Say Goodbye Page 24

  At the bottom of the stack was the piece I’d written about Laurie for Pulse. In it I used the word “naked” to describe the emotion in her voice.

  When I first typed the word, early in the first draft, I saw that I’d crossed a line. If Barb read the story she would know it too. I’d gone from journalism to flirtation, from professionalism to self-service, from faithful husband to potential cheat. I lay in bed that night and asked myself if that was what I wanted to do. Every time I said the word “naked” to myself, my heart raced, and I saw that I was going to do it whatever the risk, whatever the cost.

  Barb had never made it a point to keep up with my music journalism; she had ideas for any number of medical thrillers she’d have preferred me to spend time on. When my contributor’s copies of Pulse showed up one Saturday, however, something made her open the envelope. She was reading the story when I came in from shopping and I could see the tension in her neck. I felt like I’d been caught in a lie. I put the groceries away while listening intently to her every movement in the next room. The smack of the magazine hitting the coffee table was clearly audible. I stood in the doorway and tried to seem casual as I asked, “So, what did you think?”

  “What did I think?” she said. Her eyes were brutal. She went to her study and slammed the door.

  I’d given Tom a bag of canned goods and he’d been carrying the cans, one by one, over to the pantry and stacking them in front of the door. “Is Mommy mad?” he said.

  I said “Yes” around the lump in my throat, afraid he would ask me why.

  He only nodded and said, “Can I have a Dr. Pepper?”

  Over a year later, in email, I ask Laurie about “naked.”

  “I remembered talking to you when I read the article,” she answers. “Did I think you were flirting? Yes. If you want the truth, it gave me a bit of a tingle.”

  I Shall Be Released

  On October 31st they played a Halloween in-store at the Mad Platter in Springfield, Missouri, that pulled in over fifty costumed people and sold a dozen copies of the brand-new General Records version of the album. That night they headlined to a full house and sold another ten copies out of their own stock.

  The Rolling Stone with their review had hit the stands, and Laurie would pick it up every time she saw it and read the review again, trying to catch herself by surprise. They had a dozen copies of it in the van, and Dennis was in the habit of pointing it out to strangers in convenience stores.

  They dipped into Arkansas, then back to Knoxville, Tennessee, where they played a combination bar and laundromat called Gryphon’s that removed any lingering bad taste from the prior trip. After that came four dates in North Carolina. L’Shondra’s brother, who programmed for Data General, met them in Raleigh and drove them around the Triangle. It was a relief to see anyone with a tangible connection to anyone they knew from their former lives, and Laurie was impressed by an entire complex of cities that was only intermittently visible through the dense growth of pine trees.

  From North Carolina they had two days to get to New York City for their official corporate-sponsored record release party at the Bottom Line on Sunday, November 12.

  Mitch had a laundry list of places to see in New York, from the Guggenheim to the Apollo Theater, from the Museum of TV and Radio to CBGBs. They left the van at the Empire Hotel’s garage on Saturday afternoon and stayed up most of the night. Late Sunday morning, while the others took the ‘A’ train to Harlem, Laurie went by herself to Central Park and sat on a bench and listened to a jazz band play under a tree.

  The music made her think of Grandpa Bill, and she wished he could be there to see her hour of triumph. She wasn’t scheduled for Letterman and she wasn’t staying at the Plaza, but last night she’d seen her album in the Virgin Megastore and in a couple of hours she would be doing an acoustic set on WNYC followed by a showcase at the Bottom Line, one of the most famous clubs in the world.

  A sense of correctness filled her. She was where she belonged, doing what she was meant to do, with people she had come to love. Today was good and there was no reason to think tomorrow would be anything but better. Nothing had guaranteed her this day, and she was grateful for it. At the same time she knew she’d worked hard to earn it, and each new set of reviews told her she was not crazy to think—perhaps—she might almost deserve it.

