Soundtracks of a Life (12 page)

Somewhere along my musings it dawns on me. Crap the tour is nearly over. We are going back soon and I never did anything about finding a new place! As of now, when I return, I am homeless to top it all off! After we got the record deal and went to LA, I gave up my Palo Alto rental apartment, put my stuff in storage and moved to t
he furnished LA apartment. When we were leaving for the tour, I decided I didn’t want to go back to LA once it was over. I was tired of living there so I gave up that apartment. Since I didn’t have time to find a place before we left I was supposed to have taken care of this with Susan before I came back. But I didn’t!

I notice
that the sun is beginning to shine on the horizon now and so I decide not wait any longer and give Susan a call. I may wake her up but in my current state of mind I really didn’t care!

“Hi Susan. Did I wake you?”

“No, I was up.  But what’s on your mind that you would be calling me at this ungodly hour?”

“It’s kind of pathetic… but I realized I don’t have a home to go to when we go back.”

“I know. I tried to get your attention about that some time ago. But don’t worry. You didn’t really think I was going to let my most talented artist sleep in the street, right? I had my assistant get you a temporary apartment in San Francisco. She found a really nice place, in a brand new high rise. It has a beautiful view of the bay and all. You have pictures of it in your e-mail, if you had cared to open your e-mail once!” She has a sarcastic tone at the end.

“Oh,” I say, a bit ashamed. What kind of person doesn’t check her e-mails for so long? I guess the kind that knows everyone she knows is with her at the moment!

“Anyway, she arranged for some of your stuff to be delivered to the place, so it should be all there for you when you arrive.  It’s just temporary… to give you time to find your own place when you go back.”

“Geez. Thanks Susan, you rock.”

“You’re welcome. You’re never up this early have you slept at all?”

“No
… I can’t sleep.”

“Try to get some rest today. We won’t be leaving to Osaka until tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah ok. I’ll try.”

We
are all pretty much hotel bound now as going outside without being recognized around here is not a possibility.  Nonetheless, the guys were going to go to lunch at a famous sushi place in town but I didn’t care about leaving. I wasn’t feeling very well. This whole thing with Chris’s mom was really doing a number in my already fragile emotional state and the thin grip on my state of mind finally slips away when, at the end of the day, I receive a call from Chris.

“Hi Lori”

“Chris? Is everything ok?” I ask worriedly not expecting to hear from him at this hour.

“Yeah I just need to talk to you,” he says kind of swirling his words. I could tell he
had been heavily drinking and it sounded like he was in his car.

“What time is
it there?”

“I don’t know, late, it’s the middle of the night. My mom’s surgery is tomorrow and I can’t sleep.”

“Yeah I can understand that.”

“I’m scared,” he says sounding
distressed. “My mom could die tomorrow. There is a huge chance she could die! How can I say goodbye to her in the morning and it could be the last time… I don’t think I can do it.”

“Chris
…” I’m thinking what to say to him. I wished I knew what to say right now but I was at a loss.

“Tell me she’ll be fine.” H
e says his voice quivering searching for reassurance.

“I don’t know that Chris. But you’ve got her the best treatment possible and the best doctors money can buy will be performing her surgery.  You’ve given her the best chance she can get. That’s all you can do.”

“Well fuck that! Fuck this shit, this is bullshit! This whole thing is fucked up.” He is yelling now. I can hear that he is pounding his fists against something. I never heard him sound so angry, sound so desperate, sound so much like me…

“How can you stand this, huh?” he asks. “If this is half of what you feel most of the time how can you live feeling like this?” Th
e words hit me like knives cutting through my skin.

“Go home Chris.” I say, trying to sound as calm as possible without sounding hurt. “Get some rest and tomorrow be there for your mom. She will be scared too. And tell her how much you love her. I never got a chance to say it to my parents…”
in spite my best efforts my voice breaks down now, tears freely rolling down my face.  “Just be there, ok? Tell her you love her.” I say forcing my voice to come out.

I hear him crying. I hang up the phone. I can’t stand it anymore.

