Chapter 21

Lyttelton, New Zealand

January 31, 1991

Jake opened his eyes slowly, trying to focus on the softly spinning ceiling fan above his head. After a few moments, he was able to do so. He watched it spin round and round, casting faint shadows on the vaulted ceiling of his bedroom. The light in here was dim. It was always dim in the mornings, usually until eleven o'clock or so during these summer months. His newly constructed house, and the bedroom within it, faced southwest, toward the town of Lyttelton below. On New Zealand's South Island, the rising sun was in the northeast. It wasn't until it cleared the Port Hills that its rays were able to directly penetrate his house. Jake liked it that way. It allowed him to sleep in most mornings — something that he usually needed to do since he was in the habit of staying up very late each night.

The sound that had awakened Jake was the rumbling of a diesel engine and the crunching of tires across the asphalt access road of his property. This sound was followed by a few clanks and thumps and then the revving of that diesel engine as it settled into a high idle. Jake had been in occupancy of the house long enough to know what those sounds were. It was the propane service, coming to check and fill his tanks. Though he had a throbbing headache, a dry mouth, and his mind was not quite clear enough yet to remember just what he had been doing last night or what time he'd gone to bed or if he had anything that needed to be done today, the fact that the propane truck was here meant it was Wednesday morning, 9:45 AM, New Zealand Standard Time. In New Zealand, you could set your calendar and your watch by such a service.

Jake took a few breaths, trying vainly to expunge the headache a bit. It was to no avail. Yet another hangover was rooted well within his body, the result of drinking far too much alcohol the night before. This was, of course, nothing new. He turned his head to the right, looking at the nightstand to confirm the time. He could not see the digital clock that sat there. Two wine glasses, four Steinlager cans, an overflowing ashtray, and two empty condom wrappers obstructed the view.

"Oh yeah," he mumbled, looking at the prophylactic packages. "Kate was here."

Kate Crawford was nineteen years old, raven-haired, pale-skinned (like many Christchurch area natives), and solidly built, but not lacking in feminine curves. She had a full bosom capped with large, extremely sensitive nipples. She was also a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, functional alcoholic who was a fixture in most of the waterfront bars down by the docks.

Kate worked in her widowed thirty-eight year old mother's seafood shop down in Lyttelton. She, like the fabled Molly Malone, was a fishmonger, and that really was no wonder, because so was her mother and her mother before. Or so Jake was told anyway. He had never met the mother before before (as it were), since she'd been dead these past ten years, but he had met the mother — Elizabeth Crawford. She was nothing more or less than an older version of Kate herself — the same curvy body, large breasts, foul mouth, and love of ethyl alcohol ingestion. Jake had, in fact, slept with the mother ten or twelve times before finally giving into lust one night and getting it on with the daughter instead. Not that Elizabeth minded all that much. True, she had been a bit peeved when she found out, but as long as Jake still bought her drinks down at the Lazy Eye Tavern and gave her a good pounding once a week or so, she kept her peace. And she always reserved for Jake the choicest selections of fish, crabs, and squid that passed through her hands from the fishing fleet that called Lyttelton Harbor home.

So last night it had been Kate who had come calling. He remembered the early part of the evening. She'd arrived about seven-thirty, thirty minutes after the shop was closed for the night, and he'd prepared her a meal of stuffed pork loin, homemade horseradish applesauce, and steamed asparagus. Both of the Crawford females absolutely despised seafood at this point in their evolution. After dinner they'd had a few more drinks while watching one of the new release videotapes that Jake had shipped to his house from the United States — tapes that would not become available in New Zealand for at least another five months. This particular movie had been none other than The Northern Jungle, Greg Oldfellow's atrocity on film. Somehow it had been included in the latest package and Kate had been dying to see it. And so he'd put it in and they'd sat there, drinking mixed drinks and wine and beer while Jake continually badmouthed the flick and Kate continually hushed him because she was actually interested in what was going to happen.

