When the spotlights fade and the arena clears, my real work begins as I take a seat on the bus, towel the sweat off my hair, and scan the Shopify dashboard, cursing loudly at the backlog of unfulfilled orders clogging the queue. The moment my grandfather taught me my first guitar chord, I dreamed of one day registering a domain name for the shop portion of my website, leasing warehouse space, and hiring a team of dependable professionals to competently pack and ship keychains and duffel bags. Not this bullshit. I do not deserve this. I could play Led Zeppelin IV front-to-back by the time I was twelve. I dicked off in high school, ditching class to shred because, even then, I could see my future: spending seven hours a night on my phone dealing with customer service issues. Responding to disappointed fans across the continental U.S. looking for an update on their water bottle’s estimated delivery window, eating the return shipping costs on a too-small baseball cap, seething with rage upon discovering fourteen fans had filed the same help ticket: all had ordered medium t-shirts but received larges. “That’s not a god damned coincidence,” I shout, alone in the back of my bus. I won the school’s Battle of the Bands senior year and knew then my life needed nothing more than guitars, drums, bass, and full days spent micromanaging the dense drug addicts working in my distribution center who constantly fuck up USPS rates and box sizes, causing me to lose money selling pins and patches. How the hell do you lose money selling a product with a margin as high as a pin? By employing delinquent saps like these. When I was forming my band at twenty-two I envisioned collaborating with a qualified team of e-commerce specialists who’d pack and ship my wallets, mousepads, mugs, and umbrellas efficiently, resulting in an A+ with the BBB. But the unreliable jack-offs in my warehouse have caused me hundreds of sleepless nights and this horseshit ends now. I stumble through my long bus and tell the driver we’re making a detour to the warehouse and he swerves off the highway, speeds east while I close my eyes and try to reconnect with my younger self, that cocky gunslinger who took no bullshit, so sure he’d one day manage a respected and profitable online store. The brakes hiss and I kick in the door, projecting my voice into the cavernous warehouse, “Who has been shipping pins Priority Mail when the customer chose Parcel Select Lightweight? Do you animals realize how expensive that is? Hello? Hello? Have all you fucking imbeciles finally died?”

One of the rats, with long, greasy, unprofessional hair, races out. “Hey, man! We’re jamming! Come listen!”

He leads me to the back room where the six of them rock out on electric guitars and drums, the singer wailing hearty notes I haven’t heard since I was a kid listening to granddad’s records. It’s real rock, from their souls.

I destroy the drums with my boots. Slash their guitar strings with the box-cutter. “Fuck off! Fuck off! I pay you to pack and ship using the correct postage, not make noise. Jesus Christ.”

“But…” one of the creatures begs. “It’s all about the music. Right?”

“Fuck you,” I say, turning away in a pointed show of disrespect to review the Salesforce scheduling portal on my phone. “You’re all doing thirty-nine hours a week from now on. Part-time. No more vacation. No more insurance.” I pull back my leather jacket, revealing the unregistered pistol in my belt. “Now stuff some CDs into padded envelopes before I express myself fully.”

They scramble like bugs. From the top-floor office I glare at them while they sort and pack, aiming my gun at their heads when they stop to drink water. I check my phone, watch the queue shrink as orders are processed and stacked. I think back to myself at age twenty-five, signing my record deal, and I smile, satisfied that I never gave up. Looking down at those dumb pigs shipping my limited-edition Christmas bandanas, I know in my bones that this is what rock and roll is all about. 

Rotiss, rotiss, what’ll it be / Rotiss, rotiss, why not me?

We never forgot Mr. Malone’s song. He’d sing it in the hallways before rehearsal, while we painted sets and sewed costumes. He’d sing it walking out to his car on one of those perfect fall nights after a performance.

His song was fun and infectious, but we only sang it back to him once. “Not you!” he yelled at us, as we sat on the stage floor preparing to review the set designs he’d drawn for the original musical he’d written to be our spring show. “Me! Why not me! Mr. Malone! Not you!” He stomped into the hallway, composed himself, and returned with his usual smile. We never asked him about it, and we learned not to sing his song.

He watched us build the set for his original play, whispering, “Rotiss, rotiss,” and we’d nod along, but never say the words.

We assembled the metal pieces for the climax of his show while Mr. Malone muttered, “Rotiss, rotiss, what’ll it be?”

