The last were two girls, late teens, with passes won at a local record store, and Click and I did our best to keep them engaged, getting them to talk about themselves, as Van finished with her clump. Then Graham was at the door, telling us we had to get back to the hotel, and I walked the two girls out, giving them a handshake, thanking them for coming. Graham went with them down the hall, to make sure security got them out the rest of the way without trouble, and that left one person alone, outside, a good-looking white kid in his early twenties, holding three white roses.
“Hey, you,” I said. “What’s your name?”
He actually checked over his shoulder to see if I was possibly talking to someone else before giving me an answer. “Pete.”
I nodded and stepped back, searching for Vanessa, who was getting the last of her things together. “His name is Pete,” I told her. “He’s waiting outside.”
She grinned at me, a little caught, a little conspiratorially, and I thought what the hell, it’s been a good night, I’ll make it easy.
I leaned back out into the hall. “Hey, Pete—we’re getting ready to go back to the hotel.”
“Oh,” he said. He did a bad job of hiding disappointment.
“You want to hold on a minute, you could probably ride back with Van.”
It took him a second to parse it, to trace the thread to its inevitable conclusion. Then he said, “Oh,” again, but this time it was far more enthusiastic.
“Be a second,” I said, and closed the door.
“Thanks,” Van said.
“Cute.”
“God, yes.”
“He a keeper?”
She shrugged, pulling her bag onto her shoulder. “I’ll let you know in the morning.”
Pete was enough of a keeper that he was at breakfast the next morning in the restaurant, looking dazed to be seated between Van and Graham. Click was there, too, but I didn’t realize I was running late until I saw our tour manager, Leon, with them, as well. I caught the last of the day’s marching orders, and then Van told Pete to go with Leon. I downed some orange juice, listening to their idle talk.
“Well?” I asked Van.
“Throwing him back,” she told me.
I nodded and switched to coffee, doctoring it with way too much sugar, just for the added jump start. Click was working on an omelet, and Graham was futzing with his PDA.
“You hungover?” Van asked.
“Just a headache,” I told her.
“Not coming down with something?”
“No, just a headache.” I looked closer. “You’ve got a hickey.”
Click and Graham both focused on her, and Van’s hand flew to the side of her neck, alarm all across her face. Then she saw me grinning and picked up her butter knife, making a stabbing gesture.
“Not funny, Mim!”
“No, especially if he’s not a keeper.”
“Shut up, drink your coffee.”
“Yes, my mistress.”
Graham stowed his PDA, pulled out his briefcase, and started distributing photocopies.
“Came this morning. You are looking at a mock-up of the article that will run next week in Rolling Stone. Complete, I might add, with an image of Tailhook on the cover.”
Conversation stopped for most of a minute as rustling paper and moving silverware took over the audio. The packets were ten pages, including a copy of the cover photo, stapled together, black-and-white. I skimmed, more interested in combating my headache than finding out how good or bad I looked, but Click and Vanessa both put full attention onto theirs.
“I’m ‘The Body,’ ” Van announced after a moment. “Me, body.”
“Not just any body,” Graham said. “The Body.”
“This’ll be in color?”
“That’s what I’m told. The article is mixed, some b/w, but your shots are color.”
“The body?” I asked.
Van showed me the page she was looking at, a picture of her relaxing in a chair, head craned back but turned toward the camera, laughing and stretching. Her belly was bare, showing the hoop through her navel, the tone of her muscle. Not overtly sexual, but attractive. It was captioned with the words “The Body.”
“Which makes Click?”
Both Click and Graham answered. “ ‘The Spine.’ ”
I went to my copy and flipped through. The picture had Click from the waist up, wearing his Winterhawks jersey, looking straight on at the camera with his hand-rolled cigarette drooping from a corner of his mouth. His smile in the shot was amused at the attention.
I flipped to what they said about me, and when I saw that I’d been labeled “The Brains,” I laughed out loud. Then I saw the picture they were using.
I wasn’t certain it was me at all for a couple of seconds. I just didn’t think I looked like that, that I could ever look like that. The second thing was that I had no memory of it being taken, no recall of the moment when the camera turned on me to catch me in the pose.
It wasn’t a studio shot, it was a candid, probably taken during the two weeks the interviewer had been in our shadow, and it looked like I was backstage someplace, alone, sitting on one of the metal gear boxes. Before a show, or maybe after, because I had my concert clothes on, the cargo pants and the tank top. The Tele in my hands, eyes closed, my head back, not exerting myself, just relaxed, just playing, maybe even singing. Light on me and shadow all around.
I’d never looked that good, that sexy, in all my life.
“Pretty hot,” Graham said. “Pretty hot, indeed.”
“You look three seconds from orgasm,” Click observed.
“You’ve never seen me three seconds from orgasm. How would you know?” I told him.
“My imagination is active. It looks entirely sexual, it looks like you’re getting off.”
“Were it that easy.”
“You’ve had a long-term relationship for a while now, haven’t you?”
I held up my right hand. “Yes, the five of us are very happy together.”
“That is a picture that will be on lockers,” Graham told me. “That is a picture that gets reprinted, Mimser. That is a picture that immortalizes a rock star.”
I wasn’t sure what I felt about that.
From the look on Van’s face, she wasn’t, either.
The second night in Sydney, all of us—the band, the crew, everyone—went to a party at a club called Home. The party was thrown by the label, celebrating not just the Rolling Stone cover, but also the debut of our new single. “Queen of Swords.” It had entered the Billboard Top Fifty at twenty-two, as they say, with a bullet, and it was a big fucking deal, because it meant we’d finally smashed out of the alt-rock circle, and now had a genuine mainstream hit on our hands.
I was drunk when I arrived at the party, having polished off the second fifth of Jack in the limo on the way over, and Graham had to shepherd me across the floor and to the VIP room before he could get to the serious business of glad-handing the reps. I stayed on a couch, watching pretty girls and handsome men and avoiding conversation, and at some point someone handed me another bottle, and I got to work on that until I couldn’t work on anything anymore.
Sometime later, Graham helped me into my hotel room, got me onto my bed and the boots off my feet and the wastebasket by my head.