Dissonance - Chapter 4

We still had a few hours until our set that night, so I made my way out to Willie’s shack, which wasn’t far from the Blue Ridge, easy walking distance. I knew he’d be at the restaurant before long, but he’d been cutting his time there shorter and shorter over the last month, which made sense now that Chef had given me a little context.

Since Willie hadn’t brought anything up on his own, I decided it would be better to check in on him at home, rather than ask him about his plans where others could hear.

I called his house a shack mostly because that was what Willie called it. It wasn’t, however, run-down or low quality. I knew Chef had helped in building it years ago so that Willie didn’t have to keep living in apartments or travel very far to get to the Blue Ridge, since even back then all Willie seemed to want to do was play music or hang out on the restaurant’s front porch. I did know that Chef also owned this land and that he never made Willie pay to live on it, which was good of Chef.

I knocked on the door and waited, hearing the faint sounds of Willie shuffling around behind the door somewhere, getting steadily louder as he got closer.

“Charlie?” he asked when he opened his door. “Everythin’ alright?”

“Yep. We finished up a meeting with the label rep and the guys are going to take a break before we have to get ready. I was talking to Chef and I heard you weren’t going to be playing as much anymore, so I wanted to come down and check on you.”

“Ohh, you didn’t have to do that. I’m fine. Just decided that it was about time to start slowin’ down.”

“You don’t seem to be slowing down that much. It wasn’t that long ago you did your yearly circuit, playing three and four nights in a row, and you seemed fine.”

“I can still do it, don’t you doubt that, but no, I wasn’t just fine. I was hurtin’ something awful after I finished that up, which was why I was so glad you’d stepped up into my spot at the Blue Ridge. If I had to go right back into three nights a week here, playin’ the whole evenin’, I think I would have had to call it quits well before now.”

“Aren’t you going to miss it?” I asked.

I might have only known Willie for a year, but I couldn’t imagine him not playing music. The thought of him just hanging out here or sitting up on the porch at the Blue Ridge was a little depressing, actually.

“If I had to stop playin’ all together, sure. That’s why I want to start pullin’ back now, while I’m still able to play some. I figure if I slow down and just do a little bit every weekend, I can still get a few more years out of these fingers, before I can’t pluck a string no more. It seemed better to do that than just burn through what I got left, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t because I started taking up so much stage time. I know you all said it was okay, but now that I have the band, we’ve been taking up more and more time.”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s a good thing you took off when you did, actually. If you hadn’t, I probably would have just kept goin’ like I was, without thinking about how I was feelin’ and be just about used up by now. No, this is the best thing for me. Besides, you’re not going to be playin’ here that much longer, so it wouldn’t matter none anyway.”

“I’m only gone for the middle of the summer. After that I was planning on picking up and playing at the Blue Ridge again, since it’s the only way I can play every week and still go to school.”

“I mean it won’t be long before the rest of the world figures out how good you are, and you’re off to fame and fortune.”

“Nah, I …”

“Don’t go all modest on me. I know you know how good you are. Playin’ like you ain’t, only insults the other person. Have some confidence in yourself, boy.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was hoping that when I did start having to travel more, it would open up things for you and the rest of the guys to start playing again.”

“They’re all almost as old as I am, and they’ve started makin’ noise about retiring. No, I’ve talked to Chef some and we both agree it’s time he started looking for other acts to rotate through here. Hell, I’m sure the people around here would like to have some more variety than me playin’ every night. I’ll still get some time on stage most weekends, and I’ll also be able to meet some more young people. I hadn’t realized,  until you showed up, how much I missed being around other people like us. Sure, I’d see some when I did my circuit, but that wasn’t the same. I think this’ll be good for me.”

“Okay, as long as you’re okay with all of this. If you hadn’t asked me to play when Hanna brought me through looking for a job, none of this would have happened. I owe you more than I can ever repay.”

“I’m fine and you don’t owe me nothin’ but keep doin’ your best. You’re a good boy, Charlie. You just keep rememberin’ who you are and where you came from, and you’ll have repaid me all you need to. Now, since you’re down here, how about helpin’ me carry my things up to the Blue Ridge.”

