Her Wild Oats (22 page)

“She’s an old high school girlfriend. They met at a reunion. Her name is Stephanie. I don’t know when she got involved in Jews for Jesus, or how she pulled him in.”

“Hmmm, I have some idea,” Sarah Jean replied. “But count your blessings that it’s not a friend of yours. Can you imagine how much harder that would be?”

“You act as though everyone does this all the time.”

“I think more would do it, if they thought they could get away with it. We’re all human.”

At that moment, Willie the drummer wandered into the dressing room, beer in hand. His clothes were rumpled, his hair stuck out in a weirdly asymmetrical cowlick, and he had a deeply confused, sleepy expression on his face. He scowled when he noticed Arizona sitting in the corner with Sarah Jean, and walked back outside, scratching under his armpits.

“Well, most of us are, anyway,” Sarah Jean continued. “It’s painful when the one we love falls for another. He just wants the fun, the excitement, the novelty of new love. He doesn’t realize how much pain he’s causing.”

“Well, I can’t compete with Stephanie and Jesus,” Arizona sighed. “That’s for damn sure.”

“You don’t have to compete with anyone. You’re extraordinary. I hope you know that. And I’m sorry I’m not able to give you the ‘he’s-a-dickhead-you’re-better-off-without-him’ party line. I’ve just, well, maybe you should and maybe you shouldn’t, but at least talk to the guy. Find out what’s really going on before you give up.”

“Of course,” said Arizona. “Of course that makes sense. And I will talk to him when I’m ready. Right now I’m not ready.”

“That’s OK too, sister.”

“So listen, Sarah Jean…how did you get so smart about all this stuff? To hear Oats tell it, you’ve been happily married to his dad for four hundred years.”

“Let’s just say I’ve used up my mistake and my secret, and both were doozies. More later; I think it’s time for sound check. Let’s go out there and cheer our boy on.”

*

Oats ran as fast as he could and arrived at the stage area to find Bobby Lee pacing around looking at his watch, the others tuning up, and Gary G. onstage testing the microphones. Billy shouted, to no one in particular, that he needed more bass in his monitor mix and Jeremy was tuning his pedal steel with an assortment of weird electronic gadgets. Oats wasn’t surprised; he’d noticed that pedal steel players seemed to tune a whole lot more than anyone else. He placed Madison on the stage next to his microphone stand and harp case, and waited for further instructions.

Finally Gary jumped off the stage and ran back over to the big mixing board in the center of the seating area. He had a microphone set up there that allowed him to talk to the band onstage without yelling, and he asked Oats to play a little something into his mic. He started a riff from “Flight of the Bumblebee” and Jeremy joined in for fun. Eddie and Melody and Hank Wilson looked delighted, shouting “Yay, go, Oats,” but Gary was in no mood for shenanigans.

“Tell your friends to cool it or we’ll have to clear the area,” he said.

Gary went down the line and had everyone play or sing a little something of their own. When he got to Dickie’s microphone they all realized that Dickie wasn’t there—and no one had seen him since the bus had rolled out of the parking lot at Murphy’s.

“Gary,” Bobby Lee said tensely, “did you do a head-count before we left?”

“Yes, bro, of course,” Gary answered. “But Dickie told me last night that he was going to be out late and would just crash on the bus so he wouldn’t have to deal with an early call. His curtains were closed but I peeked in and saw him sleeping, so I didn’t bother the guy.”

“Can you go get him now, please?”

“I’ll go,” Sarah Jean volunteered. “You all keep on with your sound check. Arizona and I will find Dickie.” Arizona rolled her eyes at Oats in a funny way, but Gary handed her his bus key and she followed Sarah Jean out to the parking lot.

They returned a few minutes later, clearly upset. They both ignored the festival guard who didn’t want them to get close without All Access passes, and walked right out on the stage as the band gathered around to find out what was up.

“Dickie pulled a fast one,” Arizona reported. “He used the oldest trick in the book, piling up pillows under a blanket so we’d think he was sleeping. I can’t believe we all fell for it.”

“But I heard him snoring!” at least five people said at once.

“Look at this. He’s got it on a tape loop.” Sarah Jean held out a tiny old-fashioned tape recorder and pushed “play.” Sure enough, snoring sounds emanated from the miniature speaker. Bobby Lee threw his hat down on the stage in disgust.

