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Last week, I performed at Happy Endings, a monthly reading series held at the Make-Out Room, thanks again to Danielle for the invite. The night’s theme was “Going Feral”—and an idea came to mind immediately¹, an interpretation that hinged on ferality / feralness as a particular kind of parasitic parasocial derangement.

I won’t share what tipped me into the writing process but when I did get to typing, the piece unspooled neatly out of me over the course of a few days. It’s very different from my books but not so different from my other short fiction experiments. Feel free to tell me otherwise—anyway, here it is, more or less how I read it²:

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The Flash

The problem with being a Davis Lovely fan—or a “Loveliness,” as we call ourselves—is that there are so many people out there who think they know him, like really know him. Former assistants, fifth-line credits on photoshoots, bartenders who have one thirty-second interaction with him—they make it a point to let people know that despite his name, they always bring up his name, he is, in fact, not “Lovely” at all. Because it’s “lovely” to gloat about how superstars are just as shitty as the rest of us, to re-assign them a humanity that you’d implicitly taken away from them, right? 

But I do know him, Davis. First-name basis, and actually, I gave him the nickname “Dav, D-A-V” which he loved the moment he heard it. I might even know him better than his parents did, may God bless his long-departed mother and his more recently departed father.

Early on, Dav once told me it was like, with a name as distinct as “Davis Lovely,” he was destined for something more than just working at his local Amazon warehouse as a package sorter. Even though, the rumors are true, he changed his name to Davis Lovely from Anish Lakhani. Because who’s gonna play Anish Lakhani’s music in the dressing room of a Target in suburban Indiana? What American fangirl—and yes, there are fans of color, but we’re talking the first image that pops up in your head, the dirty blonde good-girl groupie who spits a little when she calls out her chosen god’s chosen name—is gonna sell plasma or take out a second mortgage to book a VIP meet-and-greet with someone whose name brings up Holi pilgrims and late night takeout?

His words, not mine, to be clear, even though I have to admit, you wouldn’t think he’s half-Indian-Nepalese based on his appearance. But that’s something I learned to steer around, he didn’t like to be reminded—it’s the one thing we never came back around to—that he looks like the third cutest white boy in any given setting. Not so hot as to be unapproachable, but always noticed. Someone who, if you saw him in a Target dressing room, you’d wonder, for a second but maybe longer, if it’d be too bold to knock on his door and ask if you can join him in the stall.

Not that I’m into Dav like that. No, my connection with him is—was—is, deeper. Everything he brought to the table, I could understand. There are so many playbooks to stardom and I studied his as though it were a holy text. The endless grind of talent show auditions, the busking, the joke reaction songs that went viral enough for him to get through the industry’s door.

If, he always said, he could’ve found a way to make his art without sacrificing all the human quirks—bisexuality, face tattoos, Canadian accents—that made men like David Bowie or Post Malone or his personal hero, Shawn Mendes, enduring icons, he would’ve taken that route. But that’s just not where the culture is. That’s out of his control. 

And everything he could control, he did. So he sanded down his public image to become perfect boyfriend material, a perpetual first crush on any Main Street in America, a golden retriever transmuted into a respectably 6’1” if you round, like a lot, monument crowned with a mouth of veneers. But the person behind the man leaked out in some predictable, and some less predictable, ways. Only when I got a taste for the leaks did I tune into the music, which until then I’d more or less ignored in the same way I breathe through the gnats that erupt from my green bin when I go to toss out compost.

It wouldn’t be unusual to get texts from Dav at 2, 3, 4 in the morning his local time, I’d always do the math. Usually they said the same thing with different words: he wished he could leave it all behind. Forget the sweating buckets of champagne in green rooms, the bras thrown on stage by pre-teen girls, the private jet with the carbon footprint of a sizable European city. Like, he wouldn’t have been happy in the Amazon warehouse, but maybe if he’d gotten a job with Amazon corporate, you know?

Except once you break through a high enough ceiling, really shatter that thing, everything once glittering and aspirational starts to look cheap, maudlin, a pricey dupe that’s still a dupe. Once Dav got a taste for the real thing, he did everything in his power to keep up the luster. 

Of course he got mad when people who were paid to serve the Davis Lovely dream—an economic machine as sleek as a private jet, in which I sadly never got invited to ride in—didn’t serve. Their personal relationships were falling apart, their hair was falling out: And? He’d yell the word like it was a slur, that was how deep his disdain was for those who couldn’t keep up. He worked himself harder than anyone on his payroll because he knew how all it could take was one moment of weakness, one brush with the wilderness inside man’s chaotic inner nature, to bring the whole plane down. Like, no, he hadn’t blown the A&R rep’s boyfriend while she watched and covered up his ethnicity just to become a one-hit wonder.

