ava99s

→“Isabel, beautiful. Time to work,” said Sierra.

→“I suppose it does.”

→“Doesn’t it sound like me?”

→Leon ran through the stations. He blew right by “Wait/Don’t Wait.” I shook his seat a little until he backtracked.

→“That’s what they tell me.”

→“Is this interview on the radio right now?” Leon asked.

→I had been in Los Angeles for thirty-eight minutes, and eleven of those had been in traffic. I’ve been told there are parts of L.A. where the cliché of continuous traffic is not true, but I’m guessing that’s because no one else wants to frequent them. I was not excellent at sitting still.

→Of course it had died. Behind us, someone honked. A black car or a white car, and almost certainly a Mercedes or an Audi.

→“It died.”

→“Do you have a dog?” I asked him.

→It poured out of him, his life story. It began in Cincinnati, too young to drive. And ended here in a hired Cadillac, too old to do anything else. It lasted thirty seconds.

→“I thought you were telling me why you were driving this car.”

→Of course he hadn’t. He was suffering in silence, our man Leon, behind the wheel of this fancy L.A. limo.

→“I didn’t say anything,” Leon replied.

→“You can talk,” I told Leon. “I’m sort of on hold. They’re playing one of my songs.”

→Whoever came up with that bass riff knew what he was doing.

→On his end of the line, the opening chords of one of our last singles, “Wait/Don’t Wait,” sang out, pure and acidic. It had been played so often that it had lost every bit of its original emotional resonance for me; it was a song about me, written by someone else. It was a great song by someone else, though.

→Cole St. Clair definitely doesn’t have a dog. But he might have an album soon. Let’s put this in perspective. Remember when this was big, guys?

→f live: Four nos. This is an exclusive for our show, guys.

→cole st. clair: No. No, no, no.