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rfsak2 · 7 years ago

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Cactus, A Blurb

I had another blurb-ish idea. Again, kinda separate from whatever plot I may (may not) have going on. First section is expanding on the very first chapter of Cactus, second and third are in LA post-Jamaica.

Cactus, A Blurb Summary: What attracts. The Styles Warnings: Discussion of drug use and past traumas. PTSD from childhood trauma.

She knew better than to walk into a recording session with expectations. She knew better than to expect anything of anyone in Hollywood.

She would either be disappointed or she would make a fool of herself.

Every time.

Though to be fair, every other time she’d walked in only to walk out disappointed, they’d been personal heroes, people she wanted to impress. She’d wanted to pick their brains and learn from them. NOT aggressively make out with them.

They were mostly old men and her expectations were of a musical nature.

Harry Styles was a whole different beast.

Harry Styles was Her Type™ and she knew it. Between the hair and the tattoos and the pretty eyes, there was the chance that she would be in deep shit.

She needed to be careful if she wanted to make it out of this okay.

So she was walking in expecting one of two things. Either he was a colossal asshole and she was safe or he was nice and she spent the whole recording period constantly on watch, guarding herself against catching feelings and making everything awkward and horrible.

She half-hoped he was an asshole. It would be cleaner. Get the work done, make Jeff happy, bank that commission and go on about her life with zero complications.

No muss and, sure as hell, no fuss.

She grabbed her guitar and pushed the clicker for her Jeep. Adjusting her sunglasses as the Jeep beeped, she shoved her keys into her bag and made for the door.

One hand in her jean jacket, she paused at the security desk.

“Howzit, Jamie?” Jay was the youngest of the four security guards at Columbia and a generally cool dude, probably trying in the music business just like everyone else.

She smiled. “It’s good, bro. What’s up with you? Last we talked you were dating some new chick.”

He shrugged. “She was… she was bit weird. Just strange I guess.”

“So is everyone else in LA. Welcome to reality.”

“Yeah, but…” He sat up straighter as a lanky man carrying a guitar pushed through the doors, looking confused. “Hey, man. Can I help you?”

She side-stepped and just watched as the man set the guitar down at his feet. “Hey, I’m here to help with Harry Styles’ album… I think.”

“ID?”

The man passed his driver’s license over and she pulled up Jeff’s text on her phone. She leaned against the counter and smiled. “Mitch Rowland, right?”

The guy started, pushing some of that thick brown hair out of his face. “Yeah. You are?”

She stuck her hand out. “Jamie Schwartz. I’m a guitarist with the label. I was asked to come help too.”

He sighed, audibly relieved. “So you know what the fuck is goin’ on?”

Chuckling, she turned to Jay. “He clear?” Jay nodded and handed Mitch back his ID as she motioned down the hallway. “First studio gig?”

He grabbed his guitar and nodded. “Yeah. I’m still not sure how it happened. Ryan, my roommate-”

“Ryan Nasci?”

“Uh.. yeah. You’ve worked with him then?” She nodded. “Yeah, apparently they had another guitarist lined up but he couldn’t make it, so Ryan called me.”

“Yeah. Heard about that.” She shrugged. “Jeff called and said they could use some more help. Apparently this album is going to be guitar-heavy. Wanted another set of hands.”

“Yeah. I’d imagine so. Harry seems to be really into the 70s. Big into Fleetwood Mac and the Stones... the Beatles.”

She was impressed, she could admit it. He would have good taste in music, just her luck.

She pressed the call button for the elevator and turned to him. “Cool. We’ll get along just fine then. You? What do you like?”

He shrugged. “Like the 60s, I guess. The Doors, Jimi Hendrix-”

“Love Jimi.” He followed her into the elevator, both guitarists standing their guitars up by their feet. She pushed the button for the floor. “Zeppelin?”

He seemed to feel more comfortable and he smiled. “Yeah… I like all of that.”

“This is going to be fun then.” She stepped out of the elevator and led him down the hall. “Good. I’m gonna be honest, I was a bit worried.”

“Me too.” Mitch took a deep breath. “But Harry’s like really cool. Solid dude.”

“He’s nice, then?” She opened the door to the conference room they were using for this meeting and nodded at Jeff and Ryan, already seated at the table.

“I would say so.”

She smiled at Mitch. “Mitch, Ryan, you know. This is Jeff Bhasker. Jeff, this Mitch Rowland.””

Mitch stuck his hand out. “Good to meet you.”

He sat next to Ryan and she set her bag in her chair and propped her guitar up against the table. She briefly debated taking her jacket off, before simply rolling the sleeves up and leaning over to pull her mug out of her bag. “I’m making tea. Anyone want anythin’?”

Mitch wanted coffee and she returned with her tea, a new blend sent to her by her friend in London, and passed Mitch his coffee.

“That smells weird.”

She nodded. “It’s supposed to be smoky, I think?... My friend sent it to me. Figured I’d try it.”

“Smoky?”

Laughing, she offered her mug to him. He shook his head and she sipped at the still very hot liquid.

“How’s it?”

She pushed her hair off her face. “It is smoky.. A bit weird but I don’t half-mind it.”

“Wha’s that?”

It didn’t take her very long to come to the conclusion that she was totally screwed.

He was nice.

He made comfortable eye contact with whoever was speaking. He smiled and responded and generally acted like he was paying attention, like he cared about what was happening.

He was excited, engaged and enthusiastic, which was more than could be said about 75% of the acts she’d worked with.

There was also a sort of like shy, reserved nervousness about him that she found endearingly humble.

And he was fuckin’ gorgeous. More so in person then she’d expected.

Of course he was.

She took a deep breath as his eyes (green, so green) caught hers.

“Do y’want more tea, love?”

She wanted to melt.

Jamie adjusted the gauzy white fabric of her dress and crossed her legs, tilting her mug towards her. She shrugged. “I’ll grab some more later. Thank you.”

He grinned and stood, nabbing her mug with one of his massive hands.

She’d gladly curl up in that dimple and die a happy woman.

For Fuck’s Sake.

“I’ll get yeh some more water. I wanted coffee as it is.”

He ran his hands through his hair, shaking it out and then shoving it back from his forehead, and turned toward the door.

He was even broader from the back. Jesuchristo-

Her phone roared and she dug it out of her bag to silence it.

Jeff: Down girl.

She silenced her phone and discretely flicked him off.

She wrote her name in the sand and smiled down at where he lay on his back, staring up at the moon. He hadn’t really bothered to properly button his shirt (not unusual) and the silk gaped, showing off the defined muscles of his chest and the sharp line of his collarbone.

She wanted to trace her finger over the bone and dip her tongue in the hollow of his throat. She wanted to run her fingers over the swallows inked into his skin, memorize them the way she’d memorized her own.

He traced his fingers over the dogwood branch on her forearm, the symbol of strength and stability that reminded her that Jorge would always be there for her, a port in the storm that occasionally washed over her life.

“Tell me something about yeh. Anythin’.” He smiled and his hand drifted up and over the big, red maple leaf on the inside of her elbow.

Picking up the shell she’d found earlier, she winced, reaching for the beer that was aiding the word vomit that always seemed to happen when she was tipsy. She hated it about herself, the complete inability to stop the flow of words she didn’t want to say. She always ended up killing the mood.

“I’m terrified of drugs…” She blushed and made a vague motion with her hand. “Not like weed or anything… obvs. T-the hard shit…I guess. My birth mom was a heroin addict and I’m terrified that I’ll end up like her, strung out and useless. I worry constantly about it, but I’m also angry. Sometimes it’s overwhelming how fuckin’ livid I am with her. I don’t remember anything about her, don’t care to.”

She threw back a big swig of her beer. “I don’t remember what she looks like, what she sounded like but… I remember the smell of heroin.”

