Chapter 4 Saturday, September 14

PHOENIX, AZ

Saturday, September 14

            I was still awake at three a.m., lying on my back on soft sheets, staring at the dark lines of shadow on the ceiling, soft female skin lining the left side of my body, gentle fingers toying with my chest hair. She may have administered her discipline outside, but up here in the “love loft,” the master of the house was back in charge, only after he’d been ridden like a bleeding racehorse.

            I’d dozed off at one point, but was easily awakened by her restlessness, and I knew exactly what was keeping her awake. For all her worldliness in dealing with Renata, she still had a lot on her mind.

            “Did you like her?” she asked. “Since you did see her again?”

            I took a deep breath before I answered. “Sort of.”

            She threw me a questioning look. “Sort of?”

            I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “She had a way of…screwing things up. Stretching the truth or just down and out lying to get what she wanted. I found that out the hard way.”

            She propped herself on one elbow. “What happened?”

            As much as I didn’t want to, I had to come clean on my former “girlfriends,” but only one at a time. I tried to remember…my trysts were always in relation to where the band was booked in whatever club’s rotation…

            “The second time I saw her was about six weeks later, when we were back at the Mustang.”

            “She came back, of course.” She spread her palm over my stomach. “Which Rush song did you play this time?”

            I laughed. “No Rush. She was SOL on that one.” I yawned, tucking my right arm under my head. “Terry didn’t want Neil Peart hunting him down.”

            “That would have been interesting. Did she come after you again, or were you looking for her?”

            “I don’t think I would’ve even remembered her if the guys hadn’t bugged me about it,” I said. “But she was there. And I wasn’t interested in dealing with her again, and I think she knew that. It just made her more…persistent.”

            “She said you were a challenge.” Season took a strand of my hair in her fingers and smoothed it over my collarbone.

            “She what?” I rolled my eyes. “That sounds about right. She always was one to just walk up and volunteer useless information.”

            “Oh, I thought it was pretty useful.” Season ran a finger down my chin, and though I loved the touch, I still thought this whole situation was ridiculous. But I’d started the story and knew I had to finish it.

            “It was one of those incidents men don’t ever like to be in,” I went on, “when you’ve got some woman who won’t take no for an answer, nor will she allow you the opportunity to leave with anyone else because she’s always butting in. At that age, I had no idea how to handle it.” I explained Renata’s connection with Marty the club owner, and how she was able to put me between a rock and a hard place, telling me how she was responsible for our second booking there, how if I stuck with her, we’d be able to get another, it would prep us for L.A., blah, blah, blah…

            “I guess you could say I was the gig whore,” I joked. “If I slept with the right people, I got us gigs.”

            She laughed. “I figured that was Steve’s job.”

            “No, no. I’m the “quality pussy man,” remember? My screwing around had a purpose. Steve was just getting laid. With anybody.”

            She laughed again, tucking her head back into the crook of my left arm. “So what happened?”

            “I drove her home that second night. After load-out.”

            “So how was it?”

            Did I really have to answer that? At that time, Renata didn’t know whether to choose gynecology or urology, (yes, that wasn’t just a joke she’d made up), so she knew a lot about sex organs…especially the male. She could touch places that I didn’t even know existed when I was nineteen. Oh, wait, I was twenty by then and…well, that’s another story.

            “It was good,” was all I said.

            Season raised her head. “Just good?”

            “Well, okay,” I relented. “It was…actually pretty awesome.”

            “But not as awesome as me?” she teased.

            “Oh, no, baby, not as awesome as you.” I ran my fingers between her shoulder blades and kissed the top of her head.  “No one was ever as awesome as you.”

            “You’re just saying that because you just bought me a car.”

            I laughed. “Get real.”

            “You still went back for more, though.”

