Louder Than Love

by Topper, Jessica

  Marissa may have promised best behavior, but Adrian was another story. I could tell he was in a rare mood the minute I spotted him in the station lot. He was smoking with an agitated ferocity and barely smiled as Abbey waved through her open window.

  “You don’t seem in the party mood,” I observed cautiously.

  He dropped a fat white envelope in my lap. “Looks like I’m being forced into it.”

  It was addressed to him in enviable script. “I’m shocked it’s not addressed to ‘The Wallet.’ I know that’s what they call me,” he muttered, yanking the stiff announcement from inside. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Smith joyfully request the honour of your presence . . .’ bugger, bugger, blah, blah.” He proceeded to read the entire thing as I slowly navigated us through holiday traffic. “I can’t believe my daughter’s marrying that bolshy Scouser. And at twenty! So much for learning from your parents’ mistakes.”

  “A bushy who, now?”

  Adrian laughed. “Bolshy Scouser. Scouse is the accent from Liverpool. So one is called a Scouser if they hail from Liverpool. And bolshy meaning . . . obstreperous.”

  “Ah, much better.”

  “He gets on my tits . . .” Adrian glanced sheepishly into the rearview mirror at Abbey. “Look at that, my endless prattle put her to sleep.”

  I rolled into the driveway and we quietly got out, leaving the windows down, to allow her the much-needed nap. Marissa’s parties always guaranteed a late night. I ran in to grab us a cold drink and then joined Adrian on the porch steps.

  Across the street, Colin Drimmer rinsed suds off his Subaru with the garden hose. I waved. He gave a grin and lifted a big sponge up in greeting. The cocky guitar strut of AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” could be heard from his radio.

  “Bloke a friend of yours?” Adrian moved to the step above me and gave my shoulders a gentle massaging. I closed my eyes, enjoying the touch and the breeze.

  “Colin? I used to babysit him, if you can believe that. He just finished law school and moved home.” Adrian’s fingers tapped up my spine with the beat of the song as I shifted my own American thighs off the scorch of the hot step and leaned back.

  “For fuck’s sake . . .” His hands froze on my scapulae. “Do you hear that?”

  Colin was hunched down, polishing the headlights with his back to us. The next song drifting over from his car stereo speakers sounded innocent enough. In fact, it was one of those songs turned generic due to oversaturation on the airwaves. I myself had heard it rotated countless times . . . but not since meeting Adrian. It clicked. Rick was singing, “Sanitize my insanity . . . cleanse me, make me whole again, Simone . . .”

  “Well . . . that’s a kick in the arse.”

  “Rick’s love song for Simone?”

  “Not exactly.” I waited while he lit a cigarette. “Wren confided in me one day, expressing ‘concern.’ Rick was falling short in his attempt to write a metal ballad. He tactfully suggested I try my hand at a few lines to help Rick out of his writer’s block, wording his request in such a way that I truly felt I was helping. He showed me what Rick had, and honestly, it was weak. Rhyming Simone with phone and home. It was embarrassing. Sappy has no place in metal. If love was going to appear in our music”—he tapped his chest like it was currently going on inside him—“it had to be doomed, damned, or deadly. So perhaps my lyrics were a bit tongue-in-cheek; a stab at Rick by saying he would never really know how good he had it until he lost it.”

  “Is that how he took it?”

  “No, worse. He thought I fancied her! Wren called a meeting and presented both sets of lyrics to the entire band. Rick took one look and punched me square in the jaw. I wasn’t a doomed soul pining over my ultimate love any more than I was standing on a bloody field on Samso in ‘Blood Oath.’ It was called perspective. Something Rick clearly lacked.”

  “So why didn’t you guys just scrap the whole idea?”

  “Well . . . truth be told, mine was a bloody good song. The rest of the band loved it. The label was timing the release carefully to be in the running for the Christmas number-one single in the UK that year. Rick begrudgingly admitted it was a solid song. But when it came time to credit publishing, he wanted lyrics credited to him, music to me.”

  “He didn’t want Simone to know.”

  Adrian nodded wearily. “What could I do? I let him have it. He was my best friend.”

  “So you wrote a number-one song?”

