The High Notes: A Novel(7)

She had lunch with her father the next day. He was living with a woman he had recently met, who was a stripper in a second-rate bar off the Strip. She told him about meeting Earl Drake, she had no one else to talk to. She had long since lost faith in her father, and neither trusted nor respected him, but he was the only living relative she had, and he had an opinion about everything. Once in a great while he was right. He offered to make the deal for her, and she looked at him and almost laughed, except that it wasn’t funny.

“Yeah, and take ten percent off the top for yourself and spend the rest you were supposed to save for me, like you did last time, Dad?” She’d been eighteen then. She was grown up now and knew better.

“I was acting as your agent,” he said righteously. “That’s what agents get. I could have taken twenty.”

“You spent the rest,” she reminded him. “All of it. You cashed the checks, you told me so yourself.”

“I never lie to you. I had some heavy expenses. And work’s not as easy to find as it used to be.”

“Maybe if you didn’t drink so much, you’d find work a little easier.” He’d lost a number of jobs because of his drinking.

Chip encouraged her to sign on with Hendrix. She’d save some money, since he had blown all of hers, and he said he’d heard Hendrix was a class act. Iris doubted it. Her father wouldn’t know a class act if he saw one. She thought of calling Earl Drake, but she didn’t want to.

She asked some of the musicians she knew what they’d heard about Glen Hendrix, and some of them said he was okay. He organized domestic tours in the United States and some in Europe and Asia, and she might get opportunities that she wouldn’t otherwise. After five years on the road to every miserable small town in America for Weston, she wasn’t enthused. The contracts were long, and some performers didn’t stick it out for all of it and just disappeared, but most were intimidated enough to stay until the end, which gave tour managers a flock of long-term slaves to exploit and keep their tours moving.

But the job at the bar ended, the good casinos had no openings, and she had no way in, and no money. After two months of waitressing and doing odd jobs, she called Earl Drake and signed with Glen Hendrix, for another five-year contract, at a better rate than she’d had from Weston. Hendrix only wanted her to be an opening act for six months, until she proved herself, and then she would be a featured act, with a backup band he’d provide for her. It sounded hopeful, and she told her father about it when he dropped by the restaurant where she was still working as a waitress until she left on tour. She sat down with him during a break for a cup of coffee, and he ordered a beer, as usual. He started drinking beer at breakfast, and added a whiskey chaser to it at night, as he always did.

He was stunned to hear that she had signed a contract without him, and even more so that she had her own bank account, which he had no access to.

“I’m still your agent,” he reminded her.

“Not anymore, Dad. Those days are over. I can’t afford to have you clean me out again, while I work my ass off on tour.” Her face was still innocent, but her eyes were wise now. She’d learned a lot about life in five years on tour.

“I started you on your career,” he said, instantly irate. “You’d be nothing without me. You owe me big-time for that. I’ve been your manager for eleven years, and now you’re trying to screw me!”

“You’ve got it ass backwards, Dad,” she said quietly, not wanting to make a scene at the restaurant. “You screwed me out of every paycheck for the last five years. You never even gave me my tip money when I worked at Harry’s when I was twelve.”

“We needed that so we could eat,” he said, indignant.

“And so you could drink,” she said under her breath, and he looked at her in a fury. He’d been counting on cashing in on her next job, and if she went on tour. He needed the money. He always did. He had sold his truck and was even driving the car of the stripper he was living with.

“Are you going to give me a percentage of what Hendrix is paying you?” He put it to her bluntly, and he forced her to be equally so.

“I can’t, Dad. You’re not my manager or my agent. You’re just my father, and you’ve been cashing in on me since I was twelve. I’m twenty-three, and I don’t have a penny to my name. I need to save something to live on when I finish touring for Hendrix. I can’t come home to an empty bank account again.”

“And how am I supposed to live?” he said, outraged.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to figure it out, and do what you always did, get a job here and there. He’s not paying me that much, and I need it too.” The concept that he should be taking care of her was totally foreign to him. He barely fed her when she was a kid, he never bought anything for her, except old clothes at a garage sale or Goodwill. Harry and Pearl and Sally had been better to her than her own father had ever been.

“So that’s it? You’re cutting me out? You set up your own bank account and you think you’re hot shit?”

“I’m twenty-three, Dad. I’m an adult,” she said. He left no doubt in her mind that his only interest in her was in exploiting her, as he had for half her life. He had made her sing for her supper, literally, nearly all her life, and he wanted it to continue forever, and thought she owed him that.