Standing On Top

Chapter 16a

Above Kern County, California

August 13, 1989

Jake sat alone in the cockpit of the 1982 Cessna 414 as it headed southeast high above the southern tip of the San Joaquin Valley. His hands rested lightly on the controls, making minute adjustments every now and then when the high-altitude winds pushed him off course to the Taft VOR transmitter he was navigating to. The avionics package of the plane included one of the most sophisticated autopilot systems available for a private aircraft — an autopilot capable of being programmed to fly the entire trip from shortly after take-off until shortly before landing — but Jake had it turned off at the moment. He was still enjoying the novelty of flying his own plane.

He made a quick scan of his instruments. His navigation needle was pegged dead center toward the VOR transmitter and the distance measuring equipment, or DME was showing him twenty-three nautical miles out from it. His altitude was seventeen thousand feet above sea level. Compass heading was 154 degrees. His airspeed was holding steady at one hundred and seventy two knots — just a hair above two hundred miles per hour. Each of his fuel tanks was well over half full. Cabin pressure was at the standard for eight thousand feet of altitude, comfortable enough to breathe but not enough to actually stress the airframe.

Satisfied that all was copasetic on the instrument panel, he looked outside, scanning in all directions, looking for other aircraft mostly, but also for weather phenomenon and landmarks. To the left he could see the western edge of the city of Bakersfield sprawled out on the valley floor like a relief map. Forward, he could see the mountains that made up the Los Padres National Forest, which he would soon be flying over, and beyond that, the brown haze of smog that marked the Los Angeles basin. To the right he could see the peaks of the Sierra Madres Mountain range and, beyond them, the sparkling blue Pacific Ocean stretching off to the horizon. Though he had spent thirteen of the last forty-eight hours in the air and had now logged more than eight hundred hours of total flight time, he still never tired of looking at the view from high in the air.

The Cessna 414 was Jake's latest acquisition. He had purchased it from a partner in a prestigious Chicago law firm. Since the partner in question was upgrading to a one third share of a Cessna Citation business jet and needed to free up some capital in order to make this purchase, he had been willing to let the 414 go to Jake for $185,000, about $50,000 less than the plane's actual resale value. Though Jill, his accountant, had pleaded with him to reconsider such an extravagant purchase (as well as the other extravagant purchase that was in the works), Jake had been unable to resist. After the quickest possible escrow period, the papers were signed, the official transfer of ownership was made, and Jake was now on the final leg of his flight to bring his new toy home to Brannigan Airport in Ventura County.

He had left the exclusive Chicago suburb of Winnetka at sunrise the previous day and had spent the better part of twelve hours hopping his way southwestward across the country to Winnemucca, Nevada, where he stayed the night in what passed for a four-star hotel. Early this morning took off from Winnemucca's small airport and flew to Westfield Executive Airport in the suburbs of Heritage County. In Heritage, he stayed awhile, visiting his parents for a few hours and then dropping off the final financial paperwork regarding the plane at Jill's office.

"Are you ready for next week?" he'd asked her after listening to her obligatory lecture on cutting down on his spending.

"As ready as I'll ever be," she told him. "I'll ask you one more time, Jake. Are you sure you won't reconsider? In light of the... you know... problems you're having with your bandmates, is it really wise to commit to something like this?"

"Probably not," Jake said with a shrug. "But I'm going to do it anyway."

Jill shook her head. "That's kind of what I thought you'd say."

Jake had lifted off from Westfield Exec — as it was known in Heritage — at 2:55 PM and climbed to his present altitude of seventeen thousand feet. He'd flown south and then southeast, navigating from VOR station to VOR station, roughly following the course of Interstate 5. And now, at 4:28 PM, he reached the Taft VOR station and watched as the second navigation radio went into action, locking onto the next and final station of his flight: the Brannigan VOR. The guidance needle swung slowly to the right, indicating that he should turn that way in order to head directly at the signal. The DME lit up with the calculated distance to fly: forty-three nautical miles. Jake banked the plane to the right until the VOR needle was centered. This put him on a compass heading of 182 — almost due south. Once on the correct course, he contacted air traffic control to request permission to start his descent. Permission was granted. He reduced power to the engines and pushed slightly forward on the control stick. The nose dipped toward the earth and the altimeter began to wind downward. The long flight was almost over.

