Louder Than Love (20 page)

Reality Bites

As I navigated the Mini up through the borough toward home, I couldn’t shake the essence of my lover’s mesmerizing storytelling. The overcast afternoon reinforced the mood, painting the concrete landscape even grayer than usual. I felt like I had been dropped into eighties London; my native city had never looked so foreign.

But with each underpass and highway ramp, modern-day reality began to creep in. I checked my messages while in standstill traffic on the bridge. Two texts from Marissa, two hours apart:
We Miss U and Leaving S’bucks, C U @ Ballet?
I had forgotten we had signed the girls up at the dance studio across town. I had no doubt Brina would take to the lessons without a fuss, but wondered if Abbey would make it through this first class without pirouetting to her own tune, right out the door. She often followed a sound track that resided in her head and had a hard time with step-by-step instructions.

My thoughts drifted back to Adrian as the road opened ahead of me, and my stomach grumbled a reminder that we had not consumed a single thing, other than each other. The coffee had grown cold, food hadn’t been a thought, and Adrian didn’t touch a cigarette in those three-plus hours he had been in my company. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been able to shut out the world so exclusively with another individual.

But I could remember the first time.

If I had to pick a defining moment in my courtship with Pete, the moment in time when I knew he was “the one,” I would have to rewind back to that first year. I can’t remember all the details of our date; I recall the coal oven pizza we shared at Arturo’s and escaping into the air-conditioning of the Angelika for a few hours. I remember sharing a lot of laughter, a lot of stories. Typical early date stuff. The excitement and anxiety of asking him in for the first time. Having him examine my CD collection, comment on my book collection, kiss me in front of the wall of grungy appliances that passed for a kitchen in that dimly lit, ground-floor sublet. Pulling him across the threshold into my closet of a bedroom. I rarely closed its door because it was far too claustrophobic. But that night, Pete and I shut ourselves in and closed off the world.

We lay talking and touching into the small hours, when a presence right outside froze us both. Someone was just inches from the bars covering the window, and therefore only inches from us. We could hear him muttering and breathing, rummaging through the bins of garbage pushed up against the brick wall.

I had been a city girl going on five years, but it had been a first for me. Pete could tell I was freaked out. “Shhh, he’s just looking for cans and bottles,” I remember him whispering, holding me tight. “He’ll go away in a minute.”

People use that descriptor, “the one.” As in, “How did you know he was the one?” I had never been the kind of girl to read the happily-ever-after stories or practice bridal walks with a pillowcase on my head. Love at first sight had always sounded impractical, and soul mates didn’t seem possible. But I remember being in Pete’s arms that night, the thrill and the fear of it all, and I just knew.

I thought again of the rainy morning dream, of being in Pete’s arms again. Having him remind me “there are all different kinds of love” and speak through my subconscious the unspeakable.

***

Although Adrian hadn’t come out and asked me directly, I had promised him two things that afternoon: I wouldn’t reveal his identity to my friends—or God forbid, my brother—just yet, and I would let him finish telling me about his past without the aid of Alexander Floyd or what he called “unofficial, unauthorized, wildly inaccurate accounts published purely for monetary or shock value.” It was hard to stay composed, but I managed some level of normalcy as Marissa and I settled onto a bench outside to wait out the girls’ first dance class.

“I can’t believe the ballet teacher is going to go through all five positions on the first day.” I accepted the smoothie she handed me and peeked over my shoulder into the dance school’s window.

“Speaking of
positions
 . . . what’s it really like, sleeping with the kiddy musician? I’m trying to imagine him talking dirty, and all I’m coming up with is ‘do me, my little sugared gumdrop of love!’”

“Don’t be such a goofball, Mariss.” I bit my straw. “I’m done giving you gory details. The sex is great. I would go as far as to say mind-blowing.”

“Yet he still won’t let you—”

“I’m not so worried about that.”

“Hi there!” A syrupy Southern accent oozed across the plaza parking lot. The mother of Grant’s son was lugging karate gear toward us. “Was that you I saw the other day, drivin’ on yer donut?”

“What’s her name again?” Marissa asked under her breath, lips pasted into a ventriloquist dummy’s smile.

“Not a friggin’ clue.” I smiled right along with her, shaking my head.

“That’s what my daddy calls it, drivin’ on yer spare.”

“Oh,
Marone
.” Marissa had zero tolerance for anyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and the blond hair and bouncy boobs on this woman probably didn’t help matters any.

