by CD Reiss
“Same as you, actually,” I said. “Single malt if they have it.”
“I presume you’d like some ice to suck on?”
“You presume correctly.”
The bartender, an old guy who looked as though he could mix a bull shot or Harvey Wallbanger without checking the book, scooped ice into two glasses and poured two fingers of MacAllan into each.
The room was huge and not too crowded. Mostly, the members wore creative class outfits, movie executives, talent agents, entertainment lawyers, ad agency people, and they all sat in square-cushioned armchairs around low tables. The waitstaff flitted between them, making as little fuss and being as unassuming and invisible as possible. I checked to see if everyone was out of earshot.
“How long have you been a member here?” I asked.
“My father got me a membership to the Gate Club when I turned eighteen. I moved over here a few years later.”
Iggy Winkin, the sound guy at the studio, had a girlfriend who worked at Club KatManDo. It was probably the same kind of thing, and he said memberships ran about 35 grand a year. Obscene, for sure, but who was I to say? I was trying to get around to a different point entirely, and bringing up money would sidetrack the conversation indefinitely.
“They must know you in here,” I said.
“Pretty much. The old guys. Like Kenny over there.” He indicated the bartender. “He used to work at the Gate. Knew my dad. Told me stories I didn’t want to hear.”
“Like what?”
“You’re full of questions.”
“I’m trying to keep my mind off this feeling between my legs.”
He leaned close. “Describe it.”
I sipped my drink. I didn’t have a single word or even phrase to describe the raw hunger of the physical sensation. I whispered, “Kind of like someone hooked me up to a bicycle pump and put too much air in. I feel overfull. It’s your fault. Now, tell me. Kenny and your dad. Make something up, I don’t care.”
“My dad’s a drunk. A passive, pathetic drunk, and Kenny poured him a few thousand gallons of vodka over three decades. His stool was at the end of the bar, right there.” He pointed at a space occupied by a thirty-something year-old guy in a cream suit and blue tie. “I want to hear more about what’s going on between your legs.”
“It’s eating my brain. Your body just looks like a bunch of surfaces I want to rub against. I can’t think in this state. IQ points are dropping off me. I can only speak in short sentences. Back to Kenny. How many times has he seen you here with a woman who wants to rub herself up against you?”
“Does it matter?”
“No, because it doesn’t. And yes, because I want to know if I should steal a matchbook now or next time.”
He laughed softly, covering his mouth. “I want to kiss you, but there’s a guy here from acquisitions at Carnival Records and I don’t want to embarrass you.”
“Who?” I brushed my hair behind my ears and tried so hard not to look around that I must have looked everywhere at once.
“Eddie, hey,” Jonathan said to a man behind me. He was Jonathan’s age, bulky and handsome with receding black hair he brushed forward in a way that suggested he did it for style, not to cover a balding head.
“Jon, what’s happening? Did you watch the game? We got killed.”
“I can’t watch anymore,” Jonathan answered.
“Falling down on the job, as usual,” Eddie said before he looked at me. “I’m Ed. We played for Penn together.”
“Played what?” I was embarrassed I didn’t know, but not too embarrassed to ask.
Eddie looked at Jonathan, then back at me. “You’re not one of the sisters?”
Jonathan smiled, so I knew Eddie wasn’t implying anything terrible. “This is Monica. No relation,” Jonathan said.
“Ah,” Eddie said, holding out his hand to shake mine. “Sorry then. Nice to meet you. Jonathan pitched. I played the bench.”
“Nice to meet you, Ed.”
“Monica’s a singer,” Jonathan said, “but she finds time to follow the Dodgers.”
“My sympathies to both of you,” Eddie said.
“I’m from Echo Park,” I said. “I don’t know this guy’s excuse.”
Jonathan took mock offense, looking at his watch. “Don’t you have a gig?”
