Chapter 16:Triple Play

Malibu, California

June 18, 1997

The Kingsleys had some business in LA on this Wednesday afternoon—the bimonthly KVA meeting, which had now become weekly due to the two separate projects underway—and took the opportunity to accept a dinner invitation from Gordon and Tanisha Paladay at their Malibu home. They had not been able to get together with G and Neesh for quite some time now due to everyone’s respective schedules, and all four of them had been looking forward to the gathering ever since it had been planned the week before. Dinner was a delicately roasted prime rib, lovingly cooked to perfection by Consuela, the Paladays’ middle-aged live-in domestic servant, served with steamed asparagus spears, mashed potatoes, and a rich gravy. Jake, G, and Neesh enjoyed a bottle of 1987 Napa Valley merlot with the meal while Laura enjoyed a nice, refreshing bottle of Sprite on the rocks.

After the meal, while Consuela cleaned and put the kitchen and dining room back in serviceable condition, Jake and G retired to the composition room upstairs so they could smoke a joint, drink scotch on the rocks, and try to come up with another compilation tune that they might be able to put on G’s next CD, which he was just now starting to put together. Laura and Neesh, meanwhile, retired out to the deck, Laura with another bottle of Sprite, Neesh with a glass of her favorite chardonnay, to catch up on all the latest in each other’s lives.

“Girl, you are most definitely starting to show now,” Neesh commented as they took their seats next to each other at the patio table.

Laura smiled at the comment. She was dressed in a pair of white shorts and a green sleeveless top that was a bit tight on her. It was something she had owned pre-pregnancy and had worn frequently because it preserved her puritanical sense of public modesty by not allowing much of a view of her cleavage thanks to a high neckline and her small breasts. But now she was thinking it was time to put it away until after her post-delivery lactation period. Her breasts had swollen quite noticeably now that she was well into the second trimester, lowering that neckline and raising her cleavage border. She also had an unmistakable baby bump in her belly, which caused the hem of the shirt to occasionally ride up a bit, revealing the flesh of her midriff—another part of her body that she generally did not show in front of anyone but Jake.

“Yeah,” she said shyly. “Soon I’m going to be as big as a house. I really need to start shopping for maternity clothes soon.”

“You look good,” Neesh said, reaching over and placing her hand directly on the baby bump. She began to rub it. “You’re going to be one of those women that looks hot all throughout the pregnancy. You know? The kind of bitch that other women hate.”

Laura chuckled, enjoying the feel of Neesh’s hand on her quite a bit and knowing that Neesh was enjoying it in more than a friendly way as well.

“You’d better stop that soon,” Laura told her, an impish smile on her face, “or I just might start begging.”

“You won’t have to beg very hard,” Neesh told her, her eyes shining. “I’d love to get them boobies of yours in my mouth just as an appetizer. Look at them things.”

“Yeah,” Laura said. “They’ve never been this big before. And they are incredibly sensitive now. There’s a lot to be said about this whole second trimester horniness thing. Jake is barely able to keep up with me.”

“Is that the beginning of a beg?” Neesh asked hopefully.

Laura chuckled again. “Maybe,” she said. “But you know the rules. I would have to clear it with Jake first, which would necessitate G being briefed in.”

The look of hope fell flat. G did not know about Neesh’s bisexual dalliances and she intended to keep it that way. It was something that she believed he would not understand or approve of. “Spoilsport,” she said with a pout.

“Sorry,” Laura said, with complete sincerity. Even though she and Jake had done it that morning just before taking their showers before their flight in, she already wanted, needed some more. She had always been more than a little amorous since she and Jake had done it that first time in Coos Bay, but the hormones surging in her now had upped that by a factor of ten or more. She was constantly horny now, every minute of every day, and never satisfied. And that was just for Jake. She was craving the touch of a female almost obsessively these days but had not enjoyed such a touch since she and Celia had fooled around a little that one fateful night out on tour.

