How to Kill a Rock Star (34 page)

I thought you deemed him a fake and a bastard? Choice betrays character, isn’t that what you said? So which is it? Do you or do you not stil love the guy?”

“I just don’t want to hurt him any more than I already have. I don’t think he needs his nose rubbed in it.” How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 5:00 PM

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“Now that he’s home, are you going to see him?”

“No.”

“Just tel me if you are. That’s al I ask.”

“I’m not.”

Loring turned back around, leaned on the railing and mumbled, “Go back inside. Please. I want to be alone.” The housekeeper had been there that afternoon. I could always tel because the sheets on the bed would be tucked in so tight, trying to get them out was like wrestling an al i-gator. I fought until every inch of Egyptian cotton had been freed from the mattress and then I col apsed, muffling my tears by feeding them to the pil ow.

Why couldn’t I just fal in love with Loring and be done with it?

When Loring final y came to bed he took off his shirt and got in behind me, but his chest felt cautious against my back.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. And I was. For so many things.

But I knew that no matter how remorseful I felt, my repentance would only toss a blanket over the truth, and al the contrition in the world wasn’t going to change that.

“Eliza, how would you feel about maybe going away for a while?” Loring adjusted his pil ow and put his arm above my head. “We could drive up to Vermont, just the two of us, forget about everyone else and see what happens.” I wondered if he real y wanted to get away, or if he just wanted to keep me from Paul. I also wondered how someone who could explain the chaos theory, identify every work of art painted between 1420–1600, and had four top-ten singles to his name could be so dippy when it came to love.

“I’m not clueless, Loring. I know what you want. I’m just not sure I can ever give it to you.”

“I know. But I’m not wil ing to throw in the towel yet.”
29“A friend once told me that the last man standing in a battle is usual y the biggest fool of al . Everyone has to know when to say when.”

“I’l take that under advisement when your friend does.” An MD-80 was flying nearby. I didn’t have to see the aircraft, I was able to identify it as an MD-80 by the noise it made. The engines on that particular plane had a specific tenor. They seemed quieter to me. I figured the flight had probably just taken off, and I wondered how many of its passengers feared for their lives and how many were either too smart or too stupid to be scared.

Then I wondered how many of them would curse fate if the plane started hurtling toward the ground at five hundred miles an hour.

“Okay,” I whispered.

“Okay, what?”

“Let’s go to Vermont.”

Loring eased me onto my back, put his hand on my cheek, and I closed my eyes, but when I did that I saw Paul’s face above me. And when Loring kissed me, I felt Paul’s lips. And when Loring moved inside of me, I felt Paul moving inside of me. And when Loring cal ed my name I heard Paul’s voice cal my name. And then Loring came and I came, and I didn’t open my eyes again until the morning sun told me to.

Michael and Vera lived on the fringes of an area in Brooklyn known as Park Slope, though not the hip, gentrified section with the renovated, mil ion-dol ar brownstones. Their apartment was in the basement of an aluminum-siding duplex, with a tiny cement porch covered by a green plastic awning that made even the slightest sprinkle of rain sound like hail.

Before Loring and I left for Vermont, Vera invited us over for a barbeque. Burke and Queenie were there too, and everyone sat in front of the house listening to Michael and Burke tel stories from the road while I played with the dog Michael and Vera had just adopted, a fragile Italian grey-hound they’d named Fender.

I wanted to go home as soon as we finished eating. I’d been uneasy about bringing Loring over and didn’t want to be there any longer than necessary. Queenie made me sit back down, insisting that everyone play the board game she’d brought with her, a game which required its players to split into teams of two and do things like spel words backward, hum songs, make sculptures out of lemon-scented clay, and draw pictures with their eyes closed.

During the first round, it was clear that Michael’s hostility toward Loring had waned, especial y when the two of them unilateral y declared me the worst player the game had ever seen. This came after Loring picked a card, drew what looked to me like a striped cat and a bunch of trees, and 30expected me to guess what it was.

“Frosted Flakes,” I said, thinking the cat might be Tony the Tiger.

Laughing, Loring said, “Remember, it’s a person.”

