The Big Comeback: Collins Avenue Confidential, #7

By Steve Milton

"Nobody wants a has-been pop star."

After his hit song falls off the charts, Alex is left only with his laptop full of new song ideas and Murray, his pathological liar of a manager-boyfriend. Alex holes up in a cheap hotel to take a break from Murray's harangues and try to write music. The hotel's young part-time desk clerk seems to always be catching a glance of Alex.

"This guest looks really familiar."

Luke is only twenty, but he was a fan of "Flicky Hernandez," Alex's old stage name. Their friendship develops quickly, maybe too quickly, for two guys who tell each other that they're straight.

Through crooked music industry deceptions, brainstorming beach walks with Alissa, and the small joys of Christmas and New Year, Alex and Luke find their way to the big comeback.

The Big Comeback is a gay pop star romance about second chances in life and love, with a feel-good HEA and love hotter than the Florida sun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Milton
• Release date: Feb 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393236986

Steve Milton

Steve Milton writes sexy, snarky feel-good stories about men loving men. Expect lots of laughs and not much angst. Steve's most recent series is Gay Getaways. He is a South Florida native, and when he's not writing, he likes cats, cars, music, and coffee. Sign up for Steve's monthly updates: http://eepurl.com/bYQboP He is happy to correspond with his readers by email. Email [e-mail]

Book preview

One

Nothing is worse than a has-been pop star. I still had all the looks, but none of the glory. But for Murray Bells, nothing was better than a washed-up pop star. Murray rode that washed-up pop star train, the Alex Beauregard Express, to the best of his abilities, and to the greatest of my detriment. Like a true music-industry shark, Murray smelled has-been blood in the water, and took it as an invitation for a carnivorous feast. 

I was Alex the has-been pop star, and Murray Bells was to me agent, manager, lawyer, and boyfriend. He fucked me, and then he fucked me. We’d met through a matchmaker: Collins Avenue Confidential. Murray was—a period in my life, a stage. A stage that I at some point realized I needed to get out of.

Never trust anybody who tells you they’re perfect. That goes for agents, managers, lawyers, boyfriends, and matchmakers. That goes for Murray especially. 

How had I found Murray? Alissa Bennett, matchmaker. Collins Avenue Confidential. I’d actually paid to meet this guy. The vaguely musty-smelling walls of Alissa’s low-rise Miami office was decorated with photos right out of Happy Perfect Gay Couples Weekly. Maybe those were all actors, or maybe she’d bought a bunch of stock images, or maybe my case was really her first less-than-satisfactory match, as she’d so coolly called it.

She’d set me up to attend a Young Thug concert as my first date with Murray Bells. It was the hippest thing in Miami. The show was fine, Young Thug wailing in his trademark falsetto and gesticulating. He sounded as if he was yodeling, rattling off nonsense syllables, mumbling, wailing—that was the new thing in hip hop, and that’s what I wanted to do. But more than hearing Young Thug at the concert, I kept hearing Murray: in between songs and sets, and even during them, Murray was shouting in my ear asking me about my music career. 

Did you tour? Murray boomed into my ear, so forcefully that I smelled his Scope, while the rest of the arena focused on the concert. Young Thug was doing pushups while rapping into his headset microphone.

Did I what? I tried to be gracious rather than annoyed.

Tour. Did you tour? For your hit song.

Not really. Only a few shows. Everything went by too fast, I answered, my eyes pointing to the performance on stage. The beats rang out, Young Thug’s hyperactive squeal pealed out, but my business history was all Murray could think of. I wanted to turn his attention to the concert in front of us rather than the concerts I didn’t have behind me, and gently pointed my finger at the stage in front of us, as if he hadn’t noticed that we were at a concert.

What's the highest you charted? Murray yelled into my ear.

Started?

What’s the highest you ever charted? Pop charts. Top ten?

Number eight, for one week, I shouted back, still trying to indicate with my eyes that I wanted to watch the concert, not retell the chronology of my washed-up career. It felt like an interview conducted by a high school newspaper, with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. I had to remind myself that it was really my prospective boyfriend who was shouting in my ear attempting to get the goods on me, and I shouldn’t run away, despite my instincts to the contrary.

What’s your royalty deal look like? He was in my face like a snake, and his hand was on my ass.

Really hard to hear! I said and gestured covering my ears, then gestured trying to hear something far away, then shook my head—I wasn’t sure how to say shut the fuck up about my past career and let’s listen to the concert, but it was probably one of those, because he relented. The most romantic it got was at the end of the show. He grabbed his crotch demonstratively and asked me, you wanna taste my meat? and I demurred. Still, though, I agreed to a second date, and for that I blame both my naivete toward Murray and my trust in Alissa Bennett, professional matchmaker.

I could excuse Alissa’s mistake, maybe. The average onlooker might think Murray and I would be a good match. Murray was gay, and so was I. Murray was in the music industry, and so was I. Murray was the biggest pile of maggot-infested slime to ever have appeared above ground: that’s where he and I were, I believe still to this day, quite different. 

But Alissa, in all her girlish, bright-eyed optimism, had never seen sociopaths of Murray’s caliber, and she didn’t know how to judge them. She’d eaten the Murray bullshit sandwich and drunk the Murray piss lemonade just as all his targets had. 

The second date with Murray was another screaming red flag which I had refused to heed. Murray had dictatorially insisted on meeting at Super Sushi, a dreary-looking former Blockbuster Video in a Delray Beach strip mall, with a rotary belt of unfresh-looking sushi pieces that reminded me only of the bottle factory from Laverne & Shirley reruns. He would not accept any other restaurant. He was fixated on Super Sushi, and that was the end of it. Only when he arrived and, before even greeting me, waved his two-for-one coupon at the waitress did I remember that he’d promised to pay for the second date, so picking a place on the two-for-one list would be a must.

