3. Gage
CHAPTER 3
Gage
I hear a sudden burst of drums, and my eyes fly open as my head comes off the pillow fast.
What the fuck is this?
A wave of nausea immediately hits me, and my head falls backward again.
What in the world?!
The high-pitched, piercing sound of a harmonica reaches me, and I glare into the darkness that envelops the bedroom.
It can’t be day, can it?
It feels like I just closed my eyes a short while ago after I dragged myself out of the elevator and made my way straight into the bedroom once I was done with my brief but revolting pause in the en-suite bathroom, where I ended up spewing my guts in the toilet bowl for a good five minutes.
As soon as my head felt the firm softness of a pillow under my cheek, I fucking passed out, but it has to be still night. It couldn't have been that long.
Who the fuck blares rock music at top volume at…
I blindly reach for my phone on the nightstand with my shaking hand and pick it up.
Midnight!
What in fuck…?!
It can’t be…
My vision is blurred. It doubles, then triples, and I have to squint to see.
I briefly scan the screen to make sure I’m not seeing things before I have to close my eyes again.
The last thing my brain registers is that my phone is about to switch off, and the battery is down to 2%. I didn’t even know it could go that low without the damn thing dying altogether.
I can’t even keep my eyes open longer than a couple of seconds at a time, and I don’t have the slightest idea of where I put my fucking charger. My luggage is still in the foyer, unpacked, and it feels about as far as Japan right now.
Fucking Dramamine was supposed to help with air sickness, and instead, it just made things worse.
My mouth is as dry as the Sahara, and there’s a bitter taste in it. It feels like I ate sawdust seasoned with baking soda, and my head is spinning like I’ve been on a bender for a week straight.
And I can’t even get a sip of water. I tried. I couldn’t keep even a single drop of it down.
I pull the second pillow over my face to dim the song's strings. It's Pink by Aerosmith, I think.
I grit my teeth, waiting for the track to fade, hoping against hope the asshole blasting my ears at this hour will have the good sense to realize it’s not fucking polite to get your rock on at fucking midnight and will switch the music off.
I try to get up, but I have to lie back down just as quickly. My poor brain is being devastated by the mother of all migraines, and I’m too dizzy to sit up.
Damn, and fuck!
Fucking motion sickness and jet lag fuck me over every time like nobody’s business, but it’s never been as bad as this.
Maybe it’s because my internal clock is all fucked to shit, or perhaps what I’m feeling are actually the side effects of the pill I took to try and combat the shit in the first place. I don’t know.
What I know is that I’ve been wide awake for the past thirty-six hours because my brain just doesn’t know what the fuck I want from it, and it doesn’t want to turn off like I wish it would when it’s dark outside because the thing is still on my office desk in Japan, fifteen hours ahead from here.
It’s not like I’m not used to traveling all over the globe, my line of work demands the shit, but normally I try to schedule things so that they don’t overlap this much and take breaks in between. This time around, I couldn’t afford to because I had too much crap on my plate, and here I am now in fucking Phoenix, being tortured by Steven Tyler’s belting, paying the price for being a workaholic hardass.
My global freight and logistics company has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Bangor, Boston, San Francisco and DC. We also have satellite offices in London, Munich, Paris, Rome, Zurich, Madrid, and Tokyo, so I’m required to be in fourteen places, soon to be fifteen, at once sometimes.
I’ve been zapping through the sky for a month now without let-up.
First, I spent three weeks in Tokyo to oversee some changes we made in our local warehouses there, long enough for my body to get used to that time zone, only to fuck up my clock again by making a quick stop to visit our Zurich offices and then London’s ones, just because sometimes it pays off when the boss drops in unexpectedly when you are trying to figure if your executives are really doing what you pay them to fucking do. Which they all are, thank Fuck. But being a total paranoid and controlling bastard with more than a healthy heap of micromanaging thrown in the works, I had to go check.
I took a red-eye from Heathrow after I was done there, and here I am now to supposedly coordinate the last phase of construction of the brand new offices of our fifteenth base set to open up for business downtown in two months, after I personally see to the hiring of the rest of my local exec team ‘cause I’m not one for delegating much.
