Chapter 24: Never Say Never

Heritage, California

September 27, 2002

They opened the set with City to City, the first promoted track from the Never Say Never CD, an early recording of which they had played on Rockline in Chicago weeks before the official promotional period had even been negotiated, let alone begun. The audience was familiar with the tune and cheered loudly when they heard the opening sequence of it played on Jake’s black and white Les Paul while Nerdly accompanied him on the Grand Piano that the fine folks at Steinway had donated for the tour (and were paying Nerdly half a million dollars to play). The spotlights were on Jake and Nerdly only at this point. After the opening sequence, the rest of the stage lighting flared to life, showing the entire band on the stage. The tune went up-tempo and Matt’s guitar began to lay down the primary riff. The cheers from the audience were loud at this point. Jake could tell even through the small amount that was allowed to make it into his in-ear monitors.

As they played, as they failed to make anything resembling a mistake, Jake felt the nervousness of opening night stage fright slipping away. He began to feel the dopamine rush, the elation of performing well that was better than the finest ganga, the purest cocaine. He was once again doing what he had been put on Earth to do and he was doing it well. Matt was getting into the groove himself. Full of nervous energy, he moved back and forth, playing his iconic Strat, moving his shoulders to the riff, playing a tune that had never been played to an audience before. When he went into his guitar solo, the cheers from the crowd grew louder. Everyone that Jake could see in the audience (which encompassed the SVIP section where Laura and Celia were sitting and the first two rows of the VIP section) were on their feet, many of them playing air guitars, elated smiles on their faces.

City to City ended abruptly, as it did on the CD version, simply stopping after a final play of the primary melody. Matt and Jake both nodded to the crowd as the cheers washed over them. When they died down a little Matt began to play again, this time the opening sequence for Who Needs Love? from the very first Intemperance CD, the first of Matt’s tunes to be promoted and still one of the favorites among Intemp fans. The crowd roared out their approval. When Jake started to sing the cynical and misogynistic lyrics, he saw many in the audience, male and female, singing along with him.

They fuckin’ love us, Jake thought as he played the backing riff, his left fingers moving automatically on the fretboard, his right fingers holding a blue guitar pick (Jake Kingsley, Intemperance Never Say Never Tour, 2002, was stenciled on it in white) and finding the right strings by feel and familiarity. His hands just played automatically, without conscious thought while he sang into his microphone. Never did he have to look down to see what his fingers were doing. That was the mark of a professional musician and a professional vocalist. Matt played out the guitar solo and they launched into final verse and chorus followed by an extended outro which featured a piano solo by Nerdly (and composing heavy metal piano solos was no easy feat, but Nerdly pulled it off beautifully) and they brought the tune to an end. The cheers washed over them again and Jake saw the lighters come to life all over the seating area. This made him smile as he threw his guitar pick into the crowd. Matt did the same and there were scuffles over possession of them.

Jake stepped up to his microphone, his left land resting on the side of his fretboard, his right gripping the microphone itself. “How the hell you doing tonight, Heritage?” he asked the crowd. The cheers told him they were doing pretty damn good. “All right! We’re honored to play the first two dates of our reunion tour here, in our hometown, where it all started twenty-two years ago. Did you ever think you’d see the five of us on the same stage again?”

More cheers. Jake did not hear any actual questions being shouted at him, but he assumed that someone, probably more than one, had asked how it had happened. “Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you, it was something that was meant to be. We were able to put our past grievances aside and get together and make some good music together for you all. That’s why we named the CD and the tour, Never Say Never, you know what I’m sayin’?”

They knew what he was saying it seemed.

“We’re gonna do another tune from that CD now,” Jake told them. “It’s a tune penned by Matt Tisdale over there and it hasn’t been played on the radio yet, but those of you who bought the CD have heard it and it fuckin’ rocks. It’s called Without Fail. Let’s do it guys.”

They launched into the tune, which was actually one of the most profound pieces penned by Matt. Coop opened them up by setting the beat on his toms and bass drum. Charlie then joined in with the bass. And then Matt began to play the primary riff, a four-chord progression that was both complex and yet simple at the same time. Jake joined him, playing exactly in unison, adding more power to the riff. Nerdly began to throw in some fills. And then Jake began to sing about despair at finding one’s self in a circular pattern of failure and loss. He sang with all the emotion that Matt had intended in the piece, which he knew was about the last few years of Matt’s life, the heart attack, the tax troubles, the loss of faith in him by National Records, the necessity of having to beg Jake for a contract so he could try to rectify some of those problems. He did not specifically mention any single problem in his life, but for those who knew him and what he had been through, the meaning of the lyrics was full of self-awareness that they had always assumed Matt was incapable of.

