Chapter 14b

"So anyway," Jim went on. "We did the cover tune thing for about six months or so and then I started introducing some of the tunes I'd written over the years. When we saw how good we were at putting them together into a coherent form..."

"It's Jim who does that," Steph said. "He's the one that is able to take all of our lyrics and basic melodies and turn them into actual music."

Jim shrugged this off modestly. "I have a gift for that sort of thing," he said, "but everyone helps out. So anyway, once we started putting some of my tunes together, we decided to try some of Marcie's as well. And finally, one night after we'd perfected almost an entire set, we got Steph drunk and she actually put down a few tunes she'd come up with. Until that point, none of us even knew she was a songwriter."

"I didn't think I was very good," Stephanie said softly. "I still don't, although I'm forced to admit that the crowds seem to like my stuff... especially the girls."

"Oh yeah, especially the girls," Rick said with a knowing grin.

"Shut up, dickwad," Stephanie told him with a grin.

"We worked up a set of about fifteen original songs," Jim went on, "and then we started trying to get gigs at some of the local clubs. They weren't very interested in us at first. Most of them rejected us without even an audition. They said they didn't like the way we looked."

Jake simply nodded. It was a theme that was pervading the music industry ever since the rise of MTV and music videos.

"Eventually, however," Jim said. "This tiny little club out in the suburbs gave us a shot. We played there as an opener for three consecutive weekends and that was all it took. People loved us."

"You do have a unique sound," Jake said.

"By the end of that first summer, we were headlining at clubs all over Rhode Island. The next summer we were playing all over New England. It's to the point now that we pack the house everywhere we play."

"How much are you pulling in?" Jake asked.

"Seven-fifty a show," Jim said with a shrug. "It's not a fortune — certainly not enough to quit our teaching jobs for — but it's not bad either."

"We don't do it for the money anyway," Marcie said. "We do it because we love to play music for people. I'll never forget how scared I was the first time we went up on stage. I was trembling and shaking, terrified that I was going to screw up and that everyone would laugh at me."

"I can relate," Jake said. "My first time was exactly the same."

They all looked at him in disbelief for a moment, convinced he was just jerking them off.

"I'm not kidding," Jake said. "I was twenty years old when I walked onto that first stage at D Street West in Heritage, California, and I was terrified. So was Matt and Nerdly. But as soon as we started to play..."

"Yeah," said Marcie with a nostalgic smile. "That's when everything feels the best, isn't it?"

"Damn right," Jake said.

"Does it go away?" asked Stephanie. "The thrill of playing in front of an audience? You know, like when it becomes your actual job and you have to do it night after night?"

"There are a lot of things about going out on tour that tend to burn you out after awhile," Jake said. "Being in hotel rooms all the time, long drives on the bus, all the radio station interviews and autograph sessions, the lack of sleep, the not knowing where you are or what day of the week it is. But, for me, the one thing that has never lost its allure is going out on that stage and hearing people cheering for me. It doesn't matter how many shows in a row we've done, I still love the feeling of playing my guitar and singing for a crowd, the way it feels when the show is over and you know you've done a good job and everyone had a good time. That's magic for me and I think it always will be."

The five band members nodded solemnly at these words of wisdom. "That's good to know," Jim said.

"Yeah," agreed Marcie. "One of my greatest fears is that one day I'll wake up and not want to do this anymore."

"I've been through quite a lot since my first time," Jake said. "I've been arrested, beaten by cops and truck drivers, been accused of every kind of blasphemy there is, and even a few that there isn't, had demented fans threaten to kill my girlfriend, and I still haven't woke up with that feeling yet. Not even close."

"What about the story about you snorting coke out of that girl's ass crack?" asked Marcie. "Any truth to that?"

Jake chuckled and took another drink of his beer. "I'm still pleading the Fifth on that one," he said.

"Understandable," Stephanie said. "Although I'm sure it's a really cool story."

"You have no idea," Jake said. "So tell me something, have you guys ever thought about trying to get a recording contract? Based on what I've heard, your music is definitely marketable."

A look passed among the five members of the band — a cynical look that broke through the geek squad impression.

