Ariel smiled.
“But I did date Todd Rundgren,” Chappie said. “I had a little thing going on with Joe Strummer. I used to give backrubs to Iggy Pop. And Robert Plant kissed my hand one night in Hollywood, standing right on the Sunset Strip, and something like that you never forget.”
“I guess not,” Ariel said.
“Wow, the music scene back then…it was in—” There was just the briefest of pauses and Ariel thought she was about to hear the f-bomb dropped, but Chappie caught herself. “—credible,” she finished. “So much going on, so many bands. It was just electric. And we were right in there. People wouldn’t believe how many songs were written about the sisters.”
Ariel nodded. Chappie wasn’t hesitant to admit her membership in the sisterhood of groupies. To hear her tell it, as she’d told it before, Chappie and the ‘sisters of comfort’ were all about maintaining the sanity of their rocker men and keeping them well-supplied so the great works could keep on coming. Flowing. Being created. Ariel finished her orange juice and again said thank you.
“I’ve got coffee. Do you want some?” Chappie motioned toward the pot. Her own cup, a piece of merchandise—maybe an original—that bore a picture of The Eagles, sat on the counter. “Oh…you’re a tea drinker, aren’t you?”
“Right.”
Chappie refilled her cup. “So you think Mr. Allen and those men out there can protect you?” She reached up to a cupboard, opened it and with a smooth, unhurried and completely unselfconscious motion she brought out a half-bottle of Jack Daniels. It was the most natural thing in the world to pour a small bite of Jack into your coffee before noon, which she did. “You trust the FBI?”
“I guess I do, so far.”
“So far, you’re not dead.” Chappie capped the Jack bottle and put it away. She sipped at her high-octane fuel. “Neither is my daughter. But you know that was a close call yesterday, don’t you? Nancy Grace said last night on TV that this guy at Stone Church was probably copycatting Jeremy Pett, and she thinks there’ll be others. Listen, if you were my blood, I’d get on a plane and come collect you. I’d say no tour or music or ticket sales are worth getting killed for. I’d say put it all away until that nut is in jail.”
“Have you said any of this to Berke?” Ariel asked, knowing what the answer would be.
Chappie took another drink before she replied. “This is the biggest cliché in the world, what I’m about to say. But Berke has always walked to her own beat. She’s her own different drummer. She might be scared, but she’s not going to show it and she won’t back down from anybody…not even that…” Again, the f-bomb was poised to drop. But no. “Nut,” Chappie finished.
“Berke is a strong person,” Ariel agreed. “I envy her strength. Her knowing how to get what she wants.”
“Yeah, it’d be a great world if everybody was like her.” Chappie attempted a smile that didn’t quite work due to the bitterness at its core. Then she walked a few steps away to check on the crockpot.
Ariel decided it was time to move on. “I think I’ll go outside for a while.” Last night she’d seen, in the front yard, the wooden park bench under the eucalyptus tree. “Thanks for the—”
“I’m surprised she even agreed to come here,” Chappie interrupted, and Ariel braced for an onslaught. “Even with Floyd gone. I’m surprised, that’s all.”
“Well…” Ariel felt as if she were walking on treacherous ground. “I guess she wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I had to almost beg her to come. To get what he left her. He said to me very plainly, early last year, that if anything happened to him he wanted her to have what he’d saved for her. It was very important to him.” She nodded. “Very important. And the letter too. I told him, nothing was going to happen, he was fine and he was going to have another checkup to make sure. Mandy came over twice a week to watch him take his medicine and check his blood pressure. But…he said he was tired sometimes. Just tired. Everybody gets tired.” She started to take another drink, but lowered the cup before it reached her mouth. “They did what they could for him. The emergency team. I watched them work, so I know they did what they could. But oh my God, how I miss him.” Her hand came up and the fingers pressed against her lips. Her eyes glistened. “And the thing was…he tried so hard…so hard…to be a father to Berke, but she wouldn’t let him in. She turned her back on everything he tried to do for her. Okay, so he wasn’t…like…the world’s greatest drummer, like Warren thought he was. Floyd didn’t know music, and he didn’t keep up with bands, and he liked most of all just reading, or sitting on the couch watching football or old movies, and he wasn’t flash…but he was substance. Do you understand what I mean?” She looked hopefully at Ariel, and Ariel said she absolutely understood.
When Chappie spoke again it was in a tone of reverence. “Floyd was no Todd Rundgren. He was no Joe Strummer or Iggy Pop. He was no Warren Bonnevey, either. He didn’t say he was going out for cigarettes and three days later he was calling you from Los Angeles asking you to send money because he was on the edge—right on the edge, he said—of getting a gig with the latest hitmaker, whoever was high on the chart that week. He didn’t knock holes in the walls because he didn’t get a callback. Jesus, if that house Berke grew up in could talk, it would fucking scream. Excuse my mouth, but it would. Floyd didn’t holler and yell and go on a rampage at three o’clock in the morning because he thought I was stealing his sticks and burying them in the back yard. And then he didn’t go sit in the bathtub and start shouting that if he had a gun he’d kill everybody in the house and then himself. Oh, those were some choice days and nights, Ariel. And the terrible thing was… Warren really was good. He had a great talent. He had the fire inside, you know? But it was a horrible thing, to watch someone you loved burn alive from the inside out.”
Ariel had no idea what to say, so she said what she felt: “I’m so sorry.”
Chappie blew air between her lips and waved Ariel’s comment away and took another drink of Jack and java. “Life,” she said. “It’s not bubblegum. See, the deal is… Berke asked me one time—oh, she asked many times, in that very nice way she has of asking—why I would give up on her father and marry—her description—a total loser. The Mayberry barber, she called him. The bookworm, that was another one. She said, Mom, he’s just so nothing. And I looked her right in the face, I stared her down, and I said I love Floyd Fisk because he loves me, and because he loved her, whether she wanted to accept that or not, and because they call it ‘flash’ for the reason that it goes up in smoke so fast, but you can hold onto ‘substance’, and it holds onto you. ‘Substance’ honors responsibility, and you can say…oh, man, that’s so old…but the truth is, I wanted to be happy and I wanted to be loved. I wanted things to be settled. If that’s old, you can wrap it up for me because I’ll take as much of that as I can carry.”
Chappie’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Oh,” she said softly, and brokenly.
Ariel saw a box of Kleenex on the counter. She pulled a couple of tissues out and gave them to Berke’s mother.
“Thanks,” Chappie said as she dabbed her eyes. “You’re sweet.”
Ariel stood with her a while longer until it was clear Chappie had unburdened herself as much as she was able, and now Chappie was focusing back on the soap opera again, and she had finished her Jacked-up coffee and put the cup aside. Ariel said she was going to go sit outside and think about some things. Chappie told her to enjoy the bench out there, it had been where Floyd liked to sit and read when he got home from the bookstore in the afternoons.