Climbing the Rock

Chapter 13b: Lines of Persuasion

That night, after eating the dinner Manny had prepared for him — something with an unpronounceable French name that was made out of chicken breast and rich white wine gravy — Jake walked into the office of his new place. There, beside the computer desk and the filing cabinet was a black case that had been moved from his apartment in Heritage to his apartment in Hollywood to a storage house during his first tour to his first condo after it to another storage house during the second tour and now here, to his office in his second condo. The case hadn't been opened in more than two years.

He picked it up and sat on the couch across from the computer desk. He set the case down next to him and opened it. Inside was his old acoustic guitar — a Fender knock-off that he'd purchased in a Heritage music store way back in 1977. Of course the Brogan guitar company — his official sponsor — had given him several high-quality acoustic guitars as well as five electrics, but he had never even opened the boxes they'd come in. This guitar was the one he'd always used to compose with, the one he'd always strummed for the sheer pleasure of strumming, for the thrill of making music, for translating the rhythm and melody in his head into the air around him. He looked at it now. It was covered in a layer of dust despite the case. He strummed his thumb over the strings. The sound was muted and out of tune. He felt horrible as he looked at its condition, as he listened to its imperfection. It was almost like he'd abandoned a child.

Gently he lifted it from the case and set it on the couch. He spent the next thirty minutes polishing it, cleaning it inside and out and restringing it with a set of strings that had been stuffed into the box. He then took out his tuning fork and spent another fifteen minutes tuning it to perfection. He strummed it again, listening in satisfaction as the rich, perfect sound poured out.

"You sound good, old friend," he said with a smile, unaware that he was speaking aloud. "I promise to never leave you in the case that long again."

He sat back on the couch and put the guitar in his lap, his left hand going to the neck, his right twirling a guitar pick. The room was silent, the only sound the muted roar of a vacuum cleaner from somewhere else in the condo as Manny did his housework. He strummed a few times and then grabbed a G chord — his favorite for improvisation — and picked out a brief rhythm. He winced as he heard it.

"That really sucked," he muttered.

He sat back, staring at the blank computer monitor on the desk across the room. Had he lost the ability to compose music? Had he been out of practice at it so long that he no longer had the knack? How had he begun before, back in the days before National Records, before Shaver and his Bolivian flake cocaine, before national fame and groupies in every city?

"A concept," he said. "I began with a concept."

He let his mind flow over everything he'd been through in the past two years, over everything that had been going on in the world, just and unjust, good and bad. Images and emotions flashed by as if projected by a kaleidoscope, images of Angie and their brief relationship, emotions of leaving her to go on tour and never speaking to her again, never contacting her again. He thought of the giddy elation of leaving Heritage to go to Los Angeles and record their first album, of the thought that they'd actually been signed to a record label, that they were really going to be rock and roll stars. He thought of the gradual realization that was brutally slammed home when the lifestyle of the rock star turned out to be far from what he'd expected. He thought of long bus rides and the boredom that went with them. He thought of the road fatigue that settled in after a few weeks on tour, when you could no longer remember where you were or what day it was. He thought of the absolute thrill of performing on stage in front of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people, of hearing their cheers and adoration. He thought of the groupies he encountered out there, of the difficulty in resisting the primal urges the sight of their young bodies and willing sexuality invoked. He thought of horrid fatigue ridden hangovers after the post-show partying, hangovers that could only be driven back by the hair of the dog, by a few more drinks, by a few lines, a few hits. He thought of Mindy and the raw sexual infatuation she still invoked in him to this day, of the sweltering, drug-like allure of being with her, of touching her, of knowing that she wanted him to touch her, that she craved him as he craved her, of the glorious knowledge that he was fucking a woman that most of America would kill to fuck. And then his mind turned away from his own life and onto other things. He thought of marines in Beirut, blown to pieces by a suicide bomber. He thought of the marines who had survived this bombing being pulled out of Lebanon in response. He thought of other marines in another part of the world, landing in helicopters on the island of Grenada. He thought of a Korean Airlines 747 being blown out of the sky by Russian jet fighters, how the terrified passengers must have endured five or six minutes of still-living, horribly conscious terror before the spinning aircraft mercifully crashed into the sea. He thought of protestors lining up in front of nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons production facilities. He thought of the constant threat of sudden, extinction level nuclear war that hung over the world like a pall.

