The Rock Star's Daughter (8 page)

But the way Jill had phrased her reprimand
really got under my skin. I wasn't sure if Jill didn't get that the
circumstances under which I had come to be living with my dad were
kind of irreversible. Or maybe there was a part that I didn't get:
maybe Jill had thought of other ways to get me out of their lives.
The mere notion should have made me feel relieved, since I wasn't
delighted to be the fourth wheel on their family unit, but instead
it just made me feel miserable.

The next morning my dad wore sunglasses and
did not talk much. The whole traveling tour met for a big breakfast
down in the hotel's main ballroom overlooking the ocean. We took up
two huge long tables and rather than even try to wait on us, the
hotel set up an enormous buffet. Wade and George seemed like they
were delighted to be back on the road and couldn't wait to go hit
the beach for a few hours.

But Dad remained silent while the rest of us
joked and drank coffee.

Then I realized he was hung over.

I never would have figured him for much of a
drinker, but I guess it made sense. Jill was in a lousy mood, too,
and while I originally thought it was because of the linguini
incident, I wondered if my dad's state had something to do with
it.

Typically I'm not one to judge someone else's
vices but I have a sore spot when it comes to alcoholism. More than
once when I was in elementary school, Mom forgot to pick me up
because she had overslept in the middle of the afternoon. When I
was in junior high she got a DUI in the parking lot of a liquor
store, which Allison had thought was hilarious but I failed to find
comical. Once when I was in seventh grade we were going to Westwood
for breakfast and I could tell by her wobbly driving that she
hadn't completely dried out from her bender the night before. I had
made her pull over to sit at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf until she
sobered up and she had told me, "Maybe you should drive us the rest
of the way there."

I was twelve years old at the time.

She apologized profusely later once she could
admit what an asinine suggestion it had been for me to drive, and
even went to a few AA meetings. My whole life she had drifted in
between being a complete drunk and a functional alcoholic. And I
would give my dad the benefit of the doubt that this was a rare
instance, but I got a sickly feeling in my stomach at the notion
that this was probably not an uncommon occurrence.

I barely saw my dad for the next two days
while we were in Florida. He was out of the hotel room before dawn
to go to the gym for his rigorous workout, then off to sound check,
and ate lunch with the band and roadies. I would see him backstage
before the show would start, but would barely even get to talk to
him, as usually he would be greeting fans who had won contests from
local radio stations, or posing for pictures with kids from charity
groups.

It's hard to be mad at your dad for spending
more time with kids who have terminal cancer or who need heart
transplants than he does with you. But by our last night in Florida
I was feeling a little left out, which I know is petty, but still.
I had never even officially agreed to come on this trip. My mind
began wandering toward my little house on North Laurel Avenue. Even
though the hotel was ritzy, I was missing the summer in Los Angeles
I had been planning on just a little.

Saturday afternoon I called Allison out of
homesickness. "Oh, hey," she said, sounding distracted. "I'm on my
way out the door to go meet Nicole."

"Nicole who?" I asked.

"Nicole Farley," Allison said, as if I should
have known better. "We're on our way to The Grove."

Nicole lived down the block from the Burch's
and was half a year older than us but had failed sixth grade and
had to redo the year. There had been many times when we were all in
public school together when Allison and I had dissed Nicole behind
her back for being ridiculously trendy; she always said
hella
even two summers after people had stopped saying
hella
, and we had snickered when we saw her trip over her
platform flip flops at The Arclight movie theater.

"Oh," I said.

"She took over your hours at Robek's,"
Allison explained. "She started on Thursday. And you know what?
She's not so bad. And she has her license and her dad just bought
her a new Miata."

I resisted the temptation to tell Allison to
have a hella good time. We said goodbye and I felt like I was going
to start crying. I hadn't even said one word about Brice Norris or
Florida and Allison hadn't bothered asking how my trip was going so
far. I had only been away from Los Angeles four days and already it
felt like my whole life there was being wiped away. I mean, I was
the one who had just lost my mom, and Allison never even asked how
I was feeling.

