by Greg Taylor
No, the simple fact was that there was nothing Beatles-related left in my room. No Beatles posters or buttons or calendars or dolls or my set of miniature album covers—Something New and Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s among them—with the bubble gum inside that looked like little, round pink albums. Everything that had been there the night before …
Gone.
In place of my beloved Beatles stuff was Caverns stuff. My entire room had been turned into a shrine to the supposedly multimillion-selling Caverns.
Suddenly, I laughed out loud. I did. How could I react any other way? What I was seeing was so absurd, how could I take it seriously?
A commotion outside interrupted my hilarity. It sounded like a lot of people. Strangely, some were yelling, “Regina!” I walked warily across the room and peeked through a corner windowpane.
Whoa! There were a lot of people out there. A crowd had gathered around a car and van parked by my front curb. Some of the people I recognized. Neighbors. But everyone else was a stranger. Some had cameras around their necks. Some held video cameras and microphones. There was an official-looking woman dressed in a long black overcoat and carrying a clipboard, who paced by the car talking on a cell phone.
The video-camera people, dressed in hip, colorful clothes, stood in front of the van. When they suddenly moved toward my house, I was able to see that MTV was printed on the door of the van.
That did it. This was no laughing matter anymore. Whatever strange magic was going on had already gone on long enough. So that’s when I decided to freak out. I jumped back, pulled the curtain around me, and shouted, “DAD!” at the top of my lungs. Just like a frightened little girl, I needed my daddy.
5
It took Dad only a few seconds to respond to my cry for help. When he appeared at my door, I yelped, “What’s going on here?”
Dad didn’t answer. He looked too alarmed to respond to my question. For good reason, I suppose. I stood in the corner of my room with the curtain wrapped around me like a shroud. I must have looked like a total loon.
“Why does my room look like this?” I pleaded. “Why is MTV outside?”
Dad looked me up and down, then shook his head grimly. “I was afraid all of this would get to you, Regina. I told you to take it easier. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“C’mon, Dad, stop goofin’ around. I go to bed last night with all my Beatle stuff right where it should be. Then I wake up to … this?”
“Beatle stuff? What’s that?”
The front doorbell rang. Dad and I stared at each other in uneasy silence. Finally, Dad said, “I’m going to tell them to just film the concert. None of this following you around all day. They can do that with the rest of the band.”
Dad walked from the room. Then he ducked his head back in, just to be sure I hadn’t collapsed or something. When he was satisfied I was sort of OK, he went off to deal with the MTV people. Which gave me a little time to try to sort all of this out.
My first thought was that I’d had some kind of weird breakdown due to my band members’ rejection the day before. Or I’d slipped into an alternate universe during the night while I was tossing and turning. Or, the easiest to comprehend, I was still tossing and turning and was actually dreaming all this.
Good. Done. That was the obvious explanation. I was simply dreaming. Whew. Explanation accepted.
Once I had convinced myself that the world around me was actually REM in the middle of the night, I calmed down a bit. But just a bit, to be honest. Because the world around me didn’t really feel like dream. It felt real and sequential and in the moment. Not all jumbled and time-jumpy like dreams usually are. So I was still uneasy, but at least I was able to think in a somewhat-rational way.
First things first, I told myself. Which would be … what? Well, unfurl yourself from this curtain. Which I did. Now what? I wondered. As I looked around my room, the lack of anything Beatles-related was what intrigued me most. More so than even that Meet the Caverns! platinum album.
Beatles stuff? What’s that?
That’s what Dad had said when I mentioned the Beatles. It was like he’d never heard of them!
A thought impudently snapped its fingers inside my overheated brain. Good idea, I congratulated myself. I went to my computer, logged on to the Net and Googled “The Beatles.” I had used Google just a week or so before to find a Beatles-related Web site for song lyrics. At the time, there were over thirty million results from my Beatles Google. Now, the usually lightning-fast Google computers took a while to respond. Finally, a message came on the screen:
“There are no results related to this subject.”
Incredible. Unbelievable. Mind-boggling. According to the World Wide Web—the ultimate authority—the Beatles simply did not exist in this new dreamworld of mine! I felt strangely calm about this revelation. Probably because I figured I would wake up at any moment and things would be back to normal.
Dad suddenly reappeared at my door. “They didn’t like it, but they’re leaving you alone until the concert.”
“OK” is all I could think of to say.
“Seriously, Regina. How are you feeling?”
“Good. I mean, I had a bad dream. You know how I get those sometimes. Just freaked me out a bit.”
“Maybe you should see a doctor.”
“No, Dad. I’m fine.” I smiled and did my best to imitate someone normal. Someone who wasn’t groping her way through a dreamworld.
Dad looked like he wasn’t buying it. But finally he said, “I’m making breakfast. Come on down when you’re ready.”
“I will.” A final bit of scrutiny from Dad, then he turned and went downstairs. When I turned back to my computer, my mouth dropped when I saw what was on the screen.
“There are no results related to this subject” had been replaced with “This is not a dream. Your wish has been granted.”
My wish? What wish? I thought.
