On this night, Josh barely made it to the stand-up bar before Charlie spoke in an undertone to one of the bouncers.
“Get him out of here. Side door.”
Surprised, yet understanding Charlie’s need to keep the club squeaky clean – at least in appearance – Jessie watched as the burly bouncer made his way across the floor to the unsteady twenty-seven-year-old and spoke quietly to him. By Josh’s posture, Jessie figured he was receiving the news but not acting on it. He leaned a little more into the bar, maybe to steady himself, she thought, as his layered chestnut hair fell in a protective mask around an aristocratically cheek-boned yet hopelessly downcast face.
He called to mind an ageless boy; someone who had lived in many different time periods and was at home in each. A sense of timelessness pervaded the space around him, suggested by the garments he wore easily - as if they were made for him and he never changed - a thigh length dusky, scratched, tan leather coat, faded jeans with threadbare holes in the knees, scuffed brown leather boots, a white cotton button down shirt loosely tucked under a thick worn brown leather belt.
Jessie watched Josh nod and then pull himself up to make his way unattended across the large sterile room to the side entrance, where Charlie thought he would likely be less noticed, she figured. At one point, Josh stopped and stared back into the artificial space he’d just vacated, and Jessie turned to see who he was looking at – Charlie. The two men held each other’s gazes and she instinctively knew that, in his own mind, Josh had sunk to an all time low as his old friend cowardly ordered him, via an employee, out of his bar. The standoff only lasted a few seconds, but Jessie could feel high tension between the two men’s steely gazes, as this time Charlie held on as if to say, I win. I’m the better man. Then, a brief second, as Josh glanced with barely focused eyes in Jessie’s direction, and hung his head in shame before being escorted, stumbling, out of the door.
Jessie glanced back at Charlie, who was quickly entertaining some sleazy high society gal in a dress too short to sit in, and wondered if he had already forgotten about his old friend. She felt a little sick. After a moment, she grabbed her small purse off the bar and waded through the budding crowd to the side door. She pushed it open with the help of a quizzical bouncer and stepped out into the increasing soft white moonlight. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and she peered up at the stars for a minute, remembering for the briefest instant a magical age-old night on the beach with Sandy and Rachel when the stars were plentiful, and the music and friendship, glorious.
She heard a crunching sound behind her, and turned. There he was, perched amongst Charlie’s garbage bins and bags, all legs and arms and hands and feet and rebel hair getting in his eyes and disrupting his vision almost as much as the crushed percs he’d taken earlier. Josh was swaying a little as he sat there, as if he were trying to figure out where he was and how he’d gotten there, to which volatile time period he had recently arrived.
Jessie took a breath and stepped forward into the acrid abyss of food scraps and used tissues, bending down in her short skirt and tippy heels to meet Josh at eye level. She reached out and tentatively brushed straggling hair from his forehead, revealing a sharp intelligence in the hazy, soulful chocolate eyes beneath.
Somehow he managed to focus on her, but it seemed he never quite believed she was there, looking at him, until about a few years later when she actually admitted her presence there. Instead, perhaps Josh thought it was wishful thinking that this beautiful girl who created such mystical music and who acted in remarkable films cared at all about him - a loser, a druggie, a young man with seemingly no hope left in the world.
But she was there, indeed, all five foot nine dressed up beauty of her, enveloped on all sides by the most exquisite, ethereal starlight; and she could speak, and so she did.
“Josh,” she said. “Is that your name?” Even though she knew it was. Jessie’s heart was beating double time. Maybe there was something about having lived so much of your life in pain that you could register on a deeper empathetic level someone else’s.
Josh peered up at her and wondered if there were two, or three, or even really just one of her – Jessie Wheeler. The singer. The songwriter. The poet. Crouched there in front of him. Real as the stars that swam, playfully ducking and diving, in luxury over and around her pretty head.
He didn’t have it in him to respond. All he could feel was hopelessness, the agony of humiliation, of having nowhere else left to go, nowhere to turn. The stench was overwhelming - the pungent, piquant bits and pieces of stale, rotten foodstuffs embellishing and permeating a seemingly eternal sour mood. He wrinkled his nose.
“Josh,” she said again, and through his hurting he reveled in the way she said his name, in the beauty of the way the sound of it passed simply through her lips. “You can do this, you know. End this thing.” She paused, and then added, “The drugs.”
She stared deeply into his eyes and, as he tried to stare back, he heard her words somewhere off in the distance, echoing around inside his brain. Later, he wouldn’t remember most of what she said, but Josh vaguely recalled her digging around in his leather jacket and pulling out a cell phone. She must have searched though the contact list there and found his brother’s name, because before he knew it she seemed to be talking with Zachary, and he wondered would his older brother come, or had he, too, given up on Josh, like it seemed everyone else had.
He remembered one last thing before he passed out in Charlie’s smelly, rotten garbage – well, two things, in fact. One, that he deserved to be there, because garbage belongs amongst garbage, and two – that the last words he dreamed she said to him were, “There is always hope, Josh. Never give up.”
