Pop Life

by Ryan Loveless

  Published 22 June 1999

  A decidedly *off* the wagon Jamie Webster escorting a waif-like model out of Stringfellows on Sunday night. Guess when you're a megastar you don't have to worry about waking up early on Monday…

  * * * *

  Celebrity Spy

  Seen and Heard

  Published 6 July 1999

  Jamie Webster getting into a brawl with an unidentified man at a Chelsea pub. Apparently, the man suggested Jamie's days of fame were numbered. Looks like Jamie is still holding onto his bad boy image.

  * * * *

  Celebrity Spy

  Seen and Heard

  Published 13 July 1999

  That man leaving London's Heaven with three women? It was hard to tell with his head beneath that black cloak, but we can confirm it was Jamie Webster. And no, he was not walking on his own. He needed two men along to prop him up. At least, that's what our spies claim. From what we know about our Jamie, we wouldn't be surprised if the boys went home with him, too.

  Chapter Twelve

  Russell and Keelin's visit got a rocky start. I clothed myself in Jamie's stolen shirt and went to bed. Keelin complained about Paeder, and then lashed out at anyone who dared agree with him. Michael and Russell took it in shifts to be ignored or abused. Finally, they barricaded themselves in the kitchen with a stack of Hot Rod magazines and a radio tuned to Car Talk. After three days, when Keelin and I had exhausted all the pretzels, Michael dropped a notebook onto my duvet-covered lap, Russell shoved Keelin into my bedroom, and they walked away, saying, "It's time Icon did a new record. Get to writing."

  Keelin stared at the notebook suspiciously, as if it would bite him. Finally, he sighed and slumped onto the bed. "Let's do this, all right?" He picked up the notebook and tapped my knee with it.

  "Okay." I sat up. If Keelin could get down to business, I could too. I should probably thank him for not comparing my situation with his and making me feel like an ass.

  He pulled his feet into his lap. "Let's try not to rhyme 'girl' with 'world' this time."

  "I only did that once. In college."

  "Uh huh." He smiled. It was good to see.

  In a roundabout way, Paeder forced my return to normalcy. Michael dragged me into the studio to finish Truly, Paeder. I claimed illness, but Michael pretended not to hear. "We've got a contract," he said.

  "Paeder's a jerk."

  "Yeah, well, you knew that going in."

  In the studio with Michael, I could almost forget the four days in New York. I resented that I should go through so much and have only a huge phone bill to show for it. I had called Jamie several times, using the number we had on file. Jamie never answered the phone. At first, I used his tour as an excuse. But four venues staggered across two months meant Jamie could go home in between cities. I knew I was being ignored. I tried to keep my messages bland, but had to cut them off a few times because my voice was shaking. If Jamie had answered, I had no idea what I would say. I had to accept that for those four days I had been convenient to Jamie. Now he'd probably found someone else. I hadn't done anything special for him, nothing anyone else couldn't do. His talk about connecting to me through my lyrics might have brought him to my door, but it sure wasn't enough to keep him there.

  "Would you say I'm convenient?" I asked. We were alone, and I was longing to rake my fingernails down my body and scratch out Jamie's phantom.

  Michael stopped what he was doing at the keyboards. He looked at me with suspicion. "Convenient how?"

  "Just…convenient."

  He began to laugh. "You are the most inconvenient person I know. Who the hell told you that you were convenient?"

  I shrugged. "Nobody."

  "Well, 'nobody' has obviously never been forced to take you to seven different pizza places so you could get ricotta. Convenient, my ass."

  I smiled for the rest of the day.

  * * * *

  As the weeks wore on, we were back to getting news on Jamie the way everyone did—through fanzines and British newspapers. I flipped through Celebrity Spy every Tuesday to read about Jamie's behavior.

  The songs we penned for Truly, Paeder and Icon's Iconic (title decided after a drunken contest to outdo Paeder for stultification) exploded with my distress. It had been worse with Kate, so Michael didn't say much about it. Depending upon the strength of my passion, Michael either championed or muted it with his arrangements, giving each tune a balance of emotions. It was good to be together again.

