She’s dressed in an insulated vest, a long-sleeved shirt, jeans and hiking boots.
She walks along the gently sloping packed earth covered in dead pine needles that makes up the front area of the cabin with what looks like a Burmese mountain dog and what is clearly a mutt, both unleashed.
“My daughter,” Lyla explains, taking up a mug of something that’s steaming and entering the daybed as she had the day before, to sit cross-legged on it. “Should we begin?”
Lyla:
What Tim did, with “Life in the Fast Lane,” was not good.
I understood his intention, even then, and even then, I agreed with him.
But it wasn’t the right way to go about doing it.
Preacher felt betrayed.
That was their safe space. Onstage. That was where they were always in harmony, quite literally.
Tim ripping that away from Preacher, not only at that time, which was far from optimal, but at any time, it’s just…
[Pause]
The way Preacher saw it.
It was just simply unforgiveable.
In Tim’s defense, he not only didn’t know what was going on with Preacher, he didn’t know his story.
Even with that said, Tim had known Preacher by that time for nearly a decade.
He had spent a lot of time with him.
He had made music with him.
So, he might not know the story, but he knew there was one.
And it wasn’t a good one.
More than that, Preacher was about being up front about everything.
If you had something to say, say it.
Right to his face.
I know this sounds contradictory seeing as it was clear to everyone that Preacher was not being up front about something. He was keeping something buried.
But that was the first time he’d ever been that way.
And that was…
[Pause, then a sad sigh]
What it was.
My mother and father fought viciously before Mom took us away.
Or I should say, my father got viciously angry.
Because of that, bearing witness to it at a very early age, I avoided conflict.
And I never raised my voice.
I can still hear my father shouting at my mother. The words were ugly and damaging, but as a child, it was the timbre of his voice that truly frightened me.
It is highly likely this was conditioned in me due to the noises I’d hear after. Noises of him hurting her physically.
But regardless, because of that, no matter how angry I was, I didn’t lash out with a raised voice. There was rarely any drama to my anger.
Which might have been a problem.
My conflict avoidance sometimes took the form of me making certain I was clear in communications and tackling things head on as they were happening.
[Smiles self-deprecatingly]
This was when I was being mature.
Sometimes this took the form of me burying it with the intent simply to keep it buried. Taking the tack, it happened, it’s done, move on, and never go back there again.
I understood that there might be consequences to the latter strategy, and that was on me, and why I preferred to use the former one.
And Preacher by then was accustomed to that.
He was accustomed to that from me.
He was also used to it from the guys.
They’d been together a long time. They’d learned to communicate with each other.
He had no earthly clue how to handle someone delivering a message like Tim did with that song.
And most importantly at the time, Tim crossed two lines that you did not ever cross with Preacher.
He did what he did publicly.
And he did it making a commentary about me.
I did not look up from my book when Preacher came back into the suite after talking to Tommy in the hall.
In the hall.
What the fuck was up with that?
I had learned not to ask.
I could do that again and again (and had), find a variety of different ways to do it, even attempting to sneak it in and catch him off guard, which made me feel like shit and made Preacher irritable.
But it didn’t matter.
He wouldn’t tell me.
“Babe, I gotta hit the road for this thing.”
Babe.
He was calling me that a lot now.
I still got “baby” and “cher” and Lyla on occasion.
But most of the time it was “babe,” and he called the girl who restrung his guitars “babe.”
I heard the sound of pills bouncing around in a bottle and I looked his way to see him tapping a few out while asking, “You wanna come?”
Did I want to come?
Come with him and watch him and the guys do a radio slot?
I never did that.
Not after the time I did it in Miami, the DJ mentioned I was there while they were live, tried to coax me to come on mic, also while they were live, and Preacher walked out, taking me with him, and the guys had to cover for him.
Tommy had, of course, seen to things prior to us going.
As Tom saw to fucking everything.
Including, undoubtedly, whatever was happening in the hall.
But Tommy had told the station that I would be there, I was just there to hang with the band and see my guy in action, I would be happy to meet the staff and take a few pictures, if that was what they’d like, but I was under no circumstances going on air.
The DJ was trying to get an exclusive by putting us on the spot.
He learned that didn’t work with Preacher McCade.
Now Preacher wants me to go with him?
Which could put me in the same awkward position?
I knew why.
He wasn’t talking to anyone in the band, and if he had me around, he’d have his side there.
Or his shield.
Things hadn’t been good since Phoenix. And between Phoenix and here, they’d done two shows in Vegas, one in Salt Lake City, Boise, and now we were in Seattle.
That’s a lot of time not to talk to your best friends who you worked with, traveled with and essentially lived with.
“You should consider going clean like the rest of the band,” I said carefully, watching him toss back however many pills dry.
Thus, when he swallowed, this was visible, and when his gaze settled on me, it was unhappy.
“Stupidest fuckin’ shit they coulda pulled,” he declared.
What?
Was he serious?
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, you’d be wrong,” he said and walked from the living room of the suite to the bedroom.
I watched him thinking I could not imagine how, in this day and age, someone could think kicking pills and booze and illegal stimulants was stupid.
It was always the right thing to do.
And I was proud of the guys.
I was also cutting back, on all of it, not only because the guys were, and I thought it was smart.
But because Tim sang that song.
I didn’t want that song to be me and Preacher.
It hurt, just the idea Tim thought that was me and Preacher.
As was his way, Preacher had not missed I was doing this.
But he hadn’t said anything about it.
And although I probably shouldn’t have said anything when he was about to walk out the door in order to see to a commitment, something needed to be said.
What Tim did was messed up.
His message was not lost on me (or Preacher), but it was messed up how he communicated it.