Vanni: A Prequel (Groupie Book 4) (7 page)

My throat tightens as I glance around the bare room, left only with portraits on the wall. “Where am I supposed to put them? Christ,” I say, empowered by the forbidden word. “What else did they take?”

For some reason I had believed they would only take the things from her bedroom. The clothes she would never wear. The bed where she drew her last breath. I know now this is just wishful thinking, as if it will make her absence sting a little less if I have fewer reminders.

“They took what was on her list,” Lori offers feebly. “Didn’t you read it?”

I glare at her before I turn down the hall and open the door to Susan’s bedroom. It’s completely empty. From the wide-open closet door, I know that everything is gone from there too. Pictures on the wall, even the drapes. It’s all gone. “Well, they certainly didn’t miss a spot, did they?”

She touches my arm. “It was what she wanted for you. A clean slate.”

I wrench from her and stalk to the living room. I flip on the light to see in clear detail what all had changed. Her recliner is gone, that I see right away. The sofa is present and accounted for, though, as is the grandfather clock. “I told them we needed the sofa still, until we get some furniture of our own. The grandfather clock she wanted you to have. Said that her father bought it, and she wanted to keep it in the family.”

I nod as I turn to the wall opposite the window, where I had spent summer after summer learning the piano.

Only nothing is there, except for the outline of the upright piano the sun had burned into the ages-old wallpaper. No piano, no metronome… it’s all gone. “Where?” I grit between my teeth.

“She wanted the church to have it.”

I spin on her. “Susan? Or you?”

She drops her hands to her side. “You don’t even know how to play, Vanni.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Then what is the point?”

“I don’t know who I am without her, okay?” I hurl one of the shakers against the wall, where it demolishes into dust on impact. It only takes me a second to realize that I can’t replace it. I can’t replace it and I can’t replace her. I drop the other one to the hardwood floor, where it cracks in half. I grab my coat from the peg on the wall and slam out the door.

I sit next to Tony at the bar where we nurse our beers. I’m on my third, but I’m not numb enough yet. I know I have to keep going. I signal the bartender, a cute black girl with mocha skin and hair that bounces in spiral, ebony curls around her face. She wears color in her hair, a vibrant purple. It catches my eye whenever the light hits it. “That money’s not going to last forever, Tony,” I tell my friend.

“No, it won’t. You gotta be smart about it, Vanni.”

I snort as I tilt my bottle for another chug of beer. “Are you saying I should invest?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. Invest in you.” Off my look, he expounds, “School, dude.”

I shake my head. I had never been a great student before. I can’t imagine all this time away helped matters at all. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“That’s easy. What do you want to do with your life? And don’t say rock star. I’m serious.”

I offer a helpless shrug. “There is nothing else to say, Tony. There never has been. I honestly can’t see myself as anything else.”

He heaves a beleaguered sigh. When you’re kids, best friends will support you if you want to fly a unicorn to the moon. As adults, most friends prefer to keep their friends grounded in reality. I know I’ve tested this to the breaking point with Tony. “And you’re willing to gamble every dime you have on seeing if you can be one of the small percent of singers who actually make it, is that it?”

“No,” I say softly. I had buried that dream when I had buried my aunt. “But if you ask me what I can plug into its place after years of targeting just one bulls eye, I’m afraid you’ve got me stumped.”

“No Plan B, right,” Tony says. “I can still get you into the mail room. It’s not much, but it’s a start. It’s a future,” he adds, though the concept of future has definitely lost its sheen over the past dozen days.

I kill my beer and reach for the other. I’m finally numb enough. “Might as well,” I slur at last.

Lori takes the news of my new career well. In fact, she is relieved. “That’s where Tony started, and look where he is now. It could mean big things.”

I caress her hair with my hand. “He has an education under him.”

“You can, too. I was looking around at some of the city colleges. Your money could go a long way there.”

“That’s great. But I have no idea what I’d be studying for.”

She shrugs as she runs her fingers along my chest. “You can figure that out as you go along.”

I scoff. “Yeah, and what if I spend tens of thousands of dollars only to figure out I still can’t figure it out?”

“A degree still means something. The time won’t be wasted. Future employers will take it as a sign of dedication and commitment. It will open doors no matter what you want to do.”

I swear to God, all I can think about is how I can’t see how some business degree would help me be a singer. My mind has decided not to pursue my dream, but the message hasn’t made it all the way to my heart now.
It’s just too soon
, I assure myself.

