Chapter 3: Questions and Answers

Los Angeles, California

July 18, 1994

Celia and Greg arrived at Pauline’s house just before six o’clock in the evening, their limo dropping them off out front. It was a muggy, smoggy late afternoon and the sky was an ugly shade of grayish-blue. No clouds were present and there was not a stitch of wind. Celia was wearing a pair of white shorts and a sleeveless maroon top. Greg, as usual, was dressed a little nicer than his wife. He was sporting a pair of two-hundred-dollar slacks, a Pierre Cardin dress shirt, and a tie. He was also sporting a contented smile on his face. Celia had landed at LAX after a flight from Logan International in Boston twenty-four hours before. The two of them had become reacquainted with each other several times since.

Pauline herself answered the door after they rang the bell. She smiled and hugged both of them, even giving Greg a peck on the cheek. She seemed in a very good mood.

“I’m glad you could make it, C,” her manager told her.

“This is an important meeting,” Celia said. “I kind of needed to be here for it.”

“True,” Pauline said. “Everyone else is already here. We’re having drinks in the living room and we’ll talk business during dinner.”

“Sounds good,” Celia said.

They made their way into the living room, which looked out over the lake. Obie was sitting in an easy chair, sipping from what appeared to be a scotch on the rocks. Jake and Laura were sitting on the couch. Jake had Tabby, who was now just a few days shy of six months old, sitting in his lap and he was making her giggle by pretending to sneeze. It was Laura that caught Celia’s attention, however. She looked a little like she had been through a wringer. She had an abrasion on the right side of her face and some discoloration that looked suspiciously like a black eye on her right side. There were more abrasions that looked like road rash on both of her lower arms and a brace of some kind on her right ankle.

“Madres de Dios, Teach,” Celia exclaimed. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I had a little run-in with a sea lion the other night,” Laura said sourly.

“A sea lion?” Celia asked, astonished.

“While she was naked,” Jake added, smiling.

“What?” Celia asked.

“It’s a long story,” Laura said.

“You have got to tell it to me,” Celia said, walking over to her. “Are you okay?”

“A sprained ankle, a black eye, two broken toes, three toenails that aren’t going to make it much longer, and various scrapes and abrasions,” Laura said. “I’ll heal.”

“And hopefully you’ve learned not to run naked on a beach in the middle of the night,” put in Obie, who had apparently already heard the story.

“Well, at least not without a flashlight,” Laura said with a laugh. She got to her feet and held out her arms to Celia, who gave her a big hug.

“I can’t wait to hear this one,” Celia said.

“After hugs,” Laura said, holding out her hands to Greg, who quickly obliged her while Celia herself moved onto to Jake, who stood, Tabby still in his arms, and gave her an affectionate one-handed embrace.

“And look at you, little Tabs,” Celia proclaimed. “You’ve gotten so big since the last time I saw you.”

“She’s growing like a goddamn weed,” Obie said, coming over to collect his hug as well.

“Yeah,” Pauline said. “And biting at my goddamn nipples now.”

“Most women kind of like that,” Jake offered, earning himself a murderous scowl from his sister.

After the hugs, Greg and Jake did their customary handshake and then Obie and Greg did the same.

“All right,” Celia said, snatching Tabby away from Jake. She went willingly enough. “Tell me the sea lion story.”

“It’s not really that interesting,” Laura said, sitting down and picking up her wine glass.

“I seriously doubt that,” Celia said. “Give it up.”

“Well ... it was after the Soul Train Awards the other night,” Laura said.

“Oh yeah,” Celia said. “I caught Jake and G’s performance while I was in the hotel. Not bad for lip-synching.”

“I always feel like such a sellout when I do that,” Jake said with a shrug. “Still, it was a good time.”

“And I got the most beautiful dress out of the deal,” Laura said.

“I caught a couple of glimpses of you in it,” Celia said. “It was gorgeous.”

“I still can’t believe they just gave me a Versace dress,” Laura said. “I can only image how much that thing actually cost.”

“Welcome to the big-time celebrity life,” Pauline said. “You gotta love those endorsement deals.”

“There is a lot to be said for it,” Laura agreed.

“Anyway,” Celia said. “The sea lion?”

