……..”Really?” Charlee couldn’t contain herself. She just couldn’t believe she was about to be forced to watch two spoiled rich idiots lip sync Welcome To The Jungle. And they were fucking serious!
Yep. Rebecca thought… THIS REALLY IS the pits.
Welcome to the Jungle? What the hell were they doing in this god awful situation, forced” to handle such sophomoric grapple for attention? Could they actually claim that they had been forced to do any of this? To get out of it meant simply quitting their $6 per hour jobs, buying $20 bus tickets to warm homes not three hours away. But nope. They were sitting on a fucking couch in the village, “Living the dream!!” And it sucked. Everyone in the room knew how much it sucked.
When they took the apartment from Susan, they were so excited. They were finally graduating from camping out on Bobby and Max’s couches. Or getting on the bus hoping to stay with Bobby or Max, only to find out that they “just weren’t feeling it” that night. There were too many nights that the three of them stood on the sidewalk outside Bobby’s house wondering where they were going to sleep. The result would often be some conjured story about being locked out of the house they were care-taking, or missing the bus home.
Shayna wondered if Darren’s stepfather had suspected anything the time the they called him from downstairs at midnight with a story about having been supposed to pick up the keys to a friend’s apartment and missing the girl at the store they had been left in. Steve had been so kind to make them comfy beds on the huge sofa in his giant upper west side living room.
New York is a jungle. Rebecca thought. All the “trees” were cold hard buildings built by Native Americans with the balls to scale scaffolding hundreds of feet off the ground. The “bushes” and undergrowth bust stops and subway landings. The wildlife… A motley array of rats, pigeons, squirrels and fucking homeless people just waiting to be exterminated by it all. She suddenly became horrified by the choices she had made in the recent years. In that moment of realization, nothing about her “adult” life made any sense, and clearly she was not an adult if she was willing to put up with this shit for any length of time. Why did living in NYC have any relevance in her life? What the fuck was she doing? What was the alternative? To admit failure and go crawling back to her mothers couch? To admit failure and go back to Shayna and Charlee’s mother’s house and bounce back and forth between their rooms so as not to overstay her welcome.
As difficult as it was to admit, Rebecca had to; this torture they were experiencing was nobody’s fault but their own. It was self inflicted torture, and someone would have to call the hand soon, because it was getting bad.
“Finally! Jesus!” Appetite for Destruction was finally over. Now they could scurry to their room in the other apartment and get some sleep. Rebecca was not lookoing forward to the next day, work at nine am, and then another evening with Mutt and Jeff, since the other two girls were actually working until one in the morning.
Nope.
At the mere flinch of Rebecca’s foot, Jason moved toward them and with one swift motion, swept the guitar across the three of them not an inch from their faces.
“Sit.” He said. And fired up the next song.
To be continued…….
Palace of Muse 