by CD Reiss
“Tell him we’re looking for something we can act on.”
Thoze stood. His assistant stood. Peter and Ellen stood. I took the cue and gathered papers. I looked up at Drew to see if he was going to react at all, and he was reacting.
He was looking at me as if I had an answer. I couldn’t move. Ellen tried to linger in the conference room, but in our shared stare and shared history there sat a thousand years, and Ellen didn’t have that kind of time.
She cleared her throat. “Margie, can you grab me a coffee from the lounge on the third floor?”
“There’s coffee right there,” I answered from a few hundred miles away.
“It’s better on three.”
“I’m going for breakfast,” Drew said, not moving. “I’ll grab some coffee. Donuts too.”
“Send the clerk. That’s what they’re for.”
Was Ellen still talking?
“She can come.”
Ellen paused then slinked out.
As soon as the glass door clicked, Drew spoke. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I had no idea you had a brain in your head.”
It really was amazing how his lips were so even, top and bottom. How had I not seen that? Or the way his eyes were darker at the edges than the center?
“Things changed a lot since then.”
I was feeling things, and now with his voice sounding like a cracked sidewalk, I knew he was too. That wouldn’t do. It made me uncomfortable, as if my skin was the wrong size.
“I’m sorry. About Strat. I know you guys were close.”
I’d broken the spell.
Drew pulled his gaze away and put his briefcase on the table, snapping it open when he answered. “Thank you.”
“Was it bad?” I had no business asking that, but I had to because I should have been there. I should have done the impossible, leapt time and space, presumed a friendship I might have made up, and been there for them.
“It was bad.”
He plopped his briefs in the case. I was supposed to get up and straighten the room out, but I couldn’t stop watching him, remembering what he’d been to me for a short time and how those few weeks had changed me.
“What studio did Bangers record in?” I asked.
“Audio City.” He slid his case off the table and went for the door.
Just as he touched the handle, I spoke. “Have you done a Request for Production?”
He didn’t open the door but turned slightly in my direction, curious and cautious. “I don’t see what that would prove.”
I stood. “I’m only a clerk.”
“I’m sure that’s temporary.”
I pushed the chairs in, straightening up as I was meant to. I didn’t want him to feel pressured to take advice from someone who hadn’t even passed her bar yet. Someone who had been no better than a smart-mouthed groupie all those years ago. But I wanted to be heard.
“You want to scare the hell out of them, you call in some favors at Audio City,” I said. “Take Teddy out for some drinks. Be seen. And you file a Request for Production to aid discovery. Teddy hands over the masters.”
“They’ll be mixed down. They’re useless.”
“There’s more to a tape than the music. There’s pops and scratches. Match them to Wright’s master. It’s like a fingerprint.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s true if you believe it is. You’re not trying to prove anything. You’re trying to get Moxie Zee to crack.”
He took his hand off the door handle. I noticed then looked away.
“What you want,” I continued, trying to sound casual, “is for your client to be paid for his work, right? I mean, cellists make a living but not that much.”
“Not Drazen money.”
I ignored the jab. One, he smiled through it. Two, though I tried to be as anonymous as possible in the office, it was nice to be known.
“No.” I pushed the chair he’d sat in under the table. “Not Drazen money. If Moxie Zee is caught lying, most of his artists won’t care. Some will think it’s cool. But he works for Overland Studios as a music supervisor under his real name. Overland’s risk averse. They’re not keeping a guy who might have already exposed them to a lawsuit.”
“And you think Moxie will pay off Martin under the table over a fingerprinting technique that doesn’t exist?”
“People are pretty predictable.”
He nodded, bit the left side of his lower lip, tapped the door handle three times, then looked me up and down as if he wanted to eat me with a dick-shaped spoon.
“You’re still crazy,” he said softly, as if those three words were meant to seduce me.
They did. He was half a room away, and every surface between my legs was on fire. I would have swallowed, but I didn’t even have the spit to do it.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Eighteen.”
