7. Humility
7
HUMILITY
ARCHER
No thanks to Opinionated O’Pushy Broad, we got some of our own back at the gig outside of San Diego. The club, called The Sound, was in Del Mar. It was brand new and gorgeous, with high-tech sound and a huge dance floor where people jammed to all our songs.
We weren’t the opening band this time. They were here to see us. We expanded our set list dramatically, keeping all the songs that had been such a hit when we opened for Sheree and adding others from our catalog, as well as a few covers that Ian suggested.
It was a pure blast of energy. Charlotte played her part to perfection. She was still carrying around my old boot as her favorite chew toy, even though parts of it were hanging in tatters, and people cheered to see her with it.
When it came time to sing “Charlotte’s Lullaby,” she was almost too big for me to hold in my lap. But if I wore a headpiece microphone, I could use two hands and still just barely cradle her like a baby.
The big ham loved it. She let her head hang down as if she were falling asleep and then she’d jerk up, surprising me, and lick my nose. A few times she licked the microphone, which made a unique sound, but the audience, mostly swaying as they dug the tune, thought that was great.
I gave credit for my improved mood and restored confidence to the BFT. When I sat at the wheel of that gorgeous truck, I was the king of the highway—or, as Ian changed it, king of the road. We’d added the old Roger Miller song to our set list, and it was a big hit.
We’d made it from New York to LA in four days easy. We discovered it wasn’t a smart idea to pull over somewhere that looked empty and set up our three-man tent, but we only needed one mistake to learn our lesson. Official campgrounds were cheap, had a bathhouse for toilets and showers, and almost never included a herd of curious cattle gathered around our red tent to moo us into wakefulness. We should have known better, and you’d think a resident monster like Charlotte would have kept those cows at the other end of the field, but no. We were fans of campgrounds after that.
Sometimes I’d let Ian or Mal drive, but most of the time, I was behind the wheel. I could commune with the open road in the BFT. She hummed along, and I hummed with her.
Was it insanity to write a love song to a truck? I was mulling one over in quiet moments.
Phil had left us plenty of time to get from San Diego back home. We had eight full days, and we were enjoying the road in luxurious comfort. We were taking our time.
Stopped in to stare at the Grand Canyon. Even in October, the parking lot was jam-packed. I let Ian and Mal off at the entrance, and they hoofed it to stare into a hole in the ground and then came right back .
“Want to take a turn?” Ian asked.
“Does it look like more than a big divot in the earth?” I asked.
“Well,” Mal said thoughtfully, “it’s a really big divot.”
“That’s okay. I’ll skip it. Isn’t this truck a beaut?”
We ate at Waffle Houses and then cobbled together workouts once we got to the campsite du jour. Squats and lunges could be done anywhere. A low branch or the crossbeam in the shower house for pull-ups. Sit-ups, roll-ups, V-sits—it was all right there on the ground, just waiting. We stayed in shape, even if we did splurge on the occasional pancake.
And on Thursday, we tuned in to the Opinionated O’Connor podcast.
“Do we have to listen to this?” I complained. “Last time we picked up a transmission from Planet Crazy, she broke my confidence, and it took a very expensive truck to put it back together. Don’t listen, baby.” I stroked the steering wheel.
“Better to know, don’t you think?” Mal was riding shotgun. Ian was in the back, theoretically buckled into his seat but actually sprawled on the floor, trimming Charlotte’s massive claws with a toenail clipper. The BFT’s ride was as smooth as silk.
“Leave it on,” he advised. “Better to know your enemy.”
“Fine.” Her voice made my flesh crawl. She gave me the massive creepy-crawlies. Who would have thought something so pretty could be so heinous?
“She’s probably going to talk about you,” Mal realized. He had his finger on his phone’s play button but had not yet subjected me to that screeching voice.
“What, like it wasn’t enough that she posted our entire interview video on her YouTube channel? You can see how crazy she made me. I ended up looking like an outright lunatic.”
“No, you didn’t.” Ian’s voice from the back was calm as usual. “You were more a pouty child. ”
“Thanks. Thanks for that, Ian.”
“No problem.”
“Go ahead. Let’s get this over with. I can’t imagine this is going to get that much worse, but then, I keep saying that. Hit play.”
Opinionated O’Connor sounded so reasonable—so human—on her podcast.
“She has good vocal filters,” I decided.
“Shut up,” Mal said. “I’m listening.”