She made a helpless little hand motion, eyes on her floral converse. She tried to speak again, the words getting stuck in her tight throat. “I remember her johns and I remember the smell that clung t-to my hair and my cl-” She swallowed. “My clothes.”

Shushing her quietly, he grabbed her hand and kissed her knuckle, sitting up to rest his chin on her knee.

“One time, I was in a studio in Nashville and I was on my way to the bathroom and I could smell it… kinda came out of nowhere. It smells like vinegar… Like someone just dropped a whole bottle of really strong, white vinegar and just left it. It was like all the years I spent in therapy had meant nothing.” She sucked in a stuttering breath. “I was in the bathroom for probably fifteen minutes, head in the toilet. It probably sounds so stupid. Lose my shit over a fuckin’ smell.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid. I swear.”

She smiled down at him. “Never did find out if someone was really doing smack or if they’d just dropped a jar of pickles or something. And I still don’t like pickles or most hot sauces. I’m a failure as a San Antonian.”

He kissed her knee. “1D gave me anxiety… or being famous made me anxious… probably more accurate. Maybe.” He chuckled listlessly and shrugged. “It shouldn’t have done. That should’ve been a dream come true, right? I was makin’ music, which I’ve always wanted to do. I was makin’ the kind of money that allowed me to provide for my family and live the kind of life everyone always says they want. I don’t feel like I should complain about it. Don’t feel like I have the right to complain.”

She leaned forward to kiss him chastely. “You have every right to complain.”

He met her eyes hesitantly and nodded, tongue darting out to moisten his lips. “I loved a lot of the job, I did. I love makin’ music and performin’ and I love interactin’ with fans. I love the guys. They’re my brothers. But I hate havin’ to be suspicious of everyone. I hate that I can’t just be who I am. I have to be aware and I have to always edit myself and be careful about what I say to whom and how I say it. It’s so frustrating! I’m more me when I’m on stage then I’ve been off of it in the last five years. I used to have fun, to enjoy all of this, and now I’m just tired. I’m exhausted and I feel like I’ve been holdin’ on t’all of this.”

He sucked in a breath and she squeezed his hand, eyes on his. “I’m tired of never trustin’ anyone, of always knowin’ that someone is only lingerin’ around me on the off chance that it will help them. I’m tired of being treated like arm candy, like I’m one step above a fuckin’ cabana boy. And part of me knows that I set myself up for it every bloody time. I only have myself to bl-”

“That’s not true.” She shook her head.

“It feels true. The media thinks it’s true. If you ever say anything, it’s always ‘Well, you’re famous’, ‘You’re a public figure’, ‘You chose this’. I was sixteen. I never expected this. I was never prepared for this.” He huffed and shoved a hand through his hair.

“It’s a crock of bullshit.” She ran her hands through his hair, fingers chasing his and laid her forehead against his. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for. That is not you. I’ve never felt that way with you. Thank you for that.”

She smiled. “Anytime. ‘Course. Thank you for not looking like you pity me or somethin’.”

“There’s nothing about you that’s pitiable. You know tha’, yeah? You’re so…” He clenched his fist and made a face. “You’ve got more spine than half of Hollywood. Honestly.”

She shook her head. “That’s not that hard, baby.” She thumbed at his temple, pushing short, sandy hair from his face. “You are easily the most genuine person I have ever met. I’ve never felt this comfortable with someone so quickly. I didn’t tell half… fuck, 99% of this shit to the dude in Nashville. Probably why he broke up with me.”

One of his big hands came up to cup her face. “His loss.” He kissed her softly. “I’m not gonna fuckin’ cry for him.” He smiled against her lips and nipped at her bottom lip. “Not gonna make the same mistake either.”

She chuckled and leaned forward to kiss him fully, slipping her tongue into his mouth as he laid back. She followed him down, his free hand in the small of her back kept her tight to him as they fell headlong into each other.

She let out a low groan and her hands smoothed down over his pectorals, finger massaging into smooth tanned skin. He gasped into her mouth as her fingertip ghosted over his nipple and she chuckled, doing it again with more purpose.

“You minx.” He grinned, pressing up against her, the hand still in her hair pulling her down to his eager lips and keeping her there.

“Minx.” She kissed him again, hands flattening over his chest, fingers idly tracing the swallows. “Never been called ‘a minx’ before.”

He licked at the roof of her mouth and the hand on her lower back, drifted down and squeezed. “Missed opportunity, tha’.”

She laughed and moved to mouth at his clavicle. Dipping her tongue into the hollow of his neck, she smiled. “You have gorgeous shoulders.”

He giggled. “Shoulders? Wha’? I don’t think I’ve ever been complimented on my shoulders before.”

She sat up, supporting herself with her hands in the sand, and shrugged. “Missed opportunity, that.”

He brought her back to his lips and smiled, hands slipping under her shirt to trail up her torso. He thumbed at her belly-button ring and her hips jerked against his. Grinning against her mouth, he whispered, “Wouldn’t have assumed I’d get that reaction.”

Jamie giggled. “I’ll have you know-” She gasped as he did it again.

“Wha’ was that, love?”

She captured his mouth in hot, open-mouthed kiss. “The navel is an erogenous zone.”

“So is watching such a pretty mouth say the word ‘erogenous’.”

She smiled. “Erogenous is a very scientific word, thank you very much.”

He groaned and rolled his hips up against hers. “Very erogenous.”

She gasped, her hips instinctively working against his. “We should probably go. Not good practice to have sex on a public beach in LA.”

“Good call.” He nodded and sat up to kiss her one last time.

Fuck Green Bay.

You take that back.

Absolutely not. Fuck. Green. Bay. Cowboys all the way.

The Cowboys suck.

Didn’t suck so much back in October, bitch.

Romo is fucking useless.

He’s just old. You leave him alone.

I can’t believe you have such bad taste. I thought you were a woman of taste…

Taste? I was raised this way. I bleed navy blue. YOU chose GB. Talking about taste.

Now you’re just being mean. I’m not sure we can be friends anymore...

Poor baby. However will I make it up to you?

Movie night at mine?

She smiled and cuddled under her blanket, biting her lip.

Well if I have to… I guess.

You said you want to make it up to me.

I did… What time?

It takes approximately twenty minutes to get from yours to mine… so twenty minutes. Get driving. I’ll open the gate and the garage for you.

I have to change…

No you don’t. Pajamas required. No primping allowed. And I’ll order take-away.

You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Styles.

Okie Dokie. Be there very soon.

Twenty minutes. I’ll give you thirty for traffic.

How magnanimous.

Fuck… I like it when you talk dirty to me. Keep going, love.

Haha. I’m getting in the car. See you in a bit.

The gate and the garage were both open as promised, so she pulled her Jeep in beside his Mercedes. He popped his head out of the door leading to the house and hit the button for the door.

“Hello, beautiful.” His smile was slow and soft as he walked around the front of her car. She found herself returning it, a light blush staining her cheeks.

She grabbed her phone, her keys and a tube of chapstick as he came to open her door. She stepped down, almost chest to chest with him- well chest to stomach, considering she wasn’t wearing heels.

“Not sure about beautiful, but I got here in twenty minutes.” She pulled at her Fender t-shirt and wiped suddenly sweaty hands on her brother’s old high school football sweats.

“Woman, yer fuckin’ gorgeous.” Leaning over, he kissed her softly. “Missed yeh.”

Part of her wanted to deflect with humor, to make this as casual as the non-title suggested it was, but…

Why pretend?

She didn’t want this with anyone else.

She smiled. “Missed you too.”

He grinned and kissed her again. “Even though we’ve been textin’ all day?”

“Even though you choose to root for the fuckin’ Green Bay Packers.” She plucked at the green t-shirt stretched across his broad chest.

