A Fistful of Rain Read online

  God, we had so much fun.

  And when it’s like that, the audience knows it, and they don’t care that the only fresh air is coming in through the opened windows and the propped doors, they don’t care that they’re getting bumped and knocked from every direction, they don’t care that their feet are killing them. They want the music, the show, and when they get it, they’re someplace else, someplace better.

  Those nights are magic.

  They called us back three times, and at the end of the third encore they were still on their feet, and making so much noise that applause and cheering chased us all the way to the green room. Graham was waiting, and his expression confirmed it; we’d blown the doors off the place.

  “This is it,” he said, rushing from Van to Click to me, handing a towel and a bottle of water to each of us. “This is the memory I’m keeping, the one for my deathbed. This is my moment of triumph.”

  We shared in our glory between gulps of water, laughing, praising, remembering the moments of brilliance, the near-disasters, the fantastic saves. Graham ran the circuit, slapping shoulders and pouring drinks. I’d finished one of my fifths of Jack Daniel’s onstage during the show, but the rider in my touring contract specified two to be supplied at each venue, and Graham handed me the remainder without my even having to ask. My rider also specified two liters of Arrowhead water and a carton of American Spirit Yellows, hinge-lids. I liked the fifths because they were easy to carry and easy to stow onstage. The Arrowhead normally got finished while onstage, too, like it had this night. Of the cigarettes, I’d keep a pack or two, then give the rest to the crew.

  “Mimser,” Graham said when he gave me the bottle, “I’m calling Prudential, fuck that, I’m calling Lloyds of London first thing tomorrow, on my honor, I’m calling them and insuring your hands! I saw smoke tonight, smoke coming from those strings.”

  I laughed around the mouth of the bottle, fell into a chair. Graham leaned in and smooched my sweaty forehead, then headed for Click. Click was halfway through rolling himself a cigarette, and when Graham uncharacteristically gave him a hug, tobacco went spilling out of the paper and onto his lap, and I laughed again, Van joining, too.

  “The hell are you on, man?” Click demanded.

  “A beer, a beer for the beat.” Graham was spinning around, searching for a bottle. Click’s rider was the simplest of the three of us—he’d specified nothing but a carton of Bridgeport India Pale Ale, and he’d done it as a joke, because it was a local Portland microbrew, and he figured to give the promoters a headache. It did, I’m sure, but there was always a carton waiting for him. He was sick to death of the stuff.

  “Nah, I’m good with water, Graham, and you need a tranquilizer.”

  Graham whipped around again, clapping a hand down on each of Click’s shoulders, once more disrupting the rolling process. “This is the love, Click, and you must accept it. You were outstanding tonight, you could have gotten the dead to their feet the way you were playing tonight.”

  “You are so high,” Click told him.

  “On life!” Graham said, gave Click one last pat and moved, finally, to Vanessa, where she was sprawled in a chair, her shoes already off, finishing her second bottle of water. Her rider specified that the water be Evian. It also specified a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, a bottle of Glenlivet, and a dozen fresh-cut red and white roses. She’d drink the water, but never drank the alcohol. She wouldn’t give it away, either; she’d dump the contents either down the drain or down the toilet, and once or twice I caught her using it as a perfume.

  The roses normally figured into the encore, when Van would go to the edge of the stage and give a couple to whoever had caught her eye during the show. It was the code—a fresh young male carrying a couple roses, red or white, got access backstage, and often access to even more than that.

  Graham opened a third bottle of Evian for her, swapping it out for Van’s empty, then crouched down beside the seat, his hands in front of him, cupped, as if he would catch whatever she might spill. Van took another swig from the bottle, then looked to Click, then to me, grinning. She was still a little out of breath from our close, and perspiration still shone on her arms and face. She looked at Graham and the grin got bigger.

  “You may praise,” she said, regally.

  Click and I laughed, and Graham didn’t miss the cue.

