lilyisdancing
Ex-Bluelighter
I'm not all that well-known around here yet, but maybe my relative anonymity actually makes it easier to put some of my writing on the table and see what people in general think of it. I decided to try this place out because besides the fact that it could reach a potentially large and different audience, the story includes drug use, and obviously people around here are going to be okay with reading about that.
All it is so far is a story about a band and a girl. It's only a few pages long, and I'm just looking for critiques and/or suggestions. And, while I'm at it, a name for my fictitious bassist.
So let me know what you think, and please don't be too harsh.
**
Even after all this time, I still couldn't tell you how exactly she'd ended up there. When I look back on things now, you'd think I'd have gotten that answer, at least more of an answer than I ever did, but I didn't. Chalk it up to another flaw I tend to have, chalk it up to my tendency to either ask too many questions or not ask enough. Chalk it up to anything you want; the fact doesn't change. The song remains the same.
The place couldn't have been much less revolting had it been a New York City street corner. And believe me, I've seen my share of those... NYC street corners, LA street corners. I've seen street corners in every big city this world's got to offer. I've *slept* on street corners in most of those cities, passed out from drinking too much, or worse. Those street corners, like this dive bar and the million others like it, were home to junkies and criminals of all breeds, and people worse than that. People like me. Rock stars.
You'd think that with all of our money we'd spend every night laughing it up in some exclusive members-only club, spend our nights on satin sheets in penthouse hotel rooms, and that's not untrue. We do that, we do that all the time, but just because we can afford to have the thread count of our overpriced linens checked and doublechecked and triplechecked, that doesn't mean we always want room service and Dom Perignon. Sometimes we just want to go to the worst places we can find, because that's what most of us really identify with. Having the money doesn't change who you are.
But I digress. The point is, this place was a refuge for all of these people, the criminals, the junkies, the rock stars, some of them all these things. It took a certain breed of person to be able to stomach that kind of environment. And when I saw her, when I caught that first glimpse of that shocking red hair and those intense green eyes, her flawless skin and her shiny jewelry, I thought she must have gotten lost. She must have ended up there against her will. Something. Anything. She couldn't be there because she wanted to be there. She didn't belong there. Not her, not possibly. I've seen and heard and done a lot of things in my time. But I wasn't prepared for her.
I'd come in there that night to do the same thing I went there and every other place like it to do, and I'm not proud to admit that this wasn't the first or the fifth or even the fiftieth time I'd found myself sitting in that dingy basement masquerading itself as a bar called, appropriately, Cellar Soul. Not that anyone who went there had much of a soul, really; either they never had, or years of whatever destructive lifestyle they decided to go with had simply eroded their souls away, piece by piece. I did, sometimes, sort of. Have a soul, I mean, or maybe I just clinged to that, maybe I still cling to that. Surely she had a soul. You could all but feel it, even from the back of the bar where I always sat sipping my Jack and Cokes. Maybe it was her soul that caught my attention before she herself actually did, but I'm not really one who goes in for that New Age crap.
But the point is, she had a soul. It was as obvious as... I don't know, you fill in the cliche. I'm no writer. I'm just telling a story, and because I'm telling a story I may have no choice but to be considered a story-teller, but I'm no writer. Don't read this expecting clever turns of phrase. Don't read this at all, really.
I'm losing track of myself here, something I'm wont to do. I'd apologize for that, for the sloppiness, the disjointedness of this tale, but I'm not sorry. I'm not writing this for you. I'm not telling this story for any reason, really, other than to put it down on paper and look at it later and see if it makes sense once it's been told, or if it makes sense a year or five years down the road. You don't have to read it, you don't have to like it. This is just one of my stories.
Anyway. Like I said, I'd come to the Cell, as the place had come to be known by its regulars, that night for the same reasons I always came to the Cell: to see my friends even though they had no more business being there than I did; to unwind, if that's what you can even call it, after long months on the road; to score some kind of something that would make that unwinding process a little less abrasive. I'm not lying when I tell you that getting laid wasn't on my mind that night, not at all. You may find that hard to believe, you know, since everyone knows that rock stars get laid all the damn time, we've got hoards of groupies that follow us like wild dogs desperate to find their prey. And I'm not about to deny it, that all of that is true, but I'd imagine people could find it hard to believe that there really is such a thing as too much. Too much sex, too much drugs, too many women. It doesn't matter how sexy they are, how willing, how eager, how downright dirty. After you've been to enough cities and enough hotels and enough dive bars like this one, sometimes you really do just want to go to a bar for the sake of going to a bar. Sometimes you want to find the bottom rung of the social ladder and hold on for dear life, because even your own home, or homes, or the hotels you call home half the year are less private than places like the Cell. Sometimes you have to live with the rats in order to stay close enough to the plague.
