This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen Page B

and over. They want to hear the hits, Pete. You captured that moment for them, and only you can bring it back.
    He mixed some diced dried fruit into his oatmeal, then dumped some brown sugar and cream over it. Healthy fucking choices. He gulped down the rest of the cocktail.
    The tour. So far it was Old Nevada Silver Days, in Elko, followed, probably, by a week at a Harrah’s. The Harrah’s in Reno, not Vegas, but Bobby claimed it was a foot in the door to Vegas. After that the Fresno Harvest Festival, and then the convention center in Anchorage, Alaska, which Bobby claimed was becoming the next Pacific Northwest underground scene. “It’s like Seattle just before Nirvana broke,” Bobby said. “Believe me: you want these people to hear your new songs.” He’d played Anchorage before: he wasn’t seeing Nirvana there.
    He turned the page past the skier. It was a perfume ad, which meant that it was more or less a lingerie ad and an evening-dress ad. The black-haired woman, probably Chinese, in soft-focus gazing out at him from the seat of a limousine, a white sleeve with a cuff link resting on her bare thigh, where her cocktail dress had gotten mysteriously hitched up. What was the message here? Buy this perfume and you will be sexy. Sexy and elegant. So sexy and elegant and in-control that millionaires will feel you up in their expensive cars. And what could be better than that? He’d screwed this model, hadn’t he? During the Looking for the eXit tour? The DreamKrushers had just hit the cover of Rolling Stone and she’d spotted him at a party in New York. Stalked him like a game animal. They ended up in his room, and in the half-light after she’d done everything he asked, she’d looked up at him, in that same soft focus, with the same look.
    Crap, that was twenty years ago. That woman was probably this model’s mother. And now he was just another sucker, like millions of others who saw the ad, plugging himself into someone else’s story. He might as well be out there in America somewhere—sitting in a strip mall beauty salon in Fargo or walking into some hardware store in Alaska wearing oily coveralls—see this picture on the counter, and think, “This is the woman I should have had, not fucking Maybelle !” And there’d be some proprietor type behind the counter named Luke or Jimmy or Arnie, saying, like, We’ve got a special on reversible screwdrivers, Harry! And Harry’d just be, like, I wonder if I can shoot myself six times in the head?
    He could feel the glimmer of a song. A sort of Mellencamp anthem about small-town America, their faded dreams, the unpretentious value of their simple lives that they can’t recognize because they’re longing for something in a magazine. He picked up the pen and paper he always kept with him and jotted, Staring at a model in the hardware store, she’s looking right at him, she’s asking for more … You were supposed to be mine, not this faded time … Something, something, something, Vanity Fair. Because it was, like, people’s vanity that stood between them and happiness, and the media stoked that vanity and kept it just out of reach at the same time.
    Maybe there was something there. Already he could see himself finishing the song, cutting a quick demo. Some quiet acoustic guitar riffs and just a bass drum to give some shape to the silence in the background … His own voice repeating, “Vanity Fair.” Then the fucking label guy saying, “Too Mellencamp.”
    Fuck them. He tried to add on to Vanity Fair in his head. What came next, after the magazine? Some lost love? Lost opportunity? Used to go to the races, with the roar and the lights, something, something, feeling all right … You were supposed to be mine, not this broken time, something, something, something, Vanity Fair .
    It was stupid. Feelin’ all right was the most overused