“Ya’ll could have Jake’s dad take a look at it, he’s real good at fixing flats.” She beamed at her son who, even dressed in his karate whites, couldn’t have looked less angelic. He was towheaded and snarky like his father, yet had his mother’s wide and slanted eyes, reminiscent of a fruit bat. “Fact, that’s how we met. Jacked up my car in the driving snow and fixed
my
flat tire better than any cob job I could do!”

We knew the town gossip: Grant had hooked up with this girl as she passed through town, increasing the population of Lauder Lake by two. But hearing the origins from the source was particularly interesting, considering the recent attack on my Mini.

“Thanks . . . it’s all good,” I assured her, and locked my lips to my straw so I wouldn’t have to converse with her further.

“Bye now!” They continued on their way to the neighboring karate center.

“Jacked her up, then knocked her up with the devil’s spawn,” Marissa murmured, her eyes mascara-ringed saucers. “Talk about a cob job!”

“Rosemary!” I remembered triumphantly.

“Huh?”

“Her name. Like the horror movie,
Rosemary’s Baby
. You know, devil’s spawn?” I sputtered a brief laugh. “But seriously.” The similarity of the dire tire situation was a little too coincidental. Adrian and I had speculated as to whom, but now pieces were falling together as to why. Originally I had suspected malice on my ex-boyfriend’s part. I now wondered if Grant, upon seeing my car in Basilica’s lot that night, had assumed I was dining out with just Abbey as usual and thought he’d try the old knight-in-shining-armor bit with me. Especially with his friends in town to make him look good. Thinking back to the way he had strutted into the restaurant, and how utterly stunned he was at the sight of Adrian . . . it made sense. “Lauder Lake has its very own serial tire slasher.”

“Serial town idiot, more like it.”

I laughed, twirling Adrian’s ring. My new finger trinket didn’t go unnoticed by my best friend.

“You know I’m happy for you, Tree. I was only teasing before. Although I am bummed we lost our coffee day.” Marissa attempted to fold her napkin into a hat, or a swan, and pouted.

“I’ve missed two Wednesdays . . . don’t write me off that quickly! I’ll be back.”

“Good, because someone needs to be the buffer between Debbie Downer and Perky Patty, and you know Liz and I aren’t always so good with the tact.”

“Leanna’s really losing it, huh?”

“I think I would, too, if my kid gave me such grief and my husband had his head up his ass. And Karen . . . you know I really like her, Tree, but sometimes . . .” She trailed off, looking at her watch. It was time to head inside and collect the girls.

“I know.” I held the door for her. “Karen’s in la-la land sometimes. She doesn’t realize her advice kinda makes things worse.”

“Bingo.”

“Bingo? Rhymes with
Ringo
!” Abbey slid toward us in her leotard, with Brina skidding right behind her. “We’re hungry, can we get pizza?”

Hits and Mrs.

After putting Abbey to bed that evening, my laptop greeted me like an old friend. I wouldn’t break my promise to Adrian, but my desire to at least “see” what was out there led me to run his name and the band’s through a search engine or two.

There were 1,976,000 hits for
Corroded Corpse
. Not too shabby for a band that hadn’t existed for twenty years. And 1,050,000 on
Digger Graves
alone! I ignored the urge to read the fan blogs, the speculation, or the news articles about him. Instead, I searched for images and 17,300 hits popped up. How does one get used to having that many pictures floating around for the entire world to peruse? I tapped his ring to my lips as my eyes swam over page after page. Most of the images were posed band pictures, press photos, album cover shots. What fascinated me were the rare candid ones. None looked to be more recent than fifteen years ago. Digger concentrating in the studio, Digger gaping wide-mouthed onstage. A black-and-white shot of Digger with a baby, presumably Natalie, being held poolside in his tattooed arms. His face was barely recognizable, much rounder with youth and bloated with the admitted excess consumption of ale. There was a thumbnail picture of him with a tall skinny blonde. Against my better judgment, I clicked on it to get the bigger picture and saw the caption.
Corroded Corpse’s Digger Graves with wife, Robyn, BRIT Awards, Grosvenor House Hotel
. Still married in cyberspace, frozen in time. My heart felt like it had been regurgitated and stuck in my throat. He looked stuffy yet handsome in a tux; she looked a bit too bare and underfed in a strapless number. As Marissa would say, like a skeleton with a mop on her head. Blech. The computer is not my friend. If only we could clear the cache of our minds as quickly and easily as the computer’s. In a click and a blink, I wiped clear the history, deleted temp files, and got rid of all cookies. The FBI might find evidence of my peek at Adrian’s past life, should they have reason to seize my computer, but no one else would be the wiser.

