by Eden Butler
“I’m saying,” Kenny said, “that what I heard today doesn’t encourage me.” He leaned forward, holding a gold Zippo lighter between his fingers. “I’m saying that I can hold your contract until I get the Dash Justice record I want. I don’t think you’re capable of giving that to me but…with this tour…”
“I can’t do the tour,” I said, brushing off Winston’s hand. “My father is dying.”
“And he’ll be dying whether you tour or not.” The forced sympathy Kenny had given me just minutes ago when he mentioned Wills’ name was missing from his tone. “Do the tour or lose your contract. Plain and simple.” He laughed at the frown I gave him. “Unless you want to hand over way more than you probably have to buy yourself out.”
I stood, ready to walk away and forget about Riptide or Redman or anything I’d done here in the past ten years.
“Dash, come on, man, it’s one tour,” Winston said, but I didn’t watch him. Instead I stepped away from the desk, from the assholes who didn’t get who I was now, or what I tried to do with that single. But Kenny called after me, his tone soft, a little sinister.
“You leave this label, and I still get anything you record until that last album stipulation is satisfied. And in case you forgot, you break the contract, and I get your masters. All your masters. That copyright doesn’t revert. I’ll sell your best songs to hemorrhoid companies and furniture stores.”
Everything I’d worked for could end right then. Every line. Every beat. Every award, every single fan that sang along to my music in their car, or while I sang on a stage. Kenny would fuck me, and none of that would mean anything anymore. I’d be a joke, worse than what I already was.
“I don’t know how to be Dash Justice anymore. I lost him because he’s not…who I want to be anymore,” I told them, hoping they could at least respect who I was trying to become. But men in suits who risk their family’s hard-earned legacy don’t care about growing up and getting better. Men like Kenny and Winston only cared about the unchanged and how it keeps the money rolling into their pockets.
“Then you better fucking find him,” Kenny said, tossing the magazine proof at me. “That asshole owes me an album.”
No one bothered me on the plane, and I didn’t engage. First class was filled with businessmen—guys in Armani suits with Bluetooth devices nestled in their ears. There was a scattering of women, not including the flight attendants, but no one came near me, except the leggy redhead with dimples who stared at me as though she might know who I was under those ridiculous shades.
I tried to push the tone in Kenny’s voice out of my head and focus on what waited for me at home. Iris’s text to me had been short and to the point.
Wills is fine and sucks at dominoes.
A year ago, I would have never bothered to check on people back home. A year ago, I’d have probably taken Kenny up on the Savage Freaks tour without thinking, but then, a year ago, that tour wouldn’t have been necessary for me.
We headed over Philadelphia and the clouds engulfed the plane. There were labyrinth grids below us in patchwork colors and I rested back, rubbing the pad of my thumb against the stupid magazine proof that Kenny had thrown at me. My own face stared up at me, eyes narrowed, likely bloodshot. The black and white shot made the lines fracturing the whites of my eyes invisible.
“The Unmasking of Dash Justice” spread just under my chin in a thick, red font, with a subtitle that made me want to toss the magazine across the cab: What’s America’s God of Rock Hiding About Himself and His Legendary Father? The Story from the Woman Who Knows Him Best.
She did know me best, but she probably still hated me the most. No matter what looks Iris shot my way when I was feeling bad for myself or when her heart had gone soft because she saw how sick and weak Wills was growing, the fact remained that I had done something unforgiveable. I’d done a lot of unforgiveable things to her and would pay for them for the rest of my life.
I’d only half-read the piece when the editor sent it over, glossing over the behind the stage photos and quotes from people who pretended to know me, but I hadn’t read the whole thing. God knew what she had written about me, or what she’d add to the piece now that she’d landed the extension. I hadn’t paid attention when they first asked for my confirmation; the drunken stupor and heavy guilt had me passing along my blessing without thought or hesitation.
Coño.
