New York: October 17th, 1996
He sat before the mirror, turning the letter in his hands and listening to the distant crowd roaring like a relentless ocean attacking the shore.
"I suppose I should just read the fucking thing."
Wanda shrugged. She snapped back the clasps on the makeup case and lifted it open. The contents of the case had been carefully selected to match the hodgepodge of crap he'd used way back when he had used to do this himself. It looked like a doctor's bag, full of vials of colored powders and brushes and jars of colorless liquids.
"I really should, right?"
Wanda tilted his head back and started to apply the pale foundation. She didn't answer.
"Fuck."
Her face was impassive as she worked.
He broke the seal on the letter, suddenly all in a rush, practically tearing the thing in half as he opened it.
Dear Marc.
He already knew that he was going to regret this. Daphne wasn't the sort of person to start a letter with a "dear anybody." Not unless she was in a killing mood. Anyway, he knew she was pissed if she wrote Marc instead of Dad. He should just rip it up and throw it in the trash. He didn't need this, not now. Not now of all possible times. He smoothed out the paper on his knee, and the bottom fold flipped open heavily. There was a little silver key affixed to the paper. Stuck on there with scotch tape ever so neatly, in Daphne's particular fastidious manner.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to write you, since I doubt you'll be able to manage this many big words, but I suppose you probably employ people for that kind of thing.
Ouch. Yeah, she was upset. He didn't exactly consider himself a man of letters, but he thought he might be detecting a hint of animosity. Couldn't say he totally blamed her, but still...
I wish I could wish you luck on your "comeback," but unfortunately I cannot in good conscious pretend that I have any positive feeling towards you or any of your endeavors. Nor would it do any good telling you that I hope you crash and burn. I'm sure that you can do that without any help from me.
Wanda started doing around his eyes, painting delicate gold scarlet-shot bands across the lids and over the bridge of the nose.
The way you have treated me and mom is totally obscene and hateful, and I wish you had never seen fit to once again impose yourself on our lives. No one wants you here. No one has ever wanted you here; we've just been taking pity on you. And I have finally run out of pity. A washed-up degenerate like you only gets so much pity before there's nothing left but contempt. The way you acted at Mom's party was completely sickening. I've spent my whole life being ashamed of you, but that was too far. I just can't believe that you would do that.
Wanda took out a tube of black lipstick, broke the seal and popped off the cap. She twisted the bottom of the stick, and leaned down to apply it in clean and even strokes to his pursed lips.
The things you said to Bernard were so far out of line that I don't even know what to say. I know you don't like him, but that is entirely your problem. If you wanted mom to be yours, you shouldn't have screwed around on her, and if you wanted to be my dad then you should have made an effort to be here once in a while.
Now the pale pink glow on the white cheeks, and then onto the hair. Wanda worked fast and skillfully, a true professional. He remembered back in the old days he used to do this all himself, usually in the back of the tour bus before rushing off to some club or re-purposed warehouse full of shrieking fans. He remembered once trying to put on mascara while getting his dick sucked by a groupie while he was out of his mind on coke. He'd ended up stabbing himself in the eye and spent the whole show holding an ice pack to his face. It had seemed like a funny story before, but now stuck him as somehow sad.
You think just because you're rich enough to pay people to kiss your ass that you can do whatever you want. Well, you can't. Not in mom's house and not in mine either. Just because you paid for the houses doesn't mean you own the people in them. I'd rather live on the street than have to spend one more second around you. You are disgusting and conceited and arrogant and selfish beyond all reason.
She teased his hair up then combed it evenly back and gelled it down, arranging the streak of white hair into his trademark lightening shape against the black. He had a few more streaks in there now, and not purposeful ones, but a bottle of jet black Just For Men had taken care of that.
Maybe when you were talented you could get away with this, but you're not that good anymore and eventually everybody's going to realize it. I'm actually glad that you and the rest of those useless idiots are doing this whole reunion thing, because now everybody is going to see what's become of you. Nothing but a used-up piece of garbage too stupid to roll over and die.
