by Cari Quinn
I already had before, hadn’t I? And was still with every heartbeat. I’d been bought and paid for before without such a hefty reward at the end.
“An icon. You have all the potential in the world to be not another Simon, but the one and only Ian.”
My eyes burned. “Leave your card,” I choked out. “I’ll be in touch.”
I expected her to press. To push. That was what types like her did. But she nodded and withdrew a fancy card with foil type, setting it on the dressing room table. She laid a hand on my arm—the one clutching Zoe’s camera like a life raft—and my gaze lifted to meet her surprisingly compassionate expression. Not pity. Pity would have shut me down in an instant.
But empathy. Understanding. Even a kindred soul perhaps.
If any souls like mine existed. I didn’t know.
I didn’t have that kind of hope left inside me.
Then she turned and walked out, heels clicking smartly before she pulled the door closed behind her.
I sank onto the chair in front of the table and dropped my forehead to Zoe’s camera. And pretended I couldn’t feel the hot tears squeezing out to soak the plastic.
Three
I flipped up the hood of my coverup against the breeze coming off the water. A thorough coating of sand stuck to my legs and belly. Probably because I’d been camped out on the beach for hours.
Sleep was definitely not in my zip code these days.
However, if I had to be up at an absurdly early hour, at least I could enjoy the sunrise against the backdrop of my favorite place—the boardwalk in the distance. From out here it was crisp and iconic. A never-changing silhouette. I dug my toes into the packed sand as the tide crept back into the ocean. The lace barely tickled my ankles at this time of day. It was also too early for the tourists to inundate the beaches.
It was just me and the runners.
I dug out my camera from my waterproof hobo bag. I’d taken a picture of the sunrise every day since I’d moved to Venice Beach six months ago. Half a year. Half a lifetime.
With my favorite camera, dammit.
A camera that was not currently in my possession.
Now the whole series was ruined. Sure, my other dozen Polaroid cameras would do the job well enough. But it was Matilda who had the most character.
Matilda left ghost trails through the middle of a shot whenever she wanted to. Odd flares. Random stripes or bubbles formed during processing.
Matilda had so much life. I’d hung my entire series on her idiosyncrasies.
It wasn’t enough anyway and you know it.
I jammed a cartridge into Lucy, my second-in-command Polaroid camera. That jackass British singer had stolen my camera, ruining everything.
I needed this series of photos or I was totally fucked. Part of my residency at J Town required that I had an art show every year of my stay. I was six months in—officially. I even had the email from my advocate to prove it.
Did I have a show put together? Was I ready to show her my work?
Nope.
With each picture I took, I had a little more hope that something would come of them. Now?
Fuck.
The blame button had singer boy attached to it. It was better than my face. And seriously, I didn’t even know why people were going wild for this Kagan kid. Sure, he was talented, but walk up and down The Strip for an hour and you’d see a hundred guys with just as much talent.
Lies.
I ejected the first shot out of the chamber to get the fresh cartridge going in my camera. Okay, so maybe not a hundred like him. Maybe not even ten. He was sex rolled in glitter with a husky-voiced overlay to make the package even more interesting.
And maybe I’d found myself looking at articles in the trades to see what people had said about the show. Unfortunately, there were quite a few pictures of me in the tiny local newspapers, as well as the musical blogs and vlogs. Our little…skirmish on the stage had gotten some play on snaps and YouTube.
Sexy.
Was it staged?
Who was the girl with Ian Kagan?
No one knew my name. I didn’t have real press credentials, just an all-access pass thanks to Li. That was my only saving grace through it all. Anonymity was my friend when it came to this kind of crap. And while I’d been in a bunch of the comments, they had been more about him. That effervescent churning of a viral video had grown overnight and the hits kept building. The Blue Rhino’s YouTube page was getting some serious play between the unknown opening act and the Zeps.
Some of it was because of his singing, but what they’d glommed on to was our interaction.
He was sexy—even I couldn’t deny that.
My chill faded. In fact, my whole face felt hot. It had to be the sun coming up.
A pretty face I could deal with. California was filled to the brim with beautiful people of all kinds. My first week in the city, I’d fallen hard for a beautiful boy with cheekbones like beveled glass. The minute he’d rolled off me, he’d been on to the next girl.
For men like Robbie, it was about the chase. This Ian guy was too charming to be anything but the same. I’d learned the hard way to be a little more discerning with my affections.
Beautiful didn’t mean jack to me.
It wasn’t that. There was something indefinable about him. The crowd had gotten it as well. It had only taken a handful of songs, but he’d won them over even as he insulted the headliners by touching their equipment.
Rebel. Artist. Sex appeal.
Rock and roll.
He had the thing. It couldn’t be crafted or imitated. It just was.
And he’d stolen my damn camera.
I rose onto my knees and took my shot of the boardwalk. The sun was a little higher than I liked—another ding against my collection—all because my hamster wheel of a brain couldn’t settle because of this Ian dude.
When the photo popped out, I waved it until it developed. Amazingly, there were a few streaks due to a natural lens flare.
I patted Lucy. She was my workhorse. Just happened to be perfectly calibrated because she’d been made in this decade, unlike Matilda. “That’s my girl. You never let me down.”