Wandering into the kitchen, I retrieved the album once more. After contemplating putting it on the ancient turntable, I once again fell back on technology. Within five minutes, I had purchased the album from iTunes and downloaded the entire thing onto my iPod. Amazing. I carried Digger and the gang downstairs to the treadmill. Music has always had the ability to transport and spur me on while running; but with the first telltale lick of Adrian’s soloing, this music ripped right through me. What I remembered as being a cacophonous sound track to sibling strife during my teen years had been replaced by a complex, almost orgasmic tapestry. Although Rick sang the leads with all the vigor and vibrato one would expect from an eighties metal singer, I could hear Adrian’s deeper and rougher rasp, strong and understated, behind the choruses. The crunch of his power chords injected themselves into my very marrow. The music poured over me. I was in deep.

Chemistry and Chaos

Adrian and I fell into a wonderful pattern, spending as many days together as the week would allow us. He would roll sleepily off the train to spend hours with me. Together we would collect Abbey after school and take her on adventures, some as close as Bear Mountain or the lake, others as far as Chinatown or Coney Island. Adrian started teaching Abbey scales on the piano, and they continued working on their ode to Matt the Bat. Not only was Matt “elastic and fantastic,” but he would now “go spastic if you called him plastic.” Some evenings, Adrian would call just to talk to Abbey and discuss a new lyric. Abbey reveled in the calls, grinning into the receiver. “Sure, Adrian, bats can wear party hats.”

I learned to love rather than dread the anticipation of waiting at the train station, watching as all of the harried businessmen jumped onto their Manhattan-bound trains. Smiling because I knew my man was on the reverse commute up to me in ripped jeans and a T-shirt with no plan for the day but to be utterly happy spending it together.

Some days, I would slip into the city for the luxury of lying in his arms for hours. He continued to slowly unfurl his past, but mostly we marveled at our present, a gift to each other in the here and now.

“All that time spent together and he still doesn’t keep a toothbrush at your house?” Marissa wanted to know. “I can’t believe he doesn’t want to spend the night.”

“It’s not a matter of not wanting to,” I explained. Despite the number of hours Adrian and I logged lounging in each other’s beds, we always made sure to vacate before bedtime. We had Abbey to think about, after all. Her comfort level was paramount and a good excuse for us to pace ourselves in terms of “too much, too soon.”

Abbey delighted in every Adrian encounter as if he were a new episode of
Maxwell
MacGillikitty
. In fact, she had found in him a willing viewing companion. One afternoon I found both of them—Abbey sprawled on the floor, Adrian sitting low and grasshopper-legged on the edge of my futon—riveted to the TV. “This show isn’t half-bad. Amazing how he manages to solve
every
muddle, the cheeky little bugger.”

One day, he emerged from the station with a slip of paper in his hand. “Can you take me to this address?” It turned out to be the CD manufacturing plant up in Nyack where the rest of
Songs for Natalie
were stored. “They aren’t doing any good sitting there.” He stacked the remaining boxes in the Smurf. “I’ll think of a use for them.”

Sometimes, he would bring bags brimming with food from Myers of Keswick or Dean & DeLuca. With his reading glasses perched on his nose and my mom’s pin-striped apron slung around his tattooed torso, he looked positively adorable. Like the badass metal version of the Frugal Gourmet. He’d spend hours slowly cooking, refusing help, and carefully consulting cookbooks. The end results were traditional English meals that even Abbey took to, like roast chicken with bread sauce and sage and onion stuffing, shepherd’s pie, and what Adrian called “proper fish and chips,” with mushy peas, baked beans, and gherkins. If Abbey appeared leery or unwilling to try something, the simple assurance that “Maxwell MacGillikitty eats this stuff all the time” would quickly change her mind. She especially loved the foods with funny names, such as bubble and squeak. Like a sponge, she was soaking up many of Adrian’s English expressions, throwing “crikey!” and “huzzah!” into conversations whenever possible.

Often, Adrian would wander up to Kev’s room and silently study the shrine. He approached it with a mixture of curiosity and caution, not unlike a deep-sea diver inspecting a shipwreck. I gave him his space, but some days he would invite me along. One artifact after another would turn over in his hands, and he would look at them in wonder, as if he were thinking,
I was once a part of this?
And, after carefully setting them back down in their dust-marked place,
And I survived.