I sipped the last of my scotch. The ice cubes were huge, so I couldn’t hold one in my mouth for Jonathan’s benefit the way I wanted to. “I do. The late dinner crowd at Frontage awaits. Ed, it was nice to meet you.”
“Oh, that’s you,” he said.
“Maybe. I guess that depends on what you heard.”
“I heard someone’s taking the house down over there.”
“I doubt it was me.”
Jonathan put down his drink. “It’s her. She’s not as modest with a microphone in front of her.” He addressed me, “Come on, let me get you down to the car.”
We said our goodbyes, and when Jonathan walked me out, he put his hand on my back. My skin shivered where he touched.
“Thanks for that,” I said in the hallway outside the elevator. “That guy, he’s important in my world. You put my face in a good context.”
“My pleasure, and just so you know, I wouldn’t have said anything if you didn’t sing the way you do.”
The elevator was empty. I kissed him on the way down, not as a lead into sex, but because he’d moved me by talking about me the way he did. His arms went around my waist and cradled my back, his mouth returning my affections, matching the tone and substance of what I was trying to say. That he wanted my body was enough for me, but supporting my work was a new and different thing, and it required a different kind of kiss. I wished there were more floors, because the doors opened before I’d appreciated him enough.
Lil got out when she saw us approach. I had enough time to make it back to my car and get to Frontage early enough to get made up.
“After your gig,” Jonathan said, “text me?”
“I usually go out after with my friends.”
He looked me up and down as if he was eating me raw, just like he’d done and tried to hide the first time we’d met. Only now he didn’t have to conceal it. “If you don’t mind unfinished business, it’s okay with me,” he said.
I got into the Bentley, and he walked back into the club.
four
The dressing room at Frontage hadn’t improved a single bit since my first night there two weeks earlier, but my attitude toward it had. We’d begun on a Thursday night, and they’d asked us back for Sundays and Tuesdays as well, until we dried up or found something better to do. Bitch and moan though I might, they paid in cash and didn’t suck us dry for incidentals. After that first show, we brought people in, so they started feeding us dinner and slipping a few drinks our way after the set. I enjoyed being treated like something besides a piece of drink-slinging eye-candy or a desperate whore singing for nickels.
Gabby was already there, smearing beige under her eyes. Tonight was our night. WDE had booked a table. Rhee, the hostess, confirmed it was true, and at my request, she put them by the speaker on the left, which had the warmest sound.
“Did you check your seat for gum?” Gabby asked.
“No gum,” I replied, clicking through the bottles and tubes in my makeup bag.
“Vocal chords attached?”
“I hope you get carpal tunnel.”
“Bitch,” she said.
“Snob,” I replied. We smiled at each other through the mirror.
I’d met Gabby during my first day in L.A. Performing. I was tall but gangly and awkward. Glasses and braces, the whole thing. All the other kids seemed to know each other. They’d all come from a music charter on the west side, slipping into ninth grade at the exalted magnet as planned. I’d filled out my application and bussed myself to the audition behind my parents’ backs. I informed them of where I was going to high school when the acceptance letter came.
So in that first week, while I was getting my
bearings, Gabby and her crowd had themselves completely together. Totally unprepared for the competition, I was subjected to laughter that may or may not have been directed at the fact that I was off half a key, fell victim to broken guitar strings, and found a blue gum wad on my drum skin. During last period on my first Thursday, when I sat down on a stool and it broke under me to the music of everyone’s laughter, I ran out crying.
The last person I’d expected ran out after me: Gabrielle. She laughed the loudest, stared the hardest, flipped her blonde hair with the most vigor. Before she fell apart at twenty-two, she was the most together girl I’d ever met.
“What do you want?” I’d shouted when she followed me into the bathroom. “Why are you all so mean to me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You laughed when I fell.”
“It was funny. I mean, you’ve been here a week, and if there’s a broken chair or a guitar with a busted string, you pick it. The guys have a pool about when you’re going to break your glasses in P.E.”
