Chapter 15: Ziggy

Los Angeles, California

January 6, 1997

Dr. Jennifer Gordon was the family practitioner who had been taking care of Jim Ramos for the past twelve years. She was tall and willowy, fairly good looking for a woman in her late forties, and she had a very concerned expression on her face now as Jim sat in one of the exam rooms in the Omni Health medical office building near Venice Beach. It was his first visit to her in eighteen months and there was much to be unhappy about.

“Your weight is up almost fifteen pounds since the last visit,” she told him. “Your blood pressure is out of control. One hundred eighty-six over a hundred and eight? It hasn’t been that high since before we got you on treatment for it.”

“Yeah,” Jim said with a sigh. “I’ve been out of the country for a bit.”

“Where to?” she asked.

“Everywhere,” he said. “All over Europe, Asia, South America. I just got back three weeks ago.”

“You were on a long vacation?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I got a gig working as a tour paramedic for Matt Tisdale. Have you heard of him?”

She had. She was not a fan of him or of Intemperance, but she had certainly heard of him. “It would seem that this new job of yours is not conducive to good health,” she suggested.

“We’re on hiatus for now,” Jim told her. “And that’s why I came in. I ran out of my blood pressure meds somewhere in Argentina. I tried to get more from a pharmacy there, but I think they sold me counterfeits. They didn’t do shit for my pressure readings.”

She looked at him, obviously uncomfortable with his use of profanity.

“Sorry, doc,” he apologized. “I’ve been hanging around Tisdale for more than a year now. I’m still trying to return to polite society manners.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I will certainly refill your prescriptions when you leave, but let’s talk about your labs for a minute.”

“Not good?” he asked.

“Not at all,” she said. “Your A1C—that’s the average daily glucose reading—is significantly elevated on this last draw. You’re now flirting with a diagnosis of type two diabetes. And then there’s your liver enzymes. They are elevated as well. Have you been drinking more alcohol than usual?”

“Yeah,” he said, not bothering to lie or even embellish. “It’s pretty much a daily thing out on the road. Now that I’m home I’m trying to slow it down.”

“Are you succeeding?” she asked.

“Kinda sorta,” he said.

“I see,” she said, making a notation on his chart. “The alcohol intake is undoubtedly responsible for the elevated liver enzymes and probably a significant factor in the elevated A1C. Your triglycerides are also elevated in all categories except your HDL, which is the good cholesterol. That number is significantly decreased. You’re a medical person, Jim. You have to know that you need to bring those numbers back into line unless you’re a fan of heart attacks and strokes.”

“I’m working on that too,” Jim said. “I’ve cut way down on carbs and fat since we’ve been home. I’m even going to start hitting the gym. The place I’m staying at has a nice set of workout equipment.”

“I would do that sooner than later if I were you,” she said.

“I will, doc,” he promised.

She lectured him for a few more minutes and then let him go, fresh prescriptions in hand and with an order sheet to have his labs drawn again in three months, just before his next appointment. He made a vow that he really was going to start drinking less. Maybe only do it on the weekends? Starting next week, of course. A man really needed a drink after a fucked-up doctor’s appointment like this one.

He walked out to his car. It was a 1997 Chevy Camaro Z-28, gold in color, with a sunroof and a manual transmission. He had bought it five weeks ago, paying $26,000 cash for it with money from his swollen bank account. He had always wanted to own a Camaro and now he did. It had just turned a thousand miles on the odometer on the drive to this office. He got inside, admired the new-car smell for a moment, and then pushed in the clutch and fired up the gas-guzzling V8 engine. He pulled out of the parking lot and started the one hour and fifteen-minute drive back to the place he was now staying.

That place was Matt’s house on the beach just outside San Juan Capistrano. Matt had invited him to stay there, rent-free, for as long as he wanted. It had not been an offer made out of politeness or pity. Matt did not do things just to be polite and had no sense of pity. He had, in fact, encouraged Jim to stay with him indefinitely, giving him his own key, allowing him to have his mail sent there, allowing him to eat meals with he and Kim, allowing him to drink freely from the bar, and even giving him permission to fuck Kim whenever he wanted as long as Kim was okay with it and as long as he, Matt, was not already fucking her or planning to.

