He frowns. “Damnit. It’s fucking bullshit. Anyway. Keeps me in business. People moving left and right. Williamsburg is an exodus of talent, and an influx of yuppiness ever since I started this gig.”
I put the card in my pocket.
Silence passes for a second, then he resumes nibbling the fingertip he’d since stopped kissing.
I melt, and gush. This is so unlike me... “Should we get outta here?” My heart dances psychotically in my chest.
Deck throws cash on the table (completely ignoring that it was supposed to be on me tonight), and grabs me by the wrist.
In a breath, we’re back in my apartment and on my bed, going at it. Ferociously. I can’t get his shirt off fast enough. I can’t climax fast enough.
And, after, I can’t rest on his warm body again fast enough.
We fall asleep.
In the morning, before the sun is up, he wakes me with a kiss, already fully dressed and freshly showered. “I gotta go, Blaze. Moving furniture all day.”
It feels like a sword to my heart. “Oh, right, sure.” I get up, rub my eyes.
“After that, I’m training with Skate; Trev as well. It’s typical Alpha Male shit. Lots of sweat and grunting and showing off. But...if you’d like...I could pick you up...”
The sword eases itself out of me slowly. “And watch you grunting it with all your buddies?”
“Right, I know, stupid—”
“Sounds awesome.”
“Cool. Cool. Can I pick you up around four?”
“Sure, or I could meet you if there’s a subway near it.”
“I think there’s a station there, no idea. I haven’t used the subway as a regular form of commute in years. I’ll pick you up. I’d...uhm...like to see you a few minutes before grunting it out with a bunch of sweaty men.”
I think of grunting it out with this sweaty man...
“Awesome. Around four then.”
We stare at each other for a second. Then he bends down, holds my cheeks, smothers me with a debilitating kiss. In my now-dazed state, he whispers, “Blaze Ryleigh, I feel like I don’t know the first thing about you. And, at the same time, like I know everything there is to know about you.”
And with that, he goes. The door closes. And I’m alone. In a big empty loft.
With all my memories.
But they’re further away now, I can feel it. They’re no longer slapping me and smothering me. I feel like I can actually breathe, not rocked by their penetrating pain.
Did someone mention earlier about a certain game changing?
-9-
Declan DMs me on Twitter.
Hey Blaze, had a good time. Just FYI. Looking fwd 2 2nite.
He also messages me on FB saying the same thing—except for right at the end where he adds: Sent this here as well ’cause I dunno if you’re an FB or Twitter fan mostly.
I’m about to respond with Actually, I rarely use either, when I notice I have a friend request. I usually get one or two legit ones a week from local indie bands that I reach out to during the week.
But the request isn’t from an indie band.
“Hello baby, heard you played fuckin unbeleivable [sic] set on Saturday. I want us too [sic] forget past and talk. Be friends? Tolek”
Even the written word betrays his accent. It’s almost like I can hear him speaking above me, hands raised: Is NOT over, Błażej!
A shiver crawls slowly down my spine, like a hairy-legged crab.
I decline the request and click that I don’t know him. An innocent lie for a little peace of mind...
I have most notifications turned off for my social apps because they get too distracting, but there were a few on Twitter that I noticed when I got Declan’s DM notification. I go back to the app and incidentally notice: “Thirty-seven new followers?” For me, with the whopping ninety-two I had yesterday (of which I think half are spambots), this is one serious improvement! I look through my follower list and they mostly look legit, not bots.
I look at my reply stream.
@DJHeavenLeigh OMFG OMFG OMFG. PLEASE TELL ME WHERE YOUR PLAYING NEXT!!! YOU ARE INCREDIBLE!!!
@DJHeavenLeigh WOW! TKU so much for mixing our demo tape into your mix! We’ve had calls all morning!
@DJHeavenLeigh Call me. Ur hot!
@DJHeavenLeigh Our agency would like to chat about representing you. Please send contact details through.
“Oh. My. Freaking. God.”
