Snowblind

Chapter 3: Questions and Answers

Los Angeles, California

July 18, 1994

Celia and Greg arrived at Pauline’s house just before six o’clock in the evening, their limo dropping them off out front. It was a muggy, smoggy late afternoon and the sky was an ugly shade of grayish-blue. No clouds were present and there was not a stitch of wind. Celia was wearing a pair of white shorts and a sleeveless maroon top. Greg, as usual, was dressed a little nicer than his wife. He was sporting a pair of two-hundred-dollar slacks, a Pierre Cardin dress shirt, and a tie. He was also sporting a contented smile on his face. Celia had landed at LAX after a flight from Logan International in Boston twenty-four hours before. The two of them had become reacquainted with each other several times since.

Pauline herself answered the door after they rang the bell. She smiled and hugged both of them, even giving Greg a peck on the cheek. She seemed in a very good mood.

“I’m glad you could make it, C,” her manager told her.

“This is an important meeting,” Celia said. “I kind of needed to be here for it.”

“True,” Pauline said. “Everyone else is already here. We’re having drinks in the living room and we’ll talk business during dinner.”

“Sounds good,” Celia said.

They made their way into the living room, which looked out over the lake. Obie was sitting in an easy chair, sipping from what appeared to be a scotch on the rocks. Jake and Laura were sitting on the couch. Jake had Tabby, who was now just a few days shy of six months old, sitting in his lap and he was making her giggle by pretending to sneeze. It was Laura that caught Celia’s attention, however. She looked a little like she had been through a wringer. She had an abrasion on the right side of her face and some discoloration that looked suspiciously like a black eye on her right side. There were more abrasions that looked like road rash on both of her lower arms and a brace of some kind on her right ankle.

“Madres de Dios, Teach,” Celia exclaimed. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I had a little run-in with a sea lion the other night,” Laura said sourly.

“A sea lion?” Celia asked, astonished.

“While she was naked,” Jake added, smiling.

“What?” Celia asked.

“It’s a long story,” Laura said.

“You have got to tell it to me,” Celia said, walking over to her. “Are you okay?”

“A sprained ankle, a black eye, two broken toes, three toenails that aren’t going to make it much longer, and various scrapes and abrasions,” Laura said. “I’ll heal.”

“And hopefully you’ve learned not to run naked on a beach in the middle of the night,” put in Obie, who had apparently already heard the story.

“Well, at least not without a flashlight,” Laura said with a laugh. She got to her feet and held out her arms to Celia, who gave her a big hug.

“I can’t wait to hear this one,” Celia said.

“After hugs,” Laura said, holding out her hands to Greg, who quickly obliged her while Celia herself moved onto to Jake, who stood, Tabby still in his arms, and gave her an affectionate one-handed embrace.

“And look at you, little Tabs,” Celia proclaimed. “You’ve gotten so big since the last time I saw you.”

“She’s growing like a goddamn weed,” Obie said, coming over to collect his hug as well.

“Yeah,” Pauline said. “And biting at my goddamn nipples now.”

“Most women kind of like that,” Jake offered, earning himself a murderous scowl from his sister.

After the hugs, Greg and Jake did their customary handshake and then Obie and Greg did the same.

“All right,” Celia said, snatching Tabby away from Jake. She went willingly enough. “Tell me the sea lion story.”

“It’s not really that interesting,” Laura said, sitting down and picking up her wine glass.

“I seriously doubt that,” Celia said. “Give it up.”

“Well ... it was after the Soul Train Awards the other night,” Laura said.

“Oh yeah,” Celia said. “I caught Jake and G’s performance while I was in the hotel. Not bad for lip-synching.”

“I always feel like such a sellout when I do that,” Jake said with a shrug. “Still, it was a good time.”

“And I got the most beautiful dress out of the deal,” Laura said.

“I caught a couple of glimpses of you in it,” Celia said. “It was gorgeous.”

“I still can’t believe they just gave me a Versace dress,” Laura said. “I can only image how much that thing actually cost.”

“Welcome to the big-time celebrity life,” Pauline said. “You gotta love those endorsement deals.”

“There is a lot to be said for it,” Laura agreed.

“Anyway,” Celia said. “The sea lion?”

“Right,” Laura said. “Well ... after the ceremony, Jake and I went over to G’s place on the beach in Malibu. Neesh was with us.”

“And Neesh is...” Celia prompted.

“Gordon’s fiancé,” Laura said. “She lives there with him. They’re going to be getting married next April. She’s really quite beautiful.”

“That would be the woman sitting next to G at the ceremony?” Celia asked. She remembered her as an exotic looking dark skinned woman. Laura was right. She was quite beautiful.

“That’s her,” Laura confirmed. “She comes across as kind of, you know ... uh...”

“Bitchy?” Jake offered.

“Right,” Laura said. “She seems kind of stuck up when you first meet her, but she’s really not. I like her a lot. She’s very sweet.”

“She was involved in the sea lion incident?” Celia asked.

“Yeah,” Laura said with a giggle. “We had some pizza with her and G, and ... you know ... a few drinks, a few tokes on the old J, and pretty soon, I had this idea it would be fun to go down to the beach. So Neesh and I went out there.”

“What time was this?” Celia asked.

“It was pretty close to midnight,” Laura said.

“And you were drunk?” Greg asked.

“Hammered to the core,” Laura confirmed. “Anyway, we went down to the beach and kicked off our shoes and socks and then went down to splash around in the waves a little bit. After we did that for a while, we got to talking about how much warmer the water was here in southern California than Oregon and how you could swim in the water here, and ... well ... we decided to go swimming.”

Celia laughed a little. “But you didn’t have a bathing suit with you?”

“Right,” Laura said. “Neesh suggested we go skinny dipping. I didn’t want to at first—you know me, I’m kind of shy about things like that—but after all that wine, and after Neesh told me that it was pretty much a private beach and no one but us girls would likely be out here at that time of night ... well ... it started to seem like a good idea.”

“So ... you did it?” Celia asked.

Laura giggled a little. “We did it. We stripped out of our clothes right there above the spot where the waves were breaking and just jumped on in.”

“Oh my,” Celia said with a giggle. “Very naughty of you, Teach.”

“Yeah, but it was fun. We swam around for almost an hour, I think. And then we realized that the tide was coming in.”

“What’s wrong with the tide coming in?” Greg asked.

“We’d left our clothes right where the waves were breaking, remember? We both kind of thought of that at the same time. We rushed back to the spot where we’d undressed, but that spot was under water. Our clothes were nowhere to be seen.”

“Oh my God,” Celia said, giggling again. “What did you do?”

“We decided to split up and start looking for them. Neesh went one way down the surf and I went the other. I was running, looking in the waves for a glimpse of bra or panties or shirt or shorts, and ... well ... there was this sea lion laying on the beach right where the waves were coming in. It was black and I didn’t see it until it was too late. I ran into it and tripped and fell down.”

“Madre de Dios!” Celia squealed. “You tripped over it? Was it mad?”

“It was really pissed off,” she confirmed. “It started barking at me and reared up on its flippers. I screamed and took off running and it started to chase me.”

“It started to chase you?” Celia asked, fully laughing at the story now.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was terrifying. I panicked and didn’t know what to do. Neesh saw what happened and screamed at me to stop running along the shore, to go inland.”