The jewelry came last. Gold and diamond stud earrings and a silver choke collar around his neck. They'd been glass and paint back in the day, but were all real now. It still felt weird, walking around with the price of a sports car in accessories on you.
Oh, and the new album sucks.
Do me a favor and leave me alone forever. This key is for a storage shed in town where I've put all your guitars and awards and stuff. Keep it in your own house, we don't want it here.
Daphne
He tossed the key on the table and crumpled the letter in his leather-gloved fist. He leaned back in the makeup chair and threw the crumpled ball across the room. It bounced off the edge of the trashcan and hit the floor.
He lay back and gazing up at the ceiling. The lights were swimming a little.
Wanda clicked her tongue and patted the corner of his eyes with a tissue. "None of that. You'll ruin my work."
"Right. Sorry." He sniffed, wiped carefully at his nose with the back of his hand. He looked up.
There was his face in the mirror, looking as if it were staring at him from out of the past. He remembered nineteen seventy-four, when he'd been only twenty-five years old and their first single had just hit the top of the charts. He'd sketched his look on the back of a napkin in an English pub and hadn't changed it since. He had wanted something otherworldly and shocking, something to knock the squares on their asses, something neither male nor female, like a creature of another dimension outside of human experience.
Looking at himself now, forty-seven years old and back in the same getup again after an eight year hiatus, he thought he looked ridiculous. A pitiful clown, a prancing joker in skintight leather. It was nineteen ninety-fucking-six, and rock stars didn't look like this anymore. But this was what the fans wanted, and if the fans weren't happy then what was the point of the whole all this comeback bullshit in the first place? If the tour didn't come off then he was going to default on his house, on his cars, on the whole fucking lot of it. It was amazing how fast you could burn through a fortune when you put your mind to it the way he'd done.
Gregory poked his head in the door. The new manager. Young corporate record company guy who looked like he'd never danced or screwed in his life. "You ready, Marc? The band's on stage, and we're just waiting for the green light."
Marc nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm good."
"Great. Knock 'em dead out there."
"Right. You got it."
Somehow the guy still wasn't gone. "Must be a wonderful feeling, getting back out there after so long," he said, smiling stupidly.
Marc could feel his teeth starting to grind. "It's a real dream come true."
"Okay. Well. Break a leg."
As soon as the door was shut Marc was laying out a line on the desk. Christ, of course he was. Hadn't even realized the little bag of coke was still in his pocket. Shit, and he'd promised himself that he was going to do the tour clean. Well, just a bump to start the thing off, and no more after this. It didn't count now, since the tour didn't officially start for another... what, two minutes? He could already hear the sounds of Joanna's winding synths and Roger's buzz-saw guitar coming through the wall, no doubt after a thumbs-up from Gregory. Tony's thumping bass came in a few seconds later, and the drum machine switched on. The familiar music locked into a groove. They were waiting for him now, just on the other side of that door, five steps down the hall and out onto the stage. Everybody was waiting for him.
He wasn't entirely sure what it was he'd done at Daphne's that had pissed her off so bad. He had a vague recollection of lying on his back in the middle of the front yard watching fire engines pull up. He'd been blind drunk of course, and high to boot. How the fuck else was he supposed to cope with straight life? Sitting there watching Daphne and her mom and her sweet little step-dad in a sweater vest... Christ, he'd really done it this time.
He bent low and snorted the line of coke on the counter. That was better. Shit. He took a deep breath and got up. Through the door, down the hall and out onto the stage in front of ten thousand strangers chanting his name and screaming.
* * *
"Cashmere is back! The titanic seventies rock gods came thundering to life on the stage like they'd never been away, and they brought the house down. Joanna Keyes, Roger Thorpe and Anthony Brasso were incredible, and lead singer Marc Warner hasn't missed a step since Cashmere's heyday. Their classic hits sounded as good as ever, and the material from their new record delighted all the fans who've been waiting almost a decade for more songs by the glam rock all-stars. Cashmere fans, get your tickets ASAP, because the Begin Again tour is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience not to be missed!"
