AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 50

Courty and Reed went through the reception hall decorated & dominated by modern art & old-fashioned butlers, into the seigniorial white room buzzing with cross-over cool and conversation.

Courty said, shaking her head in wonder, “What makes this mansion so hard to comprehend is that there’s nothing to compare it with.  My goodness, the man must be crazy.”  Her eyes roamed around the surroundings.  Was that art, or a signed hunk of Astroturf in a frame?  The furniture was an eclectic mix of class and trash, an interior designer’s nightmare.  There didn’t seem to be a dress code for this event.  Tuxedos talked to torn trousers.  Dinner dresses discussed with Sidekick dolls en deshabille.  The spruced up and spiffy spoke to the savagely punk.

Courty could feel eyes on her like a magnet.

“So who pays any attention to the architecture?” Reed said.  His eyes ogled a nearby Sidekick who was posing like a bed-bunny, with apparently nothing to do but look sexy and wait to be propositioned.

Courty said, without hardly a glance at the girl, “She’s twelve years older than you think, Reed.  Her roots are showing, and check those thighs, she already has cellulite.  Worse, the silicon in her breast job didn’t take, and it’s starting to slip.  Oh, now I do like that Picasso!”

Reed busted up into loud laughter that made several more people turn to look at them.  It was such a perfect parody of bitchiness.

Reed nabbed a glass of bubbly off the patrolling platter.

Courty swiped it from his fingers and started drinking it.

“Courty, you’re pregnant.”

“And thirsty.”

Reed gave her a strange look.  “You shouldn’t be drinking alcohol.  It increases the odds for a birth defect.”

Courtney gulped down the rest of the champagne quickly.  She pointed at her tummy.  “She’s thirsty too.”  Courtney looked at Reed with a quirky challenge in her eyes.

Reed recognized her look; it was the look of Courty when she has already made up her mind.  He tried, anyway.  “Courty, suppose we make a deal.  How about if I don’t drink either.”

“No deals!” Courty said, charmingly, switching her empty champagne glass with two full ones as a butler drifted by them.  “I’m on vacation.  I need serious recreation.  I need medication.  Tell me again, that I shouldn’t drink.”  One of her glasses of bubbly hovered near her lips, and her eyes sparkled with raw dare.

“You shouldn’t drink.”

Courtney gulped the champagne down faster than Wallenstein.  “Yummy!” she said, holding the spare glass up to her lips now.  “Tell me again, that I shouldn’t drink.”

Reed looked at Courtney hard and silent for about ten seconds, but then he smiled.  He grabbed the butler who was passing on his return circuit.  “Hey, Pal, could you please just stand here a couple of minutes, I think I’ve got some business for you.”  The butler stood by for a moment with his platter of champagne.  Reed smiled at Courty.  “You shouldn’t drink,” he said.

But Courtney had already figured it out.  “You’re going to make me drink so much, so fast, I’m going to throw up, aren’t you?”

“Smart girl.”

“Pax?” she asked.  “I can drink in moderation?”

“Pax,” Reed agreed, and pointed at her to make his point.  “Moderation.  Serious moderation!”  Reed looked around the room.  “Excuse me, I have to go congratulate someone.”

“Hey, take me along, I don’t trust you.  The ratio of women to men in this room is 3:1.”

“Yeah, and they’re all Courty wanna-bes.”

It was a group of three music industry power-people, once Reed joined, and some sycophants, listening to Lonnie Lane telling one of his Lonnie Lane jokes.  Ron Banks waved a HI at Reed while he laughed.  Lane was an extremely ugly, bald man with a weatherbeaten face and clunky body, a little younger than Reed’s age, but he looked fifteen or twenty years older.  Lane and Reed were the two hottest music producers of the moment.  Banks was an older producer in his late fifties, a Black ex-jazz pianist, who had been around forever and who would probably outlast them all.  Lane was wearing a tiny pair of mini-headphones that were actually custom hearing aids.

“. . . tol’ me to get off my burro!  What can I do?  Pancho Villa, he ha’b a gun!  So I get off z’ burro, and he tell me to eat burro shit!”  Lonnie Lane had a coked-up way of making jokes hilarious, long before the punch-line sneaked up and whacked everyone over the funny bone.  All he had to do was say ‘burro shit’ and he had everyone convulsing.  “So I eat z’ burro shit!  What can I do, he ha’b the gun!  Ahhh!  But then, as I am eating d’ burro shit . . .”  A roar of laughter, as Lonnie Lane licked his lips appreciatively!  Pancho Villa, he laugh so hard, he drop d’ gun!  I pick up z’ gun.  I tell Pancho Villa to get down off his big white horse.  What can he do?  I ha’b z’ gun!”  His eyes lit up in a crazed coked-into-the-ozone way that busted everyone up with laughter again.  Even Courty laughed.  What a character.  “I tell him to eat . . . horseshit!”  Not tiny, little titters or polite tee-hees; no, the bunch was Boffing & Yucking, shouting with wild laughter that drew attention away from the other cliques in the room.  “Oh, ve haf’ to wait, maybe five minute for d’ horse to shit.  D’hen he eat horseshit.”  Renewed belly laughter.  “What can he do?  I ha’b z’ gun!  So!  So!  You ask me, you ask me, if I have see the Pancho Villa!  Why yes!  Ve ha’b lunch together just d’ other day!”