“That seems a good course of action,” said Greg, who was grinning at her story.

“So I did, but it kept chasing me. I was running harder and faster than I’ve ever run before and that thing was still behind me, ark ark arking for all it was worth, and then I ran into a piece of driftwood with my foot. That’s how I got the broken toes and the sprained ankle. I fell face first into the sand. That’s how I got the black eye. I didn’t know any of that at the time, however, I was still in full-on panic mode. I jumped back to my feet and kept on running. This time the sea lion gave up and turned back to the water.”

“It’s a good thing it didn’t catch you,” Greg said. “I can only imagine what it might have done. It probably could have killed you.”

“Yeah,” Laura said, shaking her head at her predicament. “What a way to go, huh?”

“Can you imagine how the celebrity press would have spun it if my fiancé got killed by a freaking sea lion?” Jake asked.

“You’d a been in the cell next to OJ,” Obie said with a laugh.

“I wouldn’t have signed up to defend you,” Pauline added.

Even little Tabitha was laughing at this point. Celia tweaked her little nose affectionately and then turned back to Laura. “Did you ever find the clothes?” she asked.

“No,” Laura said with a sour shake of the head. “In truth, after the sea lion, we didn’t even look anymore. We just went back to G’s house. That was a bit awkward.”

“I can imagine,” Celia said. “How did you do it? Just stroll on through the door in all your naked glory?”

“Eventually, but not at first,” Laura said. “Neesh and I went up to the sliding glass door and we stood off to the side of it. She slid it open a little bit and tried to call G over so he could go get us some robes and hand them out. But G and Jake weren’t sitting in the living room anymore. The CD player wasn’t playing and their drink glasses weren’t there. She called a few times, but no one answered. She told me that G had a composing room and that maybe they’d gone up there to work on something.”

“Which was exactly what we’d done,” Jake confirmed. “We decided to co-write a tune and we had gone up there to start working on it right after the ladies went down to the beach. We were pretty hammered ourselves and we kind of got into the groove. That was why we didn’t notice they’d been gone so long.”

“Anyway,” Laura went on, “we decided we could make it to the downstairs bathroom and at least get some towels to cover up with and then get me cleaned up a little. So, we creep into the house and are about halfway across the living room, about as far from any cover as we could possibly be, when Jake and G both turn the corner in the upstairs hall and look out over the railing that looks down on the living room. We couldn’t have been more center stage if we’d planned it.”

Another round of laughter erupted, Laura included, although she was blushing furiously.

“That must have been quite a sight, Jake,” Celia said between giggles.

“It was one of the most inspiring moments of my life,” Jake agreed. “You’ve never seen two girls move so fast before. They sprinted to the bathroom and slammed the door so hard that a picture fell off the wall. The only thing funnier was listening to their explanation of what happened once they finally came out.”

“Yeah, the nurses and the doctor in the emergency room thought my story was pretty funny too,” Laura said. “And the x-ray technician, and the registration clerk, and those two cops they sent to make sure I wasn’t a domestic violence victim.”

“That part wasn’t that funny,” Jake said sourly.

“They really did that?” Greg asked, appalled.

“Of course they did,” Jake said. “I’m Jake Kingsley, the guy who rapes women and throws them off of boats, the guy who Mindy Snow implied was abusive to her. They were polite about it, but they showed up and separated us from each other and asked some serious questions about what had happened.”

“They seemed to be almost disappointed when they heard the real story,” Laura said. “Though they did think it was funny.”

“Yeah, and at least everyone’s kept their mouths shut about the whole thing,” Jake said. “There haven’t been any reports in the press about Laura’s assault on the sea lion, or about her swimming naked in the ocean—at least not yet.”

“You told them about being naked?” Celia asked.

“I kind of had to,” Laura said. “There was really no other way to explain why I’d shown up in the ER with no bra on, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a shirt that were three sizes too big for me.”

“Still,” Greg said, “I’m sure you could have come up with some explanation.”

“Maybe,” Jake said, “but then we would have been lying to them about something. Cops are pretty good at picking up on when you’re lying to them. If they would have found a hole in the story about why she was dressed like that, they might’ve started thinking there were other holes to explore as well.”

“It just seemed easier to tell the truth,” Laura said.

Celia looked at the battered redhead for a moment. She had looked down at the floor while she’d said that last part, as if she did not want to meet anyone’s eyes. It was a classic non-verbal cue of deceit. Was there something that Laura wasn’t being truthful about?

Probably not, she decided. The story was too bizarre, too detailed to be anything but the truth. The thought of falsehood by omission never even entered her mind.

“All right,” Jake said, after everyone had their plates of grilled tri-tip, baked potatoes, and grilled asparagus before them and had given the requisite complements to the cooks (Obie and Pauline). “Shall we talk about this concert ticket thing now?”

The concert ticket thing was the reason why Celia had flown home from Boston, why Jake and Laura were still hanging around in LA instead of going back to Oregon immediately after the Soul Train Music Awards. National’s suggestion on raising ticket prices for the rest of the tour needed to be discussed. It would be a controversial move if they decided to make it, maybe controversial enough to affect album sales, but it could also be a profitable one, potentially increasing tour revenue by more than one hundred percent.

“I’m ready to talk about it,” Pauline said. She was already on record as being in favor of it. “I just wish Bill and Sharon were able to be here. I feel weird talking about a business decision without all the owners of the LLC being here. Especially for something as important and far reaching as this.”

“Nerdly can’t bring himself to break away from the Brainwash project even for a day,” Jake said. “He thinks the whole thing will crash and burn if he and Sharon are not personally there to oversee every note that is put down. He told me that he will abide by whatever decision we make, one way or the other. He also said we can call him if we think we need his input on something. It’s after six o’clock. They’ll all be back at the house by now.”

“I understand,” Pauline said. “It doesn’t mean I approve of it though.”

“Fair enough,” Jake said. “I think the meeting will actually go smoother without Nerdly here to tell us about the theoretical physical aspects of the proposition and how the empirical data will lead us to the proper hypothesis.”

“Perhaps,” Pauline said.

“The person I really wish was here for this is Jill,” Jake said. “She would’ve been able to dial everything down to dollars and cents—data that probably would have been helpful. Unfortunately, she and the rest of her clan are on vacation in freaking Japan right now.”

“Yeah,” said Pauline. “They flew coach all the way across the Pacific and are all three sharing a room in the Tokyo equivalent of the Motel 6.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” Obie said. “Are they really that cheap?”

“They’re really that cheap,” Jake assured him. “I went over to Jill’s house once for a dinner meeting. It was in the middle of winter and I could almost see my breath in there because she kept her thermostat set at sixty degrees.”

“Sixty degrees?” Obie asked. “In the winter?”

“Right,” Jake said. “She told me that the difference between sixty degrees on the thermostat and seventy, which is where I keep mine set, added up to an eighteen dollar and forty-six cent difference in natural gas billing per month for a house with the cubic footage of interior space and the type of insulation that hers has.”

“Eighteen dollars and forty-six cents?” Obie asked.

