The girl was nineteen. Her name was Courtney. She had a long narcotics record and a reputation for running wild. She also had a four-year-old son, whom Mike met as he ran away.
The district attorney intended to make an example of the degenerate rock star who blew into town, shared heroin with the single mother of a small child, and then fled the scene, leaving the boy to find the body. The DA got $300,000 bail imposed as he began determining what all he could throw at him. He speculated in the press about reckless homicide.
The band didn’t find out until they arrived at their next scheduled gig in Maine. The bus had waited in West Warwick as long as it could, but with another show that night and a five-hour drive ahead of them, they took off before lunch.
Scott, the road manager, stayed behind. Mike had done this a couple times before, passing out and staying in some girl’s bed too long. Scott always managed to get him to the next stop by show time. But now Scott was waiting for a call back from Eddie Kingsolver to hear what they should do next.
* * *
When another show was canceled and Eddie still wasn’t returning calls, Taggert finally called Mike’s mother back in Wisconsin. The tour was dead: none of the clubs were willing to risk riots by putting out a metal band without its charismatic lead singer, and even if Mike made bail the DA warned him about leaving town.
But somebody ought to get him out of jail. The phone call rattled Rose, who only knew Jay Taggert as the sullen, long-haired boy who skulked in and out of her basement when not disappearing for weeks with her son’s band. She had no idea how to proceed when Taggert suggested she wire $30,000 to a bail bondsman in Rhode Island.
John was twenty-one in 1993. Having scraped his way into his junior year of college, working third shift in a UPS warehouse and enduring so-so grades and a dismal social life as a result, he raged to hear that his mother had cut a check to Mike that was almost greater than his entire college tuition. It was the only time John ever yelled at his mother.
“What the fuck, Mom!” he shouted over the phone.
“John…”
“I mean … What the fuck? Are you paying for his lawyer, too?”
Rose’s voice was tiny. “I don’t know. The record company people, maybe they will…”
John stomped his way around the small off-campus house he shared. “Did he do it?” he demanded. “Did he kill this girl?”
“John,” his mother gasped. “He’s your brother.”
“You don’t have a fucking clue who he is! He could take every dime you have and still get convicted!” John sneered. In an instant, he knew he cut too deep. Rose spent years denying what she knew was true about Mike. Now it came crashing in on her, with big bills to be paid.
John churned in the silence, caught between wanting Mike to go to hell and not wanting Mike to drag his mother there with him.
“There will be a trial,” Rose pressed on. “Nobody knows when. Mr. Kirschner, our lawyer, is making some calls, but he says Mike will need someone there, in Rhode Island. He’ll get out on bail and hopefully he can come home until then, but when the trial comes we’ll need to…”
John’s brain roiled as he understood what she was saying. “We? I’ve got school! I’ve got a job! I can’t go!”
“Fine, I’ll go alone,” she snipped brittlely. “I’ll sit by myself, in a strange town, for who knows how long, while your brother is on trial for his life. Your father would be very proud of you for the choice you’re making.”
Rage and indignation xylophoned its way up John’s spine. He spun furiously, fast-balling his phone into a Miller Lite sign on the living room wall.
* * *
Buried in Mike’s contract with the label was a morals clause that in the best of circumstances would have been moot. If Gravel Rash became a big earner, no amount of foul behavior would have caused the label to break its contract. If, as was more likely, Gravel Rash amounted to not much at all, the label would simply drop the band long before lurid rock star behavior had a chance to inconvenience shareholders.
Either the act would get so big that the label would forgive them anything, or they would drop them by the time their first album was going unsold for nickels on eBay.
So it was Mike’s considerable bad luck to wake up in a bloody bed before the first album was done. Gravel Rash was not a priority signing at Razor Records, and no one would stick their necks out for the likes of Eddie Kingsolver. When word reached New York that the band’s lead singer was dumb enough to wake up with a dead junkie before he even had a record out, it was just smart business to invoke the morals clause and cancel the contracts. Eddie, who had a roster of other acts to keep him in the game, didn’t put up a fight.
* * *
By the time the case came to trial, the DA’s options were limited. Courtney’s drug history, the dope-fuzzy nature of the events, and the lack of Mike’s prints on the syringe gave his lawyer ample ammunition to slap down the reckless homicide charge. Still, the defendant had shared hardest of hard drugs during an evening of carnal degeneracy, and he fled the scene rather than seek help for the deceased and her orphaned son. A prison sentence of five years or more was threatened.
John agreed to travel to Providence with Rose for the opening of the trial. It was almost worth it, watching Mike led into court the first day, his rock star locks sheared off and his gangly frame wedged into a cheap suit.
Mike’s swagger was gone, his broken slouch and sallow skin making him appear ten years older.
The DA came out firing, having stitched together a lurid account of Mike’s sordid past. He tried to get past examples of statutory rape with young female fans introduced to the jury before the judge ruled them out-of-bounds. Mike’s lyrics about drugs and fucking and talking about women as whores and playthings were read into the record. Rose, who could never understand the words her son shouted over the sonic maelstrom belching up from her basement, grew ill.
Mike’s lawyer rigorously kept the focus on the law. He brought detailed attention to the time of death and the futility of medical intervention by the time Mike ran away. Yes, the defendant engaged in illicit drug use, but with a consenting adult whose own actions contributed to her death. Mike may need to bear consequences for the regrettable way he chose to extricate himself from the situation in an understandable moment of panic, but enough doubt existed about his role in the death of young Courtney to justify a severe penalty.
Sensing defeat, the DA offered a deal: no more than three years at a medium security facility just outside Providence, followed by five years of parole back home.
Mike went in in 1993, and got out in a little over two years. He came home with an even stronger drug habit and a vacant sullenness that John suspected had something to do with violence he endured while behind bars.