Undone, Volume 3 (22 page)

I didn’t know what
the future had in store for us. But I did know I was going to plunge
headlong into it, fly there and find him and get to the bottom of
this. Wearing a gorgeous, glittering dress—yes short and tight,
Jillian, and yes with sleeves, Liv—to a live, televised awards show
where I would get all the answers I desperately needed.

Ash

After Ana left me, I
went into hibernation. I literally turned into a bear. OK, I didn’t
literally turn into one. I’m not a shape-shifter. But I think I
came as close to becoming a bear as a normal, full-blooded human can.

I went off the grid.
I’m not talking a Mammoth cabin with a caretaker hooking you up
with L.A. gourmet dinners in the freezer. I’m talking a hardcore,
can’t find a trace of you off-the-grid cabin. The kind my brother,
Heath, knows all about.

Heath went off the grid
sometime before his graduation from college. It had about killed our
father. I think he’d been two credits shy of earning his diploma,
whatever credits were. I didn’t know the details, but I got the
picture. My younger brother had been about to graduate and instead of
donning the cap and gown and posing for photos he’d help up his
middle finger and gone Off The Grid.

I knew all about
holding up my middle finger. But I needed Heath to help me disappear.
Lucky for me, he answered my call and set me up in a cabin near his
in Vermont. When I say near his, it was probably about 30 miles away
but I think there were maybe only two houses in between us. I’m
exaggerating, like the bear thing. But the essence is true. In the
cold and snow in a basic, rustic cabin I felt completely alone.

Which was exactly what
I wanted. I’d never felt that way before. I’d always sought out a
constant hum of activity. Now, I understood the other path my younger
brother had taken. Stripped down, there were no distractions. No cell
phone, no internet, no fans, no cameras. There was no bullshit. Just
you and the elements.

And a piano. I knew
that maybe was a little L.A. of me to insist on having a piano, but
it wasn’t like I was demanding that roadies remove all the green
M&Ms from the backstage dishes. Not that I’d ever done that,
just for the record. But I needed a piano. I knew I had something I
needed to work on, to finish up.

And I did, with the
wind howling that the snow piling up outside, I let it all out into
that song. Undone. I wrote it all for Ana, about Ana, with what was
left of me after Ana had walked away.

I’d already written a
lot of what I said in the song in a letter to her. Before I took off
for the cabin, I wrote a long letter, the kind men used to write
women when they used quills instead of pens. Or at least I hoped it
was that kind of a letter. I was shit at writing. She probably
couldn’t even read my handwriting. But I didn’t care, I wanted to
write her exactly how I felt without worrying about how dumb I
sounded or what she might think of me. I stayed up all night telling
her exactly how much she meant to me, how she’d changed everything
in my life and I never wanted to be without her. I loved her. I
sealed it and stamped it and brought it down to the post office like
a regular citizen and off it went.

I never heard back from
her. Not even a cursory “thanks for the note!” Nothing. I guess I
hadn’t really expected her to hop on the next flight back to
California and run into my arms, but it would have been nice.

So, instead of burying
myself in Ana like I wanted to, I did the next best thing. I took off
for the wilds of Vermont and wrote a song unlike any I’d ever
written before. I figured that was a good thing. If I wanted to make
big changes in my life, why not start with the core of what I did,
making music? I had it finished by the time the Super Bowl rolled
around, and I brought a crappy digital recording with me to play for
my studio.

Lola and Joel just
about crapped their pants in joy over my re-emergence. Sorry to be
crass, but that about summed up the moment. I meant it when I said
I’d gone off the grid. No one had been able to contact me for weeks
leading up to the show. Not Connor, no one. And Ana, the one person I
wanted to contact me, hadn’t.

I wondered if I was the
first celebrity they’d had to hose down and shave so I could appear
for a pre-game interview. I think I’d been wearing the same clothes
for about a week by the time I showed up for rehearsals. Connor
wasn’t looking too hot, either, though he looked more zombie than
bear. I’d found him passed out in Johnny’s hotel room with two
naked girls on his chest. As usual.

