13. On the Road
13
ON THE ROAD
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O’Connor was a surprise. Not just her being there, but her entire look. She wasn’t glammed up. She looked like someone I might have gone to high school with. Her green eyes were fringed with the pale lashes of a true redhead, which surprised me. Lots of people went to great expense to get hair that color, and O’Connor had never seemed like someone who would frown over the bill at the beauty salon. She could have bought that color. But she apparently was born a redhead, and had the ginger eyebrows to prove it.
She looked a million times less intimidating.
And yet I found I was more intimidated.
Our first meeting in person—not separated by a computer screen—since our bitter interview in her basement studio. How was I supposed to act?
We did our meet-and-greet, signed autographs, posed for selfies, and all the while, I felt her across the room. Like a campfire I’d forgotten to put out. Still producing heat, but don’t turn your back, or the entire forest is liable to go up.
And once everyone had cleared out, she went straight for the jugular.
“Why the fuck aren’t you that charming on a damned date?”
I blinked, put back on my heels. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Mal nudged me. “Means she thought you were charming tonight, at least. Right?”
“Um.” I remembered my manners. “You’ve met these guys before, but not in person. This is Mal.” He stepped forward and shook her hand, giving her the Aw Shucks Cute Little Boy grin. Her hand got lost in his big, meaty paw, and she nodded woodenly in acknowledgment. “That’s Ian.” He was checking our guitars. Stagehands were bringing our instruments in so we could load them into the BFT. He waved.
“I’ve seen Ian before,” O’Connor said. “Quite a lot of Ian.”
He blushed, and that seemed to pacify her somewhat. Vampires need their regular infusion of blood, naturally.
“And this is our girl Charlotte. Say hi, baby.”
For once, the dog did what she was supposed to do. She plopped her butt on the ground in front of O’Connor and sniffed at the outreaching hand. Then she held her paw out to shake.
“Good girl!” All three of us were impressed and proud, and O’Connor laughed out loud as she took the offered foot in her hand.
“How do you do, Charlotte. That’s a pretty good trick.”
“Nicky’s been working with her,” Ian said, ducking his head.
“Yeah,” Mal added. “But she’s never done it before without the promise of a T-R-E-A-T.”
“Well,” O’Connor said, “I already know she likes to steal a tempting B-O-O-T.”
“She’s a very bad girl,” I said as I caressed my dog’s head. “Can you wait a minute while I take her out? And we need to load the equipment. Then we can get set up to record the next lesson.”
“Not here, you can’t.” The stagehand carrying Mal’s bass drum, already in its case, was passing through. “This place will be locked up tight in about ten minutes. You guys better get a move on, you know? Great show, by the way. Just excellent.”
“Thanks, man.” I looked back to O’Connor, and she shrugged.
“We could meet at my hotel, I suppose. They didn’t have any suites, but we could probably get a conference room or something.”
“At one thirty in the morning?” I felt it was unlikely.
“Well, no one else will be using it . . .”
Mal had taken the bass drum from the stagehand and was already back from loading it into the BFT. “Not to rain on that plan, but we were going to drive to a campsite outside of St. Louis before crashing tonight—or rather, in the morning. It’s about six and a half hours from here, and we should either hit the road or make a new plan.”
I raised my eyebrows. Huh. “That’s the schedule?”
Mal shrugged. “You said you were going to have a call from the truck.”
“That’s right.” I turned back to O’Connor as Mal went for a cymbal case. “We were going to do this digitally.”
She had her lip caught between her teeth while she thought. “I guess I can call you once you’re on the road. From my hotel room.”
“She can come.” Ian was carrying his guitar and mine to the truck. O’Connor and I both turned to look at him. He shrugged. Before he disappeared to the loading dock, he reminded me, “BFT can hold four easy.”
“That’s true,” I said, pleased with my truck. “Want to ride with us?”
“To St. Louis?” She looked startled .
“Do you need to stay in Omaha?”
“Omaha,” she repeated in a daze. “No, I don’t need to stay in Omaha.”
“Cool. Can you grab that case? That’s microphones. Yeah, that one.”
This was working out nicely. Not only would I get to be lectured about dating while I was at the wheel of the world’s most magnificent pickup truck, which would give me power in the conversation, but I was also turning Opinionated O’Connor into a roadie. How you like this date, Red?
With every case she carried, I felt more comfortable.
