by Sarah Bird
It was too early for the band to be back at the motel. I thought Didi would drive to the Journal Pavilion so we could watch the Whatevs’ concert for free. But the only reason Didi ever went to concerts was to meet the bands and since she had already done that, she skipped the concert and we drove up Nine Mile Hill. Graduating seniors from every high school in town were there partying, stumbling around the West Mesa, bobbing in and out of the glare of headlights. When it was late enough to arrive in style, we drove back into town.
As we passed the Palms Trading Post, I asked, “Could you just drop me off at the Lair, please?”
“What? No. Rae-rae, you have to come. It’s the night of our last day as Whore-nuts.” Didi shifted gears and the panther bracelet on her wrist gleamed in the dim light reflected from the dashboard. She hadn’t taken it off since the blood sister ceremony. I’d never taken the turquoise cross off either.
“Naw, I don’t think I’m up for it tonight.”
“Please, please, please.”
“Since when did you ever need me?”
“Since when didn’t I need you? Of course I need you. You take care of the details.”
“Yeah, but why do you even want to go?”
“Uh, let’s see? Number one, better than going home. Number two, better than going home. And number three, did I mention? Better than going home.”
“Could I just go to your house and eat margs with Catwoman and you go without me like we always do?”
“No. Come on, Hunker. Come on, you wiener-happy woman, you.”
There she’d done it, hit the fiction that I was a hot number always up for a good time.
I didn’t actually agree, just stopped arguing. We stopped at Wendy’s on Central, ordered Diet Cokes, and took our drinks and everything we’d bought at Le DAV into the ladies’ room for a try-on party. Didi sorted through our bags and hauled out the prima vintage fiesta skirt painted with a bullfighting scene in fiery reds and blacks. The black tummy tee she already had on went perfectly with it. The skirt rode low on her hips and the tee stopped somewhere above her bottom ribs, showing Didi’s navel ring and the perfectly flat stomach it was attached to. She painted on some red vinyl lipstick from her purse and looked like a stylist had spent hours on her.
“Now you,” she said, rooting around in the bags.
“What about this?” I asked, tugging on the rockabilly shirt I was wearing. I felt safe in it, covered up.
“Oh, yeah, that’s perfect.” One beat. Two. “For a remake of Deliverance. Here, try this.” She pushed a pair of late-eighties stone-washed jeans into my hands. I put them on. Didi circled her finger indicating that I should twirl around. I did and she shook her head. “No, definitely not. Serious case of No Assatall.”
I peeked over my shoulder and saw that the jeans did indeed flatten my butt down like a sack of feed.
“This! This! This!” Didi shoved a flimsy skirt into my hands.
I held it up. “Uh, are you sure?” The skirt, a froth of lace and some slinky, slippery fabric, was one of those homemade creations you can find only in a thrift store, a flight of fancy that had found no place in its maker’s real life.
“Uh, I don’t think so. I didn’t shave my legs.”
“You need to shave your legs about as much as an albino. You have virtually no visible body hair.”
“I’m not really a skirt person.” I handed it back and started to put my jeans on.
Didi ripped the jeans out of my hands. “Cyndi Rae Hrncir, you are too young to be saying what kind of person you are and way too young to be saying what kind of person you are not. Put this on!” She held the skirt out and stared at me, not saying what was in both our minds: I could either put the skirt on or keep following a path that was starting out too narrow and would only get narrower.
I took the skirt. “Okay, but just to try on.” The garment might not have worked for its creator, but it settled onto my hips as if made for me. A fantasy me who wore skirts that revealed her midriff.
“Don’t say anything!” Didi ordered as I eyed myself dubiously. She tugged the skirt down until first my belly button, then the very top of my pubic hair showed.
“No way!” I yanked the skirt back up.
“You’re right. Pubes are too hoochie mama. But you have to wear this.” She plucked a cream silk camisole out of the bag.
“But that’s underwear.”
“Uh, yeah. Put it on! Put it on!”
