Dirty Diana by January James
Chapter One
If I’d known I was about to face a barrage of low-level abuse, I would never have looked up. But hindsight is a wonderful thing.
I was engrossed in my usual evening ritual of dissecting the working day, picking apart every little thing I should have done differently, re-forecasting the number of days I no doubt had left until my bosses had enough of my losses, and decided to cut me loose instead. I couldn’t figure out where I’d gone wrong. I was a straight A student, I was an ass-kicking talent scout, and when they first appointed me as vice president of a small indie record label, it started off well. I didn’t know what happened. Actually, I did know what happened: Cherry Tatum happened. I just hated admitting it to myself.
Cherry Tatum was the first big act I signed. She was the biggest star of the label and she knew it. At first she was grateful, compliant and eager to do well, but the angel-voiced Celtic singer turned into a diva of Naomi Campbell proportions the minute she got her first Billboard 100 spot. She’d only just snuck in at 99 I had to stop myself from reminding her; it didn’t justify her demands for a Beatles-esque tour bus or handpicked frozen peas for her pre-performance nourishment, but her demands had continued to escalate and were now giving everyone around her an epic migraine.
If she was busy working on ground-breaking material, I wouldn’t have minded, but she was too busy flaunting her fledging relationship with some Canadian rapper to give it due thought. Still, her relationship was good for press. Cherry was one of the most photographed starlets in Manhattan at the moment, which was good for sales. Even if those sales still weren’t nudging her any further up the Billboard charts.
Sales were what I needed right now. Correction, sales were what I’d needed for a long time. Phoenix Music was not the unicorn that the parent label, Empirical Records, had hoped it would be. I’d stuck to my guns and only signed alternative acts that brought something a little bit different to the market. I was sick and tired of manufactured mainstream acts dominating the airwaves, and I knew I wasn’t the only one. But it seemed as though everywhere I turned, another mainstream TV talent show was popping up, another plastic boy band was being carefully crafted and fed to the masses like pizza. I saw it as my role, my mission, to provide an alternative for people who didn’t want to nod along with the rest of the American public, simply liking the music they were told to like.
Unfortunately, there was so much money behind the big established bands and the shiny new ones being peddled out with guaranteed chart-topping tracks, that I’d found it hard to keep up and to carve a niche for my beloved artists. The only thing keeping me afloat was determination. Determination to conquer the numbers and conquer Cherry Tatum’s increasingly impossible attitude. I grappled with it day and night, night and day. It was a constant source of anxiety.
So, when a tall, leggy, impossibly beautiful but quite frightening-looking brunette appeared at my side as I perched on a stool at Ted’s bar at the end of my block, I wasn’t reluctant to look up.
“Sorry about the intrusion,” the woman said, her face looking not at all apologetic. She was so tall I had to crane my neck slightly to take in her face. Tall and striking. Her nose was long and slim, her cheekbones prominent and generously contoured, her lips taut but not too full. There was a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her hair was short and cropped closely around her face, and her eyes were huge. She looked like a much taller version of Twiggy, the famous model from the sixties.
“It’s just that, I see you here almost every night, always late, always on your own, staring into the bottom of the same old glass, never talking to anyone. And I couldn’t stand to watch the car crashing anymore. You need this.”
With one lean, immaculately manicured finger, she slid a card along the bar until it came to a stop beside my empty glass. I didn’t pick it up to read it straight away, but I couldn’t miss the word Decadence emblazoned in a sophisticated font across the center.
“I source clients. I’m one of a select few who have the authority to invite new prospects to join us, and they’re usually high net-worth, high energy, high charisma individuals.”
She jutted her hip out and rested one hand on it. The woman oozed confidence, I thought, enviously.
“Yes, you might be thinking, you appear to be none of those things, and I would agree. But seeing you every night like this makes me fucking sad. So, I made an exception. Congratulations,” she smiled, almost begrudgingly. “It’s your lucky fucking day.”
She stood back, leaving the card on the bar.
