Second Best Fantasy (10 page)

That was a little better. Earlier in the evening, Dean and Sheila’s house had been packed with people. I remembered why we were there; it was Dean’s 40th birthday.

“I need to call her. Can I use your phone?”

Sheila retreated into the house and came back with a cordless and towels. “You can take a shower here if you want to.”

“Thanks.”

She closed the door and I dialed Janine. It rang ten times before I gave up. She had an aversion to the answering machine, believing, “if it’s important, they’ll call back.” I doubted her band mates or her producers liked that very much.

After I showered, I sat down in the kitchen with Sheila and she made me waffles and told me all about Dean, her take on 64

the band, and her thoughts on Janine.

“I’ll be honest with you Maggie, I think she’s a troubled soul. But she’s a good person. It was hard for her to come into the band against such resistance. Dean adores her, treats her like his own daughter. You know, Dean’s been doing this for a long time, he helped a lot of bands get started in this area, so he knows a lot about the business. I still remember the day he came home and said ‘I’m tired of watching other men do what I
really
want to do.’ Him and Bobby have known each other since high school, they were in a band together even then. They auditioned hundreds of musicians, right out there in our garage. It went on for three months before they handpicked the rest of the guys and formed The Blue Is.”

She reflected for a few moments while I drained another cup of coffee and sopped up the remaining syrup with bits of waffle. I didn’t know any of this. Janine did talk about Dean, and the adoration was mutual. But I hadn’t known about his long history with music.

“Maggie. This life we have, these partners we’ve chosen, it’s very hard. They are under such pressure and scrutiny all the time; it makes them moody and unpredictable. But when Dean’s home, and I hear him tapping out a new rhythm, see him with a pencil between his teeth to take notes on lyric ideas…I see his passion for the music. I see it’s not what he does, but who he is.

In those moments, I remember why I married him.”

I had an admiration for Sheila just then, and I wanted to be her friend. Aside from Cindy, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to have friends. In the past several years, I’d become consumed with work, drinking, compulsive sex, and isolating myself. It was fun in the beginning to feed my disgruntled, misunderstood poet persona, but I had become very lonely. And I knew it wasn’t healthy for me or the relationship to spend time only with Janine.

“I’ve screwed up every relationship I’ve ever had, Sheil.

Sometimes I knew I chose the wrong woman to begin with, but not always. I’m fine on my own, I always have been. But I’ve never wanted it to work so much before.”

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“The most important thing is that you trust her. Do you? I mean, being on the road and playing all these gigs, I still worry about Dean. Drugs, women, or in your case men
and
women, all readily available. It helps that he calls, and we have been together many years. Janine has brought other people, mostly men but not always, into our home on a few occasions, or to parties. But I’ll tell you, I haven’t seen her with anyone the way she is with you. Just the way she looks at you is different. I thought from the time I met her until now that she was damaged, that she couldn’t be in a committed relationship.”

Funny that Sheila would say so, I thought that about myself until I met Janine.

“Thanks for talking to me, Sheila. And for taking care of me this morning. I’m glad I have someone close to this whole situation I can talk to. I do love her, in ways I can’t even put into words. And, for someone like me, that’s pretty scary. She calls me from the road too, and she sends me little care packages, or she’ll call me and sing to me, sometimes she reads to me.

Sometimes we write together and I try to help her find the right words. But prose and lyrics aren’t the same thing, I never knew just how different they were. Still, we can sort of collaborate. She tells me I make her want to sing. I understand that, because she makes me want to write.”

Sheila wiped away a tear.

“What is it?”

“You reminded me how much I love my husband, that’s all.”

So other people had this bond, I didn’t know. But I didn’t think Sheila and Dean loved each other while cutting their bags of cocaine in half. I didn’t want to say out loud this was what I worried about more than anything, for both of us. Right at that moment it was mostly me worrying about me. I had to cut back.

This blackout incident was most certainly not okay, even though Sheila was right, Janine would get over it.

“I’m really sorry about last night,” I said, getting up to leave. “Where are my keys?”

Sheila grabbed them off a hook by the front door.

“You take care of yourself. And go make up with her, okay?”

