“All these nights mean something, Henry, each more than the last and none more than tonight. So I need you to keep it together just one more time. For the band. For me.”
It was always hard to tell if Henry was listening because instead of talking to his face you talked to the sheaf of red hair behind which his face always hid. It had been this way since junior high, this hair of Henry’s.
The cook, a six foot tall transvestite, black, had grilled us hamburgers under hubcaps and I was trying, between snippets of my rah rah speech - the speech I’d made so many times this tour, nearly every night since we crossed south of Atlanta - to make Henry eat his half pounder with bacon egg and cheese, and to drink from a vat of muddy coffee. Henry claimed to have foresworn caffeine for health reasons but I reserved the right as Tour Manager to overrule any life decisions that might affect the Show Going On and the night’s Show, our first in New Orleans, was supposed to have Gone On an hour ago. Besides, Henry drank Red Bull by the case.
In between bites, he took deep breaths and said things like, “uggh.”
“Chew and swallow,” I said. “We’re late.”
“You shouldn’t make me eat this. You know I’m vegan.”
I took his feistiness as a good sign. “You’re wearing a leather jacket.”
“It’s gonna fuck with my IBS.”
I had tried to explain to him that his gastrointestinal issues were most likely the result of low grade Gluten sensitivity, but that concept conflicted with his devotion to beer. “Eat.”
We finished and I paid and we walked together out into New Orleans, which was brown, vaguely sushi-smelling, and damp enough to cause everyone in the street to sweat just a little. Outside the club Cheryl found us. She said the place was about half sold and the owner, Stanley, was pissed at our lateness. “Thought we lost you there, Henry,” she offered helpfully, “You took a pretty good fall.”
“I fell?” Henry asked. I shrugged. This pattern of Henry’s – binge to blackout to confusion – was something we’d all become used to.
“What’s the opener?” Cheryl wanted to know. “Oceanside?”
“Fine,” Henry said.
“Clark wants Thurbers Avenue Curve.”
“Okay, Thurbers Avenue Curve.”
“No! Oceanside!” Cheryl shouted, causing Henry to wilt. They had dated at one point, and still hooked up periodically, and though he adored her bass playing we all found her to be a pain in the ass. “Right?” She appealed to me now. “Right? Oceanside opener?”
Henry broke into a run toward the club entrance. After six weeks sharing a van, Cheryl and I were familiar enough with the vagaries of his substandard GI system to know why.
While we waited for Henry to clear the Mens’ room, Stanley, the club owner, yelled at me about our late start. I tried to point out the crowd that we – a measly unsigned band from Rhode Island – had brought to his club on a Thursday, all of them buying lots of drinks and none of them complaining, but he didn’t care.
Our first-night-in-New Orleans’ audience looked a lot like our DC audience and our Athens audience and our Vienna and Starkville and even our Northampton, Mass audiences: somewhere near the corner of longhair and hipster, Birkenstock and Doc Martin; lots of big drinkers and weed smokers, good time fun folks. That it was well past midnight was the only thing that made this have to be New Orleans. That and the air, so wet it seemed to weigh something.
My band (I like to think of it as mine even though I don’t even play an instrument, but it’s really Henry’s band, The Placeholders, with Clark on drums and Cheryl on bass) climbed onstage. We had no album and just a few rudimentary pub shots on our MySpace page, but Henry was still somehow recognizable behind his cherry colored hair blade, and a few in the crowd hooted and clapped and some even pushed their way up close. One hundred fifty people in the place, maybe one seventy five.
Though Henry and I had been friends all our lives, I often found him stupid and frustrating, and of everyone I’d ever known he least deserved fame. Yet he’d always been sort of famous. Even as a teenager, a suburban rebel swathed in flannel, hair begelled and colored, he’d been famous within our school, and attracted friends and especially women in quantity and quality such a poser couldn’t possibly deserve; and all because he could play guitar really, really well. Now that he was (thanks to me) a National Touring Musician, the scope of his magnetism was even more confounding. No longer just stupid high school girls but attractive, educated women; women with careers and cars of their own; women with families and even children had been spied making the morning scurry from his motel rooms in various rock towns down the eastern seaboard.
