Bobbi's Canon: Round 1

By Barbara E. Stefano

Bobbi Erin Lane has issues. Born to a normal family in a typical neighborhood in the heart of the Midwest, she's off to a great start in the world. But with an uncommon talent and knack for trouble, her life quickly goes off the rails ...

“Bobbi awoke strapped by the wrists to the rails of a hospital bed in a small examination room. She was still in the dusty, sweaty clothes she had worn for her final show at The Dive with the Rebound Band. Her head pounded. Her ears rang. She was covered in bruises. The buzz she had fed all evening was fading, and hazy, scattered images of the night before began to filter through: the search for Robbie through the club; her bottle assault on Pete; Larry’s place. And, oh God, was there a high-speed chase?”

Sex, booze and rock 'n' roll: When this young singer mixes it up in the music world, she finds herself unprepared for the pressure—and the trouble she stirs up trying to cope with it. "Bobbi's Canon: Round 1" is the first in series of musical fiction novels, rife with hanky-panky, behind-the-scenes glimpses into the rock band lifestyle and no small measure of black humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara E. Stefano
• Release date: Jan 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310615153

Barbara E. Stefano

Barbara E. Stefàno is a professional ghostwriter, freelance news and features writer and editor, and an amateur musician with a long history with bands in St. Louis and surrounding areas. She lives in rural Missouri with her husband, Enzo, and her three rescue dogs, Tweak, Butters and the irrepressible Tilly.

Book preview

Barbara E. Stefàno

Bobbi’s Canon

Copyright © 2015 by Barbara E. Stefàno

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, or events used in this book are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, alive or deceased, events or locales is completely coincidental.

For more information:

www.BarbaraEStefano.com

eBook design by Maureen Cutajar

www.gopublished.com

ISBN-13: 978-1505617740 (pbk)

Dedication

I dedicate Bobbi’s Canon to all the musicians with whom I’ve had the great honor to share a stage over the last twenty-five or so years. You’ve enriched me more than you can ever know.

This is further dedicated to my parents, Duke and Billie Jean Huck, whose love is powerful and unconditional, and to my smart and sassy siblings: Mark, Connie, Lisa, Melody, Virginia, Stephany, Pauline, Aaron and Chris.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my beautiful husband, Enzo. Without your love and support during the long hours of writing, I could never have started or finished. You’re my muse and my light, and I love you with all my heart.

Acknowledgments

I owe enormous thanks to my friends and family for the unflagging encouragement and support that buoyed me throughout this undertaking. Specifically, I wish to thank Valerie Jurkowski, my dear friend of more than a quarter century, who gave me the encouragement to believe I could put entertaining words on paper.

I’d like to acknowledge my niece, Dawn Herbert, without whom I would never have been accountable enough to fulfill my vow to write a book in 2014 in the first place. Her frank and insightful feedback after the fact also made an indelible mark on the final version. I owe the book’s completion in no small measure as well to NaNoWriMo, the challenge that kept me moving forward daily when my motivation waned.

Acknowledgement must also go to my friend Elise Connors, who brokered my first ghostwriting contracts—projects that ultimately inspired me to get cracking on my own book. Without that spark, Bobbi’s Canon wouldn’t have happened.

Finally, credit for this successful effort must go to my husband, Enzo, who facilitated the long hours of work, and to our beloved fur-babies, Butters, Tweak, Tilly and the late Titus, who kept me in excellent company—and kept my feet toasty—during the planning, writing and production processes. Who’s a good dog?!

Contents

1: Rattle and Hum

2: I Am a Child

3: Are You Experienced?

4: Worlds Collide

5: Stranger in Paradise

6: Because the Night

7: Chance of a Lifetime

8: I Think I Love You

9: Jagged Little Pill

10: Sick Things

11: Trouble

12: Back in the Saddle

13: One Night

14: Then He Kissed Me

15: Feel Like Making Love

16: Reasons to Quit

17: At the Beginning

18: Tentative Decisions

19: If Drinking Don’t Kill Me

20: Anyone Night Stand

21: Midnight Confessions

22: Life in the Fast Lane

23: Funeral for a Friend

24: Everybody Hurts

25: The Show Must Go On

[ 1 ]

Rattle and Hum

Bobbi Lane could hear nothing over the buzz saw roaring between her ears, and wondered detachedly if this was what people destined for Hell hear as they die.

