Title
: Shards -- All The King's MenThey were dropping three albums in 2002. Marshall didn't care anymore. He started using again, cocaine, for the first time since he'd made it big. There was no one around to care anymore. No one to call and catch him misbehaving. He was clean around Hailey, so even Kim didn't care to know.
He drank like a fish, fucked people in the bathrooms of clubs. Marshall had long since stopped caring about the gender of his partners. If they were willing, that was all that mattered. Dre turned a blind eye until he got a call in early January.
"Dre."
"Slim? Where the hell are you? We got recording to do." Why was it Eminem could never be on time for this stuff? Dre looked into the studio, where the rest of D12 were working around a missing member for the time being.
"If I knew where I was, I wouldn't be calling you." There was a slight panic in that voice. "I got fucked up last night. I'm pretty sure I'm still in Cali."
"Do you have any idea how big California is?" Dre was not going to start screaming this early. He wasn't. "Are you trying to get yourself killed? How much did you do last night?"
"I don't fucking know, alright? I'm in some cruddy hotel, and I'd rather not ask the sixteen year old at the desk where I am and who I came in with." Marshall's cigarette was the only light in his hotel room. They'd been AJ's, left at his house.
"Look in the drawer under the phone. There should be something with the hotel's name on it in there. Check the damned bible if you need to." Dre waited until he could hear the drawer slam shut. "Well?"
"Oh fuck."
"Now what?"
"It's in fucking Spanish."
"Slim?"
"Yeah, Dre?" Marshall knew a lecture was coming. Dre couldn't help himself. In another lifetime, he and Kevin could have been almost identical.
"As soon as I find you, I'm going to fucking kill you. I just want you to know that. Now spell the damned Spanish logo, and I'll have my secretary track your ass down." Dre scribbled down something that probably meant crappy motel in Spanish, and slammed the receiver down.
"Dre?" It was Swifty. "Where the hell is he?"
"Mexico."
"Damn. That's like… a two hour drive. How the hell did he get down there?"
"How the hell should I know? I'm not his mother!" The light clicked on in Dre's head.
"You ain't calling that bitch, are you?" Swifty wondered if Eminem had finally pushed Dre over the edge.
"No. Alex's mother. Alex's mother likes him for some reason." He flipped open his Rolodex. "Give this to the girl at the desk. Ask her to call information, find out where the hell that place is."
"What are you gonna do?"
"I'm gonna let Denise handle our problem rapper."
-----
"He's….where?" Denise was sure she'd heard wrong.
"Tijuana."
"What's he doing in Tijuana? Aren't you in studio?" Denise looked into the kitchen. AJ was out of earshot. "He's not doing so well, is he?"
"No, he ain't doing so well. Listen, you gotta do something. Slim, he don't care about anything but that little girl, and Kim won't let him see her enough to keep him sane. He respects you." Dre didn't want to tell her she was their last chance.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Come to Cali. Help me to figure what the hell do with him"
Denise sighed. "I… I'll have to get someone to stay with Alex. The bullet, it did something to his mind, but not his body. He doesn't remember being an alcoholic, but his system does. He just doesn’t get it."
"Don't you have four babysitters? He ain't got no one but me and his boys, and they don't know nothin."
"Alright." Denise looked at her watch. "I'll be there sometime tommorow." She hung up. "Alex?"
"Yeah?" He was on the floor, looking for a pot under the counter.
"I need to go to California."
"Yeah, sure." He poured oil into the pot, and dumped in a cup of popcorn. "What's on the West Coast?"
"A friend." Denise racked her brain to remember when AJ learned not to burn the popcorn. "I don't know how long I'll be gone. Why don't you call Howie to come stay with you?"
"Okay." He looked so young to her for a moment. All the tattoos covered, all the piercing out.
'He isn't eighteen anymore.' AJ had come back, but he'd come back wrong. 'You were supposed to come back for him.' Denise pushed that thought from her mind. She of all people realized sometimes you don't get happily ever after. "Behave yourself, okay AJ?"
"Yes, Mom."
-----
"Look at me." Denise sounded very annoyed. "Listen, your friend flew me cross country to yell at you, so you can at least look at me."
Marshall turned away from the mixing board he'd been working at. Paler than normal, there was a tired look on his face. "I fucked up, I know. I don't need you coming all the way over here telling me that."
"You ended up in Mexico, Marshall. Mexico! That's not fucked up, that's time to stop using. I cannot believe you drove to Tijuana high!"
"Why do you care? I told you, Denise, you don’t have to pretend to like me, a'right? Just leave me alone." He started to turn back, but she grabbed his chair.
"Listen, you little punk. I know, I understand. I lost Alex too. At eighteen, he was still pure AJ, he didn't know any better. So don't act like you're the only one that this is killing!"
Marshall stared at her for a moment. "Still haven't said why you're really here. What's Dre giving you?"
"Piece of mind, that you aren't going to take Alex's place six feet under." She pulled a chair out, and sat facing him. "It's not your fault."
"Don't give me that crap. That guy was there to shoot me. If Alex hadn't been there, he wouldn't have been hurt." There was that dead look again. "I thought he was going to die, and then Alex wakes up and he doesn't even know me. What the hell do you want from me? Sunshine and flowers?"
"You got him to get help! Marshall, the two of you were good together. Who the hell knows what you both would have gotten into?"
"You can just stop, okay? I almost got him killed."
"I sent him to Detroit."
"What?" He managed to look at her face.
"I sat down with his body guard, figured out when the two of you actually met. I sent him to see you, because I wanted the two of you to be together this year."
"Fuck."
"So, if you'd like to lay blame, send it over here." Denise sighed. "I don't want to get a call like that again. Understand?"
"Got it."
