Beg

Beg

by

CD Reiss

Los Angeles Nights – Book One

Copyright © 2013

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the
United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the
material or artwork herein is prohibited.

This book is a work of
fiction. Any similarities to places, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental

.

Cover Art designed by the author

“I’ve Got
You Under My Skin” Lyrics by 
Cole
 
Porter

CHAPTER 1.

At the height of singing the last note, when my lungs were still
full and I was switching from pure physical power to emotional thrust, I was
blindsided by last night’s dream. Like most dreams, it hadn’t had a story. I
was on top of a grand piano on the rooftop bar of Hotel K. The fact that the
real hotel didn’t have a piano on the roof notwithstanding, I was on it and
naked from the waist down, propped on my elbows. My knees were spread farther
apart than physically possible. Customers drank their thirty-dollar drinks and
watched as I sang. The song didn’t have words, but I knew them well, and as the
strange man with his head between my legs licked me, I sang harder and harder
until I woke up with an arched back and soaked sheets, hanging on to a middle C
for dear life.

Same as the last note of our last song, and I held it like a
stranger was pleasuring me on a nonexistent piano.
 
I drew that last note out for everything
it was worth, pulling from deep inside my diaphragm, feeling the song rattle
the bones of my rib cage, sweat pouring down my face. It was my note. The dream
told me so. Even after Harry stopped strumming and
Gabby’s
keyboard softened to silence, I croaked out the last tearful strain as if
gripping the edge of a precipice.

When I opened my eyes in the dark club, I knew I had them; every
one of them stared at me as if I had just ripped out their souls, put them in
envelopes, and sent them back to their mothers, COD. Even in the few silent
seconds after I stopped, when most singers would worry that they’d lost the
audience, I knew I hadn’t; they just needed permission to applaud. When I
smiled, permission was granted, and they clapped all right.

Our band, Spoken Not Stirred, had brought down the
Thelonius
Room. A year of writing and rehearsing the songs
and a month getting bodies in the door was paying off right here, right now.

The crowd. That was what it was all about. That was why I busted
my ass. That was why I had shut out everything in my life but putting a roof
over my head and food in my mouth. I didn’t want anything from them but that
ovation.

I bowed and went off stage, followed by the band. Harry bolted to
the bathroom to throw up, as always. I could still hear the applause and
banging feet. The room held a hundred people, and the audience sounded like a
thousand. I wanted to take the moment to bathe in something other than the
disappointment and failure that accompanied a career in music, but I heard
Gabrielle next to me, tapping her right thumb and middle finger. Her gaze was
blank, settled in a corner, her eyes as big as teacups. I followed that gaze to
exactly nothing. The corner was empty, but she stared as if a mirror into
herself stood there, and she didn’t like what she saw.

I glanced at Darren, our drummer. He stared back at me, then at his
sister, who had tapped those fingers since puberty.

“Gabby,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

Darren poked her bicep. “Gabs? Shit together?”

“Fuck off, Darren,” Gabby said flatly, not looking away from the
empty corner.

Darren and I looked at each other. We were each other’s first
loves, back in L.A. Performing Arts High, and even after the soft, simple
breakup, we had deepened our friendship to the point we didn’t need to talk
with words.

We said to each other, with our expressions, that Gabby was in
trouble again.

“We rule!” Harry gave a fist pump as he exited the bathroom,
still buttoning up his pants. “You were awesome.” He punched me in the arm,
oblivious to what was going on with Gabby. “My heart broke a little at ‘Split
Me.’”

“Thanks,” I said without emotion. I did feel gratitude, but we
had other concerns at the moment. “Where’s
Vinny
?”

Our manager,
Vinny
Mardigian
,
appeared as if summoned, all glad-handing and smiles. Such a dick. I really
couldn’t stand him, but he’d seemed confident and competent when we met.

“You happy?” I said. “We sold all our tickets at full price. Now
maybe next time we won’t have to pay to play?”