So much had happened to me since the
beginning of the summer that it was starting to seem as if Todd and
Allison Burch and trips to the Grove and sunny days in Los Angeles
existed in another universe.

Back in rock band universe, we all boarded
the bus bound for Atlanta. George strummed his acoustic guitar, I
worked at my summer reading list, and in general it was kind of fun
being together for a few hours while we traveled. Hours we spent on
the bus were the most I got to see of my dad, and he was typically
in an outgoing mood when we were all in a group. I got to know my
dad's body guards, heard a lot of stories from Dusty and Wade about
past tours, and best of all, was able to avoid making conversation
with Jill.

Our first afternoon in Atlanta, Jill informed
me that we were going shopping to buy me some new clothes. We left
Kelsey in the hotel with her nanny, a Brazilian woman named Cleo
who I had never met before that day, and a limousine took us to
downtown Buckhead.

Jill's former life as a professional stylist
came in handy as she tossed jeans and tops at me to try on.

"You've got long legs. You can wear tight
jeans. And detailed pockets on the rear will give your butt some
shape," she said, pushing me toward a dressing room. "Green looks
good on you with your eyes. And pink, with your complexion."

I have to say, as much as I really did not
desire any kind of a friendship or relationship with my father's
wife, the attention she showered on me that afternoon was a little
flattering. I made the mistake of checking out the price tag on one
of the pairs of jeans she had me try on and almost choked. My
mother would have killed me if I had ever asked for two hundred
dollars to buy a pair of pants. My mom had always teased me for
being fashion-handicapped but never made much of an effort to get
me interested in clothes.

Jill also insisted on buying me a Juicy
Couture leather bag and told me it was high time I started carrying
a purse and stopped tucking my wallet into the back pocket of my
jeans.

"We need to get this hair cut," she said,
studying me in the dressing room of a boutique called Little Bird.
"Maybe we can book an appointment in advance for when we're in New
Orleans. I know a guy there who works wonders with curly hair."

After she had put together no fewer than ten
outfits for me, we stopped for salads and ice coffees and I didn't
even grumble when she ordered me a vegan meal. "It's kind of nice
getting away for a girls' day," she said. "Don't you think?"

I reluctantly had to agree. She was much more
tolerable away from Kelsey. But I still didn't know where I stood
with her. I couldn't figure out why my dad had been hung over back
in Florida when Jill had emphatically stated that she did not
drink. Jill was kind of an enigma – on one hand she wanted to be
friends with me, and on the other I got the sense that she
completely resented me suddenly being part of her entourage.

Throughout lunch I got the feeling that she
was really making an effort to become friends with me. Perhaps my
dad had suggested that she try a little.

"I became interested in vegetarianism when I
was about your age," she told me as the salads arrived. "I grew up
near a farm and at an early age felt very sensitive about eating
animals. Then, as I got older, I started reading more about the
kind of pesticides poured into the grain that cattle consume, and
the kinds of antibiotics and steroids that are pumped into dairy
cows, and I made the decision to stop eating dairy as well."

It made me feel very mature that Jill was
explaining her belief system to me. While initially I had been
daunted by her wacky eating habits, her logic about sympathetic
eating and nutrition was well-researched. She seemed a lot less
flakey and new-agey than my first impression of her.

"When I met your dad, he was a holistic
mess," she laughed. "He was drinking too much, smoking, his idea of
an exercise routine was going for a twenty-minute run on a Saturday
afternoon and then having a cold beer to cool off. He knew he was
in need of a change and really dedicated himself to making it
happen."

There it was: she wanted to be clear with me
that she was the positive glue holding my dad's life together. All
right, I could recognize that if she wanted me to.

"What about you? Are you involved in any
social or environmental causes at school?"

