“Are you going to be able to do the gig?” Ariel asked.
“Yes, I am.” Nomad’s voice was huskier than usual. His good eye looked bloodshot. “Don’t worry about me.” He kept eating his stew, though his spoon seemed to have trouble finding his mouth.
Ariel nodded, but the fact remained that she did worry about him. She remembered apologizing for John’s behavior to the girl at the well, and telling her I just try to clean up the mess. It was her path, it seemed. She had tried to clean up the mess for many people, most of them guys she’d been involved with. Most all of them musicians, the messiest of the bunch. Like Neal Tapley, and before him Jess Vandergriff, who was one of the best acoustic guitarists on the East Coast but one of the worst in believing everything was either perfection or crap, nothing in between. And before him, others. After Neal had driven himself off a county road to his death, in the aftermath of one of the messiest drug scenes/breakups/breakdowns Ariel had ever tearfully and agonizingly witnessed, she had sworn off men of the music. There was not going to be any involvement with any guy in any band she was in ever again, no romance, not any little funky and innocent—mostly—fun fuelled by a few vodka shooters when she knew she ought to be drinking silver needle tea and getting the broom ready. Nothing.
And yet.
She had looked at the shape lying in the other bed last night, his shoulder and the wounded side of his face touched by the faintest iridescence of moonlight, and it had crossed her mind that if Terry was not lying on the floor in the sleeping bag she might have drawn aside her sheet, gotten up and gone to John, as silent as a spirit.
She might have slipped in beside him, and gently touched his forehead as if to draw from it the fever of his pain. She would bear that for him, if he would let her. She would ease the trouble in his bones and smooth the worry from his mind. She would take the fire of his anger in her hands, and make of it a candle.
He had so much potential. He was so very good, in so many ways, without knowing he was. She thought maybe that was a great part of why she admired him so much; he didn’t strut or brag, he just did. She wished she had a few embers of his flame, to heat up the sometimes too-cool hallways of her own house. She knew he could be abrasive, he could be childish, he could throw his tantrums and say things his mouth wished seconds later had never tumbled out. He could be terribly human, is what he could be. Human, cranked up to eleven. But she wished she had his ability to go full-throttle, to open up his engines and let the roar of life thunder out. If he made a mistake, the same kind of mistake that would have paralyzed her with the fear she might commit it again, he kicked it aside like an old sack full of ashes. He just kept going forward, even if he didn’t know exactly where he was going. To be honest, sometimes he played his guitar like that, too. But his passion and energy always made up for his lack of direction. At least, in her opinion.
She had asked herself if she was falling in love with him. Love. That was not a word used by members of a gigging band for each other, unless it was in the concept of I love my brother or I love my sister or I love my whole dysfunctional road-crazed family. She wasn’t sure, but she did feel for him—what would be the word used in those old Victorian novels by the Brontë sisters that she liked to read in school?—oh, yes…‘stirrings’.
But only stirrings, because she had tried—and failed, mostly—to clean up so many messes, and her own heartbreak was not a mess she was eager to tackle, her own weeping side of three o’clock had come and gone so many mornings when John had left a club with one or two girls laughing and rubbing themselves all over him, but that was the Nomad part of John, the persona, and she had tried very hard and so far successfully to sing and play ‘This Song Is A Snake’ with no hint of a hiss.
Anyway, there was not going to be any involvement with any guy in any band she was ever in again. No romance. No little funky fun.
But something Terry had said out under the eucalyptus tree had made her heart sink: I don’t know what you guys are planning to do, whether or not you’ll keep the name and soldier on with some new faces.
Three could not be Five. Changes were coming. If two new players came in, the chemistry would be altered. If it didn’t work, John might even decide to join another band. After all, this was a business. Wasn’t it? Berke might split and go her own way. A business, that’s what it was. Not really a family, after all.
She thought she should be considering what to keep and what to leave behind, because this life was never easy.
After his statement to Ariel, Nomad put down his spoon and very gingerly touched the piece of puff pastry that seemed stuck to his face with searing hot Super-Glue. “Maybe you should stretch your acoustic set out tonight. Do two or three extra songs. Since this is such an acoustic crowd.”
The Casbah, on the corner of Laurel Street and Kettner Boulevard in Little Italy, was one of their favorite venues. The music room was small and the club sat under the noisy flight path of aircraft in and out of San Diego International, but it was a fun and friendly place and in the three times they’d played there the reception had always been stellar. One thing Ariel particularly liked is that her acoustic set, usually a couple of quiet songs delivered soon after Berke’s drum solo, went over well at the Casbah. The audience really paid attention unlike at a lot of other clubs where the cry was for louder and louder. “Sure,” Ariel said, pleased at this suggestion. “I’d be glad to.”
A cellphone’s ring tone burbled a couple of bars of The Clash’s ‘London Calling’. Chappie checked the incoming number, which she didn’t recognize, and then she answered, “Hello?” She listened for a few seconds, as Terry walked over to stick his nose into the crockpot’s aroma. “Any of you guys know a DJ Talk It Up?” Chappie asked with the phone at her ear. “From Rock The Net? Pardon?” She was speaking to the caller. Then, to her houseguests again: “Rock Da Net.”
“Fuck, no,” said Nomad, his gentlemanly demeanor over and done.
“He wants to talk to you.” Chappie held the phone toward Ariel.
“Me? No, I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to anyone,” Chappie told DJ Talk It Up. “That’s right. Okay, I’ll let them know. Uh huh. Listen, how did you get this number?” Evidently that question was not to be answered, because Chappie put the cell down and said, “I guess they’ve found you. Mr. Allen told me they might. Anyway, DJ says to tell you he does a podcast from Los Angeles. He says to check out his website. Rock Da Net.” She couldn’t hold back a grin. “Have you ever heard anything so fucking lame?”
“Got that right,” Nomad said, aiming his spoon in what he hoped was the vicinity of his mouth.
“Says he’ll be at sound check today and would like to do an interview. Get ready for it. That place is going to be crawling with media. But that’s what you want, right?”
No one replied. Because Nomad was the emperor, sometimes his thoughts exactly mirrored those of his subjects, and that was now the case. He was thinking, as they all were, that success—if it meant acceptance, or fame, or money, or revenge on those who looked down on you as if you’d just crawled out of a gutter—was not worth the death and injury of two bandmates. All those things would be great, the dream of every working band, but this price tag was way too steep.
“What I want,” said Berke, and she let that hang for a few seconds before she finished it, “is to get this over with.” She turned her haggard face toward her mother. “The boxes.”