Chapter 33 Levi
There’s a man getting ready for a show in a borrowed bathroom in a rented house, and the face he’s working on isn’t mine. I’m watching him do it from behind my own eyes.
He’s good at it. He knows where the hands go. Works the product into the hair like the stylist showed him. Turns the jaw to the light and checks the line of it, the famous one, the one they shaved back into being. He doesn’t flinch from the mirror. He’s not the one looking out of it.
I’m further back than that.
The face is sweating. The heart’s going hard. I can feel it the way you feel a storm through a window, happening, real, none of it reaching me.
This is the old trick. I’d forgotten I had it. Years I lived back here, letting Lee Streeter wear me to work. Two weeks on a beach made me think I’d quit it for good. I hadn’t.
You step back far enough and the world goes to a movie of itself, muffled and far. The man up front runs the show. The part that hurts stays back here, where it can’t get on stage and ruin the show.
The car brought me to the crew’s party house in Panama City Beach an hour ago and it was already going.
Somebody opened the wet bar before dark.
A bottle going around, a joint on the kitchen island, the bass coming up through the floor into my boots.
A backup singer puts a drink in my hand.
I hold it a while and set it down full on a counter, and nobody notices, because nobody’s looking at the man.
They’re looking at the headliner, and the headliner doesn’t need it.
The Martin came in the car with me, same as it always does.
It goes where I go on a run, every city, every hotel, and it never gets played.
It sits on a stand at the back of the stage all night where I can see it, and a tech carries it off after, and that’s the job I give it.
Nobody on the crew has ever asked why. They think it’s superstition. Let them.
Here’s what I’d tell anybody who thinks the bottle’s the problem.
The bottle was never the disappearing. The bottle was just the cheap door in.
I’m gone tonight and stone sober doing it, gone somewhere no drink could put me.
The job does it better than tequila ever did.
I move through a room full of every chemical there is and not one of them calls to me. There’s nothing to want back here.
Freddie comes through around eight. I straighten before I know I’m doing it.
He’s not staying. He’s got the video to nurse, the statement going out, a dozen fires.
He crosses the room fast and stops in front of me.
His eyes go over my face. Down to my hand.
No drink in it. Over to the counter, the full glass sitting where I left it.
Back up to my pupils. He’s scanning for the bottle. It’s the one gauge he trusts.
“You’re good,” he says. Not a question. He’s already decided. “Show’s clean tonight. No improvising, none of whatever that bonfire was. You do the set the way we built it and the video’s a footnote by Monday. We clear?”
“Clear.” It comes out flat and even, the trained voice, no help from me at all. It satisfies him.
He’s three feet away with his attention on me, and he can’t see a thing.
It’d be funny if I were up front enough to laugh.
His one job in life is knowing where I am, and I have never been further from a room he’s standing in.
He’s got a gauge for drunk. He doesn’t have one for gone.
He pats my shoulder and goes, satisfied he checked.
When the door shuts behind him I pick up the case and take it down the hall to the back bathroom, because it’s the only door in this house that locks and there’s half an hour before the cars.
The party goes on without me on the other side of it.
Nobody comes looking for the headliner until it’s time to load him up.
The low notes come when it’s quiet.
That’s the flaw in the trick. It muffles a room, but muffling only takes the treble.
Bass comes through anything. You can shut every door in a house and still feel the kick drum in your chest. A few things in my life are pitched that low, and in the few minutes before the cars, with the room gone quiet, they find me.
The burner first. I take it out of my front pocket and read my text to him.
Under it, nothing. I can still see him handing this phone over with him leaned forward on the chair arm, dead serious, that little crease he gets between his brows when a thing matters.
I put the phone away. A minute later I take it back out and check again, because that’s what my hands do now, check the dead screen.
I tell myself the silence is him driving, busy, anything. I know better. A silence that total is a door that slammed shut. I just don’t know how hard, or what he’s thinking on the other side. That’s the one pitched lowest.
The kindest time of my life is curdling in a good man’s memory right now, this minute, and I can’t reach it. It comes up through the floor, through the boots, through everything I put between me and the world. Nothing keeps it out.
And the other one, further down still. I was going to tell him. The world told him first. I never got the room, and I’ll never get it now.
That fatal mistake is on me. I can’t blame anybody else for it. I was selfish. I wanted my time with him and now it’s over.
The case is on the tile against the tub where I set it down. It rides where I ride now.
I’m crouched over it with my thumbs on the latches.
The lid comes up. The spruce gone gold, the wear on the upper bout where my arm’s lived since I was seventeen.
The only thing in any of these rooms that’s mine, that nobody handed me, that nobody can put a name on.
My hands go to it like they’re going home.
And I come up. That’s the danger in this one. The show guitars don’t do it. I can play a show guitar from a mile back all night. It’s a tool. It stays out front with the man. This one reaches all the way back to where I’m standing.
The second my hand closes on the neck I’m at the surface, here, in the room, and everything I spent all night burying is right here with me.
The deck chair. The open door. The hand on my back. A voice saying get some sleep. A screen that won’t light up.
My hands stop dead on the strings. This is the guitar I picked over the bottle the night he turned me down. I sat on a cold floor and bled into it instead of drinking, and reaching for it was reaching for the thing that wanted me living, and the reaching worked.
That’s exactly why I can’t touch it now.
To play it is to come up and stay up, and a man standing all the way up, chest cracked open over a fella who’s never going to answer his phone, has no business in front of a field full of people. There’s no playing this guitar a little. It’s all or nothing.
I close the case. Latch one, latch two. I set it back against the tub, where it can stay being the realest thing I own and the one thing I’m not allowed tonight. And I feel myself step back as I do it.
The room goes back to a movie featuring Lee Streeter. He comes up front to run things. I let it happen. I help it happen. He’s safer than I am. He can do the work.
Somebody bangs on the bathroom door. The cars are here.
On the way out I pass the black glass of the window and the jaw checks itself, the famous jawline. Nothing in the eyes, which is the job done right. The dark burner in my pocket. The Martin in its case in my hand, going where I go.
Thousands of people are waiting to scream a name at a man who isn’t there.
The ghost goes to work.