Gregory lowered the print out with a shit-eating grin plastered across his face. Four middle-aged rock stars in gaudy outfits and makeup sat almost at opposite corners of the green room, drinking wine - or harder liquor - and nibbling food from the massive spread which had been laid out on the table at the far end of the room. The mood was sullen and deflated.
"Am I the only one," Tony drawled, "curious about the fact that there's already a review of a show only half-an-hour after it fucking ended? Almost like someone's publicist wrote it before the show even happened..."
Gregory pouted. "It was an Internet piece, from a music site. Just went up."
"The Internet? God, now the nerds really are taking over."
"Shut the fuck up, Tony, good press is good press," sneered Roger, flicking his toothpick across the room.
"Yeah, do you have to be so goddamn negative all the time?" Joanna snapped.
Marc sighed, knocking his head back against the wall. Christ, the bickering already. He was having flashbacks to Cashmere's last tour, when things had gotten really nasty. They had played more than a dozen shows without any member of the band exchanging a single word with any other. If there was talking to be done, it was done through lawyers and managers. It was like being trapped in the world's most fucked up polygamous marriage, complete with the four-way divorce ten minutes after the last show. Marc didn't think he'd spoken to any of them for a good five years after that.
"Oh, don't make like the long-suffering saint, Marc. You looked barely conscious up there," said Roger.
"He remembered most of the words, at least," Tony interjected gloomily.
"Lay off," Joanna groaned, "you'll just make him pissy with a wind-up like that."
"Gee, thanks Joanna. Thanks, guys." Marc got up with a nasty smile, mussing his hair and giving it a shake. "Just remember that I wrote the fucking songs, alright? I could have replaced you all with a bunch of scrubs and paid them pennies on the dollar to what you jokers are making."
"Oh, don't," said Joanna.
"The way I hear it, you need the money a lot more than we do," said Roger.
"It's not Cashmere without all of us," said Tony, "more like... tweed, maybe."
"That joke's just gotten so much better in the last ten years, Tony. You must have been practicing." Marc rolled his eyes.
Then Joanna with the little dig: "At least someone was."
Marc shook his head. "Let's not, everyone. It was a good show, and we've got nine more to do, so how about we all just shut the fuck up and play? See you in Pittsburgh."
And he was out the door.
* * *
Half-an-hour past midnight, the buzz had subsided and he needed air. He stripped off his makeup. Back to the old self. Lines at the corners of the eyes, the skin looser than before, the little sags and wrinkles. He still looked good. He was only forty-seven, after all, not dead and not decrepit. He looked good. But he didn't look like Marc Warner, didn't look like the perfect youthful sex god of the posters and album covers. He shrugged on an overcoat and pulled on an old leather cap and scarf. Just another guy, another human in a world of billions.
He stepped out onto the street into a throng of fans waving autograph books. For a second he thought about ducking back inside real quick, but they ignored him. They were looking for Cashmere, and he was just a guy in a shabby coat. He passed through the crowd easily, always expecting to be caught, for the cry to go up. He half-hoped someone would recognize him, but nobody did.
Somehow that made the whole thing worse.
There was a bitter chill on the air, that unique New York October bite. They'd recorded their third album in New York, at a little studio in the Upstate countryside. It had been this little wooden shack, a far cry from the high tech super-glitz of their usual LA recording studio. It was pretty state of the art though, given the location, and the record hadn't turned out half bad, though it was usually singled out as their "transitional" recording by the critics. Transitional meaning that it came between two records that everybody liked more.
