Never Say Never Page 3

  “I’ll keep the paps away,” said Kyle.

  “Well, I feel better knowing Kyle's with you,” my mother admitted. “He's at least sensible, as opposed to my stubborn, hot-headed little girl...”

  “I prefer the term ‘passionate’,” I smiled.

  Kyle did too. He knew I'd become a skilled pro at negotiating these waters with my parents.

  “Anyway,” my mother changed the subject airily. “Can't we turn up the A/C? It's like a furnace down here. And Kyle – Stacey's been asking for you. The guy we booked for the Ralph Lauren shoot turned out to be a junior member of the Russian mob and now she's desperate for a replacement...”

  “I'll call her,” Kyle said. “Thanks, Mrs. Knight...” He tiptoed out, leaving me alone with my mother.

  “Thank God you're back!” My mother embraced me. “The house is so old without you. Your dad just wants to stay in, pop in a few Turner Classic Movies, eat popcorn – I swear, you'd never believe this was the man who once bit the head off a...” She lost her train of thought. “Although you wouldn't believe what he's doing tonight!”

  “What?”

  “He's invited his old friends around...for a sit down dinner. The Dark Knights – sitting and eating with a fork and knife in a formal dining room – can you picture that?”

  My mom was a groupie back in the day when my dad used to trash formal dining rooms with a vengeance. She found it harder than he did to let that go.

  “Are they going to have a cheese course?” my mom laughed.

  “Probably,” I sighed.

  “I know I said it would just be us,” my mom put an arm around me. “But would you mind hanging with those old fuddy-duddies for a while?”

  I smiled. “Not at all.”

  .

  Chapter 3

  If my mother had been worried that my dad had gotten a bit too old for the rock and roll life, she certainly didn't need to be. No sooner had David, Leroy, and John arrived – a bit fatter than they had been, uniformly balding, their hair gray and tangled – than the four of them started behaving as if a time warp had brought them back to 1979. The classy white wine that Kyle had poured out for them at the beginning of the meal was replaced by significantly less classy beer after the second course, and halfway through dessert my father got raucously bored and decided to order thirty pizzas from the local shop, laughing as he slurred his words on the phone to the increasingly confused delivery boy.

  “Yes, you got it. Thirty pepperoni pizzas for the Keith Knight. Exactly. And a vegetarian one for Leroy Milford. No, I'm not joking – Leroy Milford, the bassist, he's right here in my house...”

  My father looked up in shock.

  “He hung up on me. Told me to stop playing pranks. Didn't believe I was Keith Knight.”

  The band all branched into raucous laughter. I caught Kyle's eye, smiling at my mother's consternation. My father might be strict “dad” to me, but to his band mates he was still the cool, iconic rock star he had been twenty and thirty years before. Before long, they were standing on the table, belting out hits:

  “Every time I look into your eyes/

  I feel the beat of your dark...”

  My father was shrieking, using the wine bottle as a microphone.

  “Careful!” My mother narrowly avoided being decapitated by his cup. “Watch it, Keith, you're going to...”

  John, the old keyboardist, turned to me. “So, you got any thoughts of going into the biz, girl?”

  “She does not!” my father interrupted immediately. “She's going to go to law school and become a lawyer and be the only responsible one in our family.”

  “Actually...”

  “No way I'm letting her anywhere near a recording studio. She plays for fun – that's all...” Even standing on a table in leather pants, my father managed to make the authoritative “dad voice” sound strict and imposing. I said nothing – but Kyle and I had to resist collapsing into giggles.

  I helped him clear the table and we escaped into the kitchen, laughing.

  “So this is what celebrity does behind closed doors,” Kyle snickered. “I was afraid your dad was going to bite the cork off the wine bottle...”

  “I can't decide if having Keith Knight as a dad makes it more or less embarrassing when you see him dancing on a table. Probably more.”

  “No – he's still got it,” said Kyle. “At least, that's what all the fan mail says.”

  “You've read my dad's fan mail?”

  “He pays me to open it for him and sort out the crazies...apparently a lot of girls think your dad is fiiine.” He started teasing me. “There was this one girl, she sent a picture of her boobs.”

