Wash Up

I rolled onto my side and pulled the pillow over my head. Whoever was knocking on my door, I was sure, could also read. The “Do Not Disturb” sign hung from the knob. I had nothing more to say.

Last night ended a mere four hours ago. Always the gentleman, I stayed conscious until the Uber of my last guest departed. Shortly after, I passed out with no intention of coming to for at least twelve hours.

But thanks to the asshole beating on my door like he was auditioning for a spot in the rhythm section of my tour band, I was wide awake. And as badly as I wanted to remain cocooned in my blankets, dead to the world, I had a hunch he wasn’t going away.

Very slowly, I inched myself upright. Once vertical, a wave of pain crashed against my brain. Carefully touching my head, I searched for cracks, certain the force had split my skull.

Sadly, after last night’s festivities, my only remaining remedy was a couple of Ambien and some Advil. I grabbed four of the latter from my nightstand and washed the pills down with the remains of a complimentary water. My throat, raw from too many shots of cheap vodka, burned.

I stupidly coughed. The percussion only made things worse.

As I massaged my temples, an image popped into my head: me, standing on the dining room table lip-synching to one of my songs like a bad Vegas impersonator.

Gross.

A balled-up tissue sat by my pillow. Smoothing it out, I gently blew my nose. First came the red, then the pink snot. I kept blowing until my eyes watered.

Moving like my limbs were carved from wood, I tugged on a T-shirt, pulled on a crumpled pair of jeans, and lumbered down the hall to the door.

On the other side of the peephole was Sarah: tall and perfectly coifed.

Jesus Christ.

Forcing a smile wide enough to crack my dry lips, I opened the door.

“Sarah.” My voice had a desiccated, cactus-in-the-desert sound. “This is a surprise.”

She glanced at my ketchup-stained shirt, my hair, unkempt and hanging in my face. “How are you, Rick?” Being a true professional, she managed to sound genuinely curious, like the answer to her question wasn’t swimming in the bloodshot pools of my eyes.

“Great. Come on in.”

To her credit, she didn’t hesitate.

“Have a seat.” I gestured at the couch.

She looked around the suite’s living room. “I’ve spent all morning in the car. I’ll stand.”

“At least let me take your coat.”

She demurred and stood next to the door. Her hand, I noticed, was still on the knob.

Nice.

On a better day, I would have ribbed her about being the same guy who went to her dad’s funeral and her daughter’s baptism. This morning, given the sight of me, I couldn’t fault her cautiousness.

“Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?”

Seconds passed.

“Sarah?”

She was gazing at the ceiling as if deciding. I needed to pee.

“Sarah?” I said again. Looking at me, her olive eyes were like nails. I tugged on the bottom of my shirt, covering the inch of exposed belly.

“You’ve become a fragment in the public’s imagination.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, only that she was wrong. I wanted to correct her: Figment. You mean to say figment of. But whenever I pointed out her mixed metaphors and misused words, she’d roll her eyes and sigh, “Not all of us are brilliant, Berkley-educated songwriters.” She’d say it in a tone that implied it wasn’t a compliment. Today, it seemed best to let it go.

“I meant to say fragment, as in a broken piece,” she said, reading my mind. “You’re a shard floating in the collective unconscious.”

“Sorry?” Rubbing my chin, four days of barnacle-like stubble scratched my fingers. “You’ve lost me.”

“You’re a shared fear. A symbol of danger. The warning sign on poison containers. To industry people, you’re a cautionary tale, and your fans are tired of buying tickets to shows you cancel.”

“Wow. Tell me what you really think.” It was ten in the morning. By my schedule, way too early for conversation, especially with a philosophy major. I needed a drink and a smoke. I pulled a cigarette from the pack in the back pocket of my jeans.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Sarah said, letting go of the doorknob to pluck the cigarette from my lips.

“Sorry, force of habit.”

“It’s 2019. Break the habit.”

“Why don’t we sit?” I tried again.

She looked away and then walked toward the couch. Standing next to it, she was careful to keep its stained suede arm from touching her crisply pleated pants. Following her, I leaned on the arm of the opposite chair. Booze, self-imposed sleep deprivation, and too little water had turned my legs into quivering castles of sand. I would have killed a good friend to sit down. Instead, I sucked in my gut and squared my shoulders. “So, why are you really here? Driving over an hour to berate me would be a lot even for you. And call me clairvoyant, but I’m sensing you’re not here to socialize.”

