Chapter 33: (Even) Bad Girls Need A Father Figure

Mac

I have lost my ever-loving-fucking mind. I barely know this man I have latched onto like a floating door amidst the Titanic rubble. Clearly this is it—I have snapped.

Babycakes, thank god you have your daddy, because they are going to lock me in a loony bin.

I know I should let go of Matt del Marco, but he's so...solid and even calmer than Adam. Adam's heart would be racing now if I were clinging to him crying like this, but I can hear Matt's even thudding—because my head is pressed  right there on his chest like I'm surgically attached.

It's strangely comforting, gripping this near-stranger. So I keep my death grip on Matt del Marco's neck and the side of my head buried into his Harley Davidson t-shirt, as I try to stop my sobs. He doesn't call security, he just pats me and laughs at me and keeps up a ramble of nonsense about solo albums and the portability of infants.

Oh, that's where Trace gets that mumbling rant thing he does to talk people down or talk people into things.

No, Matt is not bothered at all that I'm squeezing the life out of him and christening him with facial fluids. I guess he's used to strange women latching onto him and completely falling apart. Thirty years of experience with fangirls, you know.

Oh  the fuck no.  I'm a rock star acting like a fangirl!

That one humiliating thought has me pushing off of Matt like he's a hot stove. "Awww, fuck del Marco...sorry. Temporary pregnancy insanity," I mumble as a stumble away and turn to the wall, frantically patting at my now destroyed face.

"Shit, I know," Matt says, sounding just like Trace. "It's all good. Marianne's the same, every time."

Everyone is silent as I walk off my freak-out. Even the kids. I guess crazy is kind of fascinating.

As if my humiliation couldn't get any worse, another VIP liason approaches. It's time for Lane and Alley to see the doctor.

"Is everything...okay?" she asks hesitantly, taking in the scene.

"Oh yeah, fine. Family reunion of sorts," Matt says breezily. "Annie...why don't you take the kids to the see the doc while I..." he tapers off. I'm sure he's wagging at his eyebrows at me or something, but I can't see, because I still have my face turned to the wall.

I hear Marianne gathering up the kids, but then she approaches and thrusts a pack of wipes with me. "You need anything else?" she asks. "Makeup? Eye drops?" She shakes her large Louis Vuitton diaper bag at me. Marianne is a mom through and through. Prepared for every emergency. I take the wipes gratefully and wave at my own purse.

As she is leading Lane and Alley away, Matt says to Adam. "Adam, can you go get us some drinks?  A couple beers, maybe...and a calming juice, for the Mama-Child."

"What kind of juice is calming?" Adam asks blankly.

"I don't fucking know, man," Matt says with a little edge to his voice. "That's what the nutritional mixologist is for."

I turn to see Adam's completely confused face. "The who?" he says.

Matt sighs and slings a hand toward the middle of the room. "That's what they call the bartender here."

I can't help but laugh at that. I hiccup, and sob one last time, before opening the pack of baby wipes. Adam smiles, and kisses my temple, taking a wipe from me and carefully edging beneath my eyes. "I'll be right back, ok?"

I roll my puffy eyes at him. It's both sweet and annoying that he thinks he can't take two steps away from me right now. "I'm fine—now."

His expression is plain—he doesn't believe that, but he gives Matt a swift look like he's relinquishing the Holy Grail to him and he strides quickly over to the bar. Watching him lean casually on his elbows, smiling and chin-tipping to the nutritional mix-a-whatsit calms me a little. Adam's ease, his steady demeanor, his confident strength--I soak it up from a distance. Because I sure as hell don't want to desperate fangirl on Matt again.

"Huh," Matt is watching me watch Adam. "I saw that blow job video and thought it was a stunt—that you were one helluva performer. But... you got them wifey-eyes."

I snap my attention from Adam at once. Matt's words make me feel the need to bring the killer. "Wifey eyes? Please. I'm knocked up...on accident. Don't get me wrong, Adam is decent in the baby-daddy department, but ...we're...mostly... trying to make the best of it."

"Hmmmm-mmmmm," Matt smiles. "You know...Marianne and I didn't get hitched officially until after Street was born?"