But then I saw her.
At first I was completely sure that she had to be there with someone else, someone like me, probably, although by 'someone like me', I only mean someone who runs in my circles, not so much someone I have a whole lot in common with beneath the surface. I mean, really, what would a woman like her be doing in a place like this by herself, what would she be doing here at all unless some asshole dragged her here? Surely some rock star like me had fed her the right combination of lines, figuratively and perhaps literally, because there's just no way she'd come there of her own volition. No way at all. She couldn't have known what she could get herself into, coming to a place like this.
And I couldn't have known that I'd be getting myself so very deeply into her, and yeah, there's a double meaning there, but I didn't really mean to put it that way. It just sounds good, now, after the fact. Well, no, actually nothing sounds good now, because everything now and from now on is after the fact, but it's still a catchy turn of phrase, or the catchiest I'm capable of producing.
Okay, no. It's really just a bad double entendre, but I've said it already: I'm a rock star, not an author. I write songs, not stories. This isn't something I'm doing to pass English 101, which, by the way, I never passed to begin with, most likely because I never took the course. Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing this at all. I'm even pretty sure I shouldn't be doing it at all, but somebody's got to hear this, read this. Or maybe it's only me who needs that, that closure that I never really got before and now can't possibly attain. Maybe it doesn't matter, because everything about this story that matters is dead and gone, and so maybe the words don't matter so much as their meaning, and maybe, probably, their meaning is only mine. But whether this story has meaning to everyone or to some people or just to me, it's still a story, and I should get around to telling it.
I was exhausted that night, so exhausted that even breathing seemed an effort, but that was pretty much my default state. Exhausted or not, there was no decent excuse to not be at some bar or club or party on a Friday night at one in the morning, not even if going out and pretending to have fun was the last thing you wanted to do. Imitation smiles and how it's wonderful to be here. I'm really not sure what we're so scared we'll miss. Maybe it's the sex with the drugs and the fools.
So that Friday night, it was the end of June, I think, 1990, after going to about a thousand parties and bars and losing the rest of my band somewhere along the way, I stumbled into the Cell and parked myself in one of the booths in the back. I was just thinking about how pointless it was, sitting in the back when the whole damned place was just as smoky and dim and noisy no matter where you sat, when I saw her for the first time.
She was standing near the corner of the bar, and I think my first reaction was of complete disbelief that she was just standing there, not being served or even really noticed at all, even though the bartenders at this place weren't exactly the 'customer is always right' type. But then, neither am I, or maybe I am now or maybe not, but I definitely wasn't then, and even then I still would have noticed and served her before you could even blink.
She wasn't wearing anything fancy, not this this was a fancy kind of place, but even in just a little black tank top and grey pinstriped pants she looked absolutely breathtaking. And trust me when I say I'm not the kind of guy who'd usually use that kind of word, but in this case there's just really no other term. Her hair was long, red, halfway down her back, straight, a red so dark that it really looked very close to the color of blood that's just starting to dry, if you'll excuse the macabre metaphor. When she turned to glance around the place, I couldn't read the expression on her face, but maybe that was because I was too busy just staring instead of actually looking. Her eyes were green, insanely green, bright absinthe green, so bright I could see them even through the dim smokiness. Her skin was pale, her lips shockingly dark against her face. When her eyes met mine, I quickly looked away, looked back down into my drink, pretended I hadn't been looking at her at all, even though I knew she knew I had been.
After a few seconds of feigning intense interest in my cocktail, I decided I was acting like a complete idiot and finished my drink in one swallow before standing up and walking over to the bar, putting myself just inches away from her, so close that I could smell her perfume. It smelled like innocence, like baby powder. I tried to glance at her surreptitiously, but I could see the curve of her lips pulling up into a little smile; we both knew I had to make an effort not to stare at her outright. I now looked like even more of a jackass, but at least I had some leverage here. I knew the bartender.
"Yo, Rod," I called out over the din of the club. "Need a refill over here, bro." He grinned in my direction and walked over.
"Jack and Coke, I presume," he said, still grinning, glancing over at the girl with a look that said that he thought I was with her, or trying to get with her, offering me a wink.
I nodded, swallowed, turned my attention to her. "What are you having?" An innocent enough question and I still felt like I was trying to ask the hottest girl in school to the prom.
