The club is loud. The club is harsh. The club is forty sweating screaming bodies floundering in time.
I hate this club. I want to be someplace quiet. You said it would be fun here, and I believed you. Where are you? Arms and legs tangle in a drunken two-step, and for a terrifying moment I think I’ve lost you. It’s one big open square room, and somehow I’ve lost you.
The crowd parts. I see you. “Tavi!” you cry, half-sunk into the pelvis of the roadie we’ve been touring with for the past four months. “Dance with us!”
I find the exit.
The sun hits me. I jolt awake. A hurricane of dust swirls in the light. Goodness gracious, how many drinks did I have?
There’s a message on the answering machine. I don’t even know how to use my phone's answering machine. I didn’t know I’d set it up. Must have been an automatic thing when I activated the phone.
“I know this is you,” the voice on the other end says. “Quit buying new phones. I’ll find those, too. Every day you don’t pay me, I add more. Today you’re up to forty twelve hundred. That’s four, zero, one, two, zero--”
I hang up before the voice on the other end can recite the final zero. It feels good. Much better than texting something snarky. If it feels this good to hang up on something, maybe I should start calling people more often. Maybe. I’m more a fan of hanging up than I am of calling.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out. I’m still cradling my phone, sitting on the edge of my plush hotel bed. We’ve been in and out of hotels for the better part of four months, headliners on a music tour that just won’t end. There’s so much money in tours. And yet...
Four zero one two zero zero. 401,200 dollars. That’s how much Vinyl and I owe the cartel for financing this whole tour. We took the loan six months ago, drunk off a number one album release and the shoulder-rubbing that inevitably follows number one album releases.
In this business, you sell yourself. Plain and simple. You sell yourself and you succeed. Vinyl and I were not so ready to throw our bodies at the groins of network executives, for one reason or another. So we needed that loan.
Now, here we are. Four zero one two zero zero.
I squeeze my eyelids shut, hoping it’ll give me the same rush as hanging up the phone. It doesn’t.
Two hours and two breakfast cart orders later, I feel strong enough to leave my room. I didn’t used to be this way. I used to be frugal. I just spent seventy eight dollars on mimosas and coffee and eggs benedict. What happened to me?
That’s a stupid question. Vinyl happened. Vinyl is a laser, the kind that can cut through rock. She annihilates me. Wherever she touches me, I evaporate. Where she lingers, my atoms are no longer.
You have the hotel room across the hall. Stupid me. I should have asked for a single room. Then I could have just kissed you when this whole tour mess started and we could have avoided all... this.
I slink across the hallway on my tip-toes and put my ear to the door. Nothing. No moans, no squeaking beds. No clink of mimosa glasses or forks and knives. Just dead silence.
I wish it were the other things. Anything but silence. The urge to kick down the door is strong. Overwhelmingly strong. I rear back only to stop myself at the last possible second. Easy, champ. Win this battle. Worry about the war later.
As I descend the stairway, the lobby of the hotel turns into a battlefield.
That was rather vague. Let me rephrase that. As I descend the stairway, three men in suits stand up from the corner, pull machine pistols out of their belts, and spray bullets into the ceiling.
The crowd of paparazzi who had gathered to ambush me and Vinyl find themselves in the midst of an ambush. They drop their fancy telescoping lens cameras and surge towards the door. Bodies churn in the doorways. People scream. It’s all very ugly and not at all conducive to building the positive mental headspace required for long tours such as these.
The gunmen stride up to me, because of course they would.
“Where’s your friend?” the lead one asks.
And then, not because of the gunshots still ringing in my ears, not because of the implication that I was about to be kidnapped, not least because I didn’t know where Vinyl was--no, it isn’t any of that that makes me break down on the stairs in a fit of sobs.
It’s that he thought I knew.
They blindfold me, put a bag over my head, and hustle me out to an idling van.
“I have insurance for this,” I say calmly, having recovered quite nicely from my little breakdown on the stairs. “You don’t have to go through all this rigamaroll--mmmff--”
The lead bandit stuffs a handkerchief in my mouth. It tastes like battery acid sweat and papaya seeds.
I have half a mind to take a swing at him, but when I try to lash out, all I succeed in hitting is the van's quarter panel. Ow.
Someone kicks me in the gut. Not hard, but hard enough to get the message across. There’s fighting, and then there’s fighting three assailants while blinded, gagged, and head-bagged.
I let them stuff me into the trunk.