There had been this bench set up overlooking the hills. He could still remember going out and sitting there, gazing out at the rolling forests below. The whole place had smelled like apple blossoms and corn fields. It was so gorgeous you didn't even care about the fucking chill. Those two weeks, in hindsight, were probably some of the best they'd ever had. It had almost been like a retreat for them, a sanctuary in the wilderness. They were superstars at that point, and it sometimes felt like the whole world was on their backs. The unending controversy which had been such a laugh at the beginning had started to become a wearying burden, and the shrieking of fans had started to sound like something fierce and terrible. Like being in a zombie movie, the whole hoard out to get them, and they were only safe as long as they stayed up on that stage. As long as they kept rocking they could hold the onslaught back. That was their only island.
They'd still been friends back then. More than that. They'd shared everything from food to drugs to sex, and he'd poured every idea he ever had into their hands.
And it had been good.
Now he just felt cold. Instead of the sweet crisp apple scent it was diesel fumes and human shit and all the refuse of the biggest city on the planet.
The stadium was behind, still lighting up the night, and he was alone in a world of glowing street signs and dirty smoke. It started to rain. He tried to remember the last time he'd been alone like this. It didn't happen often. There were always people hanging around the mansion, even if he never knew more than half of them they were always there and they always knew him. After that it had been such a whirlwind, getting the band back together, wrangling them into the studio to crank out ten half-assed songs he'd dug out of the old reject pile, not to mention organizing the tour and record release. Now silence for the first time. Nothing but the squeal of tires in the rain and the anonymous chatter of the city at night.
Who did he really have? If the tour didn't come off and he lost it all, if the endless parties finally ended, where would he be? He'd always thought of Daphne as a sort of safety net. He could always retreat there, just be a normal guy. What a fucking joke. That wasn't him, even if he'd wanted it; he wasn't built for that sort of life. Now it sounded like he wasn't welcome back regardless.
He hadn't had a steady girlfriend - or boyfriend - for years. Why bother when there was no shortage of new faces night after night willing to fall in bed with him? Anyone serious was just after his money, and the rest were nothing more than distractions.
Friends? He hadn't needed friends before, he'd had the band. But that was over now. They were lucky if they could make it through the day without biting each others' heads off. And after the band he'd had... people. You could call them friends, but they were just colorless moths fluttering around his brightness. No one he could count on, no one he could confide in.
No. He really was alone.
He walked on, faceless and unknown in the vastness of the New York nighttime, lost in a drizzling rain and a lamp-lit neon gloom.
* * *
The drizzle turned into a shower, shower to a rain, rain to a downpour, downpour to a fucking deluge, and Marc was stuck in the middle of it with only the vaguest of notions of where exactly he was going. He saw the glow of a sign through the rain: Bar and Grill - Live Music!
Just when it couldn't possibly get any worse. Maybe they had a phone inside, and he could call Gregory to have a car sent out for him. Of course, he thought as he pulled open the door, he had no idea what Gregory's number might be. But at least he could wait out the rain.
It was a typical dingy little hole-in-the-wall sort of place. Everything faintly grimy, dim through a haze of cigarette smoke, regulars all in a line at the bar. Every guy trying to chat up every girl. There was a fuzzy little TV set turned to a game, but it was so small and grainy you could hardly even tell what sport was being played, much less who was winning or losing. Didn't stop people from staring dully at it while they sipped their watery American beers and tried to forget about the people waiting for them at home.
Marc ordered a drink. Why not? Might as well pass the time. In a bottle, though, thanks very much. He didn't trust them to do much washing in a place like this. He was tempted to get food but there wasn't anything on the menu here that seemed entirely safe, and the greasy stench coming from the platters in the occupied booths was suspect at best.
He sat at the edge of the bar and took a sip. Warm. Oh, fuck it. He threw back a swallow, wincing at the taste.
