Chapter 11
It took four days and cost sixty dollars.
That was the part Deacon kept coming back to, sitting in his truck in the lot of a strip mall in Donelson with a FedEx envelope open on the seat beside him.
He had called the administrator himself on a Monday, from a rehearsal room hallway, and a woman named Charlene had asked him three questions and taken a card number, and on Friday a boy in shorts had put a package in his hands.
Four days. Sixty dollars.
He had been a party to that agreement for nine years. He could have made that phone call on any one of about three thousand two hundred mornings.
The Tempo piece had gone up eight days back. He had read it on a bus in a parking lot with his boots off, and the sentence that got him was not the one about the accounting. It was a person familiar with the matter says the claim is a negotiating posture ahead of a tour.
He had known who said it before he finished the line. He had heard Holt say it in about that voice a hundred times, about promoters, about a drummer, about a woman at a label who wanted a different single.
He had never once heard it said about Savannah, because there had never been an occasion.
Now there was.
He read Exhibit C four times in the truck and understood none of it, which made him feel exactly the way he had felt in high school, and then he called the Brentwood lawyer who had done the transfer papers in April.
"Read me the paragraph," she said.
He read it. It took him a while. There was a semicolon in it that beat him twice.
"Okay," she said. "In English. Whoever's name is typed first in the registration is deemed the primary writer, and the primary writer takes sixty-five percent of the mechanicals. The credit on the record doesn't move. Only the money underneath it moves."
"The credit stays even."
"The credit stays even. That's the design."
Deacon looked out the windshield at a nail salon.
"How many of ours am I typed first on," he said.
"Mr. Holloway, I'd have to pull the registrations."
"Guess."
"I don't guess."
"Guess anyway."
She was quiet a second, and then she said, "In my experience, when an office puts a standing instruction in place, it's all of them."
He said thank you and hung up and sat there.
There was a page in the back of the envelope, behind the exhibits, that was not part of the agreement at all.
A file note. Somebody's copy of an internal instruction, dated two months after a wedding, with nine words written in the margin in handwriting he had been reading off legal pads and set lists and cocktail napkins since he was twenty-one.
keep DH first on everything, consistent across catalogue, avoids confusion later
DH.
He had a scar across two knuckles from a bus door in Lubbock. He looked at it for a while, because it was somewhere to look.
Then he started the truck and drove to the Gulch.
Sennett Media was a warehouse somebody had spent money on.
Brick they had paid to keep, beams they had paid to expose, and forty feet of framed magazine covers running down the hall to the corner office.
Deacon was on nine of them. He had walked past that hallway probably four hundred times and had never counted before, and he counted it now, walking, like a man counting stairs in the dark.
Marlene looked up from the desk outside.
"He's got the Boston promoter at two," she said.
"Then I'll be done by two."
Holt Sennett was standing at the window with one phone at his ear and the other one face up on the sill. He was forty-eight and dressed the way he had dressed since 2009, and when he saw Deacon in the doorway he said "call you back" into the phone without looking at it and put it down.
"There he is," Holt said. "Sit down, we've got a mess with the Wichita hold, the building's trying to move us to a Sunday—"
Deacon put the certified copy on the desk. Then he put the file note on top of it, squared, facing Holt, with the margin showing.
Holt looked down at it.
He did not flinch, and he did not stall, and he did not do one single thing that a guilty man does.
"Yeah," he said. "That's mine."
"That's your hand."
"That's my hand. Nine years ago." He picked it up and read his own writing, and his face was the face of a man reading an old grocery list. "This came up because the label's registration people kept sending things back.
They had you as Holloway and her as Holloway and half the time they'd flip the order between the mechanical filing and the PRO filing and it'd land in a suspense account for eight months. So I said pick one and stay with it."
"You picked me."
"I picked the name on the marquee," Holt said. "Same as I'd have picked hers if hers was on it."
"Do you know what that clause does."
"I wrote the clause, Deacon."
The window unit — no. There wasn't one. The air in that room came out of a vent in the ceiling and did not make any sound at all, which Deacon had never noticed in fifteen years and noticed now.
