Tease (Songs of Submission #2)(7)
Author: C.D. Reiss

CHAPTER 4

The dressing room at Frontage hadn’t improved a single bit since my first night there two weeks earlier, but my attitude toward it had. We’d begun on a Thursday night, and they’d asked us back for Sundays and Tuesdays as well, until we dried up or found something better to do. Bitch and moan though I might, they paid in cash and didn’t suck us dry for incidentals. After that first show, we brought people in, so they started feeding us dinner and slipping a few drinks our way after the set. I enjoyed being treated like something besides a piece of drink-slinging eye-candy or a desperate whore singing for nickels.

Gabby was already there, smearing beige under her eyes. Tonight was our night. WDE had booked a table. Rhee, the hostess, confirmed it was true, and at my request, she put them by the speaker on the left, which had the warmest sound.

“Did you check your seat for gum?” Gabby asked.

“No gum,” I replied, clicking through the bottles and tubes in my makeup bag.

“Vocal chords attached?”

“I hope you get carpal tunnel.”

“Bitch,” she said.

“Snob,” I replied. We smiled at each other through the mirror.

I’d met Gabby during my first day in L.A. Performing. I was tall but gangly and awkward. Glasses and braces, the whole thing. All the other kids seemed to know each other. They’d all come from a music charter on the west side, slipping into ninth grade at the exalted magnet as planned. I’d filled out my application and bussed myself to the audition behind my parents’ backs. I informed them of where I was going to high school when the acceptance letter came.

So in that first week, while I was getting my bearings, Gabby and her crowd had themselves completely together. Totally unprepared for the competition, I was subjected to laughter that may or may not have been directed at the fact that I was off half a key, fell victim to broken guitar strings, and found a blue gum wad on my drum skin. During last period on my first Thursday, when I sat down on a stool and it broke under me to the music of everyone’s laughter, I ran out crying.

The last person I’d expected ran out after me: Gabrielle. She laughed the loudest, stared the hardest, flipped her blonde hair with the most vigor. Before she fell apart at twenty-two, she was the most together girl I’d ever met.

“What do you want?” I’d shouted when she followed me into the bathroom. “Why are you all so mean to me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You laughed when I fell.”

“It was funny. I mean, you’ve been here a week, and if there’s a broken chair or a guitar with a busted string, you pick it. The guys have a pool about when you’re going to break your glasses in P.E.”

I’d wanted to fight harder with her. I’d wanted to blame her for a week’s worth of misery, but the fact was, I had chosen that guitar because it was blue, and I didn’t check the strings. The gum did look pretty old, but I’d blamed them anyway, and I’d sat in that chair because it was far away from everyone.

“Everyone says you’re a snob,” said Gabby.

“I am not a snob. I’m a bitch.”

I’d chewed the inside of my cheek for a second, because awkward girls weren’t supposed to risk saying things like that to cool girls. After a second, she laughed, and I did too.

“Come sit with us at lunch,” she’d said. “I think my brother has a crush on you, so… gross. Okay?”

She’d folded me into the in crowd from that lunch on, like a complementary voice in a symphony, just adding me as if I was naturally in the same rhythm and key, and my entrance simply hadn’t been arranged for the first few measures.

“You calm?” I asked Gabby in the dressing room as she poked at something nonexistent on her face. She had to be. Since my night with Jonathan when he’d promised to call Arnie Sanderson, she’d been blissed out. The call had been totally unnecessary, but any light at the end of her tunnel was a positive.

“No, I am not calm.” She giggled. “Look!” She held her hands out. They were shaking. Generally, one wouldn’t want that in a pianist, but in Gabby’s case, as soon as she sat down, her fingers and body would quiet, and she’d be completely on top of it. “I got everyone from school in. I called in every favor. And the whole gang from Thelonius? All here. Darren, too.”

“He bring his new girl?”

“I have no idea. Do you feel strong on Cheek to Cheek?” We’d worked on a rendition that sounded as though Gershwin had been talking about more than a little facial contact. All the songs were shaking out that way, and it brought them in.

“We’re good on Cheek to Cheek.”

“It’s happening, Mon. Really happening.”

“This is a long process.” I took out my makeup bag and smeared back on what Jonathan had kissed off. “We’re not signing any contracts in the morning. We don’t even have a disc or anything.”

“You said not to worry about that.”

“I didn’t worry about it until Jonathan introduced me to Eddie Walker as if I didn’t know who he was, and if he’d asked me for a disc, I wouldn’t have had one.”

I watched her in the mirror and saw her eyes go blank. She was doing a calculation in her head, and she took a second to come up with the answer.

“Penn,” she said.

“Yes, they went to University of Pennsylvania together, but do you know what sport they played?”

When Gabby didn’t know something, she didn’t pretend she did, so her answer came quickly. “No.”

“Baseball.”

She pushed her mascara stick into the tube slowly, staring at it. I could almost see her filing the information and cross-referencing it with every other piece of Hollywood intelligence in her head.

“Thanks for doing this,” she said. “I know you didn’t want to do a restaurant gig, but I feel really good about it, and I couldn’t do it without you.”

“Well, I was wrong. I should have said yes right off. I mean, the thing about performing is you have to perform, otherwise you’re all talk, right?” I said.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. If we get WDE behind us, we can maybe start doing your songs.”

I shrugged. My songs were rage-filled punk diatribes and wouldn’t translate into the loungey thing I was doing with Gabby. If we landed an agent as a piano-driven lounge act, I had no idea what I would do with him. I couldn’t go from eXene to Sade on a dime. As a keyboardist, Gabby could play anything at any time, but I would be in a world of shit at the first hint of success working at Frontage. I had zero songs ready.