“That’s right,” Jake said. “And over the course of the winter months, when the furnace is primarily in operation, that adds up to ... whatever it adds up to, but it’s not even close to a hundred bucks total. That is how cheap the Yamashitos are.”

“How much do y’all pay them people?” Obie wanted to know.

“Between what I pay them for being my personal accountants and what KVA pays them to keep the company books, well over a hundred K per year. And they are also one of the most highly respected CPA firms for private businesses in the greater Heritage region. A good portion of the independent restaurants, medical and dental practices, car dealers, and specialty retail stores in the area use them to manage their money and do their taxes. If they’re pulling in less than two million a year I’d be surprised, yet Ma and Pa Yamashito are still living in the post-war tract house around the corner from the elementary school Jill and I went to as kids, and Jill herself lives in a modest little single story over in the Pocket area by the river—but not on the river, because, as Jill put it, ‘paying an extra twenty thousand dollars for a riverfront location makes no financial sense in the long-term’.”

Obie was shaking his head. “So, they could afford to fly first-class to Tokyo and stay in the best individual suites the city has to offer—even with the exchange rate being what it is—without dinging their net worth?”

“Without a doubt,” Pauline agreed. “They seem to get a little adrenaline rush out of finding ways to do everything cheaply though. When Jill told me about the deal they got on their flights and hotel room in Tokyo, you could hear how proud she was about it.”

“Hmmph,” Obie grunted in bewilderment. “Is this a Jap thing or an accountant thing?”

“I’m thinking it’s an accountant thing primarily,” Jake said. “With perhaps a dash of underlying Japanese culture to give it a kicker.”

“Kind of like the lime in a gin and tonic?” Obie suggested.

“Exactly,” Jake said with a smile.

“In any case,” Pauline said, “Jill is not here, so we’ll just have to muddle through the financial aspects of this proposed deal without her. I did run the idea by her before they left, and she did let it be known that anything that would increase KVA’s bottom line should be looked upon as a good thing.”

“And this would increase the bottom line considerably,” Greg said.

“On the surface and in the short-term it would,” Celia said. “My question, however, is what would be the long-term consequences of increasing ticket prices in the name of profit?”

“That is the question of the hour right there,” Obie said.

“What do you mean?” Pauline asked.

Obie fielded this one. “It’s like this, y’all,” he said. “I don’t have a horse in this race myself, but I’ll have one in a similar race pretty soon, so I’m a very interested spectator here. Them scalpers were selling my tickets for more than a hundred bucks a pop on my last tour, so I get the underlying argument for this deal. If people are willing to lay down a C-note or more for one of our tickets, why shouldn’t we be the ones pocketing those greenbacks instead of the scalpers? I also get the counter-argument to the proposal. Tours have always been for the purpose of promoting an album in order to increase sales, therefore we’ve always charged as little as feasible for the tickets: just enough to keep from losing too much money on the tour. Charging more than that will make us seem to be shamelessly profiteering from our music, an image that goes against our desired public perception as artists who do what we do for the furtherance of our art instead of to make an assload of money.”

“Exactly,” Jake said. “That is my fear if we go through with this whole deal. Right now, Celia has a reputation as a serious musician who is fully dedicated to producing quality tunes and getting them out there for the world to hear. Everyone knows about how she went independent and how we scraped together the money for KVA Records and used my mom and Nerdly’s mom for musicians and self-produced our CDs just so we could be heard. They think of her as selfless and humble, altruistic even. If she suddenly starts charging a hundred dollars or more a ticket to see her in concert, that could lead to disillusionment by her fanbase. Could that impact sales numbers of her albums? Could it lead to people not buying tickets to her shows?”

“Do you really think her reputation as a person has that much to do with sales?” Pauline asked. “Remember, you’re the one who has always maintained that an artist’s reputation has nothing to do with sales as long as the artist produces good music.”

“I was saying that about notoriety, which is a negative thing that the suits try to encourage,” Jake qualified. “The record company execs have always said that Ozzy Osbourne sold all those albums because he bit the head off a bat once and peed on the Alamo, that Motley Crue sold all those albums because of their drinking, that Intemperance sold all of our albums because we were Satan worshipers who snort cocaine out of butt cracks.”

“You never told me if you actually did that or not,” Obie said.

“Please,” Jake said, deadpan. “That’s not a story to be told in front of little Tabby.”

Obie chuckled.

“Anyway,” Jake went on, “notoriety has little to do with album sales in the big picture, but a positive public perception is something else entirely. People want to believe we’re selfless, dedicated artists. We still have to make good music, of course, but they eat it up when they believe we’re struggling artists and they start to lose faith in us when they get the perception that we’re greedy and money-grubbing just for the sheer exploitation of it.”

“Which is kind of what we’d be doing if we started charging outrageous prices for concert tickets simply because people will pay it,” Celia said.

“That’s not exploitation,” Pauline insisted. “It’s capitalism. The market price for Celia’s concert tickets is a hundred dollars. People are willing to pay that and they are going to pay that whether we’re the ones charging that much or not.”

“What about the guy who lives paycheck to paycheck and wants to take his wife to a Celia Valdez concert?” Jake asked. “We start charging a hundred bucks for each ticket and we lose him and everyone like him as a customer. And when that happens on a grand scale, the resentment might just cause enough animosity that he becomes disillusioned with Celia as an artist. Now he won’t even buy a CD.”

“Well ... let’s look at your hypothetical paycheck to paycheck guy realistically for a minute,” Pauline suggested. “He wants to buy two tickets for Celia’s show so he and his wife can go see her. Theoretically, he can wait in line for hours so that when Ticket King opens, he’s able to pay retail price of twenty-five dollars for a GA ticket, or forty for a reserved. Alternately, he can pick up his phone and dial up Ticket King’s eight-hundred number with his credit card in hand and hope to get through so he can buy his ticket that way. Is everyone following me so far?”

“We’re following you,” Jake said.

“Okay,” Pauline said. “Now, this all sounds good in theory, but in reality, his chances of actually scoring a ticket this way are maybe fifty percent. These tickets are selling out quickly, in less than a day. If he wants to get one from the Ticket King booth, he’s going to have to basically camp out all night or they’ll all be gone before he gets to the front of the line. He’s a working man. He probably doesn’t have the time or the inclination to camp out in front of a record store all night. And as for the phone order, we all know how that works. The scalpers and their agents are extremely well-organized when it comes to high-value tickets. They flood the phone lines the moment the tickets are released for sale and they snatch up every ticket they can get their hands on because they know they can resell them for more than twice face value. There’s a very good chance our hypothetical paycheck to paycheck guy, who is just trying to score some tickets and not make a profit, will just keep getting busy signals on the line until he gives up ... says, ‘fuck it, I’ll buy my old lady a goddamn toaster instead’.”

“But he can get the tickets if he’s persistent,” Celia said.

“That’s the thing,” Pauline said. “He has to be persistent. Most people, when it comes to something they do not necessarily need in their life, tend not to be persistent. So, what ends up happening is that the scalpers are the ones who snatch up most of the tickets. I’ve seen figures floated around that estimate well over seventy-five percent of tickets for acts that sell-out every show—the Rolling Stones, U2, Pearl Jam, Nirvana back before Kurt offed himself, and Celia herself—are resold after purchase for a higher price. That means the scalpers are getting the vast majority of them and making insane profits off of us. Profits that we should be making for ourselves.”

