Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Travis
On a trip to a music store during the week Katie was here, I had bought an acoustic guitar. It was beautiful. I hadn’t played it for Katie—I’d kept it in its case and propped in a corner of the apartment, as if it was just another belonging. I hadn’t wanted to admit to her that it was so long since I’d played that I was terrified I was out of practice. I wasn’t even sure I remembered how to play at all.
Guitar had been my first love. My dad had bought me a guitar for my thirteenth birthday—a random gift that he’d bought secondhand for cheap. I’d bypassed taking lessons and taught myself, in the time-honored way of sitting alone with headphones, listening to my favorite songs and trying to make the guitar make the same sounds. I could have gotten someone to teach me, but why make it easy when it can be stupid and hard?
I’d discovered, when I sang along to the songs I played badly, that my voice wasn’t bad. With the reckless confidence of a fourteen-year-old, I had started a band.
Over the years of being immersed in music as a career, I’d learned other instruments and picked up some actual knowledge. But with a bass player and two guitarists in Seven Dog Down, I wasn’t required to play guitar onstage, just sing. I played in my down time because I liked it, and I played some of the tracks in studio when we recorded our albums, but it was made clear to me that as the frontman, I was expected to show up and deliver, not play with any skill.
After the band broke up, I’d thought about getting one of my guitars and going back to the basics, figuring out why I loved music again. But I hadn’t done it. I had stared at Andy’s pool instead.
I’d talked big about making a solo album, but I was good at talking big. Now that Katie had gone back to L.A. and I was alone in this apartment, there was no more talk. There was no Andy, no pool to stare into. Just this nice studio, and the rainy Portland day outside, and my own thoughts in my head. In other words, a fucking nightmare.
I opened the case and stared at the guitar. It stared back. I thought of all the people waiting for me to do something—my fans, my three million Instagram followers, my agent, my crying bank account, all the people I owed money and favors to—and had a long, hard moment of panic. Sweat dampened my temples.
Put up or shut up, I told myself. Time to do the fucking thing.
I took a deep breath. I had the urge to get drunk. I hadn’t thought about drugs in a long time, but suddenly I missed them so much it was like my dog had died. A Valium to take the edge off. An Adderall to make my thoughts sharp. When you first did coke, there was a moment, right before the crash, when you felt like you could do anything.
I scrubbed the heels of my hands over my eyes. “Fuck off,” I said aloud, maybe to myself, maybe to the guitar, maybe to the fictional coke I didn’t have. Then I dropped my hands and picked up the guitar.
At first, it felt right. Good, even. Like—I imagined—when you snug your own kid into your lap and feel them relax. My hands knew what to do, and I strummed a few chords, picked at the notes, then tuned the guitar, working from automatic memory. I did know how to do this.
I tried “Heaven’s Gate,” one of Seven Dog Down’s big hits, a song I had performed a hundred times onstage. We’d never done a show without it. My hands flew. I knew this song like I knew my own heartbeat, even though I hadn’t written it. I didn’t even like it all that much, to be honest. But I knew it.
The notes came out, but my hands started to cramp. My fingertips hurt on the fret, and the hand holding the pick got slick with sweat. The notes slowed down, jarred out of rhythm.
I tried again, then again. I switched songs. I could hear it in my head, but my hands got worse and worse. Too late, I remembered that guitar playing trains your hands the same way that running trains your legs. I hadn’t played in so long, and I was a runner who had been sitting on the sofa for a year, going for his first run, aching and out of breath.
Eventually—I had no idea how much time had passed—I put the guitar down. My hands were screaming, and my left fingers were starting to bleed. I got up, stopped the kitchen sink, and dumped a tray of ice into it. I ran cold water over the ice and dunked my hands in, feeling the cold slice through the pain. Thin tendrils of blood swirled over the ice.
I started to cry, because what the fuck? I was a mess. I was nothing like anyone believed I was. They all thought I was a musician, and I couldn’t fucking play. What musician can’t play his own guitar? I’d had to borrow the money to buy the guitar in the first place and then play it all alone in this borrowed apartment. I was a phony, a fake. I had never deserved fame, and I knew it better than anyone.