“Think less séance and more intervention.”

I let out a sharp, one-syllable laugh and gave her what I hoped passed for a wry smile. “Funny,” I said.

She was bluffing. She had to be. Sarah was a hard-ass at times, but she wouldn’t do that to me.

“Is it? Funny?” She pulled her phone from the pocket of her trench coat, turned it toward me, and tapped her Contacts icon.

“Come on, Sarah.” The idea of sitting in a room full of pissed-off friends, unpaid colleagues, and ghosted lovers was enough to wake the sushi and vodka sleeping in my stomach. “Be serious.”

“Aren’t I, though?” She kicked an overturned wine bottle from its hiding spot underneath the coffee table and waved her free hand around the room.

“I get it; the place is a mess. I don’t like interruptions when working. You know this. Housekeeping will come today. It’s not a big deal.” Even to my ears, I sounded defensive.

She looked at me for a second and then started scrolling.

“Hey, hey,” I said, raising my hands. Stale booze and body odor wafted from my pits. Mouth breathing, I continued, “What are you doing?”

“Look around—

Cigarette butts backhoed into make-shift ashtrays, silver meal trays stacked in towers on the floor by the door, vodka and wine bottles knocked on their sides like pins in a bowling alley, and draped over each of the six dining room chairs was an array of bras and panties, all laughable in their scantiness.

—This cliché funhouse you’ve built with your vices. It’s gross. And, I might add, expensive.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “So, this is about money? Why am I not surprised? I’ve spent my advance, is that it? Are the suits in a tither—an artist spending money on art?”

“Be reasonable, Rick. Businesses work off budgets.”

“Tell the label I’ll pay the advance back. Their money isn’t worth the strings it comes with. I’ll put the album out myself.”

“How? Your advance deal was ten percent up front plus a percentage of the back end after twenty-five thousand albums sold.”

“I don’t know. Crowd-funding? I’ll figure it out. Times have changed, Sarah. Artists don’t need major labels anymore.”

“Says the guy who likes to stay in places like this. Call me in six months when you’re driving from small town to small town and singing to five liquored-up locals in a dive bar.”

“Deal.”

“That’s not you, Rick. We both know this. You don’t even like playing clubs.”

“I don’t know what you want from me. I’m trying to write an album. This conversation, your surprise appearance, isn’t helping.”

“Is that what this is? You, trying to write?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’d hoped the rumors about the partying weren’t true, that you were avoiding my calls, not because you were drunk, but because you were deep in creative mode—too busy writing to respond. Now, seeing you…Clearly, my hope was misplaced. You’re so behind schedule, going it alone might be your only option.”

“It’s not that bad. I’m writing… the album’s coming together.” My hands were flailing like flags on a windy day, as if motion might magically disappear the chaos. “It’s all part of the process—you know this.”

Sarah was one of the few A&R reps who got that creatives needed to be nurtured, not bullied into producing content. In our thirteen years together, she’d gone to bat for me, fought the suits and their attempts to cordon my artistic vision more times than I deserved.

“Process?” she said. Her eyebrows were raised in incredulous arcs, but she’d mercifully returned her phone to her coat pocket. “You think what’s happening here is part of a process? Creative or otherwise?”

She spread her arms and rotated slightly to her left and right as she spoke. The image it conjured—a circus ringleader introducing depravity to a packed house—was unnerving. “No one would argue that things have been accomplished here. However, I’m certain none of it has been even tangentially related to art.”

I dropped my hands and stepped back. What could I say? I was standing in the middle of a life-size diorama that illustrated her point.

In the two-plus months I’d been holed up in this king’s paradise, what had I accomplished? What one worthwhile thing had come out of my time here? Where were the songs, the title track, the album’s name?

On the floor? Drowning in the estuary of failure surrounding my desk? It was painful to look at—page after page of discarded ideas. Scribbled on each was a good start, maybe even a few flashes of brilliance, and then nothing.

I’ve been haunted by the follow-up to Black Bottom Souls for years. I can see it— a sequel, a continuation of the characters in those songs. I hear the melodies as I drift off to sleep and sing the harmonies in my dreams, but like ghosts, when I wake and try to write them down, they vanish.