I guess I need mourning for that, too.

I pull Lori to me and get lost within her kiss so I don’t have to think about anything else.

It takes a few weeks for me to start my job at McKinley, Donnelly and Roth, the financial consulting firm in a gleaming Manhattan skyscraper in the financial district. It’s in the mail room, like Tony had said. I wear a white button-up dress shirt and slacks, while I run around to all different floors of the company daily. My long hair doesn’t pose a problem for this job, which, as an entry-level position, usually held by students and fresh-faced graduates anyway. Tony did warn me that I would have to cut it eventually if I want to be taken seriously, especially by my boss, Stu Plimpton.

Stu isn’t any older than me, but he has the Ivy League education behind him. He’s a proper button-down corporate climber, who clearly wants to run the business one day. He’s a by-the-book kind of guy, who takes particular glee in showing me who’s boss on a regular basis.

I suspect he’s not a very happy person. He’s rail thin, with thick glasses and comb-over before he’s thirty. But there’s a smirk on his face whenever he corrects me, as if that position of power is the only thing he has in the world to elevate him. I take it in stride most days, but it’s clear he thinks I’m stupid. If I dare say anything to Lori, she brings up the whole college conversation again.

“People will take you as seriously as you take yourself, babe,” she says, before she launches into another conversation about my hair.

She buys me clothes now. I’ve almost completely disappeared from the guy I knew mere months before.

Still not sold on college, I keep my job at Cynzia’s nights and weekends. I owe him my loyalty, sure. But part of it is that I know who I am there. The guy who stares back at me through the perfect mirrors in the men’s bathroom of McKinley, Donnelly and Roth is a stranger to me. I don’t know him, and I don’t understand him. I’m not sure I even like him. He swallows a lot of shit for a little bit of money and a whole lot of hope that one day it will all be worth it.

After a month of working in the city, even that old hair net starts to look like a long lost friend.

Things are changing fast. Thanks to the windfall from Susan’s life insurance policy, I’m able to fill the house with furniture of my own. Lori helps me, since I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. She’s thinking long-term, what kind of furniture would be practical for our future, something with quality and nothing too trendy.

I fight her only once. I want a platform bed. I know that the king-sized model won’t fit in the upstairs bedrooms. There’s only one room to fit it, and I haven’t been able to walk into it for weeks.

Lori suggests that we tear down the wallpaper and paint it. She hopes that by making it into a new room entirely, we’ll exorcise any lingering ghosts.

Truth is I no longer feel Susan there anywhere, and haven’t ever since all her furniture and belongings were taken away. That’s part of the overall problem. The me I used to be is fading just like her presence, like wisps of smoke in the wind. I don’t know who I’m becoming, but I it’s clearer by the day I don’t like this guy. I have less and less in common with him as I watch him scurry from Brooklyn to Manhattan, running around like all of the other rats in the maze. When Stu gives him a dressing down every other day, for not following some procedure in which he’s never been versed or trained, he stands there and takes it–a pawn in someone else’s chess game.

I drink more heavily these days. I’m so exhausted when I walk home from Cynzia’s nightly that all I want to do when I get home is eat, drink till my eyes cross and fuck Lori like we’ve never fucked before.

In many ways, she’s the only way I know I’m still alive. When I’m inside her, I’m not Old Vanni or this new mutated Vanni. I’m a god, the star of the show, the one who controls her like a puppet on my strings, making her scream because she can’t help herself.

That comes to mean more to me than the booze.

Despite our active sex life, our relationship strains simply because we never see each other, and the rare times we do, she’s nagging in my ear about college. She wants me to quit Cynzia’s and pursue a degree that could get me promoted in the company.

The only problem is that I don’t want to be promoted. I don’t like the assholes at work, who drink a gallon of coffee to get through hectic days and frenzied nights, working late to make other people rich. They in turn treat everyone around them as rungs on their own private ladders. Even Tony looks about ten years older than he really is. Talking to him about anything is useless. He’s done his time with the likes of Stu and advises me to just cowboy the fuck up and soldier on. Then he parrots what Lori tells me, all about planning for the future. It’s like they share the same brain some days.

But I don’t want some crappy fifty-hour workweek doing the same crap, and swallowing the same shit, day after monotonous day until I can retire with a gold watch and neat little pension in exchange for all my years of service. In exchange for my
life
. Supposedly I’m laying bricks with each frustrating, unsatisfying day, where every sacrifice I make in the moment will serve me in some far-off future I can’t even picture. It’s like I’m waiting to live, and I have a long way to go until I see these seeds I’m planting grow into something even remotely gratifying.

