Daisy Jones & the Six

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  I’d failed her. She had asked me to help her get sober. And once Teddy died, I abandoned her.

  DAISY: That first night back, I think we were in Ohio, I was so embarrassed to even let Billy see me. Because I had come to him and said that I wanted to get sober. And then I hadn’t done it. I’d fallen even further than before.

  KAREN: I told Graham I’d decided to have an abortion. And he said I was crazy. And I told him I wasn’t. And he asked me not to do it.

  I said, “Are you going to quit this band to raise this baby?” And he didn’t respond. And that was it.

  GRAHAM: I thought we were still discussing it.

  KAREN: He knew. He knew what I was going to do. He just feels more comfortable pretending he didn’t. He has that luxury.

  BILLY: Camila and the girls came to join us in Dayton. I picked them up from the airport and as I was waiting for them, I could see a guy ordering a tequila on the rocks at the bar. I could hear the ice in the glass. I could see it sitting in the tequila. It was announced that their plane was stuck on the runway and I was sitting there, staring at the gate.

  As I was telling myself that I wasn’t going to order a drink, I walked over to the bar and I sat down on a stool. The guy behind the counter said, “What can I get you?” And I stared at him. And he said it again. And then I hear, “Daddy!” and I looked and there was my family.

  Camila said, “What’s going on?”

  I stood up and I smiled at her and, in that moment, I had it under control. I said, “Nothing. I’m good.”

  She gave me a glance and I said, “I promise.” And I picked up my girls in a big bear hug and I felt okay. I felt all right.

  CAMILA: To be honest, that’s when I questioned my own faith. Finding him sitting at a bar. Flags went up.

  I started to wonder if maybe Billy was capable of doing something that I would be incapable of forgiving.

  KAREN: Camila was with us from then on. For as long as that tour lasted. She’d fly back and forth, sometimes she had all the girls with her. But she almost always had Julia there. Julia was about five, by that point, I want to say.

  DAISY: Every night was starting to feel like torture. It had been one thing to sing with Billy when I was with someone else, when I didn’t know how I felt, when I had lies I could hide behind. Denial is like an old blanket. I loved to get on under that thing and curl up and sleep. But, leaving Nicky, singing that song with Billy on live TV, telling him I wanted to get clean…I’d ripped the blanket off of myself. And there was no putting it back on. And it was killing me. The vulnerability, the rawness. It was killing me to get up there on that stage. To sing with him.

  When we did “Young Stars,” I was praying Billy would look at me and acknowledge what we were saying to each other. And when we did “Please,” I was begging him to pay attention to me. I was having a hard time singing “Regret Me” with any real anger because I wasn’t angry, most of the time. Not anymore. I was sad. I was so goddamn sad.

  And everybody wanted to see “A Hope Like You” the way we had done it on SNL and the two of us kept trying to deliver that. It just kept slicing me in two every night.

  To sit next to him and smell his aftershave. And see his big hands with his swollen knuckles playing the piano in front of me and to be singing, from the very bottom of my heart, that I ached for him to love me back.

  I spent the hours of the day we weren’t onstage trying to repair my wounds and it was like I was pulling them back open every night.

  SIMONE: I was getting a lot of phone calls from Daisy at all hours of the day. I’d say, “Let me come get you.” And she’d refuse. I thought about trying to force her into rehab. But you can’t do that. You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind.

  I used to rehearse speeches and interventions and consider flying to where she was and dragging her off that stage—as if, if I could just get the words right, I could convince her to get sober. You drive yourself crazy, trying to put words in some magical order that will unlock their sanity. And when it doesn’t work, you think, I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t talk to her clearly enough.

  But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it’s more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you’ll have to watch.

  DAISY: I’d chased this life with all of my heart. I wanted so badly to express myself and be heard and bring solace to other people with my own words. But it became a hell I’d created myself, a cage I’d built and locked myself in. I came to hate that I’d put my heart and my pain into my music because it meant that I couldn’t ever leave it behind. And I had to keep singing it to him, night after night after night, and I could no longer hide how I felt or what being next to him was doing to me.

  It made for a great show. But it was my life.

  BILLY: Every night, after the show was over and the girls were in bed, Camila and I would sit out on the balcony of whatever hotel we were in and we’d just talk. She’d talk about how the girls were stressing her out. She’d talk about how she really needed me to stay sober. I’d tell her how hard I was trying. I’d tell her how scared I was of just about everything the future held. Runner had started asking about a new album. The weight was on me.

  At one point she said, “Do you honestly think you can’t write another good album without Teddy?”

  And I said, “I’ve never written an album without Teddy, period.”

  WARREN: We were on the bus heading into Chicago and Eddie seemed upset about something. I said, “Talk if you want to talk.” I don’t like it when people try to force you to ask them what’s going on.

  He said, “I haven’t told anybody this but…” Pete was gonna leave the band.

  EDDIE: Pete was not listening to reason. Warren said I should talk to Billy, get Billy to talk some sense into him. As if Pete was going to listen to Billy if he wasn’t going to listen to me. I was his brother.

