A/N: I do not own the Percy Jackson series Kane Chronicles or The Stand Cut or Uncut version. I have however posted 'The Tales of...' series. This story takes place after The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Crown of Ptolemy but before the events of Trials of Apollo. Before reading this I suggest to read if you haven't yet:
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Early Adventures
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Lightning Thief
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sea of Monsters
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Titan's Curse
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Magical Labyrinth
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Stolen Chariot
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sword of Hades
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Bronze Dragon
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Last Olympian
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Staff of Hermes
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Quest for Buford
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The House of Hades
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Blood of Olympus
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Son of Sobek
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Staff of Serapis
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Crown of Ptolemy
Also I'm going to let this out. On rough decisions based on what I know from The Stand, any mystical creatures Monsters, and automatons that are usually associated which characters from The Tales of and/or Percy Jackson won't be in this story
Also there's no character list for the stand, but if I had too pick two from the book it be Stu Redman and Fran Goldsmith as a pairing, and if I was allowed to add a fifth character to show, it would be of course Mother Abigail.
For the list of pairings which would be spoiler alert for those showing up later:
Percy Jackson/Annabeth Chase
Leo Valdez/Calypso
Jason Grace/Piper McLean
Frank Zhang/Hazel Levesque
Stu Redman/Fran Goldsmith
Larry Underwood (no relations to Grover obviously)/Lucy Swan
Other Important Characters
Mother Abigail
Nick Andros
Tom Collins
Glen
Ralph
Trashcan Man
Susan Stern
a few more demigods as extra characters to help out.
Antagonist but still important
Randal Flagg
Harold Lauder
Nadine Cross
Lloyd
And of course the two main forces that are mention but more of Lead Supporting Roles without actually making a character appearance: God and Devil
Wayward Son of Alice Underwood Comes Home
Jason and Piper were living a normal life—at least as normal as it can be for two demigods—in Los Angeles, when one night they fell asleep only to wake up back in New York City. At first they thought they were brought back New York to help their friends Percy and Annabeth, but they soon found out they weren't in the same universe and that it was in the 1990s.
With no place to stay but money they found in their pockets, Piper manage to charmspeak a landlord in Queens to rent them out a small apartment. There they found and befriended a tenant Alice Underwood, an elderly lady with dark hair that works as building supervisor maid for a hotel. There she helped them get jobs, Piper as receptionist and Jason as an electrician in training. Alice even drives them to and from work daily.
As they got along with Alice they learned she had a somewhat wayward son, Larry Underwood. He was a somewhat troubled child and teen growing up, not that Alice complained much about it, and when he was old enough moved to Los Angeles to make a name for himself.
That he actually did as Alice often played a song called: Baby Can You Dig Your Man. Although it sounded like it was sang by an African American, Alice Underwood would proudly tell anyone that was her son singing it, and he was Caucasian just as she is. Not many believed her of course, but those she convince were surprise to hear it.
Of course Alice had originally agreed that the song did sound like it was come from a n- but that change to sounding like an African American when she pet Piper and Jason and heard stories of their friends they had including an African American girl: Hazel Levesque. It didn't help that Piper herself was native American descendent and thus had a darker skin tone her self. If it wasn't for Piper's charmspeak, she and Jason might of ended up somewhere else in New York just because of Piper's Native American Skin color.
One morning Alice had invited Jason and Piper over for breakfast. Alice was making a fine meal of meat for her and Jason while Piper stuck to her vegetarian life choice. It didn't help that every breakfast Alice insisted on making eggs, but when Piper told her why she became a vegetarian, Alice nodded.
"I can't force you to eat something that remind you of a place like that," Alice said. "Vegetarians is a life choice, but it's a life choice that shouldn't taken lightly. You have your reasons that sound more reasonable than most who choose to eat only meat."
Since then Alice made sure there was some fruit and toast for Piper to eat when she was over.
Jason was looking out the kitchen window getting himself something to drink when he notice a Datsun Z between a fire hydrant and somebody's trashcan that had fallen into the gutter. The car stood out alone in the neighborhood as it looked brand new and expensive, more than the tenants here could afford. But there was a young man in his twenties sleeping in the front seat.