Neesh reluctantly took her hand away, noting with keen interest that her gentle caress of Laura’s soft belly had made the redhead’s nipples hard. She picked up her wine and had a quick slug of it in a vain attempt to drown her frustration. “It’s just as well,” she said with a sigh. “There probably some sea lion out there that would find a way to interrupt us.”

That gave both girls the giggles as they remembered Laura’s naked encounter with the snoozing pinniped out on that very beach a few years back.

“So ... anyway,” Neesh said. “You said you had your ultrasound a few days ago, right?” Laura had mentioned that at dinner.

“That’s right, on Monday,” she said. “That was the very day I turned sixteen weeks.”

“And you said everything was good?”

Laura nodded. “A perfectly normal sixteen-week fetus with the placenta implanted exactly where it is supposed to be. All the identifiable internal organs intact and developing normally. All the identifiable bones developing normally. Everything in proper proportion. Everything perfectly on track.”

“That’s good to hear,” Neesh said.

“It was a relief,” Laura agreed.

“But did you find out what it was?” Neesh asked.

Laura smiled. “Dr. Niven did the exam herself,” she said. “She told us that she was about ninety percent certain that Ziggy is a little girl.”

Neesh smiled. “A little girl, huh? That’s awesome, Teach. But only ninety percent?”

“In the ultrasound at sixteen weeks they determine sex by the absence or presence of external genitalia. With a boy, it’s usually pretty clear what they’re looking at so it’s easier to be one hundred percent certain. She got a good look right between Ziggy’s legs and couldn’t see little balls or a little pee-pee. So, we either have a girl cooking in there, or a boy who is going to have some hangups as he goes through life.”

Neesh laughed. “How does Jake feel about that?” she asked.

“He’s very excited,” she said. “He’s not one of those men who would be disappointed if he didn’t get a boy. He just wants a healthy baby. That’s all I want too.”

“You two are going to make great parents,” Neesh said. “Have you started thinking about names yet? Or have you already decided on Ziggy?”

Laura giggled. “Ziggy is just her nickname while she’s a fetus,” she said. “That came from Dr. Vargo explaining that a baby starts her existence as a zygote right after fertilization. We would never actually name her that any more than Pauline and Obie would have named their baby Clump.”

“Ziggy is a much cuter name than Clump,” Neesh pointed out. “And it would go along with some of those other baby names that celebrities are hanging on their kids—like your friend Mindy Snow, for instance.”

“We wouldn’t do that to little Zig,” she said. “We have talked a little about names and have decided that it should be something musical in nature—we are musicians after all, and music is what brought us together—but Jake absolutely insisted, and I agree, that we will not give our child a ‘fucked-up name’, as he puts it.”

“Musical, huh?” she asked. “Any examples?”

“Nothing but rejects so far, and not even very many of those. I suggested Leslie, you know, after Jake’s favorite guitar, the Les Paul, but he did not like that at all. He said all the girls in school would call her Lez.”

“Hey now,” Neesh said. “Nothing wrong with a little Lez every now and then.”

“True,” Laura agreed (and how, she thought, eyeing the swell of Neesh’s breasts and wishing they were in her mouth), but there is no sense in setting up someone for ridicule. Jake says you have to make the high school bullies at least work a bit to come up with something.

“He may have a point there,” Neesh said after a moment’s thought.

“Jake suggested Harmony, but ... I don’t know, I don’t really like the sound of that one. I’m not sure why, but it just doesn’t appeal to me. He agreed to take that one off the table.”

“I’m not sure I’m down with Harmony either,” Neesh opined. “In any case, I can’t wait to hear what you eventually come up with.”

“Me either,” Laura said.

They watched the sun sinking toward the sea for a few minutes, hearing the crashing of the surf and the screaming of the gulls as they flew back and forth. There was no offshore marine layer and only the gentlest of a breeze blowing.

“I saw in the papers that your girlfriend Celia is one of our neighbors now,” Neesh said, breaking the silence.

“Yes,” Laura said. “She has a beautiful house not even five minutes from here. Maybe I can talk her into having us over one of these days. I’m sure you’d love to see it.”

“She is a cool chick,” Neesh said. “At least from what I saw of her at your wedding. How is she doing these days? She over the breakup with her hubby?”

