"Naw," Matt said, answering for all of them. "How about you go hang out with the pilots for a little bit? Maybe one of them needs a rimjob or something."
"They don't like it when I'm up there with them," Roberto said.
"Well, not that I'm trying to be rude or nothin'," Matt said, "but we've got some serious shit to talk here. I know it's a small fuckin' plane, but you need to get lost."
"Of course," Roberto said, still showing no offense. "Just ring the service button if you require anything." He headed off to the front and disappeared into the service compartment.
"You really should make an effort to be nicer to people, Matt," Pauline chided.
"Why?" he asked.
"Hmm," she said, "how to put this? He's someone who is serving food and drinks to you. If you piss him off enough he might be inclined to put some of his special sauce in your caviar."
Matt actually paled a little. "That's not even fuckin' funny," he said.
"That's why I don't eat the food when Matt's around," Jake said. "Shall we get on with this?"
"Yeah, I guess we'd better," Matt said.
"What are we getting on with?" Darren asked a little nervously, noticing that everyone except Coop seemed to be looking in his direction.
"We need to talk to you about something, Darren," Matt said.
"About what?" he asked.
"About your fuckin' attitude ever since we signed this last contract and made you give up the heroin."
Darren chewed his lip a little. "Hey, man," he said. "I told you that I'm over that shit. It ain't no thing."
"I don't think you are over it," Matt said. "You've treated all of us like shit ever since you came out of the Betty Ford clinic. You don't contribute much when we're composing music, you're always making a bunch of snide little remarks about how much money we're making and how much you're making, and, most of all, you performed like shit on the last tour. You just stood there at your microphone every night, lipping your lines in a monotone voice, plucking at your bass strings, and generally doing nothing to help make our shows what they should be. You're losing your edge, man, and we can't put up with it anymore."
Darren looked at their faces, seeing that even Coop, his best friend, was nodding at Matt's assessment. "So what are you saying?" he asked.
"We're saying," Matt said, "that if you don't get your shit together and get it together quick, we're going to have to send you packing."
"You mean kick me out of the band?" Darren asked, his face still expressionless.
"Yeah," Matt said. "That's what I mean."
Jake expected an outraged denial. He expected yelling, screaming, arguments, defiance. What he didn't expect was what they got.
"I'm sorry," Darren said.
Matt, Jake, Bill, and Pauline all looked at each other. They looked back at Darren.
"Excuse me?" Jake said.
"I said, I'm sorry," Darren said, his eyes cast a little downward but his voice clear and strong. "You're right, I have been treating you shitty and I haven't been playing like I should." He looked up. "I guess maybe I missed the... you know... the pain medicine a little more than I thought. Sometimes it's hard being just the bass player and the pain in my ear... well... that shit's hurting all the fuckin' time. None of that is a reason to act like I've been acting."
"I... uh... see," Matt said. "So... uh... what are we going to do about this?"
"I've been mellowing out since we came off tour," Darren said. "I've had a lot of time to think and a lot of time to learn to like the shit I got, you know? I was depressed all the time but now I think I'm learning to get my shit together. I'm gonna do better. I promise."
"You do?" Matt asked.
"Yeah," he said, dragging on his latest cigarette. "I do. I'm gonna play just like I used to on this Saturday Night Live thing. I'm gonna be there in Cincinnati rootin' for fuckin' Jake from the stands. And when we start jamming again I'm gonna be just like I used to. If I'm not, then you can kick my ass out of here and I won't cry about it."
Another look was shared among the three core members of the band and their manager. A mental shrug was passed around.
"Well then," Matt said, "I guess that about covers that fuckin' waterfront, don't it?"
"Yep," Jake said, hoping that Darren was sincere.
"How about we burn this joint then?" Matt asked. "Sound like a plan?"
It sounded like a plan. Matt lit it with Jake's lighter and they passed it around, all six of them getting three hits apiece from it before Matt popped the roach in his mouth and swallowed it. The rest of the flight passed in pleasant camaraderie and peace. They all had a few more drinks and then, one by one, reclined their seats and drifted off for a nap.
Thanks to a tailwind they landed a few minutes early, touching down at 5:58 PM. A limo, sent by NBC, took them to the Plaza Hotel where they enjoyed a five-course dinner in the restaurant overlooking Central Park. After dinner, Jake, Matt, and Coop decided to go cruise the lobby shops for women — all of them found one, of course. Nerdly took a limo to Times Square where, after donning a cap and a pair of contact lenses instead of his glasses, he was able to pass himself off as an anonymous tourist. Pauline — who really was an anonymous tourist — dressed herself in a slinky outfit and hit some of the classier nightclubs in Manhattan where she received many offers to help clean the cobwebs out of her womanly parts. She turned all of them down and returned to her suite at the Plaza just after midnight.
Darren was the only one who went nowhere. Immediately after dinner he went up to his suite and dug through his luggage until he came up with a small water bong and a baggie of black tar heroin he'd purchased from his new friend Johnny at the Flamingo Club. He had been smoking the heroin every night at bedtime since being introduced to it by Allison. He found it kept the depression at bay, that it allowed him to continue about his life without constantly thinking about the real heroin he used to inject into his veins.
He smoked four hits and lay back on the bed, feeling the exquisite sensation of opiate intoxication surging through it. So far, he was only doing this at night.
"I can control myself," he said, smiling as he stared up at the ceiling. "I can fucking control myself."
He drifted off to sleep an hour later and woke up the next morning feeling refreshed and alive. That night, when they played before a nationwide audience on Saturday Night Live his performance was first rate — the best the rest of the band had seen from him since the beginning of the The Thrill Of Doing Business tour.
Talk of kicking him out of the band was forgotten — at least for now.
The preliminary hearing in Cincinnati turned out to be quite anti-climatic. Media from all over the country were there at the courthouse and filmed Jake — dressed in his best three-piece suit, his shoulder-length hair styled neatly by the band's hairdresser, Doreen Riolo — as he stepped out of the limousine and was escorted inside. For all the fanfare and anticipation, Jake only said two words.
"On the counts of public obscenity," asked the Judge — a middle-aged, tight-assed, conservative looking barrister who, it seemed, would have been at home wearing a wig in a seventeenth century courthouse in Salem, Massachusetts — "how do you plead?"
"Not guilty," Jake replied.
He then sat down at the defendant's table next to the team of lawyers from National Records' law firm — Eric Frowley, the man who had tried his damndest to derail the contract renegotiation before it could get rolling, chief among them.
The hearing took a total of thirty minutes. The prosecutor cited the anti-obscenity law Jake was being charged under. "It is quite clear," the prosecutor argued, "that the defendant blatantly, and pre-meditatively violated the Cincinnati community standards of decency by singing the lyrics to the songs Service Me, Descent Into Nothing, and Found Myself Again, which are about whoremongering, Satanism, and masturbation respectively." He then went on to recite the exact lyrics that were considered obscene.