  WARREN: Graham overheard us talking.

  EDDIE: So Graham gets involved and he’s already getting on everybody’s nerves lately because he’s so tightly wound about God-knows-what. Anyway, he says we should talk to Billy. And I, again, mention that Pete isn’t going to listen to Billy if he wasn’t going to listen to me, you know what I’m saying? But Graham doesn’t hear me and, instead, when we pull up to this diner outside Chicago, Billy comes to find me. He says, “What’s going on? What do we need to talk about?”

  I was just looking for the john, minding my own business. I said, “It’s nothing, man. Don’t worry about it.”

  Billy says, “It’s my band. I deserve to know what’s going on in my own band.”

  That really pissed me off. I said, “It’s everybody’s band.”

  Billy said, “You know what I meant.”

  And I said, “Yeah, we all know what you mean.”

  KAREN: We were outside of Chicago. Staying the night in a hotel. Camila had called ahead to this clinic. She walked me in, sat next to me. I was bouncing my knee and she put her hand on my leg and stopped the bouncing. I said, “Am I making a mistake?”

  And she said, “Do you think you are?”

  And I said, “I don’t know.”

  And she said, “I think you do know.”

  And I thought about what she meant.

  And then I said, “I know I’m not making a mistake.”

  And she said, “There you go.”

  And I said, “I think I’m pretending to be conflicted so that everybod
y feels better.”

  She said, “I don’t need to feel better. You don’t need to pretend anything for me.” So I stopped.

  When they called my name, she squeezed my hand and she didn’t let go. I didn’t ask her to come into the room with me and I didn’t think she was going to, but she just kept walking with me—she never left my side. I remember thinking, Oh, I guess she’s gonna be here for this. I got on the table. The doctor explained what was going to happen. And then he left for a moment. And there was a nurse in the corner. And I looked at Camila and she looked like she was going to cry. And I said, “Are you sad?”

  And she said, “A part of me wishes you wanted kids, because my kids make me so happy. But…I think in order to be happy like I’m happy, you need different things. And I want you to have whatever those things are.” And I started crying, then. Because somebody understood.

  Afterward, she brought me back to the hotel and she told everyone I wasn’t feeling well and I laid in bed by myself. And…it was a bad day. It was an awful day. Knowing you did the right thing doesn’t mean you’re happy about it. But when I called in room service, and I laid there in my hotel room, I knew that I was childless and that Camila was out with her children. And that…that seemed right. That little bit of order amidst the chaos.

  CAMILA: It’s not my place to say what happened that day. All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.

  GRAHAM: I didn’t know what had happened.

  KAREN: As we were all leaving the hotel, heading out to Chicago, I saw Graham get in the elevator alone, and I thought about taking the stairs. But I didn’t. I got in the elevator with him. Just the two of us. And as the elevator started going down, he said, “Are you okay? Camila said you weren’t feeling well.”

  And I said, “I’m not pregnant anymore.”

  He turned to me with this look on his face like, I never thought you’d do this to me. The elevator doors opened and we both just stood there. Not saying a word. They closed. And we took the elevator all the way to the top. And then all the way back down. Right before we got to the lobby again, Graham hit the button for the second floor. And he got off.

  GRAHAM: I walked up and down the hallway of that hotel, over and over and over and over. At the end of the hallway there was a window, and I put my head on it. My forehead. And I looked down at all of the people below me. I was only a few floors up from them. I watched them walking from place to place, and I felt jealous of every single one of them. That they weren’t me right then. I wanted to switch places with every man down there.

  When I pulled my forehead off the glass, there was a huge greasy smudge where I’d touched it. I tried to wipe it away but it just made the window cloudy. I remember looking through this cloudy window, trying to rub it to make it better and nothing would help. I just kept rubbing and rubbing and rubbing. Until Rod found me somehow.

  He said, “Graham, what are you doing? We gotta be in Chicago this afternoon. Bus is gonna leave without you, man.”

  And somehow, I put one foot in front of the other and walked with him down to the bus.

  ROD: It started like any other show, really. We had it down to a fine art. The lights went up, the band went out there. Graham played the opening of “This Could Get Ugly” and the crowd started screaming.

  BILLY: Camila was on the side of the stage. She let Julia stay up late. The twins were back at the hotel with the babysitter. I remember looking out onto the side, behind the curtains, and seeing Camila there, holding Julia on her hip. Camila’s hair was down to her waist, practically, by that point. And it was normally brown but the summer had made it lighten up a bit, it looked more gold. The two of them—Camila and Julia—had earplugs in their ears. These bright orange things poking out of either side of their heads. I smiled at them and Camila smiled back at me. Such a gorgeous smile. Her incisors were flat. Isn’t that funny? Everyone’s incisors are pointed. But hers were kind of flat. And it made her smile perfect. It was a straight line. Her smile always put me at ease.

  And that night, in Chicago, when she smiled at me from the side of the stage…for that brief moment, I thought, Everything is going to be okay.