Jill picked my brain clean about my
interests, life at Treadwell, what me and my friends liked to do
for fun, and if I had a boyfriend. I found words just pouring out
of my mouth like a flood; once I started talking, I just couldn't
stop. It was so rare that anyone asked me about my life that I just
kept going and going. I told her all about Mr. Ferris, our
devastatingly attractive band leader who was rumored to be gay, the
weekends we sold baked goods in Harvard Square to raise money for
the orphans of Rwanda, about Emma Jeffries and her catalog cover,
about the report I had written on the history of Native American
music, and about the fire my roommate Ruth and I had started when
we hung contraband Christmas lights up for decoration in our room
and mistakenly left them on all day.

"No boyfriend?" Jill asked again.

"I go to an all-girls school," I said in my
own defense.

"Relax. You're only fifteen. A boyfriend is
probably the last thing you need right now," she assured me.
Although I definitely got the sense that Jill Cunningham (her
maiden name) probably had more boyfriends than she knew what to do
with at my age.

"You're going to be in all the papers now,"
she explained quietly on the way back to the hotel. "I don't want
them tearing you apart."

Which I assumed was her polite way of saying
that if I continued to dress like a big slob, the gossip magazines
were going to have a field day with me. And it didn't matter if I
was ambivalent about that possibility; what mattered was that Jill
was embarrassed by my style.

Her comment kind of ruined the afternoon we
had just had. In the few hours we had spent together I had allowed
myself to really want Jill to like me. I was beginning to wonder if
my father had even consulted her before inviting me into their
lives.

*****

Later that night, during the show in
Alpharetta, no one seemed to notice when I left the backstage area
in one of my new outfits and tucked my VIP pass under my t-shirt. I
roamed around the amphitheater for an hour, wondering how weird it
would be to live in Georgia and be attending this concert as a fan.
At first I wasn't sure what I was looking for as I pushed through
the packed crowd, but then I admitted that I actually knew exactly
what I was looking for.

I saw Jake doing precisely what he said he
would be doing.

"I'd like that wife beater in a small," I
told him, pointing to a cheesy t-shirt with the POUND logo on it
hanging up behind his table. There was no line at that point,
half-way through the show. He was behind the t-shirt counter with
two other guys, both a lot older than him.

"Hey," he said, surprisingly happy to see me.
"What are you doing out here?"

"It's a free country," I told him. "I'm
allowed to walk around during shows."

He hopped over the counter to join me on the
other side. "I'll be back in a few," he told his coworkers.

We walked around the outer perimeter of the
amphitheater, past all the beer stands and vendors selling nachos
and hotdogs. When we passed windows, I got the sense that there was
even a bigger party going on outside in the parking lot, where
tailgaters were standing on the hoods of their cars and playing
Pound songs at top volume on their car stereos.

"How'd you get that job?" I asked, genuinely
curious as to how or why someone my age would want to tour with
Pound.

"I didn't get it," Jake said bashfully. "It
was just given to me. Basically, whenever Pound goes on tour, my
mom and some of her friends follow. Sometimes we only do half the
tour, sometimes just a couple cities. But two years ago when we
were on tour, Micky asked me if I wanted to make some money selling
t-shirts with him. My mom was all over it. It kind of gave her an
excuse to come on this tour, even though, you know…"

He trailed off.

I didn't know. "Even though what?"

"You know," he blushed. "She's kind of old to
be a groupie for a rock band."

Jake told me that his mom had been taking him
on the road to follow Pound since he was a baby. And on summers
when Pound didn't tour, they followed Phish. One summer they
followed the Monsters of Rock reunion tour, featuring Metallica,
Skid Row and Sepultura.

"That's crazy," I told him in wonderment.

The rest of the year, he lived with his mom
in Michigan and went to high school like a regular kid, but he was
on the fence about starting senior year. He was already working as
a DJ on weekends, making pretty good money, and figured he could
drop out of high school and just work, since he already knew that
he wanted to be a DJ and produce dance music anyway.