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"Left here!" Pi said, learning over the lowered glass between the cab and the living quarters of the RV. "No, I said left!"
"I can't get into the left lane right now, because there are people in my way!" Shirota replied.
Kame was shuffling between papers all printed from Pi's computer, which had run out of black ink somewhere during the information spitting out and printed half the pages in an odd combination of yellow and blue that looked more brown than anything. "Wait, did we miss our exit?"
"Okay, this truck is going to go past, then you GUN IT," Jin said.
"I can't gun it!" Shirota said. "This is an RV; it accelerates slower than a tractor!"
Kame tugged at Jin's sleeve. "Seriously, look at this. This is our exit. Did you see that on a sign we just passed? I think we missed the exit."
"Kame, stop talking, you are confusing Shirota," Pi demanded.
"I'm not confused!" Shirota exclaimed. "I know where we are going, I just have to get over into the turn lane."
Jin scampered to the back, ignoring Kame's repeated pulls on the fabric of his shirt. From the back windows, he could see the other lane of traffic more clearly. "Okay, just wait. This guy is going to pass you. Wait... wait..."
"I'm already waiting!" Shirota said.
"We don't want to make a left, we want to go back," Kame continued.
Jin smacked his hand down on the cabinets. "Okay, now! Gun it! Go, go, go!"
Shirota did as he was told, and the RV swerved madly into the left lane. Jin lost his balance and smacked his face into the door, which he hadn't thought to lock because he didn't think it was all that necessary while they were driving. The door swung open and he tried yelling, but his nose really hurt and he was pretty sure it was bleeding.
"Jin!" Pi screeched, and dove for Jin's form. Looking outside without the door blocking his view, Jin could see the faces of the people laying on their horns behind them, as they had to slow down to let the barely chugging RV cut in front of them in order to make the next turn. A few of them flipped Jin the bird before Pi yanked him back inside and closed the door again.
"I'm bleeding," Jin moaned, pinching his nose shut.
As Pi scurried for a rag or a t-shirt to press against Jin's nose, Shirota sort of sighed from the driver's seat up front. "Guys, I think maybe we missed our exit."
"Well," Kame said, tartly, after a few moments of silence, "I did try to tell you that."
--
Two trips to the suburbs, five frantic attempts to get directions on a cell phone from Google, and three hours later, they finally arrived outside the Marriott in downtown Chicago. Jin had never before been so happy to see a corporate hotel chain before in his life, and he practically fell out of the RV in the overpowering relief that swept through his form.
"See, the good thing is that we arrived a day early," Kame said. "If we had tried to drive here tomorrow instead, we'd have missed our own show."
"If we'd driven here tomorrow, we would have had more than 20 minutes to print out better directions before leaving," Pi pointed out.
Jin grabbed his duffel bag and hoisted it over his shoulder, brushing hair out of his face. The parking lot was big enough for the RV to sit comfortably in the back without making Jin nervous that somebody was going to smack into it with their SUV. He was pretty sure the RV would fall apart entirely if something so much as dinged the bumper.
"Let's just go check in," he sighed, eager to get himself into clean, freshly ironed sheets and turn on some mindless television.
Kame pushed Pi out the door before himself. "You made the reservation, so you have to be the one to check in."
The lobby was even nicer than Jin had imagined. He sat down on one of the large leather chairs and let his duffel drop down by his feet, breathing deeply. There was a fireplace crackling to his left and a few glossy magazines on the table to his right, and there was even an ottoman for him to prop his feet up while he relaxed. He hadn't known that driving in Chicago could be so stressful.
In fact, it was so comfortable that he'd nearly dozed off before he was awoken by loud arguing that sounded suspiciously like Kame and Pi.
"-if you had waited long enough to make sure it went through, this wouldn't have happened," Kame was saying, as Jin poked his head up over the back of the chair to look at them.
"Well if YOU hadn't insisted we leave IMMEDIATELY, I would have had more time!" Pi cried.
Jin curled his arms over the back, frowning. "Wait, what are you guys talking about? What's wrong with our room?"
"Nothing is wrong with our room," Kame spat, "considering we don't HAVE one."