“Of all the childish bullshit crap,” he muttered. “I don’t believe this.”

“What are we going to do, boss?” asked Jeremy.

“Play the show, of course,” Bobby Lee said. “Billy, you’ll double on guitar. Gary, can you set him up with my Strat?”

Gary G. pulled Dickie’s amp over to near Billy, which meant everything else on the stage had to shift over. Billy immediately started asking for more guitar in the monitor mix before Gary had a chance to jump down and get over to the mixing board. Anyone could see that the sound man was not a happy guy.

Gary asked Bobby Lee to do a song, and Bobby Lee kicked off “Not if I See You First.” Oats thought he sounded great, but Bobby Lee was having some problems with his guitar and Billy still needed more of everything in his monitor. People kept coming up to Gary with questions that Pete Rawley would normally have handled, but all Gary G. wanted to do was make sure the band sounded good. He wasn’t interested in percentages of the gate or what the rider said about backstage refreshments, you could just tell.

At one point, a festival employee came over and asked him something about load-out and he snapped at the guy, a young man not much older than a teenager. No one could hear the whole conversation but they all saw the guy walk away muttering “shithead” under his breath.

But Gary wasn’t leaving well enough alone.

“Hey, asshole, you got a problem?”

“Yeah, I got a problem,” the guy yelled back. “It’s you!”

The festival employee swiveled around on one foot and started walking rapidly toward Gary G.

“Wanna make something of it?” he bellowed. “We can take it outside, dude.”

Gary stepped out of the sound-booth area.

“I dare you,” he said.

Oats saw Eddie and Hank Wilson, along with a bunch of other interested bystanders, crowd around the two men as they circled each other. The band members waited onstage, holding their instruments and poised to play. They’d had a lot of reasons to delay sound check on this tour: bad weather, bad directions, and everything in between—but delaying sound check because of bad moods was a first. You could feel the tension in the air. People began shouting “Fight, fight, fight, fight.” Gary and the festival guy squared off, doing a boxing-ring dance around the center of a grassy area next to the stage as the crowd formed a ring around them. The air felt still and expectant, reminding Oats of the weather right before a rainstorm over Clear Lake, when you can actually smell the huge gray clouds about to burst.

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud.” Bobby Lee put his guitar carefully in its stand and sprinted down the steps on the side of the stage. He pushed his way through until he was standing in between Gary and the other guy.

“Hey,” they all heard him say. “Hey, back off!” He was drowned out by “Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight,” and then Gary.

“Sorry, boss, but I have to do this.”

The two men moved in closer, eyes fixed on each other. Gary G. was not a big man, but he had a wiry toughness that made Oats think he’d probably won a lot of fights. The festival employee was much taller and bigger, not to mention younger, but he also looked a little soft around the middle. He took the first swing.

Gary moved aside just enough so that the kid’s punch grazed his shoulder but didn’t connect in full force with his face, as planned. The kid was thrown just a bit off-balance, giving Gary a chance to sock him in the stomach.

For a moment it looked like Gary had won, but it turned out the kid was tougher than that, and now he was really mad and moving in for the kill when suddenly there was an interruption as a woman’s voice shouted, “Hey! Step aside, please, ’scuse me. Step aside, thanks.” The voice was so bossy that both men turned around. Working her way through the crowd was Arizona Rosenblatt.

She looked calm and confident, and especially pretty somehow (Oats couldn’t help noticing), and she sauntered over to the guys just as if they weren’t slugging it out and just as if there wasn’t a mob of people around yelling for them to fight. In fact, she walked right in between the two, put up her hand, and said, “Will you excuse me a minute?”

Both men looked dumbfounded as they waited to see what she was going to do next.

Arizona whispered something in Gary’s ear. He looked surprised, then smiled, then started laughing. She walked over to the other guy and whispered something to him, too—his face broke out into a big wide grin. Arizona motioned for Gary to come over and the three of them talked. Then the most astonishing thing occurred. The men shook hands, smiling. Gary said something, both men laughed, and Gary walked back over to his mixing board as if nothing had happened.

“OK, fight’s over,” yelled Arizona. “Nothing more to see here.” Then she turned to Oats. “You, get back over there and finish your sound check.”