Iris’s article might have contributed to the threat Kenny had just given me. And because I seem to relish pain, because, like my mother, I craved it, I did the only thing left to me at that moment. I finally read what Iris really thought of me.
DASH Justice smokes two packs of Marlboro Reds a day, but that’s not his worst vice. There are plenty more. Excess is something that may well be essential on tour. Do rock stars list ‘extravagance’ along with the brand of water or the air conditioning temperature they want in their dressing rooms? Touring with Justice makes you a witness to that excess and how it is traded like a commodity, and if there is something more than cigarettes and liquor that Justice depends on to keep his persona well padded, it is the finely constructed walls he’s placed around himself. There are large, imposing men surrounding him and his band as he leaves the stage through the thick smoke and orgasmic euphoric screams of the crowd, a set that has been constructed of props that evoke the sensationalism of a macabre orgy. The fans love it, and Justice clearly gets off on that adoration, but like the token guards that provide the buffer from that sated crowd, freshly figuratively fucked by Dash Justice, there is something in the way. The real face of a musician.
She hadn’t held back. She hadn’t hidden what she thought or what had been shown to her during the tour. The pages were thick, glossed to a shine, and I skimmed more paragraphs, catching full insults in some of the emphasized sections, lines that had been bolded and made larger to draw the readers’ attention.
He hides the pain of a broken childhood, lived in a home that never felt safe.
That much was true, and Iris knew it. She saw it firsthand. Each line tells as much about the writer as it does the subject. She is here, among the insults and criticism, reliving the past in every phrase of “when I knew him” or “the boy he used to be.” In some sections she sounded insulted, and she would have been when she wrote this, that was a given. But her hurt is clearer than the brutality that she uses to shoot me through an unfiltered lens.
I take each line of doubt and disgust like a lash that is self-earned and wonder when each insult was written—how far removed from that show and the final humiliation she had thought of it and committed it to paper. I wondered how much more she’d write or if what she saw of me and my father would paint a different view of the man I was trying hard to become.
Iris always knew me best. She was the only person I trusted to tell me the truth, but I hadn’t always heard her. Sometimes it took more than her words to convince me I was wrong, to remind me what I needed.
The last paragraph stabs like a broken rib, but I own it.
The kid I knew loved magic and melody and how both could come together to change a life and catapult a dream into something real. Now the dreamer has become a caricature of who he wanted to be, hiding behind white war paint, a self-proclaimed warrior who battles the world and anyone who threatens the loud, boisterous chaos that riots beneath his spiked boots. It makes me wonder: who is Dash Justice fighting more? The past or himself?
Once, she would have never had to ask that question; there would haven’t been a need. I’d spent years remembering every promise she broke, every whisper she swore was mine alone. Then I spent months on that tour with Iris finally at my side again, rebuilding something I let get broken when I was a kid.
What a pendejo I’d been. What an idiot.
But, God, was I really as horrible as all that? Did I hide? Was there nothing good left of the myth I created? I’d told her I was tired of Dash. I wanted to walk away, but sometimes when I thought of what a monumental job that would be, it l
eveled me. Starting over? Walking away completely? Coño, I just didn’t know if I had the sack to do it.
All I’d ever wanted was to make that magic and for Iris to live her dream, and that tour had been the beginning to something she’d reminded me I wanted.
The night before the Indy show, the night she let me love her again, had felt like coming home. She directed. She commanded, and I did what she wanted, so caught up in the need to touch her again. One slow smile, one honest request, and Iris was mine again.
“Mami, bésame,” I’d told her, overcome by her warm breath against my cheek and the sweet noises she made when I held her face. “Stay with me. One night, for old times. One night because we loved each other so much. One night to remember.”
I’d begged. I’d tasted, and to feel her on my tongue again had made me realize the taste of everyone who hadn’t been Iris had been bitter and plain. She opened for me, spread wide that sweet, soft pussy, so hot against my tongue, her thick, tight walls pulsing against my fingers as I touched her. I loved the sight of her sweet body arching toward me, moving closer because it felt so good to be tortured by my mouth after so long apart.