“If it’s a person, why did you draw a cat?” Loring just kept tapping the cat with his pencil and adding more trees.

“Forrest Whitaker,” I said.

“Come
on
,” Michael teased. “He can’t make it any clearer.” I tried to kick Michael but he grabbed my foot and cracked the knuckles in my toes.

Time was running out and Loring quickly drew what I thought looked like a golf club. He pointed at the cat again, drew an arrow from the cat’s paw to the golf club, and another arrow from the golf club back to the cat’s paw.

Certain I’d figured it out, I yel ed, “
Caddyshack
!” Everyone roared with laughter. And when the last grain of sand had emptied from the hourglass timer, they al chanted, “
Tiger Woods
!”

And then it happened. With everybody watching, Loring bent over and kissed the top of my head. And no one in the room batted an eye at the profanity of the action. It was as though an induction had taken place. Loring was now part of the landscape my friends saw when they looked at me.

They accepted him, which meant they’d official y disassociated me from Paul, and as much as I wanted this to be a good thing, it felt like they’d taken a chisel to my heart and carved out al the sacred parts.

It was an awful moment, and if anyone thought I hadn’t noticed that Paul’s name hadn’t been mentioned once al night, not even by accident, they were wrong. I’d been counting on a slip or two here and there, to feel his presence, no matter how vague. Apparently everyone else had made a conscious effort to leave him at the door, but I could hear him
lingering like the footsteps of a ghost in a dark, empty attic.

I learned later that week, through Vera, that Paul had indeed seen the article in
GQ
. Michael told his wife that on the plane ride back to New York, Paul had ripped the photograph of Loring and me out of the magazine, blackened our eyes, wrote
Ain’t love grand?
above our heads, and taped it to the back of the seat in front of him with a piece of gum, where it remained until they started their decent into JFK, when Michael saw Paul staring at it and tore it down.

August 4, 2002

Dead.

That’s what old caterpil ar eyebrows said.

The conference room he had me and Feldman holed up in felt as big as a footbal field. If I’d been sitting at the other end of the table instead of two seats away from the guy I would have been too far to make out his face, let alone study the rotting cocoons above his eyes.

Feldman repeated the word. Dead. Then Winkle said it again. They were like two parrots vying for the next seed. But unlike Feldman, there was a pejorative echo in Winkle’s voice.

And an utter lack of sympathy. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “the record is D-E-A-D.”

It’s almost comical, real y. I said
almost
. Because debacles are nearly always funny, unless they happen to you.

Our record was released Tuesday, January 8, 2002. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure almost everyone in the music industry would agree there isn’t a worse time to release a record. Who in their right mind, right after the holidays?

Especial y by a band no one’s ever heard of. And when there’s something of a recession going on. And when the number one record in the country that week is by a band of musical heathens who pass themselves off as believers, but whose sole talent consists of being able to flex their biceps and plagiarize their infinitely more-talented contemporaries.

There’s no way in hel I can compete with that.

As much as I hate to admit it, the gigs with Loring helped us. There had been a smal but promising flux of album sales during those two weeks.

After we started the Drones tour, a couple of fan sites popped up on the net, and a couple magazines even touted Bananafish as a band to watch, but neither radio nor video know where to put us, which has led to a kind of commercial oblivion that’s only exacerbated our already shaky position with the record company.

I have a new theory on the situation. I cal it “the Catch” and it goes like this: Had we signed with Underdog, we’d be considered “indie,” we’d be considered “cool,” we’d be considered superior to the mainstream simply because Underdog conjures up that kind of bul shit aura. Furthermore, our music would have been initial y “marketed” toward, and/or stumbled upon by the proper audience—namely, the kind of people who might recognize and appreciate what we do. Pay attention, my obso-lete little recording buddy, because here comes the actual “catch” part: I signed with Winkle and Co. in order to reach a larger audience, but Winkle’s measly publicity plan was aimed at the soul ess pop pagan crowd—the crowd that demands handsomeness, a nice wardrobe, or, at the very least, a certain amount of self-serving ego from their icons.