He dropped down out of the sky, passing over the national forest and into the gently rolling hills of populated Ventura County. As he came within visual range of the airport the regional air traffic control passed him off to the local ATC. He entered the landing pattern for Brannigan Airport at 4:43 PM. As was usually the case at this particular field, there were no other planes landing or taking off at the moment and he was cleared right in. With his flaps fully extended, his airspeed at eighty-five knots, Jake pushed the lever that deployed his tricycle landing gear. He heard the brief whine of machinery from beneath and watched in satisfaction as all three gear lights on his panel turned green, indicating they were locked in place. He made his final turn toward the runway and reduced power even more. He came down smoothly and quietly. Since his two propellers turned in opposite directions, there wasn't even any torque to deal with as there would have been in his 172. He flared at the last second and touched down neatly with a slight thump. He retracted the flaps, neutralized the controls, and then taxied to the hanger he'd rented, parking just in front of the doors. He was back on familiar ground, safe and sound after flying alone for more than two thousand miles.

He expected Helen to come out to greet him. She would just be finishing with her last class of the day and she knew he had planned his arrival here to coincide with that. They hadn't seen each other in three days now and she had to be excited about checking out his new plane, if nothing else. But, by the time he got the wheels chocked and his bag removed from the storage compartment, there was no Helen in sight.

With a sigh, he shouldered his bag and started walking toward the collection of classroom buildings behind the main terminal. He was disappointed in her failure to show but not really all that surprised. Helen had not been herself of late. Though things had been a little touchy with her ever since the engine had gone out on the DC-10, her personality had undergone a radical shift from center after Jennifer Johansen was captured in her yard with a gun, a set of handcuffs, four knives, and a blowtorch. He hadn't seen the Helen he'd fallen in love with since that day.

Granted, finding a psycho in one's yard in possession of a gun, restraints, and a pyrogenic cutting tool was something to get a bit upset about. Especially when coupled with the fact that the psycho in question was going to get very little punishment for what she did, mostly because she hadn't been able to actually do it.

Johansen had refused to talk to the sheriff's department detectives or the district attorney's investigators who had interviewed her after her arrest, invoking her Fifth Amendment right to tell them nothing. Even her own lawyer, a veteran public defender appointed by Ventura County, hadn't been able to get anything out of her other than "I wasn't going to kill anyone." This was in response to the news that the DA's office wanted to charge her with attempted murder. At her arraignment hearing, she refused to talk to the judge at all. He ordered a psychiatric assessment of her to determine whether or not she was even sane enough to answer for her actions. She didn't tell the court-appointed shrink much — certainly nothing about her motivations or intentions — but it was enough for him to decide that Johansen suffered from bi-polar disorder and possibly some form of delusional disorder, but not schizophrenia. He pronounced her mentally competent enough to stand trial.

Things never made it that far. The deputy DA assigned to the case and Johansen's public defender put their heads together and took a realistic look at what she could actually be found guilty of. Though it was obvious to any thinking person what her intentions had been — she had planned to hold a gun to Helen long enough to handcuff her and get her into her house and then wrap her up in duct tape and go to work on her with the knives and the blow torch — the fact that she had not actually made it as far as confronting her victim before being caught somewhat limited the charges that could be filed against her. She could not be charged with attempted murder because there was no way to prove that murder was what she intended. She could not be charged with attempted kidnapping for the very same reason. Nor could she be charged with burglary since she had not entered or attempted to enter any of the structures or vehicles on Helen's property.

In the end, the DA's office worked out a deal in which she would plea guilty to carrying a concealed weapon, trespassing, and possession of burglary tools. In exchange for the plea and for agreeing to undergo psychiatric counseling for at least a year, she would do no jail time and would be placed on probation for one year. There was also, of course, the stipulation that she attempt no contact with Helen Brody, Jake Kingsley, or any of their family members or acquaintances. A temporary restraining order that had been granted the day of Johansen's arrest was made permanent and served by the judge himself. It stated in no uncertain terms that if Johansen was found within one hundred yards of Helen, Jake, their properties, or any of their acquaintances, her probation would immediately be revoked and she would do a year in the Ventura County Correctional Center.

"Do you understand?" the judge had asked her after explaining her sentence and the restrictions.

"I understand," she'd mumbled in return, her eyes looking down at the floor.

Later that day she was released from custody and went home a free woman. And Helen's personality had taken yet another dip toward the abyss.