Call me impatient, but I need more. Something is missing and I don’t know what it is.

I figure it out late January, when I can’t stop staring at the faded outline against the far wall in the living room. What’s missing is music, which has become a painful reminder for all I’ve lost. I avoid it purposefully, which is completely unlike me. I’ve never gone this long without it before. But these past few weeks have been torture. Thinking about music reminds me that I have nothing left to dream about, which depresses me way down deep in my core.

I had never wanted a regular life. I wanted my name up on a marquee, with thousands of screaming fans in the front row. I wanted the thunder of a band behind me and the impossible dream set forth before me, right within my reach.

“
Then make it happen
,” Aunt Susan’s ghost whispers in my ear. I have to smile because that’s just what she would have said, despite it all. It gets me thinking. Why
can’t
I have the life of my dreams? I think I’ve forgotten the answer.

Since I have a rare night off, I stay in Manhattan. There’s no need to rush home; Lori is working the late shift, and suddenly I want to be a part of the big world outside my tiny brownstone in Bensonhurst.

It’s hard to deny music in New York City. Many popular genres have taken root there, so it is a veritable stroll through time from jazz and doo-wop to disco and hip-hop. And there’s no shortage of live music venues to explore. I don’t need one drop of alcohol as I hit some of my old haunts, clubs that cater to my passion for rock. Just being a part of the crowd is a high in and of itself. Is it a surprise, really, that I want to do this and this only for the rest of my life? It’s like one of those machines where you can self-dose heavy pain medication whenever you feel down or hopeless. That’s what art does. It takes what life is and makes it better. It takes hope and makes it a tangible thing that you can see, hear or touch.

With music, it takes pain and makes it something beautiful. A guy can sing about heartbreak or a girl can sing about an unrequited love, and the swell of empathy from the audience helps lift the shadows so you can once again see the sun.

I can’t see the sun in any florescent-lit mail room.

Returning to the club scene invigorates me. That night, when I surprise Lori at work and we take the train home, I practically finger-fuck her as we make out on the deserted subway car. I thrill her with my newly charged passion, though she has no idea why I’m so fucking happy for once. But if we’re both happy, does it really matter why?

The next day I cut my hours back at Cynzia’s. I don’t tell Lori because I don’t want the lecture. And what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. It’s not like I’m auditioning to be in a band. I just need to be a part of the music in some way, otherwise I’ll disappear entirely. It’s my only anchor now.

I hide my alternative life until the end of February. It starts with a horrible day at the office, where I’m late to work. This means my day starts with being reamed by Stu. He’s in a mood most days, and I’m his favorite whipping boy. Days that start with an ass-chewing usually means shit will roll downhill all day long.

And of course, it does. He spots streaks on our incoming correspondence, which is printed by our massive printers that cost thousands of dollars. I don’t know much about them, other than how to change the ink or refill the paper. That doesn’t seem to matter to Stu. “Clean it up, Carnevale. Show some professionalism.”

“How am I supposed to clean them?” I ask, because I’ve never had to clean a big printing machine before.

“It’s not my job to figure that out,” he tells me with that know-it-all smirk that makes my fists clench. “It’s yours. So get it done.”

I spend most of the morning going through endless files to find the operator’s manual for the printer, in order to figure out how to clean the glass panel. Finally I find it. It says to wipe the pane down with isopropyl alcohol.

I head down to the lobby of our high-rise, to the quickie store. The only alcohol on the shelf is rubbing alcohol. I just know if I buy this alcohol and try it on the expensive printer, I’ll ruin it. Not only will I get yet another lecture, but I’ll likely have to pay for it too. I take a deep breath before I call Stu on my cell. “Yeah, Stu. It’s Vanni. I found a manual that said to use isopropyl alcohol on the printer to clean it. I’m downstairs at the quickie mart, but all they have is rubbing alcohol.”

He heaves a dramatic sigh, one he often utilizes when he has to explain anything to a mere high school graduate like me. He loves to throw my lack of education in my face, something Lori uses to motivate me to go to school.

All it really motivates me to do is shove a stapler up his ass.

“Rubbing alcohol
is
isopropyl alcohol,” he says with a heaping helping of derision. “How the hell can you get to your age without knowing that?”