Lines On The Map faded to black and the station cut to commercial. Jake tried to clear his mind as advertisements for South Christchurch Nissan, Steinlager Beer, and the upcoming episode of Cheers on Channel Eight played in the background. He was mostly successful in this endeavor as he focused on a good way to "think about what we talked about" when his work was done.
When he finished up, he turned off the radio in the middle of Phil Collins' Another Day In Paradise — a crappy tribute to the homeless that had taken a Grammy at the last awards ceremony, undoubtedly because the plight of the "homeless" was the hot ticket item of the last few years.
"Phil, you're such a fuckin' sell-out," Jake muttered as he walked to his bedroom. "And to think, I used to actually respect you as a lyricist."
Another Day In Paradise was a perfect example of the kind of campy, hypocritical bullshit songs that Jake was trying to avoid being forced to produce. How people bought into that feel-good shit! A millionaire musician who travels on the Concorde and owns several mansions in various parts of the world pens a tune about how middle class music consumers who live paycheck to paycheck should feel guilty because they turn the other way when confronted with some alcoholic loser and they hand him a goddamn Grammy.
"Not me," Jake muttered as he stripped off his clothes and put them in the hamper. "I should write a song called Get A Fucking Job, Loser."
Jake pulled a royal red robe out of his closet and put it on. He then opened the safe on the top shelf of the closet and pulled out a small bag of marijuana and a pack of rolling papers. He walked over to his telephone desk and went about the task of rolling a small joint from his stash.
He was out of practice and it took him a few tries. Though his alcohol consumption had gone up since arriving in New Zealand, his marijuana consumption had gone down almost to nothing. The baggie he held was more than two months old. It was Indonesian Red, which was readily available down on the docks in Lyttelton and was about the best marijuana available in New Zealand (the domestic stuff, though more plentiful, cheaper, and easier to find, was also not as good). He had bought it from a friend of Elizabeth's, mostly because he was accustomed to having pot in the house. So far, however, he had only smoked any of it twice. Tonight, however, seemed like a good night to imbibe. After all, he'd been instructed to think about something. And the best way he'd found to think about something very deeply was to get stoned first and let the mind focus all of its energies on the subject at hand.
He went out onto his deck, taking his joint, a pack of smokes, his wineglass, and his freshly opened bottle of red wine. He arranged these items on a table next to the hot tub and removed the cover from the spa. A cloud of chlorine-scented steam billowed up and was blown off into the night by the onshore breeze. He dropped his robe onto a chair and climbed gingerly into the one hundred and one degree water. He turned on the jets and arranged himself so three of them could blast into his knotted and tense shoulders.
He lit up the joint and took four decent hits, one after the other, staring out at the lights of Lyttelton as he held in the fragrant smoke.
"Nice," he said, nodding his head appreciably as he felt the drug worm its way into his brain. One of the advantages of infrequent stoning was that when you did finally smoke some, the high was crisp and fresh, unfettered by the effects of tolerance. Jake felt almost like it was the first time.
He had a few sips of his wine and lit a cigarette. He let his mind wander freely, moving from subject to subject, knowing that it would eventually find its way to what he needed to think about. He listened to the drone of the Jacuzzi jets and looked at the stars. The Southern Cross was plainly visible high in the southern sky and he stared at that for awhile, his brain pondering the concept that people down here in this half of the world used that constellation for navigation the same way people in the northern hemisphere used the Big Dipper and the North Star. This led to thoughts of sailing ships and what it must have been like to sail these seas back in the days when New Zealand was first discovered by Europeans, what it felt like to travel for weeks on end and to suddenly come across a country-sized landmass that had never been mapped before.
"Deep," Jake said, drinking more wine. "Really fuckin' deep, man."
It was also not even remotely related to the subject he had come out here to think about. Maybe, he thought, it was time to give his brain a little help.
His hot tub, like all of his furnishings, was custom built and top of the line. As such, it had a sound system installed in its control panel. The system could play CDs and cassettes as well as pick up FM radio broadcasts. Jake turned it on. It was tuned to the same American music station he'd been listening to earlier. The song currently being spun for his enjoyment was Black Velvet by Allanah Myles. Another Grammy award winner from last year.
"Yuck," Jake muttered. He did not put Black Velvet into quite the same category as Another Day In Paradise because it was at least an honestly written and produced piece. He just didn't like it very much because the lyrics were basically about worshiping Elvis Presley, a man who Jake considered the single most overrated performer in the history of music.
He kept the volume down as the song played itself out. The next song was something he enjoyed a little more. It was Janie's Got A Gun, by Aerosmith. A good, solid tune that just happened to be about a girl killing her father because he sexually abused her. Jake turned up the volume a bit and sang along with the tune in places, his mind turning over the idea of just how Aerosmith had managed to get such a heavy, disturbingly themed tune into commercial production. Jake had never met any of the members of Aerosmith in his travels but he suspected the fact that they were an established band working on a favorably negotiated contract was probably the answer. There was no way a first-contract band would've been able to get such a song on an album. Even so, Steven Tyler and Tom Hamilton had probably been pressured by their version of Crow and Doolittle to scrap the tune.
"You can't put a song about rape and incest onto your album, guys," they would've been advised.
"You'll alienate your audience," would've been another angle tried. "Why don't you write something about the homeless? That's the in-thing to do."
Obviously, Tyler and Hamilton, being the musicians they were, had stuck to their guns and proved the record company hackers wrong. Janie's had been one of the biggest hits of last year and it had taken the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group.
A set of commercials played next. Then the DJ talked a little. Jake didn't mind. The weeknight DJ was Laura Goodhope, who possessed a very sexy voice and a thicker than normal accent. As he always did when he heard her, Jake tossed around the idea of giving her a call some night and trying to hook up with her. There was a good chance that she'd be open for such thing — he was Jake Kingsley, after all and she often played Intemperance tunes, sometimes prefacing them with comments about how Jake was Christchurch's "local, luscious rocker in residence". What held him back was that he had no idea what Laura looked like. He was wise enough to know that you were playing with fire when you assumed a woman's physical attributes based solely on the sound of her voice.
"And now, for something a little different on this beautiful Monday night," Laura told her listening audience of perhaps ten thousand. "I hear the Aurora Australis has been spotted in the southern sky tonight and, in honor of that, here's a bit of a ditty by the notorious Bigg G that seems to fit the occasion. Enjoy."