“Sure,” I said, following him into his house.

***

Monday there was another slight change-up in the schedule. The week before, Kat’s psychologist, Dr. Rothstein, had asked me to come with her to her next appointment. He didn’t specify what it was about, but I guessed it might be some additional change to our unique understanding.

When we’d first met, Kat was dating Aaron, the school bully and an all-around terrible person. Although she hadn’t known it at the time, she was suffering from a condition known as Dependent Personality Disorder which essentially made her unable to disagree with or stand up to other people, at least not without ending up in a full-blown panic attack. Although some people with the condition manage to live more or less normal lives, she is on the far end of the spectrum thanks to more than a decade of abuse from her father.

We’d become friends and it had become evident how vulnerable she was, especially after getting her to speak to Dr. Rothstein and finding out about her condition. Because she was a minor and he needed permission from her father, the doctor hadn’t been able to actually treat her, however, which meant we had to find another way to help her. In the end, we’d figured out that, if we couldn’t fix her condition, we could at least use it to protect her, which is how I ended up being the person she could turn to when she was being faced with a decision she couldn’t make. I still felt uncomfortable with that level of power over another person, more so since we’d become such good friends since then, but that was better than letting her continue to be used by people like Aaron.

Thankfully, we’d finally managed to get Kat out of her father’s house and temporarily in the custody of Hanna’s mother, since she only had a year until she turned eighteen and no longer needed to be in anyone’s custody. That also meant we were able to start getting her treatment. Of course, the first thing we found out when she started seeing Dr. Rothstein was how dangerous our decision to use Kat’s condition to bring her out of the situation she’d been in, was. He’d pointed out that it did the opposite of the actual treatment for the condition, which was learning tools and skills to deal with the panic and fear when faced with confrontations or decisions. Well, that and medication for the inevitable panic attacks that came from facing those fears.

He’d given me specific instructions on how to slowly wean her off of needing me as a safety valve for her condition, which is why I assumed he needed to see me. It had been a month and a half or so since the last time I’d gone with her to an appointment and he’d walked me through how to start her on the path to making her own decisions. We were still doing small stuff at the moment, like asking her once or twice if she knew what she wanted to do in a situation, instead of just telling her what she should do, or not picking out what she wanted to eat if we got something to eat, even when she kept saying ‘whatever you think’ when asked what she wanted.

The last meeting had been just before the end of the school year, which meant there hadn’t been all that many times she’d been pressed with a decision she couldn’t make. She’d had a problem the week before with a confrontation with one of the other swimmers that trained at the same time she did, and that had been an hour-long phone call to talk her down, but other than that, it had been incredibly minor stuff, the most annoying one being forced to wait her out while she decided what to eat. There were times when it could be twenty minutes of her vacillating between options, unable to decide. The therapy was helping though, because only twice had she started to panic and I’d been forced to step in and calm her down. Before she’d started therapy, those panic attacks would have happened every time.

As with the last time I went with her, I spent the first thirty minutes out in the waiting room with Mrs. Phillips, who still went with Kat every time she had an appointment. After the first half of her session, she came out wiping away tears and told me I could go back and see the doctor. She’d done that the first time, and I was a little worried until Mrs. Phillips pointed out she almost always came out of a session crying. Except for the one other time, I hadn’t actually gone with her to other appointments, mostly because my schedule was so packed, so that was news to me.

Dr. Rothstein was in the same place he’d been the last time I’d come in to visit, sitting in one of the two padded chairs on the side of his desk closest to the door instead of behind his desk, leaving the other one for me to sit in. I remember thinking the first time that I’d expected to see the classic couch for the patient to sit or lay on while they talked and being surprised that it wasn’t there. I don’t know why I thought maybe it would be there this time, but he still didn’t have one.

“Hey,” I said, sitting down, feeling uncomfortable.

“I hear good things are happening for you,” he said.

I knew he was friends with Chef, so I didn’t know if Kat or Chef had told him, or if he’d just heard about it somewhere else, but I’d expected him to jump right in, talking about Kat. I know he was probably trying to be disarming, making me feel comfortable, but he just made me feel off-balance instead.

