And you know, he was right about that.
“You can have passion,” he says. “And you need it, ’cause this shit is hard work, and if you don’t got the fire for it, you’re gonna fail.”
Gotta say, Tom was right about that too.
But Tommy was right about a lot of things.
“But you want respect,” he says, “you gotta be good at what you do, and to be good at what you do, you gotta practice, you gotta go at it hard, and gotta do it a lot. No one who’s got talent, money and respect gets it pissin’ about and givin’ thirty percent. They earn it because they give it their all.”
[Lengthy pause]
“Now,” Tommy said, “you gotta make your minds up. You gonna get a little because you’re all pretty and you can play in a rock band? Or are you gonna earn it all?”
[Slouches in seat]
Yeah.
That was the Larry Bird speech.
To this day, I have no clue if Larry Bird actually went out and practiced like that when he was a kid.
But it doesn’t matter.
No one bitched after that.
And we had a good number of gigs.
But we practiced.
All the fuckin’ time.
Jesse:
They’d tease him, in the beginning, you know?
[Long pause]
[Off tape]
No, I don’t know.
Her name was Lyla. Dave and even Tim would tease him.
Lyla. Layla.
Get it?
[Another long pause]
They learned not to tease him, though.
I didn’t understand. Not in the beginning.
She was…
[Lengthy pause]
Not his scene.
Straight up, he didn’t seem to be hers, either.
Nothing seemed to be her scene.
We hooked up with her and her friends at the bar where we’d played, and she was not into it.
I mean, her friends and her, chalk and freakin’ cheese.
Serious.
She wasn’t into the bar, the music, the band.
Tight with her friends, you could tell, but us and everything around us?
Nope.
She didn’t even dress like them. Like a rocker-groupie girl.
She didn’t even dress eighties, Madonna teased out hair and rubber bracelets and lotsa lace. Or neon. Or whatever the fuck.
No, you know, that isn’t right.
She did.
Flashdance.
Shirt falling off her shoulder. Jeans. White Nike classics. Cortez. If I remember, with a blue swoop.
Nikes.
First time we saw Lyla, she was in Nikes.
[Smiles]
They told us they had booze and blow and mushrooms and maybe some acid and a pool.
And they were party girls.
Lyla wasn’t, but they were.
That was serious too.
Serious as shit.
Party girls like that and a pool?
[Smiles]
We were all in.
Even Tommy.
Josh took off somewhere else though. Found some other chick he wanted to party with, and he went with her.
Josh did that kind of thing a lot.
And he may say it different, but we wanted him with us, and we made that clear.
He took off and did his own thing.
So that’s on him, no matter what that guy says.
We went with Lyla’s friends. And I was twenty by then. I was in a rock band that no longer had trouble getting gigs. There were entire cities where I had pussy waiting for me when we got back to them.
But I was on my home turf.
Indy.
First time back after Dad died.
So, I was rattled, you know?
Preacher, I could tell, had a mind to me.
Tim ate the ’shrooms, Dave dropped the acid.
[Shakes head]
They didn’t have a mind to dick.
Or at least not anything but their own dicks.
Lyla sat in a lounge chair she’d pulled away from the pool, up close to the house, and every once in a while, she’d get up to take a walk and clean shit up.
Clean shit up!
[Hoots, shakes head, grows serious]
[Speaking softly] God, Lyla.
Most of the time though, she laid in that lounge chair against the house, far from the pool, you know, like…glaring at us.
Preach was an equal opportunity, benevolent almost-rock god.
I remember seeing him with his jeans bunched up to his knees, sitting on the side of the pool, his feet and calves in the water, her friends barely clothed in the water, wet and hanging off his legs and his every word, and he’d glance over at her.
When he was in the mood to spread his love, everyone was invited.
We all were nailing serious tail, but I don’t think anybody but Dave had had a threesome.
But that was not unusual for Preach.
Or more, you know?
That night, I had one girl, he had two, three were in with Tim and Dave, tripping, and Tommy was fucking another one in what we would find out later was one of the girls’ dad’s waterbed.
And looking back, I knew Preacher was more into her than the two he had.
I also got why.
Kind of.
Now, again, it was the eighties. We’re talkin’ Jane Fonda workout videos and Jamie Lee Curtis in that movie Perfect and one-pieces making a comeback because the legs were cut so far up the hips, a girl had to shave.
And Lyla was not…
[Pause]
That.
I mean, there was a reason anorexia became prevalent during that decade and didn’t let go. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t good, but it was the way it was.
But Lyla was not that way.
Tits and ass.
A lot.
Of both.
And, from what I could tell that night, bad attitude.
But fuck, the longer the night wore on, Preacher couldn’t keep his eyes off her.
She’d do a lap to clean up ashtrays or beer bottles or whatever the fuck, and honest to Christ, he didn’t miss a step.
Not that first step.
She had what they now politically correctly, but also, it’s gotta be said, just plain correctly call curves.
Freddie Mercury called them fat-bottomed girls.
But man, she was pretty.
Lotsa hair.
Perfect skin.
You know, and a way about her.
It was part that attitude.
Part the mystery.
You know, tell a man, “don’t touch, you’ll get burned,” he’ll become obsessed with the fire. It’s just how it is.
She screamed don’t touch.
And Preacher, man…
Preacher could be obsessive.
In a big way.
But it was the eyes.
I gotta believe, and this would prove true, in a way, if it wasn’t Preach, it would be somebody. Another rock star. A photographer. A painter. Someone would fall in the muse of Lyla’s eyes.
But as you know, it was Preacher.
Eventually, my girl said she had some coke hidden in her purse.
We went in, did lines, she went down on me, I went down on her, we smoked a joint to mellow out, and then we banged.
When we were done, everyone was either passed out or boning. It was late, nearly morning, she said she had to go home, so she took me back to our motel.
We were staying in motels then. Shitty-ass ones, but we slept in beds.
Yeah, battle by battle, Tommy was winning the war.