Jake entered the classroom building now, finding it mostly empty and silent. The main classroom was locked tightly. Jake peered through the window and saw that all the chairs had been stacked atop the tables, all the papers and books stowed away, and the only sign of recent habitation was an equation, written on the blackboard in Helen's spiky, feminine script, that dealt with the weight vs. thrust and speed issue of powered flight. Jake went down the hall to Helen's small office. He tried the doorknob and found it locked. The blinds covering the window were pulled tightly down. There was, however, a sliver of light coming from beneath the door. Gently, he knocked on it. There was no answer. He knocked again, a little harder and a little longer this time.

A timid, careful voice drifted out to him. "Who is it?"

"It's me, Helen," he called back. "Jake."

"Okay," came the reply. "Hold on a second." And then... "Are you alone?"

"Yes, Helen," he said. "I'm alone."

"Okay."

He heard footsteps tromping across the ground. He heard the clicking of one then two then three locks being disengaged. The door slowly opened revealing Helen. She was standing back as far as she could while still being able to touch the door. She was dressed in her normal garb of jeans and a T-shirt. The T-shirt in question was very long on her, covering several inches of her waist. Her right hand rested beneath the shirt on the right waistband. Jake knew she had a SIG-Sauer 9mm concealed in a holster there. Since Johansen had been released from jail, she carried the gun with her everywhere and spent half of any given day with her hand resting on the butt of it.

"I'm alone, Helen," he told her again. "No need to draw down on me."

Eventually, she relaxed. A little. She took her hand off the gun and stepped back to let him into the office. "Hi, Jake," she said softly. "How was the flight?"

"It was good," he said. "The plane flies like a dream." He stepped forward to give her a hug. She stiffened a little at first and then put her arms around him and hugged back. It was a perfunctory embrace at best, followed up by a sterile, perfunctory kiss on the lips that lasted less than two seconds.

"I missed you," she said, though she didn't sound like she really had.

"I missed you too," he told her. "It would've been nice if you'd been with me."

She gave a frown. "We don't need to get into that again, do we?"

That, was the argument they'd had about her accompanying him on his journey to retrieve his new aircraft. Since it involved flying on a commercial aircraft to Chicago, Helen had absolutely refused to come along when he'd suggested it. She was apparently sticking to her vow of never setting foot inside a jet airliner again. "No," he said. "I guess we don't. I was kind of hoping to see you down on the flight line though. You did know I was coming in, didn't you?"

"I'm sorry," she said, sounding anything but. "I figured I'd wait until you came to get me. I don't like... you know... going out there by myself anymore. If that psycho bitch isn't out there with a sniper rifle than some of those goddamn reporters might be."

"I suppose," Jake said, although a sniper rifle didn't really seem Johansen's style and as for the reporters, they'd been almost obsessed with the story for the first week or so, following Jake, Helen, and Helen's father anywhere they went, but as of the plea bargain and Johansen's release from jail, they had seemingly lost interest. "What are you doing in here?" he asked. "Correcting papers and grading tests?"

"No. All of that's already done. I was just waiting for you. You wanted me to be here, didn't you?"

"Uh... yeah," Jake said, "but only if you want to be here."

She shrugged disinterestedly. "It's no big deal."

"I see," Jake said, his voice a little troubled. Helen either didn't pick up on this or didn't care. "Well... uh... do you want to go look at the plane?"

"Sure," she said. "Let me go get my stuff."

Jake waited patiently in the hallway while she retrieved her leather briefcase from beneath her desk and shut off all the lights. She then closed the classroom door and spent the better part of two minutes using three different keys to engage all of the locks.

"That should do it," she said with satisfaction once the door was secure.

"I would think so," Jake agreed. "Shall we?"

They made their way out of the building and across the flight line to the hangar complex. Jake's new plane was still sitting in front of the hangar door. Jake felt a sense of pride and joy just looking at it, just at the thought that it was his and he could fly it whenever he wanted, go anywhere he wanted in it. He had just flown it halfway across the country and already he wanted to take it up again. He had expected that Helen's face would reflect at least some of this joy. It didn't. She was looking at it with no more interest than she would have shown at a picture of the aircraft in a sales brochure.

"It's nice," she said blankly, running a hand over the left wingtip, touching one of the propeller blades. "I'm happy for you."

"Let's take it up," Jake suggested. "You fly it."