            She wasn’t gonna let me out of this story until the complete finish. The rest of the story wasn’t so awesome. Those last few months in Phoenix were almost like a sexual awakening for me, which had started with my twentieth birthday, two weeks after the Rush incident. During those two weeks I’d been celibate, fending off women so I could concentrate on the band, so the guys got the bright idea to set me up with two girls as a birthday gift. Ah, my first threesome.  And one of those women actually stuck around the rest of the following week until we got bored with each other. The other had a boyfriend, and thank God I never ran into him. After that I had a girl in every club we played, and we gigged every weekend, rotating through about eight clubs in four cities. I had a guaranteed lay in every town. So for about five months, I got laid a lot. And once we were in L.A., well…

            I was not known as a womanizer. Steve had the franchise on that, because he’d sleep with anything that had two legs, and he intentionally sought them out, one after the other. I never went to a gig, or a party, or anywhere else for that matter, with the intention of getting lucky every time. I had a “take it or leave it” attitude: if I saw a girl that was interesting, and she was interested in me, then yeah, okay. If not, I was just as content to go home alone. That way I didn’t have to worry about waking up somewhere I probably shouldn’t have been anyway, or trying to find a way to get out before she woke up. And even my need to escape didn’t really surface until after I’d had to deal with Renata that one last time.

            “Renata considered herself my date every time we played the Mustang,” I explained. “But the last time we were booked there, I’d actually brought someone else.” I hated telling that story, because it always made me out to be the bad guy. But I knew exactly who the real villain was. Plus, I’d ended up wrecking my 280Z after that.

            “Renata’s a bitch,” I said at last.

            “You drove your car into a tree?”

            I was shocked. I usually don’t think of my only major car accident as a vital issue. All I could remember was how awful I felt that day before I’d hit my head on the windshield, and how pissed I was that I’d lost a vehicle and my insurance had gone up.

            “Totaled it.”  

            She was still staring at me, concerned. “Did you intend to drive your car into a tree?”

            I was confused at first, then I remembered what I’d done last summer, downing whiskey and Percodan to shut off the horrible feelings of dread and helplessness that ran non-stop through my brain. 

“No,” I said. “I was driving too fast on Shea Boulevard and lost control of the wheel. The officer who ticketed me said if I hadn’t been wearing my seatbelt…” My voice trailed off. I hadn’t thought about that wreck in years. I’d come away with a slight concussion and a small scar on my right temple. The car, not one of my favorites anyway because the transmission went out most of the time, was toast. I’d driven out of Scottsdale, feeling my heart shrivel with every passing mile, and I pressed down on the accelerator a little bit more, going sixty, seventy, almost eighty…

Contrary to what everyone thinks…Dr. Ratcliff, Season, my parents…I am not suicidal.

And the Pope’s a Buddhist, some other voice inside my head whispered. The voice that had a French-Canadian accent and belonged to a wiry, little bald man who nearly died of an overdose himself.

My grandfather.

I shook off the fear that started creeping into my psyche. “I was just careless.”

Season stroked my hair, much like Sara, the girl in the story, had done all those years ago. “What happened to her? To Sara? Did you ever see her again?”

In other words, was she going to turn up at one point or another? 

“I don’t know, and no, I never saw her again,” I said. “We left for L.A. that next week, actually earlier than we’d planned.” We didn’t want to leave until the end of June, but after I wrecked the car and Renata wrecked my personal life, I took that as a sign to move on. The band was awesome at that point, and we were ready to take on the world.

And we did, more than we’d ever dreamed, and there was still more yet to come.  I could feel it.

But I wasn’t worried about the band so much right now. We were leaving for Canada on Sunday, then New York, then I was getting married.

I looked up at her, stroking the back of my hand against her cheek. Suddenly I was glad Renata Collins was such a bitch and that I didn’t get too involved with Sara McMahon. Then I wouldn’t have this…the woman who’d saved my life, and would probably be able to keep me from driving my car into a tree. 

“I am sorry about Renata,” I said, thinking of how history could repeat itself, even though Season had more self-esteem and our relationship was so much more solid. “I really didn’t think I’d ever see her again. Much less with you by my side.”

“I know her type.” Season looked toward the window, where the light of dawn was about to creep through the drapes. “She’s just…jealous.” She looked at me strangely then, and I could almost read her mind. How many more are there, Jon? And what will they say?           

