don’t,” Johnny said softly.
“Well, obviously,” Odessa teased, “or you wouldn’t have become a bass player.”
He ignored her. “I made my peace with it back when I was a seventeen and my best friend died. Tyler Camp. He never got a chance and he was an absolute genius,” Johnny muttered. “I’m probably the only one who still thinks about him.”
“I’m sorry,” Odessa said, tugging his hair.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t make a difference, is my point. All the time we spend worrying about death and whether anyone will remember us when we go. Being remembered doesn’t fucking matter. Being alive does. And when you’re alive, shut the fuck up and go nuts, enjoy it while you can, and quit worrying about how famous you are or should be. Because I guarantee, even dead famous people mean nothing to most people.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Clint said after a moment.
“I’m not saying I want to be a celebrity or anything,” Odessa said playfully. “That’s gross. I just wanna find meaning in everything that seems so meaningless. You know, turn no big deals into big stupid deals. Whatever. Give me kisses, you guys. Fill me with meaning.”
Odessa leaned back and kissed Johnny on his stubbly lips. He stared down at her with heavy eyes. Then she bent over and kissed Clint on his forehead. He tipped his face up, their lips met, and they began to make out. Odessa’s hand traveled down between Johnny’s knees to his crotch and started rubbing it. His arms closed around her, grabbing her breasts, playing with her while she continued to make out with Clint upside-down. A little moan escaped her lips as the spliff roach fell from her fingers to the ground.
A remote-controlled robo-cop rolled into the parking lot at that moment, whirring as its sidekick drone swept the ground with a spotlight and a motion sensor. The two approached the station wagon. Upon hearing the whirring wail of the robots, the three band mates broke apart and struggled to find normal positions. The drone’s spotlight fixed on them, shining directly into the vehicle. Johnny’s hands dropped from Odessa’s breasts. Clint sat upright. Odessa pushed her hair back away from her face, trying not to look disappointed by the interruption.
An officer’s voice crackled through the robo-cop intercom:
“You guys hear anything that sounded like breaking glass in the last few minutes?”
“No,” Clint said. “No we haven’t.”
“Well, pack it up. The back of a car is no place for an orgy.”
The robo-cop continued to video record the scene while the drone hovered above, keeping the spotlight fixed on them. Clint shifted his legs nervously and a drum stick fell out from the trunk, making its trademark drumstick sound as it hit the pavement, echoing throughout the parking lot. Then a blues band broke into song in the rehearsal space right by where they were parked.
They heard a crackling and then the controlling police officer, in a tower somewhere manipulating the robotic surveillance duo, spoke again through the speakers:
“Pack it up, I said. No loitering. And it’s always a bad idea to hook up with band mates.”
Odessa burst out laughing, surprised.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Johnny said coolly. “Good thing they’re just my cousins.”
“Not funny,” the officer barked through the robot’s intercom. “Don’t make me run blood work on you all.”
The machine beeped as a syringe emerged from a side compartment. The three band mates stared at it in shock. Then the drone began sweeping the rest of the parking lot with its spotlight and the robo-cop sped after it, the creepy laughter of the controlling officer echoing through the speakers.
Stevia Wonder::
The scent of lavender, sandalwood, and the shrunken heads of pretty surfer girls had grown so strong that it had crept under the door from the garage into the cottage and begun to take residence as a sort of unwelcome permanent house guest. Stevia didn’t know how long she could put off dealing with it before it raised the wrong eyebrows. She’d originally started her garage-made skin care line to hide the scent of the shrunken heads and it was simply no longer doing its job. She would probably just have to rent a storage space soon, but she hated keeping the heads far from view. They were her favorite things to gaze upon.
Her audience of four cats watched from their respective favorite spots on her queen-sized bed as Stevia hummed an enchanting melody she’d been working on for her solo theremin album and brushed her long black hair. Pansy, the smallest and eldest of the cats, a gray tabby with a heart-shaped marking on her chest, hopped onto her bureau to watch Stevia admire herself in the mirror.
“Yes, Pansy. I haven’t forgotten. Come with me.”
Stevia scooped up Pansy and brought her out the cottage back door and into the garage, which was crowded with soap and lotion ingredients for her beauty product line. Her collection of shrunken heads of pretty surfer girls sat on a high shelf, keeping permanent watch over operations with their twisted, beautifully-creepy little faces. Stevia had set up a chemistry bar towards the back with all of her most sacred, secret ingredients in unmarked black jars of different sizes and shapes. She placed Pansy on the fur-covered pillow on the counter and grabbed her mixing bowl. A dab of white rhino testicle, a pinch of dead sea salt, some tortoise jelly, and a dash of shaman bone powder all went in the mixture. The final touch was a smear of raw honey from the magic bees her friend Otto kept in a valley up in Ojai. Stevia had enchanted them herself and therefore had exclusive purchasing rights.
Pansy purred as Stevia blended the mixture into a small amount of paste. She retrieved two different-sized silver spoons from her drawer and filled the little sugar spoon up, holding it out for Pansy, who licked greedily at it until it was gone. Stevia scooped the remainder of the mixture out with her normal-sized spoon and ate it herself.
She rubbed Pansy’s back. “Good girl.”
Pansy had been Stevia’s cat since the day after she’d had her heart broken by the first boyfriend she’d actually loved, almost thirty-five years ago. Stevia had discovered Pansy in the alley behind her apartment building in New York City and gladly rescued the kitten in order to cheer herself up. Pansy had sat on her chest every night as Stevia cried herself to sleep, and when she woke up each morning, she’d always felt a lot better. One day she woke up cured of the heartbreak altogether and realized it had only taken a week to get over a three-year relationship. That was when Stevia decided she would keep Pansy forever, no matter how expensive or hard-to-get the extra anti-aging materials were.
Since then, Pansy had helped her get over countless more failed relationships, as well as the losses of family members and major heartbreaks in her musical career, all at record speed. If Stevia had to rate the items in her house in order of importance, Pansy would definitely be at the top, even above her sacred white theremin from Yugoslavia.
Once back inside, Stevia fixed herself dinner, a lump of sauerkraut and a small piece of wild salmon. She looked up a few spells in her spell book and cast a rejuvenating one on her tomato plant that was looking pretty peaked by her kitchen window. She threw a general disruption spell at Odessa, sensing that something fun was happening to her.
That girl bothered Stevia to no end.
Suddenly,