“Right,” Laura said. “Well ... after the ceremony, Jake and I went over to G’s place on the beach in Malibu. Neesh was with us.”

“And Neesh is...” Celia prompted.

“Gordon’s fiancé,” Laura said. “She lives there with him. They’re going to be getting married next April. She’s really quite beautiful.”

“That would be the woman sitting next to G at the ceremony?” Celia asked. She remembered her as an exotic looking dark skinned woman. Laura was right. She was quite beautiful.

“That’s her,” Laura confirmed. “She comes across as kind of, you know ... uh...”

“Bitchy?” Jake offered.

“Right,” Laura said. “She seems kind of stuck up when you first meet her, but she’s really not. I like her a lot. She’s very sweet.”

“She was involved in the sea lion incident?” Celia asked.

“Yeah,” Laura said with a giggle. “We had some pizza with her and G, and ... you know ... a few drinks, a few tokes on the old J, and pretty soon, I had this idea it would be fun to go down to the beach. So Neesh and I went out there.”

“What time was this?” Celia asked.

“It was pretty close to midnight,” Laura said.

“And you were drunk?” Greg asked.

“Hammered to the core,” Laura confirmed. “Anyway, we went down to the beach and kicked off our shoes and socks and then went down to splash around in the waves a little bit. After we did that for a while, we got to talking about how much warmer the water was here in southern California than Oregon and how you could swim in the water here, and ... well ... we decided to go swimming.”

Celia laughed a little. “But you didn’t have a bathing suit with you?”

“Right,” Laura said. “Neesh suggested we go skinny dipping. I didn’t want to at first—you know me, I’m kind of shy about things like that—but after all that wine, and after Neesh told me that it was pretty much a private beach and no one but us girls would likely be out here at that time of night ... well ... it started to seem like a good idea.”

“So ... you did it?” Celia asked.

Laura giggled a little. “We did it. We stripped out of our clothes right there above the spot where the waves were breaking and just jumped on in.”

“Oh my,” Celia said with a giggle. “Very naughty of you, Teach.”

“Yeah, but it was fun. We swam around for almost an hour, I think. And then we realized that the tide was coming in.”

“What’s wrong with the tide coming in?” Greg asked.

“We’d left our clothes right where the waves were breaking, remember? We both kind of thought of that at the same time. We rushed back to the spot where we’d undressed, but that spot was under water. Our clothes were nowhere to be seen.”

“Oh my God,” Celia said, giggling again. “What did you do?”

“We decided to split up and start looking for them. Neesh went one way down the surf and I went the other. I was running, looking in the waves for a glimpse of bra or panties or shirt or shorts, and ... well ... there was this sea lion laying on the beach right where the waves were coming in. It was black and I didn’t see it until it was too late. I ran into it and tripped and fell down.”

“Madre de Dios!” Celia squealed. “You tripped over it? Was it mad?”

“It was really pissed off,” she confirmed. “It started barking at me and reared up on its flippers. I screamed and took off running and it started to chase me.”

“It started to chase you?” Celia asked, fully laughing at the story now.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was terrifying. I panicked and didn’t know what to do. Neesh saw what happened and screamed at me to stop running along the shore, to go inland.”

“That seems a good course of action,” said Greg, who was grinning at her story.

“So I did, but it kept chasing me. I was running harder and faster than I’ve ever run before and that thing was still behind me, ark ark arking for all it was worth, and then I ran into a piece of driftwood with my foot. That’s how I got the broken toes and the sprained ankle. I fell face first into the sand. That’s how I got the black eye. I didn’t know any of that at the time, however, I was still in full-on panic mode. I jumped back to my feet and kept on running. This time the sea lion gave up and turned back to the water.”

“It’s a good thing it didn’t catch you,” Greg said. “I can only imagine what it might have done. It probably could have killed you.”

“Yeah,” Laura said, shaking her head at her predicament. “What a way to go, huh?”

“Can you imagine how the celebrity press would have spun it if my fiancé got killed by a freaking sea lion?” Jake asked.

“You’d a been in the cell next to OJ,” Obie said with a laugh.

“I wouldn’t have signed up to defend you,” Pauline added.