People came to see the band, yes, and to hear the songs, but mainly they came to watch Henry, and this made sense because no matter how personally revolting I often found my oldest friend, I’d never deny how good he was, how special. He had a singular, lilting, melancholy tone, mysterious melody, heartbreaking lyricism. He always had. That’s why I’d gone to him for my last shot. He played guitar so good you forgot how insane he was. Plus the fucker sang in a lowdown bobcat rasp, like the bastard son of Dylan and Nina Simone. What an asshole.
The band started up with “Oceanside” after all, slow and big. All at once the crowd seemed to coalesce and suck toward the stage. Even the bartender snapped to. You know the band is good when the employees pay attention.
Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned and Nikki Faulkner was standing there. I didn’t recognize her for a second, with the music and the colored lights. She wore that sparkly makeup you sometimes see on tour kids, but made it look good somehow. I said “Hey!” just to say something because I hadn’t seen her since the funeral and seeing her then made me flash to that day, but she pulled me into a hug and she felt tiny and good and her hair smelled like nice women’s hair care products and cotton candy.
“What are you doing here?” She said. I attempted to explain myself, yelling over the music, trying not to spit on her or get caught leering south of her neck, where she wore tiny shorts and a nothing tank top appropriate for the underwater-type humidity.
I told her about waking up one day knowing I’d had enough of running the merch booth for Phunk Monkey, and deciding I was going to do whatever it took to get my old friend Henry and his band together and take them all out on the road. I told her how I’d done it all in three feverish months: web presence, press kit, promo, demo, tour. I didn’t tell her how much money I’d spent, how far in debt I’d sunk, how troubled my bandleader was, how the whole thing had come to feel like a desperate last chance at making it in the rock business. I didn’t tell her that the day of my awakening was the day after the funeral. I’m sure she dug the subtext.
Nikki told me about her last six months. They sounded a lot like the six months prior, only she didn’t have my sister alongside anymore, to tour the Southeast and West Coast, see bands, make scenes, and spend her parents’ money. “I can’t believe you manage the Placeholders,” she said, “everyone’s talking about them.” And honest adrenaline blitzed my scalp. If the Queen of the Scene Nikki Faulkner had heard of my band, we were on to something.
We kept talking while the band played, about everything but Heather. Sometimes we’d lay off and Nikki would crane her neck to watch Henry take another lead (never too long, never too short, never boring) or guide the band through another series of changes. The room had filled up pretty good. The floor was slathered with foamy beer/sweat concert sludge and the band was loud and the lights swirling and people doing the sorts of things they only do in dark rooms watching live music: falling, kissing, swaying, shouting, dancing, staring, nodding – eyes closed – to themselves. It can work, I thought for the eight hundredth time, if I can just keep them together, keep Henry together, it can work. And somewhere in there Nikki was looking at me in a new way, and much later, after the two hour set and before the four song encore she called my phone with her phone and saved the number under “Nik” and got close enough to my ear to say, “call me in the morning and we’ll go to the Fairgrounds,” without having to yell. Then she faded into the milling, smiling crowd.
And if the show had ended there it would have been a great night, but few Placeholders shows since Atlanta had ended well. The problem tonight was a couple in the front row. Not the couple exactly. Just the girl, who’d become over-enamored of my frontman after an evening at his mercy, and now, pre-encore, endeavored to share with him her phone number, and promises of unmentionable interactions, greatly to the displeasure of her boyfriend/husband/whatever he was. The potential (and let’s face it future, if not this night than some other) cuckold, with a trucker hat and flat top and a permanent look of confused anger, took offense and may or may not have called Henry a “cocksucker” and/or grabbed his guitar. It was always something. And someone always either said something or grabbed something, and Henry always felt justified wading into the audience to exchange words and fists with people who’d paid to see him play. More than his drinking, his digestive issues, his petulance, his refusal to sleep or start shows on time, Henry’s fighting with the audience was a problem. And of course I ended up jumping in to break it up, catching a few stray punches for my trouble. ‘Cause it was my band, and Henry was my guitarist, and someone had to save him from himself.
***
Morning birds were chirping by the time we finished load out. We had been scheduled to play the same club again that night, but between the late start and Henry’s encore fisticups, Stanley figured enough was enough and kicked our asses out, leaving us a sad gigless unit on the first Friday of Jazzfest. I’d already cast out a net of texts and voicemail, trying to find a place to play. Henry wanted to get a few drinks and I couldn’t leave him alone so it was almost 9:00 am before I got back to the hotel. I fell asleep and didn’t end up calling Nikki until 2:00 in the afternoon. I woke her up.
