Chapter 34 Dante
Benji texts me constantly between the Roadhouse and Saturday noon. I answer most of them with the word fine.
Benji: Are you good?
Dante: Fine.
Benji: Call me!
Dante: I’m fine. Busy.
Benji: DANTE.
I am fine. Because I have to be. I drove home Friday night and slept. Saturday morning, I went to work same as always. I don’t think about the beach house. Or the man in it.
I’m still telling myself that while I’m sitting at my kitchen table with paperwork, when I hear someone stomping up the stairs. Benji lets himself in without knocking. He’s in my doorway, and I close the packet.
“What the hell are you wearing, Benji? You look like a cross between Elvis and a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.”
He’s wearing brand-new white sparkly cowboy boots. White shorts with the square footage of a cocktail napkin. A blue silk shirt. And over the silk, in the wet crush of July, a white leather jacket with a fringe that arrives a half second after he does.
“We’re going to a country music concert and we need to BLEND!
” He throws his arms wide, like the outfit is the closing argument.
“I researched this for four hours, Dante. The core elements are boots, denim, fringe, and a hat. I’m wearing two of the four.
The humidity vetoed the denim, and hats flatten my hair and make my face look wide, so the fringe is doing the work of both.
This is what blending looks like when it’s done correctly. ”
“You know I love you, but you’ve never blended anything except makeup. You’re not blending in that outfit. We’re not going.”
He doesn’t argue about the blending. He reaches into the jacket and holds up two laminated passes on lanyards.
“They’re VIP. Pit, actually, but VIP-adjacent, I called in a favor.
And you’re coming, because you’ve answered me fine eleven times in eighteen hours, which is the most not-fine a human being has ever been.
I’m not doing this.” He waves a hand at all of me.
“I’m not letting you sit here being a sad, stoic businessman about it. ”
“Benji. I have a deal closing—”
“Don’t care. You know what this is.” He stops, and his voice changes, drops the performance off it, and he looks at me dead-on.
“You know exactly what this is, because you invented it, Dante. You did this to me when I was feeling low. You refused to let me rot in sorrow. You said the only thing worse than feeling it is feeling it alone.” He hangs one lanyard on the counter’s edge, in front of me.
“I learned it from you. Shut up and put it on.”
I can’t argue with him. It’s true. I invented the medicine. I don’t get to refuse the dose.
“I’m not going because I want to see him,” I say. “I want to make that clear.”
“Obviously not. You’re only going because I’m making you.” He’s already past me, into my bedroom, into my closet. Hangers start flying out of the closet and hitting the bed.
“Linen. Linen. Linen. More linen. A cashmere section, Dante. You have a cashmere section, in Florida, in July.” A hanger sails.
“Everything in this closet is for closing on real estate. Nothing in this closet has ever been to a concert. I’ve never once been beaten by a closet, and I’m not starting tonight.
” He goes quiet for three seconds, which from Benji in a closet is a drumroll.
Then he comes out holding a pair of soft jeans I forgot I owned and a plain white shirt.
“These. I was with you when you bought them, which was six years ago, which makes them vintage, which is perfect. If you don’t get changed right now, we’re going to Walmart and I’m dressing you in a flag shirt and a cap turned backwards. Move it! We’re wasting time.”
I get changed. He would do it. He’d narrate the aisle.
He rolls my sleeves himself, two turns each, and steps back to appraise the work. “Perfect. You look like the man who sold everyone here their land. It’ll do.”
An hour later Pier Park is a mass of people and airless heat.
It is the straightest place I have ever stood in my life.
Trucks the size of small homes in the lots.
Flags on half of them, the country and the other ones.
Boots that have never seen a horse. Sunburn, beer, tank tops, all of it pointed at a stage the size of a strip mall.
Benji and I thread through the middle of it, a fringe jacket and the man it’s towing, the two most overdressed men here tonight.
The lot is a quarter mile of grass and packed sand. Benji makes it two hundred feet before the boots give up.
“These boots were purchased for a Halloween costume,” he says, one hand leaning on a stranger’s tailgate.
“Rhinestone Cowboy. I won that contest. They were engineered for a condo with marble floors and an elevator, Dante. I wore them from the Uber to the couch and back. Their total career mileage before tonight was sixty feet, and none of it was on grass. I’ve already got blisters on my blisters. ”
“There’s a med tent by the gate.”