If he wanted anything to the point of madness, it wasn’t money, or sex, which he often was afraid to have because of how vulnerable it made him feel, both about his public image and his private performance, or the idea of fame. It was something specific—to become a new carving on the Mt. Rushmore of pop cultural influence: freshman dorm room posters, which he studied every time he played a college show, careful only to tread where he was invited, in daylight, always with someone from admin tagging along. Those posters, he often said, were how he’d know he’s really made it, when his supersized portraits and album covers were ubiquitous enough that they’d be part of the coming of age starter pack, thrown into the Target cart along with laundry bags and shower flip-flops and other assertions of independence. 

During our assignations, we talked often about how much materiality—stuff, basically—mattered to him. He cared about his merch more than his music, maybe; if, he often said, someone was going to wear his name on their body, then the name should look and sound cool so it would stick, like the bridge of a good pop song, in the psyches of all those who encountered it.

Davis Lovely, a daisy of a name, a ripple of wind across a field of jewel-bright wildflowers, like the “Visit California” ad played before every showing at the one-screen theater attached to a liquor store somewhere far outside the Dallas diaspora, the building in which Dav grew up and, when his father wasn’t upselling expired candy to teenagers trying to get lucky in the sticky seats, would marathon Bruno Mars and Jonas Brothers and especially Shawn Mendes music videos, laptop plugged into the flickering projector. He’d mimic the impossibly long-limbed dancers, pretending their bodies were his shadows, or pretending he was the one dancing and swooning and oh yeah, singing, the lyrics just vague enough to mean anything to everyone and the range just gentle enough for someone with no real melodic ear and the music just catchy enough to be noticed and held onto like a lucky charm, an anchor, a lifeline thrown into the profoundly vast loneliness in which he’d been suspended for most of his childhood.

When, years later, he had his first kiss, touched his first breast, and subsequently lost his virginity in the dorm room of the girl he sat next to in Bio 101, Dav found himself, afterward, in the dark blue night, her body curled around his, thinking about his mother, and his father, and the dancing light of the empty theater. And he locked eyes with the alive boys and dead men on the posters on her walls and, in a flash of inspiration, realized, If I can get up there, I’ll be able to live forever in the company of people who love me.

He dropped out of college, changed his name, and moved to LA. Five years later, he played his first opening act at Madison Square Garden. Two years later, he was the one headlining a residency.

The night he finally finished sharing the full unvarnished tale of Davis Lovely, the parts first clipped from his official bio, his voice shaking, his cadence rambling, his picture as crisp as the first snap of a fresh apple bite, I fell over and into the Loveliness. Do I now think his music is good? No, but his story. My God. The way, after rubbing his eyes for a good minute, trying to conceal tears that gave his confessional a performative sensitivity except I know what he looks like when he’s On, I’ve watched both concert documentaries and the behind-the-scenes mini-docs, Dav opened them and smiled blearily, a lover’s smile, veneers notwithstanding, and I noticed that his hazel contacts had shifted during the rubbing, giving him the eyes of an angel, the Old Testament kind.

And though I’d resisted the temptation until then, I reached into my lap, picked up my phone and said, “I’m so sorry, my assistant knows only to contact me for emergencies.” Then I pretended to squint at some life-shattering message, and snapped a picture of Dav on my laptop screen.

The moment the flash went off, I knew it was over. Not just the connection of our virtual session, the court-mandated anger management course he agreed to take as part of the deal his legal team cut with a former stylist, but our deeper one, too. I’d broken something as fragile and strange as a knife made of glass, but unlike that hypothetical knife, our relationship, still so young, just through the door of intimacy, could be repaired. 

The Loveliness, when I first approached them, initially spurned me. But when I told them I was one of them, and that I would tell them the truth about Dav, about the empty theater of his life, of the wilderness of peeling posters that wallpapered his lonely heart, they told me, Share your story. Release him—let him be free, as free as he’s made us, as free as he’s made you, NDA and HIPPA rules be damned.

Sooo, yeah. I’ve never done one of these before, so let me know what you’d like to know about Dav next. And don’t forget to um, like and subscribe, I guess it’s “follow” on here? Okay, thanks for watching, and like I always used to end our sessions with, I look forward to getting to know you better.

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Exit music:

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♬ xoxo Lio
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