kel: You would think that Lise wrote this next part because of the beat poet shout-out, but it was actually me.

Three years, and Lance has gotten one post card from Justin, and even then he's only sure because of the handwriting. There was no signature. He keeps it on the refrigerator, secured with a pizza parlor magnet, photograph down. He knows what a cheese factory in Wisconsin looks like, but it's the curve of Justin's "e" that he misses. It's not much of a message, really.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hystericalnaked

lise: It's true. This line is from Ginsberg's "Howl" - it's the first line.

Some days Lance wants to make that the first sentence of the book except that he's pretty sure it's a quote from something else. He could find out easily, type it into a search engine, but he doesn't. He likes to believe Justin wrote it himself, just for Lance. It makes him feel like Justin is helping on the book, somehow.

Not two weeks ago, someone else asked about Justin's last performance, a spoken-word reading in San Francisco and about what you'd expect from Justin and poetry. A lot of honesty, a lot of heart, but light on the metaphors. Subtle was never his style.

It was a reporter who asked, her magazine was doing an expose. She told Lance that they'd pay up to fifty thousand, cash, under the table, for evidence of Justin's instability at the time of the concert. Lance hung up on her. Then for good measure, he called his business manager, yelling for ten minutes about something that went wrong, hung up on him and called the publisher and yelled some more. He hung up on him too, slamming the phone down and it didn't lessen the ache of regret. And it didn't mean that he didn't spend two more hours watching MTV footage from 2000, trying to cull a single quote for the book.

JC calls in the middle of some fucking thing Lance doesn't even remember taping, the day or the week or the whole month they recorded it is a blur of things and Justin, drunk on a bridge and staring down at the waters of New York City. JC says, "What is it this time?" even though Lance feels like that ought to be his line.

lise: Did I write the line about Justin drunk on a bridge staring down at the waters of NYC? Or was that just you channeling more of my beat poet biography love?

kel: I think you did. You went back and added towards the end, I'm pretty sure you wrote the part about fifty thousand dollars for evidence of Justin's instability, too.

"Nothing," and that, in and of itself, is true. Notes for the book are scattered in amid the folders he keeps on all the guys; press releases of Joey's anonymous plays and JC's projects and other things.

JC sounds wild and cracked and aged. "What did he do?"

Papers are strewn messily all over the living room floor. He heard once that writers sometimes made a mess to try to make connections of the evidence, of metaphor and symbol and right now all he can see is JC's latest release next to his scrapbook from Germany.

"Forget it."

"You'd feel better for saying," but this is JC and JC likes to say. Lance looks down, right beside him are the two folders that stay closed. One of them is blank; the other has a handwritten post-it labeled 'Chris'.

"I have to --" He can't move in case he steps on papers. "I have to go."

lise: My favorite part of this is still the post-it note with Chris's name on it. Because right away we drop in something that show's Chris's impermanence, and highlighting the space between what you can actually see as where the real action is.

kel: It's definitely an in media res beginning, and a short one? But there are about a thousand clues crammed into this probably-less-than-a-page: it's clear that Lance is writing this book and that Justin is crazier than a shit house rat and that Chris is ... absent right from the get-go.

lise: It feels like I had something to say about Lance, about him not being able to deal with this very literal mess on the floor and how right from the get-go you see this, but I guess that's fairly obvious. So, moving on.