I need to walk. I start pacing around in my room, the call still playing in my head. His words ring in my ears
“how can you live feeling like this…”
It all starts bubbling up inside me, ready to burst. I need to escape but there is nowhere to escape to, I feel like a caged animal.  I see my guitar case in the floor. I open it. Maybe if I start playing some music it will take my mind away. I plug in the small portable amp I carry around with me for times like these and I just let my guitar weep for me, as George Harrison once so aptly described in his lyrics. I play for a long time stopping only once to write down a song
[4]
that emerged from my anguish capturing perfectly everything I was feeling at the moment. Another piece of my soul laid out as notes on a guitar and lyrics on a piece of paper.

Night turned into day. Without a rest, I just ke
ep playing in a bout of insanity like I hadn’t experienced in a while. I can’t really explain it, but at that moment, I wasn’t all there anymore. I was lost somewhere inside the music I was playing, away from my body, away from my mind, just a note bouncing off the walls of a cold hotel room.

**************

“Have you seen Lorelai?” Susan asks James in the hotel lobby.

“No,” he answer
s, looking at his watch.

“She is late. W
e have to go! Our plane is waiting for us.” She says feeling irritated.

“Have any of you seen Lorelai?” James asks the other guys
. Everyone is waiting in the lobby ready to leave for the airport. They all shake their heads.

“I don’t think she ever left her room yesterday.” Big Bob says to Susan. “With that big crowd outside, I was keepi
ng an eye out for her. I was afraid she might have tried to go out.”

Susan look
s at him concerned now. “I better go check her room.”

“I’ll go with you,” James says
heading off with Susan towards the elevators.

Susan knock
s on the door loudly but there is no answer.

“I think I hear
her playing guitar,” James says looking at Susan confused.

“What the hell is she doing?” she replies
as she continues to knock but no answer comes and the music continues on, nonstop from inside the room. “This doesn’t look good. I’ll go to the lobby to get a key to open the door. You stay here in case she comes out.” She says concerned to James and rushes off back to the elevator.

S
he returns shortly with the key card that she passes across the scanner. The heavy door swings slowly open as she pushes her weight against the metal handle.

***********************************

I look up
surprised to see Susan and James enter the room at the same time. James lets out a shriek when he sees the blood on my hands. He runs to me and grabs my wrist, startling me back into a vague reality.  I look at him in shock.  I watch as relief washes over him when he finds no cuts, just raw fingers…

“Holy crap, Lorelai, what have you done?” Susan asks shock and concern stamped on her face. She unconsciously rubs her hand through her hair. I had never seen her looking so distressed.

“How can you hurt yourself that way Lori?” James asks in a faint voice, I can see the sadness in his eyes.

I d
on’t know what to say to them I wasn’t really myself when it happened. I remain silent just as shaken as them at my complete meltdown.

“St
ay with her James. I’ll go get the doctor.” Susan says trying to muster some of her usual control.

I go to the bathroom to wash
the blood off my hand. Now that I was back from whatever dark place I had gone to, I could feel a deep throbbing pain in my fingers. I look in the mirror. I look like hell, deep dark circles around my eyes from the lack of sleep and rest. I realize I hadn’t eaten all day yesterday. I go back into the room and I find James looking at the paper with the song I had written. He puts the paper down and gives me a hug. We don’t say anything. Just sit quietly waiting for Susan to come back with the tour doctor. He takes the chair next to mine and proceeds to clean the wounds on my fingertips.

“I don’t know what we are going to do.” Susan breaks the
tense silence. “For the first time in my life I’m at a loss how to fix this. We have a concert in a few hours and you are obviously in no condition to play.” She is nervously pacing around the room.

“I can use a blood coagulant gel if you wish.” The doctor says
to both of us. “It’s what they use on boxers to help them close wounds quickly so they can finish a fight. The only problem is it hurts like hell…” he says that looking directly at me now.

“Go ahead,” I say. He takes the gel from inside the case and start slathering my fingers with it. He wasn’t kidding when he said it hurt like hell. It felt like my fingers had been dipped in liquid fire. The pain is so intense I start stomping my feet on the ground
just to try to cope with the pain.

