the precaution of slamming back several drinks in the hotel bar before Mr. Ketchum’s scheduled pickup time.
I joined in to help as Samantha began taking the chairs from atop the tables.
“So, how do they pick who gets what story?” she asked as she flipped a chair down onto its feet, “how did it end up being you?”
“Why? You got a problem with me?”
“No, no. I just wonder how come you got picked to come here.”
I grinned. “Punishment,” I said.
“Punishment?"
"Well," I laughed, "you’re not exactly their favorite person."
“I’m not?” she asked sarcastically.
"Well, the thing is, neither am I,” I said, “so that’s why they sent me to you. Rumor has it that they couldn’t figure out if the best way to stop you was with a restraining order or to give up and send somebody out here. ‘Hey we’ve got this screwup David, let’s send him!’”
We finished the chairs and I leaned back against the Misnomer Bar.
“So, you’re appeasing me?” she asked.
“Hey, I would’ve voted for the restraining order myself. But it wasn’t up to me.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that.”
Samantha smiled. She then walked over to where I was, right next to me in fact. Just as I was wondering what in the world she was about to do, she leaned over the bar and grabbed something—I couldn’t see what—from behind the counter. As she did so, she was very close to me; apparently close enough to give away my little secret.
“Have you been drinking?” she asked.
“Not here,” I replied.
Samantha rolled her eyes and then once again leaned over and replaced the unknown something behind the bar.
We finished with the chairs and Samantha went to the sound room, where she flipped a switch causing dozens of electronic components to whir into life. “You know,” said Samantha, “I’ve been thinking about your article. And I’ve been thinking that...well, what do you think about the idea of a book?”
“A book? You mean writing one?”
“Yeah, I mean writing one.”
“Instead of an article?”
“No, not instead of an article. God, no. You write the article, but you also write the book, see? I mean, if you think about it, this is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. You’re here at the beginning of all of this—well, not quite the beginning, you’ve missed the very beginning, but close enough to the beginning since we’re not famous yet. This is an amazing opportunity. Once the Terre Haute scene explodes, then this book will be hot. And you’ll have the jump on everybody. You’re already here. I’ve got pictures of every single set of every single band that has ever played here. So that would help. You just interview everybody. You know, do that whole scene.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “You have pictures of every single band that’s ever played here?”
“Every single set even. I take a couple pictures of every set that’s played. It started on opening night. I just brought the camera and took pictures of everybody because it was opening night. Then I thought, ‘why not do that every night?’ So I have.”
I looked at her, examining her, admiring her. “Man, I wish that I could be as driven as you are.”
“You could be. Just stick around Terre Haute a while and I’ll help you,” she said. “Have you ever written a book?”
“No. I tried to write a novel once, but it never got finished. It’s been twelve years, so I don’t think chances are very good for it getting finished. Like I said, I don’t have that drive. How do you do it?”
“All you’ve gotta do is look around and see what miserable stuff happens to people when they don’t do what they feel,” she said, “It’s like my friend Monica—she’s miserable. And God, that just makes me so mad. I see her in the supermarket the other day, and she’s draggin’ her two kids around and she looks like she’d rather be anywhere else in the world. And she’s married to a real scum—I see him here at the club sometimes, trying to pick up college girls, and he knows that I see him, and he knows that I tell her, but he just doesn’t give a shit. So, here’s this good woman who’s wasting away because she was too afraid to pick up and go. Instead, she got married, had a few kids and ‘settled down.’ And now she’s too afraid to just dump that jerk and go at it on her own. It makes me so mad and it’s not even my life, you know? So, if I want motivation, all I have to do is think of her.”
“Or your mom?”
Samantha stopped dead in her tracks. The emotion drained from her face like water swirling down the drain of a bathtub. She slowly looked up toward me, and when finally she spoke, her voice faltered, seemed to lose some of its cherished self-confidence. “Dad told you?” she murmured, “Or did...did someone else?”
“Your dad told me.”
