Tempo Change

by Barbara Hall

  “I don’t want them to listen to me. I can read but I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “But they believe you do,” she said.

  “What difference does that make? I’m just a kid.”

  “You’re a special kid,” she said.

  That was exactly like something my mother would say, that infuriating dreaminess where life was a story you were telling yourself. And suddenly I was really angry and I started yelling at her. “There has to be some way to be, something that you just are, not something you make up about yourself. Anybody can decide they’re special.”

  “Anybody can. Not everybody does.”

  She kept laughing and started twirling and the thunder got louder. I raced toward her and tried to grab her but my hands kept passing through her as if she were a ghost.

  I woke up, just as light was starting to come through my window. I sat up, breathing hard, and told myself it was just a dream and it was all going to be fine.

  I knew the dream had been trying to tell me something about what I needed to do. Now I knew what that was.

  I had to get the band back together and go to Coachella, and how I felt about that on a rational level didn’t matter anymore. It scared me to think that was what Viv would call Guidance. I didn’t call it that. I called it a dream.

  But as I lay there waiting for the rest of day to break, I knew it was as real as anything. I knew what I could do.

  The Road to Coachella

  SPRING ARRIVED. MONTHS PASSED. I WON’T BORE YOU WITH them.

  All you really need to know is that I decided to sing.

  I talked Ella back into the Fringers by telling her I would sing.

  I talked Gigi back into the band by threatening to tell everyone we knew a few secrets about her from when she was thirteen!

  The band practiced. I’d created a set list of five songs. Four of my own and one of my father’s. We played them until they were committed to memory. I kept studying and going to classes and taking tests and getting As. I had to change my schedule at Peace Pizza. I saw Jeff watching me as I darted out the door after my shift.

  My mother made it clear that since my father was coming she and Ed wouldn’t be joining me at the festival. She said she wished it could be otherwise, but there was no way.

  Gigi’s parents agreed to drive us. Her mother made T-shirts and flyers and plans for where we would stay and where we would eat. I kept e-mailing my father and he answered regularly. We would meet next to the stage where we were set to perform an hour before the event. We had the sixth slot, which meant we were going to perform at around three on the day of the Unsigned Competition. He mentioned my mother, admitting that he’d told her about his coming. She e-mailed back and said she wasn’t coming. He made no comment other than that.

  He wrote:

  Should I bow out gracefully? I don’t want to interfere.

  I answered:

  That’s her own thing. You should come. I’m looking forward to seeing you.

  He shot back:

  And I’m looking forward to seeing you. I just don’t want to be disruptive. I remember those festivals. On the one hand, you want to be entertaining. The audience expects that. On the other hand, you want to demonstrate your art. It’s a delicate balance.

  I thought about what he said and replied:

  I think I have a good set list.

  Two seconds later he answered:

  Don’t forget about the tempo change. That’s a really dynamic move. Do you know what I mean? Change makes people sit up and listen. Think about it. Everyone likes a shift in the mood, even if it’s complete silence.

  I wanted to ask, Is that what you think you did by leaving? Did you change the tempo? Did you make everyone sit up and listen? It’s one thing to do it for an audience, but what about your kid and wife?

  I didn’t, though. I kept the conversation on the level of music.

  My mother and Ed let me make my plans. They weren’t involved. Ed didn’t say another word about the night I’d cried. I was grateful.

  Coachella was the last weekend in April, and the week before, I was feeling confident, even if I had butterflies in my stomach. Ella and Gigi had started to look at me the way the kids did in my dream. I’d explained the songs again and told them their parts, the tempo, and what I was going to say between songs. They never argued and waited for orders.

  I never figured out the tempo change. We tried it a couple of times but the band wasn’t ready for it. I changed the lyrics in my songs and reworked some of the chord changes and Ella and Gigi went with them.

  I asked my father in an e-mail:

  Did you ever feel that too much responsibility is given to one person? And you don’t want to be that much in charge?

  He finally e-mailed:

  A visionary carries a lot of weight.

  I said to him:

  The tempo change, it’s too hard. You have to get everyone to agree with you on it.

  He responded:

  Yes. That’s why it’s a challenge.

  I worked with Mr. Carmichael after school on singing. He gave me good tips and exercises to strengthen my voice. He was nice enough never to tell me that I wasn’t a good enough singer. He said, “The important thing is to sound like yourself and infuse it with meaning.” One day, in between vocal workouts, he asked, “What was it like, having Duncan Kelly as a father?”

  I didn’t get mad at him for asking. I told him I didn’t know, because I really didn’t.

  All the pieces of Coachella fell into place, and two nights before we left I was supposed to work at Peace Pizza. I decided to do it to calm my nerves. I was spreading out dough and pizza sauce and grated cheese in the back when Jeff appeared.

  “So this is it, Street. Maybe your last few days of obscurity,” he said.

  “Unlikely,” I said. We smiled at each other. “I’m not going to get famous. I’m just playing a lame bill at a famous festival. No one is going to come to see us.”

