The high I get from being onstage, it beats everything. Cocaine, hypomania (that’s a bipolar thing, it’s like just below full blown mania, and it feels awesome, which is why so many bipolars, me included, periodically go off the meds). It beats drinking, smoking pot, even fucking. In a way. A different way. Okay, those two are kinda close.

I was backstage, just feeling the high. The way the audience responds, the way I feel singing and playing the guitar up there in the bright lights, it’s all so cool. It reminds me of this thing I read that Jimmy Hendrix said once, that playing the music was his church, it was like being close to God.

“Hi,” I looked up and saw a kid, a young teenage kid. I don’t know how he got back here but it was okay with me.

“Hi,” I said, and something about him seemed familiar. It was like I knew him.

“I liked the show,” he said, and I looked him over. Faded jeans, sneakers, layered T-shirts. Long sleeves. It was summer and pretty hot outside but this kid had on long sleeves.

“Thanks,” I said. We were in Vancouver. I watched the rest of the band drift back here, eating some left-overs. The drummer was smoking pot in the corner and I was thinking of getting a hit. But not in front of such a young and impressionable fan.

“You’re Craig, right? Craig Manning?” he said, stepping closer to me but still not too close. Not within arm’s reach.

“Yeah,” I said, still kind of weirded out by people knowing who I was. It was on the album, my name. Well, all of our names. But it was disconcerting.

“Who are you?” I said, and he looked down, shuffled his feet. There was that familiar thing again. It nagged at me.

“Jamie,” he said.

“Hi, Jamie,” He came a bit closer, and I could have reached him.

“I like your songs. I get them. I mean, some of them, they really make sense,” he said, and I squinted at him. It was nice to say, but he seemed kind of young to be saying it. I didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t like to think I was writing songs that would appeal to 13 or 14 year olds. Not that I didn’t want them to listen to it and like it, I wasn’t saying that. I wasn’t sure what I was saying.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You write all the songs, right? That’s what it says on the CD paper thing,” he said, oddly hopeful.

“Yeah, most of them. The other guys help out with the music, but I write most of the words. I wrote all the songs on the CD, uh, except, ’My Window’ which my ex-girlfriend actually wrote but we’re cool with that now,”

He nodded, not seeming to care all that much about my ex-girlfriend or ’My Window’ so that was cool.

“I like ’Bruised Not Broken’,” he said, looking down at his sneakers again, “I like that one. Do you, um, do you write stuff from like, stuff that really happened, or do you make it up?” he said.

“It’s pretty much stuff that happened,” I said, and watched him. That was the song about my dad, Albert not Joey, that was the song he liked. And I got it now. I got why he seemed so familiar. He reminded me of myself at that age, so I was guessing he was a mess. I had been.

“Yeah, good. I hoped so. Anyway, I’m coming to another show and I was wondering if I could have a backstage pass? I had to kind of sneak in here, and that sucked,” Now he was looking at me and there was all this emotion in his eyes. He looked kind of hurt and kind of hopeful and jittery, all the things I had been.

We usually gave the backstage passes to pretty girls, kind of chauvinistic rock star behavior I knew, but that’s how it was. But we had a ton of them. I grabbed one off the stack of them and tossed it to him.

“Sure. There you go,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, holding it like it was gold or something.