He pulled away and frowned down at her. “Yeh can go, thank yeh.” He sniffed and headed for the door. “I’ll eat our Mexican food by myself.” He grinned back at her and tugged on her hand. “Yeh should go while yeh can.” He tugged on her hand again. “Yeh absolutely should not follow me into the house.” He opened the door with his free hand. “I’m very angry with yeh.”

She snickered and let him pull her into the house. She set her phone and her keys next to his on the table in the foyer. “What are we watching?”

He shrugged. “Dirty Dancing?”

“That’s fine.” She dropped onto the couch and smiled up at him as he carried the takeout into the living room. “Haven’t watched it.”

“Ever?”

“Nope.” Shaking her head, she unwrapped her taco. “I’m super impressed that you remembered what I ate at this place, even though we only went there that one time.”

“Good.” He hit play and grabbed his taco. “I like impressing you.”

Jamie looked away shyly. “Consider me impressed.”

“All the time?”

She blushed, eyes on the screen. “Generally speaking, yes.”

He grinned and bit into his taco.

Ten minutes later, she stood to throw the trash away, even though Harry insisted he would do it later. “Do you want somethin’ to drink?”

“Aren’t I the host? Should I be askin’ yeh that question?”

She shrugged. “Do you?”

“No, love. I want yeh t’come back quickly.” He grinned a dimpled, cheeky grin at her and winked.

With a smart salute, she turned on her heel, not missing the way his eyes lingered on her as she carried the trash into the kitchen. When she’d returned, not a minute later, he had laid back on the couch.

He held out his arms. “Cuddle me.”

She climbed over him, cheeks heating as his eyes skated brazenly over her breasts, down her stomach and down further to the junction of her thighs as she straddled him. She sucked in a breath as his eyes met hers, heavy-lidded.

She braced her hands on his shoulders and lowered herself until she was tucked against the side of his body and the back of the couch. Her thigh was still trapped between his, pressed against him intimately. She went to lift her leg over his knee, but he caught her, hand high on the back of her thigh. “Uh-huh.”

She looked back up and still. “Hmm?”

“Stay there.” He grinned. “Like you there.”

She blushed and tucked her head under his chin, arm stretched across his chest. “Alrighty then.”

He chuckled.

They were quiet, focused on the screen, but they were not still.

What had started as just his thumb rubbing softly at her side became, in incrementally bigger movements, more like petting. His hand smoothed down to her hip before running back up under her shirt.

Her hand found its way under his shirt, one finger idly tracing the curve of the laurel on his belly. Harry sucked in a deep breath, his chest expanding under her as his hand wandered, tracing back down over her spine. She shivered against him, her thigh rubbing at where he was growing hard against her thigh.

He stifled a groan and his hand started its return journey down her side, fingers dipping under the rolled waist of her sweats to skate over the lace waistband of her panties.

“Lace?”

His voice was all grit, his voice rumbling under her cheek as she smiled. “Yep.”

“Were yeh…” He swallowed. “Were yeh wearin’ those when I texted-”

“Nope.” She could feel her heart thundering in her chest, waiting on the response that would change the course of the evening, hopefully for the better.

He was still watching the TV, but his eyes weren’t fixed, weren’t focused. “Yeh put them on for me?”

Jamie nodded.

“Say it, love. Please.”

“Yes.”

He groaned deep in his chest. “Fuckin’ hell.” He pulled her fully on top of him, hand tangling in her hair as he kissed her fiercely. The hand around her waist wandered back up her side, trailing over permanent brilliant color then rubbing along the lace of her bra. “Matches?”

She bit her lip and nodded and he smiled widely. He kissed her again, his hips pressing his erection up against her. “So sexy. So.” He kissed her. “Fuckin’.” Another kiss. “Sexy.”

She smiled against his mouth and pushed at the hem of his t-shirt, fingers dancing over the laurel over his hipbone.

“Sit up.” He tugged at her shirt and smiled. “Wanna see. Can I?”

Nodding, she tugged her shirt up and above her head, the collar catching her ponytail and loosening it.

She felt his hands on her, hands on the black lace that covered her. “For me?” When she nodded, lip once again caught between her teeth, he moaned. “Take yer hair down, love.”

She did, his fingers tracing the cup of her bra before taking a detour to thumb at the soft skin above it. “So pretty.” He glanced up at her and smiled. “This isn’t a booty call. Yeh know that, right?”

She felt disappointment settle in her stomach. What were they doing then? “Oh. No sex?”

“No wait! That’s not what I mean.” He sat up to kiss her. “I wanna make lo… I wanna have sex with yeh. But I don’t want it just once, y’know? I don’t want it just once...” He pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “I dun want yeh thinkin’ that yer a just booty call. Yer more important to me than that, monster.”

She sucked in a deep breath. “Good. That’s good.” She smiled and leaned forward to kiss him, hands bracketing his jaw. “For the record I want this more than just once, too.”

“Yeah?”

Kissing him again, deeper, she nodded as she pulled away. “Yeah. Been wantin’ it ‘not just once’ for awhile.”

He moaned against her lips. “How long?” He pulled down the cup of her bra, his thumb smoothing over her nipple, smiling into her kiss as she gasped and arched into him. “How long have you wanted this, pretty girl?”

She pulled at his shirt and he obliged, lifting his arms over his head as she tugged the green fabric over his head. Her hands fell to his shoulders. “Since Jamaica.”

“Got yeh beat.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’ve wanted ye since I met you in LA.”

She smiled and kissed him. “Too late for me to say ‘me too’?”

“Is it true?” He tapped front clasp of her bra. “Can I?”

She nodded and gasped when he wrapped his lips around a nipple. “Of course it’s true. Baby…” She moaned. “I remember thinking it’d be easier if you were an asshole...Shit.” She threaded her fingers back through his hair.

He covered her nipple with his thumb and nipped at the underside of her breast. She moaned as he started working a hickey into the soft, pale skin. “Fuck, Harry.”

Rolling her nipple between his fingers, he grinned. “That’s very sweet.”

“I don’t mean it that way!” She huffed. “You’re distractin’ me.”

He licked into her mouth, a smile stretching his lips. “What do you mean?”

She giggled. “You’ve looked in a mirror recently, right?” She captured his lips as he pinched her nipple. She gasped. “You’re so fuckin’ attractive, it’s unfair. It would’ve been easier to ignore that if you’d been an asshole.” She leaned her forehead against his and shrugged. “Knew it’d be difficult to pretend I didn’t want you, to be professional, if you looked the way you look and you were nice.”

She feels his fingers at the waistband of her sweats. “I need you naked. Please say yes.”

“Yes.”