“That is unacceptable to me,” Obie pointed out. “If our paycheck-to-paycheck guy really and truly wants those tickets for his wife, he’ll most likely have to get them from a scalper. He’ll have to pay the hundred dollars apiece anyway.”

“I understand that,” Jake said, “but in that scenario it’s the scalpers that are being perceived as greedy profiteering slimeballs, not the artists.”

“Then you’re saying you’re against the plan to raise ticket prices?” Pauline asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m against the plan.”

“Uh huh,” Pauline said with a nod. She turned to Celia. “And how about you, C? It’s in your name that we’re even discussing this. Where do you fall?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “I don’t want to be thought of as a money-grubbing corporate puta, that’s for damn sure. At the same time, it really bothers me that these lowlife scalpers are making all this money off me while my tour is barely in the black.”

“And it’s only in the black at all because you did not allow them to have all the dancers and lasers and choreography,” Greg pointed out.

“This is true,” Celia said.

“Why don’t we all look at this thing from a practical point of view?” Obie suggested.

“What do you mean?” asked Jake.

“Well, we have a test case to look at,” Obie said. “The Eagles are the boys who got this whole discussion rolling in the first place, right? They’re the ones selling those concert tickets for premium coin. Are people buying them?”

“Well ... yes,” Pauline said. “People are snatching up every last one of them in a matter of hours as each venue is released for sale. And there is still a considerable black-market resale market for them after that. That’s kind of my point.”

“And they are regularly accused of profiteering and exploitation of their fame in the media,” Jake said. “That’s kind of my point.”

“Is this reputation for profiteering having any effect on album sales?” Obie asked next.

“I think we all know the answer to that,” Pauline said. “Hell Freezes Over is selling like mad. It shot right to the top of the album chart the moment it was released and has been perched there ever since. And it’s mostly a live album, full of songs that have already been released in studio versions back in the day. There are only three new studio cuts on the album and only a few live cuts that have not been previously released on earlier live albums. I think it’s safe to say that the band’s image as profiteers is not impacting sales of their product.”

“And Celia’s CD is a studio album in its entirety,” Obie said. “Nothing but original, unreleased material on it. Hell, there’s not even a cover tune on it.”

“That is true,” Jake conceded. “But there is still the potential for the negative press and profiteering accusations to have an impact on sales.”

“Is that really what you’re worried about, Jake?” Pauline asked.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Are you actually worried that KVA would lose money and sales in this deal, or are you more worried about being seen as someone with a little greed in his soul?”

Jake was caught off guard by this suggestion. He opened his mouth to deny what was being said but then slowly closed it again. Could she be correct? Could she?

“Think it through, Jake,” Pauline said. “Hell Freezes Over is selling like mad, despite the negative press over the ticket prices. As Nerdly would say if he was here, we have empirical evidence that album sales remain unaffected when one gains a reputation as a profiteer. Capitalism reigns supreme. People will pay the market value for the tickets. They’ll grumble about it, but they’ll pay it. All we would be doing is shifting that profit from the black market to ourselves and making our tours a significant source of income instead of just a promotional gambit. The only real objection I hear from you and from Celia is that you don’t want to be thought of us greedy by the fans.”

Jake looked over at Celia, who was looking at him, a guilty expression on her face.

“I think maybe she’s right,” Celia said. “When I sit and think about it, that really is what concerns me the most; being thought of us greedy.”

Jake wanted to deny this was his primary concern, but his annoying tendency for self-honesty kept him from doing so. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “I guess that is my issue when you come right down to it.”

“All right then,” Greg said with a smile. “Now that we’ve opened up Jake and Celia’s souls and seen the darkness that lies within, let’s get this horse on the track. Do we give into the inevitable and embrace our greed, or don’t we?”

The two musicians looked at each other again. Celia raised her eyebrows questioningly. Jake hesitated for a moment more but finally gave a little nod.

“I guess we give in,” Celia said. “At least that’s what I’m going to vote.”

“Yeah,” Jake said with a sigh. “I guess I’ll have to vote for greed as well.”

About an hour after dinner, Laura and Celia were outside in Pauline’s back yard, sitting on the patio furniture and looking out at the setting sun as it sank through the smog layer and turned the sky a brilliant reddish-purple. Both ladies had a glass of wine sitting on the table between them. Laura opened her purse and pulled out a small one-hitter pipe and little bag of green buds. She stuffed some of the latter into the former and then flicked her Bic and sucked it down. Celia watched her impassively.

“Want a hit?” Laura offered after blowing the smoke back out into the air.

“I’m good, thank you,” Celia said.

It occurred to Laura that she had never seen Celia smoke any weed before, had never even heard her talking about it. “Do you ever get high?” she asked her.

“No,” Celia replied. “I’ve tried it a few times. I seem to be one of those people that it doesn’t have much of an effect on. It never really did anything for me except make me hungry.”

Laura finished stuffing another hit into the pipe. “That’s too bad,” she said. “I never really got into it either until Jake and I got together. Even then, we didn’t do it very much. Once I went out on the road, however, it got to be a regular habit.” She chuckled a little. “One little habit I didn’t leave down in South America.”

Oh, you little liar, Laura’s mind sang to her. She silenced the voice by sucking down her second hit. And then she found herself wondering what Neesh was doing tonight.

“Did you ever ... you know ... do as I suggested and tell Jake about those ... things you did down in South America?” Celia asked her.

“I did,” she said, feeling the THC going to her brain. She stuffed the pipe and the little baggie and the lighter back into her purse. “I told him the night he asked me to marry him.”

Celia raised her eyebrows a little. “Before or after he asked?”

“After,” Laura said. “I had to. I couldn’t say yes to him until he knew about ... you know ... those women and me. I had to be sure he was okay with it before I committed.”

Then why haven’t you told him about what you and Neesh did? the little voice spoke up again. This time she poured some wine on it. And then she started thinking about Neesh again, remembering how good it felt to have her tongue in her mouth, remembering the feel of her soft, sexy mouth kissing her thighs, pondering the thought of where that mouth would have ended up if she hadn’t remembered their clothes at that very moment.

“I’m assuming that he was okay with it?” Celia asked.

“It kind of caught him off-guard, I think,” she said, trying to shake the images of Neesh out of her head. She succeeded, but only by catching a glimpse of the side swell of Celia’s breast. She wondered what it would feel like to put her mouth on it. Jesus, what is wrong with me?

“I can imagine,” Celia said. “You caught me off-guard when you told me about it.”

“But Jake is ... well ... he’s Jake,” she said. “I told him the whole story ... well, not the whole story—I didn’t tell him what happened between me and Squiggle that one night, but I did tell him about the chemistry between us, and that I started doing those things with women to keep from being tempted to do anything with Squiggle. He understood. And he accepted it. He told me he still wanted to marry me anyway and I said yes.” She held up her left hand, the one with the engagement ring. “And here we are.”

“I think you did the right thing,” Celia said. “You didn’t really do anything with Squiggle—not when you come right down to it—and most guys will not see what you did with the women as cheating.”

“That’s exactly how it worked out,” Laura said. “I’m thankful for your advice.”

