Daisy Jones & The Six: A Novel

With “Turn It Off” summitting the charts and spending four weeks in the top spot, and Aurora selling over 200,000 units every week, Daisy Jones & The Six was the act to see the summer of ’78. The Aurora Tour was selling out stadiums and booking holdover shows in major cities across the country.

ROD: It was time to get the show on the road. I mean that literally.

KAREN: There was a weird feeling on the buses. And by buses I mean the blue bus and the white bus. They both said “Daisy Jones & The Six”

across them, but one had Billy’s denim shirt in the background and the other was Daisy’s tank top. We had two buses because we had so many people. But also because Billy and Daisy never wanted to have to even look at each other.

ROD: The blue bus was Billy’s bus, unofficially. Billy and Graham and Karen and myself, some of the crew, were normally on there.

WARREN: I took the white bus with Daisy and Niccolo and Eddie and Pete. Jenny was with Pete sometimes. The white bus was a much better time. Also, yeah, I’ll be on the bus with the tits painted on the window, thanks.

BILLY: I had a full sober tour under my belt. I felt all right going back on the road.

CAMILA: I sent Billy out on tour like I did almost everything with him back then…with hope. That’s all I could do, was just hope.

OPAL CUNNINGHAM (tour accountant): Every day that I went into the office, I knew three things. One, the band would spend more money than they had the day before. Two, no one would listen to my advice about how to curb spending. Three, anything of import—be it as big as baby grand pianos for the suites or as small as Sharpies for the autographs—you had to make sure Billy and Daisy both had the exact same thing. That rider was twice as long as it needed to be because one of them would get mad if the other had something they didn’t.

I’d call Rod and I’d say, “There is no way they need two Ping-Pong tables.”

ROD: I always said, “Just clear it. Runner will pay.” I should have just made a recording of myself saying that. But I understood. Opal’s job was to make sure we weren’t wasting money. And we were wasting a lot of money. But we had the biggest album in the country at that moment. We could ask for whatever we wanted and it was in Runner’s best interest to give it to us.

EDDIE: First day out on the road, we stop at some gas station. Pete and I get out and go inside to get a soda or something. “Turn It Off” was playing on the radio. That wasn’t that uncommon. Something like that had happened to us a lot in the past few years. But Pete makes a joke.

He says to the guy, “Can you change the station? I hate this song.” The guy changes the station and “Turn It Off” is on the next station, too. I said, “Hey, man, how about you just turn it off?” He thought that was funny.

GRAHAM: It was the first time I saw how—what’s the word I’m looking for?—how invested, I guess, people got in the band. Billy and I went to get a burger at a rest stop when we were somewhere in the desert.

Arizona or New Mexico or something and this couple comes up to us.

They say to Billy, “Are you Billy Dunne?”

Billy says, “Yeah, I am.”

And they say, “We love your album.” And Billy’s handling it great, being really gracious. He always was. He was great with fans. He made it seem like every person who complimented him was the first person to do it. So Billy starts having a more one-on-one conversation with the guy and the woman pulls me aside and says, “I just have to know. Billy and Daisy? Are they together?”

And I pulled my head back and I said, “No.”

And she nodded like she understood what I was trying to say. Like she knew they were sleeping together but accepted that I couldn’t tell her that.

WARREN: Real early on the tour, up in San Francisco, we check into this hotel the night before a show, and I walk right out of the white bus, Pete and Eddie coming out behind me. Graham and Karen come out of the blue bus. We walk right out onto the street and into the hotel, no problem.

Then Billy walks out of the blue bus and within, I don’t know, thirty seconds, you hear girls start screaming. And then Daisy walks out of the white bus and this sound that you think can’t get any louder, this shrieking sound that damn near burst my eardrums, it gets even louder somehow, even more shrill. I turn around and Rod and Niccolo are trying to push ’em all back so Billy and Daisy can get into the hotel.

EDDIE: I once saw Billy decline to give a group of fans his autograph by saying, “I just play music, man. I’m no more important than anybody else.” Watching that arrogant son of a bitch pretend to be humble was enough to make me want to scream. Pete kept telling me, “None of this matters. Don’t get all confused thinking it matters.” I didn’t get what he meant until it was all too late, I think.

DAISY: When people asked for my autograph, I used to write, “Stay Solid, Daisy J.” But when it was a young girl—which wasn’t often but it did happen from time to time—I used to write, “Dream big, little bird.

Love, Daisy.”

ROD: People were excited about this band. They wanted to hear the album live. And Billy and Daisy could really deliver the goods. Not only were they dynamite but they were…hard to read. Enigmatic. They sang beautifully together, but they rarely got on the same mike. Sometimes they would look at each other and when they did, you couldn’t figure out what they were thinking.

This one time in Tennessee, Daisy was singing “Regret Me” and Billy was doing backup and she turned toward him, at the end, at the very end, and sang right to him. She was looking right at him and singing at the top of her lungs. Her face went a little red. And he sang, looking right back at her. He didn’t break her gaze. Then the song was over and they went on. Even I couldn’t have told you what exactly had just happened.

KAREN: In general, if you paid attention, you saw a lot of dirty looks between them. Especially during “Regret Me.” Especially during that.

ROD: If you went to a Daisy Jones & The Six show thinking they hated each other, you could find some damning evidence for that. And if you went thinking something was up with them, that the hatred maybe masked something else, you could find evidence for that, too.

BILLY: You can’t write songs with somebody, write songs about somebody, know that some of the songs you’re singing are ones they wrote about you…and not feel something…not be drawn to them.

Were there times I looked across the stage at Daisy and found myself unable to look away? I mean…yeah. Certainly, if you look at press photos from that tour, concert photos and what have you…you’ll see a lot of pictures of Daisy and I looking into each other’s eyes. I told myself we were putting it on but it’s hard to decipher, really. What was performance and what wasn’t? What were we doing to sell records and what did we really mean? Honestly, maybe I knew at one time but I don’t know anymore.

DAISY: Nicky was often jealous of what happened onstage.

“Young Stars” was about two people who were drawn to each other but forced to deny it. “Turn It Off” was about trying to fall out of love with someone you can’t help but love. “This Could Get Ugly” was about knowing that you know someone even better than their partner does.

These were dicey songs to be singing with someone. These were songs that made you feel something—made me feel what I felt when I wrote them. Nicky knew that. That was a very big part of our relationship.