  “I think a shrine, Vanessa. A shrine dedicated to you, a shrine befitting a goddess. You have ruined Christchurch for the next girl, there is no one to follow you.”

  “You were practicing that one,” she said mildly.

  “I was. I was, but I think it captures the essence.”

  “It wasn’t bad.”

  “I’ll swap you insurance for a statue,” I told Van.

  “Fuck that, I’ll take either of yours for the walking dead,” Click said.

  Graham got to his feet, looking at all of us, touching one hand to his breast, faking the wound to his heart. “All I do for you, and yet you mock. Do I not care for you? Do I not provide for you? Do I not love you?”

  We all told him that yes, he loved us very well, indeed, and we laughed more, and set about getting cleaned up and ready for the first wave of backstage passes and VIPs. As our manager, Graham is required to be our greatest advocate, but even his hyperbole knew some bounds; seeing him like this, tonight, was different, and only reinforced the sense of triumph.

  The parade of visitors started, and we played nice with them all for another hour or so. Most of the flock went to Van, but Click and I had enough attention that we couldn’t duck out without being rude. You never know who’ll be coming backstage; we’ve had politicians and movie people, we’ve had local celebs who act like we should know them, and people who’ve won contests who act like we shouldn’t. Sometimes someone from the label shows, or someone hooked into the Big Money, and they’ve got to be treated like insiders. So it’s part of the job, to be nice backstage, and after a show like this one, it’s even easy, and pleasant.

  The last were two girls, late teens, with passes won at a local record store, and Click and I did our best to keep them engaged, getting them to talk about themselves, as Van finished with her clump. Then Graham was at the door, telling us we had to get back to the hotel, and I walked the two girls out, giving them a handshake, thanking them for coming. Graham went with them down the hall, to make sure security got them out the rest of the way without trouble, and that left one person alone, outside, a good-looking white kid in his early twenties, holding three white roses.

  “Hey, you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  He actually checked over his shoulder to see if I was possibly talking to someone else before giving me an answer. “Pete.”

  I nodded and stepped back, searching for Vanessa, who was getting the last of her things together. “His name is Pete,” I told her. “He’s waiting outside.”

  She grinned at me, a little caught, a little conspiratorially, and I thought what the hell, it’s been a good night, I’ll make it easy.

  I leaned back out into the hall. “Hey, Pete—we’re getting ready to go back to the hotel.”

  “Oh,” he said. He did a bad job of hiding disappointment.

  “You want to hold on a minute, you could probably ride back with Van.”

  It took him a second to parse it, to trace the thread to its inevitable conclusion. Then he said, “Oh,” again, but this time it was far more enthusiastic.

  “Be a second,” I said, and closed the door.

  “Thanks,” Van said.

  “Cute.”

  “God, yes.”

  “He a keeper?”

  She shrugged, pulling her bag onto her shoulder. “I’ll let you know in the morning.”

  Pete was enough of a keeper that he was at breakfast the next morning in the restaurant, looking dazed to be seated between Van and Graham. Click was there, too, but I didn’t realize I was running late until I saw our tour manager, Leon, with them, as well. I caught the last of the day�
��s marching orders, and then Van told Pete to go with Leon. I downed some orange juice, listening to their idle talk.

  “Well?” I asked Van.

  “Throwing him back,” she told me.

  I nodded and switched to coffee, doctoring it with way too much sugar, just for the added jump start. Click was working on an omelet, and Graham was futzing with his PDA.

  “You hungover?” Van asked.

  “Just a headache,” I told her.

  “Not coming down with something?”

  “No, just a headache.” I looked closer. “You’ve got a hickey.”

  Click and Graham both focused on her, and Van’s hand flew to the side of her neck, alarm all across her face. Then she saw me grinning and picked up her butter knife, making a stabbing gesture.

  “Not funny, Mim!”

  “No, especially if he’s not a keeper.”

  “Shut up, drink your coffee.”

