up close, and he has that familiar touring scent going now. He smells like cigarettes, beer, old sweat. He's chosen his one outfit for the tour, and he's sticking with it, so he smells overwhelmingly like Joe. He grins at me, all teeth, telling me to do my worst, as he starts to grind.

The smugness drains right out of him as I kiss him, changing this game's routine. You wouldn't think the lips on that mouth would be so soft, but they are. He's so shocked he lets go of my wrists. I grab the sides of his head, enjoying the feel of his shaved scalp way too fucking much, and pull him closer against me. Feels like my tongue should be halfway down his throat.

I take advantage of his distraction to kick his foot off the pedal. He takes advantage of his free hands to grab my ass, to hump me better. I win.

Except that I'm humping him right back.

He comes so hard against me that my spine hits the steering wheel. But that's okay because my spine is too busy being wrung out through my cock to notice anyway. I'm seeing stars either way.

Joe slides back into his seat, leaving me lying spread out against the steering wheel like a human sacrifice. Sometimes really satisfying sex drains the anger and contempt out of him, leaving him looking almost gentle and baby-faced. Well, baby-faced aside from that old knife scar on his cheek. I don't know if that happened this time, because my body is blocking the light from the
instrument panel on the dash.

I'm caught between wanting to sleep and still being too adrenaline- wired to close my eyes. My heart hasn't realized yet that I'm not gonna die after all and is still trying to pound its way out of my chest. It's been a long time. Joe puts a cigarette in my mouth and lights it for me. Just what I needed. He can be a good guy sometimes right after you get him off.

Shit, I'm a mess. My jeans stink of jizz and coffee. I need a change, and so does Joe. I managed to mess up his one outfit system a bit. Makes me smile.

"You could've gotten us killed. Fuckhead," I say, my voice coming out a soft rasp. Somehow everybody slept through all that, and I don't want to wake them up and fill them in on what they'd missed.

I hate that he makes me do these things. I hate how often I end up liking them.

The flare of fire off his lighter as he lights his own cigarette gives his eyes a hard glint. "I don't 'make' you do shit. You're too much of a son of a bitch to do anything you didn't already want to do, Billy-boy," he says, eerily close to reading my mind even after the years we were apart. Like all that time didn't make any difference. I can't believe that.

"You tell yourself that shit often enough, maybe you'll start to believe it." Same old, same old with him. The game continues.


**********************THE END***********************


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