Page 30 of Reverb

“It isn’t a story!” He was furious, his big body unnaturally still. “It isn’t an assignment or something you use to impress your bosses. It’s my fucking life! My business. My fucking soul. And all you want is to extract it, to use it for clicks, to give it to everyone to consume. You want to sell it for money.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“You do. Of course you fucking do. That’s the job, right? You just said so. Just take my friend’s death, his suffering, my nightmares, and sell them. That’s the job. And you have no fucking right.”

“It’s your story.” I tried to stay calm, logical, when I wanted to scream at him. “I’m not your enemy, Stone. You get a say in how you tell it.”

“I don’t want to tell it at all. Why don’t you get that? Why the fuck can’t you see? You come from a nice life, with nice parents, and this is just a project to you. You get to look at my shitty life like you’re looking through a microscope, write your story, then throw me away. I rip my guts out playing every night. Every time we play that song, I think about Chase, how it’s my fault, how it was my idea to go to L.A., how I should have stayed with him that morning instead of leaving. It’s my fucking fault, and I feel it every time. And that still isn’t good enough for you. Nothing will ever be good enough for you.”

There was a brisk knock on the dressing room door, and a man’s voice called out, “Ten minutes.”

“Got it,” Stone said back. He ran his hands over his face, through his hair, taking a deep breath. He was getting into show mode. Switching off his emotions. I couldn’t imagine how hard that must be in this moment, how much skill it must take. He must have to do it all the time.

“You have it wrong,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’ll get a message to the hotel. You’re getting your own room. The tour will pay for it. You can’t stay with me anymore.”

For some reason, that hurt like a punch to the gut. We’d been nothing but reluctant as roommates, but to have him let me go—I wasn’t ready. “Stone, please.”

He shrugged, shutting down. I could see a deadly calm come over him, his stage persona, the face he showed the world. The quiet one who rarely spoke. The big, silent, scowling guitar god. The white-hot anger and hurt were gone.

“Tour’s over, Maplethorpe,” he said, his voice hard. “Write what you want. We’re finished anyway. Everything’s done.”

Then he was gone.

I sat there in a daze for a while, collecting myself. Wiping my tears yet again. Somewhere far off, the show started.

When I left Madison Square Garden, the sounds of Stone’s guitar followed me, the anguished notes reverberating from the rafters.

PART 2

NOW

TWELVE

NOW

Stone

I’d told Angie that I would call Sienna the next day and set up a meeting, but I didn’t. I never intended to. Like everyone else in my life, Angie needed to learn early that I don’t follow orders.

Instead, I let a few days pass. Then a week. The Road Kings found a new rehearsal space to rent, one that was bigger and cheaper than the by-the-hour recording studio downtown. The building had once been a car dealership, but it had moved to more upscale pastures. The huge, empty showroom, big enough to hold a dozen cars, was the perfect size for us. We got the space for cheap and were set up within a day.

We had new songs that we’d been working on over the tour, playing them to see how audiences reacted. Some of them were good, but all of them needed work, and we needed new ones besides. Also, we’d played fast and loose with them during the tour—the best way to write songs, in our opinion—and we hadn’t written very much down. We needed to figure out what the songs were, what the lyrics would be, what the songs would be called, how we would play them on the record. Eventually, we’d figure out what order they’d go in. And we’d need band consensus on every decision. Considering the four of us, it was amazing any record ever got made by the Road Kings at all.

We’d only ever made two studio albums—our third was a live album—and we’d made them years ago, so though we were pros, we had to figure out a routine all over again. We were different guys than we’d been back then. We were older, and because Axel was sober, when we were rehearsing the rest of us were, too. I thought back to the cases of beer, bottles of liquor, and giant bags of weed that had accompanied our first two recordings, and all I felt was surprise that I’d been able to fuck myself up so consistently and still make music. Even for rock stars, your late thirties are no joke.

Musicians aren’t morning types, so we’d convene at the dealership around noon, eat some lunch, shoot the shit, and get to work. The dealership had left two sofas behind, and we pulled them into the room along with coffee tables, an old filing cabinet—we used it to store cables and other junk—and the familiar mess of mics, guitars, a bass, amps, pedals, Axel’s drum kit, a keyboard, and Neal’s acoustic guitar. Takeout containers filled the garbage. Sheets of paper with Denver’s handwriting littered the floor. I felt more at home here, in this makeshift musical mess, than I had in any house or apartment I’d ever lived in.

Through all of this, Sienna Maplethorpe was never far from my mind, though I never talked about her or mentioned her name. Something had shifted in me during that conversation with Angie. I was no longer avoiding Sienna, and the thought of her didn’t send dread up my spine.

We’d left things badly. I’d kissed her. I hadn’t been able to help myself. She’d showed up at my dressing room door, her makeup rubbed off and her eyes red from tears, and I’d lost my mind. I’d never seen Sienna cry, and the thought of it made me crazy, and when she’d said that her tears were my fault, I’d stopped thinking. I had just wanted to show her—what? That I wasn’t that guy, maybe. The guy she thought I was. That it was her, only her, who made me a different guy altogether.

Then she’d brought up Chase. I did not talk about Chase. I thought about him plenty, but I’d followed one rule for twenty years—do not talk about Chase. The only exception was when I’d talked to Denver about him, late one night a long time ago when we were halfway drunk. Denver knew everything. Denver understood pain, loss, and loneliness like no one else alive.

But Sienna dropped Chase on me like a bomb, right before I needed to go onstage at Madison Square Garden, right after I’d kissed her after wanting to for weeks. I’d reacted badly. I’d yelled at her—I owed her a thousand apologies for that—and I’d kicked her out of my room. I’d paid the price by lying awake for the next few nights, wondering what she was doing, wondering whether she’d finally decided she hated me forever.

Then I’d come home, and I’d tried to bury it. And what do you know—it hadn’t worked. I was going to see Sienna, and we were going to have everything out. I was just going to do it on my own time.

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