“I’m thinking of changing the name of the band to the Heaters,” Jay said. “What do you think?”

“As long as I get time to study during the week and you split fair, I don’t care if you call it Assholes from Hell.”

“Good name, right up there with Doug and the Hot Nuts, but I don’t think we’d get many high school dances.” He offered me his hand, I clasped it, and we gave each other that dead-fish shake. “Welcome aboard, Jamie. Rehearsal Wednesday night. Be there or be square.”

I was many things, but square wasn’t one of them. I was there. For almost two decades, in a dozen bands and a hundred cities, I was there. A rhythm guitarist can always find work, even if he’s so stoned he can barely stand. Basically, it all comes down to two things: you have to show up, and you have to be able to play a bar E.

My problems started when I stopped showing up.

V

The Fluid Passage of Time. Portraits in Lightning. My Drug Problem.

When I graduated from the University of Maine (2.9 cume, missed the Dean’s List by a coat of paint), I was twenty-two. When I met Charles Jacobs for the second time, I was thirty-six. He looked younger than his age, perhaps because when I saw him last he had been thinned and made haggard by grief. By 1992, I looked much older than mine.

I’ve always been a movie fan. During the 1980s I saw a lot of them, mostly on my own. I dozed off on occasion (Heathers, for instance—that one was a nodder for sure), but mostly I’d make it through no matter how stoned I was, surfing on noise and color and impossibly beautiful women in scanty clothing. Books are good, and I read my share, and TV’s okay if you’re stuck in a motel room during a rainstorm, but for Jamie Morton, there was nothing like a movie up there on the big screen. Just me, my popcorn, and my super-sized Coke. Plus my heroin, of course. I’d take an extra straw from the concession stand, bite it in half, and use it to snort the powder off the back of my hand. I didn’t get to the needle until 1990 or ’91, but I got there eventually. Most of us do. Trust me on this.

The thing I find most charming about the movies is the fluid way time passes. You might start off with this nerdy teenager—no friends, no money, lousy parents—and all at once he turns into Brad Pitt in his prime. The only thing separating the nerd from the god is a title card that says 14 YEARS LATER.

“It’s wicked to wish time away,” my mother used to lecture us kids—usually when we were pining for summer vacation in the depths of February, or waiting for Halloween to hurry up and come—and probably she was right, but I can’t help thinking that such temporal jumps might be a good thing for people living bad lives, and between the advent of the Reagan administration in 1980 and the Tulsa State Fair in 1992, I was living a very bad life. There were blackouts, but no title cards. I had to live every day of those years, and when I couldn’t get high, some of the days were a hundred hours long.

The fade-in goes like this: The Cumberlands became the Heaters, and the Heaters became the J-Tones. Our last gig as a college band was the huge and hilarious Graduation Dance ’78 in Memorial Gym. We played from eight until two in the morning. Shortly thereafter, Jay Pederson hired a locally popular chick vocalist who could also play both tenor and alto sax like nobody’s business. Her name was Robin Storrs. She turned out to be a perfect fit for us, and by August the J-Tones had become Robin and the Jays. We turned into one of Maine’s premier party bands. We had all the gigs we could play, and life was good.

Now here comes the dissolve.

 • • •

Fourteen years later, Jamie Morton woke up in Tulsa. Not in a good hotel, not even in a so-so chain motel; this was a roachpit called the Fairgrounds Inn. Such places were Kelly Van Dorn’s idea of economy. It was eleven in the morning, and the bed was wet. I wasn’t surprised. When you crash for nineteen hours, assisted by Madame H., wetting your bed is almost inevitable. I suppose you’d even do it if you died in that drug-assisted slumber, although look at the bright side: in that case you’d never wake up in pee-soaked Jockeys again.

I did the zombie walk to the bathroom, sniffling and watering at the eyes, shucking my skivvies on the way. I made my shaving kit the first stop . . . but not to clear the stubble. My works were still there, along with a taped-down sandwich bag containing a couple of grams. No reason to think anyone would break in to steal such a paltry stash, but checking is second nature to a junkie.

With that taken care of, I addressed the bowl and rid myself of the urine that had accumulated since my nighttime accident. As I was standing there, I realized that something of importance had slipped my mind. I was currently playing with a country crossover band, and we had been scheduled to open for Sawyer Brown the night before, on the big Oklahoma Stage at the Tulsa State Fair. A primo gig, especially for a not-ready-for Nashville band like White Lightning.

“Sound check at five o’clock,” Kelly Van Dorn had told me. “You’ll be there, right?”

“Sure,” I’d said. “Don’t worry about me.”

Oops.

Coming out of the bathroom, I saw a folded note poking under the door. I had a pretty good idea what it said, but I picked it up and read it, just to be sure. It was short and not sweet.

I called the Union High Music Department and lucked into a kid who could play just enough rhythm and slide guitar to get us through. He was happy to pocket your $600. By the time you get this, we’ll be on the way to Wildwood Green. Don’t even think about following us. You’re fired. Sorry as hell to do it, but enough is enough.

Kelly

PS: I guess you probably won’t pay attention to this, Jamie, but if you don’t clean up your act, you’ll be in prison a year from now. That’s if you’re lucky. Dead if you’re not.

I tried to stick the note in my back pocket and it fell on the balding green carpet instead—I’d forgotten that I wasn’t wearing anything. I picked it up, tossed it in the wastebasket, and peeked out the window. The courtyard parking lot was totally empty except for an old Ford and some farmer’s broke-ass pickup. Both the Explorer the band rode in and the equipment van that our sound guy drove were gone. Kelly hadn’t been kidding. The out-of-tune nutbags had left me. Which was probably all for the best. I sometimes thought if I had to play one more drinkin-n-cheatin song, I’d lose what little mind I had left.

I decided to make re-upping the room my first priority. I had no desire to spend another night in Tulsa, especially with the State Fair going full blast down the street, but I’d need some time to think about my next career move. I needed to score, too, and if you can’t find someone to sell you dope at a state fair, you’re not trying.

I kicked the damp skivvies into the corner—a tip for the chambermaid, I thought snidely—and unzipped my duffel. Nothing in there but dirty clothes (I had meant to find a Laundromat yesterday, another thing that had slipped my mind), but at least they were dry dirty clothes. I dressed and trekked across the cracked asphalt of the courtyard to the motel office, my zombie walk slowly perking up to the zombie shuffle. My throat hurt every time I swallowed. Just a little extra something to add to the fun.

The lady on the desk was a hard-faced country girl of about fifty, currently living her life under a volcano of teased red hair. A talk show host was on her little television, chatting up a storm with Nicole Kidman. Above the TV was a framed picture of Jesus bringing a boy and girl a puppy. I was in no way surprised. In flyover country, they have a way of getting Christ and Santa all mixed up.