Neon Nights Chapter 5
"What are you doing? That thirty-foot lion is not going to get up and move itself!” Alec Davidson, or AD as he was better known in the industry, yelled to a group of workers taking a break as the thermometer rocketed to new heights as the morning wound on.
“Sorry, AD. We were about to get on it,” one of the men said.
“I’ve got tens of thousands of people about to walk through these gates in a couple of hours, and we still have athousand things left to do. Get this shit done now.”
“We are on it, boss,” the other worker said, jumping from his seat like someone had tased him.
His staff were like children. Sometimes you had to nurture them, tell them how great they were, and how important they were to the show’s success. Then there were times you had to kick them in the ass and tell them to get moving.
Alec had been living and breathing these events for twenty years, and the crowds that came lived their entire lives around the music he promoted. The events were packed end to end with hustle, stress, and craziness that was onlymanageable with the proper combination of uppers and downers, but he had built something special here.
Millions of people worldwide had attended Neon Jungle, and another million or more would be on hand across the new twenty- city tour this summer. The music was in his blood, whether he was on stage or climbing the scaffolding to fix a speaker.
Music was the reason they came. Music was what had brought him here day after day too. The last few months had been different, though. He felt like he was drowning every day. Accounting, legal, and HR were his constantcompanions now. He spent so much time with each of them that he knew everyone’s kids’ names and birthdays, their regrets in life, and their high school love interests.
Every event had become more of the same.
There were apologies to be issued, settlements to be paid, and kickbacks that seemed to multiply around every show.Maybe he was just in a slump, but something was nagging at him, telling him it was much worse than that.
He barked orders at a dozen more staffers as he moved through the fairgrounds like a drill sergeant, displeased with everything his recruits had done so far for the day. Alec walked into a tent that looked like it could double as a small aircraft hangar and featured a honeycomb graphic printed on the canvas. The Hive was the operations nerve center ofthe festival, and when he walked inside, it looked like ten tons of chaos.
Not controlled chaos. Real chaos.
The kind where something terrible had happened, and no one knew how to fix it. Pizza crusts, chip bags, and emptybottles took over the
lion’s share of real estate in the tent, and the smell was vile to anyone who had working sinuses.
His Director of Operations, Jason Trailer, was at the far end, testing the structural integrity of one or two plastic chairs.
Alec stormed up to the man, his face red and flustered.
“What the hell are you doing right now?!” Alec shouted at him.
The mountain of a man looked up at him without moving an inch and took a swig from a two-liter bottle of green soda.
“I needed to sit down for a minute and get me something to eat.”
He gestured to the large pizza box in front of him that was missing three-quarters of the contents.
His accent was deep south. Battle of Vicksburg, south.
Alec huffed and stamped his foot, trying to burn off some of his rage.
“You understand we are about to be overrun in a few hours, the Sahara stage isn’t ready yet, and this tent looks like a war zone and smells like a landfill.”
The large man looked at his employer with an unprecedented level of disinterest.
“I got all this figured out, so let me do my thing. Terrys got the people he needs to finish over at the Sahara, and I got people fixing all the shit wrong at the main stage. I ain’t got time for housecleaning, so it’s just gonna be what it is inhere for now ‘til I
can get some maids or something to come through and pick it all up.”
Exasperated, Alec looked at him and tried to be rational. “What do you need help with then?”
Trailer eyed him up now with a look of quiet control. Alec needed him way more than he needed Alec.
“Not a damn thing, other than you steering clear of me so I can get my work done before these maniacs overrun us for the rest of the week.”
Alec was incensed at the insubordination, but the contempt between the men went both ways. It was nothing new. Hehated Trailer, but he was a necessary evil. As soon as this show was over, though, one way or another, he was done with that lowlife scum.
Alec stalked back to the main offices on-site for his team and took the back staircase up to where they were stationedfor the week. The two-story building sat on the property’s western edge and featured a steel gray facade with blacktinted windows across the entire first and second floors. The space was decorated in red and black accents, and the building made people uncomfortable almost from the minute they walked into the open atrium.
