“It just seemed easier to tell the truth,” Laura said.
Celia looked at the battered redhead for a moment. She had looked down at the floor while she’d said that last part, as if she did not want to meet anyone’s eyes. It was a classic non-verbal cue of deceit. Was there something that Laura wasn’t being truthful about?
Probably not, she decided. The story was too bizarre, too detailed to be anything but the truth. The thought of falsehood by omission never even entered her mind.
“All right,” Jake said, after everyone had their plates of grilled tri-tip, baked potatoes, and grilled asparagus before them and had given the requisite complements to the cooks (Obie and Pauline). “Shall we talk about this concert ticket thing now?”
The concert ticket thing was the reason why Celia had flown home from Boston, why Jake and Laura were still hanging around in LA instead of going back to Oregon immediately after the Soul Train Music Awards. National’s suggestion on raising ticket prices for the rest of the tour needed to be discussed. It would be a controversial move if they decided to make it, maybe controversial enough to affect album sales, but it could also be a profitable one, potentially increasing tour revenue by more than one hundred percent.
“I’m ready to talk about it,” Pauline said. She was already on record as being in favor of it. “I just wish Bill and Sharon were able to be here. I feel weird talking about a business decision without all the owners of the LLC being here. Especially for something as important and far reaching as this.”
“Nerdly can’t bring himself to break away from the Brainwash project even for a day,” Jake said. “He thinks the whole thing will crash and burn if he and Sharon are not personally there to oversee every note that is put down. He told me that he will abide by whatever decision we make, one way or the other. He also said we can call him if we think we need his input on something. It’s after six o’clock. They’ll all be back at the house by now.”
“I understand,” Pauline said. “It doesn’t mean I approve of it though.”
“Fair enough,” Jake said. “I think the meeting will actually go smoother without Nerdly here to tell us about the theoretical physical aspects of the proposition and how the empirical data will lead us to the proper hypothesis.”
“Perhaps,” Pauline said.
“The person I really wish was here for this is Jill,” Jake said. “She would’ve been able to dial everything down to dollars and cents—data that probably would have been helpful. Unfortunately, she and the rest of her clan are on vacation in freaking Japan right now.”
“Yeah,” said Pauline. “They flew coach all the way across the Pacific and are all three sharing a room in the Tokyo equivalent of the Motel 6.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Obie said. “Are they really that cheap?”
“They’re really that cheap,” Jake assured him. “I went over to Jill’s house once for a dinner meeting. It was in the middle of winter and I could almost see my breath in there because she kept her thermostat set at sixty degrees.”
“Sixty degrees?” Obie asked. “In the winter?”
“Right,” Jake said. “She told me that the difference between sixty degrees on the thermostat and seventy, which is where I keep mine set, added up to an eighteen dollar and forty-six cent difference in natural gas billing per month for a house with the cubic footage of interior space and the type of insulation that hers has.”
“Eighteen dollars and forty-six cents?” Obie asked.
“That’s right,” Jake said. “And over the course of the winter months, when the furnace is primarily in operation, that adds up to ... whatever it adds up to, but it’s not even close to a hundred bucks total. That is how cheap the Yamashitos are.”
“How much do y’all pay them people?” Obie wanted to know.
“Between what I pay them for being my personal accountants and what KVA pays them to keep the company books, well over a hundred K per year. And they are also one of the most highly respected CPA firms for private businesses in the greater Heritage region. A good portion of the independent restaurants, medical and dental practices, car dealers, and specialty retail stores in the area use them to manage their money and do their taxes. If they’re pulling in less than two million a year I’d be surprised, yet Ma and Pa Yamashito are still living in the post-war tract house around the corner from the elementary school Jill and I went to as kids, and Jill herself lives in a modest little single story over in the Pocket area by the river—but not on the river, because, as Jill put it, ‘paying an extra twenty thousand dollars for a riverfront location makes no financial sense in the long-term’.”
Obie was shaking his head. “So, they could afford to fly first-class to Tokyo and stay in the best individual suites the city has to offer—even with the exchange rate being what it is—without dinging their net worth?”
“Without a doubt,” Pauline agreed. “They seem to get a little adrenaline rush out of finding ways to do everything cheaply though. When Jill told me about the deal they got on their flights and hotel room in Tokyo, you could hear how proud she was about it.”
“Hmmph,” Obie grunted in bewilderment. “Is this a Jap thing or an accountant thing?”
“I’m thinking it’s an accountant thing primarily,” Jake said. “With perhaps a dash of underlying Japanese culture to give it a kicker.”
“Kind of like the lime in a gin and tonic?” Obie suggested.
“Exactly,” Jake said with a smile.
“In any case,” Pauline said, “Jill is not here, so we’ll just have to muddle through the financial aspects of this proposed deal without her. I did run the idea by her before they left, and she did let it be known that anything that would increase KVA’s bottom line should be looked upon as a good thing.”
“And this would increase the bottom line considerably,” Greg said.
“On the surface and in the short-term it would,” Celia said. “My question, however, is what would be the long-term consequences of increasing ticket prices in the name of profit?”
“That is the question of the hour right there,” Obie said.
“What do you mean?” Pauline asked.
Obie fielded this one. “It’s like this, y’all,” he said. “I don’t have a horse in this race myself, but I’ll have one in a similar race pretty soon, so I’m a very interested spectator here. Them scalpers were selling my tickets for more than a hundred bucks a pop on my last tour, so I get the underlying argument for this deal. If people are willing to lay down a C-note or more for one of our tickets, why shouldn’t we be the ones pocketing those greenbacks instead of the scalpers? I also get the counter-argument to the proposal. Tours have always been for the purpose of promoting an album in order to increase sales, therefore we’ve always charged as little as feasible for the tickets: just enough to keep from losing too much money on the tour. Charging more than that will make us seem to be shamelessly profiteering from our music, an image that goes against our desired public perception as artists who do what we do for the furtherance of our art instead of to make an assload of money.”
“Exactly,” Jake said. “That is my fear if we go through with this whole deal. Right now, Celia has a reputation as a serious musician who is fully dedicated to producing quality tunes and getting them out there for the world to hear. Everyone knows about how she went independent and how we scraped together the money for KVA Records and used my mom and Nerdly’s mom for musicians and self-produced our CDs just so we could be heard. They think of her as selfless and humble, altruistic even. If she suddenly starts charging a hundred dollars or more a ticket to see her in concert, that could lead to disillusionment by her fanbase. Could that impact sales numbers of her albums? Could it lead to people not buying tickets to her shows?”