Murder-a-Go-Go's, page 33
People trickled in from the rest of the club. By the time we started our third song, they crowded the front of the stage. That was the thing about Melanie. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, her voice was raw, but something about her made you want to watch, to listen.
Damn, pay attention, I told myself. This wasn’t a hard tune, but that didn’t mean I could space out. I had backup vocals to sing, and I still had trouble singing and playing bass at the same time. It wasn’t automatic, I really had to rehearse the shit out of it.
Which was why, when we did the encore, I fucked up.
We were supposed to do “Dancing Boots.” That was what the set list said. But when we came back out on stage, Melanie said, “I’m not feeling it. Let’s do ‘Target.’”
“Baby, why?” Zack asked, cupping her elbow. She yanked her arm away.
“You know why.”
“Fuck,” I muttered. “Target” was a new tune. I’d barely rehearsed the backups. I wasn’t even sure I remembered the bridge.
Just focus on getting the bass right, I told myself.
“I know you think I’m cruel…you think that I don’t care…” Melanie sang. “Got a heart surrounded by barbed wire…and you wanna know who put it there…”
Dang, it’s a good tune though, I thought. One of her best.
“I could be a victim…this could be a crime…but I’m still around to testify. You didn’t leave…no body…behind…”
The audience was digging it, too. We chugged along. I felt bad when we got to the chorus and I didn’t do my vocals—I knew if I tried, I’d fuck up the bass line, and that would be worse.
“Well I looked around to lay the blame…and ended up just staring at my face…Some people gonna hurt you if they can…just tell me what would I do in their place…”
We were into the last chorus now, and so far, I hadn’t fucked it up. Tim and I were locked in, Joe playing an understated but cool lick, Zack doing the pad on keys, Melanie gearing up for the big climax.
“You picked a…cold target…picked a…cold target…right on me…”
She paused in the center of the stage, mike in hand, sinking slowly to her knees as she sang the final “Right on me.”
Her voice cracked on the last note. It wasn’t pretty, and yeah, backups from me would have covered it, but after that performance, no big deal, right?
Wrong.
At least she waited to unload until we were outside.
All I had was my bass. Joe carried two guitars and his effects rack, Tim, his snare and sticks. Zack had it the worst—keyboards are bulky, no matter what. Melanie was already halfway across the parking lot with her acoustic guitar while Zack still loaded his keys onto a dolly.
She was pissed, I could tell. But I didn’t understand why. It had been a solid set. No major train wrecks. The audience dug it. I’d seen Kent afterward, chatting up Zack with a big smile on his face. We’d get another gig there, I was positive.
I don’t know what made me do it. I should have known better. But I jogged to catch up with her. She was still a step or two ahead of me when I said: “Hey, Melanie. That was a great set.”
Her shoulders stiffened. Then she whirled around to face me. “Where the fuck were you? Why didn’t you do the backup vocals?”
“I…look, I barely know that song, and I—”
“I fucked up the note and you left me hanging out there by myself!”
Red blotches on her cheeks. Were those tears?
“You were great. It was one fucking note, and nobody noticed it but you.” And me, but I didn’t count. I was in the band, and it was my job to notice stuff. “Jesus Christ, get some fucking perspective.”
It was my turn to prima donna. I stomped off in the general direction of my beater pickup.
“Ever since she found out I can sing, she wants me to do backups, all the fucking time, even when I don’t really know how to play the song! Like the backups are more important than the bass. It’s crazy.”
“It’s because you have a better set of pipes than she does,” Tim said, scooping more guac onto a tortilla chip.
“So, make me sing all the time? How does that make sense?”
Tim shrugged. “It’s like…reverse psychology or something.”
I sighed. I knew I could sing pretty well. But I hadn’t joined Melanie’s band to sing. I’d joined it to play bass and get better at that. And playing bass and singing at the same time is hard.
Maybe I had a better voice, but what I didn’t have was Melanie’s stage presence, her charisma. Her confidence. And maybe, her need for all that attention.
That’s what I told myself, anyway.
“It’s stupid,” I said. “I don’t want to sing. I just want to play the bass.”
I made it home in one piece, walking the three blocks from where I’d had to park to my apartment. I was exhausted but not too tired to think, “What a dump,” like I did every time I opened the door. The place smelled damp and a little like cat piss, and I knew if someone pulled up the ancient carpet they’d find mold—I’d had a ton of water damage during last winter’s storms, and of course, the creepy slumlord who owned this place didn’t want to do a fucking thing about it.
I could clean it up, I thought. Fix the things I could fix and make it look nicer.
I just hadn’t felt much like it since Duncan and I broke up.
Getting to work the next morning was brutal, even though I could walk there and, since I worked at a coffee house, I had coffee to look forward to. But coffee wasn’t nearly enough—I was wiped out, operating on four hours sleep and feeling a little hungover on top of that. If somebody had offered me a line of crystal, I might’ve said yes, and I thought that shit was the devil.
