Opening Act Read online

  “But…Jesus, Byron! How the hell can you do that to someone? What did you even say to her?”

  “I just told her the truth. Which is that, in this matter—in everything, really—everything to do with me, in every area of my life—it’s you. It’s always been you.”

  Loni was so stunned, she didn’t know what else to do.

  So she said yes.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 13

  “Just one more,” said Shay, as Paul poured him another tumbler of bourbon. It was what he’d said when Paul had poured him the last two…or was it three? It was, in fact, what he said most often to Paul, since they’d started their tradition of drinking after dinner.

  It was surprising, this friendship. No one in Overlords of Loneliness had thought they would actually hang out with Strafer Nation. After all, Strafer Nation had been together and touring since the early nineties, and Overlords was only their opening act—one of dozens they’d seen come and go during their careers. Yet Strafer was a really friendly bunch. Shay had expected them to look down their noses at their tagalongs, but apparently they’d been on the road long enough, and racked up enough gold records and TV appearances and fan pages and whatever, to have the luxury of slumming with the kids nipping at their heels. Strafer Nation had nothing left to prove. Quite the opposite; they had plenty to share.

  Case in point, Shay Dayton and Paul Di Santangelo. Paul was the Strafer front man and had been since dinosaurs roamed the earth. He’d also, in his time, been the kind of sexually turbocharged icon who’d inspired women to hurl their bras and panties onto the stage. He was in his forties now and still pretty hot, but noticeably less lithe than in his prime. When he got offstage after a full night of working, he groaned and winced and complained about his knees.

  You’d think such a guy would be threatened by Shay Dayton, who warmed up the crowd for him with the kind of Lizard King moves Paul himself could no longer pull off without pulling a muscle. (And boy did it take some warming. Most audiences didn’t know Overlords from Adam and greeted the opening set with impatience at best and outright hostility at worst.) Yet Paul and Shay had bonded.

  Shay had arrived in Pittsburgh for the first gig of the tour looking vacant-eyed and shell-shocked from his ten days in New York. In the Big Apple, he had been alternately shoved into rooms filled with media people swilling cocktails and told to charm them, and brusquely escorted into back alleys where idling cars waited to speed him off to dinner at some unspecified locale while paparazzi—having caught the scent of the Next Big Thing—circled the block of Halbert Hasque’s penthouse like hound dogs in heat. Shay quite literally never knew whether he was coming or going, whether his goal was to seduce or stand off, whether his next dinner companion would be a movie star at an awards ceremony or his chauffeur parked outside a fast-food joint.

  Paul Di Santangelo had been through it all before, and often. So the older man had taken Shay under his wing and shared with him his wisdom…and the other benefits afforded to rock legends. Benefits like the way to get any mind-altering substance known to man (“You don’t even have to ask,” Paul had said. “Just think about it hard enough. People will know.”) and a stream of eager young women who only wanted one brush with fame to hold onto (well, technically, a bit more than a brush) before disappearing into lives of drab anonymity.

  And it wasn’t long—Kansas City, to be exact—before Shay had extracted from Paul something more valuable than all of that.

  “All right,” Paul said as he set down the bottle of Woodford Reserve, which he had sent by the case to every hotel room booked for him in every city on the tour. “Let’s have another go. Play a G major 7 chord.”

  Shay tossed back a mouthful of bourbon, then plonked the tumbler atop the Yamaha digital piano Paul traveled with for practicing and composing. Lately he had, almost casually, begun giving Shay lessons. Teaching him scales, basic chord structure, the circle of fifths, and certain chord progressions, like the 2-5-1 turnaround vital to so many standards and pop songs. Shay found it to be uphill work, but he was committed to mastering the instrument. He was also committed to hiding the ferocity of his ambition from Paul—he didn’t want to look desperate.

  Shay obediently played a G major 7 chord: G-B-D-F#.

  “Now play a D7.”

  Shay slid his hand down the keyboard: D-F#-A-C.

  Paul cocked his head and grimaced. “Remember what we were talking about earlier,” he said. “You don’t want your hand to be jumping around like that. You want to keep it as still as possible.”

