Melody Burning (7 page)

“And who scores? Who turns this crap into music?”

“Whoever you hired to turn this crap into music!”

I catch on that she
wants
the
People
lady to write awful things about her. She wants to be known as a harridan, a slave driver, because it makes a lot better copy than if she was wonderful and smart and sweet.

I eat my breakfast and watch her and think about her. This is the woman who came sneaking into my room last night and put her hand on my forehead, then proceeded to leave a weathered old silk rose on my pillow as some kind of odd peace offering. It looks like something off a garbage truck. And now I’m going to conduct an experiment.

I take the rose from my purse. “By the way, Mom, thanks for this.”

She looks at it. In the jump seats Julius and Amber gobble more eggs. But Amber is not oblivious. She is doing her reporter thing of disappearing into the woodwork so, hopefully, she can pile dirt on me. As she gobbles, she watches.

Mom looks at it. “What’s this supposed to mean?”

Which is not the reaction I expected. “Um, maybe that’s my question.”

She picks it up. “This is filthy.” She rolls down the window and tosses it out.

Suddenly I want to scream because I know what it is. It’s from
him
. He saw me on the roof and he stopped me. Maybe I didn’t need to be stopped, but now I know
he can get into our apartment
.

My breakfast comes up all over everything and everybody, and I am horribly embarrassed and totally sick.

“Oh, Lord, honey.”

“You want me to stop, ma’am?”

“No, Louie, we’re fine, don’t stop, for God’s sake!”

I’m fighting for control, but my body is suddenly not my own. I remember him standing there in the shadows on the roof, and another heave comes.

Julius gets his arms around me and helps me back into the seat while Mom finds paper towels somewhere under the bar and wipes up. Then she produces a new shirt, which I change into.

“I have to get out—I’m going to be sick,” Amber yells.

“Open the windows for her, but
do not stop
.”

So we go on down the Ten with the windows open and traffic all around us and the papis frantically trying to get up beside us so they can get a shot of whatever in hell is happening in here.

We’re going to Reynolds, one of the most legendary recording studios in the world, which I like because it has a real private feeling once you are inside. Plus, the isolation booths are big and comfy, and if I’m going to spend my whole day in one, what I don’t need is claustrophobia.

“Okay, honey, okay now, it’s gonna be good. It’s gonna be good. Am I riding you too hard?”

She is cleaning me up, fixing my face, her eyes full of pride and love.

“Mom, I’m so sorry.”

“We’re fine. We’re going to have an extraordinary day.”

I feel the car stop and whisper to Mom, “I’m not scared.” Mom’s look has love in it, but also a sharpness that
does
scare me.

The papis are parking on the sidewalk and running toward us.

“Now just look out the window, don’t say anything, and let them shoot you.”

So I sit amid the machine gun clicking of the cameras, which is amazingly intense. I smile, and, yes, there is this thrill that goes through me when I realize that they are working in relays because there are so many of them.

When the window goes up, they are all gone. I sit back and close my eyes, and for just a second the world is not there. Then I hear the gargling sound of Mom sucking her plastic cigarette. I open my eyes and watch Amber writing on a pad. I mean, she actually does this. Every other reporter I’ve met never wrote a thing down and just made up all my quotes. This is real, though. It’s not a tab, it’s
People,
for Chrissake.

The door opens, and we’re in the forecourt, which is full of bamboo and palm trees and blooming lantana. Then Willie comes out with Sassy Lester, my arranger.

“Mel, they’re just brilliant,
brilliant
,” she says. She looks at Mom. “Oh my God, Hilda, aren’t they
fabulous
?”

“I know. We’re so proud of her.”

I actually haven’t played any of these demos for Mom yet. And for a reason—she’ll be too critical.

We go down the long hall paneled with blond wood and hung with pictures of people from ancient history, like Sandra Dee, and more recent ones, like Sister Hazel. There is a picture of me at the end of the hall, the one that was taken by Rod Gilliard last April. ’Course I know that it will be gone eventually, replaced by a picture of the next instant superstar.

But it sure does make me feel important, especially when I go into the isolation booth where I will spend the next however many hours. Inside I find the spritzer of mint Listerine that I like, a box of Altoids, and six-packs of Evian and fruit punch Gatorade. Nobody asked me my preferences. They found out on their own.