“Fine,” I said. I was too tired to fight, so worn out, so weary, my joints ached. I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in weeks and couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten a decent meal. For all my trying, I wasn’t any closer to finishing the new album than when the Souls tour ended three years ago. “I’ll go back on tour.”

“A Soul's anniversary tour? We’re way past that.”

“Not just Souls. My catalog is bigger than one album. I have released other records.”

“Not that people remember. You need fresh songs. New material. Not stuff years past its best by date.”

“Jesus, Sarah, that was cold. And Too Drunk to Miss You still gets airplay. A lot of airplay. People love that song.”

She was partly right, though. The label would have dropped me after my second release, Cast Iron Boots, if Nashville’s favorite DJ, Cowboy X, hadn’t started playing Too Drunk to Miss You. In two weeks, he turned the song I wrote as a throwaway B-side—an “eff you” to my ex for leaving again—into a hit.

I spent the next eighteen months on a tour bus. Night after night, all over America, playing my set, always closing with the crowd’s favorite country track.

“So far,” Sarah said, “you haven’t given me any reason to think new material is imminent.”

“That’s presumptuous. Have a seat. Stay awhile. I’ll get my guitar.”

It took less than four months to write Black Bottom Souls. I did it while watching the world go by from the tour bus window. I’d write until dawn, until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, the songs flowing out of me like beer from a tap.

“No one expects another multi-platinum juggernaut,” Sarah said, generously ignoring my obvious bluff to showcase the new material. “Albums like that are a thing of the past. The label would be happy with a few hit singles—three or four solid tracks for the charts.”

Winter’s Clutch, the first Souls release, went to number one. So did the next four cuts. The album stayed on Billboard's Top 100 for fifty-four weeks. And I stayed on tour, singing and promoting the wheels off of it for three years. I’d planned to write it as a follow-up while watching the sunrise from the bus window, but the Souls tour wasn’t like Cast Iron’s tour. Between the after-parties and the before-parties, the girlfriends and the fights with my then-wife and the tour manager, I lost something: my confidence. My muse. My sense of purpose.

In what seemed like the blink of a blurry eye, I’d become a bloated, second-rate, rock and roll cliché.

That’s why I was here: to get away from it all—my friends, the parties, my ex, and her lawyers. Without anything to distract me, I was supposed to make it happen. Recreate the magic and pull another Souls from a hat. I’d promised Sarah.

But trapped here, alone, the horrific face of a blank page staring at me and refusing to blink, I was failing. Sarah didn’t understand that the booze was keeping me sane, relaxing the python coiling my chest. Without it, I’d suffocate on my fear.

“You’ve been here for seven weeks. You must have at least one track…a hook…. a concept…”

“The songs are there, but they’re not coming as fast as I thought. They need time, just a few more weeks of coaxing.”

“It isn’t just a few more weeks. The label has been waiting for this album for three years. Three. Years.”

I didn’t need Sarah to tell me that in this business, that kind of time was like the entire Mesozoic Era. Either get my shit together and squeeze out something amazing or wind up a Nasutoceratops bone baking in the Utah desert.

“I get it. I screwed up—let the lifestyle get the better of me. But that’s over. I'm here to work. I mean it.”

“Then show me. One song. A note!”

“Come on. This is me. Can’t you tell the suits you heard a few tracks, a song?”

“You want me to lie. To put my job, my career at risk?”

“It’s not a lie. I’ll have the songs, and they’ll be great. I just—”

“Need more time. Rick, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.”

“So that’s it? After everything?”

“Without proof of progress…” Sarah said.

Unbelievable.

I tugged at the collar of my T-shirt. I needed air, but none of the windows in this luxury prison opened. I grabbed an empty glass from the coffee table. It still smelled of vodka. Sarah raised her eyebrows. I set it down. “It’s my songs, my talent—the eight years I spent on a tour bus—that’s why you’re a senior A&R rep. That’s the reason you get to stand here and belittle me.”

“Don’t make this personal.”

“Why not? It is personal. When you walked into O’Malley’s thirteen years ago, it wasn’t just my lucky night—it was yours, too. Before me, you were making copies and coffee runs for a mid-level rep—a Brent somebody, wasn’t it? He quit years ago. Got out because he wasn’t getting anywhere. But look at you: corner office on the top floor. Working only with the talent you deem worthy!”

