"How much is almost nothing?" Jake asked.
"Jake, that's not the goddamn point!" Pauline barked at him, clearly frustrated by his apathetic attitude.
"How much?" Jake repeated, ignoring her.
Jill sighed. "My guess is that you'll pull in around sixty to seventy grand per quarter for the next five or six years. That would probably go up for a few quarters if National were to utilize their right to release the music under their contract in a Greatest Hits release of some sort. That would sell well and you'd get royalties from that."
"And do they plan to do that?" Jake asked Pauline.
"Yes," Pauline said. "It's already in the works. My guess is they'll have it out by this time next year — probably a double album."
"So that'll keep me going for a while longer, won't it?"
"Absent the tour revenue and the endorsement contracts, yes," Jill agreed. "But you're still missing what I'm trying to say to you."
"Then spell it out for me," Jake said, lighting a cigarette. He blew the smoke into the air in deference to the ladies.
"You'll continue to draw income from your previous work for years," Jill said. "Every time they license one of your songs to some commercial or a movie, every time they find some way to rework some of your pieces into another album or compilation, you'll get royalties from it. And people will continue to buy your back albums for many years. All of that is true. But without new music revenue, you're going to find yourself with much less of an income. That figure I gave you of sixty to seventy grand a quarter is soon going to trickle down to fifteen or twenty a quarter."
"That's eighty grand a year, isn't it?" Jake asked. "Not a bad pension plan. Especially if it means I get to retire at thirty-one."
"Jake, is that what you want?" Pauline asked. "Are you saying you're done with the music business forever?"
Jake took a deep drag of his smoke. "I don't know," he said. "It's certainly possible, isn't it? I could liquidate all of my holdings in the states and use that to pay off the loan on this house and my Cessna. I could sit out here and live off the eighty grand a year for a long time. Eighty grand a year is like two hundred grand a year in New Zealand."
"Jesus Christ, Jake," Pauline said. "Could you possibly get any more self-deprecating?"
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"You want to sell everything you have, everything you've worked for, and give up on life so you can sit here on this cliff looking down on a fishing village? All because your little ego was bruised when the record companies didn't want to take a gamble on your new music?"
"I didn't say I was going to do it," Jake said. "I just said it's an option."
"Don't give me that crap, Jake," Pauline said angrily. "Look at you. Look at what you've done to yourself since you've been here. You've put on fifteen or twenty pounds. You've stopped exercising. You're smoking God knows how many cigarettes a day and I'd be willing to bet you're drinking yourself into oblivion every night."
"That's my right, isn't it?" he countered.
"Jake, you're committing suicide!" she said, tears springing to her eyes. "You're out here trying to painlessly kill yourself."
"I am not," he said.
"Really?" she asked. "How long do you think you'll last if you do just what you said? If you liquidate everything and stay out here in this big house with eighty grand a year of free and clear income, living the way you're living now, how long will you last?"
"Pauline, don't you think..."
"How long, Jake!" she demanded. "Be honest with yourself. You were always good at that before. Do it now! The way you're drinking and smoking and generally abusing yourself, how long will you last before you drop dead of a heart attack or a stroke or liver cirrhosis, or before you crash that fucking Harley? How fucking long, Jake?"
Chapter 21c
Jake let out a sigh. He took a moment to be honest with himself, as requested, and understood that there was a certain sort of validity to what Pauline was saying. He was living recklessly, without much regard for his life. He was drinking far too much, smoking far too much. He was driving a 1600cc Harley on a winding road while in a state of blackout and gross intoxication. Was Pauline right? Was he, on some subconscious level, actually trying to end it all?
"Look," he said. "I didn't say that was what I was going to do. I just said it was an option."
"It's a bad option," Pauline told him. "If you liquidate everything and stay here, you'll be dead — one way or another — before five years goes by. Don't even try to say you don't believe that."
Jake didn't try to say that. He suspected she was entirely correct.
"And National would like nothing better than for you to meet an untimely demise if you're not going to make another album for them. They'd absolutely love it. They would re-release all of your albums in some special memorial edition. They would dig up every scrap of video in their possession and put it on tape and sell it as a Jake Kingsley tribute. And they would put together every un-released song you have recorded and release them as singles one by one. And once they'd done all that, they'd combine all the singles into another album, put on some of your unreleased live tracks, and release those as well. You would provide them with six or seven years of seven figure income at the cost of pennies on the dollar in production expenses. It would be a goddamn goldmine for them."
This proclamation actually got to Jake. She was right. National's executive would like nothing better than a nasty, well-publicized Jake Kingsley death. They would cheer and high-five each other in the boardroom when they heard about it. And then Doolittle would appear at a press conference later that same day, fake tears in his eyes, while he choked out how devastated everyone was. And before his funeral was even in the planning stages there would be high-level meetings about the best way to profit on his death.
So vivid was this flash of insight that Jake actually shuddered, a slight sweat breaking out on his brow.
"Is that what you want, Jake?" Pauline asked softly. "Do you want to devastate Mom and Dad in their retirement? Do you want to die without ever having a wife or a family? An heir to possibly carry on your legacy? Do you want to let those greedy pricks at National clean up on you?"
"No," he said softly, his eyes cast downward. "That's not what I want."
"Well all right then," she said, nodding in satisfaction. "I'm glad to hear you say that. Now let's talk about what you're going to do about it."
"That's kind of where it falls apart," Jake said. "What is there to do? Nothing has changed, has it?"
"Crow and Doolittle have both asked me to tell you that their offer is still on the table."
"The offer I rejected," Jake said. "The one where they get to dictate what sort of music I put on the album and the manner in which it's promoted."
"It's not that bad of an offer, Jake," Pauline told him for perhaps the one hundredth time since the offer was first advanced to him. "You retain absolute creative control over half the tracks on the album. That means you can put in five of whatever songs you want."
"Yes," Jake said. "But it means they hold veto power over the other five songs and they reject and reject under threat of breach of contract until I give them exactly the sort of crap they're after."
"Crow says they won't use their veto power lightly," Pauline said. "They're open to your new material. They just want to make sure there are at least four commercially viable tunes on each album."