Laura shrugged. “She’s coping the best she can,” she said. “She was up in Oregon with us while we were working on the new group’s CD, helping out. We didn’t really need her up there—truthfully, they didn’t really even need me up there—but it seemed like she needed to get out of LA for a while.”

“The entertainment media were saying that you and she were getting it on,” Neesh said. “Please tell me that shit is true.”

Laura shook her head. “No truth to it at all,” she said. “Just entertainment media innuendo.”

“That’s too bad,” Neesh said. “She’s quite the piece. What about them stories about her and that female pilot?”

“Nothing to that either,” Laura said, fighting to keep looking Neesh in the eye as she lied to her. She knew she was a terrible liar and hated doing it, but that was not any of Neesh’s business and it was not her place to decide who should know Celia’s secrets.

Neesh nodded, seemingly buying the lie. “A pity,” she said. “But understandable. I saw that picture of the pilot she was supposed to be getting it on with. A little masculine looking for my tastes.”

“Suzie is cool,” Laura said. “And she’s not as butch looking as that picture suggests.”

Another nod. “What about those other stories?” Neesh asked. “The ones about you and the groupies out on tour. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to—just say no comment—but the thought of you having a bunch of slutty bitches come to your hotel room to eat you out is really fuckin’ hot, Teach.”

Laura smiled. It was her place to decide who to share her personal information with, and Neesh was a friend who would understand and be discrete with the information. “Yeah,” she said. “That happened. Not quite as much as they suggested, but with fair regularity.”

“Goddamn!” Neesh said, clearly aroused by the admission. “You have got to tell me about this. How does it work? You just go pull some slut from the audience, or what?”

And so, Laura explained the intricacies of how a traveling musician hooked up with a lesbian groupie out on the road. She made a point to explain the unbreakable, set-in-stone rule about how you never kiss a groupie. Neesh listened quite attentively, and her own nipples got hard as she heard the tale.

“And Jake knows about all this?” she asked.

“He knows,” she assured her. “It’s part of our deal.”

“Girlfriend,” Neesh said, “I really do envy you on this matter.”

“Being able to do that kept me from going crazy with lust out on the road and maybe being tempted to try something with the opposite sex. Jake would definitely not approve of that. Neither would I.”

She nodded. “Not that that keeps the fucking media from speculating about it,” she said bitterly.

“Yeah,” Laura sighed. “I know what you mean.”

What she meant was the latest unsubstantiated rumor being passed around about the little bundle in Laura’s belly. Shortly after the appointment with Dr. Vargo in which it was confirmed that Laura was pregnant, she and Jake released a statement through Pauline announcing the particulars of the situation in as sterile and straightforward and, most of all, briefly a manner as possible. Most of the entertainment media printed and aired the announcement as written the next day. After that, the speculation and rumormongering began.

Though, as Pauline had assured them, no tabloid, newspaper, or entertainment show dared publish anything about the underage transvestite story since it was provably refutable and would thus open them up to libel and slander charges (though the offending email continued to circulate and the story continued to be passed far and wide by word of mouth), the stories about her pregnancy were a completely different monster. The first had been that Laura had conceived via artificial insemination because Jake had become sterile from all the drugs he had taken over the years and all the STDs he had contracted. The next had been that she had conceived accidentally as a result of birth control failure just before an orgy the couple attended (it was taken as a given in the entertainment press that Jake and Laura regularly attended orgies) and they were unsure who the father even was. And now, the latest rumor that had appeared first in the American Watcher, and then the LA Times and on Entertainment Reports, was that they knew exactly who the father was: Gordon Paladay, known to the world as Bigg G, who was a regular visitor to the Kingsley’s clifftop house in San Luis Obispo county according to the locals (G had only been there one time, Neesh still had not been there at all). The idea that Jake was actually the father of little Ziggy and that the two of them had actually wanted to create her was never even suggested. And, since there was no way to prove that reporters filing these stories or presenting them on television knew that the rumors were untrue, there was nothing the Kingsleys or the Paladays could do except to declare the story the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard when their agents were contacted for comment on the matter.

