They broke apart and left the stage while the house lights came on behind them, letting the audience know that it was really over this time. The roadies handed out fresh Gatorade and then led the band through the tunnel to the dressing room where a local catering service had laid out food and drinks. Once out of the public eye, the band split apart into their separate units again. No one said "good show" or "we fuckin' rocked" or anything like that. Matt grabbed a plateful of food, a beer, and went over to a corner of the room that was well away from anyone else. Charlie didn't even do this. He simply headed for the showers — alone. Coop went to another corner of the room with a bong, a plate of greenbud, and a beer. Only Jake and Nerdly sat together at the actual table.
"I don't know if I can take this for five months," Jake said.
"I agree," Nerdly said. "The loss of cohesion coupled with the increase in lingering hostility has led to an impasse of fluidity in our interactions."
"Uh... right," Jake said slowly. "My thoughts exactly."
Jake stayed for a little while in the dressing room. He drank enough beers to give him a therapeutic alcohol level and even let a nineteen-year-old groupie with a pierced eyebrow give him a blowjob (mostly to shut her up). He did not have a terribly good time. Matt and Coop didn't drink with him or talk to him (or with each other, for that matter). They found groupies of their own, got their own blowjobs, and then left. Charlie wasn't there at all. And Nerdly had left with Sharon without either of them having so much as a drink first.
Jake left the auditorium in a limousine — not taking any groupies with him — and smoked listlessly as he drank a few glasses of red wine. Not even the novelty of going to his own home after a show instead of to a hotel room could detract from the sense of melancholy nostalgia he felt for tours past. In tours past, the band had been a tightly knit unit, a team of five against the world, united in all things. They had played together, partied hard together, fucked groupies together, and even sniffed cocaine of out ass-cracks together. There had been contests about 2x4s, 2x6s, even 4x2s. Was all of that gone for good? Was this entire tour going to be nothing but endless hours of misery and lack of communication followed by brief periods of artificial camaraderie up on the stage each night?
With a sigh and another sip of wine (more like a gulp, actually), Jake was forced to conclude that this might be exactly what they were in store for the next five months. It looked like — in the immortal words of Merle Haggard — the good times were really over for good.
It was just after midnight when Jake arrived home. He went upstairs and sat at one of the chairs in his upstairs bar for another hour, drinking two more bottles of wine and smoking eight cigarettes. Finally, drunk, staggering, his eyes red, his lungs sore, he put himself to bed and slept until eight the next morning.
He woke up hungover and with the knowledge that he had another show tonight.
The Los Angeles Times did indeed have an interesting little article on the Intemperance concert and Mindy Snow's presence thereat. It was not in the entertainment section either, but rather on page eight of the A section — the section where the front page was found and that was usually reserved for international, national, and state news.
Jake came across it about nine-thirty. He had washed down 1500 milligrams of Tylenol, a Vitamin C tablet, and a Vitamin B-12 tablet with two bottles of Gatorade and two bloody Marys and was now recovered enough to eat some of the breakfast Elsa had made for him and peruse the newspaper.
MINDY SNOW AND SCOTT ADAMS WINSLOW ATTEND OPENING NIGHT OF INTEMPERANCE TOUR read the headline. There were two pictures accompanying the story. One was a picture of Mindy and Winslow during the show, the former standing and holding a lit lighter over her head, the latter sitting like a statue, doing his little four-fingered clap. The other was a picture of Mindy blowing a kiss while holding a small, red, triangular object between the fingers of her other hand. The captions explained what each scene represented.
Jake read the article from top to bottom. It had little to say about the concert itself, but much to say about Mindy and Jake's former relationship and their current one.
Eyes were wide and tongues were wagging last night at Esparto Auditorium in Long Beach when Intemperance, the raunchy, Satanic, death-metal group headed by the infamous and notorious womanizer Jake Kinsley, played for a sold-out crowd of eighteen thousand.
The surprise came, not from the concert itself, which was the usual loud, noisy production full of thunderous guitar and indecipherable, vaguely disturbing lyrics (see Rick Gormington's review of the show in today's Entertainment section, page E-13) but by the unexpected and unannounced presence of famous celebrity couple Mindy Snow and Scott Adams Winslow in the VIP section just in front of the stage. Snow, as is well known, once had a tumultuous six-month love affair with Kingsley that ended abruptly amid allegations of emotional and physical abuse — something that Kingsley has been accused of in several of his intimate relationships, before and since.
Snow confirmed that the tickets she and Winslow had for the show and the VIP section passes came from Kingsley himself.
"I called him up and asked him if I could see the show," Snow said with a shrug when asked about this. "It's really no big deal. Despite what happened in the past between Jake and me, he's a great musician and Intemperance puts on an awesome concert. I wanted to see it and so did Scotty."
When asked when she and Kingsley began communicating with each other again, Snow said that they'd met each other by coincidence in Fiji back in August of last year and had lunch together, resolving many of their old animosities. "Jake's got his dark side, of course," Snow said, "but he's basically a nice guy and I chose to resume the friendship we once had." Snow also acknowledged that Kingsley attended a New Year's Eve party at the couple's Malibu mansion last December 31 — something that had long been rumored but never confirmed.
As for Scott Adams Winslow, he didn't seem as much the Intemperance fan as his wife, but he did acknowledge enjoying the show. "They put on a fine performance," he said after the show. "Of course, I'm not much into this sort of music, but there is a definite energy and power about the group that cannot be denied." When asked if he was worried about his wife resuming a friendly relationship with a man who had once been photographed naked with her on a boat, Winslow simply chuckled. "I hardly think I have anything to worry about with the likes of Jake Kingsley," he said. "I'm pretty sure Mindy has outgrown that little early-twenties phase of her life when she was attracted to the bad-boy image."
Mindy wholeheartedly agreed with this statement. "I like Jake," she said. "I always have and I always will, but Scotty's the love of my life and Jake was just a passing ship when I was younger."
Passing ship or not, Snow certainly seemed to get into the performance last night. She spent the entire show dancing, singing along with the lyrics, waving her hands in the air, and holding up a cigarette lighter as she cheered Kingsley and Intemperance on. There was a definite and unmistakable flow of electricity between Kingsley and Snow as he sang and played his guitar and she cheered for him. Their eyes remained locked on each other through most of the show and, at the end, Kingsley threw one of his guitar picks down to her and she returned the gesture by blowing him a kiss.