But I could not sleep without the Seconals.
KAREN: It surprised me how easy it was for her. To just hand it all over and stop.
DAISY: When we got to the hotel, Hank was already in my room. I said, “I ran out of reds.” He just nodded and picked up the phone. By the time I wanted to go to sleep, I had another bottle in my hand. It depressed me, how easy it was. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted the pills. I needed the pills. But it was just so boring, so repetitive. Having any narcotic I needed at any time, nobody really stopping me.
As I fell asleep that night—I think I was still holding a brandy glass—I heard myself say, “Hank, I don’t want to be with you anymore.” At first I thought there was another woman in the room, saying those words, but then I realized I was saying them. Hank told me to go to sleep. And I didn’t so much fall asleep as feel like I was disappearing.
When I woke up in the morning, I remembered what had happened. I felt embarrassed but also sort of relieved, to have actually verbalized it. I said to Hank, “We should talk about what I said last night.”
And he said, “You didn’t say anything last night.”
I said, “I told you I didn’t want to be with you.”
He just shrugged and said, “Yeah, but you say that all the time when you’re falling asleep.”
I’d had no idea.
GRAHAM: It was pretty clear to everybody that Daisy needed to drop Hank.
ROD: There are a lot of slimy managers out there and they make the rest of us look bad. Hank was taking advantage of Daisy, clear as day. Somebody needed to be looking out for her.
I said, “Daisy, if you need help, I’m here.”
GRAHAM: I think Daisy saw what Rod was doing for us—the way he made sure everything was taken care of. Rod was the first guy to tell anybody that we were going to rule the world. He wasn’t telling us to be happy with what we had and to keep our mouth shut. And, not to be a jerk but…he wasn’t sleeping with us and keeping us high as fuck so we didn’t know heads from tails.
I told Daisy, “Leave Hank and team up with Rod. He’s got you covered.”
ROD: I was already doing so much for Daisy anyway. I’d hooked up Rolling Stone to see the show. They were sending Jonah Berg out to come watch the set and then hang out afterward. It was a potential cover. I’d made a point of including Daisy in that. I didn’t have to. I could have pushed for it to be just a story on the band but I figured what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
KAREN: The day that Jonah Berg was coming, we were in Glasgow.
DAISY: I was stupid. I picked a fight with Hank right after sound check that day.
KAREN: Graham had come over to my room that afternoon to bring me one of my suitcases. Somehow my things had ended up with his stuff. He was standing in the hotel hallway, at my door, holding a duffel bag of my bras and underwear. He said, “I believe this is yours.”
I grabbed it from him and rolled my eyes at him. I said, “Oh, I bet you just love having your hands on my panties.” I was just joking around.
But he shook his head and he said, “If I get my hands on those panties, I want to have earned it the old-fashioned way.”
I laughed and said, “Get out of here.”
And he said, “Yes, ma’am.”
And he walked back to his room. But when I shut the door, I…I don’t know.
DAISY: I broke it to Hank when it was just the two of us in my hotel room. He was putting his arms around me and I was done with it. I kept snapping at him and he asked me what my problem was and I said, “I think it’s time we part ways.” Hank tried to ignore me a few times, kept telling me I didn’t know what I was saying. So I said it really clear. “Hank, you’re fired. You should leave.” Well, he heard it that time.
GRAHAM: Billy and I were planning on going out to grab a bite—I’d bet him he wouldn’t eat haggis.
DAISY: Hank got in my face. He was so angry and he was standing so close to me that as he spoke, his spit landed on my shoulder. He said, “You’d still just be screwing rock stars if I hadn’t found you.”
When I didn’t say anything back to him, Hank cornered me, up against the wall. I didn’t know what he was going to do. I’m not sure he knew what he was going to do.
When you’re in a situation like that, when you have a man looming over you, it’s as if every decision you made to lead to that moment—alone with a man you don’t trust—flashes before your eyes.
Something tells me men don’t do that same thing. When they are standing there, threatening a woman, I doubt they count every wrong step they made to become the asshole they are. But they should.
My body was stick straight—I felt sort of shockingly sober—and I put my arms out in front of me, holding on to whatever space I could try to defend. Hank was staring right into my eyes. I don’t know if I was even breathing. And then Hank punched the wall and walked out of the room, slamming the door on his way out.
After he left, I triple-locked the door behind him. He yelled something in the hall but I couldn’t make it out. I just sat on the bed. He never came back.
BILLY: I was walking out of my room to go meet Graham when I saw Hank Allen coming out of Daisy’s room muttering, “That fucking bitch.” But he seemed to be calming down so I was thinking I should let it go. Then I saw him stop and turn, like he was going to go back into Daisy’s room. I could tell he was trouble right then. You can see it in somebody’s gait, you know? Hands balled up into fists and jaw tight and all that. I caught his eye and he saw me. We looked at each other for a moment. I shook my head, to say, That would be the wrong move. He kept looking at me. And then he looked down at the ground and walked out.
When he was gone, I knocked on Daisy’s door. I said, “It’s Billy.”
It took a moment but she opened the door. She was wearing a navy dress—that kind where the sleeves are off the shoulders. I knew people always talked about how blue Daisy’s eyes were but that day was the first time I really noticed them. They were so blue. You know what they looked like? They looked like the middle of the ocean. Not the shoreline, not that light blue. They looked like the dark blue of the middle of the ocean. Like deep water.
I said, “Are you okay?”
She looked sad, which I’d never really seen before. And she said, “Yeah, thank you.”
I said, “If you need to talk…” I wasn’t sure how I could really help but I figured I should offer all the same.
She said, “No, that’s all right.”
DAISY: I didn’t realize just how much of a wall Billy put up around himself when he was near me until that moment, when suddenly there was no wall. Like how you don’t register you’re hearing the hum of a car engine until it’s turned off.