“We’ll have to stop at my hotel to get my gear,” she said. “I have a rolling duffel and my tech trunk for the cameras and gear. Will it all fit in here?”
Ian, arranging gear before lowering the cover, nodded. Mal was chattier. “See? I wedge the sleeping bags on top of the tent, and there’s tons of room left over.”
“You’re really going to camp tonight?”
“We camp every night. It’s perfect for Charlotte,” he said.
“Until she finds a skunk,” Ian reminded us.
“Shit, yeah. She stays on a leash pretty much all the time now,” Mal agreed. “Okay. That’s the inventory. We’ve got everything. Thanks, man.” He shook the stage-crew member’s hand and loaded Charlotte into the back. “Lie down, girl. I’m putting this seat down for me. Good girl.”
Ian took the other back seat, and I made a point of holding the door for O’Connor so she could ride shotgun. “Thank you,” she said uneasily. When I got behind the wheel, she said, “This is a very nice truck.”
“Thanks. I was going to rent an apartment that I couldn’t afford in Manhattan. Instead, I bought a truck I can’t afford. She’s a beauty, huh?”
“She is. Go left on Thirteenth. So, this is the BFT.”
“In the flesh. ”
“In the chrome,” Mal corrected, “and leather and steel.”
“And tech,” Ian weighed in too. Good. I liked having both my guys along for my public humiliation. I’d wanted to get them in on this, and now they were locked up in the BFT with me and my pretty tormentor.
“My hotel is on the left. See it? The Farnham?”
I eyed her as I waited to turn into the driveway. “You going to recommend them on your podcast? Like you did the Aman in Manhattan?”
“You’ve been listening, huh? Well, I might. They’re doing quite well. We’ll see how they handle me checking out at two in the morning, but I have plenty of Midwestern listeners. Why shouldn’t I broaden my reviews?”
A sleepy valet stumbled out the front door, but I waved him off. “We’re picking up a guest,” I called. “Okay if I leave it here for ten minutes?”
“Yeah, man. Nobody else around. You got a cow in there or what?”
“I’ll be down in a minute,” O’Connor said.
“No way.” All three of us clicked off our belts and opened our doors. “We’ll help you.”
“But—but what about Charlotte?”
I rolled down my window and patted my seat. “It’s a nice, cool night. Up here, girl. You guard the truck, okay?” She’d stick her huge head out the window and drool down the side of the cab, but no one would go near our stuff.
The woman at the front desk was surprised that O’Connor wanted to check out, but she recovered gamely. “Want me to send someone up to help with your bags?”
O’Connor looked behind her to where the three of us were lined up. I flashed my best smile, and Mal flexed his chest. “That’s okay. These guys will help.”
The desk clerk goggled and was still goggling when we returned to the lobby with one very cool rollable duffel bag that looked like it could survive a nuclear attack, and a small trunk on wheels.
“You’re Aftermath, aren’t you?” The desk clerk had been Googling while she was goggling. “Would you mind? Can I get a picture?”
Out of spite, I made O’Connor take the photo and then told the desk clerk who she was, at which point O’Connor made me take the photo of her with the desk clerk, which only seemed fair.
The valet had gotten the word too. He wanted a photo of us with Charlotte behind us, leaning out the open window. O’Connor had to pop open her tech trunk and take out all kinds of gear before she let Mal boost it into the truck bed, and then she had to set up cameras all over the damned truck. All in, it took us much longer than we’d planned to get rolling.
But eventually, we hit the road. Mal gave me the coordinates, and I programmed our destination into the BFT. “No. Shit,” I said. “Not the campsite. Let’s get O’Connor to the airport first.”
So, we did our chores while more and more employees from the hotel appeared in the doorway and took their photos. By the end, O’Connor was turning away from the windows.
“Does that happen all the time?” she asked as I finally pulled away.
“What, fans? More and more. We kind of like it, don’t we, guys?”
Ian nodded, and Mal answered. “It’s neat that people know who we are. It doesn’t happen to you?”
“Well, usually only when I’m making some kind of public appearance. I don’t usually get noticed just . . . you know, out and about.”
“I bet you do,” Mal said warmly. “You’re way too pretty to go unnoticed. ”
The city lights lit up the cab enough so I could see her blush. “Thanks. That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Mal said. “I just think you probably get noticed more than you think you do.”
She smiled and ducked her head. She used her tablet to make sure the cameras were catching all four of us, and she thought to apologize to Charlotte for not having a camera for her. Charlotte panted happily at her and then fell over onto Ian’s feet.
