"Do the melody for me again," said Matt. "Let's get it into rock mode."
Jake did it again, naming off the chord changes and progression as he did them. Matt played around with the distortion levels on his guitar for a few minutes, adjusting the sound and adding another effects pedal.
"Okay, let's see how this comes out," Matt said. He began to play, translating the melody into distorted electric. It sounded like crap at first but, with suggestions from them all, they upped the tempo a bit and eventually dialed in something that everyone liked. A riff was born.
"I'm thinking strong acoustic for the backing," suggested Bill when this process was complete.
"Definitely," said Matt. "The only fuckin' way to go. Play the original acoustic base but up-tempo to match the distortion."
Jake hit another pedal and switched to a sound that was still acoustic in nature but on the edge of achieving electric distortion. It was the same sound he used to back several other Intemperance songs, like Point of Futility and Crossing The Line. He began to play the original score faster and harder and the sound was good. After a moment, Matt joined in, playing the new riff — which was a different version of what Jake was now doing — on top of it. All of them liked the combo at once.
"Bad ass," said Matt. "Now let's throw in the rhythm section and then Nerdly can plug himself in on top of it."
They worked on this song for the next three hours, changing and modifying, suggesting and rejecting, but eventually coming up with the bare bones of a tune they knew they would be proud to play before a D Street West audience or to put on an album. As they went through all of this, as they sang and played, as they complimented, derided, and occasionally argued, all of them forgot about everything else that was going on in their lives. In their minds, they were back in Matt's garage in Heritage, getting ready to put together another performance for their small group of fans.
This amnesia to their current lifestyles did not last, however. They called it a day just before four o'clock in the afternoon, their plans to meet again at nine the next morning for some more jamming. Jake and Bill once again lived in the same building so they climbed in Jake's Corvette and headed home. Matt climbed into a limo so he could go home, take a shower, snort a few lines of coke, and then go out for a night of drinking and carousing at the nightclubs. Darren and Coop, who had also been assigned to the same building together like before, climbed in their own limo.
"I don't know about this, dude," Coop was saying as they crawled through the congested downtown streets. "I mean... I wanna try it and all, but I don't wanna play around with no monkey, you know what I fuckin' mean?"
"There ain't no fuckin' monkey involved," Darren scoffed. "I'm telling you, if you do it the way I do it, it's harmless. It ain't nothing more than smoking some weed."
They arrived home just before five o'clock. Both went to their separate condos and enjoyed meals provided by their respective manservants. At six o'clock Darren called Coop on the phone.
"You comin' up, or what?" he asked. "It don't make no fuckin' difference to me."
"Yeah," Coop said. "I'll come up."
He went up. There he found Darren sitting on the couch before MTV, the manservant dismissed for the night. On the table before him was a polished, stainless steel kit known on the streets as an "outfit". It had been removed from a felt lined case and all of its pieces glistened with sterility and the air of medicinal necessity, but it was really no different than the paraphernalia of a homeless street bum with the same habit. It was a kit that was used for preparing and injecting heroin.
"I'll do myself up first so you can see how it works," Darren said when Coop took a seat.
Darren now had a week's worth of experience with the process. When they'd come home from the tour Greg had disappeared from his life and so had the Demerol he'd been injecting the bass player with to "keep the pain under control". Darren had asked Crow to keep him supplied with the drug in order to get through the day but Crow had refused.
"You're healed up now, Darren," he'd explained. "You don't need it anymore."
This led to a begging, pleading, and threatening session in which Darren had pulled out all the stops. "My ear still hurts!" he whined. "All the fuckin' time, man. Don't you understand that?"
"The Vicodin and codeine tablets in your safe should take care of those problems at this point," Crow responded. "Demerol is expensive and hard to get hold of. There's only so much we can provide you with. It's time you weaned yourself off of it."
For a week he'd suffered. The pills helped keep the withdrawal symptoms mild but they were still there. He had constant body aches and rampant diarrhea. His appetite was next to nothing, as was his fluid intake. He vomited up everything that he did manage to put in his stomach. Not even marijuana — his previous best friend — seemed to help the aching and the depression.
And then Cedric, his faithful manservant, introduced him to the magical white powder that would soon consume his life. He didn't call it heroin, he called it "China White", implying that it was an ancient natural substitute for narcotic painkillers.
"Isn't China White a kind of heroin?" Darren asked him, uncomfortable with the thought of injecting an addictive drug into his veins.
"Well... I suppose that technically it is," Cedric replied. "It comes from the opium poppy, like heroin does, like morphine itself does, but its as different from that black, sticky tar heroin the street bums use as a fine cabernet is from Mad Dog 20/20."
"I see," Darren said wisely. After all, Jake was always going on and on about those fine wines he liked to drink — almost as much as Matt went on and on about that fucking deep sea fishing shit — so he knew that cabernet was considered high class shit. Premium hooch. Something that only people with taste and class consumed. It was about as different from Mad Dog — which Darren had been known to swill down on occasion — as night and day.
"All right," he said at that point, thrilled that he would be enjoying a drug of the elite. "I'll try it."
What he didn't realize, however, was that whatever the class distinction between cabernet and Mad Dog 20/20, both were still wine, the active ingredient still alcohol, the effect of drinking either identical. Such was the case with tar heroin and China White.
"You don't have to put it in my veins, do you?" Darren asked Cedric as he watched him dump a small amount of the white powder — finer in consistency than the most carefully chopped Bolivian flake cocaine — into a stainless steel reservoir and light a butane lighter.
"Of course not," Cedric scoffed. "That's what the addicts do. You'll get this the same way you got the Demerol — intramuscularly."
And with that he'd injected Darren in the upper arm. Twenty minutes later, the cramps and nausea were gone, as were the shakes and the diarrhea and the longing and the fear.
Coop watched now as Darren expertly went through the steps of preparing the China White for injection. He measured out a small portion of it — very small, no larger than a pea — and put it in the oval spoon-like device. The cooker — as it was called — sat atop a stand, allowing the bottom of it to rest about four inches above the tabletop. Darren applied the butane lighter to the bottom of it and sparked up, holding the flame steady. The white powder slowly liquefied and began to boil. When it was at the perfect consistency, he dropped the lighter and picked up the syringe, drawing ever last drop of the bounty up into the body.
"It sure the fuck looks like heroin to me," said Coop, who had stared at the entire operation with a mixture of horror and fascination.
"It's not heroin," Darren insisted. "Heroin is for scumbags. And you can't get addicted to it when you take it like this." With that he rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and plunged the needle into his upper arm. He sighed, smiling even though he knew the drug wouldn't take effect for another twenty minutes or so. It was on its way and that was what was important.