  "We've got that click going on," Michael said, referring to the behavior we fell into when things were going right.

  "Let's just hope it lasts," I said.

  "It will."

  Russell and Keelin had the run of the house while Michael and I worked. Mostly, they worked as well, but sometimes they disappeared for days at a time. They would return and mention visiting a relative of Keelin's in Nevada or New Mexico. Paeder called every day to check on the progress of both albums, and gradually Keelin forgot that he was refusing to speak to him.

  "They're back on," Russell said when Michael and I walked into the house one night. It was the thirteenth day of the second month after New York. He motioned to Keelin, who was lying on Michael's ragged couch that he refused to part with for unstated sentimental reasons, bare feet tapping over the armrest. He had the phone tucked between his ear and shoulder. His small hands gesticulated as if he was trying to catch someone's attention from a distance. He stopped periodically to tug the hem of his jeans away from his ankles. When he saw us, he beamed.

  "It won't last," I said. I turned my back on Keelin, partly so he would not hear, and partly because the sight of Keelin so happy over futility made me want to throttle him.

  "Andrew, you shouldn't—" Michael said.

  "You don't know what they're like. It won't last. Paeder is going to ruin it."

  "Maybe he won't." Michael looked to Russell for support. Michael's relationships never lasted more than three dates. Yet, he was still a romantic. If the women knew that going in, they probably would have stayed longer.

  Russell lifted his baseball cap and scratched his hair. The blue streaks were nearly grown out. They colored the ends of his hair like he had been turned upside down and dipped in dye. He slid his fingers over the cap's brim before replying. "He will. He's as predictable as sun in the desert."

  "That's a pity. It's nice to see Keelin happy, isn't it?" Michael asked.

  I imagined ripping the phone out of Keelin's grasp and jumping on it right in front of him. "Yeah. It's great," I said.

  The next day, Jamie called. The call came at six in the evening Pacific time, two in the morning Greenwich Mean Time. I almost ignored it because I wanted to stop Russell from overcooking the macaroni. I only picked it up because it was my private line.

  "Andrew?" Jamie's voice was distant, as if he was shouting down a tin can, and it took me a moment to recognize it. "Are you there?"

  "Jamie?" I rolled against the wall until my back was flat against it.

  "I just wanted to ring you and say hello."

  "I'm glad." Ecstatic, was more like it. I had been terrified for him. Every report was a little worse; every time I wondered if the next one would say that the unspeakable had happened.

  "Look, I just… I don't want to be a bother," he said.

  "You're not. You aren't." I was holding the receiver so tightly that my knuckles had gone white.

  "Yeah, well, I'll let you get on with it."

  I couldn't lose him now… "I wasn't, I mean, I'm not really doing anything. Russell's burning the cooking."

  "Russell's there?"

  "Yeah. Him and Keelin."

  "Oh." The hazy connection did not allow me to interpret whether this was an 'oh' of disappointment or acknowledgement.

  "Michael and I, we're doing some work for Icon." I scratched my neck. It didn't do anything to relieve the uncomfortable itching I was feeling beneath my skin. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say to him after so long. "You're all right?
"

  "Never better."

  "You're sleeping all right?"

  "I manage."

  "Good."

  "Yeah. Look, uh, I'll talk to you later, all right? I have to get to bed."

  "Yeah."

  "Bye, Drew."

  "Bye, Jamie."

  I heard another voice before Jamie closed the line, a woman's voice, and I understood that when Jamie said he had to get to bed, he was not talking about sleep.

  "What did he say?" Michael stopped in front of me. He offered a hand and pulled me up.

  "He was with someone," I said. I tried not to let my hurt show, and Michael made an effort not to show that he'd noticed my piss poor acting.

  "Well. At least he called."

  Russell burned the macaroni. We ordered pizza instead.