"Explain," Shirota demanded.
Kame crossed his arms huffily over his chest, and Pi sighed loudly, rolling his eyes. "Apparently, my credit card didn't go through when I booked it on Hotels.com, so they don't have our reservation."
"So why can't we just get one now?" Jin asked.
"Because they are completely booked," Kame said.
Suddenly, the leather chair didn't seem quite so nice, and the magazines didn't look quite so glossy. Jin had been looking forward to finally spending a weekend in a nice hotel, and it was all rapidly falling apart around him. "Wait, wait," he said, scrambling back to his feet and catching his shoe on the bottom of the chair itself. "There are tons of hotels around here. We just go and find another one- like the Embassy Suites or something."
Shirota looked annoyed. Kame looked pissed. Pi looked like he was vaguely guilty but trying to find somebody else to hoist the blame onto. Jin just wanted to get moving, because the sooner they found another place to stay, the sooner he could go to sleep.
He grabbed for his duffel again, and pointed at the lobby doors. "C'mon, let's just go find another place and get some flipping sleep, yeah?"
--
Two hours later, they finally parked the RV on the street outside the Milshire Hotel, which was nestled between something that might have been a boarding house in a previous life and a crumbling apartment complex with bars on the windows.
"This isn't my fault!" Pi wailed, as they made their way inside the lobby, which wasn't really a lobby at all and was just a small room with a desk and some guy watching porn on the television mounted in the corner. "How was I supposed to know that the largest Industry and Technology conference was going on?!"
Kame handed his credit card to the desk clerk. "We need a room, please, if you have any available."
"We only take cash," the man said, glancing briefly at the card in Kame's hand and then diverting his attention back to the woman getting rammed on the TV screen.
Kame turned back to the rest of the group wearing an incredulous look on his face. "Um... does anyone have any cash?"
"Maybe I've got a twenty," Pi said, pulling out his wallet, as Shirota did the same and managed to come up with a handful of five dollar bills. Jin stuck his hands in his pockets, his jacket pockets, and the pockets of his duffel bag, but only had about $2.43.
He added it to the pile anyway, just to be helpful. Kame dropped the wad of bills and loose change onto the clerk's desk. "Okay, we'd like a room, please."
It took about ten minutes for the guy to get it booked, while they stood awkwardly listening to the synthesized porn music and moaning coming from the television. When he finally gave Kame the room key, Jin couldn't get out of the lobby fast enough.
"Look, all we have to do is sleep and shower here," Shirota said, as they made their way over to room 108, which may or may not have been the site for a particularly gruesome murder at some point. "It's probably going to suck, but we just suck it up."
Kame opened the door and flicked the lights. Nothing happened. He tried the switch another few times, and then finally tsk-ed in annoyance, moving inside with the aid of the street light to turn the lamp on manually.
There were a few seconds of prolonged silence, and then Jin said, "No, turn it back off. It was better when I couldn't actually see the jizz stains on the carpet and the dirt on the sheets."
"I just need to take a piss," Pi said. He dropped his backpack and went into the bathroom, as Jin tried his hardest not to survey the room around him. Kame moved to the window and reached for the curtain, and then yelped, jumping back as if stung.
"Cockroach just touched me," he said, looking pale.
Shirota, who seemed to be braver than Jin was feeling, leaned over the bed and inspected the pillows. "I think there are pubes on this thing," he mused.
From the bathroom, Jin heard a sharp whack, like a shoe hitting the floor, and then Pi shrieked. "Augh, god, there are babies!"
"That's it," Jin announced. "I'm sleeping in the RV."
--
At some point during the night, Jin woke up convinced that there was a homeless guy trying to jack his way into the RV.
"Pi," Jin hissed, trying to rouse the figure sleeping next to him. "Pi, oh my god, wake up."
The four of them were smashed together on the single mattress, which made sleeping rather uncomfortable; the figure next to him was sort of half up on him, arms tangled up. Jin got a mumble in response, and a shifting which resulted in an elbow hitting the sensitive side of his stomach.
The scraping sound was still audible, and Jin was close to freaking out. "Pi, seriously, wake up!"
"Jin?" came the groggy reply.