I say supposedly because, based on how bad I feel right now, I could be dead come morning, especially if this rude jackass keeps blaring rock music in my ears.
Meanwhile, the last of the track’s strings die down, and I start to breathe easier, only for the damn song to begin from the top.
We go from the ending lyrics with Aerosmith’s frontman promising me that everything is going to be all right, to the goddamned harmonica intro again!
I clench my fists, swearing up a storm. This fucking fuckwit, whoever he or she is, put the fucking song on a fucking loop!
I strip the useless acupressure wristband from my arm and throw it away in a fit of rage, only to see the thing land at my feet on the bed.
I’m so sick I’ve been sapped of all strength. It appears that I’m fucking trapped on this godforsaken bed with old rock from the nineties murdering my migrainy brain. Fuck my life!
I try to turn to my side a bit, and again, dizziness hits me as an acrid flux of something better left unnamed, starts to claw its way up from my guts to my throat.
I can barely manage to keep from hurling, but not before the headache zings me again with a stabbing pang of pain at one temple.
Why the fuck me?!
Minutes quickly pass me by, turning into hours, and the song still doesn’t let up.
Am I hallucinating this whole thing?
How can a person stand to listen to the same fucking song over and over again for hours on end?
The lyrics are all meshed up together in my brain by now, and they don’t even sound like English anymore.
This is intolerable!
If I hear the word Pink another time, I’m going to have a fucking mental breakdown!
Here I am, a fucking thirty-six-year-old grown man, a big motherfucker that can scare people into pissing themselves with a well-placed glower, the owner and all-powerful CEO of Bannon Overseas, someone that has built a fortune from nothing and turned a little one-building operation in Seattle into an International company in five years, in fact, someone who turned into a multi-millionaire many times over in the last couple of years, someone that can crumble the competition with the flick of a fucking pen, for fuck’s sake! And here I am, reduced to a little whining bitch that can’t do anything to stop this fucking music from making my brain feel like it’s about to explode out of my skull with every note from an invisible electric guitar that is this fucking close to making me contemplate murder.
This is like the water drop torture only worse!
I slowly turn until I’m lying face-down, nose pressed into the pillow, the coverlet thrown over me and a second pillow draped over my nape, but the music’s volume is high enough that it can still easily reach me even through walls and enough covers and pillows to choke a horse.
Fuck!
What I wouldn’t give for a minute of silence right about now!
Then, a thought gives me hope.
The front desk!
I can get someone downstairs to put an end to this!
I sneak one arm around the pillow and out from under the sheets and covers to feel around the nightstand for my phone; maybe it’s not dead-dead.
Maybe there’s enough battery for a single call.
I grip the cell and bring it under the cover. I press the side button, but the screen remains black as night.
Shit. I’m fucked.
A conversation with my PA, Marcus, runs through my head, just under the loud music, and my lips purse in displeasure as I remember his words about this apartment and about how the landline and intercom system are the only things that weren’t ready to run yet.
I groan into the pillow.
The place comes with a 24/7 concierge service, but I’ve got no way to reach them because I can’t call them, nor can I even imagine, let alone try to get my ass out of here and down seventeen floors on a lift with my stomach roiling as if I’m lost at sea even as I lie here in this bed.
Fuck!
Why the hell did I have to plan my trip down here this month of all months?!
My PA told me a few weeks ago that since there would have been several conventions and conferences going on at the moment here in Phoenix, and with it being early summer to boot, most of the hotels and other short rental opportunities were already booked.
I didn’t mind. I loathe staying at hotels. Too many people privy to my shit in those places, so I told Marcus it was just as well, that since I was thinking of staying put here for a couple of months until the operation was a go, that it would be best to rent something long-term, even for the whole year maybe, since I would be traveling back and forth a lot, maybe even weekly, for this first year after takeoff, and I didn’t much like the idea of having to move from place to place to place every time.
I asked him to find me an apartment that was big, came with a home gym, was located downtown, and, as a bonus, it would be even better if it also was fully fitted out since I don’t have time to shop for furniture. I also required it to be in high-rise for added privacy and possibly near a park where I could go for my morning runs. The final prerequisite was that I needed the place to be not too far from our new offices so that I wouldn’t have to spend hours stuck in traffic and I could walk there on foot at a moment notice if needed.