  “Right, right,” Shay said, going back and playing the G major 7 again.

  “Now, play a D7, without moving your wrist,” Paul told him, then had another swig from his own glass.

  Shay thought for a moment, then moved his thumb up a whole step and his index finger a half step: A-C-D-F#.

  “Exactly,” said Paul. “You just take the A and C from the top of the chord and move them to the bottom. The tones are exactly the same, and your hand doesn’t move.”

  “Right, right, I remember now,” Shay said, feeling stupid he’d ever forgotten.

  “Toast yourself, then,” Paul said, lifting his glass.

  Shay raised his tumbler. “Here’s to me,” he said, and he had another swig.

  “Okay,” said Paul, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. “Play that G major 7 again.”

  Shay did so.

  “Now play a C minor 7 with a flatted 5.”

  Shay stared at the keyboard.

  “It’s the same principle,” Paul said, encouraging him.

  “I know, I know. This is just…trickier.” In fact, he was completely blanking. He looked at the keyboard and tried to visualize the chord in question before reshuffling the notes to accommodate the G major 7 hand position, but he couldn’t even see it. He wasn’t sure whether it was too much bourbon or the pressure of being put on the spot by Paul Di Fucking Santangelo.

  Finally he had to turn and say, “Sorry…stumped.”

  Paul chuckled and said, “No worries, that one’s kind of a killer. Here.” He came over, sat on the bench beside him, and played the G major 7 chord: G-B-D-F#. Then, just by moving his thumb, index, and third fingers slightly, he played the new chord: B, C, E, G.

  “You make it look easy,” Shay said.

  “It is…after a lot of repetition. You’ve just gotta put in the hours. And then you get to the point where you can just drop your hand and play G major 7, D7, and C minor 7 flatted 5 one right after the other, boom, boom, boom.” And he did so, with a perfectly still wrist.

  Shay grinned. “Very cool.”

  Paul knocked his shoulder into his. “You’ve earned a break, Ludwig.”

  “No, wait, let me give it one more try,” Shay said, eyeing the keyboard.

  “No use. This late, and this drunk, it won’t sink in. Go on, give it a rest till tomorrow. Or…whenever.”

  Shay became aware that he might be pushing at the outer edges of Paul’s patience, so he relented. He took up his drink again and said, “You’re right. Thanks, though. Here’s to you, keyboard wizard.” He tossed back a mouthful.

  Paul did the same, then settled back into the radiantly purple hotel chair and said, “I gotta say, you’re a pretty determined pupil. You really never studied before, huh?”

  “No, never,” Shay admitted. “Flute lessons when I was in grade school. But that never took.”

  Paul raised his eyebrows. “How very Jethro Tull.”

  “Yeah. I never knew about them back then, or who knows, I might’ve stuck with it.”

  “Well,” he said, holding up his drink to the light and casually studying its refractions through the amber liquid, “you’re well on the road to being able to compose a tune. You’ve already got a knack for rhythm and phrasing, just from performing, so it should all fall into place. Hell, maybe by the end of the tour.”

  “You really think so? That soon?”

  “Mm,” Paul said, having another sip. “If
you want. I’ll give you a nudge here and there if I see you going wrong. If you don’t mind the input.”

  Shay wanted to jump up and down and say, Are you fucking kidding me? But he forced himself to play it cool and merely said, “Thanks, that’d be great.”

  “Gotta say,” said Paul, slumping deeper into the chair, “I’d have thought someone like you would be more drawn to the guitar. Most guys are.”

  “Well,” said Shay, running his fingers up the keyboard (which, now that he’d turned it off, made no sound), “I might have, if I were touring with a guitar god. But I’m touring with you, so…piano it is.”

  Paul scowled. “Really? That’s the deciding factor?”

  Shay blushed, not wanting to be thought so callow an opportunist. “That, and the fact that my band’s already heavy on guitarists.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “Oh. I thought…sorry, didn’t you say you were interested in learning to play just so you could take a more active role in songwriting?”