She smiled at me, and I tried to find some hint of snideness in the gesture but saw only genuine warmth. "The same," she replied, and I could tell she wasn't just saying it to sound tough. I think that may have been around the time I fell in love with her, though I didn't admit that to her or even myself for a long time afterwards.
Another wink from Rod. "Coming right up, ladies."
She reached for her purse but I brushed her arm aside. I really didn't want her to have to pay for her drink, but really, I think mostly I just wanted to touch her. You hear crap like that all the time, stories about women so insanely gorgeous that you just have to feel them to believe they're real, and it all sounds so fucking stupid and contrived. You just don't get it until it happens to you. "Don't worry about it," I told her, finally managing to relocate my voice.
Before she could protest, Rod reappeared with drinks in hand, sliding them onto the bar in front of us. "On your tab then, Gage?"
I nodded. "But of course."
"Impressive enough to have a tab, huh?" she asked me then, and suddenly Rod was walking away and this girl was actually talking to me and I had no idea what to say. Luckily for me, she kept talking. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if she did it as a favor to keep me from entirely embarrassing myself. "If you've got a tab at the Cell, you've got money," she went on. "So you must be in the business."
I couldn't help but look surprised. I had the fleeting thought that by 'in the business' she'd meant drugs, but I pushed that idea away, knowing she meant the entertainment business. "Usually only people in the business actually use that phrase," I noted.
She shrugged, tucked a few strands of loose hair behind her ear. "Guilty," she admitted. "Well, sort of guilty. My dad's a record exec, but I don't really know much about that stuff." She studied me briefly. "By choice," she added.
It could have been a dig at me, but it wasn't a deep enough one to deter me, not yet, anyway. "Ouch," I responded simply, taking a sip of my drink.
She smiled again, blushing just slightly. Simply divine, I thought. "I didn't mean it that way. Well, no, I mean, okay, I *did* mean it like that. I've never been a big fan of the band guys my dad always has crawling all over the house, but I'm sure you're not *all* completely deranged."
I laughed. "No, no. You're right, we're all completely deranged." I looked down, pretended to care about the cuffs of my jeans. "Deranged enough to ask someone as obviously unattainable as yourself to come sit at our table in a seedy bar." There. I'd managed to get the entire dopy-sounding proposition out of my mouth without stuttering, but I still couldn't quite force myself to look back up.
"Whenever you're done memorizing the floor pattern, I'd like that."
I'm sure I looked utterly flabbergasted when I finally pulled my eyes back up to meet hers, because she laughed right in my face, but somehow it wasn't offensive. Instead of saying anything, I just picked up both of our drinks and started walking back to my table. I could hear the clicking of her boot heels on the floor behind me.
Once we were both settled and I'd had a few swallows of my drink, I started to remember how to behave like a human being. "At the risk of being reminded for the millionth time that I've got a chick's name, I'm Vivian Gage." I thought about extending my hand, but the gesture seemed silly and out of place, so I didn't move.
"Stage name, I assume."
"You're good," I agreed, nodding. "I was born Kristian Michaels, but I was named after a father I've never even laid eyes on, so I had my name legally changed years ago."
She nodded. "Well, Vivian Gage, I'm Julie Montgomery. Always have been."
"Julie Mont..." I trailed off, trying to place the name. "Julie Montgomery. Your dad, he's Tom Montgomery?" I was sincerely surprised.
"You make it sound like we're the Manson family," Julie replied, chuckling.
"No, no. I've met T-- your father several times. He's really a great guy, we, I mean the band and I, we've worked with him before." I paused. "You know, I'd always heard rumors that he's got this gorgeous daughter who hated rock stars and never left the house, but you're clearly out of the house and you don't seem to hate me so far. And in this case, one out of three is a good thing."
Julie laughed, sipped at her drink. I think I could have watched her do absolutely anything and been in total awe of her; I don't think that ever could have changed. "Well, I don't know about gorgeous," she replied. "And I don't hate anyone, not individually, but it is a bit of a rarity to catch me out of the house."
I opened my mouth but couldn't think of anything to say. Now that I actually had her sitting across from me, my entire mind seemed to go empty. The saving grace that I had been hoping for arrived, albeit not in exactly the form I'd have chosen.
"I'm probably interrupting," my best friend, also the drummer for our band, said all too cheerily, sitting down next to me.
"Probably," I replied, trying to sound casual and good-natured. I was definitely glad he'd shown up. I just wasn't sure what he was on. I cleared my throat. "Oh, um, Julie, this is my--"
"Jonni Jade," he supplied for me, shaking Julie's hand enthusiastically. "Drummer for Viscera and often unwitting sidekick to this jackoff." With this last bit he cocked a thumb in my direction. I did my best to chuckle politely.
