33. Who’s Got the Power?
IAN
Archer, Mal, and I were doing an admiring postmortem of Selene’s impressive interrogation when Nicky reappeared in the bus.
She didn’t even come all the way in, just crooked her finger at me while still standing on the stairs. “I need you,” she said. “Can you come?”
I was on my feet fast, Archer and Mal backing me up.
“Bring your passes,” she said. I was wearing mine, but Archer had to find his. Mal waved his and we were off, heading for the gate to the stage area.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Mal and Archer caught up to hear the answer.
“The festival has an issue,” she said. “There’s a guy threatening to keep the power off unless he gets six backstage passes.”
“What? What are you talking about?” We passed through security, and Nicky waved us to the back of the lot.
“There. Look. Those are the generators there. Can you help?”
I could hear shouting as we got closer. Being tall had its advantages. Over the heads of the assembled people, I could see one guy in an orange safety vest and a very familiar helmet. He was standing inside the enclosure, one hand on a massive JCB generator, and he was examining his phone.
“No, I changed my mind,” he said boldly to the angry faces in front of him. “Now I need eight backstage passes. In fact, make it an even dozen. I’ll give the other four away to anyone I feel like.”
Amid the protests, I found Bruce. “What the hell?”
He wheeled on me, his face angry. “Would you get the hell out of here? We’ll handle this.”
“Handle what?” Mal, at my shoulder, was watching Bruce with his easy smile. Bruce saw Archer join us, and he swallowed and calmed down.
“This guy won’t turn on the generators unless he gets a whole boatload of crap, okay?”
“I will not be held hostage by some electrician!” The shouter was a heavily bearded man whose lanyard bristled with passes.
“Yes, you will,” the guy in the safety vest said smugly. “This is a union job. Has to be completed by a union member. You want to go up against the union? Good fucking luck!”
Uh-huh. I saw why Nicky wanted me for this. I began to ease my way through the crowd to the generators.
“We’ll get someone else from the union!” Beard Guy shouted.
“Good luck,” Safety Vest said. “My lady says the traffic around here is a fucking nightmare. What are you going to do, get a helicopter in here?”
“If I have to!” Bearded Guy was furious.
“No place to land. You’ll have to parachute someone in. Or you could just give me the passes. By the way, now I want sixteen.”
“Sixteen!”
“And champagne. And I get to meet fucking everybody. And Sheree. My lady loves Sheree. We’re going to meet Sheree, got it?”
“I do not got it!” What little skin was visible on Beard Guy’s face was a dangerous red. “Someone get me the police!”
“Hey,” I said when I got to the fence.
It might have been my normal tone. I wasn’t angry. The electrician heard me and glared at me too. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Ian. What’s your name?”
He thought about it for a moment and then grumbled, “I’m Dwayne.”
“Dwayne,” I said in acknowledgment.
He looked at me and spotted my medallion. “That’s a fuse,” he said.
“I know. You’re IBEW?”
He sneered. “Obviously.”
“This is going to get you booted from the union, you know.”
Dwayne scoffed, but I saw a flare of terror in his eyes. “They’re about to boot me anyway. I’m going out in a blaze of glory. Me and my lady and all her friends.”
Bearded Guy had stopped ranting and was now listening to the conversation. The buzz of chatter around us died as someone else made their way through the crowd.
“Hi, Ian,” Sheree said. Dwayne gasped. “What’s going on? I hear that maybe I can help.”
“Well, hang on,” I said. “Maybe this is going to be okay.”
“It’s not going to be okay!” Dwayne shouted. “I’m not firing these up until I get what I want! I mean—I want—you’re Sheree!”
“I am. What is it you want?”
“Now, hang on,” I said. “Dwayne, you know that all that’s left for you to do is the equivalent of plugging in an extension cord.”
“Yeah, but a union guy has to do it. And I’m not going to!”
“What would happen if a union guy showed up? Would you do it then? And maybe save your job?”
“My job’s lost. I’ve been—never you mind what. But no one’s going to get here in time to bail out your festival! So I need twenty backstage passes right now!”
“Twenty!” Bearded Guy shouted.
“Hang on—” Sheree said, but I put a gentle hand on her arm and fished out my wallet. I flipped it open and showed it to Dwayne.
“Save your job, man. Either you do it and everything’s fine, or I do it and you get arrested.”
He stared at my ID. “Fuck me. You’re IBEW?”
“Local 25. Master inside lineman. This isn’t going to work out for you.”
Dwayne was paralyzed, then tears began leaking out of his eyes.
“Oh boy,” Sheree said.
“Shit, man! Shit! What are you doing here?” Dwayne crumpled. Bearded Guy heaved a sigh of relief and threw his hands in the air. All the event organizers shifted their weight and murmured to each other.
Disaster averted.
I nudged Bearded Guy. “You mind if I check his work before we fire these babies up?”
“Are you really union?” he asked.
I showed him my card. “There’s some paperwork we can fill out once I’m done with this, and we should call his local. Where can I find you?”
