This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  It was an old back issue of Ski that someone had scanned in, and the cover said “The Greatest Extreme Skier on the Planet,” with a picture of some dude just completely launching into the ether, the edge of some ungodly steep mountain behind him and a mountain range far off below him, flying over it on his skis like gravity had never been invented. Unreal. He looked at it a few seconds, imagining himself up there, hanging effortlessly in the sky, and then he remembered. This was that skier he met that time! The guy from Alaska! Mitch’s friend: he was in L.A. trying to be somebody, or maybe Mitch was trying to make him somebody, but when you looked at the picture, it was pretty clear that he was somebody all by himself. He’d been supposed to meet that guy in Tahoe. That was it: they’d been all set up to do some runs in Tahoe and then Beth unleashed fucking World War Six on him and that ski trip was the least of his worries. He couldn’t reach the guy to cancel, and Mitch told him later he’d snapped his leg or something. Never saw him again, and he hadn’t seen Mitch in about ten years either.

  He looked at the picture again. In some other life they skied together, and he taught him how to fly like that. To jump and be free from all the shit that dragged a person down: time, losing your audience, losing your money, just the whole thing about the world’s interest that moved on, and you really had no control over it. Where was that guy now? Still flying? He wondered if his offer was still good.

  By the time he came out of the room, dusk had come down. Matthew had gone, and he went out alone to the pool and sat by the blue rectangle that looked out over the city. This would all be gone soon. All of this that he’d worked his whole life for would be gone, and he’d be living in an apartment somewhere down there, back where he was twenty years ago when he’d first come to L.A., except that twenty years ago he’d been young, and all this had been ahead of him: a big magical future. Things are so fresh when they hit you the first time. Your first lunch where the suits pick up the tab, cool, your first deal, like, yeah, of course!, your first person going absolutely speechless when they meet you, your first model slipping you the tongue, your first two-on-one, your first time walking into a party and realizing everybody is staring at you, your first trip in a chartered jet, your first stadium crowd cheering so loud your whole body shakes. Then the other stuff. The first time your buddy kills himself with a drug overdose. The first time you play to a half-empty house. The first time your name isn’t on the VIP list. Not being invited to the party, not having your calls returned, not having your contract renewed. That stuff wasn’t behind him. That shit was still in front of him.

  Because what Harrington had taken away from him wasn’t just money, it was possibility. Money was like water in L.A. With money you could hire a publicist, you could wear the right clothes at the right events, the thousand-dollar sunglasses, show up in the nice ride that was definitely not a late-model Volkswagen. You could throw parties and invite people who mattered, make donations to charity and issue press releases. In other words, you could do all the career-maintenance bullshit that he’d never had to do the first time around but that he realized he’d have to do now if he was ever going to get on top again. But Peter Harrington had ripped that chance away from him, just before he realized he needed to grab it. According to Lev, he couldn’t even afford an assistant!

  Screw Lev’s action list! What he needed to do wasn’t call a real-estate agent or pavement resurfacer. What he needed to do was track down Peter Harrington and beat the fucking daylights out of him! He’s kicking it in a limo while I’m selling everything I have? He’s living in a penthouse somewhere while I’m looking for a two-bedroom apartment? It was time to settle a score here, and not just his. Everybody’s! All those working stiffs and old folks and middle-class dupes who thought they’d make a little extra in the stock market, like the big guys, or thought they had a safe retirement. He’d find him, spin him around, say, Hi, I’m Pete Harrington and you owe me eight million dollars, and then just deck his silly ass. Give him a few stiff kicks while he was down. That was something worth doing! Fucking curling up and dying in a two-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood … Fuck that!

  He imagined that peanut-shaped face. That grinning, smirking self-satisfied overeducated punk with his schemes and his millions! Thought he was The Man, didn’t he? Well, he’d just go and kick it with The Man for a little while and see how he liked that.

  That was a song right there—Kickin’ It with The Man! Some untouchable money guy in a tuxedo getting the boot from one of the little people he’d ripped off.

