The High Notes: A Novel(9)

“Have you been to Seattle yet?” Pattie asked her, and Iris shook her head.

“We never toured there, I was with Billy Weston before.”

“The child abuser,” Pattie said with a grin. “I hear he hires teenagers, works them to the bone, and treats them like shit.”

Iris laughed at the description. “That’s about right. I was eighteen. Supposedly Hendrix does better quality tours,” she said, and Pattie looked cynical.

“Don’t count on it. They’re not the worst in the business, but they’re not great either. None of these guys treat their performers right. They milk us for everything they can get, and make a bunch of money off us, and pay as little as they can get away with, while they have us loaded into vans all year, driving all day and night.”

“Yeah, I thought we were getting a night in the hotel before we go on tomorrow night.”

“Not likely,” Pattie said knowingly. “We’ll get a few hours before we have to set up and rehearse.” She had brought a pillow and a blanket so she could sleep on the trip. “We do country, what do you do?” Pattie asked. The two women had formed a bond as soon as they started talking. Iris liked Pattie immediately. There was something vulnerable and sweet about her, despite the hard-looking makeup. Physically, she was the opposite of Iris. She was tall, with a sexy, sensual body, with her dyed black hair. She was very theatrical looking, but normal when you talked to her. She was knitting a sweater for her son while they drove. The two men in front were talking in low voices, and the two men in the backseat were sleeping. They were all about the same age, older than Iris. “So what do you sing?” Pattie asked her again.

“Just about anything. Usually, a lot of hits, some Elvis, some Dolly Parton, Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift, old favorites, and a lot of material I write myself. Sometimes I do gospel if the mood is right. It depends on the place and the crowd and where we are. I try to tailor it to the audience.”

“A couple of my guys are playing backup for you. They’re good,” Pattie assured her.

The drive was long and boring through Nevada, and they drove north toward Oregon. The trees were tall and thick by then, and the air cooler. It was a pretty drive, and tedious, as the boys took turns at the wheel. They stopped at a truck stop to buy sandwiches for lunch, and ate them as they drove, and stopped again at dinnertime, and had burgers, as Iris realized she had just signed on for five more years of fast food.

By the time they got to Seattle at two-thirty in the morning, it was raining, and they were all exhausted.

They checked in to the hotel they’d been assigned to, and slept two to a room. Pattie had slept on the way, but Iris hadn’t. She was grateful to fall onto her bed, and was asleep before Pattie came out of the bathroom in her pajamas. Iris was dead to the world. They had left all their sound equipment in the van, and would unload it at the venue that afternoon. They had agreed to meet up again at noon.

When Iris woke up in the morning, Pattie was already dressed and had her makeup on, and had been to Starbucks. She handed Iris a cup of coffee, which she took gratefully and sipped it. It was still steaming hot. It was nice to wake up feeling like she had a friend. Pattie said she had gotten up at five to FaceTime with her son before he went to school in Biloxi.

“He sees more of me on FaceTime than he does in real life. I go home between tours, but it’s so little time. I keep telling him I’ll come home to stay one of these days, but I don’t know if I ever will. I make more doing this than I would working at 7-Eleven, making Slurpees. You gotta do what you gotta do, especially when you have a kid. I used to think I’d be a big star one day, now I’d be glad with a job at a nightclub in Vegas, but you’ve got to know someone to get those jobs.”

“I know, I’ve tried. They put you on a waiting list, and you never hear from them again. I think it would work better if you had an agent, but I don’t,” Iris said simply, drinking her coffee. “I don’t want to tour forever,” she admitted.

“Neither do I, but braces for my kid, piano lessons, doctors’ bills for my mom, new brakes for her car…and I sign up for another round of tours. Real life is a bitch, but at least I have my son. I have no regrets about that, even if his dad was an asshole. My Jimmy is the sweetest kid.” She had shown Iris pictures of him on her phone the day before, in the first hour they met. He was a beautiful little boy.

“I don’t have that excuse for being here,” Iris said, “but I couldn’t get any other job singing and it’s all I want to do. I’m not ready to give up.”

“You’re right. At your age, I didn’t want to either. Now with a kid, I’m torn. Sometimes I think I should quit and go home. I’ve got another three years in my contract, we’ll see where things are then. If I got a steady job in Vegas, I could bring Jimmy and my mom out to live there, but I haven’t found a regular job in Vegas yet. I don’t know if I ever will.”

“What about Nashville?” Iris asked her.

“It’s a thought. I don’t know if I want to live that close to my ex.”

They left for the concert venue to set up and rehearse at eleven-thirty, with their clothes for the performance, since they wouldn’t have time to come back, and they’d been told they’d have a dressing room. The hotel had been clean and decent, with no frills, but the sheets were clean and there were no rats or cockroaches, which they had both experienced before on tour. When they got to the concert hall, while the boys unloaded the equipment from the van, Pattie and Iris went to check out the dressing rooms. They were tiny, but big enough to change in. Sometimes they weren’t.