South Beach

by Aimee Friedman

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  as she is about me being a star and all, she would never up and quit her job. It's hers. It's one of the things that make me so proud of her.

  Gosh, I could go on and on about my mom but we're supposed to be talking about me. Well, 'round about the time we moved here, I dropped my first name, LuAnn, and started going by Kendall, which is my middle name. I was entering all these pageants and talent shows, and it just sounded so much more sophisticated and professional: Kendall Taylor. Only when I go back home to visit, I go by LuAnn -- my mom says so. LuAnn is my great -grandmomma's name, so it's out of respect. Me going by Kendall, nobody down there even knows about that; my mom says it's our secret. Although, gosh, with all that's going on now -- I mean, we're on MTV! -- pretty soon the folks in Frog Level will catch wind, and I can't imagine what my mom will tell them all.

  Anyway, all those pictures of my daddy. Lost. It's sad, I think, but I don't dwell on it, because I am a very positive person. Plus I know my daddy's up on a cloud, watching all the awesome things that are happening for me. Sometimes I like to think that when I sing, my daddy is starting a nudge right there in heaven!

  THE BITCH

  Call me The Bitch and you better watch your back. Just kidding! Look, no offense but it's dumb to talk about

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  which "one" I am in the band. Back in the boy-band era maybe that's what they did -- he's the poet, he's the bad boy, he's the sex god -- but please, that is over. It's just stereotyping, which I am personally very much against, and which our band is so not about. Because check it out, here's the black girl and she's not in an R&B group and she's not even the singer. Our band is about breaking barriers.

  But whatever, if these video diaries get turned into a reality show or some kind of special-bonus-extra content for our CD, and that helps sell records -- cool. See, that's how my mind works. I am a businesswoman. First and foremost. And an artist. An artist and a businesswoman. Besides, it's not like I have a problem big upping myself, and venting is good because I get to have my say. I mean, let's be real: when 6X does press for a magazine, or a talk show, any of that shit -- I'm always gonna get left out. For two very, um, obvious reasons, everyone wants to talk to Barbie -- oops, I mean Wynn, but it's okay, keep that in; she knows I call her Barbie. And then they wanna talk to Kendall, since she's the singer -- fine. And then they wanna talk to A/B, because he's the only boy and they wanna know what that's like; plus he's a cutie in that "Hot? Who? Moi?!" kind of way, and all our chick fans wanna hear from him. So by the time the interview is over, oops, they run out of tape and time and nobody gets a chance to ask me a single thing. Which is retarded, because I'm the only one in the band that's got anything to say. I have a vocabulary; all right. Do I have to show you my standardized test scores?

  Look, I don't mean to be harsh. It's not like I'm in a band with a bunch of morons. A/B is really smart, and he's

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  funny as shit, but he's an eat-sleep-breathe-fill-in-what-ever-bodily-function-you-want kind of music junkie. And Kendall's smart in that bouncy, chirpy, Goody Two-shoes way. On the low, every- now and then Kendall will come out with something whack, but mostly she works the little angel thing, which means she is pure vanilla without the bean. Then Wynn, well, between you and me and the whole entire world, I'm not sure what it is with her because I think, I know, my girl's got some pretty deep thoughts going on behind those wispy honey-colored bangs, but her favorite two sentences are "I'm sorry" and "I don't know."

  Not me. I've got opinions. I've got ideas. I make shit happen. Like that day in school, when Wynn first brought up the band thing in homeroom. We both go to Little Red School-house. Yes, that is really the name of our school -- so cute I could vomit. Personally, I think my parents could spend their hard-earned money on things other than private school for me -- and I could definitely live without taking two trains into Manhattan from Brooklyn every day. But my dad teaches math at a junior high that's so ghetto, the kids call it Jay-Z J.H.S. The shit he's witnessed on the job, you know he'd rather sleep on tacks then send me to public school. As to my mom, she believes overpaying for my education will keep me from turning out like my half brother, John Joseph, aka J.J., aka Loserboy. He's the fruit other first marriage to one of the goombah guys from her old neighborhood, before she went all jungle fever and got with my dad.

  Only forget, my family you wanna hear about 6X. Back in the day, Wynn wasn't exactly a friend, but we had a few classes together, we talked. Well, one time she's telling

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  me about some chichi champagne-fueled night out, and this drummer dude who's clearly trying to find a way into her thong. I'm half listening to this shit, but the second she gets to the part about her stepdad's law partner claiming he could build a band around her, I snap to. I mean, I'm riveted. Right away, I'm like: "Really? I play bass."

  And that weekend, I learned how.

  That's where Loserboy came in. Twenty-five years old, can't even hold a job at the freakin' post office ... pathetic. My dad does his best to ignore J.J. -- which is tough, seeing as how he's been living in our basement since his own father kicked him out -- but I love him like crazy, he's my big brother, all right. So he's got this bass (he was in a punk band for five minutes once), and that Friday night we put on Leave Home and Rocket, to Russia, and I strap on his big-ass Fender P and it's coming down below my knees and he teaches me a couple of bass lines. All weekend I practice, and the next Monday at school I'm all over Wynn about the band, the band, the band.

