WHEN YOU MEET, she should be mightily charmed by the gestures you practiced in the mirror an hour before—your bon vivant’s smile, for starters, or the Eastwood-like tilt of your head. She has to adore your hair, your cologne, the Italian loafers you paid too much for on the PCH in Long Beach. All day long, from the instant you rolled out of the rack, you should have felt yourself moving toward a possibly providential discovery, something as momentous to you as was the apple to Adam. It should be a party in the hills, Halloween on Devonshire Court, the crowd a throng of geeks and witches and gremlins, but it should not be too noisy at first—a celebration subdued, in this case, by the news, revealed only minutes before you tossed your keys to the kid from valet parking, that your host has a mistress.
His wife, lipstick smeared red on her teeth, ought to be moderately drunk—frantic and edgy, a woman who kisses hello too hard, then jams a breast in your arm. Dressed like Marie Antoinette, she should be sloppy, outrageous as a voodoo queen, her hug almost fierce enough to crack your back. “Ooooh-la-la,” she should squeal to the air beyond your ear, evidently tickled to see you—tickled to see, in fact, Kong and Nero and Sweet Betsy from Pike, all of whom followed you up the walk.
Immediately, a beverage must be spilled, Marie a sudden whirlwind of parasol and petticoats to clean it up, so this then will be the instant you see her—your new sweetheart. She might be standing next to a gray-haired guy who seems overwhelmed by his cape, the Count of Monte Cristo. In any event, you should feel your ribs cracking open, an astounding amount of light pouring in on your quivering, oily organs. You are about to gasp, you should think. In her eyes, she will have a glint that suggests that, like your own eager self, she has come to this party with no more to lose than time and terror.
“A tart,” Marie should be saying to the room at large. “At forty-six, Mr. Big Shot’s got himself a floozy.”
She—your dream girl, your angel, nothing whatsoever like your ex-wife—should be close-pored and deep-socketed, her skin like mayonnaise. With a handshake implying, even in costume, that she could bench-press you to the ceiling, she should have beautiful hands—you’ve always liked women with nails too long to be practical in the real world. Without the tee-hee-hee and the annoying trail of dream dust, she should be Tinkerbelle, her outfit the choice of her girlfriend Roxanne, who will turn out to be the tall redhead in the gold lamé swimsuit with the banner reading MISS CONGENIALITY across the bosom. They’re starlets, Roxanne and your true love, Sandi. They’ve been in commercials, industrial videos, even a feature at Paramount—which is good to hear because, as fate would have it, you’re in the business, too.
“A musician,” you should say. “A drummer.”
A half hour, spent in splendid conversation, should go by. Eventually, you must be introduced to Roxanne. They have a duplex down Eagle Rock Boulevard from Occidental College, you will learn. Roxanne has a Siamese, Mr. Mister. It came with her from Oklahoma.
Loud as a tuba, she will be the kind of woman that’s always scared you a little—too chatty, too brash, too many parts to keep track of, a woman with too much past—so you should concentrate instead on Sandi: slow, quiet, steady, perfect Sandi.
You’ve worked with Kenny Loggins, you will say. Toured with Glenn Frey. Jackson—Browne, not Michael—is an acquaintance of yours.
“I want a drink,” Roxanne should be saying. “Miss Congeniality wants a whole lake of drinks.”
At some point well before you catch yourself crashing through the landscaping, before your fancy shirt is torn at the elbow, before you fumble with your keys so you can start the car and get the hell out of here, you will stand on the balcony with Freddy Krueger, your host. He should’ve known you nearly five years—“a friendship of long-standing in these parts,” he will remark.
You’re buddies, he is to remind you. You Tonto, him the Lone fucking Ranger.
You should wonder about Sandi. She had gone to the powder room and then you thought you saw her talking to one of the Munsters.
Impatiently, Freddy should ask you if you’re listening.
You have to be gazing at the lights in the valley, a sea of flickers and winks you still remain awed by, and it should not surprise you that you’re thinking about your future—about being out there, in a car, going somewhere special, the horizon lit up like highest heaven.
