Chapter 2 PHOENIX, AZ: September 12, 1985

PHOENIX, AZ

September 12, 1985

            I woke the next morning, late morning sun pouring through an opening in heavy drapes, hoping I hadn’t dreamed the night before. We’d finished the wine, fed each other strawberries, chocolate, and baklava, the first food we ever shared together. We licked honey off various body parts…made love again and again…candles burning lower and lower…When did we finally fall asleep? Four, five a.m.? 

My cheek rested against a creamy shoulder, a sleek female body next to me, her backside against my stomach, my thigh between hers, my arm clasped around her waist, a firm breast in my left hand. I didn’t want to get up, but despite all that 9 ½ Weeks action going on, I was actually starving. For real food. Well, other real food. I lied still for a moment, just listening to her breathe, finding comfort in the slow rise and fall of her shoulder, her hair draped over my arm. 

Then I realized my right arm was numb. Lying around on each other is fun until your circulation gets cut off. 

            Damn, the weird shit that goes through my head…

            I pulled my arm out from under her, placing a quick kiss on the middle of her back.  She didn’t move, sacked out by chardonnay and too much sugar. If only every morning of our marriage could be like this…but I didn’t want to think about that now.

            I was a little hungover myself as I crawled off the bed, and hoped my ulcer wouldn’t act up. It had finally healed as much as it could after my surgery in August, and I could, sort of, eat normal food again. I stomped through flower petals on my way to the shower, thinking how pissed off my housekeeper was going to be when she came on Friday. She’d really be hacked trying to get all the candle wax off the furniture. What I needed to worry about was getting all kinds of sticky stuff off my own body.

            I showered, shaved, and took a long look in the mirror, finally over the fear of reflective glass I’d developed over the summer, when I had this whole Dorian Gray thing going on. The hollows in my cheeks were gone, my tan was back, my hair wasn’t hanging from my head like the CryptKeeper’s. Was that a six-pack developing along the center of my ribcage, despite the six-inch scar on my right side? Maybe going to the gym was starting to pay off. I was still a lean, relatively good-looking twenty-three-year-old, with nowhere to go but up, now that my future was in the hands of the excellent female specimen lying in my bed.             Hands…legs…mouth…

            I gotta get my mind out of the gutter. But what a gutter.

            I threw on a pair of jeans and a linen shirt, all the while watching Season, still fast asleep, and went downstairs.

            I was scooping butter into a cast-iron skillet when she came into the kitchen, looking at me curiously. “Are you wearing glasses?”

            I glanced over wire-rim frames and nearly burned my hand on the skillet. There’s something really cool about seeing a woman dressed in one of your long-sleeved shirts and nothing else.

            “Yeah, I hate to break it to you that you’re marrying a dork and not a rock superstar.” I dunked a slice of bread into a mixture of milk and eggs then tossed it into the skillet.

            Season climbed onto a barstool next to the center island, opposite the stove. I could smell her, clean from a shower and having that really awesome morning-after “glow.” “A dork who’s not a rock superstar who can also cook?”

            “I could feed myself before you met me,” I said, trying to concentrate, thinking how possessed I really was with her, and hoping not to burn breakfast…at eleven-thirty in the morning. I spied the bottle of maple syrup on the counter and didn’t really want to pour it on the French toast…

            “In fact,” I went on, flipping over battered toast, “I fed everybody in the band when we were still living in squalor. I was the only one who couldn’t burn water.”

            She laughed, taking a strawberry out of a bowl sitting next to the syrup bottle. I watched her lips as they sucked at the fruit, and remembered licking juice from her chin just hours before.

            “What did they eat?” she asked.

            “Whatever I bought once they gave me the money,” I answered, twirling the spatula in my grip.  “Randy usually just ate a six-pack.”