My demo comes through, and the first song we run is “Flying on Forever,” which is almost whispered, with long bass notes backing it up, and I’m thinking we should add something like a theremin when Sassy says into my earphones, “When I heard this, I said to Willie, this is slow and dreamy.”

“Kids need to be able to dance to it,” I say. “Think slow dancing, just a few kids in somebody’s rec room with all the lights turned off,” I add.

“I think our girl’s done this before,” Willie says.

Then my voice comes into my ears, and I start singing to it, and I feel like I’m flying.

“Flying on with the stars, with the clouds that love me, flying in the dark when you cannot even see, flying on forever . . . forever . . . forever . . .” Again I’m up on that railing and the wind is blowing my silk nightgown, and I sing, “When you are remembered, you’re not remembered at all, nobody’s real, nobody falls, nobody at all . . . ’cause we’re all flying on forever . . . forever . . . forever.”

I stop and after a second the scratch track stops too. Willie says, “Good. We’ll take some of those.”

“I need a punch in ‘you’re not remembered,’ ” I say. “I dropped off-key.”

Then Mom’s voice comes into the mix. “Is this a song about suicide?”

“No, Mom, it’s about flying.”

“We don’t need people blaming us for kids killing themselves, Mel.”

“My music is about coping with emotions, not giving in to them.”

I remember the weirdo standing back in the shadows. Somehow he had stopped me.

“Flying on forever,” I sing, “forever . . . forever . . . forever,” and so it goes, on and on. I do my lyrics again and again and again. Hopefully what comes out the other end will sound rad, and I’ll get amazing downloads and have a hit.

Some musicians will do fifty takes or more. But I can’t do it that way. I’ll sing it through five or six times, feeling it down deep in my blood.

Then we move on to “So Not Free,” which I think will be the big seller on this album. I can see Mom outside the sound room with her plastic cigarette, glaring. She is not liking these songs.

“You think you’re on the road, you think you’re gonna go, but you’re so not free, so not free . . . so not free . . . so not free. . . . You think there are no bars, but they put them around your heart. . . . You’re so not free, so not free. . . .”

“NO, NO, NO!” Mom throws up her arms. “This is all crazy. This isn’t music. There’s hardly any rhyme—it’s almost unsing-able! It’s dark, depressive crap, and I won’t have it!”

“I think it sounds great, Sassy. Let’s do it again. I’m ready,” I say.

“I believe we’re in mid-freakout here,” Willie says under his breath. “Mrs. McGrath, we were going to do that take again. Are you all right?”

“Okay, fine, do it again, but you will NOT get paid. None of you! Money tap is closed.” Her eyes pop practically out of her head and she looks at me. “And I
can
do it. Legally, I have the right,
little girl
!”

So I pull off my headset and go out into the observation room, where Mom paces and Amber sits scribbling wildly.

Time for me to take over. “Mother, I would appreciate it if you could go out and get Louie to take you home.”

“I’m getting in that car, all right, but so are you, you self-obsessed, self-destructive little bitch. And you’re gonna go to a goddamn shrink and get some antidepressants.”

“Well, that’s very insightful of you. Do you know that I went up on the roof last night, and I almost went over? And do you also know that it was
not you
who made me go up there and lean against that rail, and it was
not you
who made me come down?”

She grabs me and
shakes, shakes, shakes
until my eyes and neck hurt, and finally Amber says, “Hey there, hey there,” and grabs Mom’s shoulder.

“This is between me and her, dammit!” Mom lunges at Amber. “Gimme that notebook!” She grabs it and rips out pages and stuffs them in her mouth. “Your lies taste like paper,” she says as the pages come flying out.

Amber sort of recovers herself but looks absolutely horrified.

Then Sassy is there, standing in the doorway. Sassy is maybe thirty. She sings in cabarets of the kind Mom likes, so they have some sort of bond. Sassy has a sailor cut, and she’s real thin. Today she has on a Three Wolves T-shirt and jeans at least as old as me.

“It’s all brilliant, you know.”