Nobody recognized him. Nobody really even looked at him. He was just another bedraggled castaway, and hardly worth the attention which could otherwise be given to the blurry whatever that was playing up on the screen. What would happen if somebody did recognize him? Some half-drunk fan stumbling up with a pen and a scrap of phone-book paper for him to scribble on. Would the whole place go crazy, everybody brighten up and flock around the rock star who'd descended into their midst like a god coming down to earth to mingle with the mortals? Would they even really care? Oh yeah, from Cashmere. I used to listen to them, back in the day. What's going on with you now? Shame how it all turned out.
He shook his head. Fuck, he was in a black mood. Maybe he should just call a cab and go to bed. Trade the shitty beer for a glass of warm milk and complete his transformation from glam rock patron saint to middle-aged shmuck.
Marc heard a sound through the haze of low conversation. It was a sound he'd heard so many times that it had sort of lost all meaning to him; he hardly even registered it at first. A tentative note being plucked on an acoustic guitar, a furtive little strum to check the tuning. How many times had he heard Roger's guitar - or his own when he was writing - make a noise like that? Maybe a thousand? A hundred thousand? The clack of a drum stick behind laid across the head, a throat cleared a couple inches back from the mic. The sounds seemed so incongruous in this filthy miserable little place that they seemed hardly real, like it must all be just in his head.
He turned around. There they were, tucked away in an ill-lit corner well out of sight of the majority of the bar's patrons, a little two-piece band about to start playing.
They looked a bit lost, and not just because of their out-of-the-way placement. There was a guy sitting on a re-purposed bar stool with a guitar across his lap and one hand holding the microphone stand like it was the only thing keeping him from drifting away and a woman clattering around in a loose assemblage of percussion. They couldn't have been more than twenty, twenty-five years old. God, had he ever been that young?
The guitar player had long dark hair that fell loosely about his face, so thick you could hardly see him through it except for a nose and chin and one of his bright blue eyes. He wore ragged jeans with holes in the knees and a loose flannel over a ratty Pink Floyd t-shirt that looked like it had come from the secondhand store - maybe third-hand, at that. He was lanky and slender, one foot up on the stool and the other already tapping time on the floor. He brushed some hair off his face and it fell right back. He picked up his guitar and leaned into the mic.
"Hey guys," his voice was soft, totally unconcerned, hardly penetrating the murk of conversation despite having the advantage of amplification. "We're called Wilderlands and this is our first show, so, uh... be cool. Thanks for listening, and stuff."
Oh God. Marc wanted to groan. Here he was, trapped in the city, stuck in one of the lousiest dive bars he'd ever seen, already feeling about as low as he could remember ever having felt, and now he was going to be assaulted by a couple amateur-hour wannabes. He felt a low-level pang of second-hand embarrassment on behalf of all musicians. No wonder the only gig they could swing was in this pit. He wanted to turn away, but couldn't. Like watching a car about to slam into traffic, you just couldn't take your eyes off it.
The guy looked at the girl and she flashed a little grin back, a sort of can you believe we're getting away with this kind of smile. She started up with a wire brush drumstick on her tambourine. It made a shivery, almost ghostly sound, just shuffling in and out of the ambient bar noise.
The guy licked his lower lip and rubbed his fingers together. Then he started playing.
Marc hadn't quite realized, but he'd been hunching lower and lower in his seat, as if trying to sink into the floor and escape the disaster. But now he sat upright. Now he turned all the way around, and he faced the band.
The guy's fingers seemed to dance across the strings, as deft and assured as any player he'd ever seen, and a hell of a lot better than Marc himself could ever manage. He'd done most of his songwriting with rudimentary cords and basic piano lines, counting on the rest of the band to fill in the details after he gave them the overall form. This player, however, was clearly on another level. But it wasn't just the technical skill of the playing that really caught his attention. It was the music.
The guitar notes seemed to twinkle and shimmer, delicate and clean and smooth, lively as a running stream and soft as the wind in the trees. It was elemental, like nature's own music. He thought again of sitting on the hill and catching the scent of apples on a cool breeze. The music danced, twisting and living to the soft-shuffle whisper of the drum.
