“No, I’m not okay. I’m not even close to okay.”
When Bobby first moved from Sacramento to LA, he lived in Mar Vista and shared a one-room apartment with a voracious tribe of roaches. He drove a clapped-out Lincoln Continental and lived on ramen like a frat boy. Ramen and eggs. Ramen and Spam. Ramen and fried baloney. Once he was so broke he ate Ramen and cat food. Before he started Bobby Grimes Music and Entertainment, he held four different titles in eleven different companies and had taken more than his share of hard knocks. Over the years he’d been cheated, evicted, thrown out, beat up, laughed at, and sued more times than he could remember. Bobby could teach classes on Chapters 7 and 11 and give tours of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Courthouse.
Cal was the game-changer. When his first two albums went platinum, other artists jumped on the BGME bandwagon and Bobby found himself playing at the big ballers’ table. He had respect, money, toys, women. He was on top of the world. But then Steve Jobs came along with his fucking iTunes that strangled the CD to death and sucked the blood out of Bobby’s revenues. And pirating. A goddamn college kid would be pissed as hell if he got his iPod stolen but had no qualms about downloading Bobby’s music for free. Overseas was a joke. The Chinese didn’t know music was something you had to pay for. Bobby had to fire staff, tighten promotional budgets, and make fewer records. Artists left for greener pastures.
Bobby’s white knight was the entertainment conglomerate Greenleaf Studios. Greenleaf wanted to acquire BGME but the key to the deal was Calvin. Big-name artists with a worldwide fan base and a proven track record were hard to come by and Greenleaf wanted Calvin to brighten up their constellation of stars. No Calvin, no deal.
Bobby’s immediate problem: Greenleaf’s due diligence would begin soon. Marty Greenleaf’s army of lawyers and accountants would descend on BGME’s Century City offices like the roaches in the Mar Vista apartment and they’d crawl over every contract, sales report, bank statement, spreadsheet, expense account, and copyright since the company’s inception. And Marty would want to meet Cal. Bobby could just imagine that conversation. Cal in his bathrobe, high on weed and pills, and holding that stupid cat while he talked about Mr. Q and the giant pit bull and putting Noelle in jail and burning up his meaningless possessions in the backyard. Marty would insist on hearing the new tracks too. All two of them, the best of which was a twenty-three-second song about the fuck am I doing on this earth. The bonfire was a metaphor, thought Bobby. Everything he’d worked for was going up in flames. The house in Brentwood, dinner at Spago or Matsuhisa, drinks at Bar Marmont, on the list at the Sayers Club and Greystone Manor. He’d seen and done things he couldn’t have imagined when he was promoting raves and club events back in Sactown. He was on the other side of the rope now, in a world all of young America could only dream about.
Bobby partied at Young Snap’s mansion in upstate New York. The place had the same square footage as a football field and you could take a piss every day for three weeks and never be in the same bathroom. Bobby estimated a family of four could survive just eating the fish in Snap’s private lake. Bobby got a backstage pass at a Layla concert and was staying in the same hotel. Aside from the usual battalion of bodyguards and makeup artists, the icon’s entourage included a laundress, a food taster, a Buddhist monk, and a Botox technician. Somebody told Bobby her Labradoodle had its own suite.
Bobby was invited to the Monaco Grand Prix by one of Cal’s sponsors. GKnight and his girlfriend Nia were there and Bobby spent the weekend on their luxury yacht, the Colossus. You didn’t board the boat, you landed on it like an island. Bobby thought if you put a few cannons on the decks and loaded up some Tomahawks you could send the Colossus to the Persian Gulf. No way he was giving all that up and he’d commit suicide before he went back to the ramen diet. If he was anything he was a survivor.
“I am not going down,” Bobby said.
“What?” Hegan said. “Who’s not going down?”
“Bobby Grimes,” Bobby said. “Bobby Grimes is not going down.”
After dropping Dodson off, Isaiah went home. He swept the driveway, watered the front lawn, and mowed the grass in the back. He let Alejandro out of the garage, the bird pecking at insects fleeing the mower blades. After, he let the bird snoop around in the house while he made some soup and ate it standing at the counter.