Picture Perfect

and the guitarist for my band ribbed the fuck out of me as we left the stage after the encore, asking if I was going to give “jailbait” a backstage pass. I wasn’t that big of an asshole, and I shook my head in the negative. “Nah man that would be too fucked up, even for me.”
    Grinning at me he said, “Dude, you should have seen yourself. I think that girl was your fucking Priscilla.”
    His yapping was giving me a headache because I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.
    “Dude, what does that even mean?”
    “You really need to get your rock n’ roll knowledge beefed up because you should know this without asking. If we’re ever on Celebrity Jeopardy and we lose because you don’t know something this obvious, I’m going to kick your ass. Anyway, I’m talking about Priscilla Presley. You totally went all Elvis over a teenage girl.”
    His words embarrassed me, mostly because they were true. After telling him to fuck off, I got blackout drunk to forget the impossible connection I’d felt to a fucking teenager. I’d guess she was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, but my brain said eighteen was a real stretch.
    The next day I woke up feeling like shit again, only this time, I took stock of my situation and was honest with myself. I realized that I had to change the way I was living. I couldn’t remember why, but I knew, down to my bones, that I needed to do better, to be better. I hadn’t always been like a drunken robotic dildo. I wanted to be worthy. Worthy of what, I couldn’t say, but that was how I felt.
    I didn’t remember shit from the night before, but my band was happy to fill me in once I snapped out and demanded to know why everyone was calling me Elvis. Nothing they said sparked my memory. I could just barely remember eyes the color of melting chocolate, but that was all.
    The name Elvis stuck for about six months, but I never got my memory back from the night that changed the path I was on forever.

Chapter One

    The last ten years of my life were devoted almost entirely to my band, Renegade Saints. The four of us together were lightening in a bottle, and that had made us all richer than we ever dreamed. We were just kids when we got signed, literally, but the trajectory to the top happened at breakneck speed.
    The guitarist of my band, Cole, has been my best friend for as long as I can remember. In truth he’s a lot more than that. Our parents lived next door to each other, and they had us within two months of each other- Cole being the older of the two of us. We went to the same daycare and stayed with my grandparents on nights that our parents went out. Cole has always called my grandparents Gram and Pop because they’re the only grandparents he’s ever known.
    Cole's dad was a studio musician who recorded with a ton of big musical acts in the eighties. It was his influence that had Cole picking up a guitar when we were four. He could play better than most anyone I'd heard by the time we were ten, and today he's world renowned for a skill that's right up there with the best of the best.
    My dad is a voice over guy. His voice was heard on hundreds of commercials while I was growing up. To this day, he keeps right on working, even though he doesn't need to. Where Cole got his musical skills from his dad, I got my vocal abilities from mine. Little did our parents know that by living next to each other, they were creating a recipe for one of the biggest selling bands of all-time.
    Cole is the sibling I never had, and I’m the same person for him. My mother was diagnosed with leukemia when I was five and the entire foundation of my life changed. For two years, she was subjected to one treatment after another as she got weaker and weaker, her body giving up the fight before any of us were near ready to let her go. At one point when she was hospitalized for twelve weeks, I’d lived with Cole and his parents. It was during that time that I’d started singing along when he played guitar. At first, it was a lark, but later it became a way of life.
    Making music with Cole gave me something to hold onto when my mother died and my father got lost in his grief for a while. Losing my mother changed my life, and I think of her every day. My father has always been my rock, and other than the few months after her passing where he went off the rails, he’s been the best father I could have ever asked for. He encouraged all of my musical talent and helped push Cole and me