Better To Beg – Kirsti Mackenzie (1)

Twenty-one? Twenty-two? Chris­sakes, girl—don’t you say a good goddamn to anyone about life until you’ve made something of yours!” After his outburst draws looks from a few of the other ta­bles, he takes a moment to compose himself. “You’re sinkin’ fifty dollars’ worth of hooch in a five-dollar T-shirt, Miss Vivienne. Looks like you haven’t showered in a month. Willin’ to bet you don’t got more than twenty bucks to your poor mamma’s name, God rest her soul. Maybe this is tolerable right now. Fun, even.

But what’ll you do when this doesn’t work out? Maybe college ain’t a guarantee, but it’s a damn sight better than thinkin’ someone owes you a steak din­ner just for showing up.” ● Sometimes I think I’m frozen in the moment I tell Dad I quit school. It hits me unexpect­edly. When at the gas pump watching the numbers scroll. When on the toilet. When in front of a microwave. When at a stoplight. Usual­ly, it’s the worst after I drink.

Or right when I open my eyes after waking up. Ambushed. Playing like a loop in my head: After all I’ve done for you—you’re smarter than this—you’ll wind up homeless—are you nuts? It sours behind my eyeballs, but I don’t cry anymore. I’ve learned to wait. As the numbers roll by. As the toilet paper tears. As the mi­crowave halts with a beep. As the stoplight turns. It passes. There’s a specific kind of masochism in picking an industry built on rejection. In inviting people to tell you repeatedly, in a million different ways, that you’re not good enough.

You get hardened to it incrementally. A month after meeting Hux, I told a bored secretary cracking gum at the registrar’s office about my sick mom and that we needed money. A lie. She’d been dead a long time. I babbled a steady stream of excuses ’til she printed and signed a refund check with the balance of my tuition account: Twelve thousand, three hundred fifteen dollars, forty cents.

No questions asked. To be clear, he’s not a bad person. He loved me the best he could. Loved me in a steady, distant, and respon­sible way. Food on the table. Roof over my head.

Praise for Better to Beg “…a rip-roaring, heart-and-soul-gutting tour through the rock-n-roll sleaze of early aughts New York City, the funereal desolation of desert highways, and those many drug-fueled pit stops in be­tween. In the hauntingly distinct voices of bandmates Viv and Hux, Kirsti MacKenzie brilliantly captures the ways we desert our­selves and each other in the name of art and survival, and how often the two are tragically synonymous.”—JILLIAN LUFT, author of Scumbag Summer “In the post-9/11 American backdrop, where dreams clash and legends emerge, Better to Beg pulses with rebellious energy.

Kirsti MacKenzie deftly captures music’s gritty world with wit and hope, making this debut a true muse for those who dare to be different.”—MALLORY SMART, author of I Keep My Visions to Myself “Kirsti MacKenzie has been one of my favorite emerging voices for a while now, and Better to Beg is exactly why. [It’s] smart and irreverent, sexy and unhinged in all the right ways.”—D.T. ROB­BINS, author of Leasing “…an honest, raw, and unsentimental look at what it means to stay true to yourself and your art, and what it can cost you.

And MacKenzie pulls no punches. Through the perspectives of Viv and Hux, a rock duo whose big dreams of stardom are filtered through a lens of idealism and a romantic vision of the past, we watch the rise and fall of their hopes and ambitions, and their ultimate reckoning with how they define success—a story old as time [that] feels new again.”—AMY JONES, author of Pebble & Dove “Two muses, two killers, two heartbroken loners—this duo can’t fly too close to the sun because they’re never awake to see it.

But they own the night, and even after the sex and the drugs, one thing is clear: they’re never gonna give up on rock n’ roll, no matter how hard it tries to kill them.”— SCOTT LAUDATI, author of Play the Devil “Electrifying!

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 994ec70fa4454fed
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,392,985 bytes (2.282 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 165
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 269.35 minutes
• Total Words: 53,869
• Total Characters: 300,625
• Average Words per Page: 326.48
• Average Characters per Page: 1821.97

Most Frequent Words

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