We attached the gas line to achieve the stunning flame effect. “Rotiss, rotiss, why not me?”

We installed the glass door, and finally, on the morning of the premiere, we begged Mr. Malone to let us read the script for the show we’d be putting on that evening. He’d been keeping it a secret, saying he wasn’t finished editing, assuring us that our performances would be realer and rawer unrehearsed, ignited live on the big night as we read our lines off cue cards.

But we never got the chance. Six police officers entered the auditorium and demanded to see Mr. Malone. We tried to defend him, but the officers pushed us aside, leaned Mr. Malone over the stage, and handcuffed him, saying they knew what he was up to. We screamed and begged, insisting he was a good man and a profound theatre teacher. The police refused to tell us why he was being arrested. As he walked out of the theatre for the last time, we heard him sing. Softer now, and sad. “Rotiss, rotiss, why not me?”

Two years later, Mr. Malone died. We passed around the article, with its large photograph of Mr. Malone, dressed as a chicken, feet bound by twine, skewered through the mouth and anus on metal spikes, incinerated in a 700-degree rotisserie oven on stage during the sold-out premiere of his play Rotiss: Finally Me at Springdale Christian Academy.

At his funeral, we joined drama club alumni from the twenty-eight schools Mr. Malone had been fired from or arrested in. We did not need to rehearse. We all knew the song. Standing behind Mr. Malone’s blackened bones, piled in a plastic tray, all four-hundred of us sang, loud enough for him to hear in heaven, “Rotiss, rotiss, what’ll it be?”

By age 29 I’d accomplished my every goal: an Academy Award, prizes at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, a leading role in a top-grossing three-film franchise. But still I craved more success, more accolades. There were always new peaks to scale — star in a prestige streaming series, get into directing — but during one lunch meeting to plot out the next decade with my agents and managers, it hit me: I’m no closer to happiness. Each win made me need the next. I was addicted to fame, to seeing my face on billboards and posters. I set my truffle panko scallops down and leaned back from the table, overcome with the realization that would reset my life. “I’m done with all this,” I said to my perplexed team. “I’m moving to a monastery in Nepal to study with monks, to abandon these endless desires and find real happiness within.”

Upon my arrival, the monks chuckled. Another westerner here for a photo. But I insisted my motives were sincere. I showed the monks my Academy Award, and then I threw it into their deep, sacred lake.

After the first year of study I learned how little I knew.

Two years in, I began to see through cloudy eyes.

Finally, after seven years of daily meditation, my ego crumpled like a meaningless scrap of paper, rolled into the flames of my modest fire, and turned to smoke before my eyes.

For the first time in my life, I was alive. Two years of bliss and serenity. Air, pebbles, grass, water.

And one afternoon at lunch with the monks, observing how we and the carrots we eat are the same, it hits me that I have at least forty years left in my life, and this daily routine is so unbelievably boring I may have to jump off the side of this fucking mountain. It was relaxing for a little while, but, holy shit, forty more years of squeezing carrots with my eyes closed? Of smelling the dirt on a potato? It was interesting the first few times, and then just okay the next three hundred. I’m supposed to do this for decades to come? I lean back from the table, overcome with the realization that will reset my life. “I’m done with all this,” I say to the perplexed monks. “I’m moving my ass back to Los Angeles to cake my face in makeup and see my shit-eating grin plastered across the side of a bus where it belongs. This life is nice, but I killed my ego way too soon. If I’d come here at age eighty-one, it’d be perfect. I could coast on this zonked-out zen until my body runs out of gas. But I’m only thirty-eight. So I’m going to press pause on the radish-worship. Muchas gracias for the produce, gentlemen, and I wish you the best of luck zoning out while I resuscitate my ego and pledge allegiance to that gorgeous son of a bitch, getting calf implants and hair plugs, screaming at my agents to make my face bigger on the poster for the piece of shit comic book movie I star in, notching vain victories, accomplishing conceited goals, and feeling alive again. I’ll be back in a few decades, all spent and worn and ready to snooze with you hombres. Adios.”

I hire a crew to drain their sacred lake and fish out my Oscar. I hug it, standing alone on that mountain, squeezing my name on its faceplate, and the boring hellscape around me disappears. The wind, the trees, the screaming monks, withdrawing their vegetable knives and promising to kill me for what I did to their lake. For a moment it’s just me and my award with my name on it — my name, my name, my name; me and only me; all me — and I finally know peace.