Chapter 25: Cobblestone Nashville

Savannah, Georgia
February 1986

Rebecca and Tony returned to the office having just come from visiting the base commander. Hunter wanted forty chairs this year and had pledged to raise $25,000 as well. Someone, they suspected the mayor's office, had already greased the wheels as it were.

Or perhaps it was Tina and Riley's stunning success at Fort Stewart. After all, the base commander at Hunter worked for the commanding general at Fort Stewart. Having been left out the year before and seeing their smaller, sister base take all the glory, they were prepared to take eighty chairs and had a huge fundraising sign that looked like a thermometer outside base headquarters. It already read $32,000 and the goal was $100,000. All was good; well, except that they didn't have nearly that many chairs to give them. Some fifty-three had already been spread around local businesses in Savannah and they were almost seventy chairs short.

They needed a rather quick influx of cash to buy a lot more chairs. The four talked around the conference room table trying to figure out just where the money would come from.

"Obviously we need one or two more big donors," Rebecca said. "And you two aren't just going to pull out your wallets."

"Yeah, I don't mind doing it, but this really needs to stand on its own legs eventually," Tony replied. Doing some figures in his head he knew his regular donor's were going to balk, or at least start getting very reticent, and when you could count on a hundred grand a year you really didn't want to rock the boat.

"Let's get everyone in here and see what we can come up with."

Twenty minutes later most everyone was crammed into the small conference room. Tony started, "OK, too much of a good thing. Assuming we can get another thirty chairs to local business we are going to fall almost one hundred chairs short. We need a lot more chairs and there isn't money in the kitty to buy them. Ideas?"

"What are we possibly going to do with two hundred finished chairs? Where are they going?" Cheri asked.

"North or south, pick a direction. I'd like Atlanta to do their own. So I'd say south," Tony said.

"Disney will do it," Alice said. "Ever been there? They have all kinds of wheelchairs there for guests. Get them to buy a hundred chairs and promise them thirty or so Disney themed chairs for the park, I bet they'd foot the bill for the rest."

"Alice has an idea there Tony, we need an in with someone with a fat wallet down there," Bea said.

"Hmm, sweetie, think we can charm a hundred grand or so out of Mickey?" Tony asked Rebecca.

"Piece of cake loverboy," she shot back with a smile.

"OK Alice, get on the horn and see if you can get us an in. I'll do the same with the big wigs we know, someone can get us an introduction down there. I'd like to do it before Thursday. We're running out of time."

"Uh, Tony, we're going in this?" Tony was taking a fuel sample from the left wing of the Cessna 180 as part of the pre-flight inspection. "What happened to the no passenger rule?"

"I am now a certificated private pilot. You get to be the first passenger."

"Oh boy, what's Daddy going to say?"

"Rebecca was a wonderful girl. We're all going to miss her," Tony deadpanned.

"Tony! You know what I mean."

"Dunno, but I suggest we tell him when we get back. This is our only real option to get this done today. Hey just tell him we flew to Orlando and back. No need to mention your psycho boyfriend was the pilot."

"No crashes right?"

"Not so far. I'm zero for forty-five in the crashing department, a perfect record."

Rebecca rolled her eyes. "OK, do I sit in the back or what?"

"Nope, right up front with me. Just keep your hands off the controls unless I tell you."

Rebecca, in fact, had a ball. About the time the wheels cleared the runway she had fully shifted into discovery mode. The navigation really wasn't much different from the ship, everything just happened faster. Tony let her take the wheel, but even putting the seat in its full forward position she couldn't fully reach the rudder pedals. If she actually wanted to learn to fly she'd need extensions, but they were fairly common. She actually wanted to land the plane after seeing how easy it was to take off.

Tony declined to allow that. Takeoff, control, and navigation of a small plane, in the end, were not hard to learn at all. He had mastered that by his second lesson, though someone with no prior navigating experience might find it a challenge at first. Landing one, however, was actually nothing short of a very controlled crash. You tried to match the plane's airspeed, direction, and altitude until you were barely above the runway and then did something that at first seemed completely counter-intuitive, you let it stall and simply drop to earth. Even that wasn't all that hard until one took into account that the plane was in the air up to that point. Air moves, and when it does, it moves the plane right along with it. You could apply all the logic and formulae in the world to it, but in the end it really was as much art as skill. Tony likened it to perfectly positioning the fifty-five foot Kalliste next to a dock in a current, then adding in the extra dimension of altitude.

