This Is How It Really Sounds (29 page)

“He's a fan?”

“Yeah. The last thing he said before I hammered him was,
I really like your music.
”

Bobby laughed. “Yeah, Pete. You feel bad about hitting a fan? Send him an autographed copy of ‘Kickin' It.' He'll be eternally grateful.”

Bobby was right: he was splitting this a lot finer than it needed to be. The man was a bankster. Case closed.

They moved on to the tour stuff. Nothing much had developed in the last four days; still a lot of holes in the schedule, and gigs that Bobby wasn't too specific about. He didn't have the heart to press him on it. They talked about the new songs. Bobby'd already released “Kickin' It with The Man,” but it hadn't done much so far. Fourteen hundred downloads from the usual suspects, along with some “positive energy” from the radio stations. Bobby's industry-speak way of saying it wasn't going anywhere. A few months ago he would have bought into it, just said,
Bobby's got this one,
because, basically, he paid Lev to worry about the money shit and Bobby to worry about the career shit. When songs tanked, Bobby pretended to care and he pretended to believe him. That had been the deal. But that deal was no longer in force. “So Bobby, what you're saying is that ‘Kickin' It' isn't getting traction.”

“Not yet.”

“Why don't you tell me exactly what you're doing to make it get traction.”

Bobby seemed kind of surprised when he popped him with that one, but he went down the list in a very professional-sounding way that involved incoming links and outgoing links and social bookmarking and a whole bunch of Internet stuff that was like, yeah, whatever. The bottom line: between track downloads and streaming, he'd made about a thousand bucks on the song since it came out two weeks ago. Didn't even cover the studio costs. The strange thing was, Bobby actually seemed pumped about the song. “Don't count this one out yet, Pete. This is different. I've got a good feeling about this.”

Bobby dropped him off at home and Pete pushed his key into the lock. He'd only been gone four days. He didn't even have a stack of mail to throw out. And it was over. He'd gone to Shanghai, he'd done everything Charlie'd said, he'd kicked it with The Man, and now he was back in L.A. with a new song going nowhere and a concert tour that had so many holes in it you couldn't really call it a tour. He wandered aimlessly around his apartment, swatted at the heavy bag, read a magazine while he stood in front of the open refrigerator and ate wrinkled grapes. Maybe it was the jet lag that had him down. He hadn't slept in twenty-eight hours and it was four in the afternoon. Fourteen hundred downloads wouldn't even pay his rent for a couple of weeks. It meant oblivion. There were always merchandise revenues, royalties from his catalog. He could keep limping along like this for a while, but, really, if he'd written his best song, and it was dead in the water, where did he go from here?

He tried to tune it out and work on a new song, something with a honky-tonk feel, maybe a guy who had his girlfriend stolen by his best friend, or maybe a guy who stole his best friend's girl—something like that. But it felt stale. He'd written that song already, a hundred times over.

He put on his headphones and listened to the demo of “Kickin' It with The Man” that he'd cut with Duffy. Bobby'd hired some studio musicians to lay in the other tracks, and the damn thing really sounded like a DreamKrushers song, one of their earlier ones, before all the fights about songwriting credits and royalties started sapping them. The weird thing was, listening to it now, he didn't feel the same juice. He'd dreamed it, he'd planned it, he'd trained for it, and he'd done it. He was finished with it now, something he hadn't figured on when he'd imagined singing it in arenas across the country.

He took some pills and dozed off around six, then woke up at four in the morning. His first thought was that he should be writing something, putting new material between him and whatever despair was on his ass at the moment, but he was too buzzed out, so he went to his computer to check his mail. Weird shit happening: there were four messages from China that had come in over his fan site. He could tell them by the chicken scratchings along the bottom and the fucked-up English, and he'd already deleted the first couple as spam when he noticed something different. Not the usual Chinese fan letter, some Chinglish version of,
I like your music, Mr. Pete Harrington,
but instead,
Very funny video you beating banker! Very good!

Interesting. And the next one:
I see you hit him strong!

