Rock All Night(78)

“So what happened when he went cold turkey?”

Ryan gave a baleful little laugh. “He turned into the most ornery S.O.B. I’ve ever met.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. He was cranky, and angry, and short-tempered, and mean. Just an all-around a-hole.”

“Holy shit…”

That did not sound like the Killian Lee I knew.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And he doesn’t play nearly as well sober, either.”

“He plays better stoned?”

“Well, yeah… because he’s always stoned.”

It made sense. I knew a girl in college who was a big pothead, and always smoked out when she did her homework. She said that when she took her tests sober, she would always bomb them. It wasn’t until she got baked before a test and aced it that she figured out what the problem was: she studied when she was high as a kite, so she needed to be high as a kite to take the tests, too. Her state of mind had to match up.

“We all agreed to cancel the rest of the tour because he was just a monster to deal with,” Ryan continued.

“Worse than Riley?”

“Ten times worse.”

“That doesn’t seem possible.”

“At least Riley is basically fun-loving and playful. When Killian’s sober, all he is is miserable… and he makes everybody else around him miserable, too.”

I tried to wrap my head around that one. Tried to imagine the placid, easy-going guitarist a hundred feet down the road as a raging *.

Couldn’t quite do it.

“After we canceled the tour, we had a long layover in Amsterdam on the way back. The first thing he did was to go out and score some pot in the Red Light District. Within five minutes he was back to the kind, sweet-natured Killian we all know and love. It was bizarre – a 180-degree turn, just like that,” Ryan said, snapping his fingers.

“So Killian has OCD… Riley has issues you don’t want to talk about…”

“That I can’t talk about.”

“What about Derek?”

“What about him?”

“What’s he trying to deal with?”

Ryan shrugged. “His parents’ divorce… his dad… his step-dad… a whole bunch of stuff.”

“So Killian uses pot, and Riley uses booze. What does Derek use?”

Ryan looked uncomfortable. “…booze… mostly.”

I could tell he was evading the question. “Mostly?”

He looked at me like he wasn’t sure how much he wanted to say. “And attention.”

I nodded. “He is kind of an attention whore.”

Ryan laughed. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, exactly, but yeah.”

“You just wouldn’t use the word ‘whore.’”

Ryan grinned. “I suppose that’s part of it.”

I was quiet for a moment. Then I asked, “By ‘attention,’ did you mean women?”

He took a long time to answer.

“…kind of,” he finally said.

My stomach twisted a little.

“But I’m sure that’s all changed now,” he added hurriedly.

I wanted to say, I know.

Of course it has.

But the truth was, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure.

Either way, I didn’t want to dwell on it. So I moved on.

“What about you?” I asked. “What did you self-medicate for?”

“Who said I did?”

“You did. ‘Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the hat,’ remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “Right. Forgot I told you that.”

“So?” I prodded. “What were you self-medicating for?”

“Because I couldn’t handle it.”

“Handle what?”

“The fame. The craziness. The absolute insanity of being in a world-famous rock band. Life on the road 200 days a year… everything.”

“And so you slept with a lot of women?”

He bobbed his head back and forth noncommittally. “…yeah.”

“Did you drink a lot?”

“Yeah.”

“What about drugs?”

“A little.”

“But now you’re back to the straight-and-narrow.”

He smiled. “Because I’ve been off the straight-and-narrow and didn’t like where it was taking me.”

“What about me, then? I mean, I just ate a bunch of mushrooms, for God’s sake.”

“So?”

“So you must think I’m terrible.”

He laughed. “I don’t judge, Kaitlyn. You’ve got to do what’s right for you.”

“I don’t know if it’s right or not,” I said morosely.

“‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’” he quoted.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that. What do you use to self-medicate now?”

He smiled. “Music. Just music.”





64




Ryan and I got off of the heavy topics and onto some more light-hearted fare – how his sisters kept asking him for cell phone pictures they could show around school, how his mother kept trying to set him up with the daughters of her friends – when I started giggling uncontrollably at one of his comments.