"We tried once," Jim said. "We paid a couple thousand bucks and put together a demo tape at one of the recording studios here in Boston. We sent it out to about two dozen agents and to all of the major recording studios, including National Records and Aristocrat Records. Most of them we never heard from again. Those we did hear from all rejected us on the ground that 'you don't have the look we're in the market for at this time'."

"In other words," Stephanie said, "we don't look good on camera so they don't care what our music sounds like."

Jake nodded, unsurprised. "Yeah," he said. "That's kind of the way the industry is gearing itself these days. It used to be they didn't give a shit what you looked like as long as you put out good music. Now, it's just the opposite. They don't give a shit what you sound like as long as you look good in the video."

Marcie shrugged, disinterestedly. "Who cares about making it big?" she asked. "I still enjoy teaching and I'm happy with my life. We get to jam together on weekends during the school year and we get to play live for people that appreciate us for what we are all summer. At least we know we're good, that we really are musicians."

"Well put," Jake said. "That really is the most important thing. But if you could get a recording contract going... if someone did agree to put out an album of your tunes, you wouldn't refuse it, would you?"

"What are you suggesting, Jake?" asked Jim.

"I have some pretty good connections in the industry," Jake said. "If there was ever a band that deserved to be heard from coast to coast, you are it. If you have any of those demo tapes still floating around, I'd be willing to let a few people listen to them and see what happens."

They all looked at him as if he were setting them up for a practical joke.

"I'm sincere," Jake assured him. "I can't guarantee anything, but maybe I can get you heard by the right people. I don't like to brag, but I can make a phone call to most of the talent agents in Hollywood and they'll listen to me. I can ask for a meeting with the CEO of National Records and he'll grant it. He may not like me very much — he and I have butted heads many times over the years — but he'll listen to me. And if he hears something that he thinks will make money for him, he'll jump all over it."

"Do you really think they'll like us?" Stephanie asked.

"I really think they will," Jake said. "The question is, do you want to move beyond New England? I'm certainly not one to romanticize the life I lead. It has a lot of good points — the most important one being that I'm rich — but there are a lot of bad parts as well."

Jim answered for them. "Mr. Kingsley," he said, "if someone were to offer us a recording contract, we would not turn it down."

Jake nodded. "Very well then," he said. "Do you still have a demo tape?"

"We do," Jim said.

"Do you have a piece of paper?" he asked next.

Marcie immediately got up and went to a locker, where she kept her purse. She rummaged around in it for a few moments and finally produced a notepad and a pen. Jake wrote down his home address and the telephone number for Pauline's office.

"Send your tape and any information you can put together about yourselves here," he told them, handing Marcie the paper. "Get newspaper clippings about your shows, reviews, anything you can to support the fact that you're talented musicians. Put together a resume that includes bios on all of you and tells how much money you're paid for a show and the names and addresses of every club you've played in over the past year. If you could get some letters of recommendation from some of the club owners, so much the better. Get that stuff to me as soon as you can and I'll see what I can do."

The band was pleased. They all thanked him profusely, Marcie and Stephanie even going so far as to give him hugs.

Jake wished them a fond farewell and then made his leave. When he returned to the club floor he found that Helen was no longer sitting at their table. While he was puzzling this out, one of the waitresses came over to him and told him where she was.

"She got sick," she said. "Cindy helped her to the ladies room. They haven't come back out yet."

"Oh... great," Jake said. "Do you think you could go in there and check on them for me?"

"Anything for you, Jake," she said, her eyes telling him that by anything, she meant anything.

He gave her his patented Jake Kingsley shy smile, the one that seemed to say: I get you and I appreciate the offer, but right now is not a real good time. She responded to it with a smile of her own — a keep me in mind smile — and headed off to the bathroom on her mission.

Cindy and the other waitress brought Helen out of the bathroom a few minutes later, holding onto her one on either side to keep her from falling. Helen was barely conscious, maintaining just enough coherence to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

"Thank you, ladies," Jake said with a sigh. "I can take it from here."

He took it from there, putting Helen's left arm around his neck and half dragging her through the crowd and out the door. As they went, she kept trying to kiss him. He kept his face turned away because her breath smelled very strongly of vomitus. He haled a cab and stuffed her inside. Within two minutes, she was sound asleep and snoring.