The group exploded with Homeric laughter that polarized the room into those few who were having fun, and the others who vaguely wondered why they weren’t having fun.

“Hey, congratulations, Lonnie,” Reed said into his hearing aid, his hand on the guy’s shoulder.  “If I had to lose it, I’d rather you got it.”

“Well yah, my man, I uh, Yah!” Lonnie Lane laughed.  “Fuh’ I waited so damn long fo’ it, y’know?  Don’ worry, there’s another year rollin’ ’round, you’ll get yours.  I ain’t got another friggin’ year . . . Hey, I been wantin’ to meet you, little lady.  I hear you got a brain.”

Lonnie laughed at the way Courty tilted her head in response, and he threw his arm around Reed’s neck for support.  “W’ll half a brain, anyway.”

The big group had thinned noticeably, or maybe it was just that everyone not Lonnie Lane, Byron Reed, Ron Banks, or Courty, faded to dim.

“Ron, should we take this guy home before he makes an ass out of himself?” Reed asked Banks.

“Too late!” Banks and Lane said at the same time.

Reed said, “Courty, this is Ron Banks, who produces Eddie Eddie.  I produce Harlot; and Lonnie Lane here produces everybody else.”

“Fuh’!” Lane growled, releasing Reed’s neck.

“Courty’s my . . . significant other.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” Banks politely told Courty, taking her hand for a moment.  “Lord knows, I’ve seen you enough on magazine covers.  My son has your Sports Illustrated calendar up on his bedroom wall.  He’s partial to February.”

“Oh, that one,” Courty said, rolling her eyes in embarrassment, remembering how demure and sedate the suit had been when dry.  Unfortunately, when she dove in the water and then oozed out for the camera, the stretchy material clung to her and became disconcertingly transparent.

“Yah,” Lonnie Lane said.  He looked at her intently.  “All righ’, you’re at a public pool, ’n’ya see a faggot drownin’ in the deep end.  Wha’da’ya do?”

Courtney automatically obliged him.  “I don’t know.”

“Ya throw in his friends!  All righ’, I’ll give ya another chance.  Ya look again, ’n now there’s an epileptic drownin’ in the deep end.  Wha’da’ya do now?”

Courtney thought about it for a moment, because the man wearing the funny headphones was beginning to offend her.  The image that came to mind was so gross, that it had to be the answer.  She said, “Oh, gee, and I just did my dirty laundry before I came here.  What a waste of quarters.”

Lonnie Lane looked at her hard and strangely, and then his face contorted and he broke into tears.  He turned his face aside in shame and stumbled away from them, and walked quickly into another room.

“Where’s Clarissa?” Reed asked a moment later.

“She left him,” Ron told him.

“Jesus Christ,” Reed said.

“What’s the matter?” Courty asked.

“He’s going deaf,” Reed told her.

Ron Banks said, “He’s already legally deaf.  There’s nothing at all above 5000 cycles, and he’s more than 70dB down in the midrange.”

When Reed heard that, Courty could see more pain on his face.

It was now just the three of them in the group.  Courty, Byron Reed, and Ron Banks.  And all kinds of people in other cliques watching them, or her, while trying not to be obvious about it.

“Can he train himself to work without his hearing?” Courty asked.

Banks smiled.  It was not a happy smile.  “I’m afraid not.  He’s stopped working.  I’ve taken on two of his projects, and Elliot is finishing up his other albums for him.  His name will go on the work, but . . .”

“But there are composers who have written music while they were deaf!” Courty protested.  “Isn’t that essentially the same?”

Banks said, “A classically trained composer could write music without having to actually hear it, an experienced arranger who lost his hearing could do satisfactory work without hearing it, both of them could rely on theory, but a producer . . .”

“Impossible,” Reed said.  “You don’t even know what you’re doing, until you’ve suddenly Just GOT IT!”

Banks said, “Speak for yourself.  I always know what I’m doing.”

He was serious, but Reed chuckled.  “Yeah, well . . . it’s nice seeing you, Ron.  I hardly ever see you anymore.  I’m glad Lonnie took the award.  Shit, you should have at least gotten a Nomination.  Courty, this is the guy who did Eddie Eddie’s KILLER album; I mean, the thing is the best selling album of all time!”  He added, “Even if it is a piece of shit!”

COURTNEY, Chapter 51
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47