Rock All Night(111)

“Riley, I’m serious.”

“Does this chick even know how much you’re into her?”

Now I do, I thought, and I felt sick to my stomach that I was listening in on something so achingly private.

“And don’t tell her that, either, okay? …okay?”

“Okay, OKAY! Why are you doing this, anyway? Is it cause you want her to get the hell out of Dodge so you don’t have to watch Derek banging her? That would be a halfway decent reason.”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Because I want her to succeed. It’s important to me.”

My heart broke a little more, and for the first time ever, I wished that maybe I hadn’t met Derek first.

Riley sighed heavily. “For you. Only for you.”

“Thanks. I owe you one.”

“Hell yeah you owe me one.”

Before they could come out of the kitchen and discover me, I silently slipped out of the suite and back into the hallway.

When I came in five minutes later, I pretended I didn’t know anything.

Out of the blue, Riley told me – in a very annoyed voice – that she’d had a change of heart, and that maybe we should actually go ahead and do the interview for real.

I acted shocked, then suspicious, then warily happy – after extracting numerous promises of no ‘quid pro coochie.’

She grumpily agreed, and threw a couple of not-so-subtle scowls at Ryan.

He just smiled mysteriously over in the corner.

I avoided looking at him too much, for fear of giving myself away.

It was one of the toughest lies I’d ever pulled off, but I did it.

I felt terrible about it.

But I still should have been nominated for an Oscar.





92




After the show at the KeyArena, the band had a break for about 36 hours before they had to hit the road again. Riley took me out the next night after the show, grumpily insisting that she wanted ‘to get this over with.’

That was how I ended up drinking with Riley in a lesbian dive bar in Seattle.

It didn’t start off promisingly.

I was getting out the Zoom digital recorder when she barked, “If we’re gonna do this, I gotta be drunker’n a motherf*cker. So I’m doin’ shots.”

I already had my reporter hat on. “Do you think maybe that’s just a way of numbing yourself to the – ”

“And you’re doin’ ‘em too.”

I stopped talking and just let my mouth hang open for a few seconds.

“Nunh-unh,” I finally managed.

“Yeah you are,” Riley insisted. She pulled off her thrift-store parka with its fake fur collar, slung it next to her in the wooden booth, and flagged down a heavily tattooed waitress with a Betty Page haircut.


Imagine this: you have just taken up boxing. You’ve worked the bag, done a lot of jump-roping, maybe even sparred a little. With an 87-year-old man.

Then you find out your first real fight is with Mike Tyson.

Not current-day Mike Tyson. Noooo. Time-travelling Mike Tyson, who has come here from the past, in his prime and fresh from biting the ear off of Evander Holyfield.

That was what I felt like when I heard Riley wanted to do shots.

“NO.”

“Then we’re not doin’ the f*ckin’ interview.”

“But – but – ”

I wanted so badly to whine, But Ryan made you promise!

But I knew that would torpedo the whole thing.

“Riley, you’d drink me under the table in half an hour. I will literally die from alcohol poisoning if I try to keep up with you.”

She considered that. “Okay, we’ll go three for one. I do three shots, you do one. And you can do little girly shots, with umbrellas and shit.”

That was actually a pretty good offer.

But I was still nervous.

“Four for one,” I countered.

She shook her head in disgust. “You are such a *, Blondie,” she muttered, before ordering her first round of Four Horseman – Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Johnnie Walker, and Jameson.

And a shot of amaretto for me.





93




The first thing I asked her – after she’d downed all four shots – was how long she’d known she was gay.

“Forever,” she said, and belched.

“What’s your earliest memory, though?”

She stared off into the distance and actually gave it some thought. “There’s actually two things I remember. One was Mr. Hopkins.”

“Mr. Hopkins?”

“Yeah. He was this old * I had to live with when I was little.”

I frowned, but thought better than to ask about it now. After all, she was actually talking, and she hadn’t even propositioned me yet.

“Anyway, he said, ‘Riley, one day you’re gonna grow up and get married and have kids of your own.’ I was, like, four or something, and I didn’t know shit about sex… but I saw all the men and women who were married on TV, and I just knew that was never gonna happen for me.

“So I was like, ‘Nunh-unh.’

“And he was like, ‘Oh yes you are.’