We met at the C Gate, her in another pair of tiny shorts atop depthless hardwood floor colored legs, a big goofy hat and enormous sunglasses, telling me how great the Placeholders were and how lucky I was to have them.
The Fairgrounds were hot and crowded and smelled like fish fried in syrup.
There was a mishmash of music from stages at every compass point and everyone there was sort of smiling and swaying and chewing and staying at once just in and just out of each other’s way. We drank gargantuan, iced boozy drinks through ridiculous straws and ate spicy shrimp and crab and gooey cheese in convenient hand-held pies. Nikki listened to my problem, made two phone calls, and then we had a place to play for the night, in the Quarter. She made one additional phone call but wouldn’t let me listen in and wouldn’t tell me what it was about.
We walked and danced and ate, and watched and listened to people play music. There was a tent with just jazz and another with only gospel. At one point we became entranced by a short bald guitar player fronting a rowdy trio. At another Nikki handed me a small blue pill to eat. “I have to work tonight,” I said, but she only smiled and said not to worry.
One of the big bands Nikki and my sister Heather used to follow was playing the main stage and Nikki wouldn’t miss it. Things were crowded at that end of the fairgrounds, and a real wind blowing dust off the downs – maybe sixty thousand people there, a herd on the Savannah, in the wind, under the flags in the sun. Heather led us toward the stage, sipping her drink, smiling benevolently, twirling once in a while to some stray beat, looking as in charge as she always had, but different somehow too. She’d changed since the funeral, but it was hard to tell then just how because of the noise and the heat and the wind and the crowd and the pill making everything start to drip at the edges and blur into the last thing.
“I’d like to introduce!” A God-voice shouted through the PA stacks, “One of the GREAT AMERICAN BANDS!” And the rest of it was lost in the spasm of the crowd, this big like wave breaking over us and sweeping us down and then everything was moving, and the music pounding dryly, loud as anything. Sometime later Nikki and I were kissing. Not some sloppy couple at a rock show, but something real happening, two people among thousands, connected, and later I’d think it’s the first time in sixth months I haven’t thought mostly of my sister Heather, haven’t pictured her alone behind the wheel and wondered if she left the road accidentally or on purpose or both.
The show ended and Nikki took my hand and led me through the crowd, saying “I rented a house just down the street.” She checked her phone and shouted, “Yes!” and showed me a text which I could barely see in the sunshine. “Sarah Slater from PPC’s coming to see your band tonight. How ‘bout that?”
“What?” I said, “You did that?” PPC is one of the dominant booking agencies in the southeast. “How did you do that?”
“I just did.” She said it with a wise grin, which faltered when someone from the crowd touched her on the shoulder.
It was some dude. He wore a Bulletproof Lincolns T-shirt which I complemented him on when Nikki introduced us, because the Bulletproof Lincolns had let us open for them in New York City and were cool as shit and completely housed the room, but the dude said, “Right on, bro. Someone like gave me this shirt last night. Are they any good?” The dude’s name was Brett. He must have had to put quite a lot of something in his hair to keep it so still in that environment.
“Been lookin for you, girl,” he said to Nikki. His tone was paternal and weird, but I figured it was just my ears what with the recent concert blitzing and the mumblings of the parting crowd now free flowing around us like water around boulders. She pulled him a few paces away and they began a pretty serious talk, Nikki and this dude Brett in his Bulletproof Lincolns T-Shirt, Brett with that purposefully lazy “S’allgood” accent I’d heard on a hundred bored southern stage managers.
Then I saw him put a hand on her shoulder, his lips melting apart to reveal teeth the color of the blowing racetrack grit, and Nikki sidestepped which I took to mean I should come over, and maybe I was a little abrupt because Brett put his hand on my chest and said, “Slo down, bro. Me and Nikki’re just talking.”
I looked down at his hand then back at his face. Before going on tour with Henry, I’d been in exactly one fight, but since Atlanta I’d had lots of practice. Brett took his hand off me and said to Nikki, “Gotta be tonight, Girl. I’m through chasin’ you.” Then he turned and melted into the crowd. The sun arced off Nikki’s huge sunglasses.
We went back to her rental house. We left the French doors open in her master suite. Just closed the curtains and let them lope in the breeze.
I asked nothing about the douchebag on the fairgrounds, wasn’t my business. I think each of us was waiting for the other to mention Heather, but neither of us did.
