The hotel was not nearly as classy as it sounded. It was, in fact, just a half step up from your standard Motel 6. The buses pulled around back and sat at idle, the heaters continuing to blow, the band members remaining onboard, while Greg and Joe Stafferson, who was Earthstone's tour manager, went to check in. About twenty minutes passed before they returned.
"Okay, boys," Greg told them. "You have room 107 and 108. How you want to divide yourselves up is up to you."
"We only get two rooms?" Matt asked. He had imbibed in Greg's offer of a powdery wake-up/hangover potion and his eyes were glinting quite brightly. "The guys on Earthstone all get their own rooms. What's up with that?"
"It's Earthstone's tour," Greg told him. "The headliner gets certain privileges. Now, as for your laundry. Just bag it up and put it in the back of the bus. Ken and Robert will see that it's cleaned. Be sure to label your bags. This will be the procedure for laundry in every city we visit, so get in the habit."
As he had no doubt intended, the subject of what to do with their laundry distracted them from the subject of sharing rooms. He handed one key to Jake and one to Matt and then turned and headed out the door.
"I really don't like that guy," Jake said as they watched him go.
"He's not that bad," Matt said, clapping him on the shoulder. "He gets us some pretty bitchin' dope, doesn't he?"
"Fuckin' aye," Coop said.
"The coke's not as good as Shaver's," Darren pointed out.
Jake gave up. He went and gathered up his single suitcase, which contained pretty much everything he had been allowed to bring with him, and then stepped off the bus.
They decided that Jake and Bill would share one room, Matt, Coop, and Darren the other. They would then rotate roommates from night to night as the tour progressed, the scheduling for this rotation automatically assigned to Bill, their resident scientist, nerd, and mathematician.
"Jesus fucking Christ, its cold out there," Jake said as he emerged from the bathroom after shaving and showering, a towel wrapped around his waist. "What kind of morons live in a place where the temperature is three degrees at 12:30 in the afternoon?"
"I never felt wind like that before," Bill agreed as he stripped off clothes in anticipation of his own hot shower. "My dick isn't that big to begin with. I don't need a minus twelve wind chill factor to make it smaller."
Jake looked at him as he pulled a pair of underwear and a clean pair of sweat pants from his suitcase. "You know something, Bill? Not many people can work meteorological terminology into a witty retort, but somehow you pull it off."
Bill laughed his signature honking nerd laugh. "I guess it's just a gift," he said, pushing his underwear down and putting them with the rest of his dirty laundry. "And now, I'm going to shower and then catch a couple hours sleep before we go to the sound check."
"Amen to that," Jake agreed, dropping his towel on the bed so he could get dressed. "A little nap is just what I need. But first I'm gonna call Angie and let her know we got here safely. What time is it back in L.A? Is it three hours earlier?"
At that moment they heard the sound of a key turning in the door lock. The door swung open, letting in a cold blast of arctic wind, and Janice Boxer came into their room. Janice was a representative of National Record's Publicity Department. She had been assigned the position of Intemperance Publicity Manager. She was a tall, attractive, aristocratic woman in her late thirties, an almost perfect snob, and the wife of the head of the label's legal department. Rumor had it that Alvin Boxer sent her out on tour so he would have more time to spend with his various mistresses (and misters-but that was yet another rumor).
"Jesus!" Jake barked, quickly snatching up the towel and covering up. "Don't you know how to knock?"
Bill actually let out a squeal that was almost feminine. He had no towel handy. He grabbed his dirty shirt and held it over his genitals.
Janice looked startled for the briefest of seconds, but quickly recovered. "Sorry," she said, a hint of disgust in her voice. "I didn't know you were going to be..." A knowing look came across her face - with it, a little twinkle. "I wasn't uh... interrupting anything, was I?"
"Nothing but us taking showers and getting ready to crash out for a bit," Jake told her, irritated. "Is there some reason you came barging in here?"
His tone caused her expression to change to one of displeasure. "I do not barge anywhere," she replied. "I simply walked in. And as for 'crashing out', you can just put that thought out of your head. We're due at WZAP in forty-five minutes."
"WZAP?" Jake asked. "Forty-five minutes? What are you talking about?"
"It's part of the publicity campaign," she replied. "WZAP is one of the local rock music stations - one of the stations that has been playing that little song of yours and introducing our product to the people of Maine. You're going to go on the air with them for a ten minute interview and then you're going to record some sound clips for them."
"On the air?" Bill asked, his eyes widening in terror. "You mean... live?"
"I mean live," she said. "It's standard in every city we go to."
"What do you mean, 'sound clips'?" Jake asked her. "Are you talking about musical stuff?"
"No," she said. "I'm talking about radio station plugs that they can play before songs - usually your songs. That too is standard. And after that, we're going to a local record store so you can sign autographs. I need you guys dressed and ready to go in ten minutes."
With that, she turned on her heal and went back out the door. They were dressed and ready to go in ten minutes. Jake decided he would have to wait until later to call Angie.
The DJ's name was Mike Chesnay. They met him briefly when they first arrived - long enough to make introductions and shake hands - and then he disappeared from their sight. He interviewed them from a booth in one part of the radio station while they listened to him through headphones and responded to a microphone in a different booth next door. His questions were fairly generic and non-threatening. How does it feel to be on your first tour? How does it feel to open for a band as great as Earthstone? How does it feel to be doing your first show? What musical groups or individual musicians influenced you the most?
Jake, as the voice of the band, was saddled with the responsibility of answering most of the questions. Though he was nervous about his voice being transmitted live to half of Maine, he did a respectable job. Part of that was the cocaine. In order to stave off the sheer exhaustion that threatened to pull him to sleep where he sat, he had accepted Greg's offer of a little pick-me-up on the way to the radio station.
Chesnay wrapped up the interview by thanking them for their time, telling them he would see them at the show tonight, and then playing Descent Into Nothing for the eighth time that day. While he did this Jake and Matt - the only two the station wanted sound clips from - were taken into yet another small booth where they spent half an hour saying things like: "This is Jake Kingsley from Intemperance and whenever I'm in town to party down, I listen to WZAP, Bangor's premier rock station."
Finally, they climbed back on the bus and headed for the local branch of Zimmer's Records where they were set up behind a small table in the middle of the store. Sitting before them was a stack of 45-rpm singles of Descent Into Nothing, which sold for $1.10 apiece. A sporadic stream of people came by to chat with the group for a few minutes. This came easy to them. They were all accustomed to fans talking them up, telling them how good they thought their music was, asking them questions that were sometimes intelligent but were usually inane. Many of these fans - about half were male and half female - purchased copies of the single and had the group sign the protective cover. In a future time - when a thing called the Internet swept the nation and a service called eBay came available there - some of these first release, group autographed singles would sell for more than a thousand dollars if they could be authenticated and were in good condition.