I stood there with tears running down my face until I couldn’t feel my hands anymore. I lifted my hands out of the ice and grabbed two tea towels. Moving the guitar aside, I lay on the sofa. I turned on Netflix and wrapped each hand in a tea towel, lying there like an invalid, my self-pity deeper than the ocean.
I watched The Christmas Date , and when Katie came onscreen, I felt something twist deep behind my breastbone. She was so fucking beautiful. I had taken her to the airport, and I had kissed her, because that was our deal. She wanted someone who made her look edgy and sexy and cool. That was me, because I was all appearances and no substance. A musician who had no career and couldn’t play. And I needed her, because in every aspect of my life, I was a failure.
Katie couldn’t fix what was wrong with me. She didn’t know how much I had liked kissing her, and even if she learned of it, she wouldn’t care. Worse, she would be horrified. I was a means to an end for her, just like I’d been a means to an end for every manager, agent, lawyer, bandmate, girlfriend, and record company executive who had used me over the last decade. A good-looking piece of ass and not much else.
The Christmas Date made me feel a little better despite myself. I stopped crying, at least. That was the magic of Katie and her movies, why her fans loved her so much. A lot of them had probably done what I was doing now, turned on one of her movies in a low moment. There was a scene where Katie was hanging Christmas lights and realized—once she’s at the top of a ladder—that she’s afraid of heights. The way she gripped the ladder with her knees, then tried to slither down while plastered to the steps in terror, was a master class in physical comedy. My girl was fucking funny.
My fake girl.
My phone rang on the coffee table, and I could see from the display that it was Finn. I unwrapped one aching hand just enough to tap the answer button and put him on speaker, and then I wrapped my hand again. “Hey, man,” I managed.
“Hey,” Finn said. “I’m downstairs and I’m coming up. Are you naked?”
“Listen,” I said. “I really don’t like you that way. It’s time to move on.”
“Oh, you’re hilarious. Why am I on speaker?”
“Because I’m in the middle of an orgy and my hands are full. Is this urgent? I’m about to empty the lube.”
“Jesus, Travis. Thirty seconds.” He hung up.
Finn had the code to the place, because it was his. When he came through the door and saw me in my prone position on the sofa, a Netflix romcom playing, he paused. “What happened to your hands?” he asked.
“I got blood on one of your tea towels. Sorry. I’ll wash it out.”
I heard him come into the living room, and then he was standing next to the sofa, looking down at me. “Ah. The guitar,” he said, spotting it in its open case on the floor.
“Leave me alone, man.” I was irrationally glad that I had stopped crying and my face had dried. At least I had that. “Today is a bad day. Come back later.”
Finn ignored me and picked up my left hand, unwrapping it. “Ouch,” he said. “Keep playing. The calluses will come back. Why are you watching a Christmas movie?”
“It’s what I have instead of drugs,” I replied. “Do you have any cocaine? I would like some.”
“Travis.” Finn put my hand back down. “What did we agree about coke when we were in Paris all those years ago?”
I sighed. “It’s always a bad idea.”
“The worst idea,” Finn agreed. “If you score, I’ll kick you out of here. I hope that’s clear.”
“Everyone is so boring. ”
Finn knocked my feet aside and sat on the sofa. He wore jeans, a gray Henley, and a belt. His brown hair was clean and recently cut. He had a scruff of beard, trimmed and neat. He looked fucking great. He always looked fucking great, and now he was healthy and happy and successful and in love. He pulled out his phone and tapped it.
“You offend me,” I told him without any heat. I waved a towelled hand up and down. “All of this offends me.”
“Yeah.” He texted someone, his phone making that tapping sound.
“Why isn’t your phone on silent?” I complained. “Are you a sociopath?”
“Shut up.” Still texting.
“You have a great career and a hot girlfriend who loves you and a house and an apartment. You even have a dog. You are an acute reminder of my many shortcomings, Finn. At this particular moment, I don’t need a reminder of how inadequate I am.”
