There were waiting lists of highly experienced singers and musicians for the casinos, and Iris put her name on the list. It took her three weeks to locate her father when she got back. He finally turned up, and got her a gig in a halfway-decent bar where he knew the owner and spent a lot of his time when he was in town. It was a stopgap measure until she got a better job, and she had some new songs she’d written that she wanted to try out.
The audiences loved her songs. Her material just kept getting better. The only time she was happy was when she was singing. When she sang, she didn’t care where she was. She had learned to become oblivious to her surroundings. It was just her and the music, and her voice soaring high above the crowd.
The second night she presented her new material, a manager’s scout came to see her backstage after the show. The owner of the bar had called him. She was twenty-three years old and had a small dressing room, even though she was a seasoned performer by then after five years on tour, one of them as a featured act. She wasn’t interested in what he had to say, after years under contract to Billy Weston. He’d called her several times to get her to sign on again, and she didn’t return his calls. She knew better now, and what a liar he was. Her father had sold her to Weston like a slave. She wasn’t going to fall into the same trap again. She had learned a lot about the business, the hard way.
She had made a few friends, but Weston shuffled the groups around, matching up opening acts with featured performers, and they rarely went on tour with the same people. It was hard to stay in touch with anyone. They all moved around too much. She’d dated one singer and a few musicians, and eventually learned her lesson about that too. Most of them just wanted someone to sleep with during the tour. Many of them were into drugs, which she wasn’t. In the end, she just stayed in her hotel room, which she shared with one or two other women, wrote songs in her spare time, and concentrated on her music. She’d never had a serious long-term boyfriend. Her brief relationships had gone nowhere except in and out of bed, with no promise or substance for a future. It was impossible to maintain a serious relationship the way they lived.
They were all drifters, and many of them were younger than she was. Billy Weston was a master at exploiting young people, some of whom had real talent. He treated them like so much cattle. Some of them just walked away from their contracts and disappeared, and went back to wherever they came from, and gave up music. Only the hardiest and most dedicated stuck with it. Iris refused to let him beat her down. There were road managers who went with them, who were usually sleazy guys trying to hit on the girls. She managed to stay away from them too. It was a seedy world, with some of the worst elements in it. She rose above it with her music. She had no friends, no money, and no idea where her father was when she first got back. After checking with Weston’s office, Chip knew when she finished her contract, and he found her in Vegas and got her the job at the bar, where the scout heard her sing, and waited for her after her second set. She was twenty-three years old, and still looked like she was in her teens. She had a freshness and innocent look about her that didn’t exist in the world she was in. But she was willing to endure anything to stick with her music.
The scout’s name was Earl Drake. He said he worked for Glen Hendrix, which was a name she’d heard. He was supposedly a step up from Billy Weston. Drake said he managed talented artists for quality tours, and it was a short step to stardom and the big leagues in Vegas after that. Iris already knew how hard it was to get on the inside track in Vegas, unless one had a powerful agent. The bottom-feeders were plentiful and easy to find, and the reputable agents and managers impossible to get to, unless you had connections, which she didn’t. She knew no one in the upper ranks of her business, and was at the mercy of everyone she worked for, with no one to protect her. Earl Drake reminded her that she needed another “layer of experience” before she could get to the top. Sometimes she thought about just giving up, and getting a normal job somewhere, like others she had known who’d done that to escape the tours, but she couldn’t live without her music, and didn’t want to give up. She’d spent eleven years singing in bars, and terrible places all over the country. She didn’t want to waste that. She had been paying her dues for years, and still hoped that one day it would pay off. She knew she had the talent, what she needed now was luck. The scout left her with his card, and told her that if she wanted to be a big star one day, she should call them. Glen Hendrix could help her get there. She didn’t trust them.
She had lunch with her father the next day. He was living with a woman he had recently met, who was a stripper in a second-rate bar off the Strip. She told him about meeting Earl Drake; she had no one else to talk to. She had long since lost faith in her father, and neither trusted nor respected him, but he was the only living relative she had, and he had an opinion about everything. Once in a great while he was right. He offered to make the deal for her, and she looked at him and almost laughed, except that it wasn’t funny.
“Yeah, and take ten percent off the top for yourself and spend the rest you were supposed to save for me, like you did last time, Dad?” She’d been eighteen then. She was grown up now and knew better.
“I was acting as your agent,” he said righteously. “That’s what agents get. I could have taken twenty.”
“You spent the rest,” she reminded him. “All of it. You cashed the checks, you told me so yourself.”
“I never lie to you. I had some heavy expenses. And work’s not as easy to find as it used to be.”
“Maybe if you didn’t drink so much, you’d find work a little easier.” He’d lost a number of jobs because of his drinking.
Chip encouraged her to sign on with Hendrix. She’d save some money, since he had blown all of hers, and he said he’d heard Hendrix was a class act. Iris doubted it. Her father wouldn’t know a class act if he saw one. She thought of calling Earl Drake, but she didn’t want to.
She asked some of the musicians she knew what they’d heard about Glen Hendrix, and some of them said he was okay. He organized domestic tours in the United States and some in Europe and Asia, and she might get opportunities that she wouldn’t otherwise. After five years on the road to every miserable small town in America for Weston, she wasn’t enthused. The contracts were long, and some performers didn’t stick it out for all of it and just disappeared, but most were intimidated enough to stay until the end, which gave tour managers a flock of long-term slaves to exploit and keep their tours moving.
But the job at the bar ended, the good casinos had no openings, and she had no way in, and no money. After two months of waitressing and doing odd jobs, she called Earl Drake and signed with Glen Hendrix, for another five-year contract, at a better rate than she’d had from Weston. Hendrix only wanted her to be an opening act for six months, until she proved herself, and then she would be a featured act, with a backup band he’d provide for her. It sounded hopeful, and she told her father about it when he dropped by the restaurant where she was still working as a waitress until she left on tour. She sat down with him during a break for a cup of coffee, and he ordered a beer, as usual. He started drinking beer at breakfast, and added a whiskey chaser to it at night, as he always did.