Текст книги "Brando"

Автор книги: J. D. Hawkins

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

Chapter 11

Brando

Showcases are the end of the road for most indie acts. The closest they ever get to breaking big. It’s where most indie performers put everything on the line, one shot, a double or nothing bet, in front of a brick wall of impossible-to-impress label men. Nine out of ten times none of the acts get picked up. One out of every hundred – maybe thousand – acts hears from a label afterwards. Big shots go to the events more to convince themselves that they’re not missing out, or to convince themselves that they’ve still got an ear on the ground, than to actually find talent.

I don’t tell Haley any of that.

The show I’ve booked Haley for is the most high-profile showcase event of the year. One of the biggest and best clubs in LA, booked for an entire evening by some of the biggest and best labels in LA. Every act on the bill has some heavy hitter already pushing them; managers with good connections and a reputation, A&R guys trying to prove something to their bosses. And though it looks like any other gig, everyone dressed down and drinking as if it was just another open mic, it’s exclusive too. Almost everyone in the room has the power to make or break an artist; almost everyone in the room has done it before.

I don’t tell Haley any of that, either.

Because there’s already a buzz around Haley – more than there should be for someone who barely has an online presence. It’s still just the hip stations – the ones that still choose for themselves what they put on the air – that are playing her song, but they’re playing it a lot. A fan-made video of her song with just a blank background and the lyrics flashing across the screen is already stacking up views on ViewTube. Everyone wants to see what she’s all about now. Whether she’s the real deal, or just some girl who accidentally wrote a good song. The few, low-res, unrevealing pics that come up when you search her name online only stoked their interest further. They’ve got a lot of questions that need answers.

I definitely don’t tell Haley about any of this.

To Haley – and the three people who make up her band – this is just another gig. Another easy-to-book guest spot in a venue that may or may not have a few influential label guys in the audience. That’s still enough to get her nervous.

“Did you see how many people are out there?” she says, as she rushes back to the green room.

She finally let a stylist trim her hair for the occasion, and the feather-cut dances around her face as she shakes her head with exasperation. It almost distracts me from the tight leggings she’s wearing under a denim skirt, her slender thighs even more darkly arousing in black silhouette. The tight tank top she’s wearing hugs all the right places, giving you just enough to know she’s hiding something special, but only when she moves the right way. The audience is going to love how she looks, at the very least.

The green room itself is packed. The air is tense and humid. Even the air of chatter and breaks of laughter amongst the artists sounds distant and edgy. About a dozen skinny guys who all look like they’re from the same band shuffle their feet, some of them doing better than others as they try to act cool and unconcerned. In the middle, five girls in tight outfits stretch and shake off their nerves – a sight that would steal most of my attention were it not for Haley.

I watch her pace between the band members. Brian, the lank-haired guitarist, sits on a table and tunes his guitar over and over; Aaron, the tall, wiry bassist, stares at his tapping toes, while Paula, the drummer, bites her nails and gazes into space like she’s waiting for test results.

This isn’t good. Haley’s band marches to her beat, and right now it’s all over the place.

“Haley,” I say, grabbing her arm to stop her pacing and bringing her in close, “you’re the most talented musician I’ve ever worked with. Even if you go out there and play the worst set you’ve ever played, it would still be a thousand times better than what any other act in this green room could hope to achieve.”

Haley’s eyes go big and round. “I don’t know if you’re right…”

“I know I’m right. Trust me, Haley. I wouldn’t bring you here if I thought you couldn’t cakewalk it.”

“I know, but—”

There’s a rise in the level of chatter and I look around. The dancers are being called out.

“You’re on soon,” I say, noticing the rush of red that appears in Haley’s cheeks. “When you get out there, you’re gonna see a sea of faces. A hell of a lot more people than you’ve ever played in front of before. Look for me. I’ll stand at the back, by the entrance, and when you see me, don’t take your eyes away from me. Forget everything else: The lights, the crowd, the noise. Just me. Play for me and no one else. Can you do that for me?”

Haley smiles and nods.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Good.” I put a hand on her shoulder and squeeze, startled at the jolt I get from the contact of my palm against her warm skin.

