AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 63

Byron Reed took a slug of Dr. Jack, popped three whites washed down with yet another slug, and listened to the mix.  Harlot’s crisp, sexy voice blasted around the control room of SoundSync East’s C-Studio.  Reed slumped back on the studio couch, displeased.

“Come on!” Reed barked.  Then he cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted.  “Give me some volume!  I’m trying to hear this thing!”  He kicked the ergonomic chair that George the assistant engineer was in to get some attention, and motioned upward with his thumb.

The tape operator and the assistant engineer looked at each other.  But the volume went up.  Again.  The tweeters could blow any second.  If their ears didn’t self-destruct first.

Reed’s mouth was a ragged downward snarl.  The mix was shit.  Mix 200?  Mix 300?  They’d done so many tries at it, Reed had no idea.  They were getting closer, but they weren’t quite getting it.

Reed pulled one of the rolled joints out of his leather jacket, and lit up.  Three lungfuls of sinsemilla, and he passed the joint to Sabina, the recording engineer, standing close to him.

The joint was passed around, breaking one Byron Reed edict, creating another: at that moment, everyone had to smoke.  His mood was a black cloud of coercion.

“Well?” Sabina asked, at song’s end.  “I like it.”

Reed growled, stood up from the couch and stretched.  Nobody said anything while he just slowly . . . slowly . . . walked around the wide Soundcraft TSl2d 102-input mixing console, staring at the floor, shuffling his feet around.  “It just doesn’t do it for me,” he said, accepting the joint as it came around again.  He leaned against the mixer and stared through the glass into the empty sound studio.

There was sort of a collective sigh of discontent.  The four of them had been at it for eight hours.  They were burnt.  They were getting to where they didn’t even know what they were listening to anymore.  It was 5pm, and at 6 the studio was booked, and they’d been at it since 9am.  They were working on one of the album’s 5 key songs that would be released as singles.  Reed had delegated the production work on the weaker songs to his engineer, who wanted to break into producing anyway——he did not interfere with her work.  But for the key songs, Reed was autocratic.

For this song, Harlot had sung eighteen main vocal lines (some good, some bad, but none with that shimmering excitement that would knock the middle class savages out of their doldrums), and done six backing vocal tracks (adequate, solid); and they were working the equipment overtime trying to pull a decent lead vocal out of it.  They had a verse of track 48, a verse of track 44, one word pitchshifted from track 52 and inserted into the second half of track 50, which was harmonized and digitally delayed . . . little bits and pieces of different tracks of Harlot’s voice, sequenced together into a singing whole that was much better than any of her actual attempts at singing the lead vocal part; her voice was enhanced, processed, EQed, flanged, echoed, reverbed, gated, relocated by one-shot window recorders, compressed, overdubbed, intentionally distorted, blended, digitally sampled and then artificially duplicated by off-board synthesizers, sustained, dropped out, deblemished, and it still sounded fucked.  To Reed’s ears.

Reed threw himself down on the couch again and picked up the clipboard with the trackchart and his notes on it.  He flipped through some back pages.  Absently, he took another pull on the bottle of Dr. Jack Daniel’s.  He realized that he was falling apart.  The three bennies hadn’t done a damn thing; he could pop five more or ten, and still take a nice dead-to-the-world nap.

“All right,” he growled, “we’ll break it off for today.  George, I want two alternate mixes by tomorrow.  I want one with a new ten second fill between the first A and the first B, just erase the music and we’ll do another sequence, I want to try——”

“Bobby Len’s sampled chord technique,” Sabina said.

“Right,” Reed said.  “We’ll try your idea.  It just may work.  It might refocus the flow of the emotions.  We’ll have to rework the drums too, but we’ll see about that later.”

“OK,” George complied.  It was no problem.

“Also,” Reed continued, “the singing isn’t bad, by itself, but it doesn’t quite hang together with the music.  I don’t think Harley was really listening to the music when she was singing.  We need to set the emotional stage for her voice.  So, I want to also try inserting an E part between B and C throughout the song.  Make a space for it 4 bars long and give me an SMPTE track that I can sync to.”  He paused.  “And I don’t want to hear any splice glitches,” he warned.

“OK,” George complied.  It was utter hell; he would be at work late into the wee hours at least, if not all night.  “I’ll need studio time.  We’re all booked up here.  Your home studio again?”