  “Ew!”

  “She had a very detailed list of exactly what she wanted him to do to her.” Kyle grinned wickedly. “Let me see if I can remember it. “I want you to take off all my clothes, spray whipped cream all over my...”

  “That's my dad you're talking about!” I hit Kyle playfully.

  “There was definitely some creative utilization of strawberries.”

  “I don't want to hear it,” I joked.

  “That'll be you one day with the creepy fan mail.”

  “I hope not. I'm allergic to strawberries. Besides, without Geoffrey, we're not even going to make it to the D-list.”

  Our concerns about finding a replacement guitarist were not alleviated by the end of the weekend. Sunday morning our booker called me to say she'd scored us a gig at Club House, the coolest coffee-house-cum-brewery on the whole West Coast. Overwhelmed by our good fortune, I neglected to mention to her that our lead guitarist had a broken arm and several bruised fingers – and the next night, when we all met for dinner at Luc's house to jam in his basement, my nerves were beginning to get frayed.

  “We've only got five days!” I was saying to Steve as we tried – in vain – to help Luc’s mama, Mrs. Alamo in the kitchen, before being shooed away with an Italian curse word or two. “How are we supposed to find a lead guitarist in five days?”

  “We can hold auditions,” Steve said. “Don't worry. I've already put out an ad on Craigslist and posted adverts in all the music shops between here and San Francisco.”

  “But who's going to be as good as Geoff?”

  “We'll find someone – and someone who knows how to hold his liquor at that.” Steve grinned. “Don't worry, Neve. You'll get full rights of refusal over anyone we find.”

  “He's got to be incredible – whoever we find. I mean, if Slayton's looking to see how much we improve, he'll send his scouts to our shows; the pressure's going to be intense. We can't afford to do anything but the best job – we have to absolutely blow his mind.”

  “I know,” said Steve. “Believe me – we'll find something incredible.”

  “Enough worry!” Luc's mother interrupted, placing an enormous family-sized plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce on the table. “First pasta – then you can worry.”

  I couldn't think of a family more unlike my own than Luc's. Luc's mother – a tiny woman from Naples who taught Italian at the local public school – was as traditionally maternal as mine was unconventional: she was warm and vivacious and always concerned that I wasn't getting enough nutrition. “Too skinny!” she informed me. “Sophia Loren always said she got her amazing curves from spaghetti. You could be as beautiful as Sophia Loren – but you have to have a little more meat on your bones, eh?” She reserved equal amounts of worry for her two daughters, Jennifer and Amy, who were fifteen and fourteen, respectively. “Why are you not eating? You will look like a scarecrow!”

  As it happened, Jennifer and Amy did look like scarecrows – not merely because they were terribly slender, puberty not having quite caught up with them yet, but more pertinently because they sat in absolutely petrified stillness. They quite evidently had crushes on Steve and Kyle – unsure of which they thought was cuter – and managed to get by in their presence through an awkward combination of flirtation and freezing up in terror whenever one of the boys asked
them a question.

  “Careful, Steve,” I whispered. “Don't start breaking their hearts young, or I'll have to come after you myself.”

  “Please, they're kids!” Steve whispered back. “Although I could have sworn we had some girls their age in the club last week – I'm convinced they're letting them in with fake IDs. One girl barely looked old enough to watch a PG-13 movie.”

  Still, they managed to accept the girls' crushes with charm and grace, being friendly and warm without ever leading them on. When the meal was over, they both kindly offered to help the girls with washing the dishes, sending them both a shade of scarlet even darker than the tomatoes left on the plate.

  Luc smiled and rolled his eyes. “Come on, Neve,” he said. “Let's get out of here, sit in the garden. It's getting hot with all these people in here.”

  We walked out into his garden. It was a beautiful, balmy September night. I closed my eyes and inhaled the sweet scent of the magnolias blooming in his backyard. Luc sat down on a tire that swung from the old oak tree. “Remember this,” he said, motioning for me to sit next to him.

  “Yeah, of course I do. We used to swing on this all the time when we were kids.” I sat down, and Luc laughed, springing to his feet and beginning to push me.

