High

Mike Barry

“I don’t want to die.”

I looked up at this announcement, spoken so incredulously by a voice I was not used to hearing incredulity from. Jake stood in the doorway, shirtless, in only a pair of worn blue jeans. Women (and some men) have always described Jake as attractive; of the two of us, he’s the one that’s always gotten the attention. He‘s got the deep green eyes, the dark, messy hair, and the San Francisco tan. Most people think he’s vain because of how he walks around half-naked all the time, but Jake doesn’t really realize how good looking he is (if he did, he would’ve become a model instead of a musician. It’s a much safer career.) For him, it’s just about being comfortable.

At that moment, though, he looked anything but comfortable. He looked dazed, beads of water clung to his skin, and his hair hung limply, down past his shoulders, soaked like the rest of him. He clutched a crumpled piece of notebook paper in his right hand, and his eyes were bloodshot. I figured he’d just taken a hit or done a line, so I started to shrug it off, but then I noticed two things. One, water still leaked from his eyes. They were bloodshot because he’d been crying. And two, he was smiling wider than I’d seen him smile in years.

“Why are you wet?” I asked him, laying my guitar to the side. She’s a dark blue Gibson, and she’s the validation for my existence. Growing up around Jake, I got pretty well acquainted with his shadow, but playing that guitar was the one thing I could do better than him. She’s literally my life. Jake’s got a decent voice, but he’s the front man because he’s charming and the crowd loves him. Me? I’m just good at guitar.

He waved a hand dismissively. “I jumped in the shower. Needed to wake up.”

I stared at him blankly. Was he high? He was acting like it, but I’d never known Jake to cry while stoned. “What’s going on, man?”

“I don’t want to die,” he said again, shaking his head in wonderment. He started to pace back and forth across the floor of our shared hotel room. “I was standing in the shower, and I realized that I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die. I don’t WANT to die. I don’t want to die!”

“Yeah, Jake, I heard you the first time, but…” I chuckled lightly under my breath. I couldn’t help it. This was just absurd. “What’s going on, man?”

Jake took a deep breath, and visibly forced himself to calm down. “I just talked to Emily.”

I winced. It was a natural reflex that was triggered by that statement. Technically, Emily was Jake’s fiancée back home, though you wouldn’t know it from the number of women he slept with while we were on the road. They met back in high school, when everything was simple, back before the drugs or the stardom. It was just me and Jake and dreams of one day being the next Nirvana. A lot of things started back in high school, actually. Friendships, relationships, even the band. I guess in most ways, we never really left. We never grew up, and lately, Jake and Emily’s conversations tended to quickly devolve into shouting matches. If they’d been talking, nothing good could come of—

“I’m gonna be a father!”

I fell off the amp I’d been sitting on. Literally. Jake just laughed and hauled me back to my feet. “Did I hear you right?” I asked, awestruck.

He laughed again, louder than I think I’d ever heard him laugh before. “All my life, man, I’ve just been keeping going for the sake of keeping going, y’know? Get drunk, get high, get laid, get rich. That’s all I’ve cared about, that’s all that’s mattered to me. But I’m going to be a father! I created life! Ha!” He pulled me into a tight hug, and raised the crumpled piece of notebook paper triumphantly.

I raised an eyebrow. “And that would be?”

“This,” Jake said, holding it to his breast reverently like a priest holds his bible. “Is the first track of our new album, and I wrote it for my daughter.”

“Wow, Mike, that’s quite a story.”

“Isn’t it? All our lives, Jake never cared about anything, but that was the turning point. He was a different person after that.”

“For those of you just tuning in, we’re talking to Mike Barry, lead guitarist of Never Mind. He’s here talking about the greatest tragedy to hit the music scene since the Day the Music Died, the recent death of Jake Reed, the lead singer of that same band, who died of an accidental cocaine overdose just last month. Mike just shared a story with us from around the time of the band’s first album. You and Jake knew each other for a very long time, didn’t you Mike?”

“That’s right, Tom. We’ve been best friends since middle school, and we were inseparable. Then we got to high school, and, well, that’s when things really started going downhill for Jake.”

“Really? Can you tell us about that?”

“Well, as you all probably noticed, Jake was always extremely cool, unlike yours truly, who plays D&D every weekend. When Jake got invited to the cool kids’ parties, they made a point to leave me out, and because I wasn’t there to play shoulder angel, Jake tried a bunch of things for the first time.”