“Haley Grace Cooke?” comes a loud, nasal voice from the doorway. We both turn to see the mic’d up runner. He points a thumb back over his shoulder. It’s time.

I look back toward Haley, who smiles anxiously as her band gets up and walks after the runner. She takes a few steps to follow them, before suddenly stopping. I panic for a second before she turns, but when she does, it’s only to throw her lips against mine. A deep, desperate, stolen kiss, before she spins back and hurries after the rest of her band. I can still taste her glossy lips as she walks away, like an expensive drink, only a little more intoxicating.

“Break a leg,” I shout after her.

Minutes later and I’m standing where I said I would be, right by the exit, waiting for her to come out on stage. I stand up tall, but the crowd’s thick and moving constantly. They push and jostle for a good view of the stage as soon as they know Haley’s on next.

When she does walk out, it’s obvious something is wrong. She walks with her head down, hair covering her face. She fumbles for way too long to strap on her guitar, and walks with painfully slow steps up to the mic. I can see the band members exchanging glances, wondering how they’ll cope without Haley’s cues.

I raise my arm higher in the hope that Haley will notice it. She’s gazing out at the audience, which has gone embarrassingly quiet now, between the strands of hair that hang lazily over her face. I wait for the look of recognition, for any movement.

She can’t see me, and now she’s locked up. The only movement she’s making is the visible rise and fall of her chest as she pants tensely.

I push forward, shoving aside people I know I should really be more polite to. But right now none of them matter. I move indiscriminately through the crowd, toward the center, a spot where there’s nothing between us, impossible to miss. I raise my hand and stand tall, praying that Haley sees me.

There in the center of the audience I hear the judgmental comments, the random giggles at the bizarre turn of events. A couple of women in front of me even turn away and start making their way toward the bar.

But then Haley smiles. And it lights up the stage more than the thousand dollar equipment could ever hope to. With a hair flick sexier than a shampoo billboard on Hollywood and Vine, she moves the curls away from her face and stands up to the mic, her eyes settling on mine. She glances away only to cue up her band, before turning back toward me.

Paula smacks her sticks together four times and then it’s on. I forget the audience around me, the lights, the noise. It’s just me and Haley.

I can’t keep my attention away from her as the showcase finishes and morphs into a loose and loud after party – and apparently neither can anyone else.

“That was sensational!” another schmoozing executive says, handing us another card to add to the stack already filling my pocket. “Ben Livingstone, Jupiter Records. I want to have first dibs on you, young lady.”

Haley giggles breathlessly, finding it hard to keep up.

“First is taken,” I say, with a smile, “so is second. I can give you fifth. Maybe.”

Ben laughs, but there’s a note of disappointment in it.

“Well if I can’t have dibs,” he says, raising his glass, “I can sure offer the best deal.”

“Now that’s more like it,” I say.

Ben laughs again before leaning in to whisper something in my ear.

“You really lucked out here, Brando. I don’t know how, but you really did.”

Ben leaves and I turn my attention to Haley.

“Another drink?”

“No,” she says, the smile that’s been plastered onto her face since she came off the stage to rapturous applause still there, “I think I’m drinking too much.”

“If ever there was a night to drink too much, it’s this one. Most of these schmucks usually leave halfway through. They’re only here to get an audience with the future star.”

“You were the only audience I needed,” Haley says, squeezing my bicep before turning away to gaze at the crowd, which has now morphed into a rush of celebrity musicians. “I can’t believe how many famous people are here. I thought it was only record execs.”

“Musicians tend to like talking business over a loud song and some alcohol. Executives, on the other hand, tend to start living like musicians when they spend so much time around them.”

“Is that…Annabelle Church?” Haley says, gawking at the girl in a see-through dress that seems to glide through the entrance.

“Yeah. Probably here in the hope that dress will get her some funds for her next record.”

Haley turns to me suddenly, eyes filled with surprise.

“But…she’s huge.”

