“Thanks,” Nomad said. “I appreciate you coming to the show.”
“We wouldn’t have missed it for anything. We can’t stay, though, we’ve got to get back home tonight. I’ll put the pictures up on Facebook. I know lots of people would love to see them. And if you ever come through Minden, we’re in the directory. Under Raymond Capriata.” She spelled the last name. Then she squeezed his hand with her thin fingers, and she smiled up at him. “I’m so happy to know,” she said, “that somebody from East Detroit High School is living out their dream. Most people aren’t able to do that, John. And I am proud to say I knew you back in the day.”
Nomad nodded. Back in the day. His bitter sense of sarcasm welled up, and he wanted to ask, Which day was that? The Tuesday when Quince Massey and two of his dickwads jumped me from behind in the parking lot, and when they were done they threw me into a garbage dumpster and slammed the lid shut? Or the Friday the booger-smeared note was left in my locker telling me that if I even looked at Sofia Chandrette again I could kiss my nuts goodbye? How about the Saturday, when I saw the knife in Quince Massey’s hand outside the Olive Garden and I hit him as hard as I could in the throat and put him in the hospital and the police came to my house to arrest me for battery? Yeah, back in the day.
But he did not ask these things, because by the time they had happened Cheryl was down in Louisiana, and maybe even then the cancer was a small darkness in her body.
Instead, he leaned forward and kissed Cheryl on the cheek, and he said, “You take care, okay?”
“I will.” She had turned a little bit pink. A flash of flirty came up, very suddenly, from the depths of the soulful eyes. “Nomad,” she said, and then her husband took her free hand and helped her through the crowd. She walked with a slow, careful step and she depended on the metal stick, and Nomad was struck by how very young all the other people in the room seemed to be, how young they moved and talked and looked, though by years they were not so much younger than Cheryl, nor so much younger than himself. He felt like twenty-nine had become the new fifty. But Cheryl was going home with her husband at her side, and a daughter when she got there. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
When he turned away, he was shoulder-grazed by a big dude in a dark gray hoodie who kept going, on his way out the front door. Nomad started to say, Where’s the fire? but he had the mental image of somebody hearing him and shouting Fire! out of drunken mischief or plain stupidity and that would not do. So he kept his mouth shut, a guy came up to him, said, “Fuckin’ mighty show, man!” and flashed a camera in his face, and Nomad sought out the Little Genius, who had returned again to monitor the merchandise sales.
George was not only keeping count of the sales, but was tracking other numbers on his cellphone. “Hits on the new video,” he told Nomad. “Three hundred and thirty-eight on YouTube, three hundred and sixty-one on MySpace, four hundred and twenty-six on the webpage. Not bad, it’s still early.”
“How many times have you watched it?”
“A few. Not many. You work everything out with those people? She told me she’d gone to school with you, wanted it to be a surprise. Was it?” George looked at him over the rims of his glasses.
“It was.”
“You want to sign some T-shirts while you’re over here?”
“I’m on my way to over there,” Nomad said, and entered the main room where in a few minutes, give or take, Gina Fayne’s band was going to start playing. He caught sight of Berke at the center of a group of five or six women down front, laughing and chatting each other up, and he noted—as he always did when he saw Berke mingling with her sisters—that a couple of them had shoulders like Longhorn tackles, were grim-lipped and fearsome in appearance while the others never failed to be hot enough to melt a steel dildo. It had to be the idea that they didn’t need men that was such a turn-on, Nomad thought. Maybe it was the fact that unless they were going for the butch style they never overplayed their sexuality like straight women sometimes did. Nomad had seen Berke in the company of some stunning women who made you want to, as Mike had put it, “try and cry”. It was the way they looked at you, too; either lingering, their eyes cool and remote, as if to dare you to cross an invisible line, or they sliced you up with a few quick glances and cut your throat with a knife-edged half-smile.
“Hi,” said the girl who stood next to his left elbow. She was holding a beer and she leaned in closer, because of the noise. “Sorry they acted like assholes.”
It was the auburn-haired girl who’d been with the two fake blondes. She looked to be about twenty or so, had light green eyes and a cute pug nose and the tattoo of a blue star on her right shoulder. “You’re in that band that just played,” she said, as if she wanted to make sure. Her eyelids were a little heavy. Maybe she’d been hitting more than just the beer tonight.
“Yeah,” Nomad said.
“You wanna go somewhere?” she asked, and she held up a set of car keys that had a silver Playboy rabbit head on the chain.
The thing about being in a touring band was, people didn’t realize what a grind it could be. They didn’t realize that the only glamor in it was manufactured. They didn’t realize that most of being on a tour was the miles and miles and hours and hours of travelling, and if not that then the waiting. There were three things that made the grind bearable: the actual gig, which could be either Paradise or Pandemonium; the frequent use of somewhat illegal but naturally-growing substances to ease the flow of electric energy given off by the Paradise so that one could sleep that night or the following day, or to lighten the self-anger or rage at one’s bandmates following the disaster of a Pandemonium.
The third thing?
Nomad was looking at it.
“Sure,” he said, as it had been said so many times before. “What about your friends?”
“Fuck ’em, they’re bitches,” the girl slurred. “And it’s my car, anyway.”
“Okay, but I think I should drive.”
“Yeah,” she said, and she gave him the keys, and it was that easy.
During the three hours that followed, Nomad was in an apartment off Amesbury Drive in North Dallas. There was evidence of a female roommate and a second bedroom with a closed door, but nobody came out of it. He smoked some weed with the girl, whose name was Tiffany and who worked somewhere at the Galleria doing something, he never could figure it out, and they made some margaritas in her blender and she showed him her collection of Barbie Birthstone dolls lined up on a shelf, they were real expensive she said and the only one she didn’t have yet was Miss Opal of October, and then she asked him if he wanted to take a shower. He recalled that Ninja Warrior was on TV when he said he thought that was an awesome idea.
When they were wet and soapy Tiffany asked him if it would be a big deal if she got her video camera and took some clips in the bedroom, that it got her hot all over again to watch the replay and anyway she liked to be directed. Nomad, who had already seen the dolphin tattoo leaping up from the pink cleft between her thighs and had thought Another fucking Flipper, just shrugged his shoulders. This was not a first. In fact, years ago he’d considered bringing along a black mask to situations like this. More than once, a girl had gotten her friend to hide in a closet with a videocam. The techno thing was becoming ridiculous, it was like people couldn’t survive without having some gadget near at hand. But there was no time for a rumination over the future of a civilization addicted to either porn or the electronic capture of special moments, because Tiffany was on her knees.