The audience was into the tune. Jake had no way of knowing this, but fully sixty-five percent of those who had bought tickets for the show had bought the Never Say Never CD in its first month of release. Another twenty-five percent had downloaded all of the songs from the CD from Napster or Limewire. Most of the audience were already familiar with the tune despite it never having been played on the radio and they enjoyed it. The guitar solo for the tune was grinding, and utilized some of Matt’s skill at combining multiple effects pedals to create a unique sound. This one was lower pitched than standard, with longer reverb and some echo thrown in. Very few people in the audience would realize the expertise and musical ability that had to go into creating such a solo, but Jake did. Out in the audience, Celia and Laura would know as well.

In one of the seats at the house right section of the audience, only four rows forward from the very rear where the concession stands were located, sat a forty-two year old woman. She was attractive for her age, with only a little bit of middle-aged chub, which was remarkable considering the fact that she had birthed five children in her life, two boys and three girls, the oldest of which was now seventeen and the youngest of which was four. Her hair was uniformly blonde, a natural color for her but one she had taken to coloring every few months due to the smattering of grey that had recently appeared there. Her name was Michelle Rourke but it had once been Michelle Borrows and she had once been in love with Jake Kingsley, the lead singer of Intemperance and the man who she had willingly given her holy virginity to.

Why in the name of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary am I here? she asked herself for perhaps the hundredth time since purchasing a seat in the nosebleeds for four hundred dollars from a scalper she had found online. She was alone, dressed in a beige pantsuit and a blue button-up blouse. Her hair was tucked into a baseball cap and she wore no makeup. She did not want anyone to recognize her. That would be beyond scandalous. Her husband and children thought she was at a church function on this evening. She had paid for the ticket with her credit card and, since she did the family finances (her husband was terrible at it, they had discovered nearly two decades before) she would be able to pay it off, little by little, without any notice on hubby’s part. But she still did not understand what had compelled her to sneak money and lie to her family so she could see this show. The band Intemperance and Jake Kingsley himself went again everything she believed in.

She had not heard any songs from the Never Say Never CD herself. She listened primarily to the local Catholic oriented radio station KFSH—called The Fish, naturally—which was not known to include Intemperance material in their rotation. But she had heard most of the other Intemperance tunes over the years just by being a human being in Heritage, California, the band’s home town. She had also heard most of the Jake Kingsley solo tunes over the years—it was even harder to escape those as even The Fish had played a few of the mellower tracks (like Insignificance, which they clearly did not understand the meaning of) from time to time. She had even admitted to herself that she enjoyed a few of the solo tunes, particularly Winter Frost, which was an emotional, brilliant tribute to parenthood.

She was so far back that she could see no detail of Jake Kingsley on the stage. All she saw by looking directly at him was a male figure with long brown hair holding a black and white guitar and wearing jeans with a black, sleeveless shirt. But she could see him in much greater detail on the two video screens that sat on either side of the stage. The camera operators showed multiple closeups of Jake as he sang and played. He was twenty-two years older than when she had last seen him in person the night she broke up with him on a boat in the marina (after you let him eat your pussy out one last time, a dark part of her mind insisted on reminding her) but, if anything, he was more attractive these days. His hair was a rich brown without so much as a hint of gray and fell down around his shoulders. His face was covered with a scruff of stubble that made him look almost dangerous. His eyes were the same piercing shade of brown, eyes that had looked directly into hers many times when she was younger and the two of them had been naked in each other’s arms, his phallus driving into her with a skill she had never experienced since. His bare arms were well muscled, a tattoo on each bicep—one a hand handcuffed to a guitar neck, the other a detailed map of some island (was it a Lord of the Rings thing? she wondered. She remembered him going on about that satanic book when they had been together, remembered looking inside the cover of his copy once and seeing maps there).

She had had sex with only two men in her entire life: her husband and Jake Kingsley before him. Obviously, she had done it with her husband many more times than she had with Jake, but her husband could not compare, could not even come close to comparing when it came down to the sheer enjoyment and pleasure of the act. Jake Kingsley had been magnificent at it. Her husband was mediocre at best (and even that description was a stretch, though she did love him, right?).