Damn straight he'd hit him strong! He'd made a couple of people happy, anyway. But how had they tracked him down so quickly? He knew there'd been witnesses: downtown Shanghai at one in the afternoon was a piss-poor place to keep something secret. One of the e-mails had a link to a Chinese Web site, and even though it didn't have a single word of English on it, he could see from the grainy image of the video still that it was him, in Shanghai, with the other Peter Harrington. He clicked the arrow to put it in motion. There were some Chinese characters he couldn't understand, a soundtrack too garbled to make anything out, but he immediately recognized himself walking along the Bund, then going up to the other Peter Harrington, and then—hell yeah!—just hammering the living crap out of him with a single perfect overhand right that sent the bankster staggering backward onto his ass. Fucking nice shot! The guy went down, then scuttled around like a crab trying to avoid his kicks. He watched it again. Shuffle, trap, hit—boom! Charlie'd be proud of him when he saw that. The kicks could have been stronger, but the idea wasn't to damage him, it was to make him feel powerless. And by the look on the guy's face, he'd fucking aced that test.

He watched it a third and then a fourth time. It was all there: the hesitation, then the words, and then the flawless punch he'd honed with thirty thousand repetitions. The only thing missing was Charlie, taking down the bodyguard like a carnival rigger.

He watched it a few more times, then searched his name to see what else was out there. None of the videos came up. He got it: you had to search with Chinese characters or something. So at the moment it was strictly in China. He had a hunch it wasn't going to stay that way.

*   *   *

Bobby called him at nine. He sounded excited. “Have you looked at YouTube? Search yourself on YouTube.”

And there he was, walking up to Harrington, saying a few words, then punching him in the face. It was the same as the Chinese video, but better picture quality, like they'd loaded it at higher resolution, and they'd put some English subtitles in to identify the players. But there was a second video, too, from a different angle. Some of it familiar: the startled bankster, the part where he recognized him, the surprise, then the disbelief as Pete punched him right in the nose. He remembered a couple of Chinese fans following him with cell phones. This definitely looked like their work. The sound was better. He could distinctly make out Peter Harrington saying,
I really like your music.

Bobby was analyzing it. “Evidently it got posted on a Chinese site, and then someone posted it on YouTube. It's got eleven thousand views already, mostly from Europe. That's in eight hours.”

“No shit!”

“You look good, Pete. You smoked him.”

How do you answer that one? You stack up a huge pile of hundreds, set them on fire, and, just when you've decided it's all been pretty useless, Bobby calls up and says,
Good show, old chap! Eleven thousand views!
And though he should have been all existential about it, all very detached Bob Dylan and shit, he couldn't help saying, “How about the downloads?”

“‘Kickin' It' has been downloaded twelve hundred times since this went up. That's almost as much as the previous two weeks.”

He was quiet for a while, holding the phone away from him, until Bobby said,
Pete? Are you there?

“That's not why I did this.”

“I know.”

“I'm going to hang up now.”

“Cool. We'll talk later. But, Pete, I need you to promise me something: don't say anything to anyone about this. Not your friends—nobody. In case there's legal issues. Just say you can't talk about it.”

Not an easy directive to follow. By late afternoon, his phone started buzzing. He didn't pick up, but he listened to the messages. Friends calling to congratulate him.
Pete! That was so badass!
Or,
Pete, I saw you deck that banker on YouTube! Nice!
Duffy called about one of the songs they were working on, and he picked up for that one. He steered him to the video, and Duffy called back a few minutes later. “You did it, Pete! You brought the hard hand of justice down on that guy, just like you said you would. I'm proud of you!” His sister and his mother called. His first cousin in Montana called. The only call missing was Charlie. He'd tried to reach him three times that day, figuring he was jet-lagged, or just old-man cranky, because Charlie could get that way, but he never picked up. What had happened to him? Had he gotten hurt, or arrested? Was he back in the States? Bobby said he hadn't heard from him.

