‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Priscilla.’
‘Hey, Priscilla,’ said the lead singer.
‘I really admire you guys. I think your shit is awesome.’
‘Excellent.’ There was a brief pause before he added, ‘You know, we really used to dig your mom, like when she was your dad.’
Then the bass player shifted up the booth a little and invited Priscilla to sit down.
‘Hey,’ he said drunkenly, ‘if we party with you does that mean we get on the TV? Like you have little cameras following you around, right? Hey, guys! Maybe we should sing our new song and it will get on the TV!’
Priscilla wondered if he was being serious. He wasn’t.
‘Like those cameras,’ he continued. ‘You should have one in your bedroom, babe! That would like be huge! Or in the john! We could all watch Blaster Blenheim take a dump, and take a look to see how his cooch construction’s going. That would be hot! We have to watch those fucking pigs shit, why not you guys too?’
The bass player’s face was close to hers, which seemed to amplify his sneer.
Priscilla had encountered this kind of resentful aggression any number of times and depressingly it always seemed to come from people she admired. She understood it, of course; these guys were musicians trying to struggle up a very greasy pole. They had a tiny independent record deal with no distribution to speak of and the only exposure they could get themselves was by gigging, thrashing out their set night after night in a series of half-empty hellholes before loading out their own gear. She, on the other hand, was a major celebrity with her own TV show and a massive record deal.
And why? Because she was a rock star’s stepdaughter whose parent had sold her adolescence to the media.
‘So anyway,’ the bass player said, getting even closer to her, ‘how’s it all going?’
Priscilla was familiar with this too. They held her in contempt but they wanted to fuck her. Why not, she was cute enough and she was world famous. What was not to fuck?
‘Well, you know,’ she replied, ‘I’ve been doing stuff. Kind of working on my songs and shit.’
‘Your songs?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. I write songs.’
‘You write songs? I didn’t know that.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Hey, guys! The babe writes songs! Did anyone know that?’
But the rest of the band weren’t listening. The club was noisy and they were leaving the bass player to it.
‘’Cos you’re a singer, right?’ the bass player said, turning back to Priscilla. ‘You did an album, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
There was a pause after this. The album had conspicuously flopped, so there was not much to be said.
‘Hey!’ The bass player was already drunker than he had been earlier. ‘Maybe you should sing with us then we could be famous too! Wouldn’t that be cool?’
‘You already have a singer.’
‘Aw but he’s shit and besides he ain’t a
babe
.’
Priscilla did not know why but she let him take her to bed. On reflection she concluded that it had been vanity. He had credibility. He had cool. And famous though she was, Priscilla had neither. Not really. Not real cool. Mall rats and suburban metal heads might have thought she was cool but
cool
people didn’t, and yet there she was hanging out with one. She knew that he held her in contempt but nobody else in the club did and as she rocked drunkenly on his arm and was photographed at the exit a tiny little piece of his credibility rubbed off on her, just as a smidgeon of her fame attached itself to him. It was a very LA kind of thing.
Around the Couch
Calvin was too angry even to sit on the couch. Instead he paced about the book-lined study, trying not to knock over the objets d’art. In the week since he had sacked and then failed to have sex with Emma, he had been infuriated to discover that removing her from his proximity had not taken her off his mind.
He was
thinking
about her.
All
the time.
And he
hated
himself for it.
This was not Calvin’s thing at all. His thing was control. Control in every part of his life and business, that was how he managed to run his various hugely successful enterprises, how he managed to dominate vast sections of the pop and television industries in both Europe and the USA. He did it by being
in control
. By organizing his time and his thinking. How was he supposed to organize his time and his thinking when he found himself
wasting
his time on entirely unbidden thoughts of this bloody woman! He had tried to ignore it, gone out and got drunk on the arms of several of his highly glamorous occasional companions, thus creating a storm of media interest about the state of his marriage, but it had been no good. Emma kept returning to his thoughts and it was driving him mad. He had
things to do.
They were only days away from starting to film the
Chart Throb
auditions, plus there was all his usual workload of record contracts, management deals, court cases, spin-off shows and celebrity editions of his various franchises. And one small ex-employee was getting in his way.
Finally, in desperation, he had done something he had never done before, something he would never even have considered doing a week earlier. He had arranged to see a therapist. He hated himself for it, for he saw it as a sign of shameful intellectual weakness, but there was no one else he could turn to.
‘Look,’ he said, pacing round the couch upon which he had been invited to sit. ‘This really is serious. I need to concentrate, I need to
focus.
You have no idea how hard it is to make television that is as successful as my stuff. I don’t
want
to think about this girl, I scarcely know her, and yet she keeps dropping into my head. What the fuck is
wrong
with me?’
The answer was so simple that even a trained therapist was able to work it out.
‘You’re in love,’ he replied after a little thought.
‘I can’t be.’
‘You quite obviously are,’ the therapist asserted.
‘But I’ve never been in love before.’
‘I thought you had recently got married?’
‘What’s that got to do with it? I’ve never been in love before.’
‘Well, then I suppose there is a first time for everything.’
‘I don’t
know
this girl!’
‘You don’t need to know her. Love isn’t logical like that.’
