This Is How It Really Sounds (11 page)

Maybe there was something there. Already he could see himself finishing the song, cutting a quick demo. Some quiet acoustic guitar riffs and just a bass drum to give some shape to the silence in the background … His own voice repeating,
“Vanity Fair.”
Then the fucking label guy saying, “Too Mellencamp.”

Fuck them.
He tried to add on to
Vanity Fair
in his head. What came next, after the magazine? Some lost love? Lost opportunity?
Used to go to the races, with the roar and the lights,
something, something,
feeling all right … You were supposed to be mine, not this broken time,
something, something, something,
Vanity Fair
.

It was stupid.
Feelin' all right
was the most overused phrase in rock, and besides, Joe Cocker had squeezed everything out of the words that was worth squeezing.
Go to the races
, yeah, that was original! We're off to the races. A day at the races, it's a horse race, a rat race—never heard any of those before! The whole thing: some guy longing for a different life, shinier than his own: how many songs had been written about that? What the hell did he have to add to that wide, sorry genre?

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table and his forehead on his fingertips, staring down at the unfocused furrows of black-and-white print over his laptop. When the label guys got in your head, you were fucked. Period. It's what they did: they killed shit with their labels, hung a word on it that dragged it down like an anchor.

He hadn't finished a song in two years, just a bunch of fragments that he always told people were waiting for some overdubbing, like a new album was going to be popping out next Thursday, or maybe the Thursday after that. He didn't even call up Duffy to work on things anymore. Duffy'd gotten a regular gig with Face the Cobra, and though he'd never actually say no, he always had a scheduling problem, and even when he did come over they ended up mostly drinking and talking about old days, or he'd bring his wife and she'd bring a friend and they'd just hang out by the pool and drink gin and tonics and whatever. Because what they both knew was that even if Pete Harrington wrote a good song, it didn't matter anymore. A song was just a shell. You needed the backing that would put it in heavy rotation all over America and send it ringing through the buzzing electric field that hung above the earth, and from there into people's ears and into their brains, where they made it something private and glowing of their own. That energy took promoters and publicists and aggressive management. It took money, and nobody was going to put that money into a forty-five-year-old lead singer without a band whose main gig now was doing covers of his twenty-five-year-old self.

He drank the last of the mango and vodka cocktail and pushed away his Healthy Choices oatmeal, wished he'd ordered bacon instead. He flipped the page of the magazine. More noise about the financial crisis: some billionaire who bet against Mom and Pop and won big when the show collapsed. Read about that shit in the papers, the Wall Street guys walking away with millions while all these other people lost their houses and their retirements. At least he'd ducked that one. That's what he hired money guys for.

Which was why the whole thing with the Boxster didn't make sense. It was probably his fault for not putting it in valet parking, but there was a space almost right in front of the Rainbow, so, like, why not? When he paid the tab and got to the street, there was a large light-brown man getting into his car.

“Hey!” Pete ran up and grabbed the edge of the door to keep the guy from closing it, and for a second he regretted it as the big man slowly got out of the driver's seat and stood up in front of him. His chest and belly formed a bulging slab of black polo shirt underneath his gray sport coat, and the overall impression was of immovable bulk, detailed out by an oversize face with a razor-thin beard running along the jawline. “Pete Harrington,” he said.

Pete felt that little positive charge that he always got when he was recognized. “That's right. What are you doing with my car, bro?” He tried not to let it sound whiney, but it was hard, because the man was so damn big. Big men and sexy women messed with your perspective whether you liked it or not.

The guy pulled some papers out of his coat and spouted a bunch of noise at him about no payments for sixty days and the leasing company and repossession.

Harrington looked at the form. It had his name and address on it, even his social security number. Then a bunch of legal stuff. “That's bullshit! It's paid on the fucking”—he wasn't really sure when it was paid, because Lev always paid it for him, but he took a swing at it anyway—“the fucking seventeenth of every month!”

