Chapter 1: Decisions and Unforeseen Consequences

New York City, New York

October 23, 1998

Jim Ramos called Jake’s room just past 10:30 that night, which was 7:30 PM Seattle time. Jake was not in his room to take the call, however. Instead, he and Laura were in Celia’s room. The three of them were naked and in bed, and quite involved in a second round of sexual activity. True, it seemed wrong for them to carry on in such a manner when Matt Tisdale was possibly dying or dead on the other side of the country, but it had been months since they had seen each other, and ... well ... they had to do something while they waited, didn’t they?

Meghan, the nanny, took the call and then, as instructed, gave Jim Celia’s room number and told him to call back and ask for Marie Vasquez. Jim, who understood the concept of the hotel name, undoubtedly raised his eyes a bit at Jake’s current location, but judiciously made no mention of it. He simply hung up and made the call.

When the phone started to ring, Celia was on her back on the bed, her bare legs spread widely, Laura’s face between them with her tongue licking the spend that Jake had deposited there a few minutes before. Laura’s butt was up in the air and Jake was thrusting in and out of her from behind, trying to drive her to one more orgasm. His manhood was, by this point, somewhat raw and sensitive, and Jake very much doubted that he was going to be able to produce another orgasm of his own—he had already had three in the past two and a half hours—but his faithful erection hung in there, giving his wife pleasure.

“Fuck!” Celia barked as she heard the ringing. “Not now!”

This was an emotional outburst of frustration only. No one considered for a moment ignoring the phone so they could keep going. With a mutual sigh, all of them stopped their activities and separated from each other. Celia reached over and picked up the handset.

“Maria Vasquez’s room,” she said into it, her voice a bit breathless, her face a bit flushed. She listened for a moment and then told the person on the other end to hang on. She handed the phone to Jake. “It’s Jim.”

He nodded and took the phone. “This is Jake,” he said into it.

“Jake. Jim Ramos. I’m here at the hospital with Matt. He just came out of the cath lab about half an hour ago and is in the recovery room now.”

Jake breathed a little sigh of relief at these words. At least the asshole was still alive. He was surprised to find that he had been worried about Matt, and not just because his heart attack was going to cause the cancellation of multiple shows that KVA had invested heavily in, but because he genuinely did not want the asshole to die. Matt had put Jake through a lot of shit over the years, but he was still, underneath all of that, a friend, a brother, someone that Jake shared a long and storied history with. “What’s the word?” he asked.

“They successfully removed the clot in his LAD with angioplasty,” Jim said.

“Angioplasty?” Jake asked.

“They threaded a wire from his femoral artery all the way up to the coronary artery in his heart,” Jim explained. “Once the wire was past the obstructed area, they inflated a balloon on it. This widened the artery itself and then let them drag the blood clot out of the heart and restore circulation to some degree.”

“Just like that?” Jake asked.

“Well, it’s not really a miracle cure by itself,” Jim said. “It got the blood flowing again and kept Matt from dying or having a big chunk of his left ventricle die, but he still has the underlying coronary artery disease, which, as the cardiologist told him, is ‘remarkably advanced for a man who is only thirty-nine years old’.”

“Okay,” Jake said slowly. “He’s going to live through the night then, right?”

“Right,” Jim said.

“But he’s still got some issues to deal with?”

“Right,” Jim said again. “Something needs to be done about those coronary arteries or this is just going to happen again in a few days or a few weeks or a few months.”

“What’s the next step then?” Jake asked.

“Well ... when they had Matt in the lab, they asked him that question. The first choice was that they could put in a couple of stents to push those arteries open. The problem with that is that it’s only a stopgap measure. It would probably buy him four or five years before he is back in the same boat, especially if he doesn’t change his lifestyle, which I have no reason to think he is going to.”

“What’s the second choice?” Jake asked.

“Cardiac bypass surgery,” Jim said. “That’s what the cardiologist recommended. They go in, bypass those fucked up arteries with some venous grafts from his leg, and that lasts a lot longer—twenty years or more under favorable conditions.”

“It seems like that is the way to go then, right?” Jake asked.