"You know we're not supposed to do that, Jake," she said. And this was technically true. Both of them were still in the process of accumulating enough solo hours in a twin-engine pressurized aircraft to achieve official certification. Until that happened, they were forbidden by FAA regulations from carrying any passengers other than certified multi-engine flight instructors. They were operating now under the equivalent of a learner's permit.

"Nobody's gonna know, Helen," he told her.

"No, sorry," she said. "What if one of those photographers is creeping around and takes a picture of us getting in together? I don't want to chance it."

"Helen, that rule is just a technicality. When they say we can't have passengers, I don't think they were talking about fellow students."

"A passenger is a passenger," she told him. "And if I get caught flying outside the allowances of my certification level, my teaching certificate might be suspended. I'm just not going to chance it."

Jake felt a surge of frustration go through him. Wasn't this the same woman who had seduced him, her student, in an Omaha hotel room not so terribly long before? She hadn't been too worried about her teaching certificate then, had she? No, he seemed to recall that she'd been screaming in pleasure and squirting her vaginal juices all over his face. He bit back on making reference to this episode, knowing she would simply refuse to acknowledge it was the same sort of transgression.

"All right," Jake said. "I get your point. Why don't you take it up alone then?"

"Me?"

"Yes, you," he said. "You've finished the classes, just like me. You're allowed to solo alone in type. Take it up and cruise it to Catalina. I'll follow in the 172 and we'll have dinner in Avalon."

"You want me to fly your plane to Avalon?" she asked, as if Avalon were on the far side of the Sahara instead of less than one hundred nautical miles away.

"Right."

"Just to have dinner?"

"Right again," he said. "It's one of those spontaneous things that people in love are supposed to do."

"It would take me thirty minutes just to pre-flight that plane and get familiar with it," she said.

"It's the same plane was fly for our cert," he said. "Just a different year."

"It's different, isn't it? And it has different avionics, doesn't it? And then there's the matter of insurance. I'm sure I'm not covered to fly it."

"Actually, you are," Jake said. "I had them include you as a primary pilot."

"Oh... I see," she said, almost as if she were upset he'd done that. "Well... anyway, I'm not really comfortable with the thought of just jumping in your plane and flying off to Avalon in it. I'm also a little bit tired."

"Tired?"

"Yeah, it's been a long day. Can we just go out to Ritchie's?"

Ritchie's was a small, family owned country restaurant in the small town of Winterland about five miles from Helen's house. They specialized in good old high-calorie, high-fat, home-style meals. The food was very good, but Jake and Helen ate there so much he'd already worked his way though everything on the menu twice now.

"How about we drive into the city?" Jake suggested. "I can call and get us a reservation at Finnegan's or Bogart's."

Helen frowned at this suggestion. "I'm not really in the mood for dressing up tonight," she said. "You know how much I hate putting on airs."

Jake knew no such thing. She had always loved dressing up and 'putting on airs' in their earlier days. He suppressed another sigh, knowing that trying to push her would only lead to an argument. "All right," he said, trying to sound cheerful. "Ritchie's it is."

They drove there in separate cars. Once inside, they were seated at a booth near the back. Helen ordered the chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes — the same thing she always ordered here. Jake went with the fried chicken and coleslaw.

Conversation during the meal was sparse at best and mostly one-sided. Jake tried to tell her about his adventures on the trip from Chicago to Ventura — he had several interesting tales (interesting to other pilots anyway) about strange landing patterns, air traffic controllers who could barely speak English, weather problems and turbulence, and problems arranging fueling and hanger space — but she didn't seem the least bit engrossed. In fact, she hardly seemed to be paying attention at all. When she did answer him, it was short and monosyllabic.

"Is everything okay?" he was finally forced to ask her.

"Sure," she said. "Why do you ask?"

"You just don't seem yourself lately."

A shrug. "I've been through quite a bit lately, wouldn't you say?"

She would speak no more on the subject.

After paying the bill, they left and drove to Helen's house. She drove right up to the perimeter of the motion detectors before using her remote to deactivate them. After parking, she exited her vehicle like a cop approaching a hostile scene — gun in hand, her eyes peering everywhere. Jake made no comment. This was standard operating procedure for her these days.