Jake didn't remember anything past the first major battle scene. He didn't know if they'd even finished the movie. Although the condom wrappers on his nightstand and the heavy smell of musk in the air suggested that he and Kate had engaged in a lengthy session of sexual activity in this bed, Jake did not remember even leaving the couch to come upstairs.

"I have got to stop drinking so much," he muttered, not for the first time or the last. The hangovers were bad enough but the blackouts — the periods of negative memory storage — were downright frightening.

Kate was no longer in the bed. He could tell by the rumpled covers and make-up stains on the pillow that she had spent most of the night here cuddled up with him, probably drooling on his neck. But at some point, around sunrise more than likely, she had gotten up, dressed herself, and let herself out the front door. She was, after all, a working girl and the seafood shop opened every weekday morning at eight o'clock sharp. Alcoholic barflies though they might be, the Crawford fishmongers were good at their profession and possessed a typical New Zealand work ethic.

Jake rolled out of bed and put his feet on the floor. Slowly he stood up, having to take a few deep breaths as a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over him, as the pounding in his head increased to the point he could almost hear it. Gradually, the pain and dizziness eased up a little, enough to make him realize that his bladder was uncomfortably full. He opened his eyes and looked around the room for a moment, seeing the untidy heap of yesterday's clothes on the floor, as if they'd been frantically tossed there. He looked in the mirror over his nightstand, catching a glimpse of his reflection from the hips up. He was naked and what he saw was enough to make him look away in shame and embarrassment. His stomach was no longer the flat, firm, attractive anatomical feature it had been for the past twelve or thirteen years. It was now showing the definite beginnings of a beer belly.

"I need to start hitting the gym," Jake muttered, again, not for the first time or the last. This conviction, however, he was a little more serious about. If he didn't start some sort of an exercise program soon, his weight would push past the dreaded two hundred pound mark within a month.

He put this thought aside for the moment and turned toward the master bathroom. As he entered this room he found himself looking at another mirror under significantly better lighting conditions. This time, however, he could only see himself from the nipples up. This view was not so bad, except for the tattoo on his upper right arm. It was a tattoo that was only five days old now and still had the scabbing on it. It was a tattoo that Jake had absolutely no recollection of being put there.

Jake had never been all that into tattoos, although most professional musicians viewed them with damn near religious adoration. Matt, for instance, had both arms and most of his chest covered with a variety of tats, most music related, some so obscure that even he himself could not explain their meaning. Coop had full sleeves on both arms and the Intemperance logo across his upper back. Darren had had a quarter-sleeve on his left arm and a few random tats on his right arm. Even Nerdly had had some work done. On his left shoulder he sported the E=MC2 equation made famous by the intro to The Twilight Zone, and on his right shoulder he had a pair of musical notes intertwined and superimposed over a heart with the date of his marriage inscribed below it (Sharon had the exact same tat on her right shoulder, although she had to make sure it was never seen by her staunchly religious parents). Only Charlie was tattoo free among the former Intemperance members — his fear of germs too great to allow someone with a tattoo gun to touch his skin.

Until five days ago, Jake had only had one tattoo on his body. He had had it put there back in 1983, shortly after becoming fully cognizant of the fact that music was actually his life's career. It was a design he'd come up that was deeply symbolic of how he felt about the contrast between his love of music and the gladiator/indentured servant-like system of bringing it to the public. The tat was six inches long and stretched from his left shoulder to mid-way down his bicep. It showed the neck and headstock of a guitar. Gripping the neck and holding a G-chord, was a hand and wrist. A prominent gold wedding band was on the ring finger of the hand. Attached to the wrist was a handcuff, clenched brutally tight. The other cuff was attached further down the guitar neck.

Jake had always loved his tattoo and displayed it proudly (although he never explained its meaning to anyone — they either got it at first glance and didn't have to ask, or they were never going to get it even if it were explained). But this new tattoo, well... while it did represent something he'd come to love (and would probably require little explanation), it was not really something his sober mind would have chosen to have as a life-long decoration to his right arm.