Part XVI Up Next: Part XVII

#harry styles #harry styles/reader #harry styles/oc #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fanfic

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savetopnow · 7 years ago

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2018-03-27 07 MUSIC now

MUSIC

Brooklyn Vegan

Alvvays & Frankie Rose @ Metro Chicago (pics, setlist)

Coney Island Baby, new music venue opening in Brownies/HiFi spot

Secret Circle (Wiki, Antwon, Lil Ugly Mane) played 2 NYC shows (pics)

Inquisition dropped from Satyricon tour

Robyn Hitchcock reissued rare 'Tromso, Kaptein' LP, touring

Consquence of Sound

Gina Rodriguez to star in live-action Carmen Sandiego film for Netflix

Lana Del Rey says Radiohead copyright infringement lawsuit is “over”

Film Review: Ready Player One Cares More About Virtual Reality Than Actual Reality

Film Review: Gemini is the Latest Feature to Turn Los Angeles Into a Neon Underworld

Mike D says his greatest fear is Beastie Boys being compared to 311

Fact Magazine

Physical music outsold digital downloads in the US last year

FACT mix 645: μ-Ziq

Moog turns its iconic Minimoog Model D synth into a fully-featured iOS app

Talking heads: 6 of the best smart speakers

The Icelandic electronic music renaissance: Sónar Reykjavík reviewed

Fluxblog

The Middle Of A Cold Premonition

The Moon Right Behind Me

Make Me Feel Right

I Loved And I Lost

Very Nice Very Nice

Idolator

Christina Aguilera Poses For ‘Paper’ Shoot, Reveals Nothing About New Era

ASCAP Pop Music Awards To Honor Lana Del Rey & Songwriter Desmond Child

Neon-Lit Rooms & Mountaintops: Loote’s “Your Side Of The Bed” Video

Charlie Puth & James Taylor Call For “Change” On New Single

Chvrches Deliver A Pretty, Stripped-Back Cover Of Beyonce’s “XO”

Listen to This

The Flying Eyes - Nowhere To Run [Psychedelic Rock] (2011)

Jorge Ben - Chove Chuva [Samba] (1963)

Elohim -- Hallucinating [indie-pop] (2016)

Philo301 -- Take A Chance [Spoken Word Poetry / Rap] (2017)

Blue States - Your Girl [Lounge/Dub] (2000)

Popjustice

NONONO’s new one is v excellent and here’s the video

New Music Friday: all hail Let’s Eat Grandma’s miniature pop symphony

Paloma Faith’s branded content is better than your branded content

Saluting the artwork for PRETTYMUCH’s Healthy

Louisa Johnson interview: “We went, ‘oh, fuck it, let’s just get drunk’”

Reddit Music

DragonForce - Through the Fire and Flames [Power Metal]

Seu Jorge - Life on Mars? [Acoustic]

Simon And Garfunkel - The Boxer [Folk] (1975)

Incubus - Pardon Me [rock]

Anderson .Paak - Off the Ground [Electro-Soul]

Rolling Stone

Sammy Hagar, Bob Weir Lead Fifth Acoustic-4-a-Cure Gig

How Therapy Helped Albert Hammond Jr. Make His Most Personal Album Yet

Watch 'Weird Al' Yankovic Cover Neil Young's 'Cinnamon Girl'

Chance the Rapper Blames Marketing Agencies for Subtle Racism in Ads

Future, Schoolboy Q, DJ Esco Chill at Lavish Party in 'Code of Honor' Video

Slipped Disc

Seattle Symphony grants 12 percent pay rise

Cathedral music director is arrested for gross indecency

Korean star dies at 33

Philadelphia have a new chief

Watch: Dudamel pays tribute to his mentor, Abreu

Spotify Blog

Spotify Launches Integration with New and Existing Cadillac Models

Spotify Launches ‘Louder Together’ with First Multi-Artist Spotify Single Collaboration from Independent Stars Sasha Sloan, Nina Nesbitt and Charlotte Lawrence

Spotify Launches Self-Serve Advertising Platform in the UK and Canada

Spotify Announces Launch of Line-In

John Hancock and Spotify Give Runners Everywhere Access to Custom Playlists and Tips from Some of the World’s Fastest Marathoners

We Are the Music Makers

Mysterious band with same name as my band pops up on music streaming services the day before our debut album was scheduled to be released. Could this be a royalty scam?

[NEW SINGLE] Please tell me what you think, if you like it, share it! :)

Reaktor/Max for Live ensembles for experimental sound design like Arca

advice for field recording

How do you achieve the smoothest pads?

#music

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nancygduarteus · 6 years ago

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The White Flight From Football

Shantavia Jackson signed her three sons up for football to keep them out of trouble. As a single mother who works the night shift at a Home Depot warehouse 50 minutes away from her house, Jackson relies on the sport to shield the boys from gang activity in her rural Georgia county. They began in a local league five years ago when they were still little, their helmets like bobbleheads on their shoulders. Now 11, 12, and 14, they play in games across the region. Jackson says she passed up a daytime shift at Home Depot so that she can drive them to games and cheer them on.

Over time, the boys’ coaches have become mentors, making sure their athletes get good grades and stay off the streets. They take the boys on field trips to the beach and to Busch Gardens. Jackson’s eldest son, Marqwayvian McCoy—or Qway, as she calls him—has particularly thrived. Jackson says Qway has been diagnosed with schizoaffective bipolar disorder, which sometimes manifests in bursts of anger and an inability to focus at school. Now his teammates help him when he gets stuck in his studies and look up to him for his prowess on the field. They’ve nicknamed him Live Wire because he can hit so hard.

Jackson dreams that Qway will soon make it out of their home in Colquitt County, a place marked by fields of crops and cotton bales the size of Mack trucks. Football could help him do that. As a middle schooler, he’s already been asked to practice with the high-school team, the Colquitt County Packers, a national powerhouse that in 2016 sent two dozen boys to college with full scholarships. Qway knows his mother doesn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studies websites that track top high-school-football athletes and watches all the football he can online, hoping to get better at the game.

Marqwayvian McCoy at home in his jersey (Dustin Chambers)

As Qway throws himself into football, the sport is facing a highly publicized reckoning more serious than any it has confronted since the Pop Warner youth-football program was established in 1929. Research suggests that tackle football can cause long-term brain injury, and as a result, many parents are telling their kids they can’t play. In the 2017–18 school year, 6.6 percent fewer high-school athletes participated in 11-player tackle football than in the 2008–09 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Yet not all parents are holding back their kids from tackle football at equal rates, which is creating a troubling racial divide. Kids in mostly white upper-income communities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West are leaving football for other sports such as lacrosse or baseball. But black kids in lower-income communities without a lot of other sports available are still flocking to football. In keeping with America’s general racial demographics, white boys continue to make up the majority of youth-tackle-football players, according to data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. But proportionally, the scales appear to be shifting. A recent survey of 50,000 eighth-, tenth-, and 12th-grade students found that around 44 percent of black boys play tackle football, compared with 29 percent of white boys, as analyzed by the University of Michigan sociologist Philip Veliz. Football at the high-school level is growing in popularity in states with the highest shares of black people, while it’s declining in majority-white states. Other recent studies suggest that more black adults support youth tackle football than white adults.

This trend has become particularly visible as majority-white towns such as Ridgefield, New Jersey, and Healdsburg, California, have dropped their varsity-football programs due to a lack of interest. Meanwhile, in Lee County, Georgia, a majority-black area near where the Jacksons live, a coach recently started a new travel football team for kids to provide them with guidance and mentorship. These racial divides show up in the football that America watches: Today black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college-football players, up from 39 percent in 2000. White athletes make up 37 percent, down from 51 percent.

This divergence paints a troubling picture of how economic opportunity—or a lack thereof—governs which boys are incentivized to put their body and brain at risk to play. Depending on where families live, and what other options are available to them, they see either a game that is too violent to consider or one that is necessary and important, if risky. Millions of Americans still watch football; NFL ratings were up this season. That a distinct portion of families won’t let their children play creates a disturbing future for the country’s most popular game.

Sam and Megan Taggard’s colonial-style home in West Simsbury, Connecticut, has no shortage of sporting equipment. The couple’s four children stack bikes in the garage and clutter the wooden living-room floor with footballs and tennis balls. On the day I visited them last October, the Taggards’ 13-year-old son had two hockey games and their 7-year-old daughter had a basketball game. The family’s two younger sons horsed around a hockey goal in the living room.

Tackle football, however, was not on the agenda. “My kiddos aren’t playing,” Sam Taggard told me. Taggard played football years ago at Babson College, and he says his 44-year-old body is still bearing the damage: He had back surgery two years ago and is slow to get out of bed in the morning. He also did a clinical doctorate in physical therapy and has seen how debilitating head and neck injuries can be. Football requires kids to endanger their brain every single game, he said: “In football, you’re literally trying to decimate the person in front of you. If you’re not, you’re not playing well.”