Once she was satisfied the immediate perimeter of the house was clear, she opened the front door, deactivated the alarm, practically dragged Jake inside, and then slammed and locked the door behind them. She quickly reactivated the house alarm and the motion sensors out front. From there, she cleared each room one by one, gun in hand, until she was satisfied that Jenny Johansen or some other psycho wasn't hiding in a closet or under the bed (yes, she looked under all of the beds, utilizing a three-cell maglight to assist her).

"Okay," she said at last. "Everything seems to be in order." She holstered her weapon.

"Good," Jake said with a nod, letting the subject of her armed recon drop. The one time he'd brought it up, asking her if maybe she was going a bit overboard with the paranoia, it had led to a vicious, irrational verbal attack in which she'd thrown him out of the house and didn't speak to him for three days. Nor did she apologize to him when she did start speaking to him again.

"I'm gonna go get changed," she said.

"Sounds like a good idea," Jake agreed. He had a plethora of clothing, including sleepwear, stored in Helen's dresser. "I've been in these clothes since Winnemucca."

They went to her bedroom, the bedroom where Jake had slept with her, had sex with her, had made her scream out in passion and squirt her copious juices countless times. She pulled a pair of grey sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt out of a dresser drawer. Standing near the corner of the bed, she kicked off her shoes and then pulled off her socks. She dropped her jeans to the floor and removed her blouse, leaving her standing in a pair of sterile white panties and a matching underwire bra that barely contained her enormous breasts. Jake, allured by the sight of her partial nudity, reached out to her, clasping his hands around her middle, his fingertips stroking the soft skin of her midriff.

"I missed you," he told her.

She did not return the sentiment. Instead, she pried his fingers off of her body and stepped away from him, out of his reach.

"What's the matter?" he asked, biting back on his frustration. She had been increasingly unresponsive to his sexual advances over the past few weeks.

"I'm just not in the mood right now," she said, matter-of-factly. It was her standard answer to such inquiries.

"Helen," he said gently, "we haven't seen each other in three days. We haven't been with each other in more than a week now."

"I'm sorry, Jake," she said, sounding anything but. "I'm not in the mood. Maybe later."

She pulled the sweatpants on and then dropped the T-shirt over her torso, not bothering to take the brassiere off first — something he'd never seen her do when in the privacy of his or her home and dressing down for the evening. Helen's breasts were so large that she always took the bra off at night because the straps would cut into her shoulders.

Jake slowly undressed until he was completely nude. His manhood was half-erect just from seeing her body, from imaging the possibility of getting it on with her. She didn't comment on it as she normally did, didn't even glance at it. He pulled on a pair of sweatpants of his own and put nothing else on. By the time he was done, Helen was already out of the room

They watched television for about an hour, sitting on opposite ends of the couch. Finally, at around nine o'clock, she announced she was tired and heading up to bed. Jake followed her up.

She climbed into bed without removing any of her clothing. Jake climbed in after her. He reached for and began to caress her shoulder. She didn't stop him. She didn't acknowledge the touch either.

Finally, in frustration, he sighed and rolled over. Helen stayed on the other side of the bed, leaving nearly two feet of space between them.

"If you want to have sex with me, go ahead," she said, a tired resignation in her voice. "I'll do it."

"That's okay," Jake told her. "I don't enjoy it very much when I'm just being accommodated."

She did not reply. Within ten minutes her breathing took on the slow, regular pattern of sleep. Jake lay awake for quite some time, tossing, turning, unable to get comfortable. He was tired but his troubled mind just didn't want to shut down. Finally, at around midnight, he drifted off.

His dreams were vivid and unpleasant, frequently waking him with their intensity. This was something that had been occurring over the past month or so, becoming more recurrent these past few weeks. He dreamed most frequently of being in an airplane — usually his 172 but tonight, his new airplane — flying high above the ocean or the mountains, somewhere it was impossible to land, and having the engines suddenly die on him, leaving him to desperately try to restart them before he crashed. In the dream, his radios didn't work so he couldn't call for help, couldn't even let anyone know he was going down. The ground grew closer and closer while he kept futilely trying to restart the engines before he crashed. He always woke up before the fatal moment came, usually sweating, his heart hammering in his chest, adrenaline flowing freely in his veins.

He awoke just after seven o'clock the next morning, feeling tired and strung out. Helen had already showered, dressed, and eaten breakfast. He caught her just before she was about to walk out the door to head to the airport, where she had four training flights scheduled for the morning and two classes to teach in the afternoon.