"Right, Viscera. My dad's mentioned you guys a couple of times," Julie said. She didn't seem even remotely uncomfortable. Part of me assumes that this was simply because I was more than nervous enough for both of us.
"Your dad?" Jonni asked, looking confused.
"Ted Montgomery," I put in, not really sure if it was my turn to speak or not, but also not really caring.
"Oh, shit, you're the--"
"Mysterious, reclusive hot daughter, yes," Julie finished, smiling.
Jonni laughed. "Well, pleasure to be a witness to something so rare."
"What's up, anyway, Jade?" I interjected, desperate to remind him that this wasn't *his* social affair.
Jonni shrugged, idly running a hand through his tangle of black and red hair. "Not a fuck lot," he answered earnestly. "Got some speed earlier offa Marxie, but I'm all out now and Marxie ran off with a couple of blond chicks."
I glanced at Julie, who still seemed totally nonplussed. Good thing, I thought, since I'd known her for all of ten minutes and was already about to haggle over drugs with my drummer right in front of her. "So you came to see if I could track down Marxie?" I prompted, stalling. I knew that wasn't Jonni's quest.
"Pfft, like you'd know. Like he'd share with anyone but those blonds at this point," Jonni scoffed, waving the idea off.
I couldn't argue with that. Marxie was Alex Marx, our guitarist, friend, and full-time stimulant junkie. The rest of us were amateurs compared to Marxie, and trust me when I tell you that's saying a lot. I sighed. "So you're hoping that I might have something."
"Have, can easily get, whatever," Jonni replied jovially.
People like me are in a constant state of making potentially important decisions very impulsively, without much or any forethought, and so in that three seconds I decided to carry on with the conversation just like I would at any other time. I figured that Julie had already heard plenty. "I've got fuck-all," I told him. "What do you think I was doing in this snakepit before I met a new friend?" Well, that didn't come out precisely as I'd meant it.
Julie offered us a grin. "You should have just asked," she said.
I was blindingly stupid. I can usually figure shit out, but put the blatantly obvious in front of my face and I'll miss it by a mile. "What?"
Her grin widened a bit. "What were you boys looking for in particular?"
"What do you have?" Jonni fired back immediately, before I could even think of a response. If nothing else, Jonni was an expert at drug shopping.
"Speed, either glass or pills," Julie replied matter-of-factly. "Coke. Dope. Probably still have some ecstasy. Whatever else is around the house."
"Viv, you've met the woman of my dreams!" Jonni said, delighted. "All of the above," he added to Julie.
She laughed. "Well, you'll have to be a little more specific."
"Well, talk numbers to me."
"Well, you're rock stars, I'm Ted Montgomery's kid, and this is LA," Julie replied, still smiling. "In other words, it's expensive, but I doubt it gets much better than the shit my dad keeps around the house. Little family business that we both partake in, but never discuss. Anyway, let's see. Coke's sixty a gram, two hundred a ball, anything bigger than that we'll have to negotiate. I can usually do up to a half for around fourteen hundred. Glass, I only work with grams or less, so respectively that would be forty, sixty-five, and ninety. Pill form, I've got like eight different doses, anywhere from three to twenty bucks. Ecstasy's always fifteen a tab, one twenty for a tenpack. And dope I'll only do ten and twenty bags, and only for a very select few. Anything else I can usually find in a day or two."
I was speechless. Luckily and unsurprisingly, Jonni was not. "Can we get married?"
Julie laughed and it was beautiful and I didn't like how this was going, but at least it looked like I could be unhappy and fucked up instead of just unhappy. "We can discuss our vows later," she retorted, not missing a beat. "But for now, why don't we just head up to my place and get everyone a little happier? My dad's in Tahoe for a couple of weeks, it'll just be us. Anyway, I'm about to do the last of the blow I have on me, so I need to restock." That said, she leaned over so I could just barely see the top of her head above the table. I heard some rustling and the unmistakeable snorting sound of one doing cocaine before she threw her head back, looking satisfied, her hair wild around her face. "That's better. Shall we?"
It took me a few seconds to recover from what I'd just heard and seen, and a few more seconds to wrap my brain around the fact that innocent-looking Julie may be more like us than I'd previously thought. "Yeah. Sure. Okay," I agreed finally, sounding miserably devoid of intellect.
"I guess we've all got our own rides here," Jonni put in.
"And none of us have a plan," I said. "We'll follow Julie in our cars so no one has to leave their car in the city." And so I could find myself alone with her somehow is the part I only thought.