Strange as it may seem, I hadn’t connected all of this to the wish I had made the night before. Why would I? After all, it wasn’t like I’d positioned a bunch of lit candles in a circle and made a formal request in the middle of them. (OK, I’ll admit I’d done that before. But I was probably around six at the time.) My wish was just tossed off, like I said.
Now the words on the computer dissolved and were replaced with “Do you have any questions?”
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I mean, who was this person on my computer?
That’s a good question, I thought.
“Who are you?” I typed.
“Your Fairy Godmother” came the response.
My dream had obviously taken a very strange turn. I decided the best thing to do was continue the conversation. I typed, “How do I know you’re not just part of my dream?”
“C’mon, Regina. Deep down you know you’re not dreaming” was the reply from my faceless Fairy Godmother.
That hit me right in the gut. Because my so-called F.G. was right. I had tried to convince myself that my new world was a dream because it was the only rational explanation of what was going on. I mean, wishes simply never came true! None of mine had, anyway.
I quickly typed, “OK, let’s say this isn’t a dream. Let’s pretend my wish has been granted. If so, there’s been a big mistake. I wished to be as famous as the Beatles. Not make the Beatles disappear!”
“It’s impossible to be as famous as the Beatles” came the immediate response. “So I simply eliminated them and gave all their songs to you.”
All their songs to me?
I stared at the computer in stunned silence. I hadn’t thought about what was on Meet the Caverns! Things had been happening too fast for me to even get that far. I shoved away from the desk and caromed over to my CD cabinet on my rollable chair. When I found Meet the Caverns!, I extracted it from the cabinet and turned it over. This is what was on the back:
1. He Loves You
2. I Want to Hold Your Hand
3. Eight Days a Week
5. All My Loving
6. Help!
7. We Can Work It Out
8. I Should Have Known Better
9. Yesterday
10. I’m a Loser
11. In My Life
12. Hello, Goodbye
Words and Music: Regina Bloomsbury
I stared for the longest time at the back of that CD. Part of me was psyched to see that every one of the songs was a personal favorite of mine. But there was another part of me that wondered … how did this person claiming to be my Fairy Godmother know what my favorite Beatles songs were?
I spun around in my chair and looked back at my computer. I had a lot of questions to ask this lady. But when I rolled back to my desk, I was stunned at what I saw on the screen:
“Gotta go. Much to do. Good luck.”
WHAT!
I furiously typed, “Wait a second! I need to talk to you!”
No reply. I couldn’t believe it. That was it? That was the end of our conversation?
What kind of Fairy Godmother is this? I thought as the words on the computer dissolved, leaving the screen blank. Fairy Godmothers don’t abandon their little princesses!
I sat stock-still when I had that thought. I slowly looked around at all of the Caverns-related merchandise in my room. That’s when it really hit me. Crystal clear. Right between the eyes.
This wasn’t a dream after all. This was for real. My wish had been granted.
I had become a pop princess overnight.
6
“Have you packed for tomorrow?”
I was gobbling down my scrambled eggs when Dad asked me that question. I had wanted to crawl back into bed after my strange Fairy Godmother left me to deal with all this insanity by myself. But then I realized I was too famished to put off eating any longer. It had been almost twenty-four hours since I’d put anything in my stomach.
“Packing? Tomorrow?” I said absentmindedly.
“Slow down, Regina. You’re going to get sick.”
I polished off my eggs and grabbed another piece of toast. “Partly,” I replied.
“Partly what?” Dad asked.
“Partly I’m done packing.” I figured that was a safe reply to my dad’s question.
Dad nodded, then stared out of the kitchen window. A cluster of young girls and a few paparazzi were gathered just on the other side of our property, waiting for me to make an appearance, the girls providing a constant refrain of “Regina!” A couple of the paparazzi started to edge closer to the house, I suppose to try to get a shot of me through the window or something.
Dad leaped to his feet, yanked open the kitchen door, and shouted, “Care to be arrested for trespassing on private property?”
The photographers immediately backed off, but not before snapping a couple of pictures of my dad. He slammed the door and returned to the table, muttering under his breath, his adjectives for the paparazzi obviously not meant to reach my innocent ears.
So, the paparazzi … Dad not a fan. I wasn’t sure how I felt about them. Before my instant stardom, I’d seen them only on celebrity TV shows hounding movie and TV and music stars, and now here they were hounding me. Definitely weird, and kind of funny in a way. But they were more like background weirdness at that point in my rock ’n’ roll journey. There was too much else to be concerned about.
“So … it’s going to be an interesting week,” Dad said, which took my mind off the waving hands and bobbing heads of my girl fans and the black-clad snappers out by the curb. Something was troubling Dad, I could tell, and I didn’t think it was the paparazzi. But I didn’t want to ask what it was. I needed more information first. About what was going on.
I mean, here this incredibly bizarre out-there thing had happened to me overnight. But from the looks of things, I was the only one who knew it had happened. Everyone else seemed to have been living for quite some time in this new pop diva world of mine … except me.
Confusing? You bet it was.
“I better go get ready for tomorrow,” I said. Whatever tomorrow was. Before I left the kitchen, Dad asked, “You are coming back, aren’t you?”
“Coming back? Here? To the kitchen?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Regina.”