I tucked the photo into the mini album I carried. I shook out my beach blanket, rolled it up, and shoved it in the sleeve hanging on my bag, then wandered into the tide to wash off the worst of the sand on my legs. It was already warming up and I needed to make my rounds. The sunrise photos were the basis of my portfolio, but my backup ideas were always percolating. For the last few weeks, I’d been using the skate park as inspiration.
Done.
Overdone.
Not original.
I shut my eyes for a second and took a deep breath. I could do this. I’d been born to be an artist. It was all I thought about. It didn’t matter what medium I got my hands on, I had to make something with it. That was why I’d been chosen for J Town.
I just had to get my shit together.
I crouched down to my bag and tucked my camera in a side compartment. Half a dozen spray cans clanged together, the little mixing balls rattling as I swapped out my coverup for a pair of splattered cotton overalls. I’d chopped off the legs for ease of movement. I’d learned quickly that me crawling around the edges of the skate park in my bikini was asking for trouble.
The overalls weren’t sexy at all. Especially when my legs were spotted in paint within an hour.
I trudged up to street level and hopped the bus back to the boardwalk. I snagged a pretzel to fill the eternal hole in my stomach as I wandered along the storefronts.
Venice Beach was an eclectic mix of the new and the old, the stylish and the odd. Being bored simply wasn’t possible. My eyebrows rose as I got closer to the hub of street performers. Today’s weird included a guy juggling snakes in the center square. That one, I’d seen plenty of times.
He was a staple.
But someone had decided to play DJ today. The extra in today’s entertainment included a set of triplets o
n old-school roller skates rocking out in a perfect V-formation—each of them wearing rainbow shorts with enough glitter paint on their boobs to keep them from getting arrested. And they were skating around said snake juggler to a One Direction song with a decidedly disco flavor.
Just another early morning in the heart of downtown.
I munched on the rest of my pretzel and took a few pictures of the crowd, of the newest addition to the graffiti-plastered walls. New tags and rude gestures made me smile. Even after six months, I was perpetually surprised at what I found on the boardwalk.
The smack talk definitely didn’t end with tagging. The closer I got to the skate park, the rowdier it got. Some days it was quiet, some days it was chaos. Looked like today was chaos.
A group of the more famous GoPro skaters had taken over most of the ramps. I was small enough to squeeze through the watchers. Thank God I had an extra box of cartridges at my disposal. For once, I wished for my SLR. I had one back in my studio, just hated to use it for anything other than portfolio shots for my website. But it sure would have been helpful here.
Lucy ended up taking a few cool streaming shots.
I smiled because it was what I did. I suddenly wished I had that bitch face some people lamented. Especially as I caught the eye of one of the skaters waiting for time.
Crap, did it have to be him? He was a Z-Boys wannabe with only a quarter of the talent. I knew to avoid him and his little crew.
He hustled along the railing and took a ride down the easy ramps to get to where I was.
“Hey, beautiful.”
“Original.”
His smile went wide and his eyes blanked. I was tempted to raise my camera. Rattlesnake-mean was hard to capture, but this guy had it in spades. I stepped back into the crowd and shifted down into the heavier crush of people.
“Where you going? I’m talking to you.”
I didn’t answer him. While the boardwalk was full of fun and art, it was also full of creeps. I knew better than to smile at a guy unless I was definitely looking for conversation. He probably thought I’d given him a sign to come over to talk to me.
Rattlesnake forgotten, I wandered over to the beach side of the park. Where the skate ramps were curved concrete, their counterparts were the jagged monoliths that created benches for the spectators. The smooth, clean lines of the ramps were graffiti-free, but not here. No, this was all tags and mottled colors. Occasionally, someone painted it over, providing another blank canvas for us to make our mark.
My destination was the small corner that a stranger and I had been working on.
I crouched in front of what I considered my half wall. I grinned at the cartoonish figure R-41 had left for me. A bunny with lavender fur and disconcerting buttons for eyes was my starting point.
He was as big as I was.
I dropped my bag of spray paint. This was going to be fun.
Four
I shouldn’t be here.
When I’d awakened this morning to the spider web of cracks on my shitty motel ceiling, I hadn’t planned to do this. Not today. Bad enough I’d deflected a call from Jerry early on. I wasn’t ready to give my report yet. Mainly because for once, I’d been concerned with myself and not with the task at hand.
I had to contact Sabrina and get my career going, not confront old ghosts I had no business dealing with.
Well, forget contacting her. She hadn’t even given me long enough to do that. Instead, she’d been blowing up my mobile all day. I hadn’t even given her my number, but it was probably in my Ripper Records file, along with the circumference of my cock.
I understood the hard sell. Really, I did. But for someone who had supposedly turned in merely a good performance last night, why was she riding my jock like an amusement ride already? It didn’t seem to be Donovan Lewis’s typical MO to chase with such…vigor.
It hadn’t even been a day since we’d spoken. Not long in the scheme of things, but when it came to the record business, evidently everything moved at the speed of light. Fortunes were made and lost in the amount of time I’d spent sleeping away my problems.