‘I could sleep with any number of the most beautiful women on earth.
Why
do I only want to sleep with this one? She’s not even the most beautiful! I mean not in an obvious sense anyway.’
‘I’ve told you. You’re in love. That’s what love is.’
Calvin sat down on the couch for a moment and almost immediately bounced up again.
‘I’m absolutely convinced that if I could just sleep with her I’d be over it. It’s the
not
having her which is beating me up.’
‘Well, you
may
be right.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘I suppose you have to try to sleep with her.’
‘Duh! I
know
that. But I can’t. She won’t return my calls. I fucked up, you see. And that’s another thing that’s driving me insane. I
hate
fucking up. It’s so not me.’
‘How did you fuck up?’
‘I sacked her, horribly, abruptly, demeaningly and without just cause. I think that was a mistake.’
‘Hmm. Certainly not the usual behaviour of a man in love.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t know I was in love with her
then
, did I? I just thought she was . . .
distracting.
I’d noticed that I’d been looking at her, thinking about her,
focusing
on her. I had to do something about it so I sacked her. I don’t like being distracted. What else could I do? This is all new territory for me.’
‘You could have displaced the distraction into a social context.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Asked her out for a coffee.’
‘I don’t have
time
for that shit! I don’t
do
that shit. My programmes are franchised in a dozen different countries! I am a colossal
star.
I run a huge record label and rock management company and that’s just a
sideline.
I can’t be taking bloody girls out for
coffee
!! Are you insane? Do you have
any
idea what my time is worth?’
‘So you sacked her to get her out of your way and off your mind?’
‘Yes. I acted decisively. That’s what I do. I act decisively.’
‘But it didn’t work?’
‘No. By mid-afternoon, in the middle of a
very
intense character development meeting, I might add, I realized that this girl was out of my way but not off my mind. I was thinking about her and
in particular
thinking about what she would look like naked. So I invited her to dinner and asked her to sleep with me.’
‘Straight off the bat?’
‘Well, we had dinner first.’
‘But then you asked her to sleep with you?’
‘Yes, I said that she was on my mind and that I needed to sleep with her in order to forget about her.’
‘Hmm. You are new to this, aren’t you?’
‘Look, I know what you’re thinking, that I’m a complete asshole . . .’
‘No, no, no, no . . . no.’
‘But this is serious. I didn’t ask for this. I am blameless but I cannot operate properly until I’ve lanced this boil.’
‘Boil?’
‘Yes . . . I am fucking
obsessed.’
‘Well.’ The therapist put his hands before his face as if in prayer. ‘There is no doubt about it, you are suffering from that intense mental imbalance which is popularly known as love. This young woman Emma is affecting your work and I agree with you that you need to develop a personal well-being strategy in order to . . . uhm . . . lance her. My professional opinion is that, by sacking her and then saying that she can only have her job back if she sleeps with you, you have lost her trust.’
‘I know. I
know
,’ Calvin replied, wringing his hands in despair.
‘This young lady has come to view you with suspicion.’
‘Which is
so
unfair when you consider that I have been completely and absolutely honest with her.’
‘That’s women for you, I’m afraid,’ the therapist sighed. ‘However, what you need to do now is to find a way to make her see you differently. Differently from the utterly amoral sexual predator and bully that she must currently consider you to be. She is clearly a young woman of principle. When you made your suggestion she did not for a moment consider it, but neither has she sought to avenge herself on you or exploit your weakness for her in any way.’
‘Yes, that’s true. I’ve been expecting a sexual discrimination rap every day for a week.’
‘Which would of course be entirely justified.’
‘I know that. Don’t rub it in.’
‘But, for whatever reason, this woman has decided to retire with dignity from the scene and not seek to punish you as she has every legal and indeed moral—’
‘Yes, yes,
all right.
I
said
don’t rub it in.’
‘You are in love with a woman of principle who considers you to be a man utterly without principle. You need to change that.’
‘You mean get her to drop her principles?’
‘No, you’ve tried that. I was thinking more of you
acquiring
some principles or at least
appearing
to do so. You need to win her trust. Unless she trusts you she will never sleep with you. She is a boil who will remain unlanced.’
Calvin considered the advice carefully and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to annoy him.
‘I do not have
time
for this!’
Family Trip
Beryl, Priscilla and her twin sister Lisa Marie sat together in the back of the stretch Humvee. Once more they were stuck in traffic on their way out to LAX.
Beryl was returning to Britain to begin recording the new series of
Chart Throb
and Priscilla was having talks with a dildo manufacturer about developing a range of sex toys under her name. Lisa Marie was just going to hang out.
‘I might go to Europe and check out Berlin,’ she said. ‘I hear they have some awesome industrial metal going on, whole bands with just chainsaws and pneumatic drills. If you take the right drugs you actually believe you’re on a building site.’
‘All that happened before in the late eighties, dork,’ Beryl sneered.
‘Hey, if Green Day can get a Grammy playing punk rock, nothing’s dead.’
‘Except my album,’ said Priscilla morosely. She had that morning learned that it had been officially remaindered and could now be found in the bargain dump bins alongside the Country compilations and last year’s
Chart Throb
finalists.