Making sure Nicky felt okay. That he was happy, making sure he was having a good time.

WARREN: Night after night, it was packed shows, with a screaming crowd. With people singing along to every word. And then it always ended with Billy going back to his hotel room and the rest of us staying out partying until we found somebody to screw.

Except Daisy and Niccolo. They stayed out later than everybody.

Everybody went to bed knowing Daisy and Niccolo thought the night was still young.

DAISY: The drugs aren’t so cute anymore when you wake up with dried blood under your nose so often that cleaning it off is part of your morning routine, like brushing your teeth. And you always have new bruises and you don’t know why. When there’s a knot in the back of your hair because you have forgotten to brush it for weeks.

EDDIE: Her hands were blue. We were backstage getting ready to go on in Tulsa and I looked at her and I said, “Your hands look kind of blue.”

And she looked at them and said, “Oh, yeah.” That was it. Just oh, yeah.

KAREN: Daisy slowly became a person none of us felt much like dealing with. And for the most part, we really didn’t have to. She wasn’t particularly needy or anything. The only issues were when she let things get so out of control, it was everyone’s problem. Like when she almost burned down the Chelsea.

DAISY: Nicky fell asleep having a smoke and the pillow caught fire at the Omni Parker House in Boston. I woke up because of the heat next

to my face. Singed my hair. I had to put out the flames with the extinguisher I found in the closet. Nicky was completely unfazed by the whole thing.

SIMONE: I called her when I heard about the fire. I called her in Boston, I called her in Portland. I kept calling. She didn’t return my calls.

BILLY: I told Rod to get her help.

ROD: I offered to take her and Nicky to rehab and she said I was being silly.

GRAHAM: She’d slur a word here or there, she took a fall down the stage steps at some point. I think maybe in Oklahoma. But Daisy knew how to make everything look like fun and games.

DAISY: We were in Atlanta. And Nicky and I had partied all night and somebody had mescaline. Nicky thought it was a great idea to do mescaline. Everybody else had gone to bed and so it was just Nicky and me, high on a lot of stuff at once. The mescaline had just kicked in.

We broke the lock on the door leading up to the roof at the hotel we were staying at. The fans that had staked outside the lobby of the hotel had all gone home. That’s how late it was. He and I stood there, looking at the empty space where earlier in the day they had all been standing. It seemed romantic, the two of us up there. Everything quiet.

Nicky took my hand and led me to the very edge of the roof.

I made a joke, I said, “What are you up to? You want us to jump?”

And Nicky said, “Could be fun.”

I…Let me put it this way: When you find yourself high on the roof of a hotel with a husband who doesn’t outright say that the two of you shouldn’t jump off, you start to realize you have a lot of problems. That wasn’t my rock bottom. But it was the first time I looked around and thought, Oh, wow, I’m falling.

OPAL CUNNINGHAM: A large part of the growing budget was accounting for what damages they would leave behind. It was always Daisy’s room that cost the most. We were paying hand over fist for broken lamps, broken mirrors, burnt linens. A lot of busted locks.

Hotels expect a certain amount of wear and tear, especially when a band is coming through. But this was enough that they were demanding more than just keeping the security deposit.

WARREN: I think it was around the southern leg of the tour that you could tell Daisy was…I don’t know. Losing it. She was forgetting some of the words to the songs.

ROD: Before the show in Memphis, everyone’s getting ready to go out onstage and no one could find Daisy. I was searching all over for her.

Asking everyone about her. I finally found her in one of the bathrooms in the lobby. She’d passed out in one of the stalls. Her butt was on the floor, one of her arms over her head. For a second—a split second—I thought she was dead. I shook her and she woke up.

I said, “You’re supposed to go onstage.”

She said, “Okay.”

I said, “You need to get sober.”

And she said, “Oh, Rod.” And she stood up, walked to the mirror, checked her makeup, and then walked backstage to meet the rest of the band like everything was right as rain. And I thought, I don’t want to be in charge of this woman anymore.

EDDIE: New Orleans. Fall of ’seventy-eight. Pete finds me at sound check and says, “Jenny wants to get married.”

I say, “All right, so marry her.”

Pete says, “Yeah, I think I will.”

DAISY: If you’re fucked up all the time, you piece things together slower than you should. But I started to realize that Nicky never paid for anything, that he didn’t have any of his own money. And he kept buying us more blow. I’d say, “I’m good. I’ve had enough.” But he always wanted more. Wanted me to have more.

We were on the bus one morning, maybe December or so. We were laying down in the back, while everyone else was up front. I think we were stopped somewhere around Kansas because when I looked out the window all I saw were plains. No hills, not much civilization, even.

I woke up and Nicky was there with a toot, right there. I just had this fleeting thought, What if I didn’t? So I said, “No, thanks.”

And Nicky laughed and said, “No, c’mon.” And he put it right in my face and I snorted it.

And as I turned my head, to look down the aisle, I saw that Billy had stepped onto the bus for some reason, was talking to Warren or something. But…he saw the whole thing. And I caught his eye for a moment and I just got so sad.

BILLY: I made it a point to stay off the white bus. Nothing good for me happened on the white bus.

GRAHAM: We all went home for Christmas and New Year’s.

BILLY: I was so happy to go home to my girls.

CAMILA: There was so much more to my life, so much more to my marriage, than the fact that my husband was in a band. I’m not saying that The Six wasn’t a major factor, of course it was. But we were a family. Billy was expected to leave his work at the door when he came home. And he did that.

When I think back to the late seventies, I do think a lot about the band and the songs and…everything that we were going through with that. But I mostly think about Julia learning to swim. And Susana’s first word sounding like “Mimia,” and how we couldn’t tell if she meant

“Mama” or “Julia” or “Maria.” Or Maria always trying to pull Billy’s hair. And how he used to play a game with the girls called Who Gets the Last Pancake? As he was making pancakes, and the girls were eating them, he’d suddenly yell, “Who gets the last pancake?” And whichever girl put her hand up first got to eat it. But somehow, no matter what happened, he’d make them split the pancake.

That’s the kind of thing I remember more than anything.

BILLY: Camila and I had just closed on our new house in Malibu, in the hills. Bigger than any house I ever thought I’d live in. With this long driveway and trees shading every part except the deck. The deck was totally unobstructed. You could see all the way out to the ocean. Camila used to call it “the house ‘Honeycomb’ built.”