“Yikes.”

“You have no idea, Tom.”

Travis Parker

“I wish I was dead.”

I sighed and checked my watch. We’d been in this bathroom for two hours now. “I bet you do,” I muttered darkly.

Jake mumbled something indistinct and whiny and morose under his breath (probably the same statement) and heaved over the toilet again, but nothing came out. Mike kneeled behind him, holding his hair in one hand and rubbing his back with the other. “I don’t think you’ve got anything left to hurl, buddy,” he said. Mike’s a good guy, and one of the few people I can tolerate for any amount of time. And don’t get me wrong, I like Jake, too, but if I’d had to put up with him for as long as Mike has I’d have ditched him a long time ago.

“So…how long is this going to take?”I asked.

Mike shot me a glare. I raised my hands in an admonition of my innocence. “Hey, don’t look at me, I’m not the one who let him get smashed and snort three lines.”

“I already told you, I wasn’t invited to this party, and Jake was. What was I supposed to do? Tell him he couldn’t go?” Jake heaved yet again, and Mike went back to rubbing his back soothingly.

“Look, all I know is that Emily said she wouldn’t get here until midnight, and its fifteen minutes until. If she gets here and sees him like this, someone’s going to die, and it is NOT going to be me.”

Mike had apparently stopped listening to me by this point, and Jake had probably never started. He seemed pretty dead to the world. So I stood in that bathroom, smacking a half-empty pack of Lucky Strikes into my palm repeatedly. I desperately wanted a cigarette, but it was common party etiquette not to light up in the bathroom of the host. Not that that stopped people from sucking on their bongs and joints in the living room. Blech. Give me good, wholesome nicotine any day. I didn’t even want to be here. This whole “everyone-get-drunk-and-act-retarded” thing really wasn’t my kind of scene, but Jake’s a friend and when Mike called me up and told me he needed help, I got over there as fast as I could. Which wasn’t very fast. That probably should’ve told me I needed to quit smoking.

“This is my fault,” Mike said quietly, his back to me.

“How do you figure?”I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

“I should’ve been watching him better.”

“Why should you have to watch him period?” I asked. “Jake’s a big boy; he can take care of himself.”

“Because he’s going to get himself into trouble with all this stuff,” he gestured vaguely at the toilet and Jake’s panting body.

“Look, if he cared that much, he wouldn’t do it,” I pointed out. High school would’ve been a much easier place is everyone had just listened to me.

“I know,” Mike looked over his shoulder at me then, his eyes pleading. “He’ll just keep doing this, over and over and over again until it’s too late to even think about stopping. This is going to kill him some day, and I know he doesn’t care. At all. That’s why we have to care for him.”

I snorted derisively. “Yeah, okay, good luck with that.”

“I need your help, Travis. I can’t be here to watch him when he’s at these parties. They always invite you—“

“For some reason,” I muttered under my breath. One cigarette. Half a cigarette. I would settle for half.

Mike grinned. “It’s because they think you’re dark and mysterious. You’re like the one goth kid who everyone thinks is cool.”

“Ugh. What part of antisocial don’t they get?” I remarked with disgust.

Goth. What the hell? I liked black, and I liked books, and I didn’t like dealing with people. Apparently, all those kids with the ankhs and the fishnets and the heavy metal were doing it wrong.

“Are you going to help me or not?” Mike demanded.

I weighed my options. Jake was one of the few people I counted as a friend. He was like that. He transcended cliques. But was this really my job? My responsibility? Did I want it to be? I didn’t really owe either of them anything.

I sighed in defeat. “If I say yes, can I go smoke?”

“So I started going to parties with Jake. I started using my razor sharp wit and scathing humor to deter him from the coke and the alcohol, and it worked. For a little while. Until I started doing it myself.”

“Wow. For those of you just starting to listen, we’ve got Travis Parker in the studio with us today. Travis, a well-known former music journalist for Rolling Stone—“

“Oh stop, Tom, you’re making me blush.”

“And, more recently, the bestselling author of his autobiography: Cigarettes, Black Clothing, and a Bad Attitude: Travis Parkers’ Guide to Success. Now, Travis, you were telling
us about your high school years; one of the times, according to your book, that defined the rest of your life the most.”

“That’s right, mainly because of my experiences with Jake Reed, the former lead singer of Never Mind. Like I said before, Jake was one of the only friends I ever had, and he stayed that way up until the time of his death.”