“Yeah,” Jim said with a sigh. He sounded very tired. “And that’s what Matt chose when they put the question to him. ‘Bypass the motherfucker’ is what he is on record as saying. So, they didn’t put the stents in. They pulled their wire out and he’s going to be admitted and scheduled for surgery on Monday morning.”

“Okay,” Jake said, nodding. “That’s good.”

“Yeah...” Jim said slowly, “but ... well ... I just got out of the room with Matt before I called you and ... uh ... he’s starting to have second thoughts about going through with it.”

“Second thoughts?” Jake asked. “Why?”

“When they first had him make the decision, it was while he was in the cath lab,” Jim explained. “He was loaded up on Versed and Fentanyl and wasn’t really thinking things through the way he normally thinks things through.”

“Matt doesn’t really think things through,” Jake said. “He kind of operates on impulse most of the time.”

“Call it what you want,” Jim said, “but his impulse while he was loaded was to go ahead with the surgery and ‘fix this shit up’. But now the drugs are pretty much worn off and he’s in his normal state of mind—well ... his sober state of mind anyway—and it occurred to him to ask how long the recovery period was for each of the two choices.”

“And the answer was?” Jake asked.

“Four weeks for the stents,” Jim said. “Three months if he has the bypass surgery.”

“Three months ... wow,” Jake said. “Why so much longer with the surgery?”

“The stent placement is relatively non-invasive. They do it through the femoral artery. With the bypass though ... well ... they have to chop your chest open at the sternum and open it up. It takes a lot longer to recover from having your chest chopped open with a fuckin’ axe.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Jake said. “And he doesn’t want to take three months to recover?”

“He’s worried about the tour,” Jim said. “If he does the stents, he figures they’ll only have to postpone a month’s worth of shows. If he does the bypass, he figures they’ll cancel the entire tour. No tour means no money. Even more important than that, though, it means the show won’t go on. Matt wants the show to go on.”

Jake sighed. Part of him admired Matt’s work ethic. But a bigger part of him thought the man was being an idiot. “I’d rather cancel the tour and reschedule the dates for the spring if it means Matt is reasonably healthy.”

“That was my advice to him as well,” Jim said. “But unfortunately, he doesn’t much listen to me. If he did, he probably wouldn’t have had this fuckin’ MI in the first place—at least not now, before his fortieth birthday.”

“I understand about trying to talk sense to Matt,” Jake reassured the paramedic. “It’s like trying to tell a fart not to stink. Has Gahn been in there?”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “He’s here now ... and he’s part of the fuckin’ problem. He told Matt that getting the stents placed was a wonderful idea, that it would get him back to the tour in the soonest amount of time and he could have that bypass operation next year if he wanted.”

Jake frowned. That would be just the advice that Matt would want to hear. “That sounds like Gahn all right,” he said. “When does have to make this decision?”

“By the end of rounds tomorrow,” Jim said. “That’s generally between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. If he’s going to get the bypass, they need to get the preop shit rolling, get the surgeon familiar with the case, the whole nine yards. If he decides not to do it ... well ... they can’t put the stents in right away. They need to wait for the wound in his groin to heal up before they poke into him again.”

“If he does that, will he stay in the hospital while he waits?”

“That’s the plan,” Jim said. “He still has unstable angina until they do something about it. They don’t really want him walking around, drinking, snorting coke, and all that other shit until he’s fixed up one way or the other. Of course, we are talking about Matt here. There’s at least a fifty percent chance he will sign out against medical advice.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Jake said, sighing again. “I’m thinking I need to get to Seattle so I can maybe offer a voice of reason in this thing.”

“I think that would be a great idea,” Jim said, relief clearly in his voice. “When can you get here?”

“Not tonight,” he said, “but I’ll head out in the morning one way or the other and be there before the docs make their rounds. Your job is to keep him in the hospital and without a firm decision made until I arrive.”

“I’ll give it my best,” Jim said doubtfully.

Jake said his goodbye to Jim and then handed the phone back to Celia. She hung it up. The two ladies looked at him expectantly. He gave them a briefing of the situation at hand.

“What’s an MI?” Laura asked.

“A myocardial infarction,” Jake said. “In laymen’s terms, a big-ass heart attack.”

“A heart attack at thirty-nine,” Celia said, shaking her head sadly. “You have to work hard to fuck up your heart that bad by that age.”