“Umm, yeah. We’re heading out next week for our recording time in Raleigh, and then we’re going to go on tour for about a month.”

“That’s very exciting. Chef Tang mentioned you were a musician the first time we met, but I had no idea you were at the level of getting a record contract. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I said, still unsure why he wanted me to come down here if this was what he wanted to talk about.

“Mrs. Phillips called me last week and asked about Katherine going with you, which would mean she’d miss several appointments here, since I understand some of your stops wouldn’t be convenient for her to come back here and then catch back up with you.”

“Ohh, yeah. Well, I asked Mrs. Phillips if she’d talk to you about it. Hanna’s going, since she’s going to help us keep things together on tour, so Kat really wanted to go. I said I didn’t mind, but I made it clear that if you thought her missing that many sessions would set her treatment back even a little bit, then she couldn’t go with us. I guess it’s kind of my fault, since we’ve all been so excited about it, that we probably talked it up too much around her. I imagine with me and Hanna gone, she’d feel left out if she had to stay here by herself.”

“Yes, and I believe this will be one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences that she would enjoy. The good news is, I don’t have a problem with her going. I know we’re still early in our treatment, and normally I’d want a lot more sessions with a patient before I’d be okay with her missing so many, but there are some additional things to consider in Katherine’s case. I know she’s going to be a senior this year, which means she has one more year before she heads off to college, where she’d have to find a new therapist and probably lose what support structure she has here, which is always difficult for some young adults, let alone those with DPD.”

“Yeah, I’ve been worried about that too.”

“Good. That’s actually why I think this might be an opportunity to take some jumps forward in her treatment. We’ve been working on her ability to compartmentalize decisions, which will help keep multiple decisions from compounding on each other and pushing her into panic attacks. We’ve also been working on her ability to express her own opinions and how to deal with any negative feedback she might get from those. I know last time we talked, I told you I wanted you to let her start making decisions on small things on her own, and she’s said that has been going fairly well. Since we have such limited time, I think we can use this time touring with you to take that to the next level.”

“Okay,” I said.

“While you are gone, I don’t want you preemptively making any decisions for her, as you would have in the past. I’m not just speaking about the smaller decisions like you’ve been having her make recently, but all decisions. In the situations you will all be in while on tour, I imagine the variety of decisions she will be faced with will be wide and varied, which is why this is a good time to practice the skills she has been learning. I have told her it is okay for her to go to you if she is feeling pressured, but that you will only give her options, and not choose one for her. I have re-upped her anxiety medications, which should help, but I expect there to be some stress on her. It’s okay for you and the rest of your group to reassure her in these moments, but I want to reiterate how important it is for her to try and handle these on her own.”

“So if she can’t make a decision, I can simplify it by giving her options to choose from, but not pick one for her, no matter what,” I said.

“Correct. Now, in my experience, what normally starts happening in situations like this is that the person, when forced to make a decision, will often make the decision she thinks her caregiver, which is you in this case, would want. Normally, it’s good to support whatever decision she goes with, even if it isn’t the optimum choice, but if you feel she is placating you, it’s important you don’t accept her decision unless it really is the best option for her. This is where it will be tricky for you, because it will require you to guess her motivations for making a given decision.”

“What if I think she’s trying her best but she’s actually just guessing what she thinks I want her to do?”

“If it happens, it happens. This isn’t going to be one-hundred percent, and like I said the last time we spoke, this is a process. It’s okay to be wrong, in either direction. Sometimes you’re going to think she’s trying to placate you when in fact she’s just trying her best. However, in general, it will usually be readily apparent when she’s making decisions for the wrong reason.”

“Ever since we found out about her dad, I’ve been doing reading on abused kids, and one of the things a lot of the books say is that kids from these situations are usually pretty good at making their abusers think they agree with them, to keep from getting hurt more.”

“That is usually true, and she was probably very good at making her father think she approved of his abuse, but that doesn’t translate well once they’re away from their abuser. Especially in situations where the abuse started early in life. People like her father tend towards narcissism and often can’t see beyond their own needs to recognize the other people in a given situation as actual people. If they could, they would be less likely to so fundamentally hurt people they ostensibly love, since they’d see the signs of distress that are readily apparent to everyone else. Until very recently, her entire life was shaped by her interactions with her father. Even though she knows you’re a very different person than him, she will still default to how she would have placated him, which is why it will be so much easier to recognize. It doesn’t mean she thinks you’re like him, although it is often misinterpreted that way by people in your position.”

