Zombies: More Recent Dead (25 page)

“That’s not funny, Steve.”

I didn’t like the milquetoast look he was giving me. I said, “Don’t you dare flake out on me, you hear? Between the record sales and the movie deals and video game endorsements and all the rest of it, Tommy Grind is a one hundred and forty million dollar a year corporation. I’m not about to let that fall apart because of this.”

“Is that what this is about to you, the money? That’s all you care about? What about Tommy? What about what he stood for?”

I laughed.

“Tommy stood for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. That was the world to him.”

“His music was the soundtrack for my life, Steve. It means something.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “It means he liked his women horny, his drugs psychotropic, and his music loud. That was all Tommy Grind ever wanted. Now, all he wants is food. We’re good the way I see it.”

“We should let him out. Let him get some sunshine.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “Isaac, the paparazzi hide in the bushes across the street just praying for a chance to shoot Tommy Grind while he’s smoking a joint on the lawn. You have any idea how bad that would be to take him out for a stroll? No, if we’re gonna bring him out into the world, we need to do it under controlled circumstances.”

He nodded, then leaned his forehead against the barrier and watched the love of his life pop a finger into his mouth. Smaller parts like that he could eat whole.

“Listen,” I said, “you want a drink?”

“No, thank you. You go ahead. I’m just gonna sit here for a while and watch him.”

I shrugged. “Whatever. I’ll be out in the hot tub.”

I made myself a whiskey over shaved ice and dropped in an orange slice for garnish. Then I stripped and climbed into the hot tub and let the jets massage my back. The hot tub was outside, but the little courtyard where it was located was covered with ivy to prevent helicopters from peaking in on Tommy’s private parties, which were the stuff of legend. One of last year’s parties had included half a dozen A-list porn stars and a pile of cocaine the size of an old lady’s hat.

I took a couple of phone calls and arranged for a cover of Eddie Money’s “I Think I’m In Love” that Tommy had done in his studio a month before he died to appear on
That’s What I Call Music, Volume 153.

As was I finishing, I heard screams coming from the front lawn. I told the guy from Capitol I had to go, hung up, and jumped out of the hot tub.

Fucking Isaac,
I thought.
You better not have . . .

But he had. The little idiot had gone and let Tommy out of his bedroom and taken him for a walk down on the front lawn.

When I got there, clothes soaked through and my feet squishing in my shoes, Tommy was staggering around in the middle of the street, a team of terrified paparazzi gathered around him, snapping pictures. The flashes were making Tommy disoriented and he was swiping the air in a futile attempt to grab the photographers.

I waded into the crowd and grabbed Tommy by the back of his black t-shirt and guided him toward the lawn. I looked around and saw Isaac standing on the curb, a drooping question mark in a cheap blue suit.

“You get him inside,” I growled at Tommy.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to—”

“Go!” I said. “Now.”

He led a reluctant Tommy back to the house. I watched him get most of the way to the front door, my mind scrambling for a way to explain all this, then I turned to the crowd and said, “Okay, people, listen up. Come on, gather around.”

Thirty photographers just looked at me.

“What the hell, people? You don’t recognize a press conference when you see one? Gather around.”

That did it. Soon I was standing in the middle of a tight ring of bodies, cameras rolling.

“All right,” I said, “we were hoping to save this announcement for the Grammy’s, but clearly Tommy Grind wanted to give you guys a sneak peak. Tommy has just completed his first screenplay. It’s called
The Zombie King
and I’ve just got word from our people in Hollywood that it’s a go for next fall. We’ll be shooting here in Austin starting around the end of next September.”

“A horror film?” one of the paparazzi said.

“That’s right. And it’s gonna be Tommy’s directorial debut, too.”

“So, that was . . . what? A costume?”

“Look,” I said, and sighed for effect, “what do you think is gonna happen when you give a rock star access to a stable full of professional makeup artists? I mean, we’ve all seen Lady Gaga, am I right?”

That got a few laughs. I passed out business cards to everybody and told them to send me an email so I’d have their addresses for future press releases.