Her head lolled limply to the side and she cracked her eyes open. She didn’t know how long she’d been lying in the dirt and gravel behind Handsome Dan’s Bar & Grill, but it was long enough. Long enough for the chill of that October night to seep into her bones and set her teeth to chattering.

Frantic voices sounded out, muffled and distant as though filtered through bales of cotton, and she became aware of the shuffle of feet near her head. Bobbi’s hands and feet felt miles away and hard as she tried she couldn’t locate them, much less control them. Nor could she conjure any memory of how she ended up sprawled in an alley in her stage clothes, gagging on blood.

Had she stepped in front of a car? After countless admonishments to her sound engineer, Tim, not to drug and drive, had the resident high guy finally run her down? She searched for some shred of recollection but she was slip-sliding away …

"If you ever fucking hit me again, I’ll fucking kill you!"

Mickey Green—a swarthy, hulking guitarist with a well-earned man-slut reputation—straddled Bobbi and jerked her up off the ground by a fistful of hair. The rustling of those disembodied feet grew nearer and somewhere off from where she lay, she heard voices rising. There was an urgency in them, though the cries were drowned out in that incessant, grinding hum.

Mickey, fucking stop—you’re gonna kill her!

The gnarled, meaty fist came down in slow motion, hard. Bobbi watched it connect, jarring her face like the blow of a sledgehammer. Time slowed to a near-stop and her mind raced around the details that stagnated there: the bobbing of Mickey’s wild, black curls with every swing; the dull snap of bone and a ballooning cheek that threatened to swallow up her left eye; the trickle of blood that slung off into the air from his bruised fist each time he punched; the jagged root of a broken tooth that gouged her tongue and the metallic taste that filled her mouth; the wet warmth that soaked her chin and chest.

Mickey’s dark form hovered over her, his bearded face contorted into a snarl. From the corner of her right eye Bobbi could see the dim outline of the tavern’s back door. I have to get to that door, she thought. I have to get there and get away and make this stop. She reached back and clawed deep into the gravel in a vain attempt to flip onto her belly, to shield her face from the blows.

A series of violent kicks from a steel toe-booted foot knocked the wind out of her and set off a fresh burst of fireworks in her splitting head.

Someone screamed but the shrill sound was sucked up into a wormhole in the emptiness of her blackening mind and shot out into space. The darkness swallowed her …

[ 2 ]

I Am a Child

Bobbi was the plainest of plain, the unremarkable daughter of a blue-collar couple living in an ordinary house in a typical Midwestern neighborhood. Dull as this life was, the pudgy, ginger-haired girl with the freckles and blazing green eyes struggled to stand out. The seventh of Phillip and Betty’s ten rambunctious children and the most bashful among them, Bobbi shrank into herself—but she found a rich world of wonder in the make-believe spaces where she permitted her imagination to lead her.

In a strict Catholic household where days were spent in parochial school and weekends in church, there were few creative escapes for a precocious child. Her only respite from the cacophony of nine siblings in conflict was within her cluttered room. Mom and Dad, noting a spark of excitement in their daughter any time music was in earshot or a radio was in reach, had gotten her a record player and several singles for Christmas. At every opportunity, she withdrew into that space to spin the tunes until she had every pop, skip and crackle memorized. She built a secret world there, one where she could be free of the self-consciousness and painful shyness that choked her.

Night after night, Bobbi lost herself in a musical fantasy world: sell-out stadium shows, a stage awash in colored lights and Bobbi in the middle of it shining brightest of all. There, she transformed. Entire concerts were staged and carried out in this venue. Adoring fans bowed to her, hung on her every note, and she soared.

What on earth are you doing?

Carrie Lane stood in the doorway of the room Bobbi shared with two of her sisters, trying not to laugh. Her six-year-old baby sis was dressed in red Christmas leggings and a sequined tank top with Carrie’s kneepads pulled around her knobby knees. Her hair was tucked into a baseball cap and she was prancing about a small clearing on the cluttered floor like a mini Mick Jagger.

I’m Freddie, she proclaimed, strutting up to Carrie with her hands on her swinging hips. Carrie smirked.

