When The Nines Roll Over (And Other Stories) - Rilegato

Tabachnik and a foul-smelling Australian stood by the side of the stage, in front of a door marked Redrüm Staff Only! Most of the kids in Redrüm were there to see the headliners, Postfunk Jemimah, but the opening act, the Taints, was threatening to steal the show. There was no slam-dancing or crowd-surfing or stage-diving—everybody bobbed their heads in time with the drummer’s beat and watched the singer. She prowled the stage in a bottle-green metallic mesh minidress so short that Tabachnik kept dipping his knees and tilting his head to see if he could spot her underwear. He could not spot her underwear. When the band finished the song Tabachnik turned to the Australian and asked, “What’s that one called?”

The Australian had recently started an independent label called Loving Cup Records. The Taints were the first band he signed. His head was shaved and his black tracksuit stank of sweat and cigarette smoke.

“It’s good, huh? ‘Ballad of SadJoe.’ SadJoe’s the drummer. He started the band.”

“Who writes the songs?”

“Molly,” said the Australian, pointing at the lead singer. “Molly Minx.”

She didn’t look like a Molly Minx. Tabachnik wasn’t sure what a Molly Minx should look like, but not this. He guessed that she was Thai. Her hair was cropped close to the scalp and bleached blond. A tattooed black dragon curled around her wrist.

“The story is,” continued the Australian, “she has a big crush on SadJoe, and she writes this song, and one night she sings it to him. Right on the street, a serenade. So, you know, love. Boom. And he asks her to join the band.”

Tabachnik had never heard of the Australian before tonight, which meant that the Australian did not matter in the music business. Whatever contract Loving Cup Records had with the band would be a mess, whipped up one night by a cocaine-addled lawyer who passed the bar on his third try. That was Tabachnik’s guess, anyway, and he was generally right in these matters.

Making money off musicians was so easy that third-rate swindlers from all over the world thought they could do it; they swarmed around talentless bands like fat housewives around slot machines, drinking cheap beer and exchanging rumors of huge payoffs. Third-rate swindlers were doomed to serve as rubes for second-rate swindlers—unless they were unlucky enough to get conned by a true pro.

After the Taints finished their set Tabachnik retreated to the VIP room with the Australian. He expected the man to light a joint and offer him a hit; when it happened Tabachnik shook his head and took another sip of mineral water.

“I got you,” said the Australian, leaning back in the overstuffed sofa. He sucked on the joint and kept the smoke in his lungs for so long that it seemed as if he had forgotten about the exhale part. Finally he released the smoke through his nostrils, two plumes curling toward the ceiling. It was an impressive gesture and Tabachnik appreciated it— Australians were always doing shit like this—but it was meaningless. He wasn’t going to deal with Loving Cup unless it was necessary, and at this point he doubted it would be.

“I got you,” repeated the Australian. “You want to keep a cool head for the negotiations.”

“What negotiations?”

The Australian smiled craftily, inspecting the ash at the tip of his joint. He had told Tabachnik his name. Tabachnik never forgot names, but in his mind the Australian was simply “the Australian.” He was sure that he was simply “major label” in the Australian’s mind, but eventually he would be “that fuck Tabachnik.”

“Okay,” said the Australian. “Let’s just talk then.”

“What should we talk about?”

“Come on, come on. Let’s quit the gaming. You’re here for the band.”

“I don’t understand something. You’ve signed Postfunk Jemimah?”

The Australian squinted through the haze of smoke. “The Taints.”

“So what are we talking about? I’m here for Postfunk Jemimah.”

“You like the Taints,” the Australian said, wagging his finger as if Tabachnik were a naughty child. “I saw you checking on the crowd. Well, you want them?”

“Who?”

“The Taints.”

Tabachnik smiled his version of a smile: lips together, left cheek creased with a crescent- shaped dimple. “We’re having a conversation here, but we’re not communicating. I came to see Postfunk Jemimah.”

“Too late, man. They signed a six plus one with Sphere.”

