"I'm thinking about joining the dive team when I get to college next year," she said.
"I'd go for it if I were you," Jake said. "You got what it takes, hon."
Delilah grinned, pleased with his praise.
"Hey, Jake," Gerald said. "You run into Bigg-G down at the record company yet?"
Bigg-G was a rapper that National Records had signed three years ago. His first album had gone mostly unnoticed, selling just enough for the A&R department to authorize a second album. The second album was currently the best selling rap album of the past five years, selling huge numbers across multiple demographics. Blacks, whites, and Mexicans from grammar school age to college age were snapping the album up in droves. Jake had never met Bigg-G, did not even know what he looked like (he wasn't even sure what ethnicity the rapper was), and had never heard a single one of his tunes, as he did not consider rap to be actual music. He had, however, promised Gerald and Delilah that he would make an attempt to score a couple of autographed photos of Bigg-G for them if he had occasion to run into him.
"I haven't been down to the National Building since I got back from tour," Jake told him.
"Aww man," Gerald cried. "Well when you gonna be goin' down there?"
"Probably soon," Jake said, finishing up his smoke and crushing it out in an ashtray. "In fact, I'm having a meeting with my accountant and my manager in about ten minutes, so maybe they'll give me a reason to go there."
"That'd be badass if you could score that for us, Jake," Gerald said.
"Totally badass," Delilah agreed, unable to hide her excitement at the very thought.
"I'll see what I can do," he promised again. "Meanwhile, I guess I'd better go make myself presentable for my meeting."
Chapter 12b
He left the two kids in the pool and went back upstairs to his bedroom, where he brushed his teeth and combed his hair a little bit. By the time he made it back down to the lower level of the house, Jill, his accountant, and Pauline were waiting for him in what passed as his office. Jill had flown down from Heritage last night and she and Pauline had spent the day going over his financial picture, auditing each other, and putting things into easily digestible reports for his perusal. It would be the first such report for him this year, as he'd had to skip the usual mid-January meeting because of the tour.
Jill was dressed, as always when engaged in business, in a dark colored business dress. Her thick glasses were perched authoritatively on her face and her hair was in a tight bun. Pauline was dressed professionally as well, but her attire was much more flattering and fashionable, accenting her feminine charms instead of concealing them.
Jake greeted the two women and offered them drinks. They both declined. They sat down at his desk and both of them opened briefcases and began to pull documents from them. Jake stifled a yawn and spent a few moments telling them about his visit to Matt at the GGCI. He kept the details as PG-13 as he could in deference to Jill's prudish sensibilities.
"You're not making this up?" Pauline asked when he was done with the narrative.
"Not a single word," Jake assured her.
She shook her head in disbelief and consternation. "He's not going to learn a thing from this whole debacle," she said. "He's not being punished at all. He's staying in a luxury hotel with maid service."
Jake simply shrugged. "What can you do?" he asked. "Matt is Matt. He goes through his life just lucking into everything and never managing to get hurt from his mistakes."
"I find this whole thing appalling," Jill said. "A jail where they let you have beer? Where you can have... you know... in your room whenever you want to? Where you have room service? And he gets to do his time there just because he has money? He could've killed someone when he ran from those police and this is how they punish him?"
"I know," Jake said. "Life in America, right? Why don't we change the subject now? You two have been shut up in Pauline's office all the livelong day. What did you find out about me? Am I still rich?"
"Despite all of your attempts to whittle your money away on trivial pursuits," Jill said, "yes, you're still rich." She shook her head at him. "I can't believe you spent sixty-four thousand dollars for a car, Jake. A car! You can buy a house on ten acres of property in some parts of California for sixty-four thousand dollars."
"Ten acres of property doesn't go from zero to sixty in 3.8 seconds," Jake said, as if that explained everything.
"A car is a means of getting from one place to another," Jill told him. "I own a Honda Accord — a reliable, safe, fuel efficient vehicle that does the primary job of a car quite well. I bought it used when it was a year old so that the original owner was the one to eat the biggest chunk of depreciation. For this car, I paid eleven thousand dollars."
"Yes," Jake said, "but you're an accountant — a member of the most boring group of people on Earth. You're expected to be cheap and worry about things like who eats the first year's depreciation and how many miles per gallon you get. I'm a rich rock star who has an image to maintain. If people found out I was driving a Honda Accord — hell, if they found out I'd even been within ten feet of a Honda Accord — I would never sell another album as long as I lived."
Strangely, this seemed to make sense to Jill. "Oh," she said. "So you're saying that the money you spend on your automobile has a direct effect on the number of albums your band sells?"
"Uh... yeah," Jake said. "In a way, yes."
She nodded. "I wonder if I could find a way to make that car a write-off then."
"You do what you do," he told her. "That's why I pay you as much as I do. Just remember, if I get audited, your name is on the line too."
"Well, of course," she said. "In any case, despite your lavish spending habits while you were abroad on that last tour..."
"Hey now," Jake said. "I never once dressed as a broad on that last tour."
Pauline chuckled but Jill didn't get the joke. "Excuse me?" she said.
"Never mind, my twin," Jake told her. "Please continue."
"Right," she said, still puzzling over it. "So, despite your spending of eighty-three thousand, six hundred and twelve dollars and seventeen cents of your own money while abroad, the tour ultimately did just as expected to your primary revenue stream."
"So album sales went up?" Jake asked.
"Correct," Jill said. "Pauline has the exact figure with her."
Pauline referenced one of the papers before her. "International sales of every Intemperance album went through the roof in every country that you visited. If you look at this graph here..."
"I don't really want to look at the graph," Jake said with a shake of his head. "Just give me the condensed version."
"Right," Pauline said. "In New Zealand and Australia, it started about three weeks before your arrival with increased sales of It's In The Book and In Action. These sales slowly went up as the time for the dates appeared and then shot up suddenly after your appearances there. Following this, there was a second wave that consisted of massive sales of every other Intemperance album in reverse chronological order."
"So," Jake said, "they started to buy the live album and our studio piece when the concerts were announced, bought them like mad after our shows, and then started buying up the older stuff one by one."
"Exactly," Pauline said. "It's the same pattern in every country you visited, although it was most dramatic in Japan and Taiwan. In all, during the course of your tour and continuing through the first of this month, Intemperance has sold a combined total of seven million studio albums and two million copies of In Action internationally. And this trend, though dying down a bit, is still going on today."
"So we're raking in a buttload on foreign sales," Jake summarized.
"Exactly how I would have put it," Jill said.