When the Nines Roll Over Read Online Free Page A

and he thought if anyone would shoot the S out of the Shell station sign so he could join his buddies in the JD, it was SadJoe.
    Tabachnik did not want to say any of this to Molly, so instead he said, “Hell is other people.”
    Molly turned away from the window and stared at him. “Really?”
    â€œNo, I mean, that’s a quotation. I didn’t make it up.”
    She rested her head on his shoulder and said, “I never heard that before.”
    Tabachnik stared out the window but it was too dark to see anything outside. He saw his own face reflected in the glass, and Molly’s bowed head, and the empty seats around them.

    They went to a twenty-four-hour Turkish restaurant on Houston, drank small cups of bitter black coffee, ate syrupy baklava. The Turk manning the cash register had the Daily News crossword puzzle on the counter between his elbows. He chewed on the eraser-end of a pencil.
    â€œI’m going to make you a star,” Tabachnik told Molly. He never smiled when he said these words; he never made a joke of it. He said the line very simply, enunciating each syllable, looking directly into the listener’s eyes. He knew that every kid in America was waiting to hear those words, or at least all the kids who mattered to him. They wanted to believe him. They needed to believe him.
    Molly took a deep breath. She smiled and looked down at her fingers picking apart the layered pastry. She looked very young, very shy, a blushing girl on her first date.
    â€œI’m going to fuck you anyway,” she said. “You don’t have to blow smoke up my ass.”
    Tabachnik made eye contact with the Turk at the counter. The Turk grinned.
    â€œCheck,” said Tabachnik.

    She had a small room in an Alphabet City apartment that she shared with five other musicians and actors. She led him by hand through the shadowy hallways, guiding him past piles of dirty laundry, a sleeping dog, and a bong lying on its side in a puddle of bong water.
    When they got to her room she closed the door and slid a dead bolt shut. She saw Tabachnik’s raised eyebrows and said, “Weird things go on here. A guy got knifed on New Year’s Eve.”
    Tabachnik didn’t want to know about it. He held the side of her face and kissed her on the lips and she unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants and he thought, Jesus, what’s the rush? And then he realized that he was very, very old. Soon he would have no idea what kids wanted to hear on the radio. A&R men did not age gracefully—you either moved up or were bumped off. Tabachnik was good, a rainmaker for all seasons, but he had never had the huge score. He had never signed a group that became a super group, a Nirvana or R.E.M or Pearl Jam. The men who signed the super groups were no longer A&R. They were VVVVIPs.
    He unzipped the back of her catsuit. Her skin was beautiful, the color of a cinnamon stick, and it flushed in the places where his mouth went. She shimmied out of the suit and stood naked before him, her hands covering her crotch with mock bashfulness. Tabachnik kissed her throat and her breasts and her belly, crouching lower and lower until he was on his knees.
    When they finished they lay on their backs in bed and listened to the sleeping dog in the hallway moan in his dreams.
    â€œI want to fly you out to L.A. and have you record a few demos.”
    â€œWe have demos,” said Molly, pointing to a black boom box piled with cassette tapes.
    â€œI want them done right. We can fly out tomorrow.”
    â€œWhat about everyone else? I’m not just going to leave them.”
    Yes, you are, Tabachnik wanted to say, but instead he traced circles around her nipple with his fingertip and said, “I don’t have the money to fly the whole band. We’ll get you out there, have you meet a few people, send for everyone else later.”
    â€œSadJoe won’t like it. The Taints are his band.”
    â€œI’ll