The thing about Connor
was he never wanted to be alone. Even when we were in S.F. where we
all had homes, he never seemed to want to be at his own place, always
crashing over my place or Johnny’s or trying to book us into hotel
suites. Once I got home, the last place I wanted to be was another
goddamned hotel. Not so for Connor.

He looked peaceful
lying there asleep, but I had something I wanted to talk about with
him.

“Get up, mate.” I
kicked his foot with my boot. He could rally with the best of them,
and five minutes later we were walking down a sidewalk.

“Want one?” He
offered me a cigarette.

“You know I quit.”

“I keep waiting for
you to come to your senses.” We paused a moment while he protected
the flame from his lighter and lit up. “Where the fuck’ve you
been?” he asked after he’d taken a long drag. “Lola said New
Hampshire?”

“Vermont.” He
nodded like they were the same place.

“With your
librarian?”

“No. She left me.”

He nodded, smoking as
we walked. “Best for everyone.”

“Is it?” I looked
at him, wondering why he looked so damn happy. I was really not
happy. That didn’t seem to cross his radar.

“Listen, I’ve been
wanting to ask you something.” I could see him tense up. “Ana
said something, before she left. About you being the date-rape king.
Do you know what she was talking about?”

“Beats me.” He
shrugged, nonchalant. But I could hear an edge to his voice. I’d
known him too long.

“You know she was
drugged on New Year’s Eve?” I didn’t know exactly what I was
getting at. I wasn’t 100 percent ready to accuse Connor, but I did
feel like I needed to ask about it. She’d wanted me to.

Connor ran a frustrated
hand through his unruly red hair. “So, you disappear for a month.
You show up looking like a fucking bear. And now you’re on me about
drugging some girl?”

“I didn’t say you
drugged her—”

“That girl’s a
fucking tease, that’s what she is. She’s got a stick up her ass
and she needs something to help her loosen up.”

“Don’t talk like
that about her!” Hot anger flooded through me and I stopped dead in
my tracks.

“When did you become
such a fucking boy scout?”

“Did you drug her?”

The way he avoided my
eyes told me everything I needed to know. Again, that was the good
and the bad thing about knowing someone so well. You could read them
easily. He had drugged her. With a sickening lurch, I remembered how
I’d found them, Ana passed out cold and him about to slip out the
door with her over his shoulder. I’d thought he’d found her like
that and was bringing her to safety.

“You’re an
asshole,” I realized. I didn’t know if he always had been, but he
sure was now.

“You’re a nasty
little prig. No one even likes being around you anymore, Ash. You’re
a killjoy.”

I punched him hard, so
hard he fell down onto the sidewalk in a heap. I wanted to keep on
going, beating him within an inch of my life, but after a few more
choice words I pulled myself up and walked away. He belonged down in
the gutter where I left him, but I didn’t belong down there, too.
He’d dragged me down enough times in my life already.

The makeup artist
before the Super Bowl show did a great job of covering up the bruise
along Connor’s jaw. For the TV cameras, he looked good to go under
a heavy cake of foundation. But our friendship was going to take more
than makeup to make it better. An apology from him would be a start,
but it didn’t look like that was coming any time soon. He sulked
and avoided me and after the show I took off again, not back to
Vermont but to my home in S.F.

I honestly had no idea
how the Super Bowl halftime specular show went. I wasn’t
interested. We didn’t make any official announcements, but The
Blacklist was on hiatus. Indefinitely. I couldn’t imagine wanting
to make music with Connor, or re-enter that whole crazy carnival any
time soon if at all.

My label got behind the
idea once they heard my single “Undone.” I didn’t lie to them.
That was the only song I had, no album to follow. But they felt it
was strong enough they wanted to rush it to release. A few L.A.
studio sessions later and the song started hitting the airwaves.

I wasn’t even
thinking about whether it would be a success. What I was wondering
was whether Ana would hear it, and, if she did, what she’d think of
it. I’d written it for her, after all.

