Backstage Demands
Authors: Kristina King
WARNING: This ebook contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language. It may be considered offensive to some readers. This ebook is for sale to adults ONLY
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Copyright 2015 by Kristina King - All rights reserved.
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Rick wasn't ready for the next tour. It was something he had a hard time admitting to himself, as he ascended to rickety steps to his rundown apartment in the bad part of town. His band, Cull the Unfaithful, was a new wave metal cross over to hardcore punk, and Rick looked every bit the part of a punk rocker. He dressed in all black, pretty much all the time. He'd been bulky before the last tour, but then the tour or Europe hadn't afforded him the opportunity to dine on high protein Vegan cuisine, so he'd lost a bunch of weight. It was something he was a little self-conscious about, right along with how the apartment he lived in between tours wasn't glamorous at all.
When Rick made it up the steps to his place and the door swung open, he tentatively peeked inside to see if there were any giant bugs sitting at the small table he ate at. He knew it was a silly thought, but as he watched a few roaches scatter away from the light he knew that he wasn't going to be alone in the apartment in the traditional sense until he spent a few hundred dollars on a pest control guy—money he didn't have. The last tour had also wiped him out financially because of a bad storm that had swept through one of their markets right before they got there. No one had bought any merchandise at all, so as Rick opened the fridge and searched his cupboards, he knew that he was going to have to head to the greenroom early in hopes of scoring a free meal.
As Rick sat there in the kitchen, he felt a wave of sadness and loneliness wash over him. He knew that he'd gone too far with the tattoos when he'd gotten his face and neck done. Now he was nearly unemployable except in an industry that he'd grown to more or less hate. His muscles bulged under his tight black shirt, his brow furrowed.
What am I going to do?
He thought to himself.
What if this whole being a rock star thing just doesn't work out like it should?
Things wouldn't be so bad if he had someone to share everything with, but that wasn't exactly easy to find when he spent nearly all of his time on the road on tour, or back home trying to put together another album. But it was hard to find someone that he was interested in who would put up with all of the band guy bullshit. As he aged, it became more and more clear to him that a lot of the stuff that went on in his life was just bullshit generated by the music industry. The tour he'd just come back from had been extended due to bad booking and other failures out of his control. No one seemed to care that it affected his life, and it definitely kept him from meeting someone meaningful.
Because that's what Rick wanted, someone really special in his life. He didn't want to set himself up for failure and put them on a pedestal already, though. He wanted to meet them, see them in action, feel their energy, and touch their flesh far before he put them in some position in his mind above himself. Rick knew that he was like many men in how he often time set himself up for failure. He didn't want to do it again.
Rick got up and paced around his small apartment, putting off going to the greenroom. The gig for the night wasn't even really a real gig. It was more of a charity thing, which Rick thought was great, but it also meant that people would treat him like a novelty act instead of worshiping him. Rick didn't like it when people worshiped him, but at the same time he didn't like it when people treated him like some kind of bear at a circus. Rick didn't like to be treated like he was something special, or like he was a freak—like many entertainers he just wanted to be treated like someone that had a talent to share. It was a damn shame that it was so hard to find that anymore.
With a sigh, Rick dawned his favorite jacket and headed back down the stairs from his dinghy apartment to the street. He'd have to hustle to catch the bus—touring didn't make it practical for him to have his own car because he was never around to drive it. So he trotted to the bus stop and barely managed to catch it.
Wouldn't that be a great way to end the last tour and potentially start the next?
He thought to himself.
It really would have been a great way to remind himself that everything that could go wrong would. But he couldn't focus on that, he reminded himself as he slipped into a seat. He had to keep his head clear. He was meeting with the tour manager in the greenroom in less than an hour to talk about where the band would be headed in the future, to include the details of the next tour. So Rick had to be on his toes, or he might not be able to voice his opinion during pretty much the only time it mattered.
Jen was running late as well, but on the other side of town in a much better neighborhood. She was fresh out of college and wanted to make a great impression on the world. And today was her day to do just that. She was on her way to a charity show where one of her favorite bands, Cull the Unfaithful, was performing. It was a charity for a youth shelter, so there was a special skip in her step as she made her way out of her nice apartment to her car.