“Your unique code is on the back.”
Of all the questions I should have fired at her, along with several expletives given the way she’d just insulted me, I chose: “What is this?”
I picked up the card, immediately feeling its expensive, velvety coating, and turned it over in my fingers.
“Think of it as your ‘get out of jail free’ card,” she said, stepping around me in the direction of the door. Then she spun to face me again. “Do yourself a favor, honey. Call the Concierge, get signed up. And don’t think on it too long. That code expires in forty-eight hours.”
With that, she turned on her extortionately expensive, tower-high heels and sauntered her long, leather-clad legs out of Ted’s Bar onto the anonymous streets of Manhattan, leaving me agog with unanswered questions.
I immediately picked up my phone and googled ‘Decadence, Manhattan’, but not even a mention popped up. Was it possible it had been a ruse, just to make me feel even worse about myself? Because that wouldn’t take much. As vicious as her words had been, they were right. I slouched down on my stool and wearily contemplated my life.
I now had a small but struggling record label with four moderately successful acts: one lackluster singer I was going to have to strike off any day now; one edgy guitar band I was certain would make it big if only we could get the right airplay for them; another new singer I had genuine hope for; and Cherry. I knew the board was keeping a close eye on me, counting the balance sheets and coming up short. I knew I was working on borrowed time; if I didn’t do something soon to boost our sales, I could be kicked out onto the sidewalk with nothing to my name but the clothes on my back.
When I managed to get a rare break from Cherry’s incessant demands, I’d tried everything. I’d tested campaigns and promotions, I’d groveled to the key stations for more airplay, I’d coaxed my three other acts into engaging more with their fans—which most found surprisingly difficult given they were introverted, partially reclusive, indie acts who’d become talented by locking themselves in bedrooms and garages honing their craft and generally avoiding all human contact. In hindsight, hiring this type of niche talent was possibly not the best business strategy.
The mystery woman was right; outside of my job—the only way I’d found to cope with my job—I spent the majority of my time at Ted’s bar, always alone, always late, always staring into the bottom of a glass, never talking to anyone. I never had anything to say. I couldn’t talk to anyone about my past; I had no social life or hobbies to speak of; and I would rather slit my wrists than talk about my work woes to anyone besides my two closest colleagues—and the nearest things I had to friends—Sheridan and Carlos.
I knew how sad I looked. Once upon a time, I would have cared. But these days, I just needed to get through the working week. Not that I had weekends either. Working in the music business had put an end to that. And once upon a time, I enjoyed the scene. I used to love heading out to gigs, dressed in my tight black jeans, Kravitz boots and Arctic Monkeys tour t-shirt, to drink lukewarm beer and check out the latest signed and unsigned talent, but even those gigs made me feel anxious now. How did my acts compare? Would I ever have enough money to sign another band? How did the promoter drag in so many people? Why were my sorry efforts flailing in comparison?
My life was dominated by a fear of failure; it permeated every part of my life. I hardly ate anymore, and my glittering conversational skills had been reduced to two topics: how to save money and how to fight fires. I barely made an effort with my hair and my clothes—I just threw on whatever was cleanest and closest. My make-up bag had seen less action in the last twelve months than a hooker in a monastery. And my personal hygiene system extended to a splash of water, a squirt of deodorant and a hasty toothbrushing session while I hopped about pulling on socks.
I hadn’t cared until it was noticed. First, it was Carlos: “Smells like something’s gone off in here. Oh, hang on, are those mold marks on your collar?” Then, to my utter mortification, Cherry: “Quite the night was it, darlin’? Didn’t you wear that yesterday?” And finally, my loveliest and most talented of acts, Ayda: “Is everything ok, Diana? It’s just that, well, you look like you’ve lost twenty pounds in the last month, and I can practically see your zygomatic bone.”