They scattered after that to email their photos to their contacts and I went inside to kick Isaac’s ass.

A few weeks later, in early February, I was back in the hot tub, helping another untraceable young lady out of her bikini for a little warm up before she went in to see Tommy. I was sitting on the edge of the tub, and the girl came over and positioned herself between my legs and put her cheek down on my thigh. The drugs in her drink were already starting to take effect, and I had to nudge her a little to get her to pay attention to what she was supposed to be doing.

She had just gotten to it when Isaac Glassman walked through the sliding glass door.

“Jesus, Isaac,” I said, covering up my junk. “What the hell, man?”

“Sorry,” he said. “But we have to talk.”

The girl had pulled away from me and sunk down to her chin in the water. She wouldn’t look at either one of us, even though it was a day late and a dollar short for any pretense at modesty at that point.

“Do you mind?” Isaac said, and pointed at the girl with his chin.

“Just wait for it,” I said.

The girl’s eyelids were drooping shut. I jumped in, caught her just as her face slid under the water, and pulled her out.

“Help me get her out of here,” I said to Isaac.

He reached in and took one arm and I took the other. We pulled her onto her back on the side of the tub. She had great tits, I thought absently. A pity.

I climbed out and slid into my trunks.

“This better be good,” I said.

“What are you gonna do with her?”

“What do you think? You’re gonna help me drag her into Tommy’s room. Then he’s gonna eat her.”

“But you were gonna have her first?”

“I think Tommy’s past the point of jealousy,” I said.

He was uncomfortable, stared at his shoelaces, then at the ivy-covered walls behind me. Then, finally, at me. “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I don’t . . . I don’t like the direction you’re taking Tommy’s career. The Eddie Money cover— ”

“Has been number one on the Billboard charts for two weeks in a row. What are you trying to say?”

“That’s not the point,” he said.

Not the point?
Not the point!
I couldn’t believe it. The little geek had the gall to stand there and tell me he didn’t like my decisions. Christ, what did he know? The song was doing great. The critics were calling its stripped down acoustic arrangement and gravelly-voiced lyrics a masterstroke from one of rock’s greatest performers. Industry experts were already anticipating Tommy Grind’s fourteenth Grammy, which I would accept on his behalf in just a few weeks.

“Tell me, Isaac. What is the point? I gotta hear this.”

“It’s a cover song, Steve.”

“Yeah, a fucking successful one, too.”

“But it’s a cover song. Tommy Grind never did cover songs. It was always
his
music,
his
vision. That’s what made him so special. That’s why people loved him.”

“Oh Jesus,” I said.

“Seriously, Steve.”

“You’re so full of shit, you know that? You don’t live in the house with him, Isaac. You never heard him playing in there in his studio. The guy would sit in there and play cover tunes all day long. He loved ’em.”

“That’s because he loved the music, Steve. He played what made him feel good. But when he put his music out there for the world, it was always his own stuff. Don’t you see?”

No, you little dweeb, I don’t see.

I had managed to get together a lot more original songs off of Tommy’s studio tapes than I first thought. We had enough for another eight, maybe nine albums. More if I included the cover tunes he loved so much. And it was good stuff, too. Plus, he had tons of live recordings from the heavy touring he did from 2003 to early 2008. I was thinking of putting together a double live album to go along with a DVD release of his Hollywood Bowl concert last August, maybe a viral marketing campaign on the web. Michael Jackson had been a bigger hit dead than alive, and it was looking like Tommy Grind was going to be even bigger.

“What is it you’re accusing me of?” I said. “You think I’m selling him out? Is that it?”

It took him a moment to work up the courage, but finally he squared his shoulders at me and said, “Well, yeah, I do. I guess that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

It took all the self-control I had to keep from killing him right there where he stood. I felt my face flush with anger.

Maybe he saw it too, because he took a step back.