  Pete hummed a few chords, imagining them as guitar licks. You think you got it all and you can’t be reached. I got news for you: your fortress is breached. Something, something, a line in the sand. Something, something, something, now I’m kickin’ it with The Man! He laughed. Fuck yeah!

  He felt a sudden surge of joy, a boundless power rising from within him and smashing all the doubt and bitterness of not only the last eight hours, but of the entire soggy decade of failure that had preceded them. He laughed at the incredible clarity, the lightning-like truth of it. The song, the knowledge that he’d practically been appointed by God to find this dirtbag and beat some fucking enlightenment into him. Yeah! You’re fucking with God now, motherfucker! You’re fucking with Right and Wrong and Justice and whatever your Wall Street buddies told you when they made the fucking rules in their own image doesn’t mean shit anymore! You’re guilty—you stole my name and I’m fucking going to make you pay!

  He jumped up from the table and rushed into his studio. Two hours later he called Bobby. It was all different now. The mist had cleared. Shit was on.

  * * *

  Bobby had shown up with a bottle of tequila, and they’d already killed a quarter of it by the time the doorbell rang. “Look out,” Bobby said, “that’ll be Beth.”

  His ex-wife. “You called her?”

  Bobby raised his hands helplessly.

  He opened it and there she was: streaked brown hair, quick blue eyes in a round face, five feet, one inch of nuclear-powered New Jersey womanhood. She gave him her full body scan. Like at the airport, but more thorough: she could tell how much he’d drunk, how much he’d fucked off instead of working, and the age of the last girl he’d slept with, all in a one-second glance that she irradiated him with every time they met. It was that last little vestige of ex-wife wariness. Although, realistically, she could probably do that with anyone.

  She gave him a quick kiss and one of those sympathetic sad-puppy looks. He could tell she’d already talked to Lev and Bobby. Definitely knew about the Boxster et al.

  “Don’t look so serious, Beth. Everything is awesome!”

  “Awesome…” she repeated, because her mind was unquestionably like, Crap, Pete’s more fucked up than I thought! She shook it off. “Ira says hello. He had to stay with the kids.”

  “Good man!” Thank God for Ira. Ira’d been his ticket back to her good graces after their marriage liquidated, or, really, after he basically put a brick of C-4 under it and pushed the plunger. He’d had to crawl on his stomach over broken glass for years before she’d even talk to him. In a moment of supreme inspiration he’d dropped Ira on her, and, to his amazement, they could go on to being what they should have been in the first place: friends. And in the clinch, you definitely wanted Beth Blackman as your friend.

  She turned down an offer of tequila and sat on the couch to hear him out. He explained the whole thing to her: who the other Peter Harrington was, his Crossroads scam, and what he was going to do about it. When he finished, she slid an empty shot glass toward Bobby. “Give me about a half inch of that stuff, will you?” She and Bobby traded looks, then she started.

  “Let me make sure I understand this, Pete. You’re going to find this financier, punch him in the face, and you’re writing a song about it that you’re going to use as the theme of your tour. And this plan has all developed in the last eight hours.”

  “Don’t try to talk me out of it, Beth. It’s fucking righteous and it’s
what I have to do, for me and for the thousands of other people who got ripped off in this bankster’s game.”

  “Fair enough.” She looked over at Bobby again, who was flopped backward on the couch like a walrus on an ice floe. “I won’t try to talk you out of it. But let me just put a couple of things out there. First of all, there’s a word for what you plan to do. It’s called assault. And that little incident with Uncle Sam’s Erection a few years ago? That’s called a prior offense. You could get a lot more than sixty days this time.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care.” She nodded her head slowly. “Okay. What about the song? Have you written this song, or is this a song you’re going to write?”

  “Ha ha, Beth. Very funny. As a matter of fact, I wrote it today. And it’s not some wimpy protest song—” His voice became nasal and cloying. “Wall Street bigwigs, we want justice, boo hoo hoo. No, it’s, like, I’m finding this guy and I’m kicking the crap out of him! Because that’s fucking justice!” He stood up. “This is hero shit, Beth! It might be too epic for you to understand!”