“Where do they even come up with shit like that?” Neesh asked. “Do a group of them just sit down and make things up, or what?”

“No, that would be unethical journalism,” Laura said angrily. “Instead, they go find someone on the street, someone who does not even know us on anything more than a superficial level, and ask them their opinion on the matter. God only knows who came up with the artificial insemination story, or the orgy story, but Jake and I are pretty sure it was some of the locals in Oceano that fed them the story about Gordon being the father.”

“Yeah?” Neesh said. “What makes you think that?”

“Jake’s become friendly with some of the sheriff’s deputies that work in our area,” she said. “He donates money to their causes and he goes down to their bar on Friday nights to play guitar for them, sing for them, and drink beer with them. They told him that there were some reporters from the Watcher sniffing around last week, talking to a bunch of the locals, asking them about us and what sorts of things we did here in town. It was right after that that the story first popped up in the Watcher.”

“Assholes,” Neesh spat. “Why would you want to live among people like that?”

“We don’t live among them,” Laura said. “We live on a cliff that is miles away from any other house. Oceano is just the nearest town to where we are, the place we do our grocery shopping and fuel up our cars and things like that. We’ve never done anything to those people, have never been anything but polite and kind to them, Jake contributes a considerable amount of money to their high school music program and their libraries, and they respond to that by spreading lies and speculation about us.” She shrugged. “It’s frustrating, but it’s the price we have to pay to live where we do and be the people that we are. I love our house and I’m willing to pay that price. Besides, it doesn’t really matter where we live. The same thing used to happen when we lived in LA. Our neighbors would talk about us and the papers would print it. At least in Oceano we are isolated and secure. The reporters cannot actually approach us at our home.”

“I suppose there is something to be said for that,” Neesh allowed. “It just makes me angry. These assholes are printing and airing that my husband is fucking another man’s wife and got her pregnant and there is nothing we can do about it.”

“It’s the life we choose,” Laura said with a sigh.

“Yeah,” Neesh said bitterly. “The life we choose.”

Upstairs, Jake and Gordon had just finished burning the joint and were feeling pretty good. Jake sat with his Fender acoustic on his lap and Gordon sat behind his electric piano. So far, neither of them had played a single note. Instead, they were talking, doing much the same as their better halves and catching up on what had been going on in each other’s lives.

“I hear that song by your Brainwash peeps on the radio a couple times a day now,” G said. “I like it. It pulls you in. The Nerdlys outdid themselves with the engineering.”

Jake nodded. Brainwash’s debut song from the Brainwash II CD, What’s in a Name?, was getting saturation airplay all across the United States and Canada and was moving steadily up the charts. “It’s actually doing better than I thought it would,” he said. “I was afraid that it was over-engineered and under-polished.”

“Well, it is to some degree,” G allowed. “I can certainly hear your absence in the piece, but you had good material to start with and the Nerdlys to put their anal-retentive ways to it.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “My absence is why we were over budget and almost over time.”

“How’s the CD itself selling?” G asked.

“Not as fast as the first one,” Jake said. “We went Gold last week and are creeping slowly upward from there. I think this one will be a little more conventional than the last. We probably won’t start getting runaway sales until we’ve had three hit songs aired regularly.” Assuming we get runaway sales at all. He was really worried about that. Brainwash II just did not have the same panache as Brainwash. And there was nothing that could be done about that at this point in the game.

“You gonna have those teachers hit the road?” G asked. “That should pick up some sales for you and generate some tour income.”

“Aristocrat is hot to send them out,” Jake said. “They were willing to finance the tour and split the profits with KVA fifty-fifty. They figured we could easily price the tickets at seventy-five minimum, three hundred maximum, and sell out all of the first-rate venues. I am inclined to agree with them. Unfortunately, Brainwash balked at the idea. They voted four to one against going out.”

“What the fuck did they do that for?” G asked, appalled at the thought of a successful musical act not going out on the road.