"Too much," he said, shaking his head, closing his eyes in frustration. "There's too much in there."

He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, keeping the guitar on his lap but keeping his hands off of it. Yes, there were too many concepts to consider, too many ideas for him to focus on a single one. Maybe he should just give this up for the night and try again tomorrow. It was obvious that the conditions were not right for composition.

But he didn't get up. Instead, he let his mind go a little bit further, releasing the brakes and restrictions on it, letting it drop into a mode it hadn't been in for two years now. And soon, as it always had back in the day, it picked a concept out of the maelstrom of thoughts and began to focus on it.

It was a pleasant thought, one of the most pleasurable, perhaps the most pleasurable, he'd experienced over the past two years, something he'd experienced every night out on the road. It was the moment when they first stepped onto the stage at each performance, when the lights came on, when the crowd saw them for the first time and they began to play. To Jake, the applause, the screams, the appreciative yells and whistles that took place at this instant of the show were the best, the most gratifying. They were the yells and screams and applause of people that had been waiting for days, weeks even for this moment. And every night, when he heard this, it didn't matter how tired he was, how hungover or pissed off or burned-out, it always brought him to life. It was like... like... like he'd found himself again, his purpose, his reason for being.

"Found myself," he muttered, setting his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. "Yeah."

He picked up the guitar and grabbed the G chord again. He began to pick at the strings, throwing out a simple melody as it formed in his head.

"Found myself," he said, half-singing those words this time.

But it wasn't just that he'd found himself at the moment, was it? No, not at all. It happened every night — every performance anyway. And no matter how many times it did happen, the sensation remained strong, the feeling of finding one's purpose.

"Again," he said. "Found myself again. I've found myself again."

He repeated this phrase, fully singing it now, emphasizing the last word, and strumming out the developing rhythm as he did so. "I've found myself again."

He liked that thought, could see the potential it held. His mind focused more intently on it and while it did so, his fingers continued to strum the melody over and over, twisting it a little, throwing in some chord changes, firming it up. And, as always, the music focused his mind even tighter, letting him recall everything about that moment, letting him put into words exactly what that moment felt like.

"The lights come on..." he sang, slowing the melody a bit. "The lights come on, I hear that roar... and I've found myself again." A furious bit of guitar strumming and then, "I've found myself again!"

He stopped, taking a few breaths, the words he'd just composed running over and over in his head along with the melody.

"Yeah," he whispered, smiling, grinning from ear to ear in fact. "Fuck yeah!"

He set the guitar down and walked over to the desk, pulling open one of the drawers. He took out a pen and a notepad and scratched out the lyrics he had come up with so far. True, it was only thirteen words, but more would soon join it, of that he had every confidence. He knew, of course, that his efforts might be in vain, that the song, the concept he was now working on might end up sucking ass when all was said and done, might end up a balled up piece of paper in the wastebasket, but that didn't matter. He was composing. He hadn't lost it after all.

He went back to the couch, setting the notepad and pen down next to him and picking up the guitar. The melody and the words were still dominating the forefront of his brain. He began to play again, singing out the words he had so far.

"The lights come on, I hear that roar, and I've found myself again. I've found myself again!"

It was twelve-thirty when he finally went to bed. For the past three hours he had sat there on the couch, strumming and singing, thinking and composing, changing and changing back. During that time he didn't smoke, he didn't get up to go to the bathroom, he didn't drink or eat. The notebook, which he locked in the safe next to his marijuana and cocaine, now had the first three pages covered with lyrics and musical notes. The first verse, the chorus, and the beginning of the bridge were already composed.

While Jake was finding himself again, sixteen blocks away, on the twenty-eighth floor of another upper-class high-rise condo building, Matt was doing the same. He did things a little differently than Jake. In the first place, he was incapable of composing new material while sober. To prepare for this first attempt in two years he had smoked six hits of potent greenbud from the old plastic bong he used to use when he was a teenager.