Jake probably hates me, she thought now as he started the next song in the set, which she recognized as Loser, a tune that Jake wrote about his high school days when he had been a loser, a song he used to play at D Street West when they had been a couple, a song that had ended up on the second Intemperance album a few years after she broke up with him. It was a slow tempo song with a gentle backbeat, Jake and Nerdly Archer playing the primary chords of the verses and then Matt Tisdale kicking in with his harsh distorted electric for the choruses. The lyrics were sad and meaningful, describing a hopeless crush he had had on some girl and how she did not even know he was alive, about how the one time he had screwed up his courage and tried to talk to her, she had removed herself from his presence as quickly as possible. She remembered the song because Jake had once told her the story behind it when they had been together, had even told her the name of the girl in question, although she did not remember that part now.

He really is a deep lyricist, she thought as she swayed and tapped her feet to the rhythm of the tune. I don’t agree with anything he stands for, but he is deep and very intelligent. What a shame he went down the wrong path in life.

She thought back to the reason he likely hated her now: That article she had penned in Catholic Monthly way back when, in 1987, six years after she had broken up with him. It had been the days when Jake and Intemperance were at the height of their popularity and the height of their notoriety, when the rumors about cocaine from butt cracks and rampant sexuality and even Satanism had been particularly thick in the media. She had been an English teacher at Holy Assumption Catholic School for Girls (her dream job), her latent parental rebellion that had led her to date Jake in the first place long since over and done with, her core upbringing as a good Catholic girl firmly back in control and guiding her life. She had been a founding member of the Family Values chapter of Heritage, California, a group dedicated to get music like Jake Kingsley’s off of the radio and to prevent it from being played live in public venues. She was newly married to the man of her dreams (a good Catholic boy with a good practice as a chiropractor) and they were living a nice, middle class life in the suburbs of Heritage. They went to mass every Sunday and they looked forward to her getting pregnant (though it still had not happened yet, probably, she had to admit at times, because they did not try all that often in those days).

She and her husband had been subscribers to Catholic Monthly back then. She had been inspired by an article in the June 1986 edition in which a former prostitute had described her journey from working for a pimp in Las Vegas as an outcall sex worker to embracing the teachings of The Church and finding her way back to Jesus and salvation. Michelle realized, after reading the article, that she herself had undergone a similar journey with Jake Kingsley. Nothing as sordid as prostitution and drug use (though she had smoked more than a little marijuana with Jake back then, but that hardly counted, right?) but she had sinned with him, engaging in premarital sex (and even oral sex, both the giving and receiving of, but she would not put that in the article) and listening to the godless music that the man and his band made (and even enjoying much of it, though she would not put that in the article either). She had been a bit of a wretch back then and she was now fully vested in The Church and what it stood for once again. Though the story was somewhat shameful to her—at this point in her life no one but her husband, her parents, a few old friends, and her priest even knew about it, and they all had kept the information to themselves—she felt the urge to share her journey from wretchedness to grace with her fellow Catholics. She decided to write her own article.

Her college degree was in English and she was a good writer. It took her the better part of three weeks to put down her story. It had been a truthful representation of her relationship with Jake, with only lies of omission such as the oral sex and the marijuana use. She did admit to the drinking since that was not exactly frowned upon by the Catholic Church. She told of her sheltered upbringing, her latent rebellion when she was in junior college, how Jake Kingsley, then a struggling musician who had never played a gig before, had asked her out one day and she had accepted. She told of how their relationship had developed from there, primarily driven by that rebellion but she also admitted to having genuine feelings for him at the time. She confessed to how she had given up her sacred virginity to him with hardly a second thought the night after seeing his first performance in a Heritage club. She did not accuse him of taking advantage of her, let alone raping her. Though she did not mention it in the article, that encounter in one of the bedrooms of Matt Tisdale’s house on his parents’ property was one of her fondest, most erotic memories. She had been turned on something fierce after watching her boyfriend play his music up on that stage, as she had heard the crowd cheering him and the rest of the band on. And the music had been powerful, meaningful, loud. No, when Jake pushed a little bit to do more than just make out and feel her up, she had not hesitated a moment, had not even offered a little token “no, we shouldn’t” to him. She let him take off her clothes until she was naked, let him suckle on her breasts, driving her insane with lust, and then go down between her legs with his mouth, where he licked and sucked her to two earth-shattering orgasms. After that, she pulled him up her body and demanded that he fuck her (“fuck me right now!” had been her exact words, she remembered as if they had just been spoken yesterday). And he did, working his condom-covered erection through her maidenhead with hardy a sting of pain, with only a drop or two of blood left on the sheet. And he did it very well. And he did it very well many times after that night. So well, that she became addicted to the act, both the fucking and the licking.

