"But you can't do that same thing with phone calls?"
"All your local calls are free."
"I don't want to make a local call," he yelled. "Who the hell do I know in Buffalo? I need to call Los Angeles and talk to my girlfriend!"
"Well that's easy," Greg said. "Call her collect."
Jake slammed the phone down at that point. He knew that Greg's suggestion made sense, but he couldn't bring himself to call a girl collect to apologize to her for not calling. And so the phone call went unmade. The next day he fell back into the rabbit hole of consecutive tour dates and the next time he found himself in a hotel room in a relative state of sobriety and with the time to actually make the call, the thought of calling collect was even more repugnant.
"Would she even want to talk to me now?" Jake asked Matt as Simon and Simon reached the exciting conclusion for the week. "I mean, would she even accept the charges?"
"You're asking me? Matt replied with a laugh. "The man who has made a life out of not caring what women think? You're the fucking Romeo. You figure it out."
Jake looked at the phone. He didn't pick it up. "I don't even know what day it is," he said. "Is it Saturday?"
Matt stared at the television, thinking as hard as he ever did about anything. "I think it's Tuesday," he finally said.
"Tuesday? No way. We did the show in Houston on Wednesday and got arrested on Thursday. That means the Little Rock show was Friday and this is Saturday night."
"No," Matt said. "Houston was four days ago. We got arrested after Dallas, remember?"
"Oh yeah," Jake said, shaking his head. "So that would make it Sunday then, not Tuesday."
"No," Matt protested. "It has to be Tuesday because when we did the Austin show it was Thursday and Dallas was the next day."
"No," Jake disagreed. "We did San Antonio in between Houston and Dallas, remember?"
Matt thought that over. "Fuck, you're right," he said.
"And El Paso was in there somewhere too, wasn't it? Was that before or after Austin?"
"Or was it before San Antonio?" Matt asked.
This discussion went on for several more minutes, long enough for both of them to realize that they had no idea whatsoever what day it actually was and that they had no frame of reference they could agree upon in order to fix a day in the past. It was not the most comfortable realization.
"So what about your bitch?" Matt asked when they finally stopped racking their brains about it. "You gonna call her, or what?"
"I don't even know if she's home," Jake said. "If I don't know what day it is, I don't know if she's at work or not."
Matt rolled his eyes upward. "If she's not home then no one will answer the fucking phone," he said. "It's not like a nuclear device is gonna go off under the White House if she's not there."
This was sound logic but Jake uncharacteristically did not allow it to sway him. "I think it's been too long for a phone call," he said. "I need to talk to her face to face."
"And when are you going to do that?"
"After the Louisville show next week," he said. "That's the end of our first leg. We'll have two weeks off and Greg said they'll fly us back to LA."
"Really?" Matt said. "That's bitchin'."
"They're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts," Jake replied. "It's cheaper to fly us home and then back to Hartford when we start the second leg than it is to pay for two weeks worth of hotel rooms somewhere."
"Ahhh," Matt said, nodding. "Of course."
Jake lit another cigarette, took another drink of his soda, his brain pondering. He looked over at Matt. "Home," he said. "That's a funny thing to be talking about right now."
"How's that?"
"I don't have a home."
"Huh?" Matt said, looking at him strangely.
"I'm not talking figuratively either," Jake explained. "I'm talking literally. I gave up my apartment in Heritage when we moved to LA. I gave up my apartment in LA when we went on the road. I don't live anywhere at all. My mail is going to some PO box. If I left the tour right now, I wouldn't have anywhere to go to and no money to go there with."
"Are you thinking of leaving the tour?"
"No," Jake said. "But that's not my point. My point is that even if I wanted to, I couldn't. Not unless I wanted to be stranded in Baton Rouge or New Orleans or someplace like that without a dollar or even a quarter in my pocket. Did you ever wonder why they seem to make sure we don't have any money on us?"
"What's to wonder about?" Matt asked. "We haven't made any fucking money yet. The album has sold almost three hundred thousand copies but we're still a couple thousand fathoms in the hole because of the recoupable expenses."
This was all very true. Descent Into Nothing - the album - was selling like hotcakes all across the nation, much faster than the record execs had predicted. The biggest sales spikes were appearing in the cities that Intemperance had visited as part of the tour, spiking there in every case in the three days following the concert. And Descent Into Nothing - the single - was doing even better. When they'd listened to the top forty countdown on the radio during the bus ride to Baton Rouge earlier that day (and if either Jake or Matt would have remembered that the top forty countdown was always on Sunday, they would have realized what day it was) their song was spending its third week in the top ten, this time occupying the number six spot. Again, this was much higher than the record execs had expected since album sales were the moneymakers with hard rock bands and the individual songs usually didn't fare well on the charts. But even with all of these remarkable sales, the first of the four yearly royalty periods had passed with Intemperance - the band - still in the red, their recoupable expenses still being paid off. Though National Records was raking in the money, the band members had yet to see a penny beyond their initial advance.
"It's not just that though," Jake said. "Even if we were out of the recoupable expense hole and bringing in thousands - millions in royalties, we still wouldn't be able to get our hands on any of it out here on the road. Those checks would just be sitting in our PO boxes uncashed. I don't even have my checkbook with me and even if I did, who's going to cash an out of town check for us? They don't want us to have any money, Matt. They want us to have to rely on them for everything. Remember when we wanted to get the pie?"
"How could I forget?" he asked sourly. That had, after all, led to their beating, arrest, and general mistreatment by the Texas authorities.
"We had to beg for money from Greg in order to do that. And that was just a pie. What would happen if we wanted to go see some sights here in Baton Rouge and asked him to give us some cash for a rental car? Or what if we wanted to cruise New Orleans when we're there? After all, Mardi Gras is this week and we're gonna be in the Big Easy. You think he'd kick loose some cash for us?"
"No," Matt said at once, remembering how reluctant Greg had been to even give them money for the pie.
"Without money, we can't do anything," Jake said. "We can't even leave the hotel rooms. Food, booze, pot, coke, women - all of that is provided for us, but if we wanted to go hit some nice restaurant down on Bourbon Street... forget it. We couldn't even get a cab to take us down there. We couldn't even take the fucking city bus."
The next few days passed in its usual consecutive shows blur. They performed in Baton Rouge, in New Orleans, in Jackson, in Memphis. They did drugs and drank alcohol and fucked groupies. They crashed hard and were awakened with cocaine instead of coffee. And then, on February 4, came Nashville, the heart and soul of the country and western music industry. You would hardly be able to tell that by the crowd that filed into the 9000 seat Memphis Memorial Auditorium. Intemperance and Earthstone had sold it out weeks in advance and on the night of the show it was stuffed to the rafters with teenagers and young adults, most of the females in tight mini-skirts or tight jeans, most of the males sporting long hair and a variety of rock band T-shirts. A sea of lighters was held aloft when Jake, Matt, Bill, Darren, and Coop took the stage and began to play.