by Jesse Jordan
“Shoot, big man,” I reply, pulling out my Batman t-shirt shirt that Joey got me for my birthday and pulling it on. “What's on your mind?”
“This scandal, the others, why are you letting them get to you so much? I mean honestly, man. You know the game in LA, you get press any way you can. And if you don't have something for them to try and tear you down with, they'll make up some shit to try and tear you down with instead. You just happen to be the lead singer of the group, so you get the most press. Nobody gives a damn what I do, I'm just the drummer in the back. As long as I don't actually go out and murder someone, nobody gives a fuck about me.”
“I know, I know. Just... when I started dreaming about being a rock singer, Ian, you know what my dreams were? They weren't of groupies, or of scandals, or of any of the tabloid crap like that. I didn't care about the money. Well, okay, I liked the idea of being rich. But what I wanted to do was make music that made people smile. It was all about the music. I dreamed of playing at Wembley like Queen did, or at some of the big music festivals, not because of the paydays but because I wanted to entertain that many people. For me, the idea of gold and platinum records means we're reaching out and touching people, not that we're getting groupies or any of that extra crap.”
Ian nods before sitting up. He opens his eyes and sees that I've changed my clothes. “I know, Rock. And who knows, maybe we'll get to that point someday. In the meantime though, we gotta deal with the paparazzi.”
I shake my head. “That's the problem, man. Think about it. How many groups got a little bit of fame because of shit like this, and got derailed because of the drama? Where's the Verve now? What about The White Stripes? The Blood Brothers? The Black Crowes? Hell, those are some good fucking bands that got shattered by the stupid fucking scandals! And those are just the ones who really made it big once! What about the ones who never quite made it?”
“Not all that drama was external for them though,” Ian reminds me. “Rocky, the Crowes were killed internally, same with the Stripes. You, me and Joey, we're still copacetic, so you don't have to sweat it.”
“Yeah well, how long is that going to stay?” I worry. “What happens if one day you or Joey gets pissed because of one of these stupid scandals?”
“Then we'll deal with it then,” Ian says, getting up off the couch. “In the meantime, you've got some stress to work off, and I've got a Tempurpedic mattress to crash on. And Martha's going to think the two of us might not be interested in girls as much as the scandal sheets say if we stay in here alone much longer.”
His humor makes me smile, and I grab my bag and jacket. “Okay, okay. Back to the hotel, it is.”
Thankfully for me, the hotel gym is enough for me to get a sweat on and to lose some stress. Sure, it's not Equinox, but it's got a StairMaster and enough stuff that I can get a workout in. I'm about fifteen minutes into my cardio, sweat dripping down my torso and under the loose tank top that I'm wearing when Martha comes in, still in her pantsuit. I pull the bud out of my right ear and give her a once over. “Don't you ever change clothes?”
“Sure,” she says, coming around in front of the machine so I don't have to turn my neck, “I change clothes all the time. But I'm still working, you know. Anyway, I talked with the label, they want to capitalize off this spot on The Tonight Show and the gigs at Rock the Delta and CBGBs. What do you say to some studio time?”
I grin and pop out my left earbud, letting the electro-violin I'm listening to fade. “Studio work? They want another EP?”
“They want a whole LP album,” Martha corrects me. I'm stunned and miss a step on the machine for a second before catching my rhythm again. “Yep, they want to upgrade you guys to a premier act. And maybe a headlining shot on your next tour dates. No more opening for the acts who pack the stadium, but peaked years ago.”
“Whoa. I mean, we've got some material we've been head gaming on, but this is awesome. When do they want to start?” I ask, still pumping away with my legs on the StairMaster. “And where do they want to do it? Oceanside Studios again?”
Martha shakes her head, tapping at her tablet. “No, they're trying to get a hot new producer they want to pair you guys with. Apparently, she's been doing guest spots with various studio acts, to the point that she's getting the attention of the label itself. I listened to some of the stuff they sent of hers. She's got good chops. Nothing famous yet, action movie soundtracks, some padding work on pop albums, but for what she's been given to work with, she turns shit into shinola more often than not. They didn't gimme her name, but they're wanting to bring her in, giving her a shot with you guys, she has apparently been bugging to get work in the rock genre.”