  “But Jason’s the one—”

  “Jason’s just the puppet! This guy’s the puppeteer!” She started to say something but he talked over her. “Don’t you get it? These guys fucked over an entire country! People lost their savings, they lost their houses. This fucking asshole made a fortune off other people’s misery! Do I just kick back and let him get away with it?”

  Beth patted the place on the sofa next to her. “Sit down. Okay? That’s it. Put the glass down and look at me.” She put her hand on his knee. “Pete. I’m your friend. Right? I’ve always given you the best advice I could. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know this is all a shock, and when you’re shocked, you want to fight back. But you can’t fight when you’re in quicksand. Lev says you’re spending fifty thousand dollars a month, and you have to cut it to five. That’s where your focus needs to be. Plus, you’ve got a tour you have to get ready for, right, Bobby?” Bobby nodded. “You need a new place to live, and there’s going to be lawyers and forms to fill out and a lot of other things that aren’t very pleasant. But you’ve got to be the grown-up here. This is the part where you save your own ass.”

  He gave a long exasperated breath. “I am trying to save my own ass. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Pete! It’s a fantasy!”

  “That’s my life, Beth! Everything good I ever did started as a fantasy!”

  “This is insane! Bobby—?”

  The walrus roused himself. “She’s right, Pete. It’s insane.”

  He looked from one to the other, both of them so comfortable in their successful lives. And him. The failure. “There comes a time,” he began in a low voice that got steadily louder, “when you get to the edge of the cliff, and you either back off, or you fucking launch it. And I will always, always launch it!” He jumped to his feet. “I’m going after this asshole! He stole my money. He stole my fucking name! He fleeced the whole goddamned world, and he thinks he’s fucking untouchable! Well, he’s not! I’m going to beat this guy down and I’m going to write a fucking anthem about it and the whole world’s going to stand up and cheer!” He was shouting now. “I’m touching the untouchable! And if you can’t understand why I need to do that, then you are fired as my manager and you are fired as my ex-wife! I’ll do it without you!” He stormed across the carpet to the hallway, then turned around and threw back in a painful, enraged shout: “Fuck you!” He rushed into his bedroom and slammed the door.

  Fuck it! In the end it always got down to this anyway. You were on your own and you had to do it for yourself and not for anyone else, and the more impossible it seemed, the more worth doing it probably was. Okay. He was alone. If nothing else, this whole Boxster thing and then being basically abandoned by Bobby and Beth brought everything full circle again and stripped away the illusion that he was anything but alone. Hell yeah! He was happy about it! There was nobody left to desert him now.

  He heard Beth’s and Bobby’s voices coming from the living room. They were talking about something, and the volume kept creeping up around some argument Beth was making, answered by Bobby’s sleepy croak. Then Beth’s voice sawed away for a longer time, and Bobby croaked back, and then Beth said something short, then Bobby answered her kind of sharply, and he thought, No, Bobby, no! because then Beth went Jersey on him in a big way, and God help the SOB: he knew what that felt like. It wasn’t just that she got loud: Beth could harsh a decibel until it was like having some dude caning you in a Singapore jail. It was quiet for a while, then Beth knocked on the door.

  “Pete? Will you come out here, please? Bobby and I want to talk with you.”

  Bobby was sitting there like a house that had just had its roof ripped off by a tornado. Beth had refilled her glass of tequila.

  Bobby started first, kind of slow and serious, like he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “Pete, I understand how you feel. You want to take this guy down a notch—”

  “Not a notch, Bobby. I’m taking this guy all the way off the fucking totem pole!”

  “Okay. He’s off the totem pole. I understand. You want to do this? I’ll help you.”

  “We’ll both help you,” Beth added.

  This was a fucking attitude adjustment. The singer examined them both, looking for some trace of an angle. “What do you mean?”

  Bobby answered. “For starters, you need to train for this. And we need to find out where Peter Harrington lives, stuff like that. And it all has to be done confidentially. It’s complicated.”

  “But doable!”

  “Doable,” Bobby conceded.

  “And worth doing,” Pete insisted.

