Chapter 14 Cracking the Ice Crew #2
Bex’s smile was relieved. “Fantastic. See ya.” She started toward the door.
Fergus reached into his pocket for something and held it out to Sam across the table. It was the key fob for his truck. “Drive safe,” he said. “Might be better if you’re in a car no one associates with you.”
Sam gave her brother a quick hug, grabbed her bag, and went to the entryway. She opened the closet near Bex’s front door and started rummaging around.
“What are you doing?” Bex asked.
Sam found it. She held up a big golf umbrella she’d once received as swag when she took her dad to the Masters Tournament in Augusta. “Looking for this. To protect your hair.”
The marquee above the red door of the Velvet Chair read NEU RAL ILK HOTE 2-25. A few of the black letters were missing from the name of the band, which had broken up in the late nineties.
For decades, celebrities and music lovers rubbed shoulders in the dark interior of this famous club.
The Velvet Chair was one of those places that an artist who ordinarily played stadiums would show up at on a Thursday for a surprise set.
Its owners were known to look the other way at the debauched antics that played out in its shadows.
But Sam had never been here, and not because she didn’t love music or the chance to check out a place with so much intense Hollywood history.
She had never been here because the legendary club on West Sunset had closed more than twenty-five years ago.
The windows alongside the double doors were backed in brown paper to keep the curious from looking inside.
As she and Bex approached, Sam noticed the graffiti.
The entire alcove around the door had been tattooed with decades of statements inked in Sharpie, overlapping and so dense that they read at a glance like a painted design.
Close up, she could pick out messages from fans and tourists beside autographs from Kurt Cobain and Kathleen Hanna.
It gave Sam goose bumps on top of the goose bumps she had from the unseasonably cold and rainy weather.
“It’s something else, huh?” The low rasp of Bex’s voice seemed correct in this alcove, in front of this door. Sam had a sacred feeling about it. “I’ve texted Macie.”
Because Macie Finn, they’d learned, was the secret owner of the Velvet Chair. When Bex had called to ask for a meeting, it was Macie’s suggestion to meet here. “If you’re going to try to understand,” Macie had said, “we might as well sit with the ghosts.”
The club had shuttered after a tragedy involving an overdose in the mosh pit.
Macie quietly bought it and sealed it up like a time capsule.
Or a tomb. It was true that the Velvet Chair had been the place where the Ice Crew held forth, and so it would hold significant memories for Macie.
But the purchase seemed to Sam to indicate feelings a lot more complex than nostalgia.
Macie had never done anything with the property.
Vic was right. There were dynamics at play that needed airing if Sam and Bex were going to find Ramona.
After a few moments, the brown paper behind the glass flanking the door rustled, and the door opened.
Macie wore layers of jersey over leggings and an enormous wool scarf that climbed nearly to their ears. The circles under their eyes were puffy and purple-black. The excess of emotion in their face made Sam worry.
“Come inside.” Macie tried to smile and failed. “Sorry I didn’t clean up for you.”
They walked into the foyer. The black-and-white checkerboard floor was worn in the path to the ticket booth.
It was the glassed-in kind, with a small mousehole opening to exchange tickets and money.
The multicolored flyers and posters on the walls overlapped in layers upon layers of paper, staples, and tape.
There was a cigarette machine in the corner by the beaded curtain that led to the main floor.
The machine had a hand-lettered sign above it: DON’T FORCE THE LEVERS YOU CRETINS.
If Sam closed her eyes, she could almost smell sweat mixed with cheap beer, perfume, and clove cigarettes.
She hadn’t been part of Macie’s generation, but her oldest two brothers were on the cusp.
Sam could remember being curled up in the back of Caesar’s Mercedes wagon in her pajamas one of the times he’d had to go pick up Primus and Magnus from a club like this.
She had been fascinated by the people milling around the entrance in their striped tights and baby doll dresses.
“It’s incredible,” Bex said.
Macie rubbed their hands together. “It’s just the same as it was the day they handed me the keys. I gave the last owner all of my savings. Paid him in cash. Anything I talk about in here will probably be pretty raw, but I’m guessing that’s how you’d rather hear it.”
