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CREEP
Words and Music by Albert Hammond, Mike Hazlewood, Thomas Yorke, Jonathan Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Edward O'Brien and Philip Selway
Copyright © 1992 EMI April Music Inc. and Warner Chappell Music Ltd.
All Rights on behalf of EMI April Music Inc. Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219
All Rights on behalf of Warner Chappell Music Ltd. in the U.S. and Canada Administered by WC MusicCorp.International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved - contains elements of "The Air That I Breathe" by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, Copyright (c)1972 EMI April Music Inc.Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
CREEP
Words and Music by THOM YORKE, JONATHAN GREENWOOD, PHILIP SELWAY, COLIN GREENWOOD, EDWARD O'BRIEN, ALBERT HAMMOND and MIKE HAZELWOOD © 1992 WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC LTD. and RONDOR MUSIC (LONDON) LTD.
All Rights in the U.S. and Canada for WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC LTD. Administered by WB MUSIC CORP. {Incorporates THE AIR THAT I BREATHE by ALBERT HAMMOND and MIKE HAZELWOOD, © 1972, 1973 (Copyrights Renewed) RONDOR MUSIC LTD. (LONDON)}
All Rights Reserved
Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC
DEDICATION
Somewhere in a dark corner of our planet, there is a young eighteen-year-old soldier standing a post or preparing to go out on a patrol. When his or her peers are contemplating the party they are about to attend, or the beers they are going to drink, or the time they are going to spend with their boyfriends or girlfriends, this soldier is wondering if tonight will be their last night. He or she might be thinking about the friends they lost, or how their mother and father and brothers and sisters might react to their death.
As you are safely snuggled beneath your covers, he or she is in harm’s way. When you are arguing about politics and exercising your First Amendment rights, they are sacrificing theirs to make sure that your rights shall never be infringed.
In two or four or eight years, they will return to the world. You may have graduated from college, married and had children, while they are trying to adjust to civilian life after enduring hardships and horrors that you cannot even conceive of. While you may have student loan debt, they will forever bear the scars of their service to our great country. And make no mistake about it, America is a great country.
As you go about enjoying your life, please take a few moments to contemplate the unsung, unappreciated heroes who have given so much of themselves to keeping our country safe and secure. When you run across a Veteran of our Armed Services, take a brief moment to think about all that he or she has sacrificed for you and your loved ones. And accept the fact that if you have never served, you can never fully understand. Don’t just say “Thank you for your service” as a courtesy—say it as a genuine show of appreciation and gratitude. But DO say it.
This book is lovingly dedicated to all veterans of the United States Military. Your heroism, dedication and sacrifice make me humble and forever grateful.
From the bottom of my heart, I say, “Thank you for your service!”
Jan St. Marcus
PART 1
BRANDON AND MICHELANGELO
1. Brandon
Fuck my life. Fuck. My. Life. Fuck, my life. I guess it doesn’t matter how I say it, or how many times I say it. It still adds up to the same thing: Fuck my life. It’s become sort of my motto. Or is it more like a mantra? Mantra? Where does that word even come from? “Man-tra”? Why not “Wo-man-tra?” Womantra. Why does it have to be man-tra? Huh? What? What was I talking about? Oh yeah. My motto. I don’t think I’ll ever say “mantra” again. It’s a stupid fucking word. Fuck my life. All eighteen years have sucked. Has it really been that long? It seems like forever. Eighteen years. It doesn’t even have a nice ring to it. Fuck. Here’s an example of how fucked my life is: Today is my birthday and I just turned nineteen. Wait. Maybe not. Let me think about this. They wait until you’ve actually “turned” one to start counting years, right? So after you’ve lived for a whole year, they say you’re a one-year-old. So if today is my nineteenth birthday, they call me nineteen years old and that means I’ve already lived for nineteen fucking years! Oh, my fucking God! My life has sucked ass for nineteen whole, fucking years! Fuck. My. Life.
All of a sudden, I feel really tired, so I stop walking and sit down on a damp bench near the boardwalk. It’s raining, I am tired, and my life sucks, so I sit here in the rain. Yay! Happy Birthday to me. My name’s Brandon in case anyone cares. Brandon Hawkins to be exact. And if you’ve been paying attention so far, I just turned nineteen, and I’m walking around the boardwalk in Venice Beach, California, on the night of my birthday. I have no idea what time it is because time isn’t a concept I’m very interested in right now. Or pretty much ever. I suppose if I had a home to go back to, or a job I had to show up for, or friends to meet and hang out with, maybe then I’d give a flying fuck about the time, but that’s not my situation. Not my life. I used to have that stuff . . . but wait . . . yeah, my life sucked back then, too. But that was almost a year ago. It’s not like I was living in a place I could call my own. I lived wherever they told me to live. Ate whenever they told me to eat. Sort of slept whenever they told me I could sleep. Oh yeah, and I killed people whenever they told me to kill people.
I mean seriously? You take a stupid seventeen-year-old kid who was living in the streets of Memphis fucking Tennessee and you actually give him an M4 rifle and tell him to go to some God-forsaken desert and kill people? Yeah, that seems like a really good idea, right? Not so much. On the plus side, I got this really dorky Mickey Mouse watch. Yeah. Seriously. Sergeant Kilroy gave me this stupid kid’s watch because I was always late for everything. I couldn’t even read the damned thing. Mickey’s stupid white-gloved hands covered the numbers and I couldn’t tell which hand was actually longer than the other, so when Sergeant Kilroy was screaming at me to tell him where the long hand was, I had to guess. Hey, I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right, right? I always had trouble telling my right from my left, too. Made it hard to march. “Left-right-left-right-left” kind of gets screwed up when you don’t know which leg to start with. Sergeant Kilroy once wrote RIGHT on my hand with a big sharpie so I would know. I start laughing remembering how mad he got when I asked him to write LEFT on my other hand so I could tell them apart. I thought his head was going to explode. It actually did explode one day, but not because I asked him to write something