Then the guy started singing. His voice seemed somehow fragile and powerful at the same time, quivering with barely contained intensity. He had clearly never been professionally trained, but if anything he sounded better for it. The sound of his voice was like a high-wire act, always threatening to slip off key or lose energy or break, but always staying just on this side of controlled. It was a phrase that Marc hated almost above all others, but the guy was singing from the heart. No, more than that. He sang like he'd just ripped his heart out of his chest and was holding it out for you to take if you wanted it.
He sang so well that Marc hardly paid any attention to the words at first. Just at first. They were like poetry, like real poetry, not the rhyming sing-song children's book crap either. They were the sort of words you might find in a musky little red book in the back of an old man's house, words that that sucked you in and makes it feel like the world just dropped out from under you, the sort a woman might share at the podium of a little coffee shop with tears in her eyes and leave the whole place stunned into silence so completely that they don't even remember to clap, the sort you'd find scratched in the bark of a tree on the edge of the wilderness. They were the sort of words... no, he couldn't describe it, it all fell short. But he could feel their power. Words that sent shivers like razor blades, and opened something up deep inside, a yawning yearning emptiness for something he couldn't quite express.
Marc found that he was frozen in a kind of shock. He listened, rapt, hyper-attuned, straining to absorb every note, every vibration of sound. The song ended. Couldn't have been more than two and a half minutes, maybe three, but it had seemed to last a lifetime. He could have lived in that song. He blinked, as if coming out of a trance, and realized that he'd been holding his beer halfway up to his mouth the entire time, hand arrested from the first note.
The guitar player almost but not quite smiled, nothing more than a slight twitch of his lips. "Thanks," he murmured his response to the smattering of applause which was moving lazily through the crowd.
Marc looked around in shock. The place seemed hardly to have taken notice of what had just happened. Half of them had barely looked away from the television. People in the booths kept chatting away, the grill in the kitchen kept sizzling; the guys kept going after the girls with their shitty pickup lines. The world hadn't stopped for anybody other than Marc Warner. And the show had only just begun.
For twenty-five or maybe thirty minutes he didn't move a single muscle, just sat there holding his beer and watching. Listening. They played seven songs, each as good as the last, as astonishing. He felt like he hardly breathed the entire time that they played. After the second song the whole bar just faded, and there was nothing left except him and the two musicians. He hadn't felt like this in a long long time, not since he was a teenager, really. Back in the early seventies he'd used to hitchhike into Sacramento, since nobody bothered playing the little California town where he'd grown up, and he would sneak into shows that he couldn't even come close to affording. He remembered the way it had spun his head around, had lifted him off the world. He'd hitch back in the dead of night with all those tunes still whirling in his head. Every show made the world outside his hometown seem bigger, and his hometown seem smaller. Every show made him more and more convinced that he was going to do it himself one day.
He had that feeling again. It was strange, stupid even: he was a multi-platinum artist with a deep back catalog of successful records to stand on, but listening to those guys play made him feel like he was a scrappy kid with a dream again. They made him want to be a musician.
"Yeah... that's it," the guitar player said, and leaned back from the mic. The bartender or whoever it was didn't waste any time hitting the light, and their little corner faded deeper into the gloom. There was a smattering of applause from the relatively uninterested audience. Marc himself didn't give so much as a single clap. It seemed... sacrilegious. It seemed like it would have only intruded on the moment. He wanted to bask a little longer in the world of their music, to catch the last fading sounds of their songs as the echoes were swallowed by the walls.
He shook his head. Un-fucking-believable. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a show that good. He wasn't sure he ever had.
Was this real? Maybe they'd just caught him at a weird time. Maybe it sounded so good because he was just vulnerable to it. It wasn't like the rest of the crowd had been especially moved, maybe it was only in his head. How could he be sure? He needed to hear them again. Needed someone else to hear them, someone with taste that he trusted, Roger or Joanna or even Tony, maybe. He doubted he could convince any of them to come to a place like this. Shit, it wasn't like any of them would have been able to convince him. If he hadn't actually heard it, he never would have believed it - and he only half-believed it himself.