The two weeks that I was home for the holidays, we spent most of it moving in and getting settled. The first night we brought the girls, I said to Julia, “Which room do you want?” She was the oldest, so she got first pick. Her eyes went wide and she went off running down the hall, looking at each one. And then, she sat down on the floor in the middle of the hallway and she deliberated. And then she said, “I want the one in the middle.”

I said, “Are you sure?”

She said, “I’m sure.” She was just like her mom. Once she knew what she wanted, she knew.

ROD: That Christmas was the first time in a long time—a long, long time—that I didn’t have to do any work. That I could just enjoy myself.

That I didn’t have to save some rock star from some crisis or make sure their rider was fulfilled or whatever I was doing.

I rented a cabin with this guy Chris. He and I moved in the same circles and I’d been seeing him whenever I was in town. We spent the holidays together in Big Bear. We made dinners together and went in the hot tub and played cards. For Christmas, I gave him a sweater and he gave me a day planner. And I thought, I want to be normal.

DAISY: Nicky and I flew to Rome for Christmas.

EDDIE: Over the holiday, Pete asked Jenny to marry him and she said yes. I was real happy for him, you know? I gave him a big hug. He said,

“I have to figure out when I’m going to tell everybody. I don’t know how they are gonna take it.”

I said, “What are you talking about? Nobody cares if you’re married.”

He said, “No, I’m leaving.”

I said, “Leaving?”

He said, “At the end of the tour, I’m quitting the band.”

We were at our parents’ house in the den. I said, “What are you talking about? Quitting the band?”

He said, “I told you I didn’t want to do this forever.”

I said, “You never said that.”

He said, “I’ve said that a thousand times to you. I told you this stuff doesn’t matter.”

I said, “You’re talking about giving all of this up for Jenny?

Really?”

He said, “Not really for Jenny. For me. So I can get on with my life.”

I said, “What does that mean?”

He said, “I never wanted to be in a soft rock band. C’mon. You know that. I got on the train, I rode it for a little while. But my stop’s coming up.”

DAISY: Nicky and I got into a fight in the hotel room in Italy. He accused me of sleeping with Billy back in Kansas. I had no idea what he was even talking about. I didn’t even talk to Billy in Kansas. But he said he’d known for weeks and he was sick of watching me try to hide it.

Things got intense, really quickly. I threw a few bottles at him. He smashed his hand through the window. I remember looking down and seeing gray tears falling down my face. They were stained with my mascara and eyeliner. I don’t remember exactly how it happened but one of my hoops got ripped out of my ear. Cut clear through. I was bleeding and crying and the room was trashed. And the next thing I know Nicky is holding me and we’re promising to never leave each other’s side and never fight like that again and I remember thinking, If this is what love is like, maybe I don’t want it.

ROD: We had booked Daisy’s flight to get in a full day early for the show in Seattle. I had her come in early because I was nervous she’d miss her flight and I needed to make sure we had a margin of error.

DAISY: The morning we were supposed to fly to Seattle, I woke up and Nicky was sitting over me. I realized I was soaking wet, sleeping in the base of the shower. I was groggy and confused but by that point I always woke up groggy and confused. I said, “What happened?”

He said, “I thought maybe you overdosed. On the Seconals or something. I couldn’t remember what else we took.” You know what happens when people overdose on Seconals? They die.

I said, “So you put me in the shower?”

He said, “I tried to wake you up. I didn’t know what else to do. You wouldn’t wake up. I was so scared.”

I looked at him and my heart just sank. Because, while I have no idea whether or not I overdosed or what exactly happened that night, I could tell he had been truly terrified.

And all he did was put me in the shower.

My husband believed I might die. And he didn’t so much as even call the concierge.

A switch flipped in me. It was like one of those breaker switches…

Like on a circuit box. You know how they take a lot of pressure to flip?

But then once they catch, they switch over with force? I switched over.

I knew, right then and there, that I needed to get away from this person. That I had to take care of myself. Because if I didn’t…

He wasn’t gonna kill me but he would let me die.

I said, “Okay, thank you for watching me.” I said, “You must be tired. Why don’t you take a nap?” And then, when he was asleep, I packed all my things. I took both plane tickets and I went to the airport. When I got there, I found a pay phone. I called the hotel. I said, “I need to leave a message for Niccolo Argento in room 907.”

The lady said okay. Actually, she probably said, “Bene.”

I said, “Write, ‘Lola La Cava wants a divorce.’ ”

WARREN: When we all got back after hiatus, that show in Seattle…

Daisy seemed, I don’t know, lucid.

I said, “Where’s Niccolo?”

And Daisy said, “That period of my life is over.” That was it. End of discussion. I thought that was badass.

SIMONE: She called me and said she’d left Niccolo in Italy and I started clapping.

KAREN: She started making sense when you were talking to her. She started showing up clearheaded to sound checks.

DAISY: I would not, unfortunately, use the word sober. But you know what? I showed up to places on time. I did start doing that.

BILLY: I don’t think I had realized just how much of her was gone until it was back.

DAISY: I had gotten back to being aware of myself onstage, those first months away from Nicky. Of being aware of my relationship with the audience. I started making a point to be in bed by a certain time and awake by a certain time. I had rules about when to do what drugs. Only coke at night, only six dexies at a time, or whatever number I’d come up with. Only champagne and brandy.

When I was onstage, I was singing with intention. Which I hadn’t done in a long time. I cared about the show. I cared about making it good. I cared about…

I cared about who I was singing with.

ROD: Daisy high is fun and carefree and a good time. If she’s having fun, you’re having fun. But if you want to rip people’s hearts out of their chests, bring Daisy back down to earth and have her sing her own songs. There’s nothing like it.

DAISY: I was drunk at the Grammys. But it barely mattered.

BILLY: Before the award for Record of the Year was announced, sometime earlier in the night, Rod told me that Teddy didn’t want to speak. It’s sort of a producer’s award, but Teddy preferred to be the guy behind the guy, so Rod asked if I wanted to be the one to do it and I said, “It doesn’t matter. We aren’t gonna win.”

He said, “So it’s okay if I give it to Daisy?”

I said, “You’re giving her a big fat bowl of nothing but sure.”

Look, you can’t be right all the time.