“He’s worked pretty hard at it,” Jake agreed.

“You don’t really think he’s going to take the easy way out, do you?” asked Laura. “I mean, the man has to have some common sense.”

“Well ... he has some,” Jake said, “but not much when it comes to his own health and welfare. I think that the earlier I can get there, the better.”

“Not tonight though, right?” asked Laura.

“No, not tonight,” he said. “It’s too late to even get a charter this late, but I’ll get on the phone and book something for as early as I can get out in the morning.”

The two ladies nodded sadly.

“Sorry this had to happen on our reunion,” he said.

“That’s okay,” Celia said. “Things happen. And at least we got to get together tonight.”

“Yes, we did,” Jake said, looking at their nudity and smiling.

“Am I coming with you?” Laura asked.

“There’s no real need for you to come with me,” he said. “Stay here with C, catch her show, do some shopping with Meghan, do all the other things we were going to do and then you and Caydee and Meghan can fly back on Monday night, just like we planned. We already have the tickets. We’re already paying Meghan. No sense dragging you and Caydee and the nanny to the shitshow.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Laura said.

“And no matter what happens, I’ll be home by Monday night to pick you up in LA,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. She then looked down at his member, which had deflated back to its normal state during the interruption. “Awww,” she said, pity in her voice. “He’s all worn out.”

“Hey,” Jake said, “I think Little Jake has more than risen to the occasion tonight. Cut him some fuckin’ slack.”

“I wasn’t quite done with him yet,” Laura pouted.

“And I wasn’t quite done with your mouth yet, Teach,” Celia added.

Laura smiled. “Well, why don’t we get back to work then?” she asked. “Is Little Jake going to wake up for this, sweetie?”

“He might,” Jake said, keeping the doubt out of his voice. “If he doesn’t, I’ll just initiate Plan B.”

“All right then,” she said happily. “Let’s get back to work.”

They went back to work. Little Jake refused to join in the fun and games this time, but Big Jake had a mouth of his own and he knew how to use it. He licked his wife to orgasm from behind while she licked Celia to orgasm from the front. They then collapsed in a heap on the bed.

The ladies were soon drifting off to sleep. Jake was tired and yearned to close his eyes as well, but there was business to take care of first. He left the room and walked into main room to start looking for how he was going to get to Seattle in the morning.

Had the Nerdlys been there (or had he thought to call them) his task might have been made easier by using the internet. But he had no computer with him in New York and Wi-Fi was not a term that had even been invented yet. He found what he needed the old-fashioned way: by looking through the yellow pages and calling every airline to see what was available.

Apparently there was not all that great a demand to get to Seattle from New York. The earliest commercial flight out of the area going nonstop to the rainy city left Newark at 10:30 AM and would arrive at Sea-Tac at 1:45 PM Seattle time. This was within the window for the close of hospital rounds for the day but, to Jake’s chagrin, there were no first-class tickets available for the flight, just coach. Even if the time of arrival was not cutting it a little too close to the deadline for comfort, Jake simply could not bring himself to fly coach for more than six hours. And so, he ended up calling Jorgensen Aviation Services, which had a twenty-four-hour booking service. He was able to charter a Gulfstream out of Teterboro Airport, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, that would take off at 9:00 AM and land at Boeing Field at 12:05 PM, Seattle time. That would give him at least three hours to get to the University of Washington Medical Center, where Matt was currently stashed, before the end of rounds for the day. It was an expensive flight—almost twenty thousand dollars—but there would be no hassles with security checkpoints or baggage checks. He read off his credit card number to the dispatcher and was told to be at the airport by 8:45 AM if he wanted to take off on time.

He wrote down his flight information on a pad of hotel paper and then called the desk and arranged for a 7:15 AM wakeup call and a limousine to pick him up out front at 8:00 AM. Once these arrangements were made, he went back into the bedroom. Celia and Laura were cuddled together spoon fashion under the covers, Laura on the left side of the bed, Celia with her arms around her in the center of the bed, both of them sound asleep. Jake crawled into the bed on the right side and spooned his body up against Celia’s, putting his arms around her and stretching them out so he was touching Laura as well. He basked in the warmth and the smell and the feel of soft female flesh against him as he drifted off to sleep.