The reason behind Matt’s generosity was simple. He had become addicted to having Jim around and wanted to keep him nearby. He received a great deal of comfort knowing that he had a trained and equipped paramedic living in his house. Kim had told him one night (after he got done fucking her—she seemed quite fond of his company as well) that Matt became visibly agitated whenever Jim had to leave for an extended amount of time. Even though he lived in a major suburban area and could have emergency medical services at his doorstep in less than ten minutes simply by dialing a three-digit phone number, that was too much of a lag in his opinion. He wanted Jim there when he needed him and was willing to give up a part of his house in order to facilitate that.

Jim had jumped at the offer when it was made. Why wouldn’t he? He genuinely liked hanging out with Matt (even though it was taking a significant toll on his own health) and, since he was not being charged rent, had paid off his new car outright, and had paid off all of his previous debts and credit cards with the money he had made out on tour, his only real recurring expenses were the three hundred and eighteen dollars a month he had to shell out to Omni Health Services for his medical insurance and the four hundred dollars a month he had to shell out for his car insurance. He had well over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in his savings account now. At the rate he was spending money that number would only trickle down slowly and he would not have to go back to the grind of working in the ambulance anytime soon.

Life was good.

When he arrived at the mansion, he used the remote control clipped to his visor to open the door to the six-car garage. He parked next to Matt’s Maserati that he rarely drove these days. Kim’s Mercedes was absent at the moment, as was the Toyota Camry that belonged to Charles the butler.

He closed the garage and entered the house through a side door that led into the kitchen. Louisa, the cook, was in here working on dinner. It smelled like her spicy chicken meat that she used when making her tacos. This served to elevate Jim’s mood a bit. Louisa’s tacos were the best he had ever had.

He greeted Louisa, spent a moment or two making small talk with her, confirmed they were indeed having tacos tonight, and then exited the kitchen into the entertainment room. There, he found Matt sitting on one of the couches before the television, which was currently turned off. Matt was wearing a tattered pair of jeans and an Iron Maiden t-shirt that had seen better days. He was rolling a joint on the coffee table and had a mixed drink sitting next to him. He looked very happy to see Jim home once again.

“Wassup, dude?” Matt asked him. “How was your appointment with the quack?”

“It was all right,” Jim said, heading directly for the bar. “She told me to cut down on my drinking, start exercising more, start eating better, get back on my medications. You know how it is?”

“Fuckin’ A,” Matt said. “Those doctors are always spouting shit like that. If it was up to them, nobody would have any fuckin’ fun.”

“That’s the truth,” Jim said, taking down a water tumbler and filling it with ice. He poured the glass about half full of Beefeater London dry gin and then topped off the rest with tonic water from the tap. He took a bottle of squeeze lime juice out of the refrigerator and added a squirt to his drink. He then carried the concoction back to the couch and sat down.

“Smoke this joint with me,” Matt said after he sealed it shut.

“Sounds good,” Jim said, taking a big drink.

Matt fired up and took a long hit. He then passed it over to Jim, who did the same. It was pretty good shit, so they only had to smoke about half of it to get themselves feeling pretty good. Matt dropped it into the ashtray and then lit up a cigarette.

“How was your conference today?” Jim asked. He knew that Matt had a scheduled phone conference with some of the bigwigs at National Records at one o’clock this afternoon. He was now free and clear of the contract he had signed after the breakup of Intemperance and was starting negotiations for the next one. He had been saying for months that he was now—after back-to-back successful CDs and tours—negotiating from a position of strength and would be “fuckin’ rolling in the dough” on the next round.

Matt’s expression soured. “They’re trying to jack me around,” he said bitterly.

“Yeah?” Jim asked, surprised.

“Yeah, the assholes,” he said. “They’re not willing to increase my royalty rate at all. They even suggested dropping it from thirty percent to twenty-eight.”

“What justification could they possibly have for doing that?” Jim asked. Matt was, after all, one of the most popular hard rock acts in the nation.