I was surprised by how good the pale camisole looked against my skin, which had turned a rosy pink from all the hours we’d spent cruising with the top of the Skankmobile down.
Didi fluffed up my hair and painted my face as if I were her favorite doll. Then she spun me back around to face the mirror. “See how great I made you look!”
I studied not myself but Didi’s handiwork, amazed at what she had done. My lips were plump, my eyes sparkled, my face was a palette of delicious creams and pinks and blues. Even in the buzzing fluorescent lights of Wendy’s bathroom, I looked good. Didi had made me look good. “You’re a genius,” I whispered.
“And tits out!” Didi drilled a knuckle into my spine and I jerked my shoulders back. “Sexy mama,” Didi said.
It was as if I had still been carrying a heavy backpack and had just dropped it. For that moment, that night, I was light, and free, and sexy.
The skirt felt like a cloud barely floating around my body as we walked outside. The parking lot was bathed in silver all the places where the gaudy neon colors didn’t reach. Didi stopped dead and pointed up. “Hey, look. Have you ever seen a moon that full?”
I hadn’t. It was as if the moon had graduated that day too and was shining more brightly than it ever had before. I tilted my head up to let the silvery light stream over me.
“Wow, I wish you could see yourself. Someone is going to fall in love with you tonight, sexy mama. Probably me.”
I laughed along with Didi. The joke wasn’t Didi falling in love with me. It was her falling in love with anyone.
The Whatevs’ party had started by the time we pulled into the parking lot of the Ace High. The motel’s sign, an ace of hearts, flipped over and over in blinking red neon. As soon as we stepped out of the car, we could hear the old ZZ Top song about how she’s got legs and she knows how to use ’em blaring from an upstairs room. Didi was already bobbing her head to the music as we followed it upstairs. The matador on her Mexican skirt swung his red cape from side to side as we climbed the concrete stairs to the third, the top, floor. The music led us to the door of room 312. We pounded, but no one heard, so we walked into the front room of the suite. It was dark and felt tropical, the air overheated and dense. The only illumination came from a black light that turned Didi’s smile into a phosphorescent zombie grin. We stumbled over a quilt of grease-ringed pizza boxes. The black light made a pyramid of Foster’s beer cans stacked in one dark corner appear to be floating in midair.
The door to the back room where the real party was going on opened and a blast of ZZ Top and smoke poured out. A guy wearing a straw hat that drooped down in front and back, and a black T-shirt with tour dates printed on it, stumbled out, fixed his gaze blearily on Didi and me, and yelled, “New recruits! New recruits!” He could have been any of a hundred roadies or soundmen who’d waved Didi past security guards and welcomed her into hotel rooms. Didi beamed. She was home.
“Hey, come on back.” He waved toward the open door. “Party’s in here.”
Didi turned to me and gave the shrug that guided most of her actions, the shrug that asked, Why not?
“Go on.” I flagged her a wave of permission, wishing again that I was back at Didi’s house spooning margaritas with Catwoman.
“I’ll just hang out here for a while,” I told Didi. Without any discussion, we’d reverted to our usual groupie MO where I left after the reconnaissance work was over. Didi danced away and I yelled after her, “I might walk home!”
“Yee-HAW!” The guy in the droopy hat led Didi away.
I had decided to leave when, drifting above the roar of the party, I heard another sound, a sound so pure and crystalline that even though it was barely audible, it cut through the cacophony with diamond-sharp clarity. As my eyes and ears adjusted, I realized that there was an alcove beside the Foster’s pyramid and someone was sitting in it, playing guitar.
For a second, he was nothing but blurred streaks of ghostly white where the black light caught his nails rippling over the strings of his guitar. His head was bent down, resting on the neck of his guitar so that he could hear himself play, the sound resonating directly into his skull. The music was unearthly, like stumbling upon a fallen angel playing his harp on the floor of a steel mill. The party noise fell away and suddenly all I could hear was the cascade of notes pouring from his fingers. I didn’t know enough about music to identify the style. It was too raw to be classical, too rarefied to be rock. Then I stopped trying to figure out what it was and just listened.