“Roxanne,” Freddy will be telling you, “she’s the girlfriend.”
You like Freddy, you should tell yourself. He’s a facilitator, you will have heard many times. He puts deals together—“like nitro and glycerin,” he should’ve said once. “Watch for the flash and see what’s left when the dust clears.”
They met at the Red and the Black, Freddy should be saying. Roxanne was having a cocktail with her agent, an ogre from ICM. The wife doesn’t know the particulars, at least not that he’s been laying pipe two afternoons a week above the Main Bar at the old Beverly Wilshire.
“Right,” you will say, trying to keep up your share of the discussion.
Torrid should be a word used a lot. Passionate. You will be asked, more than once, how you feel about passion.
You favor it, you should think. Really, you do.
“The whomp of it,” Freddy must keep saying. “It’s like hitting a goddamn wall in a bus.”
Freddy will have a joint—one whose name you’ve never heard before: Crunch or Crud—eighteen percent THC, it should be said. “The marihoonie,” he will call it. “Rhymes with moony.” Stoned, Freddy should hold forth on a number of subjects—the points he almost had in Aladdin, plus a crisis with ASCAP and getting old—but he should keep returning to passion. With a capital P.
“Roxanne,” he will confide to you, “is an animal. A lynx. A tiger.”
“Terrific,” you are to remark. “Honest.”
Here Freddy should be working his lips as if his teeth hurt.
They’re breaking up, he should say at last. Complications. Tumult. It’s tough shit, but there it is. Roxanne doesn’t know yet.
Now Freddy should seem soured, divided into fifteen, or fifty, parts—no flash anywhere. In a brotherly fashion, you might clap him on the shoulder, concerned. Besides having found you the most ruthless divorce lawyer in California, he’s thrown significant studio work your way over the years. He’s an independent, he will have reminded you often, indebted to no man. With connections to everybody but the Ace of fucking Spades.
Did he mention how invigorated he feels with Roxanne, he should be saying to you. “A new man,” he should insist over and over. “The corpuscles fairly hum. Honest to goodness, it’s like the Vienna Boys’ Choir set up shop in the belly.”
You must like the idea of that, but days and days and days from now, even a month after you’ve sent candy and flowers to apologize for the ruckus, passion will seem as wanton to you as weather, as much a matter of fear as of beauty, a frenzy as much to flee from as to wallow in.
When the silence sets in, a few seconds after Freddy has explained his views concerning God and the blessings that are steadfastness and tough genes, you will make to excuse yourself. You’ve spotted Sandi, you should think, in animated conversation with Jesus of Nazareth.
“What’s she doing now?” Freddy should ask you.
“Roxanne?” you will guess.
Freddy’s reaction—part shrug, part wince—has to be semi-painful to behold.
“No, man,” he should sigh. “Marie Antoinette.”
You mustn’t know how to answer. Before you came out here, Marie will have been in the den, scissors in hand, snipping methodically at the seams in one of Freddy’s jackets, her audience—two of the Stooges and nearly half of the Ten Little Indians—as enthralled as cavemen at a science fair. “It’s a vestimenta,” she should have been saying. “Four figures from Sami Dinar.”
“She gets crazed,” Freddy should inform you. “Always takes it out on the clothes.”
You ought not to know many other people at the party—they’re suits mostly, management hustlers or A&R types on the prowl—though the fellow dressed like a pumpkin seems familiar. At the bar, shoulder to shoulder with Cabeza de Vaca and one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Pestilence, you think—you must keep an eye out for Sandi, and try to stay out of the path of the more serious hoopla. Freddy’s wife, her massive powdered wig slipping over her eyes, will be yelling into the telephone in the kitchen. In spite of her fury—or perhaps because of it—she should appear unspeakably gorgeous, much of her chest exposed, her breastbone so milky white you can’t help the low-life ideas that assault you five and six at a time.
“She weeps,” Freddy will have said to you. “She yowls. Swear on a stack, she gnashes. It’s like being married to Minnie Mouse.”
