Chapter 6
(Kit)
“And now it’s official,” Draven declared when I finished signing my contract. “Kit Michalson is the newest member of Blissfully Immune.”
We’d decided to live stream this moment, along with an extremely abbreviated story about why the band was adding a second drummer.
Ozzy had yet to go public with the full details of what was going on with his hands, so for now, the less said about it, the better.
It was a lot for him to process, and I hoped, by being here, I’d be alleviating some of the stress that went along with it.
Cheers went up from my new bandmates, who’d strung streamers off every surface in the hotel room and littered the place with balloons.
“We’ve got cake, wings, and a batch of Dash’s infamous punch,” Johnny announced. “It’s celebration time!”
“Wow, um, damn, I didn’t expect all of this,” I muttered as Ozzy pulled me into a hug.
Ozzy just snickered and guided me over to a cake shaped like a drum kit. “Cake and wings are the band's traditional celebration dinner. The punch was added later, after a couple of Dash’s cousins sent him the recipe.”
“What’s in it?” I asked, warily eying the lime green bottle.
“Rivers of tears and a thousand regrets,” Johnny declared.
“Green fruit punch, booze, and every wrong decision I ever made in my life,” Dash amended.
“Seriously though, it’s an old family recipe.
My old man made it for every barbeque. He’d hide it in the garage so us kids couldn’t get into it.
It wasn’t hard to figure out that something interesting was in there, since all the cool adults were constantly wandering in and out of there with their cups.
The look on my old man’s face the summer I turned 17 and my cousins and I siphoned the adult punch into empty gallon jugs and refilled it with regular green fruit punch was priceless.
One of my uncles started bitching up a storm about the punch being weak, so Dad tasted it, frowned at the cup, then tasted it again, cursing, because he knew he put alcohol in there, but he can’t taste any.
“Did he ever figure it out?” I asked as I accepted the cup of punch Rebel handed me.
“Cheers,” Rebel said, touching our red plastic cups together.
I took a swig, shocked that the alcohol didn’t punch me square in the face. It was noticeable but not overwhelming, with enough tangy sourness to mellow the whole thing out into a pleasant drink.
“Oh yeah,” Dash said. “The moment he spotted my cousins and me passed out in lawn chairs beneath our old tree fort, a half a jug of the evidence leaning against the trunk.”
“I’d have been grounded until bell bottoms came back in style,” Ozzy said. “My mom was forever threatening me with that. Ozius Mikal, if you don’t stop beating those drumsticks on my counter, you’re going to be grounded until bell bottoms come back in style!”
“My old man said the hangover was going to be punishment enough,” Dash admitted, “and holy shit, it was. I woke up to him mowing the lawn right under my window, and then he decided to wash the windows on my side of the house, blaring Slayer the entire time. For an encore, he cooked liver and onions for lunch and served it up on hoagie buns with a big ol’ smile on his face. ”
“Did you eat it?” I asked, grimacing at the memory of the one and only time my aunt had served liver and onions when I’d been at her house.
It smelled like the tins of food I fed my cat, and if they tasted the same too, then I was going to owe my sweet kitty an apology in the great beyond because eww, eww, eww.
“Had to,” Dash said. “Couldn’t back down from that challenge.
I sat right there at the table where he could see me and ate every bite, then I asked if he wanted any help with the windows.
Mom came out the winner in that one after we finished polishing them all, since she’d been after Dad to do them for months.
He told me later that the only reason he was out there was to fuck with me.
I just looked at him and said, "I know," and went right back to shining the glass.”
I’d missed laughing with them after my short stint filling in for Ozzy. Now I relaxed and enjoyed the moment, knowing we had a lot of hard work and a grueling touring schedule in front of us.
Johnny passed me a hunk of cake too big to be called a slice, and I followed him over to one of the two sofas in the suite and plopped down on a cushion.
“Word of warning,” he said as soon as I’d gotten settled. “Sip the punch slowly; otherwise, it goes down way too smooth.”
“I’ll be sure to remember that,” I said as I dug into the cake.
Everyone started with cake. There wasn’t a wing on a single plate as we got comfortable in our chosen spots.
“We’ve got a long day tomorrow,” Draven announced via his speech-to-text device. “So, I want everyone on the buses by eight sharp. Not 8:03 or 8:05. In fact, I’d prefer if everyone was loaded up by 7:55 so we can roll out of the parking lot at 8, but I know that’s not possible with you fucks.”
The guys all laughed at that, with Ozzy and Rebel shooting looks at Dash like he was solely responsible for all the times they were late.
“Anyone I have to hunt for pays the tab at the next steakhouse," Draven added, silencing much of the laughter as Dash and Johnny groaned. “That goes double for you.”
He pointed at Johnny when he said it, earning a gasp and a wounded look.
“Do you know how much these barbarians eat?” Johnny complained.
“Like you don’t eat your weight in butterfly shrimp every time we hit the all-you-can-eat buffet at The Coral,” Dash said, calling Johnny out and eliciting another round of laughter.
“Just don’t be late,” Draven cautioned before he left with my contract and a slice of cake.
It couldn’t be easy running two bands and advising a third. Ozzy thought Savage Roar would be on the road with us full-time by mid-summer, but that was still several months away, so anything could happen.
“So, what’s it going to be?" Johnny said, nudging my arm. “Superheroes, slasher flicks, or disaster movies?"
“I’m good with superheroes,” I said.
"Avengers: Age of Ultron it is,” Johnny said, pulling it up.
The cake was a sticky sweet mix of cream cheese frosting and luscious red velvet, my absolute favorite flavor, but the only one I’d ever mentioned that to was Rebel, the day we’d sat together on a rock beside the ocean, watching the tide roll in while talking about our favorite desserts.
That was months ago.