"Say it out loud," he said.
"Sixty-five percent of mechanicals to the first-listed writer.
" Holt sat down on the edge of his desk.
"It's in about a third of the co-writing agreements in this town.
It exists because two writers who split everything down the middle will still fight for the rest of their lives about who did more, and if you fix it in advance, in a definition, nobody ever has to have that fight. "
"Nobody ever had to have that fight because nobody ever knew."
"That's right."
"You're agreeing with me."
"I'm agreeing with you," Holt said, "because you're saying it like it's an accusation and I'm telling you it's the job."
He got up and walked around the desk and stood there with his hands in his pockets, and he was not angry, which was somehow much worse.
"You want to know what I do?" he said. "Fifteen years.
What I actually do, not what it says on the paper.
I take the conversations off the table. Every act I ever lost, I lost to a conversation about money at two in the morning in a hotel hallway.
Every single one. So my whole life's work is making it so nobody in the building ever has to have that conversation, because the second they do, it's over, and then I've got sixty people out of work and a bus company suing me.
" He tipped his chin at the desk. "In fifteen years, how many times did you and Savannah fight about a check? "
Deacon didn't answer.
"Not one time," Holt said. "You're welcome."
"Say her name," Deacon said.
Holt blinked. "What?"
"You've been talking for four minutes. Say her name."
"Savannah." He said it easily. "Savannah, who — look, I want to be careful here, because you're standing in my office with a face on you."
"Be careful, then."
"She's the best asset that act ever had," Holt said.
"I've said that in rooms she wasn't in, when it cost me something to say it.
The blend was the whole product. You can buy a voice like yours in this town for four hundred dollars a night and you cannot buy that blend, and I knew that in year one, and I protected it the way I protect a bus. "
There it was.
Deacon had come in there with a page in his hand and no idea what he was actually looking for, and it turned out he had been looking for one word, and Holt had walked right up and handed it to him without breaking stride.
"Asset," Deacon said.
"That's not—"
"The blend. The product." He was surprised by how level his own voice came out. "Fifteen years, Holt. Nine records. You have never once, in a room, in a car, on a phone, at four in the morning in Bakersfield, called her a writer."
"She's a writer."
"Say it like you mean it."
"She's a writer," Holt said, and it came out fine, and it came out empty, and both of them heard it.
Holt heard it. That was the thing Deacon would think about later, at two in the morning in a rehearsal room.
Holt Sennett heard himself say it and knew it landed hollow and could not for the life of him figure out why anybody would care, and stood there in his own office with his hands in his pockets, genuinely puzzled, like a man who has been asked to be moved by a fence post.
"She's a writer," Holt said again. "She's a hell of a writer. And the first-listed name is a box on a form, and I have never in my life met a writer who got happier because of a box on a form."
"You met one this month."
"I met a lawyer this month."
"You met my wife's lawyer," Deacon said, "because you gave a quote to a trade about my wife's motives, and you did not call me first."
Holt stopped.
"That's what this is," he said.
"That's part of what this is."
"Deacon, it was a four-word answer to a reporter I've known since—"
"You did it in March too."
The room did the thing a room does.
"You put out a release with my name on it and my whole life in it and her not in it anywhere," Deacon said. "And then you sat in a car with me at four in the afternoon and told me it was handled."
"Because you told me to handle it."
"I did."
"You said those exact words." Holt's voice had come up a half step, the first movement in it all day. "Parking lot of the Tulsa arena, last September. You said, I don't want to have the conversation until it's real, handle it. I've got it on my calendar because I wrote down what we agreed."
"I know I said it."
"Then what are we—"
"I know I said it," Deacon said. "I've been carrying that sentence around since March.
I say it to myself in the shower." He rubbed the back of his neck, up under the hairline, and caught himself doing it, and made himself stop.
"You didn't do one thing I didn't ask for.
Not one. That's not the part I came about. "
"Then what's the part."
"The part is that I asked you to run my life for fifteen years and you did it beautifully," Deacon said, "and when I finally look at what you built, there's a room in it where my wife's work goes in and comes out worth less, and neither one of us ever had to walk in there."