canyon fodder, chapter 1

When the elevator doors opened on the third floor of Sunset Sound in Hollywood, Zolie Wachs stepped out and felt a blast of frosty air conditioning against his face. Aural shrapnel from an Elliot Randall guitar lick cut through the walls of Studio 3D in the distance and ricocheted around the insides of Zolie’s ears as he ambled down the hallway towards the head. Framed Gold Records lined one side of the narrow corridor. On the other side, a glass window offered a view into a corporate-looking room in which Charlie Watson sat alone at a long table, looking disheveled with his long hair flying in all directions. But Charlie wasn’t sitting upright, and it took Zolie a few seconds before he figured out what the fuck the guy was doing in there. Hunched over, Charlie pressed his face against the table’s surface, his nostrils vacuuming freshly cut lines of Bicentennial powder.

Zolie pissed at a urinal. The image of Charlie was still imprinted on his brain when the men’s room door swung open behind him.

“Zole! You ready to do the harmonies?” It was Jefferson White, Zolie’s friend, producer, and savior, just coming off the Gold Record success of his own fourth album, The Man Behind the Mask.

“I’m hung over,” Zolie said.

Jefferson joined him at the next urinal. “None of that,” he said. “We’re gonna lay down some beautiful harmonies. Everybody’s here to do it with us.”

Zolie’s doughy 29-year-old body stood at about five-and-a-half feet tall. He had long, curly blond hair, thick glasses over his brown eyes, and he wore a cream-colored blazer with dark blue jeans and white tasseled loafers. Jefferson, a few years younger, dressed his tall, skinny frame in a faded red t-shirt and form fitting dungarees, which he wore with a pair of white and green Adidas Country sneakers. His light-brown hair grew to just above his shoulders, framing a face with well-sculpted features and handsome eyes of Pacific Ocean Blue.

When Zolie was close to being done, he closed his eyes, pointed his puffy face towards the ceiling, and wrung his dick out, as if it were a wash cloth, before waddling away from the urinal without flushing or washing his hands. Jefferson, on the other hand, gently tapped his corona, flushed, and then glided effortlessly towards the sink.

“I just saw Charlie,” Zolie said, pointing in a vague direction outside the men’s room.

Jefferson glanced at himself wanly in the mirror above the sink. “Yeah,” he sighed after a few thoughtful seconds. “Poor Charlie.”