He walked out, letting the door slowly swing shut behind him, and I watched him stride down the hall in his perfect suit.
Men loved tits, legs, ass, pussy. Men loved long hair and necks. They loved clear skin and full lips. But some men, the right men—men like Drew and Strat—loved cutting themselves on sharp women, and I hadn’t been loved for the right reasons in a long, long time.
Chapter 6.
1982 – Before the night of the Quaalude
Bullets and Blood was on the verge. Kentucky Killer had caught fire and made the small label enough money to keep the lights on. But then the Big Boys went after Bullets and Blood, sending hip-looking A and R guys around with pockets full of promises. They introduced them to music legends like Hawk Bromberg, with his little flavor-saver and sideburns, who talked up his label and everything they’d done for him.
This was background noise in the weeks following, but the morning after I cleaned them both out at poker, I knew nothing. I’d kept my bra on, put my shirt back on, and stretched on the couch for a few hours. Woke up with a headache and a throat that felt like a bag of dry beans.
I had to get to school.
Lynn was gone. So was Yoni. The hotel room looked over the beach and, in the yellow of the rising sun, seemed expensive and luxurious in a different way than the night before.
“Morning,” Strat said from the balcony. He leaned on the doorway in a shirt and stonewashed jeans.
Behind him, Hawk smoked a stubby brown cigarette as thick as a middle finger, looking at me as if he was eight and I was a piece of birthday cake. He was a legend, but I wasn’t flattered. I was disgusted.
“Where’s Indy?” I asked.
“Out for a swim.”
Had Strat even slept? He still looked perfect, but maybe my standards were skewed. He looked as though he partied all the time, and that was what I found attractive about him.
“I gotta go.”
“You should come around later.”
Hawk nodded, picking the slick brown butt out of his teeth. He sang about heaven and earth with a voice like a fist, but I wasn’t loving his real presence.
“Sure.” I didn’t have time to chitchat. My father was coming back from a business thing in Omaha, and I had to be home.
“Do you have my beeper number?”
“No.”
I didn’t have time to scrabble around for a pencil and a piece of cleanish paper so I could set off the little black box on Strat’s belt. He wouldn’t even answer it. He was a rock star.
“Eyebrow,” he said. “Six-oh-six E-Y-E-B-R-O-W.”
“Six-oh-six? Kentucky? I thought you guys were from Nashville.”
“The beeper’s from Kentucky.”
I didn’t move. Just waited for the long version.
“My dad moved to Kentucky. He’s a doctor. He upgrades every six months.”
Mister Big Rock Star was either too frugal or too busy to get his own damned beeper. Or too much of a kid. Or too attached to his parents.
No matter what angle I looked at that from, no matter how the light hit it,
I found it charming.
I had no intention of using that number for anything, though I’d never forget it. My driver was off. So I got a car at the hotel’s front desk and sat back for the short ride from Santa Monica to Malibu. It was six thirty in the morning. I had ten minutes to get back.
Nadia, Theresa’s nanny, would be up because she didn’t sleep. Hector, the groundskeeper, was probably already working. Maria, Graciella, and Gloria. Definitely rousing Carrie, Sheila, and Fiona for school. Dressing them. Making sure homework was done. Deirdre, Leanne, and Theresa would be causing havoc. If I got right in the shower, there was a pretty good chance no one would notice I had even been out.
Except Mom. She was a wild card. She usually slept until eight, but if she drank the night before, she actually woke up earlier. And if she caught me out, she was unpredictable. She’d been pregnant six times since I was born, so she always seemed to be in a constant state of flux. Big. Little. Tired. Energized. Horizontal. Running. One person. Two. She was as likely to lock me out and act as if everything was normal as tell my father, which would be bad. Very bad. All bad. He did not like losing control. He seemed to have two emotions: cold calculation and satisfaction.