“I’ve seen enough,” James says. He gets up, gives me a revolted look and storms out of the room.

“I can still play,” I say to Susan.

“Look at your hand
, how?”

“No one said it
won’t be painful. But I can deal with the pain. It’s just two more shows and then the tour is over, I’ll make it through. I’ll ask Tom to take over the solos I normally do and I’ll play the easier second guitar parts. Or I can do a more piano based version of some songs… the band is good at improvising they know how to follow my lead. I’ll handle it Susan. We’ll finish the tour.”

“At the cost of your
suffering? What kind of person am I to make you pay that price? The right thing is to cancel the last two shows.”

“
I did this Susan, it’s all on me. None of this is your fault or your choice. I’ll fix it, we are not cancelling. It’s just pain… Pain is part of my life like talking on the cell phone is part of yours. To tell you the truth physical pain is a nice break for me. There are pain killers for that kind of pain.”

“You need help Lorelai.”
She says to me troubled.

“Don’t I know it… I think I might be losing control Susan.”
I say truthfully.

“Why don’t you get some help then?”

“What kind of help do you have in mind? Therapy? Group therapy? Grief counseling? Don’t you think I’ve been through all those already? If that’s my only chance, then I’m screwed.”

Susan looks at me at a loss, I see
deep tiredness in her eyes as she takes a long breath and sighs in resignation.

Chapter 18

We rush to the airport and try to get ready for takeoff as fast as we can. We are behind schedule and it would be a marathon to be able to start the concert on time now.

As we are boarding
the plane and the air is so tense between us that you could practically touch it.

I take a sit in the front.
Tom follows Ted down the plane’s corridor towards the seats in the back. We all hear as Tom whisper to Ted, “Dude did you see her hands? That chick has some serious issues!” He proceeds by making little circles around his temple with his finger as to say “she’s crazy!” Ted turns around, grabs him by his collar looking furious, ready to punch him. “This is her band and she is kind enough to let a douche bag like you be part of it. So show some respect. You don’t know anything about what’s going on, you prick.” Susan immediately interrupts before it gets any worst. “I don’t want to know what this is all about.  Just stop it! Take your seats, right now!” She barks out angrily taking a sit next to James. Tom and Ted both look at her like kids that were just reprimanded by their mom and quickly sit down. Susan definitely doesn’t look like someone you would want to mess with at the moment.

As soon as the plane’s wheels lift off the runway, I recline my chair. I’m exhausted and emotionally spent. All I want to do now is to get some sleep. I can kind of hear Susan talking to James. I think they are talking about me but I don’t care. I just close my eyes and hope that I don’t have any nightmares today.

**************

“You’ve known Lorelai the longest right?” Susan asks James as the plane glides through the calm skies, making its way toward Osaka.

“Yeah. My parents were her parent’s best friends.” He answers looking thoughtful.

“Oh,
so you knew her parents?”

“I’m two years younger than her. I was twelve when they died so I don’t
know too much about them but my parents still speak highly of them. Our parents enjoyed each other’s company very much so we would hang out together a lot as kids. They were always very nice to me and I remember they spoiled Lorelai so much,” he says laughing. “She was definitely daddy’s little girl. I remember when we went to the winery to visit them one time and she was all excited to show me the new present her dad had given her. It was a beautiful, young white horse. She was that kind of girl, the kind who got a pony for a present! So you can imagine how shocking her life was after they died.”

“What happened then?”

“Her sister came back from college and she decided to move them out of their winery home. All the memories, it was too hard, I guess. So her sister rented a place in San Francisco. I suppose it was easier for her to be in the city too, now that it was just the two of them.

My parents would sometime stop by to see how they were doing
. They often invited Lorelai for a sleep over at our house too so her sister could have a little break. We became really good friends. We had our love for music in common and used to practice together. I thought she was the coolest girl on the planet.”

Susan smiles when
he says that. “Sounds like you had a crush on her!”