"Oh thank god," Jin breathed. His heart was pounding so hard in his chest he thought it might burst right out. "I think someone is trying to get in, can you hear that-"
He stopped, and squinted. "Wait, Kame?"
Kame blinked at him.
"How did you get next to me?" Jin asked. And then, when he heard the scratching, "Oh god, whatever, can you hear that?"
Kame frowned and tilted his chin up, like he was trying to hear the noises Jin was referring to. After a long moment, he shrugged. "I think that's just a raccoon."
"A RACCOON?!" Jin cried, and then slapped a hand over his mouth when both figures past Kame stirred. Shirota mumbled something about sausages and rolled over, and after a few seconds, Jin let his fingers fall away from his face. "But what if it's a homeless guy?"
"Jin," Kame sighed, laying back down on the pillow and tugging the sheet up closer to his chin, "I think a homeless guy would just come through the glass in the cab rather than try and drill through the RV's walls."
Jin thought about that. "Maybe you have a point."
"Where would a homeless guy even get a drill?" Kame asked, and then he yawned, and the end of his words sort of sputtered off into nothingness. Jin stared at him as Kame's breathing regulated itself again, and then tried to fluff the pillow he was laying in hopes of falling back asleep.
It took awhile, and it wasn't until Kame rolled over and hooked an arm around Jin's waist that he felt calm enough to drift off towards dreams again.
--
The Metro wasn't a big place to have a gig, but it was a step up from the dive bars they seemed to have been booking recently. Jin liked that it had a little bit of flair and a little bit of class- he also liked that someone had put up a rope to manage the attendees as they filed in. It wasn't a velvet rope, no, but he could pretend it was, and that was what really mattered.
Jin was, however, surprised to see that the Entertainment Beat reporter Sakurai had showed back up again. The other man didn't look very pleased.
"They liked your report on us so much they sent you back again?" he asked, as Shirota set up the drum kit and yelled at Jin to help, which Jin pointedly ignored.
"Oh, sure," Sakurai snorted. "I'm lucky I still have my job. Why did you guys have to steal my phone to update my twitter report?"
Jin noticed that the man was keeping his iPhone tucked securely in his jacket pocket, obviously paranoid. "It needed some truth. I do not need rapping in my lonely guitar ballad."
Sakurai looked like he wanted to say something, but Pi appeared behind him and motioned Jin over.
"Well, gotta run," Jin said, patting Sakurai soundly on the shoulder. "My adoring fans await."
"I just wanted you to go over the set list with us again," Pi told him, once Jin had joined the others. "You don't have any adoring fans."
Jin raised one eyebrow. "I have Kame."
Pi looked at Kame, who had perked at the mention of his name, then back at Jin, and then frowned. "Point taken."
"What?" Kame asked.
"Nothing," Jin said, and grabbed for one of the folded papers he had thoughtfully hand-written the set lists on. "Nothing at all. I think maybe we should switch the order of 'I Really Hate Buses' and 'MTV Can Suck My Dick'."
--
"Hey, ladies, we're going to have a brief intermission right now, so if you want to throw any articles of clothing at us, we'd really appreciate it!" Jin shouted into the microphone. He expected to be hit with a pair of panties immediately, but when nothing came, he turned and reached for the beer he'd at least thought to leave on top of one of the speakers.
But not before he noticed- again- the freakishly tall dude who was moshing in the middle of a sea of scantily clad fan girls. It was pretty hard to miss a guy whose head might as well be scraping the bottom of the ceiling.
"Jin, seriously," Shirota complained from behind the drum set. "Could you at least attempt to be less obnoxious during live shows?"
"The fans love me for who I am!" Jin said, and just to prove it, turned around and gave the crowd two devil-horn hands. They went crazy, cheering and screaming and jumping up and down.
When he turned again, Shirota was eyeing him warily. "Whatever, dude. You were the one that ended up on a celebrity wash-up show."
"It was not a celebrity wash-" Jin started, and an article of clothing hit him in the back of the head. He reached for it, expecting it to be lacy and frilly and maybe pink. It was a pair of Scooby-Doo boxers.
"Yeargh!" he cried, dropping them to the ground.