"Mrs. Underwood, there's someone up front," Jason said.
Alice looked and sighed. "It's just my son. He been there since around six. I thought he come in by now, but I guess I better go wake him."
Piper looked at Jason a bit surprise. They were finally going to meet Larry Underwood, but by the sound of the way Alice put it, the visit might not be for a good reason.
Alice left and a few minutes later came in with a young man with dark curly hair like hers.
"Larry, this is Piper McLean and Jason Grace. They live in an apartment a floor above here and been helping me out," Alice said. "Piper and Jason, this is my son Larry."
"Hey," the young man greeted awkwardly as if he was hoping no one else was here.
Piper and Jason greeted him back as Alice made her son the same breakfast she prepared Jason. Larryt lit a cigarette and pushed back from the table as Alice flashed the disapproving look. Piper was about to charmspeak Larry to put it out for his mother but decided not too when Alice kept quiet.
"Are you not hungry… Piper was it?" Larry asked.
"I'm a vegetarian. Been that way since my dad drove us pass a cow slaughter house when I was young," Piper said.
Larry shrugged. "That's fine with me. I met a few vegetarians back in California so I get it. So where are you guys from?"
"We were from Los Angeles, but I originally from San Francisco, and Piper spend time in Oklahoma for a time before coming here," Jason said.
Larry nodded. He never met these two before despite just coming from there, but he knew LA was a huge city and regular people who aren't celebrities live there, so it's possible for him to know someone from there.
Alice dropped the iron skillet into the gray dishwasher and it hissed a little. She was a little older than the last time Larry saw her—she would be fifty-one now—but hasn't changed much, except maybe a little grayer in her black hair. She was wearing a plan gray dress, probably the one she worked in.
Larry started to tap cigarette ashes into his coffee saucer; when Alice jerked it away and replaced it with the ashtray she always kept in the cupboard. The saucer had been sloppy with coffee and it seemed okay to tap in it. The ashtray was clean, reproachfully spotless, and he tapped into it with a slight pang. He knew Alice could bide her time in complaining about his smoking, and he knew she could keep springing small traps on you until your ankles were all bloody and you were ready to start gibbering.
"So you came back," Alice said, taking a used Brillo from a Table Talk pie dish and putting it to work on the skillet. "What brought you?"
Larry guessed she been talking to Jason and Piper about him otherwise this be more private. He also guess they must be as trusting as they look then. Still Larry wasn't about to get into details just yet with complete strangers. About how his troubles began.
…
It had started with him eighteen months ago. He had been playing with the Tattered Remnants in Berkeley club in Los Angeles, and a man from Columbia had called. Not a biggie, just another toiler in the vinyl vineyards. Neil Diamond was thinking of recording one of his songs, the tune "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?"
Diamond was doing an album, all his own stuff except for an old Buddy Holly tune, "Peggy Sue Got Married," and maybe this Larry Underwood tune. The question was, would Larry like to come up and cut a demo of the tune, then sit in on the session? Diamond wanted a second acoustic guitar and he liked the tune a lot.
Larry said yes.
The session lasted three days. It was a good one. Larry met Neil Diamond, also Robbie Robertson, also Richard Perry. He got mention on the album's inner sleeve and got paid union scale. But "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" never made the album. On the second evening of the session, Diamond had come up with a new tune of his own and that made the album instead.
Well, the man from Columbia said, that's too bad. It happens. Tell you what—why don't you cut the demo anyway. I'll see if there's anything I can do. So Larry cut the demo and then found himself back out on the street. In L.A. times were hard. There were a few sessions, but not many.
He finally got a job playing guitar in a supper club, crooning things like "Softly as I Leave You" and "Moon River" while elderly cats talked business and sucked up Italian food. He wrote the lyrics on scraps of notepaper, because otherwise he tended to mix them up or forget them altogether, chording the tune while he went "hmmmm-hmmmm, ta-da-hmmmm," trying to look suave like Tony Bennet vamping and feeling like an a-. In elevators and supermarkets he had become morbidly aware of the low Muzak that played constantly.