He emerged from the attic after one of his excavations carrying an album in each hand. “Erm, Kat, how much homeowner’s insurance do you have, luv?”

I had been catching up on e-mail and twisted away from my laptop to face him. “Why? Are they really worth that much?”

“He’s got an Italian twelve-inch promo of
Blood Oath
. And this is
Spoils of War
on green vinyl. I think only twenty-five were pressed. Not that I really pay too much attention to collectibles.”

Since I was on the computer already, I ran the items through eBay. “Holy crap.”

He leaned over my shoulder. “Ridiculous what some people find value in, no?”

***

One morning, he arrived lugging a heavy odd-shaped box off the train.

“Flowers for me? You shouldn’t have!”

“This,” he said, “is better than flowers. Came all the way from the UK.” It was a car bike mount. “Most I found wouldn’t fit your model year. But this one”—he went to work with the spanner from my trunk right there in the station lot—“holds two bikes.”

“Perfect for you and Abbey. Bear Mountain awaits.”

“There’s a bike down in your basement, you know. A Rockhopper, and it’s a bloody good one.”

“Oh, Kev’s old bike. He saved up all of his paper route money to buy it, and then had a growth spurt.”

“Perfect size for you. It just needs some air in the tires,” he said.

“I don’t know . . .”

“When was the last time you rode?”

“Does spinning class count?”

“Tosh! You might as well do karaoke and air guitar. Come on. You’ve got to get out and feel the wind in your hair. I’d love to take you to one of my favorite parks. Fort Tryon.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“You call yourself a New Yorker! For shame, Kat!”

I laughed. “I never ventured above 125th Street when I lived in Manhattan.”

“Well, you should.” He smiled.

The next day he showed up with his own bike and a dozen roses. He was very hard to resist.

***

More often than not, music accompanied Adrian on his trips upstate. CDs were brought by the handful to play in the car, in the house, at the beach. He mixed playlists for Abbey, ranging from the Stray Cats to Etta James to Peter Gabriel, the Ramones to Jethro Tull to 10,000 Maniacs. He delighted her by including some of his own renditions, throwing in her name and funny rhymes on the fly about loving LEGOs and blueberries. If I was a walking
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
, Adrian was
Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians
personified. He knew scads of fascinating information on every genre of music.

There was an ever-changing sound track to our lives those weeks; the only time we didn’t listen to music was when we made love—frequently, intensely, and with every nerve alive focused on each other. Silence punctuated only by our sighs, truncated one word at a time, until we found our voices once more. Gentle pillow talk often ensued.

It was fairly easy for Adrian to talk about rock and roll and his role in its history;
Metastasis
had quickly gone gold in America and platinum in the UK, resulting in ample material that he could pull from. However, discussing the two remaining parts of the trifecta—sex and drugs—often left him searching for the right words in order to properly press home his experiences.

We were at the lake. It was a mild Monday morning, and we had wandered down from the house with a blanket and breakfast. Adrian had stopped by the Naked Bagel en route to Grand Central and had brought some of Liz’s finest with him. Breakfast was soon abandoned for other delicious pursuits, taking advantage of the secluded haven of soft sand where the old boathouse had once stood. Large thick pines had encroached upon the empty space, allowing us to be sealed off from all sides save a small slice of the beachfront. Once again, I attempted to slowly and seductively make my way down a certain path of pleasuring, and once again, he managed to detour me.

Adrian’s tongue still tasted of Irish butter, the decadent and smooth Kerrygold that Liz always used in the shop, as he kissed me into bliss. We fell into talking afterward, as the breeze swept across our hot skin and we allowed our pulse rates to calm. Unprompted and as eloquently as the situation would allow, he began to describe the heartbreaking spectacle of the endless parade of nameless women, on their knees in a lewd receiving line, all eager to suck down the seed of stardom.

“No doubt you’ve wondered why I won’t let you . . . I just . . . I want to have something different with you.” He watched my fingers as they trailed the length of his thigh, and shuddered happily. “I
do
have something different with you. Maybe, in time . . . I can learn to enjoy it again. It isn’t a sexy thing to me.”

Adrian’s opinion of groupies was certainly not the norm among his bandmates. “Sam fell in love with every girl he touched, poor sod. It earned him nothing but headaches, lawsuits, and many cases of the clap. Adam, he was the starfucker of the group. Sure, he would let any anonymous bird backstage get him off, but when it came to a shag partner for any lengthy period of time, she’d have to have at least equal, if not more, star power. Page Three girls in Britain,
Baywatch
girls in the States, swimsuit models in Spain.”