He had to physically pick her up and carry her into the hotel when they arrived. As he was opening the door to their suite, she suddenly woke up and began to hiccup wetly. Jake barely got her to the bathroom before she started to erupt with great volumes of alcohol-scented emesis.

"It's gonna be a long night," Jake sighed as he patiently held her hair out of her face and kept her from falling over.

When the retching finally trailed off, Jake managed to get her to her feet, get her undressed, and mostly cleaned up. Before he could get her into bed, however, she had another episode of violent vomiting. As soon as it was over, she passed out again, this time with her head in the toilet bowl. Jake considered just leaving her there — after all, she was pre-positioned for the next round — but in the end he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. He dragged her back to the bedroom and put her in bed, careful to lay her on her side to keep her from following in the footsteps of Bon Scott, John Bonham, and Jimmy Hendrix.

She woke up three more times during the night, although by the third she was reduced to nothing more than dry heaves. Finally, she fell into a slumber so deep it could almost qualify as comatose.

The next morning she was so sick she could barely get out of bed. The very mention of food was enough to make her gorge rise. She a vague memory of the end of the Brainwash show, but no recollection whatsoever of Jake leaving her at the table so he could go meet the band, how she got back to the hotel, how she ended up naked in bed, or her many trips to the toilet to purge her stomach of the poison she'd ingested.

She took a long soak in the room's bathtub and then dressed listlessly, falling back asleep while Jake packed her suitcases for her.

It was as they were in the first class lounge waiting for their flight to be called that she began to tremble.

"Jake," she told him, "I'm afraid to get on that plane."

"I know," he said, patting her leg. "I'll be with you. We'll be okay."

And, of course, they were. The 747 took off normally and leveled out at 35,000 feet. It flew normally for five hours and forty-eight minutes. It then touched down normally at LAX, only five minutes behind schedule. Helen sat in barely controlled terror the entire flight. Every bump of turbulence, every bank of every course change, every change in altitude, made her jump and look around wildly and then look out the window at the two engines on the right wing.

"Are you going to be okay?" Jake asked her at one point.

"I don't know," she admitted. "That flight yesterday scared me, Jake. I feel like we're riding in a broken down box of bolts that's going to break apart any second." She shook her head and sighed. "I'm not sure I'm ever going to climb on one of these things again."

San Juan Capistrano, California

July 1, 1989

Jake pulled his BMW into the circular driveway in front of Matt's house. A uniformed valet, hired especially for the occasion of Matt's get-out-of-jail party, rushed over and opened the passenger door, allowing Helen to step out. Once she was out, he made a dash to Jake's door but Jake beat him to the punch, getting out on his own before he could get there. The valet seemed a bit disappointed by this, as if etiquette as he understood it had been broken.

"How are you doing tonight, Mr. Kingsley?" the valet enquired.

"I'm hanging in here," Jake told him.

"Very good, sir. I like your car."

"Take good care of it for me, huh?" Jake responded. "I'd hate to see what Matt would do to you if you scratched a guest's car."

"I'll treat it like it was my own," the valet promised. He got behind the wheel, closed the door, and a moment later, he was gone.

They started toward the front door of the mansion. Even from sixty feet away, through solid walls and windows of double-pane glass, Jake could hear the thumping of bass from Matt's stereo system, could hear the babble of dozens of semi-drunken conversations. Matt had promised the party of the year for the occasion of his release from jail and it seemed like he was delivering it.

The door was opened by a uniformed butler (not Charles, the normal butler; he had other duties tonight) and Helen and Jake were escorted through the house and into the main entertainment room, the source of the music and the conversations. Jake saw well over sixty people down here, all dressed in the most casual wear possible, per the invitation's specification. He saw Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts, blue jeans, light summer dresses, tank tops, and tube tops. Jake himself was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and his favorite Corona T-shirt. Helen was sporting denim shorts, sandals, and a pink spaghetti strap top that showed a lot of cleavage.

The butler picked up a microphone that was mounted on a stand on a small podium just inside the room. He clicked it on and a slight hum emitted from a speaker next to the podium. At the sound, the conversation level decreased and many of the guests turned to look.

"May I present," the butler said formally, "Jake Kingsley, lead singer of the band Intemperance, and his guest for the evening, Helen Brody, pilot and certified flight instructor."