KAREN: When we won Record of the Year for “Turn It Off,” we were all standing up there, the seven of us and Teddy. Pete wore a goddamn bolo tie. Hideous. I was so embarrassed for him. I thought, for certain, that Billy would be the one to give the acceptance speech. But Daisy went up to the mike instead. I thought, I hope she says something coherent. And then she did.

BILLY: She said, “Thank you to everybody who listened to this song and understood this song and sang it along with us. We made it for you. For all of you out there hung up on somebody or something.”

CAMILA: “For everyone hung up on somebody or something.”

DAISY: I didn’t mean anything by it except to give a voice to people feeling desperate. I was feeling desperate about a lot of things. I was feeling desperate and also, somehow, more myself.

It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity.

And when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.

BILLY: When we walked off the stage, with that award, I caught her eye. And she smiled at me. And I thought, She’s turning it around.

ELAINE CHANG: Daisy accepting the Grammy for Record of the Year, where her hair is disheveled and she’s wearing the bangles up to her elbows and she’s got on this thin cream silk slip dress and she seems entirely in control of that band and confident in her talent…that night alone might be why she’s considered one of the sexiest rock singers of all time.

Shortly after that, they recorded the famous video of the band performing “Impossible Woman” at Madison Square Garden—where she’s singing deep from her gut and fearless about even the highest notes, where Billy Dunne can’t seem to keep his eyes off her.

All of this was during those months just after she had left Niccolo Argento. That’s when she was fully self-actualized, fully in command of herself. All the magazines were talking about her, everybody knew who she was. All of rock ’n’ roll wanted to be her.

Spring of ’seventy-nine is the Daisy Jones we all talk about when we talk about Daisy Jones. You would have thought she was on top of the world.

KAREN: There’s something I haven’t mentioned.

GRAHAM: Did Karen tell you about it? It’s not my place to say anything if she hasn’t told you already. But…I guess if she did, then it’s okay.

KAREN: We were in Seattle, I think, when I realized what was going on.

EDDIE: I never brought it up with Graham and Karen, that I knew they were sleeping together. But I did think it was odd they kept it so quiet.

People would have been happy for them. Maybe it was just a one-time thing between them. Sometimes, my memory is so hazy I wonder if I imagined it. But I don’t think I did. I don’t think I would make up something like that.

KAREN: I was taking a shower in the hotel and Graham had the adjoining room and he came in. And then he got in the shower with me. I pulled him into me, put my arms around him. That’s part of what I liked about Graham so much, was how big he was, how strong he was. He was hairy and bulky and I liked all of that. I liked how gentle he was, too. But this time, as he pressed his chest into mine, my boobs felt swollen. They felt sore. And I knew. I just knew.

I’d heard women talk about being able to sense when they were pregnant. But I thought it was some Flower Power shit. But it’s true. At least for me. I was twenty-nine. I knew my body. And I knew I was pregnant. This dread just seeped into me. It was like it started at my head and filled my whole body. I remember being so thankful when Graham heard Warren knocking on his door because he rushed out of the shower.

I was so relieved to be alone. To not have to pretend to be human, in that moment. Because I felt…gone. I felt like my soul had left my body and I was just a shell. I stayed in the shower for I don’t even know how long. I just stayed in there, under the showerhead, staring off into space until I could muster the energy to step out.

GRAHAM: You know how sometimes you can tell that something is off with somebody? But you can’t put your finger on it? And you ask what’s wrong and they seem to have no idea what you’re talking about?

You feel crazy. You feel like you’re going crazy. This feeling in your gut that the person you love isn’t okay. But they look okay. They look okay.

KAREN: I took a pregnancy test in Portland. I’d kept it a secret from everybody. But then…that meant I was alone in my hotel room. Seeing

the line turn pink or whatever color it was. I stared at it for a long time.

And then I called Camila. I said, “I’m pregnant.” I said, “I don’t know what to do.”

CAMILA: I said, “Do you want a family?”

And she said, “No.” When she said “no…” it sounded like this croak. In her throat.

KAREN: It was silent on the phone. And then Camila said, “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

GRAHAM: When we got to Vegas, I finally said, “C’mon, you have to talk to me.”

KAREN: I just blurted it out. Told him. I said, “I’m pregnant.”

GRAHAM: I didn’t know what to say.

KAREN: He didn’t talk for a long time. Just paced around the room. I said, “I don’t want to do this. Go through with it.”

GRAHAM: I figured she was just wrestling with it a bit. I said to her,

“Let’s just give this some time. We still have time, right?”

KAREN: I told him I wasn’t going to change my mind.

GRAHAM: I said the wrong thing. I knew it was the wrong thing. I said,

“We can get a different keyboardist, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

KAREN: I don’t really blame Graham, honestly. He was just thinking like most people. I said, “Do you understand how hard I worked to get here? I’m not giving this up.”

GRAHAM: I didn’t want to say it but I thought it seemed selfish.

Choosing anything over our baby.

KAREN: He kept calling it “our baby.” Our baby our baby our baby.

GRAHAM: I told her that she should just take some time. That’s all I said.

KAREN: It was our baby but it was my responsibility.

GRAHAM: People change their minds about this stuff all the time. You think you don’t want something and then you realize you do.

KAREN: He said that I didn’t know what I was saying and that if I didn’t go forward with the pregnancy I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

He just didn’t understand.

I wasn’t scared of regretting not having a child. But I was scared of regretting having a child.

I was scared of bringing an unwanted life into this world. I was scared of living my life, feeling like I’d anchored myself to the wrong dock. I was scared of being pushed to do something I knew I did not want. Graham didn’t want to hear it.

GRAHAM: Things got heated and I stormed out. We had to have the conversation when we felt calm. You can’t scream about something like that.

KAREN: My mind wasn’t going to change. I’ve been judged for it every time I’ve said it but I’ll keep saying it: I never wanted to be a mother. I never wanted children.

GRAHAM: I just kept thinking, She’ll change her mind. I thought, We will get married and have a baby and figure it all out. She was going to realize how much she wanted to be a mother, how much family meant to her.

DAISY: After the Grammys, Billy and I started talking again. Well, sort of. We had just won for a song we wrote together, a song we sung together, and that resonated with me.

BILLY: She leveled out. She loosened up. With Niccolo gone, it was…

easier to have a conversation with her.