“They say that they are not anticipating as high of sales numbers for my next project and they cannot justify increasing my fuckin’ compensation rate in light of this projection.”

“Why are they not anticipating as high of sales numbers?” Jim asked. “You’re badass.”

“Because they don’t give a shit about the quality of the next release,” Matt said. “They want me to rush it and get it on shelves by fuckin’ June.”

Jim knew how a concert tour worked quite intimately, but he was completely clueless about the recording process. “That’s like six months,” he said. “You can’t get a CD out in that timeframe?”

“Fuck no,” Matt scoffed. “Not a quality one anyway. I haven’t even composed any tunes yet. That alone will take me a few months. And then me and guys have to work them up, shape them, make them what they should be. That’s usually another three or four months, minimum. The recording process itself is another two or three months and then another two months to mix and master. There is no fuckin’ way I can operate under a timeline like that.”

“Why do they want it by June?” Jim asked. “What’s so important about that?”

“They don’t give a shit about the quality of the new CD,” Matt explained. “They know that anything with my name on it is going to go platinum automatically at this point. They want me to have two solid, radio friendly tunes and the rest simple filler.”

Jim did not understand the point of this seemingly self-destructive plan. “I don’t get it,” he said. “They are in the business of selling CDs, right? Wouldn’t it benefit them for you to take your time and put out quality tunes so you could sell more than just the automatic purchases?”

“They are not in the business of making CDs,” Matt explained. “They are in the business of making money for the stockholders. And they figure the best way for me to make the most amount of money for them is to have me out on tour as much as possible.”

“Out on tour? They think the tour revenue is more important than the revenue they get by selling CDs?”

“Things are heading in that direction,” Matt said. “They are totally loving this whole market-price for concert tickets thing. It’s opened up a whole new source of revenue for them. My last CD just cleared triple platinum, and that’s an assload of money for them even if they do have to pay me thirty percent of it, but with the extended tour we just did and with them charging a minimum of a hundred bones per ticket, they made more money from that than they did from the CD sales. And now they’re figuring that they’ve pretty much drained my well of good tunes at this point so they just want me to churn something out real quick so they can justify a new tour and start pulling in more money in the third quarter of this year instead of sometime next year.”

“Why don’t they just ask you to go out on tour now?” Jim asked. “People will still put up their money to see you, won’t they?”

“Not as many, and not for as much,” Matt said. “You see, if we tour without releasing new material, it gives people the impression that we’re just doing it for the money—and they would be right. There has to be new material to go with a tour. It’s like a fuckin’ law, dude.”

“I see,” Jim said slowly. “Then are they offering to increase your portion of the tour revenue?”

“Fuck no,” Matt said. “Again, they actually had the balls to suggest that they should lower my cut to forty percent since they are financing everything and the cost of truck rental and fuel has gone up and blah blah fucking blah. Of course, I told them that they could stick that shit right up their fuckin’ asses.”

“As you should,” Jim said. “I mean, you can also sign with Aristocrat or Columbia or one of the others, right?”

Matt sour expression turned even sourer. “I could,” he said, “but that wouldn’t be such a good deal for them or me. National owns the rights to all of my tunes and will continue to own them for another twenty-two fuckin’ years. I can’t do any of the tunes from the last three CDs in concert unless they give me their fuckin’ permission to do them.”

“That’s fucked up,” Jim said, appalled by the very concept.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Matt said.

“So, National will just tell you that you can’t do any of your previous tunes on any tour that isn’t with them?”

“If they really wanted to be dicks about it, they could,” Matt said. “But remember what their main purpose in life is: making money. Odds are they would give me permission to perform my shit if I signed with another label, but they would demand a cut of it, just like they did at the TSF. Only this would be a much bigger cut. I’m guessing they would ask for at least twenty percent of the concert revenue for any tour that I performed music from their label on.”

“Twenty percent?” Jim said. “Jesus.”