“I don’t need a med tent. I need infrastructure. Who puts a concert on grass? Where are the walkways? I did a wedding on a polo field and I laid plywood. I would be fired for this. I would fire myself for this.”
“You’re limping.”
“I’m not limping.” He draws himself up, favoring the left boot every step. “Limping is involuntary. What I’m doing is distributing my weight strategically. It’s a technique. Dancers use it.”
He distributes it strategically onto my arm for the last hundred yards, and I steer him by the elbow around the worst of the ruts.
A guy in an airbrushed eagle shirt raises a beer as we pass. “Nice jacket, brother!”
“Thank you! It’s vintage!” Benji glows the next fifty feet. “You saw that. Tell me you saw that. I told you I’d blend. This outfit is perfect.”
“He can see you from space, Benji.”
“Blending is not invisibility,” he says.
“Blending is when a place decides you belong in it, and this place has decided. We’re in!
That man and I are friends now. I’m basically local.
Damn this fucking field!” He stops to unstick a boot heel from the sand, while holding onto my arm.
“The outfit is a success. The boots are a mistake I’ll be paying on through Tuesday.
I regret nothing except everything below the ankle. ”
I buy two waters at the first stand and hand him one. “Drink. You’re wearing leather in ninety-five degrees.”
“Leather breathes. It’s a natural material. It was alive once.”
“So were you. Drink the water before you pass out.”
He drinks it. All of it, glaring at me over the bottle the entire time, which is how Benji has always taken orders from me. I almost laugh, twice, which is more than I’ve managed in a day.
The first opener goes on with the sun still up. A kid, twenty at the most, thanking the field after every song and playing everything a hair too fast. The crowd claps and keeps drinking. He’s background to their conversations.
“They gave him the daylight slot, Dante. Do you know what that does to a person? There’s a million dollars of lighting rig over that stage doing absolutely nothing, because the sun is up, so that kid has to matter for thirty minutes with no help.
I’ve watched brides get better production at a beach ceremony. We should riot on that child’s behalf.”
“He can’t hear you, Benji.”
“He can feel it. A crowd is one organism. I know crowds, and this one is being rude.”
The second act plays to a livelier crowd, and between sets the bachelorette party on our left adopts Benji.
By the first chorus he’s four rows over in a line dance he learned in one pass.
The fringe earns its money. For two songs he is the most popular man in the pit, taught a boot slide by six women in matching pink hats.
He comes back grabbing my shoulder while standing on one foot to give the other foot a rest.
“Worth it. Don’t ask my feet, they’ve stopped speaking to me. The bride is named Samantha, I’m invited to the wedding now, and I’ve already fixed three things about her reception. Her planner has her doing a sparkler exit at nine-forty. In August. Children will be present. I gave her my card.”
“You were gone ten minutes.”
“You can fix a seating chart in six if the bride trusts you. Samantha trusts me.”
The sun goes down between acts. The crew resets the stage, and the field packs itself tighter toward the rail. Then the rigs light all at once, the field makes a sound I feel in ribs, and Lee Streeter walks out.
The man I’ve been taking care of came into rooms sideways. Bandana, chin down, sunglasses to cross ten feet of parking lot. He sat at Tex’s bar trying to take up less of it. He slept on floors with his jeans on.
He needed feeding, needed watching, needed me.
This man takes the stage like he owns the place. Shoulders back. Chin up. Boots planted on the center mark. The lights hit him, he opens his arms, the crowd screams at him, and he stands in it completely at ease.
And God help me, he looks good up there.
That’s the insult buried in the middle of everything else — the shoulders, the planted boots, the stage rig doing for a field what one lamp did for me across a couch.
Thousands of people wanting the same man I wanted, and not one of them knows they’re all wanting a costume.
Then he smiles. Every smile I ever got out of him I had to work for — earn it, pry it loose, catch him off guard with something before he could get his face set.
This one is a foot wide on the big screens, thrown to the back of the field, and it cost him nothing at all.
Someone hands him a guitar. Not the beat-up thing from the bonfire.
This one gleams under the rig, custom, the fake name inlaid up the neck. He straps it on without looking at it.