"C'mon, break's over," Pi said. He strummed a couple of chords to prove it. Jin chugged his beer before going back to the microphone and finishing out the show- the end was really the big kicker, since he'd lined up all their most jammin' songs as a grand finale. And when they were done, the crowd cheered and women swooned, and Jin felt incredibly awesome as he wiped the sweat from his forehead.
They had just started dismantling the stage when the super tall guy approached from Jin's left side. "Guys, you were great! I mean really great!"
"Uh, thanks," Jin said. He was having flashbacks to the gay bar, and he wasn't entirely sure they were images he wanted in his head. Ever.
"No, seriously, I'm a huge fan," the guy continued. "And I brought my guitar. I was thinking maybe I could join you guys for your next show. I've got all of your songs memorized already!"
Pi gave him a weird look as he walked over with a handful of cords and wires. "This isn't an open audition," he said. "We aren't looking to replace anyone."
"No, not replace anyone! I mean I'll be the fifth member!" the super-fan said.
Jin laughed, sort of loudly, and felt a little bad when the guy's face fell.
"Sorry, dude," he said. "But we don't need five members to the band."
"But I know all your songs..."
Pi patted him on the shoulder, which required him reaching up really high since the guy was, like, the Jolly Green Giant. "It's very sweet. We appreciate the support! Keep buying CDs, yeah?"
"Jin," the fan said, turning back to Jin. "You need me!"
"Only if we need to replace some light bulbs or something," Jin told him, and Shirota started laughing so hard that he nearly dropped the cymbal he was holding. It seemed to be the last straw with the super-fan. His hands bunched up into fists at his sides and he kind of vibrated like one of those pens that rattled across the page when you turned it on.
He thrust his finger in Jin's face, too close for comfort. "You will regret this! Your career at the Metro is over!"
He flounced off, and Kame turned to Jin, confused and a little stunned. "What on earth was that about?"
"Some of our fans are crazy delusional," Jin told him. He reached up for the microphone Kame was handing down to him. "I can't help it if my sheer awesomeness makes them that way."
Pi chuckled all the way through loading the RV back up with the equipment, and when they were done, Shirota slid back into the driver's seat, cracking his knuckles over the wheel.
"We still don't have a hotel room," he pointed out. "Where on earth are we staying tonight?"
Jin yawned widely and got himself comfortable on the mattress. "I don't even care. Just park by the lake or something."
Somehow, and Jin didn't know how without some sort of mapping device, Shirota found the lakefront and turned the RV off. It took thirty minutes for them to all get comfortable in the mattress and another thirty for everyone to shut up and go to sleep, but Jin was so tired from everything that his eyelids started drooping almost immediately, and he slipped off without any trouble.
--
When he woke up, he was vaguely aware that the RV was moving. And not in the way it usually did after he'd had too much to drink and everything was spinning around him, but like when Shirota was driving and the wheels were bumping along the uneven pavement.
Jin rubbed the sleep from his eyes and got up to ask Shirota why they'd gotten off to such an early start. Then he stopped, because Shirota was still asleep in the mattress, along with Kame and Pi (who was drooling on the pillow).
"Whoa!" Jin cried. It woke the others, who all jolted upright in varying states of surprise, and Shirota banged his head against the RV's ceiling. "Guys, we're moving! A hobo stole the RV and is driving away with us to sell us into black market sex slavery!"
"What?!" Pi exclaimed, and tried to get out of the bed only to get so tangled up in the sheets that he fell flat on his face on the floor.
Kame managed to extract himself without any major incident, and pressed his hands against the glass to the cab, peering through it. "We're being towed."
"Shit," Shirota said. "I think maybe parking by the lake was illegal."
Jin sat down hard on the edge of the mattress, sighing and running a hand through his hair. They were definitely going to hear it after they got back, and he was dreading even breaking the news, and yet he pulled his phone out of his hoodie pocket anyway, thumb poised over the speed dial button.
"What the fuck did you do this time?" Meisa asked, as soon as she picked up.
"For the record," Pi called on his way to the RV's bathroom, "this was not my idea."
Jin just glared at the floor. "We're going to need some money..."