“So, where?” I repeat. “And when?”
“Burbank, by the airport at the main Gashouse studios, and as for when... they said next month. They want the Fragments to finish up your concert dates in San Fran and Oakland; take a couple weeks off to get your heads right, and then hit the studio hard. What do you say?” Martha says, her smirk saying she knows the answer even before I say it.
“I say that it's the best news all day. I could kiss you.”
Martha laughs, walking away. “You know some day, I might just take you up on that offer. For now, get your sweat on, and I'll tell the other guys... if Ian's awake. Hey, have you said anything to him about not sleeping naked?”
I laugh and grab my earbuds, putting them to listen to music that gets my mind off the ache building in my calves as I go into the last five minutes of my StairMaster routine.
Cora
“B says buh and C says cuh, D says duh and E says eh....” Bella sings with me as we play with her dolls. I'm always shocked at just how intelligent my daughter is, just past three and a half and she's got most of the alphabet memorized both visually and phonetically. Knowing her, she's going to be reading by the time she turns four.
We finish up the song while putting clothes on Missy and Jazzy, Bella's two favorite dolls, and put them to bed in their little house. It's not a lot, the walls of each room are made from shoeboxes and the furniture isn't the right size for the two dolls, but Bella and I built it together, covering the sides with pink contact paper and decorating it with plenty of little stickers that make it unique and totally Bella. I sit back and give it a once over. “What do you think, honey? Think Missy and Jazzy are safe for the night?”
“Uh huh, Mommy,” Bella says, rubbing at her eyes and yawning. She's still got hair that is mostly blond, although I figure that she'll start to go brown soon enough. After all, her father was a brunette, not that I've seen him in four years. Once he found out that I was pregnant with Bella, he bounced pretty quickly. “I'm sleepy too.”
“Okay baby, then how about I read you a book while you get yourself comfortable in bed?” I ask, standing up and taking her by the hand. Our apartment is tiny, only a one bedroom, but that's okay, Bella doesn't mind sleeping with her Mommy still. “What would you like to hear tonight?”
“Elsa!” Bella immediately says, and I have to control the roll of my eyes. She's a little girl, of course she's going to love Frozen.
“Elsa, it is then,” I say, scooping her up and setting her in her spot on the bed. Not that Bella will stay there. It's the main reason I got rid of the box springs and we just have the mattress now, she can't hurt herself falling from eight inches up.
“Mommy?” Bella asks as I tuck the blanket around her, sitting down on the carpet next to the bed and opening the book. “Do you ever miss Daddy?”
“Daddy?” I ask, surprised. While I've never lied to Bella about who her father is, she's never met him. And I've never tried to demonize him, I just ignore him for the most part. “No honey, why?”
“Well, Lemondrop was talking about her Daddy the other day when you were at work,” Bella says, referring to one of her classmates at the daycare that's close to the studio where I'm working right now. Hollywood types, they never cease to amaze me with their ability to screw up names for children. “She says that she misse
s him while he's in Tanazia.”
“Tanzania, honey. And Lemon's got a different situation than us,” I reply. “Maybe someday we'll find a man who is good enough to be your Daddy, but for now… no, I don't miss your father.”
“Okay,” Bella says sweetly, smiling. “Maybe he can be like Kristoff?”
“Better than Olaf,” I tease, giving Bella a kiss on the forehead. “Now... let's see... Far away, in the kingdom of Arendale...”
Bella's asleep by the time that the snowman even makes an appearance, and I give her another kiss on the forehead. I make sure she's okay before I shut off the lamp next to the bed and go out to the other room of our place. I've lived here since Bella's birth, and while it's small, it's home. Mom and Dad understand, and they're more than happy to have me drop Bella off whenever I need to, but more importantly, they are supportive of me trying to make it on my own too.