  Beth spoke up. “It is worth doing. Bobby and I sat here after you left and we thought about it and we realized, Pete’s right about this. Something really wrong happened here, and nobody was punished except the people at the bottom. That’s wrong. When the system is rigged, maybe somebody needs to act outside the system.”

  “I told you,” Pete answered calmly. “It’s hero shit.”

  “It is hero shit,” Beth agreed.

  “It’s superhero shit,” Bobby said.

  Now Beth took over. “So here’s the deal, Pete. You take care of your financial situation, which means all the things Lev told you to do, and Bobby and I will try to find someone to help you on this project. But you have to keep it quiet, and you have to keep us out of it. This is all you, and nobody should think otherwise. Is that a deal?”

  “Deal.”

  All three of them stood up and shook hands together. The singer felt a swelling of joy and relief. The untouchable was getting closer.

  3

  Tiger Claws a Tree A Precious Duck Flaps Its Wings

  Knowing Bobby and Beth were backing him up made it marginally easier to see his life dismantled piece by piece. It went fast. The meeting with Lev and Jason had been on a Wednesday. By Friday he’d signed for a new apartment and some organizer woman from Panama had come over and put little colored stickers on all his shit: blue for stuff they were moving, green for stuff they were selling, and black for shit they were throwing out.

  Like when his mom had moved into the nursing home and everything had to be cleared out. He’d been getting ready for the Wreckage tour so he hired a service to take care of it, but his sisters still got on him for not helping. The single day he’d shown up, one glance into the Dumpster had destroyed him. The blue ceramic mixing bowl, the one Mom used to make cookies in, sitting there on the heap with the crack finally broken completely open, and he’d started to tear up, and Cody was like, Forget it man, it’s gone, and it was gone: his childhood, his father, the kids in the neighborhood. In a few months, Cody would be gone, too, stupidly. Chugging that rum, and everybody too wasted to know they needed to call 911. That was some fucking wreckage, all right. The show went on, everybody saying shit like, Cody would want us to go on, but the reality being that it was their fi
rst big tour and they wanted it to go on. It had that weird dead-friend vibe, beneath all the blow jobs and the interviews and the parties, like Cody was looking over their shoulders all the time, not disapproving, but insistent, and it gave a weird dimension to the tour, one he never talked about except with Duffy and Bobby. He never wrote a song about it, never knew how, just like he’d never write a song about the mixing bowl in the Dumpster or that house outside Wilksbury. It didn’t rock.

  He was supposed to be helping the process of closing up his house, but on the last day he just lay on a couch with a bottle of Jägermeister and watched it all wash away. Moving guys in and out for three hours. A couple of them asked for autographs between hauling his stuff. The stereo equipment, the pool furniture, the chrome floor lamp, the guitars. Fifteen years of his life turned into yellow tags at a secondhand store. When the only thing left was the couch he was lying on, he stood up, stepped into his sandals, and walked out.

  This is what it came to. Two years in Tacoma with his high school band, then a couple more in Seattle, then three more in L.A. before the DreamKrushers got signed. Everyone thought rockers appeared on the scene after a few months of club gigs; they didn’t see the humiliating grind that led up to it. Asking for favors from people who owed you nothing, building mailing lists of potential fans, begging people to please come to your next show, please keep on liking you, because somehow you might be able to turn all that liking into a better gig, a bigger spotlight, a contract, a million dollars, a future of parties where you hung with people you couldn’t quite imagine but that were somehow better than the ones you presently knew. A little bit like the perfume ad, where you thought you were going to be elegant and in control, when what you were really aspiring to was having some unseen rich guy feel you up in his limo. Which was kind of funny, actually.

  * * *

  Once he got into the new apartment, Bobby was the one who got him focused. They still had to find the Crossroads guy: he’d fallen off the charts a while ago, and they needed to know where he lived and where he hung out. Bobby would look into that, but if he was going to find this fucker and beat him down, he needed to prepare. “It’d be a shame if you tracked this punk down and got your ass kicked,” Bobby said. “Plus, he might have a bodyguard, so you can’t dink around. I’ve put together a list of some martial arts teachers. You just have to pick one.”