  Jeff waited for me after closing up shop. It had fallen on me to count the money in the cash register.

  Jeff said, “How did we do?”

  “We made a hundred and ten percent profit, which is probably wrong.”

  “It usually is when you do it. I like that you have us too far on the profit side. It shows an attitude of optimism.”

  I walked toward my mother’s house and he fell into step beside me.

  I said, “Why do you keep on seeing good things in me? Why can’t you just see me as a freak?”

  He smiled and said, “I try but I always come up short.”

  “I’m not a normal girl and I’ve noticed you like normal girls.”

  “How have you noticed that?”

  “I’ve observed.”

  He shook his head and said, “I don’t believe in normal.”

  “You’re the only one.”

  “I’m not the only one.”

  I stopped and said, “Jeff, I’m not your kind of girl.”

  “I don’t have a kind of girl,” he argued.

  “Yes, you do, whether you know it or not. You’re going to go on with your life and be an engineer or whatever. I’m not in your landscape.”

  “What do you know about my landscape?”

  “I know you have a real shot at joining the real world and I’m always going to be someone on the fringe. I’m a Fringer.”

  Jeff seemed to think about that for a moment and then he said, “Blanche, you’re an artist.”

  I turned on him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly, except I don’t have that ability but I like to be next to it.”

  “Oh, I’m some kind of exotic animal?”

  “I don’t know how you define it. But when I look at you, I always see someone who doesn’t look at the world the way the rest of the people do.”

  “So you’re admitting it. I’m a freak.”

  He shrugged again.

  “Everybod
y has to be what they are. I know I’m a gear-head. It’s not like I would have picked that, but it’s what I am. I look at you and I see someone who has a different idea about life. People like you put into words or music ideas about life so we can understand it. You give us something bigger to dream.”

  “That’s a nice way of saying I’m a freak.”

  “I don’t really believe in freaks. I believe in artists and visionaries.”

  “I know what that means. A crazy person.”

  “Do you think you’re a crazy person?”

  We had veered off from my path toward home and were approaching the beach. The sound of the water meeting the sand was soothing. I stood very still. Jeff was staring at me.

  I said, “Jeff, there are days when I wish my parents were accountants and I was following in their footsteps, when the only thing I ever knew or cared about was numbers. Just some undeniable truth. I hate how uncertain it all is.”

  He shook his hair and said, “Blanche, you’re just full of it. I see how excited you get about the music.”

  “I do and then I feel crazy. I sit in my room and I dream about feeling like other people. Not looking like them or behaving like them but feeling like them. Do you understand?”

  “Sort of.”

  “And then when I think of being that way, the way my mother is now, settling for a quiet life, I feel completely miserable. There’s just all this tension all the time. I’m pulled all over the place. And the only relief from that is to write something or play something. That’s how I end up doing it. It’s not pleasant.

  “But you,” I went on, surprised at how much I was talking, “you are a different story. You have your idea of a perfect system. You see the numbers and they calm you down because they make sense.”

  “Numbers are mystical, too,” he said. “Somebody was once crazy enough to envision geometry and algebra and calculus. They ran out of words and started talking in numbers and theories. Think of Einstein and the guys who created the computer. In a lot of ways, they stopped making sense to the people around them.”

  “This is different. This place where I live doesn’t even make sense to me. Don’t try to walk next to me. Trust me, just be where you are.”

  “Is this you telling me to leave you alone?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’d rather not but I will.”

  “No, just don’t envy me. Or admire me. Or pity me. Or whatever that is in your eyes.” I looked at him.

  “I like you, Blanche. I really do.”

  “Well, you might want to reconsider that, too.”

  He leaned in and kissed me like we’d been doing it all our lives.

  “Too late,” he said.

  The Real Road to Coachella

  ANYTIME YOU GET MORE THAN THIRTY MILES OUTSIDE OF LOS Angeles County, the landscape turns post-Apocalypse. It’s Mad Max territory; the hills have eyes. Mostly because the world around us is a desert. L.A. is a desert, too, but they’ve drained the rest of the state, making it looking like a regular city. Going to Coachella, we drove past barren landscapes with scraggly brush and literal tumbleweeds and trailers parked at the foot of dry red and yellow rocky hills. We drove past outlet conglomerates and car dealerships and In-N-Out Burgers. It was all so ugly.

  Gigi’s parents had rented a van and loaded all our equipment in the back. Ella and Gigi and I stared out the windows and we all indulged in our own thoughts while the Stones rattled on.

  “Some pretty big acts are playing here,” Rodney said. “Some people I remember from my day. I’m looking forward to checking out the scene.”

  Gigi rolled her eyes at me and I smiled.