“Right,” said Tabachnik, rattling the ice cubes in his glass. “And we’re buying Sphere.”

The Australian opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “You’re buying Sphere? I just saw Greenberg two nights ago at VelVet. He didn’t say a word.”

“Who’s Greenberg?”

The Australian laughed. “The president of Sphere.”

“Greenspon. And he’s required by law to keep silent about it. I’m breaking the law telling you, but”—Tabachnik indicated the empty room with his free hand—“I know I can trust you.”

The Australian nodded solemnly and took another deep hit. Tabachnik figured he would need forty-eight hours to get the girl. The last thing he wanted was for this pissant label to sniff out his interest and put the chains on her, rework her contracts. If that happened he would have to buy out Loving Cup, and Tabachnik hated paying off middlemen. In the grand scheme of things, the musicians made the music and the consumers bought the music, and anybody in the middle, including Tabachnik, was a middleman. But Tabachnik did not believe in the grand scheme of things. There were little schemes and there were big schemes but there was no grand scheme.

“I can introduce you to Heaney,” said the Australian, desperate for an angle. “He manages Postfunk Jemimah.”

“Yeah, we went out for dinner last night. But thanks.” Tabachnik gave another tight- lipped smile. All of his smiles were tight-lipped because Tabachnik had worn braces until a few months ago. He wore the braces for two years because his teeth had gotten so crooked that he would bloody the insides of his lips and cheeks every time he chewed dinner. The teeth were straight now, the braces gone, but he had trained himself to smile and laugh with a closed mouth.

He was supposed to get braces when he was twelve, like a normal American, but his mother and father, who had split up the year before, kept bitching about who ought to pay for it. “Your only son is going to look like an English bookie,” his mother would say into the telephone, smoking a cigarette and waving at Tabachnik when she saw that he was listening. “Excuse me, excuse me, I would have a job except you know why I don’t? You know who’s been raising our son for the last twelve years?”

So when the money for the orthodontia finally came, Tabachnik told his mother he didn’t want it. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you want to be a snaggletooth all your life?”

Tabachnik found the negotiations over his teeth so humiliating that he refused to have them fixed. He never again wanted to depend on another man’s money. He worked his way through college in New Hampshire, copying and filing in the Alumni Office, until he figured out better ways to get paid. He convinced the owner of the local Chinese restaurant to let him begin a delivery service in exchange for twenty percent of the proceeds; he hired other students to work for tips and free dinners and to distribute menus around town. Tabachnik made out well until the restaurant owner realized he no longer needed Tabachnik. That incident impressed Tabachnik with the importance of a good contract.

He managed a band called the Johns, a group of local kids who worked as custodians and security guards at the college. The Johns always sold out when they played the town bars, and Tabachnik took them to a Battle of the Bands in Burlington, Vermont, where they came in second to a group called Young Törless. Young Törless became Beating the Johns and had a hit single remaking an old Zombies song. Tabachnik was reading Variety by this point, and he saw how much money Beating the Johns made for their label, and he thought, Jesus, they’re not even good. And he realized that good doesn’t matter, and once you realize that, the world is yours.

When Postfunk Jemimah began to play, Tabachnik and the Australian went to listen, and afterward joined them, their manager Heaney, and the Taints for a postgig smoke session in the club owner’s private room. The VVIP room. Tabachnik had been places with four progressively-more-exclusive areas, where the herds were thinned at each door by goons with clipboards, turning away the lame. Some of these rooms were so hard to get into that a full night would pass without anyone gaining entrance. People who had never been turned away before, people unused to rejection, seven-foot-tall basketball players and lingerie models with bosomy attitude, would snipe at the bouncer and declare their lifelong friendship with the owner, and the bouncer would nod and say, No. Tabachnik wasn’t a VVVVIP, but he didn’t care. He suspected that if you ever got into the fourth room you would find another closed door, leading to an even smaller room with even fewer people, and if you could somehow convince the bouncer to let you pass, you would enter a ...