  * * * *

  Paeder took four of the songs we wrote for Truly, Paeder. After this, he called only to speak to Keelin, and I suspected that Paeder's interest in Iconic was a ploy to win Keelin back. Keelin and Russell began joining Michael and me in the studio and laying down vocals. Paeder would do his vocals in London when his schedule allowed, sometime in autumn.

  Over the next month as we worked on Iconic, Jamie called every two days on average. His mood varied sporadically. Some days he was chipper, high as a kite, I thought. Others had me talking into silence and wondering why Jamie had called in the first place. I talked about anything that came to my mind on these calls—movies, books, embarrassing things I'd done—anything to keep him on the line.

  "I'm sorry I'm not there," I told him on one of these brooding calls. We hadn't discussed even the idea of a relationship again. It seemed to go better for him not to bring it up. It was in the back of my mind, though. Otherwise, why would he keep calling?

  "You don't want to be with me right now," Jamie said. "I don't want to be with me right now." He sounded dull.

  "I still wish I were there."

  Jamie did not speak for a long time. The earpiece crackled, and I guessed that Jamie was tapping a finger against it. "I'm trying to do without you, Andrew," he said.

  "Oh." I counted out forty-six cents in my pocket and squeezed them until they bled through the cracks between my fingers. I didn't know that doing without me took effort.

  "I'm not doing very well. I miss you with me."

  My grip slackened on the coins. "I miss you, too," I said.

  "I'm sorry," Jamie said. "I asked Audrey to find your phone number a few days after I left New York," he said. "But I was scared to call you."

  "Jamie, are you all right?" I asked. He really… he sounded bad. "You don't have to be… you can call me anytime you want."

  "I'm sorry, Drew, I have to go. I shouldn't have called tonight." He hung up before I could say another word.

  * * * *

  Two weeks passed before he called again. "I forgot the words to three songs tonight," he said.

  "That could happen to anyone."

  "My three most popular songs. Not to mention, this is me we're talking about, here. It's not like my mind's a sieve."

  "But I'm sure the audience was all right…"

  "Yeah, well. I stop and they take over for me. Makes them feel part of the show."

  "You know, I never told you, when you did that for me in New York it was…" I didn't have words for how amazing and grateful I'd felt.

  "I miss you," he said. I wanted to tell him how much I missed him, too, but he continued talking before I had the chance. "You make me want to confess everything I've done. That terrifies me. I think I'm going to die. I'm going to live myself to death. It might be… easier for both of us if I did. If I told you everything, Drew, and you didn't want to see me ever again, that would make perfect sense to me. And that terrifies me as well because I… I don't want to lose you."

  I sat speechless.

  "So you'll understand," he said, "why the first thing I did when Audrey gave me your number was shove it into my pocket without looking so I wouldn't accidentally memorize it."

  "Jamie?"

  The line was silent.

  "You can tell me anything you want. I swear I won't tell," I said.

  "I know you won't. Swear something else to me."

  "Anything?"

  "Swear you won't hate me."

  "I won't hate you." How could he ever think that I could hate him?

  He chuckled, his voice sounding empty as a ghost's, a subtle prediction that I would soon eat my words and abandon him like he predicted. "Do you know what it's like to have something eating you from the inside out that you can't tell anyone?"

  A dull pain that wasn't linked to anything physical started to throb somewhere down in my gut. "Actually, I do."

  "Then… then maybe you'll understand."

  I didn't expect him to jump right into it. Whatever caused night terrors like he had obviously needed a buildup.

  "I killed a girl."

  Then again, some things a person just had to say outright. "What?" Everything stopped except his breath coming through the phone. "What?" I asked again, hoping to sound less shocked, but not succeeding.

  "It was my first year on the road. She was a girl I picked up at a club. David had been on my back about the drugs. I was out of control, and he was trying to bring me back in, but I wasn't paying any attention to him. So, I met this girl and she had the good stuff, so I took her back to the hotel with me. We got high and fucked all night. In the morning, David woke up. He looked furious. I thought it was because I'd snuck out, but he kept shouting at me. I tried to wake the girl up, but she wasn't moving. She was dead. That was when I figured out why David was shouting."