            “That’s no surprise.” She was eating honeydew melon now. Ah…melon…

            “You have no idea.” I cut back the heat on the burner, either to benefit the toast or my body temperature. “He rarely ate unless I made the food.” I imitated the guitar player’s intoxicated drone.  “’Your stuff doesn’t taste like shit.’ It’s a wonder any of us survived. Steve couldn’t even operate a microwave. Terry at least knew how to do that.”

            “Wow! That’s a shocker!” She leaned on her elbows, licking her fingers.

            Jesus.

            “Give him some credit, he’s not always such a bonehead.” I picked up a plate and pointed at the skillet with the spatula. “How many?”

            She held up two fingers on one hand, still licking those on the other.

            “Are you doing that on purpose?” I asked. Was I sweating? I had the A.C. on…

            She smiled. “Maybe.”
            I served her the plate. “I don’t have powdered sugar.”

            “I don’t care.” She picked up the syrup bottle. “I’m surprised you didn’t have this sitting out last night.”

            “We’ll try that later.” With my own plate full, I turned off the burner and sat across from her.

            “I don’t think you look like a dork,” she said.

            “But I am a dork,” I replied, slicing my toast with a fork. “Just wait ‘til my mother shows you pictures of me from junior high.”

            “I was a band nerd, too, y’know.” She licked syrup off her upper lip, and I nearly choked on my food.

            “I don’t know many band nerds who can do that so well.” I pointed my fork at her mouth. “You gotta quit licking yourself.”

            She laughed again. “I can’t help it. I get around you and all I want to do is lick things.”

            I had to change the subject so I could eat. “What are they gonna do with Perry?” I also had to get this discussion out of the way quick so I could enjoy the rest of my life.

            She didn’t want to talk about it any more that I. “They’re gonna make us drop the attempted rape charge.”

            I dropped my fork with a clatter. “You’re kidding?”

            She shook her head, still eating. “Nope. They say that’s just my word against his.”

            “Come on! I saw it with my own two eyes!” I placed my palms flat on the counter, ready to start breaking dishes. “Clint did, too. Do they need me to come testify?”

            “He still claims that was part of our “agreement.”” She put her hands up as if to indicate the quotations around “agreement.”

            “That’s bullshit.”

            “He’s pleading ‘not guilty’ to everything,” she concluded. But with what the record company has, he won’t be able to get away with anything.”

            “Thank God for that.” 

Amazingly, I hadn’t lost my appetite, mainly because I knew Perry Putman, former manager of Season’s band, Rampage, was going away for a long time, after making off with the band’s earnings and making Season’s life a living hell for the entire summer by physically and verbally abusing her. He actually went so far as to make arrangements to have me…eliminated.

I hope that fucker goes away for a long, long time.

“What about Randy?” she asked finally.

Oh, yeah…the other legal battle. “He’s due back in New York right before the wedding. Barry also managed to book us on Letterman and Saturday Night Live the same week.”

“Can you guys handle that all at one time?”

“He thought it’d be better if he kept Randy busy. He wouldn’t have to worry about the trial so much.” I chewed and swallowed. “Keep him from drinking.”

“Is he?” Season got up to refill her glass, fetching some water out of the refrigerator.

“Yeah,” I muttered, then felt my uneasiness fade as she trailed her fingers across my back when she passed by me again, all the way around the island, and resumed her seat. “He’s still trying to hide it.”

“Musical guest on Saturday Night Live?” It sounded more like an admonition of triumph than a question. “That’s so cool!”

“Now we’re really important,” I said, and noticed she was staring at me. “I know, I look like a nerd who needs a haircut.”

“No, you look more like a…rock-n-roll intellectual.”
            I raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“How many rock musicians do you know who actually know what an oxymoron is?”

“You have a point there.”

“A rock-n-roll intellectual who’s getting a killer body.” She flirted with me, looking seductively over the rim of her glass.

“Oh, I’m far from buff, believe me.” 

