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But what I had expected to be a reasonable conversation turned into Samanthe sending the record company an e-mail announcing that she no longer wanted to be in the band due to creative differences with me. I knew this was what she said, because she cc’d me on the e-mail.
    I went home from the studio and wrapped myself around The One’s warm body, telling her everything was going to be fine. I had done most of the writing for the band anyway. I could take over the singing duties, too—I’d been wanting to take the band in a more acoustic direction anyway, blah, blah, blah. Somehow I spun it like our lead singer quitting was the best thing that could have possibly happened to the Sweet Janes.
    Looking back on it now, though, it felt like the album had flopped even before the reassuring words were out my mouth. Actually, I can’t say it flopped, because the record company didn’t hear a single “single” on thealbum of thoughtful love songs I turned in. Progressive rock, which had been so hot in the late nineties, had begun to death spiral. Indie bands couldn’t sound thoughtful or fall in love anymore. They had to be ironic. Electric.
    Even though they weren’t on the same label as me, my A&R guy had the Strokes playing on low in the background as he explained this to me.
    And so the Sweet Janes broke up, meandering off in different directions. I put away my acoustic guitar for good and started playing around with my electric guitar, using my synthesizer as backup, and I decided that I liked that sound way better. And maybe that would have been the end of the story. But I checked my bank account a few months later, and it only had a couple hundred dollars in it. That’s when all the crumpled receipts for withdrawals and my charge statements came marching out of the trash cans that I had thrown them in. They piled up behind me, snickering and pointing while I stared at the ATM’s balance screen, mouth hanging open.
    When I got home from that ATM train wreck, I said to The One, “Let’s go out tonight. I need to get wasted so bad.”
    But The One answered that she wanted to stay home because she had to get up early the next day.
    And at that moment I decided I was sick of her bullshit. She still hadn’t told her family about us, and she never wanted to go anywhere, even when I promised not to touch her in public. She said she didn’t believe me. There was that time a few months ago, when the third single off the original Sweet Janes album premiered on KROQ while we were idling at a red light with her in the passenger seat. I had smacked her on the lips with a huge “Mwah!” and she had been embarrassed. Had insisted that our relationship stay indoors ever since.
    That arrangement had been all right when I was on the road. But I was going stir-crazy in the place we shared. I let her know that she needed to come out with me that night or I was going to accidentally fuck somebodyelse. “That’s the way it works with musicians,” I told her. “You either keep an eye on us or you lose us.”
    I’d always been really good at saying the wrong things. People usually laughed when I said things the way I said them. But not this time.
    The One’s face flashed from hurt to fear to anger before she said, “I don’t think this is working.”
    And so, less than two years after dropping out of Smith College and moving to Los Angeles for a record deal, I found myself broke, with no label and no girlfriend, living in the shittiest apartment complex that Silver Lake had to offer.
    Samanthe changed her name back to Samantha and got married to some insurance company executive. She grew out her hair, and she now lived in Plano, according to her Facebook account. I didn’t hate her. But I also didn’t sing Sweet Janes songs on demand just because some clueless club manager asked me to.
    “You engaged Supa Dupa, not the Sweet Janes,” I told him, going out to my balcony and lighting a cigarette. Supa Dupa is what I called