The first thing I do when I get to the other room is to go through the mail. Electricity, gas, the Internet... I can pay those online tonight before I go to bed. Junk, junk, junk.... ah, I've been looking for this. “Well, hello again, Duane Phillips,” I mutter to myself, slicing open the envelope and taking out the money order inside. “Still doing it the hard way I see?”
I chuckle and set the money order on top of my backpack, I can drop it off at the bank tomorrow. As much as I love Bella, having sex with Duane Phillips has literally been the most disappointing experience of my life. After leaving high school, and seeing Rocky pretty much get caught up right off the bat with his new band, I was lonely and desperate. A chance meeting at LACU where he brought up the prom dance again, a little bit of drinking at a party, and boom... instant pregnancy.
I remember asking him explicitly to deal with it the time the burning issue of my virginity came up. And we did do it again, so I can't really be sure if it was the night I lost my virginity, or the night a week later when Duane fucked me in the back of his car that got me pregnant. We were trying to be a 'couple,' and that's what couples do, right? They fuck.
Not that Duane wanted to continue as being a couple once I missed a couple of periods and figured out I was pregnant. Duane was a drunken mistake, followed by an immature girl's attempt to try and put a band-aid on that mistake. Thankfully, his parents are high profile enough that all I had to do was threaten to go to the courts and get him labeled as a deadbeat dad before they signed a private child support agreement right away. Okay, so maybe if I'd fought a little harder, I could have gotten quite a bit more than I'm currently getting. But then I'd have had to worry about lawyers, custody agreements, and all that shit. Duane's off the hook, and if he wants to be a little childish himself by sending his thousand a month via certified money order instead of a simple electronic bank payment, I can still use the money.
I glance at the clock and see that it's only nine o'clock, I'm feeling just fine after getting some work done. I go over to my home computer setup and load up my current project. With Bella's birth, my hopes for a four-year degree were cut short, and I used a two-year degree from LACU to start getting unpaid internships with the local music and film studios. I spent a year scraping change out from between the sofa cushions, getting food stamps, and not turning down a single offered free munchie from anyone at any studio before I started making a name for myself. The money's still not great, but I'm starting to get better work.
Work like my current project. Sure, it's a cheesy action flick. Sure, the tracks that I've been handed were recorded in a total of two days by two different studio bands. But with a little bit of work, I've gotten something halfway decent out of the eight tracks of utter dogshit that I was handed. I managed to pull seven usable songs out, mixing it with some backing tracks from the studio sessions.A little mix-n-match, some tweaking, and I've got all but one of the ten tracks that the studio wants ready.
Best of all, I can do all the work for this on my home setup. If I turn in something that can be taken from a 128 kB/sec Mp3 compression and laid into the movie, the studio's more than happy with it. I even upgrade it a little, going with a better compression.
It takes a little searching, a little equalizing and some stretching, but by the time that eleven thirty rolls around, I'm happy with the results. I compile the song and save everything to the burnable Blu-Ray that I'm using for this project and back it up on my external hard drive. It’s a habit I picked up after I got stiffed by an indie studio for a project, saying that I didn't do what I said I did and disappearing with the data. Without data backups, I was out twelve hundred dollars, and Bella had to eat nothing but Grandma's leftovers and mac n’ cheese for a week. Never again.
I'm not tired as I stand up and I decide to turn on the TV. I don't watch much, but the cable is included in the deal for this place, so I sometimes catch the news or some of the late-night shows. I flip channels until I land on KNBC, where the guest host is in the middle of his introduction.
“All right folks, tonight we've got a killer, killer show lined up for ya!” the former NFL player says. “First, here to talk about her new movie where she's certainly showing a side of her that we've not seen before, we've got a sit down with the lovely and beautiful Emma Watson!”
The studio cheers and the host holds his hands up. “That's what I said too when I showed up for work today. In fact, I told my wife, and her reply was that if I didn't keep my hands to myself... well, let's just say there'd be a wizard short of his wand tomorrow morning.”