“Okay,” I said.

I was still unsure about this, since it was hard sometimes to see why she was making the decisions she’d make. It often felt like she was just trying to do what she thought I wanted her to do, which I guess was the whole point of our original agreement. Then again, I knew I was setting myself up for this kind of thing when I’d first decided to do it, and reasoned that it was worth it if I got her out of the hands of people like Aaron. I couldn’t very well be upset about it now that I had to deal with the fallout from it.

He spent the next fifteen minutes going over some of the possible situations and responses from Kat and how to deal with those, and I hoped that it would be enough.

***

After practice on Tuesday, Hanna told us the next day we needed to meet after the lunch rush at the Blue Ridge. She didn’t explain what was happening, but I think everyone was happy for a break from practice for a day. We all loved playing, but we’d been going so hard for the last several weeks that I think we were starting to burn out a little bit.

Hanna didn’t come to practice that morning, and I was pretty sure this was about the merchandising thing she’d talked about on Monday. She hadn’t said anything else about it since then, but I knew she hadn’t dropped the subject.

She’d made it clear how important this idea was to her the last time we talked about it but it wasn’t until we walked into the Blue Ridge that I realized how far she’d taken the whole thing.

A large projection screen was sitting on the stage where we normally played, with a very old slide projector creating a glowing white square in the center. Both looked straight out of the nineties and I wondered for a second where’d she gotten the equipment, since the only place I’d seen stuff like this was at school. Of course, she could have gotten it from Mr. French, who would have had access to that kind of thing.

She was standing next to the roll-up projection screen, hands clasped in front of her, looking just about as professional as I’d ever seen her. More surprising than the equipment, however, were the people in attendance. Besides Chef, who I’d been expecting, there was Mr. Eaves, her mother, my mother, who I thought was at work, and several other people I didn’t recognize right off the bat.

We took our seats in the chairs lined up to face the screen and she signaled to Vinney, one of the Blue Ridge cooks, to turn off the lights, which didn’t exactly plunge the room into darkness thanks to the windows lining one side of it, but did make the glowing box show up brighter. She walked past each of us, handing us a thick stapled packet with a title page that read, Merchandise Investing. I flipped through it while she passed them out to everyone else, and was impressed by how organized it was, from the table of contents to the reference pages in the back that looked like they pointed to where we could find the numbers used through the packet. It was particularly amazing because I’d seen some of her papers in school, and they were never this well done.

“I appreciate all of you coming today,” Hanna said in the voice I recognized from when she’d practiced class presentations, using Kat and me as a target audience. “On Monday I spoke with Charlie after the meeting with Mr. Graham, the studio representative, and told him about what I think is a very profitable business opportunity. He rightfully pointed out that there was an initial investment cost that kept us from grabbing this opportunity and suggested that, if I wanted to make this happen, I needed to find a way to pay for the up-front costs.”

I quickly replayed the conversation we’d had in my head and, while I had said she could run with the idea of getting merch made, I don’t think I ever suggested she go out and find a way to pay for it. If anything, she’d already had that idea and only made sure I wasn’t going to try and stop her.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I promise you this isn’t some kind of get rich quick scheme or me trying to explain crypto currency. It’s going to take some explaining and I will have numbers to give you as we near the end, but everything I’m explaining is a tried and true business that has been around since the late fifties. I just wanted to preface that because, while some of you are familiar with what Charlie and the band have been up to, some of the community leaders that have agreed to come hear me out today, haven’t been a part of this, and so might not be as familiar with what’s been happening.”

I assumed the faces I sort of recognized but couldn’t place were the ‘community leaders’ she referred to. After a second, I realized I did recognize one of them from my first date with Rhonda Haines. I couldn’t remember her name, but the lady who’d run the bowling alley I’d taken Rhonda to was sitting a few rows over, looking surprisingly interested. I couldn’t imagine what Hanna had done to convince these people to come out and hear her pitch, but I was certainly impressed.