Then, nine weeks ago and out of the blue, the man from Columbia had called. They wanted to release his demo as a single. Could he come in and back it? Sure, Larry said, He could do that. So he had gone into Columbia's L.A. studios on a Sunday afternoon, double-tracked his own voice on "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" in about an hour, and then backed it with a song he had written for Tattered Remnants, "Pocket Savior." The man from Columbia presented him with a check for five hundred dollars and a stinker of a contract that bound Larry to more than it did the record company. He shook Larry's hand, told him it was good to have him aboard, offered him a small, pitying smile when Larry asked him how the single would be promoted, and then took his leave. It was too late to deposit the check, so Larry ran through his repertoire at Gino's with it in his pocket. Near the end of his first set, he sang a subdued version of "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" The only person who noticed was Gino's proprietor, who told him to save the n- bebop for the cleanup crew.
Seven weeks ago, the man from Columbia called again and told him to go get a copy of Billboard. Larry ran. "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" was one of three hot prospects for that week. Larry called the man from Columbia back, and he had asked Larry how he would like to lunch with some of the real biggies. To discuss the album. They were all pleased with the single, which was getting airplay in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Portland, Maine, already. It looked as if it was going to catch. It had won a late-night Battle of the Sounds contest for four nights running on one Detroit soul station. No one seemed to know that Larry Underwood was white.
He had gotten drunk at the luncheon and hardly noticed how his salmon tasted. No one seemed to mind that he had gotten loaded. One of the biggies said he wouldn't be surprise to see "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" carry off a Grammy next year. It all rang glorious in Larry's ears. He felt like a man in a dream, and going back to his apartment he felt strangely sure that he would be hit by a truck and that would end it all. The Columbia biggies had presented him with another check, this one for $2,500. When he got home, Larry picked up the telephone and began to make calls. The first one was to Mort "Gino" Green. Larry told him he'd have to find someone else to play "Yellow Bird" while the customers ate his lousy undercooked pasta. Then he called everyone he could think of, including Barry Grieg of the Remnants. Then he went out and got standing-up falling-down drunk.
Five weeks ago the single had cracked the Billboard's Hot One Hundred Number eighty-nine. With a bullet. That was the week spring had really come to Los Angeles, and on a bright sparkling May afternoon, with buildings so white and the ocean so blue that they knocked your eyes out and send them rolling down your cheeks like marbles, he had heard his record on the radio for the first time. Three or four friends were there, including his current girl, and they were moderately done up on cocaine. Larry was coming out of the kitchenette and into the living room with a bag of Toll House cookies when the familiar KLMT slogan—Nyoooooo…meee-UISIC!—came on. And then Larry had been transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming out of the Technics speakers:
"I know I didn't say I was comin down,
I know you didn't know I was here in town,
But bay-yay-yaby you can tell me if anyone can,
Baby, can you dig your man?
He's a righteous man.
Tell me baby, can you dig your man?
"Jesus, that's me," he had said. He dropped the cookies onto the floor and then stood gape-mouthed and stone-flabbergasted as his friends applauded.
Four weeks ago his tune had jumped to seventy-three on the Billboard chart. He began to feel as if he had been pushed rudely into an old-time silent movie where everything was moving too fast. The phone rang off the hook. Columbia was screaming for the album, wanting to capitalize on the single's success. Some crazy rat's a- of an A & R man called three times in one day, telling him he had to get in to Record One, not now but yesterday, and record a remake of McCoy's "Hang On, Sloopy" as the follow-up. Monster! this m- kept shouting. Only follow-up that's possible, Lar! (He had never met this guy and already he wasn't even Larry but Lar.) It'll be a monster! I mean a f- monster!
Larry at last lost his patience and told the monster-shouter that, given a choice between recording "Hang On, Sloopy" and being tied down and receiving a Coca-cola enema, he would pick the enema. Then he hung up.