“Do you think I drove ninety minutes in the rain on a Saturday because I don’t know that? My daughter has soccer today. But I’m not there, I’m here.”

“What if I brought in another writer? Someone to get me over the hump.”

“You’re not hearing me. The label is out of patience.”

“There’s got to be something I can do.” Yesterday, I would have said I didn’t care if everything came crashing to an end. I was sick of trying. Of failing. I could sell the ranch. Sell the downtown condo and move to Italy. Live out my days sipping wine and eating real cheese.

Now, with the actual end staring at me, I wanted to fall onto my knees, wrap my arms around Sarah’s legs, and beg: Don’t do this to me! This is all I have, all I love!

Instead, I sank into the ocean-deep cushions of the chair and pressed my palms together, as if in prayer. “Anything, Sarah. Anything,”

Sarah sighed and looked out the window. The view of the Cascades was breathtaking. Rainier was holding court, a diamond-encrusted giant.

“There’s one thing, but you won’t like it.”

“A festival tour? I know I’ve complained before—sharing billing and buses—but I’ll do it. Send me the dates.”

“It’s not a tour.”

I shrugged and shook my head. “Then what?”

“Rehab. It’s the one thing that might save you.”

“Are you serious?”

“As the E. coli you're farming in that week-old steak tartare,” she said, nodding at the silver mountain of trays. “The fact you're asking me, though, is telling. Have you looked in the mirror recently? At this suite? When was the last time you went outside? I asked around—it’s not just me you’ve been avoiding. You haven’t talked to anyone in weeks..… Rick, if you don’t need rehab, I don’t know who does.”

“I’ll stop drinking.” I snapped my fingers. “Done! And the pills, too. I’ll count fucking sheep to sleep.”

“It’s not that simple. You need to renew everyone’s faith—your fans, the label…me. People don’t trust you—not with their admiration or their money. You need a big gesture, an apology of sorts. And, not to belabor the point, you also need to sober up. Get clean. Even if the label weren’t ready to jump, you, in this condition, would never make it through the first leg of a tour.”

“But rehab. In a facility. With people? I’m not a group person. It’s why I never joined a band. The forced camaraderie is tedious. I work better alone, solving my own problems.”

“It’s rehab, not summer camp. No one’s asking you to make friendship bracelets and braid hair. Go. Relax. Think of it as an opportunity to figure some life stuff out. Maybe do some writing. In thirty days, we’ll revisit things with the label.”

“And if I say no?”

Sarah shrugged. “You know how this business works.”

“Right. Sell or disappear.”

Sarah stepped away from the couch and walked to the door. She held the knob as if she were ready to leave, then let go and turned around. “Black Bottom Souls is a brilliant album. You’re a brilliant songwriter. You deserve better than a feature on some version of Where Are They Now? You’re too talented for that. But what I think, what the label thinks, doesn’t matter. It comes down to you, how you want this to end.”

And there it was: the monster living under my bed. Lingering at the bottom of every bottle of booze, every empty can of beer, was the question: Was I washed up?

Truth, I had no idea. But I couldn’t keep living like this. I hated who I’d become: a coward hiding from his fear behind a fortress of booze and pills.

“My daughter has a pizza party at six,” Sarah said, taking hold of the doorknob again. “What’s it going to be, Rick? Are you leaving with me or not?”

I stood up. “Thirty days in a cage. I’m not sure if I’ll survive. I’m not an animal. You know this.”

Sarah looked at me and then surveyed the room, taking in its disarray. I followed her gaze but stopped at the dining room table. In my mind’s eye, the revolting image of me, drunk and high, lip-syncing to my own song came to life. This time, I didn’t rush to sweep it away. I let the memory seep into my bones and take hold. That guy was part of me, he’d always been part of me. I didn’t get a say about that. How much of a part, though, that was my choice.

I walked to the closet, grabbed my coat, and slipped it on.

BIO: VA Wiswell lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. When not writing, she enjoys ice skating, reading, and working on her art. Her work has appeared in Literary Heist, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Lumina Journal, Panoplyzine Magazine, The Basilisk Tree, Remington Review, Figwort, and Homimum Journal. You can find her at vawiswell@gmail.com and Instagram at @vawiswell.