Sam Taggard played football in college and had to have back surgery later in life. (Monica Jorge)

The Taggards aren’t the only family in their neighborhood pulling their boys from tackle football. At one of the day’s hockey games, I chatted with five other parents—all of whom were white—in the frigid stands of an ice-hockey rink on a private-school campus as their sons skated past. Four told me they wouldn’t let their son play. The fifth, a mother named Sharon Walsh, said she had objected, but her husband and son overruled her. She hated signing the waiver saying that she understood her child might die. Thankfully, she said, her son recently decided to give up football on his own.

Ron Perry, another hockey parent, echoed the sentiment that he wouldn’t let his son play tackle football, because of concerns about concussions and head injuries. A friend of his coaches a rec-football team and is always looking for players, Perry told me. But he wouldn’t recommend his son. “There’s just constant hitting,” he said. (Hockey, it should be noted, can also lead to head injuries. USA Hockey, which oversees high-school and club hockey in America, has been relatively proactive about safety, deciding in 2011 to ban bodychecking in games until age 13.)

A huge amount of evidence shows that football poses a risk to developing brains. Athletes who begin playing tackle football before the age of 12 have twice as much of a risk of behavioral problems later in life and three times as much of a risk of clinical depression as athletes who begin playing after 12, according to a 2017 Boston University study. A separate study from Wake Forest University found that boys who played just one season of tackle football between the ages of 8 and 13 had diminished functions in part of their brain.

One of the biggest risks of repeated head injuries is that players could develop CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that occurs when a protein called tau spreads through the brain, killing brain cells. CTE is linked with behavioral and personality changes, memory loss, and speech problems. Conversations about CTE tend to focus on the dangers of concussions, but brains can also be damaged by frequent hits to the head. A February 2018 study found that mice with repeated traumatic brain injuries, regardless of concussive symptoms, still had CTE. The condition has been found in the brains of many high-profile football players who committed suicide in recent years, including Junior Seau, Andre Waters, and Terry Long. One 2017 study of the brains of 111 former NFL players found that 110 of them had CTE.

Because of this research, a growing number of elite-level football players are trying to get kids to wait until high school to start playing tackle. By then, kids’ bodies are developed enough that head trauma may not be as detrimental, and the kids can better understand proper tackling procedures and control their body to follow them.

[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]

Even if kids wait until they’re in high school to play tackle football, though, they’ll need something else to do in the meantime. And that’s where Sam Taggard’s kids have an advantage over Shantavia Jackson’s. Throughout the country, affluent school districts offer more extracurricular activities than poorer districts, and upper-income parents can pay for more activities outside of school. On top of hockey, the Taggard’s oldest son, Jack, plays trombone in the band, volunteers to teach music to disabled kids, and participates in the chess and ski clubs. Jack expects to go to college whether or not he excels at sports. Both his parents did, and his father has a master’s in business administration. Shantavia Jackson is still working on getting her GED.

As brain-damage fears have grown, upper-income boys have started decamping to sports such as golf or lacrosse, which are less available in poorer communities. The kids are influenced by adults who have their own biases about the safety of football. Just 37 percent of white respondents told researchers that they would encourage kids to play the sport, while 57 percent of black respondents said they would, according to a working paper by the sociologists Andrew Lindner of Skidmore College and Daniel Hawkins of the University of Nebraska.

The Taggard family outside their home in Simsbury, Connecticut (Monica Jorge)

Now getting white kids just to play flag football can be a tough sell. Jim Schwantz, the mayor of Palatine, Illinois, and a former linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers, tried to start a flag-football league as an alternative for families in his area worried about concussions. Despite a strong start in 2012, interest fell each year in the mostly white suburbs where the league operated, because parents saw the sport as a gateway to tackle football. Schwantz decided to scrap the league in 2017.

Meanwhile, in Colquitt County, where the Jacksons live, football remains the biggest thing around. The county’s population is just 45,000, but it’s not unusual for the 10,000-seat high-school stadium to be full of local fans for Friday-night games. Timmy Barnes, a former player who later traveled with the football team as a police officer, has called Colquitt County “a community who only has football.” He wrote that after Rush Propst, the high-school coach, was nearly suspended after head-butting a player but saved when he apologized and the community rallied around him.

On a fall afternoon, I sat with Shantavia Jackson on the metal bleachers of a high-school stadium in Thomasville, Georgia, a town in a neighboring county near the Florida border, as successive teams of boys came to play in a tournament branded “The Battle of the Babies.” Jackson was there from the start. She wore a gray long-sleeved Colquitt County Cowboys T-shirt to support her youngest son, Chance, whose Pop Warner team played in an early game. She cheered for him while keeping her 12-year-old, Jyqwayvin, entertained in the stands. Qway’s undefeated team was playing a team from Atlanta in the last game of the day, so the family’s day was dominated by football.

The stands were mostly empty when the 6- and 7-year-olds played around noon under a scorching Georgia sun, but they began to fill up as games featured older boys, who could run, jump, and hit harder than the little kids. Amid the sounds of the tournament—the cowbells and hollering from the parents, a DJ blasting Drake from the end zone, the referee’s whistles and the grunts of adolescent boys counting jumping jacks behind the stands—no one seemed bothered by the thuds of the hits. These happened constantly: when the 6- and 7-year-olds ran smack into one another trying to get a fumbled football, when a 9-year-old caught a pass and got leveled by a boy twice his size, and when an 11-year-old got yanked around the neck and tackled by another 11-year-old.

[Read: How students’ brains are in danger on the field]

“Get him, come on!” a grandmother yelled at her grandson, a tiny 61-pound 9-year-old named Zain who was flattened by a boy 40 pounds heavier. Zain came off the field crying and his mother went to stroke his head. With the exception of Zain and his family, nearly every other player and family in the stands was black.

By the time Qway’s game rolled around, the stands were packed and the sun had set, turning the sky a purplish blue. The game was a rout; the team from Atlanta was faster, bigger, and more organized than Qway’s team, and so the boys started getting violent in frustration, tackling one another after the whistle, grabbing at necks to pull one another down. Parents yelled at the referees for what they perceived as missed penalties, and then turned on one another. “We’re in the sticks now!” one Atlanta parent yelled, taunting. Qway got hit in the groin, and Jackson stood at the bottom of the bleachers, her hand by her mouth, waiting to make sure he was okay.

Shantavia Jackson (Dustin Chambers)

Jackson knows football is dangerous. Her father broke his neck playing football when he was in high school; he was in the hospital for weeks and had to get screws in his spine. But she has a fatalistic attitude about injuries. Her boys could get injured in a car accident or a drive-by shooting. They could get injured if they joined gangs. “If it’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen. We can’t stop it,” she said. “You can get injured in any sport.” All she can do, she told me, is hug her boys and tell them she loves them before each game.

Other parents in the stands said similar things. One mother: “Boys will be boys. They need a little roughness.” Another: “You have to keep your child busy so they don’t have time to get in trouble.” One woman, Hope Moore, started her son in football when he was 6. At first he wasn’t interested in playing sports, Moore said, but she wanted to get him off the couch and away from video games. He fell in love with football from the moment he started playing. Moore used to worry about the hits, pulling him from games if she thought he was getting hurt. But the coaches told her that her son needed to learn to make mistakes, and how to get hit, she told me. Now he’s getting invited to live in other school districts so he can be on their teams. “It’s going to help him in college,” Moore said.

Even as the dangers associated with tackle football become more evident, the sport is growing more lucrative. Universities can make money from football on ticket revenue, broadcasting fees, licensing opportunities, and sponsorships through bowl games. Some of the biggest schools have doubled what they make from football over the past decade, according to Forbes. The football program at Texas A&M University, one of the nation’s top teams, brings in $148 million annually.