But she already knew
every word. I’d written it all to her in my letter, my love for
her, how her leaving me left me undone. I did wonder if people might
call it melodramatic. If you’d never felt that low before, you
might. The lyrics were the kinds of words I’d never written before.
I’d never let myself feel that vulnerable, that raw. It was a big
risk.

But, it turned out,
people loved it. It was a huge commercial hit, one of the biggest
successes I’d ever had. Critics were calling it the best song of
the 2000s, revealing a new depth to my maturation as a recording
artist. Whatever that meant.

I wasn’t what you’d
call an introspective man, but even I realized a lot had changed for
me over the past year. Ana had certainly been the catalyst, but right
before I’d met her something else big had happened. My father had
died. I’d spent so long defying him, proving my own worth in
opposition to all of his values. In all that rebellion, I’d almost
forgotten what I wanted. Now, he wasn’t there to fight with
anymore. I wasn’t saying it was a good thing that my father had
passed away. I was simply realizing that since he’d been gone, I’d
felt a shift. I’d always had his brick wall to rail against. Now,
without it, maybe I didn’t have to fight so hard? Maybe I could let
go and admit what I really wanted?

What I really wanted
was Ana. I sent her a note along with the packet Lola put together.
Honestly, songwriters didn’t get award party invites. There wasn’t
even a BMA category for best songwriter. A lot of artists didn’t
write their own songs and they didn’t exactly want to
broadcast—literally—their lack of musical ability. But Ana
deserved to be there. The song was hers. She’d heard the scratch of
an idea from me and she’d blossomed it, grown it into the haunting
tune that now played across the world. Lola knew everybody, so when I
asked her to ask someone as a favor to Ash Black, not only had Ana
received an invitation but I’d been able to slip my own note into
the packet along with it.

I got nothing back from
her, though. I guessed I could have said more in my note. I’d kept
it short. But I’d said it all in the letter I’d written her back
in January, and then again in the song she had to have heard a
million times by now. Another long, pleading note might seem like
overkill.

But what did Ana think
of the song? Our song. I’d created the lyrics and I suppose a case
could be made that I’d come up with the original melody. A whole
team of lawyers from the label had tried to talk me out of giving Ana
songwriting credit, or at least they advocated for co-credit. But my
lawyer, Nelson, had stuck by me. He’d insisted. It was his client’s
wish. And what Nelson insisted upon, Nelson got.

I didn’t have
anything to prove to anyone. I didn’t need to prove I could write a
song like that. It was Ana’s song. Now I just needed to know what
she thought of it. And, more importantly, what she thought of us.

§

The night of the awards
show, I flew solo. It felt strange to be there without my band mates.
Strange but good.

Walking into the
pre-party, I was completely sober. How’s that for crazy? Rock god
Ash Black sober. At night. At a party. What were the chances?

Stylists put me all in
white. A little cheesy, I’ll admit, but sure, I went with it. I cut
off most of my hair, too. It felt cleaner, like a fresh start.

Pit Bull came over and
gave me some shit about stealing his look. We both wore all white and
rocked mirrored aviator shades. I wasn’t saying anything, but I had
about a foot of height on the guy. He was pretty cool, though.

I still didn’t know
if Ana was coming or not. She’d RSVP’d yes, I got that out of
Lola. But sometimes people said they’d show and then didn’t. I
didn’t want to get my hopes up too much.

Even if I did see her,
who knew if she’d want to talk to me? She’d closed up shop after
that night in the cabin. I didn’t even know exactly what she’d
overheard me and Connor talking about. I’d been pretty drunk. I
remembered Connor telling me that his sister was in the hospital from
an overdose. And I remembered giving him a lot of reassurances that
nothing was going to change. Everything was going to stay the same.

It must have been some
of that talk she overhead. So, I honestly couldn’t deny whatever
stupid things she’d heard me say. I could blame it on the alcohol,
or blame it on my 14 years of friendship with Connor translating into
pressure and guilt.

But, really, I had to
be honest. Back then, I’d had some doubts. I’d been recognizing
my feelings for her, but I hadn’t been man enough to tell her. I’d
let myself get spooked by it. Maybe a small part of me had wanted
things to go back like they had been.