He was awakened later, not by the phone ringing to give him the wakeup call, but by a hand fondling his penis. He thought it was a pleasant dream at first but then gradually realized it was reality. He was now laying on his back, as was Celia, and she was stroking him softly and deliberately. Little Jake, despite the state of overwork he had been put through last night, was responding quite nicely to the sensation and stiffening up in her hand. He glanced over at the alarm clock on the nightstand and saw that it was 6:56 AM. So very early. And in nineteen minutes he would have to get up. His body desperately wanted to take advantage of that nineteen minutes and go back to sleep, but Little Jake was quite a powerful counter to that school of thought.

“Again?” Jake whispered.

“I want one more before you go,” she whispered back. “God only knows when I’ll get another chance to have some of your chorizo.”

“But Laura is still sleeping,” he said. The rule was that it was all for one or none for all when they were together.

“She told me it was okay,” Celia whispered.

“When did she tell you that?”

“Last night, while you were on the phone, before we went to sleep,” Celia said. “She said that as long as you are okay with she and I still having fun after you leave for Seattle, then I could fuck you one on one before you left.”

“Really?” Jake asked. Both of those scenarios were a blatant violation of the rules they had established.

“Really,” she said, a little exasperated. “Do you really think I would try to get away with fucking you in the same bed she is sleeping in and hope she wouldn’t wake up and catch us?”

“I’ve seen a lot of porno movies where they do just that,” Jake pointed out.

Celia chuckled a little. “Yes, those movies are quite realistic, aren’t they? Teach said that the touring clause we discussed applies to this situation.”

“But we never actually agreed to the touring clause,” Jake said.

“True,” Celia allowed. “But Teach and I both agreed to it last night. As long as you agree right now, it’s unanimous and therefore a binding amendment to the ground rules. So ... do you agree?”

While a lawyer might argue that being asked to agree to such a thing while his penis was being fondled and his sex hormones being stimulated was not exactly a kosher way to enter into a binding contract for behavior, Jake was not a lawyer. “I agree,” he told her. “Let’s do this.”

They did it. By unspoken agreement they did not kiss each other, since both had morning breath and stale vaginal secretions covering their faces, but that did not detract much from the experience. She climbed atop him and mounted him in the female superior position, her wet vagina neatly engulfing his now rigid member. They then moved and thrust against each other for the better part of fifteen minutes, Jake frequently squeezing and suckling her breasts, until she shuddered her way through a powerful orgasm. Jake blasted off inside of her shortly after, his hands on her ass and pulling her tightly against him. Though the bed had shook and shimmied throughout the entire session, and though both of them had been panting and moaning as well, Laura did not even stir.

“Now that’s the way to say goodbye to someone,” Celia sighed contentedly after she collapsed back into the middle of the bed.

Before Jake could even settle back into a comfortable position, the phone began to ring. This woke Laura up. She blearily reached out and picked up the handset since she was closest to it. “Maria Vasquez’s room,” she grumbled into it. She listened. “Okay. Thank you. I’ll make sure he’s up.” She turned to her left. “It’s your wakeup call, sweetie.”

“Thanks,” he said with a sigh, still breathing a little hard from the exertion.

Laura looked at the two of them knowingly. “It smells like fresh fucking in here,” she said. “I take it you agreed to the touring clause, sweetie?”

“Uh ... yeah,” he said. “I agreed.”

She smiled. “Cool. I’m going back to sleep now. Kiss me on your way out.”

“Will do,” Jake said. He then got up so he could get showered and make it to the airport on time. Laura and Celia were both asleep again before he even finished emptying his bladder.

Jake kissed both Laura and Celia goodbye before he left, though he only kissed them on their foreheads. He knew, after all, where those mouths of theirs had been. He told them each that he loved them and they mumbled that they loved him as well and then went back to sleep, Laura cuddled into Celia with her head on her chest.

He carried his travel bag out of the room and walked over to the other suite, where Meghan the nanny, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and looking very cute, was watching television while Caydee played on her blanket on the floor of the sitting room.

“Hey, Jake,” Meghan greeted. She noted the travel bag in his hand. “Are you heading out?”

“Yeah, unfortunately I have to fly to Seattle,” he told her.