I got through my shift without throwing hot coffee on any jerks, and after my shift, I managed to sneak a cup and a muffin to Harry, the homeless guy who camps somewhere near Bitter End. “Thanks, doll,” he said. Normally I wouldn’t be crazy about some old dude calling me “doll,” but Harry’s a nice guy. He says he’s a Vietnam vet. Who knows if that’s true? What I know is that he’s grateful for the coffee and keeps things neat around our entrance. When I open in the morning, I see him there, picking up trash and shooing away anyone sleeping in the doorway. The sidewalk still smells like piss some days, but it’s not as bad as a lot of places on Rose Avenue.
I had time for an hour nap before I needed to leave for rehearsal.
Rehearsing the night after a gig wasn’t ideal but it was the one night this week we could all do it. Driving all the way to the Valley wasn’t ideal either, but that’s where rehearsal space was cheap, and since Melanie and Zack were paying, it wasn’t my call.
Our room was down a concrete hall with caged lights, the number “9” stenciled on the door. It wasn’t terrible as these places go, even if the carpet did smell like a combination of beer and bong water.
I grabbed the refrigerator handle doorknob and pulled hard to open it, my mouth already opened to apologize for being late. Melanie hated it when people were late. But coming from Venice, you never knew when traffic was going to be a problem, and, okay, I’d had a hard time waking up from my nap.
“Hey, guys,” I said. And stopped.
Tim sat at his kit, practicing a light pattern on his hi-hat. Joe tuned his guitar. Zack stood behind his keyboard, jaw clenched tight.
Melanie wasn’t there.
That was a first.
“Where’s Melanie?” I asked.
“Late,” Zack muttered.
We all stood there in silence for a moment. The place was pretty well-insulated, but you could still hear the thump of bass and drums and a thin wail of guitar and vocals from the room next door.
“Anybody want a beer?” Tim finally asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He’d sprung for Sierra Nevada. I took a few sips. “Has anyone called her?”
“Why?” Zack drained a third of his bottle in one gulp.
“I don’t know, because she’s never late and maybe something happened to her and we should probably give a fuck?” I was feeling a little bitchy, it’s true. But maybe because I was the only other girl in the band…even though I didn’t like Melanie much, I didn’t get his attitude. Hadn’t they been dating for a while? Shouldn’t he care?
Then I thought about the scene last night, when she called “Target” for the last song, how she couldn’t stand for him to touch her. Maybe they’d had a fight, and that was what this was all about.
“I’m gonna call,” I said.
I padded down the hall to the payphone, waited for a metal-head to finish making his drug deal, and punched in her number, which I’d written down in my gig bag notebook, the one where I jotted down chord charts and lyrics and, okay, some ideas for songs of my own.
After three rings her answering machine picked up.
“Hi. I’m not here. You know what to do.”
Ha, I thought, I really don’t know what to do. I cleared my throat and said, “Hey, Melanie, it’s Kat. We’re just wondering where you are. Hope everything’s okay.”
Duty done, I trotted back to Room #9 and wondered what we were going to do for the next two and a half hours without a lead singer.
“Let’s just play,” Tim said. “Zack, you can sing some of the tunes, right? Enough so we know where we are?”
“Yeah,” he said, finishing his beer. “Sure.” He looked at me. “And you can do a couple of them, right, Kat?”
I thought about it. There were two tunes where the harmonies were extensive enough that I’d had a lot of practice playing and singing them. “Yeah. I’ll probably fuck up the bass though.”
“That’s okay,” Joe said. “It’s why we call it ‘practice.’”
“I don’t think I know all the lyrics,” I said.
“I have them,” Zack said abruptly. “Tell me the ones you can sing.”
The tunes I had a pretty good handle on were “Stone Cold” and “Nail.” The first couple times I tried to sing them were pretty rough. But third time through and I was actually getting it.
“Living this way…guess it works for me…I don’t know if it’s what I want it’s just how I know to be…”
Man, her songs are sad, I thought, feeling the words, the notes. I’d never exactly paid attention before, I’d been so focused on getting my parts right.
“Sometimes I’d like someone to talk to…but I’m afraid of someone listening to me…”
A little shiver went through me as I sang and played. It’s that feeling you get when you’re carried along by the music, when you’re singing the song but it’s singing you, too.
“I can’t explain the crimes that hold me in this jail…I’m just a hammer pounding on a broken nail…”
We finished the song. Everyone was quiet for a beat or two.
“That rocked,” Tim said. He looked at me. “You should sing more, man.”
I could feel myself blushing. I was embarrassed, and I wasn’t even sure why. “I don’t know. Maybe. When I get better at playing.”
“Fuck her,” Zack snapped. “We don’t need her. There’s no reason you can’t sing the songs.”
“They’re not my songs,” I said. “And I don’t think—”
“We wrote the songs together. I have as much right to them as she does.”
“Wait a second,” Joe said, pushing the hair curtain out of his face. “Did Melanie quit or something?”
Zack looked away, his cheeks reddening, but not, I thought, from embarrassment. He was angry.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “We had a fight. I don’t know what she wants to do.”
Great, I thought. This is why couples in bands and band romances were a bad idea. Because shit like this was bound to happen. I mean, I’d looked at Tim a few times and thought, maybe? If he’s interested? But what if he is, and we got together and then it didn’t work out? Then everything would be fucked up.
