“What do you mean?” she asked. This was a foreign concept to her, at least as far as concert seating went. In most venues they played in, the bleacher sections were reserved and the open floor area in front of the stage was the general admission area.
“The bleacher seats in the rear, for instance, are priced at a hundred dollars each,” Larry said.
“A hundred dollars?” Celia asked, wide-eyed. “For the bleachers?”
“That’s right,” Larry said. “You cannot get your hands on an Eagles ticket for the Hell Freezes Over tour for under a hundred dollars. And if you want to sit on the side bleachers, closer to the stage, you’re talking a hundred and fifty. And if you want to sit on the floor in the rear area behind the soundboard, one hundred and seventy. And the first twenty rows, in front of the soundboard ... those are two hundred dollars a pop.”
“That is insane!” Celia said. “The band itself is charging that much?”
“They are,” he said. “Like I said, if people are willing to pay that for the tickets, why should the scalpers get to keep all the money?”
“Are people paying that?” she asked.
“Every show sells out within eight hours of ticket release,” Larry said.
“At those prices?”
“At those prices. People grumble about it, of course. They accuse the band of profiteering, of selling out, of being greedy bastards, of every other kind of atrocity, but they’re snatching up those tickets the moment they come on sale. And even with that, the tickets are still being scalped on the black market. The nosebleed seats are being resold for three and four hundred. The front section tickets are being resold for five to eight hundred.”
“Five to eight hundred?” she asked, incredulous. It was hard to believe that anyone would be willing to pay that much just to watch a two-hour concert—even if it was the reunited Eagles.
“Like I’ve been saying, the demand is high for these shows. Ticket sales is a vast, untapped revenue source, at least when we’re talking about a popular act.” He looked at her. “An act such as yourself.”
She looked at him pointedly. “Is that what this is all about?” she asked. “You want to raise the ticket prices?”
“That is the suggestion of the home office,” Larry said. “Now, of course, we won’t be able to charge as much as the Eagles are charging—your fan base is not the baby-boomers with their limitless funds—but we can certainly do better than twenty-five and forty a ticket.”
“What are they suggesting?” she asked.
“Well, we’re committed to the venues we’ve already sold tickets for,” Larry said, “but we can put the tour on hold for a few weeks beyond that and restructure everything. Instead of GA areas, we would have to rent seat setups for the floor and assign numbers for them. Once that is done, they are suggesting fifty dollars for the rear bleachers, seventy-five for the side bleachers, one hundred for the rear floor seats, and one hundred and fifty for the seats forward of the sound board.”
“Madres de Dios,” she whispered. “That’s a lot of money.”
“It is,” Larry agreed. “And it’s still only about half of what the scalpers are charging. People are willing to pay that much, Celia. Why shouldn’t we be the ones to profit from it?”
“It just seems ... wrong,” she said.
Larry shrugged. He did not really have much of a concept of what was right and what was wrong. “I was just told to offer up the suggestion to you,” he said. “They don’t need a decision right now. They want you to talk it over with Pauline and Jake, see what they think about the idea.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding slowly. “I’ll call Paulie in the morning before we leave for Chicago.”
Two hours later, Celia was in her room on the top floor of the Hyatt Regency hotel just north of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. It was just past midnight, but she was still not sleepy. She was acclimated to a swing-shift type of schedule these days and sleep was not as hard to come by since she and the band did not have to ride the bus between venues. They typically checked out of their hotels around eleven o’clock in the morning and boarded their plane just after noon for the flight to whatever city was next. Tomorrow would be no exception. Celia would go to bed around two in the morning and sleep until nine-thirty or ten. She would have a room service breakfast and then head downstairs to the bus at eleven.
She had just got off the phone with Greg a few minutes ago. They made a point to talk to each other several times a week. Their relationship was still a bit on the touchy side and she still did not quite know where it was heading, but the dark anger and mistrust in him had cooled down considerably.
She had told Greg about Aristocrat’s suggestion to increase ticket prices. Greg, of course, was all in favor of the idea—she never thought for a moment that he wouldn’t be—but he listened patiently to her doubts about the scheme and even expressed understanding of her reluctance.
She thought about him now, as she sat at the writing desk, a glass of chilled chardonnay before her. Did she miss him? It was hard to be sure. She certainly missed the regular sex she got from him, but was that the same as missing him?
Before she could follow this thought too far, the phone began to ring. She looked at it for a moment, a smile coming to her face. There was only one person who would be calling her at just past midnight. She picked up the handset and put it to her ear.
“Tell me you have something long and cylindrical for me,” she said into the mouthpiece.
A female voice chuckled in her ear. “You know it, hon,” said Suzie Granderson, the pilot-in-command of their chartered aircraft. Celia and Suzie had become friends over the past two months of the tour. The lesbian flyer was a very interesting person with a quirky personality and a commanding presence that was quite intriguing. The two of them liked to get together a few nights a week in Celia’s room and ‘shoot the shit’, as Suzie liked to term it.
“Come on up,” Celia told her. “I’m in room sixteen-twenty. There’s a really nice balcony that looks out toward the airport.”
“Be there in less than five,” Suzie promised.
It actually only took about two minutes before there was a gentle knock on the hotel room door. Celia, now dressed in a pair of tattered sweatpants and a pullover t-shirt, padded over in her bare feet and opened it.
“Hey, Fly Girl,” she greeted as the pilot stepped into the room.
Suzie was wearing a pair of jeans and a tank top that showed off her well-muscled arms. She had a tattoo of a pair of air force wings on her right bicep. Her hair was short, almost militarily so, but her face was feminine and kind of cute. “Hey, band geek,” she returned, holding up her hand, which held two Cuban cigars—the long cylindrical objects of which Celia had spoken.
Their standard greeting ritual complete, they made their way out to the balcony of the room, where a small table and two chairs sat. Celia had already moved her ice-filled wine bucket and her wineglass out there. Suzie, who did not drink alcohol for the obvious reason, had brought a tall glass of iced tea with her.
“Nice view,” Suzie said, looking out at the city lights and the airport where, despite the late hour, there was still considerable arrival and departure traffic. “My room is down on the seventh and looks out over the air conditioning units.”
“There’s a lot to be said for air conditioning units,” Celia said, sitting down.
Suzie chuckled a little and then sat down across from her. She unwrapped the cigars and then quickly prepped them with a cutting tool she carried. She handed one to Celia and put the other in her own mouth. She then produced a lighter, which she fired up and held under the tip of Celia’s stogey.