I look at him, curious. Trace says he's like this... very open about his family stuff, within his inner circle. "That so?"

"Yep. She told me I'd dicked her around for a decade, and she was going to make me wait for at least that long. Didn't happen, though. Street came out squallin' like a damn coyote, but so amazingly beautiful and sweet. A mixture of us both. Her eyes and my smile. My lungs and her coloring. There was nothing but love in that room, where he was born. I climbed in the bed behind her and put my arms around them both and we became a family right then and there. I didn't get out of that bed until she let me put a diamond on her finger—I had been carrying it around since the day after she told me she was pregnant, anyway. Three months later, she was my wife. And she will be forever."

I can't help but smile at him. It's easy to see why the man is a legend. "That's a truly beautiful story, Matt. But I don't think it's mine and Adam's. We're together, but I'm not the marrying type."

"That's cool," Matt says. "You don't have to be, to be the mothering type." He smile is so kind, as he puts his hands out toward my stomach in a gesture of adoration. "I didn't actually say, congratulations, Mama-Child. You and Adam seem like great kids. I'm sure the little one will be fucking awesome."

"Thank you," I beam. "We uhhhmmm," I'm embarrassed but for some stupid reason I want to tell him. I skim by abdomen briefly. "We call it...Babycakes, right now."

He laughs. "Much better than what we called Street."

"What was that?" Adam smiles, returning and handing Matt a Corona with lime and me some kind of thick purpley juice. I sip and taste blueberry, citrus...and avocado, I think? It's actually pretty good, and that's surprising since nothing is good except a bacon cheeseburger right now.

Matt pokes the lime down in the beer and takes a hasty sip before it overflows. "Fuck, I miss day drinking," he groans as he rubs a hand over his styled gray hair and closes his eyes in bliss. "Marianne stays on my ass about it...high blood pressure you know..." he takes another sip and then he says. "Noyoko."

"No what?" Adam says. His attention is only half on Matt. His eyes are roving every part of me as he gently caresses my back. I see his acute eyes scouring my face, my shoulders, my chest, my hands, and finally my throat. All the places I could carry tension. Yes, Adam, I'm on the edge. We both know it. But I'm a little bit better, for you being aware of it. I don't feel alone in my panic.

"No-Yo-Ko," Matt repeats slowly. "As in Yoko Ono, you know? As in...this kid ain't No Yoko—this kid ain't breaking up the band. It's what we called Street, before he was born. Actually, it's what we called every Skid Marcs band member's first kid before they were born."

I try to focus on what Matt is saying. "Sounds like there's a story there."

"Funny you should ask," Matt grins and gestures to the couch. He pushes aside the candles and stuff on the small table and sits down in front of us. I sit close to Adam but dreading him putting his arm around me. I don't think I can bear the pressure on the back of my neck. He automatically moves to stretch his arm across the back of the couch but I must tense up or something because he casts me a swift look, and then removes his arm, resting it instead atop my crossed legs.

"So the story starts with the album Skid Marcs cut back in '83."

"'83?" Adam scratches his beard. " I thought Road Hazard was your first album...recorded in '86."

"Yeah, Road Hazard was '86, but the first one got shelved. We've reworked some of the material on other albums so that it's not really recognizable over the years, but that first one will never be released as it was recorded. We lost the rights, but eventually we tied our old label hand's with litigation. So there are Skid Marcs songs that will be in the vault forever."

"What happened?" I ask, truly curious now. This is not public information.

"Well, the short story is...Jax knocked up his high school sweetheart and it killed our first record," he grins. "But that baby was Noyoko, you see? Killed the record, but not the band. It went down like this:

"We'd gotten signed to a small-time label with a one album deal. We were young...as young as you guys were when Soundcrush got its deal. But we were good—obviously," he grinned, "and they had invested heavily in the production and the pre-marketing. We were committed to do a year-long world tour as an opening act for Blood Eagle. But this was the old days...not these seven-figure signing bonuses you kids get today. And back then we made our money from the album sales and the promoters took the money from the tour. So we'd have to wait for the album success to make bank.