“Hello, Monica
Sexybitch
.” That was his
pet name for me. The guy had the personality of a landfill and the drive of a
shark in bloody waters. “Nice to see you too. I got Performer’s Agency on the
line. Their guy’s right outside.”

Great. I needed representation from the
The
Rinkydink
Agency like I needed a hole in the head.
But I was an artist, and I was supposed to take whatever the industry handed me
with a smile and spread legs.

Vinny
, of course, couldn’t shut up
worth a damn. He was high on Performer’s Agency and the worldwide fame he
thought they would get us. He didn’t realize half a step forward was just as
good as a full step back. “You got a crowd out there asking for an encore.
Everybody here does their job, then everybody’s happy.”

I listened, and sure enough, they were still clapping, and Gabby
was still staring into the corner.

“Let them beg,” I said.

***

Darren took Gabby home after the encore, which she played like
the crazy prodigy she was, then she blanked out again. Her depression was
ameliorated by music and brought on by just about anything, even if she was
taking her meds.

She’d attempted suicide two years before after a few weeks of
corner-staring and complaining of not being able to feel anything about
anything. I’d been the one to find her in the kitchen, bleeding into the sink.
That had been terrific for everyone. She took my second bedroom, and Darren
moved from a roommate-infested guest house in West Hollywood to a studio a
block away. We played music together because music was what we did, and because
it kept Gabby sane, Darren close, and me from screwing up. But it didn’t even
keep us in hot dogs. We all worked, and until I got my current gig at the
rooftop bar at Hotel K, I had to give up Starbucks because I couldn’t rub two
nickels together to make heat.

Because Spoken Not Stirred had drawn more people than the cost of
our guaranteed tickets, we’d made three hundred dollars that night. Fifteen
percent went to
Vinny
Landfillian
.
Sixty-eight dollars paid for Harry’s parking ticket because he figured if he
was loading his bass and amp, he could park in a loading zone on the Sunset
Strip before six o’clock. We split the rest four ways.

Hotel K was a spanking new modernist, thirty-story diamond in a
one-story stucco
shitpile
of a neighborhood. The
rooftop bar thing in L.A. had gotten out of hand. You couldn’t swing a dead
talent agent without hitting some new construction with a
barside
pool on the roof and thumping music day and night. The upside of the epidemic
was that waitress service was the norm, and tall, skinny girls who could slip
between name-dropping drunks while holding heavy trays over their heads without
clocking anyone were an absolute necessity. The downside for someone tall and
skinny like myself was my
replaceability
. You
couldn’t swing a tall, skinny girl in L.A. without hitting another one.

Darren and I had taken too long discussing who would watch Gabby.
He convinced her to stay at his place for the night, though “convinced” might
not be the word to use when talking about someone who didn’t care about where
she slept, or anything, one way or the other.

I ran from the elevator to the hotel locker room, the fifty bucks
I’d made for holding a hundred people in my palm light in my pocket. I peeled
off my jacket and stuffed it in my locker, then pulled my shirt off. I didn’t
have a second to spare before Yvonne, who I was relieving, started chewing me
out for stranding her on the floor. I yanked a low-cut dress that showed more
leg than modesty out of my bag and wrestled into it.

“You’re late,” Freddie, my manager, said. He stank of cigarettes,
which I found disgusting.

“I’m sorry, I had a gig.” I kicked off my shoes and pulled my
pants off from under my dress. I had no time to worry about what Freddie
thought of me.

“Bully for you.” Freddie crossed his arms, scrunching his brown
pinstripe suit. He had a mole on his cheek and wore a puckered expression even
when he looked down my shirt, which was almost every time we talked.

I didn’t wait to argue. I slipped back into my shoes, slapped my
locker shut, and ran toward the floor.

“Yvonne!” I caught her in the back hall as she folded a wad of tips
into her pocket.

“Monica, girl! Where were you?”

