“Go!” Jory told her, slapping her on the shoulder again.
She went, strolling out onto the stage alone. A single spotlight illuminated her and her saxophone and the cheers grew louder. She stepped to the center of the stage, just to the left of Celia’s microphone. She began to play the five-minute solo she had rehearsed up.
She played it flawlessly, not missing a single note, her timing and phrasing exquisite. The audience loved it, cheering loudly throughout, particularly in the middle, when she was playing with an increasingly rapid tempo and really blasting out those notes like a machine gun. She brought the tempo back down slowly, playing out a lengthy, sorrowful piece for about thirty seconds and then she went back up-tempo for the finale. Once the last note was played, she held her instrument aloft in triumph and basked in the deafening applause and cheers, feeling them wash over her.
They love me, she thought wondrously, her body flooding with dopamine and endorphins, her unconsciously self-administered reward for playing as she did. They really do love me.
Celia and the rest of the band came back out on stage while the audience still cheered. Celia gave her a big hug and then walked over to her microphone.
“Laura Kingsley on the alto sax!” she yelled into it. “How about that, huh?”
Another wave of cheers for Laura washed over her. She could not help but grin.
“Is she badass, or what?” Celia asked the audience.
The audience agreed that she was badass.
When the decibel level died back down to reasonable again, Celia, who had just been handed her 12-string acoustic by Rog, stepped back up to the microphone. “All right now,” she said. “Thanks for sticking around for the second half of the show. We’ve got another hour or so worth of music to play for you.”
Another wave of cheers.
“We’re going to do another song from the La Diferencia days now,” Celia said. “This is one of the songs that I wrote, one of the songs that didn’t get a lot of radio airplay back then, mostly because those putas that run the recording industry wouldn’t let me play it the way I wrote it and didn’t bother trying to promote it. Well, here it is now, the way I meant it to be played. I hope you like it.”
A four count by Coop, and they launched into Bring Me Home, one of the deep cuts from La Diferencia’s last and least successful album. On that album, the tune had been recorded with the primary melody played by a synthesizer, the backbeat played by electronic drums, with very little electric or acoustic guitar, no saxophone, and the tempo at one hundred thirty instead of the eighty to one hundred it was meant to be performed at. Now, there was no synthesizer at all. The primary melody was Celia’s acoustic guitar, with a secondary melody by Laura’s sax and frequent alternating and harmonizing fills by Little Stevie’s distorted electric, Liz’s piano, and Eric’s violin. The drumming and bass were natural and set the beat authoritatively. Much of the audience had never even heard the tune before and those that had probably had not cared much for it. But they loved it now. Though there was not as much singing along as other tunes, it was obvious from the cheers and the clapping along with the beat, that they approved of the new rendition.
After Home, they went on a five-song set of the hits from the first and second Celia Valdez solo albums, ending it with Done With You, which was rounded out by an extended session of dueling solos between Laura on her alto sax and Eric playing his distorted electric violin. From there, they played two more songs from the new album followed by Carabobo from the La Dif days, and then finishing out the set with Should We Believe?
They exited the stage once again, listening to the stomping of feet, the clapping of hands, and the shouts for “More-more-more!”
“All right,” Celia told her band after five minutes. “Let’s bring it home!”
They brought it home, stepping back out and performing a three-song encore consisting of What Is Love? from the second album, Audacious, from the new album, and Why?, from the first album, which was Celia’s biggest hit of her solo career.
The band took their bows and left the stage for the final time. The house lights came up despite the renewed calls for more. The show was over, and the audience began to file out of the arena, most of them wishing there had been more.
Dinner after the show consisted of roasted tri-tip, asparagus spears with a cheese sauce, garlic mashed potatoes with gravy, a small vegetable lasagna for Charlie the vegetarian, and a cheesecake for dessert. There were the usual tubs of beer, bottles of red and white wine, a small bar stocked with hard alcohol, ice, and various mixers, and a stash box filled with high-grade marijuana and a pipe.
Laura drank down another bottle of Gatorade and then poured herself a healthy slug of chilled chardonnay. She then stuffed the pipe full of ganja and took a few rips of it before passing it around. Coop, Little Stevie, and Liz all took a few tokes. Charlie smoked some of the weed too, but he rolled his own joint as he was too germophobic to participate in the communal pipe ritual.
Everyone ate their dinners and then it was time for showers. Laura, Celia, and Liz all took turns in the female dressing room, where there was only one shower, while the boys got through things more quickly since there were communal showers in the male dressing room. When they returned from bathing, the requests had been delivered. There were only two groupies on this first night, one for Coop and one for Charlie.
They made their way out to the chartered stretch limousine and piled inside for the short trip to the downtown Miami Hilton, where suites had been reserved for all of them.
“Feel like a little drink in the bar?” Celia asked Laura as Coop and Charlie headed upstairs with their groupies and the rest of the band filtered off in different directions.
“No,” Laura said. “I’m gonna go call Jake and then crash out.”
“I understand,” said Celia, though she seemed a little disappointed.
Liz and Little Stevie ended up joining Celia in the bar for a few nightcaps while Laura headed up to her room.
“How was the first show?” Jake asked her when she got him on the phone.
“We nailed it,” she told him, smiling at the memory. “It was probably the most exciting performance I’ve ever done.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said dreamily, taking another little puff on the joint she had brought with her. “More than seventeen thousand people in the audience, sweetie. It was so loud. They had so much energy. And when I did my solo ... it was just ... awesome. Listening to them cheer for me. For me!”
“You blow a good horn, hon,” Jake told her.
“I really do,” she said, as if just realizing this. She smiled again. “I only wish I was there to blow your horn right now.”
He chuckled. “You know what to do when you the pressure gets high,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. “But it’s not there yet. Besides, I’m still pretty sore from last night.”
“It was quite a night, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” she agreed.
They talked for a few more minutes, said their ‘I love you’s’, and then hung up. Laura did not promise to call him tomorrow, though she knew she probably would. Jake had a deeply rooted complex about promising to call every night. Laura understood. He had told her the story of Angelina, the girlfriend he had had when he left for the first Intemperance tour all those years ago. He had promised to call her every night when he left. He had never spoken to her since and still felt a considerable amount of guilt about that.