The train kept rolling just the same. Assurances that this could be the biggest record in five years poured into his dazed ears. Agents called by the dozen. They all sounded hungry. He began to take uppers, and it seemed to him he heard his song everywhere. One Saturday morning he heard it on "Soul Train" and spent the rest of the day trying to make himself believe that, yes, that actually happened.
It became suddenly hard to separate himself from Julie, the girl he had been dating since his gig at Gino's. She introduced him to all sorts of people, few of them people he really wanted to see. Her voice began to remind him of the prospective agents he heard over the telephone. In a long, loud, acrimonious argument, he split with her. She had screamed at him that his head would soon be too big to fit through a recording studio door, that he owed her five hundred dollars for dope, that he was the 1990s' answer to Zagar and Evans. She had threatened to kill herself. After Larry felt as if he had been through a long pillow-fight in which all the pillows had been treated with low-grade poison gas.
They had been cutting the album three weeks ago, and Larry had withstood most of the "for your own good" suggestions. He used what leeway the contract gave him. He got three of the Tattered Remnantsw—Barry Grieg, Al Spellman, and Johnny McCall—and two other musicians he had worked with in the past, Neil Goodman and Wayne Stukey. They cut the album in nine days, absolutely all the studio time they could get. Columbia seemed to want an album based on what they thought would be a twenty-week career, beginning with "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" and ending with "Hang On, Sloopy." Larry wanted more.
The album cover was a photo of Larry in an old-fashioned clawfoot tub full of suds. Written on the tiles above him in a Columbia secretary's lipstick were the words POCKET SAVIOR and LARRY UNDERWOOD. Columbia had wanted to call the album Baby, Can You Dig Your Man? but Larry absolutely balked, and they had finally settled for a CONTAINS THE HIT SINGLE sticker on the shrink wrap.
Two weeks ago the single hit number forty-seven, and the party had started. He had rented a Malibu beachhouse for a month, and after that things got a little hazy. People wander in and out, always more of them. He knew some, but mostly they were strangers. He could remember being huckstered by even more agents who wanted to "further his great career." He could remember one girl who had bum-tripped and gone screaming down the bone-white beach as naked as a nuthatch. He could remember snorting coke and chasing it with tequila. He could remember being shaken awake on Saturday morning, it must have been a week or so ago, to hear Kasey Kasem spin his record as debut somg at thirty-six on "American Top Forty." He could remember taking a great many reds and, vaguely dickering for the Datsun Z with a four-thousand dollar royalty check that had come in the mail.
(A/N: Now comes the prime example why I don't recommend doing drugs and drinking alcohol)
And then it was June 13, six days ago, the day Wayne Stukey asked Larry to go for a walk with him down the beach. It had only been nine in the morning but the stereo was on, both TVs with something going on in the basement playroom. Larry had been sitting in an overstuffed living room chair, wearing only underpants, and trying owlishly to get the sense from a Superboy comic book. He felt very alert, but none of the words seem to connect to anything. There was no gestalt. A Wagner piece was thundering from the quad speakers, and Wayne had to shout three or four times to make himself understood. Then Larry nodded. He felt if he could walk for miles.
But when the sunlight struck Larry's eyeballs like needles, he suddenly changed his mind. No walk. Uh-uh. His eyes had been turned into magnifying glasses, and soon the sun would shine through them long enough to set his brain on fire. His poor old brain felt tinder-dry.
Wayne, gripping his arm firmly, insisted. They went down to the beach, over the warming sand to the darker hardpack, and Larry decided it had been a pretty good idea after all. The deepening sound of the breakers coming home was soothing. A gull, working to gain altitude hung straining in the blue sky like a sketched white letter M.
Wayne tugged his arm firmly. "Come on."