The CD will have come on again, a whole house system it probably took a month to install, and when Popeye has begun demonstrating something frug-like to a creature that could be Pocahontas, you should think of your ex-wife, Darla—to dancing, you have to note, what bullets are to gunplay.
She should be in Texas, a suburb of Dallas, with your son and namesake, the boy—what?—fifteen or sixteen. That you are uncertain will embarrass you. Drink in hand, you should remember his hair, surfer blond like his mother’s, and his eyes, which are yours, blue as a kind of ice. Although you send the child support yourself, you should try to recall when you yourself actually talked to him, or Darla. It could have been Easter. Or Memorial Day. Very probably, you should guess, you were on the road. St. Louis, maybe. Or Kansas City.
At this moment, Little Bo Peep will be advancing on you, behind her a man in gauzy robes and a scary quantity of white, windswept hair. She should ask what you are, your costume. Her companion, his fake beard frosted white and crooked underneath his nose, has to be wild-eyed, a snow-covered cannibal fresh from a rampage.
Old Man Winter, he should tell you. That’s what he is.
You will try to clear your head, but your thoughts, usually ordered as infantry, have to be competing for space with the wails the Breeders, at 110 dbs, are blasting into your brain. Not for the last time will you wonder where Sandi is, your long-lost true love. Like a weapon, Bo Peep should be carrying a staff, large and hooked at one end.
You’ve forgotten, you should tell them. You’ve been out of town. You aren’t dressed as anything.
Puzzled, they must consult with each other, Bo Peep and Old Man Winter. They’re surprised. They thought you were a cowboy. A young Bat Masterson, for example. Or a younger Lee Van Cleef.
A week from now, when you are nearly asleep and when you feel like a sickly child who’s seen a bad shape skulking in the trees, you should remember that time, at this point in your adventure, passed in a disturbing way, as broken and ill-fitting as space was in the aggressively silly art Darla once dragged you around Brentwood to gawk at. Freddy’s place will have become more crowded. Attended by a Nubian slave, Nefertiti should arrive. The crew of the starship Enterprise, Mr. Spock on crutches, must materialize.
You’re a cowboy, you will tell George and Martha Washington. You’ve just mislaid your pistols.
You’ll have another drink—and another—and when you hear the name Harrison Ford, you should wonder if he’s here as well, or just his Han Solo look-alike. Sandi will have said she’d had a part—itsy-bitsy, albeit—in The Fugitive, but while you dread for the ten thousandth time that she’s run off with Colonel Sanders or the Michelin Tire Man, you should glimpse Roxanne trapped on the couch at the far end of Freddy’s lobby-like living room, her expression completely stricken, absolutely helpless while a woman heaves and sobs in her lap. It will be Marie Antoinette, her hoop skirt fanned up over her shoulders like a turkey’s tail, while behind them Frankenstein is doing a handstand for Heckle and Jeckle.
Here it must occur to you, in the frighteningly corny way all insight has occurred in your middle years, that you are ravaged. Thoroughly trashed.
...
Near the door to the bathroom, you should lean against the wall, an effort to take stock of yourself. Something is missing, you have to feel. Your wallet. Or that interior tissue, the result of many centuries of natural selection, that’s meant to keep humankind from slobbering all over itself. Your hands, normally light and strong, should feel clumsy as crates and too heavy to carry around for the next hour, but in them you should find not one, but two drinks. Yours and—whose? You should endeavor to reconstruct the last five minutes of your life, an exercise that proves as futile as trying to swim to Siam. The marihoonie, you decide. The Crud.
You will imagine yourself elsewhere—at the beach, or the gym on Pasadena Boulevard. Christ Almighty, you should be in bed. You have a session in the morning, Julio Iglesias or the like. The producer—an inconceivably hairy guy, a virtual Wolfman, another of Freddy’s connections—will expect you to be sharp. Really, you ought to leave now, but between you and your car stand several munchkins and famous murderers, all of them amused by your ability to keep the wall from crashing down over your head.