“What happened to Matt?” she asked timidly, as if wondering if she was breeching etiquette by enquiring.

“The asshole had himself a big heart attack,” Jake told her. “He needs to have bypass surgery but he’s thinking about not doing it.”

“Why would he not want to do it?” she asked.

“Because he’s Matt Tisdale,” Jake said tiredly. “He should have named his band Bad Decisions instead of Intemperance.”

“Aren’t they kind of the same thing?” she asked.

Jake chuckled a little. “Well ... one tends to lead to the other, but they’re not exactly the same thing. Anyway, how’s my little girl doing?”

“Dada!” Caydee squealed happily. “Owe me!”

“I’ll owe you for a minute, Caydee-girl, but then I gotta hit the highway.” He picked her up and she put her arms around him happily and gave him a big, sloppy kiss on his face. He kissed her back a few times and then held her up higher so he could put a big zerbert on her belly. She laughed loudly as he did this.

“Is Laura still sleeping over there?” Meghan asked.

“She was when I left,” Jake said. “We were uh ... up a little late last night.”

Meghan gave a knowing look but said nothing.

“Want me to get her ass up before I leave?” he asked. “Caydee is probably wanting some breakfast.”

“No, let her sleep,” Meghan said. “Caydee and I are having fun over here. And I gave her some of her Cheerios and some of her juice so she’ll be fine for another hour or so.”

“Okay, but don’t let her sleep past 8:30.”

“I won’t,” Meghan promised.

Jake kissed his daughter and told her that he loved her. She smiled broadly and told him that she loved him (“Uv eww, dada!” was how she said it in her language). He spent another minute or so just holding her and cuddling her and feeling love for her. Finally, he said his final goodbye and gave her to Meghan. He then left the room and headed for the elevator.

The limousine was waiting for him as promised. The driver took him through the moderately busy streets of weekend morning Manhattan and through the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey. He arrived at the general aviation terminal of Teterboro Airport at 8:40 AM and was aboard the Gulfstream IV by 8:50. The two pilots introduced themselves to him politely and the young, attractive female flight attendant made sure he was strapped into one of the chairs. He chose one of the seats behind the cockpit. The attendant—her name was Chelsea—brought him a bloody Mary and he drank it while they went through the preflight and taxi. It was in his stomach and making him sleepy by the time they roared into the sky at 9:02 AM and headed west. He declined the offer of a second drink once they were above ten thousand feet. Instead, he used the in-flight telephone service (which cost eighteen dollars a minute) to contact the FBO at Boeing Field and arrange for a limousine to pick him up when they landed. He then called Pauline, forgetting about the whole time zone thing and the fact that it was only 6:18 in the morning in Los Angeles until her annoyed voice reminded him of this fact.

“Sorry,” he said, feeling embarrassed. “I usually remember shit like that.”

“You’re getting old, bro,” she told him. “Things are starting to slip your mind.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say,” he replied with a pout.

“And it’s not nice to call people before the fuckin’ sun is up either. Now what’s up?”

He gave her a quick update on the situation and then probed to see if she had any information that he did not. They then talked about some of the legalities of the situation. By the time this business was concluded, they were at forty-two thousand feet. He unbuckled from his seat and moved to the rear of the cabin, where two couches were located. He scored a pillow and a couple of blankets from Chelsea, had her turn down the cabin lighting and close the little sliders in the windows, and then laid himself down and went to sleep. He did not wake up again until they were passing over the Selkirk Mountains in northern Idaho.

The next limousine was waiting at Boeing Field. From there, it was a twenty-minute trip to the University of Washington Medical Center just adjacent to the campus itself. It was 12:50 PM, Seattle time, when Jake finally made it to the cardiac telemetry unit on the eighth floor of the main building. There, in room 8013, he found a very dejected Matt Tisdale in Bed 1 of the two-person room. Matt was wearing a powder blue hospital gown and a pair of yellow hospital socks. He was connected to a heart monitor that beeped and booped away on the wall behind him. He had an IV line in his arm but it was not connected to anything currently. A table that contained a plastic water pitcher, a few packages of soda crackers, and the remains of Matt’s lunch tray sat next to the bed. The television was on, playing an episode of Judge Judy. He had no visitors currently. In Bed 2, on the other side of a curtain, was an elderly man with a couple of IV drips running into his arm. He was asleep and snoring at a moderate level. His television was showing a college football game.