  The Bottom Line

  There were eight for dinner at Virgil’s, a crowded, noisy barbecue place near Times Square: the band, including Chuck; Melinda, who’d flown in for the occasion; Ross Claybeck; and the head of General’s New York office, Dominick Fetrillo. Ardrey was tied up, Claybeck said, though he would be there for the show.

  Fetrillo was in his fifties, heavyset, with receding gray hair in the inevitable industry pony tail, a black silk shirt and a leather jacket. After shaking hands with everyone, he sat back and said next to nothing. The noise level kept conversation to an awkward minimum in any case; Dennis and Claybeck talked pro football, Fetrillo asked if the hotel was all right, Melinda wanted to know what General was doing about triple-A radio.

  They took three cabs to the club, and Laurie ended up with Gabe and Fetrillo. “It’s a great record,” Fetrillo said, turned sideways in the front seat. “I’m a major fan.”

  “Thanks,” Laurie said.

  “Don’t worry too much about the numbers. This is the kind of record that builds over time.”

  “Which numbers, exactly, are we talking about?”

  “The initial orders. Ten thousand is disappointing, but hey, we’re all in this for the long run. Once we break some radio and get a video or two happening, it’ll take off. You’ll see.”

  In the oddly angular dressing room of the Bottom Line, Laurie shook off Fetrillo’s bad news. She would think about it later, when she didn’t have something more important in front of her. Another of General’s baby bands, a country-rock outfit from Missouri called the Hicks, was warming up the crowd. Mitch sat smiling in one corner, seemingly unaware that his hands were playing scales at breakneck speed, while Gabe sat in another, eyes closed, wearing his bass but not otherwise touching it. Dennis was reading the Sporting News and Chuck was fishing a beer out of the ice.

  “So,” Chuck said. “Exactly how stoked are you?”

  “Fully,” Laurie said. “Totally. I almost hate for it to start because once it starts it’ll be over too soon.”

  Melinda came in, shut the door, and fell back against it, fanning herself. Her wispy red hair was up and she was wearing an ecru Donna Karan suit. “It’s serious out there. You got Judy McGrath, president of MTV, you got the New York Times, the Village Voice, Time magazine, Rolling Stone, Spin, your friend Sid the Shark, and three or four van-chasing managers who are looking to do me out of my clients. Nervous?”

  Laurie laughed. “You haven’t heard us in a while.”

  They started off with Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved.” Laurie stepped back from her excitement and her funktionslust, her pure animal pleasure in doing what it seemed she had been born to do, and opened her heart. What came out was everything she’d felt in the last two months on the road: frustration, longing, fear, despair, joy, confidence, contentment. When the lights were right she could see the table down front where Ardrey now sat with Fetrillo and Claybeck. She imagined that she saw amazed delight on their faces.

  “Thank you,” she said when it was over, above the noise of 400 pairs of wildly applauding hands, “this is the new single,” and they tore into “Angel Dust.” Mitch, in brand-new blue jeans and a brand-new flannel shirt, played without a trace of calculation or artifice, setting loose one flock of notes after another to circle the room and batter at the doors and windows. They did a pair of Laurie’s new songs, and “Neither Are We,” then went into “Fools Cap” and most of the rest of the album, wrapping up with “Carry On.”

  A standing ovation brought them back to play “Get Ready” and “Midnight Train.” They said their good nights and left the stage again and once more the crowd brought them
back.

  “Thank you,” Laurie said. “I can’t possibly tell you how much fun this is. But we really have to go, so we’re going to leave you with my favorite song.” She played the opening A to F# and the band fell in behind her. “This is by Tonio K.” She let the music build and then started to sing about the end of innocence, the passing of an age that would never come again. “ ‘Blow a kiss and dry your eyes,’ ” she sang. “ ‘Say goodbye.’ ”

  Down the river

  They hugged each other wordlessly in the dressing room. They all knew how good they’d been. Laurie was proudest of the kind of band they’d become since Skip left, the kind of band that played best when it counted the most, a band that was not afraid of its own possibilities.

  Chairs appeared for them at the big table down front. “Sit and relax a minute,” Melinda said. “We’ll meet and greet once you’ve got your breath back.”