I answer a few. Funnily enough, although there are indeed a few spammy tweets (“Wanna know more about Heaven Leigh’s latest singles? Visit: link.to/gHyy6Rt”—this then lands on a porn site), I get no hate tweets. Maybe it’s easier for people to hate on you when they’re talking behind your back?
It’s the same with my email account—notification emails about comments on my blog (First one: “Heaven-Leigh, you rock! R U single?”) I pull open my laptop, log into the blog and turn off the email notifications (and approve the one saying I’m hot.) I log onto FeedBurner and see I have a staggering forty new subscribers. Staggering to me, because that’s about as many subscribers as I got in the last four years since creating the damn thing! If you take off Mamah and a few friends of friends, probably I only really had twenty actual subscribers.
It’s a similar scene on MySpace, Google Plus (I’m added to twenty-nine new circles.) My mood lightens the more I read some of the positive feedback. I feel on top of the world. I feel like luck is on my side. It seems them haters were only on that one forum.
Time flies by, and before I know it, it’s twelve P.M.
I haven’t done a damn thing for the day! Not even eaten! “Shit!”
I’m making myself some coffee when my phone buzzes. XAVIER.
“Chiquita, moolah’s on the way. Randy want to meet wichyoo tomorrow. He want to talk about clubs, the label, all those things.” Xavier’s accent only comes out thick when he’s either in Business Mode or Gangsta Mode. Which, sadly, is really one and the same...
“What time can you make it?” he asks.
I’m such a terrible riser. Who is, when they work at parties all night? “Eleven?”
He bellows into the background. I think Randy answers. “No problem. Eleven. Look, he want to know as well what he need to do to guarantee at least a few more gigs wichyoo. I mean, you seem to be getting a lot of buzz right now. Know what I’m sayin?”
“Not really.”
“Can you guarantee him you’ll sign with him? As a favor. Seeing as he’s the one who broke you out?”
Uhm, hello!? Can anyone spell déjà vu? “Didn’t we just have this conversation yesterday?”
“Things are heating up, so we havin it again.”
He’s like a dog to meat, and I’m the meat.
I feel a sting of discomfort. And, although I can’t speak for Randy, I know Xavier too well to think he isn’t getting a cut out of this. Maybe it isn’t Randy pushing the deal at all. Maybe it’s Xavier. Because why isn’t Randy calling me personally? “Xavier, how much of a commission are you getting on this?”
He hesitates. “Well, a man has to live.”
“I see.”
He says nothing, doesn’t even try to defend himself.
“Look, Xavier, fine. Tell him I can’t guarantee taking ‘his’ offer until I know what it is. But that I also won’t take anybody else’s until I’ve heard him out. I can promise him that at least.”
“I can live with that. Meet us at Randy’s store at eleven. You know the spot?”
Randy owns a DJ gear store. Whatever money he doesn’t make directly on his parties, I’m sure he makes it in kit sales to wannabe DJs. “Sure. See you then.”
Sipping my coffee, I check out MySpace and discover that my track plays—my original music, made with FL Studio—are through the roof. And I know that my idea of “through the roof” is tiny, but you gotta start somewhere. On a hunch, I go on YouTube. Against Randy’s wishes, someone did make a video of Saturday’s session. It’s not viral, but it’s got lots of
upvotes and has quite a few comments. The quality is typical YouTube comment-quality (“Dope shit cuz I digzz some musicz shitz!! PIECE!”) so I don’t bother looking at any more of them.
It’s all very sudden. I mean, this has always been my dream. Hasn’t it?
Suddenly I’m seeing floating envelopes around me and tax forms and men in suits and YouTube comments and people putting me down, others pushing me up, people wanting things from me, unpaid rent, no guarantees but plenty of hope, web pages, Facebook accounts, lease agreements—
It’s too much.
I can’t deal with it right now. So I put my phone on flight mode, slap on my Allen & Heath headphones. And I bury myself in creating Declan’s mix.
-10-
When I mix, I don’t think. The thinking is done outside the mix. Inside the mix, there’s no time for it. So I spend my days with headphones in my ears. Yesterday—the day I spent with Declan—was the first day in four years where I wasn’t listening to music most of the day. Usually, it’s Spotify or Beatport or my local iTunes library on the road. Getting to know the BPMs by heart so I’m not dependant on the digital display of the Serato software on my Mac, or on my decks.