It came to a head when Carlos and Sheridan staged an intervention and forced me to take some personal time. I took five days off work and hated every second. I couldn’t stand to be in my own company; I suck. And I was stuck. There was no way out. No other label would employ me as a VP, I would have to start over as a scout. No management company would hire me either. There were no secrets in the industry, everyone knew how bad my books were, and there was no way I could go back to England. I had no choice but to make it work, but I was running out of ideas. I’d come to hate the four walls of my apartment, and I had no place else to go. Ted’s Bar had become my second home.
I turned the card over again in my fingers, and this time I studied the back. It gave nothing away—just the word Concierge, a telephone number, and the code the mystery woman had mentioned before she’d departed leaving flames in her wake.
She was crazy if she thought I was going to do anything with it. I might have been desperate and sleep-deprived, but I wasn’t stupid. A strange woman comes up and gives me a strange card with no information on it, telling me to call a number, to reach God only knew who. She could be setting me up for anything. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to rip it up and leave it at the bottom of my glass in smithereens. I ordered another vodka on the rocks, forcing myself to forget about mystery woman’s cruel (albeit true) words and focus on how I was going to drag myself through the week.
“Another long day?” Jez, the bartender glanced up at me as he poured the Grey Goose with a flourish.
“Yup,” I answered, flicking my eyes away, signaling that, as usual, I wasn’t here for the chat. Then a thought occurred to me. “Hey, Jez…”
Jez froze, his back turned away as he placed the bottle back in its place on the dusty shelf. I’d hardly ever spoken a word to him, so my brief olive branch must have freaked him out. He turned back to face me, cautiously.
“Did you see the woman who came up to me a few minutes ago?”
“The tall one?”
“Yeah. Ever seen her before?”
“Maybe a couple times, ma’am. We don’t get the likes of her in here too often, y’know?”
“She gave me a card. Have you heard of Decadence?”
“What is it? Another bar?”
“I’ve no idea.” I reached into my bag and pulled it out to show him. Jez took the card and studied it in much the same way I had.
“Feels expensive,” he said. I nodded and chewed the corner of my lip. “Nope, never heard of it before, never seen the name anywhere.” He handed the card back. “Did she say anything at all about it?”
“Just that it was my ‘get out of jail free’ card. Said I looked like I needed it, whatever ‘it’ is.”
“Well,” Jez said, wiping down the bar and shaking his head. “It could be just what you need: something new and exciting. I don’t turn away customers often, but you could do better than this place, darlin’. You are in here a lot.”
“I like it here,” I pouted.
“That’s great an’ all, but a place with a name like Decadence? That sounds a lot more fun. And I hate to say it, but maybe you need to get out of a rut.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I nodded, taking a large swig of vodka. “I just don’t have the time or the headspace to do anything about it.”
“Well,” he said, planting his palms into the bar in front of me. “You know what my motto is? If you keep doing the same thing every day, nothing will ever change.”
I narrowed my eyes, unsure of what he was trying to say.
“I mean, if you don’t change the way you live your life—who you are and the things you do every day—how you expect your life to get any better?”
I turned the thought over in my head as he hovered over me. Fortunately, a couple chose that moment to walk in and slide onto seats at the other end of the bar, so Jez had to move off to serve them, but I pondered his theory. I had been doing the same things day in and day out, yet nothing was changing; nothing was getting any better. Maybe by changing how I dealt with Cherry, things at work might get a little easier. Maybe if I gave a damn about what I looked like, more people might want to look at me.
I noticed I was still flicking the thing that had started the conversation between my fingers. I couldn’t expect this little piece of velvety card to be the thing that changed my life, but I could certainly look at changing the way I lived.
I swallowed the rest of the vodka and tucked a few dollars beneath the empty glass, then I slid off the stool to leave. What one thing could I change about the following day? I could give a shit about what I looked like, perhaps. I could force myself to eat breakfast, take a proper shower and wear a dress. Baby steps.
I turned as I walked past the bar towards the door, acknowledging Jez for the first time in twelve months, as I left. His words had got in. And the smug grin on his face told me he knew it.