  “You thought that if you swung high enough, you'd be able to jump off and land right on the moon.”

  “I remember that. I figured I just had to try a little bit harder.”

  “That's my Neve,” Luc said, pressing his hands against my back as he pushed me harder still. “Always so driven. So ambitious.”

  The tire slowed to a stop and I couldn't help but smile at his words.

  “See, there it is.”

  “There what is?”

  “That smile. That smile that says 'everything's going to be fine.' That smile that makes me know everything's going to be okay, and that you're not going to worry.”

  “Worry?”

  “You've had a frown on your face ever since you met with Slayton.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Listen, Neve – I know you care. We all do. But if RRR doesn't sign with us, it's not the end of the world. There are always other opportunities to knock. Other doors.”

  “But right now we have this opportunity,” I couldn't help replying. “This door. He liked what he heard, Luc. He didn't say 'no.' And that means we could do it. We can do it. Or at least, we could, if it weren't for this thing with Geoffrey. But we've got what it takes, Luc. I can feel it. I'm sure of it.”

  Luc pressed his warm lips against my forehead. “I believe in you, Neve. I trust your instincts. If Slayton feels right to you, then let's go with that; I'll follow you, 110%.”

  I took his hand and squeezed it. “Thanks, Luc,” I said. “That means a lot to me.”

  “Good.” Luc held my hand against his cheek. “Because you know how much you mean to me. I don't like seeing you worried. I just want to see you happy.”

  I felt vaguely embarrassed at his kind words, and blushed in the moonlight. Usually Luc and I traded witty banter, not serious sentiment.

  “You're so sweet,” I said.

  Yet as Luc leaned in, his chocolate-brown eyes grew dark, and I saw a pain there I had not seen before. “I'm not trying to be sweet, Neve,” he said slowly, carefully. His whole face seemed transformed in the moonlight, and I could feel a strange shiver run up and down my body. He put one strong arm around my waist, sitting next to me as he pulled me into a tight hug. “I remember when we first met, Neve. We were just kids. I always figured you were the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. You still are, you know, but that's not all you are. You've got something else – something different. You're funny, fun to be around, and interesting, and smart – but more than that...you're ambitious. You have something I've never found in another girl – in another person...”

  “What's that?”

  “This...like this relentless drive in you. This passion that makes you always work so hard. And that's what makes me sure that you've got what it takes, Never. That you're going to make it. And I'm so excited – so lucky – to be a part of making that happen. To be a part of this.”

  As he spoke, I suddenly became aware of his lips mere inches from mine. A feeling – strange, indescribable, overwhelming – passed over me like a tidal wave, and I pulled back...

  “Luc...” my voice was full of warning.

  He stopped. He hesitated, as if making a decision. “Don't worry, Neve. I'm not trying to freak you out or pull a Geoff or anything. But...you're my friend, Neve. I care about you. We're friends, right?”

  “Of course!”

  “And...uh...I'd never do anything to get in the way of that. Or hurt you. You know that, right?”

  “I know...”

  But deep down, I felt that something had passed between us. My cheeks were bright red. “We should go back inside, Luc. Before your sisters make Kyle and Steve do all the dishes.”

  “Of course,” said Luc, forcing a smile. The moonlight hit him as he walked and I involuntarily gasped. For a moment, I forgot that it was Luc standing before me – instead there was just a gorgeous man with dark Italian eyes and caramel-colored hair that made my heart involuntarily race.

  I shook my head and tried to ignore it. What was going on with me today? First Kyle – then Luc? Was there something about going off to college that had sent all our collective hormones into a tizzy?

  Come on, girl, I told myself. The band comes first.

  But as I walked back into Luc's living room, I felt a strange sense of foreboding. Something had changed – something deep down within all of us. The more serious the band was getting, the closer we got to making it, the more we had to grow up. We all knew each other since middle school, but now we weren’t prepubescent awkward kids anymore.

  Things weren't going to be the same anymore.