Julie nodded. "Can't leave any of Daddy's precious cars out here, anyway."
All it is so far is a story about a band and a girl. It's only a few pages long, and I'm just looking for critiques and/or suggestions. And, while I'm at it, a name for my fictitious bassist.
So let me know what you think, and please don't be too harsh.
**
Even after all this time, I still couldn't tell you how exactly she'd ended up there. When I look back on things now, you'd think I'd have gotten that answer, at least more of an answer than I ever did, but I didn't. Chalk it up to another flaw I tend to have, chalk it up to my tendency to either ask too many questions or not ask enough. Chalk it up to anything you want; the fact doesn't change. The song remains the same.
The place couldn't have been much less revolting had it been a New York City street corner. And believe me, I've seen my share of those... NYC street corners, LA street corners. I've seen street corners in every big city this world's got to offer. I've *slept* on street corners in most of those cities, passed out from drinking too much, or worse. Those street corners, like this dive bar and the million others like it, were home to junkies and criminals of all breeds, and people worse than that. People like me. Rock stars.
You'd think that with all of our money we'd spend every night laughing it up in some exclusive members-only club, spend our nights on satin sheets in penthouse hotel rooms, and that's not untrue. We do that, we do that all the time, but just because we can afford to have the thread count of our overpriced linens checked and doublechecked and triplechecked, that doesn't mean we always want room service and Dom Perignon. Sometimes we just want to go to the worst places we can find, because that's what most of us really identify with. Having the money doesn't change who you are.
But I digress. The point is, this place was a refuge for all of these people, the criminals, the junkies, the rock stars, some of them all these things. It took a certain breed of person to be able to stomach that kind of environment. And when I saw her, when I caught that first glimpse of that shocking red hair and those intense green eyes, her flawless skin and her shiny jewelry, I thought she must have gotten lost. She must have ended up there against her will. Something. Anything. She couldn't be there because she wanted to be there. She didn't belong there. Not her, not possibly. I've seen and heard and done a lot of things in my time. But I wasn't prepared for her.
I'd come in there that night to do the same thing I went there and every other place like it to do, and I'm not proud to admit that this wasn't the first or the fifth or even the fiftieth time I'd found myself sitting in that dingy basement masquerading itself as a bar called, appropriately, Cellar Soul. Not that anyone who went there had much of a soul, really; either they never had, or years of whatever destructive lifestyle they decided to go with had simply eroded their souls away, piece by piece. I did, sometimes, sort of. Have a soul, I mean, or maybe I just clinged to that, maybe I still cling to that. Surely she had a soul. You could all but feel it, even from the back of the bar where I always sat sipping my Jack and Cokes. Maybe it was her soul that caught my attention before she herself actually did, but I'm not really one who goes in for that New Age crap.
But the point is, she had a soul. It was as obvious as... I don't know, you fill in the cliche. I'm no writer. I'm just telling a story, and because I'm telling a story I may have no choice but to be considered a story-teller, but I'm no writer. Don't read this expecting clever turns of phrase. Don't read this at all, really.
I'm losing track of myself here, something I'm wont to do. I'd apologize for that, for the sloppiness, the disjointedness of this tale, but I'm not sorry. I'm not writing this for you. I'm not telling this story for any reason, really, other than to put it down on paper and look at it later and see if it makes sense once it's been told, or if it makes sense a year or five years down the road. You don't have to read it, you don't have to like it. This is just one of my stories.
Anyway. Like I said, I'd come to the Cell, as the place had come to be known by its regulars, that night for the same reasons I always came to the Cell: to see my friends even though they had no more business being there than I did; to unwind, if that's what you can even call it, after long months on the road; to score some kind of something that would make that unwinding process a little less abrasive. I'm not lying when I tell you that getting laid wasn't on my mind that night, not at all. You may find that hard to believe, you know, since everyone knows that rock stars get laid all the damn time, we've got hoards of groupies that follow us like wild dogs desperate to find their prey. And I'm not about to deny it, that all of that is true, but I'd imagine people could find it hard to believe that there really is such a thing as too much. Too much sex, too much drugs, too many women. It doesn't matter how sexy they are, how willing, how eager, how downright dirty. After you've been to enough cities and enough hotels and enough dive bars like this one, sometimes you really do just want to go to a bar for the sake of going to a bar. Sometimes you want to find the bottom rung of the social ladder and hold on for dear life, because even your own home, or homes, or the hotels you call home half the year are less private than places like the Cell. Sometimes you have to live with the rats in order to stay close enough to the plague.