And then the bathroom door has to open. It will be Sandi, the only person in the world able to renew you with a single wave of her wand.
“There’s a problem,” she has to tell you.
You should repeat the word, startled to find what could only be snakes at the bottom of it.
“The ex-boyfriend,” she will say.
A bone creaking inside, you should remember what you learned about Sandi before the Aga Khan, on the claw of a Maine lobster, interrupted you earlier. The ex-boyfriend should be named Jake—or Slate: a name as contrived as are hats on hyenas—and he should be an actor notorious for off-screen escapades involving sports cars and semiautomatic pistols. Like a billboard for tanning butter, he should be handsome, and mean as a hammer. Sandi is afraid of him. Really. Before rehab, he ran with the Brat Pack—Judd Nelson, Emilio, that bunch. A certifiable brute.
This was totally unpredictable, she should be saying now. Typical Slate. The story of her life.
You should groan, more truth bearing down on you.
“What about a rain check?” she should ask. There’s a place in Burbank. The Palace of Mystery. Maybe you could meet her there?
Like someone shown the modern world with the lid yanked loose and the gears inside spitting off grease and flame, you should understand that, among the arachnids and yammering vegetables, among the living dead and the various extraterrestrials, Slate has just appeared, the latest of Freddy’s guests.
“Burbank,” you have to say. “The Palace.”
Events will unfold very swiftly now. You may find yourself dancing, your partner a vigorous blonde you believe you rooted for on Baywatch. Wobbly on her high heels, Roxanne may break in with news about Freddy and Marie. In one of the bedrooms, so it should be reported, they are sitting calmly on a settee, sharing a joint Freddy has speared on one of the gleaming knife blades that are his fingers; apparently reconciled, they are said to be singing a verse of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Without question, this image should move you. You are not insensitive, no matter Darla’s opinion on the issue. You do have a sentimental side, and for a moment, while Roxanne struggles to tear her banner off, you should imagine having slept with Sandi, the different things you could have learned—about her body, sure, or her habits in bed, but also about your own self at its best. She will have told you that, as a triple Virgo, she is trustworthy, but, apart from behavior to read about in the Calendar section of the Times, you have to wonder, as a Scorpio, if that ever boded well for you.
Meanwhile, Roxanne, at war with her outfit, will have attracted a crowd. Dracula, Porky Pig, Jimmy Carter, Thelma and Louise. Nearby should stand the fellow in the pumpkin outfit, his expression composed and abstract, as if he’s chanced upon a problem he could solve with his calculator and graph paper. At last, you should recognize him—the Virgin exec you worked overdubs for at Groove Masters in Santa Monica—Fenton, or Felton. He wanted to be called Finn, you should remember. He desired more boom-boom, or comparable effects. More hi-hat. More chuffa-chuffa. More of what you didn’t have that day.
The bottom is out of you now, you ought to realize. Lordy, you’re litter inside, a wretched wind howling through the center of you.
“Help,” Roxanne should be yelping, slapping and swatting at the glittery script of her banner. She wants this thing off. Right fucking now.
“Calm down,” you should tell her. But at the instant you prepare to wade in to assist her, which is also the instant Sandi appears with Slate, you should realize you are about to do something both stupid and violent. Your heart suddenly frozen, you pause, dumbstruck by your own goofiness. You won’t believe it. You’re the peaceable kind, you should think. Once upon a time, ages ago, you marched.
Nevertheless, as dazzled by your own lunacy as you might be were a Martian to land on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oscar night, you should turn away from Roxanne: You are now, against all odds, a man with one last good office to perform. You are the nitro, you should think. And the glycerin.
“Mr. Drummer,” Roxanne will be saying, tears in her voice. “Where the hell are you going?”