I’d read a theory in Newsweek once about why crack cocaine is so addictive. It said that some people have receptors in their brains like keyholes. That if you have such a keyhole in your head, the drug will slide into it, the drug will be the key that unlocks you. It is this unlocking of a true and essential self that dooms a person with this chemical quirk to addiction from the first pipe. I had a keyhole in my brain for the music this stranger was playing. From the first notes I heard, it seeped into me, filling an empty spot I hadn’t known existed.
He was seated on a straight-backed chair. Invisible in the darkness, mesmerized by this angelic music, I was freed from self-consciousness. I sank to the ground beside him, hoping to keep that sound pouring into my head. He tilted his face toward me so that the black light picked up the whites of his eyes turning them into flashes of phosphorescence. His only acknowledgment of my presence was a small nod as if he’d been waiting for me to take my place at his feet. I was invisible in the black light, lost in darkness, nothing but a hopeful smile glowing in the dark above a lacy camisole floating disembodied as a cloud in the phosphorescent light.
My pulse fell into time with his playing as if it were the moon capturing my blood in a tide that surged, then fell away.
In the dim light I saw that he was as different from any of the guys I’d ever been this close to as a human could be and still belong to the same species. Where other guys were pink and embryonic, he was brown and fully formed. His black hair, brows, the black lashes shadowing his cheeks had an etched certainty missing in the tentative pastel fuzziness of the boys I knew. Those boys were poised to take everything about themselves back, to change it all if a better idea came along; this stranger was a finished product. He was a full-grown man in a way that the boys I knew never would be no matter how old they grew to be.
He didn’t stop playing, barely looked up from the guitar, and asked, “What are you doing here?” A seam of white opened in his dark face as his lips formed the words, hiding then revealing his teeth so that they almost seemed to blink on and off like the neon sign that buzzed outside the window. He had a slight accent. Spanish, but not like the homeboys at Pueblo with their shorts that drooped to midcalf and wallets on chains. His accent made his words sound oddly formal and important.
“I came with—” I pointed toward the back room, then realized that he couldn’t see my hand in the darkness and couldn’t hear my soft voice over the deafening music. But I had heard my voice and what I heard was wrong. The sound of my words didn’t fit this music, this room, this night. They didn’t fit the person I suddenly wanted to be. In my head I heard Didi’s voice, teasing, flirty, funny, nasty, challenging. That was who I wanted to be, so I echoed the memory of Didi’s voice and said in a bold voice, “I came to hear you, of course.”
The seam of white widened into a full smile. He stared at me, ignoring his hands flowing over the strings. A trail of white followed his nails as he took his left hand from the neck of the guitar and patted the side of his leg. “Come here.” His right hand kept plucking music.
I edged closer until my shoulder nuzzled against his thigh.
“Escuches. Listen.” He pressed my head against the polished body of the guitar, then stroked the strings with the tips of his nails, showing me how he coaxed the sound out. As the rush of soft notes resonated inside my brain, I studied the insect scurry of his fingertips across the strings. Each note was a minute collision of wire-wrapped string and the tender pad of finger flesh that launched an upward tug of nail on string. I focused on his right hand so intently that it became a creature separate from the body it was attached to. His knuckles rolled like marbles beneath the skin as fingers pulleyed up and down, floating over the strings, gently drawing sounds that made my head fill with stained-glass colors: cobalt blue, Prussian blue, emerald, ruby, colors so deep and saturated it hurt to even imagine them.
When he stopped playing and leaned over to pick up a can of beer, the colors shattered and I was dumped back into a seedy motel room that had, for a few seconds, been transformed into a cathedral.
I had to ask, “What are you doing here?”