Seeing the revenue opportunities, many schools have expanded their football program and started offering more scholarships. Since 1988, the NCAA has added 62 Division I schools that are eligible to offer full-ride football scholarships, representing about 3,000 more scholarships available. By contrast, 31 fewer schools offer NCAA Division I scholarships for men’s swimming and diving than in 1988. “If [universities] started giving boys the same amount of scholarships in swimming, you’d see a whole bunch of poor kids jumping in the pool,” Robert W. Turner II, a professor at George Washington University who briefly played in the NFL, told me.

In communities like Colquitt County, many families see high-school seniors get full-ride football scholarships and aspire to something similar. Jackson’s boys, for instance, look up to Ty Lee, a former Colquitt County football player who was recruited to Middle Tennessee State University. They visit him when he’s home from school. Around 78 percent of black male athletes in the lowest income quintile expect to qualify for financial aid through an athletic scholarship, compared with 45 percent of white males in the same income bracket, according to a forthcoming paper by the Portland State University sociologists CJ Appleton and Dara Shifrer.

[Read: Football has always been a battleground in the culture war]

College recruiting can happen as early as middle school, which means kids can feel pressure to start playing sooner to hone their skills. If parents in Colquitt County were to prevent their kids from playing until they’re 14, their kids’ athleticism and knowledge of the game would be far behind that of boys who have been playing for years. Chad Mascoe Sr., who played football at the University of Central Florida and in the Arena Football League, and who now lives in Thomasville, Georgia, told me that his 14-year-old son, Chad Mascoe Jr., had three recruiting offers before he got into high school. Now, as a star freshman, Chad has 13 offers, according to his father. He was recently recruited to transfer to an elite boarding and sports-training school in Florida later this year.

The NFL starts marketing to children when they’re young, which has attracted criticism from groups who say the league’s material portrays football as safe and healthy, even as research shows that it is not. The league runs a website and app for kids that has 3 million registered users, and it has funded NFL-branded fitness and healthy-eating programs in more than 73,000 schools. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the short-term health of students improved more in participating schools than in those not enrolled. In Colquitt County, schools got a visit from an Atlanta Falcons player through one of those programs in 2014. (The NFL declined to comment for this story.)

Even without the NFL’s presence, though, Colquitt County prioritizes football. In 2016, Colquitt County voters approved a ballot question that allowed the school board to use some proceeds of a sales tax for education funding to build a $3.7 million, 73,000-square-foot indoor multipurpose space that allows the football team to practice even in the heat of a Georgia summer. Propst, the high-school coach, made $141,000 last year, according to Open Georgia, which provides salary information for state and local employees. Most teachers at Colquitt County High School make less than half of what Propst does.

Colquitt County High School (Dustin Chambers)

Without football, the options for boys in Colquitt County are limited. Only 80 percent of incoming freshmen at Colquitt County high schools end up graduating. Of those who do, just 29 percent go on to four-year colleges. For those who stay, job options are bleak: More than two-thirds of households in Colquitt County make less than $50,000 a year. That’s less than half the median household income in Connecticut’s Hartford County, where the Taggards live.

The people who do seem to be pulling their kids from football in Colquitt County are the ones who can afford other opportunities. I talked to Todd Taylor, who is white and lives in Moultrie, Georgia, a few miles from Shantavia Jackson’s hometown of Norman Park. He played football and baseball at Colquitt County High, and his family has season tickets to Colquitt County Packers football games. But his wife really doesn’t want their 8-year-old son, Jud, to play, because of concussion dangers. Instead, Jud plays baseball and dives at Moss Farms Diving, a powerhouse facility in Moultrie that has trained dozens of divers who get college scholarships. Moss Farms offers training tuition-free to those who need it, but diving remains an expensive sport in America, requiring pool time and lots of travel. Sixteen percent of the Moss Farms roster is made up of people of color.

The divide on the football field makes it hard not to see how inequality in America is worsening health disparities and raising the specter of another, darker era of American history. In the early part of the 20th century, black Americans were prevented from buying homes in well-off neighborhoods by racially restrictive covenants, excluded from trade unions and the jobs they guaranteed, and paid less than their white counterparts. The segregation that resulted has long had health implications. Today simply the fact of being black can be hazardous to one’s health. Low-income black boys are more likely than low-income white boys to live in neighborhoods with persistent poverty, violence, and trauma. These neighborhoods also have little access to healthy foods.

Despite the benefits football can provide, it may also be worsening these health disparities. The medical care accessible to low-income families in poor neighborhoods may be helping to obscure the dangers of brain injuries. Low-income black communities have less access to good medical services and information that would emphasize the downsides of playing football, says Harry Edwards, a civil-rights activist and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. “Nobody advises them as to the long-term medical risks,” he told me. “They are out of the loop.” Black people who said they had followed news about concussions were less likely to encourage children to play football than others who hadn’t been following the news, according to Lindner and Hawkin’s study.

[Read: The worst part about recovering from a concussion]

When black boys from low-income families look for examples of men who have come from similar backgrounds and succeeded, they don’t have as many positive role models outside of sports and music. Black NFL players who came from poverty are featured in commercials selling products, sitting behind desks at halftime in tailored suits, holding up trophies. They’re in newspaper stories and TV specials in which they talk about growing up poor in the South, raised by a single mother, and making it big in the NFL. “The media serves up encouraging stories for black kids to consume,” says John Hoberman, the author of Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Low-income black boys do not see the hundreds of athletes suffering in silence as their brain deteriorates, who ache when they get out of bed every morning, who damaged their body playing in high school or college but who didn’t even make it to the NFL.

While black boys are disproportionately getting channeled into a violent sport, white people are making the most money off of it. Seventy percent of NFL players are black, but only 9.9 percent of managers in the league office are. The NFL was just 52 percent black in 1985. Only two people of color are majority owners of NFL franchises: Shahid Khan, the Pakistani American owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Kim Pegula, a Korean American businesswoman who is a partial owner of the Buffalo Bills. “If you’re going to avoid 21st-century gladiator circumstances in terms of football, the teams have to look something like the demographic representation of this nation,” Edwards told me.

Last year, the NFL expanded its Rooney Rule, which was first implemented in 2003 and seeks to diversify teams’ coaching and front-office staff. Still, the gladiatorial overtones are hard to overlook. Players who want to get recruited by NFL teams must attend the NFL Scouting Combine, a week-long showcase in which they perform mental and physical tests. Athletes’ hand size, arm length, and wingspan are measured during this event, and players are asked to stand naked but for their workout shorts so that team recruiters can see how they are built, according to Edwards, who also works as a consultant with the San Francisco 49ers. NFL and team executives, mostly white men, are evaluating the bodies of black players, deciding whether to make an investment.

Even as broadcast networks lost viewers generally, NFL ratings were up in 2018. Americans still appear to have a growing fascination with the sport, even if a majority-white segment of the population doesn’t want their children to play it.

Without a reversal in economic fortunes for poor communities across the country, football could one day become a sport played almost exclusively by black athletes, while still enjoyed by everyone. Black athletes—who already make up the majority of players in the most dangerous on-field positions—would continue to suffer from long-term brain damage, their life cut short by dementia and the scourge of CTE. Black boys would continue to be drawn to a sport that could make their life painful and short. Everyone else would sit back and watch.

Efforts are under way to try to make football safer. Youth leagues are implementing concussion protocols, lessening the amount of hitting players do in practice, and even distributing helmets with special sensors that analyze whether an athlete has gotten a concussion. Dartmouth College eliminated live tackling in all practices in 2010; other Ivy League schools adopted similar rules in 2016. The NFL has made some changes, too, adding a concussion protocol in 2009 and altering kickoff and tackling rules to lower the risk of injury. The 2018 NFL season saw a 28 percent decrease in concussions, compared with the previous year.

