He began to sing the chorus of “Girls, Girls, Girls,” humming the parts where he’d forgotten the words.
“I should leave you alone,” I said.
“Here,” said Joey, handing me a champagne glass.
“Does this have alcohol in it, Joey?”
“Chillax, Mom. Yours does. Mine doesn’t.”
He lit up a cigar and patted the space next him, beckoning me to sit. I couldn’t stop looking at his legs. Those poor, mangled limbs! He might as well have fallen into a wood chipper, they were in such a state. And his toes… he didn’t even have toes—he had toe, in the singular. A fused mass of bone, cartilage, and skin, located at the end of each twisted foot. How did the man even manage to walk?
I lowered myself onto the recliner, leaving as much room between us as possible. Then I drank the champagne. All of it, in one gulp. It had been that kind of day.
“The numbers, huh?” said Joey, nodding at my empty glass. “Not good.”
“You said there was bad news coming,” I replied, pouring myself another.
“Sure there is. We’re gettin’ nuked. They’re giving us one last episode. No ratings, no more show.”
“Our elimination night.”
“Ha! Ironic, ain’t it? God, I could graze on that ass for a month.” He was looking again at one of the swimmers, who was performing an underwater handstand. Then he turned to me quickly, as if not wanting to cause any offence. “I fuck dudes, too, by the way,” he said. “Just in case you’re thinkin’ I’m some kinda sexist or something. Size is a factor, though. More than seven inches and it feels like—”
“I get the idea, Joey.”
“She blushes again!” he roared, pointing at my face. “Shit, man—the traffic lights on Sunset Boulevard turn red less often than you do. It’s cute, Bill. Very cute.”
“Do you ever care what happens to Icon, Joey?” I asked, with more bluntness than I’d planned. “I mean, if I were you, with your—y’know, the back catalog and everything—I wouldn’t want the hassle. Taking orders from Len Braithwaite. Dealing with Bibi. Or worse, Teddy Midas. C’mon, Joey. Wouldn’t you rather be sitting on a beach somewhere in Hawaii, writing your memoirs, sipping mai tais—”
“Whoah!” Joey interrupted, with an eruption of partially chewed spring roll from his mouth. “You got me ALL wrong, sugar. Holy crap-a-doodle-doo, have you got me wrong. Lemme tell you a story about how much I care, Little Ms. Bungalow Bill, about how much I invest in the shit I do. You remember the summer of ’83?”
I blanked. It was the year Swordfishtrombones by Tom Waits came out. That was all I knew.
“Yeah, like shit you do,” Joey went on, not waiting for a reply. “You weren’t even a sperm in your daddy’s dick! So let me remind you: It was the middle of Honeyload’s third world tour. Me and Blade, we were banging ten chicks a night, drinking, fighting, playing, using. We’d gone deep into Crazy Land, man. And I lost my shit a few times, that I admit. But that summer, Blade went psycho-fuckin’-killer on me. Said he wanted to put a bullet in my head, ’cause the band was driving him insane. Accused me of not caring—just like you did a moment ago. He even got it into his head that I was gonna fuck everyone over and go solo. He’d seen how well Ozzy was doing after Black Sabbath, and he was shitting his pants. Big time paranoia, like you wouldn’t even believe.
“So, it’s the last night in July,” he continued, “and we’re booked to play Yankee Stadium. And our manager—may the devil roast his soul over the hot coals of hell for all fuckin’ eternity—has this far-out idea for starting the show: He’ll give us all some parachutes, take us up in his Learjet, fly over the stadium, and at just the right moment we’ll jump out the back, pull our rip cords, and float down to the stage. And when our feet touch the ground—DNN, DNN, BLAM!—we’ll launch into ‘Duckin’ and Fuckin,’ the first track on our new album. Genius idea, credit where it’s due. Only me and Blade were still fightin’ so much, taking us up in an airplane was pretty much the dumbest thing anyone coulda done.
“It was a bad scene, man. In that tiny plane. Bumping around all over the place. It’s dark. The door’s open. Wind screaming in our ears. Me and Blade screaming at each other, swinging punches, arguing over… reverb settings, would you believe—at twenty thousand feet! And