But then I saw her.
At first I was completely sure that she had to be there with someone else, someone like me, probably, although by 'someone like me', I only mean someone who runs in my circles, not so much someone I have a whole lot in common with beneath the surface. I mean, really, what would a woman like her be doing in a place like this by herself, what would she be doing here at all unless some asshole dragged her here? Surely some rock star like me had fed her the right combination of lines, figuratively and perhaps literally, because there's just no way she'd come there of her own volition. No way at all. She couldn't have known what she could get herself into, coming to a place like this.
And I couldn't have known that I'd be getting myself so very deeply into her, and yeah, there's a double meaning there, but I didn't really mean to put it that way. It just sounds good, now, after the fact. Well, no, actually nothing sounds good now, because everything now and from now on is after the fact, but it's still a catchy turn of phrase, or the catchiest I'm capable of producing.
Okay, no. It's really just a bad double entendre, but I've said it already: I'm a rock star, not an author. I write songs, not stories. This isn't something I'm doing to pass English 101, which, by the way, I never passed to begin with, most likely because I never took the course. Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure why I'm doing this at all. I'm even pretty sure I shouldn't be doing it at all, but somebody's got to hear this, read this. Or maybe it's only me who needs that, that closure that I never really got before and now can't possibly attain. Maybe it doesn't matter, because everything about this story that matters is dead and gone, and so maybe the words don't matter so much as their meaning, and maybe, probably, their meaning is only mine. But whether this story has meaning to everyone or to some people or just to me, it's still a story, and I should get around to telling it.
I was exhausted that night, so exhausted that even breathing seemed an effort, but that was pretty much my default state. Exhausted or not, there was no decent excuse to not be at some bar or club or party on a Friday night at one in the morning, not even if going out and pretending to have fun was the last thing you wanted to do. Imitation smiles and how it's wonderful to be here. I'm really not sure what we're so scared we'll miss. Maybe it's the sex with the drugs and the fools.
So that Friday night, it was the end of June, I think, 1990, after going to about a thousand parties and bars and losing the rest of my band somewhere along the way, I stumbled into the Cell and parked myself in one of the booths in the back. I was just thinking about how pointless it was, sitting in the back when the whole damned place was just as smoky and dim and noisy no matter where you sat, when I saw her for the first time.
She was standing near the corner of the bar, and I think my first reaction was of complete disbelief that she was just standing there, not being served or even really noticed at all, even though the bartenders at this place weren't exactly the 'customer is always right' type. But then, neither am I, or maybe I am now or maybe not, but I definitely wasn't then, and even then I still would have noticed and served her before you could even blink.
She wasn't wearing anything fancy, not this this was a fancy kind of place, but even in just a little black tank top and grey pinstriped pants she looked absolutely breathtaking. And trust me when I say I'm not the kind of guy who'd usually use that kind of word, but in this case there's just really no other term. Her hair was long, red, halfway down her back, straight, a red so dark that it really looked very close to the color of blood that's just starting to dry, if you'll excuse the macabre metaphor. When she turned to glance around the place, I couldn't read the expression on her face, but maybe that was because I was too busy just staring instead of actually looking. Her eyes were green, insanely green, bright absinthe green, so bright I could see them even through the dim smokiness. Her skin was pale, her lips shockingly dark against her face. When her eyes met mine, I quickly looked away, looked back down into my drink, pretended I hadn't been looking at her at all, even though I knew she knew I had been.
After a few seconds of feigning intense interest in my cocktail, I decided I was acting like a complete idiot and finished my drink in one swallow before standing up and walking over to the bar, putting myself just inches away from her, so close that I could smell her perfume. It smelled like innocence, like baby powder. I tried to glance at her surreptitiously, but I could see the curve of her lips pulling up into a little smile; we both knew I had to make an effort not to stare at her outright. I now looked like even more of a jackass, but at least I had some leverage here. I knew the bartender.
"Yo, Rod," I called out over the din of the club. "Need a refill over here, bro." He grinned in my direction and walked over.
"Jack and Coke, I presume," he said, still grinning, glancing over at the girl with a look that said that he thought I was with her, or trying to get with her, offering me a wink.
I nodded, swallowed, turned my attention to her. "What are you having?" An innocent enough question and I still felt like I was trying to ask the hottest girl in school to the prom.
She smiled at me, and I tried to find some hint of snideness in the gesture but saw only genuine warmth. "The same," she replied, and I could tell she wasn't just saying it to sound tough. I think that may have been around the time I fell in love with her, though I didn't admit that to her or even myself for a long time afterwards.