I maneuvered onto the highway and set the cruise control to a nice, stable seventy-five. Midwestern states didn’t fuck around about getting places. I loved it. “So, ready to lecture me?” I asked her. “I think we’re up to my many and ample personality defects, right?”
She sighed and nestled into the shotgun seat. “Well, let’s definitely talk about that. You know I have a long list of things that go under the ‘personality’ category, including being interested and interesting?—”
“Hold on. Don’t hit me with all of them at once. Let’s take it a little slower.”
She shook her head at me. “But I want to make a point. Hang on. Interested and interesting, reading the room, being kind to your date and to others, funny, carrying the conversational ball, and watching out for name-dropping. But I saw something this evening that makes everything on this list secondary.”
A bolt of panic shot through me. “I didn’t have something in my teeth, did I?”
In the rearview, I saw Ian grin, and Mal laughed out loud.
“No.” O’Connor waved me off. “Nothing like that.”
“So what did you see?”
She let me hang for an agonizing beat and then gave it up. “Charisma. You’re spectacularly charismatic.”
My relief deflated me. Ian said, “Yeah he is. ”
Mal laughed. “Why do you think Archer’s our front man?” he asked.
She looked over her shoulder at him. “I had assumed it was because he could sing—and because he’s exceptionally handsome.”
I grinned, feeling cocky again. Yeah, I was.
Mal was setting her straight. “I’m handsome. Ian’s handsome—no, you are, you idiot. But that’s not any use at all if you can’t lead the crowd.”
“Lead the crowd?” she echoed.
“Lead the crowd.” Mal was trying to voice in a few words a conversation we’d been having for a decade. “You can’t demand a crowd feels this way or that way. They have to want to follow you. They have to have confidence in the front man. It’s like, trust. You know?”
“Trust.” O’Connor was thinking. “I guess I can understand that.”
“There are lots of good-looking singers. I mean, lots of them.” Mal shook his head. “And there are people who a crowd would follow if they had the guts to lead them. But the overlap, you know? It’s small. There aren’t many people who can do what Archer does.”
I held up a fist over my shoulder and my drummer banged it with his. Felt good to be recognized.
She turned back to look at me. “Could you always do it? I mean, is it instinctive? Or learned?”
All three of us laughed. “Nah. When we played our first gig—shit. Remember, you guys? Oh my god.”
“Prentice Luce’s fifteenth birthday party.” I could hear the grin in Mal’s voice. “We thought we were the shit.”
“And terrified too.” Ian was more prone to reality, where Mal and I preferred to soft focus our nostalgia.
“We did okay,” Mal said, and Ian just laughed.
“Tell me,” O’Connor demanded .
The guys left it to me. I settled into the tale. “Nobody knew what this girl, Prentice, was doing in our public high school. Take one look and you’d know she was old money all the way. She went sailing every weekend—you know the type?”
“Summers in Nantucket,” O’Connor offered. “Needlepoint belts.”
“Nautical flags that spell out your name. You got it. Anyway, Prentice was pretty popular, and she had this huge fifteenth birthday party at her massive house. Her mom hired Aftermath for its very first gig. Fifty bucks each, remember, you guys?”
“Fifty bucks,” Mal said happily. “Our first step on the path to stardom.”
“We were in our Nirvana phase,” I said. “Real retro stuff. Full of angst and drama and references to substances we in no way understood. And it had never occurred to us that our vision of our first gig was a little off base.”
“Not a dark, smoky club,” Ian said.
“Let me guess,” O’Connor said. “Terrace around the swimming pool?”
“In broad fucking daylight,” I agreed. “And we had no idea that in later years, we could just wait until our audience was a little drunk before we went on. No, we played to our classmates. They were stone-cold sober, holding our performance up against Kurt Cobain and ready to roast us mercilessly.”
“God,” Mal moaned happily. “It was a fucking nightmare.”
“All the adults trying to get the kids into it? Ugh.” Ian was rubbing his eyes.
“And I was the worst,” I admitted. “I came out with all this attitude, and then I got a look at all those staring eyes and I fucking lost it. I lost it, man.”
“He totally lost it,” Mal confirmed. “Thought he was going to take the final dive into the deep end, you know?”
“Oh, it was a baptism by fire. We sucked so bad. It took weeks to get over it.” I was laughing and also horrified. God, we’d come a long way.
“What happened? How did you dare go back onstage?” she asked.
