He nodded. “They are. They love the story. That was the phone call I got last night.”
“The story,” I repeated.
“You know, Superdog’s mom and all that.”
“Oh, my God.”
“I am so sorry.”
“Are you?”
My mind whirled. I couldn’t make sense of it. Or, as I realized later, maybe I didn’t want to make sense of it. I was trying to hold all the memories of Billy and my arrest at bay, all my past. And I was very much not trying to think of my future, the one that involved being exposed in a celeb magazine.
Maybe it had to happen, maybe my past had to roar into my present. But I found I could not go lightly into that new future. It was as if I were holding back a screeching train, all by myself, using all the power of my body, or in this case my mind, to stop, stop, stop it from coming into my present.
“They have your mug shot,” Gavin said.
The train couldn’t be stopped. It plowed into and then through any thoughts, defenses, holdups in its path.
I got a flash of an image, the one that I hadn’t seen since the year or two after my arrest when I ached from missing Billy, and even more, I bled from missing the “Billy and me” that I had fallen in love with.
I had smiled during my mug shot. I had never even partaken in cocaine, and for some reason, that made me feel less liable in my mind when I agreed to pick up coke for the band. Not once had I used drugs, although many were available on the road, especially when the McGowans’ parents left the tour and returned to their businesses and their home. For some reason, I thought it helped that I wasn’t a drug user, even a little bit. I was simply accepting a package.
When I was questioned, the police tried to get me to divulge the roles of each of the McGowans and how they were involved. I marshalled my strength like never before, and didn’t mention anyone in the band. I wouldn’t. Their reputation—meaning Billy’s—could be tarnished. Granted, Billy’s sparkle, in my mind, had been growing rusty since he had started using coke with regularity (and then hiding it when I commented on it). But despite that, despite his other transgressions, his betrayals, I still loved him deeply.
And so for me, but mostly for Billy and Billy and me, in case my arrest was revealed, I didn’t want to take one of those horrible female mug shots. His brothers had dated girls who’d been arrested—open liquor charges and assault after a concert brawl—and inevitably the mug shots were horrible—hair askew, eyes too wide or too slitted, makeup dripping like black candle wax. Sometimes they would hit the papers or magazines, side by side with a photo of Mick singing to an adoring crowd. And I knew what happened to those girls after. Nothing. They were no longer part of the McGowan clan.
I was unlike those girls. I was more a member of the McGowan family than my own. Billy and I had been dating since we were fourteen. I felt a responsibility to uphold what they had worked for.
And so I had smiled.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter because Billy ended it with me. Right then. He didn’t even try to help in any way, nor did anyone from the band or the staff. And so the photo had never hit the newspapers. By the time the McGowan Brothers reached crazy fame, no one knew who I was or cared.
“When is this article coming out?” I asked now.
In the silence that followed, Gavin’s face came into clearer focus.
Finally he spoke. “It went online last night. It started hitting the newsstands today.”
Baxter made a slight whimpering noise, and I looked down. He was sitting at my feet, eyes up to me, head cocked to one side.
Thank God for you, I thought. Thank God I have you.
I looked back up and I studied Gavin’s eyes. I crawled into them. I didn’t hear him talking, although I vaguely noticed his mouth moving, the words sorry and apologize floated around. I wasn’t really registering Baxter settling back in below me, then getting up a beat later when someone said, Superdog! Although I was somehow aware of that, too.
I knew enough to know that moment was precious—that moment before a whole life changes, again.
31
I left Gavin in a shocked state, my mind reeling from the fact that my arrest would be revealed, and worse, it would be revealed in a rather big way. I tried to remember the readership of the magazine Gavin worked for. One million people? Two? But I had rarely read it and never worked with them. I shook my head and picked up the pace. I marched down State Street, my destination suddenly clear. Baxter trotted alongside me, closer than usual, looking up at me every few seconds.
I can’t believe him! Tears erupted in my eyes. How could he do this?
Before I’d left him, Gavin had said I love you. I love everything about you.
Words I’d always yearned to hear. And yet. And yet it was the end. And possibly the end of my new life. Who knew how an arrest record could affect I’d Rather Sleep with the Dog. Was it all coming to an end? I had to see the magazine, and how bad it was.
I bent down now on State Street and scooped Baxter up, putting him in a football hold the way Sebastian and Gavin did.
As I passed the corner of Oak and State, the pharmacy came into view. I put Baxter down again and walked faster.
I thought of Sebastian. Gavin was right that I’d never told him about my past. What would happen when he learned about the arrest and my other marriage? He would lose respect for me. That’s the answer that kept coming into my mind. I tried to assuage myself with the fact that I’d lied to him via omission. I’d never mentioned the arrest or my marriage, and he hadn’t asked. But I hadn’t told him, either.
I finally reached the pharmacy. I tied up Baxter and walked, fast, into the store. Where are the magazines? Where are the magazines? I wasn’t even sure if I was talking out loud or only in my head.