Near the foyer, Slate and Sandi will have appeared. Notwithstanding what you’ve heard from Sandi’s own luscious lips, they should present themselves as sufficiently arm-in-arm to convince you that the world has rules as twisted and bassackward as are its ruled. It’s the Crud, you should believe, that’s making you think this way. It is not, you feel certain, a permanent but heretofore unacknowledged feature of your character. Nor is it a condition, like a pimple on your ass, you can ignore or forget about. As if seeing this episode from the rafters, or on Freddy’s big-screen TV in his media room, you should be amazed. Utterly bamboozled. You are, clearly, a man in need of some help yourself. If Roxanne—or anybody—is hollering at you, they ought to be doing so now. In a kind of stupor, you should look about. If there’s someone to save you—Attila the Hun, maybe, or the June Taylor Dancers—they should be doing so now, before the ground opens beneath you, before the lights start flashing and the banshees break into song.
“Hey, pal,” someone should be saying. “Long time, no see.”
Distracted, Slate has to be looking elsewhere, but Sandi—beautiful, tasty, faithless Tinkerbelle—should be trying to warn you off with her eyes. Bravely, you are to attempt to ignore her. A principle is involved here, you will be telling yourself. Something big—bigger than the two of you, more monstrous than happiness itself—is at stake, and if you could summon them up, you should like to say a few words about it.
Still, halfway to Slate—which, to you, is halfway between one life and another, halfway between fate and circumstance—you have to discover that you are, remarkably, only halfhearted about what’s befallen you. You are, God help you, resigned. You are motion, not movement; activity, not action. Your blood running cold in your throat, your fist should be cocked, but you should feel powerless, dutiful, obliged. Once again, you should wait for your brain to catch up to your feet. The world, you have to decide, is almost rotten, and there’s only one thing you, alas, can do about it: You—Noley James Gilmore, formerly of Star Route 2, Luna County, New Mexico, Western Hemisphere, Planet Earth—are about to throw a punch.
You should be face to face now with Slate. Sandi should have been only partly right: He is a Nazi, yes, but with a smile from a toothpaste ad.
“Is this the guy?” he should be asking Sandi. “This can’t be the guy. Say this ain’t the guy.”
With a shudder, you should understand now that the punch, the first you’ve thrown in anger since the Alameda Junior High School lunchroom, has no chance of connecting—for a thick-legged mesomorph, Slate will be fast as a flyweight—and that, slack-minded and off balance, you will tumble past St. Francis of Assisi and crack your head against the tile-covered stairs.
Your punch still unthrown, you should see yourself moaning like an infant on the floor, your universe muffled and swirly and murky, colors running gooey at the margins of your vision. You should see yourself crawling, slowly at first, then with greater determination. Briefly, you should imagine something sharp attacking your ankles and knees, a mob going after your kidneys and thighs. Then, your flung fist flying feebly in the air to nowhere and the focus coming back to your eyes, you should envision being later assailed from on high.
It will be the pumpkin man, bent over you like an orange Florence Nightingale. Whispering over and over, “Hey, pal,” he will be trying to help you up, and, like a bullet into your forehead, knowledge will be reaching you that, a knot throbbing over your eye and your shoulder bruised, you are leaving here with a tiger.
Roxanne.
In the car, she will have something to tell you. A secret.
Behind the wheel, you should be taking an inventory of yourself. The stinging in your wrist. The faint ringing you should hope, however stupidly, is coming from an ice-cream truck lost way after dark. Amazingly, you should be in good spirits. Pumped and jittery—wasted, sure, but somehow shriven—as athletes are said to feel on the other side of victory. But then you should recall your shameful exit from Freddy’s house, in particular that pathetic attempt from the floor to explain yourself, the sneers of contempt from Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf beside her, and here your heart will give an ugly lurch sideways, the steering wheel about the only thing in free America to hang on to.
Her real name is Alma, she should tell you. After the city in Oklahoma, her parents’ idea of cute. “Near Muskogee,” she should say. “Where Merle Haggard comes from.”
Now you should yearn for other things to happen tonight. A drive-by, say. Or a flash fire roaring in the canyons leading out of here. A catastrophe equal to the hour and atmosphere. An earthquake.
Roxanne is so much more evocative, she will be telling you. She could just strangle her mother.