He shrugged and nodded toward the din coming from the back bedroom. “I was hitching down from Santa Fe and they, those Whatevers, picked me up.” He put the beer can down and started playing again as if the words he’d spoken had depleted him in some way and he needed to fill himself up with music in order to speak again. And then he sang so softly I was barely able to hear the Spanish words that stretched themselves out, rising and falling on the waves of rhythm rolling effortlessly from his guitar. The chords he plucked, the words he sang were both sadder and more thrilling than anything I’d ever heard in my life. They translated the state of gloom and exhilaration I lived in. I saw my father’s bony shoulders heaving up toward his ears as he struggled to suck oxygen into his wrecked lungs. I saw my face golden in a setting sun, laughing until tears ran down my cheeks. I saw myself kissing the guitarist. He finished with a hail of notes and one quick, dismissive thump of his ring finger on the face of the guitar.
“I’m not a cantaor, not a singer. But I like that one.”
“What does it mean? The song?”
“Mean? I’m not sure. Let me see.” He nodded his head as he whispered the Spanish words to himself. “Okay, this isn’t an exact translation but something like this.”
By the light of a candle
I wept without shame;
The candle went out.
The tear is greater than the flame.
I couldn’t be Didi, couldn’t be cool. “It’s beautiful,” I whispered. “So beautiful. And so sad.”
“Tragedy in the first person,” he said, studying his hands. “That’s the best definition I’ve ever come across for flamenco.”
Flamenco. I’d heard the word before, but it hadn’t had anything to do with me. Now, here it was, inside my head, presented to me by an angel prince enthroned next to a pyramid of beer cans.
He kept playing, not looking up. “This”—he pointed at the dried curls of pizza in greasy boxes, at the pile of beer cans, the noise bludgeoning us from the back room—“this is my tragedy.” He played some more, each chord sadder, more wistful than the last. “Sorry, I’m not usually like this. Okay, I’m not always like this. You caught me on a bad night. A really bad night. Possibly the worst night of my life.”
“What’s wrong? What happened?” What I meant was What can I do? Tell me. Anything. I will do anything for you. I will spend my life fixing whatever is wrong. Tell me what the problem is. I’m good with details. Just ask Didi. Tell me.
“It’s complicated,” he answered.
“I’m good with complications. I got an A in calculus.” For the first time, he smiled a real smile and stared at me for a long time. The
smile and the stare were gone in the next instant when a blinding light filled the room. It bounced crazily off all the walls, exploding in flashes of blue and white. Before I could even figure out what the light meant, he was on his feet. An amplified bullet of static crackled, then a voice on a bullhorn in the fake country drawl of an airline pilot boomed out from the parking lot three floors below, “Come on down, boys. Party’s over?”
“Of course,” he said, shaking his head wearily as if he’d been expecting the party to get busted.
The music was silenced and a barrage of voices coming from the other room followed. “Hey! What the fuck you—?”
“The fucking cops are outside, fuckhead!”
“Fuck! No!”
“Shit!”
“Get rid of the shit!”
The door to the back room burst open. The guy in the floppy straw hat ran out, emptied a ziplock bag of pot and a handful of pink, red, and blue pills into the toilet, then flushed. Band members, groupies, roadies followed him stampeding out of the bedroom heading for the bathroom. A fog of smoke enveloped the suite.
“Didi!” I screamed, but could barely make myself heard above the panicked voices. I tried to get back to the other room, but the fleeing revelers pushed me aside. “Didi!” I screamed again.
Suddenly, a hand grabbed me and I was dragged away from the back room, away from the frenzy of bodies. The stranger, his guitar slung over his shoulder by its strap, pulled me to the far corner of the room where mustard-colored thermal curtains hungover a set of sliding glass doors.
I pointed frantically to the bedroom. “My friend, Didi, is back there.”
He jerked me away. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.” I hesitated and looked back at the door where pierced and tattooed heads churned through the smoke. He caught my eye and asked with a glance if I was coming or not. When I didn’t move, he released my arm and, moving with the assurance of a cat burglar, flipped up the lock on the glass door.