  Champagne arrived and everyone drank to Laurie Moss, even Laurie Moss herself. And at that moment, before the flush had subsided, in front of two vice-presidents of General Records and a room full of the most important journalists in popular music, Mark Ardrey said, “So where’s Skip?”

  All eyes at the table turned to Laurie.

  Laurie looked at Melinda, who shrugged. “I thought he’d be back,” Melinda said. “Like the proverbial bad penny.”

  “Excuse me,” Ardrey said, “but is anybody going to answer my question?”

  “Skip,” Laurie said, “is no longer with the band.”

  “And Jim?” Ardrey asked.

  “He went home to his wife and kid. Mark, what’s the matter with you? Where’s your sense of timing?”

  “My sense of timing? Who waited for her showcase at the Bottom Line to inform her record company that her band has broken up?”

  Laurie looked around the table. The executives all seemed to be in neutral, waiting for a clear victor to emerge.

  Gabe leaned forward, batting a stray dreadlock away from his face. “I saw you sitting out here while we were playing. Did this sound like a band that’s broken up? With all due respect to Jim and Skip, who are both friends of mine, this lineup here kicks the old lineup’s ass, and has been kicking it every night for the last five weeks.”

  “And let me remind you,” Melinda said, “that the contract specifically states that anybody in the band, with the exception of Laurie, can be removed or replaced without notice to the Label.”

  “Goddamn right,” Dennis said, as if proud to be so expendable.

  Laurie’s heart swelled in her throat. It would have been one of her proudest moments if Fetrillo hadn’t picked that moment to ask, “What about the video?”

  “What about it?” Laurie asked.

  “How can we run that video,” Fetrillo said, “without Skip in the band? Hell, you didn’t even play the fucking song tonight.”

  “It was the second song,” Laurie said. “And Skip doesn’t sing on ‘Angel Dust’…”

  Another apocalyptic silence fell over the table.

  “Oh no,” Laurie said.

  Now everyone was looking at Ardrey. “What’s with this ‘Angel Dust?’ ” Fetrillo said.

  “You didn’t,” Laurie said, remembering Patrice’s strange insistence on getting shots of Skip singing. From the corner of her eye she saw an expensively-dressed woman with chin-length brown hair start to approach the table, then think better of it. “Tell me you didn’t,” Laurie said.

  “CMJ passed on ‘Angel Dust,’ ” Ardrey said. “So did MTV. But CMJ was interested in ‘Don’t Make Promises.’ Some kid there is a big fan of Dylan and Tim Hardin and Skip Shaw.”

  “I know,” Laurie said. “He brought one of Skip’s albums to an interview where Skip didn’t show up.”

  “We looked at what we had, and there was all this great footage Patrice shot of ‘Don’t Make Promises.’ The storyline works just as well with that song, so we did a re-edit—”

  “Without telling me,” Laurie said.

  “We just wanted to see what it would look like. Then things got out of hand.”

  “The contract says—”

  “Let’s be realistic,” Claybeck said, finally entering the fray. “It’s a little late for you to give back the advance and us to unmanufacture the records. You can take us to court if you want, but we think VH-1 is going to add ‘Don’t Make Promises’ next week. You’re going to have a hard time convincing a jury that getting a video on VH-1 actually hurt your career.”

  Laurie had never thought of herself as part of the demographic for VH-1—or Lifetime or QVC, for that matter. And the band’s audience was not, in her experience, made up of forty-year-olds with cell phones and sport-utility vehicles.

  “This makes sense,” Ardrey said. “VH-1 is very big on women in rock. And a cover song is always a good way to break a new band. We’ve got this all mapped out. I mean, I can see the two of you on the cover of Rolling Stone, like Buckingham and Nicks or something. But we need Skip back to pull it off. Do you know where to get hold of him?”

  Laurie sat for a long time trying to find words, any words, to say to Ardrey. When she absolutely and finally could not find them, she got up and walked to the dressing room.