“Next month Charlie and the Wild Cats will begin a regional tour that will last a month and cover twenty-two venues in all. While the costs of travel, arranging of the venues, and marketing has been covered by the MAC Records, they have declined to fund any merchandizing that the band could sell, aside from early pressings of the album that the band will begin recording next week. While MAC will be taking their normal cut of those sales, their decision to not participate in merchandising means the band can keep one-hundred percent of the sales from that. Of course, that is minus the costs to produce that merchandise, and why we’re having this meeting in the first place. As business owners yourselves, I know many of you are familiar with the costs of scale that go into producing things like hats, t-shirts and hoodies, but I think it’s important to go over these numbers, just to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

She clicked a small button in her hand, and a chart popped up on screen.

“I’ve checked a pretty wide area, pricing out various printing companies and manufacturers, trying to find the best deal we could. I know some of you might have priced out things like this before, so I wanted to say that these numbers represent what I felt was the best quality for the best value, not necessarily the lowest cost option around. As someone who has bought many band shirts in her life, I can tell you that fans are aware when bands cheap out and sell low-quality merchandise that quickly falls apart or feels bad to the touch. I can also say that many fans discuss the low-quality merchandise and are less likely to purchase items from the band in the future, which is why I felt it important to take the quality of the items into account when discussing price.”

I guess most of the people in the room had dealt with that in the past, because I could see a lot of the heads nodding in response. I’d only ever had second and third-hand clothes, so the quality of what I wore was never something I really took into account. I was just happy to get something that didn’t look like total crap. It wasn’t hard to see how selling bad quality merch could turn off some of your fans, however, and I was glad Hanna was taking that into account. The last thing I’d want to do is make someone who might pay to come see us play feel like we were just trying to squeeze them for every dollar possible, since some of those people might never come out again. Better to make less upfront and get them to pay to see us more than once than to get every dollar we could as soon as we could make it.

“As business owners, we all know about the benefits of scale, and this is an area where that really matters. The costs of getting merchandise produced drops quickly the more we buy at a time. The current average price for a band shirt is twenty dollars, with hoodies going for thirty to forty dollars, depending on the style. A good quality shirt with a multi-colored logo would cost us seventeen-fifty to produce one at a time which, with shipping, means almost no profit, and just under five dollars a shirt for five hundred of them. Now, even if we decide to stay with one tour design, which I would say is reasonable, we still need to carry several different sizes. Looking at other bands our size, I think we can probably sell between five hundred and a thousand shirts overall across the entire tour, so clearly getting five hundred shirts in four or five sizes would mean a lot of leftover inventory and very little profit for anyone. After speaking to our label rep and calling around to a few other bands in the area about their sell-through rate, I think we need about fifteen hundred shirts in total. I know I said we’d sell between five-hundred and a thousand shirts, but if you look at the breakdown here, you’ll see that, at fifteen hundred shirts in total, split across these sizes, gives us the highest sell-through rate with the lowest unsold inventory.”

She changed the slide to another chart with a breakdown of sales, including comparable sales of other small bands in the Asheville area. Considering she’d only asked about doing this two days ago, it was an impressive amount of information to gather. On the other hand, using her numbers of an average of seven dollars a shirt for fifteen hundred shirts, plus the following slides where she showed costs of hoodies, the numbers she was talking about was pretty staggering.

As if she was reading my mind, she said, “Now, I know some of you are doing the math and coming to the conclusion that those are some pretty large numbers. We are looking at needing an investment of fifteen thousand dollars to produce this, which is why I asked so many people to this meeting today. The Wild Cats are a new band with a growing but still small regional following. The good news is, there will be marketing for these shows and the venues are expecting decent numbers based on the days that have been booked. I’ve spoken to both the label and several of the upcoming venues, and they’re all fairly confident attendance will be high. This means we are going to have access to a decent customer base at no additional cost. In addition, this investment would cover the complete sell-through, not just the sell-through on tours. At the moment, the label does not plan on paying for anything to do with the non-tour shows the band plays, which means we can use shows here at The Blue Ridge during the school year to sell through the remaining merchandise, and any investors will continue to be paid their portion of the proceeds as long as that merch is being sold.”