I guess “barking up the wrong tree” is an appropriate cliché to insert here.

In continual y trying to pass Bananafish off as part of the pagans and heathens, the Winkles are succeeding in ostraciz-ing most of the true believers —that is, they’re shunning the very audience our music is meant for—the fairly smart, pre-dominantly liberal, dare I say misfits who probably take one look at the poseur shot of me on the cover of the record—the very shot Winkle and Clint and Meredith promised not to use— judge me to be nothing but a no-good wanker and put the disc back in the Bananafish bin.

Who am I kidding? We don’t have our own goddamn bin.

30We’re thrown in with the other random Bs.

I wil now read a few lines from a review of our show in Austin:

“In a paral el universe,” wrote a guy named Daniel J.

Pierson, “one in which talent counts for something, a band like Bananafish would have ignited an inferno of excitement in music. The song ‘Pale Blue Jeaner’ could have done for the new mil ennium what ‘Smel s Like Teen Spirit’ did for the end of the last one.”

Yeah. And how does that saying go? The one Eliza said her dad used to use al the time?

If my aunt had bal s she’d be my uncle.

You know what I am? I’m just another guy with a guitar trying to make it. Nothing more, nothing less. And the statistics only serve to reinforce my theory. Our first single was promot-ed meagerly and received less-than-modest air play. No big surprise there. The second single was subsequently released without any promotion at al . Winkle claimed he couldn’t jus-tify spending the kind of money it would take on a record that wasn’t generating any real heat, meanwhile the industry is such that it’s categorical y impossible to generate heat without heavy promotion.

It should also be pointed out that Winkle recently signed a nineteen year-old, ample-breasted, singing-and-dancing android from Indiana to a multi-mil ion-dol ar, multimedia contract.

There’s no way in hel I can compete with that.

Winkle also made the mistake of assuming the Drones tour would do most of the publicity work for him, and sure, we gained a decent number of fans along the way. But the Drones’s most recent release has been their least successful to date, and the tour was something of a flop.

There’s more. Around the time our record came out, Winkle wasn’t generating much heat either. He hadn’t knocked out a hit in over a year, and in the record business, Winkles are one
flop away from the unemployment line. Al the eggs are now in the teen sensation’s basket. Bananafish is completely ovum-less. Adding to that pressure, the company’s stock is down— maybe people aren’t buying mayonnaise and cigarettes like they used to, and how many people stil go out and buy new CDs when they can download them for free?

There you have it—the recipe for mincemeat á la Paul Hudson.

To paraphrase: Winkle can no longer afford to take a chance on an artist who could take years to turn a profit when the poor guy needs a sure thing
right now
.

A gold record is five hundred thousand units sold. Platinum is one mil ion.

A year ago this kind of goddamn data was completely unknown to me. Then one day I woke up, knew it al by heart, and wondered where the hel I’d gone wrong.

Probably the biggest kicker of al is that Bananafish’s record sales have, at this point, reportedly tapered off at around twenty-nine thousand.

Success is so unbelievably relative. To think that twenty-nine thousand people went out and spent their hard-earned money on a col ection of songs that came from my goddamn heart and soul makes me wanna do the Hustle down Broadway.

Winkle considers it a failure.

“Dead,” he said for the fourth time in sixty seconds.

“What about the ‘career artist’ approach? Nurturing the band?” Feldman huffed, his face as pink as a baby’s newborn ass.

Winkle had the nerve to say he was doing just that. It was the reason, he said, for sending me back into the studio ASAP.

Studio? I asked Winkle what happened to Europe, and shit, I know I sounded desperate, but I WAS desperate. Getting out of New York was the only thing I had to look forward to. I should probably add that a little over a week ago I gave Jil y Bean the old heave-ho. The more I saw her walking around my apartment
30in her mishmash of under things, sitting on Eliza’s window ledge with a goddamn cigarette hanging from her mouth, the more I wanted to catapult myself off the goddamn roof.

“Europe?” Winkle said the word as if the entire continent had just been nuked and was no longer existent. He yapped for a long time about his reasons for canceling the European tour.