by Julian Bloom
There. He had said it. It was out there. Now all he could do was wait for her reply.
CHAPTER 7: Temptation
“Going to AA is the only chance in LA you get to see fellow musicians.”
- Moby
JD had been staring at the glass of whisky for close to an hour. He was waiting for his brain to reach the point where the pros of not drinking would outweigh the one con of not drinking.
He was hurting and he wanted to numb the pain. Alcohol would do that for him. All the other pros for not drinking seemed insignificant compared to this one con. If he did not drink, he would not be able to numb the pain. And right now all he wanted was for the pain to go away.
The pain of rejection. No other kind of pain was quite like it. Miranda had rejected him, citing the usual nonsense reason of wanting to keep things professional between them.
“Too late for that!” he had yelled, anger coursing through his veins.
“Keep your voice down JD.”
Fear and hurt and desperation removed the filter from his brain and mouth and he found himself speaking his mind. “You didn’t keep your voice down when my tongue was between your legs. You didn’t want to keep things professional between us then, did you Miranda? You were begging me to make things between us very unprofessional – “
“Stop being an ass!”
JD found himself thinking that even angry, she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Her mouth was still swollen from his feverish kisses. It hurt his eyes to look at her and it hurt his heart to know that she did not want to change the nature of their relationship. He felt a burning in his eyes.
Please, please, help me not to break down and cry in front of her.
He had hurriedly left her office, desperately needing to escape so that he could break down and cry in private. He had left Miranda asking him to wait so that she could explain herself. He had gone on walking, only wanting to get to somewhere private.
Now here he was, in the privacy of a crowded bar, staring at the glass of liquor, trying to remember all the reasons why he wanted to be sober in the first place. He decided to try one last lifeline before giving in to the urge to drink his first glass of alcohol in over four years.
His sponsor answered his phone after the third ring. Within fifteen minutes, his sponsor was outside the bar, picking him up so that they could go and talk in a neutral environment.
JD never took his sponsor for granted. Michael was a no-nonsense sharp shooter who never minced words but also never judged. He called things as they were but never imposed his personal beliefs on anyone. After JD had explained what was ailing him, Michael tackled the problem in his usual manner; by simply asking questions.
“Did she say that she never wanted to have a relationship with you?”
“Not in those words no. But her actions were speaking louder than anything she could have told me.”
“Really? So you think she only wanted you for your body, as it were? To give her some sexual release?”
“No! Of course not! Miranda is not like that. She is the most caring, giving person I know. She would never mess with me like that!”
“Ok, so what makes you think that she does not want to have a relationship with you?”
JD sighed. “She wants to keep things professional between us.”
“You know, a professional relationship is still a relationship…”
“I don’t want just a professional relationship! I want…more!”
“I hear you. But you can’t force her if she is not yet ready for something more. From what you’ve told me about her, she seems like a pretty driven woman and it seems she wants to do her best to make your comeback as smooth and as successful as possible. Maybe she can’t handle mixing business with pleasure.”
“Maybe.” JD conceded.
“Can you handle mixing business with pleasure?”
JD thought about it for a moment. The tour dates were already being set. Touring was extremely hectic on its own. Would he be able to add the additional stress of being in the early stages of a relationship? Sure, it was going to be positive stress but stress is stress. And JD knew himself. He had an addictive personality. It didn’t take much imagination or a PhD in psychology to foresee that he would get very attached to being with Miranda, both emotionally and physically.
“Maybe not.” He admitted grudgingly.
“Do you still think she rejected you?”
“No. She was rejecting mixing business with pleasure.” It was great saying it out loud. He could already feel the weight of rejection being lifted off him.
He smiled and said it again just to hear it again. “No, she wasn’t rejecting me.”
CHAPTER 8: Dreams and Nightmare
I'll be dreaming my dreams with you/I'll be dreaming my dreams with you. /And there's no other place, /That I'd lay down my face. /I'll be dreaming my dreams with you. – “Dreaming my dreams” The Cranberries.
JD had rejected her. He had walked out of her office without a backwards glance, despite her pleas for him to stop so that she could explain herself. She was angry but mostly she was hurt.
She went through the motions of her daily work, doing what needed to be done with her usual thoroughness and efficiency. But deep inside, she could feel her heart bleeding.
She did her best to avoid meeting with JD. So far so good. A few times, JD had tried to come into her office but she had given Chantal strict instructions that she was not to be disturbed by any of the band members, including the lead singer. Chantal was an oddball and a bit flighty but Miranda kept her around because she followed her orders to the letter.
