Brain Stew:Prologue

Mike sat alone in the tour bus drinking his usual after-show pabst and cursing his band mates mentally. Billie had flown home for the weekend last minute and Tre was off God knows where, likely with the woman he'd been winking at the whole concert. Sighing, Mike turned on his cheap-ass laptop that he'd got when his mother , of all people, told him he needed to stop living in the past. Is it really so bad to live in the past? He thought to himself. The past had been awesome. No wife, kids, responsibility. Just him, Billie, Tre, and the music. And the one night stands, can't forget about those. He opened his email and spotted one from his mom. "Speak of the devil and the devil shall appear, huh?" He muttered with a smirk. Blah blah blah, normal old people talk. Even she, Mike noted, was talking about the past. She did this, talked about their past before she put him and his sister up for adoption. "I remember when you were really little you had an imaginary friend." She wrote. "I just came across a picture of him you drew. Van Gough, I think his name was. You strongly believed he was real, telling me stories about him. Saying that he was your twin and that's why he always wore a mask, so you and he wouldn't get mixed up! You were so imaginative..." Mike chuckled softly, imagining a younger him clad in his Donald Duck tee shirt that he'd been so in love with. He shut down his laptop, not bothering to reply to his mother's email. Stretching out on the bed, he tried to remember his old imaginary friend. "What the fuck man? You don't remember your only childhood friend?" A voice said sounding pretty pissed. Mike jumped up with a yelp, only to come face-to-face with a man wearing a mask that, in his opinion, looked like a condom.

"Look dude, I don't know who you are or what your problem is-" Mike began.

"Mike, seriously. This is fucked up. We spent almost every damn day together until you started going to that asshole psychiatrist that convinced you I wasn't real or some shit." Scoffed the man.

"You want me to believe that you're my imaginary friend? Seriously?" Mike scoffed back. "I'm calling security. How the hell did you get in here anyways?!"

"Honestly, don't be so dim. You're the only one who can see me, naturally." The man, Van Gough?, drawled in a sarcastic tone of voice.

"Lets say you are real. Who are you? What are you?"

Van Gough leaned closer to him. "Well isn't that the million dollar question."