Celia took a good long drink of her wine and then set it back down. “Tell me something,” she said, her voice a little quieter now. “When you came back home after the tour ... did you ... uh ... I mean do you still ... you know... think about doing things with women?”

Why is she asking this? Laura wondered, a little alarmed. Does she suspect something? Does she know something?

“Uh ... well ... why do you ask?” Laura said, fighting to keep her voice casual.

“Well ... it’s funny,” Celia said. “Ever since you told me that story about you and the women, I’ve been ... uh ... kind of ... you know ... thinking about it a lot.”

“Thinking about it?”

“Yeah,” Celia said with a nod. “Almost obsessively at times.”

Laura licked her lips a little. “In a good way or a bad way?” she asked.

“In a curious way,” Celia said. “I’ve never ... uh ... done anything with a girl before. I’ve never even kissed one. But ... well ... I’ve thought about it. The idea was never really repugnant to me, but I never obsessed over the issue or was tempted to try it or anything. And then once you told me your story, I started thinking about it all the time ... mostly about what you did, having a girl go down there and lick me.”

Holy hell, Laura thought, amazed. Celia wants to get it on with a girl! The thought was blackly exciting and she felt a gush of moisture go rushing to her nether region. “That’s uh ... it’s uh ... kind of sexy, C,” she told her softly.

Celia smiled. “Is it?”

“Yeah,” Laura assured her. “Do you think you’d ever do it?” Maybe with me? her mind added. She felt immediately ashamed for thinking that—but the intrigue remained.

Celia paused for a few moments and then nodded her head. “I think maybe I would,” she finally said. “If I were single, that is. Even though Greg ... well ... you know what he did ... even though he did that, I don’t think I could bring myself to do it while we’re married.”

“What if Greg was okay with it?” she asked.

She shook her head immediately. “No,” she said. “Our marriage has enough troubles right now without throwing that into the equation.”

“But you told me I should tell Jake what I’d done,” Laura said. “How is it different with you and Greg?”

“Because Jake is Jake and Greg is Greg,” she said. “They’re two different people entirely. And the situation is different as well. You and Jake are in the beginning of your relationship with each other and have a strong bond. Greg and I are in the middle of our relationship and our bonds have been strained lately.” She shook her head again. “No, I’m not even going to hint to him about these feelings I have.”

“That’s too bad,” Laura said, with honest regret no less. Of course, she wouldn’t have really done anything with Celia, even if asked ... but ... it was rather hot to know that the possibility even existed.

“It is what it is,” Celia said with a shrug. It was a shrug that carried a bit of bitterness in tone. “Anyway, you never did answer my question.”

“What question is that?”

“Whether or not you still think about ... you know ... girls doing that to you.”

“Oh... that question,” Laura said softly.

“Do you?” Celia prodded gently.

I’ve done more than think about it, she thought with a mixture of guilt and desire. She sighed and then nodded her head. “Yeah,” she told the singer. “I still think about it. I think about it a lot.”

“In a good way?”

Another nod. “Jake keeps me pretty satisfied in the bedroom,” she said. “But on those occasions when I have to ... you know ... take care of things myself, having a girl eating my pussy out is pretty much all I fantasize about.”

“And did you used to think of that before?”

She shook her head. “No, not until I’d actually done it.”

“Are you bisexual, Laura?” Celia asked her.

Laura smiled. “Obviously, to some degree I am,” she said. “I never would have thought so before, and I don’t have any desire to have a romantic relationship with a girl, but when you’ve actively arranged for women to eat your pussy out for you, when you fantasize about women eating your pussy out while you’re playing with yourself ... well ... I think it’s kind of hard to say no when asked if you’re bisexual.”

Celia nodded slowly. “An interesting perspective,” she said. “Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course,” Laura said.

“The pilot of our tour plane has the hots for me.”

Laura simply shrugged. “What’s the big deal with that?” she asked. “You’re an incredibly attractive woman, C. Most of the guys in America between the ages of fourteen and sixty have the hots for you.”

“The pilot’s name is Suzie,” Celia said.

Laura licked her lips again. “Suzie,” she repeated. “Am I to assume that is not an ironic nickname for a man?”

“Suzie is a woman,” Celia confirmed. “She is a card-carrying lesbian and proud of it. And, though she hasn’t specifically said it in words, she has let it be known that if I want her to put her face between my legs some night in the hotel room, she would be happy to oblige me.”

“Wow,” Laura said, feeling another gush of moisture flooding in down below. “What’s she look like?”

Celia laughed, shaking her head. “That’s the first thing you ask me? I bare my soul to you about this raging temptation I’m saddled with, and you want to know what she looks like?”

“Well...” Laura said with a giggle, “it’s a relevant question, isn’t it?”

“She looks like a lesbian,” Celia said. “But an attractive lesbian. She’s tall, in impressive shape, with short hair but a very pretty face. The kind of face I frequently find myself envisioning planted between my legs—just to see what it’s like, you understand.”

“I understand completely,” Laura said. “What are you going to do about this situation?”

“My plan is to do nothing about it,” Celia said. “Suzie and I get together every few nights on the road and have a cigar together and talk. She flirts a little. I flirt back a little. I know she’s serious about the flirting and she knows that I’m not. When she goes back to her room, I usually lay down and paddle the old pink canoe while thinking about her. So far, that’s the status quo.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of about that,” Laura said. “It’s not like you’re doing anything wrong.”

“Yeah,” Celia said, “but like you and your friend Squiggle, I’m kind of worried that it’ll get to the point where playing solo isn’t enough. And we’ve got another three months of touring to get through.”

Laura was particularly enthusiastic when she and Jake fucked that night. Before he could even get out of his clothes, she forced him down on the bed, dropped her pants and panties to the floor, and then slithered up his body and planted her wet, swollen vagina on his mouth. He obliged her desires, licking her to one orgasm in this position and then flipping her over and licking her to another in that position. Only then did he remove his own pants and underwear and sink into her body. They rutted together until she squeaked out one more and then he shot off inside of her.

She fell asleep shortly after he climbed off of her. Jake was still wide awake, however.

He peeled off his shirt, leaving himself naked and then gathered up all the strewn laundry and placed it in the hamper so Elsa would not yell at them in the morning. He then pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a clean t-shirt. After brushing his teeth and washing his hands, he wandered downstairs and made himself a rum and coke at the bar.

Elsa, dressed in her night clothes, came into the room just as he was finishing up this task. “I thought I heard someone puttering around in here,” she said. She sniffed the air a little and gave him a knowing look.

“Just me,” Jake said. “I’m enjoying one more night of relative privacy before we head back to the asylum tomorrow.”

“What time are you heading out?” she asked him.

“I scheduled the flight out of Van Nuys for noon,” he said. “The limo will pick us up at eleven. We should be back in the beach house in Coos Bay by two-thirty.”

“Do you have all of your belongings packed and ready to go?”

“I do,” he confirmed. “You’ve taught me well.”

“Hmmph,” she grunted. “Please take care to put that glass in the sink when you’re done with it.”

“Don’t I always?” he asked with a smile.

“No, you do not,” she replied tersely. And with that, she returned to her room.

Jake took his drink and wandered over to the couch.