  “Yyyyeah,” Shay said.

  “But…you’re obviously thinking of performing, too.”

  He felt busted. “I don’t…I’m not…maybe.” He shrugged. “I mean, we’ve got Jimmy on keys already, so…I mean, there’s no real need. But…”

  “You thinking of getting rid of Jimmy?” Paul asked.

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “ ’Cause I gotta say, he doesn’t strike me as a guy who’s real happy to be here.”

  “He’s always like that. It’s just his way. He’s good. Really. Totally committed.”

  Paul nodded. “All right, then. I just…excuse me for getting all sloppy on you, sport. But you’ve got the goods for this job, and by that I mean the pipes and the moves. You know how to work the stage like a champ. Last thing you need is to anchor yourself behind a keyboard.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Not as a regular thing, anyway. I think.”

  “You sound uncertain.”

  He shrugged. “Well…it’s just, you think of a rock-and-roll front man, you think of an instrumentalist. Is all.”

  “You think of a guitarist,” said Paul. “Be specific. And I don’t need to be told that.” He threw back the last of his bourbon, then reached for the bottle. “I’ve had to put up with that my whole career.” He grinned as he poured out a new serving. “But then I never had your moves, so I was always grateful to be able to hunker down behind the keys.”

  “Yeah, you never had my moves,” said Shay, reaching out his own glass for a topper. “You just had your three-octave range and your banshee wail. Poor fucking you.”

  Paul finished pouring and screwed the cap back on the bottle. “So,” he said, leaning back into the chair. “Who is she?”

  Shay choked in mid-swallow. “Who’s who?”

  “The girl,” he said, smiling wryly. “The one who made you think you weren’t a proper front man ’cause you don’t play an instrument.”

  Shay could feel his face burning. “I never mentioned any girl.”

  “Oh,” Paul said in a highly sarcastic tone, “my mistake. Apologies.”

  Shay sighed. “It’s that obvious?”

  “Maybe not to the average dude. But for me…man, it’s like looking down the narrow corridor of time.”

  “You, too?”

  “Mm,” he said, taking a sip. “Ended up marrying her.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “And I can honestly say, our nine years together were the happiest two years of my life.”

  Shay laughed.

  “But don’t let that discourage you,” he added, raising his glass to Shay.

  Shay shook his head. “No discouragement needed. She’s already hooked up with some other guy. Moved out west with him. They’re faculty at some university where they teach together.”

  Paul made a sour face. “Sweet fucking Christmas.”

  “I know,” he said. “Thing is…I mean, I barely know her. But I just…I got the impression she’s not like that.”

  Paul looked at his watch and stretched his arms behind his back—a clear signal he was calling it quits for the night. It wasn’t even one o’clock, but Shay had to remember Paul had about twenty years on him, and they were twenty years of hard road.

  “Your call, cowboy,” Paul said through a theatrical yawn. “But my advice? If you’re actually trying to learn to play piano because of her, then this thing ain’t finished.”

  “You think?”

  Paul got up and waved him to the door. “Go on, get the hell outta here. Let an old man have some peace.”

  On his way to his room, Shay heard a tremendous crash spill out from behind another door followed by raucous laughter.

  He went over to it and knocked. “Hotel security,” he called out.

  Someone from inside shot back, “Fuck you, flatfoot—investigate my ass.”

  Shay laughed and shook his head. “Christ, Trina. You really are fucking crazy.”

  The door opened, and marijuana smoke billowed out, obscuring Shay’s vision before he saw that it was Baby who was admitting him. Lockwood and two members of Strafer Nation were hanging out, smoking. The floor was covered with shattered glass. In its midst, Trina, completely unperturbed, brushed off her sleeves, then flopped onto the bed.

  “What the hell?” said Shay.

  “What?” Trina sneered, “Did we disturb the big fucking Yalta summit of douchebag front men?”

  “I think you disturbed the entire breadbasket of America. What happened?”