I didn’t want to ask, but what Terry said about waiting until after the tour was over bothered me. I knew what I wanted and I had a tendency to dive right in to things when I felt there wasn’t anything standing in my way…now that Perry was gone and…

“Do you think we’re getting married too soon?”

She spread her hand over my chest again, not answering right away. I felt a nervous knot growing in my stomach.

“Season?”

I thought of what happened tonight, and what happened weeks ago in Las Vegas, and in L.A., when she’d been so upset, with me, with everything, with nothing…I thought of how I felt right after the proposal. How I loved her and wanted her with me every day. How I missed her when she left that following Sunday, flying first to San Francisco, then Atlanta, then New Orleans. We’d talked on the phone every day, and I’d spent every waking moment scheming, trying to find a way to get us married as soon as possible. I thought of the conversation from her mother’s shop in New Orleans, how I had the date set and wanted to have the ceremony at the house and calling my dad to keep the airspace free so nosy photographers in helicopters wouldn’t fly over the backyard and screw up everything. I wanted everything to be perfect, because she was.

And when I saw her, standing next to that mixing board at rehearsal three days ago, I knew for once that I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t imagining things, I wasn’t making a mistake. I was positive this was the right thing to do.

But had I really stopped to consider what she wanted? I knew what I wanted for her…and for myself…if we needed to wait, we had less than a month to figure it out.

“If you think we are, you need to tell me now.”

She looked directly into my eyes then, and I felt completely and utterly helpless, almost like I did the morning of that car accident.

“No,” she finally said. “I don’t think we’re getting married too soon.”

I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath. I sucked in air and felt dizzy for a second. Thank God. 

I reached up with both hands to hold her face. “I can’t let you get away from me,” I said, my voice suddenly raw with emotion. “I don’t think you understand how…” I struggled to find the right word, and laughed inwardly about how the guy who always knew the right thing to say at the right time seemed to lose the ability to do just that every time he looked into Season Trovisar’s eyes. She could reduce me to a blithering idiot with one glance.

“Three years ago all I could think about was me, what I wanted, and I have more than I could have ever hoped for. I could lose it all tomorrow and I’d probably still be okay, but if I didn’t have you it wouldn’t mean shit to me.”

Her eyes began to well up with tears, and I hoped they were of joy. 

“I did some stupid things in the past and I’m sure I hurt a lot of people, but I’ll do everything I possibly can to make you happy. And I’m not letting anyone or anything get in my way. Not managers, or former girlfriends, or anything else.”

She kissed me, and I spent the next hour showing her some of the things I learned from my early club days, and still didn’t have to emulate Geddy Lee.

My mother called around one p.m.

“Jonathon Allan.”

Urg…I cringed. To the end of my days, hearing my full name coming out of my mother’s mouth will always get on my nerves.

“Mother.”

“You didn’t call to let me know if Season got home okay.” Francine, the former stripper turned dance instructor from hell, was in fine form today. “How is she?”

“She’s fine, Mom.” Notice she didn’t ask how I was doing? But then again, she’d called almost every day since the U.S. leg of the tour ended. She knew I was “business as usual.”

“Were you home Thursday?”

Yes, and I was having sex all day. I didn’t need your input for that. “No,” I lied.

“Where were you?”

Season walked into the kitchen, dressed in jeans and one of her band’s concert t-shirts. She stopped to give me a kiss on the cheek as she passed, then reached into the cabinet to take out a coffee cup. She was barefooted. I almost hung up.

“Out,” I said.

Season shook her head and whispered. “That must be your mother.”

I made some kind of face. Season was getting used to my love-hate relationship with the woman who bore me, and most assuredly recognized the tone that crept into my voice when I spoke to her. I loved my mother, and had been able to lay some of my issues with her to rest over the summer, but there were times when I still felt like she was a frightful nag.

“Be nice.” Season poured a cup of New Orleans-style coffee into her mug and sauntered out to the deck. I sighed, watching her hips sway side to side.

“Did you get your wedding rings?” my mother asked via Ma Bell.

“Yeah, Terry has them.”

I heard Francine sniff disapprovingly. “You think you can trust him not to lose them?”