James looks at her with a mix of surprise and embarrassment. “I had a huge crush on her,” he
admits coyly. “We were both in our teens and she was kind, very pretty and could rock. What else can I say? Her only flaw was that she never smiled enough. But on those rare moments she did… well I lived for those moments.”

Susan looks at him surprised. “I’m afraid to ask what happened. It doesn’t sound like this has a very happy ending.”

“Nothing happened... that was the problem. As we grew up it became obvious to me that she didn’t see me that way. Then her sister passed away too…” James pauses for a moment, “and I think that Lorelai, the one I fell in love with, pretty much died with her.” He takes a hard swallow as he finishes saying that. They sit in silence for a while. Susan doesn’t dare to prod him for more information but after a while James continues anyway. “You see, she had managed to get over her parents death, I mean as much as you can with that kind of a tragedy. It wasn’t easy and the trauma of it haunts her to this day, but she had accepted that it was an accident and it just had happened to them. As bad as it was she realized she needed to move on. But when her sister died, the little that was left of her world just shattered all around her. Her ‘need to move on’ rationale quickly went down the drain. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how to process this new blow; it took the floor right from under her. She had no idea how to continue living after that and I guess she just completely lost it… like nothing I ever seen before. She came back from the hospital laid down in her bed and that was it. She was gone. I didn’t even know that a person could do something like that, like she had turned off a switch or something. I didn’t buy it at first and tried for a while to get some reaction out of her. I talked to her, I yelled at her, I even banged something really loud right in her face. Any normal person would flinch at that kind of noise or at least blink, she did absolutely nothing… like I wasn’t there at all. She just lay there staring into nothing, ignoring everything and everyone around her. Finally, when my parents saw she wasn’t going to just snap out of it they had a family doctor examine her. He diagnosed her with severe acute depression and suggested she be taken to a mental health institution for constant supervision. He said he was afraid in her state she could try to hurt herself. But of course, someone would have to make the decision to commit her. This was the worst.  She had no family to speak for her so no one wanted to make that choice. In the end, my parents decided instead, to hire a nurse to take care of her at her own place, since with her family’s money she could afford it. She stayed like that, just lying in bed, for a long, long time. I couldn’t stand seeing her like that such a beautiful soul now almost a vegetable. It just killed me. It got to the point where the doctor started to suggest she might die if she continued that way much longer, they could hardly force her to eat anything and she was withering away. She had given up living.

I couldn’t take seeing her like
that anymore, so I eventually stopped visiting her altogether and moved on with my life. My mom and my younger sister kept on visiting her. My sister was just a little kid and she would sit on her bed, talk to her and play.

I’m still not sure
what made Lorelai come back. It just happened, one day, out of the blue. Maybe she missed the music. My sister had taken a little toy keyboard she was playing with during one of my mom’s visits but she forgot it in the bedroom when they left. That same day the nurse heard some sounds coming from upstairs and when she got to Lorelai’s room there she was sitting up in bed playing music with that kiddy piano!” James swallowed hard and let out a bittersweet laugh. He stopped talking remaining thoughtful for a while. “I never had the courage to ask her what she remembers from that time, but I believe she was there still, somewhere inside her own head, because after she came back to herself she became very attached to my sister. I think she appreciated the company... I still feel so guilty now for not going there to visit her during those times. When she needed me the most I bailed.”

“You were young,” Susan says with kindness. “That’s a tuff thing to deal with at any age.”

James shrugged, not convinced he deserved Susan’s understanding. “Anyway, it took her quite a few more months after that for her to recover her health again from that whole episode. When she did, that’s about the time I was applying to Stanford. Now that she was more or less back to her old self we had rekindled our friendship, so I convinced her to apply too. With her talent she could get into any school she wanted really. We were both accepted and well from that point on, you know how it went.”

“
Wow.... I knew it was bad but I never imagined it was that bad.” Susan finally says still taking in all that she had just heard. “Do you still feel the same way for her as you used to?”

“
You want to know if I still have a crush on her.” He smiles at Susan now. “No,” he answers. “I still love her but not in that same way anymore. Like I said, she is different now. We are both different people now.”

