Chapter 4 Way Back When
Way Back When
The pungency hit Jace and Paloma right as they opened the stage door: Burnt popcorn. Cigarette smoke. Body odor.
Eau de Artemis Club.
“This reeks worse than that shitty Quality Inn in Toledo,” Paloma said, wrinkling her nose.
“Don’t worry, it’ll smell even worse once the audience gets here,” Jace said, squeezing Paloma’s hand.
The sun had barely set when Paloma and her rhythm section—Mary the bassist, who Jace poached from the Ice Floes out of Pontiac, and Colin the drummer, the brother of the lead guitarist of East Lansing’s Hootchie Mama—got on stage to do their sound check.
Jace had insisted they be precisely on time so they could fiddle with the light levels, brief the kid who was running the merch table, and still have plenty of time for a leisurely dinner instead of eating cold pizza backstage per usual.
It was the first time Paloma Doralle was playing to a Detroit audience after months of humping across the country, and Jace wanted her to be relaxed and ready to wow the home crowd.
They were running through “Why Don’t You?” when Paloma halted mid-verse. “Louis, is my mic too hot?” Paloma asked, looking toward the back of the room. “I don’t want to drown out Mary and Colin.”
Sabine had upgraded the sound and light boards while Jace and Paloma had been out of town.
She’d also brought in Louis as her primary tech for the evening; Jace remembered him as something of a MacGyver, handy with high-end electronics but not above taping microphones to broom handles back when Sabine didn’t have enough money to buy mic stands.
Louis turned a couple of knobs on the mixing board. “Try it now.”
The trio picked up where they left off, and Paloma threw Louis a thumbs-up in between chords.
Next, they worked through “Taken for Granted” and “Seedy,” a couple of the new songs Paloma wrote in the van as Jace drove the band from college town to college town.
Now that schools were closed for spring break, she was ready to perform them in front of a roomful of grown-ups.
Thanks to Jace’s relentless phone calls and emails to flaky students and overworked campus staff, Paloma Doralle had played several months of gigs rippling outward from metro Detroit to Ann Arbor and East Lansing, dipping down into Ohio and out to Wisconsin and Illinois.
Jace’s strategy was to build Paloma’s following with Midwestern audiences, who would tell their friends across the country to check her out.
She set up interviews for Paloma for local newspapers and radio stations.
If she saw an indie music zine in a bookstore or record shop, Jace would track down the publisher and invite them to the next show.
When they weren’t playing, Jace would take Paloma to hole-in-the-wall venues to check out the talent and chat up the bar owners, engineers, and fans to find out who else they needed to meet and where else they needed to perform while they were touring.
And Jace gave every person she talked to a business card featuring an artsy black-and-white photo of Paloma on one side and the address of her brand-new website on the other.
It had been a slog. Nothing was ever set up as promised, and Jace spent most performance days calling around town for cables, guitar strings, and even generators and light trees.
They’d slept when and where they could and eaten at a lot of gas stations and 7-Elevens.
After all that, the Artemis felt like Madison Square Garden.
Standing in the back next to Louis, watching the red and blue lights dapple Paloma’s face as she grinned during a guitar riff, clearly overjoyed to be on a stage that wasn’t a converted cafeteria for the first time in forever, Jace felt immensely proud.
Their show was sold out with additional standing room, and Brother Uncle, a group Paloma wouldn’t have dreamed to be on the same bill with not long ago, was her opening act.
The best singer/songwriter/guitarist in recent memory was returning to Detroit as a rising star, and Jace was sure she’d continue to soar from here.
The sound check wrapped, and Jace helped the musicians stow their equipment offstage so the opening acts could set up. Sabine met them as they came offstage and gave Jace a hug.
“It feels like you’ve been gone for nine years, not nine months,” Sabine said with a squeeze.
Jace smiled, picking up notes of Sabine’s signature freesia perfume and face powder. “I’ve missed you, too.”
“Great to have you back at the Artemis!” Sabine said to Paloma as she hugged her next. “Your new material is really something special. You’ve taken a leap since you played here last summer.”
“Thanks,” Paloma said. “I’ve been trying to sharpen my lyrics, say something more than just ‘Time’s up, are we gonna fuck or what?’ You know?”
Sabine chuckled. “That’s actually a great lyric. You should write that down.”