  Melinda found her there, sitting on her amp with her back to the door, winding cables into pathologically neat rolls. “Look,” Melinda said, “I’m not going to tell you they’re not assholes.”

  “That’s something, anyway.”

  “All I want to say is that they’re the assholes who have both hands around the neck of your career. This is not the plan we originally came up with, but it’s not a bad plan. VH-1 sells records.”

  “This isn’t about VH-1. I’m okay with VH-1. It’s about Skip.”

  “He’s been in the band for a year, and only out of it for five weeks. Would it be that impossible to coexist with him for a few more months? Long enough to get some publicity out of this?”

  “Melinda, he was shooting heroin. He was missing sound checks and it was only a question of time before he started missing gigs. He was bound and determined to screw up, he’d invested his whole being in it. You heard what this band has turned into with Mitch. You can’t expect me to throw all that away.”

  “I hate to be the one to tell you this. Good does not necessarily sell records.”

  Laurie stood up and turned around. “It’s been a long night. I’ve been on an emotional roller-coaster all day, and right now I feel totally ambushed and betrayed by General Records. This is probably not the night for us to have this discussion.”

  “Tonight’s the night. The entire corporate muscle of General Records is out there ready to flex for you. If you can find it in yourself, you need to go out there and try to work with them.”

  “Don’t make me do this.”

  “I can’t make you do anything. All I can do is what you pay me for, which is to give you advice and back you up. You did notice me backing you up, out there.”

  “I noticed. Thank you.”

  “I’m asking you to try, that’s all. To make an effort.”

  Laurie followed her back to the big table down front. They both sat down. Too late, Laurie realized that she felt the same way she had the night Skip quit, far beyond caring about the consequences of her actions.

  “I’m sorry,” Ardrey said, “that we surprised you like that.”

  “You didn’t surprise me, Mark,” Laurie said. “You sold me out. You know I didn’t even want that song on the album. Neither did Skip, for that matter. So you went behind my back and made it a single, and you didn’t tell me about it because you knew I wouldn’t agree. And now you want Skip back in the band for the sake of the video, as if a band was made out of Leggo blocks and you could just take one piece out and put another one in and it wouldn’t matter. You think your professional judgment is more important than my instincts and my feelings. Guess what? You’re wrong. And if you can’t appreciate what we did up there on stage tonight, then you’re also an idiot.”

  She went bac
k to the dressing room for her guitar and her amp. She had her hands balled up into fists because she didn’t want Ardrey to see her shaking. She got all the way out to the van before she started crying, and by that point she had no idea who or what the tears were for.

  By the time Mitch and Dennis and Chuck and Gabe had loaded the rest of the equipment, she had dried her face and blown her nose. Everyone got in the van and Dennis started the engine. For a painfully long time they sat and listened to it idle.

  “So,” Mitch said at last. “Where to now?”

  Two Bad Mice

  When Laurie was three years old, her favorite book in all the world was Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Two Bad Mice. She never tired of the simple story: Two mice named Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca sneak into a beautiful doll’s house one morning, tempted by the luscious-looking food they see there. Then they discover the food is made of plaster, and the fire is nothing but paper, and the knives won’t cut anything. All their dreams turn out to be an illusion, a fake. At that point, Potter says, “there was no end to the rage and disappointment of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca.”

  “That was my mantra after the Bottom Line,” Laurie tells me in email. “I didn’t actually trash a hotel room or carve up Mark Ardrey voodoo dolls, but the world was a different place.”

  She had the persistent feeling that the walls around her were made of tissue paper, that the sky through the windshield of the van was only a projection, that every time she spoke she was only lip-synching to a soundtrack that cleverly anticipated her every word. If the one hour out of every day that she was on stage continued to bring transcendence, the remaining 23 weighed increasingly heavy. She found herself waking up in the middle of the night, her mind roiling with things she wanted to say to Ardrey or Claybeck, or changes she wanted to make to the set, or panicked thoughts about Grandpa Bill, that kept her from getting back to sleep for hours at a time.