"All right," he said, grinning on his living room couch as he felt the massive surge of THC obliterating his higher brain functions. "Now let's write some fuckin' music!"

The instrument he used to compose with was different from Jake's as well. Jake's tunes were all acoustic guitar based and any one of them could be translated back to its base form if so desired. Even the hardest rocking of Jake's songs, like Descent Into Nothing or Living By The Law, could be sung around a campfire by a single guitarist or even played out on a piano. Matt's songs, on the other hand, were all based on power chords on a distorted electric guitar and virtually none of them could be translated into an unaccompanied acoustic format, at least not without changing the basic melody.

What this all meant was that while Jake was sitting in relative quiet with his old acoustic on his lap, Matt had taken down his beloved Stratocaster and plugged it into a thirty-five watt amplifier and connected a series of effects pedals. He spent almost thirty minutes playing with the distortion levels and the effects and then turned the volume on the amp itself up to eight. He began to play, warming up with a series of riffs and solos that were loud enough to cause the pictures on his wall to vibrate on their hooks.

His new manservant, Emil (his last manservant had refused to serve him again) came rushing out of his bedroom within seconds of Matt's initial solo. He had to scream "Mr. Tisdale!" six times before his voice finally made it to Matt's ears.

"What the fuck you want?" demanded Matt after silencing the guitar. "Can't you see I'm composing?"

"Begging your pardon, sir," Emil said, "but the noise! The neighbors will complain."

"Fuck the neighbors," Matt said. "And don't ever refer to my music as noise again, you dig?"

"Uh... yeah, I dig," he said. "But, sir, the... uh... music you're making is sure to..."

"I'll stop when the cops show up," Matt said. "That's a rule that's always worked for me in the past. Now tell me what you think of this riff. Too heavy? Or not heavy enough?"

And with that, he ground out a crunching, multifaceted riff that reverterbrated throughout the floor above and below his.

Emil didn't answer. He simply fled back to his bedroom, worried for his immigration status when the cops finally did arrive.

Matt chuckled under his breath and continued playing. He played with different riffs, trying to come up with something new, something original, something that sounded like nothing he or anyone else had ever done before. After about twenty minutes he hit upon such a thing. It was a complex five-chord riff that blasted out of the amp like lightning from a storm cloud. He tweaked it a little here and there, refining and modifying, increasing the power in some parts and decreasing in other, playing with the distortion levels until he had something that made him smile with accomplishment.

"Yeah," he said, his ears ringing from the amp, his head nodding in satisfaction. "Now that is what I'm fuckin' talkin' about!"

He began to play again, doing it over and over, getting it down, imprinting it in his brain for all time. Once the base riff was there, he began to modify it again, to make it even more complex. Through it all, in his mind, he envisioned what the riff would sound like backed by Jake's guitar, by Nerdly's piano, and with the drum and bass beat keeping time. Once that was done, he knew he had another hit on his hands, something that a crowd would scream for. Now it was time to come up with some lyrics to go with it.

What to write about? he wondered as he put the guitar down and took another three hits of greenbud. What to write about? His mind automatically turned towards the three things he loved to write about more than anything: sex, gross intoxication, and violence. Like Jake, he cast his mind backwards over the last two years, trying to focus on a concept that fit into one of these categories. And, also like Jake, he eventually locked onto an aspect that had to do with life on the road.

The groupies. For him, this was one of the most enjoyable aspects of being on the road. He loved playing before a crowd, loved the applause — initial and final — and loved the adoration that swept over him at such moments, but he also loved the gratuitous sex that he was provided at the end of each show by the young, slutty, and gloriously attractive groupies the security team picked and chose and admitted to the backstage area. He loved everything about them — their namelessness, their youth, their willingness to do anything and everything, up to and including dyking out with each other or even pissing on each other for his pleasure.

"They serve me," he said, ripping out his new riff again. "They fuckin' serve me!"

He played the riff a few more times, variations of this phrase running through his head, searching for a lyrical rhythm that went with the music. At last he came up with one.

"You're here to service me," he sang as the riff ground out. "You're here to service me. You're here to ser-vice me! You're here to ser-vice me!"