  “Number two, actually.” Adrian clicked his tongue modestly. “Good thing it didn’t make the Christmas number one; my mum would’ve had a heart attack. Oh yes, she had burst out of the woodwork that year. No matter it was the lowest point in my life emotionally. She was there riding the coattails, hounding me for tickets and bragging to her friends. ‘Ickle Dougie Graves, playin’ at the Hammy-O!’” He cackled. “We were scheduled to play London right before Christmas, then over to the States for three nights at Radio City to kick off the North American leg. Suddenly I was getting calls from her about ‘my number-one fan.’ Rodney, my half brother.”

  “The brother Kevin’s age.”

  “Yes. He was fifteen and she was taking him to London.” I could tell it was difficult for him to continue telling me the tale. How he had sent a car to bring his family to the show, set them up with the best tickets, with backstage passes. “And then like a selfish bastard, I pulled a runner right after the concert. Jumped into a waiting van and left without a word. Holed myself up in my flat and proceeded to shoot Christmas right up my arm.”

  “Oh, honey . . .” He let me pull him into a hug.

  “The seats were so close, I could see them out there in the crowd.” His voice cracked. “The lights usually prevent you from seeing beyond the first few rows. But there they were. Rodney looked so happy. I didn’t acknowledge them, couldn’t even glance in their direction the rest of the night. Where was my happiness at fifteen?”

  Without another word, Adrian went into the house.

  I sighed. Colin was gathering his rags and sponges, oblivious. The song ended, and the disc jockey began yammering, pulling Abbey into the waking world.

  “Mom . . . so thirsty . . .”

  I unhooked her sweaty torso from the seat and she gratefully downed the remains of my water, relishing the cup between her little hands. Slowly, we made our way inside as if we were first-time houseguests.

  “Where’s Adrian?” Abbey squinted, her eyes adjusting to the late afternoon interior light. She followed up with her own reply. “He’s up in the boogeymen room.” Her fuzzy pigtails quivered in defeat; Adrian was one of the few adults she would follow to the ends of the earth, but when it came to the second floor of our house, all bets were off.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. He’ll come down soon.”

  “Maybe if I turn on PBS and Maxwell’s on . . . ?” Selfish motivation or a four-year-old’s simple optimism; either way, I felt a surge of tender sympathy.

  “That’s a great idea, Abbey. You go check and we’ll be down in a few minutes.” I paused on the third step until I heard the demented cackles of Dr. Loveydovey.

  Adrian was stretched out on Kevin’s old bed, hands folded corpse-style over his sternum. Had he been shirtless, he’d have resembled a knight girding his sword to his stony chest in a dusty tomb.

  “You okay?”

  “Just needed to be alone with myself.” He turned his eyes ceiling-ward and chuckled.

  The bedsprings protested as I helped myself to a corner, but Adrian did not. “Can’t stand that ruddy song,” he murmured, tracing undecipherable shapes along my back. “Don’t know why people always wanted to hear it played live. Funny, Simone herself rarely got to hear it; by that point in the evening she had usually left the venue and was putting the children to bed at the hotel. She didn’t bring nannies on the road, with Rick’s track record and all. Meanwhile, every bloke in the audience wa
nted to be with her, every girl wanted to be her. She became a celebrity by association.”

  I leaned my cheek on my shoulder, looking back at him. “Do you think she knew you were the one . . . the one who wrote it?”

  “I think . . . there wasn’t much that Simone didn’t know.” He cleared his throat. “So yeah. I reckon.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  He clasped his hands behind his head, regarding the posters above him once again. I let my fingers fall on the tip of the misericorde, peeking out from below his shirt. “Winter, late ’87. We were playing the final show of that three-night stand at Radio City. The partying went on into the small hours. We were staying at the Plaza . . . but I was wired. I needed a fix get me to sleep. I found myself walking to Eighth Avenue to see a guy I knew who was always good for some quality H. I snorted some at his apartment to mellow me out for the walk back, pocketing the rest to shoot up at the hotel.