DAISY: We were on an overnight flight to New York to do Saturday Night Live. Rich had given us the Runner jet. I think almost everybody had fallen asleep. Billy was on the other side of the plane from me. But our chairs were sort of facing each other. I had on a tiny dress and I was cold and I took a blanket and wrapped it around myself and I saw Billy see me. And he laughed.

BILLY: Some people will never stop being themselves. And you think it drives you crazy but it is the very thing you will think about when they are gone. When you don’t have them in your life anymore.

DAISY: I looked at him and I laughed, too. And it was, for a moment, at least, like we could be friends again.

ROD: By the time they did Saturday Night Live, “Young Stars” had become a hit, too. It was number 7 on the charts, I think. Somewhere in the Top Ten. We were selling so many albums they couldn’t print them fast enough. Runner had teed up “This Could Get Ugly” as the next hit.

DAISY: For SNL, the decision was that we would do “Turn It Off” as the first song, and then we would do “This Could Get Ugly” for the second.

KAREN: I bet Warren that Daisy wouldn’t be wearing a bra and I won two hundred bucks.

WARREN: We’re all deciding what we were gonna wear and I bet Karen fifty bucks that Billy wore a denim shirt and Daisy didn’t wear a bra. I won fifty bucks.

KAREN: During dress, Daisy and Billy were actually speaking to each other. You could tell there had been a shift, somewhere.

GRAHAM: We did the dress rehearsal for “Turn It Off” and it went really well. So did “This Could Get Ugly.”

BILLY: When the show started, I planned on doing it just like we’d rehearsed.

DAISY: Lisa Crowne announced us, you know, “Ladies and gentlemen,

Daisy Jones & The Six,” and the crowd went crazy. I’d been in huge stadiums with crowds cheering but it felt different. This small group of people just in front of us, making that much noise. It was this jolt of energy.

NICK HARRIS: By the time Daisy Jones & The Six performed “Turn It Off” on Saturday Night Live, they were performing a song almost everyone in the country knew. It was the Record of the Year.

Daisy was wearing faded black jeans and a satin pink tank top. Of course, she’s got the bracelets on. She’s barefoot. Her hair is this brilliant red. She was dancing around the stage, singing her heart out, and tapping the tambourine. She looked like she was having a great time. And Billy Dunne is in his classic denim and denim. He’s up close on the mike, watching her, having a great time himself. They looked like they belonged up there together.

The band is hitting every beat with a crispness and a freshness that you don’t expect when a song has been played as many times as you know they’ve played this song.

And Warren Rhodes is a showstopper for anybody interested in learning what it means to hold an entire band together with the drums.

He was electric behind those things. If you could take your eye off Daisy and Billy long enough, it would go right to him slamming down on the floor toms.

And then as the song progresses, and the lyrics get a bit more pointed, Billy and Daisy both seem transfixed with one another. They move to the same mike and they sing facing one another. This emotive, hot-blooded song about wishing you could get over someone…they seem like they are singing to each other.

BILLY: There was so much going on during that performance. I had to be aware of my timing and the words and where I was looking and where the camera was. And then…I don’t know…Suddenly Daisy was there next to me and I forgot about everything but just looking at her and singing this song that we wrote together.

DAISY: The song ended, and I sort of snapped out of it, and Billy and I looked at the audience and then he took my hand and we bowed. That was the first time my body had so much as grazed his in a very long time. It was the sort of thing where, even after he let go, my hand still hummed.

GRAHAM: Daisy and Billy had something no one else had. And when they played it up, when they actually engaged with each other…It’s what made us. That was one of those moments where you think their talent is absolutely worth all the bullshit.

WARREN: Between songs, Billy told me he had an idea for “A Hope Like You.” I liked the idea. I told him as long as everybody else was okay with it, then I was, too.

EDDIE: “This Could Get Ugly” went great at dress. And at the last minute, Billy wants to do “A Hope Like You.” A slow ballad. And he wants to play the keys instead of Karen. So it’s just him and Daisy onstage.

BILLY: I wanted to really surprise everyone. I wanted to do something unexpected. I thought it could be…something to really remember.

DAISY: I thought it sounded really, really cool.

GRAHAM: It all happened so fast. One minute we’re all supposed to go out there to play “This Could Get Ugly” and the next, Billy and Daisy are going out there alone to play a different song.

KAREN: I’m the keyboard player. If someone is out there with Daisy, it seemed like it should have been me. But I understand what he was selling when he went out there. I got it. Doesn’t mean I liked it.

ROD: It was a brilliant move. The two of them out there alone. It made for great TV.

WARREN: They were facing each other, Billy at the piano, Daisy standing opposite him with the mike. The rest of us watched from the sidelines.

DAISY: Billy started playing and I caught his eye, for just a moment, before I started singing. And… [pauses] It just seemed so obvious, so painfully embarrassingly obvious. Without Nicky there to distract me, without keeping myself so drugged up I wasn’t even mentally present, it just seemed so obvious that I loved him.

That I was in love with him.

And getting high and going to Thailand and marrying a prince wasn’t going to make me stop. And him being married to somebody else…That wasn’t going to stop it either. I think I finally resigned myself to it in that moment. Just how sad it all was.

And then I started singing.

KAREN: You know when you can hear that there is a lump in somebody’s throat? That’s what she sounded like. And it…it killed everybody in the room. Her looking at him like that. Singing to him like that. Singing, “It doesn’t matter how hard I try/can’t earn some things no matter why.” I mean, c’mon.

BILLY: I loved my wife. I was faithful to my wife from the very minute I straightened up. I tried desperately to never feel anything else for any other woman. But… [breathes deeply] Everything that made Daisy burn, made me burn. Everything I loved about the world, Daisy loved about the world. Everything I struggled with, Daisy struggled with. We were two halves. We were the same. In that way that you’re only the same with a few other people. In that way that you don’t even feel like you have to say your own thoughts because you know the other person is already thinking them. How could I be around Daisy Jones and not be mesmerized by her? Not fall in love with her?

I couldn’t.

I just couldn’t.

But Camila meant more. That’s just the very deepest truth. My family meant more to me. Camila meant more to me. Maybe, for a little while there, Camila wasn’t the person I was the most drawn to. Or…

…

…

…

Maybe Camila wasn’t the person I was the most in love with. At that time. I don’t know. You can’t…Maybe she wasn’t. But she was always the person I loved the most. She was always the person I would choose.