“You gotta settle that with them.
Here
…” He handed the musician the leasing company's business card. “Call this number.” The man seemed to sense that Pete wasn't going to push it, and he squeezed himself back into the tiny front seat. He started the engine and looked up at him. “I love your music, Pete! You're on my favorites list.”

“Awesome! Which cuts?”

The man put the car in gear and it started to roll forward. “Everything up to when you went solo. It was all downhill after that.”

The tires chirped and Pete Harrington watched the yellow Boxster disappear over the hill toward Doheny.
Thanks, man,
he thought.
Thanks for your support.

*   *   *

They met up for lunch at a restaurant he'd read about in
Los Angeles
magazine, the latest French-sounding place on Avenue of the Stars where a lot of the Creative Artists agents took their clients for lunch. Table for four for Mr. Harrington. The valet showed the proper professional respect,
Hello, Mr. Harrington,
even though Pete thought he saw a glimmer of surprise at the Volkswagen he drove up in. It was the extra car he kept around for out-of-town visitors. “Mine's in the shop,” he explained, and he gave the valet a twenty-dollar tip, just to show him he could. The hostess was a nice-looking brunette, probably thirty-five, professional hostess-actress type you found in the high-end restaurants. She recognized him and told him she liked his music and she looked like she just might be doable if he took her out to dinner and a club. He ordered a vodka and mango cocktail as she led him to his table. “Bring it quick!” He smiled as they came into view of the three men. “It looks like I'm going to need it.”

Bobby was sitting next to his investment guy, Jason, and across from them was Lev, his accountant. He could sense a weird energy: the three men weren't chewing over the menu or bullshitting about little stuff. They were huddled together talking something over, and Bobby was saying something low and sharp-sounding to Jason as he and the hostess reached them. There was an orchid on the table and sweating glasses of sparkling water with lemon wedges next to the plates.

“Hey Pete!” Jason came halfway to his feet and stuck out his hand like he was grabbing on to a life preserver. He had a sickly look of welcome on his face that hung like a stink in the space between them. He was about ten years older than Pete, a small man with thinning hair that was badly dyed to an army-boot black. It never worked on those older guys, like
, Hey, your face is all wrinkly and you've got the hair of a twenty-year-old? I don't think so.
Jason wore a suit and tie, as always, because the financial guys always wanted to show how permanent and conservative they were, and how carefully they were watching your money. He didn't put out a lot of confidence at the moment: he was cringing in his corner of the booth, avoiding contact with Bobby's heavy body as if Bobby was an electric fence. It looked like he'd been brought here at gunpoint.

Bobby and Lev both stood up and gave him a serious greeting. Lev, his accountant, was wearing a short-sleeve silk shirt with royal flushes on it that he'd picked up in Bangkok. He had about a dozen from the same store. He'd told Pete all about it one time, but Pete had forgotten what it was that made them special. Same as the hipster goatee reduced to a half-inch patch of beard on his chin, a style that had been around for a while but that he must have figured was still current. Bobby was as usual: a big curly head of black hair, a dark T-shirt over his gut. Over six feet tall. He'd been a road manager before he took on all the management duties and he still had that roadie vibe. The guy who could heft an amp into a semi at two in the morning and still stiff-arm some late-night autograph seeker when necessary.

Except for the weird vibe, this wasn't so different from how things were supposed to work. Usually, when some little money glitch came up he'd get a call from Lev giving him a little lecture about not pissing away his money quite so fast on shit like coke and racehorses, and then he'd have Lev call Jason and they'd talk to each other and the noise would go away. So what were they all doing here?

Nobody was drinking, which was unusual for Bobby. A couple of people at the tables nearby were staring at him, and he carefully ignored them, though he pushed his blond hair a little to the side. Pete slid in next to Lev and opened up his menu. The hostess showed up with his drink and he called her an angel of mercy and took a couple of gulps.

