This moment of contemplation needed to end before the fans started to throw rotten food. So I stepped onto the bus, ready to meet my high school idols.
I had barely climbed the first step when I felt the difference. The interior of the bus was painted black. The afternoon sun might be bright outside, but in here, it was always night. The hidden cave of the Fiery Boys. Excellent!
I took another step and had to downgrade my "excellent" rating. The bus smelled bad. I could detect stale beer and male sweat, with a hint of marijuana. It reminded me of the boys' wing of my freshman year dormitory. Nothing I couldn't handle, of course, but my fantasies had imagined the Fiery Boys in a more elegant setting.
This shouldn't have come as a surprise. Did I think that any bus with four men living on it would be pleasant? Men are slobs. If it seemed like a dormitory, then perhaps it was. I certainly wasn't going to get bothered by that. And I couldn't let Big Tim down by making him lose the roadie pool. I'd had some fine times in dormitory rooms, and I was about to have some fine times here.
As if to confirm that fine times were indeed on their way, the first one suddenly materialized. I glanced up to see a bald head looking down at me. River! My heart jumped into my throat at this first encounter with a Fiery Boy, my favorite one, too. I felt a sense of kismet, a vision that we were destined to be together. And damn! He looked exceptionally hot in person. Hotter than that recent photo I'd seen. Mature, solid, and just plain perfect. A sharp frisson of excitement ran through my body.
River quickly turned and retreated into the bus, shouting, "It's Annalisa!" His footsteps pattered into the distance, and he was gone. That's okay, we'd get to know each other later.
I finished my ascent onto the bus and looked around. My eyes were already adjusted to the dark, crypt-like space. What I didn't expect to see was a continuation of the jarring color palette from the outside. Only a man would have decided to decorate the interior of a bus in black and fiery red. Only a man would want to live in there. The bus oozed sex and drugs and rock and roll.
Standing at the top of the steps, I found myself in a living room, with a sofa, table and chairs, and a wall-sized television tuned to a sports channel. Guitars sat by the wall along with cables and boxes of gear. The table was cluttered with beer and liquor bottles, a mostly empty bowl of snack food, and an ashtray with quite a few hand-rolled cigarette butts. Yeah, yeah, I knew they weren't cigarettes. So what?