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I smiled and left.

* * * *

I heard from her later that day. She had indeed forgiven me, but she thought it was a good idea if we spent the night apart, in our own beds for a change. I agreed. I told her I had given some serious thought to my drinking and our combined drug use, and that I wanted to slow down. She said very little, which made me wonder how much she was using on the road.

She had just found out the band was going back to LA for a week, a gig every night at some of the bigger venues. The Blue Is second single, “Serenity Speeches” had peaked at number 6

and remained there for several weeks. I ended our conversation with “
You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star
!”

She responded only with “
42nd Street
, really?”

While she was gone I strictly monitored my alcohol intake.

She called me every night from LA before their scheduled show.

Not drinking as much, I missed her more since I wasn’t escaping my feelings. The third night she was gone I cried when she sang part of a new song to me on the phone, “
It’s what you call lonely…that’s ooh-kaay…it’s what makes you…beautiful…
” I started saying “I love you” before I hung up. Sometimes she said it back, sometimes not. It didn’t matter to me.

When she returned from her LA trip, I told her in person how much I loved her, how sorry I was for embarrassing her, and I promised it would never, ever happen again. She sent me flowers at work the next day, something she had not done in our nine months together. Weeks flew by and I realized we’d make it to a one-year anniversary, something I had not done since my relationship with Elizabeth. Janine started getting invited to different talk shows and magazines for interviews, which she would only agree to if the performances or write-ups included the whole band. Some didn’t agree to that, but
Late Night with David Letterman
did. It seemed like things couldn’t get any better.

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* * * *

The
Late Night
show was awesome; I was allowed to accompany her backstage. I’d never been on the live set of a studio before. It was total chaos, people running about everywhere perfecting last minute details. Just like in the movies, someone popped their head into the dressing room and said

“five minutes, Miss Jordan.” Except it wasn’t just Miss Jordan, I was sitting in there with the whole band. None of them flinched though; they must have been used to it by then. I wondered if they knew how loyal she was to them, that she’d been approached several times to go out on her own and had said no.

She had even said in interviews “I’m a member
of
The Blue Is, it’s not Janine Jordan
and
the Blue Is.”

Me, Sheila, and Angela, Bobby’s girlfriend, pushed our chairs together in the green room to watch the show on the TV

screen mounted on the wall. Sam, Josh, and Corey, the other three band members, were bachelors, and each of them had rows of groupies in lines around the corner waiting outside the studio. It felt special to me to be among the much smaller group of “significant others” huddled and hidden away backstage.

“To our loves!” Angela said, and handed each of us a glass of champagne. I hadn’t gotten drunk in several weeks.

Janine and I hadn’t done any cocaine since my blackout. We still kept a stash of pot, but I only remembered doing one hitters one late night after she got back from a 12-hour rehearsal. I had decided my blackout and my frequency of getting high had been a result of my fear of losing Janine, and now that I felt secure in the relationship, I didn’t need it.

We were having recreational fun, that was all. I’d become fond of telling Janine it was she who “intoxicated me” every time she offered me something. She’d just roll her eyes at me and then take a hit or have one more drink after I’d stopped. That was fine with me. It didn’t affect me, it didn’t affect her work, it didn’t affect the relationship, so, as far as I was concerned, there wasn’t a problem. Besides, I
liked
to drink, she
liked
to get high.

It was a want, not a dependent need.

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After the show was over, everyone went to a party, of course, at a hotel suite where one of the other Letterman guests was staying. We walked in, the whole rock band entourage, and someone took my coat and handed me a rum and coke. The

“suite” was the whole top floor of the hotel more or less. So this was what success looked like. I moped around the party; I would rather be at home, alone, making love to Janine. Sheila found me in the kitchen. “This is how it is, sugar. It’s good for her, it’s good for the band. You’re going to have to get used to this.”

“I know.”

“Come on. Mingle with me.” She dragged me out into the crowd where strippers were handing out Jell-o shots. I looked around. Dean was talking to Dave Letterman. Bobby and Angela were sitting on a sofa, making out like teenagers. Sam was talking to a guy in a suit that looked to me like another record producer. And Corey and Josh were doing lines of cocaine with some of the other strippers in a corner, surrounded by their groupie girls. I had no idea who any of the other people were besides Letterman and I felt very out of place. I didn’t see Janine anywhere.