Jen had worked hard all the way through high school and college to be able to have the things she had, and that was something she was proud of. She knew that a lot of her peers were heavily subsidized by their parents. That just wasn't the way Jen was brought up, though. She'd always been taught that it was best to be reliant on herself, more than anyone else, including her parents. Not that her parents hadn't always been there for her, ready to help her whenever she might have needed it. Her mother always told her that she was her grandfather's child, the way she was too prideful to ask for help from anyone, and Jen always replied that maybe that determination to make it is what had made her successful in school and now heading in the direction of success in the real world.
She was headed to the show not just to watch, but also for her first day as an intern. And the internship was the best kind, not something unpaid that she would have to validate in every interview she had with future employers. Because that's what so many internships were, more or less wastes of time. She'd run into a myriad number of them in her search for a decent gig: corporations that would let you run the execs coffee, record labels that would let you wait on them hand and foot, and other weird things that seemed a lot more like slave labor than anything else. This gig wasn't like the others, though. This internship was not only paid, it was of importance to the musical Collective that Cull the Unfaithful worked in.
Cull the Unfaithful was a group unlike the rest of the mainstream music world. They didn't rely on the major record labels or distribution outlets. In truth, what they were doing was only possible because of the age of the internet. In the eighties, there would have been absolutely no way that they would have been able to ignore nearly every unwritten rule of the industry and still achieve success. The band's lead man, Rick, was a tough cookie—or so she'd heard. He seemed like a nice guy in all of his interviews and other public appearances, but he had a reputation for being an asshole. Compared with the other bad behavior by minor celebrities, it was nothing to write home about, but it did make the tabloids. Every now and again Rick would fly off the handle at someone shoving a camera in his face, or go off on some strange rant on Facebook. It was going to be her job to manage him.
It was a strange first assignment, but Jen was glad to have it. As she navigated her way across town, she thought about how important it was going to be to achieve some kind of rapport with Rick early on in the business relationship, meaning today, so that when the tour kicked off in a few days it wouldn't be harder than it had to be. Rick wasn't going to be happy about the tour, mostly because no one had told him about it. Jen had heard that the end of the last tour hadn't gone so well, so they'd been a little wary of letting Rick in on the big news that another tour was about to launch. He wouldn't have wanted to go, but he didn't really have a choice, so no one asked. The Collective that the band had signed on with had insisted that the tour take place, they said that their market analysts had done a couple of tests on small groups and they thought that this certain tour, for many reasons, would be very lucrative. Jen wasn't really in on all of the pseudo-science that had gone into deciding that this tour would be the best tour ever. She figured it had a lot to do with taking into account the rest of the music industry and where they were sending their bands to tour. But what she did know was that she'd been told that she'd have to break it to Rick.
As Jen neared the venue, she realized that her job today would be a really tough one. Up until this point, she figured that her fiery red hair, curves, green eyes, and freckles would be enough to win Rick over, or at least win him over enough where he didn't have some meltdown before the show. The rest of the band was insisting that he be told before the show. They did have a point, that he deserved to know. Jen thought about how the tour manager had looked very worried at the possible prospect of Rick throwing a fit, and she thought about how the manager had said that if she couldn't keep that from happening then maybe she wouldn't have a job. It would really suck to lose her job on the first day.
Jen pulled into the spot reserved for staff and readied herself to walk into the venue. She wanted to make a good impression and had dressed to kill. She hoped it all worked.
Rick showed up to the venue to early. He hated it when he did that. There wasn't any food, or really anyone else there when he showed up. He figured he must have read the event wrong off his phone, or put it in wrong in his phone, or whatever the fuck kept seeming to happen to him during this crazy business of live music. So he walked around the place for a second to scope it out. The venue wasn't bad, being medium sized and having a grungy industrial feel to it. The greenroom was small, but it would do. There were a few things he wasn't so excited about.
