by Nick Apuzzo
I approached the receptionist who could easily have been moonlighting as a lingerie model, and told her who we were to see and she immediately led us to an impressive glass enclosed conference room. The table is worth describing; it was about ten feet long and very wide, it was made out of some kind of highly polished rich looking wood, and it was a little curved. Set into the middle of the table was a large, thick section of glass or plexiglass and molded into this big piece of material was a Fender Stratocaster with a candy apple red finish. There was an autograph on the guitar but none of us could make it out.
"Think we can steal this?" Kenny asked, from his high-backed plush conference chair.
"Something tells me it's one of the reasons that the walls are all glass…so no one can make off with it." I said.
The receptionist came back, pulling a cart behind her loaded with drinks…soda, coffee, tea, wine, vodka and even a cheese platter. After she'd transferred everything from the cart to a serving area built into the wall, she told us that Doug would be just another minute. We descended upon the free drinkables like locusts in a wheat field.
"The cheese plate looks like it was sculpted. I'm afraid to touch it." I said "Kenny, if I take some cheese, can you arrange it so it looks nice again?"
"No sweat." he said.
I took some cheese.
Doug came through the door at high speed; he shook everyone's hand "So…you found parking! Someday you'll have to tell me how you did that." prompting laughter all around "Everyone have something to drink?" nods all around "Good."
"So Doug, what's all this about us having to perform in those Scottish kilts?" Ingy said.
"I'm not givin' up my pants!" I managed to add before Tommy spoke.
"Aaaaand here we go with the jackass sisters." Tommy said.
"You have nice legs Nick, don't shortchange yourself." Ingy added with an earnest expression.
"Well, maybe I was hasty…" I said.
"OK. Alright. Let's get down to business." Doug said with a chuckle and a spread of his hands "We're ready to sign you. You'll go into the studio in L.A. and lay down all of the originals you've written, maybe you'll want to see if you can come up with more in the mean time." as he spoke he retrieved a drink and sat back down "We'll have someone work on some album cover designs and we'll take some press photos…"
As Doug is saying this I feel like I've been hit on the head with a mallet; not that I'm in pain, I'm just stunned. As much as we had thought about this, I wasn't prepared for the offer to come so soon. I was hearing his voice, I understood what he was saying, but it was like I was standing in the corner of the conference room watching the meeting.
"…one of our largest acts is starting a nationwide tour in a matter of weeks, and the opening act fell out of the deal, and you guys are a better match than they were anyway."
"Who?" I heard my own voice asking.
"I can't say, it's not like you couldn't figure it out if you put some time into it, but it's a contractual thing, I can't talk about it specifically with you guys yet." he said "The contract is standard. I don't know what you may have heard, but we don't customize the contract with a new band. There are so many things that are unknown it just doesn't make sense. I'll give you each a copy of the contract and I strongly advise you NOT to go over it with your cousin the lawyer; if you seek legal advice please work with an entertainment lawyer. It's a specialized field and if you get help, it needs to be expert help." he finished his drink "There WILL be questions and concerns but don't worry too much about them. We'll talk, we'll work it out before anyone signs anything, and it'll be fine. My advice…all you should be worrying about at this point is how to do more of what you're already doing."
It was quiet for a while and Doug waited and gave us time to process.
It was Sean who eventually broke the silence "Well. We'll look at what you have and let you know as soon as we've had time to absorb it all."
"Fair enough. You're going to have a lot of questions. You don't have to save them up for a meeting, just give me a call anytime and ask."
He stood, put his hands on his hips and lowered his head, every one of us could sense he had something else on his mind and none of us moved.
"You guys seem remarkably functional and level headed for a young band so I'd like to share something with you." he said, then looked up at us "One of the shortest measureable times in the universe seems to be the time between a contract signing and the explosion of ego of at least one band member. I like you guys…don't let it happen…you'll fuck everything up. Trust me on this, of ALL of 'em, it's the most common mistake to make…and the easiest to prevent."
"My assistant will attend the next meeting since I have a pedicure scheduled." Ingy said.
"Exactly." said Doug, with a little smirk.
Doug took us to dinner after the meeting; he had a stretch limo waiting at the curb. We climbed in and tried to look like we weren't impressed, but I'm sure we weren't fooling anyone. He took us to Carmine's in midtown, a great Italian place that serves family style entrée's. Any item you order could feed a small Italian village. I was expecting everyone to fire questions at Doug but instead we just ate, drank, joked and ate some more; it was a really fun time. The limo dropped each of us at our parking spot too which was a bonus. With so much food and wine in our bellies, we were all too sleepy to talk about the night's events and agreed to get together the following day, Thursday.
Track 20
Fast Food
Thursday came with a vengeance, the sun was blinding, the sky was of the purest azure, the air crisp and crystalline and the last of the previous week's snowfall had melted away. Tommy had a new job starting on this day and he stopped at the Rickel Home Center to restock some supplies. Hope had 'borrowed' one of his good cloth tarps for a home project and when he saw her with a pair of scissors he knew that he had to purchase another. Even though he took excellent care of his tools, Tommy's four inch brush was becoming too frayed and had started to streak, so he had to pick up a new one of those. He took his time moving through the aisles; when it came to painting Tommy never rushed. When he painted he moved with skill and confidence and had learned that by the time a painter had touched up the mistakes he made by rushing, he could have saved time by moving at a comfortable pace and not making mistakes.