Even little Tabitha was laughing at this point. Celia tweaked her little nose affectionately and then turned back to Laura. “Did you ever find the clothes?” she asked.

“No,” Laura said with a sour shake of the head. “In truth, after the sea lion, we didn’t even look anymore. We just went back to G’s house. That was a bit awkward.”

“I can imagine,” Celia said. “How did you do it? Just stroll on through the door in all your naked glory?”

“Eventually, but not at first,” Laura said. “Neesh and I went up to the sliding glass door and we stood off to the side of it. She slid it open a little bit and tried to call G over so he could go get us some robes and hand them out. But G and Jake weren’t sitting in the living room anymore. The CD player wasn’t playing and their drink glasses weren’t there. She called a few times, but no one answered. She told me that G had a composing room and that maybe they’d gone up there to work on something.”

“Which was exactly what we’d done,” Jake confirmed. “We decided to co-write a tune and we had gone up there to start working on it right after the ladies went down to the beach. We were pretty hammered ourselves and we kind of got into the groove. That was why we didn’t notice they’d been gone so long.”

“Anyway,” Laura went on, “we decided we could make it to the downstairs bathroom and at least get some towels to cover up with and then get me cleaned up a little. So, we creep into the house and are about halfway across the living room, about as far from any cover as we could possibly be, when Jake and G both turn the corner in the upstairs hall and look out over the railing that looks down on the living room. We couldn’t have been more center stage if we’d planned it.”

Another round of laughter erupted, Laura included, although she was blushing furiously.

“That must have been quite a sight, Jake,” Celia said between giggles.

“It was one of the most inspiring moments of my life,” Jake agreed. “You’ve never seen two girls move so fast before. They sprinted to the bathroom and slammed the door so hard that a picture fell off the wall. The only thing funnier was listening to their explanation of what happened once they finally came out.”

“Yeah, the nurses and the doctor in the emergency room thought my story was pretty funny too,” Laura said. “And the x-ray technician, and the registration clerk, and those two cops they sent to make sure I wasn’t a domestic violence victim.”

“That part wasn’t that funny,” Jake said sourly.

“They really did that?” Greg asked, appalled.

“Of course they did,” Jake said. “I’m Jake Kingsley, the guy who rapes women and throws them off of boats, the guy who Mindy Snow implied was abusive to her. They were polite about it, but they showed up and separated us from each other and asked some serious questions about what had happened.”

“They seemed to be almost disappointed when they heard the real story,” Laura said. “Though they did think it was funny.”

“Yeah, and at least everyone’s kept their mouths shut about the whole thing,” Jake said. “There haven’t been any reports in the press about Laura’s assault on the sea lion, or about her swimming naked in the ocean—at least not yet.”

“You told them about being naked?” Celia asked.

“I kind of had to,” Laura said. “There was really no other way to explain why I’d shown up in the ER with no bra on, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a shirt that were three sizes too big for me.”

“Still,” Greg said, “I’m sure you could have come up with some explanation.”

“Maybe,” Jake said, “but then we would have been lying to them about something. Cops are pretty good at picking up on when you’re lying to them. If they would have found a hole in the story about why she was dressed like that, they might’ve started thinking there were other holes to explore as well.”

“It just seemed easier to tell the truth,” Laura said.

Celia looked at the battered redhead for a moment. She had looked down at the floor while she’d said that last part, as if she did not want to meet anyone’s eyes. It was a classic non-verbal cue of deceit. Was there something that Laura wasn’t being truthful about?

Probably not, she decided. The story was too bizarre, too detailed to be anything but the truth. The thought of falsehood by omission never even entered her mind.

“All right,” Jake said, after everyone had their plates of grilled tri-tip, baked potatoes, and grilled asparagus before them and had given the requisite complements to the cooks (Obie and Pauline). “Shall we talk about this concert ticket thing now?”

The concert ticket thing was the reason why Celia had flown home from Boston, why Jake and Laura were still hanging around in LA instead of going back to Oregon immediately after the Soul Train Music Awards. National’s suggestion on raising ticket prices for the rest of the tour needed to be discussed. It would be a controversial move if they decided to make it, maybe controversial enough to affect album sales, but it could also be a profitable one, potentially increasing tour revenue by more than one hundred percent.

