Black Elvis (16 page)

After Jean dropped us back in Paris, we went straight to the train station and headed to Switzerland, where the really good money towns were. Since what you earn as a street musician is the change in folks' pockets, you want to situate yourself in a country where the pocket change means something. Also, the Swiss are so orderly, so painfully aware of anything remotely out of place in their little windup towns, that they tend to throw money at you out of a kind of civic duty; they think if they pay enough, you'll go away. On a busy street in Bern, our first stop, we made nearly two hundred francs, and no one watched us for more than thirty seconds at a time.

We camped. Most towns had campgrounds on their outskirts, with reasonable facilities, a laundry room, perhaps even a Ping-Pong table or a bar. Wendy had a small tent, and every night, after a few hours of partying and maybe practicing a new song, we'd lay out our sleeping bags. I'd watch her kick out of her jeans, roll them up into a ball, then slide in. I grew to know her smell, which reminded me of sourdough bread. I learned the rhythm of her breathing when she slept, deep and even and a bit like surf. Occasionally, I'd make some kind of gesture—rub her shoulders, maybe, or try to nibble her ear—but although she'd let it go on for a minute or two, eventually she'd always push me away. When a campground had the right kind of phone, I'd practice my technique, calling the number of this nurse I'd gone out with one time, Rita, but with no luck. Foreign voices spoke to me, and I'd quickly hang up. I had no plan for what to do if I ever did get through, if Rita ever did answer. I knew she'd remember me. She was nice enough, older, maybe thirty, and had a kid. We'd eaten Chinese food at a place in the neighborhood. We'd just had nothing to say. Our waitress had taken our order, then disappeared for a long time. We'd heard shouting from the kitchen. We were the only people in the place. Finally, after another twenty minutes, during which she told me all about that evening's episode of
Wheel of Fortune
, the cook had come out to retake our order, very apologetically. He had almost no English at all, and we'd pointed to the items of the menu. For some reason, I still had Rita's number in my pocket.

A week passed, then another. We went up to Amsterdam, where I'd started my trip. The tall ships were coming, which meant crowds, which meant money. Money was the thing that kept us together, the subject of most of our conversations, the closest thing we had to a direction or goal. We stayed with Wild Bill, who ran a flophouse-style hostel, with strictly enforced house rules about being out of the house between 9:00
A.M.
and 4:30
P.M.
, and required attendance at an afternoon tea at 5:00
P.M.
He was Dutch, but long ago he had lived for a while in New York. Underneath his bossiness and generally irritable veneer, I suspected he was actually a nice guy. "Hey, look who it is," he said, when we showed up on his doorstep. "The Voodoo Child."

He gave us a room all to ourselves. It was tiny—there was barely space to stand up, but it had an actual bed in it, and even a tiny dresser. "Weren't you embarrassed?" she asked. "Going around pretending to be Hendrix?"

"It was like being in a tribute band," I said. "Just without the band. One of the few things I do well is imitating Jimi. I've been working on it since I was twelve. In high school, I was a god."

"You are
so
much better off with me." She broke off a piece of a Toblerone and popped it in her mouth, offered me the rest. "Listen, the Gnats are planning a big jam tomorrow night. They asked us to play." The Cashville Gnats were a bluegrass quartet made up of two Americans, upright bass and guitar, and a star banjo player named Jens, who was German and all of about sixteen. They had a mandolinist, too; I didn't know where he was from. We'd seen them in Bern and also Zurich—they always seemed to be leaving a town when we got there, or vice versa. It figured they'd come for the tall ships.

"How do you know?"

"I ran into Matt, the bass player, at the train station."

"You did?"

"When I went to get French fries. He was getting some, too."

"How come I didn't see him?"

"I don't know. Because you're oblivious? Anyway, I told him we'd come play."

"I don't want to play with them. We won't make any money."

"Maybe not, but it will be fun. Don't be a baby. Now, let's go see if we can find something to eat."

"Matt? How do you even know his name?"

"He told me. What's your problem?"

