Chapter 1
At the heart of the matter, I was only human. That’s the bit that everyone can understand. To be human is to need connection. To need other humans. But I was also something beyond that. I wasn’t born to merely eat and sleep like everyone else with interludes of washing dishes and working in between. I was born to sing and to express and to dance like mercury slipping around in a maze. That’s why I chose the name, Mercury.
Many cannot understand the choice a person makes to be with another person. Most think it’s something very tangible and easy like attraction. But attraction isn’t a perfect smile. It’s a crooked smile tethered to a muscle in the lower eyelid that curves in just the right direction to suggest something more. You don’t get “sleep with me” from the bicep of a muscular man. You get “sleep with me” from the tension between the eyes, the smile and the direction of the gaze. I could never turn down certain gazes. I had to see them all through to the end. To the look in the eye when the act reaches its height. When the crescendo is the only thing that could possibly come next because the energy is overwhelming. A sea of 78,000 swaying audience members waiting for that explosive guitar chord or 78,000 molecules of sweat squirming and bursting from your skin, running down your brow as you clutch the lover in front of you. The energy is the same and it always moves in the correct direction, final release. It is why I could only ever be a rockstar. It is why I could only ever be promiscuous. Well, that and the quiet moments where silence gathered me into the daze of loneliness I always felt late at night at home when Mary wasn’t around and the cats were off in their own corners of the house. I didn’t quite like being alone and I did everything I could to avoid it.
Don’t judge me. You’d be the same way. Here’s the problem with fame; it creates another person inside you. An extra element of craving that seeps around you like low-level anxiety. It’s too hungry. It cannot be distinguished. The adoration of the fans. The lights, the stage and the energy of it all consumes one so desperately that you cannot breathe without it. Going home and retiring that energy to four walls, an echoing kitchen, a few dim lights, a pile of clothes on the floor and some dust around the tiles, it doesn’t work. It cannot be. The energy of the performance must carry on because it's unstoppable. Drink and drugs, the tools of the weak man? No. Drink and drugs are the only things you can rest in. There is no other sanctuary. You build the energy, you let it loose and you unravel at its feet. Don’t judge me.