It is Camila, for me. Always.

Passion is…it’s fire. And fire is great, man. But we’re made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive.

My family was my water. I picked water. I’ll pick water every time. And I wanted Daisy to find her water. Because I couldn’t be it.

GRAHAM: Watching Billy play the piano and look at Daisy, I thought, I hope Camila doesn’t see this.

BILLY: You try playing a song like that with a woman like Daisy knowing your wife will see it. You try doing that. And then tell me you’re not about to lose your goddamn mind.

ROD: It was electric, that performance. The two of them, together, performing to each other. It felt like they were ripping their hearts out on national TV. Those moments don’t happen all the time. If you were up late that Saturday night watching them, you felt like you’d witnessed something big.

KAREN: When the song was over, the small audience there erupted and Billy and Daisy took their final bow. And the rest of us came out and joined them. And, you know, I did kind of have this feeling, then, that we were big and we were only going to get bigger. It was the first time that I thought, Are we going to be the biggest band in the world?

WARREN: We went to the after-party with the whole cast and everybody. Lisa Crowne was the host and I thought, you know, Just play it cool with her and maybe she’ll be into you. And so that’s what I did. And then she was.

GRAHAM: When I looked over, sometime in the early morning, and Warren had his arm around Lisa Crowne, I thought, Shit, we must be really fucking famous. I mean, we’d have to be for Warren to have a chance with Lisa Crowne.

EDDIE: Pete and I partied with the SNL band to the point where I couldn’t feel my own nose and Pete puked into a tuba.

WARREN: By the time I left with Lisa, I didn’t see Daisy anywhere.

GRAHAM: At some point, we all lost track of Daisy.

BILLY: I was polite, and I went to the bar with everybody. But I couldn’t stay long. SNL parties are not where you want to be when you’re sober.

When I got back to my hotel, I got a call from [Camila] and we talked for a little while and there was a lot that we weren’t saying. She had watched the show and I think she was wrestling with how to feel about all of it. We talked around it a long time. And then she said she wanted to go to sleep and I said, “Okay,” and then I said, “I love you.

You are my ‘Aurora.’ ” And she said she loved me too and hung up the phone.

CAMILA: No matter who you choose to go down the road with, you’re gonna get hurt. That’s just the nature of caring about someone. No matter who you love, they will break your heart along the way. Billy Dunne has broken my heart a number of times. And I know I’ve broken his. But yes, that night watching them on SNL… that was one of the times that my heart cracked.

But I just kept choosing trust and hope. I believed he was worthy of it.

DAISY: I was sitting in a booth next to Rod at the SNL party and a bunch of girls went into the bathroom to do a line and I was so bored. I was so incredibly bored of my life. Of the speed and coke and the cycle.

It was like watching a movie for the hundredth time. You already know when the bad guy’s gonna show up, you already know what the hero will do. It was so boring, the thought of it, that I wanted to die. I wanted real life, for once. Anything real. So I got up and I got in a cab and I went back to the hotel and I went to Billy’s room.

BILLY: There was a knock at my door. Just as I was falling asleep. And at first I just let the person knock. I figured it was Graham and it could wait until the morning.

DAISY: I just kept knocking. I knew he was in there.

BILLY: Finally, I get out of bed and I’m in just my skivvies. And I answer and I say, “What do you want?” And then I look and it’s Daisy.

DAISY: I just needed to say what I needed to say. I had to say it. It was then or it was never and it couldn’t be never. I couldn’t live like that.

BILLY: I was genuinely in shock. I could not believe it.

DAISY: I said, “I want to get clean.”

Billy immediately pulled me into his room. And he sat me down and he said, “Are you sure?”

I said, “Yes.”

And he said, “Let’s get you into rehab now.”

He picked up the phone and he started dialing and I got up and I hung up the phone and I said, “Just…right now just sit with me. And help me…understand what I’m doing.”

BILLY: I didn’t know how to help somebody else. But I wanted to. I wanted to help somebody the way Teddy had helped me. I owed so much to him, felt so grateful to him. For getting me into rehab when he

did. And I wanted to do that for someone. I wanted to do it for her. I wanted her to be safe and healthy. I wanted that for her…I…yeah, I wanted that for her very badly.

DAISY: Billy and I talked about rehab and what that would mean and he told me a little bit about what it would be like. It seemed so daunting. I was starting to wonder if I didn’t really mean it. If I wasn’t actually ready to go through with it. But I kept trying to believe in myself, that I could. At one point, Billy asked if I was sober. Was I sober right then?

I’d had a drink or two at the party, I’d had dexies earlier in the day. I couldn’t have told you what sober meant, exactly. Had everything worn off? Did I even remember what it was like to be entirely straight?

Billy opened the minibar to get a soda and there were all these nips in there of tequila and vodka and I looked at them. And Billy looked at them. And then he just took them and walked to the window and threw them out the window. You could hear a few of them break on the roof of the floor below. I said, “What are you doing?”

Billy just said, “That’s rock ’n’ roll.”

BILLY: At some point, we got to talking about the album.

DAISY: I asked him something that had been plaguing me for the past couple months. “Are you worried we’ll never be able to write another album as good as this?”

BILLY: I said, “I worry about it every fucking day.”

DAISY: All my life I’d wanted people to recognize my talent as a songwriter and Aurora had brought it, the recognition. And I’d immediately started to feel like an impostor.

BILLY: The higher that album went, the more nervous I felt thinking about how to make another one. I’d be scribbling down songs in my notebook on the bus and I’d just end up crossing it all out and throwing it away because it wasn’t…I couldn’t tell if it was any good anymore. I didn’t know if I was just exposing myself as a fraud.

DAISY: He was the only one that could understand that level of pressure.

BILLY: When morning came, I brought up rehab again.

DAISY: The thought I kept hearing in my head was Go for a little while just for a break. You don’t have to stop forever. That was my plan. To go to rehab without planning to quit forever. It made perfect sense to me. I’ll tell you: If a friend lied to me the way I lie to myself, I’d say,

“You’re a shitty friend.”

BILLY: I picked up the phone to call information to get the number for the rehab center I went to. But when I picked up the receiver, there was no dial tone. And someone on the other end was saying, “Hello?”

I said, “Hello?”

