Beneath the Stain - Part 2

Part Two

Trav Ford doesn’t like strings and he doesn’t like messes. Coming off of a messy breakup, Trav is grimly determined to keep his life absolutely pristine. When Trav is asked to take over the management of Outbreak Monkey, his first order of business is to clean up their act—and that includes shipping the youngest, most troubled member off to detox and rehab before Mackey Sanders’s life choices kill him.

But Mackey didn’t become an addict overnight, and it’s going to take
more than one trip to rehab to fix him up. When an act of violence destroys
Mackey’s struggling equilibrium, Trav is going to find that messy isn’t so hard to escape—not when it’s wrapping its mess around Trav’s heart.

T
HE
NEXT
month was a blur. So much of it was above Mackey’s head. Someone told him and the guys where to be, when they were going, and boom! They were there. He remembered the panic of their first plane ride, the way he and Kell sat next to each other, listening to their own iPods, all the fear and apprehension and excitement theirs and theirs alone. Neither of them talked about how pissed they were at Grant. Once they got to LA, it was all
drive here
and
sign this
, and with one swipe of the pen, their world changed. Jeff and Kell let go of their apartment. Mackey bought their mom a house.

It was the last thing he did that made any sense to him. He
insisted
that part of the contract be that their mom had a house, wherever she picked.

Mackey didn’t care. As long as his mom didn’t have to work in bars anymore or worry about rent, or Cheever, he was happy. That moment in the Los Angeles office at Tailpipe Productions was one of the best of his life. When Gerry (as Mackey started calling him) asked them what they wanted to do afterward, Mackey said, “Go to Disneyland, of course!”

Gerry laughed and told them Disneyland was at least two hours away in traffic, but that he’d take them the next day. Instead, he proposed that they go out to dinner with the owner of the company, Heath Fowler—after they went shopping for suitable clothes.

Heath was in his early thirties, and he wore an expensive suit like he’d squirted out of his mama and right into it, and it had grown with him. His brown hair was cut perfectly, his teeth were even and white, and his blue eyes (contacts, Mackey figured) were level and steely. He let Gerry walk them through the contract and stopped to clarify stuff Gerry missed. He made sure to mention they were responsible for an album at least every two years, and to give them a loose outline of what their time would look like, provided they sold and did what they were told.

Mackey took that seriously. His mom’s house depended on him putting out the albums, playing the music, doing what he was told.

“We won’t let you down,” he said, shaking hands after he’d signed his spot. Kell copied him, and so did Stevie and Jeff, but the fact that he was the one leading the band and all those zeroes were in his hands—that scared the crap out of him.

So while Kell, Jeff, and Stevie nodded, fine with being dragged in this current like fish on hooks, Mackey recognized the shopping trip for what it was: part of his duty to the band. Had to look the part, right? He trooped along with them to the outlet mall in the LA burb he couldn’t remember, even the next day, feeling more like he was being inducted into the Marines than making his dreams come true.

It hit Mackey then—hard—that their cleanest T-shirts from Walmart and their least-worn Wranglers were no longer adequate for whatever life they had signed into. He’d have to pick out his own clothes, and someone besides his mom would be bleaching his hair, and Grant wouldn’t be there to keep him from acting out in public.

In the middle of the big dressing room with four mirrors surrounding him, Mackey’s hands started to shake. He longed to be on stage, where
he
was the mirror, because the punk kid reflected back at him was small, scrawny, badly dressed, and unprepared.

“You okay?” Gerry said kindly.

Mackey shrugged, swallowing down nausea. “It’s… I mean, it ain’t Walmart.” He played up the twang in his voice, figuring he could get away with more if people thought less of him.

“No.” Gerry patted his shoulder. “Here, kid. Let me get you some clothes to try on and a glass of water. What are you, a twenty-eight in the waist and a—”

“A twenty-six,” Mackey replied, grimacing. “And a twenty-eight inseam.”

Gerry shook his head. “Son, in a town where a small waist is a prize, you’re gonna be so small you fly under the radar. Jesus, you’re scrawny. But that’s okay. Room to grow.” The look in the older man’s eyes was sympathetic, and he rubbed his hand over his stubbled cheek and then along the back of his neck. He didn’t look well either, Mackey thought. He was sweating, even in the seventy-eight-degree day, and his eyes looked bleary, like he still hadn’t woken up. But he’d walked them through the contract in Mr. Fowler’s office using language so simple even Kell could follow along. He’d included the caveat for Mackey’s mom—the band’s only caveat, actually—and the provisions giving Grant part of the profits for the songs he’d helped to develop instrumentally. Kell had argued against that, because he was still pissed, but Mackey insisted.

Grant got them there—and Mackey wasn’t going to let him bail on a guilty conscience like he’d bailed on his brothers.

The thought made Mackey a little sick to his stomach, and he started sweating even more. He had to get out of there!

“You know, I think I need a little air.  If you let me go outside, I can get—” He thought maybe he could run out of the store all the way to the airport, and catch a plane back to Sacramento. He could be in Tyson before his mom even picked a new place.

Gerry shook his head. “No, kid. Here. The girl’ll be in with the water in a sec. Take one of these—it’ll calm you down.”

Gerry pressed a Xanax into his hand, and Mackey clutched it for dear life. It came from a doctor’s bottle, right? Couldn’t be any worse than weed or wine, right? Just something, anything, to make Mackey feel like he could deal with having someone other than Grant pick out his clothes, and go to dinner in a place that wouldn’t take the jeans he had on.

