“Why would we want to do that?” Fiasco said. Really, truly begging for it now.
But the open antagonism was achieving its purpose. Clay felt like Fiasco could see right through him, like he knew that Clay had never recorded a decent song or even played a live show. Just another poseur in a town full of them. Still, Clay held the inquiring eyes. “Because,” he replied, “you want to see Rocco Boyle’s house.”
This only made Fiasco laugh. “If we want that, we’ll just sic Savy on you. You’d give us everything for a shot at her, wouldn’t you?” Then his brow darkened and Clay understood that the roots of Fiasco’s anonymity ran deep, as deep as Clay’s own, and that any violence he instigated would be met in kind. “Because guys like you aren’t used to not getting their way. Am I right? Mr. I Never Had to Grind for It. Mr. Trust Fund.”
The Dark Hollywood shuttle idled near the front gates, while clusters of goth girls and Asian tourists peered through the wrought iron and snapped pictures of the gargoyle face and the red-tiled roof rising from the sycamore. Clay pulled behind them in his Jeep and acted like he was there to rubberneck too. To live in the Boyle House was a dream come true, but an oddly self-conscious one. What right did he have to sleep under Boyle’s roof? Back east, Clay had never fit in with his privileged private-school peers. His moral compass skewed toward the Springsteens and Boyles of the world—creative men who’d risen from humble beginnings. But his parents’ affluence made Clay feel spoiled and fake. How can I write about the hardships of the average man when I got a thirty-thousand dollar Jeep for my birthday?
Contrary to what Fiasco Joe assumed, Clay did not have a trust fund. He generally refused his father’s more lavish gifts and entitlements, save the expensive birthday present, which his mother had insisted was rude to send back. Birthday gifts, and now a multi-million-dollar rock-star estate—Fiasco’s animus-laced voice barked in his head—let’s not forget that, you fucking poseur. But Clay had, and always would, draw the line with music. Any albums he bought, concerts he attended, instruments he played, came from money he’d earned himself. As a result, his gear totally sucked. A roughly used acoustic, a bottom-of-the-line electric (who had ever heard of a Wilsson guitar anyway?), and a 10-watt amp that couldn’t topple a house of cards. Amateur shit. Clay may have had fire in his belly, may have practiced for hours every day and instinctively sang in the right key, may have been able to take a guitar down to its screws and put it back together, but at the end of the day he was just a pretender who hesitated buying serious equipment until he “got into a serious band.” Whose big dreams were little more than tiny delusions.
Clay watched the tourists mill around outside his new home. Among them was a cute redheaded goth with a hardcover of All Goes Dark peeking out of her shoulder bag. The unofficial Boyle biography, named after Throne’s third album. Clay had read it three times himself, compelled by Boyle’s rise from anonymity to fame.
At 14, Boyle had run away from Chicago and shit-heel parents who’d had him slinging drugs on the street. Armed with library copies of Into the Wild and On the Road, he hiked highways and thumbed rides and stowed away on freight trains, boxcar-jumping from Seattle to Miami, befriending the lost souls who rode the rails, and trading—legend had it—his winter coat for his first guitar. Transit cops once fingered him for a theft he didn’t commit and beat him senseless while he pleaded his innocence. Boyle had lain in a hospital bed with swollen black eyes and broken ribs, no one listening that a fat public servant had worked over an underage kid who had nothing to do with the crime, and he determined, then and there, that he was going to stand in front of thousands of people one day and beheard.
When they shipped him back to the South Side, he discovered his father dead, his mother incarcerated for stabbing the old man through his black heart. So Rocco split from foster care and made his way along old Route 66 with nothing but his guitar and whatever money he could muster from day labor. By 18, Boyle had arrived for good in Southern California and went to work slinging burgers at a Mouth House along the Coast Highway, secretly living on its roof for months (on his employment form, under home address, he’d listed the franchise’s own address, adding “penthouse suite,” and no one had been the wiser). It was on that roof overlooking the Pacific that he’d written most of the songs that would appear on Rocket Throne’s debut album. On the beach, he met a surfer named Dave Ganek, who introduced Boyle to Barrett Roethke, a fidgety drummer with a sister who waitressed at the Whisky a Go Go. And at the Whisky they met Hank Ooljee, a seasoned bass player, keyboardist, and Navajo ten years their senior. Right from their first session they knew they had something. And Boyle was soon making good on his vow, his voice heard by sold-out thousands, night after night after night.
Nowhere in that story was there mention of Boyle walking into a music shop and getting rebuffed by the shithead music clerk. Why? Because it never would have happened. Because no one in their right mind would have told Rocco Boyle, “We don’t want you in our band.” Because it didn’t matter if he could read music or sing pitch-perfect. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know, or care, about the brilliant fingerplay of Yngwie Malmsteen. Or that his troubled past would lead him to a more troubled future. None of that mattered.
Because Rocco Boyle had