That part is the work.
The mix is the fun. The mix is the escape.
My Adam.
The real Adam. Or, if Savva were saying it, The Real Doctor of All Ultimate Molly Doctors Everywhere, baby.
Patryk—he once told me that an artist should be completely cool with her tools, so she can simply create. Actually, he used the pronoun “he.” The creation comes from somewhere else, somewhere inexplicable, he said. “You have to feel it. In here!” And then he slapped my upper chest firmly.
Then he slammed his own chest like a gorilla. “In here!”
He was a really intense dude. Still is, I guess.
“It brings out the dark in a person, Błażej.” He also knew me from Greenpoint. “It calls to a level deep down, far beyond anybody’s reaches. The head-doctors”—he tapped his temple—“they never gonna figure it out. It’s too ugly down there. But it also takes you up into the heavens—the art, the creation.” He raised his arms, pointed up to the sky. He had a fat hipster beard back then, so he reminded me of Moses or some such guy. Like I said, real intense. “And they’ll never reach up there either.” He looked at me. “The art—it brings out the real in you. Even if it’s a mucky cesspool. It shows you who you really are and makes you face it. Brings out what you’re hiding, what you’re too scared to talk about with words. You, me, the ones who created this stuff...” He gestured around to a back-to-back graffiti piece on a wall that we were looking at. “...We know.”
See what I mean about intense?
When I mix, I’m vaguely aware of what I’m mixing. This time, I start with Seven Devils by Florence and the Machine. It’s a dark song that makes me think of old cathedrals with hidden waterways in them and rafts on those waters being sailed by vampires, blood dripping from their teeth.
And it’s also got a good BPM—one hundred and seventeen beats per minute—which makes it such a killer song to mix with something equally gothic and housey.
I scratch in Birdy’s You Light me Up. Because, despite its pie-in-the-sky name, its lyrics scream of pain.
I think of falling into pieces, being picked up.
Images form in my mind like billowing clouds of color.
The drums crash.
The guitar riff kicks in.
Her voice sinks deep into my blood.
I set an echo effect on it.
The images turn to ones of me and Declan in the near-darkness, on the bed to my left, a light golden glow washing in from the windows. Me riding him.
The drums crash again.
The guitar riffs harder.
I ride him.
I throw in a bass loop, four beats.
I’m sweating. I put Birdy’s voice on a lower, longer echo. It makes it sound lonelier, darker.
In my mind, I hit Savva’s face.
I see Declan’s face.
I see me riding him again.
My skin breaks out in goosebumps.
Birdy’s voice is everywhere, towering, screaming, high in the heavens.
A sweat breaks out on my forehead.
Before I know it, the sun is low near the horizon. There’s banging on the door. In my mind...?
No, the banging is here!
I take off my headphones, realize I’ve been mixing for close on four hours.
Bang bang bang.
I wipe the sweat off my face. I’m in that dark place Patryk told me about, down in the depths of it, and I’m trying to bring myself back up to reality.
The door bangs a third time. “Blaze, you OK? Blaze!”
It’s Deck. It comes to me that he’s probably been banging frantically for minutes and I didn’t hear him. “Deck, I’m OK. Just give me a second.”
I look around the room. See my brick walls, menacing at first, then, simply tiring. Same old... I shake my head, come up slowly from the past.
A year ago, I might occasionally even throw in the likes of sunshine-loving artists like Colbie Caillait or that chick who sings Call me Maybe into my mixes. Now, except for those teeny-bopper parties I have to mix over in the city to pay the rent, those songs never even see the light of day in my tunes.
This is what I mix now: Four-hour long stints of screaming pain.
-11-
“You OK?” Deck’s face is a wash of worry. In his hand is a brown paper bag.
“I’m good. I’m sorry. I was mixing. I didn’t hear you knock.”
“I called as well.”
“Phone’s on flight mode. Come in.”