"We weren't set to make shit from the tour, and we didn't have any perks either. We had to roadie ourselves, even put together our own touring outfit—a couple of old vans and a truck with a trailer we bought off Dominic's uncle. Jax called a meeting one night about three weeks before we were set to go. Came in real nervous, but he got straight to the point:he'd just found out he was going to be a father. His girl, Amy was having a baby in six months. He told us straight up, he couldn't go on a year long tour. He said he could maybe do the first six months, although he knew what he should be doing was getting a day-job. But he wasn't leaving Amy once the baby came, nineteen and alone, living with her parents and a newborn while he partied on the road.

"I went immediately into survival mode—only thinking about how to keep the whole alive. How were we going to see Skid Marcs through, you know? So I start throwing out ideas. Maybe replace Jax temporarily, for the second half of the tour. Maybe he forks over part of his contract to pay for the replacement guitarist? Pretty soon we are mouthing off and the shit is really hitting the fan. Jax says something smart and then Artie says maybe we replace Jax permanently since we aren't his priority anyway. You all know Jax is our Trace—our lead guitarist. Skid Marcs wouldn't be what it is without him. I know it now, I knew it then.

"Jax and Artie got up in each other's faces and that's when I had a moment. It was like I could see us all from above...my three best friends and I descending into snarling jackals. All snapping at each other over the corpse of our band that hadn't quite figured out it was dead yet.

"I stood up with my beer and said the one thing nobody had said yet. I said. Jax, you're going to be a fucking father, man. What the fuck are we arguing about when we should be toasting? And everybody saw it was true. We all toasted to Jax's kid on the way, and everybody got quiet for a minute. So then I said, I'm sorry, man. I was guilty of asking the wrong questions. Trying to make the wrong decisions. The only question we need to ask tonight is...Is this band a family, or a business? We answer that question, and then we know which way to go, here.

So everybody finished their beers in silence, and then Dominic slammed his bottle down on the table and said, "Family." I nodded and said, "Family." Artie chugged his beer, burped and said. "Fuck yeah, of course. This kid ain't no Yoko—it ain't breakin up this band. So Jax's daughter Everleigh became Noyoko, and we told the label we could only do a six month tour. We stood firm, even when they threatened to shelve our album. They did it, too. It never got released, and then Skid Marcs got released from the label six months later. We were flat busted.

"We went back to playing local gigs, but we got better than we had been. We got fucking tight, because we were doing it for the love of each other. Jax and Dom got day jobs but we kept plugging away on our sound. That next year, we got an offer to play some gigs in Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break. This was back in the MTV spring break hey-day, you know. There was a shit-ton of industry and A&R guys down there. We got picked up again, and the second album we cut, was ten times better than the first. If we'd come out with that first cut, we probably would have been labeled as mediocre and buried in three years. But Road Hazard went multi-platinum and won four Grammy's. And we did it on our terms."

"And I didn't see it then quite like I see it now. Back then, I just thought fuck it, let's be loyal. It's Jax's turn now, it will be Dom's or Artie's or mine down the line. Now, I realize it's about more than just loyalty. We've been through so much shit, the four of us. Twelve kids, affairs, two divorces, suicide attempt, rehabs, a cancer scare, heart attack, you name it, we've fucking suffered through it."

"Hardly any of that shit was my personal stuff, but it was all mine, because it was Skid Marcs. This is the thing you got to understand: Family ain't fair. It's never about taking even turns. Some family members will bleed the band a whole helluva a lot more than others. Maybe Madam is the big bleeder in Soundcrush because you are a package deal, now. Madam will always be bleeding at the same time, when it comes to each other and your kid, you know? But it's all right. Because you and your kid will bring something that wasn't there before. A conviction, a strength that the band didn't have before it was tested

"But that first test will have to come soon. If you cancel that European tour, it ain't going down smooth. You're probably going to get sued. You're going to cost your family a whole lot of money, and put a shit-ton of pressure on that third album you will need to cut to redeem yourselves. And I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, cause you've been in this business long enough now to know how it works."