I wanted to stay all night, all week, but Henry’d been unsupervised for too long already, and if Sarah from PPC booking was coming I needed the Placeholders to impress. Nikki said she’d see me later at the show.
“All these nights mean something, Henry, each more than the last and none more than tonight. So I need you to keep it together just one more time. Do it for the band. Do it for me. For real this time.”
This I spoke into the wood of the door of the bathroom of the Club Nikki’d got us into – the Sinkhole on Toulouse - inside which Henry had locked himself at 5:30 that afternoon. What intra-band conflict or bodily malfunction of combination thereof had led him to this end was unclear. Clark and Claire would say only that Henry’d shown up grumpy, didn’t seem to have slept, and had taken with him into the bathroom a handle of Jim Beam somewhere between a half and two-thirds full. Communications in the intervening three hours had been spotty and I had yet to hear a sound to indicate my bandleader was even still alive. So after negotiating a price with the Sinkhole’s manager – Hank, who thankfully seemed to think Henry was a crew member and not his night’s entertainment – I broke the door down, pulling something in my shoulder in the process.
Henry sat on the floor of the single stall, his head reclined on the toilet seat, eyes open, handle – vessel now only to a thin, amber film – lolling in his lap.
“You shouldn’t be doing this to me,” he said.
“What am I doing?”
“You know.”
“What am I doing to you?”
“I was happy in Rhode Island.”
“Installing cabinets?”
“I was happy.”
“You want this.”
“I don’t want anything. You shouldn’t be doing this to me.” The handle clinked on the tiles. The bathroom wasn’t terrible as nightclub bathrooms go, and who didn’t need to get away from it all now and then?
I tried to be as plain as I could about the woman from PPC booking, “the fact that she’s even coming means a lot after last night.” I mentioned Clark and Claire. I talked about the future, his talent, the songs. None of it meant shit to him. So I talked about myself, and for whatever reason he started to listen. Our friendship had always meant more to him than I was comfortable with. When I talked about my sister his eyes cleared for a moment, like the flash of blue sky that will occasionally burn by during a Rhode Island summer thunderstorm.
“Two hours till doors. We go on in three.” I said. Henry nodded and I knew he was with me.
The place filled up fast and a half hour after doors the manager came up to me and said it was sold.
“Sold?” I said. “How many?”
“650.” And just by the way he said it I could tell he was psyched, “And there’s 30 more out on the street wanting to get in.”
The sign said Placeholders 11:00, but at 10:45 the crowd started cheering for no good reason, and soon after that started chanting, “place-hol-ders, place-hol-ders!” Six hundred plus, chanting for a band without even an EP to call their own. We must have done something good the night before, and word must have spread around town because when we finally did take the stage we were met not with the usual polite smattering of applause, but instead a great whooshing sound, the cavitation of a huge engine, so loud the band’s tuning noises were lost in it, and only getting louder until Henry counted out “On Fire”, and after that was just noise and light.
I stood with the crowd awhile, feeling there a wonderful shared secret before it explodes into common consciousness. The buzz was so profound I didn’t notice my cell phone vibrating until Nikki had called five times. It was past midnight now and the Placeholders had played five songs, each melting into the next in ways surprising to both band and audience.
I couldn’t hear Nikki over everything, so I ducked behind the bar and even there it was difficult. Finally she just started shouting, “I need help! Can you help me?!”
“Yes!”
“I’ll text you the address.”
It appeared a second later, as the band veered into “Eastern Facing”. “Eastern Facing” tended to fire up even the most timid crowds. Here it was like tossing gunpowder on a barrel fire. Above the spastic, stretching, pulling throng Henry’s face was obscure beneath the sheaf of red. I told myself he looked good up there, that the address Nikki’d texted was right around the corner on Bourbon, that nothing would go wrong if I just ran over there real quick.
I was almost to the door when someone pulled my shirt and I turned to see an older woman too fashion-forward for the scene. “Sarah Slater, PPC Booking,” she said, shaking my hand.
“Thanks for coming!” I shouted. I didn’t want to seem rushed but I kept hearing Nikki’s voice in my head, Can you help? “What do you think?” I asked Sarah, sure to indicate not only the band, but the packed-to-the-walls club, the sautéing crowd.
“I think we need to talk,” she smiled.