“You toured with Never Mind for Rolling Stone for a little while, didn’t you? Were you with them when he died?”

“Sadly I wasn’t. I was only with them for one tour, writing my review for the man. I had left them by the time Jake died, to return to my glamorous little cubicle to slave over a machine I wanted nothing more than to bash in with an Oxford English Dictionary. But Jake and I still kept in touch, and I gave the band a positively glowing review, which they’d absolutely earned.”

“I remember reading that article, actually. So you knew Mike Barry in high school too?”

“A little bit but we weren’t best friends or anything. The only thing we really had in common was Jake. But even now, five years later, we still get together every couple of months and talk about him. He and I and Emily Reed, Jake’s wife, even started a charity together .”

“The Shannon Blue Reed Foundation for Recovery, right?”

“That’s the one. In fact, half the proceeds from my book will be going into that foundation, so I’d encourage anyone and everyone out there to pick up a copy. The world’s got too few real rock stars left to be losing them to drugs.”

“One last question before you go, Travis, and this one’s purely for my own curiosity. Wasn’t Shannon Blue the name of the last album Never Mind ever put out?”

“That’s right. It was Mike’s idea to name the album that. It’s the name of Jake’s daughter, and I honestly couldn’t think of a better way to tribute Jake Reed than to name his last work of art after his greatest. Thanks for having me on the show, Tom.”

“It was our pleasure, Travis.”

Emily Reed

“Why do you want to die?”

“Huh?” was his intelligent response. I guess I couldn’t really blame him. For this question, I mean. It had sort of come of out nowhere. Well, I couldn’t blame him for this, at least.

“Why do you want to die?” I repeated, slower, sure to enunciate every word carefully. It didn’t matter that I was insulting him. He never, ever got insulted, no matter what anyone said to him. It was one of the reasons why I fell in love with him in the first place. I cradled the phone a little closer in the futile hope that it would let me hear his thoughts. I used to be able to do that. I used to be able to hear his silence and know exactly what he was thinking. It didn’t work anymore.

“Well…I dunno. Do I want to die?” Great. Now he was answering my question with another question. Classic Jake.

Wash, rinse, and repeat. How long has this cycle been running for?

“Jake, you’ve wanted to be dead since the day I met you, and I understand that. It’s the 90s, and it’s cool to be miserable. Sometimes I think you’re the one who started that trend. But you’re…you’re so fucking numb, between that fad and the drugs that I honestly don’t even know that you’re not already dead.”

“So what? What do I have to live for anymore? I don’t even know why we’re still together! Should I keep living for the next fix? The next gig? The next groupie? Because that’s all I’ve got at this point. I’m sick of this life. I’m sick of this life and there’s nothing I can do about it.” He didn’t sound angry. He just sounded numb. Neutral. Cold. He usually did, these days.

“You were in rehab,” I said.

“Yeah, until the record company blackmailed me into touring! I signed a contract; I’ve got no choice, and there’s no rehab on tour, Emily. Everywhere I look, it’s there. Everyone’s shooting up, snorting, smoking, and I’m rapidly running out of reasons not to jump on the fucking bandwagon.”

I bit my lip and shut my eyes tightly, creating a less-than-watertight dam against the sudden stream of tears. I was about to jump off a proverbial cliff, and it could go one of two ways. I could either reawaken what died in him a long time ago, or I could drive him over the edge and lose him forever. But then again, if this continued, hadn’t I already lost him?

I took a deep breath and clutched the little white plastic stick a little harder. I had kept it sitting on my nightstand for all three months since I first took it. I kept it next to the sonogram photo that showed the outline of our baby girl. “I’m pregnant.”

Silence. Then, softly, “what?”

“I was late. A month late. I guess I didn’t really believe it was possible, I mean, since it was only the once before you left again on tour but…I guess that did the trick,” I laughed a little laugh that probably sounded more than a little hysterical. I tried listening to his thoughts again. Nothing, of course. “It’s been four months, so…the doctors were able to tell me the gender at my last appointment. It’s a girl.”

“I’m going to be a father?” He sounded like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. I wasn’t used to hearing that from him. Seems like I’d found the one thing that could render him speechless.

I nodded, then I remembered he couldn’t see me. “Yeah.”