“Yep,” Matt said. “Not a bad payday for them when they had to invest no money of their own to tap into it. And if National is getting twenty percent, there is no way in hell that Aristocrat or Columbia is going to agree to giving me fifty percent. They may go forty on the CD sales just to get me to sign, but you can bet your ass they ain’t gonna agree to any more than thirty or so for tour revenue.”

“Where does that leave you then?” Jim asked.

“In the same fucking boat I’m in now,” he said, taking a drag off his smoke. “I owe millions of dollars to the fucking IRS and the fucking state. They’re garnishing my fucking royalties and other income as it comes in, letting me keep only half and that is still not paying down the debt I owe them fast enough to avoid more penalties every fuckin’ quarter, which just increases the debt more. I still have to pay taxes on all the incoming income and I still have to pay the fuckin’ bills that come in. My savings is shot to shit and I’m barely holding onto what little I have left. I was hoping this next contract would pull me out of the fuckin’ spiral, but it seems pretty fuckin’ clear that it won’t.”

“What are you going to do, Matt?” Jim asked. “Can Kim help out?”

He shook his head. “Me and Kim stay out of each other’s finances,” he said. “That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s always been. I would let them take my fuckin’ house away before I asked Kim for a fuckin’ dime. Besides, even she doesn’t have enough money to help me out of this shit. She’s rich—selling quality porn is a really good gig—but she ain’t that rich.”

“What’s the answer then?” Jim asked.

Matt looked over at him and hefted his drink. “This,” he said. “This is the answer.” He then picked up the joint and hefted that as well. “And this.”

“I see,” Jim said thoughtfully.

January passed and moved into February. V-tach was flown up to Oregon to start recording their first album. Jake and Laura and the Nerdlys flew there in Jake’s plane while Celia—who decided to hang out with them in the Oregon house for the duration in order to clear her head, help out with the recording, and maybe start working on some new compositions, drove up there in her car. Jake, the Nerdlys, and V-tach all settled into the five days a week routine of laying down the tracks. Celia and Laura would typically spend at least two of those days in the studio to watch and help them along if they could, but usually spent the other three days hanging out at the house, talking and drinking wine.

During one such session, when they had the house to themselves on a weekday afternoon, Celia became the second member of the Kingsley circle of acquaintances to learn about their plan to procreate. Laura blurted it out to her after her third glass of wine.

“Madres de Dios, that’s awesome, Teach!” Celia exclaimed upon being told the news. “You and Jake will be great parents. When do you think it will happen?”

“If all goes well, it will happen soon,” Laura told her. “I’ve been off the birth control pills since just before that whole transsexual thing came out. The doc says it takes one to three months for my body to get back into the mode for getting pregnant.”

“Are you tracking your ovulation and scheduling when you have sex and all that?” Celia asked.

“No,” she said. “Dr. Vargo suggested we do that, but we are just going about our business like we always have. We ... you know ... do it frequently enough that the odds are bound to be in our favor.”

“Must be nice,” Celia grunted. She still had not had a penis in her vagina since the last night with Greg in El Paso. Suzie’s mouth had been there plenty of times, and Celia’s dildo even more, but nothing with a Y chromosome in its DNA had even come close.

“Well ... yeah, it actually is,” Laura said. “Sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize for getting dicked regularly,” Celia told her.

“Somehow, it felt like I should,” Laura said. “Anyway, the doctor actually suggested that we slow it down a little.”

“Slow it down?”

Laura nodded, a little embarrassed. “He asked me how often we typically had sex with each other on a weekly basis. He seemed rather surprised when I told him that we ... uh ... you know ... do it pretty much every day at some point when we’re both home. Sometimes more than once if it’s Jake’s day off.”

“That is a pretty impressive rate of getting it on,” Celia said, clearly a little jealous.

Laura blushed. “We like to have sex,” she said. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Not a thing,” Celia said. “More power to you—although perhaps you could be a little quieter when you do it. But why did the doctor want you to slow it down? Wouldn’t that rate pretty much guarantee that the miracle would happen?”

“You would think,” she said, “but he says that how it actually works is a counterintuitive idea. The more we do it, the lower Jake’s sperm count is likely to be on any one ‘occurrence of intercourse’, as he puts it, since it doesn’t have time to replenish itself between ‘ejaculation episodes’.”