I had a few more rum and cokes and tried to get comfortable in my surroundings. Sheila stayed by me and kept bringing me into conversations I didn’t want to take part in.

“Sheil, I want to go home.”

“It’s part of what they have to do, Maggie. They have to make connections, be seen.”

“I get that,” I said. “I do, I’m not mad, I’m just not comfortable here, that’s all.”

“If you leave now, she will feel like you aren’t supporting her.”

Fine. I got up to go look for the bathroom. I wandered down a long hallway, and then I thought I heard Janine’s voice behind one of the closed doors.

“Hello?” I pushed open the door to find Janine, sitting on a bed, topless, with a needle in her arm, firmly gripped by the hand of a man I’d never seen before.

“What…” My face got hot and I started to freak out, I didn’t know what to do.

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The man lit a joint and handed it to me. “Why don’t you just relax? Sit down and watch.”

I sat, she didn’t move an inch in the few minutes that passed between me and Needle Man. I looked at her face and she was smiling ear to ear, humming.

The man said, “She’s good. Real good,” and then proceeded to shoot up himself.

It moved me to see her this way, she looked…happy.

Normally, even when she was truly happy, there was still a look about her, a touch of sadness in her eyes, or the corner of her mouth, or the way she folded her hands in her lap. Something mysterious but ever present. I was pretty stoned myself, and imagined her high was different. I stared at her for what seemed like hours, then realized Needle Man had left the room and closed the door behind him.

I looked at the track mark left in her right arm and remembered all I had been told about heroin. I’d never seen it, been in the same room with it. Josh and Corey had told me some sordid stories of their early days in a garage band in the eighties when everyone was using it. But when their friends started dying, they quit. Sam told me he had used heroin with Janine once when she first joined the band, someone had given it to him, and he had no idea how to shoot. She did, apparently.

“Come here.”

Janine’s voice ripped me out of orbit and back to reality.

The reality of drugs, of death, of dating a rock star, which I still sometimes couldn’t believe
was
a reality. I was frightened by the look of her now, she didn’t seem real to me. There was now a haunted look in her eyes, a desperate searching no man, woman, or drug could ever answer to.

“Come here baby,” she said again, but I swear her lips didn’t move. Afraid she was casting some sort of heroin witchcraft that affected me simply by being there, I imagined myself running for the door. Somehow she had aged in the minutes that had passed, she’d become an ancient muse with heroin knowledge that only she could dispel. Without really being aware of my own body, I moved to the bed. I kissed her, still with 70

the lingering feeling of not at all knowing who she was. She kissed me back but without passion, fumbled with the button fly on my jeans. Then she tilted her head back with an explosion of cackling, then slumped over a pillow.

“Leave me alone.”

I was awake now, sober in an instant. Reality will do that to you. I returned to the party, dazed. Sheila found me back in the kitchen, headlong into a bottle of scotch, glass optional.

“I’m so sorry, Maggie. Dean’s upset about this too. You need to talk to her about this in the morning. It’s no good, Maggie.”

* * * *

The next day I preached like a first-rate school marm, spouting all the information Dean and Sheila had shared with me about heroin. You’d have thought I was touring with the D.A.R.E.

keynote speakers in high schools across America. I felt silly, hypocritical, and afraid. Silly because here I was, a year into fucking a rock star (everyone’s second best fantasy to actually
being
a rock star), and chancing ruining it all by telling her how to live. Thus the afraid part, certain she would toss me aside for some heroin-using, or at least, heroin-accepting groupie who was probably hanging out in the driveway right at that moment. I rationalized this away by telling myself that sometimes, it really does come true, that love prevails. Pamela Courson, after all, had done this for years with Jim Morrison’s hellacious drug and alcohol addiction. (To no avail, of course, but I wasn’t giving up.) And although he never gave it up, he never cut her out of his life either. It was a tattered thread to hang my tirade on, but I did.