"Bye," she told him as he poured a cup of coffee. She gave him a perfunctory peck on the lips and headed out the door. "Be sure to set the alarm when you leave."

"Right," he told her.

"Are you coming back here tonight?"

"No," he said. "I think I'll crash at home tonight."

She nodded. "Okay," she told him, not trying to change his mind as she had once habitually done. She pulled her gun out so she could clear the path to her car and left the house, closing the door behind her.

Jake stared at the door for a few moments and then carried his coffee to the bathroom so he could get dressed. He too had a long day before him.

Jake arrived at the Intemperance rehearsal warehouse at nine o'clock that morning, parking his BMW in his accustomed spot in front of the door. He was dressed in his standard rehearsal garb of blue jean shorts, a plain t-shirt, and tennis shoes. He punched in the security code for the main entrance and entered, walking across the mostly empty floor space to the very back, where the band's equipment was set up. Everyone else was already there. Nerdly was fussing with the soundboard. Coop and Charlie were sitting over by Coop's drum set, talking softly to each other about something. Matt sat by himself next to the main amplifier stack. He was smoking a cigarette and going over some of his music sheets. He was the only one not to greet Jake's arrival. Once again, business as usual.

Matt didn't greet anybody anymore. He didn't talk to anybody unless it was absolutely necessary. He showed up for their composition session each day and did what was required of him and that was about it. He didn't smoke marijuana with the rest of the band, didn't drink beer with them, and went out of his way to stay well away from them whenever they weren't actually playing. It wasn't a very productive way to do things, but it was, after five weeks, a far sight better than the way things had gone in the first five or six sessions.

The hostility between Matt and the rest of the band — particularly between Matt and Jake and Matt and Charlie — had been venomous at first. Yelling and screaming matches, threats of violence, and wild accusations had flown left and right over every issue, major, minor, or even completely irrelevant to the great scheme of things. Jake had started to think that they weren't going to be able to accomplish anything at all, especially not a twelve-song demo tape by their September 15 deadline.

This acrimony was at its absolute worst when they actually got their instruments turned on and tried to start composing on those first days. They tried to start with neutral ground, by rehashing the one song they'd agreed to do way back in 1988, before National had derailed their creative efforts in favor of the double live album. That one song was She Cut Me Loose, Jake's tribute to his break-up with Rachel, the waitress. Cut Me Loose had been about nine-tenths dialed in when they'd stopped working on it. It should have been a simple matter of re-acquainting with the tune and then working out the final details of producing it — the intro, the ending, and the specifics of the lead-in to the bridge were all that was left to put together. It didn't quite work out that way.

What should have taken no more than an afternoon's worth of work stretched out for the better part of three sessions with absolutely nothing being accomplished but more animosity and bad feelings. Matt would reject every suggestion that Jake would make about how to start the song, how to end it, how to lead into the bridge. Jake would similarly reject every suggestion that Matt made. There was no middle ground sought, no compromise suggested. Jake wanted to do things his way and Matt wanted to do things his way.

Everybody, including the two main combatants, knew that the real issue was not a minor difference in musical philosophies on minor parts of a song. No, the real issue was a struggle for control — a dick contest, as Coop would have put it. Matt wanted to assert that, despite being overruled and forced to cave on the Darren vs. Charlie issue, he was still the leader of the band and not simply a figurehead as Jake had suggested during the heat of that battle. Jake, in response, wanted Matt to know that he was not going to be pushed around just so he, Matt, could make some sort of a point. Cut Me Loose was Jake's song. He had written it, composed it, and introduced it, and he would be goddamned if he was going to let a foul-tempered guitar player tweak it around just to say he could. Also, Jake knew if he gave in on this issue, Matt would only be worse when there was something else, something major that needed to be decided.

On and on the fighting went, with the shouting and profanity and insults getting worse by the hour. Matt threatened violence multiple times. Several times Jake actually offered to take him up on his challenge to fight it out. Once they got as far as walking to the center of the warehouse and squaring off at each other before the other band members managed to break them up and drag them off in separate directions.

Interestingly enough, it was during the hottest part of the battle of wills, when the accusations and angry profanity were flying back and forth like gunfire in South Central LA, that an actual accord was reached. It was during the latest argument over the bridge intro to Cut Me, shortly after Matt and Jake had been dragged away from each other, when it happened.

