How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie Debartolo Read Free Book Online

fixed on that asshole’s eyebrows. I told him I wasn’t sure I understood what he meant, even though I had a pretty good idea.
    He told me to can the band. He said, “You’re better than they are.”
    According to Winkle, signing four guys to one contract is asking for trouble. And anyway, as far as he’s concerned, Paul Hudson is Bananafish.
    I didn’t speak or move until Winkle looked like he was about to resume his discourse-o-shit, then I raised my hand to keep the silence in tact, and to halt the world as it spun around me.
    “We’re talking about the opportunity of a lifetime, Paul.
    Not to mention a lot of money.”
    Three hundred and fifty thousand dol ars—that’s the number he threw at me. Let me repeat: Three hundred and fifty thousand goddamn Gs.
    I dropped my forehead to the bar, then I looked up at the table of Michaels across the room. I pointed their way and said, “Those guys are my friends.”
    Winkle said he’d make sure I had more friends than I knew what to do with, then he went on to outline the main points of the contract. I listened to al of it, feeling like the acid from the orange juice I’d had an hour earlier was eating away at my insides. Maybe it’s kil ing the cancer, I thought hopeful y.
    With more desperation than I care to admit, I asked Winkle if we could work something out, if we could at least start with How to Kil _internals.rev 2/22/08 4:59 PM Page 39
    the band and see how it goes.
    He said he sees me as a solo artist, plain and simple. But even a solo artist needs a band, right? The next twenty seconds went something like this: “Paul, we’ve got the best studio musicians in the country lined up and waiting.”
    “I don’t want a bunch of goddamn studio musicians. I want the Michaels.”
    “It’s not open to negotiation.”
    I said I needed a minute to think. I hit the bathroom in a daze, locked myself in a stal , put the lid down on the toilet seat, and sat with my head in my hands, staring at the piss stains on the concrete, pondering the proposition that had just been laid before me, and also wondering why the idiots who used that stal couldn’t aim their dicks into a bowl wider in cir-cumference than my head and Winkle’s ass put together.
    A thick lump had formed in my throat, I wanted a cigarette, my pancreas hurt like hel , and for one pathetic instant I thought I was going to say yes.
    I’m not sure if I spent five seconds or five hours like that, and I have no recol ection of returning to the bar, but when I was back in front of Winkle I heard myself mumble, “I can’t do it.” I didn’t even turn around when Winkle cal ed my name because I was afraid he’d be able to change my mind.
    My chicken fingers were waiting for me, with two little bowls next to the plate. One had ketchup in it; the other had some kind of creamy salad dressing shit. Normal y I’d never in a zil ion years put salad dressing on chicken, but I picked up a finger and dipped.
    Burke asked me what happened and I said, “I’l tel you outside. Let’s just go.”
    Angelo, who’d ordered a rib eye and the most expensive wine on the menu, said, “Can’t we eat first?” I dragged them outside. In the cab ride back downtown, I
4told the disappointed Michaels that Winkle didn’t understand the direction of the band. They asked a zil ion questions and I repeated the same answer: “I don’t want to talk about it.” The suckiest part was I felt almost as bad about lying as I did about the truth.
    To be continued. I’m late for work.
    Over.
    The Sonica offices occupied the fifteenth floor of a tal , unre-markable building below Columbus Circle. Terry North, the editor in chief of the magazine, was on the phone when I walked in. He invited me into his cluttered office using a fly-swatting hand gesture and nodded for me to sit.
    After finishing up his cal , the first thing he said was that I looked just like his kid sister, Maggie, who had been kil ed by a drunk driver at the age of