“You’re not inadequate, Travis,” Finn explained while texting. “You’re actually talented. You’re just dramatic, that’s all.”
I glared at him, uncomfortably reminded that Finn’s dad had died of cancer a few years ago, and then Finn had been diagnosed with a brain tumor that had to be removed in surgery. He was healthy now, but he’d been through some shit, and yet he wasn’t moping on a borrowed sofa, wishing he was high. Not like me. I wished?—
I went still as something jarred loose in my mind. A hand tapping on the glass deep in my brain.
I looked at Katie onscreen again and thought, I wish I was high. On drugs. On her. On us. I wished I had her back here, that I had another chance. I wished I had the high of being a rock star again, of being someone that mattered. I wished I had so many highs.
That idea…sounded like a song.
Finn put his phone down. “Okay, that’s done,” he said. “You’ll get a delivery in a few hours.”
“A delivery of what?” For a second, I was so in my head that I wondered if Finn had told me about something and I had tuned it out.
“A keyboard,” Finn said. “You need to be able to play while your hands get back in shape. You’ll also get a laptop with software on it, headphones, and a mic.”
I stared at him. “What? Why?”
“So you can write material and cut a demo. Something rough will do. I’m setting up a meeting with the Road Kings, and they’re going to want to hear material before they agree to a deal.”
I sat up. “Are you fucking kidding?”
“Not at all,” Finn said. “If you want to stay in this apartment, you’ll write something, record a demo, and go to the meeting. That’s my condition.”
I should have been mad. My rebellious, contrary side should have kicked up on cue, saying, You can’t tell me what to do. I don’t take orders. This was, by every metric, a great opportunity, one that I had shown no signs of deserving. I should be doing everything in my power to sink it.
And suddenly, I was so, so tired. I didn’t want to be a useless lump on a borrowed sofa, complaining about his sore hands. I didn’t want Finn to kick me out of here. I didn’t want to disappoint my best friend. I didn’t want to disappoint Katie.
In the deep recesses of my brain, some faint notes sounded. In sequence. The beginnings of a riff.
“Okay,” I said to Finn.
He looked honestly surprised. “That’s it? You’ll do it?”
“Sure,” I said, sadly amused at how certain he’d been that I would fuck this up. “Set up the meeting. But I’m just getting started. I need a little time to write.”
“Of course.” Finn shook his head. “I should have expected that you’d surprise me. Now, what’s going on with Katie Armstrong? Because you followed her on Instagram.”
“Oh, my god. You too?” I rolled my eyes.
“What? I figured out Instagram. Now spill. You didn’t mention her when you stayed with me. What’s happening?”
I told him. Sitting up with my aching hands in my lap, I gave him the whole sad story of my celibate week with Katie pretending to hook up, finishing with our agreed-on kiss at the airport as she left for L.A. Finn listened, and he didn’t judge, because when he was a famous teenager he’d been set up with models. He’d been told at the time that he needed to date them for publicity. This was fucking with me at thirty-two, so I had no idea how it would screw with a teenager.
When I stopped talking, Finn didn’t comment on my career or on Katie’s. Instead, he said, “You like her.”
“Everyone likes her,” I said.
“Not everyone. You like her.”
Shit. I slid down on the sofa again. “I feel all kinds of things about her,” I mumbled.
“Name one thing,” Finn said.
I gusted out a sigh. “I feel everything and nothing, all the time. I like her. I’ll never have her. I’ll take what I can get of her. I’d like to be better, but I don’t believe I can. I want to go for it, but I’m sure I’ll let her down. She’s magic, but she can’t fix me. Also, she’s hot. I thought my dick was dead.”
Finn’s eyes widened as I made this speech. “Travis, you might need therapy.”
“I tried that. The guy talked to me for ten minutes, then tried to sell me ketamine.”
“Okay, that’s…illegal?”
I shrugged.
“Well, then.” Finn stood. “You’ll have to do what every heartsick guy has done since the beginning of time. Write some songs about the girl you like.”