“So all we’ve got to do is press Karney’s intercom?” Clay said. He kept his foot on the brake. Looming in the near future was tonight’s gig at the Echoplex, and as yet, Clay had no guitar to perform with. If Savy only confessed to having second thoughts about this, if she suggested going instrument shopping on Guitar Row instead, he wouldn’t have hesitated to crank the gearshift to R and backtrack downhill.
Except when Clay met her gaze, what Savy told him was “We have to.”
“Blue tigress,” Clay replied, a non sequitur, though not in his mind. “Barry kept teasing me with the secret of whatever that is.”
“Don’t worry about Barry.”
“I thought there weren’t supposed to be secrets between us.”
“The tigress is a tattoo.”
“You don’t have any visible tattoos. Even in the pool.”
“It’s an ass tattoo, Clay.”
Clay tried to process the idea, while also expelling the image of that pathetic slob sweating and grunting over Savy. “That doesn’t seem like—”
“It’s not on my ass,” she informed him.
Clay stared back.
Savy rolled her eyes. “It’s on someone else’s ass. Possibly this slut from Reno—who met Barry at the same party. We looked nothing alike, but he was so fucked-up, he did her and woke up believing it was me.”
“And you never enlightened him?”
“By the time I found out, he’d done everything but Tweet it out to the world. I was pissed and felt like he used me for his own chest-thumping. So—I used him back.”
What’s the game? Is your brother fucking up again? You and Grandma need money?
Anger creased Savy’s lips as she caught something—skepticism?—in his body language. “What are you anyway, the karma police? I’ll return my nun’s habit on the way out of fucking church.” She motioned at the intercom with the six-gun of her thumb and forefinger. “Now are you driving or do I have to walk over?”
It wasn’t exactly how Clay wanted the conversation to go. He thought about sleeping next to Savy the night before, filled with lust and… something deeper, something fertile begging to be planted, born, and propagated, and he wished he could have been cooler about it (surely there would be male groupies after her at every show). But Clay didn’t think anyone could feel the way he did about her and play a convincing James Dean. Coolness required a removal of emotion, indifference—which was the mortal enemy of a songwriter who needed to stay in touch with every nerve ending in their body. Otherwise: Oooo-ah, baby, give it, pow! So no, Clay wasn’t cool. Just like none of the songwriters he admired would have been cool with loving someone and having to spend every waking hour repressing it. Nevertheless—Clay imagined Boyle telling him—there’s the mind, then the face. You can play it cool on your face, can’t you, dude-love? And that was what Clay did here, or tried, when he told Savy he was sorry, thumbing his long nose and saying he was naturally, hopelessly nosey, haha, forget he ever mentioned it, and he let his foot off the brake and rolled toward the gates.
From their perches, the succubi watched them come.
14
KISS KISS IS GETTING OLD
“Yeah?” Karney’s intercom wanted to know.
“Um, we’re friends of Barrett Roethke’s,” Clay said.
“I don’t care whose pecker you suck,” the female voice fired back. “We don’t entertain guests.”
Clay looked to Savy. “We’re Farewell Ghost,” she announced, like it meant something. “The band that opened for the Demons last night? Davis is expecting us.”
The intercom fell silent—for so long that Clay began to relax, thinking the woman had tired of them and gone about her day. Now they could depart and do the same.
Then the sturdy gate jumped on its hinges and lurched inward. “Park in the courtyard,” the voice barked. “Knock at the first door you see.”
Clay did as instructed, pulling into a wide area filled with wax-bright sports cars and high-end SUVs. The property was such a contrast to Roethke’s dumpy trailer that it felt like they’d traveled to another planet. The house before them had rounded corners and “windows” made of opaque glass blocks; and its white stucco walls were spotless and unbearably bright in the sun. To Clay, it looked as if a talented, but troubled architect had designed the place, then misplaced the master plans and worked from random, medicated inspiration. From the courtyard’s perspective, the house didn’t appear to be more than a single story; built into the steep side of the hill, the walls ran to the very edge of the slope and disappeared over like a structural waterfall.
And there seemed to be doors everywhere, six in plain sight, none identified as the formal entrance, and Clay worried they would choose the wrong one and incur the surly female’s wrath.
He was drawn to one in particular—a heavy wooden door that might have guarded a Bavarian castle in another life. Savy yanked the pull-chain bell and a moment later the intercom voice materialized in the person of the blonde who’d been on Davis’s arm the night before. Kiss Kiss, Roethke had called her. In the daylight, the woman seemed less like a gothic Barbie doll, more akin to a plastic surgeon’s blunder. Cheekbones set too high; Botoxed lips; a nose thin and sharp enough to carve aluminum. Her corn-blond hair was piled into a makeshift beehive and her epic breasts stretched the screen print of her U2 shirt, fracturing Bono’s face right down the middle. She stood aside to reveal a white-marble foyer like Heaven’s waiting room. “You must’ve put on a helluva show,” Kiss Kiss told Clay. “I wouldn’t know. I was in the girl’s room, taking a dump for most of it.”
“Where’s the Activia when you need it?” Savy quipped.
Kiss Kiss ignored her, addressing Clay directly. “Davis and the band couldn’t stop talking about you on the bus home. They’re the most hetero boys I’ve ever met, but you made them sound like a a bunch of West Hollywood queens.”
Unaccustomed to praise, in any form, Clay