“And has an ego to match. Not many people want to touch her since she created her own Twitter account. Forget her, anyway, you should be mixing with people who’ve got real talent. Someone like Rex Bentley over there. Now that’s a genius.” I raise a glass in his direction, and Rex obligingly returns the gesture. “Guy’s a legend. Made some of the greatest records you’ll ever hear and he still looks better than—”

I stop when I notice Haley’s face. The color drains from it like a reverse painting. Even her lips turn a chilling shade of white.

“Let’s go.”

“What?”

“Please, Brando. Let’s leave.”

“But everyone here wants to speak to you! You’ve already made more connections than most musicians make in their careers, and you’ve barely spoken to half the record chiefs here. Besides, you haven’t even finished your dri—”

“I have to go. You can come with me or stay. Don’t make me ask you again. Please.”

“Haley,” I say, bending down to get a better look at her ghostly face, eyes limpid and dilated, as if she’s been drugged. “What’s the matter? Are you sick? Do you want to—”

She doesn’t even let me finish the sentence before dashing away into the crowd, shoving through confused strangers like she’s being chased. I watch her for a second, trying to think of a logical reason for the change in her, before giving up, slamming my drink down on a table nearby, and following her toward the back exit.

Chapter 12

Haley

Brando brings a thick blanket out from his loft onto the wide balcony of his apartment and wraps it around my shoulders.

“Thanks,” I say, my voice trembling, only slightly caused by the cold. It’s the first word I’ve said since Brando caught me outside, embraced me tightly, and ushered me into the back of a cab to his apartment.

“You sure you don’t want to go back inside? I can make you something hot to drink. Get you something to eat, maybe?”

“No,” I say, eyes unfocused as I watch the red and white lights of LA cars snake through the traffic-jammed streets. “I need the fresh air.”

Brando smooths a part of the blanket over my shoulder, making it a little more snug. A gesture I can’t resist smiling at him for. He leans up against the balcony railing beside me, his bicep against my arm.

“So,” he says, setting the tempo to a slow one with the patient, neutral way he says it, “you mind telling me what that was all about?”

I stiffen again as I recall the moment.

“He looked at me,” I mutter, clenching my jaw.

“Who? Rex? Well yeah. He looked at us. Is that what this is about?”

“He looked at me,” I say, the exact same way, “and he didn’t recognize me.”

Brando pauses before speaking.

“Haley, don’t get ahead of yourself. Tonight was great, but it’s just a first step. It’ll take time before people recognize you. You’ve got to be pa—”

“You don’t understand,” I say, turning toward Brando with a fierce gaze. “Rex Bentley is my father.”

Brando’s chiseled jaw drops so heavily it looks like it’ll smash through the floor.

“What? Wait…I don’t understand. Are you sure?”

I nod slowly, before turning back to lean on the railing and gaze into the night.

“It was right after his ‘blue’ period, when he made those albums in Europe. He came to LA, bought a big mansion, mountains of cocaine, and started making hits again. My mom was a musician too. She’d tried to get an album together, but ended up as a back-up singer. He liked her, used her on some of the records, and eventually, used her for some other things as well. That’s when she became his ‘assistant.’”

Brando still looks confused. “But he was married then…”

“Yeah,” I shoot back with a bitter laugh. “He was. Which is why when she told him she was pregnant he fired her, gave her a thousand dollars, and sent her on her way to ‘take care of it.’”

“Fuck,” Brando says, drawing out the word until it becomes a long sigh of anger and disbelief.

“When I was born,” I continue, feeling the heat build up behind my eyes, sniffing back the fogginess in my throat, “my mom sent him a picture of me. A letter telling him where we were, how he could get in touch. He never responded.”

Brando’s arm wraps around me tightly, but even the feeling of protection, of being cared for, can’t remove the pain that’s stabbing at me inside. He brushes tears from my cheeks softly.

“When I was twelve, my mother decided to tell me. I was already—” I pause to swallow down the hurt, “I was already in love with music. Already sure of what I wanted to do with my life. I thought it was amazing—” I can barely get the word out, stutters and sobs interrupting me, “…amazing that it was him. I had this big hole in my life where a father should have been, and I would have settled for anyone. Any drunk, or loser. But instead it was him. It made me so h… ha… happy.”

