Page 113 of A World Apart
“This is Kaiya, she’ll be shadowing you today to ensure all your needs are met.” Celine’s smile was sickly sweet as she stared at a short, balding man wearing a leather jacket over a serious pair of dad jeans.
“Hi,” I smiled.
Dad jeans gave me a slow once-over before he landed back on my face and treated me to a sneer that I was pretty sure he intended as a compliment.
“Well then, darlin,’ lead the way.”
From that moment on, it went steadily more downhill in various different ways. The band themselves were a modest five-man band comprising of lead and bass guitarist, drummer and two singers, a pretty standard setup. But for some reason, they’d brought not only their manager, but also their publicist, stylist, financial adviser, three bodyguards, their girlfriends and inexplicably, a person dubbed their ‘wellbeing officer,’ who as far as I could tell was in charge of dispensing little drops of something from a brown bottle under the band member’s tongues once an hour.
I’d had to insist to the manager that only the actual band and himself could be in the room, other members of the entourage had to wait upstairs in the hospitality areas. I’d had some pushback on that, but once the producer had threatened to cancel their booking, they’d reluctantly complied.
Thankfully, at least it wasn’t Trevor Kyle working with the band.
The vocals actually went okay, but when it came to recording parts of the band’s backing track, the lead guitarist was nowhere to be found. A building-wide search was initiated − and by that, I mean that I was ordered to search the whole damn building on my own − which was when I found him upstairs in the lounge, completely unconscious in the lap of one of the girlfriends. I was still unsure if it washisgirlfriend, but honestly, they all kind of looked the same.
The ‘wellbeing officer’ at least had the grace to look embarrassed when he told me the guitarist wasn’t likely to wake up anytime soon, due to an overindulgence in ‘herbal remedies.’
It was with this information that I stormed into Jeremy’s office.
“Boss, there’s a passed-out guitarist in the lounge and the manager won’t stop calling me ‘babycakes.’ I need a personal day.”
He didn’t even bother to look up from his computer screen, but he did sigh to let me know he was listening.
“Do we need to call an ambulance?”
“Not according to his ‘wellbeing officer.’”
That did get Jeremy to glance up, and frowning he asked, “His what now?”
I opened my mouth-
“Never mind, I don’t care.” He put his head down on his desk, and I winced at the thump.
“Look, just… goddamn bands.” Another thump. “You play guitar, right?”
“I-er, what?” I asked, stupidly.
Jeremy pulled his head off the desk to stare at me, the stare of a man who has truly had enough of these goddamn bands.
“I mean, yes?” I said, cautiously.
“Good. Go offer to play for them.”
“Boss… Shouldn’t we ask tech?”
He snorted. “Good luck. They’re downstairs with the orchestra doing the soundtrack for that new movie with the things in that place with the...” He waved his hand around vaguely.
“I guess I can offer…”
“That’s the spirit! Go get ‘em, girl.”
I’d lost him, he was already eyeballing his screen as if it held the lotto numbers necessary to buying his ticket out of this place.
“And that, my friend, is how I ended up playing the guitar on three tracks of Smoking Guns’ newest album, available in all good stores, this winter.”
Becka howled as I finished up the story of my shitty day, culminating in the bassist giving me his number in front of his girlfriend, who it transpired had been the girl the lead guitarist had been using as a pillow. Messy, messy, messy.
“Truly, my friend, your life has been raised up to the stuff of legends in the few short months you’ve lived in LA. It’s the dream!” Becka declared, waving a beer in salute at me.
