Chapter 29 Levi
My backup musicians and crew roll in Wednesday like a tornado you can’t outrun. A driver that Freddie hired pulls up mid-morning to pick me up in a sleek black SUV.
“Lee Streeter?” he asks.
“That’s me,” I tell him, then I slide in the back seat. My anonymous days are over.
He doesn’t offer his own name, and drives me to the crew’s rental house in Panama City Beach. A Gulf-front monster somebody booked off a photo. Eight bedrooms, a pool, a wet bar the length of a bowling lane. Leased three weeks, so the outfit has got a place to sleep and drink and stage out of.
Two black trailers and a box truck are already in the drive when we pull in.
By noon the place is full. Backup singers I’ve sung beside for years and couldn’t name one of their kids.
Two guitar techs. The drummer. Lighting guys hauling road cases off the truck.
A sound man already cussing at the rental’s wiring.
The stylist, who hugs me like we’re close and we’re not.
They spill onto the deck. Somebody opens the wet bar and the music comes on. The house fills up rowdy, like these houses always do.
I stand square in the middle of it and feel more alone than I have since I arrived in the Panhandle.
This is the work family. Twenty people who’d take a bullet for the tour and not one who’d take my call in the middle of the night.
They scatter like roaches the second the lights go down on the last night.
They always have. I never minded before.
Now I’ve got experiences to compare it against. The reality is brutal.
Freddie doesn’t stay with the crew at the party house because he’s executive level. He books his own place up the beach. Freddie keeps a floor of air between himself and the help.
Later that afternoon, when he comes to see me at my beach house, it isn’t a man killing time down a hall. It’s a decision he drove across town to carry out.
I hear a car in the drive, a door, and the car pulling away. He comes in already sizing up the place, those sharp eyes going over every inch of the room like I’ve hidden contraband in the flower vases.
First thing he does, the very first fucking thing, he sets a sweating water bottle on the long table by the window.
On the wood. No coaster. In a house Dante is trying his best to sell.
Then he drops his bag on the couch, right on the throw that smells a little like Dante now, and shoves it aside with the back of his hand to make room.
I snatch that throw off the couch, fold it over the chair, and slide a coaster under his water.
Jesus Christ.
Dante would have a fit. “Keep a coaster under that water bottle,” I hear myself say. “It rings the wood.”
Freddie looks at me. Looks at the coaster. Looks at me again. “Since when do you care about a water ring? I didn’t realize you knew what they are.”
“It’s a rental,” I say. “They charge you for every mark.”
It’s thin, and it isn’t the truth. A water ring on the table might cost Dante a sale from the rich buyer that’s circling around. The contract hasn’t been signed yet.
Somewhere this week I turned into a man who guards a house he’s about to get put out of. A water ring on his table feels like letting somebody hurt Dante. None of that goes anywhere near Freddie.
“The office chose well with the house,” Freddie says, drifting to the window, looking out at the water. “Private beach. No fans to bother you out here.” He glances around the big empty room, and I feel the question coming before he asks it. “Owner ever come by?”
“Never seen or heard from an owner. There’s not a soul in any of the houses on this street. Might even be corporate owned.”
“Anyone got a key besides you?”
And there’s the question I’ve been dreading.
The thread that runs straight to Dante if I let him pull it.
A lockbox on the side door, Dante letting himself in to check the place and walk a buyer through, the business of a sale running under Freddie’s rental.
If Freddie catches one corner of it, he’ll want to manage it. Managing it means meeting Dante.
I stay flat and keep my eyes off the side door. “Cleaner comes on Fridays. Property manager swung by to make sure I wasn’t throwing house parties. That’s it. Place came empty and it suits me empty.”
“Huh.” He takes that and tucks it away. Then he gets to the reason he drove over.
“I want people around you.” He says it like it’s already settled.
“Couple of the guys take the back rooms here, keep an eye, make sure you’re sleeping, make sure you’re —” he doesn’t say it, “— make sure you’re ready.
We open Saturday. I’m not walking into a two-week run with my headliner held together with tape. ”
And the hell of it is he’s not wrong. He’s got the receipts. He’s scraped me off a Nashville hotel floor more than once. He knows what I am alone with a bad night and a minibar. He’s just never known the difference between caretaking and owning. To Freddie they’re the same verb.
“No,” I say.
It comes out quiet and hits loud. I don’t draw lines. Never have. Freddie’s face changes, because I go along. That’s the deal, that’s what I’m here for. And here I am with my boots planted in a rented living room, telling him no for the first time.
“No?”
“Nobody stays at the house with me.” I’ve got reasons stacked high and I give him the ones that’ll hold.
“Crew in here round the clock and I don’t sleep at all.
You know I don’t sleep with people in the house, never have.
I’ll be worse by Saturday, not better. I need the privacy.
I’ve been better down here than I’ve been in years and that’s why. ”
All true, every word.
A house full of crew means somebody figures out what’s going on with Dante and the house sale.
“I’ll do the work. I’ll hit every call. Just let me have the house.”
Freddie studies me a long time. I’ve handed him a symptom dressed up as a preference. I can’t sleep with people around.