It takes a full minute of Brando rubbing my back before I can stop the quivering in my lips and the sobbing in my throat enough to continue.

“My mom still had his address – the one he used for personal letters. I knew he checked them himself, rather than through a secretary. I started sending him letters, photos, cassette tapes of me talking mixed with the songs I was making. I don’t know what I thought would happen. Maybe that he would accept me back into his life. Maybe he’d see that I had his blood, musician’s blood, and realize he’d made a mistake.” I shake my head at my own teenage stupidity. “Yeah. I actually thought he’d realize he’d made a mistake. Maybe it was the drugs, the lifestyle, the career that got in the way. I sent him letters for five years. Five fucking years! Half a decade, hundreds of letters with my whole life in them. My deepest thoughts, my hopes and dreams. One hope and one dream most of all – to have a fucking father.”

I break down fully. The cracks too wide to close up. Pain and heartbreak flowing through every vein in my body. Brando pulls me toward him tightly, squeezing me as if he can push it all back out.

“Haley,” he says, as I weep into his chest, “I’m sorry.”

I gather the pieces of me that remain and stand back upright to breathe in the cool night air.

“Maybe,” Brando says, his hand still brushing my wet cheek, “he didn’t get the letters? Perhaps he had a different address? Or it just got stuck with all the other fan mail?”

“All he had to do was look, you know?!” I scream, loudly and angrily, as if it’s him standing in front of me rather than Brando. “All he had to do was look! We weren’t on fucking Mars; we were six hours away in Santa Cruz! Twenty-four fucking years and nothing. Not one fucking word! I thought maybe he was staying away, scared to come back after all this time. He had to know. Who could spend twenty-four years without checking once – just once – to see what his daughter looked like? And then tonight… He just looked right through me, like I was anybody, and I knew. I knew I was lying to myself.”

Brando says nothing, but his eyes show it. He wishes he could take this pain away, wishes he could do something, but he can’t. Instead, he reaches down to the six pack of beers he brought out onto the balcony, cracks two open, and hands me one. I gulp almost half of it, hoping the cold fizz and the alcohol will help clear away the bad taste that all the memories left behind.

“Thanks,” I say, drying the last of my tears with the edge of the blanket.

Brando nods and leans back against the balcony, twisting the bottle in his hands as he searches for something to say.

“You know, I can’t tell you how to feel, or how to think about any of that. I can’t tell you how to stop hurting – I’d be a therapist if I could. But the one thing I do know, for sure, is that it’s the shit that hurts the most, which hurts the longest and the deepest, that makes you tougher.”

I lean over the railing, dangling my beer above the empty street below, watching the shadows of strays slide around the garbage cans of the alleyway.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ve just never really spoken about this before.”

“It’s okay,” Brando replies softly.

“Let’s talk about something else. Please. I don’t want to think about this anymore.”

“Okay, let’s see…” he says, moving closer and leaning in.

I look up at him, searching his gaze. “Tell me about you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. What’s your story? We spend so much time together, and I still have no idea where you’re from.” I snort a little laugh. “Did you just emerge out of thin air as the very charming, incredibly handsome ‘Brando Nash’?”

“Yes?”

I laugh. “Funnily enough, I’d believe that.”

“Actually,” Brando says with a sigh, “the truth is a bit messier.”

“Oh?”

He turns his face back toward the skyline, as if he can almost see his past still happening way off beyond the city’s lights.

“I don’t really know where I was born, or who my parents were. They gave me up for adoption when I was two.”

“Jesus.” For some reason, this was the last thing I expected to hear. I turn to look at Brando. “You didn’t try to find out?”

“I didn’t have time to try. The first ten years of my life are just a blur. One group home to another, friends you make and lose in a single day, foster parents I eventually gave up on hoping would be long-term. I was always the new boy, always the stranger. I got bullied pretty bad. I learned pretty quickly to just keep my mouth shut and get through the days.”

I study Brando’s face. He stares outward, his expression stony, as if reciting a history textbook in his deep monotone.

