“But ... were you and she actually ... you know ... doing it while she was teaching you?”
“Well ... yeah,” he admitted, “but that didn’t matter. Helen was ... is a professional. She never would have signed me off if I didn’t know what I was doing, even if we were rubbing pee-pees at every opportunity.”
“What happened with her?” Laura asked. By now, her drink was almost completely in her stomach.
Jake sighed. “We really loved each other,” he said. “But our lifestyles were incompatible. She couldn’t take the life of being involved with a celebrity. She thought she could at first, she took a lot of things in stride—having her picture in the American Watcher, having reporters stalking her and asking her how often I beat her, having women dropping domestic violence cards in her hand and urging her to get help—but then things started to escalate.”
“There was a crazy woman, right?” Laura said. “I seem to remember that some psycho tried to kidnap her.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “That’s what pushed her over the edge. She went a little nutso after that—understandable, really, I guess—and our days were pretty much numbered from that point on.”
The waitress returned, now carrying their breakfast plates. She set them down before them, asked if they needed anything else—Laura declined the offer of a second bloody Mary—and then left them to their cuisine.
“You still miss her?” Laura asked when she was gone.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. You know the song we’re working on, the one we’re here to get the sax for?”
“South Island Blur,” she said. “It’s about being in a drunken stupor in New Zealand, right?”
“Right,” he said. “An autobiographical piece if there ever was one. The inspiration for that tune was the months I spent there, hiding from the world, drowning my sorrows. One of those sorrows was that Intemperance had just broken up and my musical prospects weren’t looking too good. The other was the breakup with Helen.”
“It’s kind of a depressing song,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I like it and I can feel the melody when I play it, but it’s sad, almost hopeless.”
“It was a hopeless time,” he told her. “Writing songs about such things helps with the healing process, I think.”
She nodded, putting a bite in her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. She swallowed and then wiped her mouth with a napkin. She then looked at him pointedly. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“The butt crack thing?”
“The butt crack thing,” she confirmed with a smile. “True or false? I have to know.”
“You have to know, huh?”
“I will die if you don’t tell me,” she said.
He chuckled again, shaking his head. “It was our first tour, back when we were still living the lifestyle that National wanted us to live. I was a twenty-two year old punk, finding myself in a situation where people adored me, would do anything for me, where security guys led a bunch of naked women into our showers every night after a show. It was kind of hard to turn some of the stuff down.”
“Naked women in the showers, huh?” she said. “And they did this every night?”
“Every night,” he said. “But that was just the warm up. The real partying took place back at whatever hotel we stayed at after the show. They’d bring a bunch of groupies with us and ply us with booze and pot and cocaine. And then ... well ... things sometimes got a little wild.”
“Wilder than women in the showers?” she asked. “I can’t even imagine things much wilder than that.”
“Some of the stuff we did defies imagination,” Jake agreed. “Anyway, on the night in question, a Spinning Rock reporter was hanging out with us, doing an article about a day in the life of Intemperance. The record company was pushing hard for us to have that reputation as oversexed degenerates, so they encouraged us to be wild and crazy and oversexed and obliterated with drugs and alcohol. I guess we were kind of living up to the reputation back then. Anyway, Matt—Matt Tisdale, Intemperance’s guitar player?”
“The one who swears he’ll never play with you again?”
“That’s him,” Jake confirmed. “He decided to rise to the occasion. It was his idea to snort coke out of the groupie’s butt crack. He had her bent over on the floor, her face in the crotch of another groupie and...”
“Wait a minute,” Laura said, wide eyed again. “The girls were doing it to each other? In front of other people?”
Jake shrugged. “Yeah, you know how it is.”
It was obvious that she did not know how it is. “That is so depraved,” she whispered, almost in awe.
Jake shrugged again. “We were twenty-two,” he said. “Didn’t you do dumb things when you were twenty-two?”
“Uh ... yeah,” she said. “Things along the line of locking my keys in my car or forgetting to turn off the iron when I left the house. Nothing quite on the level of group sex in a hotel room with another girl.”
Jake nodded. “I guess there are degrees of stupidity at twenty-two. I never did lock my keys in the car or leave the iron on.”
She giggled. “Fair enough,” she said. “Please finish the story. I am completely enthralled with it.”
“Well, not much to tell,” he said. “I was in another room with a couple of groupies of my own.”
“A couple?”
“A couple,” he confirmed. “You have to understand that I was pretty wasted at the time. I barely remember any of this. Anyway, Matt calls me out of the room, telling me he’s got something cool to show me, so I go out there and...”
“You go out there?” she interrupted again. “Were you ... you know ... naked at the time?”
“Not quite,” he said. “I had a condom on.”
A slow blink. “I see.”
“So, anyway, Matt’s got the two groupies doing their thing on the floor, and he’s standing behind the one with her butt up in the air, and ... well ... he did it. He poured some coke in her crack and snorted it up. And then one of the other groupies snorted some too.”
“One of the other groupies? There was a third girl involved in this?”
“She didn’t do anything other than hold the girl’s cheeks apart and then snort the coke out of her butt. Some of those girls aren’t into the whole dyking out thing.”
“Nobody’s perfect, I guess,” Laura said with a smile.
“Exactly!” Jake told her. “So ... anyway, once the girl was done snorting up, Matt pours a little more coke in the crack and he offered the straw to me.”
“And you took it?”
“I took it,” he said. Another shrug. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it was only that one time. It wasn’t like we did that as a regular gig. Nobody would have even known about it if that Spinning Rock reporter hadn’t put it in her article. And for some reason, Matt doesn’t ever get associated with that, only me. But that’s my legacy now. And that’s the story of the coke from the butt crack incident. I hope I didn’t shock you too much.”
“I found that story strangely fascinating,” she told him.
“It’s nothing I’m particularly proud of,” Jake admitted. “You’re one of only a handful of people I’ve even admitted the truth of the tale to.”
“Well, I appreciate your trust in me,” she said. “It certainly a lot more interesting than any of my stories.”
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “You’ll have to tell me some of them and let me make the call.”
Just south of the downtown proper, they found a large music store named, appropriately enough, Portland Music Store. They arrived just after nine o’clock and found three clerks on duty and perhaps ten customers browsing through the collection of instruments. As in most music stores Jake had been in in his life, the floorspace was divided up into four main sections; one for stringed instruments, one for percussion, one for brass and woodwinds, and one for electronic instruments.