As time went on, she continued to enjoy the sex with him as often as she could. The love she felt for him, though it remained strong, soon developed a competitor: doubt about the long-term prospects of the relationship. By this point, she was getting ready to transfer to CSUH to finish her Bachelor’s degree in English. Her rebellious streak was fading as well and she began to lose that feeling that she was wiser than her parents, that she knew better what was good for her than they. And Jake continued to play the clubs in the Heritage area three, sometimes four times a week for $500 a gig which had to be split among the five of them. Jake was making less money than people on welfare, was sharing a shabby apartment outside midtown Heritage with Nerdly Archer. He had no other job, no other source of income, and was seemingly happy to keep doing what he was doing forever. She needed more out of a long term relationship than that. She could live with the fact that he was not a Catholic, was not even religious at all, in fact, but she had a lot of trouble seeing herself in a long-term relationship with a man who had long hair (even if it was sexy as hell) and made only four or five hundred dollars a week for what he did.

She kept her thoughts to herself during those days but she began to distance herself from him. She often found excuses not to get together with him. Very rarely did she go see any of his shows. He asked her often what was wrong but she claimed nothing was wrong. In truth, she would have broken up with him—as painful as that would be because she did still love him—but then she would no longer have access to that wonderful physical relationship they enjoyed when they did get together. She did not admit to herself then that that was the reason. In fact, she found herself arguing to Jake more and more that the sex they were having was wrong because they were not married. This did not stop her from having it, however. She could not resist him when she was in his presence. Her knowledge that the relationship would have to end at some point if Jake did not make a major life change continued to build in her and she continued not to discuss it with him. Her illogical brain continued to focus on the fact that they were sinning.

Finally, one night, the last night they had together, she agreed to visit Jake and the band at Willie’s Roadhouse on the river as they had added a new song to their set. She agreed to go, not because she was interested in the new song, but because it had been more than a week since she had seen him last and she wanted his body in a bad way. She had actually been having a good time that night, eagerly anticipating the sinning that would take place after the show, and then Jake and band performed the new song in question. It was called It’s in the Book.

She kind of liked the opening of it. It had a good beat and some complex guitar work from both Matt and Jake. She had really come to appreciate rock music to some degree since she started dating Jake. It had a power and an energy to it that was unmatched by any other genre. Of course, she would never admit to her family or church friends that she even listened to it, let alone enjoyed it. She found herself tapping her feet and nodding her head a little as the music played.

And then Jake began to sing the lyrics to the song. He had already told her that the tune was one he had penned and composed the initial melody to. She did not even have to wonder if Matt had been the one to write it. She had no trouble whatsoever interpreting the lyrics. She was an English major and had no problems figuring it out, even on first listen. And, thanks to Nerdly’s masterful sound checks, she heard every single word of the tune. It was about the bible, a cynical condemnation of that most holiest of books in human history. Jake was mocking it, accusing it of encouraging prejudice and hatred, bigotry and war.

She did not ponder the fact that what he was singing about had a strong grain of literal truth to it. He was attacking the bible. Mocking it. Blaspheming! How could she possibly stay another day with a man who would do something like that? She could not! Tonight would have to be the night.

She had every intention of breaking up with Jake as soon as he emerged from the backstage area to join the crowd for the after-show festivities. She really had. But then, when he came out and stood next to her ... well ... he smelled so good, looked so good. And then he invited her out to the boat he had access to. She refused at first, trying to rally herself. But then he offered to eat her pussy out and she folded like a camping tent. She accompanied him to the boat and let him stick his face up under her skirt, pull her white panties to the side, and then lick and suck her to a powerful orgasm.

That release gave her just enough relief for her willpower to overcome her lust. As he was pulling down his pants, displaying his impressive erection to her, and preparing to put a condom on, she told him to stop. A part of her—maybe forty-eight percent?—did not really want him to stop. She knew it was a near thing. The lust in Jake’s eyes was unmistakable. If he had just pushed forward and tried to sink that latex-covered hardon inside of her, she would have let him. But he did stop. And he asked her what was wrong. And she told him.

A few minutes later, she was out the door, tears running down her face, knowing it was over, part of her feeling relief, a bigger part feeling regret. Tonight was the first time since that night that she had been within half a mile of him.