Then she’d moved to her knees directing, guiding me. “Get behind me,” she demanded, and it took all my self-control not to wither to nothing right then and there.
I slipped inside Iris then because it had been my place once. I returned to what had been mine, where we’d always be the happiest, the freest. She’d pressed and touched and took like she had all the times before, like she would again. Like I would stop hurting her. Like her secrets with my father wouldn’t get told to me in half understanding. Like I would forget that I was selfish and vain, that I had never let my guard down for anyone. Like I wouldn’t spend the next day planning to record us one last time and then force Landon into editing the video so that when the humiliation came again, it would cut deeper than any wound I’d inflicted before.
“I’m an idiot,” I told myself, throwing the magazine to the floor as I leaned back in my seat, closing my eyes against the grid of landscape below and the biting truth Iris had written about the man I’d become.
Chapter Twelve
It was 1:00 a.m. when the Uber driver dropped me off, and I slipped into the apartment, making it to my bedroom first. Wills slept in the middle of my bed with Iris at the foot, a dog-eared book in her hands.
There was a small curve to her mouth, almost like a sleeping smile, and small noises moved from her nose when she breathed. The sight pulled me inside that room, and I knelt down, tracing the arch of her mouth and the sharp, severe lines of her cheeks as she slept. Would she wake up if I kissed her on the forehead? I’d done that a lot as a kid, when I was awkward and stupid and too damn scared to kiss her like I wanted. Now what I wanted didn’t matter. What I needed clearly didn’t either.
“Savage Freaks,” I whispered, and just the sound of the words off my tongue felt thick and bitter like acid.
Wills released a loud snore, and the spell was broken, sending me out of the room and down the back stairs to the shop below. Sometimes when Wills slept hard, when the snoring was very loud, I’d come down here and remember what it had been to discover my father. It seemed everything about my life came in segments: times before I had destroyed my career, my love, and my family with irrational cruelty, and after. When I thought about after too much, those memories of how good it had been to want Iris brought a sweetness that was caught up in hope and possibility. I craved the times we’d unearth new songs, sitting in this shop. Hours and hours we’d spend in the back of Hector’s shop, our heads together, sharing earbuds and closing our eyes against the vibration of the speakers on the hardwood floor.
Sometimes I missed that more than Iris, more than the taste and touch of her—I missed the thrill of a first song, a first dream. There weren’t any more of those to have.
I didn’t crave anything now like I did then—no whisky, no weed; no woman would sate me like the thrill of hearing those songs and sharing those first listens with my best friend.
Hector’s office was nestled behind the counter and three rows of bookshelves that had once housed stacks of vinyl records. The linoleum was brown and dingy now, and the metal desk had a broken leg that made the whole thing wobble when you sat behind it.
I stuffed an old telephone book under the desk and dug out a nearly empty bottle of Jack, not bothering with a cup as I walked out of the office and stood in front of the record player I kept away from the front window. The player sat on top of a cedar cabinet of Hector’s that he’d scored at a thrift shop in Madison back when I was a kid and the record shop was in its prime.
The turntable wobbled when I clicked on the power. I steadied the needle, finding the slight indention in the vinyl, grooves set into those black lines from how often the record had been played. It never got old. It never failed to seep inside me and latch on tight. But I could never stop myself from listening. Even with everything Wills had told me about Crash and the birth of this song, to me it still belonged to Hawthorne, and more than that, it belonged to me and Iris.
Take a shot of me
Swallow me whole
I am bitter and dark
But yours to control
The Jack went down easy, a first for me. Maybe I’d gotten used to the bitterness. Maybe I didn’t know pain when it came to me. The music went on. A crackle, a pop, and the lyric entered my chest, the sound of my father’s guitar wailing like a temptress, and I welcomed the spell.
