Bullet(81)

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We made it through another holiday season, and the fans were still loving my new look. I didn’t regret it for a moment. That I was surviving some of the coldest months wearing that skimpy stuff was just short of miraculous, and I knew in the summer I’d appreciate it.

As a band, we were maturing and growing, much as I had imagined Clay’s band had. And, yeah…they had a contract with a major label and were getting ready to record a real album. My band? We started to sense each other, and I think my brazen move emboldened my bandmates to try new things. Ethan started doing weird guitar tricks onstage, always performed with more skill when he was sober, and the fans ate it up. And Brad—my most reliable second vocalist—started talking more. It started out just as the occasional thank you to fans, but he and I started joking around with each other…and before you knew it, the jokes became sexual in nature. At first, I’d gotten a sense that we shouldn’t, that any fandom earned because of my sex appeal would be lost if they imagined Brad as my guy, but it wasn’t like that, and I think it’s because our fans knew Brad and I were just teasing, just having fun. Brad and I had become close friends over the years. I respected and admired the man and his drive, and I knew he felt the same way about me. And as we noticed the fans loving the repartee, I relaxed and stopped worrying about the reception.

The problem? All that flirting we did in January and February just started to remind me of what a hot guy Brad was. We’d spent some breathtaking moments together in the past, and I’d never forget them. I think if we hadn’t had that past that my brain never would have gone there. We were still just “buddies” offstage like always, but Ethan hated the onstage antics. He never said a word, but I could see it in his eyes. The biggest problem with that was I knew it could potentially detract from the illusion. Or maybe that was part of what the audience liked about it—watching Ethan simmer and roll his eyes might have been funny.

In March at a concert, I sang “Happy Birthday” a capella to Brad, and I did it a la Marilyn-Monroe-singing-to-JFK. In the third line, I exchanged “Mr. President” for “Hot guitarist.” By the end we got a lot of cheers, but I could hear the girl fans going wild too. I even saw one girl in the audience lift up her shirt.

Once the noise died down, I heard a guy with a bass voice yell, “Whatcha gonna give him for his birthday?”

I cocked an eyebrow and smiled and then said, “I bet you’d like to know, but it’s not something we should talk about in public.” And then we went on to the next song.

And all that had done was make the flirting worse, because I’d actually seen how Brad looked at me when I sang him the modified Happy Birthday song. So it was starting to get to him too. And what drove that point home even more than the way he’d looked at me was the way it was starting to spill over into our personal lives. In fact, I’d known for a while that Brad had an occasional night away. He was a young man with needs and desires, but unlike the other three guys, he never brought them home. As I started paying more attention, I noticed that he hadn’t actually stayed the night elsewhere in months. What did that mean?

Well, I knew, but I chose to ignore it. Unlike the way I’d ultimately felt about sweet Clay, I thought Brad and I had a lot more in common, were a lot more compatible in a lot of ways, and I based that on the fact that we’d been friends and even roommates for a long while now. But Brad and I had made that agreement so long ago, that we wouldn’t f*ck up the band with a relationship.

Still…Ethan and I had gone there, and it hadn’t ruined the band.

No…but Ethan was so f*cked up that we all just worked around him, and his relationship with me had been just another one of those things. Something with Brad, though…that could be a potential wreck. Why? Because if we didn’t work out, one of us would be hurt. I was still young, and I believed it would be a bad idea, so I didn’t even want to try. And I got the feeling Brad felt the same way, that he didn’t want to even have the chance to hurt me, so he kept his distance.

Onstage, though, there was no stopping us.

One night in April, we had just finished a song, and someone threw a condom onstage and it hit me on the arm. It was still in its wrapper, and when I went to pick it up, I realized I had been showered with them. There were several on the stage around me. I said into the mike, “Glad to see you folks are practicing safe sex.”

Brad cozied up to his mike but looked over at me. “Not very safe if they’re throwing them up here instead of hanging onto them.”