“It took a while. But I’d say there were a few things that helped.”
“Such as?”
“For me,” I said, “it helped when Prentice came up to me in the lunchroom and thanked me for playing at her party. She didn’t have to do that, and it made me stand a little straighter.”
“She just wanted Mal,” Ian said.
“Fuck off. She did not,” Mal said.
This was an old conversation, so I cut them off. “And then I heard an interview that Adam Levine gave about Maroon 5. He said it was work. It took a long time to get good but that you just had to keep going, and every failure was valuable.”
“He said that?”
“Something like that. It meant a lot to me. So, we made a few changes.”
“We learned some fucking Maroon 5.” Ian laughed.
“We did,” I agreed. “I still love them. And we actually learned the music instead of faking it. We practiced a lot after that, and I studied concert videos like a total nut. Everyone. Elvis videos? I watched it. Eminem? Shakira? You name it. Old episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club with Justin Timberlake at the age of about two? Studied. Repeatedly.”
“You were a little freak,” Mal agreed.
“I was.” No shame in it. “And we got another gig—a minor school dance—when we were sixteen.”
“I was fifteen,” Mal said proudly.
“Yeah. No money, but we got to play for the same kids who had mocked us at Prentice’s party. And know what?”
“You crushed it,” she guessed .
“Well, no. We were still weak. But the kids actually got to dancing. I mean, someone might have spiked the punch.”
“Johnston Furneau,” Mal muttered under his breath.
“Johnston,” I agreed. “But even if he hadn’t, we got people dancing. And I knew enough to keep my eyes unfocused so I wouldn’t see their faces until I was at least three songs in. Helped me get over the initial stage fright. It wasn’t a shitty show, right?”
“We actually rocked a few songs,” Mal said. “That Modest Mouse one . . . what was it?”
“ ‘Float On.’ ” Ian, as usual. Huge musical memory.
“We were pretty good on that one. And from then on, every gig, we tried to learn a little more. We’d talk it over after every show.”
“The postmortem,” Ian said.
“Every show. The postmortem. And we got better. It took a while.”
“Until you got to tonight’s show in Omaha,” O’Connor said, “which was a little better than pretty good.”
I grinned at her before looking back to the endless flat ribbon of highway spooling out before us in the headlights. “You liked it?”
She thought about it before looking at the camera set up on the dashboard. She spoke clearly. “I thought it was incredible. Maybe the best concert I’ve ever been to.”
Well, what do you know. Opinionated O’Connor was a fan. “Is that going to make it into your video?”
“Cross my heart. It will make it in. It was a remarkable, freeing, exciting, dizzying experience. So, I ask again—how come you can’t be that charming on a date?”
It was like getting a kiss and a slap in the same motion. “Well, shit. I mean. I don’t know.”
“Take your time,” she said. “Think about it. We’ve got hours. What’s so different about being onstage? ”
Frustration crept up inside me. “Just . . . everything. Onstage and in person are two entirely different things.”
She let me stew in my discomfort and looked to the back seat. “What about you guys? What do you think the answer is?”
“What?” Mal asked. “You want me to comment on what Archer’s like on a date?”
He tried to pass it off as a joke, but she wasn’t deterred. “I want your opinion on why Archer is so comfortable in front of three thousand people but can’t manage a decent conversation with one person.”
“Could be,” Ian said, “that Archer isn’t the problem in the one-on-one conversation.”
Oh, burn . He’d just tagged Opinionated O’Connor. I reached back over the central console and between the seats, cleared sleeping Charlotte, and Ian (of course) met me in a low slap. My guy!
She watched our moment of triumph in annoyance, and Mal stepped in as peacemaker.
“Archer was raised by two loving parents with two older sisters who adore him. He’s the only boy, and they treat him like royalty. He’s spoiled.”
Also my guy, but maybe not quite as worthy of the low five.
Mal turned to Ian. “What’s your line about Archer?”
Ian sighed and telegraphed his apology in the rearview. “He was told he walks on water, so he’s always surprised when he gets his feet wet.”
O’Connor barked a laugh at that, and I tried to hide my grin at the old chestnut. “I can walk on water! You saw me do it tonight!”
“Sure,” she said, teasing me. “You’re the second coming of Adam Levine.”
“Are there better footprints to follow?” I cried.
I wish I could report that the conversation became more elevated, but the discussion just got sillier as the miles rolled past and we got her to the airport.