“Do you have a breakdown on what portion of the sales we would get?” one of the people I didn’t know asked.

“Yes. We are prepared to pay seventy percent of the sales back to investors, with the band keeping the remaining thirty percent as their profit. What that means is, if you were to fund the production of one shirt for seven dollars, you would receive fourteen once that shirt sells. Now, I know that most of you realize that, unless we have a hundred percent sell-through, which is unlikely, you won’t see that return rate. Here are the numbers I have projected for our sell-through rate, based on what other bands just starting out sell, but I know we all take these kinds of projections with a grain of salt, since this is really just a guess. Of course, we have the opportunity of selling the remaining inventory here at The Blue Ridge on nights when the Wild Cats play, although we’d have to work out a payment back to the house, so the percentage would be lower.”

She hadn’t discussed any of these numbers with us, but looking through her packet, she’d included numbers on what the return would be if the label had taken their part of merchandising, and our percentage would be significantly lower, so I wasn’t going to quibble with what she was offering. Besides, if we didn’t get people to put up a pretty large sum of money, we wouldn’t be able to do it anyway.

“If I’m one of your investors, the house payment would just be my percentage,” Chef said.

“I wouldn’t ask you to do anything that we wouldn’t ask another business owner. I believe it’s best to treat situations like this dispassionately, keeping personal feelings out of it and just focusing on the numbers.”

That did not sound like Hanna and I made a note to ask her who helped her with this presentation. Not that I disapproved, and I agreed that we shouldn’t take advantage of friends just because they felt somehow obligated to help us, but both the packet and some of the phrases she was using had been influenced by someone.

“That’s a good policy,” Chef said, although I could see he was having similar thoughts to mine and fighting off a smile. “However, I see anything I invest in Charlie as a long-term investment, so I’d be happy with just the return on my initial investment without any additional cut.”

“I offered, but if you’re willing to give up the house’s percentage, we’ll take it. So, as I was saying, we have the opportunity to sell-through the remaining merchandise during the regular gigs once the tour is over. What that means for you as investors is that, given long enough, we shouldn’t have unsold stock that you aren’t profiting from. You’ll find more detailed figures in the packets I handed out, and Charlie and I will be reaching out to each of you in turn to answer any specific questions you might have. I do want to point you to the end of the packet, before the reference pages, where you will find when investments must be made by, since we have to have time to print up any of the merchandise before the tour starts. Thank you.”

Vinney then turned the house lights back on, causing everyone to squint a little as their eyes readjusted. I watched as Hanna began making the rounds, talking to everyone. I was impressed with how quickly she’d put this all together and how thorough she’d been.

“So, what did you think?” she asked when she finished her rounds and got to me.

“Impressive, although I’m dying to know who helped you on this.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, although I could tell she knew exactly what I meant.

“‘I believe it’s best to treat situations like this dispassionately, keeping personal feelings out of it and just focusing on the numbers.’ You have never said a sentence like that in your life.”

She tried to stare me down, but after a few seconds she cracked and smiled.

“You got me. I called Mr. Cross, he’s the professor we met when we went did the campus visit to UNC. He was really interested and gave me some pointers on how to do this and then went over my presentation with me. He’s making me keep notes on this, from the presentation through to the end results and everything in between, so that when I finally get to take one of his classes I can use it as the basis of the project he has all of his students do. He’s been super helpful.”

“You really are loving this, aren’t you?”

“I really am. I was pretty sure I’d enjoy it after we did that campus visit, but I gotta tell you, I was into it the whole time I was working on this. From calling printing and merch companies down to looking up records on what other bands’ sell-through rate was. It’s really interesting.”

“Nerd … ouch,” I said as she hit me in the shoulder.

It didn’t particularly hurt, but I knew the reaction would make her laugh. She went back to talking to people with Kat in tow, continuing to pitch investing in us, while the rest of the band and I began to stack up chairs and help get the restaurant ready for dinner.

Not for the first time I realized how lucky I was to have the friends I did, and how much of this wouldn’t have happened without them.