Still, the league can’t do much about the fact that football, more than any other sport, requires players to run into one another over and over again and fall to the ground. “Football at the elite level is about as close as you can get to war and still stay civil,” Edwards said. Concussion protocols can’t erase the research that suggests that primarily brain trauma, not concussions, leads to CTE.

The Colquitt County Packers practice field (Dustin Chambers)

Some lawmakers want the government to get involved by prohibiting kids from tackling in football before high school, or by banning youth tackle football entirely. Bills introduced in five states to restrict tackle football have faced backlash. “To demonize just this sport is unfair. It’s illogical, and frankly, it’s downright un-American,” Mike Wagner, the executive commissioner of Pop Warner’s Southern California conference, said in reaction to the Safe Youth Football Act, a failed California bill introduced last year that would have set a minimum age for organized tackle-football leagues.

The disappearance of tackle football could be a real blow to some communities, unless something changes so that those places offer more opportunity and less peril for low-income black boys. If tackle football were banned, for instance, Shantavia Jackson’s boys would lose the coaches who look out for them. Without football, they wouldn’t have something to look forward to on weekends, or as big of a community of teammates. They might not have a dream they can pursue that’s quite as tangible and achievable as playing college football.

Before she had kids, Jackson wanted to leave Colquitt County, but she ended up staying in the same town where her father and grandmother still live. The stakes are higher for her sons, she says, especially for Qway, whose mental-health condition sometimes sets him apart. He needs to be somewhere bigger, with more people like him, she told me. “There’s really nothing much here for him,” she said.

White parents may be doing the best thing for their sons by pulling them from tackle football. But parents of black boys in the rural South are facing a different reality, Jackson says. She believes that she is being a good parent if she gets her sons excited about tackle football. Their opportunities grow if they learn how to hit and tackle and run—how to be as much of a live wire—as well as they possibly can.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/football-white-flight-racial-divide/581623/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 6 years ago

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The White Flight From Football

Marqwayvian McCoy at home in his jersey (Dustin Chambers)

Sam Taggard played football in college and had to have back surgery later in life. (Monica Jorge)

[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]

The Taggard family outside their home in Simsbury, Connecticut (Monica Jorge)

[Read: How students’ brains are in danger on the field]

Shantavia Jackson (Dustin Chambers)

[Read: Football has always been a battleground in the culture war]

Colquitt County High School (Dustin Chambers)

[Read: The worst part about recovering from a concussion]

The Colquitt County Packers practice field (Dustin Chambers)

Article source here:The Atlantic

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nancygduarteus · 6 years ago

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The Risky Promises Remote Owners Are Making to Rural Hospitals

CEDARVILLE, Calif.—Beau Gertz faced a crowd of worried locals at the town senior center, hoping to sell them on his vision for their long-beloved—but now bankrupt—hospital.

In worn blue jeans and an untucked shirt, the bearded entrepreneur from Denver pledged at a town-hall meeting in March to revive the Surprise Valley Community Hospital—a place many in the audience counted on to set their broken bones, stitch up cattle-tagging cuts, and tend to aging loved ones.

Gertz said that if they voted on Tuesday to let him buy their tiny public hospital, he would retain such vital services. Better still, he said, he’d like to open a “wellness center” to attract well-heeled outsiders—one that would offer telehealth, addiction treatment, physical therapy, genetic testing, intravenous vitamin infusions, even massage. Cedarville’s failing hospital, now at least $4 million in debt, would not just bounce back but thrive, he said.

Gertz, 34, a former weightlifter who runs clinical-lab and nutraceutical companies, unveiled his plan to pay for it: He’d use the 26-bed hospital to bill insurers for lab tests regardless of where patients lived. Through telemedicine technology, doctors working for Surprise Valley could order tests for people who’d never set foot there.

To some of the 100 or so people at the meeting that night, Gertz’s plan offered hope. To others, it sounded suspiciously familiar: Just months before, another out-of-towner had proposed a similar deal—only to disappear.

Outsiders “come in and promise the moon,” says Jeanne Goldman, 72, a retired businesswoman. “The [hospital’s] board is just so desperate with all the debt, and they pray this angel’s going to come along and fix it. If this was a shoe store in Surprise Valley, I could care less, but it’s a hospital.”

The woes of Surprise Valley Community Hospital reflect an increasingly brutal environment for America’s rural hospitals, which are disappearing by the dozens amid declining populations, economic troubles, corporate consolidation and, sometimes, self-inflicted wounds.

Nationwide, 83 of 2,375 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, according to the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program. These often-remote hospitals—some with 10, 15, 25 beds—have been targeted by management companies or potential buyers who promise much but often deliver little while lining their own pockets, according to allegations in court cases, a Missouri state audit, and media reports.

Enticed by such outsiders, some struggling rural hospitals around the country have embraced lab billing for faraway patients as a rescue plan. That’s because Medicare and commercial insurers tend to pay more for tests to sustain endangered rural hospitals compared with urban hospitals and especially outpatient labs. In general, this kind of remote billing is controversial and legally murky, and it recently has resulted in allegations of fraud in several states, according to government documents and media reports.

Rural hospital boards, however, tend not to have expertise in the health-care business. The president of Surprise Valley Community’s board, for instance, is a rancher. Another board member owns a local motel; a third, a construction company. That lack of experience “leaves them vulnerable in many cases,” says Terry Hill of the nonprofit National Rural Health Resource Center, based in Duluth, Minnesota.

Seeking to distinguish himself from other would-be rescuers who ran into legal trouble, Gertz described his proposal to residents as perfectly legal—a legitimate use of telemedicine, essentially remote treatment via electronic communication such as video. “If you do it correctly,” he said in an interview with Kaiser Health News, “there is a nice profit margin. There [are] extra visits you can get from telemedicine but ... it has to be billed correctly and it can’t be abused.”

Jeanne Goldman talks with Beau Gertz after the town-hall meeting. (Heidi de Marco / KHN)

Gertz runs several companies—founded within the last four years—including two labs, SeroDynamics and Cadira Labs, as well as a wellness company called CadiraMD.

He pledged in court documents to buy the bankrupt hospital for $4 million and cover its debts. In a public meeting, he also said he had loaned the hospital $750,000 and lined up a $4 billion New York company as a financial backer. Kaiser Health News was unable to locate the company under the name Gertz cited in the meeting, Next Genesis Development Group. He did not respond to emails seeking clarification on the issue.

Gertz, who acknowledged that he had never before run a hospital, was asked at the same gathering whether he had disclosed his “financials” to the hospital board. “As a private entity, I don’t have to show my financials and I have not provided my financials to the board,” he replied.

It was not clear whether board members had ever asked. Surprise Valley Health Care District Board President John Erquiaga declined to comment.

Surrounded by the Warner and Modoc mountains and forests in California’s northeastern corner, Surprise Valley is home to four small communities. The largest is Cedarville, population 514, at last count.

The valley, covered in sagebrush and greasewood, is part of Modoc County, one of California’s poorest, with a median income of about $30,000. The closest hospital with an emergency room is roughly 25 miles away, over a mountain pass.

One of hundreds of rural hospitals built with help from the 1946 federal Hill-Burton Act, the Surprise Valley hospital opened in 1952 to serve a thriving ranching community. But it has struggled since, closing in 1981, reopening as a health clinic in 1985, then reconverting to a hospital in 1986.

A county grand jury report in 2014-15 found that “mismanagement of the [hospital district] has been evident for at least the past five years.”

