“Are you out of your fucking minds?” she asked, so appalled she lapsed into a Jake-ism. “I’m not doing any of this shit!”
“But Celia,” they insisted, “this what your fans want to see! This is what they expect to see! You’re a sex symbol. You need to embrace that and go out there each night and show them what you’ve got!”
“What I’ve got is my music,” she replied. “And that is what they are going to get: a musical performance. I am going to wear jeans and a sleeveless shirt for my stage clothes. I am going to play my guitar and sing live into a microphone that sits on a stand while my band provides the music to accompany me. I am going to have simple stage lighting that lets the audience see me and the band. I am not going to dance. I am not going to have dancers on the stage with me. And I most assuredly am not going to have anything I do up on that stage choreographed by your troop of brain-dead imbeciles.”
“You want to go up there in jeans and just play your guitar?” asked Vernon Crandall, the suit assigned as her tour coordinator. “That’s boring! Nobody is going to pay money to come see that!”
“I’m pretty sure you’re talking out of your ass right now,” Jake, who had been present at the meeting (along with Pauline), put in at this point. “People are going to love her show because she’s a talented musician, songwriter, and singer. The fact that she’s attractive is secondary to all that. She doesn’t need to shake her tits and show off her legs and belly in order to keep their attention.”
“We disagree,” Crandall informed them. “And your proposal is not what we had in mind when we signed the touring contract and agreed to finance this endeavor.”
This was where Pauline came in. “It may not be what you had in mind, Vern, but it’s what you’re going to get. That contract grants all rights for tour planning, composition, lineup, musicians, and production to KVA Records. The tour is what Jake and Celia say the tour is.”
“I believe,” said Gene Rickens, the Aristocrat lawyer, “that an argument could be made for misrepresentation of terms for that contract.”
The look he got from Pauline at this point actually made him back up his chair a few inches. If looks could kill, he would’ve been halfway to the Pearly Gates. “You go ahead and make that argument, Rickens,” she challenged. “Try to get a judge to agree that you have the right to dictate tour production to KVA Records when you signed a goddamn contract that specifically states in black and fucking white that KVA Records retains those rights for itself.”
“Well...” stammered Rickens, “I’m aware of the wording of the contract we signed. I’m just suggesting that an argument could be made that, since we were clearly anticipating a choreographed production when we agreed to finance this tour, KVA’s insistence on a non-choreographed, simple production constitutes misrepresentation and bad faith negotiation.”
“You can just cram that shit right up your ass,” Jake told the counselor.
“I beg your pardon!” Rickens said, outraged now at the lack of decorum.
“What my brother means to say,” Pauline put in, “is that you don’t have a leg to stand on. You’re just blustering for your clients and you know it, I know it, and I’m reasonably sure they know it as well.”
“I do not bluster!”
“Hmm, a lawyer who does not bluster?” Pauline said mildly. “You must have skipped the first year of law school?”
“I most certainly did not!” he assured her.
She shook her head a little and chuckled. “In any case,” she said. “Did you forget that I audio-recorded all negotiation sessions? I still have those tapes and they are legally admissible evidence that can and will be presented if necessary. At no time during the negotiation of this contract did Aristocrat express, in any way, that they were expecting a particular type of performance out of Celia other than the obvious one: that she put on a ninety-minute concert on a North American tour consisting of sixty-four dates in fifty-two cities. Choreography, dancing, costume design, lip-synching ... none of these things were brought up in any way. And now you’re trying to say that we misrepresented ourselves? That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve heard since ... well ... since the last time I negotiated something with you record executives.”
“I do the show my way, or I don’t do it at all,” Celia said firmly.
“And that is the final word on that,” Pauline said. “Can we put this subject to rest now?”
They had put the subject to rest.
Now, as the Gulfstream flew through the sky en route to their date with rejection, Celia was sitting in the rear of the plane, just in front of the door that led to the bathroom/shower area forward of the tail. She was by herself—she and Greg had arrived at the airport together in the same limousine but had been sitting as far apart as they could get ever since boarding—sipping out of a glass filled with ice and a clear liquid that Barb, their flight attendant, had brought her a few minutes ago. Jake was reasonably sure the glass did not contain water. Greg sat alone at the front end of the cabin. He was drinking scotch on the rocks and staring out at the passing scenery, a morose expression on his face. The Nerdlys were sitting across from Greg at another of the tables, both of them working intently on something that had to do with audio reproduction while Sharon sipped from a glass of wine and Nerdly from a vodka and prune juice.
Jake was sitting in one of the chairs arranged next to a table. Pauline, who was holding Tabby in her arms and rocking her gently back and forth, sat across from him. Directly across the small aisle from them was Veronica, the twenty-two year old UCLA Business major who Pauline used to babysit her little clump on those occasions she had to leave her house for business. Ronnie, as she liked to be called, had agreed to cut two days worth of classes so she could fly private across the country, be put up in Paulie’s suite at the Sheraton New York in Times Square, and be paid two thousand dollars on top of all that just to take care of Tabby during the hours Pauline was at the ceremony as Jake’s date. For the lower middle class girl who was going to school on an academic scholarship and working two jobs just to keep from sinking under water, it was a dream assignment on several different levels.
“Shouldn’t you be going over your speech?” Pauline asked Jake when she saw he had an old Sony Walkman—the kind that played cassette tapes instead of CDs—in his hand.
“What speech?” he asked.
“The speech you’ll have to give if you manage to win one of the three Grammys you’ve been nominated for,” she said, a bit exasperated.
He shook his head. “I didn’t even come up with one,” he said. “I’m not going to win anything. This whole thing is a farce, a little production put on by the big four to help promote their own albums and their own artists. They’re sure as shit not going to hand one of those things to an independent label’s act—especially not one who is known to sniff coke out of ass cracks on occasion.”
“I have no doubt you’re correct about the awards being a farce,” Pauline said. “But remember, National is making money off your first album and Aristocrat will be making money off of your second one. Did it ever occur to you that it might behoove them to throw you a little bone and at least give you Best Rock Performance?”
He shook his head. “Nope,” he said plainly. “It never occurred to me.”
“And what if you’re wrong?” she asked. “What if they actually do hand one of those gramophones to you? What are you going to say?”
“I’ll wing it,” he said.
“Wing it?”
He nodded. “How hard can it be? I’ll say some shit like: ‘Wow, I just can’t believe this, this is all so cool. First off, I’d like to thank my sister, Pauline, who has been my manager ever since the Intemperance days and was a real inspiration in getting this song and the album into production. I’d like to thank my mom and my dad, for encouraging my musical interests back when I was a child, and, naturally, I’d like to thank the judges for selecting me for this great honor, blather, blather, blather, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.’”