It’s then that the lead bandit grabs my chin and drags my face inches from his. I see him as a blob through the dark canvas of the bag, a shifting mass reeking of action movie villain complex and gunpowder. A human Bullet Bill.
“I’ll ask you one more time,” he says, “where’s your friend?”
More tears. Damn, he’s good. He knows exactly what angle to take in order to break me. “I--I--I--”
Tears spill down my cheeks. The bandit sighs and closes the trunk. The van takes off. As far as I know, Vinyl is still in the hotel. Unless she went back to the staff travel bus with the roadie. Then she’s safe. Probably.
Probably... what a mean tease of a word.
The concept of kidnapping insurance is simple, and functions the same as home or auto insurance. You take out a policy for yourself up to a certain amount of money--for Vinyl and I, it’s twenty million dollars each. Very flattering, I know. Then, in the unlikely (but not statistically impossible) event one of us gets kidnapped, the insurance company can authorize a payment up to the maximum of the policy for our safe return. Once safe, our rates shoot up and we pay a steep deductible. But we’d pay it from the safety and comfort of our own homes.
That is what I tried to impress on this idiot bandit as he drags me from the van. My feet meet the pavement. I wish I’d worn close-toed shoes. Ow.
“I said, the company--ouch--is willing to--ow!--pay up to... are you listening?”
The bandit drags me into some kind of warehouse. My voice echoes through unseen rafters. The light filtering through my head bag shifts.
I’m deposited in an aluminum folding chair. A moment later, the bag comes off. I gasp at who sits before me, though really it should come as no surprise.
Seated across from me is a cartelismo brick house of a human being, whose only known name is, and I truly can’t make this up, Brick House. That’s not his actual name, of course. Probably. But he insists on being called Brick House. Probably because he’s 5’3” and not in the least bit okay with it. I have nothing against shorter men. But I can’t say the same for men with complexes.
“So,” he says, flashing his muscular tattoo-striped arms out wide. “We meet again.”
“My insurance is willing to cover up to--”
“Shut up,” he says. He’s grown a mustache since we last spoke. It’s patchy and oddly shaped and quivers when he speaks. I hope he doesn’t try to kiss me. That mustache looks like steel wool. “I don’t care if it’s from the insurance company, or you, or the fucking Hamburglar. I want the forty fourteen hundred you own me.”
“Fourteen hundred?”
“Taxes. Forty fourteen hundred.”
Again with that. He isn’t saying it right. But perhaps in this moment I should be less worried about things like that and more about things like the glock stuffed down the front of his pants, the barrel sitting perilously close to his you-know-whats.
I say, “The insurance company can get it to you with minimal delay, provided I’m returned safely.”
“No,” he says flatly.
“No?”
“No. You’re not going anywhere until I get my money.”
“But the tour--”
“Who paid for the tour?”
“I did.”
“You borrowed my money, which means I paid for the tour. Now I want my money back.”
“You’ll get it from the insurance--”
“Shut up!” he roars. His voice bounces off the high walls and hits me a second time. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... we won’t fall for such...” he pauses, brow furrowed. Then he shakes his head. Goodness gracious, he can’t even remember the whole saying. How did he manage to outwit me? “Either your partner delivers the money here herself, or I will hold you indefinitely.”
“What? Don’t be so unreasonable.”
“I’m being very reasonable. And it would be very easy for me to be much less reasonable.”
I gulp.
“Now,” Brick House continues, “I will allow you one phone call to make Vinyl aware of the new terms. Every hour I don’t get my money, I’ll grind off an inch of your finger with a belt sander.”
I decide that I would rather not have any length of my fingers ground off with a belt sander. I take the phone he offers me, and I’m halfway through keying in the area code when I realize I don’t actually know Vinyl’s phone number.
More tears spring to my eyes. Heavens above, I’m just a fountain today. All this shame and unhappiness over Vinyl, and I can’t even remember her phone number. All this time I thought it wasn’t really important since I don’t have to actually dial her number to call her. Sometimes the most important things are disguised as trivialities.
“I don’t--I--I--” I gesture to the phone and stammer some more gibberish. Quite unbecoming of a number one album-producing artist. Brick House gives me a sneering look before reaching into his pocket and pulling out my cell phone.
Vinyl’s voice physically shocks me when it comes through the line. All I can hear for a moment is an inarticulate scream in a nightclub. I think I see her hands reaching back to caress the back of that roadie’s head, draw him closer into her, atomize him like she did me, but then I realize that’s just my overactive imagination projecting a daydream onto Brick House, who’s stretching and letting out a yawn.