It was the concierge. He said, “I have an Artie Snyder on the phone for you.”

I told him to put it through but I was thinking, Why is my sound engineer calling me at the ass crack of dawn? I said, “Artie, what on earth…?”

DAISY: Teddy had a heart attack.

WARREN: A lot of people live through heart attacks. So when I found out, I thought…I didn’t immediately realize that meant he was dead.

BILLY: Gone.

GRAHAM: Teddy Price isn’t the kind of guy you think is going to die of a heart attack. Well, I mean, he ate like shit and drank a lot and didn’t take great care of himself but…He just seemed too…powerful, maybe.

Like if a heart attack came to town he was going to tell it to screw off and it would.

BILLY: It just knocked the wind right out of me. And my first thought when I got off the phone, the very first thought in my head was Why did I throw the booze out the window?

ROD: I got them all home to L.A. for the funeral.

WARREN: We’d all been devastated to lose Teddy. But, man, watching Yasmine, his girlfriend, break down in these awful tears at his grave…I just kept thinking that so little in life mattered. But how Yasmine felt about Teddy…that mattered.

GRAHAM: Teddy was a lot of things to a lot of people. I’ll never forget being at the memorial and seeing Billy holding Yasmine’s hand, trying to make her feel all right. Because I knew he wasn’t all right.

Every man needs a man to look up to. For better or worse, I had Billy. Billy had Teddy. And Teddy was gone.

BILLY: Things had sort of spun out of control for me. I could barely make sense of anything. I couldn’t process it. Teddy being gone. Teddy being…dead. I think I died inside, for a little while. I know that sounds kind of extreme. But that’s what it felt like. It felt like my heart sort of turned to stone. Or…you know how people get cryogenically frozen?

Like, they just put themselves on ice in the hopes that they can come back one day? That’s what happened to my soul. On ice.

I couldn’t handle reality. Not sober. Not without a drink or a…I just checked out. I checked out of my life. I had no other way of coping but to die inside. Because if I tried to stay alive, to live during that period of time, it might actually have killed me.

DAISY: When Teddy died , that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed Teddy. You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything.

WARREN: I’d spent about three weeks on my boat. Smoking cigars, getting drunk, barely changing my clothes. Lisa and I had been talking a bit, since the show on SNL. She came out to see me. She said, “You live on a boat?”

I said, “Yeah.”

She said, “You’re an adult. Get a real house.” She had a point.

EDDIE: I’d thought the best thing for all of us was to get back out on the road. We lost a cousin of mine in a car accident about ten or eleven years before, and my dad had said, “Work through pain.” That’s been my way ever since. I thought it might make Pete stay in the band. But, if anything, it made him more ready to leave.

BILLY: One time, Camila asked me to scrub the toilet and I went in there and I started scrubbing the bowl and I just kept scrubbing it. And then she came in and she said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m cleaning the toilet.”

She said, “You’ve been cleaning the toilet for forty-five minutes.”

I said, “Oh.”

CAMILA: I said to him, “You need to get back on the road, Billy. We’ll all go with you. But you need to get back out there. Sitting at home thinking is killing you.”

ROD: At some point, you have to get back on the bus.

GRAHAM: You think that tragedy means that the world is over but you realize the world is never over. It’s just never over. Nothing will end it.

And I kept focusing on the fact that, with Karen and I, you know, life is just beginning.

KAREN: I was very thankful to Rod that he got us back out on the road.

That he didn’t let us capsize.

BILLY: I did what Camila said. I got back out there. The first show, we were in Indianapolis. I flew out with the band. Camila and the girls were going to join me at the next stop.

Indianapolis was…it was tough. I showed up at the hotel, checked in, saw Graham, saw Karen, and then at sound check there was Daisy.

She was wearing overalls. She looked strung out. You could see it. Her sunken eyes and her skinny arms. I had a hard time looking at her.

I’d failed her. She had asked me to help her get sober. And once Teddy died, I abandoned her.

DAISY: That first night back, I think we were in Ohio, I was so embarrassed to even let Billy see me. Because I had come to him and said that I wanted to get sober. And then I hadn’t done it. I’d fallen even further than before.

KAREN: I told Graham I’d decided to have an abortion. And he said I was crazy. And I told him I wasn’t. And he asked me not to do it.

I said, “Are you going to quit this band to raise this baby?” And he didn’t respond. And that was it.

GRAHAM: I thought we were still discussing it.

KAREN: He knew. He knew what I was going to do. He just feels more comfortable pretending he didn’t. He has that luxury.

BILLY: Camila and the girls came to join us in Dayton. I picked them up from the airport and as I was waiting for them, I could see a guy ordering a tequila on the rocks at the bar. I could hear the ice in the glass. I could see it sitting in the tequila. It was announced that their plane was stuck on the runway and I was sitting there, staring at the gate.

As I was telling myself that I wasn’t going to order a drink, I walked over to the bar and I sat down on a stool. The guy behind the counter said, “What can I get you?” And I stared at him. And he said it again. And then I hear, “Daddy!” and I looked and there was my family.

Camila said, “What’s going on?”

I stood up and I smiled at her and, in that moment, I had it under control. I said, “Nothing. I’m good.”

She gave me a glance and I said, “I promise.” And I picked up my girls in a big bear hug and I felt okay. I felt all right.

CAMILA: To be honest, that’s when I questioned my own faith. Finding him sitting at a bar. Flags went up.

I started to wonder if maybe Billy was capable of doing something that I would be incapable of forgiving.

KAREN: Camila was with us from then on. For as long as that tour lasted. She’d fly back and forth, sometimes she had all the girls with her. But she almost always had Julia there. Julia was about five, by that point, I want to say.

DAISY: Every night was starting to feel like torture. It had been one thing to sing with Billy when I was with someone else, when I didn’t know how I felt, when I had lies I could hide behind. Denial is like an old blanket. I loved to get on under that thing and curl up and sleep.

But, leaving Nicky, singing that song with Billy on live TV, telling him I wanted to get clean…I’d ripped the blanket off of myself. And there was, no putting it back on. And it was killing me. The vulnerability, the rawness. It was killing me to get up there on that stage. To sing with him.

When we did “Young Stars,” I was praying Billy would look at me and acknowledge what we were saying to each other. And when we did

“Please,” I was begging him to pay attention to me. I was having a hard time singing “Regret Me” with any real anger because I wasn’t angry, most of the time. Not anymore. I was sad. I was so goddamn sad.