But Miranda found out the hard way that she could not command her subconscious the way she did her personal assistant. At night, her dreams were filled with JD. Hot, naughty dreams that made her want him more and more with every passing day…
***
Miranda was quickly walking away from JD, towards her parked car. She knew she was dreaming because she was wearing 6-inch-high heels and was still managing to walk away very quickly. In real life, she had never mastered the art of walking quickly when wearing high heels. Also, she did not own a car. Purely by choice.
“Listen Miranda,” he said and grabbed her hand, stopping her in her tracks.
“Let. Go. Of. Me.”
He didn't. Instead he turned her around and pushed her onto her car and kissed her again. Madly. Deeply. Desperately.
Miranda wasn't quite cooperating but that just added fuel to his fire.
“Your mine,” he mumbled, over and over again, in between his feverish kisses.
Little by little, Miranda's resistance melted. She sighed and thought: He really is a great kisser. Her hands rose up of their own accord and went around his neck.
JD picked her up off her feet, somehow managed to open the door of her car, placed her inside then joined her. At one point, he took off his jacket and placed it on the passenger front seat then he positioned Miranda on top of the jacket so her skin wouldn’t chafe from the leather seats.
How… Miranda tried to think of the appropriate word but it took her a while, what with JD’s skillful tongue wreaking havoc on her thought process. But finally, she found the right word.
How considerate!
JD kissed and licked and touched her all over. They were fast approaching the point of no return when a cell phone intruded upon their reality. Miranda had to call JD three times.
“What?” he finally murmured from somewhere in the vicinity of her navel.
“Phone!” Miranda gasped then moaned.
“What about phone?” he continued his exploration.
“Ringing!” was all Miranda could manage before the tremors shook her violently.
***
She suddenly woke up, sweaty, disoriented, with the aftershocks of her dream-induced orgasm still going through her. The orgasm wasn’t the only thing that had crossed over from dreamland to reality, or from reality to dreamland as it were. Her cel
l phone was ringing.
She looked at her alarm clock. Some minutes past 3am. She looked at the caller ID and frowned. Why was one of the band members calling her at three o’clock in the morning?
“Hello?”
“Miranda? Please come down to St. Anne’s hospital. There’s been an accident.”
CHAPTER 9: Ordeal
“Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you.” – “A Prayer for Owen Meany”, John Irving.
A cave. A dark cave. The path is so narrow and so dark that the safest way to get through is on hands and knees. The earth pressed close around him. He could hardly breathe.
Suddenly, JD came out into the deepest chamber and found himself face to face with a towering figure, a menacing Shadow. He instinctively knew it was a manifestation of all his doubts and fears. His knowledge was confirmed when the Shadow grew a pair of shadow hands and opened a file cabinet that materialized beside it.
Out flew all the memories and feelings that he had repressed over the years.
His daring escape from the desert rehab “camp” and his subsequent homeless days, living in the streets.
Meeting a music legend who had supposedly disappeared from the face of the earth but was actually living on the streets. By choice.
The music legend giving him his guitar with the cryptic advice of “Watch out! Fame is a double-edged sword”, one week before he died from an overdose.
The two bullies who cornered him one night and forced him to suck both of them.
His vow after that incident that he would use his talent to become so rich and famous that no one would ever force him to do what he did not want.
His success as a rock star followed by his wild, drunken days.
His dragon tattoo, chosen because it fit perfectly with how he felt about his hectic, stressful life as a rock star. He had read somewhere that the dragon was a Western symbol of a tyrant who had held fast to a kingdom until all the life had been squeezed out of it.
His deliberate, over-the-top bad behavior that had made him and his band members blacklisted in the rock circles that mattered.
Rehab.
Rehab again.
Rehab, one final, successful time.
Miranda.
Miranda’s rejection… and that particular file made JD want to ask the Shadow to encircle him, suffocate him, destroy him.
The Shadow gladly complied and engulfed him in a car-like mist. The mist solidified into Michael’s car. Michael was behind the wheel, driving JD home.
Blinding headlights, hooting, screech of tires, big bang…
Before the blackness had engulfed him, JD had cried out one name.
“Miranda!”
***
“Miranda!”
“I’m right here JD. I’m not going anywhere. Please come back to me. Please let him come back to me. Don’t take him away from me. Do this one thing for me and I’ll never miss another Sunday service for as long as I live.”
Miranda watched and prayed. She watched as the semi-comatose man she now knew she loved - because the idea of losing him terrified her - thrashed and moaned and twitched and murmured her name. She prayed fervent, incoherent, disjointed, tearful prayers to a God that she had not paid much attention to ever since her ex cheated on her. She vowed and promised and bargained, all in the hopes that the Supreme Being would let her keep JD in her life.