He could hardly hear his own voice over the sound of the guitar, but that didn't matter. He heard it in his mind and he liked it. He envisioned that phrase as a repetitive lyric, sung primarily by the back-up singers — himself, Bill, Coop, and Darren. Jake would sing other lyrics in between the repetitions. Other lyrics... other lyrics... like...

"I want you down on your knees," Matt sang, imagining Jake's voice and then imagining his own again, mixed with the others. "You're here to ser-vice me." He nodded in satisfaction and then stopped long enough to write that down on a piece of paper. He then began working on more Jake lyrics to go between the service me lines.

"Bring your girl-friend please," he sang. "Just don't bring no disease. Yeah, you're here to ser-vice me! You're here to ser-vice me! No talking, no names, please! You're here to ser-vice me! I like to come clean you see! You're here to ser-vice me!"

He played and sang, pausing every few minutes to write down the particular lyrics he thought were keepers (he rejected the ones about "no cottage cheese" and "watch those teeth if you please"). By the time the LAPD finally pushed their way into the condo — assisted by the building manager (who had pounded on the door, unheard for more than twenty minutes) and his passkey — he had all of the chorus sequences written and had started on the main lyrics.

The entire band got together two days later for their first official jam session in more than two years. They met in their rehearsal warehouse where all of their touring equipment had been set up and attached to the soundboard and their basic recording set. Jake plugged his old Les Paul into the amps while Matt plugged in one of the Brogan brand Stratocaster knock-offs he'd been provided. Bill's piano was the electric one instead of the grand, the idea being simplicity in sound reproduction instead of showmanship.

Darren was ten minutes late and looking a little haggard. Most of his hair had grown back, although it wasn't as long as it had been before, and he had only minimal scarring from his encounter with the explosives. He still wore the earplug in his right ear, however, because loud noise allegedly still bothered him, as did a rampant, chronic case of tinnitus (ringing in the ear) from his damaged eardrum. He was also quite obviously stoned and under the influence of narcotic painkillers. Neither Jake nor Matt commented on it and didn't really care anyway. This was a jam session, after all, not a rehearsal, and during jam sessions, marijuana intoxication was not only allowed, it was mandatory.

They smoked out, passing Matt's old plastic bong around their little circle just like in the old days. When they were sufficiently stoned they climbed up on their makeshift stage and began to play around with their instruments.

"Check this out, guys," Matt said when he finally got his guitar adjusted to the sound he wanted. "This is what I've been working on for the past two days. It's called Service Me."

"Cool name," said Darren, sitting in a chair, his bass in his lap.

"Sounds like a fuckin' commercial for Tune-up Masters," said Coop.

"But its not," said Matt. "Now check it out. Here's the riff I came up with for it."

He began to play the riff over and over, grinding it out of the amps and letting all of them absorb it. They liked what they heard — which wasn't the case with all of the riffs he came up with — and began to nod their heads in time to it. After ten or fifteen repetitions, he stopped and asked opinions.

"That's got a good flow to it," said Jake. "It's loud and authoritative, but it isn't harsh at all."

"Indeed," agreed Bill. "I like the step-up progression between four and five."

"Sounds good to me," said Darren. "Let's try it with some back-beat. It'll sound good with heavy."

"You always fuckin' say that," Coop told him. "Let's try it with moderate back-beat first and then we can step it up or down from there."

"Okay," said Matt. "Sounds like it might be a keeper. Let's do some mixing."

He launched into the riff again, doing it repetitively. After the third repeat, Darren began hitting his bass strings, adapting to the timing of the riff and then enhancing it. Then Coop began to hit the drums, playing offset from Darren's bass strokes. They played around a little, experimenting with different formats and powers, with different combinations of drum strikes and bass string progressions but finally were able to lock in something that just sounded right.

"That's it," Matt said, nodding enthusiastically. "That's fuckin' it! Now let's get Jake and Nerdly in on it. What do you think, Jake? Too heavy for strong acoustic backing?"

"Yeah," Jake agreed. "You need me to go distortion for this one. The acoustic strokes wouldn't do anything but get lost behind the bass and the drums, and there does seem to be something needed between two and three and between five and one."