I’d wanted to fight harder with her. I’d wanted to blame her for a week’s worth of misery, but the fact was, I had chosen that guitar because it was blue, and I didn’t check the strings. The gum did look pretty old, but I’d blamed them anyway, and I’d sat in that chair because it was far away from everyone.
“Everyone says you’re a snob,” said Gabby.
“I am not a snob. I’m a bitch.”
I’d chewed the inside of my cheek for a second, because awkward girls weren’t supposed to risk saying things like that to cool girls. After a second, she laughed, and I did too.
“Come sit with us at lunch,” she’d said. “I think my brother has a crush on you, so… gross. Okay?”
She’d folded me into the in crowd from that lunch on, like a complementary voice in a symphony, just adding me as if I was naturally in the same rhythm and key, and my entrance simply hadn’t been arranged for the first few measures.
“You calm?” I asked Gabby in the dressing room as she poked at something nonexistent on her face. She had to be. Since my night with Jonathan when he’d promised to call Arnie Sanderson, she’d been blissed out. The call had been totally unnecessary, but any light at the end of her tunnel was a positive.
“No, I am not calm.” She giggled. “Look!” She held her hands out. They were shaking. Generally, one wouldn’t want that in a pianist, but in Gabby’s case, as soon as she sat down, her fingers and body would quiet, and she’d be completely on top of it. “I got everyone from school in. I called in every favor. And the whole gang from Thelonius? All here. Darren, too.”
“He bring his new girl?”
“I have no idea. Do you feel strong on Cheek to Cheek?” We’d worked on a rendition that sounded as though Gershwin had been talking about more than a little facial contact. All the songs were shaking out that way, and it brought them in.
“We’re good on Cheek to Cheek.”
“It’s happening, Mon. Really happening.”
“This is a long process.” I took out my makeup bag and smeared back on what Jonathan had kissed off. “We’re not signing any contracts in the morning. We don’t even have a disc or anything.”
“You said not to worry about that.”
“I didn’t worry about it until Jonathan introduced me to Eddie Walker as if I didn’t know who he was, and if he’d asked me for a disc, I wouldn’t have had one.”
I watched her in the mirror and saw her eyes go blank. She was doing a calculation in her head, and she took a second to come up with the answer.
“Penn,” she said.
“Yes, they went to University of Pennsylvania together, but do you know what sport they played?”
When Gabby didn’t know something, she didn’t pretend she did, so her answer came quickly. “No.”
“Baseball.”
She pushed her mascara stick into the tube slowly, staring at it. I could almost see her filing the information and cross-referencing it with every other piece of Hollywood intelligence in her head.
“Thanks for doing this,” she said. “I know you didn’t want to do a restaurant gig, but I feel really good about it, and I couldn’t do it without you.”
“Well, I was wrong. I should have said yes right off. I mean, the thing about performing is you have to perform, otherwise you’re all talk, right?” I said.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. If we get WDE behind us, we can maybe start doing your songs.”
I shrugged. My songs were rage-filled punk diatribes and wouldn’t translate into the loungey thing I was doing with Gabby. If we landed an agent as a piano-driven lounge act, I had no idea what I would do with him. I couldn’t go from eXene to Sade on a dime. As a keyboardist, Gabby could play anything at any time, but I would be in a world of shit at the first hint of success working at Frontage. I had zero songs ready.
“I didn’t tell you something about meeting Eddie today,” I said, trying to sound flip.
“He cute?”
“Yes. And he’d heard about us.”
“He was trying to get into your pants.”
“No, he didn’t know it was me singing here when he mentioned it. I mean, he did, but he could have just said something polite like, oh, how nice. But he didn’t. He was all, Oh, that’s you?”
“What did he say, exactly?”
“He’d heard someone was bringing down the house at Frontage.”
“Someone?”
I got defensive. She’d gotten me through high school. I’d never abandon her. “He didn’t phrase it like it was just one person. Could have been a swing ensemble from the way he said it.”