“Of the five of them, only Steph, the guitarist, is willing to quit her teaching gig. In fact, she has already done it. The rest are too afraid of cutting themselves loose and drifting. Their school board has been clamoring to fire them for years now. They know that if they resign they will never get another teaching gig in New England.”

“That sounds idiotic,” G opined. “How much you paying them people in royalties?”

“Each individual member has made well over a million-five from the first CD and are poised to pull in almost as much with the second. Unless they completely crash and burn—which I don’t think is likely at all—they will be set for life as long as they don’t do something stupid. And if you throw in the touring income—they would be entitled to half of KVA’s cut of the profits to divide up among themselves—that puts them in an even more secure position.”

“Did you explain that shit to them?”

“I did, and so did Pauline. But that’s not the only thing factoring into their decision. They all have kids in school. They don’t want to leave them for four or five months while they travel all over the country playing dates.” Jake shrugged. “Can’t say I fault them for it.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” G said, though he really had no concept of what it was like to have to worry about the welfare of children. Neither did Jake, really, but he was starting to understand it a little now.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Jake said. “Maybe by the time we get to Brainwash III, they’ll be ready to make the move.”

“There’s gonna be a Brainwash III?”

“Absolutely,” Jake said. “They have an incredible catalogue of marketable tunes. We could easily get two or three more hit CDs out of them just with their existing repertoire. And they tell me they’re getting together on the weekends again up in Providence to work on new material.”

“That’s cool,” G said. “What about the band that Phil and Ted and the boys put together? How’s that going?”

“V-tach,” Jake said, smiling. “I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with them. Aristocrat listened to the CD and agreed to MD&P for them for only twenty-five percent royalties—plus payment in advance for the cost of manufacturing and distribution, of course. Not bad for a first-time act on an indie label.”

“Not bad at all,” G agreed.

“They’re not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts,” Jake said. “They want to stay on our good side, knowing that there will be future Celia Valdez and Jake Kingsley and Brainwash releases that they can profit off of as long as they keep us happy. Besides, I think they finally have faith in me and my ability to find and produce good music. They listened to V-tach’s master and seemed quite impressed with it. It has a bunch of solid tunes that will be appealing to the younger gen-x crowd in particular. I am rather proud of the end result. I worked very closely with them through the whole process and was able to shape everything like I did with Celia and I and the first Brainwash.”

“They’re a good bunch,” G said. “I had a lot of fun playing with them for the TSF. You gonna send them out on tour?”

“We’ll have to play that one by ear,” Jake said. “Their first release will be a tune called When I’m Not Home. It’s about a dude who thinks his lady is getting dicked by someone else while he’s at work.”

“A subject to invoke strong emotion in the male listening audience,” G said.

“Agreed,” Jake said. “It’s a solid piece with a good hook. It’ll start getting airplay on Fourth of July weekend. The CD will hit the shelves on July 22. We’ll see how the sales go after that. Like with any new band, we’ll probably need to get three hits out on the air before CD sales start to take off. They’ll have to be selling an assload, however, before it becomes financially advantageous to send them out. Aristocrat has already told us they won’t finance one hundred percent of a tour for V-tach but they will spring for half if they think it will be profitable. That means they’ll have to be popular enough that we can at least expect to sell tickets for sixty minimum.”

G shook his head in amazement. “Sixty a ticket minimum for a new band,” he said in wonder. “Remember all of them years we were charging sixteen-fuckin’-fifty for all the seats in the house even after we were established?”

“I remember,” Jake said. “Times have certainly changed.”

“And they keep fuckin’ doing it,” G said. “What’s next, you think?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “I’m not sure where else we can go from here.” At the moment, he, nor even the Nerdlys, had the slightest inkling of the coming rise of the MP3 file with its easy transmission over the internet, its easy storage on media with greater capacity than a mere CD, and how that would change the music industry in a way that was nearly as fundamental as the invention of the sound recording itself.

But that was still a few years in the future. For now, they had a tune to work on.

“Where do we start?” asked Jake.

“The same way we did for Signed,” G said. “We come up with a concept that is shared by both of us and try to come up with lyrics and a melody for it.”