Twenty minutes later he pushed a shopping cart out to his van; he opened the doors in the rear and began to transfer the tools into the van. Lying in the seam of the opened right side door was a guitar pick, he picked it up and smiled, it had the faces of the Three Stooges on it…it was one of Kenny's; Kenny had the most bizarre collection of pics. One night Tommy remembered Kenny flicking a pick at him, flying beer-cap style. Tommy caught it and looking at it in his hand he saw a cartoon Mayor McCheese head. Where he got these he refused to divulge, but he always played with something unusual and Nick and Ingy found them hilarious and regularly raided his guitar case.
Tommy smiled to himself "Kenny."
Jimmy was late for work on this day. He was driving southeast on Route 3 heading for the Lincoln Tunnel, and as he was passing through Secaucus he saw an attractive woman standing next to her car up ahead. When he'd pulled onto the shoulder he could see that she had a flat tire, it was on the rear driver's side.
"Trouble?" He asked as he got out of his car.
"I must have run over something." she said as she pulled her coat tighter around her and as she did it accentuated her considerable cleavage, and that unconsciously added to Jimmy's charitable nature.
However, now that he was close to her, something about her seemed a little less attractive; perhaps she was high or just coming off a night shift or something. She had a tired, unfocussed look in her eyes and she looked just a little bit older than he'd first thought.
"It's cold out here, why don't you pop the trunk and let me handle the rest. You can sit in the car where it's warm."
"That's so nice of you. Are you sure?"
"Yeah, let me handle it. Jus
t open the trunk and I'll change it for you, won't even take ten minutes."
She moved to the trunk, opened it, and watched as he removed a green duffle bag and a pair of pants on a hanger, wrapped in dry-cleaner plastic. He lifted the spare out of the trunk along with the jack and lug wrench.
She quickly put the duffle bag and pants back into the trunk and closed it, saying "It'll get cold in the car if we leave it open, and I hate to say it but I'm freezing."
She smiled as she said it and touched Jimmy's hand, her hand felt warm and moist.
"No problem, I'll let ya know when it's done. When you get back in, put the parking brake on, OK?"
“Sure.” she said as she got back in the car and pushed the pedal as far toward the floor as she could to set the parking brake.
Jimmy worked quickly, finding the slots in the chassis that indicated the correct placement of the jack and then jacking the car up a few inches. As he was loosening the lug nuts she waited in silence in the car, craning her neck so that she could watch him in the side view mirror.
Jimmy wrestled the flat tire off of the studs and placed it under the car beside the jack as insurance in case the jack failed. He placed the full sized spare onto the studs and threaded the top most lug nut with his hand.
Inside she sighed and told herself to relax. Things were going OK and there was no indication of trouble, but she couldn’t seem to keep her hands steady. She drove her hands deep into her pockets and felt the warmth of her body, the fingers of her right hand curled around the grip of the Smith & Wesson .38 Special. If she didn’t have all of the money with her when she met Marcus, every dollar of the cash in the green duffel bag in the trunk, it would be worse than death for her. First he’d do things to her to make her talk, and when it was clear that she was telling the truth, he’d most likely kill her anyway over the screw-up. She’d seen with her own eyes the futility of other girls who tried to run and hide; she had to keep her head clear and avoid arousing this guy’s suspicion. Could she really shoot him if he looked in the bag and did try to take the money? She didn’t know, and perhaps that’s what bothered her most. The car started to rock and she almost pulled the pistol from her pocket, but her eyes darted to the side view mirror and she felt some relief as she saw that it was simply Jimmy lowering the car. He paused before the tire was completely bearing the load of the car and tightened each lug nut with all of his strength. After he'd removed the jack he knocked on the window; she got out and opened the trunk. As he removed the duffle bag and pants again, she had her hands buried deep in her coat pockets, looking like a woman on the verge of turning into an ice sculpture; in fact, her right hand was squeezing the knurled grip of the pistol. When he'd placed everything back into the trunk and closed it, she took her hands from her pockets and patted his arm affectionately.
"Thank you so much, you're a knight in shining armor, you know that? Thanks for coming to my rescue."
Again Jimmy got the feeling that there was something not quite right with the woman, good looking though she may be.
"No worries." he said and turned to leave, he was going to be late for work.
He started his car pulled back into traffic, watching her image shrink in his rear view mirror. When he'd arrived at the job site, his foreman gave Jimmy grief for being late and mumbled something to Jimmy about the fact that triple-A didn't sign his paychecks, to which Jimmy replied that being ten minutes late wasn’t a matter of life and death.