I loved him. I loved both of them. But I never knew what to make of them. In the end, I realized they didn’t go on and on about how they felt but concerned themselves with actions. I respected that. It was what I thought it meant to be an adult.
I knew I’d pushed it. Playing strip poker with two guys in a semi-famous rock band in a semi-luxurious hotel room? And telling them my name?
My God. I didn’t know what my parents would do to me, but everything about it was trouble. Dad cared about what people thought. He cared about appearances and chastity. Even if he wasn’t in town, he had the nannies dress us all up and take us to church on Sunday. He made sure we had ashes on our forehead and palm crosses in our hands. He never mentioned God at all, but the Catholic Church always loomed as the ultimate authority.
I’d asked him why, and he said something odd.
He said, “Invisible gods are ineffective.”
I had to hope that Strat and Drew had no reason to find out who the Drazens were. How old their money was. They wouldn’t. I wasn’t anyone to them. I made myself invisible in my mind when the cab got to my house. I gave the cabbie one of Drew’s hundreds, ran into the side door, and made it into the bathroom without being seen.
I washed the night away with scalding water.
Six-oh-six eyebrow.
Go over pre-calc in the car.
History
Comp
Stupid’s not a verb, asshole.
Forty minutes to memorize a hundred Latin conjugations
Tennis
Photography
Eat something
What’s your name?
Catholic Women’s Club
Chess Strategy Club
Then?
Then?
Then…
Chapter 7.
1994
“I know everything comes pretty easily to me compared,” I whispered to Drew/Indiana in the hall before swiveling into my cubicle. I had to pick up my things before doing Ellen’s donut run. “But I put some work into being here. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention we knew each other eleven plus years ago.”
“Am I so embarrassing?” He smirked as if he had me over a barrel.
Typical man, thinking it was all about hard work now/today/this week. If word of our history got out, I’d be a slut and he’d be a hero. I’d be fending off advances in the copy room, getting censured for shit I did a decade ago, wondering why I never got the good cases, and he’d fly back to New York and get promoted.
“It’s not shame and never was.”
“That’s my Cinnamon.”
“It’s Margie now.” I spun to face him, my back to my desk and spoke quietly. Terry, the other clerk, was a foot away through the grey half-wall. “Full-time. This is my life. Like I said. I have plenty of privilege but no dick.”
“It’s 1994.”
He said it as if we had entered the modern era and his dick didn’t make a damned bit of difference in the workplace. Only a man could think something so utterly incorrect.
He must have seen me boil, because he put a hand up before I could explode. “I’m just giving you a hard time. I never intended to say a word about anything, but I’m in town for the week.”
I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and got my purse out. “Fine.” I slapped the drawer shut.
“Fine?”
“I have no feelings about it one way or the other.”
“Good to see you haven’t changed.” He winked and slipped out.
Chapter 8.
1982 – Before the night of the Quaalude
I didn’t have to remember E-Y-E-B-R-O-W or six-oh-six, which I happened to know was a Kentucky number from a friend at Carlton Prep. I got a beep in the middle of chess strategy with a Nashville call back number. An hour later, I was in the passenger seat of a Monte Carlo driving into Pacific Palisades. Strat was behind the wheel, and Indiana was in the back with Lynn and Yoni.
I had no idea why I was there. I wasn’t the prettiest girl who hung around them. I hadn’t screwed either one of them, though apparently Yoni and Lynn had had a fine time with Strat before the poker game had gotten under way. I didn’t understand why I was there because I didn’t understand men.
Yet.
It came to me many years later, while reading Rolling Stone. During the interview, Indy was sitting in front of a mixing board they’d installed in the Palihood House (He was “producing” because that was always the story arc. Small-town beginnings>cohesion of the group>artistic satisfaction>commercial success>drug use>break up>The Bottom>redemption>rebuilding/branding). His hair was scraggly but intentionally so. His shirt was clean. He’d lost the puff around the eyes, and he was talking about Strat.
