by Jo Raven
Tryp said, “I was living in a shitty hotel because my girlfriend OD’ed on heroin and was in a coma. I didn’t know how to wash the blood off the walls of her apartment.”
“That must have been terrible.” She opened his door, frog-marched him through the living room of the suite to his bedroom, and shoved him toward the bed. He landed on it like a redwood falling in the forest.
“She died,” Tryp said. “Liver failure.”
Elfie really should cut him some slack. She had been hanging around the other techs too long, verbally abusing the drunk musos. “I am really sorry about that.”
She closed the drapes, darkening the room and shutting out the bright morning sun outside. He only had five hours to sleep before his wake-up call.
“You wanna suck my dick?” Tryp mumbled into the pillow.
Elfie jumped back, nearly slamming into the wall, but Tryp was still prone on the bed, nearly comatose. She said, “Not in the slightest.”
“Why not? What kind of a groupie are you?” he kind-of whined.
She shook out her arms and started toward the door. “I’m the pyrotechnics technician, you jackass. Now go the fuck to sleep before I put a bomb in your bass drum tonight.”
“Promises, promises,” he muttered. “Where was the show today, Elfie?”
“Sacramento.”
“And where are we now?”
“Berkeley.”
“No wonder it’s so fucking cold.”
He looked cold, lying on his belly on the bed like that, even though he was dressed in leather pants and a ripped-up tee shirt, his scarlet and black tattoos visible through the slices in the fabric. Hotel rooms are always damp and cold, so Elfie flipped the other side of the comforter over him.
He said, “I hate Berkeley. We always have to do a runner.”
In arenas without backstage facilities, the musicians ran to waiting SUVs where they were cooped up and belted down, sweaty and shaking with adrenaline, sometimes for hours while they were driven to the hotel or the tour bus.
Technicians didn’t rate runners. Elfie stayed and tore down her pyro effects and the lighting battans.
“Yeah, runners suck.” Elfie edged toward the door and put her hand on the light switch.
“Don’t go.”
“I’m not going to fuck you, Tryp.”
“Just stay.” His face was half-buried in the pillow. “I’ll die and no one will know.”
“You’re just drunk. You’re not going to die.”
“I feel like I’m going to die.”
“Lay off the Jagermeister. That shit is poison.”
“Please stay.” His hand twitched on the sheet like he was reaching for her.
So Elfie sat in the chair and waited until Tryp’s breathing evened out and he went to sleep, his face mashed into the pillow, before she went and found her own hotel room to crash for a few hours while the rest of the crew struck the concert stage and lighting rig before they packed the semis and everybody trooped to San Francisco the next day.
Rise and Shine
When she came back to wake him up, Elfie closed the door to Tryp’s room quietly, standing in the gloom. She stepped through a wall of stale smells: dribbled whiskey, filthy laundry, and sour, male sweat.
“Hey,” she said, but Tryp didn’t answer. The lump on the bed didn’t even twitch. She walked across the hotel carpeting to the side of the bed and leaned on it, bending the bed toward her. His shoulder and arm still lay on top of the sheet. “Hey, Tryp.”
The heavy curtains blocked out the late afternoon sunlight, and the night filled the hotel room like dark water. “Tryp?”
She put a knee on the bed, reaching for his shoulder, but drew back. Getting too close was a bad idea. She should have brought Rock or Jonas or someone with her. If Tryp had gotten a hold of something after she had left, he might come awake with a start and not know what the hell he was doing. Rade, the keyboard player, had been crazy-paranoid on cocaine and attacked one of the other roadies with a knife from under his pillow when they tried to wake him up.
“Tryp?” she said. “Come on, man. Time to rise and shine.”
He still didn’t move.
She couldn’t hear him breathing.
Every other time that she’d had to babysit Tryp and roust him out of bed, he had drunk-snored at least a little. The comforter lay over him exactly where she had thrown it last night, with his one black motorcycle boot still hanging off the edge of the bed, toe pointing to the floor.