Mary tapped Jace on the shoulder. “When does Brother Uncle go on? I sat in with them when they got started a few years ago.”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Great. I’ll be back by then,” Mary said, zipping up her pink Naugahyde jacket and fluffing her jet-black bob before going out through the lobby.
“I’m out, too,” Colin said, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his skinny red 501s. “My brother and I are going to catch his friend’s band over at the Old Miami; they’ve got an early set.”
“No fights this time,” Jace called after him as he turned to go. “I don’t have any more money for bail.”
With the rhythm section out of the picture, Sabine turned to Paloma and Jace. “Well, ladies, the city is ours. Feel like Mexican?”
Before Jace and Paloma could weigh in, there was an enormous crash out in the hallway. Sabine ran toward the lobby, with the other two right behind her. When they opened the door, they heard a sound even louder than the crash: Mo yelling, “What the FUCK, Clem?”
Mo was towering over a pile of overturned cases of beer, with glass shards scattered across the lobby and pools of amber liquid creeping across the scuffed tile floor.
A slightly built guy with a lopsided red undercut and a royal flush tattooed on his neck was on the other side of the pile, staring at his feet.
“I thought—” Clem said quietly.
“Oh, you thought?” Mo snapped. “Glad to know that’s possible.”
“Mo, be nice,” Sabine interjected. “Clem, what happened?”
He continued to look at his shoes. “Since it’s a long way from the delivery door to the bar, and those cases are heavy, I thought I could put the cases on a dolly cart and give them a push so they’d roll down the hall, and I’d catch them at the door.
But they went a lot faster than I expected and smashed into the wall. ”
Mo’s face tightened. “No kidding.”
“I didn’t know the floor sloped toward the doorway,” Clem protested.
“You’re blaming the floor now?” Mo asked.
Careful not to step on the wreckage, Sabine inserted herself between the two. “Okay, okay; what’s done is done. How much did we lose?”
Mo scanned the boxes. “I’d say at least ten cases, and this is the fancy stuff. We charge more for this than the kegs of Crap on Tap.”
Clem let out a sigh. “About the kegs…”
Mo froze. “What about them?”
“The delivery guy didn’t have them. He said they got put on the wrong truck.”
Sabine’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding.”
“And they didn’t have the vodka or whiskey we ordered either. Something about an accident on the Ambassador Bridge, trucks not being able to come over from Canada. So that’s not on me.” Clem finally looked up at them, his apologetic water-blue eyes encased in black eyeliner.
Mo abruptly walked to the opposite end of the lobby, where she looked up at the ceiling and let out an unbridled “FUUUUUCK!” When she came back to the group, her face was much more relaxed.
She pointed to Clem. “You are on cleanup duty. Get moving.” He turned on the heel of his run-down Converse and raced to the supply closet.
She turned next to Sabine. “I’ll do a quick inventory of what booze we’ve got on hand. We should have enough to keep people happy until I can get some more supplies. I need some cash, though. How much do you have?”
“I’ll go check the safe,” Sabine said, heading to her office.
Mo turned to Jace and Paloma. “You’ve got a van, right?” They nodded. “Jace, you remember how to get to the Liquor Coliseum?”
“In Dearborn?” Jace asked. “I think so.”
Mo looked over at Paloma. “You comfortable chatting up strangers?”
“I’ve chatted up some strange people, if that counts,” she answered with a side glance toward Jace.
Mo smiled and clapped her hands together. “Then let’s go on a field trip, shall we?”
Forty-five minutes later and money in hand, they pulled into the barely lit parking lot next to the Liquor Coliseum in Jace’s rust-ridden Aerostar.
Under the terms of the Artemis Club’s liquor license, they were not supposed to buy in bulk from local retailers, so they needed to make three large, seemingly unrelated purchases without raising suspicion.
They entered the store with a clatter of sleigh bells as the front door opened, ready to follow the plan Mo had laid out for them on the drive over.
By the time Mo hoisted the kegs onto a flatbed and dragged them to the front register, Paloma was having a friendly conversation with the clerk, her purchases already paid for.
Jace was quietly stocking her cart with cases of craft beer, keeping tabs on what was happening to make sure all was going smoothly.
“You’re a guitarist, too?” Paloma said, leaning over the counter and ignoring Mo. “That’s amazing! Where do you play?”
The clerk, who looked to be in his forties, puffed up. “I haven’t performed in a while, but in the seventies our band would open for acts coming through the Grande Ballroom.”