“You listen to me,” I said. “Nobody accuses me of selling Tommy Grind out. Nobody. You don’t have that right. You jumped on this gravy train after it had already worked itself up to full speed. But me, I’ve been with him since the beginning. I was with him in Houston when he was working two daytime jobs and playing all night long in the clubs. I’m the one who got him his first radio time. I’m the one who made the club owners pay up. And when he got drunk and wanted to fight the cowboys who threw beer bottles at him in the middle of his sets, I was the one who stood back to back with him and got my knuckles bloody. So don’t you stand there and think you know more about Tommy Grind’s vision than I do. I’m the one who told him what his fucking vision was.”

That cowed him. He stood there with his eyes fixed on his shoes and it looked like he was about to cry. For a second there I thought he was going to run from the room like a scalded hound. But he suddenly showed more backbone than I knew he possessed. He raised his almost non-existent chin and looked me square in the eyes.

“What?” I said.

“You’re the one telling Tommy what his vision is?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, good. Because I just talked to Jessica Carlton’s attorney over lunch. She heard your bit about
The Zombie King,
and she wants in.”

“
The Zombie King . . . ?
”

“Yeah. The movie you told the press Tommy had just written. Remember that?”

“Yeah,” I said, and looked down at the naked girl at my feet. I had almost forgotten she was there.

Jessica Carlton, damn. The bubble-headed blonde who broke onto the scene a few years back claiming to be as virginally pure as Amy Grant, but had no qualms whatsoever shaking her ass for every camera from L.A. to Hamburg. The claims to virginal purity passed away unnoticed right about the time her first movie came out, and she rose to the status of tabloid cover starlet, which if you ask me was a brilliant piece of marketing. Now she was on the cover of just about every magazine in the grocery store checkout line. The last I heard she was dating an NFL quarterback, was doing a new album, and even had another movie deal on the table. She had the goods, definitely. And if she said she wanted to be in Tommy’s movie, well, there was no easy way to refuse that. People would ask questions.
People Magazine
would ask questions.

“That’s a problem, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s a problem.”

And a week later, I still didn’t have a solution. The Eddie Money cover had slipped down to number fourteen on the countdown, but we were prepping a new single—a Tommy Grind original—and that would be out in another three weeks, so at least his name would stay out there.

But the Jessica Carlton thing was bothering me. She had come to Texas to see her jock boyfriend, and her people had been calling to set up a meeting. No surprise there. I just didn’t know what to tell them.

I started smoking again. Cigarettes, I mean. I never quit weed. That was almost impossible when you hung around Tommy Grind. I quit cigarettes back in 1998, and never felt better. But the stress of dealing with Tommy’s unique needs—he was up to four girls a week now, and it was getting increasingly difficult to dispose of the garbage in a way that didn’t attract dogs of both the canine and human variety—and the Jessica Carlton situation conspired against me. In a weak moment, I bummed a smoke off of Isaac and within a week was back up to a pack a day.

It made me feel ashamed every time I lit up. Like I was some kind of pansy or something, but, to quote Tommy, a need is a need and it has to feed, like it or not.

The situation reached a head on the night of February 14th—Valentine’s Day.

I was in Tommy’s fully restored 1972 Triumph TR-6, headed back to the mansion from the store where I’d gone to buy another carton of smokes. It was a cool, crisp night, full of stars, and I had the top down and Tommy’s 2003 album
Desert Nights
cranked up on the CD player. The night was cool and clear, and the little Triumph handled the Hill Country roads like a dream. Any other night, I would have been in heaven.

But, like I said, I was troubled.

The feeling got worse when I pulled into the driveway and saw the lights on upstairs.

I had turned them off when I left. Tommy was usually calmest when the lights were off.

“Fuck,” I said, and in my mind I was already throttling Isaac.

I parked and went inside, just to make sure. But I wasn’t surprised to find Tommy gone. Isaac hadn’t even done a half-assed job of cleaning up Tommy’s latest meal. Nice enough girl. Said she was from Kentucky, I think.

I went to the security room and replayed the tape. There was Isaac, talking to Tommy through the Plexiglas, opening the door, coaxing him outside. Tommy staggering toward Isaac, hands raised in a gesture that almost looked like supplication.

And then they were off camera until they got downstairs and out the front door.