“What about Rick?” I knew at this point, Rick and Simone had had not only two-year-old Paul, but twins on the way as well.

“Rick . . . oh, Rick relished the depraved excess of it all. Multitudes of girls with their tongues in his every orifice simultaneously was his way of unwinding after a show. In his mind, he had figured out how to, as he so eloquently put it, ‘separate sex from love.’ A knob jerk was just a job perk. What he had with Simone was
love
. Yet he hadn’t the decency to fill Simone in on his epiphany.” This disgusted Adrian then, and still upset him to talk about it now. “Simone and I had an amazing relationship. I had never bonded with a woman on such a platonic level. If he was my blood brother and she his soul mate, well, that made her my soul sister. I loved her . . . and that scared the hell out of Rick. Mind you, it was never on a sexual level. But rather, a level Rick either couldn’t bring himself to or wasn’t able to go to. It drove a real wedge between us.”

The wedge resulted in their inability to collaborate on music, for the first time in their decade-long friendship. Drugs were also beginning to cause a rift between the two bandleaders, Adrian explained. While Rick would partake in the occasional joint, he wasn’t interested in any other chemical enhancer. The others, Adrian included, were delving into bags of black beauties by the handful to keep up with the rigors of the road. He had been well on his way to becoming a speed freak until his accident in 1985, when he was introduced to an intravenous opioid for burn pain management in the hospital—morphine. His brain and his body did a 360-degree turn. “The euphoria was full-body and like nothing I had ever experienced before. I craved it long after my burns had healed.” He rolled into the comfort of my arms, pulling with him a section of sandy blanket over his back to cocoon us. Pressing his scarred torso against me, he sighed.

My fingers fell onto the hypodermic needle etched between two ribs, protruding from Corpse Guy’s head. A nuclear neon green substance filled the chamber, with a few cartoonlike droplets spurting nearby. “What . . . I can’t imagine . . . what was it like?”

A silence ensued, one so long I almost thought he hadn’t heard the question.

“It’s . . . complex to explain.” He cleared his throat. “A powerful dance.”

Back on the road, there was no pure morphine to be had, and no one he trusted enough to inject him with anything else. “I quickly discovered convenient substitutes: oxycodone, hydrocodone. Great little helpers . . . for a time.” Snorting heroin became the next viable option, as he quickly developed a tolerance to the oral painkillers. That was easy on the East Coast, where the drug was in powder form. “But once we hit California, Portland, Seattle . . . it was like tar. Brown lumps you had to cook down and soak up with a cotton ball. Junkie science,” Adrian explained. Shooting was a massive, immediate rush. Any pain—mental, physical—was chased away. “It brought on something I hadn’t experienced in ages: comfort.”

“Comfort?” A mixture of hurt and sadness stirred in me. I kissed along his forearm. I wanted to be his drug, his only indulgence.

“Getting ready for the high,” he explained, his finger absently circling in the hollow above my collarbone, “was as warming as the high. You’ve your spoon and your lighter. You have your bundle, your razor blades for cutting it. Your needle is bleached out and it’s clean.” The details rolled off his tongue, but he paused between each, as though relishing the memories one by one. “The ritual itself is relaxing; the high is imminent.” His lips brushed my temple, dry and hot. “Getting ready was the opening act.”

Wren, desperate to keep his puppets happy and under his thumb, ensnared each of them deeper according to their individual weaknesses. For Rick, it was the constant assurance that he was the glue holding the band together, as well as the star power. For Sam, Wren made sure there was ample snatch to be had, and for Adam, a constant party. Adam’s drinking had become the stuff of legend, and the antics that ensued kept the publicity wagon running. And for Adrian . . . “Wren provided me with a ‘personal assistant.’ Basically, someone to teach me how to shoot up and not die.” Heroin was now not just the drug of choice, it was the drug of necessity. “I needed it to rapidly cross that brain-blood barrier in order to function and perform, so injecting it was the only way.”

“I don’t understand. Why would Wren encourage . . . no, sabotage the band?”

Adrian pulled on his jeans and sat up to light a cigarette. “The best way to conquer is to divide,” he answered quietly. “What little soul was left in us, he began to steal one by one.”

He took a deep drag, and we both watched his exhale of smoke. It danced and dissipated toward the water, as if it were the very essence of the souls he spoke of.

Lyrics from “Habit”—a song he had written for the
Hell Hath No Fury
album—rolled into my memory and out of my mouth.