Gabby tossed her sticks and tubes back in her little bag. “I’d better get out there,” she said. “I have to warm them up.”
We hugged like sisters, and I went back to making my face presentable.
When I told Jonathan he was lucky to have sisters, I’d meant it. I hated being an only child. I hated when my mother looked at me as if I’d somehow disappointed her by being her first and last, as if it was my fault they found cancer during the C-section. I hated being the only kid in the house. I hated being responsible for every success and failure of my parents’ children. The attention was great, except when I wanted to die from it.
If anything happens to the only child, there’s no backup. If she’s a drug addict, all the kids are drug addicts. If she dies in a car accident, suddenly the family is dissolved.
In one way, I never felt right around people, and in another, I craved their company. I needed them too much. So I had tons of acquaintances, maybe four hundred people in a loose music-scene around Echo Park and Silver Lake. I could fill a club when I needed to, but outside the guys who wanted to screw me, I inspired no closeness in anyone besides Darren and Gabby, who were orphans and needed me as much as I needed them.
five
I poked my head out into the restaurant. Darren was at the bar with a huddled group. I recognized them: Theo, Mark, Ursula, Mollie, and Raven. Darren was Mister Popularity. He could bust out an inside joke with anyone he met on the east side. He had an ear for language and a way of listening that gave him a vocal “in” with whoever was in earshot.
I didn’t see a girl I didn’t recognize, so he either came without her or I knew her. I deliberately didn’t look at the table by the warm speaker. I didn’t want to see if they’d shown or if it was a table full of assistants getting drunk on the company dime. I didn’t want to see an empty table with a big “reserved” card on it. I didn’t want to see anything at all; I only needed to feel.
I’d been drawing off the energy from my night with Jonathan for two weeks, and after that afternoon at the Loft Club, I felt renewed and concerned. I couldn’t let myself depend on him getting me all hot and bothered so I could sing to the throb between my legs. I had no idea how much longer he’d drag me around by the panties, but it surely wouldn’t be long enough to make a career.
Rhee stood by the door at the opposit
e side of the room, hair up, a big smile her default setting. A black woman in her forties, she didn’t look a day over thirty. She winked when she saw me and tilted her head to the table by the warm speaker, which I couldn’t see from where I stood.
It was go time, as my dad would say.
The management always put fifteen minutes at the beginning of the schedule for the talent to walk around doing a meet and greet. My disdain for that type of gig had evaporated when I realized what shrewd businesspeople ran the operation. My job wasn’t to fade into the background as I’d originally thought, but to make the diners feel as though they’d walked into a place where they were known, and special, and wanted. The goal was repeat business, and though new customers were encouraged, the management found people who came back regularly were better tippers, better customers, and better friends than a constant stream of trend followers.
Gabby was already improvising something on the piano in the center of the dining room. Her eyes were closed. She wouldn’t even know it was time to start until I put my hand on her shoulder in twelve minutes. Darren was in the middle of an earnest discussion with Theo and Mark, and I broke in to greet them.
“You guys,” I said to Darren, Theo, and Mark as a group, “please look like I’m cheering you up when I sing, okay? You’re talking like you’re at a funeral.”
Theo, who had Maori tattoos crawling up his neck despite being a skinny Scottish dude, pointed an unlit cigarette at me. “You tell him to get his sorry ass over to Boing Boing Studios. He’s a man without a band. It’s a crime.”
Darren rolled his eyes, and I put my hand on his arm, speaking for him. “He told you he wants to mature as an artist before selling his ass to the man, right? He told you he wants to develop his process before he starts playing for other people’s glory?”
“Oy,” Theo said. “My ears hurt with this.”
Mark cut in. With his narrow-lapel jacket and horn-rimmed black glasses, he couldn’t have been more Theo’s opposite. “You need to get in your ten thousand hours, buddy. That’s the rule. You can’t master an art in under ten thousand hours. Documented. You can’t develop a process in a vacuum. Bank on that.”