  And if that makes me pushy or aggressive or a bitch then, fine, whatever....

  THE BOY

  Ah yes: The Boy. The dude, the guy, the Y chromosome. That would be me. Most of all, though, I'm the musician. Every band's gotta have at least one. Not to be a complete asshole but, hey, we've all got our jobs.

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  Wynn's job is to be the babe. Oh, she keeps the beat okay -- believe me, when I first heard her, man, I was like "No way," but it's amazing how much she's improved. Only come on, calling her "attractive" is like saying the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground, and I don't just mean her body, it's the details -- her heart-shaped face and those eyes, not quite green, not quite blue. Even her earlobes are hot, her clavicle. She could be up there hitting a bucket with a pair of knitting needles. As to the other half of our rhythm section, Stella, she's also a graduate of the leaps-and-bounds improvement program. Still, playing bass is not her main thing. Hmm, how can I put this? Stella's job is to be the boss. We've got a manager and an A&R guy and a lawyer and a label, but Stella's the boss because she scares the crap out of us. The girl was a Mafia kingpin or a Third World dictator in a former life, I shit you not.

  Kendall, obviously, her job is to sing. She's one of those people, you hand them the phone book and when they start singing it, your jaw drops, you get goose bumps, the whole nine. So you could say that Kendall's a musician, too, but I beg to differ. She's something else: a natural. Never took a lesson. Pure gift. Me, I got some gift action going -- at the risk of coming off completely obnoxious, I can play anything -- but while Kendall just does it, I have to work at it. You can't hand me the didgeridoo or the tuba and bang-zoom I know how to make zee beautiful music. You got to give me a couple of days alone with it. Not like I've got much else to do since I don't have a girlfriend running my life at the moment. Hey, I'm not Bo-Bo the Dog-Faced Boy, either, but at my school if you haven't stepped right out of an

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  Abdominals and Fitch ad -- if your hair's a little shaggy or your muscles don't have muscles -- you're deemed wholly undrool-worthy by the girl-powers-that-be.

  Anyhoo, like I said, I have to work at music, only it's not work because I love it.

  And the point is, it doesn't matter to me if 6X is chicks or Chihuahuas, I'm just happy to be part of a band that's going somewhere. I'm seventeen years old and I've been in eight different bands, so the fact that we're signed with a hit single out and ready to make our record is, to me , finally.
Not just "all right!" but also "all right, already." Even my mom and dad are resolving their considerable conflicts about my career choice now. Typical Jewish parents: you slide out of the womb and they practically slap you onto the piano seat, but God forbid you actually want to do music instead of be a doctor or a lawyer or a nuclear physicist and it's as if you handed them massive two-for-one heart attacks. I don't care -- I'll always do music. Say I become the CEO of some enormous bloodsucking conglomerate one day, I'll still do music on the side, and if I got a record deal I'd call a board meeting and be like "Later, dudes ..."

  I was eleven in my first band, a cover band, classic rock. Everyone else was in their late twenties and thirties; I was the gimmick, the little piano prodigy. We'd play bars all over Long Island; my mother was not into it, but my dad convinced her it was okay because his kid brother was in the band. Uncle Dick. And his first name is not Richard, he's just an asshole. We'd do all the alphabet bands -- BTO, ELO, ELP, and of course, AC/DC. Miraculously, the

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  experience didn't turn me off to music. In fact, I loved it -- I still get the warm-and-fuzzies when I hear AC/DC or the Floyd.

  Still, by age thirteen I'd switched to guitar as my main instrument and started a band with some kids on my block. Here's the rest of my musical résumé to date: I had a skapunk band; an emo band; a very strange duo with this guy from camp -- me on guitar and keyboards and him on oboe and flute; your basic generic rock band; a very short-lived nu-metal thing; and two things I can only categorize with the meaningless tag of "indie rock." Where did they all go? Nowhere. Guys would move away, or get into sports or girls or drugs too much; or we would just disintegrate for some other reason.

  So about a year or so ago, while trying to disentangle myself from the last indie-rock thing without making anybody hate me, I started doing the coffeehouse open-mike circuit. Just me and my six-string soul mate, Dan Electro, taking the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan, plugging in between all these whiny-sensitive acoustic-guitar guys, doing a set of obscure covers and crappy originals (a master songsmith I am not). Yet somehow that's how I hooked up with a manager, who turned out to be a major dickwad, but through him I met this guy who knew a lawyer who hooked me up with the girls, and now we're 6X, pop-rock sensation, superstars in training.

  Does that sound simple as A-B-C? One-two-three? Vini. vidi. vici? Yeah, right...