And those were the words that bounced around his head as Zachary arrived with his sweet wife, Hilary, and quietly hoisted Josh out of the pithy depths and into their Beamer. As they pulled away, from inside the club he could hear Jessie start to sing; a new ballad, Josh thought, and he supposed that if he ever saw her again he would ask what song she opened with that night at Charlie’s Club.
Josh let his long eyelashes flutter over his dark eyes and he drifted off to never-never land for a while, where things wouldn’t hurt so much and where nobody could reach him to humiliate and interrogate.
The next day, when Zach and Hil dropped him off at rehab for the third time in two years, while Charlie remembered his promise and took Jessie out shopping for a ring, Josh repeated her words to himself and hoped that she’d been real. Two weeks later he got an anonymous card at the center, where he’d been behaving and committed to the program, unlike during previous incarcerations. The card was yellow, sunny and bright, and on the inside it was inscribed with just one word.
Hope.
He set it on his window ledge where it could be lassoed by the sun’s ever-changing buttery light each day, and he thought about where it might have come from, and it was then he realized that hope was a tangible thing, and if one chose to make it exist – then indeed it did.
***
Months later, Jessie ran into Josh at one of Dee’s fundraisers. Charles Keating and Drifters Executive Producer Jonathon McCloud were good friends, and Jessie, as one of the featured artists that evening, was lingering over drinks with the serious, reserved Charles as flighty Dee flitted between patrons in a stunning sequined lavender gown, wheedling dollars from the wealthy with her wit, charm and grace. Charlie was off cavorting as usual, flirting and drinking and, generally, ignoring his soon-to-be bride. Ever dazzled and disillusioned by the gajillions of dollars seemingly thrown out the window at these types of lavish events, and still after many years trying to reconcile the waste with her years of struggle, Jessie was bent over a circular stand-up bar peering at couples on the dance floor. She was soaking up the gorgeous lush mellow jazz Vancouver musician Colin James and his band were delivering up to the crowds when Charles sighted Jon and, with a boisterous wave, beckoned him and a few of his new cast over to their little corner of the room.
“Jessie, this is Josh. He’s an actor whose name you’ll want to remember for some of your future projects – it’s only a few months in, and he’s got the editors fighting to keep the others on the screen. He does good work.”
As Jessie looked up, she inadvertently – nervously - tossed her hair, and an auburn tinted strand fell loose from behind her ear. Somewhere off in the distance she heard Steve and Sue-Lyn groan as they disputed Jon’s negligence of their own acting abilities in favor of praise for Josh whom, Jessie noticed, seemed also to be blushing, as he shifted his feet uncomfortably, frowning, peeking up at her from beneath those lovely deep brown eyes she remembered from their first decisive encounter.
Josh was in mortal fear to be standing there in front of this gentle girl with the sad blue eyes, the one who saw his soul in such a state of disrepair. Silently, as he fixed his solemn gaze on hers, he affirmed his own assumption that she thought poorly of him, for she seemed hesitant to take his hand. Not wanting anyone else to notice his discomfort in the awkward moment, he reached out just a little further, and helped her go that last tiny distance, then he stepped forward and leaned in to greet her. They felt they were in a bubble then, those two, as the others in their party were still in their own worlds, chiding each other. Lithe, happy Stephen was holding court, as he often did, sending the others into hysterics as he tried to convince Charles there were other reasons besides Josh to watch Drifters, namely he and Sue-Lyn, at the moment.
Jessie barely heard Josh, but she knew what he meant when he put his lips to her ear and, in a low voice that conjured images of a sedate life amongst the wisely disenchanted, whispered, “Thank you.”
Then he pulled away from the protected sphere where he was enclosed with her, just the two of them, where the rumbling room tone, stacattoed with high-pitched laughter, had diminished to an indistinguishable murmur. He reached up and tucked the stray tendril behind her ear, and Jessie couldn’t help but tremble. She wanted to touch him back, but knew that she couldn’t, that it wasn’t appropriate. Even if she wasn’t marrying Charlie within the year, the feelings this man engendered in her were terrifying. She reminded herself that such ‘lightning-struck’ romance wasn’t real or, if it were, she had already been hit and then, soon after, burned to the ground.
As she shook the thought of Sandy away, Josh wondered where she’d momentarily escaped. Then, before he was willing to let her go completely and, likely, forevermore, he felt compelled to add another word or two.
“For the music, too, I mean,” he stammered, clearly uncomfortable, wondering whether she cared to hear this for the billionth time from some star struck stranger.
Jessie looked up from their hands that, mysteriously, she suddenly realized were still entwined. She couldn’t tell her fingers from his, and Jessie instantly loved that about Josh; that his fingers could disappear into hers as if their souls were one and the same, as if he had the power to let a long ago lost light back into her simply through his touch. Into his eyes she glanced again, shyly, with that completely disembodied feeling that only peering into the kind, lost, bottomless chocolate eyes of a timeless man with chestnut-colored shoulder length hair could produce.
She smiled, and felt her knees go weak.
The night got even better.