“Really?” she asked. That was indeed a counterintuitive thought.

“That’s what he says,” Laura said. “But I have faith in Jake’s little swimmers. I think they’ll be up for the job. Besides, it’s no fun to schedule sex. Or to go without it when you want it just to build up a sperm count. We’ll try it our way for a few months first. If I don’t turn up pregnant by the time we go back home, maybe we’ll try what Dr. Vargo says.”

“A good plan,” Celia said.

“That’s right,” Laura said. “We’re not really in a hurry or anything.”

It was a good plan. In fact, it was already well on its way to working. On the day she told Celia her news, the levels of progesterone and estrogen that had been kept artificially elevated for the past seven years of her life by her birth control pills finally began to approach normalization. Birth control pills primarily worked by fooling the female body into thinking it was already pregnant, thus it did not mature and ovulate a fresh egg and send it down the fallopian tubes on a trip to the uterus, thus putting it into a position where a waiting sperm cell could encounter it.

On February 3, 1997, Laura’s hormones were just enough in natural balance that an ovum was finally kicked loose for the first time in eight years. It was a good ovum, perfectly capable of performing its one function in life, and it started its journey down her left fallopian tube, eager for the possibility of letting a sperm inside so it could turn into a zygote, an embryo, a fetus, and then a full-on infant ready to poke his or her head out into the world.

But alas, it was not to be. Though Jake certainly fulfilled his part of the bargain, sending loads of spermatozoa into her body on a nightly basis in amounts that were well above the minimal level for fertilization, and though the vast majority of those spermatozoa were all intact and capable of performing their part in the miracle of life, they were not really motivated to act. Laura’s body still had a slightly elevated estrogen level left over from the pills. It was not enough to hamper ovulation, but it was enough to suppress capacitation of the sperm cells, which was the point that they were infused with hormones to swim faster and stronger and to begin the process of converting the acrosome layer on their heads to a state where they could release enzymes that would make them capable of burrowing into the zona pellucida layer of the ovum.

The ovum passed an impressive collection of sperm cells in her left fallopian tube. None of them were interested enough to make a run for it. Those that the ovum bumped into by chance had no acrosome reaction to help them burrow inside. The ovum continued on its journey unfertilized and eventually implanted in the wall of Laura’s uterus. The sperm cells all died a natural death and were absorbed by Laura’s body where they were converted back into their base molecules and eventually excreted out in her urine and feces. After ten days or so, her body realized she was not pregnant and her hormones reacted accordingly. The nice, nutritious uterine lining that had been prepared for an implanted blastocyte began to break down into blood, tissue, electrolytes, and water. It shed from her uterine wall and passed down through the cervix and out of her vagina over a period of four days. Most of it was absorbed into a series of cotton tampons and thrown into the trash.

Two days after the last of the menstrual bleeding stopped, another surge of hormones began inside Laura’s body. Another ovum, this one in her right ovary, began to mature in response. It too was a healthy ovum carrying only twenty-three chromosomes instead of the forty-six that all the other cells in her body carried. On one of these chromosomes was the gene—contributed to her bloodline eight generations back—that encoded for red hair. It was a recessive gene and would only come forth if the hair color gene in Jake’s contributing twenty-three chromosomes was also for red hair. And that was assuming that this ovum was the one that ended up being fertilized. Everything had to go right in order for that to happen. But everything went right on a regular basis when it came to human reproduction. That was why there were now six billion people living on the planet.

The ovum kicked loose from its mooring on the third day of March and began to slowly move toward the fallopian tube. That very night, Laura and Jake had sex in the hot tub after everyone else had gone to bed and Jake blasted a very impressive load of spermatozoa up inside of her. Unfortunately for them, the heat of the tub and the chlorination of the water had caused the opening of her cervix to reflexively clamp shut. The vast majority of those sperm cells poured out of her body and into the water of the hot tub when Jake pulled his schlong out of her. Their fate was to be sucked up into the filtration system of the tub and eventually thrown into a landfill when the maintenance guy changed it. The few sperm that managed to make it past the cervix by chance had no shot at performing their function. There were too few of them to make a run and they had been rendered sluggish by the heat.