“I’m ready to talk about it,” Pauline said. She was already on record as being in favor of it. “I just wish Bill and Sharon were able to be here. I feel weird talking about a business decision without all the owners of the LLC being here. Especially for something as important and far reaching as this.”

“Nerdly can’t bring himself to break away from the Brainwash project even for a day,” Jake said. “He thinks the whole thing will crash and burn if he and Sharon are not personally there to oversee every note that is put down. He told me that he will abide by whatever decision we make, one way or the other. He also said we can call him if we think we need his input on something. It’s after six o’clock. They’ll all be back at the house by now.”

“I understand,” Pauline said. “It doesn’t mean I approve of it though.”

“Fair enough,” Jake said. “I think the meeting will actually go smoother without Nerdly here to tell us about the theoretical physical aspects of the proposition and how the empirical data will lead us to the proper hypothesis.”

“Perhaps,” Pauline said.

“The person I really wish was here for this is Jill,” Jake said. “She would’ve been able to dial everything down to dollars and cents—data that probably would have been helpful. Unfortunately, she and the rest of her clan are on vacation in freaking Japan right now.”

“Yeah,” said Pauline. “They flew coach all the way across the Pacific and are all three sharing a room in the Tokyo equivalent of the Motel 6.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” Obie said. “Are they really that cheap?”

“They’re really that cheap,” Jake assured him. “I went over to Jill’s house once for a dinner meeting. It was in the middle of winter and I could almost see my breath in there because she kept her thermostat set at sixty degrees.”

“Sixty degrees?” Obie asked. “In the winter?”

“Right,” Jake said. “She told me that the difference between sixty degrees on the thermostat and seventy, which is where I keep mine set, added up to an eighteen dollar and forty-six cent difference in natural gas billing per month for a house with the cubic footage of interior space and the type of insulation that hers has.”

“Eighteen dollars and forty-six cents?” Obie asked.

“That’s right,” Jake said. “And over the course of the winter months, when the furnace is primarily in operation, that adds up to ... whatever it adds up to, but it’s not even close to a hundred bucks total. That is how cheap the Yamashitos are.”

“How much do y’all pay them people?” Obie wanted to know.

“Between what I pay them for being my personal accountants and what KVA pays them to keep the company books, well over a hundred K per year. And they are also one of the most highly respected CPA firms for private businesses in the greater Heritage region. A good portion of the independent restaurants, medical and dental practices, car dealers, and specialty retail stores in the area use them to manage their money and do their taxes. If they’re pulling in less than two million a year I’d be surprised, yet Ma and Pa Yamashito are still living in the post-war tract house around the corner from the elementary school Jill and I went to as kids, and Jill herself lives in a modest little single story over in the Pocket area by the river—but not on the river, because, as Jill put it, ‘paying an extra twenty thousand dollars for a riverfront location makes no financial sense in the long-term’.”

Obie was shaking his head. “So, they could afford to fly first-class to Tokyo and stay in the best individual suites the city has to offer—even with the exchange rate being what it is—without dinging their net worth?”

“Without a doubt,” Pauline agreed. “They seem to get a little adrenaline rush out of finding ways to do everything cheaply though. When Jill told me about the deal they got on their flights and hotel room in Tokyo, you could hear how proud she was about it.”

“Hmmph,” Obie grunted in bewilderment. “Is this a Jap thing or an accountant thing?”

“I’m thinking it’s an accountant thing primarily,” Jake said. “With perhaps a dash of underlying Japanese culture to give it a kicker.”

“Kind of like the lime in a gin and tonic?” Obie suggested.

“Exactly,” Jake said with a smile.

“In any case,” Pauline said, “Jill is not here, so we’ll just have to muddle through the financial aspects of this proposed deal without her. I did run the idea by her before they left, and she did let it be known that anything that would increase KVA’s bottom line should be looked upon as a good thing.”

“And this would increase the bottom line considerably,” Greg said.

“On the surface and in the short-term it would,” Celia said. “My question, however, is what would be the long-term consequences of increasing ticket prices in the name of profit?”

“That is the question of the hour right there,” Obie said.

“What do you mean?” Pauline asked.