"Wassup, everyone?" Jake said with a wave. A few wassups were thrown back at him and the conversation level picked right back up.

Jake and Helen waded into the room, an environment thick with cigarette and marijuana smoke and the odor of alcoholic beverages. Several of Matt's courtesy bowls — the very objects that had almost sent him to a real prison on drug trafficking charges — were open and in use at several of the tables.

Jake knew most of the people present at the party, at least on a passing basis. There were veteran members of Intemperance's road crew, friends of Matt's from the various clubs he patronized, a few musicians (including Matt's bud from Cabo San Lucas, Sammy Hagar) — and a gaggle of porn actresses who were friends of Kim. There were also a dozen or so people that Jake recognized as counselors and other staff members from GGCI, Matt's home away from home these past four and a half weeks.

Jake greeted those who crossed his path as he made his way to the back of the room. He shook a few hands, received a few hugs, and he and Helen were even propositioned for a threesome by one of the porn stars. Finally, they made their way to Matt, who was standing near the sound system, smoking a cigarette and drinking from a large glass of beer. Standing on one side of him was Kim, who was dressed in Daisy Duke shorts and a brief halter top that hid little of her artificially enhanced charms. On Matt's other side was Laurie Jenkins, the kitchen staff member and waitress from GGCI whom Matt had promised a threesome with he and Kim at the party tonight. Laurie was in a short denim skirt that showed off her best feature — her legs — very well.

"Jake," Matt said, shaking his hand. "Glad you could make it, brother."

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Jake told him.

Matt greeted Helen with a hug and a comment about how nice her titties looked in that top.

"Thanks, Matt," she said. "I wore it with you in mind."

Kim gave both Helen and Jake a hug of her own and then introduced Laurie to Helen, calling her a "very special guest." Laurie blushed deeply with embarrassment and arousal.

"Are the rest of the guys here?" Jake asked Matt.

"Yep," Matt said. "You were the last one. Coop and Nerdly are in the kitchen making some sort of fruit punch. Freakboy is around somewhere — probably up in my bedroom sniffin' my fuckin' underwear. And Darren is out in the back, talking to one of Kim's porno actress friends."

"We prefer the term, 'adult film star'," Kim said lightly.

"Oh yeah," Matt said. "Sorry, babe."

"Hey, Matt!" one of the GGCI people shouted from across the room. "This keg is running dry! You got another one ready to go?"

"Does Gumby have a rubber dick?" Matt yelled back. He turned to Jake and Helen. "I'd better go take care of this keg situation. See you in a few."

"Right," said Jake. "We'll go get a drink."

They walked across the room to the bar, where two smartly uniformed bartenders were on duty. Jake ordered his usual, a rum and coke. Helen ordered a plain diet coke. Since that night when they'd watched Brainwash in Boston, Helen had not touched so much as a drop of alcohol. The hangover she'd suffered as a result of that night had laid her low for two days and had even lingered to some degree for a third. The very idea of drinking was still enough to make her queasy. The smell of booze was enough to make her gag. If Jake had been drinking, she would not kiss him until he brushed his teeth.

In many ways, Helen was not the same as she'd been before the trip to Boston. She didn't laugh as much, wasn't quite as affectionate as she'd once been, and she definitely had not gotten over her fear of commercial aviation.

"Never again," she'd told him on multiple occasions since their 747 had touched down at LAX. "I am never getting on an airliner again as long as live."

"That's kind of a rash statement," Jake had tried to explain to her. "What about when we need to go somewhere?"

"If I can't get there in my own plane, I'm not going," she said stubbornly. "I lived through one fuck-up by those incompetent airline mechanics. I'm not putting my life in their hands again."

The fuck-up she was referring to was the preliminary cause report that had been issued the week before regarding the incident on their DC-10 (an incident which had only been reported as a blurb in the Boston newspaper the next day). Though the full and official report was still months in the future, the findings so far indicated that a simple maintenance oversight had been responsible for the loss of the number three engine. One of the mechanics who had done a routine maintenance regiment on that engine the day before the flight had apparently installed a fuel control diaphragm backwards, resulting in nearly five times a much fuel entering the combustion chamber as the engine was designed to handle. This influx of fuel had caused the explosion and fire and resulted in what the NTSB politely and euphemistically termed "a loss of function of the engine".