“If he does, I’ll kick his ass,” I replied. I tucked the receiver into my shoulder and reached for my tour schedule on the work island.

“Did she like the car?”

“Loves the car.” Damn, I thought, not really paying attention to her but poring over the tour schedule. We wouldn’t have time to breathe on this Canadian stint…maybe the week would go by quick.

“Jonathon, are you sure you want to get married in October?”

Godammit. What was with everybody?

“Mom…” I pinched the bridge of my nose.

“There’s nothing wrong with a long engagement,” she went on, and I heard her exhale. Either she was smoking or breathing fire. Like a dragon. “You’re both so busy, and she’s got that trial with her manager…”

“She doesn’t have to go to the trial now,” I informed her. “They have her deposition and the case the record company has is pretty much gonna put him away.” The call from Barry had come yesterday afternoon, right after we’d gotten rid of Terry and tried out the back seat of the Blazer. Season did not have to go back to San Francisco on the first of October. We’d have two full weeks together before the wedding.

“That’s great, cherie. But don’t you want to give yourselves some more time?”

“We don’t have more time,” I said. “All we’ve got is right now.”

“I worry about how you’ll be away from each other for so long, and so soon…”
            “Mom.” I was going to put a stop to this argument once and for all, at least with my mother. “You married Frankie Lesko less than six weeks after you met him. He was going to war.”

She paused, and I heard more fire-breathing. “It wasn’t really a war, then.”

“But you did it,” I said. “And then you knew you were gonna have me.”

Silence.

“And you never saw him again.”

A long, heavy expulsion of air erupted through the receiver. I felt guilty then, knowing how tough that really must have been for her. They’d only been married for about six months. But she had her own hero to rush in and save the day.

“You were lucky enough to have Dad after that,” I said. “I’m not so lucky. I don’t have a back-up plan.”

“She’s not pregnant, is she?”

I nearly dropped the phone. “No,” I said immediately, glancing over my shoulder to look at the woman in question, curled up in a deck chair, enjoying her coffee, looking as if she didn’t have a care in the world. How I wished every day of her life could be like that from this point on.

“That would change things considerably,” Mom said.

“She’s not pregnant,” I reiterated. Oh, God, she better not be…I thought about Bryon, how Nita’s pregnancy had been a major surprise.

“Have you thought about children?”

“No.” Negation seemed to be a big deal today. “We’re not ready for that.”

“You’re not ready to get married,” she said.

“Who ever is, Mom?” I asked, wanting to crumple the tour schedule in my hands because it represented everything she was talking about - being away from my fiancée for yet another week, and how being away just sucked.

She laughed. “You’re probably right, son.”

Holy cow! Something positive  “I want to do this, Mom…”
            “I know you do. And once your mind is made up, there’s no changing it.”

Could she be referring to my decision to quit college and be a professional musician? To run off to L.A. with a man-whore, a drunk, and a…drummer? ‘Picking up strange girls and even stranger habits,’ as she put it?

“You should probably consider her father’s decision to get married in the church,” she said.

“It wasn’t her father, it was her father’s mother,” I said. 

“The voodoo queen?”

“No, that’s Nadine’s mother,” I amended, trying to sort out the Cooper family tree. “I haven’t even met the other grandmother.” I hadn’t met her father, either, the archeologist, the guy who hunted game in places like frickin’ Africa, the man who was due to drop by in the next few weeks with Season’s furniture. I rubbed my forehead and seriously considered eloping. “We’re getting married here, at the house, with just family, our closest friends, and that’s it.”

            “You should really take her family background into consideration…”
            “This is our wedding…”

            “These are your in-laws. You’ll always be an outsider.”

            Oh, now I get where this was coming from. My dad’s side of the family was never too keen on his choice of bride, an Air Force widow five months pregnant with his best friend’s child. A young girl with a questionable past, having worked at the Penthouse, a strip club in Vancouver, and a dancer in musicals before that. 

            Yes, we show business people are nothing but trouble.

            “Well, I have to go.” I sensed her stubbing out her cigarette and looking in the mirror next to the back door of her kitchen, making sure every hair was in place and her make-up wasn’t smudged. “I’m taking your grandmother shopping.”