Randy and I had just started going back to the gym, and I was still awfully thin, even for me, from the scotch and painkiller diet I’d been on in the previous months. We’d gone to work out just yesterday before rehearsal…

September 11, 1985, 11 a.m.

“The girl at the desk is scoping you out for sure, dude.” Randy was on the treadmill next to mine, huffing and puffing, his smoking habit making a two-mile run virtually impossible.

I glanced over my shoulder at the finely-sculpted blonde behind the reception desk. She smiled and waved at us.

“Nah, she’s looking at you.” I was huffing and puffing myself, not having done a full workout in months.

“She’s especially interested in your squats,” he added.

“Well, she’s just gonna have to keep watching.” I slowed the treadmill down to a jog, feeling my left knee start to ache.

He laughed, shutting off his treadmill and stepping down, leaning against the mirrored wall in front of us and wiping his face with a blue towel. I just knew he was gonna pull out a cigarette. He pointed at my knee brace, knowing full well why it was there.

“So, how is it you bunged up your knee?” he teased. 

I just grinned smugly. “You should’ve heard me try to explain that one to Eduardo.” I imitated my Guatemalan doctor’s thick Latin accent. “‘You doo-eeng da chinga wid you nobia, peen-day-ho.  You gon’ kill each udder, you don slow down.’”

Randy cackled. “Maybe you just needed a more comfortable couch.”

“Maybe I can sue the Hyatt,” I joked. Can you sue a hotel after you got a little carried away having sex with your girlfriend on its furniture?

“She’s home tomorrow?” He pulled a water bottle out of his bag.

“Yeah. I’ll be so glad when this shit with Perry is done.” I hated that Season had to be gone because of Perry, but I also knew she wanted to stop in New Orleans to discuss wedding plans with her mother Nadine and Mama Claree, her fortune-telling, voodoo priestess grandmother. “I wish they could give him the chair.”

“They don’t give the death penalty for embezzlement.” Randy was becoming all too well averse in legal jargon himself. “But they should put him away for a while.”

“Just as long as he leaves us alone, that’s all I care about,” I said, slowing down the treadmill even more. “If I see him again, I’ll probably kill him.”
            “Did he really put out a cigarette on her arm?”
            “Yes, the little bastard. And she didn’t even tell me. It was after we left Vancouver.”

Randy frowned. “Asshole.”

For a moment I tried not to be suspicious of his concern for my fiancée, knowing that he’d passed up her original advances on him when Rampage first joined our tour in Atlantic City last June.  He’s turned her down out of respect for me, the one who’d fallen in love with her just from one glimpse at her album cover - the black and white photo depicting the most gorgeous female I’d ever seen…the one that made me a horny, nervous psycho for about a month. I had to marry her, just so I could function as a normal human being.

He took a swig out of the water bottle and wiped his chin with his forearm. “You sure you wanna get married so soon?”
            I shut off the treadmill, exhausted. “Why wait?”

Randy shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a big step.” He kept talking as I reached for a towel and tried to catch my breath. “This is being with only one woman for the rest of your life.” He added with a wink, “No more groupies.”

“I gave that up months ago,” I reminded him. “Look what I got in its place.” I took the bandanna off the top of my head and wiped the towel through my hair.

“Why don’t you just wear a ponytail?” he asked, fidgeting and taking the rubber band from his own brown mane. He looked like he was going to need a cigarette soon.

“I look shitty with a ponytail.” I tossed the towel over my shoulder, placing the bandanna back on my head like a skullcap. “Season thinks this looks cool.”

The guitar hero shook his head, stepping away from the wall, more than ready to step outside and burn one. “Season thinks, Season says, Season does this, Season does that…is there ever a time when you don’t talk about her?”

I grinned, which I hadn’t been able to stop doing since she’d said yes in front of thousands of fans at our closing show in L.A. “Can you really blame me?”

“No, I guess I can’t.” He hoisted his bag over his shoulder, and started to speak in reference to the Canadian dates we were going back to make up after they were cancelled in August. “But y’know, you’ve never done Canadian girls.”