But all the other noise was starting up again: he could feel it. Noise he'd heard when the DreamKrushers had first hit, and then again after that China tour. The kind of noise where people called your name again and again, but even though it was your name it wasn't really you, it was just a name they knew. Because how could it be
you
punching a guy in the face but not
you
with a sense of fear?
You
singing a hit, but not
you
chasing after that song you couldn't write. He went out to the Rainbow for a quick dinner, halfheartedly flirted with the waitress. When he got back he tried to start a new song, that one about the house in Wilksbury, but he couldn't figure out the melody, or what he'd call it. He pushed it around until ten o' clock, then took a couple of Valiums. He went over to the computer to take one last look before the pills kicked in. The video had gone to fifty thousand views.

The Valium only kept him down for six hours. When he fired up his laptop again, he thought at first it had some sort of virus. There were over three hundred e-mail messages waiting for him in a half-dozen languages and every variation of stilted English you could find. A lot were from fans, but there was a new element now. The link must have gone out to some sort of Crossroads-victims mailing list, because dozens of messages had come from people who'd lost a chunk of their retirement or their houses in the collapse. They retold their hard-luck stories and thanked him for what he'd done. Again and again, the stories and then the chorus, in one form or another:
You're my hero!
On top of this were the requests for interviews from Web sites and media. Even some of the music labels were on to him now, congratulating him on his new release and pretending that they'd been following him all these years, just waiting for a chance to sign him. Sure, pal. You always loved me. He picked up the phone and called Bobby. Even as he surveyed the messages, new ones kept sliding in at the top of the list.

“This is fucking weird, Bobby. I've gotten three hundred thirty-two messages in my mailbox in the last eight hours!”

“It's five in the morning, Pete! You woke up Sandra!”

“Sorry, man. I couldn't help it: it's freaking me out!”

He heard some muffled swearing, then a woman's voice sounding pissed. “I'll call you back, Pete,” Bobby said. Then carefully, so he would understand him, “Don't answer any e-mails. Okay? Not even from your family.”

*   *   *

When Bobby called back at ten he was cheerful, as if waking up his bitch wife at five
A.M.
was no big deal.
No, hey, Pete. Call me anytime you need me. That's what I'm here for.
He was starting to get it now: this was the new Bobby. The new Bobby told him that “Kickin' It” had been downloaded 6,000 times in the last twenty-four hours. That set him back for a second. He did the math, something he'd gotten good at, though with much smaller numbers. With no label to take a cut, that was $1,800. Not only that, he'd had another 7,800 downloads of other tracks, and over 300 album downloads, on which he scored about six bucks a pop. Total take: close to $6,000 in twenty-four hours. Bobby sounded warm and brotherly, like they were in this together, no matter what. He said his phone was ringing off the hook. Industry suits, media people, even major-market radio stations interested in “Kickin' It with The Man.” It looked like people were starting to remember who Pete Harrington was.

“So, Bobby, I've got, like, four hundred e-mails. And a bunch of them are interview requests? What do I do?”

“First of all, don't answer them. Second, I think you need a publicist.” His tone lifted slightly. “Maybe you should give Beth a call.”

“Um … Do you really think that's a good idea? It took me twenty years to dig out of the hole I made last time she was my publicist.”

“That's ancient history; we're all grown-ups now. And she's one of the smartest people out there. Give her a call and see what she says. She cares about you, Pete.”

An hour later he was at her PR agency. The ground floor of a Wilshire Boulevard office building, it was all open and airy, like nobody was actually working. Even the little cubicles were open on two sides to make them feel more humane and egalitarian. Everybody seemed like they were right out of college, looking up at him with that “it's the client!” smile as the receptionist walked him through the space to Beth's office. Framed pop stuff to show how hip they were: a Lakers uniform, an electric guitar belonging to Eric Clapton, and even, no shit, an old Oompa Loompa costume with a signed photo of Gene Wilder next to it. Oompa Loompas: cool! The house that Beth built. Have to admit: the woman was impressive. He'd screwed her over pretty badly when they'd been married, no doubt about that, and rescuing that relationship from a watery grave had taken many buckets of blood. He'd serially messed up at least a million relationships in exactly the same way, but Beth had been different. She wasn't some little bonbon waiting to be unwrapped and eaten: he'd really admired her. They'd finally settled in to a friendship where she and Ira were the responsible couple and he was a sort of wayward son, soaking up dinner and practical advice. Sometimes he called them “Mom and Dad.” Their kids laughed at that.