The Rock Star Next Door, a Modern Fairytale (37 page)

There was nothing worse than a rock icon that didn’t have t
he good grace to retire while he
was still popular. There were many of those, still touring in
to their fifties and sixties--playing
to
smaller and smaller crowds. That wasn’t for Lex. He was on the crest of a new career, a new path, a new found spiritual enlightenment and he was glad to be leaving the daunting life of touring with
its
sordid business of groupies, drugged out roadies and trashed hotel rooms.

He
evolved past his stage persona. Hell, he’d started with the predatory male gig when he was just nineteen, had refined it to become a more cultured, suave master of seduction a
s he matured. A
t thirty two
he
didn’t want the pressure of being the ideal fantasy lover to thousands of screaming, lust-filled females as they threw their bras
and
panties at him on stage. At first, it was like a drug, the power he held over women. The first time a girl took off her shirt and asked him to sign her breast, he’d been blown away.
The first time
a woman
pulled down her pants and asked him to sign her ass, he’d thought he’
d died and went to
heaven.
Twelve years later, it was just anothe
r
day in the life of a rock star
.
And a lot of those asses he had to sign
had zits on them, too.

“Hey, dude?
” A voice intruded upon his meditations to the
soothing
waves and
the lunar goddess. It was Steve
from next door. “How’s it going, man?”

Lex turned to the lanky figure, not sure of what to say. “I’m alive.”

“Sorry
.” The skinny
keyboardist
offered his hand. “If there’s anything I can do, man, just name it. I’m there
for you
.”

Lex kicked at the sand with his boot
and pondered the genuine sorrow he hea
rd in Steve’s voice. “Thanks. I
f
--if
there’s eve
r a time she’s in trouble,”  He
hated
himself for what he was saying b
ut he still loved Jessie
. No matter what, he’d always love her.
“What I’m trying to say is,
if she’s in trouble, sick,
in nee
d of a friend or a favor;
call me
. Let me help, no
matter what she says. And,
if you’d just let me know that she’s okay from time to time.”

“Sure.
I will.
” Steve see
med surprised
. “
But, y
ou c
ould call her yourself
.”

“No.
I can’t.
”

“
S
he
still
loves you, du
de. I know s
he does.
Things have been rough lately. She’s worried about Jack
.
She
just
needs time
.
You two
belong together.”

“I waited, for ten years, for my last gi
rlfriend. I don’t have any more time to give.
”

“I get that. Still. Jess is worth the wait. She wouldn’t two time you, like that other bitch. It’s not in her.
Hey, care to drive up to Moonshadows for
a
drink?”

“No
.
” Lex shrugged, pulling at his earring. “I’m up to my ears in
my
work, I was just taking a break to clear my head. Alcohol hardly helps the creative process.”

“Another time, then?” Steve squashed his
cigarette
beneath his feet as he spoke. He looked back up to the house. “We’re trying to hammer out the kinks before we enter the studio to lay tracks. We have
a few days left
and lots of crap to get through.”

“Keep it straight
and
sober, you’ll write better material.”

“I wish my
band
mates had that theory down. Jess and I do most of the co
mposing, at least lately
cuz we’re the only two who are sober
.”

The sliding glass door opened
and Steve was being waved to return to their jam session by one of the guys. “Hey, string bean
.
” B
y that address, Lex
identified the
waving
silhouette as Jack. “Get your ass in here. Darrell’s messing with your boards, man, he’ll trash our demo tape
.
”

“Shit
.
” Steve swore. “We
’re past deadline by a week
and now the monkeys are playing with my sound equipm
ent. Sometimes I hate this life.
”

Lex nodded
as he started to walk down the shore in the opposite direction.

Yes, the star machine was a brutal mistre
ss. Success in the music world was precarious and
fraught with pressures that drove some of the brightest
musicians
to suicide.

Chapter Nineteen

A
month passed si
nce Lex and Jessie’s breakup
.

A
miserable four weeks in which she managed to convince herself she’d made the right d
ecision. It
was
moving too fast,
Jessie reminded herself
almost
h
ourly. Her family dynamic imploded over the proposed marriage
and
truth be told, she didn’t
know Lex that well
. There could be something dark and sinister lurking behind that magnetic smile and those sensuous blue eyes.

N
o matter how she tried to spin it in her mind,
Jessie couldn’t convince herself
she was
right.

Her heart ac
hed for just a glimpse of him
or
a
word between them.
Lex still resided next door. She didn’t see him. His c
ar remained parked in the drive. H
is
housekeeper and his
agent seemed to come and go, but Lex had become invisible. He m
ade no further contact with her. He
seemed to fade away
like a mirage
into the Malibu sands. 