Then I felt something. It had been almost a year since the last time I’d been able to hear what he was thinking in his silence, and now it finally worked again. I heard the smile coming before it erupted into triumphant laughter. I heard him ruffling sheets of paper and moving things around, and he started talking to me, laughing and asking questions and making jokes. He talked to me as I heard him scribbling in the background, and then he sang the song he’d just written for our daughter out loud. I couldn’t stop the tears. I didn’t even try, to be perfectly honest. Something just told me everything was going to be okay.

Everything gets better from here.

“Shows what I know though, I guess. Oh, god, listen to me. I’m sorry. I’m sure no one wants to listen to me sound bitter and complain.”

“On the contrary, Emily, they tune in every day just to listen to me do the same thing. For all you latecomers, we’ve got Emily Reed, professor of Music History at Seattle Pacific University in the studio today, talking to us about her late husband’s untimely death. Emily, it’s been about six years since Jake’s relapse and subsequent death, hasn’t it?”

“To the day, as a matter of fact. Coincidence, Tom?”

“What can I say? I’m a criminal mastermind trapped in the body of a radio personality. So, here’s another question, would you say that Jake’s widely missed by the music industry?”

“That’s an interesting question. Never Mind wasn’t on the scene for a terribly long time, you know, and they were never as good as, say, The Who, or as influential as The Clash, but I think that most of the music industry does at least remember Jake. He was the sort of man you couldn’t help but love, no matter how much you wanted to hate him. People just had this natural reaction to him. I can remember the Madison Square Garden show where Never Mind opened for Nirvana, and as Jake’s walking offstage he happens to walk past Kurt Cobain, and he just reaches out and gives him a high-five! Just as cool as can be, like it’s no big deal at all, and then he comes over to me, and I say “you know that was Kurt Cobain, right?” and he just smiles and says “really?” and shrugs. That’s a perfect example. Influential? Maybe not. Remembered? I don’t think there’s any question.”

“I’ve heard similar stories before. I don’t know how long you’ve been listening to the show Emily, but we’ve had both Mike Barry and Travis Parker on in the past.”

“Oh, I made sure to listen. Travis kept reminding me; he likes showing off. I remember one story he told in particular, of that night at the party in high school. By the time I got there they’d somehow managed to drag Jake downstairs and set him on the couch between them. When I walked in, the two of them were sitting on either side of him, and Jake’s snoring away in between them. They both looked so innocent. Of course I was suspicious.”

“So the three of you still keep in pretty close contact?”

“Oh yeah, Tom, absolutely. The two of them help me run the Shannon Blue Foundation for Recovery, which is the charity organization I set up after Jake’s death. It helps people struggling with addictions get help.”

“Speaking of your daughter, how is she doing these days? Never Mind’s last album with Jake on vocals was named after her, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right, Tom. It was Mike’s idea, and it was a beautiful gesture. Shannon’s doing fine, she’s every bit as pretty as her father and every bit as smart as me. Thank god.”

“Well Emily, we’re almost out of time, and I hope you won’t think that I keep harping on this topic, but…after that phone call you told us about before, was Jake really a different person? I mean, I know you’ve talked about how he was completely changed, but he did die of a coke OD, so…”

“It was a complete freak accident, Tom. There was this show in Detroit, and the crowd got violent and a riot ensued. Three people died, and seven more were hospitalized. I guess he just needed to escape for a few hours after that, but the fact is he WAS a different man. I think he saw Shannon as his second chance, a chance to be involved in a life without fucking it up. Oh. Sorry. Can I say that on the radio?”

“Which word? Bleep? Absolutely. Go on.”

“Right. He saw her as his second chance, his chance to be a better person, and he took it. This may seem random and unimportant, but it really sums up his change better than I ever could. During his last break before they went on the Shannon Blue tour, he went out and got part of a James Dean quote tattooed on his arm, so that he could always look at it if he needed to. It said: ‘This is going to be one terrific day, so you better live it up boy, because tomorrow maybe you’ll be gone.’ He was always such a kid. In a lot of ways, I don’t think he ever left high school. In his world, it was always cool to be miserable, and he was always trying to find that next high. I think that’s why Shannon made such a difference for him. I think he realized that after creating something as beautiful as our daughter, he was never going to be able to top that high.”

“Well, we’re almost out of time here now, Emily, but if you’ve got any last words for the unwashed masses, now’s the time to lay ‘em down.”

“I think the young Mr. Dean said it best, Tom. Live it up, because tomorrow you might be gone. And I guess…that’s all I’ve got.”