“But it’s not gonna SELL,” my mom says. “Kids like—” She dances a kind of crazed little jig. “They like to dance and laugh and love! Like I did! It hasn’t changed. It’ll never change.”

Silence. Everybody is now in the room with us, and every single person disagrees with Mom. You can hear it in the total vacuum.

“It’ll never change!”

She throws herself down on the couch and jams her headphones back on. She takes out her plastic cigarette and throws it across the room. She lights a Marlboro, takes a long drag, dragons the smoke out her nose, and says, “Okay, so Mommy’s being bad again. Call a cop!”

I won that one. We go on with the session, and I find a rhythm, grabbing songs out of some kind of spirit wind that is blowing through my head. I know we’re just laying down scratch tracks at this point, but they’ll lead to something. Anyway, we end the day with five finished songs, “So Not Free,” “Flying on Forever,” “Blue Roses,” “Love Without You,” and, of course, “So Long, Boyfriend.”

As we’re heading back to the car, Mom apologizes to Amber.

Amber says nothing. I can’t even begin to imagine what’s going to appear in
People
, but it won’t be pretty.

Mom is still smoking, so I crack a window.

She reaches over, closes it.

“Mom, I can’t stand—”

“I put up with your crap.”

“I can’t stand us fighting! Why are we fighting? Why can’t we stop?”

“Why are we fighting? Because you’re sixteen years old and I’m the dumbest mom who ever existed.”

“I hope I’m not that much of a cliché.”

She reaches over and pats my knee. And, in this way, a truce is declared. She says to Louie, “We go in on Tischer Court. The super’s got the back open for us.” Then to me, “The party’s over for the papis.”

“Thank you, Mom.”

Frank is there—he comes out the door as we pull up. He looks huge, like a guard coming out of a guard house. He must be six four. I imagine him carrying me upstairs.

There’s an elevator waiting at the end of the long gray hall near the security office. In the office I see all the screens, all the images from the security cameras on every floor, and I wonder if Frank knows who the stalker is. But I don’t want to ask him. I don’t want to say anything because there will just be more hell over it with Mom. If Mom knew he’d been in the apartment, there would be no peace.

We arrive at our floor.

“Thanks, Frank,” Mom says, and I hear in her voice the certain tone that she reserves for men she likes, a sort of smoothness with a whisper of bedtime in it. But he’s at least ten years younger than she is.

As we enter the foyer, I see an arrangement on the big table, a beautiful spray of flowers.

“Hi there, Mel. Hi, Hilda.”

A man comes strolling out of the living room, and at first I think it’s some new beau who has been given the run of the apartment without even a mention to me, but then I am introduced.

“Melody, this is Dr. Singer.”

Somehow, she has managed to call a shrink and get him over here.

I head straight for the door.

“Mel!”

“No, Mom, I’m not staying. If you want me to see a doctor, ask me. Don’t ambush me.”

“You’re a minor.”

“I’m a human being, and I have human rights!”

“You’re a child, and you’re in trouble, and you need help.”

She turns away, strides toward the wall of windows. “Oh, God,” she murmurs, “help me.”

I realize that she is absolutely terrified for me.

I look toward the front door and want so badly to just walk through it and keep going forever, just like in my song.

Except, except,
except
, I do want my career. It’s not the fame that matters—it’s the kind of musical inspiration that happened today.

“Okay,” I say to Dr. Singer. “What are we doing?”

“I’m here because your mother is concerned.”

I look at her. She looks right back. The defiance there makes me mad. The terror makes me sad. She says, “Honey, please.”

So I go into the den and drop down on the couch. “Is this how you want me?”

“Melody, I want you to be comfortable. I just want us to get to know each other today. We’ll keep talking. But I want to put something right on the table now. Do you know what a suicide intervention is?”

Ohmygod. This guy must be from a suicide watch.

I say nothing.

“So tell me, did you do what your mom says you did? What you told her?”

I just had the best day of my whole life, and the worst day of my whole life.

“I don’t know what I said.”

He takes out a pocket recorder. He presses a button and I hear
me
: “Do you know that I went up on the roof last night, and I almost went over?”

He stops it. “That is you?”

My throat closes. I want to talk, but I can’t. I want to shake my head
no no no
, but I can’t.