First O’Connor interviewed a starlet, which was standard fare. Then, for some reason, she decided to interview the starlet’s gardener, who had a surprisingly juicy take on the starlet’s life . . . plus she gave him a chance to talk about the Beverly Hills ordinance against leaf blowers. It turned out to be not-a-totally-uninteresting discussion.
She’d gotten a shit ton of sponsors for her podcast. She ran at least two minutes of ads between every segment, which I thought was excessive and very annoying. Mal and Ian both told me to shut up that time.
Next up, some drivel about a hair-care product that controlled frizz in her frizzy hair. I noted the name just in case I went back to long hair. More ads.
A totally self-serving segment called “Products I Love Today,” which was a combo of shit she was paid to like and a cluster of eco-friendly crap. Shoes and trash-can liners. What a snore.
More ads.
“Messages from My Followers” was where I got into trouble, since most of her followers wrote to her to tell her how much they hated me.
“She didn’t have to pick so many messages from people who disapprove of me,” I growled. “She did it on purpose.” I gripped the wheel of the BFT and focused on the road. She didn’t own me. I owned the road .
“Sure she did,” Ian answered.
“The fuck?”
Ian wouldn’t answer, so Mal filled me in. “She’s generating heat for the series. I mean, obviously. If she didn’t get those five messages, she probably would have written them herself.”
“She probably did write them herself! I’m lovable. People like me. Right?”
“You make me swoon,” Ian said seriously from behind me.
“I’m head over heels, personally.” Mal swatted me as usual—more lightly in deference to my position behind the wheel. “And didn’t Charlotte lick your bronzer off this morning? I’d call that love.”
“You guys.” Assholes that they were, they made me feel better.
The last segment on O’Crazy’s podcast was called “On My Mind Today,” and it pissed me off. Because she announced that her topic was “humility.”
Oh, fuck me.
“You know the concept of the humblebrag, right?” O’Connor asked us all through the BFT’s exceptional speakers. “It’s where you draw attention to something by insisting it’s not good enough. Like, ‘my boss said this report was excellent, but I could see all the flaws.’ Got it?”
“Got it,” Mal answered her as if she were there. Please.
“Social media is a rich hunting ground for the humblebrag. People love to draw attention to themselves by looking modest. But the key word there is looking modest. Because these people never are modest.”
“Turn it off,” I barked. “It’s going to be a lecture about me being so damned vain.”
“Shut up,” Mal said.
Ian was back in his seat, and I saw him nod in the rearview.
“I’m thinking about modesty and humility today, and I bet you know why. If you’ve seen my recent engagement with Aftermath front man Archer Armstrong”—my heart fell—“which you can see in its entirety on my YouTube channel, I found the guy to be every bit as arrogant as I remembered from our so-called date. In fact, maybe more arrogant than I expected.”
“Turn this off!” I was getting hot. I had to unbutton my shirt to let some of the steam escape.
Mal just shook his head.
“But I came across a quote.” O’Connor was still annoying me on a cellular level. “It’s by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who was rightly accused of tremendous arrogance. His reply? He apparently said, ‘Better honest arrogance than false modesty.’ And that gave me pause, my friend. I had to sit and think that one over.”
“She had to sit and stir the brew in her witch’s kettle.”
“Shush,” Ian said. “This might end up going your way.”
“The fuck it will!”
“Shush. Back that up a little, Mal.”
“—and think that one over. I thought about those self-serving little humblebrags, and I thought about the chronic lack of self-confidence in the world today. Sort of two sides of the same coin. And I got to wondering. If you really are arrogant as hell, isn’t it more honest to just be arrogant out loud?”
“What did she just say?” I must have misheard. “Back that up again.”
“Shut up.” Mal was not being obedient.
“I suppose,” O’Connor was saying, “if you were as undeniably handsome as Archer Armstrong—and believe me, even those gorgeous photos don’t do the man justice—then maybe owning your arrogance has at least one point worthy of praise. At least he’s not hiding who he is.”
My mouth was hanging open. What the hell was I hearing?
“So, let’s give this one to Archer. He’s unbelievably vain, but at least he’s not hiding it under a shitstorm of self-serving humblebrags. As hard as it is for me to say this, good for you, Archer. Be who you are. Let that freak flag fly, you know? Okay. Don’t turn away—these people paid a lot of money for you to hear their ads, so pay attention, right?”
Holy crap.
Had Opinionated O’Connor just extended a strange sort of partially cruel olive branch?