He sat down and turned on the television set but, after a few minutes of channel surfing, found nothing he wanted to watch and turned if off again. He thought about listening to some music for a bit, but that didn’t appeal to him either. Maybe I should work on the tune that G and I are putting together?

That sounded like a good idea. On the night that Laura had been chased by the sea lion (and I got to see Neesh naked, he recalled gleefully. Holy shit, what a fucking set of titties!) the two musicians had managed to come up with a solid primary melody and a tentative chorus. Maybe he could pound out the beginnings of a verse or two? It would be helpful if he had some ideas down for the next time he and G got together, whenever that might be.

He stood up and walked across the house to the music room near the back, the room he did most of his composing in. Several years before, at Elsa’s request, he had had a contractor come in and install cork soundproofing. He shut the door behind him and walked to where his old Fender was hanging on the wall. On the way, however, his eye was drawn to the talk box that G had given him. It was sitting on the composition table next to the music sheets and the notes they had made that night.

Curiosity crept into him and thoughts of composing retreated to the back of his brain. There was a new toy to play with. Wouldn’t this be a good time to check it out?

He diverted course and headed for the opposite wall instead, where one of his Les Paul guitars—a black and white one—was hanging. He took it down and carried it over to the couch, setting it down. He then walked over to the room’s storage closet and opened it. In here was a variety of musical equipment, most of which he rarely used. There was a small keyboard, a ukulele, a banjo he had once taught himself to play, a couple of amplifiers, a couple of speakers, a microphone stand and a microphone, and a large box filled with a variety of miscellaneous cords, effects pedals, and other gear.

He pulled out both of the amps, one of the speakers, and the microphone stand and carried them all over to the table and arranged them in a row. He then got the box of gear and carried it over to the couch. He spent the next fifteen minutes setting things up. First, he plugged the amplifiers and the speaker into the outlet strip near the wall to give them power. He attached the microphone to the smaller amp and the speaker and then sound checked it a few times until it was at a respectable volume that was loud enough to be heard well but not loud enough to penetrate through the cork sound-proofing.

Next, he plugged the guitar into a distortion effects pedal and then plugged that into the other amplifier. He played around with the instrument and the pedal for a few minutes, making sure the guitar was properly tuned and then dialing in a healthy level of rock and roll distortion for his coming experiment. After cranking off a few classic riffs—Crazy Train, Highway Star, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and his own Descent Into Nothing—and then cranking out an improvised solo, he plugged a heavy-duty speaker cable into the amp’s output jack and ran the other end into the talk box. He strummed the guitar a few times and confirmed that that distorted sound of it was now coming out of the end of the flexible plastic tube.

“Wild,” he said with a smile, playing a brief riff and listening to the sound. It did not sound all that impressive just falling into the air through a tiny hole like that. It sounded a little like a riff heard through a couple of walls.

Experimentally, he put the end of the tube in his mouth and strummed out the riff again. It turned out it was a bit louder than he’d thought once inserted into an enclosed place. Sound virtually exploded throughout his head, slamming through his skull bones and into his ears from the inside. His teeth vibrated uncomfortably, sending bursts of pain out anywhere he had a dental filling. With a shriek of surprise, he spit the tube out. It landed wetly in his lap, the fading power chord still weakly emitting from it.

“Wow,” he whispered, shaking his head a little to clear it. It seemed that an adjustment to the volume was in order.

He dialed down the primary volume and the bass level on the amplifier, leaving the treble and the distortion level on the pedal where it was at. Tentatively, carefully, he cranked out another power chord. The sound still seemed pathetic coming out of the tube, but that had fooled him before. Hesitantly, he picked up the tube and put it back in his mouth. Softly, wincing in advance, he touched his pick to the open low E string.

The sound filled his head again, but this time it was almost reasonable. He turned down the amp just a little more and then strummed again. Still loud, but tolerable. All right. It was time to check this thing out.

He had to leave the room and go hunt down a roll of duct tape from the kitchen drawer. Upon returning, he taped the tube to the microphone stand so that the final six inches protruded just beyond the microphone itself. He picked up the guitar again, positioned it, and then leaned forward to the microphone stand. He took the tube into his mouth and then turned his head so his mouth was close to the microphone.

Here goes nothing, he thought, and then struck the low E string once again.

This time the sound did not explode in his head, it exploded out of the speaker. A huge burst of distorted low E mixed with a nearly deafening whine of feedback reverberated throughout the room, sounding like something out of a nightmare. Pictures rattled on the wall. Jake could see the sound waves disturbing the liquid in his glass.

He silenced the instrument by grabbing the string. The feedback, however, continued until he pulled his mouth away from the talk box tube. Even then, it faded reluctantly, leaving only the hum of the speaker.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered, his ears ringing, his head throbbing.

There was a pounding on the door and it creaked open, revealing Elsa’s face. “Jake!” she barked at him. “Whatever in the world are you doing in here?”

“Sorry, Elsa,” he said. “Just playing around with a new effects pedal.”

“It sounded like you were strangling a cat!” she said. “I heard it all the way through a soundproofed wall!”

“I’m still working on adjusting the sound for it,” he said.

“Obviously,” she said. “Did it occur to you to maybe start at the quiet end of the scale and then adjust up instead of the other way around?”

“Actually, that did not occur to me,” he admitted.

“Perhaps it should!” she told him, and the door shut once again.

He did as she suggested and turned the volume on the amp down to almost nothing. He put the tube in his mouth again and began to strike the low E string, softly at first and then with more force. Between strikes he slowly adjusted the amplifier output upward until the sound coming out of the speaker was loud enough to be heard well but not loud enough to penetrate outside the room. It seemed obvious in retrospect, but he found that the optimum volume of the guitar distortion being expelled from his mouth and into the microphone was about the same volume as what came out of his mouth when he was singing. That made sense.

He pulled his mouth back again and noticed he was a little out of breath, as if he’d been running. He realized that he had not really been breathing while adjusting the volume, so intent was he on keeping the sound directed into the microphone without interference. He would have to watch that.

“All right,” he said, settling the guitar in his lap again. “Let’s see what we can do with this thing.”

He began to play around, cranking out simple distorted chords using primarily the low E and the A string. The vibration of the strings was transformed into an analog signal by the dual Humbucker pickups in the body of the guitar, sent out through the guitar cord into the first effects pedal where it was boosted and distorted, then into the amplifier where the signal was boosted even more and tone was added, and then into the talk box, where it was run through a tube into Jake’s mouth. Jake then took that sound and began to shape it by using his lips, tongue, and variations to the dimensions of his oral cavity before it was expelled out into the microphone for its trip to the speaker.

He could tell right away that he was going to have to seriously work on the technique if he ever hoped to produce anything like music in this manner. But still, he was having a good time playing around with it.

And though he improved only marginally, he kept playing around with it until almost two o’clock in the morning.

Later that day, when he boarded the Lear for the flight back to Oregon, the talk box and all the equipment that went with it were packed away in the baggage compartment.