"How about a three-chord mock-up of the main riff?" suggested Bill.

"Hmm," Jake said, considering. He walked over to his effects pedals and stomped on one of them. He hit an open chord and listened to the distortion that emitted. With a nod, he put his palm against the strings, silencing them. "How about something like this?" he said, and then began to play. The riff that came out was a much simpler version of what Matt had been doing. He played around with it a little, upping the tempo and decreasing the overall power.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I think it'll work," Matt said. "Let's try it out."

Matt began to play the riff again. Darren and Coop chimed right back in with the rhythm they'd worked out. Jake let them go through a few repetitions and then he began to play as well, inserting his backing riff just beneath it all. It sounded good but not great. Jake changed his riff around a little, playing it stronger at the onset, a little weaker at the offset, and this seemed to do the trick.

"Fuck yeah," Matt said into his microphone. "This has got some balls. I like it."

"Get in on this thing, Nerdly," Jake said into his mic. "Let's put some frosting on it."

No one bothered suggesting to Bill just how he should incorporate his piano into the mix. Jake and Matt were both adept at the piano and Darren was passable on it, but none of them could even come close to matching Bill's mastery of both the instrument and its best use in a hard-rock song. Bill could always find a way to plug in, to give his playing soul, and he did so now, picking at a few keys for a moment but finally going full out and mixing the ivories just beneath the sound of the main riff and just above the sound of the backing riff.

"Fuck yeah, Nerdly," Matt said. "That's the shit right there."

"The fuckin' frosting, man," Jake said, smiling, enthralled by the music they were making. "You got the knack for that."

They played some more, solidifying the sound until all of them could do it without thinking. Then it was time to introduce the lyrics.

"Okay," Matt said into the mic while they continued to play. "Here's what I got for words. When you pick up on the main chorus lines, everyone sing them together. In between lines go to the lead. Got it?"

They all got it. Matt took on the lead vocal for the time being. "This is the chorus," he said, waiting for the riff to come around to the beginning again. When it did, he sang: "You're here to ser-vice me. You're here to ser-vice me!"

After five repetitions of this, Jake, Darren, Coop, and Bill all began to sing it in unison. When they had it dialed in, Matt began to sing out the in between lyrics for the first chorus.

"I hear you wanna meet me."

"You're here to ser-vice me," sang the back-ups.

"So come on back, babe, and see."

"You're here to ser-vice me."

"Just drop right down on those knees..."

"You're here to ser-vice me."

"... And show how you earned your SG."

They had to stop for a few moments as Jake and Coop both started laughing out loud at the last lyric Matt had sung. The SG he was referring to were the large blue letters on the Special Guest back-stage passes that the groupies were typically issued. And everyone, of course, knew how they earned those passes.

"Oh my god, Matt," Jake said. "Those are some classic Matt Tisdale lyrics you got going there."

"It only gets better," Matt promised. "From the top?"

"From the top," Jake agreed.

They began to play again.

They went solid for the next two hours, first perfecting the chorus of the song — there were five in all, and all had different in between lyrics — and then starting in on the verses. After the entire song was introduced to everyone, Jake took over the job of lead vocals and Matt went back to singing back up. Jake read the lyrics off a piece of notepaper taped to the bottom of his microphone but by the end of the second hour he hardly had to refer to it at all.

The song was far from together when they finally decided to take a break. On the contrary, they had only the basic riffs and melody and the basic lyrical formula down. They would still have to work on the bridge, the intro, the changeovers, and the merges. But all of that would have to come later. They were burned out on Service Me for the day and it was time to work on something else.

They smoked some more bonghits, reinforcing their jamming demeanor and then Jake introduced them to the new song he had been working on. As had been the case with the initial composition itself, the introduction was also different. Jake put his guitar back into acoustic mode and played out the song for them exactly as he had been practicing it on his guitar at home. By this point he had a complete set of lyrics to go along with the basic melody and a strong bridge section as well. He still had to refer to his notes to keep from stumbling on the verses but the guitar work itself had been committed to memory. It was a rough draft, of that there was no doubt, but the consensus was unanimous. They liked it.

