The High Notes: A Novel(5)

“They moved again. That guy can’t stay in one place for six months.”

When she was sixteen, they went to Austin, which Iris loved. Chip didn’t. It was too polished for him, with a university, and too sophisticated. He liked the dusty cowboy towns, which were more familiar. But the money was good in Austin, and Iris was finally looking more grown up, so seeing her perform in a bar wasn’t as shocking. They figured she was a college student. She was still small, but she was starting to look more mature.

Her act stayed as clean as it had been when she was twelve. It was all about her voice, and the songs, and more and more she performed the ones she’d written. She wrote the lyrics and the music, and the messages were strong. She could nail a ballad like no one else, sing some old Elvis songs, newer hits, and country when the audiences requested it. Fame hadn’t found her yet, but her talent dazzled everyone who heard her, and her father exploited her liberally.

Chip gave her pocket money, kept the rest and drank most of it. Sometimes she helped herself to some of the tips before he got his hands on them, but she never gave him a hard time. He was capable of some serious nastiness if he’d been drinking, and threatened to kick her ass. She grew up believing it was how most men behaved, with a few exceptions. She had no pie-in-the-sky dreams about wanting to buy expensive things. She would have just liked to stay in one place for a while. She had gone to eleven schools to get through high school. They stayed in Austin for nine months, the longest they’d been in any town. They spent a few months in Arizona, and then moved to Nevada for her senior year of high school. She got her high school diploma in a town fifty miles outside Las Vegas, after living in four towns before that.

There was a method to Chip’s madness. By Iris’s eighteenth birthday, he wanted to start booking her into nightclubs in Las Vegas and aim for the big time. Her beauty had reached full bloom by then. Her father had to keep a close eye that none of the men in the audience hassled her when she finished the set and left the stage. She wore simple clothes when she sang, usually black jeans and a black sweater, or a plain black dress, and she looked like an angel with her long blond hair, exquisite face, and big blue eyes. As always, she wanted to highlight the music and not herself. Chip was convinced that a good promoter would know what to do with the raw material and turn her into a star. She’d been singing in bars and roadside restaurants for six years by then.

Chip got his wish when two months after her eighteenth birthday, he booked her into a bar on a back street of Las Vegas, and a manager’s scout happened to hear her one night and gave Chip his card. The bar owner had pointed him toward Chip when the scout asked to speak to Iris after her performance. “Her father handles everything.”

The scout told Chip he worked for Billy Weston. Chip had never heard of Weston, and the scout told him his boss was always on the lookout for young talent. He recorded Iris with his cellphone that night, just to give Billy an idea of what he’d heard. Despite the poor quality of the recording, her voice soared, as it always did, straight up to the high notes. She’d taken some singing classes while she was in high school, and her delivery was more professional. Her voice had only gotten stronger as she matured. The high notes were easier for her than ever, and the songs she wrote were powerfully moving, with more sophisticated arrangements, all of which she did herself.

Chip called Billy Weston the next day, and he was waiting for his call. He promised to come and hear Iris himself. He came the next night and went crazy when he heard her, only spoke to Iris briefly, asked her a few questions about the material she sang, and made the deal with her father. Chip was only too happy to make the deal with Weston. As her self-appointed agent and manager, Chip cosigned a contract with Weston for five years for a touring deal on the road. Weston said he had groups touring all over the country. Chip didn’t bother to check him out. The money looked good to him. He told Iris about it when he got to the house where they’d rented rooms. He had cosigned for her as an opening act on national tours, with the possibility of being the main feature for the last two years, if Weston felt the audience’s receptivity and her performances warranted it. He made no solid promise to feature her, only to use her as an opener onstage before bigger bands. She was the teaser before the main event came on. He handled mid-range performers, and arranged tours to smaller cities around the country. He assured Chip verbally that her accommodations would be comfortable and she’d be treated well. He said the artists he represented were like his children and Iris would be one of them. Many of them were discovered on the road and went on to stardom from there. He didn’t mention any names, but his promises were good enough for Chip.

Chip all but forced her to sign the contract, since she was eighteen and had to sign too. It sounded like a hard life to her. And five years of touring sounded like a lifetime. It was the life she had been living for years, with even shorter stays. She wanted to stay in one place for a while, and was hoping to audition for some of the big casinos, but she needed an agent for that. Her father had no connections to get her in. Chip said this was the next big step to stardom.

She signed the contract with Billy Weston with some misgivings, but her father convinced her that this was a phase she’d have to go through, as an opening act. He said that everyone did it, and there was a one-sided escape clause, which would allow Weston to fire her if he chose to, but she couldn’t quit. She signed it, and left on her first tour a week later, in the Deep South. Weston hadn’t told them that they would travel from city to city in a beaten-up van with another unknown act, that she would have to go on whether sick or not, that they would drive for fifteen-and twenty-hour stretches between towns, crammed into the ancient van, with the stench of sweat and unwashed bodies, and often drunk and drugged-out musicians recovering from the night before. When they spent the night, they were booked into the cheapest motel in each town, or had to get in the van as soon as the equipment was loaded right after a performance, and drive straight through the night and the next day to reach the next spot an hour or two before they went on, with no time to rehearse. It was a grueling, brutal life, and they played in filthy third-rate venues. She worked for a relatively low salary, with an insignificant raise at the beginning of each year. She got a small portion of each check to spend, the rest was sent to her father, as Chip had arranged, so he could save it for her.