Two weeks before, the family had been gathered in the living room for the nightly television ritual. Most of the kids lost interest when 60 Minutes came on and bolted the moment the iconic tick-tocking signaled its start. Not Bobbi. She raced into the room, clamoring past the others to get a seat as close to the set as humanly possible. She had become obsessed with Queen, and the promise of several minutes seeing and hearing Freddie Mercury was more thrilling than anything. When Dad teasingly instructed her to change the channel, the directive had her in near hysterics. For several minutes, her nose nearly touched the TV screen and she hung on every word, every note.

After that, Bobbi ate, drank and breathed everything rock ’n’ roll: Queen, the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones and anything else she could find on the radio or scavenge at the local record store. She begged for albums and saved every penny of her allowance to buy them, and then played them dozens of times a night, mimicking Mercury’s soaring vocals until she had captured every nuance the best a six-year-old could. So it was that she cultivated an alter-ego that she named after her flamboyant hero.

When she disappeared into Freddie, she channeled his charisma and command of the stage. Her love affair with him introduced her to other great voices: Patsy Cline, Ann Wilson, Billy Joel, Janis Joplin, Steve Perry, Karen Carpenter, Art Garfunkel, Annie Lennox, Steven Tyler, Linda Ronstadt—the list was endless. Through them, she learned early how to harness her vocal power, temper it and imbue it alternately with cream or grit. And she mastered the ability to serve it up messy and tattered when that’s what the sentiments of the song required.

Artists like Mercury and Jagger informed her own sense of style, confidence and charisma onstage, while her obsession with the Beatles inspired her to write. By age seven, she had written her first songs—tunes that on the surface seemed playful and trite, but upon closer examination bore a sophistication beyond her years. She absorbed the music and stagecraft like a sponge and squeezed out a unique mix of everything she took in.

Mom, listen to this, she pestered her mother one day after careful study of her latest Beatles purchase. Tossing her head side to side and swaying, she sang an emotive Oh! Darling, mimicking Paul McCartney’s soaring, achingly raw vocals. She poured on the pathos in the chorus, clutching her shirt, stooping and stomping as she screamed out the pleading lyrics. The last line came with a gritty, subdued scream and a deep bow in mock exhaustion. Her mother was impressed with the melodrama that sprang out of her eight-year-old.

Well, I’ll be, she said. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were Michael Jackson.

Mom clearly didn’t recognize her daughter’s Beatles impression, but the idea that she’d just morphed a classic rock standard into a Motown sound was a revelation to Bobbi. Through her immersion in these multiple influencers, she would find a musical identity that borrowed from all of them and none of them at once.

Mrs. Walton was a fan of inclusive classroom activities, ones in which every child in the third and fourth grades of St. Joseph Catholic Elementary was encouraged to take part—or forced, depending on one’s level of willingness—in structured and very public learning exercises. It was the hallmark of her teaching style that got her hired as the sole un-nun on the staff and kept her in the classrooms there for more than forty years. Bobbi rarely took away much from these exercises besides the jitters. She didn’t like being put on public display for unfettered gawking and mocking; playing rock star in the privacy of that disaster area she called a room was more her speed. Here in the echoing rooms and halls of school, the short, knock-kneed ginger was too aware of her own awkwardness to desire the center of attention.

But now, Mrs. Walton was lining up her twenty-seven students into three tidy rows for a multi-versed song on which they would share the lead. She handed a live mic to the first child in line and gave each student a lyric sheet with a few lines of a church song to sing when his or her turn came up. Bobbi, stuck in the first line, nervously counted just five children ahead of her. Her legs wobbled.

Mrs. Walton took her seat at the upright piano and began to play, signaling with a nod when each child was expected to chime in with a verse.

The procession of singers came ever closer and Bobbi squirmed. She had never even spoken in front of this many people, never mind sang in front of them. She wanted bolt from the room before anyone could pass the microphone to her. A lead knot formed in her stomach and her fingers went clammy and cold. Two more singers and it was her turn. This would be the perfect time for one of her trademark nosebleeds. She held her breath and bore down, but nothing came.

Someone tapped her shoulder and she turned. Shannon Teal was holding out the mic to her, nudging her to take it fast. Bobbi reached out to it with a pale, trembling hand and felt herself leaving her own body. Her heart pounded so powerfully she could feel it shaking her entire body. Mrs. Walton nodded to her. Bobbi stared at her sheet music and whispered the lyrics in a quiet, nasal whine.

Sherl Lane listened incredulously as her little sister listlessly puked out her verse, sounding exactly like the girl who had sung before her—lame, flat and lifeless.