  DAISY: It killed me. To look at him look at her. I can’t think of any two things that make you quite as self-absorbed as addiction and heartbreak. I had a selfish heart. I didn’t care about anyone or anything but my own pain. My own need. My own aching. I’d have made anyone hurt if it could have taken some of mine away. It’s just how sick I was.

  BILLY: We played everything. The way we normally did. We did “Young Stars” and “Chasing the Night” and “Turn It Off.” But it didn’t feel right. It felt…it felt like the wheels were coming off.

  WARREN: Karen and Graham seemed like maybe they were mad at each other. Pete seemed checked out. Eddie had been complaining about Billy—but what else was new?

  DAISY: Someone in the front had a sign that said, “Honeycomb.”

  BILLY: People requested “Honeycomb” a lot on that tour. And I usually ignored it. I just didn’t want to sing it. But I knew that Daisy liked that song, I knew she had been proud of that song. And…I don’t know what came over me but I said into the mike, “Do you guys want to hear ‘Honeycomb’?”

  GRAHAM: I was sleepwalking through that show. I was there but I wasn’t there.

  KAREN: I just wanted to get through it and go back to my hotel. I just wanted some quiet. I didn’t want…I didn’t want to be up on that stage watching Graham watch me, feeling his judgment.

  WARREN: When Billy said “Honeycomb,” the whole place sounded like thunder.

  EDDIE: We’re all just here to perform the way Billy wants us to, right? We don’t need to be told we might play a song we haven’t played in a year.

  DAISY: What do you say to a roaring crowd? Do you say no? Of course not.

  BILLY: Daisy said, “All right, let’s do it.” I got up to her mike and the moment I did it, I regretted it. I could tell she didn’t want me that close. But I couldn’t leave. I had to make it look like everything was okay.

  DAISY: He smelled like pine and musk. His hair was about half an inch too long, you could see it hanging behind his ears. His eyes were clear, and green as ever.

  People say it’s hard to be away from the people you love but it was so hard to be right next to him.

  BILLY: It’s sometimes difficult to say what I knew and when I knew it. It’s…it’s all a mess in my memory. It’s hard to parse out, I guess. What happened when or why I did what I did. Hindsight bias. But I do remember distinctly that Daisy was wearing a white dress. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had big hoop earrings on. Her bracelets. And I looked at her, just before we started singing, and I think—I really do think this—I think I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life. In that way that you appreciate things more acutely…I mean…you appreciate people more acutely when they are fleeting, right? And I think I knew she was fleeting. I think I knew she was leaving. I don’t know how I knew. But I feel like I knew. I probably didn’t know. It just feels like it.

  So I guess what I’m saying is, when we started singing “Honeycomb,” I either knew I was losing her or I didn’t. And I either knew I’d loved her or I didn’t. And I either appreciated her, for all she was in that moment…or maybe I didn’t.

  DAISY: I started singing and I looked at him. And he looked at me. And, you know what? For three minutes, I think I forgot we were performing for twenty thousand people. I forgot his family was standing there. I forgot we were singers in a band. I just existed. For three minutes. Singing to the man I loved.

  BILLY: The right song, at the right time, with the right person…

  DAISY: And then right before the end of the song, I loo
ked over to the side of the stage to see Camila standing there.

  BILLY: And I just…[pauses] God, I was so frayed at the edges.

  DAISY: And I knew he wasn’t mine.

  He was hers.

  And then I…I just did it. I sang the song as Billy originally wrote it. No questions.

  “The life we want will wait for us/we will live to see the lights coming off the bay/and you will hold me, you will hold me, you will hold me/until that day.” It was the hardest line I’ve ever had to get through.

  BILLY: When I heard her, singing the lines as I originally wrote them, singing about this future that Camila and I would have…There had been so much doubt in my heart. So much doubt in myself that I could keep going down the good road I was on. And I…[breathes deeply] Those lyrics. That small gesture. For one moment, Daisy didn’t remind me that I might fail. She sang the song like she knew I’d succeed. Daisy did that. Daisy. I didn’t know how much I needed it until she gave it to me. And it should have just made me feel better but it hurt, too.

  Because if I was the man I wanted to be—if I could give Camila the life I’d promised her—well, I mean…there was loss in that, too.

  DAISY: I fell in love with the wrong guy who was exactly the right guy. And I had made decisions time and time again that made it worse and never made it better. And I’d finally pushed myself right over the edge.

  BILLY: When we got off the stage, I turned to Daisy and I didn’t have any words. She smiled at me but it was one of those smiles that isn’t a smile at all. And then she walked away. And my heart sank.

  It just became so perfectly clear to me that I had been holding on tightly to the possibility. The possibility of Daisy.

  And suddenly, I was having a very hard time with the idea of letting that go. Of saying, “Never.”

  DAISY: I saw Billy Dunne as he was coming off the stage and I didn’t trust myself to say a single word to him. I couldn’t be around him. So I waved goodbye and I left.