He vaguely remembered the conversation that had led up to the tattoo. He had been down in The Lazy Eye on the waterfront, drinking shots of Jack Daniels and chasing them with pints of Steinlager with Kate, Elizabeth, and a group of five or six bar regulars who were always Jake's best friends when he was buying (which was whenever he was in the bar). Several of his companions — South Island natives, all of them — had balked when Jake had drunkenly proclaimed how much he loved New Zealand in general and South Island in particular. It simply was not possible, they insisted, to love a geographic locale as much as a native of said locale, especially not when one had spent less than six months of one's life living there.

Jake remembered that the argument had gone on for quite some time, sometimes friendly, sometimes heated to the point that they were flirting around the edges of physical confrontation. Everyone in the bar (and there were many there that night — it was Friday, after all) had an opinion on the matter and everyone had felt the need to share that opinion. There were those — a few — who agreed that it was possible for Jake to love New Zealand as deeply as he proclaimed — after all, what was not to love about it? — but this group was very much in the minority. Most people agreed that Jake was being melodramatic to some degree. A few were outright offended that Jake would even suggest that he loved their beloved country as much as they themselves did.

The argument had still been raging when Jake's brain, overwhelmed by alcohol, had stopped recording memories for the night. His body, however, continued to function quite well as evidenced by the fact that when he woke up in his bed the next morning (and yes, he had driven himself home at some point, piloting his 1990 Harley-Davidson Fatboy up the Summit Road, in the dark, without a helmet) the first thing he noticed — even before the hangover — was that his right upper arm was really hurting. He looked and found a bloody gauze bandage wrapped around the appendage from his shoulder to his elbow.

"What the hell?" he'd muttered, wondering if he'd been stabbed or if he'd crashed his bike.

It was only when he got into the bathroom and unwrapped the bandage did he discover that he was now the proud owner of a new tattoo. It was only after talking to Kate, Elizabeth, and the bartender that had been on duty that night that Jake got the story of how the tattoo had come to be there.

Apparently, just after midnight, Jake had tired of the endless argument regarding his love, or lack thereof, of his current country of residence. He had stood up on the bar and offered to prove how much he loved this fucking place.

"How are you going to prove it?" he was asked.

"Who's the best goddamn tat artist in Lyttelton?" he'd replied.

This, of course, led to a brief sub-argument, as there were almost a dozen tattoo shops in Lyttelton — it was a port town after all — and everyone in the room who had a tat (which meant pretty much every male and about half of the females) wanted to nominate their particular artist for the honor of "best in Lyttelton". Eventually, however, they all had to agree that there was one particular artist — Ian Blackworth — who was a definite cut above the rest. The owner and operator of Blackworth Tattoo, Ian was a second generation artist who had learned the trade from his father and had been putting ink on body parts for the past thirty-eight years.

"I want him!" Jake told the crowd. "Let's get him right now!"

When it was explained to Jake that Blackworth Tattoo was only open until nine o'clock on Fridays and that Ian was undoubtedly in bed in his room above the shop by now, Jake declared that he didn't give a fuck.

"Let's wake his ass up!" Jake was reputed to have yelled. "I'll make it worth his while!"

And so they had. And Jake did indeed make it worth his while, paying the equivalent of six hundred American dollars — plus a two hundred dollar tip — for a little over three hours worth of late night work that Jake now had absolutely no memory of receiving.

As he looked at his new tattoo in the mirror now, Jake took a little solace in the fact that he'd at least been coherent enough to demand the very best and that the townspeople he had been drinking with had been honest enough to point him in the right direction. After all, if you had to have an impulsive, alcohol-fueled mistake adorning your right arm for the rest of your life, you might as well have it put there by the best in the business.

Jake stepped closer to the mirror, turning so he could the image a little better. He supposed it would start to grow on him eventually — after all, he really did love New Zealand's South Island.