Oats ran over to where she was standing.

“Whoa, that was amazing. What did you say to them?”

“Aw, nothing much, dude,” Arizona answered. “Let’s just say I’m a problem-solver.”

*

Sarah Jean watched the sound check in awe. She’d known since Oats was a toddler that he had a special talent. She’d listened through the wall for years as he practiced his harmonica day after day, quickly absorbing the Reverend Walter Little’s lessons and moving on to recordings of all the greats. By age nine or ten he could play circles around many adult musicians who were considered excellent. But watching him take his place on the bandstand among half a dozen grown men; watching him command not only his instrument but the space around him with such professionalism; watching him control his tone and his pitch and come in tastefully on fills, playing his little waiting game to see if Jeremy or Billy was going to grab a solo first, then sliding in as though the half-a-second delay was not only intentional but musically essential; all of this caused her throat to catch in a peculiar way, made her reach into the mess in her purse to find a scrap of Kleenex; it would never do for her son to see her tearing up.

She remembered the first time she’d stepped onstage as a backup singer for a country-music diva, shaking with nerves. She and the other girls had shared everything from Wild Turkey to beta-blockers to get them through those first gigs, before they got used to stepping out on that riser in front of all the screaming fans. She remembered the encouraging smile on the guitar player’s handsome face, the camaraderie of the band after a great show. It had been the most exciting time of her life.

Watching from the wings as her son stepped up to his microphone and kicked some major ass on a solo, she wanted to say, “Honey, don’t blow it on the sound check—save some for later,” or adjust the one shirt-tail hanging out while wiping a smudge off his face and pushing stray hair out of his eyes. Instead, she let herself stand there and realize that her adorable boy had become a seasoned professional, right before her eyes.

She looked around at the men on stage. They all seemed comfortable and confident as they delivered hot licks and fills in between providing tasteful rhythmic backup for Oats’ solo. Sarah Jean glanced across the stage and happened to catch Bobby Lee’s eye. He was watching Oats too, a smile spreading from ear to ear—then he looked up at her and winked.

Meanwhile…

17

Kira Brantley sat on a little bench in the dressing room of a Rodeo Drive boutique, wearing a lace bra and panties and waiting for her Valium to kick in. She methodically held a Preludin pill up to each of seven overpriced pinkish-salmon-colored blouses. None of them matched quite exactly right, and she was frustrated by that—as well as by the fact that her new business seemed to have stalled. After an initial run of orders from friends who thought it would be cute to dress up their Oscar and Emmy statuettes with seasonal hats and wraps, the phone had been quiet. She needed to strategize with someone, but Arizona had not responded to any of her emails, texts, jpegs, or phone calls for the last couple of hours. Arizona had also said she’d help her pick a blouse… Kira felt lonely and abandoned. She reached into her Prada bag for her phone to see if she’d missed a call, when she was startled by a shriek coming from the direction of the sales floor.

“Oh my god!” someone cried. “Look at this dork on TV—hurry.”

“Oh geez, what a dufus!”

Kira ran out of the little room, not bothering to put on her clothes, to see what was up.

Two elegantly dressed saleswomen stood in a little alcove furnished with a wet bar, a couple of armchairs, and a flat-screen TV. Meant as a diversion for gentlemen who accompanied ladies on shopping excursions, the area was also used by employees when the shop was empty and the manager was out. Kira had been in the dressing room so long that they’d forgotten she was there, and one of the women had turned on the TV to watch the news.

There on the screen a man was led off by two police officers as an announcer said something about “Hollywood’s doctor to the stars.” Though the captive tried to shield his eyes and hide his face, there was no mistaking the frizzy hair sticking out every which way from beneath the copper pyramid perched on top of his head. Kira’s heart sank. The man was her beloved Dr. F., the genius who provided her with all her vitamins, including the very pill she was trying to match in a blouse. Kira barely noticed the two women staring at her as she ran back into the dressing room to grab her bag and count her remaining pills. She had to find Arizona, and fast. This was an emergency. A few minutes later, a distraught Kira ran out the door, desperately punching numbers into her cell phone. The self-absorbed shoppers on Rodeo Drive barely noticed the lovely woman running down the street in hysterical tears, wearing nothing but her underwear.