Over that sushi dinner, I made the mistake of telling Murray that my former radio hit, Cheddar Skins, was enjoying a mild comeback, at least as a semi-ironic meme sort of hit. Murray asked me whether I was going to be the next Rick Astley and have a big, profitable comeback as an irony icon. I said, maybe.

Murray grabbed me, in full view of the Korean family who owned the place staring in shock but trying hard to look as if they weren’t noticing at all, and held his mouth to mine, plunging his minty tongue into my otherwise innocent mouth. His eyes were nearly phantasmagoric in their having sensed his big chance of his big break—a break I’d already had once with my one radio hit, a break he’d never yet had, playing wannabe agent to Miami’s C-list almost-stars—as Murray’s apishly hirsute hand moved to my pants for a feel of flaccid cock. 

Get hard, Murray commanded into my ear, as if this was how he made cocks rise: by speaking to them, snake charming, issuing direct commands. I did my best mental gymnastics to try to produce an erection, and kind of sort of succeeded. Murray jerked my dick frantically, as the restaurant owners continued to pretend not to see.

I don’t think we should— I tried to interrupt Murray, still all Pollyanna, having known him for all of a week. I assumed Murray was acting strange because we were only on our second date, maybe because he already loved me. And maybe I was so desperate for someone to pay me some mind, to be a celebrity in someone’s eyes again, that I didn’t run away as I should have.

I want you, Murray proclaimed, in a voice so deadly earnest and humorless that he was either hopelessly in love with me or hopelessly incapable of traversing the complexities of real emotion. But in a time when I was spinning into loneliness and rejection, the postpartum depression of a former pop star five years past his last hit, at least somebody wanted me.

That was how Murray and I started. He was there when no one else was. He was involved in the music business, which I told myself was a significant plus in his column, somehow failing to admit to myself that trying to ride my minuscule tailwind was the extent of Murray’s supposed involvement in the music business. 

When I met Murray in 2015 I was still young, if twenty-nine was young, but I was already washed-up, as a one-hit radio wonder from the early 2010s. By the time Alissa had introduced me to Murray, all the reputable managers and record labels had long abandoned me, figuring Cheddar Skins was the next One Night In Bangkok or Puttin’ On The Ritz: a cute novelty song to be milked for royalties, but not anything indicative of long-term potential.

I had half heartedly told myself that living with a music industry insider would benefit my career, and that I’d learn a lot, maybe even hone my musical craft. It was one of those hopeless lies we try to force ourselves to believe, against all evidentiary resistance. Murray, for all his posturing as an insider, saw the music business—what little contact with it he could actually lay claim to—as a smorgasbord of fat cigars, martini lunches, and Mercedes convertibles. The music itself to him was just a widget that Murray thought he was expert at selling; he had no particular interest in music qua music. During our time together, I couldn’t remember Murray taking any purely musical in anything at all, other than wondering aloud about some artist’s wealth or lack thereof. 

But I’d been listening to things, to Young Thug, to Shabazz Palaces, to Handsome Boy Modeling School, to old Morcheeba and Jurassic5, to whatever came up over the horizon at Pitchfork and NME, to what was discussed on the half-dozen internet music forums I stalked. There were musical stories I wanted to tell, styles I wanted to dig into. Avant garde hip hop, or something like that, was where I wanted to go—it was what Cheddar Skins had been hoping to be anyway, before the record guys had told me to cheese it up and make it a novelty song. I’d teased the subject of avant-garde hip hop with Murray, using the Young Thug concert we’d heard as a template, but his monolithically generic reply was always to smirk—the most punchable face ever, I slowly came to realize—and assume the role of the wizened veteran speaking to a novice, a tone he’d probably learned from the samurai movies he was always watching in bed. Ah, yeah, here in the business what we always say is, he always began, and I would tune out that point, but I knew that the gist of what he’d say would be that the music doesn’t matter and you just need to market. 

When I had still been hopeful enough to attempt to pass him my headphones when something particularly good was coming out of them, he’d wave them away as one would wave off an annoying insect. It was, after all, just music, not marketing, and Murray wanted nothing to do with that.

In the hazy, vaguely desperate autumn of 2016, I’d been having more frequent thoughts of exactly why I was still with Murray—and if not explicit plans of leaving him, because I was too much of a wuss to explicitly contemplate anything like that even in my own private mind, then at least with some desire to attempt to improve the situation, or my side of it. I didn’t even know exactly what I wanted. Was there a list of demands that would make Murray acceptable to me? The big problem was that even if somehow I’d managed to rid Murray of his faults, what would be left would still be just—Murray. Someone who was ok, in a third-rate music-industry kind of way, but not particularly exciting, not someone who made my skin tingle or made my head get loopy.

I got away from Murray eventually, but I didn’t do it alone.

Two

The apartment stank of unfulfilled dreams and inescapable inertia. Murray always moping about the next big thing he was going to get me into—if I’d just devote another few thousand dollars to his idea—was feeling like a death spiral. 

A mouse of a man, I couldn’t gather up the will to move out completely, but I made more frequent use of my office. It was a room at the Hilton Garden Inn I’d rent for a day or two at $49, and hole up with my laptop, my music storage drive, my keyboard, and, most importantly, my Murray-less serenity. 

Those Hilton Garden Inn weekends were me time. My creative juices flowed, at least a little. When I wasn’t tapping out beats with my fingers on