Sunday was the one day of the week that the members of Brainwash were regularly allowed to themselves, although, if it had been up to the Nerdlys, they would have been in the studio on the Lord’s Day from nine to six just like any other. The Sunday after Jake and Laura’s return from Los Angeles was no different. Still, it was not a complete day of rest for everyone. There were chores and missions vital to the progression and maintenance of the household to be done. And so, on Saturday night, Jake was informed that a run to Costco in Eugene needed to be made for supplies that were unavailable or hard to come by in the Bay area. This was something that happened about every two weeks on average. Jake didn’t mind. It meant he would get to fly his plane, even though the hop was short. He usually took Laura with him so they could get away by themselves for a bit, but she was unable to make the trip this week because she was still having difficulty walking thanks to her encounter with the native pinniped down in Malibu.

Jake asked Stephanie Zool if she wanted to accompany him for the journey.

“I don’t know,” the guitarist said doubtfully. “I’m not a big fan of flying even in big old jet airliners. Your plane is even smaller than the one that brought us here, isn’t it?”

“True, but it’s good plane and I hardly ever crash it,” Jake told her.

“Hardly ever?” she asked, raising her brows.

“Hardly ever,” he assured her. “It’s just a little hop up over the mountains and then back down. About twenty-two to twenty-five minutes each way.”

“Well ... will it be bumpy?” she asked.

“It can be,” he said. “It’s warm in the valley today and we have a sea breeze blowing here. We get bounced around a little over the top of the mountains sometimes when that happens.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of selling this to me,” Steph told him.

“Come on,” Jake chided. “It’ll be fun, and I really need someone to go with me to help with the groceries and the loading and unloading.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I’ll let you do some turns and banks once we’re airborne,” he offered.

She shook her head. “No way am I going to fly an airplane.”

Jake nodded and then hit her below the belt. “All right, how about this? You don’t have a hair on your ass if you don’t climb in that plane with me.”

The eyebrows went up again, higher this time. And a little over an hour later, Steph was strapped into the copilot’s seat, a headphone set on her ears, her hands gripping the side of her seat as the aircraft accelerated down Runway 22 at North Bend Muni and lifted into the bright blue summer sky.

“Okay,” she admitted as they climbed out over the ocean, turned around, and then started heading for the mountains on the east side of town. “This is kind of cool.”

“Told you,” Jake said, smiling, enjoying himself. Below them they could see the extensive dunes along the coast and the estuary of the Umpqua River as it drained into the sea. The river itself was a twisting, turning blue line winding its way out of the mountains. Columns of smoke could be seen here and there as landowners burned debris in control burns. The mountains were covered with a dense carpet of evergreen trees—seemingly a billion of them.

“How high are you going to climb?” she asked.

“Sixty-five hundred feet,” Jake said. “That will keep us at least two thousand feet above the highest peaks between here and the Willamette Valley.”

“How high can this plane fly?” she asked.

“Theoretically, it could go as high as thirty thousand feet, but I don’t ever take it above nineteen thousand. If you fly higher than twenty thousand you have to have oxygen available in case of depressurization.”

“So ... you don’t have oxygen available?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Don’t need it as long as I don’t go above twenty. If the plane suffered a decompression at nineteen thousand, the air is still thick enough that I have time to recognize the situation and descend before I pass out.”

“I see,” she said. “Are you going to pressurize the plane for this trip?”

He shook his head again. “No need to at sixty-five hundred. I only pressurize when we go higher than nine thousand or so. At full pressurization we’re only at eight thousand feet of equivalent pressure anyway—same as in a commercial airliner.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“It means that this airplane and commercial airplanes flying at forty thousand are only pressurized to the level that a person sitting at eight thousand feet of elevation on a mountain would feel. That’s why traveling by airliner makes you so tired. The air is thin and dry.”

“Why do they only pressurize to eight thousand?”

“To prevent metal fatigue mostly,” he said. “If they were pressurizing to sea level altitude, the fuselage would be expanding and contracting a lot more with each ascent and descent. This reduces the useful life of the aircraft and increases the maintenance and inspection cycles.”

The flew on as Stephanie digested this information. Soon they were at their target altitude and flying over the coastal mountains. Though they were two thousand feet above them, they still looked close enough to touch. Highway 38, the road that crossed the mountains between Interstate 5 in the valley and Highway 101 on the coast, was visible twisting and turning its way through the passes. They bumped and bounced a little bit in the rising air, but not too badly. His passenger continued to stare at the passing scenery in amazement.

Jake was glad that she was enjoying the flight. Of all the members of Brainwash, he felt the closest to Stephanie Zool. It was not that he disliked any of the others—he did not—it was just that he and Steph spent more time together and had more in common. She was a physical education teacher and, as such, made a considerable effort to keep herself in shape. Like Jake, jogging was her favored method of accomplishing this. They ran together on the beach (or the road if the tide was wrong) most mornings before breakfast, the way he and Celia had once done. And she put at least as many dollars and quarters into the swear jar as Jake—maybe even more.

“Nerdly tells me that you should be able to finish up the primary vocals for Wrong the next session,” Jake said. Wrong was what they called Stephanie’s tune, Wrong Tree, which would be the last cut on the album when it was mastered, and probably a song of controversy due to its subject matter. It concerned a love triangle between two women and a man, with the singer—Stephanie obviously—trying to tell the other woman that she was a lesbian and should not be in a relationship with the man, she should be with her. It was a very profound and emotional tune, and Jake knew what Steph was trying to say with it, but he was afraid it would be misinterpreted by the more homophobic listening audience (those who were smart enough to analyze lyrics anyway) as Steph trying to turn a heterosexual woman into a lesbian instead of trying to explain to the woman in question what she really was.

“We just have the bridge to finish up,” Steph confirmed. “Finally. That used to be one of my favorite tunes to sing, but now I’ve sung it so much over the past few weeks that I’m sick of it.”

“That happens,” Jake said. “Is it a song from personal experience?”

She looked over at him, her eyes trying to see what was behind the question. He hoped she was picking up that it was simple curiosity. Jake had been around gay men quite a bit these last few years—Dexter, Charlie, Phil, Bobby Z—but Stephanie was the first verified and committed lesbian he had ever had a chance to get to know on more than a superficial level. He was finding that she was quite different in mannerisms, speech, and actions than what the stereotype suggested.

She seemed to see what she needed to see in his eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s from personal experience. Her name was Carissa. Carissa Morgan. She was a teammate of mine when I played basketball for BU. We used to room together during the away games. She was tall, thin, quirky, and she considered me her best friend. We did everything together. I was in love with her almost from the first time I met her. And I’m pretty sure she was in love with me as well. And she was a lesbian—not bi, not curious, not experimental. I wasn’t trying to turn her to the dark side or make her be anything she wasn’t meant to be. She was a sister—one knows her own kind. Only she wouldn’t admit to herself what she was.”

“She stayed in the closet?” Jake asked.

Steph shook her head. “It was more than that,” she said. “She didn’t even let herself be free enough to get into the closet in the first place. Most of us dykes go through that to some degree when we first start to realize who and what we are, but most of us accept it at some point, whether we stay in the closet or not. Clarissa was one of the ones who could not accept what she was. Part of it was her upbringing—she was raised a strict Catholic—and part of it is societal views toward homosexuality. Nobody wants to willingly be part of a hated and mistrusted minority. And so, she played the game with classic overcompensation. She dated man after man, was extremely loose with her affections toward them, sleeping with any male who so much as hinted that he would like to get into her pants. And she enjoyed none of it, got nothing out of it. She was miserable, Jake, and she used to cry to me about how she couldn’t find a decent man to have a relationship with, all the while denying what was right in front of her.”