“Correction,” I said quickly, checking my face in the mirror before we went outside where we knew some fans were milling around in the parking lot. “When my grandmother was still living in Vancouver, she had a neighbor named Michelle who used to pick up the mail when she was out of town.”

“Oh? You never told me about this one.”

I probably didn’t need to start talking about my previous sexual encounters since my girlfriend wouldn’t be home for another twenty-eight hours, but rolling around with a hot blonde underneath an oak tree in my grandmother’s secluded backyard on a Saturday afternoon was a pretty cool memory…

Speaking of hot blondes…

“My, you worked up a sweat.”

The girl behind the reception desk was more than friendly as we started toward the front entrance. She looked like your typical blonde who worked at a gym, well put-together and relatively pretty. Randy nudged me, and I nudged back. He glanced at me, confused, expecting me to turn on my usual flirtatious charm, which had slowly been disappearing around other women at an alarming rate.

When I didn’t answer her, he took over. “Gotta keep the image up.”

She ignored him and eyed me up and down. “Aren’t you getting married soon?”

I reached into my bag for my sunglasses. “Next month.”

“Oh.” That information didn’t seem to disappoint her. “Well, y’know, if you’re interested in living it up before you’re tied down…” She pushed her business card across the counter, leaning forward somewhat and offering a flash of her abundant cleavage. “That’s my home number on the back.”

“Thanks.” Being polite, I took the card, and handed it to Randy. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

Her eyebrows perked up at the word “we.” She looked from Randy to me and back again. “That sounds interesting.” She winked at me. “See ya next week.”

I headed for the door, anxious to get out of there before I had an urge to do something stupid. Randy put on his own pair of shades and instantly had his smokes and a zebra-striped Zippo lighter in his hands. 

“You sure you don’t want one last hurrah before you concede the ball and chain?”

Another memory flashed through my mind: a vision of the two of us taking turns with a girl at a party in LA about two years ago, the only time I’d ever been involved in that type of threesome. It was exactly why I was ready to get out of the gym…I doubted I’d ever do that again…unless…

Okay, stop now, before you get your ass in trouble.

No. I was done with that. “As long as Season’s on the other end of the chain, I concede to that all day.”

A small group of fans were standing outside, held back by Clarence Stewart, aka “The Thundering Thor,” our band’s head bodyguard. How people even knew Randy and I were at the gym was a mystery but the local fan club seemed to be able to find out where we were all the time when we were in Phoenix. Luckily, none of them had found our homes…

We stopped to sign some autographs, and I was bombarded with questions.

“Are you sure you wanna marry Season?” asked one girl, blonde, about fifteen.

I grinned. “Afraid so.”
            “You need to marry me first!” called out another, brunette, about nineteen. Had nice…don’t look, don’t look…

“I’ll have to clear that with her,” I joked.

Randy feigned disappointment. “Doesn’t anybody wanna marry me?”

A stray voice, somewhere from the middle of the group. “I’ll marry you, Randy!”

Clarence, dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans, a walkie-talkie strapped onto his belt, steered us toward a Bronco. “Come on, guys.”

Randy stared at me.

“What?”

“Nobody pays attention to the rest of us anymore,” he said good-naturedly, climbing into the back seat beside me. “All they ask about is you.”

“That’ll wear off.” I strapped on my seatbelt. “Once I’m an old married guy.”

He disagreed. “Look who you’re marrying. The press will be all over you two forever.”

Back in the present, Season finished her breakfast. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” The conversation that followed after leaving the gym yesterday bothered me. I worried about the extra press and how it would affect the bands, both hers and mine. She and I had been all over the media since my proposal, and every time Tarax did a promotional event or an interview, reporters made a beeline to me to ask about her, and the more I tried to downplay it the more they needled me. Steve was already pissed about the whole thing…as far as she and I were concerned, I just wanted to be able to keep our personal life as “normal” as possible. It wasn’t going to be easy…

I could’ve stewed about it longer, but as she leaned across the island and grabbed another strawberry, the shirt she was wearing slipped off one shoulder and revealed the swell of one naked breast. I suddenly had other things on my mind.