And that was what the tattoo was: A seven-inch by two and a half inch relief map of South Island drawn to scale in fine detail. The map included snow on the Southern Alps, all of the rivers, lakes, and coastal inlets large enough to be shown on a map of that size, and it even had Stewart Island, placed to scale and the proper distance from the southern tip of the main island. Though it was purely a geographic map — the image Ian had used to make the stencil had been taken from an atlas and showed no cities or place names — the town of Lyttelton was marked with a little red flag (apparently that had been Jake's idea — he wanted to be able to show people where his house was on the map).

Jake reached out and touched the tattoo now, running his finger over the Southern Alps, which was where most of the scabbing was concentrated. The tat no longer hurt, but it did still itch. He resisted the urge to scratch it and made a mental note to rub some baby oil on it at some point this morning. But first, his bladder was still straining.

The toilet seat was down, which meant that Kate had been the last one to use it, probably just before she got dressed and left this morning. Jake lifted it up, aimed his withered and abused penis towards the water, and let loose a torrent.

It took him perhaps three seconds to realize that he was peeing — he could feel it leaving his body in the normal fashion — but that he was neither hearing nor seeing any urine splashing into the toilet. He puzzled over this apparent contradiction for a moment before looking down at his penis. The end of it seemed to be swelling up grotesquely, like a balloon. He emitted a startled scream at this sight and another two or three seconds of sheer terror passed before he realized that he was still wearing his last condom and that he was, in effect, turning it into a urine-filled water balloon.

A brief struggle ensued as he tried desperately to pull the straining rubber from his manhood and stifle the flow of urine at the same time. The first effort proved to be successful after a vigorous, sharply painful tug. The second was less so and he ended up spraying a good portion of his pee over the floor, toilet tank, and rim before getting the stream redirected to the proper place. Meanwhile, much of the urine contained in the condom spilled out over his hands.

"Christ," Jake said, shaking his head as he looked at the puddles he'd created, as he contemplated having to clean all of this up. "It looks like the start of another beautiful day."

Construction on Jake's Port Hills home was officially completed on September 24, 1990. Under New Zealand law, however, escrow could not close and the deed could not officially be recorded in the hall of records until the owner of the property completed a walk-through and inspection. Jake could have designated a representative to perform the walk-through and inspection for him, but doing such a thing would have caused two or three more days worth of paperwork, more legal fees, and probably a dozen or so international phone calls and faxes. By far, the easiest course of action was to simply inspect the property himself.

This was not Jake's only reason for making the long flight, however. He wanted to see his new house, wanted to see the project he'd only glimpsed drawings and blueprints of so far standing in actuality. Nor was that the only reason either. The most compelling rationale was that he really didn't have anything else on his plate at the moment, nor was there anything on the horizon.

Just one week before, on September 17, negotiations between Jake (with Pauline as his representative) and the legal and productive team of National Records, reached what Pauline termed an "unbreakable impasse" on the issue of Jake's solo album contract. All of the other major labels had already rejected Jake on the grounds that his contract provisions were unreasonable, unworkable, and, if accepted, unlikely to produce anything resembling profit. National was the final stop, and the label most likely to compromise with Jake since they already had a relationship with him. Jake, however, was unwilling to compromise.

The sticking points were many. Jake insisted on complete artistic license, complete control of the hiring and direction of backing musicians, and absolutely no veto power of any material by the label on any grounds other than blatant obscenity. Jake would not sign off on any provision that even hinted that he had to perform a certain style of music. Furthermore, Jake refused to sign on for anything more than two option periods, refused to give up the rights to any of his new material for longer than the duration of the contract, and refused to accept less than thirty percent royalties.

"Jake, you're being unreasonable," Pauline told him on many occasions. "Negotiation is a game of give and take. You're not giving anything."

But Jake was stubbornly insistent. "I'm tired of being owned by a label," he told Pauline and every management type or lawyer he met in any negotiation meeting. "What I've given you is the absolute minimum I will accept in order to sign a contract. Take it or leave it."