And I was still pretty hung up on Duncan if I was being honest.
Joe shrugged. “Let’s just chill, then. See what happens.” He turned to me. “You sounded good though, for sure.”
“I just want to play the bass,” I said.
I just want to play the bass.
I fired up the joint and took a hit. Sipped my nightly beer. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, same as what Tim had brought to rehearsal last night. I hadn’t thought I liked beer until I’d tried this.
I leaned back against my couch and let the music wash over me—The Sugarcubes, “Life’s Too Good.” The album had come out last year, but I’d only just bought it. I liked the girl singer a lot, her voice was amazing, on the edge of chaos but somehow controlled, almost operatic.
I can’t sing like that, I thought.
But you don’t have to, the other voice said. You can sing like you. And be the center of attention. The star.
“I dunno,” I said aloud. Was that really what I wanted?
I wanted to be a good musician. To show that I was as good as the guys, not just some token who couldn’t hang. I still had a lot of work to do to get there.
But it would be nice to be the star, wouldn’t it? The one everyone wanted, as opposed to the girl who got dumped?
The phone rang.
“Hey, it’s Zack. You busy?”
“Hey. I…Not really. What’s up?”
“Just wondering if you had some time to talk.”
“Sure.” I waited for him to say something. Silence. Then: “I’d rather talk in person. We could go out for drinks or something.”
I was pretty stoned, and I’d drunk about half a beer, and it was 10 p.m., not late for me, but I wasn’t in the mood to walk the three blocks to my car and drive anywhere, either. “I’m pretty much in for the night.”
“I can come to you. I was going to suggest that anyway.” He sounded…not exactly anxious. Intense?
Well, Zack was an intense dude.
I thought about it. I wasn’t sure I was in the mood for more band drama.
But he was kind of cute.
Don’t, I told myself. Don’t even go there.
We don’t need her. There’s no reason you can’t sing the songs.
Zack said he’d be here in forty-five minutes. When he’d mentioned the drink, I’d almost opened my mouth to suggest we just drink a beer at my place, but then I remembered what a disaster my place was, and besides, was that really a good idea? I’d known Zack for almost a year now, but only as part of the band. I didn’t have the kind of relationship with him I had with Tim, or even with Joe.
Funny thing was, at one point, I even had a closer relationship with Melanie. A couple of months after I started playing with her, we seemed to be getting along. We went out a few times for drinks and hiked Runyon Canyon. But it wasn’t always comfortable being around her, even then. She was so intense about everything, like a guitar string wound too tight, to the point just before it broke. Things were always fucked up, people always letting her down, or that’s how she saw it, anyway. “Zack can be such a manipulative little shit,” she told me once. “He’d better not be doing the band with me just because he wanted to get into my pants. He’d better be doing it because he believes in the project. Otherwise he can fuck right off.”
I shook my head, thinking about it now, as I changed into a tighter pair of jeans and an old Pretenders Tour T-shirt and dug around in my closet for my battered leather motorcycle jacket. The fog had come in heavy, so it was going to be chilly out. Thickened up my mascara and added eyeliner. A little hair gel, some lip-gloss and I was good to go. Good enough, anyway. It wasn’t like I was going to make a play for Zack.
But…what if he had decided to do the band because he wanted to be with her? What was so bad about wanting to be with someone? It wasn’t like he hadn’t really committed—he worked hard and contributed a lot. At least some of the songwriting. He did the booking. The publicity. The kinds of things a manager would do.
The band was more important to Melanie than her relationship with Zack, I was sure about that. If she had to make a choice between him and the band, she’d choose the band.
What if Duncan had given me an ultimatum, I thought? Quit the band, or I’m leaving.
I had to laugh. Because Duncan had been fine with the band. Duncan didn’t give a shit what I did. There was nothing I could have done to stop him from leaving. Except maybe be a different person.
10:55. Zack’s forty-five minutes were up. Maybe I’ll just meet him at the gate, I thought, and avoid the whole awkward “invite him in for a drink or no?” situation.
Besides, I never picked up my mail today or yesterday, and I’d probably better make sure there weren’t any bills with red borders around them.
I climbed up the stairs to the lobby, where the elevator and mailboxes were. It was an old building, built in 1915 or something, a red-brick horseshoe with the lobby in the middle. My apartment was on the corner on the first floor, slightly below ground level, so it probably would be damp even without the broken pipes and the lack of drainage in the window boxes. I should move, I thought, not for the first time.
Then again, I lived less than two blocks from the beach, and I didn’t have the money to move anyway.
Advertisements. Flyers for a special election. Junk mail. I took all that stuff and tossed it in the lobby’s overflowing trashcan. A phone bill. No red border, so that was good.
A letter. Thick textured paper the color of cream.
From Melanie.
My heart thudded. Was she firing me through the mail? I didn’t want to open it. Didn’t want to see whatever nasty things she had to say to me. I wasn’t in the mood.
I walked down the stairs, thinking, I’ll slide the mail under the door. That’s what I did with the phone bill. But as I held Melanie’s letter, rubbed my thumb over the thick paper, I changed my mind. Why not get it over with?