If The Hive was chaos, then the office was anarchy.
People scrambled everywhere, taking calls, screaming in the conference areas to co-workers or the heavensabove, and self-
medicating where needed to make it through the day. He managed to sneak past one of the sales teams arguing withone another about a sponsor trying to pull their funding even though the event was already underway. He snuck intothe office he had been calling home for the last few days, killed the lights, drew the blinds shut, and put his head on the desk in the darkness.
Three days to go.
Why did I make these events so long?
There was a knock at the door, and he rolled his eyes.
Another knock. Louder and more aggressive. He pushed his palms into his temples.
It had to be her.
“Open the fucking door, Alec!”
He walked back across the room and steadied himself for the onslaught. He flicked the lights back on and turned thedoor handle halfway, only to have the ten tons of crazy on the other side barrel through the rest of the way, knocking him backward into the wall.
A petite blond with lime green streaks through her hair, who looked like she came from a music video in the year 2200,looked erratically around the small room.
“What took you so long? You have a bitch in here?” “You’re high, Stephanie, chill out,” he snapped.
The woman walked up to him and slapped him hard in the face, causing his eyes to water and his rage to returnwith full force.
Without thinking, he grabbed her by the arms and threw her across the room. A loud crash rang through the space as she hit a cabinet and knocked over a lamp and vase holding a bouquet of plastic flowers.
There was another knock at the door, this one more civil, and a voice from the other side asked if everyone was alright. Alec snapped out of his rage and called back that everyone was good. He walked over to his wife and extended hishand to pick her up off the ground. She took it gingerly and walked over to a mirror on the wall to check her face and makeup.
There had been worse fights in the last fifteen years than this one. Much worse.
He knew why she stayed. He didn’t know why he did.
“You broke the heel of my boot!” Stephanie screamed, pointing to a pair of bright pink six-inch platform heels that brought her at least up to chin level with him.
They sat on opposite sides of the room and stared at each other. Finally, Stephanie broke the silence.
“I just wanted to talk, baby. I hadn’t seen you in a few days, and you know I get jealous when it’s showtime,” she said.
She pulled out her makeup and fixed the small scratch on her face with concealer. He grabbed a few ice cubes and poured himself a drink from the mini bar. He took a sip of the tequila, a reserve bottle of Patron from a case he foundin Mexico last year and savored the burn as it went down his throat.
“None for me, I guess,” she snipped. “I guess I’ll get my own, dick.”
She walked over to the bar and, eschewing a glass altogether, popped the cork on a bottle of Grey Goose and drank thewarm vodka from the long-necked bottle. It seemed to improve her mood, and Alec thought for a split second that the train might keep from totally coming off the tracks.
Maybe it helped balance out all the other substances coursing through her system? She sat down, still holding the bottle, and looked at him.
“You have a problem, dear,” she said with an evil grin growing across her face.
“I’ve got a thousand problems today besides you. What’s another one going to hurt?” He winked at her and took another sip.
She reached into her slim pink purse that fit tight across her chest and pulled out her phone. Her fingers flew over the screen, and an instant later, he heard a ding on his desk. He looked down at his screen, and his eyes widened.
She finished the last pull of the bottle and threw it on the ground, blowing him a kiss as she turned to walk out the door.
“Checkmate, lover.”
Alec sat for a long time before there was another knock on the door.
The bottle of tequila was half of what it had been not long ago, and he was starting to feel a bit better. It didn’t solvethe 1,001 problems
in front of him, but it helped. He would pay for it later, but it would have to suffice for now.
Was it time to pack it up and move to Europe for good? Start over in their scene.
New name, new identity. Another knock. Please, not that crazy bitch again.
“Come in,” he said, half expecting something to get hurled at him.
Mercifully, it was his assistant, Rebecca, who looked only somewhat surprised when she walked in the door and saw the damage. The tequila had clouded his vision, but he was at least 90 percent sure it was her.
