Chapter 67 Levi #3
Freddie’s in the big front room, glass wall, the Gulf behind him, pacing, on the phone. He turns when he hears me and hangs up without saying goodbye to whoever it was. He’s called every shot in my adult life. I keep waiting for the old feeling, the shrinking, the bracing. It doesn’t come.
“Finally, you show up,” Freddie says. “Do you have the faintest idea what you’ve done?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I think I do.”
“You detonated eight years of work in ninety seconds. Almost a decade of my life. The wholesomeness, the family audience, the position in the market, gone, on a stage, on camera.” He’s pacing again.
“Every sponsor we have will be on the phone Monday morning. The Christian chains will drop you by lunch. You’ve humiliated the label, you’ve humiliated me, and worst of all you did it with no strategy. ”
I let him finish. I’ve got nowhere to be. That’s new too.
“You done?” I ask, when he winds down. “I want to make sure you’re done before I talk.”
That stops him. He’s not used to me having a turn.
“Pull your phone back out, Freddie. The one you just hung up. Look at what’s been happening on it since midnight.
” I keep my voice calm, the cool flat tone he taught me for hostile interviewers, aimed back at him now.
“Country radio’s done with me. I know it.
A station in Georgia couldn’t even wait for lunch to announce it.
Eight years you told me that was everything, the only door, the thing we could never lose.
It’s gone, and I’m still here. Because the most viral name in music this morning isn’t a country act.
It’s a fella on a stool with a beat-up guitar, singing one true song with no band and no committee anywhere near it.
People are covering it on porches, Freddie.
Banjos. A kid at a piano. There’s a petition for a song that doesn’t exist. That’s not a format.
You can’t buy your way into it and you can’t focus-group it, because the only ticket in is meaning what you sing. ”
“What are you saying, Levi?”
“It’s my belief that at the end of the day, people want to hear songs that make them feel something. Remembering a first love, or the heartbreak of losing one. The pain of burying a parent. A brother. People want to feel when they hear music. And those are the songs I’m going to sing now.”
He holds up his hand to stop me.
“I’m not finished, Freddie. That’s what you can’t stand.
You walked in here expecting a ruined man, somebody who lit himself on fire and needs you to put him out.
What you got instead is a man at the start of something you don’t know how to sell.
And you’ve got no idea what to do with me, because the only hold you ever had on me was my own belief that I was nothing without you.
The world spent the night telling me different. ”
Now he changes tactics. I watch him do it. The panic folds away. The operator comes back online, recalculating on the spot.
“Fine,” he says. “You made your point, it went viral, congratulations. But viral is a weekend. A moment like this has to be managed, monetized, turned into a career before it turns into a meme. And you cannot do that alone. You have never handled one piece of your own business in your life. You don’t know where the money is.
You don’t know who to call. You walk out of here on your own, and in six months you’re a trivia question — the country boy who came out and disappeared.
Come back to Nashville. Let me steer this.
I have always had your best interest at heart. ”
There he goes again. The same lever, the only one that ever worked, because I believed it.
The part of me raised on being told I was nothing.
Would amount to nothing. Was lucky anybody bothered with me at all.
Freddie didn’t build that part. My father did, a long time ago.
Freddie just found it already standing and leaned his weight on it.
But here’s what Freddie doesn’t know. While he was staging girls on boats, Dante was on a plane to Miami with my paperwork.
The stack I signed at seventeen and never read, that my own daddy co-signed me into.
An entertainment lawyer took it apart line by line, and what she found is in the folder sitting on the table between us right now, tabbed in three colors, and I’ve been through every page of it twice this morning.
Half of what Freddie’s spent all this time letting me believe isn’t in there at all. He’s been leaning on a kid who never read his own contract. The kid finally had somebody read it for him.
I don’t yell. I don’t even raise my voice. I just tell him how it goes from here.
“I’m not quitting,” I say, because I can see him reaching for that one, ready to call the label and tell them I’ve lost my mind, walked off.
“Hear me clear, because you’ll be repeating it all day.
I’m not done with music. I’ll be in the studio by the end of the week.
I’ll do the work. I’m not stupid. I want the reach.
I want the platform. I’m not pretending I don’t.
” I take a breath. “But I’m cutting my own songs now.
The ones I write from here out. Those are mine — every one of them, start to finish — and nobody locked that down, because nobody figured I’d write again. ”
“The catalog—”
“The catalog we’ll fight about.” I don’t blink at it.
“Every year of it, and my lawyer says some of it comes home to me and some of it never will and it’ll take a year and a half to find out which.
I’m fine with that. I’ve got a year and a half.
” I let him sit in that. “You can help me sell the new stuff, and there’s a fortune in it, more than the committee ever squeezed out of me.
You saw the proof this morning. Or you can stand in the way and watch me do it without you.
With someone else. Those are the options. Those are the only two.”
He goes silent. And I watch what I’ve never seen Freddie do.
I watch him figure the odds and come up on the wrong side of them.
I watch him understand he’s not talking to an asset anymore.
The operator in him, the money guy, can see exactly which way it runs now.
And it doesn’t run through his fist anymore. It runs through me.
“We’ll need to discuss the arrangement,” he says finally. Already negotiating, because that’s the only language he has, and he’s just understood that negotiating is all that’s left to him. “The structure. Your role, my role. There’s a great deal that will have to change.”
“Yeah,” I say. “There is. We’ll talk about all of it.
My lawyer, your lawyer, a proper table.” I head for the door, then stop, because there’s one more piece of it he should hear.
“I’m not firing you today, Freddie. I might not fire you at all.
You’re good at parts of this, the parts that aren’t running my life, and I might still want those parts.
I don’t know yet. That’s the whole difference between this morning and yesterday.
I get to not know yet. I get to decide later. It’s mine to decide now.”
I walk out. I don’t slam the door. I don’t need to.
I just open the door and walk through it into the sun.
Behind me Freddie stands in the middle of that big glass room with the Gulf at his back, working the only move he has left, which is figuring out how to keep a piece of a man he used to own outright.
Dante’s right where he said he’d be, leaned against the SUV in the sun, arms crossed, watching the door. He pushes off when he sees my face.
“Well?” he says, because he wants to hear me say it.
“It’s mine now,” I say. “All of it. My own songs. My life. Mine to run.”
A grin breaks across his face. He reaches out, pulls me in by the back of the neck right there in the gated drive in the daylight, no cameras to scan for, nobody to hide from, and kisses me like he’s proud enough to bust.
It isn’t all settled. I know that, riding back with the windows down and my life upended in the best possible way.
But I broke out of the box. That much is done. The car came this morning and I didn’t get in it. The world I was told would end me went crazy for the truth instead. I walked into that room, said my piece to the warden, and walked out my own man.
Whatever comes next, I get to choose it. After eight years of being driven, I get to take the fucking wheel.
Dante reaches over without looking, finds my hand on the seat, laces his fingers through mine, and drives us home.