  “Yes, my mistress.”

  Graham stowed his PDA, pulled out his briefcase, and started distributing photocopies.

  “Came this morning. You are looking at a mock-up of the article that will run next week in Rolling Stone. Complete, I might add, with an image of Tailhook on the cover.”

  Conversation stopped for most of a minute as rustling paper and moving silverware took over the audio. The packets were ten pages, including a copy of the cover photo, stapled together, black-and-white. I skimmed, more interested in combating my headache than finding out how good or bad I looked, but Click and Vanessa both put full attention onto theirs.

  “I’m ‘The Body,’ ” Van announced after a moment. “Me, body.”

  “Not just any body,” Graham said. “The Body.”

  “This’ll be in color?”

  “That’s what I’m told. The article is mixed, some b/w, but your shots are color.”

  “The body?” I asked.

  Van showed me the page she was looking at, a picture of her relaxing in a chair, head craned back but turned toward the camera, laughing and stretching. Her belly was bare, showing the hoop through her navel, the tone of her muscle. Not overtly sexual, but attractive. It was captioned with the words “The Body.”

  “Which makes Click?”

  Both Click and Graham answered. “ ‘The Spine.’ ”

  I went to my copy and flipped through. The picture had Click from the waist up, wearing his Winterhawks jersey, looking straight on at the camera with his hand-rolled cigarette drooping from a corner of his mouth. His smile in the shot was amused at the attention.

  I flipped to what they said about me, and when I saw that I’d been labeled “The Brains,” I laughed out loud. Then I saw the picture they were using.

  I wasn’t certain it was me at all for a couple of seconds. I just didn’t think I looked like that, that I could ever look like that. The second thing was that I had no memory of it being taken, no recall of the moment when the camera turned on me to catch me in the pose.

  It wasn’t a studio shot, it was a candid, probably taken during the two weeks the interviewer had been in our shadow, and it looked like I was backstage someplace, alone, sitting on one of the metal gear boxes. Before a show, or maybe after, because I had my concert clothes on, the cargo pants and the tank top. The Tele in my hands, eyes closed, my head back, not exerting myself, just relaxed, just playing, maybe even singing. Light on me and shadow all around.

  I’d never looked that good, that sexy, in all my life.

  “Pretty hot,” Graham said. “Pretty hot, indeed.”

  “You look three seconds from orgasm,” Click observed.

  “You’ve never seen me three seconds from orgasm. How would you know?” I told him.

  “My imagination is active. It looks entirely sexual, it looks like you’re getting off.”

  “Were it that easy.”

  “You’ve had a long-term relationship for a while now, haven’t you?”

  I held up my right hand. “Yes, the five of us are very happy together.”

  “That is a picture that will be on lockers,” Graham told me. “That is a picture that gets reprinted, Mimser. That is a picture that immortalizes a rock star.”

  I wasn’t sure what I felt about that.

  From the look on Van’s face, she wasn’t, either.

  The second night in Sydney, all of us—the band, the crew, everyone—went to a party at a club called Home. The party was thrown by the label, celebrating not just the Rolling Stone cover, but also the debut of our new single. “Queen of Swords.” It had entered the Billboard Top Fifty at twenty-two, as they say, with a bullet, and it was a big fucking deal, because it meant we’d finally smashed out of the alt-rock circle, and now had a genuine mainstream hit on our hands.

  I was drunk when I arrived at the party, having polished off the second fifth of Jack in the limo on the way over, and Graham had to shepherd me across the floor and to the VIP room before he could get to the serious business of glad-handing the reps. I stayed on a couch, watching pretty girls and handsome men and avoiding conversation, and at some point someone handed me another bottle, and I got to work on that until I couldn’t work on anything anymore.

  Sometime later, Graham helped me into my hotel room, got me onto my bed and the boots off my feet and the wastebasket by my head.

  “Just put it in the goal, baby,” he told me.