Another wink from Rod. "Coming right up, ladies."
She reached for her purse but I brushed her arm aside. I really didn't want her to have to pay for her drink, but really, I think mostly I just wanted to touch her. You hear crap like that all the time, stories about women so insanely gorgeous that you just have to feel them to believe they're real, and it all sounds so fucking stupid and contrived. You just don't get it until it happens to you. "Don't worry about it," I told her, finally managing to relocate my voice.
Before she could protest, Rod reappeared with drinks in hand, sliding them onto the bar in front of us. "On your tab then, Gage?"
I nodded. "But of course."
"Impressive enough to have a tab, huh?" she asked me then, and suddenly Rod was walking away and this girl was actually talking to me and I had no idea what to say. Luckily for me, she kept talking. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if she did it as a favor to keep me from entirely embarrassing myself. "If you've got a tab at the Cell, you've got money," she went on. "So you must be in the business."
I couldn't help but look surprised. I had the fleeting thought that by 'in the business' she'd meant drugs, but I pushed that idea away, knowing she meant the entertainment business. "Usually only people in the business actually use that phrase," I noted.
She shrugged, tucked a few strands of loose hair behind her ear. "Guilty," she admitted. "Well, sort of guilty. My dad's a record exec, but I don't really know much about that stuff." She studied me briefly. "By choice," she added.
It could have been a dig at me, but it wasn't a deep enough one to deter me, not yet, anyway. "Ouch," I responded simply, taking a sip of my drink.
She smiled again, blushing just slightly. Simply divine, I thought. "I didn't mean it that way. Well, no, I mean, okay, I *did* mean it like that. I've never been a big fan of the band guys my dad always has crawling all over the house, but I'm sure you're not *all* completely deranged."
I laughed. "No, no. You're right, we're all completely deranged." I looked down, pretended to care about the cuffs of my jeans. "Deranged enough to ask someone as obviously unattainable as yourself to come sit at our table in a seedy bar." There. I'd managed to get the entire dopy-sounding proposition out of my mouth without stuttering, but I still couldn't quite force myself to look back up.
"Whenever you're done memorizing the floor pattern, I'd like that."
I'm sure I looked utterly flabbergasted when I finally pulled my eyes back up to meet hers, because she laughed right in my face, but somehow it wasn't offensive. Instead of saying anything, I just picked up both of our drinks and started walking back to my table. I could hear the clicking of her boot heels on the floor behind me.
Once we were both settled and I'd had a few swallows of my drink, I started to remember how to behave like a human being. "At the risk of being reminded for the millionth time that I've got a chick's name, I'm Vivian Gage." I thought about extending my hand, but the gesture seemed silly and out of place, so I didn't move.
"Stage name, I assume."
"You're good," I agreed, nodding. "I was born Kristian Michaels, but I was named after a father I've never even laid eyes on, so I had my name legally changed years ago."
She nodded. "Well, Vivian Gage, I'm Julie Montgomery. Always have been."
"Julie Mont..." I trailed off, trying to place the name. "Julie Montgomery. Your dad, he's Tom Montgomery?" I was sincerely surprised.
"You make it sound like we're the Manson family," Julie replied, chuckling.
"No, no. I've met T-- your father several times. He's really a great guy, we, I mean the band and I, we've worked with him before." I paused. "You know, I'd always heard rumors that he's got this gorgeous daughter who hated rock stars and never left the house, but you're clearly out of the house and you don't seem to hate me so far. And in this case, one out of three is a good thing."
Julie laughed, sipped at her drink. I think I could have watched her do absolutely anything and been in total awe of her; I don't think that ever could have changed. "Well, I don't know about gorgeous," she replied. "And I don't hate anyone, not individually, but it is a bit of a rarity to catch me out of the house."
I opened my mouth but couldn't think of anything to say. Now that I actually had her sitting across from me, my entire mind seemed to go empty. The saving grace that I had been hoping for arrived, albeit not in exactly the form I'd have chosen.
"I'm probably interrupting," my best friend, also the drummer for our band, said all too cheerily, sitting down next to me.
"Probably," I replied, trying to sound casual and good-natured. I was definitely glad he'd shown up. I just wasn't sure what he was on. I cleared my throat. "Oh, um, Julie, this is my--"
"Jonni Jade," he supplied for me, shaking Julie's hand enthusiastically. "Drummer for Viscera and often unwitting sidekick to this jackoff." With this last bit he cocked a thumb in my direction. I did my best to chuckle politely.