You are in this together, you must realize, two fools in fantasyland. So you should ask her what she’d like to do now. You will know a dozen clubs you could get to in twenty minutes—Sparky’s Melon Patch, for example, the Frog and the Peach, the Crest Café on Sunset—but you should assume she’d be embarrassed to show up in a swimsuit and see-through raincoat. You could shoot pool, you will think. Maybe sneak down to the beach. It will be past midnight, the sky cloudless all the way to China, the ocean somewhere dark and forever in front of you, the desert over the scrub-covered mountains behind, and you will say okay, a part of you cold and brittle, when she says, in a tone both mischievous and business-like, that you should surprise her.
“Freddy Krueger,” she should say. “What a dipshit.”
At your place—the bungalow on Valencia Street in La Canada, the house Darla will have left in a huff one spring so long ago you can’t remember your reaction—Roxanne will be thrilled that you’re so tidy.
“A neatnik,” she should call you. “Not like you-know-who.”
Here events should become roiled, disordered as war itself. One minute, Roxanne might be inspecting your drum set, maybe timidly trying her hand at banging the floor tom; the next, she is drinking Quervo, sniffling over how crooked life has turned out. One minute you might be kissing her—she will almost be too tall for you, the kiss curiously without current and heat—and the next, she is chattering about calligraphy, hers a language about nibs and strokes you struggle to make sense of. It will be morning late and morning early. A streaky dawn and deepest darkness. Tumbledown and upright, the air smelling clean as Clorox. You will find yourself ahead of her and behind, both smarter and dumber—maybe, you have to concede, as you’ve been with all women—and then a moment will arrive, unexpected as lightning, when you find yourself in your hot tub beneath the gazebo in the backyard, only hundreds and hundreds of gallons of bubbling, frothy water separating you from a sodden woman who, as Miss Oklahoma Rodeo of 1986, once barrel-raced astride a quarterhorse named Hardhat.
“Poor Julio,” you will say. It should be obvious to you now that you’re in no condition to go anywhere.
“Yes,” she will hasten to agree. “Poor Señor Iglesias.”
The Crud should have seemed to wear off, but there will be a vast space between your ears you fear was once filled with memories and plans.
Roxanne will ask about your eye.
“It’s sore,” you will have to admit.
“Here’s to that,” she will say, and from somewhere previously out of sight a bottle of Dos Equis will rise in salute.
On the outside speakers, your only album, Wet Places at Noon, has to be playing. John Hiatt, himself a wild man in those days, should’ve helped you with chord changes and horn arrangements. This should’ve been your drug years—Percodan, Xanax, the exports of Mexico and Peru. Back then, it might seem to you, you had no trouble with words.
“Who’s Finn?” Roxanne will want to know.
“The pumpkin,” you should answer. “Another music mogul.”
She has to look at once bedraggled and revivified, her red hair slicked back like a seal’s, and then you should realize that you, your brow still thumping, probably don’t look so swell, either.
Finn gave her his card, she will announce. Tucked it in the top of her suit when he was leading you out the door. She’s to call his service next week. Tuesday.
You should study the evidence, soggy in her fingers.
“Poor Señor Finn,” you will say, and, taking the card from her, you have to drop it over the edge of the steamy tub, where it should lie for nearly a week until the maid, Mrs. Dominguez, picks it up and asks Señorita Roxanne, the last lady in your life, if it is importante.
Deliberately, you are approaching the end of something, you should conclude. Not an era, certainly. Merely a phase. A confusing but not unimpressive period of warp and woof, of riot and silence, of ruin and rain.
“Noley,” she will say. “What kind of name is that?”
“It’s a ranch name,” you should answer, and several images will spring to mind of you and your father discussing T-posts and salt rubs and spavin in the cattle you have grown up tending.
With the awful clarity of a clairvoyant, you should foresee what’s to happen next. An hour from now, Roxanne will have asked you if you want to make love, a prospect that will have struck you as inevitable and necessary and sad. You should say yes, but at the moment the two of you rise from the tub—Roxanne still hasn’t gotten her banner off and it should droop from her shoulder, water dripping as you walk toward the house—she will say she has a story to tell.