Okay, even I had to chuckle at that one. The host continues. “Also, straight off a season that has a lot of people comparing him to another handsome face who played in the NFL… seriously, I don't know who that could be... Christian McCaffery!”
Not as much of a round of applause, but I can understand. He played at Stanford, a lot of the New York audience probably wasn't familiar with him. Still, he's a good-looking, clean-cut player, the type of poster boy the League office loves. Okay, looking better.
“And finally, y'all, our musical guests tonight, taking over for the Tonight Show band while Jimmy’s on vacation. When I was asked to guest host, I asked NBC to line up something hot as you guys have seen. Something just a little bit different than what y'all might be used to. Something that rocks. And boy, did they deliver. So tonight, for one night only, our special guest band who has guaranteed me to play their hit single Slam the Floor, the Fragments!”
I sit up, nearly dropping the remote as Rocky and the other two members of his band are shown on screen. My God. Five years. Five years and barely a word from Rocky. I can't blame him really. After that promise to hang out all summer, he and the Fragments were working the roads hard. Not only playing gigs all over southern California but also out in Arizona, New Mexico... anywhere that they could get noticed. With all of that, getting together was impossible over the summer, and then once school started, I had classes. Daily e-mails became every other day, became every week or so, became... Well, the story's one that lots of people have told over the years, just the technology changes.
When I got pregnant with Bella, I wasn't even sure how to tell him. How do you tell the man that you wrote the best piece of work you've ever done for, that you went out a few months later, half drunk, and got yourself pregnant? So, after giving birth, I just kind of... stopped. But I didn't stop thinking about him. Every time he and the Fragments have gotten press, I've checked it out. A lot of it over the past two years or so have been scandals, Rocky's gotten himself a reputation, as one tabloid website calls him, of being 'rock's newest fallen angel.' There's something about all the press though that just doesn't jive with the Rocky Blake I went to junior high school and high school with.
Then again, five years can change people. The girl I was had been too afraid to show Rocky a sheet of paper with some poetry, poetry that in her dreams she wanted to set to music for him. I still keep that notebook in my backpack, in an inside pocket that I use to remind myself of who I was, to motivate myself to stick to my dreams. Also to remember the mistakes I made. The woman I
am now, she's stronger and more cautious. Maybe Duane Phillips gave me a gift in addition to Bella.
“Up next guys, after the commercial break, Rocky Blake, Joey Rivera, and Ian Ivory sit down with us for a little bit before giving us a few songs off their latest EP along with their hit single Slam the Floor,” the guest host of The Tonight Show says, before Joey plays a little guitar riff that takes them out to commercial. Huh, I've been so focused on my reflection of the past, that I missed Emma Watson's interview. Ah well, I was never a Harry Potter fan anyway.
My phone buzzes and I'm glad that I've got it perma-set on vibrate. Music people run weird hours, and with that, they tend to forget that three-year-olds go to sleep when they're just starting work sometimes. At least I'm not in New York, I've heard that some of the West Coast people will call at one in the morning LA time, forgetting that on the East Coast that it's four. “This is Cora Clearwater.”
“Hi, this is Larry Olson, with Gashouse Records. How are you tonight, Miss Clearwater?”
Gashouse Records. I've heard of them, they're in the same 'cloud' as a lot of my projects. Despite the plethora of studio names running around Hollywood, the reality is that most of the studios, radio stations, movie makers, television and more are owned by the Big Six conglomerates. While I've never directly worked for Gashouse, we've shared 'clouds' before, a lot of the movies and the indie pop work I've done are under labels associated with the same cloud as Gashouse. I wonder what he wants?
“I'm doing okay, Mr. Olson. Just finishing up a movie project that someone asked me to do. How can I help you tonight?”
Olson's got a melodic voice, he sounds like maybe back in the eighties he used to be a radio deejay, although now he sounds like he's spent too many days sitting in an office and not behind a mic. “Are you watching TV right now, Miss Clearwater? An act of ours is playing The Tonight Show. The Fragments, have you heard of them?”