“I had nothing. Owned nothing. Even my clothes were ‘borrowed’ from other kids in the homes. Except music. That was free. You couldn’t steal airwaves.” He takes a long draught of beer.

“True,” I say, starting to see the pieces of Brando come together. “You can’t.”

He shrugs. “I started hanging out in places I could hear music. Snuck into clubs, sat outside bars. Sometimes I’d just stop outside someone’s house if they had the radio on loud enough.”

Brando laughs at the recollection.

“Then something clicked. I realized that these songs weren’t just some alien thing that came from another planet, but that you could actually make music. Kids rapping on street corners, dreadlocked guys on the subway banging on drums. It was expressive, moving, powerful. And it made me feel powerful.”

Brando looks at me, a little embarrassed.

“I loved music, but I knew I couldn’t make it. That wasn’t where my strengths were. I was a smart-talker, a connection-maker – a hustler. I could see things. Make things happen. That’s what I was good at. I put on some showcases, networked like hell, and then started a small label, got a few local acts together. Persuaded people to give us some studio time, brought people together I thought would work. It was good. Underground, nothing major – but good.”

He drops his gaze to the alleyway a hundred feet below us.

“Then I met Lexi, and I knew it could be something huge. She used to make these tapes of her just humming melodies, and you’d have sworn they were classics. She wrote songs like that, just singing them into a cheap tape deck. And her voice was…mind-blowing. She was working in a fast food joint at the time, just doing the music for fun, for the love of it. It was me who convinced her it could be something more.

“I dropped everything. Gave the label over to some associates to handle, forgot all about the hustling, and from then on, it was all Lexi. I did everything for her.”

“You fell in love with her?” I ask, gently.

Brando nods. “How could I not? She was amazing. We moved into some shitty apartment in the Bronx. I started doing everything I could to get her demos together, get her in front of the people who mattered. But I was jealous, possessive, a control freak. Lexi, on the other hand, liked to party. We argued about everything, money, the music, us. But we knew we needed each other.

“Things started moving, and we both came to LA. I didn’t know anybody here, but I knew how to make friends fast, how to move in the right circles. It was coming together. I had the songs, had the connections. I got a job at Majestic Records. Everything was lined up.”

Brando smiles widely, but it’s a macabre smile, a smile that he’s putting on to stop the other emotions from coming out.

“And just when we were about to do it, about to make it big, the labels already making offers, the studio time already starting, the songs already there – Lexi left.”

He turns to me and stares, as if I might have an answer, might be able to explain why, or how. I shake my head slowly, in disbelief and sympathy.

“How? Why?”

“I asked myself that same question every day for the past three years,” he says. “Maybe I’d been so focused on her career, I forgot about her. Maybe I underestimated how much I hurt her; how much she hated me. Maybe we never had the same ambition all along. She disappeared for a week. I found out through somebody at the label that she’d signed with Davis. He’d promised her a number one record, mega-star status. She even cheated on me just to make sure I got the message – some pretty-boy from Davis’ label who I know she never even liked.”

“Brando…”

“It’s alright. I fucked the pain away, pretty much. Went out every night, making up for lost time. Became somebody else, in order to survive. Still a hustler, but even more so. If I stopped to think it would only hurt, so I kept moving – only faster. I started to treat women the way I treated my acts. I cared for them, had fun with them, gave them what they wanted, and took my share of that. But I didn’t get attached. Didn’t get emotionally involved. In that sense, I moved on. Or at least, I thought I had, until she showed up again.”

It takes a second for me to piece it all together.

“So that’s what you guys were doing at the open mic I played?”

“Yeah.”

We turn toward LA, the city that gave us our dreams, and then took them away.

I start laughing. It’s slow at first, but it gets crazier and crazier. I try to stop, covering my mouth, but the more I do, the more maniacal it gets. Brando watches me with confusion, until he starts breaking out himself. For a full minute, we howl like schoolkids, doubled over and clutching our stomachs.

“We are quite a pair!” I say, laughing harder.

“Two abandoned strays!” Brando shouts into the night. “Coming for revenge!”

“You hear that, LA?!”

“We’re coming!”