His expression turned stricken. “I was kidding. Not wanting to share your fries is not a character flaw.” He paused. “You know what a rider is?”
“Yeah. LikeI demand M&M’s in my dressing room, but the green ones only?”
He chuckled. “Exactly. Concrete Temple had a lot of lean years as a band. We won a Best New Artist Grammy ten years ago, but we’d been together for seven by that point. We did a lot of tours where my practice being hungry came in handy. But it felt different from childhood. It was part of a trying-to-make-it sort of hustle.”
“It was part of a life you chose,” I said. “It was in service to something, rather than this thing that was happeningtoyou that felt like it was never going to end.”
“Exactly. And eventually things started taking off, and we started booking bigger venues. We upgraded to a tour bus, and later we started flying around. The funny thing is that as you’re making more money and you can afford to buy what you need, the venues start to come with all this free stuff. You can literally order whatever you want, like they’re your God damn butlers. The bigger we got, the more outlandish the guys got with their riders. By the time we were in arenas, their demands were, to my mind, insane.”
“Like what? Sushi served off the body of a model?” I thought back to that date with Scott. He’d told me he was “getting really into Buddhism” and accused the others of having crappy taste. He’d made it sound like he was subsisting on organic pomegranates and tempeh made by monks.
Teddy chuckled again. I was pleased with my ability to make him laugh. “Not quite, but all the stereotypical stuffyou’d imagine. Tons of junk food, but also steaks, top-shelf liquor. Our lead guitarist always wanted a whole cheesecake with cherry topping. But then they’dalsoask for all this healthy stuff they were never actually going to eat. Our lead singer would ask for fixings to make smoothies—he had this whole list of kale and mangoes and shit—and a Vitamix blender to make them in. Had to be a Vitamix. No other brand would do. But then he almost never made the smoothies.”
What a shocker, given what I knew of Scott Collier. “I imagine the idea of a rider is a little wild if you grew up like we did.”
Like we did.I’d phrased that as if there were a kind of solidarity between us, between this rock star and me. But the weird thing was,somethingwas stretching out between us, here in this quiet, cool water, and it felt an awful lot like solidarity.
“Exactly,” he said. “There was so much waste. Of the healthy stuff, but also of other stuff. They wouldn’t be in the mood, or they’d say they weren’t hungry. Regardless, it would have been impossible for anyone to eat everything they ordered. It used to drive me completely batshit.”
He was talking fast, his arms paddling faster. I could sense his irritation rising. “What did you order?”
“You’re going to laugh at me, but usually a Caesar salad with chicken and a small amount of sushi—on a plate, not a model.”
“Not very rock star–like,” I said, and look at me,teasingTeddy Knight.
“I wanted to make sure I’d eat everything I ordered, and honestly, I never wanted to eat that much before a show. I’d eat the sushi, which was a good infusion of protein and carbs. Then I’d eat the salad afterwards. I did go through a phase where I asked for a chocolate croissant, but I had to nip that in the bud when I realized I’d gained ten pounds in six months and theonly thing that had changed was those croissants. You don’t get a lot of exercise on tour. I used to swim laps when we were in hotels with pools, but that was pretty much it.”
“I always thought performing was very physically taxing.”
“Maybe if you’re Taylor Swift. Or, speaking of Minnesota, Prince—that dude was amazing live. But when you’re the grumpy bassist in a band like Concrete Temple, not so much. I mean, it was a lot of standing, but there was also a lot of time on buses and planes.”
The thought of Teddy Knight watching his weight was mind-blowing. But so was the idea of him having had a hungry childhood.
Not to mention the fact that we were treading water in a lake talking about all of it.
It started to feel like too much. An unsettling, heavy feeling rose through me, and my legs were having to work harder to keep me afloat.
“You OK, there, Miller?”
My discombobulation was showing. “Yeah, yeah.”
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I guess because you haven’t called the tabloids yet.”
I hadn’t, but I had continued to creep his ex-girlfriend, lately because I wanted a look at her apartment that was really his. She’d had an overnight oats phase, and Teddy had a really nice kitchen. But now that I knew more about him, I felt kind of… icky for ogling his kitchen? I didn’t even know. I just felt weird. I guess it was going to take a while to adjust to the fact that Teddy Knight was actually, maybe, at least somewhat, a decent person. Celebrities! Theyarejust like us!
“Haven’t called the tabloids,” I said. “In fact, I’m going to put my phone away.”
For real this time. I would call Rory, Justin, my Realtor, and my lawyer and tell them to call the camp office if anything came up, and then I would power that sucker down.
“That’s why you bought an alarm clock at Target, right?”
“Yep, but I’ve faltered a bit and have yet to fully cut the cord.”
“Have you backslid on your reset? Are you back on the dating apps?”
“No.”I’m just on your ex-girlfriend’s apps.“But what’s the point of being here if I’m on my phone all the time? You know how sometimes you look up and you realize you’ve been on it for two hours and you didn’t even feel the time passing?” He was looking at me blankly. “You don’t, do you?”
“I mostly use my phone to talk to my sister,” he said. “Some of the other guys in the band were attached to theirs like it was an umbilical cord. I don’t mean this to sound all judgmental. I certainly have my vices. But I don’t think cell phones were good for them. They’re probably not good foranyone. I have this theory that you should only use cell phones as proxies for things that existedbeforecell phones—so, like, use it as an actual phone, use it as a map, read a book on it. But don’t use it for things that canonlybe done with a cell phone, you know? By which I mean, don’t do social media. It messes with your brain. Changes your personality, and not in a good way.”