Larry got all the miles he had felt he could walk. Except that he no longer felt that way. He had an ugly headache and his spine felt as if it had turned to glass. His eyeballs were pulsing and his kidneys ached dully. An amphetamine hangover is not as painful as the morning after the night you got through a whole fifth of Four Roses, but it is not as pleasant as, say, balling Raquel Welch would be. If he had another couple of uppers, he could climb neatly on top of this eight-ball that wanted to run him down. He reached in his pocket to get them and for the first time became aware that he was clad only in shivvies and that had been fresh three days ago.
"Wayne, I wanna go back."
"Let's walk a little more." He thought that Wayne was looking at him strangely, with mixture of exasperation and pity.
"No, man, I only got my shorts on. I'll get picked up for indecent exposure."
"On this part of the coast you could wrap a bandanna around your w- and let your balls hang free and still not get picked up for indecent exposure. Come on, man."
"I'm tired," Larry said querulously. He began to feel p- at Wayne. This was Wayne's way of getting back at him, because Larry had a hit and he, Wayne, only had a keyboard credit on the new album. He was no different than Julie. Everybody hated him now. Everyone had the knife out. His eyes blurred with easy tears.
"Come on, man," Wayne repeated, and they struck off up the beach again.
They had walked perhaps another mile when double cramps struck the big muscles in Larry's thighs. He screamed and collapsed onto the sand. It felt as if twin stilettos had been planted in his flesh at the same instant.
"Cramps!" he screamed. "Oh man, cramps!"
Wayne squatted beside him and pulled his leg out straight. The agony hit again, and then Wayne went to work, hitting the knotted muscles, kneading them,. At last the oxygen-starved tissues began to loosen.
Larry, who had been holding his breath, began to gasp. "Oh man," he said. "Thanks. That was…that was bad."
"Sure," Wayne said, without sympathy. "I bet it was, Larry. How are you now?"
"Okay. But let's just sit, huh? Then we'll go back."
"I want to talk to you. I had to get you out here and I wanted you straight enough so you could understand what I was laying on you."
"What's that, Wayne?" He thought: Here it comes. The pitch. But what Wayne said seemed so far from a pitch that for a moment he was back with the Superboy comic, trying to make sense of a six-word sentence.
"The party's got to end, Larry."
"Huh?"
"The party. When you go back. You pull all the plugs, give everybody their car keys, thank everyone for a lovely time, and see them out the front door. Get rid of them."
"I can't do that!" Larry said, shocked.
"You better," Wayne said.
"But why? Man, this party's just getting going!"
"Larry, how much has Columbia paid you up front?"
"Why would you want to know?" Larry asked slyly.
"Do you think I want to suck off you, Larry? Think."
Larry thought, and with dawning bewilderment he realized there was no reason why Wayne Stukey would want to put the arm on him. He hadn't really made it yet, was scuffling for jobs like most of the people who had helped Larry cut the album, but unlike them, Wayne came from a family with money and he was on good terms with his people. Wayne's father own half of the country's third-largest electronic games company, and the Stukeys had a modestly palatial home in Bel Air. Bewildered, Larry realized that his own sudden good fortune probably looked like small bananas to Wayne.
"No, I guess not," he said gruffly. "I'm sorry. But it seems like every tinhorn cockroach-chaser west of Las Vegas—"
"So how much?"
Larry thought it over. "Seven grand up front. All told."
"They're paying you quarterly royalties on the single and biannually on the album?"
"Right."
Wayne nodded. "They hold it until the eagle screams, the b-. Cigarette?"
Larry took one and cupped the end for a light.
"Do you know how much this party's costing you?"
"Sure," Larry said.
"You didn't rent this house for less than a thousand."
"Yeah, that's right." It had actually been $1,200 plus a $500 damage deposit. He had paid the deposit and half the month's rent, a total of $1,100 with $600 owing.
"How much for dope?" Wayne asked.
"Aw, man, you got to have something. It's like cheese for Ritz crackers—"
"There was pot and there was coke. How much, come on?"
"The f- DA," Larry said sulkily. "Five hundred and five hundred."
"And it was gone the second day."
"The h- it was!" Larry said, startled. "I saw two bowls when we went out this morning, man. Most of it was gone, yeah, but—"
"Man, don't you remember the Deck?" Wayne's voice suddenly dropped into an amazingly good parody of Larry's own drawling voice. "Just put it on my tab, Dewey. Keep 'em full."