“I’m sorry. Thanks for covering my tables. Can I make it up to
you?”

“I don’t get home in time, you can pay the sitter an extra hour.”

“No problem,” I said, though it was a big problem.

“Jonathan Drazen is at your table.” She put her hand to her
heart. “He’s hot, and he’ll tip if he likes what he sees. So be nice.” She
handed me the tickets for my station.

Drazen was my boss’s boss. He owned the hotel, but we’d never
crossed paths. Apparently, he traveled a lot, and he spent little or no time on
the roof when he was in town, so our paths hadn’t crossed.
 
This development was more annoying than
anything. I’d just gotten the ovation of my life at a really cool club and was
bathing in the warm validation. I didn’t need to prove myself all over again,
and based on what? If it wasn’t my music, I didn’t care.

The place was packed: wall-to-wall
Eurotrash
,
Hollywood heavyweights, and assorted hangers-on. The pool was a big rectangle
in the center of the expanse. Red chairs surrounded it, and a large cocktail
area with tables and chairs sat off to the side. Little tents with couches
inside outlined most of the roof, and when the curtains closed, you left them
closed unless someone looked as though they’d taken off without paying.

I stood at the service bar, flipping through my tickets. Five
tables, two with little star punch-outs in the upper right hand corners. Put
there by Freddie, they meant someone important was at the table. Extra care was
required.

My first tray was a star punch-out. I put on a smile and
navigated through the crowd to deliver the tray to a table in the corner. Four
men and I knew Drazen right away. He had red hair cut just below the ears,
disheveled in that absolutely precise way. He wore jeans and a grey shirt that
showed off his broad shoulders and hard biceps. His full lips stretched across
flawless, natural teeth when he saw his tray coming, and I was caught a little
off guard by how much I couldn’t stop looking at him.

“H-Hi,” I stammered. “I’ll be your server.” I smiled. That always
worked. Then I thought happy thoughts because that made my smile genuine, and I
watched Drazen move his gaze from my smiling face, over my breasts, to my hips,
stopping at my calves. I felt as if I were being applauded again.

He looked back at my face. I stared right back at him, and he
pursed his lips. I’d caught him looking, and he seemed justifiably embarrassed.

“Hello,” he said. “You’re new.” His voice resonated like a cello,
even over the music.

I checked Yvonne’s notes and picked up a short glass with ice and
amber liquid from the tray. “You have the Jameson’s?”

“Thank you.” He nodded to me, keeping his eyes on my face and off
my body. Even then, I felt as if I were being eaten alive, sucked to fluid,
mouthful by mouthful. A liquid feeling came over me, and I stopped doing my job
for half a second while I allowed myself to be completely saturated by that
warm feeling. In that moment, of course, someone, a man judging from the weight
of impact, pushed or got pushed, and my tray went flying.

For a second, the glasses hung in the air like a handful of
glitter, and I thought I could catch them. I felt the sound of the impact too
long after three gin and tonics and a Jameson on the rocks splashed over each
guest. I was shocked into silence as everyone at the table stood, hands out,
dripping, clothes getting darker at crotches and chests. A collective gasp rose
from everyone within splash distance.

Freddie appeared like a zombie smelling fresh brains. “You’re
fired.” He turned to Drazen and said, “Sir, can I get you anything? We have
shirts—”

Drazen shook a splash of liquid off his hand. “It’s fine.”

“I am so sorry,” I said.

Freddie got between me and my former boss, as if I would beg him
for my job back, which I’d never do, and said, “Get your things.”

CHAPTER 2.

Fuck it. Fuck that job and everything else. I’d get another one.
I promised myself, I was going to make it big, and when I did, I would come in
here with my freaking entourage and Freddie was going to serve me whatever I
wanted for no tip at all. Not even a cent. And Jonathan Drazen was going to sit
by me and look at me just like he did before I spilled gin and tonic all over
him, but like I’m an equal, not some little piece of candy working for tips.