  The next day was hell.

  We had a live set to be played on local radio, and that had to be canceled, but there were two television appearances to do, and there was no way out of those. Graham had slept in my room, dozing in the easy chair by the desk, and every time I’d woken to vomit or use the bathroom, he’d been there.

  The first television spot was live, for an audience, and when I saw myself on the monitors, I knew the makeup chair hadn’t been enough. I looked awful, and even though my hands knew what to do, Van froze me out during the set, and even Click kept his distance. The worst part was that after we’d finished playing “Queen of Swords,” the host wanted time with Van in the chair, and that meant that Click and I had to stay on the stage, beneath the lights. It took supreme effort to keep from being sick again.

  Then we changed studios and did another set. This one went a little better, but not much.

  As soon as we were finished, Graham carted me back to the hotel, and put me back to bed. The good news was that we had the night off. The bad was that we were flying to New York in the morning, to do an MTV gig, and that we were all supposed to meet in the lobby at six.

  I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might be sober by then.

  I was, but not enough that I realized what I was seeing when I reached the lobby the next morning. I had my bags and my flight case for the Tele, and I came out of the elevator and into the lobby with the dawn just starting to stream in through the hotel’s windows, bouncing harsh off the marble floor. Beyond the service counter there was a little sitting area, and they were all already there, Van, Click, and Graham, seated around a little coffee table.

  Click saw me making toward them first, and he reached out and tapped Van’s bare knee through her torn Levi’s, said something. She and Graham both looked my way, standing up, and Click followed to his feet a second later, slower.

  None of them had any bags visible, and I supposed it could have meant that they’d already loaded them, but even as I thought that, I knew it wasn’t the case. A weird tightness crawled across my chest, as if trying to squeeze, but from the inside, and I could feel my heart beating, not like it was faster, but as if it had suddenly grown larger, as if each pulse threatened to rupture my chest.

  Van had one of her trademark tank tops on, a black one with a silver logo in its center. The logo was an image of a stylized, almost Art Deco, woman, standing in a swirling G, and beneath the letter was the word “Girlfiend.” It was the name of a lesbian boutique in Los Angeles, on La Cienega, though Van didn’t wear the shirt because she was advertising a preference; she wore it because it made the boys crazy. Her skin was clear
and her eyes were bright, and her hair professionally unruly. She hadn’t bothered with makeup, and when she smiled, her lips seemed to almost pale away against her face.

  “Mim,” she said, and for a moment I thought that I could get forgiveness without asking. Then the smile went away, and I wasn’t going to see it again.

  “This is ominous.” I tried to make it sound flip. It didn’t.

  “We’ve got to talk about some changes.” She was watching me closely, not quite staring, but really focusing. Then she gestured at the seat that Click had vacated and added, “You want to sit down?”

  I looked at Graham, but Graham wasn’t having any, focusing instead on the leather portfolio he was holding in his hands. Click barely gave me eye contact before looking away to Vanessa.

  “You’re canning me?” I directed it at Van, trying to keep my voice strong. It came out too loud, and bounced around the lobby. Early risers glanced our way.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Van motioned at the chair again, then fell back into hers.

  I stared at her, but she was only giving me her profile now, facing the empty seat. Neither Graham nor Click made a move or a sound.

  I had to set down my bags to take the chair, and it was clumsy, and humiliating.

  Van waited for me to get settled. “You were really fucked-up yesterday.”

  “Are you canning me?” I asked again.

  Van shook her head slightly, as if to say that I had her wrong, that wasn’t what this was about at all. “Been a long tour, Mim.”

  “Why won’t you give me an answer?”

  “Gonna be even longer, now that we’ve added all those European dates.” She glanced past me, around the lobby. Out the windows, you could see the harbor and the opera house. “I’m not sure you’re up to it.”

  “What—I don’t even understand what . . . what are you saying, Van?”

  She focused on me again. “Your drinking’s way out of control.”