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I go upstairs and open the door to our rooms. The sound is like getting punched in the chest. I hold up my hands in a T time-out signal. She smiles at me like a demented eight-year-old.
“It sounds great up here, doesn’t it?” she says.
“It’s beautiful. Angel choirs and demon songs. Now please go and play in the practice room. If I hear much more of this gorgeousness it will spoil me for all other music forever.”
She screws up her mouth into a half sneer.
“You’re weak, old man. And you’re dripping all over the floor.”
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” I say.
She unplugs her guitar and amp. Picks up both.
“You’re off the guest list for our first show.”
“Then it won’t be the first show I’ve crashed. I know all the back exits and kitchen doors on the Strip.”
She comes over and stands on her toes.
“Kiss me and I won’t hate you forever for being such a noise wimp.”
I lean down and we kiss. She head-butts me lightly when we stop.
“Nope. I still hate you. You’ll have to make it up to me later.”
“How?”
“Be sure to lock the door tonight. We’re going to play the Cowboy and the Duchess.”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“You will,” she says. “And I make no promises that you’ll be the cowboy.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
I get out of my wet clothes and leave them to dry in the bathtub. Pull on some dry jeans and a moth-eaten Max Overdrive T-shirt and go downstairs.
“Thank you,” says Kasabian.
“If I’m the Duchess later, you’re going to owe me.”
“What?”
“Nothing. What’s that you’ve got?”
He holds up a disc and wiggles it.
“Your witch stopped by with a new movie. The full eight-hour version of von Stroheim’s Greed. Before us, only twelve people ever saw the uncut film. We can be the thirteenth and fourteenth.”
“I like a lot of odd stuff, but even I think eight hours of Teutonic existential grimness sounds awful.”
Kasabian shakes his head.
“Pussy.”
“Everyone is calling me names tonight.”
Kasabian sets down the disc and puts a copy of Hitchcock’s lost flick, The Mountain Eagle, back on the shelf.