For starters, there was just too much lighting. He hated it when small time venues tried to fool people into thinking they were important by blasting the people onstage with enough light singe their nostril hairs. Another thing he wasn't a fan of was the bathroom. It wasn't that the bathroom was too small, or too gross, it was that it was a big, nice, sprawling, sparkling thing that looked so sanitary Rick wouldn't have had a problem having a minor surgery in there. That told Rick that the venue itself wouldn't be attracting the kind of people that listened to Cull the Unfaithful. Their fans were mostly music scene people that liked metal, but also like the raw emotion of hardcore. That was the kind of music Rick liked to play and listen to, so he enjoyed it that his fans were the same as him—he knew a few bands that had been built on fan bases that they didn't even identify with, and it always seemed like the people involved with those projects had just had their souls sucked out of them.
Rick had a seat at the bar and ordered a drink. Waiting for everyone else to show up would leave him with a lot of time to think, and be hungry—the two very things that he had very specifically been trying to avoid. But now there was absolutely no avoiding them.
“Hey, Rick right?”
It was the bartender. Rick thought he recognized him from somewhere, but couldn't place him.
“Yeah, I'm Rick. I'll be playing tonight. I'm pretty sure my band is the headliner. What's your name?”
“Tod,” the bartender answered. “We went to high school together. But that was a long time ago. You probably don't remember me at all.”
It took Rick a second to place Tod's face. He tried and tried, but kept coming up with a blank. Until, that is, he thought of football. Rick hadn't been that much of a jock in high school, but he had played football a few years. Tod had been the defensive center, and he still was a very big guy.
“God damn I do remember you!” Rick said, smiling. “Hell, I remember the last game of junior season, on the last play, how you tore through the offensive line like they were wet tissue, sacked the quarter back causing a fumble, and then grabbed the ball and ran it into the in-zone.”
They both laughed at this. Their team that year had been terrible, really terrible, and that last second touchdown hadn't won the team the game. But it had created a memory that both men could call upon in this moment to bond over; something that made Rick feel good and made him realize that he wanted more moments like these. Not necessarily nostalgia, but the actual bonding that goes on between human beings. The band had kind of lost that spark as far as Rick was concerned. Everyone seemed so set on making money and making Rick go along with it, that he wasn't really in the mood to even see them much anymore. Even though his entire life was the band.
“You know,” Rick said as Tod poured him a beer. “I really miss high school sometimes. But not for all the horseshit reasons people miss high school; like because they were a cool kid, or because they got laid a lot, or whatever the fuck else people reminisce about.”
Rick took a long drink of his beer.
“Why do you miss it?” Tod prompted.
Rick liked bartenders. They always knew how to prod him into having a decent conversation even when he didn't really feel like it at all.
“Well, I guess I miss the freedom,” Rick said. “I know that might sound a little strange coming from a minor rock star, but my life is so wrapped up in dates and deadlines and touring that sometimes all I can think about is the days before when I was struggling to make it, back when I had more of a say about what was going on. And then there is high school, way back when neither of us had much to worry about except getting caught skipping class or smoking weed in the bathroom.”
They both laughed at this. Their principal had been a former Marine and a real hard ass. He liked to chew out the young men he found huddled in a bathroom stall smoking a joint amongst them. As they laughed the door to the venue opened and a smoking hot redhead walked in. Rick couldn't help but check her out using the corner of his eye. Even though he was a rock star or a minor one at least, didn't mean that he just stopped caring about manners and stuff like that. At least when it came to being a gentleman. That didn't mean that he let women walk all over him, or that he gave them special treatment like letting them hang out in the greenroom in hopes that he would get to sleep with them.
“What'll it be?” Tod asked the young woman as she sat down.
Rick noticed that Tod hadn't carded her, which meant that she was probably someone that he knew from around. And how could he not at least try to know her, she was so stunning. Her curly hair fell back in long locks that were fire engine red. Her eyes were the kind of green that happened in the ocean after a storm, with speckles of gold in them. Her body had curves in all the right places, and sometimes with curves to spare. It was crazy to think that anyone could look as attractive as she did.
“I'll just take a water,” she said. “I have to talk some business with Rick.”
Rick felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up on end. He didn't like it when people got the drop on him. He didn't know if this lady was with the press or what, but now he didn't want to talk with her at all.
“I guess I could have started that without putting you off,” she said softly as Tod walked to the other end of the bar and busied himself with cleaning the glasses.