All that was left was t
o throw herself into her career to
try to get over him.

Jessie
did just that
. She ate on the run, slept as little as possible and spent t
he long lonely nights
in the recording studio wit
h rest of the band. They had
some pretty intense jam sessions, a few heated arguments over chord structures and melodies, but all in al
l, they managed to pull it
together by sheer dint of will.

Kyra showed up infrequently for the studio recording sessions. Kyra’s presence added tension to the sessions on the sparse days she showed up. She nursed a deep grudge against Jessie for ‘dumping Lex’ as she put it. Kyra didn’t
even want to hear Jessie’s reasoning. S
h
e
made her mind up that she was marrying Mike, and that meant she was taking his side in the matter of who was at fault
in Jessie and Lex’s breakup; it was Jessie without question
. Kyra had been
her best
friend all through
school. Now she appeared to resent
Jessie, almost to the point of bitter loathing.

“You
could have had everything, Jess.” She sneered
one afternoon
. “Success
and a man who loves you enough to marry you, just like that,
with
no prenuptial clauses, no
long, drawn out engagement
to see if you work out
.
Even I don’t have that.
In ten years you’ll be alone, a
has-been in the music industry
and I’ll be Mrs. Michael Parks, with three kids and a house in the canyons. A guy like Lex comes along once, Jessie, and you blew it.”

“Thanks for the heads ups.
” Jessie muttered. “I’m t
wenty
four and doomed to be an old maid
. And you accuse me of reading
too many trashy romance novels?
You make it sound like I’ll never find another guy.”

“Not another Lex.” Kyra stubbornly affirmed. “He was the kind of guy you always talked about, dreamed about, a guy who would waltz in and sweep
you off your feet. Well, he did. A
nd
then
you got scared and du
mped him
.
What’s wrong with you?
”

“Nothing
, from where I’m looking.” Rick
, the tall, l
anky sound engineer came up behind
them un
expectedly. “And don’t forget, p
izza after this session.” He smiled at Jessie, giving her a seductive wink. 

Jessie smiled back, grateful for his kind intervention. Try as she might, she just couldn’t muster a
nything but friendship for Rick
and he was doing his best at trying to make her fall in love with him.

“Oh, you’re pathetic.
” Kyra groused. “And he’s ano
rexic.” She gave Rick’s
fleeti
ng figure a look of disapproval
.

Rick
was very thin. Jessie had to agree as she watched him slip on his headphones and sit at the console behin
d the glass. He was six foot four
and probably weighed about on
e hundred
and ten
pounds
soaking wet.
It would be like making love to a Q-tip. She laughed at the bizarre image of being with the dangerously thin Rick. The mem
ory of Lex’s hard, solid biceps and
full toned chest made any charms that Rick might
possess fade by comparison. T
he soun
d engineer was nice
and companionable; a distraction
at best from the pain
of losing Lex.

And Rick
knew his business in the sound room. All who knew him dubbed him ‘The Wiza
rd’, and the familiar chant of
‘we’re off to see the wizard’ had a very different meaning for the musicians in the sound studio. He’d been showing a great deal of interest in Jessie since they began their studio work, asking her nearly every night to go out and grab som
ething to eat or go for a
drink after they called it
a
wrap.
Jessie did go with him, twice, but she made Steve go with them so it wasn’t too cozy.

Kyra ha
d the game point; he wasn’t Lex.
She found herself constantly c
omparing the two men, with Rick
coming up with a heavy deficit each time.

Kyra didn’t know the new songs. A
nother guitarist was hired in her pl
ace to play the backup tracks for the new release
. And the little twit
didn
’t care. She
wanted to make sure her face would
still grace the cover of the CD and
her royalty checks would keep coming in,
but she didn’t care about jamming with the band anymore.

That
set Jack off. 
Af
ter Kyra
made her feelings known
he
refused to do another vocal track until Kyra lef
t the studio. After she left,
their studio session dissolved into a gripe session, complete w
ith Max’s input and his assurances
Kyra would get her portion for this album, but no more if she continued in this destructive vein. If the record execs learned about her deliberate absences, she’d be fired, her contract s
hredded, and that would cut the last badly frayed cord on
a friends
hip that spanned more than a
decade.

The growing chasm between them grieved Jessie. Not only had she
just lost the
love of her life, she wa
s losing her best
friend
and she did
n’t understand why. They shared
f
irst dates as uncertain
six
graders. They
confided secrets about crushes, kisses and teenage angst. Together, they had taken that first sip of forbidde
n alcohol at a homecoming party
and
shared the same bathroom
when they ended up tossing their cookies
afterward
.