Sabina interrupted, “We need A-Studio for that.  Trying to splice tape on the Mitsubishi . . . that’s crazy.  You’ve got five reels of digital multi-track times thirty-two channels each . . . no way!  You’ll either have to give up a generation and go to analog, or take it into Studio-A.”

Byron Reed thought about it.  She was right.  Cutting and splicing the multi-track digital tape was too clumsy, it would take the kid too many shots to get it right on all the reels.  “OK.  I’ll steal you an hour on the Synclavier.  Bounce it to hard disk, and do it there in the computer.”

George brightened: piece of cake.

Reed stood up and drudged out of the control room toward his office.

There was silence for a few seconds after he had gone.

Sabina said, “Want me to do it?  It’s really my job.”

“Oh, I can do it, it’s just . . .”  George started to laugh.  “What the fuck does he want?!  NOTHING satisfies that guy.  Jesus.”

Sabina knew what he wanted, but what she said was, “He wants a follow up to the Missionary album that outsells the original.”

“Outsells 16 million copies?  Good Luck.”

Reed crashed on his office sofa.  On his desk was a list of calls to be returned.  Reed glanced at it just long enough to see that none of them were from Courtney, and then faded to black on the soft super-wide leather sofa.  The next studio he built, he was going to have a shower and bedroom installed just off his office.

A discreet knock on his office door.

Reed growled that it was OK to come in.

“Mrs. Ryan on line one,” the secretary said.

Reed moaned, without opening his eyes.  “Wrong Ryan.”

“She’s been calling every few hours for two days.  I think you ought to talk to her.”

Reed growled.

Secretarial tilt of head, quizzical regard of the lump of distressed male lying in crumpled ruins.  “I think you should talk to her, Byron.  She’s tying up our phone lines.”

Reed laboriously crawled to a sitting position.  It took about twenty seconds, and the complete consumption of his energy reserves.  He sat there and looked as though he was about to fall forward onto the floor.  “Would it be asking too much for you to bring me the telephone?”

She smiled, and brought him the telephone; it had a thick heavy cord, but she set it next to him on the sofa.

He looked blankly down at the several flashing lights, and at the other lights that were steadily lit.

“Line one,” she reminded him, pressing the correct button.  She smiled and walked out.

Byron tried to wake up.  It wasn’t going to happen.  So he picked up the phone anyway.  “This is Byron Reed.”

“I’m Ginger Ryan.  Courty’s mother.  Mr. Reed, do you know where she is?”  It sounded as if she had read the words written on a card.

His mind sludged around.  “How did I get to be Mr. Reed?”

“Byron, do you know where my daughter is?”  She was not reading from a card this time.

Deep inhale and exhale.  “No.”

“Have you any idea?”

“No”

“Are you sure?  I’m very worried about her.  She always calls me several times a week, no matter where she is.  But she hasn’t called in more than two weeks.  I’m very worried about her, it’s so unlike her.  Also, Byron, she was very upset when she came to visit me three weeks ago.  Five thirty in the morning, Lauren brought her home, and Courty was nearly incoherent, she kept bursting into tears, and then laughing, and then CRYING, and then LAUGHING, and she wouldn’t tell me a THING!  We finally got her to bed, and Lauren told me a few things . . . but HONESTLY I don’t know WHAT to believe!  It all sounded so crazy!  Mr. Reed, I don’t mean to pry, but . . . well, what DID happen that night, and what . . . I mean . . . well, what is happening between you and Courty now, relationship wise?  There.  I’ve said it.”

Reed agreed.  “You’ve said it, all right.  Ginger, I don’t know anything.  I’m afraid I’ve been a total and complete shit.  I put a couple I’m sorrys on her answering machine, but she hasn’t gotten back to me.  I suggest you contact Michael, her agent.  He probably——”

“He doesn’t know where she is, either.  He called ME!  That’s why I’m so worried, she’s just up and DISAPPEARED!”

Well, it woke him up.  He didn’t have an answer, though; and his mind was not in the problem solving mode.  Slowly he said, “I wouldn’t get worried just yet.  I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation.”  Long pause.  “She probably got fed up and went off by herself somewhere.”  For a hot, get-even love affair, Reed thought.