She did not even pay attention when her PR contacts came to see her in the hospital to inform her the “good news” that, because of JD’s accident and subsequent coma, sales of his comeback album were increasing with every hour he remained in a coma.
Miranda screamed at them to get out of the room, the hospital, her life.
On the third day of JD’s coma, the title track song off his comeback album reached number one on the charts. It was the song that he had written for her.
Miranda was reading the reviews of the album to JD when he opened his eyes.
CHAPTER 10: Recovering the Rock star
Superficial nature wearing thin. /I can't seem to begin/. What really do I see when I stare back at me? /As crushing time reveals my foe, /Inheriting all woe. /Solutions in the past, /Conditioned not to ask/It's what you're meant to be, /Your name and number. /Be all that you should be/You will recover…
-“Building a better me”, Dogwood.
Review by Rolling Moss Staff Writer.
With most rock stars there comes a time when it becomes clear that the days of that artist as a major recording force are over. Many of these rock stars do carry on touring but many others decide to call it quits. Five years ago, it seemed that time was nearing for JD.
After 10 albums which had sold over 150 Million copies, did JD matter anymore?
JD brings old-school fervor to his new album, Phoenix Rising, as though to make it clear to the whole world that he still matters. At the core of the rock star known as JD remains a white hot sincere desire to be bigger, better and/or worse than anyone else. The last time we heard from him, he was auditioning for the job of the World's Most Fucked Up Rock star and he got the job. His life was a mess and it showed in that single-title album, “Spirits”. The album was about alcohol, women and alcohol, rehab and alcohol, sex and alcohol, breakups and alcohol, makeups and alcohol, sobriety and alcohol, war and alcohol, peace and alcohol, religion and…wine.
On Phoenix Rising, already being shortened to PR by fans, the theme is decidedly different. This is grandiose music from a grandiose man, seamlessly confident in the execution of his duty as a reborn Rock star. Hardly any of the twelve songs break the four-minute mark. JD has gotten over his alcohol addiction and his midcareer anxiety about whether he is still cool enough. Now, he just lets it rip.
Able Abe’s bass is, as always, right in your face while Joe’s trademark guitar sound is filled with echoing harmonics and powerful riffs that offer a fitting wave for the many chant-along choruses to surf on till they reach the back rows of some humongous, packed to capacity sports arena. And that level of precisely honed craft can be sensed throughout the whole album. Overall there is a self-awareness, a self-confidence and positive energy that pushes this Phoenix Rising well beyond JD’s competitors and JD’s own previous albums.
During the exciting auditory terrain of Phoenix Rising, JD will urge you to ponder birth, thanks to the title track (“Phoenix Rising”) that roars to life, signaling the beginning of an auditory journey like nothing else. It's a wonderful feel good song that offers a strong opening to the album. There’s Death (“Make It Your Own"), God ("Have You Forsaken Me?"), war ("The War Within") and love ("Miranda’s song").
You would be forgiven for thinking that after ten studio albums, JD would have lost his touch on writing great ballads. The production of Miranda’s song is exemplary, particularly when JD’s passionate vocals are layered on one another, like two lovers – separate, yet…not separate. The song is built around Joe’s chiming guitar, which complements JD’s vocals perfectly.
Miranda’s song is an intimate ballad that makes you feel as though you were a peeping tom, a voyeur looking into the sacred space of two lovers as they consummate their relationship with fire and blazing guitar riffs. This, JD seems to be saying, is how you get the audience to pull out their lighters. When JD sings “You’re the reason why I have the shakes” his passion and his grandiosity seem to come from the same region in his heart. It’s a clear reminder that what makes JD a genuine Rock star is not really his clever ideas, or his intelligence or even his trademark voice. It’s the painful sincerity, warmth and passion that all too few rock stars have any clue as to how they can turn them into music. Even the final orgasmic lyrics of the song "Oh baby please" sound far better than any three words have a right to. Miranda’s song is destined to become one of JD’s live songs that becomes a religious experience for the audience.
The War Within is JD’s self-portrait, an honest, warts-and-all depiction of a rock star who has seen it all, done it all, lost it all, then miraculously, found a way to start getting it all back. Like Lazarus, come back from the dead. Like a Phoenix Rising. It features a brief JD scream, and when he sings "I'm still alive, I will arrive", it's clear that JD is still as exuberant as when he first started his career two decades ago.
Great musicians remain relevant regardless of the passage of time. This album is proof enough that JD is still a great artist working at the peak of his musical powers. What this new album is, is the most moving material that JD has popped out since his first album. May the Phoenix continue to Rise.
