my bro, we had a rough time dealin’ with it. That ain’t an excuse for doin’ what I did, ’course. There’s no excuse for that.”
“Look, Joey” I said. “I know this is a bad time, so don’t answer this if don’t feel like it. But I need to know. When you took my pills, did you really find them in my trailer?”
Joey laughed, which seemed to cause him some pain. “You’re still busting my ass about that?”
“I don’t care if you stole them, Joey. I just need to know.”
“They were right there in my trailer, man,” he said, leaning forward. “I fuckin’ swear! Look at me: I’m done. Game over. Why would I lie to you about that now? They were in the bathroom, on the countertop. When I saw ’em, I was all alone, with the door fuckin’ closed. I spent thirty goddamn years on those pills, and another ten getting off ’em. I thought I was hallucinating. I thought the devil himself had come along to tempt me. And I failed, Bill, I failed the test. But I swear to you, they were in my trailer. So either you left ’em, or some asshole put ’em there.”
I believed him. As much as I felt like a sucker—never trust an addict—I really believed him.
“Now let me ask you something, Bungalow Bill,” said Joey, his voice strengthening. “Why are you even doing this job? I mean, you asked me if I cared about Project Icon the other night. But what about you, huh? You act like you’re too cool for school half the time, like none of this means a goddamn thing.”
No one had ever asked me this before. Not directly, anyway. I’d certainly never had to explain it out loud. “Before my dad died,” I began, aware how deluded I was going to sound, “he told me to do what I love. And what I love is… I love to write, Joey. But the problem is, no one’s going to pay me to write a novel when I’ve never been published before. So I need to save up some money, take some time off, and…”—I gave him the spiel about Brock, Hawaii, the whole master plan—“… and that’s why I took this job. I never even wanted to work in TV. It just came up. Len called me and it seemed like a good idea—”
“What did your old man do?”
“He played the trumpet.”
“He made a living doing that?”
“Barely. He played in a wedding band.”
“So he did what he loved, and he made a paycheck.”
“Yeah.”
“Listen to me, Bungalow Bill. Your daddy was right: You should do what you love. But here’s what he didn’t tell ya: You’ve also gotta find a way to love what you do. I bet you any money you like, your old man never dreamed of working his ass off—playing two gigs a night, probably—in a fuckin’ wedding band. I know trumpet players, man: They all wanna be the next Miles fuckin’ Davis. That’s why most of ’em end up drunks or junkies. Either that, or they give up altogether and go kill their souls in an office somewhere. But not your daddy. No, he found a way to love what he HAD to do to pay the rent. Life ain’t perfect, Bill. It’s easy to complain about the job you’ve got, how it ain’t exactly what you want, and this, that, and the other. I used to hear that bullshit from Blade all the time. ‘Why are we playin’ this shitty little club, now that we’re a stadium band? Why are we doin’ this stoopid MTV video, when it should be about the music? Why are we doing that commercial, this book deal, that reality TV show?’ Well, hey, guess what? No one owes you a living. In the entertainment business, you snap your fingers, your audience has moved on, you’ve spent your money, and you’re back home, livin’ with your mom. So you wanna be a writer? Why the FUCK do you need a year on a beach with Mr. Hawaii to do that, man? You’re already a writer: You ghostwrite for the contestants, dontcha? It ain’t War and Peace—I’ll grant you that—but everyone’s gotta start somewhere.”
I’d never thought about my job that way before. But it was true—I did ghostwrite for the contestants. I wrote those cheesy backstories to the songs they chose every week.
I remembered now what Dad had told me about his old band, Baja Babylonia: Stevie on bass, Jimbo on