I found some. But only beauty and fashion. Where are the rest? The tabloid ones? I turned another corner and found what I was looking for—a hefty selection of magazines, including the one that employed Gavin, my boyfriend, my former boyfriend.
My eyes zeroed in on a yellow bubble at the top right of the magazine cover, one with red lettering.
It was almost as if I didn’t want to read it, because my eyes swam. But eventually they focused right on that yellow bubble.
Superdog Mom’s Troubling Past
Part III
32
I stood with that magazine outside the pharmacy. I looked both ways, up State Street then toward my place. But even though the condo was only a few blocks away I couldn’t go there. If I went home, then it would settle in, my rage and my grand disappointment would surge and overtake me. “It” was all too much already.
My phone rang again, as it had twice when I was in the pharmacy. I pulled it out of my purse. Gavin.
I hit the reject-with-message button and stuffed the phone to the bottom of my purse.
I crouched down by Baxter, kissing him on the top of his head, breathing in the warm doggy scent of him. Then I stood, flipped to page twenty-seven and made myself read the first sentence of the article.
“Superdog’s mom is not as sweet as she pretends,” it read.
And there was my mug shot. At least I had a grin on.
There was no byline, but I thought about the fact that Gavin might have edited the article, seen it in draft form or even written it. Which made the hurt so much worse, like a deep, squeezing vise on my chest.
I started reading the article, but my vision was jumpy. From what I could tell, the piece was short and accusatory, like many articles I’d seen in magazines like this. The wrath had just never been aimed at me before.
I made myself start at the beginning. Jessica Champlin, the article said, was “a child bride” to rockstar Billy McGowan. As if Billy hadn’t been eighteen right along with me. As if we hadn’t decided to spend our li
ves together.
I remembered suddenly when Billy told me he wasn’t going to college. We were seniors in high school then.
“What do you mean?” I’d asked, trying to hold in creeping fear.
We were sitting at the corner of the racetrack, watching the running of a few fillies in training. His family were longtime race watchers, and they all seemed to have an innate interest and understanding of it.
He didn’t answer right away. The fear grew, filled in around the edges of me.
For the last few years of our high school lives, Billy and I had talked about going to college together, maybe to the university here in town, or maybe one a little farther away so we could be with each other all the time, just us. We’d already sent our applications.
Never had we talked about not going to college.
But then Billy gave me a shy smile. Then he tucked a lank of wavy hair behind an ear, a nervous gesture I knew well. He did that onstage when he was anxious, afraid how a song would go.
The McGowan Brothers had recently teamed up with a manager, and that manager, Billy explained that day, was emphatic that the brothers make a name for themselves. Soon. That meant that they needed to move to New York.
I sat in a stupor, seeing our plan—me and Billy, four years together in college—was done. Over. I felt, at that minute, a sure death—the loss of a person who had known me like no one else had. Certainly not my parents.
“I want you to come with us,” Billy said.
My whole world opened up when I heard that. My whole life. In a million tiny colored pieces I saw so many places we could go, people we could be, together.
It wasn’t hard for me to decide that I would follow Billy and the McGowan Brothers to New York as soon as we graduated. Manhattan was the Holy Grail anyway, the place you shot for after you went to college. So why not just jump the gates and get there when you could? Especially when we had a lead, like we did with the McGowans’ manager, especially when he was willing to help us find places to live, to fund everything.
Even my parents couldn’t say no. My father had told me once on one of our long walks around town that he liked Billy very much and felt I should hang on to him—to our love. My father wanted, I saw then, for me to have what he and my mother had.
That was why my parents quickly assented to me following Billy. And that was why we were all brokenhearted when I messed it up.
A group of tourists came out of the pharmacy and started opening maps, apparently trying to decide where to go.
I pulled Baxter across the street and started walking, no destination in mind.
The phone rang again. I ignored it.
It rang again, and I pulled it out of my purse. Gavin. I tapped Reject.
I folded the magazine over so that only the article appeared.
After the marriage to Champlin fell apart, McGowan was linked for years to a young Mavis Regent.
That made me stop, grateful for a stoplight.
The McGowans’ fame had skyrocketed right after they’d teamed with Mavis Regent. Mavis was a girl from Indiana who’d been named after Mavis Staples and who, similarly, could sing like a blues legend who’d been on the road for six decades. She was tiny and curvy, and she undulated her hips while she lolled her head side to side and belted out tunes that could scale from a thundering timber down to a smoky whisper. By the time the McGowans started touring with her, I had been Billy’s girlfriend for nearly four years, and during that time I had become a master at watching live music, whether it was lounging in the studio, standing backstage or dancing out front. And so I couldn’t help studying the guys around Mavis Regent. What I saw was that her bandmates, although they were much older than her, clearly loved working with her. The drummer, a wiry guy with a Mohawk, never took his eyes off her, all the while crashing and thumping, ready to change a beat at an instant’s notice if she wanted. Her bass player, too, was often fixated on her. I wasn’t surprised that Mick, Billy’s brother, had a similar reaction, and definitely wasn’t surprised when he and Mavis got together.