“Matt,” Jake said simply when the guitarist noticed he was there.

“Jake,” Matt returned sourly, giving him a nod of greeting.

“How you doing?”

“This is fuckin’ hell, dude,” Matt told him. “This is karma being a fucking cunt, you know what I’m saying?”

“That bad, huh?”

“It’s the worst thing imaginable,” Matt said. “They won’t let me drink, they won’t let me go out and have a fuckin’ smoke, and Jim and even that Mormon freak Gahn won’t smuggle me in any coke to help pass the time.”

“Yeah...” Jake said slowly, “most people kind of think it’s a bad idea to bring cocaine to someone who is on the cardiac floor after having a heart attack. Even Gahn.”

“What fuckin’ difference does it make now?” Matt asked. “The shit already happened.”

Jake decided to pretend that that was rhetorical question. He nodded in the direction of the old man in Bed 2. “What’s up with the roommate?” he asked. “I would think they would give you a private room.”

“You would fuckin’ think, wouldn’t you?” Matt said sourly. “I got the best fuckin’ health insurance money can buy and I even offered to pay out of my own fuckin’ pocket for a private room, but they ain’t got any fuckin’ private rooms on the cardiac floor here. What kind of fuckin’ place is this, dude?”

“It’s supposed to be one of the best hospitals on the west coast,” Jake offered.

“That might be true,” Matt said, “but they need to work on their customer service a little bit. That geezer over there is a fuckin’ Medicaid patient and they’re treating him just like they’re treating me. Being rich and famous don’t mean shit here!”

Jake smiled a little, feeling his liberal bleeding heart poking up some. “There are some who would say that that’s the way healthcare should be administered,” he suggested.

“Who the fuck says that?” Matt asked, disgusted. “Is this fuckin’ America or is it not fucking America?” He shook his head at the tragedy of it all.

Jake decided that now was maybe not the best time to discuss the inherent inequities in modern American healthcare. Instead, he sat down in the chair next to Matt’s bed. “Seriously though,” he said, “no cocaine or smokes or booze aside, how are you doing?”

“Well ... I had a big-ass fuckin’ heart attack and that’s kind of tripping me out a little.” He looked at Jake meaningfully. “Heart attacks fuckin’ hurt, dude. That ain’t no shit.”

“Yeah?” Jake asked.

“Yeah,” Matt said sincerely. “I thought it was heartburn at first, had been having episodes like that for a few days, usually after I ... you know ... blasted a few rails. And then, during the soundcheck yesterday ... the pain came back, but this time it didn’t go away when I chugged some Maalox, it just kept getting worse, until it felt like there was a fat chick sitting on my chest. It got hard to breathe and I started sweating. I knew something was wrong. I started feeling like I was about to die; and that ain’t a good way to fuckin’ feel.”

“Sounds kind of scary,” Jake said.

“It was,” Matt said. “And you know I don’t fuckin’ scare easily, but that was some terrifying shit. And then Jimbo hooked me up to the heart machine he carries and I saw his face go all pale and shit. He tells me, ‘Matt, I’m pretty sure you’re having a heart attack right now’. Usually, you can’t pick one up with that machine he has—it isn’t sensitive enough or some shit like that—but this one was so big it did show up. And when I heard that shit, the sense of impending fuckin’ doom got even worse. I swear to god, Jake, I didn’t think I was gonna make it to the hospital.”

“A good thing you had Jim there,” Jake said.

“Fuckin’ A,” Matt agreed. “He saved my ass. He gave me some aspirin, some fuckin’ nitroglycerin, and some morphine all before the Seattle paramedics were able to get to us. By the time they got there and took over, the pain was down to almost fuckin’ reasonable and that sense that I was living the last few minutes of my life had chilled out a little. I was still having a fuckin’ heart attack, but all the shit that Jimbo gave me helped get the blood circulating again and helped chill my shit out. The docs here said I might not have made it if Jim hadn’t did what he did.”

“I guess he deserves a bonus then,” Jake suggested.

Matt looked at him, confused. “A bonus?” he asked. “What the fuck for? He was doing what I pay him to do.”