“You look rough, boss.”
He pointed at her and then at a glass on the bar. She shook her head.
“No, thank you. You know you only have thirty minutes until the press room opens, right?”
“Shit! I totally forgot about it. Can we postpone?” She rolled her eyes.
“Umm … no. We can’t just ask fifty reporters to come back another day.”
“Can you handle it?” “No,” she replied. “No … Just like that?”
“Yes, just like that. There are things that I can’t answer for. Like … did you know that multiple kids ended up in theICU last night from some pills they took here, and one is on life support?”
Alec rubbed at his eyes hard and put his head on the edge of the desk, exasperated that the tequila was no longer able to fend off the barbarians at the gate.
“Which reporters are here?” he asked. She raised an eyebrow.
“Do you really want to know?” “Him?” Alec asked.
“Yes.”
“You can tell him I won’t even acknowledge him, so he doesn’t have to worry about raising his hand. He might as wellleave now and save himself the trouble.”
She changed her mind, grabbed a glass, and took a shot of the Patron.
“Good for you,” he said as he struggled to lift his head off the desk.
He knew she was ready for something better … someone better. Money had stopped being a carrot to chase ages ago,and now it was nothing more than a misguided sense of loyalty that kept her here.
“Okay. I’ll handle the press conference, but you’ve gotta sober up. The day is about to get very crazy, and you need to be on point.”
He sat up as straight as he could in his chair, dusted his shirt off, and saluted her. Then he tried to focus on the real Rebecca out of the five he saw in front of him.
“What would I do without you?” he said as he picked up a Volcano energy drink from a case beside his desk. He had created the brand and was proud of it even if the drink tasted like mouthwash.
“Well ... I need to talk to you about that, too,” she said.
When things went bad, they went really bad. Fuck all of them.
They had no problem spending his money and living the high life when he was on top. Now suddenly he was everyone’s enemy?
His introspection was cut short by a high-pitched, whiny voice that grated against every fiber of his being.
“Alec! Alec! David Smith, Neon Nights. Can we talk?”
The fog lifted, and he whipped around to see a small, round man with a thin mustache and bleached blond hair sogelled it looked like it might never come unstuck. David Smith was being chased by a beanpole of a kid with a camera mounted to expensive-looking housing. The cameraman couldn’t have been more than nineteen and wore a t-shirt that said ‘NIPS, NITROUS, AND NEON’; black skinny jeans that looked like they might not have legs in them, and an Oakland A’s cap worn slightly off center that Alec was confident had never seen a baseball field.
“No comment.”
“C’mon, AD, I didn’t ask a question yet.” “Don’t call me AD!”
David smiled at his cameraman, pleased with the gold he was getting right now.
“Lots of things going on here, Alec. I keep hearing rumors.”
As Alec approached the front gate, he called out to Jimmy, his longtime head of security, who stood as attentive as a cobra at the entrance.
“Your ass is off this property in about ten seconds!” Alec shouted back at the pair.
The shorter man struggled to keep up and could only spare enough oxygen for a few words.
“You can’t hide from it this time, Alec.”
“Jimmy, get these two guys off this property now!” Alec yelled.
Jimmy had been with Alec since his days touring when his primary role was to carry the coke in on a serving tray like Scarface. He whipped his head at his boss’s voice and in seconds closed on him and the two men who trailedhim. The eyes of the men behind Alec were so wide they looked like cartoon characters.
Alec took up a position next to Jimmy and whispered something to him.
Jimmy started to advance on the two smaller men, the same way a cheetah sizes up a slower and dumber animal, an evil grin spread across his block-like chin.
The men changed direction and headed toward the exit. The cameraman held it together surprisingly well and continued to film the entire time.
“We have the right to be here, Alec. This community deserves to see what really goes on here!” David yelled.
Jimmy continued his advance, and the two men broke out into a sprint across the parking lot.