They stepped between the wooden beads of the curtain.
The interior of the Velvet Chair was a huge black-painted space.
The stage sat piled with speakers, mic stands, monitors, and stools at one end.
There was even an electric guitar on the stage floor, the strings broken and curled around it like something dead.
The round wooden tables and their wood-backed chairs had been shoved around the edges of the main floor. The long bar was covered in stickers, and its row of top shelf was gone. Or it had never had one. There were sleeves of red plastic cups beside beer taps heaped with dust and grime.
“My God.” Bex spun around, taking everything in. “It’s not a time capsule, it’s time travel.”
“Let me get some chairs.” Macie went to the wall and dragged over three chairs that they set up in the middle of the mosh pit, then went back for a fourth chair and a black plastic ashtray.
They pulled a pack of Camels and a lighter from their sweater pocket as they sat down.
“I stopped at a gas station for these. I’m not going to vape in the Velvet Chair.
If you’re allergic or object, tell me now. ”
“Go ahead,” Sam said after looking at Bex, who compressed her mouth to indicate permission as she began digging through her purse.
She came out with her tin of lubricating lozenges and a device that she turned on after filling it with water from a bottle, also in her purse.
Vapors curled out of it. Bex took a breath through the mouthpiece. “Are you sure?” Sam asked.
“I am protecting my voice.” Bex looked at Macie. “But one time sitting by you smoking in a huge room won’t take it out. My voice has some legs.”
Macie lit the cigarette, drawing in smoke that they held in their lungs before letting it out in a long exhalation.
“I’m scared,” they said. “I’m beyond scared, really.
” They lifted a trembling hand to their cheek.
“Ramona’s parents got here a few hours ago.
They’re talking to an LAPD detective who’s known to be discreet.
I’m keeping them up to speed with what the two of you are doing.
I don’t know if Ramona’s being gone is connected to any of the shit from when we were young and stupid, but I’m starting to feel like this is more than any of us have dealt with before. ”
And they’d dealt with a lot, Sam thought. Including the death of a good friend. “What does being here make you think about?”
Sam watched Macie take another long drag, blow it away, cough, and then set the cigarette down in the ashtray. “We filmed a lot of the documentary here.”
“Really?”
“It was such a nineties project. Handheld camera, interviews on sidewalks outside this place and other bars, dark cut-ins of grainy footage of the crew piled on sofas on the set of The Lights of Marfa arguing, talking. The boys, me, and Juliette were often drunk or high. There were some talking heads.” She pointed.
“Shot them against the wall back there in the corner.”
“And this documentary was something all of you wanted to do?”
Macie shrugged. “How were any of us deciding what we wanted to do? Everyone around us wanted to make money. We were what was for sale. My agent told me the only career I could ever have was playing the weird sidekick, and I didn’t have the ‘privilege’ to turn down anything.”
Oof. Autonomy was hard to come by in the industry, but it would have been much worse for actors so young, who had so easily captured the imagination of America.
“Tell us about Juliette.” Bex popped a lozenge and leaned forward, her curls gleaming in the low light of the club.
“She was funny. Hilarious. Nobody ever talks about that. But she had a hard time. She grew up in a fundamentalist church that was essentially a cult, and when she left for Hollywood, her whole family and everyone she’d ever known shunned her, basically.
She’s seventeen, with the kind of beauty that makes casting agents see God, and she’s got this need to be loved that’s screaming inside her, insisting she’s nobody if she doesn’t belong to someone. ”
“Seventeen,” Sam said. “Jesus.”
“When we met. This was on the first movie Tom Kessler wrote and directed with us, Karma Revisited, before Lights of Marfa. Chad had already done a few projects. He was twenty-two. Ramona and I were eighteen. Christian wasn’t around yet. Kessler brought him in later. Chad was the big draw.”
Macie tilted their head and flipped long, imaginary bangs off their forehead in a rakish manner that was exactly Chad.
“He does have a quality, and the camera loves him. At first, if he wants to, he can make you feel like you’re the only person in the world and the best thing that ever happened.
But the minute you’re ready to take a step out of the love bubble and focus on anything but him, he’s done.
Chad spits out people like sunflower seed shells. ”