"Classic Jake Kingsley lyrics touching on a new subject," said Matt.

"It's deep, man," agreed Coop. "I'm down with it intensely, you know?"

Jake was pleased at their praise. His opinion of the song was the same, of course, but one always needed the approval of others before one could surely know he wasn't deluding himself.

"Do the melody for me again," said Matt. "Let's get it into rock mode."

Jake did it again, naming off the chord changes and progression as he did them. Matt played around with the distortion levels on his guitar for a few minutes, adjusting the sound and adding another effects pedal.

"Okay, let's see how this comes out," Matt said. He began to play, translating the melody into distorted electric. It sounded like crap at first but, with suggestions from them all, they upped the tempo a bit and eventually dialed in something that everyone liked. A riff was born.

"I'm thinking strong acoustic for the backing," suggested Bill when this process was complete.

"Definitely," said Matt. "The only fuckin' way to go. Play the original acoustic base but up-tempo to match the distortion."

Jake hit another pedal and switched to a sound that was still acoustic in nature but on the edge of achieving electric distortion. It was the same sound he used to back several other Intemperance songs, like Point of Futility and Crossing The Line. He began to play the original score faster and harder and the sound was good. After a moment, Matt joined in, playing the new riff — which was a different version of what Jake was now doing — on top of it. All of them liked the combo at once.

"Bad ass," said Matt. "Now let's throw in the rhythm section and then Nerdly can plug himself in on top of it."

They worked on this song for the next three hours, changing and modifying, suggesting and rejecting, but eventually coming up with the bare bones of a tune they knew they would be proud to play before a D Street West audience or to put on an album. As they went through all of this, as they sang and played, as they complimented, derided, and occasionally argued, all of them forgot about everything else that was going on in their lives. In their minds, they were back in Matt's garage in Heritage, getting ready to put together another performance for their small group of fans.

This amnesia to their current lifestyles did not last, however. They called it a day just before four o'clock in the afternoon, their plans to meet again at nine the next morning for some more jamming. Jake and Bill once again lived in the same building so they climbed in Jake's Corvette and headed home. Matt climbed into a limo so he could go home, take a shower, snort a few lines of coke, and then go out for a night of drinking and carousing at the nightclubs. Darren and Coop, who had also been assigned to the same building together like before, climbed in their own limo.

"I don't know about this, dude," Coop was saying as they crawled through the congested downtown streets. "I mean... I wanna try it and all, but I don't wanna play around with no monkey, you know what I fuckin' mean?"

"There ain't no fuckin' monkey involved," Darren scoffed. "I'm telling you, if you do it the way I do it, it's harmless. It ain't nothing more than smoking some weed."

They arrived home just before five o'clock. Both went to their separate condos and enjoyed meals provided by their respective manservants. At six o'clock Darren called Coop on the phone.

"You comin' up, or what?" he asked. "It don't make no fuckin' difference to me."

"Yeah," Coop said. "I'll come up."

He went up. There he found Darren sitting on the couch before MTV, the manservant dismissed for the night. On the table before him was a polished, stainless steel kit known on the streets as an "outfit". It had been removed from a felt lined case and all of its pieces glistened with sterility and the air of medicinal necessity, but it was really no different than the paraphernalia of a homeless street bum with the same habit. It was a kit that was used for preparing and injecting heroin.

"I'll do myself up first so you can see how it works," Darren said when Coop took a seat.

Darren now had a week's worth of experience with the process. When they'd come home from the tour Greg had disappeared from his life and so had the Demerol he'd been injecting the bass player with to "keep the pain under control". Darren had asked Crow to keep him supplied with the drug in order to get through the day but Crow had refused.

"You're healed up now, Darren," he'd explained. "You don't need it anymore."

This led to a begging, pleading, and threatening session in which Darren had pulled out all the stops. "My ear still hurts!" he whined. "All the fuckin' time, man. Don't you understand that?"

"The Vicodin and codeine tablets in your safe should take care of those problems at this point," Crow responded. "Demerol is expensive and hard to get hold of. There's only so much we can provide you with. It's time you weaned yourself off of it."