“
What you have to understand about her,” he continues, “is that it hasn’t been that long since all this happened. It is still very raw for her and she goes through these ups and downs. It’s hard to be close to her and sometimes have to watch her veer off to a self-destructive path.”

“Like she just did,” Susan says
concerned and James just nods in agreement.

**************

I wake up only after we land with Susan gently calling me. We quickly scramble out of the plane and into a car that drives us directly to the stadium. There was no time for anything. The roadies had done the sound check for us. We would arrive and go straight to the stage and start the concert cold turkey style.

Before I head to the stage the doctor comes see me again. He hands me a couple of pills. “For the pain,” he says.

“What is it?” I ask before I take them.

“Vicodin.
” He responds and I start shaking my head giving him the pills back.

“Look as soon as you start playing those wounds are going to open up and it will be very painful.”

“No.” I say firmly. “There are twenty thousand people out there waiting to see me play, nothing that messes with my head please. Just Ibuprofen is fine. The adrenaline of the stage will do most of the trick anyways.”

“Fine, it’s your call.” he responds and changes the pills for regular Ibuprofen.

Its nerve wrecking starting the show in such a hurry, without sound check or anything but the adrenaline helps us get pumped up and when we hit the stage the familiarity of it all sets us at ease. The crowd is excited and cheering us on and that helps us achieve our usual energetic performance. Tom takes over most of my guitar solos. I mainly stay with second guitar parts which consist mostly of rhythm guitar, strumming chords, much easier with no string bends required. Still, even then, about three songs in, I can feel my fingers raw pressing down against the metal strings. It hurts but somehow I hardly notice.

We
manage to put a good show but the end of the concert could not come soon enough. The pain in my hands is blinding, my fingers tips are raw and my guitars and piano are all bloodstained. It looked, as well as felt, like I had gone to war on this one.

T
here is a deafening silence in the car as we ride to the hotel, a stark contrast to the loud screaming sounds of the stadium just a few minutes before. If I close my eyes I can even hear it still. None of us felt like chatting at the moment, we were tired, emotionally spent but feeling relieved we had pulled it off. Only one more show to go now…

I
enter my hotel room and immediately drag myself to the bedroom and crash on the bed. I lay there without moving, letting the tiredness wash over my body for a while. I can feel each and every bone in my body aching, my hand throbbing and the silence wringing in my ears. I’m almost falling asleep when the phone rings loudly in the room cutting through the silence. I jump out of bed, my body screams in complaint of this sudden harsh movement. I stare at my cell phone ringing for a few seconds, I know what this call is and I’m afraid of what I might find in the other end. I take a deep breath and finally answer it.

“Chris?” I say after I pick up.

“Hey Lor,” I hear Chris calm voice at the other end. “She made it,” he says immediately trying to ease my mind. “The surgery went fine and the doctors say she will make a full recovery.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath letting relief
wash over me. We remain silent for a moment.

“That is wonderful news Chris.” I finally say tears running from
my eyes. “I’m very happy to hear.”

“Yes we are all over the moon…
it’s been really difficult for us all.”

“I know, but it’s over now and you
guys can put it all behind you.”

“Look, I’m sorry about the other night when I called you. I think I said some things that I should not have, I was drunk, afraid and I don’t think I dealt with it all very well.”

“Nah forget it, its ok. I can understand.” I say dismissively not letting him know how much his words really hurt me.

“How’s
it going over there?”

“We are all ready to be over I think.” That seemed to me like a better answer than “ok” which would be too close to a lie.

“Well one more concert and it’ll be over. I can’t wait for you to come back, I miss you.”

“I mis
s you too,” I answer smiling. “I wish I had more to say, I’m very happy everything went well with your mom Chris but I think I’m so absolutely exhausted that my mind is drawing blanks right now, sorry!”

“It’s okay, don’t worry I understand, we’ll talk better when you get back.”

“Okay. Send your mom and your family my regards.”

“I’ll, take care Lor. I guess I’ll see you soon!

“Yeah… bye Chris.”

I go back to bed feeling like a weight ha
d been lifted from my shoulders. I fall asleep minutes after lying down.