“Octavia!” she says through the phone. “Are you okay? There was a gun battle in the lobby. We’re safe in the tour bus. There’s police everywhere. I’m so scared, Tavi, please tell me what’s going on.”
Brick House. Forty fourteen hundred. Contact insurance. Cash must be delivered by you. I rehearse this in my head for a moment. I find collecting my thoughts always helps deliver hard news.
I take a deep breath in.
“The roadie?!” I scream into the receiver. “You slept with the roadie?!”
Once again, it seems I’ve stunned the world. Vinyl is silent on the other end of the line. Brick House has paused mid-stretch. His eyes fixate on me, unblinking, like a lizard baking in the sun.
“Octavia--”
“No. Shut up. Did that night in the Maldives mean nothing to you? We went sailing together, Vinyl.”
“Why is that such a big deal? Sailing into international waters together doesn’t make us married. Think of all the pirate novels we’d have to recontextualize if that were true.”
“We made love!”
“A little. Yeah.”
“I thought--” I cut myself off.
“What? You thought what?”
“I thought I meant something to you.”
“Oh... oh, Tavi.” That stupid voice. So much raw intensity in everything she says. She whispers, and it echoes like a shotgun. “You mean the world to me.”
“Then why were you sleeping with the roadie?”
“We aren’t exclusive. We never were. I told you on the boat, I can’t get involved. I’m not in the right place.”
“Did you want to hurt me? Is that it?”
“Hurt you by living my life the way I want to? Why can’t you be happy for me? It took years to get to a healthy mental place.”
“Oh yeah, I’m so happy you skinned me like a rug and fucked the roadie on it.”
“If we could please get back to the subject of payment,” Brick House cut in.
I give him a polite, but firm shush. “That’s why you invited me out last night. You wanted to send a message. Well, message received.”
“I just wanted to go dancing!”
“And that’s why I found you rubbing your ass all over the roadie?”
“That’s not sleeping with him!”
“Did you sleep with him after?”
Silence. Shit. “I already told you I wasn’t gonna do the exclusive thing. I didn’t do anything wrong here.”
“You suck. I hate you.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong and you know it!”
I yank the phone away from my face and shout into the microphone, “Well maybe if you hadn’t thrown yourself all over me, I wouldn’t have gone and fallen in love with you!” I hang up with extreme prejudice. Oh yeah, that felt great. Definitely going to do that more often.
I hold the phone out at arm’s length and give Brick House an expectant glare. Then, I remember why he’d given me the phone in the first place.
“Oh. Right.” I redial Vinyl. In a curt voice I add, “Also, I got kidnapped. I’ll ping my address. Bring half a million dollars in a duffel bag.”
“Did you mean it when you said you love me?” Her voice sounds shattered like a baking sheet of methamphetamine.
“The money, Vinyl.”
That breaks something in her. I knew it would. “We have insurance.”
“I know. And it has to be you who brings it.”
“Tavi?”
I wait. Silence.
Vinyl sighs. “Nevermind. See you in a bit.”
I’m not the bad guy here. The bad guy is pacing around the warehouse and twirling a butterfly knife. I’m the one tied to a chair.
I am not the bad guy.
The light crawls up the walls. Vinyl sure is taking her time. Vinyl. Now there’s a bad guy. She might not have a sinister agenda and a fetish for sharp metal objects, but she’s just as bad as Brick House all the same.
That time we spent together in the Maldives was special. I’m not the bad guy for thinking it didn’t mean anything. She took me out on a boat on the night our album went number one. She wore this perfect white bikini and danced with me alone for hours and poured me champagne and looked me in the eyes and said, “Nothing can stop us as long as we stick together,” and the love we made was so deep and profound it altered the migratory pattern of the area’s aquatic wildlife. And then she got distant. And she stopped talking to me so easily. And then things got chilly. And then she fucked the roadie.
The roadie. Another bad guy. Am I the only not bad-guy in this story?
I hear a commotion outside. A car pulls up, and every evil henchman within earshot racks their rifle. A collective ca-chik spills through the warehouse. Must be Vinyl. Yippie.
The metal door slides open on rusty hinges. Vinyl walks in, hands raised above her head. A stuffed duffel bags tugs at the shoulder of her thin, olive green t-shirt. Quite involuntarily, my mind returns to a night off the shore of a nameless island in the Maldives, a night when she wasn’t wearing anything at all. The faintness of form, her frame mere smoke in the moonlight, the ocean rocking us closer and closer... It’s a tainted memory now, I tell myself. But that just gives it more power.