Some guy in the audience that I couldn’t see yelled, “Let me at ‘em. You’ll never be the same, Valerie!”

Wow. That was huge…that a fan knew my name. That meant people were paying attention. They must have been logging into Facebook and also checking out the new website Nick had designed for us. They might have even been buying our CDs. So I smiled but was at a loss for words. Brad was still poised and ready, though, and didn’t hesitate. “Now why the hell would she want you when she’s got my sexy bod?” I started laughing as the women in the audience went wild, screaming and tittering. “And she’s never been the same sense.”

I regained my figurative footing and looked over at him, eyeing him up and down. Jesus Christ. Yeah, he had a beautiful body, and he was sexy as hell. If I hadn’t been on display, I might have sighed. Instead, I winked at him and finally grabbed onto some words. I waggled the condom package at him and said, “You know, Brad, I don’t think this would fit you anyway. You need the large size, right?”

He started laughing, and I knew no one in the audience could tell, but I actually made him blush. The screams from the girls died down and he said, “Hit it, guys.” Guys actually meant Nick, who’d have to lead us off with the beat. But the song started with Ethan on the guitar—Brad would join a little way in. Brad walked right over to me and took my face in his hands and laid a smoldering kiss on me. He caught me totally by surprise.

But I let him. And, aside from seeming like an even better kisser than he’d been before, it was as though no time had passed between us. He let go and started shredding on cue, and I doubt he or anyone else knew how he’d left me breathless. In fact, the effect he’d had on me was cool, because I usually belted the beginning of this particular song and all the way through, but instead I sang it low and breathy for the first verse, trying to get a hold of myself.

Maybe flirting with Brad onstage wasn’t such a good idea after all.





Chapter Thirty-five



BRAD WAS ONCE again working on something big, and that was a good idea. The energy was waning again, and I’m sure it was because most of our audiences were familiar with us. They knew our music—even when we threw in some new stuff—and had seen us enough that we weren’t exciting anymore. I figured if we were playing the same venues month after month, it was bound to happen. So Brad, once again, was looking to broaden our scope. He asked me if I could afford to work fewer hours at my job. I knew I could, especially if we continued to make more money playing gigs. He was going to branch out to other states then, but he knew we’d need extra time for travel. The band was my number one priority, I told him, so he could do what he needed to. My boss was a bit of a pain, but I could always trade shifts with coworkers when I needed to, and he wouldn’t say shit about it.

But Brad, as usual, played band manager too and arranged a four-day multi-state tour much like we had done the year before. This one would be in July, and the first show would be in Nebraska, the last in Texas. We’d leave a day before to get there. Brad also managed to get three other bands to join.

In the meantime, Brad too was feeling our audience’s lethargy and started taking us out of the Denver Metro area into other Colorado venues. Again, though, it meant more travel, but it was nice to be exposed to new audiences and new energy. It did mean we were spending more money on gas, but our merch revenues went up again, so it seemed to pay for itself. Brad was socking away money for that professional-sounding EP, and I knew he was getting us closer, but we’d never get there playing the same old places, no matter how much our audiences loved us.

“Wanna go see Fully Automatic again?” I imagined one of our audience members saying.

“No, we just saw them last month and the month before. Let’s go to the movies instead.”

We wanted to be something people relished and looked forward to, and if they were tired of us, it would never happen. Yeah, sure, we had some hardcore diehard fans but not thousands of them. We had to make them want us again, so we had to branch out and expose ourselves elsewhere.

Mid-July arrived before I knew it, and my twenty-first birthday would arrive right after our four-day tour. I wasn’t looking as forward to the birthday as I was to the tour. I was jazzed. I didn’t know the last time I’d been this wired about a show. As for the bands that came along, I knew the guys, their music, and their faces, but we’d only played a few shows with any of them. I knew, though, like the last mini tour we did that we’d know each other a lot better afterward.