Silence hung, suspiciously like her heart was the only one in the room that was beating. “Tryp? Are you okay?”
He still didn’t move.
The comforter was navy blue. In the darkness, she wouldn’t be able to see darker blood staining it.
Elfie backed up. The smooth walls were bare of blood or bullet holes. She pushed open the door to the bathroom and flipped on the light, but no one was in there, either. She ducked down and lifted the bedskirt, but the hotel bed was built on a platform so that people wouldn’t lose their shoes or kids’ toys under it.
Okay. No one was hiding in the room. If he was dead, and if it was murder, the murderer had left.
Elfie stepped closer, toes leading, tentatively. She sprinted across catwalks and shinnied across lighting booms. She wasn’t the tentative type, but her heart was flipping in her chest like a snake trying to writhe out of a fist. She stood on his side of the bed, unsure what to do.
“Tryp. It’s time to wake up. Tryp?” She touched his shoulder, and his skin was cool.
Ah, fuck. Tryp had died of alcohol poisoning, and not only was she the roadie who had let the drummer for Killer Valentine die and would be blackballed from every show forever, but she also hadn’t held his hand when he had wanted her to, when he had known he was dying. What a piece of shit, she was.
Elfie sank to her knees beside the bed. “Tryp? Honey? Please wake up?”
His fingers were still curled on the sheet where he had reached for her last night. She lifted them. In her palm, his fingers were pliant and a little warmer than his shoulder. “Tryp?”
His fingers jumped in her hand.
“Tryp? Tryp! You’re okay, right?”
He opened one dark eye, his lashes as black as the curling hair tousled over his forehead.
She said, “Oh my God. You’re okay.”
“You stayed,” he said.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth, not when it felt like the angels had dumped his soul back into his wrecked body. “It’s time to get up, buddy. The radio station will be calling soon. I ordered you some breakfast.”
He raised up on his elbows and shook his head. “Did I get in a fight last night? Someone smash a bottle over my head?”
“I think it’s just a hangover, Tryppy.”
He rolled over on the bed and raked his black curls out of his eyes. “I hate that nickname.”
“Tryppy?”
“Yeah. Makes me sound like a cokehead.”
Elfie didn’t rise to the bait. “So what would you rather be called?”
“Tryfon.” Try-fonn.
She pulled back the curtains, and the winter sunset reflected off solar panels erected in the vacant lot across the street from the hotel. Elfie squinted against the scarlet light. “Your real name is Tryfon?”
“Tryfon Diavolos Areleous.”
“Diavolos? Like the Devil?” Another name for the Devil was the Prince of Fire. That was actually kind of cool.
“Yeah, with a name like that, I could never have been a good little kid. It’s Greek. I thought you would know that.” He groped for his drumsticks on the nightstand and spun them in his fingertips and around his knuckles, nearly fumbling them. “Some groupie you are.”
“I am so sticking a bomb in your bass drum tonight.” She patted one of the cargo pockets on her pants to ensure that she could make good on her threat right then, if she needed to.
Tryp’s twirling drumsticks flashed red in the sunset. He sighed, “I s
uppose I would deserve it.” His body racked, and he dropped the sticks and muttered, “Oh, shit,” and ran for the bathroom.
Vomiting in the bathroom was right polite of him. Some of the other band members just turned their heads and yakked off the side of the bed. Elfie waited until the water-splatting sounds stopped and the toilet flushed. Tryp stumbled out of the bathroom, catching himself on the door jamb and shaking his head. He even had the decency to duck his head in embarrassment. “Shit. I hate that.”
“Breakfast will be delivered—” a knock rattled the door, “—about now.”
“I never eat that shit. I think Jonas gets off on torturing us by having a bunch of bacon and shit delivered. When we were in London last year, he ordered kippers.”
She opened the door to let the waiter guy push the cart in. “I got you some nice, bland stuff.”
Tryp collapsed on the bed and clutched his drumsticks like he was at a craps table and was depending on a lucky rabbit’s foot. “Just let me sleep until the radio station calls.”
