The Band's "Other Women"

The other guys also had women they were involved with, too. And even though I knew I couldn't control the love lives of the guys..I wasn't going to let the loves in their lives determine what would happen in this band. And every one of these women had very strong opinions on what "should" be happening with the group. And the opinions went from one extreme to the other. Mark was married, and he and his wife had a young son. Mark was totally devoted to both of them, but as the band got closer and closer to becoming a reality, to me, it always felt like Mark's wife seemed  more and more insecure, and more threatened by our likely success, and by the groupies that would inevitably appear with it. It was a groundless fear, because Mark didn't even look at other women...but that didn't keep his wife, Josie, from perceiving the band as a threat to her world. I also think that she in some way believed that Mark's past drug problems, and the fear they might resurface, was a result of his friendship with me. Mark had been getting high since long before I became friends with him, and he made his own choices in that area. Although everyone in the band liked to party, and I certainly did the best I could to minimize the cost of drugs for everyone in it...Mark would have been doing what he had always done, regardless of my role in his life. But it was a source of friction between Josie and me, and I never felt that Josie wanted to see the band succeed. That was always my perception, and is pure speculation on my part...but that is how it felt to me. To this day, I still think she would prefer if Mark and I didn't interact with each other. Charles was living with a beautiful girl named Bonnie, as well as having a very close relationship with Nick, who he always described as his "manager"...although I always felt there was something much deeper happening there. I knew that what they did on their own time was none of my business, and I really didn't want to know...all I knew was when the three of them were together.. that was usually when Charles would come back to me with complaints about things that he hadn't had a problem with at all...a day or two earlier. And it usually amounted to Charles wanted more validation, or more control over aspects of the band that had already been clearly discussed and agreed upon. Charles wanted more money, and more drugs from me, and Bonnie and Nick fed his ego and encouraged him to make demands of me that Charles knew I couldn't meet. He would say he wanted more control over the repertoire, but never came up with one song he had written...so I didn't know how to satisfy that demand. He liked to point out what he saw as problems, or more accurately, what Bonnie or Nick perceived as problems, but he never offered any solutions. And in the end, he would always use those times to debate our "course"...as a way to spend a few hours getting high on cocaine I had, while I calmed him down. As time went on, I became aware of the fact that Charles had found a way to get high any time he felt like it...he would just find something to create a crisis over, even when there wasn't one. I couldn't understand it, most of the time...we were making amazing progress...a blind man could see it...and when Charles wasn't being influenced by Nick and Bonnie, Charles himself would be the first person to express how happy he was about the way things were going. But this was a problem...and having so much cocaine around all the time just made it easier for Charles to drink more, and he'd become agitated and belligerent unless he "straightened out" with some coke. Nick had a lot of coke too, but when Nick said "enough"...Charles just came to me, and if necessary, would throw a tantrum...and it was getting very unpleasant, and very expensive...