“I am not,” she said simply. “I have every confidence that Mr. Frowley will verify all of my briefs.”
“And charge you for the time it took to complete the research,” Jake added.
“Naturally,” said Nerdly.
“How much you charge these fucks an hour, Frowley?” Matt asked. “Like six hundred bones or some shit like that?”
“It’s a lot more than that,” Doolittle said sourly.
“Damn, homey,” Matt said, looking at the lawyer with something that resembled respect. “No wonder you whore yourself out to these assholes.”
“Should I go over the other precedents,” asked Pauline, “or do you get the point?”
“I’ll look them over on my own time,” Frowley said through clenched teeth.
“You do that,” Pauline said. “You will find that they are all quite relevant to the case of National Records vs KVA Records, should such a case ever be filed. You will find that in each case, the ruling upheld the original contract as valid while giving no responsibility to the defendant to uphold the clause regarding the second contract. And you will find no precedents under California contract law—which is what we are dealing with here—in which a contract that was dependent on an unnegotiated and unsigned second contract was held to be valid on final appeal.”
“In other words,” Matt said, “another round goes to the band, motherfuckers! To the fuckin’ band!”
“Again, well put, Matt,” Pauline said. “Now, on that note, we’ll call an end to the meeting for today. We will give you a week to peruse these briefs and draw the conclusions you need to draw. We will come back next Friday at 2:00 PM. At that point, we will enter good faith negotiations for a touring contract for Matt and Celia. And when we do so, please keep in mind that we are perfectly free to sign with any other entity for such a contract and that with Celia, we do not even have to pay you for the performance rights.”
And with that, the KVA team and Matt Tisdale stood and left the office. They walked out of the building with smiles on their faces, knowing they had won.
Chapter 25: The Naughty Nanny
Santa Clarita, California
May 23, 1998
It was the Friday that kicked off the start of the Memorial Day weekend. Celia and her band had worked an eight-hour day in their new tour rehearsal warehouse, as they had done every day since the facility was handed over to them for their use the previous Monday. Under the terms of the tour agreement they had finally signed with National Records two weeks before, KVA was paying for the lease on the facility, the catering, and the salaries of all the musicians, but National was footing the bill for renting or buying all the tour equipment and for training up the roadies and techies who would be running the shows. National would also pay for the venue rentals when the tour actually started, and half of the transportation and personnel costs involved in moving the tour from city to city. In return, National would collect half of all ticket revenue and the other half would go to KVA. It was not the deal that KVA or National had hoped for, but it was what they finally agreed upon over six long days of negotiations.
The contract for Matt’s tour was a little bit different because National had an ace to play for that one. Since they owned the rights to Matt’s previous solo material and had the ability to forbid him to perform it if they wished, they demanded a few more concessions. The biggest was the division of the revenue. They would get sixty percent of ticket sales instead of fifty. And KVA would pay for one hundred percent of Matt and his band’s travel and entertainment expenses out of their own pocket. National would still pay for half of the road crew personnel and transport costs and one hundred percent of the venue costs, but KVA had to pay for feeding and entertaining the entire crew. KVA, in turn, had voted to give Matt sixty percent of their forty percent of the revenue so he could enjoy a healthy profit for his efforts (Matt would pay his band members and his paramedic out of that money). This did cut down on KVA’s tour profit considerably, but KVA had a lot more faith in their upcoming CDs than National did. They planned to clean up on those CD sales.
Jake, as had been his habit since the beginning of the experiment, had spent the workweek alternating between the two warehouses so he could supervise and shape the way both tours were being put together. The Nerdlys did the same, though they worked opposite of Jake, meaning that whichever band Jake was with on a particular day, the Nerdlys were with the other, working on their sound and engineering.
On this day, Jake had been with Celia and her band. They were a bit behind Matt in progression and were still working on the basic layout of how the show would go. There were only a few sound guys working with them currently. They had a basic stage set up and a basic sound system. As of yet, there was no concert lighting, no backstage area, no choreography being planned. They had not even found a saxophone player yet, so Laura was filling in for that part, but she had made herself very clear when she proclaimed that she would not be going out on the road.
The band finished their third rendition of Playing Those Games—which was loosely planned to be the closing number for the show—just after four o’clock. Though they usually worked until 5:00 PM, Celia decided to call an early end to the day in honor of the three-day break that everyone would be taking for the holiday weekend. The band, all of them tired and grumpy and a little burned out from this first week of grinding work, were grateful. Charlie, Eric, Liz, and Little Stevie all cut out immediately. Coop elected to hang out with Jake, Laura, and Celia for the traditional Friday post-rehearsal beer.
“Anyone wanna burn?” asked Coop, pulling out a joint and a lighter.
“I can’t,” Jake said with a little regret. “I’m flying in a little bit.”
“You’ll be flying a lot sooner if you hit some of this shit,” Coop told him. “It’s genuine Humboldt skunk bud.”
“Tempting,” Jake said with a sigh, “but I’ll have to pass all the same.”
“I’ll take a couple hits,” Laura said. “Fire that thing up.”
“Really?” asked Coop. “I thought you weren’t supposed to do that.”
“I’m not breastfeeding anymore,” she said. “Caydee got her first tooth two weeks ago. That brought an end to my nipples in her mouth.”
“So ... you’re just like feeding her regular milk now?” Coop asked.
“I still have a pretty good supply of pumped milk in the freezer,” Laura said. “We’ve been giving her that and some formula.”
“She’s also starting to eat baby food now,” Jake added. “Elsa makes it for her.”
“Oh ... I see,” Coop said, nodding wisely. Though he was a father, and was paying five digits a month in child support, he had never actually been around the child. “Let’s burn then.”
Coop fired up. He and Laura passed the joint back and forth until they were both feeling good. Celia and Jake watched them, Celia sipping out of a bottle of beer, Jake with a bottle of iced tea that was completely unsatisfying.
“Good shit, Coop,” Laura said, her eyes now half-lidded.
“For sixty bucks an eighth, it better be,” he replied.
Coop left a few minutes later. Nobody bothered to tell him to be careful driving while he was stoned. He was Coop, after all, and he probably drove more miles per week stoned than he did straight.
Ordinarily on Friday evenings Jake and Laura would go back to Celia’s house with her and the three of them would get naked together and do the sorts of things that three naked, horny people liked to do. Jake and Laura would then shower and drive back to the airport and fly home so that Meghan could start her weekend off after earning a little time and half bonus for the extra Friday night work. But that was not going to happen on this day. Instead, the three of them would be staying the night at Tom and Mary’s house outside Cypress. Caydee was going to visit Grandma and Grandpa with Jake for the weekend. The ladies had their own plans. They were going to drive to Sacramento tomorrow morning to attend the Dixieland Jazz Festival that was held every Memorial Day weekend in Old Sacramento. They had hopes of finding a sax player there was the excuse they used. Jake suspected they just wanted to drink and have fun, but he kept his suspicion to himself.