Rock All Night(99)

Killian paused and looked confused.

“Alright,” he mumbled, “perhaps that wasn’t the best story to use to illustrate the situation.”

“You think?”

“Derek’s not a bad bloke, Kaitlyn,” he said softly. “But if he does something that hurts you, try to remember that it wasn’t meant maliciously. It’s… just his nature.”

Just his nay-chuh.

“Can I give you a piece of advice, Killian?” I asked as I stood up.

“Of course.”

“Don’t use that story to comfort any other women. Ever. Especially when they’re pissed off.”

“…right,” he said apologetically.

I walked over to the door. The irritation I was feeling had temporarily overridden my nausea.

Maybe it was time to get started on that bender.

Bloody Mary? Mimosa? Straight-up champagne?

“Kaitlyn?” came Killian’s hesitant voice.

I stopped with my hand on the doorknob and turned back. “Yes?”

“Sorry about bollocksing that up.”

He looked really apologetic. Downright pathetic, even.

“…that’s alright,” I grumbled.

“I guess cocking things up is in my nature.”

My nay-chuh.

He said it so pitifully, so seriously – and the story had been such an ill-conceived attempt to convey wisdom or condolences or whatever the f*ck he had been trying to impart – that there was no way the words could support the grave earnestness behind them.

It was just… ridiculous.

Or maybe I’d gotten a contact high by sitting next to him for ten minutes.

Either way, I started giggling.

He looked surprised – and then he smiled, as though realizing he might have somehow miraculously snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

“Bye, Killian,” I said, shaking my head, and walked out of the room.

“Toodles,” he called after me.

The last thing I heard before the door closed was the whisper of his guitar strings.





81




Killian’s little parable made me paranoid. I tried to put it out of my mind, but it tended to creep back in every time something less-than-perfect happened.

And a lot of less-than-perfect things began to happen.

You hear musicians talk about the Road, about the toll the Road takes. Back in 1973, Bob Seger wrote a song about it, “Turn The Page,” where his life as a rock star takes on this dark, relentless grind.

I’d never really understood that. I just figured musicians were talking about the driving and the traveling, like that scene in Walk The Line where a young June Carter and Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis are all in the same car late at night, and Jerry Lee kind of goes off the religious deep end.

But I thought that the driving and the boredom were all musicians were talking about when they mentioned the Road.

Then I found out by going through it.

It was the constant repetition of waking up in a strange room… hanging out, not really doing much… going to play a show… partying… waking up the next morning… getting on a bus… and doing it all over again.

It was a wandering gypsy sort of life, which I wasn’t cut out for. And yet it also had a lot of the hallmarks of a 9-to-5 job, except it was 24/7. Like a wandering gypsy who had to punch a time clock again and again and again.

No wonder so many musicians turned to drug abuse and alcoholism and sex addiction. You needed something to take your mind off of how much a routine you were stuck in, with no end in sight.

And I just barely got a taste. The band had been touring for four months before I came along. I was there for the very last leg of their North American tour: Los Angeles. Irvine. San Diego. San Francisco. Sacramento. Portland. Vancouver. Boise. Seattle. Salt Lake City. Denver. Albuquerque. Phoenix. And finally a two-night engagement in Las Vegas.

Even the partying began to take on a desperate quality, like being trapped in some kind of Groundhog Day purgatory. The same types of fans. The same look to the groupies. The same faces on the crew. The same concrete corridors in the stadiums and arenas. The same drinks, the same drugs, the same jokes, the same rituals, the same everything.

The Road was its own peculiar sort of hell.

And it was taking its toll on Derek and me.

I’m not entirely sure it was just the stress of the Road. I think part of it was my paranoia over what Killian and Shanna had said. Either way, I began watching Derek on the sly, taking mental notes, totting up marks on a mental chalkboard.

And overanalyzing everything.

Although there was a lot to overanalyze.


I could give you dozens of stories, but part of good writing is judicious editing, so I’ll just hit the highlights.

We began snapping at each other, for one thing. Not in the ‘building sexual tension’ way before we’d slept with each other, but out of genuine irritation.

We had our first fight – our first ‘relationship’ fight – over toothbrushes, for God’s sake.

“Jesus, Kaitlyn, can you not put your toothbrush right next to mine?” Derek asked one morning. He said it with a sense of humor – but that ‘Jesus, Kaitlyn’ got under my skin.

I came over and looked at what he was talking about. He kept his toothbrush in a glass, and I’d casually stuck mine in there earlier.