“Okay!” I should have stayed, needed to stay, but Nikki… “I have to get a backup guitar from the van. Back in two minutes.”
“See you then,” said the woman who could literally save my career and personal finances.
As constantly moist as the air had been since we got to New Orleans, it was never wetter than right then as I ran down Toulouse and dove into the throng bursting the sides of Bourbon St. It was the sort of horde you just cannot move quickly through: aggressively drunk frat boys in predatory circles around bare chested teens, the ground so slathered with a jelly of vomit and spilt liquor that any tight cut becomes impossible. I slid through fast as I could, sweating freely amid the neon reds and blues and club music and Dixieland jazz, and then into a dark bar, mostly empty, one loan accordion player for entertainment, then up the back stairs to a second floor, empty again except for Nikki, standing alone on the wrought iron balcony.
“What are they doing?” I asked her. There was some sort of disturbance in the street below, bodies darting about, shouting.
“Hi,” I’d startled her. “I didn’t know if you’d come.”
“Of course. I gotta be quick though. That woman from PPC is at the show. What’s going on down there?” A fight had broken out now in the street.
“Asshole! You left Sarah alone? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s do whatever you need to do and we’ll get back to her.”
She made a face like she wanted to fight about it but saw it would be useless, and then I followed her to the back of the bar and up another flight of stairs to the third floor.
Up here was a full on house party, complete with club beats and well-dressed scenesters, and it took me a few minutes following Nikki through the swarm (every third member of which knew her, of course, and wanted to hug hello) to notice the little things that were not right. First: the lights were all on. Second: there were semi-pro looking two-man camera teams roaming around videotaping the guests. But it all didn’t come together until we got to the densest part of the multitude, which parted to reveal a skinny dude and a girl on Ecstasy having sex.
I say she was on Ecstasy because beyond being naked and copulating in a crowded public space, that she was mightily rolling was her single defining feature. Her eyes were gigantic and formed wholly of pupil, and her tongue poked from her mouth in rhythm with the skinny kid’s morose thrusts. She had one foot on the floor and the other on a dirty looking sectional. Two camera teams filmed the scene, and a guy with a clipboard periodically interrupted the action to effect minute adjustments on the performers. When the girl on Ecstasy spotted Nikki she said, “Hey, girl,” lazily, like they’d run into one another in the supermarket.
“Hey, Beth.” Nikki sounded sad.
With fresh eyes on the room I noted that wherever there was a camera, there was a little piece of exhibitionism being filmed: a girl kissing another girl, two dudes rubbing up on a single girl; all of it just for the camera with a sort of deliberate amateurishness. The cameras all had little stickers on them that said “Houseparty.com”.
I followed Nikki out onto another balcony. Maybe 10 people here and a camera team, this one filming the dude we had met on the Fairgrounds, Brett, who held aloft between his ring and index fingers a $100 bill. I couldn’t hear just what he said to the camera and the little crowd, but it led up to him casting with a flourish the hundo down onto Bourbon Street. Everyone leaned over to watch it go. The crowds, upstairs and downstairs, cheered.
Nikki tapped Brett on the shoulder. He made a big show of greeting her, introducing her to crowd and camera, trying to absorb her into his production – and that’s what all this was, a production of this dude Brett’s, who on the Fairgrounds had been just one among the numerous, but who here was in charge. Nikki pressed a slip of paper into his hand and pulled away and grabbed me and we started for the door but Brett shouted, “Three grand, Nikki? Three?”
The two of us were now more at the center of things than two people who aren’t having sex should be at this kind of party. Brett flapped the check, “This says three thousand! That’s like not even half!”
Every eye and lens on the balcony watched us. From the party emerged four stout guys. They were holding bright red Solo cups, but their eyes were clear and focused, looking only at Nikki and me; Brett’s party, Brett’s cameras, Brett’s security.
Nikki stepped close to Brett, trying to shrink the scene, keep it between them. All she and my sister had ever done had been designed for public dissemination: they were the Queens of the Scene who everyone knew and who knew everybody. But right then I identified what had changed in Nikki since my sister’s death. She had turned inward, trying to reclaim what pieces of herself she’d given away for so long. Moreso than the business of the money, it was this change in her that seemed to piss Brett off. He pushed her away and shouted, “Tell me from there!”
When I punched him in the mouth he said “ooh!”, and everyone on the balcony except the cameraman scattered. The burly Solo cup guy nearest me lunged and I just ducked clear.