“What looks good?” The other three picked up their menus like an afterthought. He went down the list of entrees. He was rigid about what he ate, because lately he'd noticed that it tended to stick to him if he wasn't. He was good at refusing things, though. At least, things other than cocaine. Or women. Or, gotta face it, booze. Crazy menu. He didn't even know what half this shit was. Radicchio? Why couldn't they just call it a radish? You needed a fucking special assistant just to order for you. Radicchio, radicchio …

“So…” he drawled in a leisurely voice, without looking up from the menu. “Some guy repo'd my Boxster yesterday.”

He dropped it in and then peered up over his reading sunglasses at them. Jason looked like the menu was the most interesting thing he'd seen his whole life. Bobby looked annoyed, and for a few seconds the only sound he heard was the João Gilberto tune playing in the background. The safe choice. Classy in a completely generic way.

“Jason…” Bobby's voice had that overly friendly tone that meant he was ready to start yelling at someone. He pulled down the menu that Jason was looking at. “Why don't you explain it to him?”

Jason swallowed. His voice was quavering a little. “Well, first of all, I want to say I'm really sorry about how this all turned out.”

“
You're
sorry? That's my Boxster, man. Why is some three-hundred-pound Samoan guy showing up with a fucking court order and telling me I haven't made my payments? Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

There! He'd fucking laid it out there for them and they'd better have an answer.

Nobody said anything, and then Bobby nudged Jason with his elbow. “Go on, Jason, tell him.”

Now Jason picked up a piece of paper and held it out to him. It was shaking.

See, Pete, we've got some liquidity issues at the moment …

He started into one of those long Jason-type speeches that Pete tuned in to and then out of, but still looking like he was thoughtfully following it all. He put on his reading glasses to look at the piece of paper Jason had given him, looked over them to see if he could spot the hostess, took them off, and wiped them. He really liked these glasses. He'd picked them up a few months ago when he left his Versaces on an airplane. These were Gucci: slightly pink, very cool. He'd had the original lenses taken out and replaced them with the tinted bifocal ones. This way, if some paparazzi caught him off guard, it'd look like he was wearing sunglasses, not reading glasses. They
were
from last summer, though. Maybe he should pick up a new pair. That could be tomorrow's mission. Get mirrored lenses, or maybe black, like a limo window. Flip 'em down below his eyes:
climb right in, sugar.
Those'd be some kickass reading glasses! Meanwhile, words kept popping up over and over again from Jason's little speech:
bond, derivative, liquidity
. He might as well have been speaking Egyptian. This was shit that he paid people like Lev and Jason to think about. Why were they bothering him with this? He waved his hand upward in a little spiral of dismissal. “
Whatever,
Jason! Just take care of it. That's what I pay you and Lev for.”

Jason looked at Bobby and Bobby glared back at him.

Lev took over. “Pete, Jason invested most of your money in a bond fund called Crossroads Partners. They bought a kind of bond based on people's mortgages. Jason thought they'd give you good income without any risk.”

“I was told they were fixed-income—”

Lev cut him off. “But you didn't read the prospectus.”

“When the biggest banks on planet earth are selling it as fixed income, you don't read the prospectus!”

Lev turned toward the musician. “‘Fixed-income' means rock-solid investments that don't fluctuate in their rate of return, like municipal bonds. You're a retired businessman with a million dollars in the bank and you buy bonds at five percent and live on the fifty thousand a year. They never lose value.”

Jason wouldn't let it drop. “Their guy stood up in front of fifty financial advisors and said they were fixed-income! Fixed-income that paid nine percent! How else was I going to keep Pete afloat? You know how much he spends! Do the math!” He turned to Bobby and said angrily, “Do you mind if I get up to take a piss?”

Bobby slid out to let him pass, then got back in.

Lev said, “That's the last we'll see of that idiot.”

“Fuck, man.” Pete laughed, lifting his empty cocktail tumbler. “I'm dry already. And I definitely need another one.”