We played all the next morning down by the harbor. Two teenage girls had a stand selling soft ice cream cones, and around noon they brought us over a couple. The tall ships were due in the following morning, and the city was filling up with tourists. According to a headline I'd seen outside a newsstand, Iraq had just attacked Iran, but both these places seemed so remote to me as to almost be fictional. My jeans pockets were stuffed to bursting with guilders, so heavy I'd had to crank my belt another notch to keep my pants up.

A young couple was making out on a bench, really going at it. Wendy took an extra-long lick at her ice cream, then cleared chocolate from the corner of her mouth with the end of her finger. "I should call Tomislav," she said.

"Why haven't you?" I'd been wondering this for a while. I'd even begun hopefully to entertain the idea that there might not
be
a Tomislav.

"That wasn't our deal. Our deal was time apart. You aren't apart if you keep checking in."

I crunched the rest of my cone, swallowed. "I'm going to have to leave," I said. "We're going to have to split up."

She licked again and thought some more. A group of big, black birds pecked at the cobblestones a few yards away. "You mean it?"

"I have to live life to its fullest. Carpe diem."

"Don't T-shirt philosophy me. Speaking of time, yours is improving."

"I didn't know anything was wrong with it."

"You drag a little. More than a little, actually. But you are getting better."

"Well, that's nice." I checked my watch. "We don't want to be late for tea. Bill will toss us out on our asses."

"What?" she said.

"Nothing."

"I told Matt we'd be there."

"I might hit Greece," I said. "Go lie on a beach someplace and eat grape leaves."

She was studying me. "All right."

"All right, what?"

"You know. Maybe the normal rules don't apply to us."

One of the crows took a vicious swipe at another. Then the lot of them took off over a warehouse like a gust of sooty wind.

In theory the things you want most, the things you've waited longest for, ought to be the sweetest, but everyone knows this isn't always true. The apples reddening so attractively on the tree turn out to be mushy or tasteless; the fantasized-about, dreamed-of career turns out to be just another desk in a cubicle in an office with bad air. The dope so delicately traced with red fibers turns out to give you a massive headache, the big game is a blowout, the expensive shoes just make your feet hurt.

I thought about getting a hotel or something, but we didn't have so much saved that we could afford to blow a lot of guilders. Plus, that would have made it a big deal, and the idea was that it was not. People assumed we were a couple anyway—certainly Bill did. To go check into some fancy place would have upped the stakes too much. This was casual. We just needed each other, and the bottle of Côtes du Rhône we picked up on the way back.

We'd had tea; we'd had dinner. There was still some pastel light coming through the tiny window by the bed. It all went reasonably well. She told me she'd remember me. "How?" I said. I was happy the way I was happy once on Halloween, when I'd gone out twice, in different costumes, spread out double the candy I deserved on the floor of my room and started to divide it taxonomically: Snickers and Baby Ruths, 3 Musketeers, Hershey's, right on down to the lowly boxed raisins and worthless candy corn. But she never answered. After a while, I realized she'd fallen asleep.

The next day we went out and made some money in the late morning, but then she wanted to rest, and I went for a long walk around the city. I was furious with myself, because I was pretty sure I was in love. I wanted more nights like last night. I thought about ways of fixing things. Did tumors ever just go away by themselves? I tried to imagine how that might happen. It wasn't something you just coughed up like a hairball. Perhaps I could be the recipient of miraculous news from the States.
It was a mistake. We mixed your X-rays up with someone else's! All is forgiven!

I didn't want to play with the Gnats, and I was reasonably sure they didn't want me to play with them, either. One guitar is plenty for bluegrass. Plus, Wendy was right about my time—I couldn't even get the phone trick right. What they needed was a fiddle. I'd seen them watching us back in Zurich, enemy faces among the tourists, appraising, scouting our little Division III team for its pro-quality running back.

At 7:30
P.M.
, we all met down by the docks. Wendy had put on a sleeveless black top that showed off her figure, and she had a purple scarf that fluttered in the evening breeze. The ships had arrived, a leafless forest of masts and rigging. I remembered a book my father had bought for me when I was twelve, called simply
Pirates
. I searched the decks of these enormous vessels for men in breeches and blousy shirts. "They were ruthless," he'd told me. "They took what they wanted. They made up their own rules."