By last summer, those in charge didn’t seem up to the task of running a modern hospital. By then, it was hardly a hospital at all. Crushed by debt, it primarily offered nursing-home care, an emergency room, a volunteer ambulance service and just one acute care bed, with three others available if needed.

When state inspectors arrived last June, they found chaos. The hospital’s chief nursing officer resigned during the inspection. Staffers reported unpaid checks to vendors hidden in drawers. Inspectors learned that the hospital had sent home temporary nurses because it couldn’t pay them, according to their report.

The hospital’s then-chief administrator, Richard Cornwell—who staffers said had instructed them to hide the checks, according to the report—had taken a leave of absence and was nowhere to be found. Cornwell, a health-care accountant from Montana, was later fired and replaced with the hospital’s lab director, who in turn resigned, according to public records. Reached by Kaiser Health News, Cornwell declined to comment.

Federal regulators suspended Medicare and Medicaid payments to the hospital—a rarely invoked financial penalty—over concerns about patient care. Those payments have since been reinstated, but a follow-up state inspection in November 2017 identified more patient care concerns.

Infighting ensued, with some residents fiercely committed to keeping the hospital open and others favoring closure, perhaps replacing it with a small clinic. Jean Bilodeaux, 74, a local journalist, says board members often kept the public in the dark, failing to show up for their own meetings and sometimes making decisions outside public view.

When Bilodeaux raised questions about the hospital’s finances in the Modoc County Record, a weekly newspaper, she recalled, board members “started screaming at me,” she said. Now “I don’t even step foot in that hospital.”

Ben Zandstra, 65, a pastor in Cedarville, says that while Cornwell was in charge, he too got a chilly reception at the hospital, where he had long played guitar for patients on Christmas Eve. “I became persona non grata. It’s the most divisive thing I’ve seen in the years I’ve lived here.”

Even residents who say they have experienced poor care at Surprise Valley Community believe its continued existence in some form is crucial—for its 50 or so jobs, for its ER, and because it puts the region on the map.

Eric Shpilman, 61, a retired probation officer, says his now-deceased wife received “unspeakable” treatment at Surprise Valley. But to shut it down? “It would take out the heart of Surprise Valley, the heart out of Cedarville.”

Last summer, the board turned to an outside management company for help.

Jorge Perez, the CEO of Kansas City–based EmpowerHMS—which promises on its website to “rescue rural hospitals”—agreed to take over Surprise Valley’s debt and operate the hospital for three years, according to a management agreement with the board.

In the two months after EmpowerHMS took over management, Surprise Valley’s revenue more than doubled, according to financial documents provided by the hospital.

Then, according to hospital officials’ public statements, the company stopped making the promised payments, and they haven’t been able to contact EmpowerHMS or Perez since. In January, when Surprise Valley filed for bankruptcy, documents filed in court said EmpowerHMS had “abandoned” the hospital.

Around the time Perez took over, he and companies with which he was involved were dogged by allegations of improper laboratory billing at facilities in Mississippi, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri, according to ongoing lawsuits by insurers and others, a state audit, and media reports. Missouri’s attorney general in May opened an investigation into one of the hospitals Perez managed, and the Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri recently called for a federal investigation into lab-billing practices at one of the hospitals.

Cows roam in Cedarville, California. (Heidi de Marco / KHN)

Medicare rules and commercial insurance contracts, with some exceptions, require people to be treated on an inpatient or outpatient basis by the hospitals that are billing for their lab tests. But insurers have alleged in court documents that hospitals Perez was involved with billed for tests—to the tune of at least $175 million—on patients never seen at those facilities. Perez has maintained that what he is doing is legal and that it generates revenue that rural hospitals desperately need, according to Side Effects Public Media.

Experts say insurers are catching on to voluminous billing by hospitals in communities that typically have generated a tiny number of tests. At one Sonoma County district hospital not associated with Perez, an insurer recently demanded repayment for $13.5 million in suspect billings, forcing the hospital to suspend the lucrative program and put itself up for sale.

Lab tests for out-of-town patients have “been a growing scheme in the last year, slightly longer,” said Karen Weintraub, the executive vice president of Health-Care Fraud Shield, which consults for insurers. “There’s an incentive to bill for things not necessary or even services not rendered. It also may not be proper based on contracts with insurers. The dollars are getting large.”

Some residents were aware of controversy surrounding Perez and his companies and said they tried to warn the hospital district board. “All they wanted to hear was, ‘We will pay the bills,’” Bilodeaux said.

Neither Perez nor EmpowerHMS returned requests for comment. However, Michael Murtha, the president of the National Alliance for Rural Hospitals, said in an email that he was responding on behalf of Perez, who chairs the coalition’s board.

“The mission to rescue rural hospitals and set them on a path of sustainability is a difficult undertaking, and it would be a disservice to their communities to preclude struggling facilities from availing themselves of every legal and regulatory means to generate badly needed revenue,” Murtha wrote, in part.

“Such pioneering efforts are not always welcomed by those who have benefited from the status quo,” he said.

Regarding Perez’s role at Surprise Valley, Murtha wrote that Perez tried to help save the facility by “effectively” donating over $250,000 but then discovered it faced “more challenges than had been initially realized.” Murtha said Perez worked to attract others who might be better able to help the hospital.

One of those “others” in Perez’s orbit was Gertz, the Denver entrepreneur, who arrived in Surprise Valley several months ago.

The Denver executive told residents and Kaiser Health News that he operated a lab that previously performed tests for hospitals owned or managed by Perez’s companies. At one hospital board meeting, Gertz also said he had handled marketing for Perez companies for one-and-a-half years.

However, he said he had parted ways with Perez after learning of his controversial dealings in other states, and Gertz said Perez now owes him more than $14 million. (Gertz and his companies have not been named as defendants in lawsuits reviewed by Kaiser Health News involving Perez and his companies.)

“I come in with a certain guilt by association,” he told the Modoc County Board of Supervisors in April, according to a recording of the meeting. But Gertz sought to assuage any concerns, telling the supervisors he had a “passion” for rural life. He’d grown up on a farm, he said, where he “hung out with the chickens” and cleaned the stables every morning.

Gertz said his plan was different from Perez’s and legal because the hospital and one of his Denver labs, SeroDynamics, had become one business. With the hospital board’s approval earlier this year, he loaned the district $2.5 million for it to buy SeroDynamics—effectively an advance on the hospital’s purchase price of $4 million, according to bankruptcy court documents. SeroDynamics’ website now proclaims the lab a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of the Surprise Valley hospital, with “national reach.”

Robert Michel, a clinical laboratory-management consultant who learned of the terms of the transaction from a reporter, offered a critical assessment. “The essence of this arrangement is to use the hospital’s existing managed-care contracts with generous payment terms for lab tests as a vehicle to bill for claims in other states,” said Michel, the founder and president of a trade magazine for the lab industry. This arrangement “should ring all sorts of bells” for the hospital board, he said.

For now, Gertz has said, dollars are flowing in. According to the journalist Jean Bilodeaux, Gertz phoned in to a Surprise Valley hospital board meeting in May to report that the lab billing so far had netted about $300,000. According to bankruptcy court documents, 80 percent of the profits will go to his companies, 20 percent to the hospital.

Those are terms some in Surprise Valley are willing to live with.

The next step, for Gertz, is taking ownership of Surprise Valley’s entire operation. For the roughly 1,500 district residents, voting no on Tuesday almost certainly means closure, leaving taxpayers with potentially more debt, including any money they may owe Gertz.

That is good enough reason to go with the Denver entrepreneur, said the acting hospital administrator Bill Bostic.

“He’s got something we haven’t got—which is money,” Bostic said.

This post appears courtesy of Kaiser Health News.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/06/the-risky-promises-remote-owners-are-making-to-rural-hospitals/561677/?utm_source=feed