Rock All Night(109)

When I couldn’t get the beginning, I decided to try to write bits and pieces from the middle and patch them together later. I wrote huge swaths, thousands upon thousands of words – about the concerts. About the song-writing session I’d witnessed (and later got chewed out for). About the tour bus and the after-parties and the fans.

All of it felt like crap. Like I was a sophomore back at Syracuse, struggling through my first Journalism 101 class, trying to string together two sentences that didn’t sound like I was fresh off the high school paper writing about an ‘awesome’ pep rally.

So I put it off. With sex with Derek. With fights with Derek. With make-up sex with Derek. With talks with Ryan. With listening to Killian improvise. With concerts. With after-concert partying. With long, bored stretches of staring out the tour bus windows as rural countryside flew past.

And with the one last thing I felt I had to do, which was probably going to be even harder than writing the article itself:

Interviewing Riley.





89




It wasn’t like she wouldn’t talk to me. She already had, back on my very first day on the tour bus:

To f*ck hot chicks.

I… what?

To f*ck hot chicks.

What are you talking about?

Why I do it. To f*ck hot chicks.

That wasn’t what I was going to ask.

Oh. Well, that’s the answer, anyway. To f*ck hot chicks.

O-kaaaay… moving on. What’s the best part of being a rock star?

Fucking hot chicks. I mean f*cking chicks that’re hot. Not chicks who are f*ckin’ hot. I mean, I want ‘em f*ckin’ hot, but if you don’t get to f*ck ‘em, what’s the f*ckin’ point, right?

She was perfectly willing to be interviewed… if you can call that an ‘interview.’

No, I wanted more. The real person, not the caricature. What Killian had given me on the ride out to the desert.

Which Riley was apparently willing to give me, too. But just like Killian, she had a price.

With Killian, it had been participating in a psychedelic holiday.

With Riley, it was a bit more… Rileyesque.

“I really need to do an interview with you,” I told her one afternoon, after her morning hangover had faded to where she was semi-coherent.

“Okay, shoot,” she said as she took a pull from a bottle of Jack.

“No, I’m serious. A real interview. One where you actually talk about real stuff, and not just – ”

“Yeah, yeah, I said okay, let’s f*ckin’ do it,” she said crossly.

I couldn’t believe my luck. Had I hit on exactly the right moment to ask her? Had all her defenses dropped by the wayside long enough for me to get to know the real person beneath the insane punk-rock-chick-drummer persona?

“Okay… what’s your first memory of – ”

“Tits.”

“…what?”

“Tits. That’s my first memory.”

I sighed and hung my head as she continued on her reverie, holding her hands out in front of her like the ‘huge… tracts of land’ guy in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. “Big ol’ f*ckin’ tits – firm ones, big as my head, with – ”

“RILEY.”

“What?”

“I SAID A REAL INTERVIEW.”

“That’s what I’m givin’ ya, Blondie.”

“No you’re not. You’re just talking about your favorite subject, is all.”

“After *. Favorite subject, after *. We could talk about that instead, if you want. Maybe, say… your *? My *? Bumpin’ pussies?”

I just scowled at her.

She gave me an impish little smile, then stopped drinking long enough to fish a cigarette out of a pack, light it up, and take a drag. “You f*cked Derek.”

I scowled at her harder. “That’s none of your goddamn business.”

“Ooooh, Blondie gettin’ a backbone! Hawt! But that’s not what I’m talkin’ about.”

I stayed silent, waiting to see where this went.

“You f*cked Derek, and he gave it up. His story, I mean. That’s all I want.”

Now I wasn’t scowling, I was frowning in confusion. “…what?”

She gestured with her cigarette, as though pointing to a series of invisible blocks in a logical arrangement. “You f*cked Derek… you got his story. You want my story… you f*ck me. That’s the deal.”

She settled back in her chair and grinned with glee as shock and revulsion washed over my face.

“I am NOT sleeping with you for a f*cking interview!” I shouted.

“It doesn’t have to be a f*ckin’ interview. We can do it after we’re done f*ckin’.”

“I didn’t sleep with Ryan or Killian for an interview!”

“If you haven’t figured it out yet, Killian doesn’t really give a damn about f*ckin’ you – or anybody else. And we both know Ry wants to f*ck you, he’s just too nice to put it out there. Plus he knows he’d lose out to D.”

My stomach turned when she said that.

Mostly because I knew she was right.

Furious, I got up from my chair to go.

“C’mon – think of it as… what’s that Hannibal dude say? ‘Lend me a quid, Clair-eeeeeeeese…’”