Obie fielded this one. “It’s like this, y’all,” he said. “I don’t have a horse in this race myself, but I’ll have one in a similar race pretty soon, so I’m a very interested spectator here. Them scalpers were selling my tickets for more than a hundred bucks a pop on my last tour, so I get the underlying argument for this deal. If people are willing to lay down a C-note or more for one of our tickets, why shouldn’t we be the ones pocketing those greenbacks instead of the scalpers? I also get the counter-argument to the proposal. Tours have always been for the purpose of promoting an album in order to increase sales, therefore we’ve always charged as little as feasible for the tickets: just enough to keep from losing too much money on the tour. Charging more than that will make us seem to be shamelessly profiteering from our music, an image that goes against our desired public perception as artists who do what we do for the furtherance of our art instead of to make an assload of money.”

“Exactly,” Jake said. “That is my fear if we go through with this whole deal. Right now, Celia has a reputation as a serious musician who is fully dedicated to producing quality tunes and getting them out there for the world to hear. Everyone knows about how she went independent and how we scraped together the money for KVA Records and used my mom and Nerdly’s mom for musicians and self-produced our CDs just so we could be heard. They think of her as selfless and humble, altruistic even. If she suddenly starts charging a hundred dollars or more a ticket to see her in concert, that could lead to disillusionment by her fanbase. Could that impact sales numbers of her albums? Could it lead to people not buying tickets to her shows?”

“Do you really think her reputation as a person has that much to do with sales?” Pauline asked. “Remember, you’re the one who has always maintained that an artist’s reputation has nothing to do with sales as long as the artist produces good music.”

“I was saying that about notoriety, which is a negative thing that the suits try to encourage,” Jake qualified. “The record company execs have always said that Ozzy Osbourne sold all those albums because he bit the head off a bat once and peed on the Alamo, that Motley Crue sold all those albums because of their drinking, that Intemperance sold all of our albums because we were Satan worshipers who snort cocaine out of butt cracks.”

“You never told me if you actually did that or not,” Obie said.

“Please,” Jake said, deadpan. “That’s not a story to be told in front of little Tabby.”

Obie chuckled.

“Anyway,” Jake went on, “notoriety has little to do with album sales in the big picture, but a positive public perception is something else entirely. People want to believe we’re selfless, dedicated artists. We still have to make good music, of course, but they eat it up when they believe we’re struggling artists and they start to lose faith in us when they get the perception that we’re greedy and money-grubbing just for the sheer exploitation of it.”

“Which is kind of what we’d be doing if we started charging outrageous prices for concert tickets simply because people will pay it,” Celia said.

“That’s not exploitation,” Pauline insisted. “It’s capitalism. The market price for Celia’s concert tickets is a hundred dollars. People are willing to pay that and they are going to pay that whether we’re the ones charging that much or not.”

“What about the guy who lives paycheck to paycheck and wants to take his wife to a Celia Valdez concert?” Jake asked. “We start charging a hundred bucks for each ticket and we lose him and everyone like him as a customer. And when that happens on a grand scale, the resentment might just cause enough animosity that he becomes disillusioned with Celia as an artist. Now he won’t even buy a CD.”

“Well ... let’s look at your hypothetical paycheck to paycheck guy realistically for a minute,” Pauline suggested. “He wants to buy two tickets for Celia’s show so he and his wife can go see her. Theoretically, he can wait in line for hours so that when Ticket King opens, he’s able to pay retail price of twenty-five dollars for a GA ticket, or forty for a reserved. Alternately, he can pick up his phone and dial up Ticket King’s eight-hundred number with his credit card in hand and hope to get through so he can buy his ticket that way. Is everyone following me so far?”

“We’re following you,” Jake said.

“Okay,” Pauline said. “Now, this all sounds good in theory, but in reality, his chances of actually scoring a ticket this way are maybe fifty percent. These tickets are selling out quickly, in less than a day. If he wants to get one from the Ticket King booth, he’s going to have to basically camp out all night or they’ll all be gone before he gets to the front of the line. He’s a working man. He probably doesn’t have the time or the inclination to camp out in front of a record store all night. And as for the phone order, we all know how that works. The scalpers and their agents are extremely well-organized when it comes to high-value tickets. They flood the phone lines the moment the tickets are released for sale and they snatch up every ticket they can get their hands on because they know they can resell them for more than twice face value. There’s a very good chance our hypothetical paycheck to paycheck guy, who is just trying to score some tickets and not make a profit, will just keep getting busy signals on the line until he gives up ... says, ‘fuck it, I’ll buy my old lady a goddamn toaster instead’.”

