“I want to do it at least twice a day every day you’re with us,” she said. “Oh, and I want to do it on the bus too.”
“On the bus?” he asked. He had never actually had sex on the bus before. The bus rides were for sleeping and intoxication.
“I have a private sleeping area,” she said. “It has a curtain for privacy. It’ll be tight with two of us in there, but we have to do it. I insist.”
He nodded. “We’ll see if we can make that happen,” he said, his hand idly stroking her bare breast.
They lay in silence for a bit, letting their sweat dry in the muggy air, letting their hearts return to normal. Finally, Jake looked over at her. “Are you having fun out here, hon?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’m having the time of my life,” she said. “It’s brutal, especially the long bus rides, but I think this is what I was put on Earth to do. I love getting up on that stage every night, listening to them cheer for us, for me. And tonight, having you up there with me ... that was special, sweetie. I’ll treasure that always.”
“So will I,” he said, leaning over and giving her a kiss.
The next morning, at 6:30, they climbed aboard the bus, all of them weary and out of sorts and tired. They climbed into their spaces and settled in for the ride. It would be a seven hour slog to El Paso.
They had a show there tonight.
Six miles south of Land’s End, Baja Peninsula, Mexico
October 7, 1993
The forty-foot vessel Pescador de mar road easily up and down on the rolling swells of the Pacific Ocean six miles off the southern tip of the Baja peninsula. The vessel was captained by Mario Delgado, a sixty-year-old mariner who had spent his entire life on the sea. His two sons, Miguel and Jesus, who had grown up on the vessel, assisted their father in his business.
The boat was capable of holding thirty anglers per trip. Today it only held four. Matt Tisdale, who owned a home on the beach in Cabo San Lucas, where Pescador de mar’s home harbor was located, had chartered the entire vessel for the day so he could show his bandmates what real fishing was all about. They had been out for nearly eight hours now and had caught three blue marlin, two bluefin tuna, and two dorado, totaling well over two hundred pounds of fish. They were now heading back to the harbor, chugging along through the swells, Mario at the helm while Miguel and Jesus moved about, cleaning the deck and putting things back in order.
Matt, Austin Jefferson (his bass player), and Corban Slate (the twenty-three year old studio guitar player Matt had picked to be his rhythm guitarist on the upcoming tour), sat on the benches at the stern of the boat, passing a joint around and drinking cans of beer from one of the two large ice chests Matt had brought with them. They were the only three who had had a good time on the trip. Steve Calhoun, the drummer, had never been on a boat before today and had not found the experience to his liking. He had become seasick even before they left the harbor and had been pretty much incapacitated ever since they moved out into the open ocean. He was curled up on one of the benches on the port side, getting up a few times an hour to barf into the sea, but otherwise just lying there and moaning.
“What a fuckin’ pussy,” Matt said with contempt as he saw the drummer rise up for another round of puking over the side. At this point in the game, Calhoun had little left in his stomach to vomit up and was reduced to nothing but dry heaves.
Austin, who was quite intoxicated after drinking twelve cans of beer and taking part in the smoking of three communal joints, laughed and called over: “Hey, Calhoun! You’re looking a little empty over there! You want one of these sardine sandwiches we got?”
Calhoun looked at him for a moment, seemed to turn an even darker shade of green, and then leaned over the rail again for another round of retching.
“I guess he don’t want the sandwich,” said Matt with a chuckle.
“Do we really have sardine sandwiches?” asked Corban. Though he was twenty-three, he looked like he was fourteen at the most. His face was smooth skinned, as if he had never shaved a day in his life. His brown hair was cut short on the sides and spiked up on the top with blonde highlights brushed in—apparently that was the latest rage among his age group. Matt thought he looked and acted like a fucking faggot, but Corban claimed that he was completely heterosexual. And he was quite the prodigy on the guitar. Matt had been impressed with both his acoustic and distorted electric skills, particularly his ability to pick up a riff and reproduce it exactly just by listening to it once or twice.
“No,” Matt said, irritation in his voice. “We don’t have any fucking sardine sandwiches. What is the matter with you? Can’t you keep a fucking joke going?”
“Sorry,” Corban said, taking a swig from his beer. “I don’t smoke ganja very often, dude. It makes me hungry, and a sardine sandwich sounds pretty fuckin’ gnarly right about now.”
“Stop calling me dude, dude,” Matt told him. “You make it sound like you’re talking to an old motherfucker when you say it.”
“Well ... you are kind of old, dude,” Corban pointed out. “What are you, like forty-five? That’s fucking ancient.”
“I’m thirty-fucking-four!” Matt barked.
“Dude!” Corban cried. “No shit?”
“No fucking shit,” Matt barked. “And your ass is about one ‘dude’ away from swimming back to shore!”
“Sorry, dude ... uh ... I mean Matt,” Corban said. “What do we have to eat though?”
“Fuck me,” Matt whispered. He opened up the ice chest and pulled out a soggy chicken and cheese burrito in a plastic bag. He’d bought it from one of the roach stands on the waterfront. “Here,” he said, tossing it over. “Munch on this.”
“Thanks, Matt!” Corban said happily.
“I hope it gives you the shits,” Matt told him.
“Dude, that’s not cool,” Corban said, ripping open the wrapper.
Matt just shook his head and took another swig of beer. It was quite clear that Corban didn’t have a hair on his ass, but one had to wonder if he even had any on his balls. Still, a good guitar player—the best of the bunch that National had paraded before him for auditions. He had picked up his part of the show with an uncanny speed and skill over the past six weeks of rehearsals.
They had just finished up the final two full dress rehearsals for the tour two days ago. As they floated out here on the ocean, the road crew were engaged in extensive training on how to tear the set down and set it back up again. In two more days, the entire set—including that belonging to their opening band, Primal Fire, who had just released their second album after their first had gone gold—would be packed up in four tractor trailers and shipped across the country to Bangor, Maine for the first date of the tour on October 16th. Primal Fire would ride on the bus with the caravan. Matt and his band would be riding the bus between venues themselves, but they at least would be flown out to the first date instead of having to ride cross country. That was why Matt had invited/ordered his bandmates to accompany him down to Cabo. Though he considered all of them to be nothing more than the best of the best of the studio hackers, they needed some serious bro-time after all the rehearsals and recording. They needed to cut loose a bit before submitting to the grind of the road.
“Here’s the deal,” Matt said now. “Once we get ashore, the beaner bitches that work the docks will gut and filet all these fish for us. Most of the shit I’m going to ship back home to put in my freezer, but we’ll hold back enough for a serious fish fry out on my patio as the sun goes down tomorrow night. We’ll get some drinks going, find some local gash to invite and violate in as many ways as possible, and burn some of that Acapulco Gold shit I picked up the other day.”