Since my PA is worth every penny of the stupidly high salary I pay him, he came through on all fronts about three weeks ago and booked me the penthouse suite here at The étoile, which, based on the pics he sent, was even better suited to my tastes since it also came with its own private elevator and sprawled over the entire twentieth floor of the skyscraper.
Everything was perfect.
Until tonight when I landed and got here and found out about the little mishap .
The penthouse that I rented out for the year had been double-booked by mistake by the managing agency, and there was a middle-aged lady who had been living there already for the last ten days.
Considering that the aforementioned lady is merely renting for three months and made a deposit only last week, the place should be mine by rights since I booked it first. Still, even as tired as I felt when I got here, I couldn't cast out an old lady to get the penthouse for myself, especially not in the middle of the night. I've been raised better than that. Shit, my mom and grandma would tan my ass if I even thought about doing such an ungentlemanly thing!
So here I am, the perfect gentleman enjoying my first night in Phoenix, being tortured by oldie rock on a loop since it must be true that no good deed is ever left unpunished and all that.
The person manning the desk downstairs was incredibly helpful. They said they had another unit available on the seventeenth floor that wasn't supposed to go on the rental market for another month or so because it missed some finishing touches, and would I be interested in sojourning there instead until they could find better accommodations for me or, if I liked it enough, until the lady's lease came up and I could move into the penthouse?
If I was down with it, they would organize the move and take care of everything themselves, and by the time the date of my next stay here in Phoenix came around, all my stuff would be in the penthouse waiting for me.
They even offered to refund me the difference in deposit cost between the penthouse and the apartment I would be staying in, which I declined to accept since it would be an asshole move considering that the penthouse would be mine for the year even if they refunded me.
They said the seventeenth floor apartment was big enough, had WI-FI and almost all the same amenities of the penthouse, minus the home gym and private lift, but it was fully furnished, and that was good enough for me that by then had only visions of plush pillows and soft beddings in my mind.
The only things missing were a working intercom-system and the landline that would be set up within the end of the week if I thought I could live that long without them.
I told the lady that sure I could do that and took the Dramamine my PA offered along with a big glass of water —that I didn’t know yet I was soon going to upchuck.
By then, even without the collateral effects from the medication that were at least twenty minutes from kicking in, I was already about to faint.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even have been able to walk the few feet to the bank of elevators, let alone get my ass in one of them, if Marcus hadn't been there to lend a hand with the luggage.
So, of course, I could live without a stupid landline and intercom for a few days as long as they could guarantee me I could drop on a comfortable bed like a stone and sleep for the next twenty-four hours within the next three minutes, which felt about as long as I could bear to be on my feet without passing the fuck out.
Big fucking mistake!
It seemed such a small thing not to have a landline for a week in this day and age, what with all of us packing phones and smartwatches and shit —all gear that I have somewhere in my bags.
In fact, I could have placed a phone call easily enough from my very fucking wrist if only I hadn’t taken the watch off to put on the goddamned acupressure band in its place!
And now, look at me: I can’t do nothing but suffer in silence! Or rather, in noise. I can’t move an inch, and I can’t send someone to go pound at this fucker’s door to knock some sense and some politeness into them and get them to shut the fucking music up.
I feel like screaming, but if I did, I’m sure no one would fucking hear me under Tyler’s and his bandmates’ caterwauling.
Oh, but there is something that's keeping me from losing it…
And that something is that as soon as I can stand on two legs again, I’m going to be at this asshole’s door, and I’m going to give the bastard a piece of my mind. Whoever this inconsiderate jerk is, they will soon find out that you don’t piss off someone like me scot-free.
I will make them regret every fucking note played on the never-ending loop from Aerosmith hell, that’s for fucking sure!
I’m going to scold this asshat until I make his stupid ass cry. By now, I’m sure this is not a chick I’m dealing with. A woman would never be so careless and unfeeling about other people’s needs.
I feel better at this thought, but my elation is short-lived because that’s when the harmonica intro starts up again, and I just thump my forehead against the pillow, groaning and praying for a quick end.