  “Anyway, I’m on Broadway passing this all-night diner, you know that place right near the Ed Sullivan Theater? No trendy coffee shops in those days. And there’s Simone, inside by herself. And I thought, Bloody hell. I really just wanted to be alone, get stoned, but there’s my best mate’s girl, and she’s got the raccoon mascara, the ashtray overflowing with half-smoked cigarettes. So I go in and sit across from her. I can see what she was wearing, to this day. These rust-colored platform suede boots up to here”—he smacked at his thigh—“skinny black pants and this studded halter. In New York City she could’ve been a high-class hooker, but she was just Rick’s wife, beautiful mother of his three kids. Of course, he was balling girls on the tour every chance he got; it was a disaster the moment Simone came on the road. That tour she left the children with her parents to reacquaint herself with the stranger she was married to. Meanwhile, she found herself facing a different monster in each of us: Rick’s philandering, my drug-dabbling, et cetera. My therapist always said the three of us had addictive personalities: mine involved the drugs, Rick’s was the fame . . . and Simone was addicted to him. So we’re sitting and she’s smoking and I order a coffee and we don’t say a thing, not a word. My coffee comes and I drink and she smokes. It’s quiet and the place is ours. There was a napkin on the table and I was never without a pen so I start to write and she’s watching me the whole time but I don’t think she’s seeing me. Dawn was breaking through the window behind her and it was a picture I couldn’t not paint with words. I didn’t feel right, showing her. Like I had taken advantage of her sorrow when I should’ve been comforting her. So I added it to my pocket and I took her hands. ‘I’m leaving this time,’ she said, ‘for good.’ We just sat there, holding on for I don’t know how long, felt like hours, till the vampire paparazzi were tipped off and began closing in; snapping away with their cameras and firing questions at us about our affair, how long had it been, did Rick know, and I’m throwing chairs at them and breaking plates over their heads . . . would have driven stakes through their hearts if I could, the bloodsuckers. The diner calls the cops, and Simone . . . bless her. She grabs me and pulls me close and I feel her fingers in my trouser pocket and then she’s pushing me away from her as they grab me and haul me off to jail. She took the heroin, and the words I penned on the napkin, and I never saw her again.”

  “Oh my . . .”

  “Yeah. She saved my neck. Bad enough to be arrested for assault, but a drug charge would have gotten me deported, banned . . . So I’m behind bars and everyone is waking to the news. Rick and Wren come to bail me out and I lay into them, saying things need to change, this can’t go on, you’re killing Simone and Wren’s killing us . . . making us tour 230 days a year, we’ve got no bloody life. Meanwhile I am shaking with DTs and sweating and still bleeding from those broken plates and the police scuffle; probably looked like a raving lunatic. But if Rick could have slowed down for one minute, he would have come to the same conclusions himself.”

  “No such luck?”

  Adrian smirked. “Tour bus left for Boston without me that day. They pulled some twonk to replace me so they wouldn’t void the contracts. The tour tanked; not saying things would have been different had I been there. We just couldn’t weather the perfect storm of personalities, mismanagement, and the downfall of the genre. Corroded Corpse ended up like that mascot on the first album cover—a smoking bloody corpse digging its own grave. We thought we owned the world back then. Well, the world showed us just how fickle it could be; it buried us and moved on. Barely cold in the ground before the likes of Alice in Chains, Corrosion of Conformity, Tool, My Dying Bride, all started signing label deals. Brilliant acts, all will tell you they were heavily influenced by Corroded Corpse, but the music world had already written us off.”

  “I can see why you’re bitter.”

  “Corroded Corpse was like an ancient spider; we spun a huge, ugly egg sack before crawling into a corner to die. All these other bands emerged like tiny spider babies, floating off on their tangent web strands, creating new genres—grunge, alt-metal, sludge, indie, nu-metal, emo. Some climbing higher than we had ever gone. So, bitter . . . yeah. A bit. But proud, too. We started a revolution of sorts. Only we imploded before we could build our defenses. Too many traitors in our midst. And the hardcore fans thought we had sold out with the ballad.”

  “What became of Rick? And Wren?”

