Page 29 of Beneath the Stain
By one o’clock the four members of Outbreak Monkey were about done. They’d sat in the control room of the record studio and listened to more than ten lead guitarists, most of whom were better, skillwise, than Grant had ever been, but not one of whom looked like someone they could play with. Mackey had a headache that wouldn’t quit.
Gerry was there with two ibuprofen to help him out.
The next guy up was Blake Manning, sort of a whip-thin kid, not as small as Mackey, but with a gangly, liquid grace all his own. His hair was too long and not sculpted or trimmed, and he sported a scraggly goatee/beard hybrid that mostly looked like he couldn’t afford to shave. He was wearing pretty much what the Sanders boys had worn coming down to LA: worn jeans and a T-shirt from Walmart.
He opened with an acoustic version of “Backstabbing Betty,” and he wasn’t the most fluid of the guys who had played for them, but Kell grunted as he spat out the word “motherfucker,” and Mackey harmonized with him when he went into the high-pitched scream.
He finished playing, and the guys looked at each other.
“Him,” Kell said, and Mackey nodded, letting Kell know he approved.
Gerry grimaced. “Him? Eduardo, the guy before him, had faster fingers—”
“Feed this guy,” Mackey said decisively. “Feed him. Give him a stay in the hotel room. Let him practice with us tomorrow. We might not hate him.”
“Blake?” Gerry spoke into the microphone. “Could you meet us outside the sound booth, please?”
That night they stayed up late and talked, the boys and Blake and Gerry. Gerry brought them good liquor, Cuervo Gold and margarita mix, which they drank until two in the morning. Mackey didn’t say much—Kell did all the talking, really, but that was fine. Mackey didn’t have to love the guy, just had to be able to give him directions, and with Kell to translate, well, that would work. When it was time to pop up at 8:00 a.m., Gerry was there with the coffee and some ibuprofen for everybody, and when Mackey had to run outside to throw up from a combination of nerves and hangover and sadness for playing with someone who wasn’t Grant, he was there with the Xanax.
Blake, it turned out, had grown up in one of the tiny desert towns over the Grapevine. So close to LA and so far away? It had left him with the acrid ozone bitterness of the smog that never quite left. He fit right in with the boys from Tyson. He got Mackey’s jokes, but he was cynical like Kell. The second time they all went to Disneyland, Kell and Blake refused to go on the Haunted Mansion, and Mackey sat with Jeff and Stevie, listening to the secret murmur of their own language, jokes they got with half a word, references Mackey hadn’t been present to catch. He lost himself in the fantasy instead, but at the one curve of the ride, when the crystal ball was floating with the face of the fortune-teller encapsulated inside, for a moment, he didn’t see the fortune-teller at all. Instead he saw a long road, blank and white, and himself, a tiny black figure standing alone.
That night he had his first panic attack, shivering under the comforter on the floor by the bed. Kell yelled at him to quit his fucking whimpering, and Gerry showed up with a magic pill and a glass of water. Mackey slept after that, but the next morning, he needed more than coffee to wake up.
Gerry gave him that too.
By the time they were done cutting the album, Gerry had a tour booked with a kickoff performance in a club in LA with over a thousand people. Mackey refused the Xanax for that. The crowd was his place, his safe haven, his harbor, and he rode their applause—screaming applause, because after six weeks in the studio, every song they performed was diamond-cut perfection—for the rest of the night.
But they had to be up to fly to Chicago at four the next morning. He needed a little pick-me-up to haul his ass out of bed. Gerry wasn’t there—it was the guys stumbling around on their own, trying to figure out how to pack five times the clothes in the same amount of luggage—and Blake pulled out the tiny vial they’d seen him use sometimes when coffee wasn’t good enough for him either.
“Here,” he whispered to Mackey in the bathroom, as Kell swore up and down the damned room. “Just a little snort—all it does is wake you up, I promise.”
God, anything. Mackey couldn’t function this fucking tired, could he?
The powder burned the back of his nose and dripped into his throat.Pfaugh! World’snastiesttaste.Never again, Mackey vowed as he sat jittering on the plane, bouncing on his asscheeks alone, so high his heart rate had nowhere to go when the unfamiliar engine noise picked up, and he was lifted into the air for only the second time in his life.Never fucking doing this again.
By the time they got to Europe, Gerry had gotten him his own prescription for Xanax, and he went through ninety tabs a month. Blake could find a dealer in an igloo in Alaska if he needed to—he’d been living on the streets of LA for three years, bussing tables and mopping floors before he’d landed the gig with Outbreak Monkey—and he kept Mackey supplied. A little bump to wake him up, some Xanax to stop the shaking hands, some alcohol to help him sleep at night.
Their first night in London, Tailpipe held a contest. Twenty lucky winners got to come in and party with Outbreak Monkey and the band they opened for, Tiger Bright. By the time Mackey was done with the set, he was ready for a shot of vodka to calm him down. As he was kicking back the shot glass, he noticed the fans, who had all grouped by the catering tray and were timidly pecking at the little canapés and shit as the band talked about the set and who fucked up and could Blake maybe try to keep up with Kell and did Jeff really need to wear his new sunglasses on the stage?
He kicked back another shot of vodka and smiled at them tiredly. “You all enjoy the show?” he asked, because he needed to hear it.
“Yeah, Mr. Sanders,” said the bravest boy. He was maybe Mackey’s age, with a long face and a few blemishes still, and hair shaved on the side and spiked orange.
“Call me Mackey.” He winked then, and the boy blushed.
And opened his mouth slightly, and licked his lips.
Mackey shuddered. God. Heknewthat look.
At that moment, Tiger Bright came in and the fans got hyperactive, screaming and chattering among themselves, but the kid with the orange hair looked at Mackey and then darted his eyes toward the hallway leading to the bathroom.
Mackey—well, his body was flooded with alcohol and Xanax and the cocaine from that morning, and still high from the set, and all he could think was how good it would be, howgreatit would be, to get off, to be touched, to befucked.
He grinned—fuck-off-and-love-me—and sauntered by the fans. “You’d better have a rubber,” he whispered to orange-haired gangly boy with spots, right next to his ear.
The kid looked at him with predatory eyes and nodded.
Mackey wandered down the hall until he heard footsteps, and then he dodged into one of the dressing rooms they’d used before the show.