I stood.  “You ready for round two?”
            She giggled. “Round two?  Don’t you mean five or six?”

I circled the island, reaching for her as she turned to face me. “I can go for ten…eleven…even with the glasses on.” I opened the only four buttons that were fastened on her, my, shirt, and spread my hands over her body underneath. She touched my face, slowly pulling off the glasses.

“You get too excited,” she whispered, kissing my chin. “I wouldn’t want you to break them.”

I kissed her mouth, cupped my hands around her bare bottom, and lifted her onto the counter, leaning her backwards and pushing dishes out of the way. A glass fell onto the brick floor and shattered.

“Oops,” I laughed. “I guess I’ll be breaking other things instead.”

She laughed with me, her arms encircling my neck, the glasses still firm in her grip. “Let’s just hope we get new dishes as a wedding present.”

I sucked at her earlobe and unbuttoned my jeans. “Who needs dishes?”

We did little else that day besides lay around in bed, and other areas of the house, doing things to each other. She did demand a different kind of dance lesson at one point in the afternoon.

“You’re got to be kidding.” I was lying on the couch in the living room, my jeans on but the fly undone. I had a feeling I’d probably never be fully dressed in her presence ever again. She was straddled across my lap, still wearing the blue and white striped shirt, the first piece of clothing she’d ever completely removed from my body the first time we made love in Dallas last July, after an argument that I thought would destroy what little we had between us at the time.

“Your mother will expect us to dance at our reception.” She ran her fingers through the minimal patch of light brown hair on my chest, tracing a trail down to the middle of my stomach. 

Damn. I never knew how many times I was capable of getting an erection in just one day. 

“Oh, we’ll dance all right,” I said, squeezing her firm thighs in my hands. “But not like she’ll expect us to.”

She laughed. “Oh, come on. I got a feeling I’m gonna need to know this stuff if I’m gonna be a good daughter-in-law.”
            “That fact you’re brave enough to marry her son ranks you quite high on the Francine-O-Meter.”

She leaned down and rubbed the tip of her nose against mine. “Please?”

I sighed, reaching down to the floor and putting the glasses back on. I don’t even know why I’d bothered to put them on today because they were coming off as often as my clothes were. “You’re delving into a whole new level of dork-dom here.”

“I don’t care. Because you’re my dork.” Season got up, taking my hands. “I watched you prance around onstage all summer. Now show me how to do it right.”

I rolled my eyes and groaned like an aggravated teenager, much like I did when my mother forced me to help her in her dance studio years before, when she needed some helpless young boy to practice with the young girls because they didn’t like dancing with the older men in the ballroom classes. “Do I have to?”

“Yes, you do. Come on.”

I led her into the dining room, where we pushed the table and chairs to one side so we could use the floor to ceiling windows as a mirror and we had enough room to maneuver. It was hard to get her to let me lead, her independent nature tough to break even on a dance floor, but I managed to teach her as many steps as I could remember.

“You’ve got to remember one thing though,” I warned her, as we tangoed across the hardwood floor. “You tell no one you know about this.”

“The guys know,” she said.

“And they respect the same secret,” I said. “If people find out I know how to do this shit, my reputation as a heavy metal bass-playing animal tough guy will be shot all to hell.”

“Well, where else would you learn to thrust your hips like you do?” She pressed her body closer, tightening her fingers around my right hand.

I smiled, dipped her backward, my left arm tight around her slender waist, one thigh tucked between her legs. “That’s a natural impulse.” And I was pretty certain she could tell what other natural impulse had just kicked in.

“Oh, really?”

Seconds later, we were naked again on top of the dining room table. “Oh, yeah.  Really.”