And everybody wanted to see “A Hope Like You” the way we had done it on SNL and the two of us kept trying to deliver that. It just kept slicing me in two every night.

To sit next to him and smell his aftershave. And see his big hands with his swollen knuckles playing the piano in front of me and to be singing, from the very bottom of my heart, that I ached for him to love me back.

I spent the hours of the day we weren’t onstage trying to repair my wounds and it was like I was pulling them back open every night.

SIMONE: I was getting a lot of phone calls from Daisy at all hours of the day. I’d say, “Let me come get you.” And she’d refuse. I thought about trying to force her into rehab. But you can’t do that. You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind.

I used to rehearse speeches and interventions and consider flying to where she was and dragging her off that stage—as if, if I could just get the words right, I could convince her to get sober. You drive yourself crazy, trying to put words in some magical order that will unlock their sanity. And when it doesn’t work, you think, I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t talk to her clearly enough.

But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it’s more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you’ll have to watch.

DAISY: I’d chased this life with all of my heart. I wanted so badly to express myself and be heard and bring solace to other people with my own words. But it became a hell I’d created myself, a cage I’d built and locked myself in. I came to hate that I’d put my heart and my pain into my music because it meant that I couldn’t ever leave it behind. And I had to keep singing it to him, night after night after night, and I could no longer hide how I felt or what being next to him was doing to me.

It made for a great show. But it was my life.

BILLY: Every night, after the show was over and the girls were in bed, Camila and I would sit out on the balcony of whatever hotel we were in and we’d just talk. She’d talk about how the girls were stressing her out. She’d talk about how she really needed me to stay sober. I’d tell her how hard I was trying. I’d tell her how scared I was of just about everything the future held. Runner had started asking about a new album. The weight was on me.

At one point she said, “Do you honestly think you can’t write another good album without Teddy?”

And I said, “I’ve never written an album without Teddy, period.”

WARREN: We were on the bus heading into Chicago and Eddie seemed upset about something. I said, “Talk if you want to talk.” I don’t like it when people try to force you to ask them what’s going on.

He said, “I haven’t told anybody this but…” Pete was gonna leave the band.

EDDIE: Pete was not listening to reason. Warren said I should talk to Billy, get Billy to talk some sense into him. As if Pete was going to listen to Billy if he wasn’t going to listen to me. I was his brother.

WARREN: Graham overheard us talking.

EDDIE: So Graham gets involved and he’s already getting on everybody’s nerves lately because he’s so tightly wound about God-knows-what. Anyway, he says we should talk to Billy. And I, again, mention that Pete isn’t going to listen to Billy if he wasn’t going to listen to me, you know what I’m saying? But Graham doesn’t hear me and, instead, when we pull up to this diner outside Chicago, Billy comes to find me. He says, “What’s going on? What do we need to talk about?”

I was just looking for the john, minding my own business. I said,

“It’s nothing, man. Don’t worry about it.”

Billy says, “It’s my band. I deserve to know what’s going on in my own band.”

That really pissed me off. I said, “It’s everybody’s band.”

Billy said, “You know what I meant.”

And I said, “Yeah, we all know what you mean.”

KAREN: We were outside of Chicago. Staying the night in a hotel.

Camila had called ahead to this clinic. She walked me in, sat next to me. I was bouncing my knee and she put her hand on my leg and stopped the bouncing. I said, “Am I making a mistake?”

And she said, “Do you think you are?”

And I said, “I don’t know.”

And she said, “I think you do know.”

And I thought about what she meant.

And then I said, “I know I’m not making a mistake.”

And she said, “There you go.”

And I said, “I think I’m pretending to be conflicted so that everybody feels better.”

She said, “I don’t need to feel better. You don’t need to pretend anything for me.” So I stopped.

When they called my name, she squeezed my hand and she didn’t let go. I didn’t ask her to come into the room with me and I didn’t think she was going to, but she just kept walking with me—she never left my side. I remember thinking, Oh, I guess she’s gonna be here for this. I got on the table. The doctor explained what was going to happen. And then he left for a moment. And there was a nurse in the corner. And I looked at Camila and she looked like she was going to cry. And I said,

“Are you sad?”

And she said, “A part of me wishes you wanted kids, because my kids make me so happy. But…I think in order to be happy like I’m happy, you need different things. And I want you to have whatever those things are.” And I started crying, then. Because somebody understood.

Afterward, she brought me back to the hotel and she told everyone I wasn’t feeling well and I laid in bed by myself. And…it was a bad day.

It was an awful day. Knowing you did the right thing doesn’t mean you’re happy about it. But when I called in room service, and I laid there in my hotel room, I knew that I was childless and that Camila was out with her children. And that…that seemed right. That little bit of order amidst the chaos.

CAMILA: It’s not my place to say what happened that day. All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.

GRAHAM: I didn’t know what had happened.

KAREN: As we were all leaving the hotel, heading out to Chicago, I saw Graham get in the elevator alone, and I thought about taking the stairs.

But I didn’t. I got in the elevator with him. Just the two of us. And as the elevator started going down, he said, “Are you okay? Camila said you weren’t feeling well.”

And I said, “I’m not pregnant anymore.”

He turned to me with this look on his face like, I never thought you’d do this to me. The elevator doors opened and we both just stood there. Not saying a word. They closed. And we took the elevator all the way to the top. And then all the way back down. Right before we got to the lobby again, Graham hit the button for the second floor. And he got off.

GRAHAM: I walked up and down the hallway of that hotel, over and over and over and over. At the end of the hallway there was a window, and I put my head on it. My forehead. And I looked down at all of the people below me. I was only a few floors up from them. I watched them walking from place to place, and I felt jealous of every single one of them. That they weren’t me right then. I wanted to switch places with every man down there.

When I pulled my forehead off the glass, there was a huge greasy smudge where I’d touched it. I tried to wipe it away but it just made the window cloudy. I remember looking through this cloudy window, trying to rub it to make it better and nothing would help. I just kept rubbing and rubbing and rubbing. Until Rod found me somehow.

He said, “Graham, what are you doing? We gotta be in Chicago this afternoon. Bus is gonna leave without you, man.”

And somehow, I put one foot in front of the other and walked with him down to the bus.