Larry looked at Wayne with a dawning horror. He did remember a small, wiry guy with a peculiar haircut, a whiffle cut they had called it ten or fifteen years ago, a small guy with a whiffle haircut and a T-shirt reading JESUS IS COMING & IS HE P-. This guy seemed to have good dope practically falling out of his a-. He could even remember telling this guy, Dewey the Deck, to keep his hospitality bowls full and put it on his tab. But that had been…well, that had been days ago.
Wayne said. "You're the best thing to happen to Dewey Deck in a long time, man."
"How much is he into me for?"
"Not bad on pot. Pot's cheap. Twelve hundred. Eight grand on coke."
For a minute Larry thought he was going to puke. He goggled silently at Wayne. He tried to speak and he could only mouth: Ninety-two hundred?
"Inflation, man," Wayne said. "You want the rest?"
Larry didn't want the rest, but he nodded.
"There was a color TV upstairs. Someone ran a chair through it. I'd guess three hundred for repairs. The wood paneling downstairs has been gouged to h-. Four hundred. With luck. The picture window facing the beach got broken the day before yesterday. Three hundred. The shag rug in the living room is totally kaput—cigarette burns, beer, whiskey. Four hundred. I called the liquor store and they're just as happy with their tab as Deck is with his. Six hundred."
"Six hundred for booze?" Larry whispered. Blue horror had encased him up to the neck.
"Be thankful most of them have been scoffing beer and wine. You've got a four-hundred-dollar tab down at the market, mostly for pizza, chips, tacos all that good s-. But the worst is the noise. Pretty soon the cops are going to land. Les flies. Disturbing the peace. And you've got four or five heavies doing up on heroin. There's three or four ounces of Mexican brown in the place."
"Is that on my tab, too?" Larry asked housely.
"No. Deck doesn't mess with heroin. That's an Organization item and the Deck doesn't like the idea of cement, cowboy boots. But if the cops land, you can bet that bust will go on your tab."
"But I didn't know—"
"Just a babe in the woods, yeah."
"But—"
"Your total tab for this little shindy so far comes to over twelve thousand dollars," Wayne said. "You went out and picked that Z off the lot…how much did you put down?"
"Twenty-five," Larry said numbly. He felt like crying.
"So what have you got until the next royalty check? Couple thousand?"
"That's about right," Larry said, unable to tell Wayne he had less than that: about eight hundred, split evenly between cash and checking.
"Larry, you listen to me because you're not worth telling twice. There's always a party waiting to happen. Out here the only two constants are the constant b- and the constant party. They come running like dickey birds looking for bugs on a hippo's back. Now they're here. Pick them off your carcass and send them on their way."
Larry thought of the dozens of people in the house. He knew maybe one person in three at this point. The thought of telling all those unknown people to leave made his throat want to close up. He would lose their good opinion. Oposing this thought came an image of Dewey Deck refilling the hospitality bowls, taking a notebook from his back pocket, and writing it all down at the bottom of his tab. Him and his whiffle haircut and his trendy t-shirt.
Wayne watched him calmly as he squirmed between these two pictures.
"Man, I'm gonna look like the a- of the world," Larry said finally, hating the weak and petulant words as they fell out of his mouth.
"Yeah, they'll call you a lot of names. They'll say you're going Hollywood. Getting a big head. Forgetting your old friends. Except none of them are your friends, Larry. Your friends saw what was happening three days ago and split the scene. It's no fun to watch a friend who's, like, p- his pants and doesn't even know it."
"So why tell me?" Larry asked, suddenly angry. The anger was prodded out of him by the realization that all his really good friends had taken off, and in retrospect all their excuses seemed lame. Barry Grieg had taken him aside, had tried to talk to him, but Larry had been really flying, and he had just nodded and smiled indulgently at Barry. Now he wondered if Barry had been trying to lay this same rap on him. It made him so embarrassed and angry to think so.
