"You sure about this, man?" Coop asked.
"Dude, I've been doing this for a week and I'm not addicted or nothin'. It's just like gettin' stoned, only better an' shit."
Coop allowed himself to be convinced. He watched Darren prepare another hit, his eyes taking in everything. When Darren used the same syringe to draw up the hit Coop had another moment of doubt.
"Dude, you just used that fuckin' needle on yourself," he said. "I shouldn't be usin' the same needle, should I?"
"Dude," Darren said, "we fuck the same bitches all the time. I ain't got AIDS or none of that shit and neither do you. It ain't no different than drinking out of the same beer."
"Oh... I guess," Coop said, still looking for a way to get out of this.
But Darren didn't give him a chance. He reached over and rolled up Coop's sleeve. Before the drummer even realized what was happening, the needle was buried in his bicep and the plunger was depressed.
"I don't feel no different," Coop said.
"Wait for it," Darren told him. "It takes a little bit. In about twenty minutes or so you'll be feeling fine."
And of course he was right. The drug kicked in and Coop enjoyed it immensely. The two of them spent the next four hours sitting on the couch, side by side, smoking cigarettes and watching Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner cartoons on Darren's VCR.
Chapter 14A: The Core
Los Angeles, California
November 19, 1984
Jake's Corvette moved slowly down Hollywood Boulevard, caught in the thick Monday afternoon traffic. Jake was behind the wheel, feeling the usual frustration that came with driving a high performance vehicle he could rarely get out of second gear. Bill sat next to him, his thick glasses perched firmly upon his face, his hand playing with his crewcut, trying to determine if it was time to get another haircut or not. They had just finished a jam session, or rather, they had been forcibly pulled out of a jam session early by a National Records gopher who had shown up at their warehouse to give them a message. They were now on their way to the National Records building in Hollywood. Several blocks behind them were the two limousines carrying the rest of the band. The summons had asked for all of them, citing a "status meeting" as the reason.
"That asshole Crow keeps pressuring us to work harder, work longer, work faster," Jake complained as they sat through another red light for the second time. "He yells at us for wanting to take Thursday and Friday off so we can go home for Thanksgiving. And now, what does he do? He orders us to wrap up early today so he can tell us in an official meeting that we're not working fast enough."
"He does have a marked tendency to be counter-productive to our efforts," agreed Bill.
"We could have dialed in that new tune if we'd hit it just a little longer. We were getting there, you know what I mean? Now we'll have to spend an hour plugging back into it tomorrow." He sighed. "Oh well. What the fuck can you do?"
"Yep," said Bill with a nod. "Sometimes we're helpless before the actions of osmotic migration."
Jake interpreted that in his mind for a few seconds and finally decided — mostly through long experience of translating Bill's statements for others — that this meant 'what the fuck can you do?' as well. "Damn right, Bill," he said. "Well put."
The light turned green and they surged forward again, just clearing the intersection before the light turned back to yellow. Almost immediately, however, they were trapped in another section of gridlock waiting for the next light to turn.
"Coop and Darren are getting worse," Bill said.
"Yeah," Jake agreed. "They are. I don't think either one of them said a damn thing during the whole session today. They just did what they were told and played like they were told. It's making it harder to dial these tunes in."
Over the past few weeks, as the band tried frantically to come up with more tunes and to perfect them before the mid-December deadline for submission, Coop and Darren had become gradually but persistently less involved in each session. They would show up late, moving slowly, their actions lethargic and mechanical, their words few and far between. They had all but stopped contributing suggestions towards how the music should be played and mixed and, when asked to come up with a beat or a rhythm to back a particular beat, they would inevitably choose the simplest, least complex beat or rhythm possible.
"I never realized how much we relied on those two fuckheads to help set the backbeat for us until they stopped doing it," complained Matt during one of the multiple discussions the core members of the band had had on the subject. "It's hard enough coming up with the riffs and the mixes. Now we have to move their fucking fingers and hands for them as well to set the rhythm."
Both had been confronted on what the problem was and both had denied that there was a problem.
"We're doing everything we've always done," Darren would respond.
"Yeah," Coop would agree. "I don't see no problem. We're getting these tunes done, ain't we?"
They were, but the quality was starting to suffer, as was the speed of progression. There was also an insidious decline in the feeling of teamwork and camaraderie that had always marked their jam sessions in the past. It was starting to feel like a battle was being set up — a battle between the core and the rhythm.
"I think they're using heavy narcotics," Bill said now as the light turned green and they crept forward another fifty yards before it turned red again.
"Narcotics?" Jake asked, looking over at him. "Why do you say that?"
"Mostly the way they're acting," Bill replied. "We've all seen each other stoned and coked-out and drunk a multitude of times so I think we'd all know if any one or two or three of those things was the problem. Instead, they're acting quite atypically for the normal intoxicants we use. But remember when Darren was getting shot up with the Demerol before the shows?"
"How could I forget?"
"That's the way both of them are acting now," Bill said. "They move slow and they don't talk much. They're almost falling asleep sometimes while the rest of us are arguing over something. When you do talk to them, its like they're not completely cognizant of the words you're speaking to them."
"Hmm," Jake said, thinking about what Bill was saying and — now that it was pointed out to him — finding that he was right. They were acting a lot like that.
"And then there's the physical symptoms of narcotic intoxication," Bill said.
"The physical symptoms?"
He nodded. "Their pupils are always pinpoint sized now," he said. "It's not dark in the warehouse by any means, but its not bright either. Their pupils should be fairly normal sized, like yours and Matt's — about three millimeters, right?"
"You know what the normal pupil size is in millimeters?" Jake asked.
"Of course. Doesn't everyone?"
Jake let this go. "Go on," he said.
"Well... my point is, that your pupils and Matt's pupils, and, presumably, mine as well, tend to hover around three millimeters in the lighting conditions prevalent in the warehouse. Darren and Coop's pupils, however, tend to stay around a millimeter and a half no matter what the lighting is like. That's pretty small. It's also a side-effect of narcotic use."
Jake had never actually noticed this before, but now that it was mentioned to him, he did recall both Coop and Darren complaining at various times that the lights were too dim in the warehouse, that they were having a hard time seeing things because of this. Following his own train of logic he concluded that having your pupils be half the size that they were supposed to be would serve to make it seem dim when it really wasn't. It would be kind of like walking out of the bright sunshine into a normally lit room, only this wouldn't go away.