How to Kill a Rock Star Read Online Free PDF

stiff and heavy.
    Paul pul ed a lighter from his pocket and put the cigarette
2he’d been fingering into his mouth. “I’m trying to quit,” he said. “Just so you know.”
    He lit the cigarette and inhaled so long and so deep it sounded like air being let out of a tire. Then he walked to the window and blew the smoke toward the sky. He was half turned toward me and his eyes, at that angle, took on a fluorescent-white hue.
    “It’s not that I don’t want to be successful,” he said. “I do.
    But music’s not a popularity contest to me. You either mean it or you don’t. Fuck the ones who don’t. I have no use for them. And I’d rather write some real y good songs and sing them into my four-track, songs that no one wil ever hear, than be some record executive’s tool.” He paused to take another thick hit, and then he put the cigarette out on the window sil , col ected the residual ashes into a receptacle he made using the bottom of his shirt, and shook the debris into the night air. “Having said that, I can’t deny that sometimes I wish I were smart enough to bite the Big One.”
    “Bite the Big One?”
    “Sel out,” he said. “Do you know how much I live on after I pay rent and the rest of my bil s? Hel , when I splurge on a good cup of coffee I’m in the red for the week. I guess I need to find a happy medium, someplace between giving them what they want and ending up face-down in a pool of my own goddamn integrity.”
    I found myself suffering a considerable amount of admiration for what Paul made himself out to be—a spirited mav-erick who probably had a long, lonely road ahead of him.
    “Then again, I shouldn’t complain, considering what your brother’s going through,” he rambled. “Not that I have any intention of letting him quit the band, I’l tel you that. He’s too good. And too organized. We’d fal apart without him.” Paul’s words slapped me out of my quixotic musings.
    “ Huh? ”
    “If I’m talking too much, just tel me to shut up,” he said, clearly misinterpreting the look on my face. “I spent the day playing guitar in the rehearsal space. Haven’t had a real conversation since breakfast.”
    “No, it’s not that. What did you mean about Michael quitting?”
    Paul’s head tilted. “You don’t know? I thought you and Vera were like, best friends or something.”
    “Vera thinks confiding in her friends is a burden.”
    “She never told you about the three-year plan?” I did know about the three-year plan. Michael and Vera had made a pact before leaving Ohio.
    Michael got three years to get his music career off the ground, and then it was Vera’s turn. For as long as I’d known her, Vera had wanted to go to law school, but in order to live in New York either she or Michael had to work ful time. They couldn’t afford to chase their respective dreams simultaneously.
    “I didn’t realize it had been three years already.”
    “It wil be in November,” Paul said.
    “And Michael’s okay with this?”
    “No. Hence the problem.” Paul put his hand up in the air like a traffic cop. “Can we not discuss this right now? It’s throwing me off-rhythm.”
    He went to check on the pizza. Standing in front of the oven, he braced himself on the counter and began to moan like he’d just been stabbed.
    “ See ?” He pointed to his right side. “As if being poor and desperate isn’t enough,” he said with his hand below his right hip, “I’m pretty sure I have some sort of growth on my pancreas. I’m probably going to die of cancer before I ever cut a record.”
    “FYI: Your pancreas is behind your stomach.” He moved his hand to his lower abdomen.
    “Higher,” I said.
    2He inched up a little more.
    “Higher,” I said again.
    He waved the hand through the air. “What ever . The pain is migrant.”
    “Maybe it’s an ulcer.”
    “I don’t think so. Both of my parents died of cancer.”
    “ Pancreatic cancer?”
    “No. Breast and brain, but it’s