Nikki had me by the shirt now and was dragging me away into the party, which had decided collectively not to notice the viscous punching of its host. We swam through the crowd, tipping beers and jostling cameras along the way.
The first of the Solo Cup Security Brigade caught up to us in the stairwell, but I was able to grab his arm and sort of heave him down the stairs ahead of us, the whole time thinking that this was some action movie shit right here. As we hit the ground floor I clearly heard a high pitched titter. Nikki was giggling.
We washed into the Bourbon Street crush like a whitewater tributary into a lake, not even trying to be polite now, just bulldozing people, leaving Brett’s security to deal with the anger left behind. Drinks of every shade and temperature were spilt upon us. By the time we reached Toulouse we were rainbow colored.
We enjoyed a hundred yards or so of unencumbered running between Bourbon and the Sinkhole, and as we cut into the entrance of the club I thought “Safe! Safe here with my people!” but in the entranceway we ran into a wall of humanity running straight back at us. It was the Placeholders’ audience, my audience. The frontrunners wore expressions of rabid panic. Further behind could be seen the sort of violent jostling one never likes to see in big crowds, bodies flying back and forth, mosh pit-like even though there was – pointedly, I thought – no music playing, only the terrible feedback of an electric guitar carelessly thrown aside.
The mob came with too much force for Nikki and me to possibly swim against, and we found ourselves pushed back out into Toulouse where waited Brett, a bloody Kleenex pressed to the corner of his mouth. Solo Cup Security was arrayed around him. One stepped forward and held out his hand and in his hand was a fucking gigantic blue gun, the sight of which actually made me unable to breathe for a moment. To the already freaked out crowd fleeing the Henry-inspired riot inside the Sinkhole, the gun had an even more potent effect. People started to actually lose their shit. They flittered about Toulouse like converts, waving their hands over their heads and moaning.
“Come on now, Brett,” Nikki began, but he held his hand out for silence.
“Seven’s what you owe. Seven grand right now or you come back to the party and work it off. And you?” He never really looked at me, but who else could he have been talking to? “You I’m still deciding whether it’s just an ass beating or what.”
Another wave burst from the club, pushing me straight toward the guy with the gun and just as I was about to hit him I realized all at once that a) it was the guy I’d thrown down the stairs and b) he was going to fire the weapon. I’d never even seen a gun until right then, but I just fucking knew somehow, so I lashed out at his arm and got it pointed up into the sky just before the thing went off. The shot was the last straw for the Sinkhole’s besieged concert goers. I’ve been to a thousand concerts, stood in a thousand crowds big and small, but I’d never experienced mass panic until just then.
Hysteria replaced oxygen as the atmosphere’s dominant element. I lost my grip on Nikki’s hand as she was flung to the pavement. The gunman was hit too and the gun went skidding. A security guy swam into view, punched me hard in the face, then got broadsided and knocked flat by a frenzied overweight earth mother. I swam, woozy from the punch, and a pair of frat boys tripped over me and we all went sprawling on the damp pavement. I could hear only shouting and grunting and footfalls and it never let up, never became any less of a tumult even as Brett pulled himself to his feet, found the gun, swung it around and pointed it down at me and was just about to fucking shoot me – I’m quite sure of this – right there in the street over the confused matter of three or seven thousand dollars and a punch in the face. The clamor never died but seemed to coalesce, sharpen and focus into one familiar voice.
It was a terrible, savage screech.
It was Henry.
He was the last man out of the Sinkhole, driving the crowd before him like a demonic sheepdog, swinging Cheryl’s bass in concentric arcs, directly, as it happened, into the back of Brett’s head.
***
For all that excitement it felt like we should have stayed in New Orleans, put down roots maybe, learned some sort of lesson. But we have a show in Tuscaloosa tonight, and since Sarah from PPC still hasn’t called, we need all the momentum we can generate.
I thought Nikki might come with us, but she has that house rented through next weekend and doesn’t seem too excited about sharing our van. She tempted me to stay a while, and promised to meet in Colorado next month. We’ll see if Henry makes it that far.
He’s been better today, started talking to me again, maybe even forgave me for leaving the venue last night.
We’re still drawing, and still going, and we might outrun my credit card debt yet.
My sister’s memory is another story. She’s with me all the time, unless the lights are down and the volume is up and the band is on.
Then everything is fine.