  “I saw them here and there. Our lawyers met. We dissolved everything. But there wasn’t much. Wren’s dirty dealings and ‘back commissions’ we owed him were just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, he made a lot happen for us. But he made a lot more happen for himself. For years he was making deals behind our backs that weren’t exactly in keeping with his contract, but there was just enough of a loophole for him to squeak through. And we hadn’t solicited enough legal advisement to catch it. Luckily, the song publishing and our back catalog remained ours, or I’d be living in a paper bag right now. The bastard had copyrighted our name himself, not on behalf of us as we had originally assumed. So even if we ever wanted to reconcile, he’d be able to sue us if we tried to use the name.”

  “You’re kidding. Why would he do such a thing?”

  “Well, remember his whole ‘success formula’ he sold us over that game of pool?”

  “Developing a band and a brand?”

  “Yeah. I think he had imagined churning out a metal Menudo of sorts; replacing each of us after we burned out with an equally young and angry, hungry musician. Almost two decades later and I still wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “And Simone . . . do you think she left?”

  “Whether she did or didn’t . . . I’d like to think she’s happier now, somewhere out there.”

  “Did Sam stay in touch with them? And where’s Adam?”

  “Sam was always my mate, not Rick’s. He’s enjoying life as a session musician in LA. I doubt they’ve maintained a friendship. I’d be highly surprised. Adam? London. Kind of a nutter, became born-again after Cass. Harmless enough, I suppose. Met a girl in the flock and settled down. I think he’s wiped most of Corpse’s sins from his mind . . . and the blood from his hands.” He sighed. “We were gods . . . but no one has the right to be that almighty. To think nothing and nobody could stop us. That was our fatal flaw.”

  With his eyes still skyward, he put a finger to his lips, tapping them yet pointing at something simultaneously. My eyes fell upon a poster ripped from the pages of a rock magazine, hanging in the corner. A decades-younger Adrian, chiseled arms clamped around his childhood chum. A heavily silver-ringed finger of Rick’s pushed against his friend’s nose, flattening it for comic effect. Both man-boys mugged pouts and grimaces for the lens.

  “I’ll do my best to find him . . . if you want me to.”

  Adrian assumed the same exaggerated pout he had pulled for the camera years ago. “My supersleuth,” he said softly, beeping my nose flat with his finger. “Thank you.”

  “Information scientist,” I corrected, w
ith a kiss to his finger. “Your supersleuth is downstairs with Maxwell MacGillikitty. You’ll catch the last five minutes if you hurry.”

  “Come on then.” He pulled at my hands with a smile. “I’m not leaving you up here alone with the boogeymen!”

  ***

  Adrian’s mood had lightened considerably by the time we arrived at Marissa’s. We could smell the festivities as we pulled up; steaks over apple wood chips and Kahlua-brushed salmon, one of Rob’s specialties. My entire posse was gathered on the lawn like the Welcome Wagon. Or perhaps they were circling the wagons in preparation for attack. I hoped not; Adrian had been through enough that day.

  “Hey!” Rob greeted us with his customary broad smile. He wore an apron that read GRILL SERGEANT over his usual tie-dye. “Nice to finally meet you, man.” Adrian accepted Rob’s non-spatula hand and they half shook, half slapped in a manly guy way.

  “It’s about freakin’ time!”

  “Sorry, Mariss. Naptime ran long.”

  Adrian kissed her on both cheeks. “Nice to see you again, Marissa.” From anyone else, she would’ve considered the action as pretentious as air-kissing, but I could tell from Adrian, she didn’t mind one bit.

  “Naptime? Yours or Abbey’s?” Leanna laughed devilishly. She had what looked and smelled like a strong Jack and Coke in her hand. Ed was nowhere to be seen, which didn’t surprise me. He rarely accompanied her to social functions, and she barely seemed to care.

  “Hello, Miss Abbeycadabra,” Liz greeted Abbey, giving her a high five. “Brought you something.” She pulled a kid-sized cap from her bag and plopped it on Abbey’s head.

  “Awesome!” It had a glittery skull with a sequined pink bow on top; happy girly skulls were a favorite. “Thanks, Aunt Lizzie!” Abbey left me to protect it as she galloped toward the splashing and laughter coming from the aboveground pool in the backyard, leaving a trail of clothes in her wake as she stripped down to her suit. Sarah, the Falzones’ babysitter, was waist-high in the water and throwing diving sticks for Joey, Brina, and Dylan to fetch.