He looks at me suspiciously. My mind’s still adrift. When he kisses me, I hold onto him a little tighter than I did earlier. And he brings me back. “You know, you have an amazing kiss, Declan Cox.”
“I could say the same about you, Blaze Ryleigh. You sure you OK? You feel a little shaky.”
“I haven’t eaten much. Haven’t eaten at all actually. Maybe that’s it.”
He doesn’t call my bluff. “Good thing I brought a sandwich.” He holds up the brown paper bag. And just like that, my stomach catches up with my mind, and my mouth starts to water with ravenous hunger. He holds it out to me.
“Are you, like, psychic or something?”
“Nope. Took a long shot. And if you weren’t gonna eat it, I would’ve.”
I stop mid-bite of the warm chicken and mayo sub.
“It’s cool!” He laughs. “I’m not hungry. I can just eat anything anytime so, if you didn’t eat it, I would’ve.”
I don’t even answer. I just start wolfing the thing down. Even my head hurts suddenly. “God, I can’t believe how hungry I am.” In a dim state of consciousness, I realize I probably have lettuce and mayo on the side of my mouth. But I just don’t care. I’m freaking starving!
“So, you ready to go see a bunch of sweaty guys lifting weights? I mean, after you finish eating of course.”
It’s just me and the sandwich now. Deck’s gonna have to wait just a second longer.
When I’m done, and after the food has settled like lead in my empty stomach, I say, “I can’t wait.”
SIX
DECLAN STARTED IT
-1-
Declan Cox
After she’s done guzzling the chow down, I hold her small oval face in my hands. She licks her teeth and tries to pull away—maybe to go and brush them—but I don’t let her. I want her lips to mine, salad and all. I press mine to hers. They tremble. Her body joins in, quivering lightly. And mine quickly follows suit. There’s an intensity about her that oozes out into my space, my aura. Our aura. It radiates off her skin like hot fire.
All day I was moving shit—a dresser the size of the Statue of Liberty; a TV large enough to replace the ones at MetLife stadium; a cupboard larger than what Brodrick Bunkley probably lifts in one hand while eating a cheeseburger in the other.
But now, she and I
kiss. Every moment that I think, OK, enough now, I linger a little longer. Maybe it’s her flavor—that flavor of girlness under the tomato and chicken. Or her softness...
My arms feel weak. The thought of benching two hundred tonight seems more and more impossible.
I let her go. I’ve probably got a gaga look in my eyes, dopey and stupid.
She smiles. So I kiss her again, because I just have to.
“You have an interesting way...” She bites her lips, puts her hands to my waist, looks down. “...Uhm, an interesting way of making me forget.”
“Forget what?”
“Stuff... Should we go?”
I don’t want to. I want to stay here. But Trev’s gonna be gone in two weeks. And I gotta spend time with my boy. I’m even hoping, maybe, Blaze turns out to be “my girl.” I know I feel something for her. Maybe it’s just that infatuation of having seen her perform. I want to make sure there really is a connection that’s more than the heat of the moment.
“Deck?”
I love it that she calls me Deck. “Uhm—” Ah, fuck it. I kiss her again. I push her up against the door.
It gets hot quickly. She’s got her hands all over my back. It feels like she needs this as much as I do. She turns me, and now I’m the one against the door. We go at it for a few minutes. Finally, we exhale, force ourselves apart. “OK, I think we do have to go. I can’t leave Trev hanging. He’ll be back at Penn State in about two weeks.”
Red and flushed, she says, “I think you kissed me?”
I feel the grin forming, because I want to kiss you again, and again, especially if you look up at me like that. Behind me, I fumble for the doorknob. “Let’s go. Let’s go before”—I take your clothes off and make love to you—“I... Never mind.”
I somehow stumble out into the hallway with her, weakened by her kryptonite eyes.
-2-
In the car, I ask her about her day. She tells me about people wanting a piece of her, about the gazillion tweets, the so-called agents. She plays it down, tells me it was “a little overwhelming.” But I can see through the armor. I don’t call her on it, because we all need to feel like our armor’s on good and solid sometimes. But she looks a little freaked by it all.
Know Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book One) Page 10