  Chapter 4

  I'd decided to fulfill my necessary Sociology credit at USC by signing up for a Music-In-Society class – the somewhat transgressive-sounding “Starting a Riot: Music, Sexuality, and Gender in the Late Twentieth Century.” I'd been somewhat embarrassed about signing up, despite my genuine interest in the topic – I was painfully conscious that it might look like I was striving for an easy A off my dad's stories – but I hadn't been able to resist the promise of studying my dad's punk lyrics alongside the poetry of the beat generation and the Stonewall riots. I tried to dress down for the class as much as possible – hiding my customary glam-inspired studs and black stiletto boots under an enormous USC sweatshirt in the hopes that nobody in the class would recognize me – at least not at first. The last thing I wanted was to be “Keith Knight's daughter” here in the classroom. I remembered what I'd said to my mother. I wanted to do this on my own – to forge my own path. And if that meant taking out my ear studs and cutting back on the purple mascara – well, I'd just have to sacrifice my glam aesthetic to the higher calling of knowledge. The class was taught by Professor Edmund Poe, an ethnomusicographer better known for his studies of Georgian polyphonic chant in the South Caucasus than for his experience in the punk music scene. But rumor had it that Professor Poe was going to be team-teaching the class with an English TA with some experience in the contemporary music industry.

  “My dear ladies and gentlemen,” Professor Poe stood up at the podium, standing on his tiptoes so that his bushy white hair could just barely be seen behind it. He couldn't have looked less like a rock star. With his wavy, tangled white hair, his enormous owlish glasses, and his stained tweed suit, he looked more like a professor of Medieval History than someone conversant with the lyrics of the Clash. “It gives me great pleasure to be standing in front of all of you as we prepare to embark upon this journey together. Music has long been a medium that brings individuals and societies together – it allows them to affirm their shared identity, or else – as we shall see in this semester's class – to subvert it entirely. Its power has been called spiritual – it has also been called dangerous. In the remote mountains of Svaneti, some tribes use m
usic to hold onto a religious and cultural identity all but lost. On the streets of New York City and Los Angeles, some “tribes” used it to create their own identities. Perhaps some of you are wondering what an old fuddy-duddy like me has to say about Keith Knight or David Bowie...”

  A few members of the class laughed along with his joke, but I flushed bright red. Why did they always have to bring up my dad?

  “But this year I will be complementing my traditional ethnographic methods with what one might call a more youthful approach. As many of you know, it is customary within the department to teach alongside qualified teaching assistants – graduate students in our department who wish to gain experience of the classroom before seeking full-time teaching positions. Well, it is my great honor to introduce to you your TA and one of my very brightest research students, who is studying for a doctorate in the comparative imagery of gender in late nineteenth-century ‘decadent’ fiction and in the ‘glam rock’ of the 1970's. I would like to introduce you all to Danny Blue. Danny, would you stand up please?”

  My mouth fell open. The tall young man in the skin-tight black jeans and the black t-shirt couldn't have looked less like the typical graduate students. With his long jet-black hair that fell down to his shoulders, his piercing blue eyes, his chiseled Roman nose, high cheekbones, Danny Blue looked more like a rock star than a music scholar. As he sauntered up to the podium, his long ebony hair shining under the fluorescent lights of the classroom, I felt my heart skip a beat. He radiated sex appeal – the kind of raw animal magnetism that my father had always just called “it.” That thing that rock stars either had – or never would have. That thing that separated the wannabes from the truly greats. And Danny Blue, sporting a leather jacket and what looked like the tiniest hint of eyeliner on his gorgeous, sky-colored eyes, had it.

  I felt my face flush hot and red, embarrassment making the color brighter still. What was happening to me? I'd managed to pass my teen years without even the slightest hint of a crush on anybody – utterly uninterested in sex or romance. I'd had my hands full with work and the band – and between my dad's stories of groupies “back in the day” and the greasy wannabes in the club scene who used to hit on me just because I was Keith Knight's daughter and could probably get them a record deal, I'd basically been turned off to the idea of romance altogether. But somehow sitting in a desk in front of Danny Blue made me really regret wearing this sweaty USC shirt – a regret and self-consciousness utterly unlike anything I'd ever felt before.