"There is no fucking way," Jake screamed at Matt — not yelled, not raised his voice, but actually screamed with an angry finger pointed at Matt's chest — "that I'm gonna allow a fucking two-chord step-down between the goddamn chorus and the bridge! You want to destroy a song with some gay fucking shit like that, do it to one of your own songs, not one of mine!"

"Oh that's right," Matt returned, his vocal decibel level nicely in the same range as Jake's. "It's your fucking song. It's not an Intemperance song at all. It's a Jake fucking Kingsley solo effort! Well, by all fucking means, Massa Kingsley, let's do it your way. It'd only be right, suh! You jist tells me exactly how you wants it played, suh, and I plays it like a good nigga!"

Jake opened his mouth to retort — something on the order of if Matt got any more melodramatic he should go on the fucking Phil Donahue Show — but Nerdly spoke first. "Actually," he interjected, holding up a hand to silence Jake, "if I may?"

"Oh, now the massa's fucking lapdog chimes in," Matt said with disgust. "This should be pretty fuckin' rich."

Nerdly let the insult roll off his back. He was pretty good at that. "Actually, Matt," he said, "I think you may have just unwittingly suggested an acceptable solution to this dilemma."

"What?" Matt asked. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"The suggestion you just made," Nerdly said. "I think it's a valid course of action."

"You mean play exactly like Mr. Prima Donna Rimjobbing fuckin' Felcher wants me to?" Matt asked. "You must be out of your fucking mind. Don't you know fucking sarcasm when you hear it?"

"I have been known to miss that particular nuance of human communication from time to time," Nerdly admitted. "But in this case, I did not. I understood that you were speaking in jest. Jest or not, however, I am of the opinion that the suggestion in question can stand on its own merits."

"Forget it, Nerdly," Matt said. "There ain't no way in hell I'm letting anyone dictate to me like I'm a fucking studio hacker."

"I'll agree it is not an optimum solution," Nerdly said. "I do fear, however, that it is the only solution we have at this point in time. We have spent twenty-six point three hours now trying to compose and perfect a mere thirty seconds worth of music and we have accomplished exactly nothing. We have eleven more complete songs to work out in addition to this one. Something has to give, Matt. Cut Me Loose is a song of Jake's conception. Would it be all that bad to simply perform the chorus/bridge transition in the manner that Jake suggests?"

Matt opened his mouth, undoubtedly to give yet another acrid and angry reply, but this time Coop beat him to it. "He does have a point there, Matt," Coop said. "We could be done with this fuckin' thing and working on something else in an hour or so."

"And now the fuckin' traitor gives his two cents worth," Matt said. "Did Jake pull you aside last night and feed his position to you like he did over Freakboy? Did you let Freakboy stick his cock up your ass while you were selling me out?"

"No," Coop said slowly, angrily, "but I'm about to stick a couple of fuckin' drumsticks and a cymbal stand up your ass if you don't watch how the fuck you're talking to me."

"You think you can take me, you fuckin' fag lover?" Matt said, standing up and facing the drummer. "I'll wipe up this whole fuckin' warehouse with your two-faced, dick-sucking, head!"

Coop stood up, throwing his drumsticks to the ground. "You think so, motherfucker?" he demanded. "Let's fuckin' go! You need a fuckin' ass-kicking and I'm the motherfucker who's gonna give it to you."

"Bring it on!" Matt said. "Right here and right now!"

Charlie and Nerdly both grabbed Coop before he could make it two steps away from his drum set. Jake put his hand on Matt's shoulder. Matt tensed up and it looked like he was going to change his target and take a swing at Jake instead — after all, they'd been on the brink of that just fifteen minutes ago.

"This ain't solving anything," Jake said softly. "We can all kick each other's ass and end up in the fuckin' hospital but we ain't gonna be any closer to a solution when we get out. So why don't we just skip that part?"

Matt slowly unclenched his fists. He shot one last look at Coop and then sat back down in his chair. Coop continued to glare as well but shook off Nerdly and Charlie's hands and resumed his own seat.

"I'll play it your way, Jake," Matt finally said. "Just tell me how you want it done."

"All right then," Jake said. "Let's do it."

"But if you start barking orders at me and treating me like a studio hacker, I'm gonna fuckin' hit you! That's a motherfuckin' promise!"

"I won't treat you like a studio hacker," Jake promised.