"Good. Because next time, I'll bring Kevin. He's better at this than I am. Which is probably why my son listens to Kevin more than he does to me." Denise looked behind Marshall at the roll of tape. "So, let's hear it."
"Hear it?" She couldn't mean…
"The track. Let's hear it. It's not like I'm going to rat you out to the competition."
"You're crazy." He clicked play.
-----
He didn't call Howie, but he did stay out of the liquor cabinet. AJ guessed he believed them, that he was a drunk. His dreams only confirmed it. AJ hadn't told them about the dreams. Little pieces of his life, presented in MP3 format, with no visuals. Some were long, others only seconds. The first one he'd had, days after getting out of the hospital, was a single clear sentence. 'My name is Alexander McLean, and I’m an alcoholic.'
Scary stuff, those years he'd lost. "At least I'm getting some of it back." No one asked how he knew LeighAnne's name, or picked up the old songs just a little too quickly. As Long As You Love Me had taken about a week to come back, but he couldn't remember writing his own song. As his neurologist had said, the human mind was a strange place.
He put his feet up, and clicked on the TV. TRL, and AJ waited to see himself in a video he didn't remember filming. "I still don’t get it. The song's called Drowning, but we're bone dry and the fountain's off."
AJ had seen it at least a dozen times, and it was still a blank. "Number one video on TRL. Seven videos retired. Album in the works, and my mind's a fucking blank."
He closed his eyes, and let Carson put him to sleep.
**Dream Sequence**
"I cannot believe you got yourself arrested! What the hell is wrong with you?"
"It wasn't loaded, a'right? I wasn't actually gonna shoot the guy."
"You. Pulled. A. Gun. In a bar. During a divorce proceedings. You want them to take you daughter away? Put you away because of who you are, not what you did?"
"Like you don’t do stupid things."
"I've never had an MTV news alert dedicated to me."
*****************
AJ snapped awake. He didn't recognize the voice, but it wasn't the first time he'd heard it. However, whoever it was, he wasn't around anymore. And speaking of MTV news, there was a flash on right now. The same song and dance they'd been giving about his 'car accident' for weeks. "Completely recovered my ass."
The reporter switched topics. "And in other news, despite the crazed actions of Stanley Karin, Detroit rapper Eminem is still alive and kicking, in the studio with D12, hard at work on his third solo LP, the Eminem Show. In mid-December, Stanley entered Eminem's condo, intending to kill him. Luckily, the real Slim Shady was away, and the only life Mr. Karin took was his own. Karin left documentation in his hotel room indicating his attempt on Eminem's life was in response to his anti-homosexual lyrics. Police have not revealed why this real life Stan shot himself, and Eminem was unavailable for comment."
"Mid-December? Shooting?" AJ shut off the tv, and wondered what the hell was going on. That corresponded to when he'd been shot. The question was, why was he in some rapper's condo? He picked up the phone, and dialed. "Sarah baby, you want to go out to dinner with me? I need some info."
-----
There really was a Sarah, but she and AJ were definitely not engaged. The Firm had hired her sometime before rehab, and she'd been a cover for… some guy, he assumed.
"Actually, I don't know how you got shot." She toyed with her water glass. "They airlifted you from somewhere and I only know that because I was told to come play the concerned girlfriend."
"I wasn't in Florida?"
Sarah shook her head, and looked at the desert menu. "I assumed you were with that boyfriend of yours."
Well, theory was shot to hell. AJ was pretty sure he hadn't been dating a homophobic rapper. "Did I ever mention his name to you?"
She thought for a moment. "No, the Firm didn't tell me, and you said it was none of my business. We weren't exactly friends before."
"You were my beard an we didn't bond or anything?" Weird.
"You told me that if Howie didn't have a girlfriend, you shouldn't have to either. You were really into that guy." Something occurred to Sarah. "No one's even told you his name? You were together for something like two years."
"I think they must have paid him off. I mean, why else haven't I heard from him?"
-----
Another restaurant, another state. "So the head PR guy comes to me while their setting my hand. Says Alex is awake, but something's wrong. That I shouldn't come around anymore, because he doesn't remember me. Fuckers."
"You didn't have to listen to them." Automatically, Denise's eyes swept the room. "Don't you have people with cameras following you around?"
"The stupid ones are afraid I'll shoot them. The smart ones are too far away to see. I don't give a fuck what they see anymore." Marshall picked up his spoon, and started bending it. "Look, thanks for coming, but there ain't nothing you can do. If I want to fuck up my life, I'll fuck up my life."
"Nothing I can do?"
Marshall didn't like that look. "Denise, whatever you're thinking, forget it."
"No, I don't think so."
-----
He couldn't sit on the couch. He couldn't replace it either. The bed was already gone and replaced by the time he'd come home, and a professional art restorer had lifted the blood off Nick's drawing, but Dre didn't know about the couch.
Before they'd gone to get Hailey, before AJ had given him the sketch, he'd let AJ fuck him. It was the last time Marshall planned on letting anyone do that to him. All the people he'd fucked, he'd topped, and never looked at their faces.
A key turned in the front door. "Yo, Slim, you here?"
"Bizarre. Shut the door, you fucker. It's cold out." Marshall looked away from the couch. "You here on Dre's orders too? Cause I've had enough."
"No, I’m here cause you're being a fucking idiot." Bizarre threw himself into a chair. "Coke. You're doing coke again. Fuck, you were so messed up you left the country and didn't know it."
"You're going to get morally righteous on me? Look, I told her I'd stop, and I will. Good enough?"
"Good. The last thing that woman needs is to see your ass in rehab."
Marshall's eyes widened. 'He doesn't mean it like that.'
"I mean, you got her son shot. Fuck, I wouldn't have come all the way out here to lecture your ass."