I squinted. “No way you can tell from here!”
She said, “Yes, I can.”
“No, you can’t.”
Ryan turned around and leaned on the railing and smiled wide. “You’re right, I can’t. I just wanted an excuse to bring you up here.”
I should’ve been more used to flirting by then, but it felt like my stomach had slipped off the rooftop. I asked, “Is that so? Why me?”
She shrugged. “Guys don’t usually like to talktome at these things. They just sort of talkatme and try to get me to dance with them until I walk away. It was nice to have a fun conversation for a change.”
It didn’t hit me then, but it really sucked that she had to deal with that. And looking back, she was a kid. I wasn’t much older—the youngest in my band, I want to set the record straight on that. But it’s a bummer what she had to go through. I thought of a couple of my other friends downstairs who were probably being douchebags to other girls like Ryan as we spoke.
“I’m sorry you’ve met so many morons,” I said. “I try not to be one.”
“You’re doing a good job of it.”
And then she tugged the front of my shirt, gently, and pulled me forward to kiss me.
Exclusivity is ... kind of a weird thing to navigate in these careers, especially when you’ve grown up with so much relationship instability like Ryan and I did. You’re constantly moving around, working with different people, seeing your team shift; it’s hard to know when to get close and when to move on. How do you date someone who lives in a different state and has a tour schedule opposite yours? It’s even weirder than long distance.
Ryan and I spent as much of the next two days—and nights, if I’m being honest—together as we could. “Neon Dreams” on theFirebirdalbum? Not to brag, but yeah, that one was about me. We did, in fact, “walk down those Las Vegas streets like anything was possible and nothing was real.”
But we both had to head out of town midweek. Socket Plug was going back to LA, and Ryan was set to play her last show in San Francisco. We very bravely and, um, passionately said goodbye and promised to meet up with each other the next time we overlapped.
If I’d known back then what would happen in San Fran, I would have gone with her. I wish I had.
Skip
It’s unfortunate that you can’t really see the loopholes in the security system until something like this happens. Things like OSHA, you know, are written in blood—it takes mistakes to understand what we could be doing better.
And really, it was a sign that Ryan was starting to get so big that she needed a more robust security detail. But I still felt goddamn guilty that it had to happen at all.
Jasmine
Simon McCarthy was some creep in his thirties who’d been attending every single one of Ryan’s shows—we saw that from the ticket records afterward. Like, literally following her on every stop of the Southwest tour; the guy must have been shelling out for planes and cabs left and right. Ugh.
But the San Francisco show was the first time he managed to get one of those VIP june-bug tickets. I don’t know why it didn’t raise eyebrows when a man of that age got in the backstage line all alone. I mean, Ryan welcomed everyone, but that should have put the bouncers on alert.
Skip
McCarthy struck up a conversation with some other girl waiting to get backstage and walked in with her. Security thought they were together, so I guess they stopped keeping an eye on him? I don’t know. We ended our contract with that company after the incident, I’ll tell you that much.
Anyway. He acted normal for the first half hour or so, and then ... well, he slipped something in Ryan’s Diet Coke. The fucker must’ve had a lot of practice. You could hardly even catch it in the security footage afterward.
She sat down to watch the other fans playGuitar Hero, and after a while you see her sort of start to slump, start to rub her forehead. That’s when McCarthy steps in, starts asking Ryan if she’s feeling okay, if she needs anything. Yeah, she needs you to get the fuck away from her.
Sorry. It gets me riled up even now.
I have no clue what his plan was. This dude tries to lead her out the back exit like no one’s going to stop him, says Ryan needs some fresh air, when securityfinallygets off their asses and asks where the hell he thinks he’s going.
I mean, that was that—you could tell by one look that Ryan was pretty out of it. Security restrained him, the cops were called, Ryan was rushed to the hospital, the whole ordeal. Thank god it was just a small dose of GHB. She recovered quickly—I’ve never been more grateful.
Mari
McCarthy was a complete and utter idiot. But Ryan was extremely lucky that, one, he was caught on camera, and two, the drug was still in her system when they tested her at the hospital. Otherwise there might not have been enough to charge him. He didn’t even get the second felony charge for attempted sexual assault because they couldn’t “prove intent.”
Bullshit.
