I guess I better tell you something about my older sisters. You think I was good at pretending my mother didn’t exist? I was even better at pretending Lilibeth and Janine didn’t exist, and when we were growing up my life was a lot better when they pretended *I* didn’t exist. When my big sisters […]
Ziggy was much better at pumping Remo for information. He quickly determined that the reason Claire was in Tennessee and not Kansas was that her high-falutin’ religious leader husband had dropped her like a hot potato when they figured out that her problem wasn’t her gallbladder after all, but cancer of the pancreas. I didn’t […]
Okay. So I had touched the guitar a couple of times, but only to like get a note for vocal exercises and maybe once or twice to hit a chord to practice the hymn. I had not “played,” for what I considered playing. I was nervous to really play. Which sounds stupid, but I was.
We got in late that night and I tried the number where Remo had said he’d be. By the zip code it looked to be somewhere in Tennessee and I wondered if he was doing another trip through bluegrass country or what. I got a hotel voicemail system and left him a message. He’d have […]
We ended up staying in New York until Monday night (or maybe it was Tuesday, doesn’t matter). We stopped by the office before heading out of town so Ziggy could sign something (or meet someone or whatever, doesn’t matter). Carynne was there and I sat down next to her desk and played with the Wonder […]
“Can I borrow your phone?” Sarah said to Ziggy after we were done with vocal exercises. I was feeling very calm afterward. So calm it was like being stoned. So calm that I sat there, zoned out, listening to Sarah call her mother. She stood in the kitchen, leaning against the wall, holding the phone […]
So it turns out you don’t have to do a lot of drugs or have a lot of sex to have what I–and probably most people–would consider a rock star weekend. Magenta seemed determined to prove us “kids” weren’t going to outlast her and when you have three lead-singer types hanging out together, they will […]
We didn’t leave Jordan’s until brunch time the next day, when Sarah insisted on showing Magenta the best breakfast spot in the city, which was a diner in Hell’s Kitchen. It didn’t strike me as all that different from a hundred other diners in Manhattan but Sarah had settled on this one as her favorite […]
Jordan and I got talking some time after midnight. Of course we were still there. Jordan had eventually put a small tumbler of fine bourbon into my hand and I had been nursing it slowly like a long conversation with an old friend. J and his beau had left but a couple more people had […]
Somehow Ziggy and I were the first to arrive at Jordan’s. But the table had ten chairs around it. Trying to do the dinner guest thing right, Ziggy and I had brought a bottle of gourmet olive oil instead of wine. Jordan cooed appropriately over the oil and put it directly into a rack next […]