Vinyl walks right towards me. “Tavi,” she cooes in that terrible, stupid, beautiful voice of hers.
Rage fills me. I want to bum rush her, but my hands are still tied. Maybe I could bite her. Maybe I won’t live to regret any of this. Can’t regret stuff if you’re dead.
Woah, too dark. Reel it in, Octavia, you’ve got a deal to negotiate. Clearly this whole operation has been a set-up from the start. Brick House wants to get Vinyl and I both in a building alone together. Now he has both of us and half a million dollars in insurance money. A double-win for him.
That’s his fatal flaw, though. No one, and I mean no one, fucks with my insurance premium.
Right as Brick House is about to take the duffel bag, I launch myself and my chair at him facefirst in a limbless tackle. His head hits the floor with a hollow thunk, and he goes still. The other goons train their rifles on us, but it’s already too late. I’ve slipped my bindings and Vinyl has produced a snub-nosed machine pistol with a hilariously long magazine. No time to wonder where she hid it. I can fantasize later.
Brick House stirs. His nose starts to bleed. “Mommy?”
Vinyl smirks. “This is just like how we got that boat in the Maldives.”
Then she squeezes the trigger.
The sound of bullets tearing through flesh and metal at four hundreds rounds per minute blooms into a flower of incredible violence. I’m physically thrown off Brick House by the sound. A few bullets hit the ground near me, but to no effect. Between Vinyl’s spraying and my praying, she takes out every last bandit in the room in one effortless scything sweep.
She reaches into the duffel bag and pulls out a MAC-10 with the rear brace removed. She tosses it to me. Hundred dollar bills--real, I notice to my chagrin--spill from the bag and flutter around her in an ethereal breeze, like the flowering buds of a capitalist cherry blossom tree.
“Did you mean it?” she asks.
I aim the uzi at her head and pull the trigger.
She ducks and looks behind her, where a bandit she’d missed went tumbling down from the rafters. He hits the floor with a noise like prime rib hitting a countertop at a fine french restaurant. Smack.
“You’re welcome,” I mutter.
As Vinyl recovers from the force of a bullet flying inches from her face, I pick up the duffel bag and zip it shut. Waste not, want not.
Vinyl follows me out of the warehouse. “I’m serious Tavi. Did you mean it?”
“Yes,” I mutter. It feels so stupid of me to admit it. Declarations of love shouldn’t come with shame. Or a body count. But here we are.
Vinyl is quiet for a long time. She looks back at the warehouse. All around us, the countryside rings with the sound of tropical life. The afternoon sun is just starting to dip beneath the trees. Golden hour. I must look amazing, because Vinyl won’t stop staring at me.
“I’m sorry,” Vinyl says. “For everything. I did it all wrong.”
Her words surprise me. Take me back, then, I almost say. Earn my forgiveness. Earn my love.
But that wouldn’t be right. I know it before I’ve even thought it. Instead, I say, “I’m sorry too.”
It takes a second for her to process this. “The tour’s next stop is Patagonia,” she says. “The stagehead there says if we bribe the local officials they’ll let us fast rope onto the stage from a helicopter.”
“I think the tour is over, Vinyl.”
Shock blooms on her face. It’s more than shock, really. It’s like ten emotions at once. “But. Uh. What? We can’t just quit.”
“Can’t we?”
“We still gotta make up all that money.” She glances at the warehouse. “The cartel . Brick House.”
I follow her gaze. An idea, glorious and terrible, springs forth from the mycelial dirt of my imagination. “Be a dear and hand me a brick.”
She scampers off to a corner of the warehouse where the foundation is cracked. It hadn’t cracked from our gunfire. Merely years of neglect. I never thought I’d find myself feeling for an inanimate piece of concrete.
I find the van Vinyl pulled up in and throw it into gear. Then I trot back inside and fish through the pockets of the unconscious Brick House until I find a single hand grenade painted in pineapple yellow.
I stuff the grenade in the van’s gas tank, pull the pin, and toss the concrete block onto the accelerator. The car screams to life and shoots through the metal door of the warehouse, snapping it clean off his hinges.
I turn around. “C’mon Vinyl.” BOOM. “We’ll walk back.”
Now the tour’s over.
Author's Note
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