She consulted her phone. “They’re going to call in five minutes. Just take a couple bites. It’ll sop up some of that rotgut you were drinking last night and will do you more good than a few minutes of sleep.”
She was so lying. They had a half-hour until the radio station called. She meant to get him to shower, too, because he smelled like he hadn’t done that in a couple days. Most of the time, the Terrible Threesome—Tryp, Rade, and Grayson—didn’t shower for weeks on end. Their busy schedule of drugs, bars, strip clubs, and vomiting didn’t leave time for such luxuries, and the groupies never complained. She was kind of worried that the oil on his skin might be so thick that it might be flammable, and her pyrotechnics would be pretty close to his drumset on tomorrow’s smaller stage. She didn’t want to ruin her perfect record of never having burned a band member to death.
Tryp rolled off the bed and staggered to the cart. “What did you get?”
“Orange juice, to hydrate you and pop up your blood sugar to take the edge off the hangover. Some buttered toast and oatmeal, for bland carbs. Some egg whites if you can stomach them, for protein.”
He sniffed the cart. Elfie pretended not to notice that the cart wasn’t the source of most of the odors in that hotel room. He said, “Doesn’t smell too bad.”
Elfie bit her upper lip, and then bit it some more. She managed to say, “Try the orange juice.”
He sipped a few swallows.
“Okay,” she said. “Stop for a second and let that absorb into your bloodstream.”
“You know a lot about nursing a hangover?”
She smiled at him because she did feel sorry for him, even if all this pain was self-inflicted. A lot of rockers were self-medicating with the various chemicals they got into, and Elfie had seen the rather severe side effects of these particular over-the-liquor-store-counter pharmaceuticals before. “A little.”
“Okay.” He leaned back on his elbows. “How come you’re being so nice to me?”
“Because hangovers suck, and I’m sorry that you have one.”
Tryp’s eyebrows lowered, but he smiled with one side of his mouth. “You’re a weird one.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Some of the roadies dump ice water on me or have their phone play a bugle or some shit. Jonas can be a dick.”
“Sip your juice.”
He took a long pull off the orange juice. “I don’t feel like hurling quite so much.”
“Right after you barf, you feel better, so that’s when you should drink something to pump up your blood sugar. It’s that post-puke afterglow.”
“Right.” He sipped some more. “What’s that oatmeal got in it?”
“Nothing, so far. Maybe a little sugar would be good. Save the add-ins for after you get a couple bites down.”
Tryp managed to get a few bites down before he stood. “I’ve got to whiz. I’ll be back.”
This time, he managed to shut the door behind himself. Again, better than some of the other band members who just rolled over and pissed off the edge of the bed because they were too hammered or hungover to stand or crawl.
He came out of the bathroom, wiping his hands on a towel. “Got some more of that slimy stuff?”
She handed him the bowl of oatmeal, and he ate it, very slowly, stopping after each couple bites to contemplate the white china bowl in his hands. His fingers wrapped most of the way around the bowl, curling up the sides like tree roots.
When he had finished it, he handed the bowl back to her. “That was okay.”
Elfie checked her phone again. “Hey, I just got a text saying that the radio station interview is going to be twenty minutes late,” she lied.
Tryp groaned and flopped backwards on the bed.
“You have time for a quick shower, if you want.”
“The other guys will say I’ve gone all prissy,” but he was already stumbling toward the bathroom.
“I’ll toss some clothes in for you,” she called after him.
She got into his luggage, ignoring the baggies of dried plant matter and white powder, and rummaged for clean clothes. In the lid pocket, sunlight shined on a long line of circle-in-a-square plastic condom packets. She tried not to look at those. How embarrassing to be caught with sex stuff.
Near the bottom, among the litter of broken drumsticks, she found jeans and a black tee shirt with zippers sewn into it.
“Hey!” Tryp stuck his head out of the bathroom. Steam billowed out around his black curls and broad, inked shoulder. “Don’t steal my stash.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. Here.” She tossed his clothes to him.