“Jamie…”
It wasn’t an invitation, my name spoken like that, and Iris didn’t expect me to turn to her, dropping the bottle so I could offer her my hand. There was surprise pushing up her eyebrows and dropping her mouth open.
But she didn’t turn away. She didn’t leave me alone in that shop.
It made no sense for her to let me hold her. I’d been the cruelest sort of friend to her. I’d hurt her the most, but we spoke a language that was older than we were. Despite everything, I thought we could still speak that language. Every look, every frown, every unspoken fear, all moved between us in silent expressions and quiet pleas. That night, I made one, and Iris answered it, stepping into the circle of my arms as the music went on wailing, ripping apart the tension that had grown heavy between us for years.
For just a few moments, I didn’t think about my guilt and her offense. I didn’t think about the damage my father had done to his own body or the healing my mother was trying to do. I didn’t think about how weak Iris had made me out to be in that article or the deal with the devil Kenny wanted me to make.
I didn’t think at all. I just held Iris, moving her against me as we danced, as my father’s voice rose in the dark record shop where we had fallen in love a hundred years ago.
I am gray
You are too
We share the night
And this heartache in blue
Iris fit against me like a whisper—soft, sweet, something that was precious. Something I was scared could easily slip through my fingers, but I’d never felt anything as sure, nothing that seemed so wholly mine as her.
Her breath moved against my chest, and I got wrapped up in that honeysuckle smell and the slow stroke of her long fingers against my neck. Long tendrils of hair fanned between us, and I slipped my hand up her back, keeping her still, counting each beat, each note as it went away, wishing I could make that moment last.
As the music faded and the soft crackle of vinyl took over, Iris stop moving but didn’t push me away. She went still, and kept her palm against my neck, her fingers at the ends of my hair.
I could only inhale, committing every curve of her body and slip of skin to my memory. I’d never bet to do this again. Not with her and I’d never get another chance like this one.
“I’d do anything,” I told her, tightening my eyes as I spoke. “To take it all back. Whatever you want.”
I wanted to stop her as she pulled away. I wanted to keep Iris in front of me, keep her arms against
my back and her fingers in my hair, but she took a step away, her face flushed, eyes blinking quick. “It’s not that simple, and I’m not that forgiving.”
Iris didn’t flinch from me when I touched her face, and I swore there was something glinting in her eyes against the low lamp light behind us. Chances like this don’t happen twice. I had no plans to squander it. “Please let me try.”
“No,” she said, moving my hand from her face. “With you I’d always be looking over my shoulder.”
“Looking for what?”
That glinting shine went out of her eyes then and Iris took another step away from me, though I swore she fought the frown that hardened her features. “Looking to see if you’re trying to get your arms around me just enough to put a knife in my back.”
There was nothing aimed at her back, but just then, I swore I felt something sink deep into my chest. It felt a lot like loss.
Chapter Thirteen
“We could set up a sound booth in the old office, primo, and put up a wall between the front of the building and the counter. It could be bueno.” My cousin waited for a response, watching my face as I looked around the now-empty shop. Isaiah was always planning, always thinking ahead, and once I’d informed him about Kenny wanting us on Savage Freaks, my little cousin got busy planning for the day I’d sack up and walk away from my label. If I could.
Doubt still clouded my head, mixed with a little fear, but I listened to Isaiah when he offered suggestions. He hated Gunnar almost as much as Iris did, but then, the big Norwegian had stolen a girl Isaiah had cared a lot about. He’d never gotten over it and told me point blank he wouldn’t back me up on the tour if I said yes to Gunnar.
“Maybe,” I told him, falling onto a stool while Kyle and Lou, my drummer and bass player, packed away their equipment. One glance around the old record shop when they walked through the door, and my band refused to play. Isaiah led the charge, barking orders to our bandmates and their women as we cleaned.
