Page 175 of Broken Lines

Alice shakes her head as she exhales. “We're all flawed creatures, Jack. I loved Ig, but he wasn't a god or a saint or something.”

I swallow thickly.

“How?”

She takes a slow breath as she sits at one of the stools against the counter.

“It was during your first US tour. I…I couldn't do it. I mean,yeah, you all had been playing around England for a while before that. And I followed when I could…you know, when I could get off work and when I could join the tour and be with Iggy and all of you. But the United States? With a chart-topping record?”

Her eyes glass over as she shakes her head.

“Jackson, all I saw on TV were the girls just throwing themselves at all of you, and I couldn't do it.”

“Alice, Iggy neveroncestepped out—”

“I know, I know.”

She looks away.

“But I cracked. I couldn't take the wondering and just the waiting for him to call me one day and tell me it was over. Or worse, if he neverdidcall. If instead, I just turned on the news or opened a Rolling Stone and saw him with some girl, and I’d be shattered. It would’ve killed me, Jack.”

My fingers shove through my hair as I watch her shrink in on herself.

“So, me being me, I did it first. I ended it, and we broke up.”

My brow furrows deeply.

“You…” I frown, trying to replay those manic, drug-and-booze-and-adrenaline fueled days on the road from almost twenty years ago.

“He was my best friend…” I choke. “How the fuck would I not know that you two…”

And then suddenly—dimly and darkly—a flicker of something hits me. A vague memory of Iggy after a show in…

I stare at her.

“Chicago,” I breathe.

Alice wipes a tear away.

“Yeah. It was when you were in Chicago.”

I slowly shake my head as it floods out of the dark corners of my memory.

“Ig was a fucking mess that night.”

I don't know how the fuck I remember that twenty years later, and after an infinite number of nights when any number of us were beyond fucked up. But that one stands out. Maybe because it was our first US tour, and I was still in that business mind-set of making sure the machine kept churning.

The media may have seen me as this drug-fueled wild man—which, obviously, was completely true. But they didn’t see the war general behind the scenes.

Back then, I washyperaware of how tenuous our place in the music world was. One hit does not a career make, after all. And back then on that first North American tour, I was abastard—a single-minded machine making sure the wheels didn’t fall off.

My face falls.

I remember being soangryat him that night in Chicago. I was pissed that he was just fucking it up. That he was too drunk. We hadn't even started the show yet, and he was absolutely blitzed. I remember yelling at him and then feeling terrible when he almost cried.

Somehow, I remember wondering what that was about.

Now I know.