“No.  She would call and let me know so I wouldn’t worry about her.  Something’s wrong!  Are you sure you don’t know where she is?”

The secretary was back from the limbo off the edge of Reed’s awareness, holding a Post-it note in front of his face.  He nodded to her, and accepted the note.  She smartly about-faced, her skirt swishing bewitchingly, the high heels and French line-up-the-back nyloned legs doing a creative & rambunctious flirt; the effect completely lost on Reed.

“I don’t.  Maybe she went to a Writer’s Colony to finish her poem.”

“But she would TELL me, so I WOULDN’T WORRY!”

“I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“Oh, YOU’RE no good!”  Click, the line was dead.

“You’re right: I’m no good.”

Reed stared vacantly and slumped dejectedly.  He looked at the note.

BYRON——Your housekeeper on 800 line——TAMMY.

“I’m sorry to bother you at work like this, Mr. Reed, but uh . . . I think you’re home has been burglarized.”

“You think?”

“Uh, it has been.  It has been burglarized.  The alarm was inactive when I came in.  Everything seems to be all right except your bedroom, Mr. Reed.  The hidden wall-safe in your bedroom is open, the entire bedroom is a mess.  The wall is black all around the safe, as if there’d been a fire or something!  I don’t know what you had in your safe, but it’s completely empty.”

Inhale.  Exhale.  Mental shrug.

“Also, your older Rolls-Royce is missing.  Should it be here?”

“No.  It’s in a private garage near LAX.”

“Oh, that’s good.”  She paused.  “Oh, and all the ladies’ clothes in your closets are gone too.”

Reed’s breathing almost stopped.  The news hurt him: it was Courty’s way of saying, “Go and get fucked!”  He wondered if Courty had come for her things, and forgotten to set the alarm.

“Yeah, well . . .”  He chuckled a single syllable; a chuck.  “You’ll have to deal with it.  Call the Sherman Oaks police and report it.”

Reed felt like a dethroned king dragged through a government-sponsored study of love damage, whose clone had just died.

He punched buttons to put another message on Courty’s answering machine.

Two rings.

Lauren’s recorded voice: “Hey, we’re MUCH too busy, and having MUCH to much fun to sit around by the phone.  We’re out DOING THINGS.  We’re out on the town, shaking the world down.  We are Out Of Here.  We are SO FAR OUT Of Here, that, well, let me put it this way . . .”  BEEEEEEEP!

Inhale.  Exhale.  “Courty . . . shit.”  Painful pause.  “I can’t talk to a fucking machine, damn it!”  Painful pause.  Angry: “Courty, I love you.”  Angrier: “Only you!”  Painful pause.  “I want you back.  Whatever I have to do, to get you back.  You can write the book, and I’ll live it.  You can——”

“Byron!”  Lauren’s voice cut in.  “My God!  Someone trashed my apartment!  It’s like a tornado hit!  I don’t believe it!  One of my TVs is gone.  One of my VCRs too!  And Courty’s room . . . ISN’T!  They just completely cleared her out.  Books, clothes, everything.  I’m all knocked over with shock!  And she was right, too.  She was worried about a fire or something, so she kept giving me photocopies of her work in progress——but boy was she ever right.  I can’t handle the tension!  They actually stole her poetry too.  But be sure to tell her that Lillie has a copy of her poem, so it’s safe.  Whew.  And I thought this was a safe building.  Wow.”  Lauren pause——flustered & stressed out.  “HeLOWoo!  HeLOWoo!  I can hear you breathing, Byron.”

“Where is Courty now, Lauren?”

“But she went to see you.”

“She went to see me?”

“Yeah.  We had a long talk and decided that although you are a schlong, that . . . I can’t remember how she put it, but it was GREAT.  It was really funny; something . . . something about condoms . . . condoms and circumcision.  Damn, I can’t remember.  Anyway, what am I going to DO, Byron?  My apartment’s a mess!”

“When was the last you saw Courty?”

“Um, let’s see, a week ago Friday, yeah it was Friday night.  We went together to your loft, but you weren’t there, and she didn’t want to stay, so we got a taxi back here, but then she decided to go down to SoundSync to see if you were there.  She didn’t want to call, she just wanted to surprise you.  She didn’t find you?  I just assumed that she was with you all this time.”

“No.  I’m coming over.”

COURTNEY, Chapter 64
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47