“He was like a brother to me, but more. A partner. And when he died, man, it was like someone ripped me open.”
In the passenger seat of the Monte Carlo, with the two of them still poker-playing strangers, I didn’t know they were like brothers. Years later, reading the Rolling Stone article, that Monte Carlo ride came back to me.
I’d been so clueless about how close they were and how lonely they were.
I always assumed I was brought into this world fully formed. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I didn’t understand people the way I thought I did. I chewed on that then forgot it, because it only turned up the heat on a cauldron of stew that had everything and nothing to do with the Bullets and Blood boys.
Indy leaned forward and pointed at a locked gate closing off a road into the foothills of the Palisades. “Up here. Code’s fifty-one-fifty.” He turned to me, and I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Wait until you see this place.”
“It’s nice up here,” Lynn said before cracking her gum. She was in a black lace corset and tiered skirt. Red, red lips and black, black eyeliner.
“This is the ass-end though,” Yoni chimed in. “It’s the Palihood.”
“Yeah, anything east of the park.”
“South.”
“East.”
I rolled my eyes.
Strat ignored them. “He can’t afford it.”
“We just got a quarter-million dollar contract.” Indy leaned back and kicked Strat’s seat.
Strat shook his head. “Have you read it?”
“You don’t read Greek either.”
Driving up the hill under the clear spring sky, the fact that he’d read the contract and understood it made me look at Strat’s arms, his music tattoos, the muscles of his legs, and respect him with a sexual heat.
We pulled up to a house made of glass and overhung with trees and surrounded by tall bushes. When we got out of the car, the shade was a welcome respite from the blasting sun, and the birds cut through the white noise of the freeway.
“It’s nice,” I said.
“And I can afford it.
” Indy pointed at Strat as he headed for the front door.
“Fuck you can,” Strat muttered.
Yoni and Lynn had no interest. They’d started bantering about the coyotes in the hills, bouncing with excitement, as we went up the cracked steps onto the pocked flagstones.
“Ye of little faith.” Indy opened the door. “I have the down payment next week. Made escrow already.”
The black linoleum floors shined, and the sightline went through the house, over the west side, and to the ocean. Yoni and Lynn were already checking out the bean-shaped pool in the back.
You’d think a musician on the cusp of fame wouldn’t want to be tied down to a house. He’d want to ride the tour bus and fuck a few hundred girls. That was the norm. But Indy stood in the empty space between the front door and the horizon and lit two cigarettes before handing me one.
“I can move in next week.”
“Dude,” Strat said.
“Dude,” Indy snapped.
Strat turned to me, hands out, pleading. On the whole ride up, I’d wondered why they brought me, and I feared at that moment that they’d gone to the library or talked to their lawyers and found out who I was. Now they were going to ask me for money, and I couldn’t give it to them. There was no other reason to put me in that car.
I liked them, but that house had to cost two hundred grand.
Would they threaten to tell Daddy things? The poker? The bra? The smoking? Would they tell him I drank and I kissed? Or that I was a cocktease?
When I brought the cigarette to my lips, my hand was shaking. I didn’t know which scenario terrified me most. I inhaled the nicotine and blew out rings as if I had control of this. Whatever this was. It was my first cigarette of the day, and it made my palms tingle.
“Why the fuck am I here?” I asked.
Strat stepped forward, finger pointing at me then Indy. “Keep me from killing him.”
“Fuck you,” Indy retorted.
I didn’t have anything much more intelligent to offer. “It’s a nice house. Needs work. Get an accountant to tell him if he can afford it.”
“Let me give you the short version.” Strat’s comment was directed at me but meant for Indy. “Two fifty minus fifteen percent to WDE. Two twelve and a half. Eighty-three grand. Minus three points to our producer. Two-oh-five. And by the way, we, you and me and Gary—the band—we have to recoup their points.”