A bottle of bourbon had helped. Well, only half. I had a couple surefire sleep elixirs, and one of them involved alcohol. The other I hadn’t had any energy for.
That had to be a first. Too tired to fuck. Coming to America had worked out better for Eddie Murphy in his movie than it was for me so far.
It wasn’t as if I knew any women in the States. Not that they were terribly hard to come by. Even after my only partially successful show last night, I’d had a few groupie-types hanging around outside when I ducked out of the club. More than I’d expected, truthfully. But none of them had interested me. My mind had been spinning from the show and what Sabrina had said. Still was. And those women hadn’t been able to compete with the one in my head anyway.
That real estate solely belonged to Zoe.
I’d spent my solo hours drinking Jim Beam and scrolling through her IG feed. I’d gone all the way back to the beginning of her posts. Three-plus years ago. Earlier on, she’d mixed in a few personal shots along with her work. No selfies. Didn’t seem to be her vibe. Candid shots with friends or family were, however. One was taken in the fall at some farm with hay bales all over the place and a bunch of homespun people smiling at the camera. Zoe was in front of the group, wearing a location-appropriate outfit of dark denim overalls and skin. I couldn’t see a shirt under them but maybe she’d had on a little tank top. Considering whether she’d been wearing a bra, never mind a shirt, had occupied a good ten minutes or so while I studied the snapshot from all angles.
And her smile. Her smile grabbed me as much or more than her top or lack thereof. She’d seemed genuinely happy. Surrounded by people she cared about and holding a fat pumpkin in her arms.
Such a bucolic scene.
I’d finished the bottle with that image behind my eyes, along with a few others. All involved Zoe. Her hugging a tall guy with dark hair while he pointed at a framed picture on the wall behind them. Hers, no doubt. There was some kind of ribbon on it like she’d won an award. Another of her at a concert where she and a friend had mugged for the camera, though Zoe had pulled back as if she didn’t want to be the focus of the shot.
Not as easy for her to step in front of the lens, apparently. Maybe she didn’t like the lack of control in being part of the photo. Or didn’t appreciate being the focus. Whatever the reason, she definitely appeared to enjoy attention being directed elsewhere.
Basically, she was my exact opposite, since I’d been trying like a monkey on a unicycle to get all eyes on me practically since I was in nappies. Trying and failing, mostly. But I’d never given up the pursuit.
Now I was here, about to step off the bus in Carson, California. Here to confront my roots.
If only wood and concrete could talk. Scratch that. It was probably better they couldn’t.
I got off at the stop I’d mapped and swallowed hard at the landscape around me. Modest homes, huddled close together. Relentless sun beating down on them all, wearing away strips of paint and turning lawns brown. Unless that was partly due to the lack of care. All the homes looked the same minus the little details they’d added to try to distinguish themselves. A plastic pink lawn flamingo with a spinning tuft of feathers that rotated on its rump seemed to mock me as I passed the first house on the block. The second had a crooked mailbox and plastic over the front windows. The third had a boarded-up second story.
The farther I walked, the harder it grew for me to breathe, and not because of the smog.
I was no stranger to poverty. To living hand-to-mouth and doing whatever it took to survive. But even with my mum telling me the stories of the hard-scrabble life she’d left behind to come to England, I’d somehow deluded myself that Simon and my dad—my real dad, not the parade of men that blew in and out of my mum’s life—weren’t struggling that much. Sure, times were tough. Wasn’t that true for most people who weren’t born with a silver spoon?
&nb
sp; But this. This was something else.
I’d scrawled down the number of the right house on a piece of motel stationery. I snorted at that. If a motel’s pad by the phone counted as such. But I hadn’t only looked up where Simon and my father had lived. I’d also searched out the address of Nick Crandall’s old house, and Deacon McCoy’s. They’d lived near each other growing up. Kind of like The Temptations and Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson and a lot of the great Motown acts had all been neighbors in their early years.
Not that Oblivion was in their league. Time would prove if they had the chops to be spoken of with reverence as the years passed.
But even now, Oblivion had made a mark. A significant one. And that mark had begun in this neighborhood.
Another spoke of their circle had grown up here as well. Chloe Shawcross, married to one Michael Shawcross, who was the brother of Nick’s sister’s fiancé. More interestingly, Chloe had been engaged to and impregnated by Snake, the man who’d tried to kill Nick and had killed another person they were close to last fall.
So much drama. So many connections. I felt like I needed a scorecard to keep up.
I might also need another run at the maps app on my phone, because the addresses weren’t right. I rechecked my paper. Had I written them down wrong? Or—
Cocking my head, I swallowed hard as I took in the empty, weedy lot between two painfully similar houses. The space for the home in between had been so small, I had taken it for a surprisingly large side yard at first instead of a vacant lot. The child’s bicycle lying on its side atop a mound of dirt had helped me along with that assumption.
But nope. It might be a side yard now, or a community gathering spot for the children. Once upon a time, however, the lot had held the home where my father, mum, and brother had lived.
Where I’d been conceived.
Where my father had died.
Simon had bought this house. I’d thought it odd he would want those memories if it had been as bad as he’d said. Now it all made sense. He’d purchased the property to destroy it.