“Yeah!” someone yells.
I open the door into a small cluttered room with a strip of fluorescent light beaming from above and some fat guy with long thinning hair sitting at a desk covered by a dirty towel. He looks at me only long enough to see I’m some chick, the kind of chick he has no use for (i.e., not a chick he wants to fuck), and that I’m not a threat. Then he removes the dirty towel from the desk and continues what he was doing, which was counting money.
“Whaddaya want?” he says.
“I played here tonight,” I say.
“And?”
“I just wanted to get paid.”
He exhales, sits back in his chair, paws around on his desk for his cigarettes, takes one out, and lights it. “Really,” he says. The right half of his neck is covered with a tattoo that’s bending into the folds of his flesh. He takes a drag from his cigarette and blows the smoke out through the large gap between his two front teeth. “Which band?” he says.
“Jennifer Trynin,” I say.
“Whadja do, open?” he says, reaching for a piece of paper with tonight’s band names and set times and percent signs scrawled on it.
“We played third,” I say, pointing to my name.
“Hmmm,” he says, picking up a few bills from his desk. “Here’s fifty bucks,” he says.
“That was our guarantee,” I say, my heart beginning to race. “We also get twenty-five percent of the door.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know anything about that,” he says, crumpling up the piece of paper with my name and “25%” written next to it.
...
I’m sitting at my desk, designing my monthly mailer — a postcard that lists upcoming gigs and local radio appearances with computer scans of the covers of any new stuff I’ve recorded that’s for sale. People sign up to get the postcards at shows. The first time I ever sent it out, two years ago, the list had seventeen names on it. Today’s list has over six hundred. It takes me the better part of a day to do the whole thing, and it’s expensive. As of this month, all told, it comes to about $160, mostly for postage.
I keep track of all my expenses in a book, as if I really have my own business. And it’s looking like this year, for the first time, I’m going to break even — that is, if you only look at what I pay to musicians and soundmen, for rehearsal space, and the mailer. I’ve been meaning to “fold in” the manufacturing costs for the two 45s and Cockamamie, but then I’d have to admit to myself that I’m still losing money, and who wants to do that?
My fax machine begins to whir, and I grab the slippery fax paper and sit down in my old gray chair with the springs poking into my ass.
It looks like some kind of contract.
I can’t make out much because the whole thing is smudged, and what I can is full of legal mumbo jumbo, but it’s from Sony Publishing, where Cinda Weinstein works, and I can definitely make out the number, the cash, The Advance: $80,000.
I turn the sheet of paper over and look back. Then I look at the front again and it’s still there: $80,000.
I’ve ferreted out advance numbers from other wanna-be big-time songwriters, and I’ve never gotten wind of more than $30,000, which to me is more money than God.
I’m figuring and refiguring how long $80,000 could last me.
I picture walking into Doyle’s and flinging my apron across the bar. “That’s right, you heard me,” I’ll say to Jimmy the bartender — the guy with the wicked-good mullet and a handlebar mustache, the guy with whom you do not fuck — “I quit!”
Yeah!
And then I’ll go over to the parenting publication and tell them where they can stick their “What’s Happening?” section.
YEAH!
Ring-ring!
Beeeep. “Jen, it’s Neil. So we just got our first official publishing offer and — ”
I leap across the room.
“Neil!”
“I got you!”
“Eighty thousand dollars? This is fucking great! I can’t believe it!”
“So you got it. Okay, well, I don’t even really know where these guys are coming from on this cuz it’s way too early for actual offers, but here we are, so, so there you go. And it’s not bad, but I mean, I don’t know. I’m thinking, in this case, they’re shooting kinda low, you know?
“Low?”
“Like I think this offer’s a little under.”
“Under? Like how under?”
“Like at least a hundred thousand under.”
I’m staring at one of my dirty curtains thumbtacked above a window.
“You still there?” says Neil.
I’m lying in bed, slowly petting Ranger and staring at the water marks on my ceiling. I called Guy at his hotel and at the studio where he’s working with Aimee but there was no answer. Then I tried Tim but couldn’t get him either. A hundred thousand under. A hundred thousand under. I can’t understand a hundred thousand dollars being under anything.
Reprinted with permission from Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be : A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale by Jen Trynin (Harcourt, 2006).