“But he can get the tickets if he’s persistent,” Celia said.

“That’s the thing,” Pauline said. “He has to be persistent. Most people, when it comes to something they do not necessarily need in their life, tend not to be persistent. So, what ends up happening is that the scalpers are the ones who snatch up most of the tickets. I’ve seen figures floated around that estimate well over seventy-five percent of tickets for acts that sell-out every show—the Rolling Stones, U2, Pearl Jam, Nirvana back before Kurt offed himself, and Celia herself—are resold after purchase for a higher price. That means the scalpers are getting the vast majority of them and making insane profits off of us. Profits that we should be making for ourselves.”

“That is unacceptable to me,” Obie pointed out. “If our paycheck-to-paycheck guy really and truly wants those tickets for his wife, he’ll most likely have to get them from a scalper. He’ll have to pay the hundred dollars apiece anyway.”

“I understand that,” Jake said, “but in that scenario it’s the scalpers that are being perceived as greedy profiteering slimeballs, not the artists.”

“Then you’re saying you’re against the plan to raise ticket prices?” Pauline asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m against the plan.”

“Uh huh,” Pauline said with a nod. She turned to Celia. “And how about you, C? It’s in your name that we’re even discussing this. Where do you fall?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “I don’t want to be thought of as a money-grubbing corporate puta, that’s for damn sure. At the same time, it really bothers me that these lowlife scalpers are making all this money off me while my tour is barely in the black.”

“And it’s only in the black at all because you did not allow them to have all the dancers and lasers and choreography,” Greg pointed out.

“This is true,” Celia said.

“Why don’t we all look at this thing from a practical point of view?” Obie suggested.

“What do you mean?” asked Jake.

“Well, we have a test case to look at,” Obie said. “The Eagles are the boys who got this whole discussion rolling in the first place, right? They’re the ones selling those concert tickets for premium coin. Are people buying them?”

“Well ... yes,” Pauline said. “People are snatching up every last one of them in a matter of hours as each venue is released for sale. And there is still a considerable black-market resale market for them after that. That’s kind of my point.”

“And they are regularly accused of profiteering and exploitation of their fame in the media,” Jake said. “That’s kind of my point.”

“Is this reputation for profiteering having any effect on album sales?” Obie asked next.

“I think we all know the answer to that,” Pauline said. “Hell Freezes Over is selling like mad. It shot right to the top of the album chart the moment it was released and has been perched there ever since. And it’s mostly a live album, full of songs that have already been released in studio versions back in the day. There are only three new studio cuts on the album and only a few live cuts that have not been previously released on earlier live albums. I think it’s safe to say that the band’s image as profiteers is not impacting sales of their product.”

“And Celia’s CD is a studio album in its entirety,” Obie said. “Nothing but original, unreleased material on it. Hell, there’s not even a cover tune on it.”

“That is true,” Jake conceded. “But there is still the potential for the negative press and profiteering accusations to have an impact on sales.”

“Is that really what you’re worried about, Jake?” Pauline asked.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Are you actually worried that KVA would lose money and sales in this deal, or are you more worried about being seen as someone with a little greed in his soul?”

Jake was caught off guard by this suggestion. He opened his mouth to deny what was being said but then slowly closed it again. Could she be correct? Could she?

“Think it through, Jake,” Pauline said. “Hell Freezes Over is selling like mad, despite the negative press over the ticket prices. As Nerdly would say if he was here, we have empirical evidence that album sales remain unaffected when one gains a reputation as a profiteer. Capitalism reigns supreme. People will pay the market value for the tickets. They’ll grumble about it, but they’ll pay it. All we would be doing is shifting that profit from the black market to ourselves and making our tours a significant source of income instead of just a promotional gambit. The only real objection I hear from you and from Celia is that you don’t want to be thought of us greedy by the fans.”