Jake nodded. “We already covered getting screwed by the record companies,” he said. “What else do we got in common?”

“We both like pussy,” G suggested. “We could write something profound about our love of sinking into some trim.”

“A sex song?” Jake asked. “Don’t you want to do something a little deeper than that?”

“Hey,” G said, “not everything has to be a fuckin’ political or philosophical masterpiece.”

“Yeah ... maybe,” Jake said, considering. “And it’s not like most of the people listening to our music have any idea what it’s actually about anyway.”

G looked over at him. “How’s that?” he asked.

“How’s what?” Jake asked.

“That bullshit you was just spouting. What do you mean that most of the people listening don’t know what we’re laying down?”

“It’s true,” Jake said. “I wish it wasn’t, but the fact is undeniable. Don’t you read your fan mail?”

“I do,” G said, “but most of it is from bitches that just want to fuck me. They don’t wax philosophical about the meaning of my lyrics.” He grinned. “They do send lots of Polaroid shots though. And now that we have the email up and running for the fan club, they send Jpegs too. You should see the collection I have.”

“Yeah,” Jake said, “I’m familiar with the concept.” He had his own collection of such shots stashed away in a corner of his office and saved on his hard-drive. “But the bitches who want to fuck are not the point. The point is that most people who listen to us on the radio and buy our CDs are getting into it because of the hook, and the music, and the guitar solos. The ones who actually understand the lyrics and the concept of the tunes are few and far between. I’d say somewhere in the vicinity of five percent or so—at least for the tunes that are not blindingly obvious.”

G was shaking his head. “I can’t accept five percent as a legitimate number,” he insisted. “I might buy fifty-fifty, but even that is stretching it.”

“It’s true,” Jake said. “I get letters and emails all the time from people who think they know what my music is about but are completely clueless. When someone actually does pick up what I’m laying down—which happens maybe once in every batch of correspondence—it stands out because it’s so rare. In fact, some bands, like Led Zeppelin or Dio for instance, don’t even try to make their lyrics meaningful. They just throw down some lines that sound cool, that rhyme, and that are backed with solid music and the fans eat it up.”

“Now you’re completely talking out of your ass,” G accused.

“Think so?” Jake said. “Tell me what Stairway to Heaven is about.”

“Uh ... well ... I’ve never actually...”

“You know the lyrics, right?” Jake asked. “Everyone knows the lyrics to Stairway. Run them down in your head right now and tell me what the song is about. Here, I’ll help.” He began to pick out the melody for Stairway on his guitar and then sing the lyrics in question. He got as far as the third stanza before G stopped him.

“All right,” the rapper said. “You made your point. Stairway ain’t got no decipherable meaning to it.”

“That’s right,” Jake said. “Fuckin’ Plant and Page don’t even know what the goddamn song is about. They just got high one day and threw down some cool sounding lyrics and it became the most popular rock song in history. And it’s not just Stairway. Kashmir? No one knows what the fuck they’re talking about there either, not even them. Basically, any Led Zeppelin song that is not about sex, Vikings, or hobbits is meaningless. And it’s not just Zeppelin either. You ever listen to Elton John? Great singer, great pianist, his music is beautifully composed and engineered, but what the fuck is he talking about in Daniel? In Levon? In Madman Across the Water? He ain’t talking about shit, that’s what he’s talking about.”

G pondered those songs Jake had just named off and concluded that he was correct about that as well. It was an interesting epiphany for him. “You don’t write shit like that, do you?” he asked.

“No,” Jake said. “Every one of the tunes that I’ve written and produced and recorded has meaning. Sometimes the meaning isn’t all that deep, but it’s always there, ready for someone to interpret.”

“You ever try to write something like that?” G asked.

“No,” Jake said. “That’s not what I’m about. I want my tunes to have meaning.”

“Do you think you could pull it off though?” G asked.

“Pull some lyrics out of my ass and lay them down? Of course I could pull it off, but why would I want to?”

“To prove your point,” G said. “As an experiment in the lack of the musical sophistication of the majority of the American population.”