In the end, Alice was right. Disney jumped in with both feet. They fully supported the project with a hundred and fifty chairs as a straight donation with a rolling agreement to have all their chairs done. It would require someone to drive to Orlando, pick up ten chairs at a time, decorate them, and repeat. Disney wanted this done as a service at two hundred and fifty dollars a chair. So in addition to the donated chairs there would be a constant stream of revenue doing chairs for the park, which turned out to have no less than two hundred chairs of their own for their guests.

Tammy's Wheels was expanding all right, just not in the direction they had foreseen. Alice was ecstatic and instantly went to work with the contact at the park, making arrangements for Go-Go to pick up the first batch.

The band itself steadfastly refused to give up it's now only twice weekly rehearsals. Obvious progress was being made at the studio, but they realized early on that if that was all they did they ran the risk of forgetting how to play together, rather then just laying down tracks individually or in small groups. Instead they started literally working on their tour. They would realize later that this gave them a huge advantage. Most bands spent months in the studio and only then began putting a touring show together; playing songs they had rarely played together as a single band.

Still, each Friday they climbed on the plane and made their way to Nashville. Tony surprised Tina while laying down a rhythm track one afternoon in mid February. As soon as he finished the take she was immediately on the studio microphone. "Tony you didn't just do that!"

Tony looked at her through the glass and shrugged. If he could box a lead guitar, he figured he could do it to a keyboard solo as well, so he just gave it a shot. "When did you become the musical genius of this outfit? Hang on, we can make it just a bit better."

It did work better. When the other player knew he was going to reach out and bring the solo back home to the rhythm they could help the timing until it was almost seamless. Chance was furious at having Tina redo what he thought was a perfect track, but he had to admit in less than an hour they had it. And it was better. He was beginning to realize that every suggestion this sixteen year-old girl made caused things to sound better. She heard it in her head before the first note was even played.

Eventually, on a song Tony found himself playing, he tripled the technique up. He laid down the piano and two rhythm tracks, so he reversed the box on the first rhythm to kick out the second, to capture the piano solo and bring them all three into perfect unison with nothing more than a simple bridge to the rhythm. He actually figured three had a smoother sound, so in rehearsals he began teaching Tina to bridge the second rhythm to kick his out to capture the lead. The fun thing was that if you took the idea to a music theorist they'd tell you, just like the first time Tony thought he had to reach to the A, that it wouldn't and couldn't work. They were inventing something new here and what was once their unique guitar sound based on Dewayne's talent alone became something better, something it would take other guitarists months if not years to figure out and learn to play. That was mainly because it simply went counter to all their musical instincts. It was actually something born out of playing to exhaustion fighting off bad dreams. Tony had brought back some essence of the dragons with him.

There were now four songs in a state of near completion, all were in final mix waiting for the mastering phase. Jake had found them both an analog and a digital mastering engineer. They decided to simply send it to both and see which one they preferred. One would think that digital mastering would be superior, but it was a fairly new process, where analog mastering was a well-known and mastered art.

February also brought one more highlight. Tony's 'daughter' turned sweet sixteen. While not as large as the joint party for Rebecca and Tina, Tony made sure all of Cheri's extended family and friends showed up, though they had to do it on a school night.

Of course neither girl had any objection but Tony checked with Rebecca (who gave an enthusiastic yes) and Tina (who really didn't care, but he had to ask). Cheri had fallen in love with Marj's car. When Tony started to think about what to buy her he started looking at a Volvo identical to the other girls'. Rebecca just shook him off. She took him straight back to the same dealership and pointed out the black Mercedes 300 (this one with a sunroof). She assured him that Cheri was so infatuated with Marj's car that nothing else would do. That car was almost as expensive to insure, with Cheri as the primary driver, as the payments would have been on a really nice Ford. Tony right then decided his little girl was spoiled rotten. Then he amended "girl" to its plural form.