Samantha seemed to loosen a bit with relief. “Yeah,” she said softly, “Yeah, I do sometimes think about her. When I’m really in need of motivation.” A bit of the confidence came back into her face and she began to walk again. “Thank God I seldom need motivation that badly. And neither should you, young man.”
“Well,” I said, “we can’t all be fearless now can we? Some of us have to be the ones who just go wherever we’re told to go, doing whatever we’re told to do. Sometimes,” I said, “you’ve got no choice.”
“Is that what you are? The guy who does what he’s told?”
“Absolutely.”
“So then why are you being punished, if you’re the guy who always does what he’s told?”
“Well I used to be the guy who was the tremendous pain in the ass. But I’ve been, shall we say, shown the error of my ways.”
“So what did you do?”
“Oh God, let’s please change the subject.”
“What did you do?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What was it?”
“Oh look,” I said, pointing to two kids approaching the front door, “Customers.”
The truck / the van...
As I sat on my non-bar stool wondering what, pray tell, this evening at the club Seattle in Terre Haute, Indiana might have in store for me, someone tapped me on the shoulder.
“Excuse me,” said a female voice from behind me. As I turned around I was nearly poked in the eye by one spike of a massive orange hairdo.
“Whoa!” I cried and as I jerked back I damned near fell off of my stool. Only my catlike reflexes saved me. Oh, all right, it was Steve reaching out and grabbing my shoulder that saved me.
“Oh geez, I’m sorry,” said the girl who was attached to the orange hair.
“It’s okay,” I said, “catlike reflexes you know.”
“What?”
“Nothing. What’s up?”
The girl seemed somewhat nervous for some reason or another. It was strange to see such a sheepish expression on the face of someone who sported spiky orange hair, a nose-ring and a tattoo of a lizard winding its way down her arm. But the nervousness definitely was there. She cleared her throat and then said in a voice that was quite quiet for a nightclub, “You’re the writer, right?”
“Writer Right. That’s me,” I said and held out my hand, “David.”
As she raised her hand to shake mine I could see that she was actually trembling slightly. “Lisa,” she said, “Um, I was wondering... actually my friends and I were wondering... how did you manage to get ahead like that?”
At first I was puzzled by her question. It took me a moment before realizing that she was talking about my working for a major magazine. I almost laughed aloud at the thought that this girl was under the impression that I had somehow "gotten ahead." Perhaps I should have told her that I was probably the least ahead person in this room. Instead I opted for my usual sort of reply. “Well, I’ll tell you,” I said, “I had to sleep with an awful lot of people. Some of them I didn’t mind but the publisher is this hairy old guy and that just wasn’t enjoyable.”
I don’t know. Maybe it’s my d
elivery. Many times I say things and people don’t seem to know if I’m being serious or funny. Or creepy. I don’t know. To me I seem to possess perfect comedic timing. But I suppose that I must not possess perfect comedic timing because it seemed to take this girl a moment to realize that I was joking. Once she did realize then she, of course, did laugh. Too much. Then she said, “No. Really.”
“‘Really?’ Well ‘really’ I’m not exactly sure. I got my first fake I.D. when I was 16 and my friends and I used to hit every bar in L.A. that we could get into.”
“L.A., wow,” she said enviously.
“Yeah, ‘L.A. wow.’ I just got hooked on the whole nightclub lifestyle. We’d see a dozen different bands a week and we became experts on the whole music scene. So it just made sense for me to start writing about it. One gig lead to another which lead to another until I reached the pinnacle of my profession, said pinnacle at which you now see me.”
“Wow,” she said.
“Wow,” I echoed. I lit up a new cigarette and waited for her to say something. If you wait long enough, they always do.
“You know,” she began, “I’ve always wanted to do what you do.”
“Chain smoke?”
“No, not that. I’ve always wanted to write for a music magazine.”
“Can you write?” I asked.
“Yeah. At least I think I can. I get As in English. I know what a gerund is.”
“What’s a gerund?” I asked.
She laughed. Odd thing that. Because when asking this question I actually was serious. I remember that a gerund has something to do with grammar but exactly what I couldn’t tell you. Don’t hold it against me.