  The plan was to play at the Unsigned Competition that day and spend the night and check out the regular festival the next day. Ordinarily I would have been excited about all the bands I’d get to see, but I couldn’t think past our own performance. I didn’t let myself. Because the first stop I’d have had to make was meeting my father again for the first time in almost ten years. When I started thinking about that, my brain started falling apart. The Rodney Stones had us staying in the Royal Desert Inn and Spa. This was not, as you might imagine, where the other unsigned bands were staying. The minute we walked into the lobby I realized why rich people were the way they were. My limited experiences with hotels were not like that. A clerk handed you the key and told you where the vending machines were.

  Once in the room, which was practically as big as our house, Gigi started looking at all the amenities the spa had to offer and asked if we could get massages after the gig. She was more like her parents than I’d figured.

  I stood at the window and looked at the cloud-shaped pool with all the beautiful tanned bodies in it and I realized there was a whole world I’d never even thought about.

  “What’s wrong?” Gigi said, joining me at the window. “Are you afraid of heights or something?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You don’t have any color in your face. Are you going to faint?”

  “It’s all a lot,” I said to her.

  “But you know what you’re doing. I mean, this is your thing.”

  I struggled to smile. Now was not the time to tell her that I didn’t feel I had a thing.

  Her parents came into our room and clapped their hands together like excited children.

  Her mother said, “Girls, we should head over. Only an hour until sound check.”

  I put my hand to my heart to see if there was any chance of my dropping dead right that moment.

  No such luck.

  Coachella

  IT WAS ORDINARY AND IT WAS MAGICAL. IT WAS EVERYTHING and it was nothing. It was the energy of all those people coming together, throwing up their tents and lugging in food and toys and sneaking in drugs and alcohol. It felt like the most important place I’d ever been and it felt like a big dusty field in the middle of nowhere for no reason.

  These were my mixed emotions as we walked into the wide-open space in the desert that was Coachella. I didn’t want to think of my mother not being with me. I just wanted to think about seeing my father, at last.

  There were stages everywhere, but so far from each other that you could hardly see them all at once. There were a main stage for the headliners, two slightly smaller stages for the midlevel bands and half a dozen tents for the smaller acts.

  The Unsigned Competition was taking place on the main stage, where people like Rage Against the Machine and the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Arcade Fire and Bj?rk had played. We were going to be up there. The Fringers. Up there.

  We walked past all the performance artists and the huge sculptures of abstract things and the smattering of amusement park rides and the technicians still putting the finishing touches on everything. People had already arrived and were milling around, or sitting on blankets and eating. It was only about half as full as it was going to be. That was too much to think about.

  When we got to the main stage, we were greeted by concert organizers and some techs and a sound guy, and before I had time to be nervous, we were being asked all these questions about our instruments and suddenly I had to think about music. I was grateful for that.

  The Clauses were just finishing up their sound check when we went in to start ours. Redmond Dwayne, who had buzzed his hair for no discernible reason, was coming off the stage with his guitar slung over his shoulder. He pretended not to know us, just gave us a kind of rock star chin wave, and that was fine with me. I was focused on getting my gear set up. Then he circled back around because, I suspected, he didn’t like my nonreaction.

  “Hey, Blanche, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good luck up there.”

  “You too.”

  “There are some good bands here. The dudes from Kentucky, of all places. Watch out for them.”

  “I will.”

  He looked around as if something was missing. Which, of course, it was.

  “Where’s the singer?” he asked.

&n
bsp; “You’re looking at her.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Creative differences?”

  “More like spiritual ones.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ve done the right thing.”

  He said that like he wasn’t at all sure. Which made him happy.

  He said good luck again and left.

  We got through sound check without anything terrible happening. At first I was so nervous, looking at all that open space and all those people staring at the stage, I could barely make a sound come out of my guitar or my mouth. But the rest of the band had a lot of energy and I just fell into the rhythm and then I was doing all the stuff I knew how to do. In the back of my mind, the whole time, was the wonder if one of those people staring at the stage was my father.

  We only got to do one song for sound check so after that we went to get something to eat. I looked compulsively at my watch. I still had another hour before I was supposed to meet him. And I still hadn’t told anyone what was happening. I didn’t know what I was going to do in the moment, if I was going to introduce him to people or keep him a secret. The whole thing was so unimaginable. In fact, I was starting to believe I’d dreamed the whole scheme.

  Ella and Gigi wanted corn on the cob, so I followed them.

  We were feeling a little conspicuous since our school uniforms were still our “costumes.” We’d added touches to them, scarves and chains and belts, and I’d chosen studied bed head for my hairstyle, so you could tell we were going for something, not just schoolgirls gotten lost. But the problem with going for an image was that it didn’t entirely make sense out of context. Standing at the corn on the cob stand, I could feel festivalgoers staring at us.

  Ella said, “I can’t decide if I like it or not.”

  “I do,” Gigi responded. “Any kind of attention is good attention, right?”

  “To a neurotic personality,” I said.

  But it was kind of cool. The stares made you feel as if you were doing something other people couldn’t do. Or wouldn’t do. Willingness, again. Just getting up there.