“That’s kind of sad,” Jake said. “What happened to her? Did she eventually come around?”

“I tried to explain to her one night what she was,” Steph said softly, her words almost drowned out by the sound of the engines turning. “She didn’t want to hear it. She knew that I was a lesbian, of course, but she always used to talk about my sexuality like it was a phase I was going through, like it was something that I would grow out of. Anyway, when I suggested to her that she was gay ... she got angry with me. She started accusing me of trying to ‘convert’ her. Our relationship was never the same after that. She stopped hanging out with me. She stopped rooming with me during away games. Within a week she was dating some dweeb she met in a computer class. They ended up getting married her senior year.”

“How did that work out?” Jake asked.

“They got divorced after less than a year,” she said. “And she went back to the same pattern of sleeping with any man who asked. She started drinking a lot, got into drugs, couldn’t find a job. Two years after graduation, she committed suicide by jumping off a freeway overpass into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.”

“Wow,” Jake said. “That’s not a happy story.”

“No,” Steph agreed, “but it inspired me to write a pretty good song, don’t you think?”

They bought three hundred and forty-five pounds of groceries and household supplies from the Eugene Costco store and then transported them back to Mahlon Sweet Airport by cab. Jake loaded them in various places throughout the plane, taking care to make sure the weight was evenly distributed.

The flight back was a little less somber.

“I have to say,” Steph told him after the sterile cockpit condition was lifted, “it’s been really weird living in a house with you all.”

“What do you mean?” Jake asked.

“Well, you’re famous, a major celebrity,” she said. “And yet, at the same time, you’re an ordinary person.”

“Ordinary is a strong word,” Jake said with a chuckle.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “I feel ... oh ... schizophrenic sometimes, like this is all a dream. I have dinner with you and Laura and Nerdly. I go running with you in the morning. We sit down and drink wine together and have ordinary conversations, just like normal people have. And then you fly off for a few days and I turn on the television and there you are, with Bigg G, up on the screen playing music for the country.”

“We were lip-synching,” Jake told her.

“That’s not the point,” she said. “You’re Jake fucking Kingsley! The Jake fucking Kingsley. And that redhead who shares the bedroom with you is Laura Best, who I’ve seen in the tabloids. And the guy engineering this album we’re recording is Nerdly Archer. And you hang out with Bigg G, and Celia Valdez, and Greg Oldfellow. I just saw Greg Oldfellow in a movie right before we came here! When I sit down and think about all this, it just blows me away. I have to keep asking myself if this is really happening. And when I decide it is, I ask myself what we did to deserve this.”

“You’re all talented musicians and composers,” Jake said. “You deserve this chance. You’ve paid your dues and you’ve earned it. I’m just making sure you get your best shot.”

“We’re all very grateful for what you’ve done for us, Jake,” she said.

“Think nothing of it,” he said. “I expect to profit handsomely from the efforts. I only wish you were all able to participate in the mixing process. I feel kind of bad that you all have to go back to work while the Nerdlys and I do the most important part without your input.”

“We wouldn’t know what we were doing anyway,” Steph said. “Even Jim, who recorded two albums before, wouldn’t know a mixing board from his ass.”

“I didn’t know shit about it either when I first started in the business. But it’s a skill that has to be learned if one is going to put one’s heart and soul down on an album. Maybe on the next Brainwash album we’ll have more time, or you’ll have the ability to take leave.”

She looked at him. “Do you really think there’s going to be a next album?” she asked.

He smiled. “Yeah,” he told her. “I really think there is.”

They landed uneventfully at North Bend just before three o’clock that afternoon. Jake secured the airplane in his rented hangar and the two of them spent fifteen minutes loading the groceries into the back of the van they used to transport everyone to and from the studio.

Once they arrived back at the house on the cliff, everyone except Laura and the smaller children pitched in and had everything unloaded and carried inside in no time at all. As Jake was putting away the toilet paper in the storage closet upstairs, he heard the phone ringing downstairs. It rang three times before someone picked it up. A few moments went by and then Laura’s voice called up to him, telling him he had a phone call.

What now? he wondered, a trifle uneasily as he trotted down to the main living room. Receiving phone calls at the house was still an unusual event. And when they did come, they usually were not for Jake. And if they were for Jake, they usually were not good news.

Laura was sitting on the couch, sipping from a large glass of iced tea and holding the phone in her hand. As Jake got close to her, he could smell that she’d been hitting the pipe again. She was doing that more and more lately.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It’s Jill,” she said. “She says she has news for you.”

Jake’s mood improved a bit at her words. She could only be calling about the property in San Luis Obispo that he wanted to buy. The survey teams had all issued their reports on it the previous month and the news had been good at that time. There were no zoning restrictions that would prevent Jake from building a house on the land. There were no geological issues that would prevent a house from being built either. A test well had established that there was ample groundwater and that it was not brackish from ocean contamination. And power could easily be strung in from the power lines along the roadway, though at a fairly steep price. With this information in hand, Jake had put an offer in on it just before Jill and family had left for Japan.

He took the phone from Laura’s hand. “Hey, Jilly,” he said into it. “Good to hear from you. How was the motherland?”

“We had a great time!” she said enthusiastically. “And best of all, we did everything we wanted to do there for less than three hundred dollars a day!”

“That is something to be proud of, all right,” he remarked. “I assume you took lots of pictures?”

“Hundreds,” she said.

“I can’t wait to see them. So ... what’s up? Are you calling about the offer we made?”

“I am,” she said. “You’ll be happy to know that the Heliodorus family accepted your offer of five million, three hundred thousand for the property.”

“Fuck yeah!” Jake said happily.

“A dollar in the swear jar!” a gleeful voice exclaimed from the kitchen area—it sounded like Jessica. “You said ‘fuck’!”

Jake shook his head and made a mental note to pay up once the phone call was completed.

“They are agreeable to a thirty-day escrow which will start when the down payment money is wired to the bank’s escrow account,” Jill said.

“Right,” Jake said. “And the agreement was ten percent down?”

“Ten percent,” Jill confirmed. “That’s five hundred and thirty thousand dollars, Jake. More than half a million.”

“Yep,” Jake said. “When can you get it wired?”

“I can do it tomorrow, but you’ll have to come back to LA at some point to sign the papers.”

“No problem,” Jake told her. “I can fly back Saturday night and sign on Sunday and then be back to Oregon on Monday.”

“That’ll cost you extra to have the notary show up on a weekend,” she told him sourly.

“That’s okay,” Jake said. “Start putting things in motion.”

A sigh from Jill. “Jake, I have to ask you one more time. Are you sure about this? This is a lot of money we’re talking about, and when you come right down to it, it’s an unnecessary expense. You don’t really need a house on the ocean right now.”

Jake thought of the earthquake, and the traffic, and the smog, and his general hatred of living in the city of Los Angeles. “But I do, Jill,” he told her. “I really do. Now make it happen for me.”

Another sigh. “All right, Jake,” she said. “I’ll send the money out first thing in the morning.”