He looks at me kindly, "And none of that is your fault, MacKenna. A baby, a family, is worth all that bullshit. Absolutely no question...it's worth it. I've got six kids. If Skids Marcs wasn't a family, but a business, I would have and could have easily walked away long ago, because Marianne and those kids are my joy. So don't you feel a damn bit guilty for choosing this," he gestures at mine and Adam's linked hands, snuggled against my lap where Babycakes is busy growing.

"Because I would, a thousand times over. But the thing I'm trying to tell you...it probably doesn't have to be a choice. I get why it's difficult to tell Trace about your baby on the way. He has a good head for business and a hard edge, and it's his band. He's going to feel like it's on him to come up with the answers to this challenge. That's hard for you to take, because you don't want to feel like your personal stuff is burdening your bandmates.

"But if you take an old rocker's advice: when you sit down at the table to tell Soundcrush about Babycakes...it should only go down one way. You and Adam should stand together. And Adam needs to be the one to stand up and ask the only question that matters."

"And that question is: is Soundcrush a family, or a business?"

"I'm banking that if you put it to Trace like that, there's not even going to be debate about the answer."

He twirls the empty bottle, and the lime in the bottom makes a hollow pinging noise against the side. He sits the bottle on the table and something in the way he does that has Adam rising, and me with him.

Matt looks twenty years younger when he grins that devilish del Marco grin I know so well. "It goes without saying, you have no fear from me. I won't say a word about seeing you here to Trace. I figure, what happens in this..." he trails off as he gestures around at the velvet curtains and dimly lit space, "what happens in this bizarrely Vegas-like setting stays in Vegas, you know?"

He claps hands and backs with Adam, and then he hugs me tight. "Take care of yourself and Babycakes, MacKenna. You're fierce as any rock star I ever met, but you let Heartley help you take care of business right now, ok? That's a decent man's job--to protect his woman and child. Stick together and so will Soundcrush."

And then he strolls off, and like magic, one of those Stepford Wife VIP liasons magically appears to escort him to the kids' doctor's appointment. We just stare after him, sort of dumbstruck and sad. It's like a cloud rolling over sunshine, being removed from the presence of Matt del Marco.

"Adam," I say slowly, rubbing his calloused fingers. "Is it weird that I'm in love with you, but that I'm crushing a little bit on Matt del Marco?"

Adam leans in close to my ear, his beard tickling me. "You want to hear weird, Shortcake? I think I'm crushing on him, too."

My peal of laughter is cut short by Callie coming to start our tour.

Matt's advice was well and good, but even the calm he lent me doesn't stop what happens next.

I should have warned Adam about my fears. Maybe I would have, if we hadn't been estranged all week. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe I kept my distance from him all week, because I dreaded to tell him about my nightmares...my memories of the first night after my crush injuries, terrified in the ER, struggling for each breath as the tissue in my damaged throat swelled nearly shut.

I make it through the exam room tour okay. But the minute we walk into the hall where the birthing suites are, it hits me—the hospital smell—that strange combination of pure oxygen and antiseptic. That smell brings it all back.

I'm suddenly feeling all the things I felt back in the ER a year ago. I'm struggling to breathe, my mouth is filling with saliva because it hurts too much to swallow. I think I'm unable to speak from the crush injuries, unable to even nod or shake from the pain and the collar around my neck.On the edge of consciousness, restricted air and restricted vision...I have to get out of here.

Callie is talking, and Adam is talking and I'm...suffocating. I stop, pull away from Adam, jerking my hand from his.

Beyond the pounding in my own ears I hear Adam's tone changing. He's concerned, asking me questions I can't answer.

"I can't...do...hospitals...Adam, please..." is all I can say, backing away and protecting my throat from him as he reaches for me and my vision starts to blur.

Oh god, this is exactly what I was afraid of.

I can't be here. I can't do this.

My back hits a wall. Every time, my back hits a wall.

Well, alot happens in this chapter. What do you think of Matt's story of Skid Marcs and his advice for Mac and Adam? What about Mac's flashback that follows?  How do you think Adam will respond to what's happening?

Thanks for reading my story! Please slap that star button if you like, and please feel free to hit me with comments/questions!