The next night, March 4, 1997, conditions were considerably more copacetic. They did the deed in their bed. Jake licked and sucked on her vagina and clitoris for the better part of twenty minutes, drawing two orgasms from her and flooding her body with oxytocin (and waking up a few of the house guests as well). This served to make the cervix open up a large passage in anticipation of a deposit. That deposit came shortly. After pounding away at her in the missionary position long enough to squeak out one more orgasm from her, Jake rolled her over and entered her from the rear for his own finale. This allowed gravity to offer an assist to the process. When he finally ejaculated, nearly the entire load—some three hundred and eighty million sperm cells—was shot directly into Laura’s cervix and well over ninety percent of them stayed in there when he finally pulled out and she rolled over onto her back.

As she slept after the encounter (and as Jake went out on the deck in his robe to enjoy a cigar and a glass of sixteen-year-old Scotch), those spermatozoa began to move inward, propelled by their little tails, moving steadily upstream like salmon in a river. They entered her uterus, which was tiny at the moment, but the size of Lake Erie in comparison to the size of the sperm cells. The uterus knew that Laura was fertile at the moment and, as such, it was secreting a concoction of lipids and corticosteroids that had a profound effect on the spermatozoa within. Suddenly, their tails grew stronger, allowing them to move faster and more efficiently. And on their heads, the acrosome layer began to deteriorate, which would allow the enzymes capable of penetrating the ovum to start to flow.

The sperm continued to swim onward. Most of them were drawn in the direction of the right fallopian tube, where there was a high concentration of progesterone that had been secreted by the ovum inside the right ovary. Sperm were attracted to progesterone, and they picked up the pace as they sensed a large surge of it.

The next morning, while Laura was taking her shower and preparing to start her day (she planned to go into the studio with Jake on this day), a good portion of the sperm cells had entered the fallopian tube and were working their way upstream, their little tails moving like mad as they followed the increasing concentration gradient of progesterone. At about the time they were going through the ritual of the sound check, the sperm began to collect in the ampulla of the tube, the curved section where the tube wrapped around the ovary itself. This was to be their final destination. There were two things that could happen to them in this space. Either all of them would die, or all of them would die except one.

Meanwhile, the ovum had made its way into the fallopian tube and started to work its way downward, moving slowly, in no particular hurry. It did not reach the ampulla for another eighteen hours. During that time, Jake added two more deposits of sperm, but for those troopers, it was far too late in the game.

Once the ovum entered the ampulla, the sperm inside—which had been kept warm and nourished so they would stay alive long enough to fulfill their function—went truly insane. They attacked the walls of the ovum—which was ten thousand times their size—using the enzymes from the acrosome layer on their heads to eat into the wall of the corona radiata layer, all of them desperate to get inside. Many of them ran out of enzyme before they could burrow through. When this happened, they fell away, defeated, and other sperm took their place, burrowing deeper, until finally one of them—a sperm cell with twenty-three chromosomes, none of which were a Y chromosome, and with a gene that encoded for red hair (a contribution to Jake’s blood line from four generations back, one that had been expressed in his maternal grandmother)—finally made it through and was able to go after the zona pellucida layer, the final obstacle. This sperm burrowed through the wall of glycoproteins and stuck its little head into the holy land itself. The moment it did so, cortical granules were released all over the zona pellucida layer, spreading quickly like a wildfire. The chemical reaction this caused made the wall of the layer stiff and impenetrable to any other sperm cells. It also dissolved the acrosome layer on their heads. The winner had been determined. All the rest were to be expelled back out into the ampulla.

While the losers were getting ready to die, the winner continued to move inward. It’s tail, which had served its purpose and was no longer needed, fell off and remained outside. The head was drawn inward and into the nucleus of the ovum, where the two fused together, their twenty-three individual chromosomes becoming forty-six. A zygote was created. Soon, that one new cell underwent mitosis and divided into two. And then those two divided into four. And then those four to eight.