As if he could read her mind, Colin James played one last song before retiring for a mid-evening break. It was, in fact, one of Jessie’s ballads from the last few months she’d given him permission to cover. As she stood there smiling like a goof at a man whom she barely knew, who completely disarmed her, whose presence here as a sober man with an exploding career was, in fact, largely due to her unfailing belief in him, a stranger – the Colin James Band played the song she wrote for Josh and all lost souls like him.
As she became aware of the opening strains, she heard Josh’s sharp intake of breath. Melting, Jessie glanced away quickly to the band, and then back at the man who stood before her.
He knows, she intoned quietly inside herself. He knows the song is about him. Her smile suddenly faded, and she let go of Josh’s hand, and looked away again, embarrassed that he’d glimpsed into her soul that way, that he seemed to recognize she’d stolen something very private away from him, and then unabashedly shared it – him - with the world.
In response, Josh grasped Jessie’s hand and led her onto the dance floor. This was a moment the universe was handing him, and he was not about to let it pass by. As he silently thanked God, and she wordlessly worshipped Colin James, Josh gently placed his left arm around Jessie’s waist, his right hand in hers, and they waltzed in tribute to the unequivocal, remarkable strangeness of life, which brought them together in a heap of garbage many months before.
They stayed that way, lost in their little bubble, while Charles looked up in distracted puzzlement, and Jonathon’s eyes knitted together in curiosity; while Stephen and Sue-Lyn watched in wonder, their concern for their good friend raising their internal red flags; and, across the room, the elegant Deirdre continued to woo the rich and famous in their Armani and diamonds.
Charlie watched them dance, too, while he slugged back a bourbon before turning to Leeza, a martini saturated eighteen-year-old starlet wearing a skimpy diamond encrusted scarlet gown, and whispering in her ear, “Just got a new 911. Sweetest little thing on the planet.”
Which ended the fundraiser for Charlie and started the rag bag engines again, at an rpm that would equal any elite sports car, Porsche 911 or otherwise.
***
It was just as Charlie’s latest scandal with Leeza was dying down that Jonathon pulled up to the 5800 square foot Spanish Villa where the Keatings resided. A lush creamy yellow, its graceful arched windows were tastefully accented with clean white sashes and tall, thriving hollyhocks in gorgeous, fragrant hues of rose and pink. A curved flagstone walkway led the way to a welcoming curved Palladian mahogany door gracefully encircled with muted stained glass windows, and white roses gently nestled at its base in beds of verdant greenery. The late afternoon sunlight washed the perfectly appointed home with a cheery golden hue, as the heady scent of manicured late summer flowers promised to intoxicate even the most weary of travellers.
As he awaited entry, Jonathon tapped his foot impatiently, seemingly not taking up the exquisite surroundings on their offers of peace and tranquility. In his left hand he held papers – a script – that he coiled up and tapped against his left thigh.
When Dee first brought Jessie up to the house, the girl had stared in numb wonder. Some places have auras, as do people, and she found herself instantly relaxing in the sanctuary of this home. The color, architectural style, flowers – all conjoined a
s if to say ‘welcome’ to this stray child whom the world hurt so badly. Immediately a phrase had popped into Jessie’s head, as she felt the stresses of the world melt away in the shadow of the gentle Spanish styled home. ‘Mellow Yellow’…it was silly at the time, reflecting the giddy state in which Jessie found herself suddenly thrust into in those first heady days of fame. The name had stuck – La Casa Amarilla Reposada, as Charles officially redubbed it.
Now, wandering inside beckoned by the welcoming maid Carlotta, a comfortably plump coffee-skinned woman in her fifties, Jonathon ignored the stately home’s placid glow and stormed out to the deck, where Jessie sat in a comfortable striped lounger overlooking the pool with a pile of scripts at her side, sipping on a lemonade.
She looked up when he entered, and frowned. The thin, successful television producer was obviously unhappy about something, greeting her tersely before pulling out a chair at a nearby table to chat animatedly with Charles and Dee. Agitated, he ran his fingers through his snow-white hair repeatedly, and then slammed the script on the table.
Jessie was a born eavesdropper. She listened in. The singer often tuned in to other people’s conversations ‘as a study of character’, she told herself. As an actor, one was always studying the speech and behaviors of others. However, in Jessie’s case, it was likely more of a study of relationships and families as, ever the outsider, the girl was always seeking, searching, observing, wondering.
Smoothing the recently curved edges of the script on the table in front of him with his lean fingers, Jon let out a deep breath and spoke of the object of his derision.
“Suddenly they’re on the fence about financing a full season. Drifters hasn’t even had a chance to show those network asses what it can do yet, they’ve only seen three lousy episodes, but already HBO is telling me I don’t have enough star power in the show for it to carry even thirteen one hour slots. I’ve played this game long enough, and had enough successes that by now I should have earned some level of trust. Why do I continue to suck up to those heavy handed asses at their production meetings, and nod and smile and say yes to everything, when I should have earned my stripes by now?”
A Song For Josh, Drifters Book One Page 5
