Mated to the Alien Alpha

“You’re full of shit, Ziggi. My new tatt doesn’t look like text from a crappy printer. It’s based on Otzi the Iceman’s ink. This stuff has history.”

I looked at the black bars on the back of Carlos Rivera’s neck. All I could think was lame. “This is like a step above tribal tatts, is all I’m saying, my dude.”

Carlos adjusted the volume on his bass. “Whatever. You have pink hair and a rainbow on your ass.”

“Hey,” I said. “My rainbow isn’t a rainbow, it’s a moonbow. That’s why it’s in black and white. Moondust is my middle name. Ziggi Moondust Collins. It has meaning, it’s not a badly inked bar code!”

“Would you two shut it? I’m trying to get in the zone,” Spike said. He twirled his drumsticks in the air.

I plugged my guitar into its amp. “Right.” I turned to Carlos “Hotsauce” Rivera. “Forget what I said. Your new tatt is cool.” (It wasn’t.) “We good?”

Carlos nodded, wary. “Whatever. I guess.”

On that discordant note, the Iguana Knees jammed.

Cyrus wandered in halfway through our set, smoking pungent weed in his mushroom shaped bong. This one smelled like a dank skunk. He scoured the floor of Carlos and Spike’s garage. Cyrus found a rusty nail and a dented bottle cap.

“Would you guys mind if I kept these?” Cyrus yelled over the blare of my riff, pocketing his newfound treasures.

Carlos eyed Cyrus’ toned arms. I wasn’t exactly immune to them either.

“Sure thing, man,” Spike shouted over my solo, making a V with his drumsticks. “Mi casa is your casa.”

“Stop speaking Spanglish Spike, you’re rage-murdering my ears,” Carlos muttered, plucking at his bass.

“Shut up, Hotsauce,” Spike laughed.

“Whatever, dude,” Carlos sighed.

Cyrus fiddled with the bottle cap. “Thanks, most gracious of hosts. I’m just here to enjoy the ambience.” Cyrus smiled his lazy smile and settled into the threadbare couch near the entrance. He closed his eyes and took a drag from his joint. Exhaling, he picked at a thread in the couch. “Music is like a flower, y’know? Petals of it unfold to engulf us, and soon, we are drowning in its liquidus, seeping nectar. The Rosarium Philosophorum of old, nigredo burnt into rubedo gold!”

Spike and I shared a look. Enamored, Carlos nodded. “Yeah, that’s something like Otzi the Iceman would say. You can’t tell me a bog body frozen for thousands of years wouldn’t be a wise man, like a bona fide Dalai Lama or something.”

“Or freezer burned,” I muttered.

Carlos gave me the evil eye. I gave him the middle finger. As usual, we were fighting.

Set over, we packed up and parted ways. I ferried my stoned roommate back to our apartment, wondering the whole time if the tattoo on my ass really was just a rainbow.

At home, I floated through a sea of Cyrus’ junk to my room, determined to pen the final lyrics to our new set. I was just reaching the bridge, where the suburban dad from our concept album commits suicide with a George Foreman grill in Loudoun County, one of those starched collar and chino clad multimillionaire Washingtonians in ugly outdated 90’s era McMansions, when Cyrus’ drilling from his makeshift studio broke my concentration yet again.

“Ugh.” I crumpled up the eleventh version of my lyrics and tossed them into the wastebasket.

The drilling continued. I banged my head against the desk, wondering how I would ever sleep tonight with Cyrus working in a stoned haze on his newest art project.

I looked into the mirror hanging from my inspiration board and spoke to my baggy-eyed reflection, my bright pink bangs askew: “Get it together. You’re days away from performing your new set. You’re a broke musician. Do the thing broke musicians do and write a killer song.”

Despite my best efforts, no inspiration came.

The drilling grew louder. The girl in the mirror was on the verge of breaking, ready to kick her roommate out, wondering why she had ever let him move in in the first place.

It began innocently enough. I was short on rent for my small two-bedroom in Bent Tree Apartments, and my old roommate had just shaved his head and joined one of those totally not legit completely white Hindu monasteries in Annandale without any ethnic people, just a bunch of kombucha drinking Hare Krishna weirdos, so I put up an ad on Craigslist for another occupant.

Cyrus was the first to respond: a tall, quiet nineteen year old prodigy with long, loose ringlets of cornsilk hair like something from a romance novel and skin like ice in shadow. I had initially liked him because he said he was an artist. It also helped that Cyrus, as I said, looked like something from a romance novel, one with like a millionaire playboy on the cover or like maybe a hot Viking warlord. Maybe that was kinda dumb, but that’s what I instinctively thought when I first saw him in all his glorious hotness. Harlequin had, after all, stolen my high school years, besides the Beatniks and Edgar Allen Poe.

Cyrus had proven soft-spoken and charming when we met up in the local library. His fingers had been stained with paint and he was dressed in all white, down to his Doc Marten’s. I thought his paint-spattered clothes an endearing quirk.

Things were roses for the first weeks - he kept to himself and his studio - but then I made the mistake of taking him to one of the Iguana Knees’ after-parties, where Carlos, ever the Hotsauce, introduced Cyrus to weed.

From the moment Cyrus toked his first joint, he was hooked. The weed had a weird-ass manic effect: he scavenged for trash and channeled bursts of creativity into his found art. Me, it mellowed me out, but it turned Cyrus into a shinies-hoarding magpie. He would collect cast-off shoes from the gutter and cardboard from recycling bins, then go dumpster-diving for more materials. Come morning, the haphazard objects would be forged and soldered and sewn together into new creations and displayed in his studio at the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria where they would be sold for hundreds of dollars, even thousands sometimes. Somehow, even now at 19, he could afford rent at the collective art gallery. I could barely afford a hoagie at Wawa.