Had he remembered, or was the choice just a happy coincidence?
He’d claimed not to have one. That he had a favorite for every season. Strawberry shortcake in spring, blueberry-lemon ice cream in summer, pumpkin bars in fall, and eggnog cheesecake in winter. It was perfectly logical when he put it that way.
I guess if he could remember all that, it shouldn’t surprise me that he’d told someone what flavor to get.
Our conversation had moved from the mundane to deeply personal by the time the sun had begun to set.
With shadows creeping over us and water lapping at our feet, he’d made a joke about it being the perfect setting for a romance book that I’d taken as an invitation to lean in and kiss him.
Instead of backing away, he’d deepened it, fingers carding through my hair, gripping the strands, holding me there as we’d kissed until we were breathless and gasping.
“See,” he’d muttered. “Perfect.”
Out of all of them, he’d been the one to keep in touch the most after I’d finished subbing for Ozzy.
Drunken, late-night texts had revealed an introspective side to him.
One night, he’d asked if I thought our dreams were really just us being awake on a different plane, living a whole other life somewhere else in the cosmos.
Even after I’d given my rather uninspired response of “no wonder I always wake up tired,” I’d lie awake thinking about that question, wondering what he’d been dreaming about.
“You know what the best part is about all these movies?" Johnny said. “Every fight sequence is different, and in each movie the stakes are higher. They really took the time to make each piece of the universe unique.”
“The thing I always looked forward to was Stan Lee’s cameos,” I said. “Every last one of them is funny as fuck.”
“My be-all and end-all favorite scene will always be Loki ranting about being a god and Hulk leaving an imprint in the floor with his body before calling him a puny god,” Dash declared.
“Oh man, that was just comedy gold right there,” Ozzy said. “Hulk going all smash on him was expected, but Loki lying there, wheezing and groaning when it was over, was the icing on the cake.”
Johnny let out a long, gasping sound, high pitched and breathless, mimicking the pained tone in Loki’s voice when he’d lay there amidst the rubble from the floor Hulk had destroyed with his body.
These guys were all movie buffs. They set aside one day a week to hang out together with movies on and whatever songs they were polishing, no internet, no playing games on their phones, just watching, chatting, snacking, and occasionally hitting on that aha moment that helped fine-tune an already amazing piece of music.
I finished my punch before the cake, stood to get a refill, and decided to step out onto the balcony to hit my vape and let my head clear a little, because damn, Johnny hadn’t been kidding when he’d warned me to sip it.
Everything was always mellow around the edges when the fresh air hit my face, but when I turned to close the sliding glass door behind me, Rebel stood there, waving a blue vape in my direction.
Guess it was smoke break time for more than just me.
“What flavor is that?” I asked when I caught a whiff of something sweet and fruity clinging to his vape smoke.
“Blue Razz,” he replied. “Strawberry slush tragically started tasting like burnt ass this morning and was relegated to the trash can.”
"Ugh, every time one does that, it’s a reminder of why I gave up cigs.”
“Right? That’s why I always stock up. There is nothing worse than sucking on a burnt-ass vape just to have nicotine until you get to the vape shop.”
“I grabbed three when we stopped for gas.”
“Good thinking.”
We smoked in silence, watching kites flutter above a nearby field, the sky the perfect shade of blue to serve as a backdrop for all those brilliant colors.
“This,” Rebel said.
But when he didn’t say anything more, I turned away from the view to look at him. “This what?”
“The other night when we were texting, you asked what my biggest motivation was. I never got around to answering you, so I’m answering now,” he said.
"This, as in hotel balconies, vapes, or the kites flying in the park?” I asked, completely confused.
“All of it. Everything. Every new place and experience. I love waking up in my bed at home and lying there listening to the waves roll in, but there’s nothing like waking up somewhere I’ve never been before. That’s my motivation.”
“That’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted,” I admitted. “Getting a taste of it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t say yes fast enough when Ozzy called.”
“Shocked another band didn’t snap you up first,” he replied. “I know it was selfish of me, but I hoped they wouldn’t.”
“Several bands reached out after Rocktoberfest,” I admitted, “but none was the right fit.”
“Thank the metal gods for that.”
“Sounds like you missed me.”
“You know I did,” he grumbled and took another drag. “You’re easy to talk to.”
“Funny, but I’ve never seen you have a hard time talking to anyone.”
“Meh. Small talk is easy, mostly; you just let people talk about themselves, smile, nod, and say something snarky at just the right moment so everyone laughs and doesn’t notice when you slink away.”
Wow. Okay. I’d never noticed that about him, just that there were always people pressed in around him or peering at him with adoring eyes.
I thought he ate that shit up, but it seemed like I was wrong.
The bored indifference in his voice was nothing like the excitement I’d heard when he’d talked about how much he loved waking up somewhere new.
“I’d love to have a kite right now,” he muttered.
“Never flown one.”
“Seriously?”
“Yup.”
“We can fix that,” he offered.
“How?”
“We’ll go get one.”
“Wait, serious?”
“Hell yeah, come on,” he said, catching me by the sleeve and tugging me back into the room.
“Hey guys, new plan,” Rebel declared. “Kit’s never flown a kite before. There’s a bunch of people flying them in the park; let’s go pick up a couple and show him how it’s done.”
“Never flown…” Johnny sputtered as he turned the flat screen off. “Yeah, we need to remedy that.”
“Huh, wait, we really don’t have to…” I sputtered, snagging a wing as I was swept past the table and out the door, where we were joined by the men assigned to guard us.
Johnny’s mouth was going a thousand miles a minute as he explained what we were up to, and all the while I just bit into that wing and wondered if I was up to the challenge of keeping up with their brand of chaos.
The answer was easy.
Hell yeah, I was!