Maybe they had a record out, a demo tape, something.
He was startled out of his thoughts by the sound of a guitar case clacking shut. Shit, they were already packed up! Back at the stadium the roadies were probably still trying to load Cashmere's gear into the three massive tour buses, and would be for hours more.
He hopped up off the bar-stool. "Hey!" he called out, feeling like an idiot. What could he say? They were already hefting their gear and heading towards the imposing metal door in back.
The guitar player looked back, brushing his black hair behind his ear. Christ, he was gorgeous. High cheek bones, slender jaw, piercing blue eyes under dark intense brows. He nodded a little and gave Marc a lazy two-fingered salute, and he was gone.
Marc hurried up, caught his foot on the stool and almost tripped. His by now rather warm beer sloshed on his shirt-cuff. "Shit!"
The door shut, and a bulky looking guy leaned back against it, arms crossed.
"Hey, I need to get in there," he said.
"Sorry buddy. Employees only."
"But I need to talk to that band."
The guy furrowed his brow, looking confused. "I'm sorry, did... did you not hear me? Employees. Only. You wanna fill out an application, they're at the bar. But we're not hiring."
"I'm Marc fucking Warner, let me in, okay?"
"Yeah, but I'm David fucking Bowie, so no, I'm not letting you in. Piss off."
"Fucker!" he spat, and turned on his heel and heading for the door.
The guy snatched his arm, reacting faster than Marc thought a guy of his size could have possibly managed, and yanked him back. "You gonna play for that beer you dumped all over the counter, buddy?"
Mark dug in his pants for his wallet. Christ, he needed to get out of here. He doubted the band would hang around this dump for long. Goddamn it, hardly any cash. He pulled out a dollar bill, which of course left him coming up short.
The guy raised his eyebrows.
Marc sighed. "You take credit?"
He pointed to a sign behind the bar. We accept credit cards only for purchases over $10.
"Shit. Shit. Shit! You fuck!" What a fucking time to get stuck haggling with this asshole. "Sell me a bottle, whatever! Come on!"
He stood there at the bar, practically bouncing up and down as the guy dragged out an ancient looking card reader and started operating it. He was seriously considering just dashing out the door. They weren't going to chase after him for a two dollar beer, after all. But what if...
It was the fucking price of celebrity. That would be a great way to start the new tour, with some bullshit story about Marc Warner stealing a beer. And he'd told the guy his name. Shit.
"Thank you so much for your business," the guy said, all sarcasm.
"Yeah. Have a nice night." Marc snarled, snatching his card out of the guy's hand and running out the door.
The rain had stopped, reduced to puddles and slow drippings off the balconies and gutters. Cars knifed through the dark, their wheels spinning up silver droplets, their wipers flicking, their headlights gleaming in the wet reflections. It was a silent, transcendent sight, one which called for contemplation and thoughtfulness. Marc rounded the building at a run and started dashing down the street. There had to be an alley, or something... Three doors down he found one and cut through, kicking aside a pile of soggy newspapers and God knew what else. He climbed a rain-slick dumpster and almost broke his neck clambering over the chain-link fence across the middle of the alleyway. He hit the wet ground running and burst out just in time to see a junky old silver van pulling out into traffic. There was something painted on the back but it was dark out and the thing was already moving swiftly away down the road.
"Goddamn it!" he cursed, kicking a puddle with all the indignation he could muster.
What the hell had they called themselves? Wilderness? Wild Lands? Shit, he couldn't remember.
He stood there, not caring about the drizzle of gutter overflow dripping steadily down his collar. He watched the retreating lights of the van until they rounded a distant corner and vanished into the darkness.
Eight hours later he was checking out of his hotel room and boarding the tour bus for Pittsburgh, leaving New York City and everything in it far behind.