  Marty, the Strafer Nation drummer who had to be fifty if he was a day, said, “We bet Trina she couldn’t make it all the way to the bathroom with the room-service tray on her head.”

  “Loaded with every glass in the place, from the look of it,” said Shay, nodding.

  “Every glass, plus,” said Lockwood laconically. “We sent down for more.”

  Shay looked at Trina, who shrugged and said, “Hey, they don’t call me Kid Daredevil for nothing.”

  “No one calls you Kid Daredevil,” said all the others, including the Strafer Nation players, who had learned this refrain by now and had taken it up with tremendous enthusiasm.

  Shay shook his head in disbelief and said, “Just to remind you, we have a long bus ride tomorrow with an actual paying gig at the end of it. For actual human people who have shelled out actual money to see us.”

  “Yes, Fah-thuh,” said Trina in a truly execrable attempt at a British accent. “Shall we go to sleep now, and pray for Grandmama to be happy with the aaaahn-gels?”

  “Pray that Halbert Hasque is happy with us, or you’ll be able to find out how Grandmama’s doing firsthand,” he said.

  “Whoa, is that a threat?”

  “Nah. I know a threat would only turn you on.”

  Everyone in the room said, “Oooohhh,” and Trina threw a box of Cheez-Its at him. Unfortunately it was open, and tiny orange crackers spilled out all along its aerial arc, rendering it too lightweight to reach Shay’s head. It fell to the ground several inches from his feet.

  “Just try to wrap it up before the bus leaves,” Shay said as he headed back toward the hallway.

  When he turned to shut the door behind him, he saw Trina hanging off the bed, picking Cheez-Its off the carpeted floor and eating them. Jimmy said, “Trina, are you out of your goddamn mind? That floor is full of busted glass.”

  “Oooh, how frightful,” Trina said, again in her British accent. As the door shut behind him and he continued down the hall, he heard her go on, “I must be evah so careful or I might—ow! Fucking fuck! Owww!”

  Moments later, Shay was back in the relative privacy of his own room. Relative only because he was technically sharing it with Lockwood, who could come barging in at any time. But given the settled look he’d just had in Trina’s room, that was unlikely. He dropped onto his bed, lay back, and worked his shoes off one at a time. Then he put his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling.

  It had been nice, this leg of the tour. A little r
ocky, at first. He’d left New York more or less a broken man, with Pernita even more smotheringly proprietary of him than ever. The first few gigs had been rough as Overlords got used to being on the road and the wild variances between sound systems at different venues. (They’d learned pretty quickly the first rule of touring was never mind what the sound engineer tells you, insist he does it your way.)

  And then, how the hell it had happened Shay couldn’t imagine—possibly he’d been praying in his sleep or something—but Pernita had gotten bored and left. As much as she wanted to control his every waking movement, barring the ones he conducted behind the bathroom door (and given enough time, she might insist on monitoring even those), she found that the endless hours on the drab freeways frayed her nerves. She had a constant need of novelty, and whenever they arrived at their destinations—small cities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois—the clubs awaiting them there were not remotely up to the caliber Pernita was accustomed to. So she left the group, though with plenty of assurances that this was just a temporary departure to attend to some pressing business and she’d be back very soon. She’d even left most of her luggage on the bus, as if it might check up on Shay in her absence. But the truth was, she’d essentially cut bait.

  Just today, however, she’d e-mailed to say she’d be rejoining the band in Chicago, their last stop on this leg of the tour. That gave Shay less than a week to enjoy his liberty and the high times he’d been having with Paul.

  Paul, God bless his crusty heart, had never once mentioned Pernita’s name after she was gone. He seemed to have sensed how desperately Shay wanted to be free from even thinking about her. Maybe he even knew what Shay was going through. Certainly when they’d first met him, Pernita had thrown herself at Paul as though claiming him as a reward she’d earned in a past life. He’d managed to shrug her off gently, with complete aplomb, as though that kind of assault was something he’d grown very, very used to. There was even a look on his face, behind the twinkling eyes and pasted-on smile, that said, Oh, yeah. One of your type. Hell if I can’t handle you.