The air held the mingled harbor scents of fish and diesel exhaust and open ocean. I looked at her, I looked at the gathering Gnats, and then it hit me—the fix was already in. She hadn't just run in to the bass player—she'd made a deal with him. It was why she'd finally agreed to sleep with me—out of guilt. When we started up, I stood on the far side of the action, watching and listening as the five of them burned their way through some very professional-sounding stuff. I'd learned a lot from Wendy over the past weeks. We did "Uncle Pen," and "Salt Creek," and "Way Downtown." They had other, more complicated material up their sleeves, too, including "Take Five," and a banjo version of "Flight of the Bumblebee." I sat those out, resentment growing in me. When it came my turn to solo on "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," I stomped on the fuzz pedal, and started playing Jimi's solo from the Woodstock version of "Fire." A couple of people cheered.

In a jam, it's customary to take two choruses, then shut up and let the next guy go. Maybe if you're all having a good time, you go around again. But I wouldn't stop. I did all my tricks: between the legs, behind the back, playing with my teeth (you don't actually get your teeth on the strings, but it looks that way). From "Fire," I segued into "The Star-Spangled Banner." Mostly, I was just making noise. There were maybe a hundred people watching, hundreds more moving past along the waterfront behind them, enjoying the cool evening, happy to be out and about where people were alive and mingling, and where there were tall ships.

By the time I was done the Strat was out of tune and I was sweating profusely. I stepped back and avoided Dennis's icy stare. Wendy was clearly mortified, but I didn't care. I unstomped my pedal and tried to strum along, but it sounded so bad that I just turned down the volume and stood there, watching as Jens took center stage again, sending busy, silvery ladders of notes up into the night sky.

"You are a jerk," she told me, when we took a break.

"I knew what was going on as soon as I saw that scarf."

"You're crazy."

"It's like a signal or something."

"Was that one of your visions? It's a
scarf
. I thought it would look nice."

Jens was signing autographs. The other Gnats were popping open bottles of Grolsch, with those cute little porcelain stoppers.

"I'm not dying," I said. She just stared at me. "The cancer thing is a dog I know, Ralph. I just borrowed it." The perspiration at my collar was getting chilly with the breeze coming in off the water. "So, I'm a jerk. Proven. It was a stupid lie, but I didn't think it mattered because we'd never see each other again anyway, and now I see that it does matter and I can't do anything about it." I hoisted my gig bag over my shoulder and picked up the amp. "I'm going back to Bill's," I said. "Have fun with your new friends." After a few steps, I stopped and turned. "Aren't you going to say anything?"

"Like what? That I'm disappointed?"

"You didn't say I was wrong."

"Maybe I knew all along," she said. "Did you ever think of that?"

She came in very late that night, smelling of beer, climbed into bed, and turned her back to me. I listened to her sleep and thought this must be what a marriage feels like after it's gone past the point of repair.

In the morning, Bill's houseboy brought us coffee and a cinnamon muffin as he always did. "They're invited to three festivals in the States next summer," said Wendy, brushing crumbs off her napkin and writing her address and phone number down for me. "I'm playing with them tomorrow at the Leidseplein. Then, in a week, I'm going home."

I did the same for her with mine. It seemed we were done talking about it, which was probably best anyway. "Just remember," I pointed out, "now you're looking at a five-way split."

I went to Germany. For eight humid days, I traveled and busked with a harp player I met in Heidelberg, a short Austrian named Ernst, but he smelled bad and sang even worse, and one night I woke up in the park where we were sleeping to find him attempting to make off with Satin Lives. I tackled him, but he surprised me with a head-butt, grabbed the guitar and ran off into the night. I figured it was a sign.

The number Wendy had given me turned out to be for a bar at a driving range outside of Bel Air, Maryland. "Nineteenth Hole," the guy said, when I called from the Brussels airport. Our connection had a bad echo. Three days since my fight with Ernst and my head still hurt. I couldn't believe I'd finally gotten the phone trick to work.

I asked anyway.

"Windy?" he shouted. "I don't know—I'm inside. They were talking rain for later on. You sound long distance. Are you long distance?"