            Thanks, Mamere. Get this woman off my back. It’s so nice to have grandmothers around. “I’ll talk to you later, Mom.” I was about to hang up, but as usual, Francine had the last word. 

            “You think long and hard about all this, Jonathon. Marriage is a serious commitment.”

            “Goodbye, Mom.”

            She was probably about to say something else, but “Jonathon” was definitely finished with this conversation.

            I strode out onto the deck. Why is it that on such a gorgeous day I had to deal with my mother?

            “How’s Mom?” Season sat cross-legged in the lounge chair, cradling her mug in her lap.

            “You’re already calling her that?” I leaned on the deck railing, standing almost in the same spot I was last night when her “hot Asian girl” was performing her favorite oral pastime.

            “Your mother likes me,” she grinned, leaning backward. “She thinks I’m good for you.”

            Yes, you most definitely are. You’re barefooted and not wearing a bra. I fought back the urge to leap onto the lounger. “Yeah.”

            Strange. I had been in a good mood when I first got up over an hour ago. I probably needed some more sleep because I’d had very little since she got home.

            “What’s the matter?” Season sat up straight again, placing her feet on either side of her chair. Oh, but there’s a hole in those jeans…right near the inseam…

            I didn’t want to make the following announcement. “You can’t come with me to Canada.”

            She looked disappointed, just briefly. “I figured Barry wouldn’t let me. But it’s no big deal.”

            “I really wanted you to go,” I grumbled.

            She laughed. “Afraid you’ll do something you shouldn’t?”

            She was teasing, but with the crummy mood I was in, and after running into Navajo Sheena and having to recount one of the worst incidents in my love life…plus feeling tremendously guilty for things I should’ve been more prepared for…

“You don’t trust me?”

            Season blinked in surprise. I hadn’t meant for that question to come out quite as harshly as it did. I figured she was about to ask me if I’d taken my Elavil this morning, but she didn’t. And I didn’t. Take my meds, that is. I’d probably better go do that…

            “I didn’t say that,” she answered, frowning. She nervously played her thumbs across the handle of the coffee mug, and tried to change the subject. “Aren’t you looking forward to playing again?”

            I didn’t answer for a while. “No. I don’t wanna go do this.”

            She sighed heavily and stood up. “Are you back to that again?”

            Shit. My day just went from bad to worse. “Back to what again?”

            “Moping because you have to go back out on the road,” she said. “It’s your job.”

            I crossed my arms on my chest and looked away from her, trying hard not to relive yet another shitty moment from my past. One that started with the same comments and ended rather badly.

            “And it’s only for a week.” Her voice softened somewhat. She was learning the hard way how to deal with my up and down, prickly demeanor. “I can get a lot done while you’re gone. You won’t have to worry about the wedding for awhile because I’ll be here to take care of everything.”

            I hung my head, knowing she was right. I just didn’t want to be away from her anymore. Jesus, what was I going to be like for those four months starting in November? This was going to be a real picnic, I could already tell.

            “I’m sorry,” I said. “Barry said you may get to come to New York with us, though.”

            “Well, then.” She walked closer to me. “That’ll be more fun anyway. I’ll get to see you on Saturday Night Live.”

            I just nodded. “Yeah.”

            “You think they’ll ask you guys to be in a skit?” She slid her hands under my shirt. “Terry would be hilarious.”

            “True.” I was still staring at the floorboards of the patio, feeling…everything that had nothing to do with hilarity.

            She kissed my neck, moving her hands over my back. “I’ll be alright here by myself, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

            My tension eased somewhat. “You sure? There’re coyotes in the woods over there.”

            “And snakes?” She pressed her pelvis into the lower half of my body.

            I laughed then. “No, the local diamondback will be touring the Great White North.”

            “He’ll be sorely missed.”

            “He’d better be.” I placed both hands around her neck, pressing my forehead to her cheek. “I just wanted you to be there.”

            “I can’t always be there,” she whispered, still feeling me up underneath my shirt. “We’re going to have to get used to that.”

            I pulled her close to me, holding her like a life preserver. “I know.”