The girl—a skinny thing with a minidress and no tits—came in and smiled with big, straight white teeth as she handed him a glass with ice and a bottle of water. Mackey managed a weak smile back, and he washed down the Xanax while she was watching. She didn’t bat an eyelash, and he wondered what the hell kind of town this was.

The water helped, though, and he sat down on the leather benches and finished it off. By the time Gerry came back in, his arms full of choices, Mackey had stopped sweating and was mellow, able to smile at jeans that would actually fit.

“Fuckin’ awesome,” he muttered, winking at the salesgirl. She simpered and left so Mackey could change.

“You feeling better?” Gerry asked. Mackey grinned, fuck-off-and-love-me. Gerry nodded, reassured. “Well, now we know the magic little ticket,” he said. “Here, Mackey—you got any water left in that bottle? Time for Uncle Gerry to take his own medicine.”

D
ISNEYLAND
DIDN
’
T
need Xanax—Disneyland was a drug all its own. They went on a weekday, from early in the morning all the way until it closed down, and Gerry went with them. He bought them T-shirts, bought them stuffed animals—even shipped most of those back to Mackey’s mom and Cheever—and then took them back to the hotel room, exhausted and happy. Stevie had been to Disneyland before, but only with his aunt, who got sick on all the rides. The Sanders boys had never been, and Gerry laughed at them kindly as they raced, as eager as eight-year-olds, from roller coaster to roller coaster. Even the Pirates of the Caribbean had its own sort of magic, and Mackey was entranced by every detail. (Kell was not. Kell muttered all the way through that one, saying it was stupid. Jeff and Stevie murmured happily to themselves like bees in the seat behind them, and Mackey wished heartily for his mom or even Cheever, who wouldn’t have tried to crap all over Mackey’s parade.)

That night, Gerry told them to sleep tight, because the next day they’d be auditioning guitarists.

Mackey didn’t hardly sleep a wink.

He lay there in that strange hotel bed, listening to traffic noises from too many cars outside, wondering why he needed a queen-size all on his own, while Kell snored in the bed next to his. If Grant had come, he found himself thinking resentfully, he would have at least kept Mackey company as he floundered on soft white sheets that didn’t stay stuck under the mattress.

When Gerry came in at eight, Mackey was mostly asleep in the corner of the hotel room between the bed and the wall, wrapped up in the comforter. At Gerry’s “Howyadoinkid!” he stood up, bleary-eyed, dressed in one of his old T-shirts and the tighty-whities he’d packed for the trip to LA, and Gerry sighed.

“C’mon, kid. Put on some of your new duds and I’ll get you coffee.”

Mackey smiled at him gratefully. By his third cup of coffee, he felt like he could face his day.

By one o’clock the four members of Outbreak Monkey were about done. They’d sat in the control room of the record studio and listened to more than ten lead guitarists, most of whom were better, skillwise, than Grant had ever been, but not one of whom looked like someone they could play with. Mackey had a headache that wouldn’t quit.

Gerry was there with two ibuprofen to help him out.

The next guy up was Blake Manning, sort of a whip-thin kid, not as small as Mackey, but with a gangly, liquid grace all his own. His hair was too long and not sculpted or trimmed, and he sported a scraggly goatee/beard hybrid that mostly looked like he couldn’t afford to shave. He was wearing pretty much what the Sanders boys had worn coming down to LA: worn jeans and a T-shirt from Walmart.

He opened with an acoustic version of “Backstabbing Betty,” and he wasn’t the most fluid of the guys who had played for them, but Kell grunted as he spat out the word “motherfucker,” and Mackey harmonized with him when he went into the high-pitched scream.

He finished playing, and the guys looked at each other.

“Him,” Kell said, and Mackey nodded, letting Kell know he approved.

Gerry grimaced. “Him? Eduardo, the guy before him, had faster fingers—”

“Feed this guy,” Mackey said decisively. “Feed him. Give him a stay in the hotel room. Let him practice with us tomorrow. We might not hate him.”

“Blake?” Gerry spoke into the microphone. “Could you meet us outside the sound booth, please?”

That night they stayed up late and talked, the boys and Blake and Gerry. Gerry brought them good liquor, Cuervo Gold and margarita mix, which they drank until two in the morning. Mackey didn’t say much—Kell did all the talking, really, but that was fine. Mackey didn’t have to love the guy, just had to be able to give him directions, and with Kell to translate, well, that would work. When it was time to pop up at 8:00 a.m., Gerry was there with the coffee and some ibuprofen for everybody, and when Mackey had to run outside to throw up from a combination of nerves and hangover and sadness for playing with someone who wasn’t Grant, he was there with the Xanax.

Blake, it turned out, had grown up in one of the tiny desert towns over the Grapevine. So close to LA and so far away? It had left him with the acrid ozone bitterness of the smog that never quite left. He fit right in with the boys from Tyson. He got Mackey’s jokes, but he was cynical like Kell. The second time they all went to Disneyland, Kell and Blake refused to go on the Haunted Mansion, and Mackey sat with Jeff and Stevie, listening to the secret murmur of their own language, jokes they got with half a word, references Mackey hadn’t been present to catch. He lost himself in the fantasy instead, but at the one curve of the ride, when the crystal ball was floating with the face of the fortune-teller encapsulated inside, for a moment, he didn’t see the fortune-teller at all. Instead he saw a long road, blank and white, and himself, a tiny black figure standing alone.