You like stories, you should remind her. Hell, you’ve told a few in your own life.
She was in an auto accident, she should begin. On the Ventura freeway, near the Laurel Canyon turnoff. Last August. A pretty nasty affair. A three-car pileup. Somebody died, the idiot who caused it.
You should be in your bedroom now, both of you looking at your bed, a car alarm woo-wooing nearabouts.
It’s afterward she will need to tell you about. When the ambulance arrived.
You should have your soggy pants off at last, your shirt somewhere you will laugh to discover when you awake ten hours hence.
It’s the paramedic, she should continue. He was so gentle, so careful. He talked to her like a lover. Held her head, went through her hair slowly, searching for glass. For the cut that would account for the blood beside her ear.
The alarm should be gone now, but another noise will have become clear to you—a clanking, rattling sound that could be an engine, something infernal and wrong.
His name was Ric, Roxanne should tell you. With a c, not a k. She’ll remember that forever. His tenderness.
It is your heart, you will decide. At the moment the two of you climb into your bed from opposite sides, still wet, still slow and cautious, that noise, thunderous and leaden, is your heart.
His touch, she should say. She wanted Ric Martin Pettibone to take her home. She almost asked.
The whomp of it, you should think. It’s like hitting a brick wall.
But this scene shouldn’t have happened yet. Time a fluid as likely to travel one way as another, you will still be back in the tub, the future an hour away from history, and you should be telling Roxanne about Darla. On the stereo your most famous song should be playing, “All Things, All at Once,” a ballad, complicated as any poem you studied in college, that peaked at 84 on Billboard. The advent of a Santa Ana, a breeze should have arisen, hot and dry as air from a grave, and you must be telling a story about your mother, how you once saw her slug a horse. Another story should occur to you, this about backing up Jeff Beck years ago at the Coliseum outside Cleveland, and you should describe how it felt, spooky and exhilarating, like being able to fly, when the crowd applauded and you couldn’t get the shouting out of your ears.
Water burbling under your armpits and between your legs, you should speculate aloud about Sandi, even about Slate. You’re planning a vacation, you should say. Aruba, the Azores. Australia, maybe. You should fetch Roxanne another drink—Ron Rico now, you’re out of tequila—and, on the way back, you should notice how doughy you look, how you didn’t have a gut even a month ago.
You don’t smoke, you should tell her. Generally, you’re law-abiding, considerate. You owned a dog once, a collie, and would again were you home regular hours. You vote, mainly Democrat. You’ve given money to United Way, to the AIDS people. For a couple of days, you were a Boy Scout. You tried college, Arizona State, but you were—are—a musician. A drummer. You’ve played with Jackson Browne. With Ray Davies, from the Kinks. Bonnie Raitt, God bless her, is a pal of yours.
“You’re shaking,” Roxanne should say to you.
With effort, you ought to be able to bring yourself under control. You should have experienced the first of many flashbacks, this one the moment that you lay crumpled more or less at Slate’s feet while Little Bo Peep, urged on by the squeaky cheers of Old Man Winter himself, whacked at your knees with her terrible staff.
“What happened?” Roxanne will be saying to you. “To the horse your momma socked.”
“Nothing,” you have to say. “She busted two knuckles.”
It will happen now. Or not at all. Head back, looking at the stars, Roxanne will say the magic words, those few unique to all matters of love and loss.
She’s lonely, she should admit. Flat-out pissed off.
Awkwardly, you should reach across the tub to her. Something, you should feel, hangs in the balance between you. A compact having more to do with the soul than with the flesh. Her skin should be water-wrinkled, like your own. She will be Miss Congeniality, you a young cowboy after all. Your mind, which you have always thought of as a cluttered storage attic, should be clear, nothing between the first and the next thing to do but water and air and time. You have to feel fortified, stalwart even.
“Please,” she will say to you. “Put it on again. That song.”
And you should.
You will.
You have to.