What the hell?! She wanted to run up and grab Bobbi by the collar and shake her until her until her damn freckles popped off. This embarrassing exercise wasn’t fun for anybody, but her sister had a beautiful voice—the bilge that spewed out just now was inexcusable.

Though she’d never admit being proud of her pesky sibling, Sherl had secretly hoped for bragging rights. She’d had a front row seat to the Divine Miss L’s many impromptu bedroom concerts, and her mimicry was nothing short of uncanny.

The little shit is taking a dive, Sherl fumed. She could shame everyone in this room easily if she put her mind to it—what’s she thinking?! This was her chance to do something relatively cool for once, to not blend into the woodwork—to maybe be a little bit popular. Instead, she warbled and mumbled through the song in the same reedy, infantile style as everyone else. No worse, but certainly no better—and she could do much, much better.

The song ended with Sherl having worked up a serious head of steam—and she knew exactly how and where she’d release the pressure. Mrs. Walton collected the sheet music and the bell rang, signaling the end of the class period and the end of the day. The students clomped out of the room, then broke into a full gallop the moment they passed through the double doors to the freedom outside. Bobbi met Sherl at the flagpole, as was their custom, ready to make the four-block walk home and put the day behind her.

Sherl greeted her with a hard kick to the shin.

"Ow! What was that for?!"

For you’re a stupid idiot, Sherl hissed. You sang like shit, fat-crack. Why did you do that? Why did you sing like a fucking retard on purpose?

Bobbi’s jaw dropped.

I’m telling Mom you said—

Sherl cut her off with another kick that landed exactly—and painfully—where the first had, and Bobbi yowled. A deep, angry blue emerged under the welt left behind by the first kick and she limped a few paces around the pole to shield herself from another swing of Sherl’s leg.

"You’re a great singer, moron. If I ever see you half-ass it on purpose again, I’ll give you a

Reviews for Bobbi's Canon

[Just Joe · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The book title should have been "Memoirs of my fast, wild, and drunken youth" considering who the author is.

[Mickey Green · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book is seemingly rooted in real events about the author's personal experiences in her younger years however those have been over embellished, over sensationalized, and over extended with an over use of adjectives. Deviations from the truth include hair color--it was brown until a bottle of red dye came along, and her eyes--they are a light green. Further, she was very overweight until she found and stuck to a diet in her late 20's and early 30's, long after being a part of a band named Concept. With exception of college choir and karaoke, Concept was the first band she was a part of. The names of people in this book are only slightly changed from the person's true identity. Truths include she had an amazing singing voice that should have made her famous and she has a definite niche for stirring up trouble. Regarding the scene where the main character Bobbi was hit and beat up, it didn't happen. What happened was she tried to have an affair with the character called Mickey. She was rebuffed but she was persistent, going so far as to try and convince the character Lena that an affair had occurred. She pursued him aggressively on stage while performing, to the point that the band asked her to leave. Angry over this, she took the band to court over lost wages. Over ten years later she went on to become a singer with a band named Good Time Oldies however that was shortlived as well. She was asked to leave soon after she started with them. There were no high speed chases, cocaine, heroin, or meth but the author did enjoy her liquor and the drinks customers at the bars the band played at would buy for her. To this day Facebook is littered with photos of her at local wineries and breweries. There were no pedophiles, throwing things, brawls, arrests, trips to the hospital, or deaths. Her career as a journalist and writer is on display on the website LinkedIn. Jobs have lasted from 1-3 years. Only a few of them have been in journalism type roles. In between jobs she notes freelance writing as a job. Google can help find her publications and works. Every good review of this book can be traced back to her family, close friends, and there's one very glowing review from the author herself. The press releases, interviews, and publication of the book were written and handled by the author. As for Mickey and the character known as Lena in the story, they were able to continue their long relationship after the author interfered and went on to a happy, peaceful life together. Lena died in 2018. Mickey was and is heartbroken over her loss. He is still a well respected regular on the music scene in St. Louis as he has been for over 40 years. If anything, this book is a sad display of a girl from a large family that didn't receive much attention growing up. Then the band Concept picked her up and she received so much positive attention about her singing voice she didn't know how to handle it all and spiraled out of control. Hopefully by writing this book, the author experienced some closure and healing on events from over 20 years ago and is finally able to move past it and find some happiness and peace of her own.