Ingy sat in the back of the classroom for 'Rhetoric in Western Thought' and his choice of seating was easy to understand, it was difficult to nap in an early morning class unless you snagged a seat in one of the back rows. He felt no guilt about it, the professor rarely taught the class, undoubtedly a late starter himself. The T.A. (the 'Robin' to the prof's 'Batman') droned on, meandering from Aristotle, Cicero and Augustine to Erasmus, Locke, Richards, and Burke. As the T.A. launched into a fine point about composition pedagogy and how rhetoric can shape identities, interpret texts, and communicate effectively, Ingy was taking notes, doodling absentmindedly, staring with eyes half closed at the thighs of a girl he didn't know a few seats to his right and lazily trying to add the next line to song lyrics he was working on. Ingy was a multi-tasker. After twenty minutes the T.A. began to copy something from a yellow pad onto the black board; Ingy slowly came out of his near-slumber as he recognized that the T.A. was giving the outline of the midterm exam with the relative point weighing of the various sections. As he copied the information into his notebook, his mind started to drift toward the unresolved issue of whether he'd sign with Ophion…or not. If he did, he wouldn't be taking the midterm, and he wondered if he'd really get around to the work that was necessary to graduate. He stole another glance at the pair of long legs to his right and nonchalantly looked up to see the face that was attached to them. Busted. She was looking right at him and her expression did not invite further looking. That was something that would also change if he signed with Ophion. Maybe finishing the last few months and getting his Bachelor's Degree wasn't a 'must'. He continued to think it over, copy the midterm outline, ponder the next line in the song…and he was able to steal another glimpse at the legs too.
I was returning from the cafeteria with my morning coffee and bagel; I walked the long curving front corridor and looked out the floor to ceiling glass at the barren trees and expansive meadow. The laboratory where I worked was three stories tall and in the shape of an arc; it matched the shape of the hillside it was built into. There were in excess of three thousand scientists with Ph.D.'s who carried out research in the lab and two hundred or so engineers and technicians to assist them; I was a part of this support staff.
When I arrived at my lab, I had to cradle my coffee in the crook of my arm so that my right hand was free to operate the security lock on the door; mounted to the wall beside the door was a metal box with five rocker switches in its bottom. I entered the code '1 - 2 - 6 - 7' and heard the door unlock. I set my coffee down on my high-tech equipped workbench and placed a napkin on top of it, then I set my bagel down on top of that; until I had my hands free to drink and eat, the coffee would help to keep the bagel warm. I moved to my right and sat down at a ‘clean workstation’, basically an immaculate white Formica covered table set in front of an expensive air filteration system that pushed microscopically-clean air in near perfect horizontal lines across the table's surface and the space above it, preventing airborne contaminants (dust) from interfering with the experiment.
Reaching to my right, I turned on the power to a six foot tall rack of electronics and then I adjusted the controls on the front panel of a phase-lock amplifier. When I was satisfied that all was ready, I hit a button that told the signal generator to sweep through a wide range of frequencies; it would take half an hour to complete the sweep and collect the data. I moved to my bench and took a bite from the bagel and a sip of coffee and carefully considered how I felt about leaving this life for another. I thought about how much I could learn here, the research staff members were incredibly bright and educated at the best technical universities in the country. I was aware that I was at the very beginning of my technical career. On the other hand, would I get bored with the solitary lifestyle? While I do work with people, the nature of research was such that I'm alone about eighty percent of my work day; the interactions with staff members and with the science support groups were interesting but brief. If I left, I'd never get back in; and if I passed up the opportunity with the band it would very likely never come again. I took another sip of coffee and pondered my dilemma.
Kenny had just bundled up and left the house on his ten speed, he pedaled at only a medium speed because if he went faster the wind would make icicles of ears. He made a wide turn onto Blair, pedaling as he was without touching the handlebars. Another wide turn onto Webb with his hands snug in his jacket pockets as he slowly approached the light on Lexington, and seeing no cars closing the intersection, rode straight through its red light and down another block to the next
light, at Yorktown. He crossed Yorktown and pedaled to the front door of the "Tex's Famous" fast food place on the opposite corner of the intersection. Kenny hopped off of his bike, threw it into the bushes in front where it became practically invisible and entered, feeling the blast of heat from inside.
The drive-through was backed up with commuters who were looking forward to their grease and carbohydrate fix as they drove to work; but the registers inside were clear and there were only a handful of people in the dining room. He stepped up and ordered two breakfast muffins and an orange soda, paying with a dollar bill and a mound of coins. Barely a minute later his order was ready and Kenny picked up his tray and sat at a table in the corner of the dining area.
As he began to eat, Kenny noticed, a few tables away, a mother, perhaps thirty or thirty five with blonde hair and then saw her blond haired little boy. The toddler was taking tenuous steps around her table with that adorable wobble that only toddlers have; as the child returned to his mother he noticed Kenny at the corner table and smiled. Kenny smiled back and waved to him by crooking his index finger. The boy let out a shriek, clapped his hands once, and buried his head in his mother's lap. The woman turned and discovered the source of her son's amusement, a smiling twenty-something year old rocker-looking guy with long blond hair and tinted aviator glasses at the corner table. She smiled at him and he returned the gesture.
In the rear of the parking lot, a '78 blue and silver two tone Ford Bronco was parked adjacent to the trash dumpster enclosure; inside Joe and TJ were snorting speed out of a glass 'shooter' vial.