"Right, Viscera. My dad's mentioned you guys a couple of times," Julie said. She didn't seem even remotely uncomfortable. Part of me assumes that this was simply because I was more than nervous enough for both of us.
"Your dad?" Jonni asked, looking confused.
"Ted Montgomery," I put in, not really sure if it was my turn to speak or not, but also not really caring.
"Oh, shit, you're the--"
"Mysterious, reclusive hot daughter, yes," Julie finished, smiling.
Jonni laughed. "Well, pleasure to be a witness to something so rare."
"What's up, anyway, Jade?" I interjected, desperate to remind him that this wasn't *his* social affair.
Jonni shrugged, idly running a hand through his tangle of black and red hair. "Not a fuck lot," he answered earnestly. "Got some speed earlier offa Marxie, but I'm all out now and Marxie ran off with a couple of blond chicks."
I glanced at Julie, who still seemed totally nonplussed. Good thing, I thought, since I'd known her for all of ten minutes and was already about to haggle over drugs with my drummer right in front of her. "So you came to see if I could track down Marxie?" I prompted, stalling. I knew that wasn't Jonni's quest.
"Pfft, like you'd know. Like he'd share with anyone but those blonds at this point," Jonni scoffed, waving the idea off.
I couldn't argue with that. Marxie was Alex Marx, our guitarist, friend, and full-time stimulant junkie. The rest of us were amateurs compared to Marxie, and trust me when I tell you that's saying a lot. I sighed. "So you're hoping that I might have something."
"Have, can easily get, whatever," Jonni replied jovially.
People like me are in a constant state of making potentially important decisions very impulsively, without much or any forethought, and so in that three seconds I decided to carry on with the conversation just like I would at any other time. I figured that Julie had already heard plenty. "I've got fuck-all," I told him. "What do you think I was doing in this snakepit before I met a new friend?" Well, that didn't come out precisely as I'd meant it.
Julie offered us a grin. "You should have just asked," she said.
I was blindingly stupid. I can usually figure shit out, but put the blatantly obvious in front of my face and I'll miss it by a mile. "What?"
Her grin widened a bit. "What were you boys looking for in particular?"
"What do you have?" Jonni fired back immediately, before I could even think of a response. If nothing else, Jonni was an expert at drug shopping.
"Speed, either glass or pills," Julie replied matter-of-factly. "Coke. Dope. Probably still have some ecstasy. Whatever else is around the house."
"Viv, you've met the woman of my dreams!" Jonni said, delighted. "All of the above," he added to Julie.
She laughed. "Well, you'll have to be a little more specific."
"Well, talk numbers to me."
"Well, you're rock stars, I'm Ted Montgomery's kid, and this is LA," Julie replied, still smiling. "In other words, it's expensive, but I doubt it gets much better than the shit my dad keeps around the house. Little family business that we both partake in, but never discuss. Anyway, let's see. Coke's sixty a gram, two hundred a ball, anything bigger than that we'll have to negotiate. I can usually do up to a half for around fourteen hundred. Glass, I only work with grams or less, so respectively that would be forty, sixty-five, and ninety. Pill form, I've got like eight different doses, anywhere from three to twenty bucks. Ecstasy's always fifteen a tab, one twenty for a tenpack. And dope I'll only do ten and twenty bags, and only for a very select few. Anything else I can usually find in a day or two."
I was speechless. Luckily and unsurprisingly, Jonni was not. "Can we get married?"
Julie laughed and it was beautiful and I didn't like how this was going, but at least it looked like I could be unhappy and fucked up instead of just unhappy. "We can discuss our vows later," she retorted, not missing a beat. "But for now, why don't we just head up to my place and get everyone a little happier? My dad's in Tahoe for a couple of weeks, it'll just be us. Anyway, I'm about to do the last of the blow I have on me, so I need to restock." That said, she leaned over so I could just barely see the top of her head above the table. I heard some rustling and the unmistakeable snorting sound of one doing cocaine before she threw her head back, looking satisfied, her hair wild around her face. "That's better. Shall we?"
It took me a few seconds to recover from what I'd just heard and seen, and a few more seconds to wrap my brain around the fact that innocent-looking Julie may be more like us than I'd previously thought. "Yeah. Sure. Okay," I agreed finally, sounding miserably devoid of intellect.
"I guess we've all got our own rides here," Jonni put in.
"And none of us have a plan," I said. "We'll follow Julie in our cars so no one has to leave their car in the city." And so I could find myself alone with her somehow is the part I only thought.
Julie nodded. "Can't leave any of Daddy's precious cars out here, anyway."
a really compelling read, the longest piece I've ever read here and the longest reply in a while 