The article she wrote for Catholic Monthly told the basic story of her relationship with Jake. She told how they met, how their relationship came to be, how they had sinned together (without offering details of what that entailed, although she did admit he took her virginity from her) many times and how she had enjoyed it. Most of the meat of the article was how she had strayed from the teachings of The Church, pulled away by latent teenage rebellion and her own lusts. She then talked about hearing that song on that fateful night (she did not name it), about her outrage at Jake for attacking the Holy Scriptures and all they stood for. That, she said, was the catalyst that led her back to Christ (and this was completely true). She wrote that Jake wanted to sin with her one last time on the boat in the marina, but she had turned him down (not mentioning that she had let him perform cunnilingus on her first, or that she had left him quite literally with his dick in his hand) and broken up with him at that moment. She wrote a little more about her return to Christ and that was the article.

She submitted it to Catholic Monthly, not very hopeful that they would choose to publish it. While it was well written—she really did have a flair for writing—it was a bit sordid in nature. To her surprise, however, she received an acceptance letter for the article just a month later. They wanted to publish it in the February 1987 edition. She was going to be a published author!

A contract for publication arrived a few weeks later. In it was a check for five hundred dollars. She signed the contract—which was four pages in length and written in incomprehensible legalese—without even reading it. She would later discover that that had been a mistake. A big mistake.

When the February issue of Catholic Monthly was delivered to her in mid-January she eagerly pulled it out of the packaging. A teaser for her article—which she had titled “A Wretch Like Me” was on the front cover. She wrinkled her brow a little as she read it. It promised a “disturbing telling from one of Jake Kingsley’s former girlfriends”. Disturbing? she thought, puzzled. There was really nothing disturbing in her article other than the undescribed sinning that had occurred. She had certainly not made Jake out to be evil in any way.

And then she read the article, her alarm and anger growing with each new paragraph. The A Wretch Like Me published in the magazine only superficially resembled what she had actually written. Some other writer had taken her words and added complete and total fabrications to it! The new article claimed that Jake regularly beat her, regularly raped her, regularly made her watch him have sex with other women! They made her relationship with him sound like sexual slavery and physical abuse. They claimed that he made her use cocaine! Though she had known at the time that Jake used cocaine on occasion, he had never done it in front of her and never once invited her to use some as well. And they were describing forced oral sex! They had made her and Jake out to be complete and total degenerates. What the fuck?

Within days the article was the talk of the country. People were outraged at Jake’s behavior with her and she was sought out by media representatives who wanted further information from her. She refused to talk to any of them, even to tell them that the article was not the one she had written. She tried to get in touch with the editor of Catholic Monthly, which was based in Boston. It took her more than three weeks and even then, she did not talk to the man himself, but his secretary. She demanded explanation for why they had changed her words, demanded a retraction of the article. She got the former but not the latter. She was told that the contract for publication she had signed effectively transferred the rights, including the copyright, for the article to Catholic Monthly. As owners of those rights, they had the right to modify the article as they saw fit. If she would just look on page 3, paragraph 4 of the contract, she would see that in black and white.

This is when she began to think about going to the media people and showing them the real article. She did not want to go through the rest of her life being thought of as Jake Kingsley’s former sex slave and a domestic violence victim. She was already getting far too much syrupy sympathy when she went to mass or when she met parents of the girls she taught. As if someone had been reading her mind, however, she was asked by Father Garcia to stay after mass on Sunday. She agreed, figuring he wanted to hear more details of her ordeal and to possibly confess a few things she had not already confessed (the sins she did confess to the Father were all pretty boring and minor league). But that was not what he wanted. He led her to his office and there sat Bishop Devecchio, the leader of the diocese that included all of Heritage and Cypress counties. She recognized him from his portrait that hung in the main hall but had never met him before.

Devecchio knew that the article published in Catholic Monthly was quite different from what she had actually written. How he knew that, she did not enquire, knowing that he would not tell her. He apologized for the difference but explained that if she were to dispute the authenticity of the published words it would bring discredit to The Church itself as the magazine was owned by The Church and was one of the most respected publications in the United States.

“But they changed my words around, added complete lies to the article,” she protested. “They made Jake out to be some kind of monster and me out to be an abused sex slave. None of that is true!”

“You do agree, however, that Jake Kingsly and his music is an unhealthy and even Satanic influence on American youth though?”

“Well ... yes,” she said. “Especially that anti-bible song, but...”

“It is an influence that The Church is trying to discredit and counter,” Devecchio said. He then went on to explain that the fight against Satanic, anti-Christian music was akin to a war, and sometimes you had to fight dirty in a war of this sort. Yes, they had printed things that were not necessarily true. Yes, they had distorted her words to some degree. But in doing so, they had struck a major blow to Jake Kingsley and Intemperance, who were perhaps the most evil of the evil musicians who were distributing pornographic filth to the youth of the nation for the purpose of corrupting them.