“Yeah, I think I’ll call it an early night,” Matt told him. “I already called up my man Chuckie and told him to have Louisa fix up some grub for me.”
“Home it is,” Corey said amicably, dropping the gearshift into drive and pulling smoothly away.
Matt quickly mixed himself a stiff Jack and Coke, the ratio quite close to fifty-fifty. He then pulled his cocaine kit from his pocket and assembled a few lines on the mirror. He snorted these up, thought things over for a minute or two, and then crunched up and snorted two more.
“Oh yeah,” he said happily as he felt the familiar rush of cocaine intoxication coursing through him. “That hit the fuckin’ spot.”
His heart hammered in his chest a little faster than he really liked it to, but he did his best to ignore this. Dumping a good portion of his Jack and Coke on it helped—not the actual heart rate of course, but his anxiety about it. And the combination of the two intoxicants together made him feel peace on Earth and goodwill toward men. He became talkative.
“What’s been going on with you, Corey?” he asked the driver. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“I’m just doing this gig part time these days,” Corey said. “I finished my degree in August, and I got a job working on some projects for LA County.”
Corey, he remembered, wanted to be a civil engineer and had been working his way through school for several years now.
“Does it pay well?” Matt asked him.
“Not really,” he said with a shrug. “It’s mostly research and math checking. But it’s a foot in the door. Hopefully, it’ll lead to a full-time gig at some point.”
“That’s cool,” Matt said nodding. “Engineers don’t score a lot of gash, do they?”
“Well ... it’s not exactly a profession that makes women throw open their legs for you,” he confirmed. “I actually score a lot more pussy doing this gig.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Corey said. “There’s nothing like driving a group of girls having a bachelorette party around all night. You really have to be a geek not to get laid when that happens.”
Matt patted him on the shoulder companionably. “That’s all fuckin’ right,” he said. “A bunch of drunk bachelorettes. Kind of hot. You ever nail the bride herself?”
“Uh ... no, I’ve never been able to pull that one off.”
“What a rip,” Matt said. “How about scoring with two of the bachelorettes at once?”
“Uh ... no, I’ve never done that either.”
“Oh,” Matt said, disappointed. Why tell a fucking sex story if it only involved one bitch who you had every right in the world to fuck? “Well ... to each their own, I guess.”
“Hey,” Corey said, changing the subject, “the last time I drove you somewhere you were telling me you were thinking about buying a boat. Did you ever end up doing that?”
This brightened Matt right back up again. “Fuck yeah I did!” he said excitedly. “I scored me a seventy-nine-foot motor yacht with twin diesels. Just closed escrow on it last month.”
“Oh yeah?” Corey asked. “Sounds sweet.”
“As sweet as eighteen-year-old pussy,” Matt assured him. “It’s got five full bedrooms, a fuckin’ hot tub, a dining room, and a complete kitchen. Down below it’s got cabins for the crew, its own icemaker, and lots of storage for fish. I got the entire back of it set up for deep sea fishing, with four chairs and a fish cleaning station.”
“Sounds awesome,” Corey said. “What does something like that cost?”
“Four and a half million bones, dude,” Matt said solemnly.
“Damn,” Corey said, impressed. “That ain’t chump change.”
“Nope,” Matt agreed. “It’s more than I paid for my fuckin’ house. And I have to hire a crew before I can take it out.” He shook his head. “I really need to start working on that shit.”
“Did you pay cash for it?” Corey wanted to know.
“Fuck yeah,” Matt said. “The only way to do business if you have the means. And between that Greatest Hits bullshit that National put out and my last album selling like wildfire and my profits from the tour, I had the fuckin’ means. Especially since my accountants figured out a way to keep me from being butt-raped by taxes.”
“That’s really cool, Matt.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”
“Where are you keeping it?”
“Marina Del Ray for now,” he said. “Although I’m going to have to move it around every now and then.”
“Why is that?”
“Tax reasons,” he said. “Apparently California has this property tax thing on yachts. One and a half percent of the fucking value every year. Can you believe that shit?”
“That’s fucked up,” Corey said.
“It is. Anyway, since I bought the thing in Mexico—at least that’s where the Franchise Tax Board thinks I bought it—I didn’t have to pay sales tax on it. But my accountant has it registered in Mexico as well, connected to my home in Cabo. So, officially, the yacht is just up here because I’m visiting. And if I’m visiting, the state of commie-fucking-fornia doesn’t have any right to tax me on it. That shit all starts to fall apart, however, if I keep it in one place too long. So, every six months or so I’m going to have to move it somewhere else.”
“Wow,” Corey said. “And that’s legal?”
“That’s what my accountants tell me. And they should know about that shit, right?”
“I suppose so,” Corey agreed.
They talked of inconsequential things for the rest of the forty-minute ride. Matt crunched up two more lines of cocaine and made them disappear. He mixed and drank two more Jack and Cokes, each more potent than the last. By the time he walked in the front door of his house, he was feeling quite fine indeed.
Louisa had prepared a couple of New York steaks, sautéed mushrooms, baked potatoes, and steamed asparagus for dinner. Kim was at the house tonight and they ate in front of the television set, watching Wheel of Fortune and then Jeopardy while swilling down a few bottles of Corona beer.
Louisa had just cleared their plates from the coffee table when Jeopardy ended. The show following it was Entertainment Report, one of the celebrity gossip rags. Matt picked up the remote to change the channel but stopped when he saw a picture of Jake Kingsley flash up on the screen. Jake was smiling and dressed in a white tuxedo, the red-headed saxophone bitch he was boning on his arm and wearing a white dress.
“We’ve received confirmation,” the skinny bitch host of the show told him and the rest of the viewing audience, “that musician Jake Kingsley, former member of the death metal band Intemperance and current solo artist with one of the best-selling alternative rock albums of the year, married his girlfriend Laura Best, saxophonist for Celia Valdez, in a private ceremony in Hawaii yesterday. It is a first marriage for both of them, although Kingsley does have a rather notorious past, including accusations of abuse and of snorting cocaine out of the butt crack of a young woman in New York City some years ago.”
“Motherfucker,” Matt said, looking at the picture in amazement. “He actually went and married that bitch. Fucking married!”
“Does that surprise you?” asked Kim.
“That Jake Kingsley would marry someone? Fuck yeah, it surprises me. I can’t stand the motherfucker and he’s nothing but a sellout prick, but he’s a man who loves pussy almost as much as I do. I never thought I’d see the day he’d settle down with one bitch.”
“He dated Helen for quite some time,” Kim said.
“Yeah, and look how well that shit worked out for him.” He shook his head in consternation. “There must be some fuckin’ tax reason he did it.”
The host of ER, in the meantime, was talking while a series of pictures from the wedding were flashed on the screen.