“Fine,” he says, and it isn’t fine. “You can have your privacy.” He picks his bag off the couch. “But I’ll be checking on you.”
I know he means it. Freddie doesn’t like not knowing what I’m doing. He’ll come find out for himself. That’s a given.
I walk him out. He thumbs at his phone on the front step and an Uber comes up the drive inside of a minute. Freddie doesn’t drive himself, never has. Driving is for the help. I don’t breathe right until it clears the gate and he’s on the other side.
The stylist comes for my new beard that same afternoon. She sits me in a kitchen chair with a towel around my neck, a little battery clipper, and her shears. Talks about the humidity wrecking her flat iron. I watch it happen in the black mirror of the window.
It comes off in about a minute. The beard I started growing before I got on the plane.
The beard that let me be a nobody at a bonfire, that let a bartender slide me a plate and not place me.
And it surrenders without a word to a fifteen-dollar clipper.
The jawline comes back. The one on the poster that’ll be going up.
I watch the line of it come up out from under the clipper, sharp and clean and famous, and there’s no fight in it at all. Days of being nobody, gone in one pass, and the old one walks right back in like it never left and puts its feet up.
Then she wets my hair down and takes the shears to it.
Off my ears, off the back of my neck, every inch I’ve let grow since I got on the plane coming away in wet dark pieces onto the towel, down onto the beard already on the floor.
She works product through what’s left, combs it the way the photos do, steps back.
“There he is,” she says, pleased. She means it kind, and it’s the worst thing anybody’s said to me since I got here.
Like the beard was the costume and this is the truth.
I run a hand over my own bare jaw and don’t recognize it. I look like a man who sells out arenas. I look like a stranger. I look like the end of everything I want is coming faster than I can stop it.
She packs up and goes. The house empties out.
The one human thing I have left is the cheap phone in my front pocket.
I take it out for a peek between things all day.
While the stylist worked, while the crew argued about the sound rig over at the party house.
Dante’s been grounded at the Miami airport since morning, a storm sitting on the Gulf, and he’s been texting during the wait.
Answering him is the only stretch I feel like myself.
Dante: Still at the gate. Storm won’t move. Packet’s killing me. Broker wants everything notarized.
Levi: You’ll have it all done Friday and complain the entire time.
Dante: I don’t complain. I narrate hardship.
Levi: That’s a real fancy way to say complain.
Dante: Probably. Buyer might be coming back to see the place again. Thursday or Friday, she won’t commit.
Levi: Don’t worry. You hooked her the first time.
Dante: We’ll see. Old money likes to make you sweat before it lets you win.
Levi: You’d know. You invented making people sweat.
Dante: I prefer the term creating urgency.
Dante: How are you holding up over there? Everything good?
Levi: Yeah. All good.
Dante pictures me bored, rattling around an empty place, killing a slow week till he’s free. He doesn’t picture the beard now on the kitchen floor, or the soundcheck I’ve got at six, or me getting bolted back together.
Levi: How’s the family?
Asking is the closest I’ll ever get to a family like that.
Dante: Clara’s still texting me about my phone habit. And I’m flying home with a brick of frozen pernil in my carry-on. If this storm ever lets me. My mother doesn’t trust me to eat.
Levi: What’s pernil?
Dante: Roast pork shoulder, low all day, skin like glass. I’ll make you that too. If you want.
Levi: I want. You’re building a Cuban restaurant menu.
Dante: Keeping a list. You’ll eat it eventually. I’ll hide it in your fridge.
Levi: How big is the rest of the family? Cousins and all that.
Dante: Big enough my mother cooks for a neighborhood and calls it “just us.”
Dante: Are you eating? Or is it chips and pie again?
Levi: You’re starting to sound like your mother.
Dante: Answer the question.
Levi: I’m eating.
Dante: Levi.
I grin at the little screen. I can picture him too, folded into an airport chair with a stack of paperwork on his knees, one thumb going, sleeves shoved up over tanned forearms. It’s the best minute of my day.
And I’m lying to him with every word I leave out.
He was supposed to be back today. If the sky had behaved, he could’ve come by this afternoon and walked straight into the trucks, the crew, Freddie. Instead, a thunderstorm parked itself between us on the one day the caravan rolled in. First time in my life I’ve been grateful to weather.
But storms move on, and there’s one more thing I have to send. It’s the hardest one, because it has to sound like nothing at all.
Levi: Gimme a call first if you head this way. I need to straighten up the place.
I watch the dots.
Dante: Sure. I’ll text you.
No hitch, no second look. I get away with it. Whatever’s going on in this house, he won’t walk into the middle of it. I tell myself that’s protecting him.
I tried to tell him the truth on the phone. I couldn’t do it. I need to say it to his face, where he can say or do whatever he needs to while I stand there and take it because I deserve it.
I’ll tell him in person. This weekend. Once his paperwork’s done and the buyer’s been through again and he’s got an hour that isn’t spoken for.
I’ll get him somewhere private and say the thing straight and let it fall however it falls. Do it right. Do it like Dante deserves.
I feel almost good about the decision.
Tomorrow’s the production run-through, and the tailgate songs are already cuing up behind my eyes, sliding back into my throat like they never left.