Elfie had thrown on her work clothes and was ready to leave Tryp’s room, practicing her nonchalant swagger as if she had been only rousting him out of bed and force-feeding him oatmeal instead of lying in his arms dressed only in one of his big tee shirts with his body wrapped around hers, when the interview phone rang.
Tryp consulted the cheat sheet that Jonas typed up every morning and said into the phone, “Hey, Bob and Doug, thanks for having me. It’s great to be back in L.A. on KROQ. All of Killer Valentine is going to stop by your studio tomorrow morning for an in-depth interview, but I appreciate that I get to talk to you guys first.”
Some tinny sounds came through the phone, and Tryp extended his hand toward Elfie, his fingers stretching. She buckled her belt around her pants. “Yeah, it’s the first time that I’ve sung lead. This single is very personal for me.”
Elfie came back and sat beside him on the bed. He wrapped his arm around her waist. “There are actually three stories in there. I’ll tell you about the first one.”
Groaning over the phone started high and sang down an octave.
“I have a band meeting in a few minutes,” Tryp said. “So here the first one. From the time I was seven until I was fourteen, I grew up in a polygamist cult on the Utah-Arizona border.”
High-pitched wails of disbelief came from the phone speaker that Tryp held to his other ear.
Elfie took his hand and held it. Tryp’s fingers wrapped around hers.
He said, “It was actually a pretty good place to grow up. Lots of other kids. Lots of little kids to read baby books to. But when I was fourteen, I fell in love with a girl. She was fifteen. We held hands one afternoon.”
Elfie stared at their intertwined fingers, knotted together.
“They caught us, and they married her to my step-father the next day before she could be sullied further. She was his eighteenth wife.”
More squawking over the phone’s speaker.
“Yeah, it does happen in this day and age. That’s not even the worst part.”
Silence from the phone. Tryp shifted the phone to his ear by Elfie so she could hear the DJ. A small voice asked, “What happened?”
“She went to his room that night. I was downstairs, freaking out inside, knowing what was happening up there. When I heard her screaming, I pulled a Galahad and broke the door down. There was blood everywhere, all over the bed, and she was bleeding from her mouth because he punched her when she didn’t thank him afterward. I lost it. I attacked him, but I was a skinny fourteen-year-old kid, and he was a fifty-year-old man who was used to beating people up. I think I weighed a hundred and thirty pounds but was already six feet tall. My mother called the other elders, and they hauled me out before he killed me. I got in a few haymakers, though. He had a broken nose, and I broke his arm, too. The next morning, my mother drove me ten miles to the highway and told me to get out, that if I ever came back, they’d shoot me on sight.”
Hushed silence on the phone. Tryp’s hand squeezed Elfie’s tighter. It didn’t hurt, but his grip was that of a man getting a root canal without Novocain. Rock radio interviews were supposed to be feel-good fests, not gut-ripping exposes.
“What did you do?” the DJ asked over the phone.
“I started walking toward Los Angeles because I thought it was somehow better than Phoenix or Las Vegas. I hitchhiked, and a trucker picked me up.”
The DJ said, “I don’t think I want to want to know what happened next.”
“This is a happy part. He bought me my first hamburger and soda in years, and he dropped me off at a crisis shelter in L.A., five miles out the way for him, driving down L.A. city streets in that big rig of his. I wish I could find him now. As a matter of fact, Yeager, if you can hear this, call KROQ. I want to tell you that I’m all right and buy you a burger.”
A small voice on the phone said, “Did you ever go back?”
“As soon as I got my driver’s license, when I was sixteen, I went back for her.”
The DJ barked a nervous laugh. “They didn’t kill you, right?”
“I hid in the bushes around the compound for two days until she left the house alone. She had a kid by then and wouldn’t leave her. I begged her to get her daughter and come with me, but she wouldn’t leave.”
“So she’s still there?”
“Yep. I tried twice more the last couple years, but she won’t leave. She even wrote me a letter to tell me not to contact her again.”
“Do you still love her?”
Elfie tried not to tense.
“She was my first love,” Tryp said, hanging onto Elfie’s hand. “I would do anything to get her out of that compound, but I let her go. I had to. Until I did, I was still out on the road. I couldn’t let myself love again.”
“So it’s just like the song.”
“Yeah.”
“So does that mean that you have let yourself love again?”
“Wow, Doug, will you look at the time? We’ve been talking for way longer than our five-minute interview slot,—”
“No, we’ve still got two minutes left.”
“—and I don’t want to delay your listeners’ music any more. Thanks for inviting me today, and I’ll see you in the studio tomorrow. KROQ rocks.”
The DJ let him hang up, maybe because of the time, maybe because they were going to corner him in the studio the next day anyway.
Elfie sat beside him on the bed. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not hiding it anymore,” he said, staring ahead at the wall. “I won’t be ashamed of it. I didn’t do anything wrong, except for leaving Sariah there. I should have gotten her to come with me somehow. That, I’m ashamed of.”
“They should be ashamed,” she said. “They should be arrested.”
“The state authorities don’t care as long as they’re quiet about it.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist.
He said, “I can’t believe I went public.” He grabbed the front of his tee shirt. “I figured I’d be a pathetic heap under the bed, dead drunk by now.”
“It’s only been two minutes since you hung up.”
“Hey, I’m a dirty rocker. I can get fucked up in two minutes.” He slid his arms around her and laid his forehead on her shoulder.
She stroked his back. “Are you going to get drunk, Tryfon?”
“Sure. Any minute now.” His ragged breath fluttered against her neck.
Elfie held him in her arms, stroking the heavy muscles of Tryp’s back through his shirt, until it was time for the daily pre-show band meeting in Xan’s room. He spun his drumsticks over his knuckles all the way there and through the door.