No, I didn’t. I didn’t have the faintest clue what was going on! Which was why I needed to get back to my room. Research. “We’ll talk about this later, Dad.” Again, a safe thing to say. At that point, I was just stalling for time. Until I had a clue.
* * *
Google led me to the Caverns’ official Web site. A wealth of information greeted me. This is what I discovered:
Meet the Caverns! had already spawned three number-one hits. The next official single from the album was going to be “He Loves You.”
The CD had sold over four million copies to date.
It had been nominated for a total of seven Grammy Awards, including Best Album, Best Song (for “Yesterday”), and Best Rock Album. Plus the band was up for Best New Artist.
We were close to completing our hotly awaited second album, which was going to be released in the spring.
To kick off Grammy week, the Caverns were playing a concert—which would be streamed on the MTV Web site to a worldwide audience—at our former high school, T.J. High in Twin Oaks, on February 9.
I looked at the Caverns calendar hanging on the wall by my desk. It was open to February. The first eight days of the month had been crossed off.
Interesting.
Apparently, I had traveled from December 21 to February 9 overnight. Which meant that the Grammys were in one week.
Aha!
That’s what I was supposed to be packing for. A trip to L.A. to attend the Grammy Awards! But wait a second. It also meant that the Caverns concert at T.J. was …
Tonight!
My stomach jumped into hyperdrive when I was confronted with that info. I always get nervous when I perform. But nervous in a good way. This was nervous in a not-so-good way. I mean, I couldn’t just stumble blindly through the day until concert time. That’s what I felt like at that point.
Blind.
For one thing, what was with the announcement on our Web site that we were playing a concert at our former high school? Had we quit school?
I sighed in frustration. There was only so much I could learn from a Web site. Even an official one. I needed to discover what else was going on. Behind the scenes. I needed to fill in the details of my new life.
A confidant.
That’s what I needed. Someone I could talk to. Someone I could trust. (Seeing as my lousy Fairy Godmother had abandoned me!) Someone I could maybe even tell the truth about what was really going on. Without them thinking I had bought a one-way ticket to Nutville. There was only one person I knew who fit that description.
Julian.
7
“ ’Lo?” Julian answered his cell phone on the second ring.
“It’s me, Regina.”
“Gina. Heard you’re not feeling well. What’s wrong?”
I immediately tensed up when I heard Julian’s voice. The vibe coming over the phone was weird. Off, in some way. But then I thought, Probably just me. This is Julian, after all.
“I’m just a little under the weather,” I replied.
“You be OK for the concert?”
No, there it was again. A kind of flat, uninterested tone to Julian’s voice. What was going on here?
“Yeah,” I said. “But listen, do you think we can get together before then? I need to talk to you.”
“Sure, if you don’t mind having every breathless word recorded.”
I’d forgotten that the rest of the band was being followed by MTV. And every second of what they recorded was on our Web site. Each of our pictures was featured on the main page of the site, so I clicked on “Julian” and—just like that—there he was. Driving his ’65 Falcon on a two laner that passed through open farmland on the outskirts of Twin Oaks. Talking to me.
I have to say, Julian looked as good as I remembered. I found that comforting. Something hadn’t changed, anyway.
“That could be a problem,” I said, referring to having every breathless word recorded. “This is kind of private.”
“I don’t think I can shake these guys.” Julian looked at someone in the backseat. The camera panned to reveal a familiar-looking busty blonde who was more than happy to return Julian’s smile. I think her name was Shania. One-name Shania. I’d seen her on MTV hosting one of their shows.
“If you’re watching, Regina, there’s no way I’m letting Julian out of my sight!” Shania bleated into the camera.
“You hear that?” Julian asked.
“I’d have to be deaf not to. Listen, we’ll talk after the concert.”
“OK. See ya.” Julian snapped his phone shut before I had a chance to say good-bye. I continued to watch him on the computer as he pointed out some local landmarks for Shania. Then I exited our Web site and frowned.
First, Dad. All uptight about something. Now Julian. Playing it cool with me. That definitely wasn’t my imagination.
My frustration suddenly turned to anger. Why on earth had this weird Fairy Godmother of mine given me no memory of anything leading up to this particular day? That was downright cruel.
As I looked around at the ton of Caverns merchandise that surrounded me, I had the strange sensation that this was not so much a wish come true as it was some kind of maze that I could get increasingly lost in.
* * *
Music has been my sanctuary for as long as I can remember. Playing it. Listening to it. And the Cavern is where I play my music. The Cavern is the basement rec room of my house. It has a dingy gray concrete floor and concrete block walls painted white. Not much to look at, but it’s the heart and soul of the house as far as I’m concerned. For those of you who are not Beatles nerds, my basement—and my band—are named after the underground club in Liverpool where the Beatles played before they were famous.
So the Cavern is where I retreated after talking to Julian. I needed to play my guitar, lose myself in my music, and just forget about everything for a while. But as soon as I walked down the steps to the Cavern, it was obvious that I couldn’t get away from my new life. The Beatles posters that had hung on the walls—the inserts from The White Album, a Help! movie poster—were gone and had been replaced by, natch, Caverns posters and pictures.