For a week he'd suffered. The pills helped keep the withdrawal symptoms mild but they were still there. He had constant body aches and rampant diarrhea. His appetite was next to nothing, as was his fluid intake. He vomited up everything that he did manage to put in his stomach. Not even marijuana — his previous best friend — seemed to help the aching and the depression.

And then Cedric, his faithful manservant, introduced him to the magical white powder that would soon consume his life. He didn't call it heroin, he called it "China White", implying that it was an ancient natural substitute for narcotic painkillers.

"Isn't China White a kind of heroin?" Darren asked him, uncomfortable with the thought of injecting an addictive drug into his veins.

"Well... I suppose that technically it is," Cedric replied. "It comes from the opium poppy, like heroin does, like morphine itself does, but its as different from that black, sticky tar heroin the street bums use as a fine cabernet is from Mad Dog 20/20."

"I see," Darren said wisely. After all, Jake was always going on and on about those fine wines he liked to drink — almost as much as Matt went on and on about that fucking deep sea fishing shit — so he knew that cabernet was considered high class shit. Premium hooch. Something that only people with taste and class consumed. It was about as different from Mad Dog — which Darren had been known to swill down on occasion — as night and day.

"All right," he said at that point, thrilled that he would be enjoying a drug of the elite. "I'll try it."

What he didn't realize, however, was that whatever the class distinction between cabernet and Mad Dog 20/20, both were still wine, the active ingredient still alcohol, the effect of drinking either identical. Such was the case with tar heroin and China White.

"You don't have to put it in my veins, do you?" Darren asked Cedric as he watched him dump a small amount of the white powder — finer in consistency than the most carefully chopped Bolivian flake cocaine — into a stainless steel reservoir and light a butane lighter.

"Of course not," Cedric scoffed. "That's what the addicts do. You'll get this the same way you got the Demerol — intramuscularly."

And with that he'd injected Darren in the upper arm. Twenty minutes later, the cramps and nausea were gone, as were the shakes and the diarrhea and the longing and the fear.

Coop watched now as Darren expertly went through the steps of preparing the China White for injection. He measured out a small portion of it — very small, no larger than a pea — and put it in the oval spoon-like device. The cooker — as it was called — sat atop a stand, allowing the bottom of it to rest about four inches above the tabletop. Darren applied the butane lighter to the bottom of it and sparked up, holding the flame steady. The white powder slowly liquefied and began to boil. When it was at the perfect consistency, he dropped the lighter and picked up the syringe, drawing ever last drop of the bounty up into the body.

"It sure the fuck looks like heroin to me," said Coop, who had stared at the entire operation with a mixture of horror and fascination.

"It's not heroin," Darren insisted. "Heroin is for scumbags. And you can't get addicted to it when you take it like this." With that he rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and plunged the needle into his upper arm. He sighed, smiling even though he knew the drug wouldn't take effect for another twenty minutes or so. It was on its way and that was what was important.

"You sure about this, man?" Coop asked.

"Dude, I've been doing this for a week and I'm not addicted or nothin'. It's just like gettin' stoned, only better an' shit."

Coop allowed himself to be convinced. He watched Darren prepare another hit, his eyes taking in everything. When Darren used the same syringe to draw up the hit Coop had another moment of doubt.

"Dude, you just used that fuckin' needle on yourself," he said. "I shouldn't be usin' the same needle, should I?"

"Dude," Darren said, "we fuck the same bitches all the time. I ain't got AIDS or none of that shit and neither do you. It ain't no different than drinking out of the same beer."

"Oh... I guess," Coop said, still looking for a way to get out of this.

But Darren didn't give him a chance. He reached over and rolled up Coop's sleeve. Before the drummer even realized what was happening, the needle was buried in his bicep and the plunger was depressed.

"I don't feel no different," Coop said.

"Wait for it," Darren told him. "It takes a little bit. In about twenty minutes or so you'll be feeling fine."

And of course he was right. The drug kicked in and Coop enjoyed it immensely. The two of them spent the next four hours sitting on the couch, side by side, smoking cigarettes and watching Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner cartoons on Darren's VCR.