Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,19

read. That morning, that bus ride.

Billy: That night, we pulled into Santa Rosa, we started getting ready for our show at Inn of the Beginning. But I wasn’t in the right mind.

Eddie: Our first show of the tour did not go well. And there was no reason for it to go poorly except that we just weren’t in sync the way we should have been, you know? Billy reversed two of the verses on “Born Broken.” And then Graham came in late on a bridge.

Karen: I wasn’t too worried about it. But you could tell Billy and Graham were upset about how it went.

Billy: Afterward, we went back to the hotel. Girls starting pouring into the room. There was a loaded bar there for us. I had more to drink than I should have. I had a highball glass in one hand and the bottle of Cuervo in the other. Just kept pouring myself a new glass. New glass, new glass, new glass.

I remember Graham telling me to slow it down. But there was too much running through me.

I was gonna be a father and I was a husband and Camila was back in L.A. and we had just played this awful show, and our album had just come out and we didn’t know how it would do.

Tequila quieted the whole thing down.

So when Graham told me to stop, I wasn’t gonna listen. And you know, there’s coke lying around. And I’m doing that. And somebody’s got quaaludes and I grab a few of those.

Warren: We were in two adjoining rooms at this motel and I was getting into it with this girl over in the corner of the one room. Cool chick—she was wearing a scarf as a shirt—and all of a sudden she jumped up and asked where her sister was. I didn’t even know she had a sister with her.

Somebody called out, “I think she’s with Billy.”

Billy: Sometime around three or four in the morning I think I blacked out. When I woke up I was in the hotel bathtub … I wasn’t alone. [Pauses] There was a … blond girl, laying on top of me. I’m so embarrassed to be telling you this but it’s true.

I got up and puked.

Graham: When I woke up, I saw Billy standing out in the parking lot smoking a cigarette. He was pacing back and forth, kind of talking to himself, looked a little crazy. I went out there and he said, “I fucked up. I fucked it all up.”

I knew what had happened. I’d tried to stop it. But there was no stopping him. I said, “Just don’t do it again, man. That’s all. Just don’t do it again.”

He nodded and said, “Yeah.”

Billy: I called Camila just to hear her voice. I knew I couldn’t tell her what I’d done. I told myself that I would never do it again and that’s what was important.

Camila: You’re asking me if I knew he was going to be unfaithful as if that’s a thing that you know or you don’t know. Like it’s black and white. But it’s not. You suspect, then you sort of un-suspect. Then you suspect again. Then you tell yourself you’re crazy. Then you ask yourself whether fidelity is really something you value above all else.

Let me put it this way: I’ve seen a lot of marriages where everyone is faithful and no one is happy.

Billy: At the end of the call, Camila said she had to go and I said, “All right,” and then I remember she said, “Okay, honey, we love you.”

And I said, “We?”

And she said, “Me and the baby.”

And that just … I think I hung up the phone before I could even say goodbye.

Karen: Camila had become my friend. I hated Billy for putting me in a position to either tell Camila what he’d done or lie to her.

Billy: Drinking, drugging, sleeping around, it’s all the same thing.

You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end.

You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.

Graham: It got to be a rhythm: get to town, sound check, play, party, get on