He caught them with one hand, picking them out of the air as they fluttered. His arm was wrapped with muscle, and blue and black tattoos painted his rounded shoulder down to his wrist. “Thanks.”
She set the interview phone—because they didn’t hand out the musician’s personal phone numbers for interviews—and the cheat sheet listing the radio station, DJ, and city on his nightstand.
“S’alright. That radio station should call in about fifteen minutes, but I’m going to jet, okay? I’ve got people to see and things to blow up.”
“Cool. See you at sound check tomorrow.” He grinned at her and took one more step out of the bathroom. A white towel was slung low around his hips, and tattooed muscle rippled down his body to the deep vee below his navel that pointed toward the towel.
Elfie looked back at the rumpled bed, studying the bleached sheets.
He was kind of pretty when he wasn’t sick unto death from hard liquor, not that she was looking at him, not that she ever looked at guys.
She said, “If you chow down on those egg whites, you’ll feel even better.”
He glanced at the table, a little less suspiciously than before. “I’ll chow. Later.”
He shut the bathroom door.
Elfie let herself out of his hotel room and went to find the bus to the arena for the load-in. She had explosives to set up.
Band Meeting
For the first time in months, Tryp sat in the pre-concert band meeting in Xan Valentine’s hotel suite, twirling a drumstick in his left hand, and studied the set list instead of concentrating all his effort on not vomiting all over Xan’s funny-looking black boots.
He squinted. What the hell kind of animal were those made out of, anyway? The ebony leather had some kind of scales, but you really couldn’t see what it was through the black gloss, and Xan’s black slacks hid the tops. They looked like ankle-height dress shoes anyway, not proper motorcycle boots or even cowboy boots.
Xan Valentine, the lead singer and driving force behind the band Killer Valentine, ran a hand through his long hair, pulling it back from his face. His hair was medium brown on top, but blond ends waved around his ears. The earring dangling from his lobe was a thick, black chain with a huge green crystal at the end.
“We’ve only got a few months left of this tour,” he said, and his British accent was thick to
day, “so we need to start thinking about recording the next album. I’ve got a few tracks, but we need more. Several more.”
When Xan was drunk, when he was relaxed, he made fun of his own English accent, calling it a Royal Shakespeare Company knock-off, full of round, dark brown vowels, which he exaggerated as rao-oond, dahk braun vow-ools.
Xan wasn’t ever laughing or drunk these days, and he kept his songwriting notebook shoved under his armpit all the time when he wasn’t on stage. Sometimes he weighed it in his palm and stared at the hotel balcony and the long, long way down to the sun-dappled swimming pool below.
Tryp had a song in his own notebook, music and lyrics, but he flinched like a toothache stabbed him, just thinking about it. Even if Xan might like the song, even if he needed it, that song wasn’t ready yet.
Or, really, Tryp wasn’t ready to play it for anyone yet.
And he might never be.
He spun a drumstick between his knuckles, let it rise to his fingertips, and passed it to his right hand without breaking the spin.
Tryp sipped his clear soda, trying to hydrate like Elfie had told him to. His radio interview today hadn’t been a jumble of half-mumbled curses and retching sounds, something to be proud of in this fucking mess.
Tryp cradled his still-aching head in his other hand, still rolling the drumstick in his right. He hadn’t completely recovered.
On the couch across from him, the newish back-up singer Rhiannon was taking notes as Xan dissected their last few performances of each song on the set list, her bright auburn hair bouncing as she scratched her ideas and corrections on the paper. Curled up on the couch with her soft legs tucked under her like that, she looked like a fluffy ginger cat, like some of his sisters had looked when he was a little kid, cuddly and kind.
Rhiannon scribbled on the paper some more. They still hadn’t fit her for an in-ear monitor yet, so she taped her notes on her monitor wedge every night. He was surprised that Jonas hadn’t gotten that done yet, considering Jonas was fucking her as they had all discovered last weekend on the blowout on the bus. Xan was still pissed at both of them.