I was surprised, however, when Billy and Mavis did. In our new apartment.
The pain of finding them together had been unimaginable, and I was insane with anger. But I shouldn’t ever have told Mick about it, because telling Mick was what brought about my downfall. Somehow in Mick’s twisted mind I became the bad guy. Billy felt terrible—of course he did. He’d not only betrayed me but he’d betrayed his brother. Later, therapists would help me see that Billy’s rejection of me, especially after I’d been arrested, was a way to make it up to Mick, to choose life with the band over me. And it was his ultimate rejection—not the arrest—that was the most painful memory.
“Oh, my God!” The sound broke my reverie.
I blinked. Four girls, likely high school–aged, rushed toward Baxy. “He’s so cute! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
One of the girls stopped. She was shaking. “Is this Superdog?”
“It is,” I said, glad for the diversion.
The girls squealed.
While they took pictures with Bax, I turned my back and kept reading the article.
Insiders say the end for McGowan and Champlin came when Champlin took possession of a large packet of cocaine, with intent to sell.
A shot of hot anger seared through me. The intent they mentioned wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter. Not now, not back then. Because when someone is caught with a certain amount of drugs, the law tacks on a conviction for intent to sell, not caring about your real motivation.
Still, I’d told my public defender a million times—I was there to pick up drugs. The person who usually did that for the McGowan Brothers was tending to some other emergency that day. At least that’s what Mick, Billy’s oldest brother, had told me when he asked me to do it.
I had agreed to pick up the drugs because I was falling—falling out of the McGowan world as their fame increased, falling out of Billy’s world, too, despite how much we loved each other, how we’d essentially helped make each other.
I stood now on State Street, skimming the rest of the article. It made me sound like a drug abuser, or certainly an occasional drug user, neither of which was accurate. The piece ended with a promise to readers to keep investigating “whether Champlin is still in the drug world.”
“Bye, Superdog!” The girls were all hugging him. They left and the light turned green. I tugged on Baxter’s leash. But people recognized him now, and so we kept getting stopped. One person’s noticing would trigger the next. “Superdog!” we’d hear and then someone, or many someones, would descend upon him with hugs and head-scratches, all of which Baxter loved.
I loved it, too, because such attention made Baxter happy. And mostly because it was a temporary distraction from the magazine (which I’d rolled tightly and tucked under my arm). Those moments with Baxter and people on the street allowed me to answer questions, normal everyday questions, about the breeder from whom I’d bought Baxter, the trainer I’d used in the city when he was a pup, the issue of crate versus bed, what kind of food he ate, how to order the collars and leashes, and so on.
No one seemed to have seen the article about me yet, likely no one really cared, but I was mortified, rattled.
The latest fans left. The weather was hotter than hell, but still I kept walking, unable to stop my feet. Instead of moving north to the park or east to the lake, which would provide respite from the heat, I decided to keep walking west. It felt almost like self-punishing instinct. We passed LaSalle, then Wells. I thought about walking around Old Town, but I associated that area with fun, with Sebastian.
Thank God Sebastian was on a story. For once, thank God that he was in a foreign country full of strife where the news of “Superdog’s mom” wouldn’t make a dent. I needed him to stay overseas while I attempted to come to terms with this.
I stopped in front of a parking garage, realizing I had to start merging my present and my past.
I had outrun the past for a long, long time. I usually felt as if that period of my life—falling in love with Billy and the downfall of us, of me—had happened to someone else. When I thought of it, I thought of her. I felt bad for her. I was embarrassed for her. I was glad not to think of her very often. And when I did it was as if I was telling myself a story about someone else, saw the tale scrolled out, almost like words in a book.
A horn blared. Baxter yipped. He was tugging on the leash, pulling me away from the entrance to the garage.
The phone rang. Gavin. I turned it off.
I let Baxter tug me down the street. He stopped a block later, wanting to smell something in a patch of grass. I let some slack go and watched Baxy sniff around, grateful that he would never understand any of this. Whereas before I had always wished Baxter could talk or communicate, now I was thankful he couldn’t.
Her—she—was starting to be me again, and the merging of the two was exquisitely painful, and it was only made worse by my anticipation of the recognition in people’s eyes when the story became widely circulated. I knew it wasn’t big news. I knew it wasn’t likely to change anyone’s life. It would be fun news for some, others would say, Who cares if she had a drug bust when she was eighteen? Who cares that she was married to a rock musician?
The story wouldn’t change anyone else’s life. Except mine.
33
The morning after the article was released I met Gavin outside at Tempo Café. He was relentless with the phone calls. And it was either get a new phone or talk to him. (Although, getting a new phone was an option since I was starting to get calls from other media outlets. I’d changed the message, indicating people should contact Toni.) So I texted and said I would meet him. I wanted someplace public where I would be hesitant to lose my marbles in either a fit of screaming or a fit of tears. On the busy corner of State and Chestnut, the Tempo patio fit the bill. Most important, I could have Baxter near.
The Dog Park Page 15