We made our plans and the crowd dispersed, leaving Archer, Mal, and Nicky grinning at me, Selene and Judy wide-eyed behind them.
Sheree stopped me before I went back to Dwayne. “Bring him to bus one when you’re done here, will you? I’d like to talk to him.” I smiled at her. Sheree was a sincerely kind human. “Nice job, Ian,” she said. “I didn’t know you were an electrician.”
I shrugged. “Gotta pay the bills until Sheree comes knocking.”
She laughed. “I was a waitress,” she admitted. “And not a very good one.”
“We’ve all got dreams.” We were both watching Dwayne, who was snuffling as he looked at the generators.
“Yeah. Bring him when you’re done. At the very least, I can sign some merch for him.”
His emotional health was a disaster, but Dwayne was a good electrician. His work didn’t need correction, and we got the generators running in time for the first set of musicians to rally in the greenroom area. I left Dwayne with Sheree and a whole team of her private security (Bearded Guy was right outside the bus door) and changed into my “I’m Death” black jeans and T-shirt.
Our gig went really well. Unlike a Sheree show, we weren’t playing to a half-full stadium. The festival grounds were already packed, even that early in the festival, and when Charlotte got her introduction, we could hear the cheers from the crowds now filling the streets.
The best bands play after dark at festivals, but playing in the full light of day turned out to be fun too. We could see people dancing and watch the wave of reactions ripple across the crowd.
We’d settled into our self-confidence. The trust we’d built up over years of playing together was now a solid, reliable part of our performance. Mal was playing better than ever, Archer held the audience in the palm of his hand, and I was relaxed and alert onstage in front of thousands. The energy didn’t get me as high, but that felt safer than the strange, out-of-body experiences I’d had at the beginning of the tour.
We were capable. Experienced. Commanding.
And it felt good.
Archer put Charlotte down after the lullaby (she continued to be a total ham, long legs bumping Archer’s nose as he sang to her). That was the moment he usually lifted her boot and explained that it was her favorite chew toy.
But I saw him start laughing before he even got to the boot. “Oh baby, you are such a bad dog!” His voice, amplified by Dwayne’s generators, echoed across the city. “Look at this!” He held up one of Nicky’s black hoodies, newly arrived from the manufacturer in Delaware. “I was going to tell you all that we have hoodies available for sale at the merch booth. See?” He held up the hoodie, and one of the cameramen obligingly shot it so Archer could show both front and back to dozens of jumbotrons and thousands of eyeballs.
“But look!” Archer pulled the hood out to show that Charlotte had gnawed a large hole in it. The crowd cheered. “This dog! She can find anything! Anyway, if you want a hoodie, they’re for sale. And if you want this hoodie, personalized by Charlotte herself . . . well, we’ll get that to the merch stand at some point this afternoon. Keep an eye out!”
The crowd screamed in delight. The stage manager appeared and took the shirt from Archer. She waved to the crowd and gestured to the booth and disappeared. We swung into “The Salesman,” and the entire world was singing along, and I found that I was unable to hold back my smile.
My three-quarters of a smile.
I must have looked like an idiot. Scarred, black-clad Death, smiling like a fool. I couldn’t help it.
We left the stage to gratifying applause and spent a wild fifteen minutes in the pressroom, fielding shouted questions until the next band finished and took their turn. We were allowed five-minute showers each in the portable bathrooms set up backstage, then we got Ken to agree to watch Charlotte and found Nicky and her friends in the jam-packed VIP area of the audience.
It was far too crowded to do anything as formal as dancing, but we swayed together, sang at the top of our lungs, applauded and cheered, and overall felt amazing.
Sheree didn’t need us for her city-specific song; she’d gotten Barton Thetford to perform with her. He’d written three of her most recent number-one hits, and he added a tremendous warmth to her exciting performance. Watching from the audience was an entirely different experience because now we were part of the energy flowing up to the stage. It was . . . enriching. The best way I can describe it was that it could make an old man dance. We were all rejuvenated by the experience, and I didn’t want to leave when she ended her show.
But fireworks were exploding overhead, and we’d been warned sternly that if we didn’t want to be trapped in traffic for hours, we needed to leave before the last fireworks exploded.
The end came too quickly. We had time to share hugs and kisses with Selene and Judy—now part of my family, too—and then we were back on the bus with Ken and Charlotte, cruising through the now-empty bus lot and onto roads lined with cars that had pulled over to watch the pyrotechnics overhead.
“Motherfucker!” Mal threw himself into one of the swivel chairs. “Let’s do that every night!”
“I am down for that, Brother Malachi!” Archer hung from the overhead pole, stretching the muscles in his back.
“That was so much fun!” Nicky hugged me, and I held her close. She’d given me so much. In the silence of the bus, I heard the beginning of another song.
Nicky’s song.
Unaware of the creative explosion taking place in my brain, she looked around to smile at the guys. “Okay. How you gonna top that?”