  "What happened?" I asked. I had come to expect people to talk about traumatic experiences with detachment, but Jamie sounded like he was living it again. His voice shook with terror and from the way his breaths were staggered, I was certain that he was crying. "What did you do?"

  "I was too fucked up to do anything. David took her away. He came back, I don't know how much later, and beat the living shit out of me. I could hardly stand up, and I had to do a show that night. I went to the hospital after.

  "He took the girl away?" I had a vision of Jamie's brother, ever the business type, disposing of the body in a clinical, efficient way.

  "He never told me what he did with her, but I know that her body was found in another hotel room and nothing became of it. The news said that her parents weren't surprised, so they didn't press the police to do anything beyond the preliminary investigation. That was her reputation, that she was a user, so it helped me, I guess. We canceled the last three dates of the tour because I was barely functioning. David wasn't talking to me. I was having nightmares a thousand times worse than the ones I have now. I got home and tried to kill myself with my mum's old pills and a bottle of vodka, but mum found me and I ended up in hospital." He paused, as if timing his punch-line. "The papers said I was in for 'severe fatigue'." His laughter sounded like a mixture of hatred and relief.

  I reminded myself to breathe. This was not even close to what I had come up with. Drugs, yes, everyone would guess that, but death and cover up? All the speculation about his falling out with David had never come near to the truth. And Jamie caught in the middle, forced to keep quiet. A teenaged kid terrified into silence. No wonder he carried so much guilt.

  "Drew?" Jamie asked. He sounded far away.

  "I'm here."

  "Say something."

  "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I understand now. I do." I'd never wanted to reach through the phone and touch him so badly.

  "Say the other thing. Please."

  I had to think. Then I realized what he needed to hear. "I don't hate you. I could never hate you."

  He was quiet.

  "Jamie? Did I say something wrong? Don't disappear on me, all right?"

  "No. It's just… I never expected… I… you're special. You really are." He broke himself off, unquestionably crying.

  "So are you," I said quickly, trying to break through to him
how much I meant it. "I want you to know that I'm coming to London in less than two weeks. I'll come see you, if it's okay?"

  There was a soft, wet sound like he was wiping his nose. "I'd like that."

  "Okay. Good."

  "Thanks for listening, Drew."

  "Thank you for trusting me." I tried to make my hands stop shaking. The phone went dead. I pushed the call waiting button twice before I realized that he had ended the call.

  "Another pleasant call?" I looked up to see Michael standing above me. He stuck an arm out to help me leverage myself off the floor where I had been sitting against the wall.

  "He needs me." My stomach felt as if a fist were squeezing it. I flattened a palm against it. "He told me… he told me everything. Everything."

  "We'll be in England at the beginning of August. That's not even ten days. It'll be fine." He gripped my shoulders and held me at arms' length. "All right?"

  "I forgot to tell him that I still love him," I said. Michael gave me a crooked smile.

  "So tell him next time."

  But the calls stopped. Three, four, five, six days went past and I didn't hear from him. I tried not to worry. I didn't do so well. I blamed Michael for jinxing me. Everyone knew that you did not say things like "next time" or "what's the worst that could happen?"

  There was always something that could happen.

  * * * *

  Keelin and Russell were scheduled to fly to London four days before Michael and I. Paeder had made arrangements for us to attend his solo debut at the Royal Albert Hall. ("Solid front, lads!") Most of the writing for Iconic was finished. We all drove to a dance club for a final evening together.

  "Here we are!" Keelin announced as he climbed over Russell to get to the car door. "I haven't been clubbing in forever!" He was out of the car before it stopped, bouncing from foot to foot in front of the club's peeling black door. Year-round Christmas lights flashed out "JJ's" over his head. It was a Wednesday night, just past eleven. There was no line.