Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,91

the most part, we really didn’t have to. She wasn’t particularly needy or anything. The only issues were when she let things get so out of control, it was everyone’s problem. Like when she almost burned down the Chelsea.

Daisy: Nicky fell asleep having a smoke and the pillow caught fire at the Omni Parker House in Boston. I woke up because of the heat next to my face. Singed my hair. I had to put out the flames with the extinguisher I found in the closet. Nicky was completely unfazed by the whole thing.

Simone: I called her when I heard about the fire. I called her in Boston, I called her in Portland. I kept calling. She didn’t return my calls.

Billy: I told Rod to get her help.

Rod: I offered to take her and Nicky to rehab and she said I was being silly.

Graham: She’d slur a word here or there, she took a fall down the stage steps at some point. I think maybe in Oklahoma. But Daisy knew how to make everything look like fun and games.

Daisy: We were in Atlanta. And Nicky and I had partied all night and somebody had mescaline. Nicky thought it was a great idea to do mescaline. Everybody else had gone to bed and so it was just Nicky and me, high on a lot of stuff at once. The mescaline had just kicked in.

We broke the lock on the door leading up to the roof at the hotel we were staying at. The fans that had staked outside the lobby of the hotel had all gone home. That’s how late it was. He and I stood there, looking at the empty space where earlier in the day they had all been standing. It seemed romantic, the two of us up there. Everything quiet. Nicky took my hand and led me to the very edge of the roof.

I made a joke, I said, “What are you up to? You want us to jump?”

And Nicky said, “Could be fun.”

I … Let me put it this way: When you find yourself high on the roof of a hotel with a husband who doesn’t outright say that the two of you shouldn’t jump off, you start to realize you have a lot of problems. That wasn’t my rock bottom. But it was the first time I looked around and thought, Oh, wow, I’m falling.

Opal Cunningham: A large part of the growing budget was accounting for what damages they would leave behind. It was always Daisy’s room that cost the most. We were paying hand over fist for broken lamps, broken mirrors, burnt linens. A lot of busted locks. Hotels expect a certain amount of wear and tear, especially when a band is coming through. But this was enough that they were demanding more than just keeping the security deposit.

Warren: I think it was around the southern leg of the tour that you could tell Daisy was … I don’t know. Losing it. She was forgetting some of the words to the songs.

Rod: Before the show in Memphis, everyone’s getting ready to go out onstage and no one could find Daisy. I was searching all over for her. Asking everyone about her. I finally found her in one of the bathrooms in the lobby. She’d passed out in one of the stalls. Her butt was on the floor, one of her arms over her head. For a second—a split second—I thought she was dead. I shook her and she woke up.

I said, “You’re supposed to go onstage.”

She said, “Okay.”

I said, “You need to get sober.”

And she said, “Oh, Rod.” And she stood up, walked to the mirror, checked her makeup, and then walked backstage to meet the rest of the band like everything was right as rain. And I thought, I don’t want to be in charge of this woman anymore.

Eddie: New Orleans. Fall of ’seventy-eight. Pete finds me at sound check and says, “Jenny wants to get married.”

I say, “All right, so marry her.”

Pete says, “Yeah, I think I will.”

Daisy: If you’re fucked up all the time, you piece things together slower than you should. But I started to realize that Nicky never paid for anything, that he didn’t have any of his own money. And he kept buying us more blow. I’d say, “I’m good. I’ve had enough.” But he always wanted more. Wanted me to have more.

We were on the bus one morning, maybe December or so. We were laying down in the