“Probably,” Rick said. “So who the fuck are you, anyway? You seem to have me at a serious disadvantage, considering. You know who I am, and apparently we are here to talk about something that the rest of the band didn't want to be around for. Is that why I was scheduled so early to show up? Fucking Christ. You know, I don't have to be on time like I always am. I could just be one of the fuck off rock and roll guys that never does shit but anything for himself. I don't know why the Collective keeps pushing me around like we won't be renegotiating a contract after the next tour.”
Rick saw something flicker in the eyes of the woman beside him.
“So this is about the next tour,” Rick said. “Let me tell you something, I'm burned out from the last tour. I don't know how much they told you exactly, but I ended up, at one point, standing out in the fucking rain for three hours because the rest of the band gets so fucked up they're out of their minds most of the time.”
The woman whose name he still didn't know shifted in her chair uncomfortably. Rick was glad she was uncomfortable. It was complete and total horseshit that they had sprung a meeting on him, much less with a total stranger.
“So are you going to start talking or should I just go home?” Rick said. “I never signed a contract for this gig, so it'll be no skin off my ass if it doesn't happen.”
She looked like she was going to fall out of her seat. Rick decided to wait until she spoke again to say anything else. He didn't want to come across as one of those people who always talks over the people around him. Those kind of people sucked, as far as he was concerned, and he was afraid he'd just been one.
“Hey,” Rick said softly. “You know, I'm sorry about all of that. It's just that, well, I'm a little burned out is all. You have to understand that this industry isn't exactly easy on the people that actually make the music. We get treated like animals that do nothing but make other people money. The Collective was supposed to be something that actually cared about the musicians, but that hasn't turned out like I thought it would. I guess I wasn't really sure how it would turn out, but when I signed on—fuck, it seems like years ago now—I had no idea that they would be aggressively running things like they are now.”
The woman looked down at her drink then up at Rick.
“I'm sorry things have gotten off to a rough start,” she said. “My name is Jen, and I'm your personal manager. I think you might have been told I'm the tour manager and that we were going to speak before the show—at least that's what I sussed out of the emails I read. So let me start with an apology.”
She stopped and took a long drink of her water.
“Well all right then,” Rick said. “So my days with the Collective are officially numbered. There is pretty much no fucking way I'm sticking around with these assholes if this is how they tell me about meetings.”
Jen nodded.
“I'm also here to tell you that the next tour starts in three days. That's the reason that they had this meeting take place two hours before the gig actually kicks off. They didn't want you to lose your cool in front of a bunch of people. And if you don't do the gig or the tour, I lose my job. Not that that really matters to you, I completely and totally understand that you aren't really going to care that I lose my job when my job can't exist without your job. It isn't your thing to care about your intern’s job. It's your--”
“Wait, what?” Rick interjected. “So I have a fucking intern now? The fucking Collective, full of people that are the most punk rock, like, ever, have forced a fucking intern on me.”
Rick finished his drink and stood up.
“Listen, lady,” he said. “I'm sure that they gave you some kind of song and dance when they hired you. But even if they're paying you, being an intern in the music industry is fucking shitty. Like, way shitty. I don't want you to waste your life looking after a bunch of people that probably shouldn't be allowed out of the house, much less on a stage to be worshiped by a bunch of drooling zombie fans.”
Rick pulled a few dollar bills out of his pocket and placed them by his drink. He quickly registered that Jen was surprised that he was tipping so heavily. Everyone was always surprised that he tipped heavily. It was kind of annoying, but not nearly as annoying as the Collective hiring what amounted to a personal assistant or nanny to look after him without even bothering to consult him first. It was the kind of thing that just didn't fly with Rick at all.
“I'm fucking out of here,” he said. “You can try and follow me to convince me otherwise, but it probably won't work. Not that you won't have time. Because I don't have a car, I have to walk my ass all the way across town. Do you have any idea how not fun that is for me? So not only did I get jerked around today, but I'm being forced to exercise? Do you have any idea how much punk rockers hate being healthy?”
With that, Rick turned and left. Tod nodded at him as he did, a faint smile on his lips. Tod must have heard the whole thing, and that was fine with Rick. Let Tod tell the rest of his fucking jerk off band mates that were part of this little set up know how badly he reacted to the whole thing. Let the fucking bartender tell the rest of the band how badly this had all gone. As he flung the door open, Rick felt free for the first time in a very long time.