"Why tell me?" he repeated. "I get the feeling you don't like me so very g- much."
"No…but I really don't dislike you, either. Beyond that, man, I couldn't say. I could have let you get your nose punched on this. Once would have been enough for you."
"What do you mean?"
"You'll tell them. Because there's a hard streak in you. There's something in you that's like biting on tinfoil. Whatever it takes to make success, you've got it. You'll have a nice little career. Middle-of-the-road pop no one will remember in five years. The junior high boppers will collect your records. You'll make money."
Larry balled his fists on his leg. He wanted to punch that calm face. Wayne was saying things that made him feel like a small pile of d- beside a stop sign.
"Go on back and pull the plug," Wayne said softly. "Then you get in that car and go. Just go, man. Stay away until you know the next royalty check is waiting for you."
"But Dewey—"
"I'll find a man to talk to Dewey. My pleasure, man. The guy will tell Dewey to wait for his money like a good little boy, and Dewey will be happy to oblige." He paused, watching two small children in bright bathing suits run up the beach. A dog ran beside them, rowfing loudly and cheerily at the blue sky.
Larry stood up and forced himself to say thanks. The sea breeze slipped in and out of his aging shorts. The word come out of his mouth like a brick.
"You just go away somewhere and get your s- together," Wayne said, standing up beside him still watching the children. "You've got a lot of s- to get together. What kind of manager you want, what kind of tour you want, what kind of contract you want after Pocket Savior hits. I think it will; it's got that neat little beat. If you give yourself some room, you'll figure it all out. Guys like you always do."
…
Thinking back on it, even with Jason and Piper not here, Larry didn't know how to answer this question. So aloud he instead said, "I guess I got to missing you, Mom."
Piper wasn't convince. She seen that drawn out look before. The look of someone who got too much of fame and fortune than they could handle and ended up biting off more than they could chew. Her dad worked with many people like that.
It happens to the best of people, Pipes. It can't be helped. Her dad would say. All you can do is give a helping hand when they need it and hope they take it.
Piper guessed someone did just that for Larry and he's here because of it.
Alice snorted to Larry's response. "That's why you wrote me often?"
"I'm not much of a letter writer." He pumped his cigarette slpowly up and down. Smoke rings formed from the tip and drifted off.
Jason was about to ask about calling, but remembered they were in 1990s and he got the feeling long distant calls weren't free yet.
"You can say that again," Alice said.
Smiling, he said: "I'm not much of a letter-writer."
"But you're still smart to your mother. That hasn't changed."
"I'm sorry," he said. "How have you been, Mom?"
Now Jason and Piper felt they were in something personal as Alice put the skillet in the drainer.
"We better get going, Mrs. Underwood," Jason said. "Thanks again for the breakfast."
"Not a problem, Jason and Piper. With as much as you two been helping me out, it's the least I can do," Alice said.
Jason and Piper took the subway to work. When they came back after work, Larry's car was still where he left it, telling them he was staying.
"I hope he doesn't do something to cause his mother trouble," Piper said as she told Jason earlier of her opinion of him.
"Alice raised him, hopefully she know how to deal with him," Jason said. "All we can do right now is hope."
A/N: If you haven't figured it out, it was the consequences of drugs and alcohol abuse is part of the reason why I stay away from them. There's always consequences.
Also I started doing volunteer work, so my writing time is cut down. So I extended my poll final dates to two months instead of one to give me more time on winners.
I also realized that despite my careful planning with Calypso, I forgot that Percy still has the Achilles Curse, and that any test involving needles will be impossible. Still, too late to do anything about it, so I'm just going to have to let them pass it off as a unexplained ability of Percy that some humans have that no others have.
Oh and if you really thought 'Baby, Can Dig Your Man?' was sang by an african american singer, then Stephen King had you fool as he didn't reveal Larry as the real singer until he first appeared too.
Also I'm going to skip around in chapters in this story and combine some like Fran's parents response to her pregnancy and all that due to little to no character involvement or impact from those from The Tales of series