Treble Clef

Part 5 No Regrets

It was time to go home, our weekend was over and I lost something that could’ve been. We drove for about 30 min and I hadn’t said one word. So Tahoe pulled over to a rest area, He was my best friend now, he could always tell when something was right. “Look bro” he said, “it‘s one girl, you’ve gotta move on. This life we live, we’ll never get it back, so we gotta live for now and have no regrets.” “I know!” I replied “I was just doing some thinking.” I had spent the whole ride pondering the situation, and the more I thought about it, the colder my heart grew. I had already decided that I was not meant to live a life of love, so I had let Brianna go. It was time for me to move on. Tahoe looked at me and said “speak what’s on your mind bro.” I looked up with a cold look on my face and said “It’s time we take back what’s ours, we were supposed to be famous when we were 14, and we let things get in the way of that. F*ck what anybody else says, we’ve still got the talent. It’s time we get back on our grind, hard 24/7. The east coast is ours, so now it’s time we take the west coast and everything in between.” Tahoe smiled at my words as if he’d been waiting to hear me say that. The old me was coming back and I was ready to be myself again. Jacob was in the back seat, but he was high. With a puzzled look he said “So what are you saying Max?” I put on my shades and sat back in my seat…”We’re getting the band back together.” Tahoe smiled and started the car up again, “I was hoping you’d say that.”

                We grinded hard. We wrote, practiced, and played every single day. We had to work hard, we had gone from a 5 man band down to 3. We changed our style, we were once love song hard throbs, now we were all out bad boys. Our music was true to our feelings, we were hurt and the only way we knew how to change that was by rocking out. Tahoe’s dad put us on some great gigs. And in July we went on tour with the Plain White Ts as their opening act. Road life was great, but we knew we weren’t where we wanted to be yet. We practiced day in and day out, we would practice all the way until we got on stage. We were committed, and we had purpose. I was angry, Tahoe was hurting, and Jacob was…well Jacob was just high, and he loved the drugs that came with being a musician on tour. Either way we all had a reason to push harder. We agreed that we would never go back to our old life. We toured America, one night Dallas, the next we were in Miami, then LA. We didn’t care if we were openers, we were getting our name out there. Every night, just before going on stage, we’d look at each other and say “No regrets” it had become our motto, our creed, our pledge of allegiance to the treble clef. Because to live for the treble clef you have to live without regret, because to be a musician you have to be willing to do anything, without feeling bad about it. Well you fall in love with the treble clef, you lose your conscience…

                At the end of summer, The Ts fired us because we had gotten so good that people were coming to the shows just to see us. You don’t do that in show business, the opener Is never supposed to be better than the main act. It didn’t matter though, because Tahoe’s dad felt we were ready to go out on our own. He pitched hard for us, he went into every music labels office and sold us. He was so good that we had 5 offers on the table by Christmas.

                Here we were again, it’s December and we have an offer to become professional musicians. We had repeated the cycle, this caused me to become fearful because if the cycle was repeating then tragedy was sure to be around the corner. But luckily for us, nothing happened. We took the best offer we had and ran with it. After just one month we had our first sellout show.

                I sat in the green room, my stomach was turning but I wasn’t too nervous. I played varsity football at school so I was used to the crowds and the pressure. However this was big for Jacob and Tahoe, yes we had played in front of bigger crowds but this was the first time they had come just to see us. I watched as my two best friends laid out three white streaks of coke on the table. “Hey Max we laid out a hit for you, come get some it’ll take the edge off.” Said Tahoe. “No thanks I’m fine” I’ve never done drugs, I didn’t to take the edge off. Music was my drug, the more I played, the higher I felt. And t would take hours for me to come down. “Fine more for me” Jacob said. They snorted it, and in 5 seconds they were two totally different people.

                As we walked down the long hall to the stage, our heartbeats out ran our footsteps. It felt like we would never reach the stage, the crowd grew louder and louder, screaming our names. I was addicted to fame, it was amazing I swear I almost caught an erection at the sound of 15,000 people screaming for me. When the lights came on, we played our hearts out. It was like someone had taken over my body, I was in autopilot much like the night that I f*cked Brianna with no remorse. Our backup musicians and backup singers had a hard time keeping up with us. The 3 of us, the original Broken Aces, we were all in our own zone but somehow we were still in sync.

                At the end of our last song, it was if whoever took over my body had returned me just so I could reap the reward of a great performance, a standing ovation. Screams and applause. The stage was bombarded by horny screaming girls, we had to run and jump into our limo. I had dreamed of this moment since I was a kid. Once we were safely inside of our limo, we all smiled and simultaneously laughed and said “No regrets” as our limo pulled out to take us to our hotel. I stared out the window, the city lights were beautiful, it was amazing. We had arrived, we were famous. The life we had longed for, after all our grind and hard work. Everything was perfect…

~End of Part 5~

-----Oh I hope you guys don’t think this is the end. Stay tuned for Part 6 The Price of Fame.

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