Chapter 47 Levi
The woman from the country station has a warm on-air voice that sells trucks during the commercial breaks. She opens with a softball question, the one they all open with.
“Let’s start with the new record,” she says. “What do you want people to feel when they hear it?”
“Man, that’s the whole question right there, isn’t it?
” I lean in and give her the smile that photographs better than my real one.
“I’ll be straight with you. This is the most myself I’ve ever sounded.
I quit chasing the radio on this one and wrote the honest stuff.
The songs I’d play for nobody but me, driving home at two in the morning.
Closest I’ve ever let anybody get to the real me. ”
She smiles and writes it down like I’m telling the truth.
There’s no me on the new record. There’s no me anywhere they can stream. But it’s the cheap kind of lie, the kind that doesn’t hurt anybody. She thanks me. A kid with a clipboard rotates her out and the next one in.
They’ve built me a press room inside a hotel room for the press interviews.
Top floor of one of the beach towers. The Gulf going on forever out a window they keep at my back.
Two chairs. The tour logo angled just off-side so it sits in every shot without looking like it wants to.
Lights on poles. A girl who steps between reporters and fixes my face with a brush.
And Freddie against the back wall, arms folded, not watching the reporters.
Watching me. He’s the only thing in here that isn’t a prop.
They come at me in shifts and I hit every one clean, because the stage is the only place I’ve ever been let to live.
“Two more performances at the Bash,” a kid from a Panama City Beach station says. “What are we in for Saturday night?”
“Everything we’ve got left,” I say. “This coast’s been too good to us to shortchange it now.”
“There’s a duet rumor making the rounds,” the next one tries. “Anything you want to tell us?”
“Now, you know I can’t say.” I tip the hat brim an inch, which tells them everything, and they love it.
I’m charming. I’m natural. I’m, God help me, good at this.
And the entire time there’s a line I’m trying not to think about, because Freddie wrote it himself, an hour ago, before they let anybody up to see me.
He sat me down in the green room with two waters, one for each of us, like we were about to do something reasonable together.
“Here’s the situation,” he said in his kind voice.
“The video is everywhere. We can’t kill it, so we own it.
Here’s the story. You were drunk. You misread a situation at a bar.
You stepped in where you had no business, you’re embarrassed about it, you squared it with the guy, and everyone’s friends now.
” He turned his phone face-down on the table between us, which is what Freddie does instead of rolling up his sleeves.
“You were drunk, Levi. Whatever you actually were, drunk is the version that survives. Drunk is forgivable for you. Drunk is practically a genre of country music. The other thing” — he let two seconds go by — “is not on the menu. Now say it back to me.”
“I’d had a few too many—”
“Not to me. To the camera that’s going to be behind me. Warm it up.”
I put the grin on. “I’d had a few too many, and I got it in my head I was gonna ride in and fix it.”
“Again.”
He made me say it again and again. Somewhere around the fourth pass it quit being a sentence I was saying and started sounding true. Freddie nodded along like a producer getting his take.
“Good,” he said. “That’s the one right there. Keep it.” He stood, buttoned his jacket, and collected his water on his way out. “Twenty minutes. Drink something.”
Before they turned a single camera on me, I sat in a chair and rehearsed sanding down the one night that was mine down to a lie. Out loud. Take after take, till it came smooth as warm butter.
The guy from the entertainment site leans in with his nice-guy face. “Alright, I gotta go there,” he says, like it pains him. “The video. Last night, the bar. It’s all over the place this morning. What actually happened?”
The line’s already written. I don’t even feel my mouth start moving.
“Aw, man.” The rueful headshake, the one Freddie and I built an hour ago.
“Yeah. Not my finest night, I’ll own that.
Here’s the truth of it. I’m out having a couple, blowing off a little steam, and there’s a fella down the bar who’d been running his mouth all night.
Ugly with it, wouldn’t quit. I’d had a few too many and appointed myself sheriff.
I have the hat for the job.” The big grin, built to disarm.
“Stepped clean into something that wasn’t mine and let it get away from me.
That’s on me, nobody else. But him and me are square.
No bad blood at all. Matter of fact he’s got VIP passes waiting for him at will-call. We’re good.”
It all rolls out of me wholesome and warm, every word sitting where Freddie set it. The room laughs. The nice-guy reporter laughs. Troubled-but-charming, a little wild, good heart and a long bar tab. Lee Streeter being a hot mess in a bar again.
Every word of it is a knife I’m passing them. The smoother I make it go, the more of it I’m killing. And God, am I smooth. I hate myself right now.
It’s a woman a few chairs later who finally does what I’m dreading, and she doesn’t do it mean. She does it smiling, leaning in like we’re trading gossip over a fence.
“Okay, I have to. I promised my listeners I’d ask,” she says.
“That man in the video, the one who got you out of there. Tall, dark hair, unfairly good-looking.” She presses a hand flat to her chest and fans herself, playing it up, and somebody behind the lights laughs.
“The whole internet has lost its mind over him. Everyone is asking the same question. Who is that guy?”
And there it is.
The question with everything lying at the bottom of it. She thinks she’s asking me for a name, a fun little who’s-that-hunk to hand back to her listeners. What she’s really doing is reaching past the bar and the video, down to Dante.
Freddie never prepped this one. There’s no line written for it. Nothing rehearsed at all. And Lee Streeter answers anyway. Before any part of me that’s still mine gets a hand up.
I give her the aw-shucks shake of my head. I hear it come out in Lee Streeter’s drawl, light, already sliding past her toward the next question. “Honest truth? No idea. The fella hauled me out before I made it worse. Never caught his name.” The shrug, the grin I don’t feel. “Don’t know him.”
About Dante.
About the man I woke up wrapped in this morning, his arm thrown over me and his face tucked into my neck. Freddie made me rehearse the lie about the fight. Nobody rehearsed me on this one.
The question came for the truth, and my training stepped in front of it like a hired body. I put the one person who actually knows and wants me flat on the ground with three words.
Don’t know him.
She nods, writes it, lets it go. The clipboard guy rotates her out. The makeup brush comes in. Somebody puts a water in my hand.
They run me another half-hour and I don’t remember one second of it. I must be doing good. Freddie’s face on the back wall stays smooth, and his face is the only scoreboard I’ve ever watched.
Then it’s over. The lights drop. The room goes from a set back to a hotel suite with a nice view. A guy starts coiling cable.
I’m in a folding chair with my hands in my lap, and the cost of what I did finally comes in all at once. I didn’t acknowledge that I even knew him. On a record. Forever.
I thought I’d been winning. Inch by inch, in the dark, I’d been getting myself back.
I killed the app that watched me. I’d started, big fool that I am, to believe the real me was finally getting bigger than the Lee Streeter they built.
Then they turned a light on and the machine chewed me up and spit me out.
I want loose from the lie. I’ve never despised anything in my life like I hated the smooth lying man I just was.
And there’s nowhere to take it.
The point of the lie is to keep the world believing it. Which means I have to keep living inside it. Which means the one place on earth I want to be is the one place I just made impossible to go.
I let the handler walk me to the elevator. I get in the car they send and ride back to the house.
I want to take my words back and I can’t.
I want, just once, out loud, in the light, where everybody can hear it, to tell the truth. I look out the window at the water going dark, and I let it die there, the same as it always does.