"Do me from behind again," Rachel said breathlessly as he stripped her of her clothing. "I really liked it that way."
"I'm here to please," Jake said, pulling a condom from his supply and rolling it down his erection.
Later, Jake cooked dinner for her, using his new barbeque to broil up a couple of New York steaks. By the time the dinner mess was cleaned up all of the protestors and all of the reporters were gone. Peace had returned to the neighborhood it seemed.
Rachel stayed the night with him and they had another extended sex session before dropping off to sleep around eleven o'clock. The next morning Jake went outside in his robe to see if the newspaper service he'd arranged for had dropped off a copy of the LA Times. They had, but that was not the only object that had been dropped off.
A large wooden cross had been erected directly in the middle of his front lawn. It stood more than ten feet high, the crosspiece about seven feet from end to end. Written on the left arm of the cross piece, in red paint, was the word: JESUS. On the right side of the crosspiece was the word: SAVES! Written in vertical letters down the upright portion of the cross were the words: REPENT SINNER! JOHN 3:16.
Jake was beyond outraged. He called the police to report the vandalism to his house. It took almost two hours before two black and whites arrived in his driveway. Two patrol officers and their lieutenant — all of them well over the age of forty — stepped out and examined the cross blankly. They then came in and took a report from Jake, asking questions in monotone voices that did not succeed in belaying an almost childlike amusement at his predicament.
"So what is going to be done about this?" Jake asked.
The lieutenant shrugged disinterestedly. "Not much, I'd imagine. There's no actual damage to your house, you know. I don't see any need to even classify this as anything other than simple vandalism really, and even that might not fly if we did, somehow, manage to catch the people responsible."
"Simple vandalism?" Jake asked. "They put a cross on my front yard. When that happened to a black family over in Westwood a couple of months ago the FBI got involved in it."
"That's a little different, Mr. Kingsley," the lieutenant said. "That was a hate crime. The people who did that lit that cross on fire in order to intimidate a black family for moving into a white neighborhood."
"How is that different?" Jake asked. "Some bible thumping hypocrites put a cross in my yard to try to intimidate me for moving into a neighborhood where they don't think I belong."
"Well... you're white," he responded. "You're not even Jewish." He looked at him. "Are you?"
"No, I'm not Jewish," Jake said.
"And they didn't burn the cross, they simply placed it in your yard."
"They even used cement," one of the cops added, as if that made everything okay.
"So you're saying that if they would have lit the cross on fire, it would've been a crime, but since they only put biblical crap on it, it's okay?"
"No need to degrade the bible," the lieutenant said harshly. "As I said, they were probably just trying to suggest to you that maybe you should repent. From what I've heard you've got a lot to repent for."
"What I do or do not need to repent for is irrelevant to this discussion," Jake said. "They put a cross on my front yard!"
The lieutenant stood up. "We've taken a report on that," he said. "I don't see how there's anything else we can do for you, Mr. Kingsley. If I were you I'd look up that passage in the bible — assuming you even own a copy — and take to heart what it says. Jesus died for your sins and you're making a mockery of that sacrifice with that music you make. I can't say I blame those folks for trying to point out what you represent to them."
The cops left, driving off in their cars, leaving an incensed Jake in their wake.
"Are you okay, hon?" Rachel asked, her fingers caressing his shoulders.
"Yeah," he said. "I need to make a phone call."
He went to the phone and dialed Matt's number from memory.
"Wassup, homey?" Matt asked. "How was your first night in the new pad?"
"It was okay," he said. "Listen, I've been thinking."
"Yeah? About what?"
"What do you think about doing It's In The Book on the next album after all?"
Chapter 4a
National Records Building, Los Angeles
June 16, 1987
The argument had been going on for more than thirty minutes now with Matt holding firm to one extreme, Bill holding firm to the other extreme, and Jake trying to get the two of them to meet somewhere in the middle. They were in one of the mixing rooms of the recording studio in the basement of the building. It was far from the first argument that had taken place within those hallowed walls.
They had entered the recording studio on April 1 after finalizing the tracks they planned to record for It's In The Book, their fourth studio album. Once the band agreed to record Jake's controversial tune and name the album after it, National became very open to any and all other tracks. The only one of the thirteen songs Intemperance had submitted in their demo tape that caused any question was I Am Time.
"No lead guitar?" Crow and Bailey had asked doubtfully, both wondering if the song was another one of their joke songs like they'd submitted during the contract dispute. Those songs had been about picking boogers, choosing a brand of soup in the grocery store, and angry tirades full of gutter profanity. I Am Time was a song from a hard rock group with no lead guitar, only a lead harmonica.
"It's an experimental piece," Matt had explained to them. "We know it's a departure from our normal shit but we all like the tune a lot and we want it on the next album."
"But a harmonica?" Crow asked.
"It's a harmonica that rocks," Jake said. "We're not asking for you to release it as a single or anything. It's just a deep cut filler tune."
Crow and Bailey had balked at this for the better part of two days, urging the band to pick another tune as filler, but eventually they gave in. They wanted to get It's In The Book recorded as soon as possible and using their veto power on a filler tune just didn't seem worth the effort.
The band had worked six days a week, nine hours a day for two solid months and recorded all of the musical and vocal tracks for the new album in near record time. They were now veterans of the recording process and did not require nearly as many takes per track as they had in their earlier albums. Now that every guitar track, every bass track, every vocal, piano, and drum track had been captured to near perfection on individual reels, they needed to mix them together, blending all the tracks at proper levels onto a master recording tape. It was here where the differing philosophies of the three core Intemperance members began to cause tempers to flare and the process to bog down in arguments and disagreements.
I Am Time, the so-called "filler" tune, was the subject of the current mixing room argument. Jake, Nerdly, and Matt sat in chairs before a complex soundboard, headphones hanging around their necks. George Harmon and Roger Covent, the head studio technician and his first assistant, sat at another soundboard across the room, listening helplessly as the three musicians pounded another minor detail into the ground. George and Roger had both liked it a lot better when Intemperance had been operating under their first contract and had had no official input whatsoever in how their songs were mixed.
"I'm telling you," Matt said for the tenth or twelfth time, "Time sounds perfect the way it's mixed now. There ain't no fuckin' reason to put any overdubs at all on it, let alone a goddamn synthesizer track."
An overdub was an additional track to a song put on after the basic tune was recorded and mixed. Generally the overdubs were minor enhancements that would be barely noticed by anyone but a professional musician or a professional sound mixer but that served to make the music blend together more harmoniously on the recording. All of the previous Intemperance albums had overdubbed additional guitar, cymbal, and piano tracks on almost every song. Matt hated the very concept of the overdub because by using them it meant more instruments were being played than the band actually possessed. Nerdly loved overdubs and thought they weren't used nearly enough. Jake was somewhere in the middle. He didn't have a problem with the concept of overdubbing when it served to smooth out the rough edges on the recorded tunes but he didn't want them used to the extent that the basic sound of the song was changed in any way.