Red Hot Blues (3 page)

His smile was melting honey, his gaze, a
unicorn on a rainbow.

I was
so
in love with him.

At that moment, my back up against the wall,
Rolling Rock can in my hand, Brett’s body so close to mine, I
flashed back to all the reasons why this
was
real, why it
did
make sense, why this
was
meant to be. In those
few seconds—maybe even
milliseconds
because I can’t remember
the time of it too well—I forgot all about my mother’s myriad
boyfriends, her lovers, her husbands and ex-husbands and all the
crap
I’d had to grow up with! I forgot about money and weird
men who sometimes looked at me like they wanted me more than my mom
and I forgot about moving, getting on the road, hot desert suns,
cacti, changing schools.

I forgot about dad.

I forgot about everything.

In that moment, I believed in love. True
Love. And The One.

And then he kissed me.

It was the dawn after six months of night. It
wasn’t “insecurities” or “fears” or “lack of self esteem.” It was
Love, baby. Real and
true
fucking
Love. I knew that
then, and I know it now.

His tongue entered me with a smoothness that
felt like velvet. His right hand slid up my back, taking my dress
up with it, baring the back of my thighs to the cool breeze. The
dress snagged momentarily against the wall behind me.

I fell onto him. My arms wrapped themselves
around him and I was on a rainbow, flying, soaring to that pot of
gold and gliding on thermals. I heard him groan, such a manly
sound. And I remember thinking that very thing:
Such a
manly
sound, and yet we’re both just teens.

I tasted booze on his lips, but I didn’t
care. Not much. Because I knew he wasn’t drunk. And I loved him. I
knew that. Why? I don’t know. But what I felt, in that moment, was
love. “You’re drunk,” I said as a joke.

He pulled away, a glint of something like
sorrow in his eyes. I saw, in him, at that moment, what I’d seen in
my own eyes every day: Fear, Uncertainty, Questioning.

He was just like me.

He wasn’t the hot quarterback, the sexy kid
in school—not in that moment. In that moment, he was a boy, kissing
a girl; a girl he liked.

His eyebrow twitched once. He said, “I’m not
drunk. I promise you.” He glared me down, never unlocking his eyes
from mine. He held me tight, and I’m glad he did, because I had no
legs anymore. All I saw were his red lips, moist from when my
tongue had touched them only seconds ago. I wanted those lips
again, wanted his breath inside me again.

“Brett!” someone howled from somewhere. A
shrieky, high-pitched sound. A girl. I remember thinking she even
sounded
thin. “Brett! Sweetie, where are you?”

Brett smiled mischievously, he grabbed my
hand and tugged me further into the trees at the back of the house.
The ground smelled moist and rained-on. The beer was still in my
hand. He pushed me up against the wall again, breathed his breath
into me. Eventually the beer fell onto the soggy leaves. We kissed,
his hand found me, below, and he brought me up, up, to murmuring
ecstasy.

Afterwards, I held him. He held me. From
inside the house, muffled, but there, we heard music, a slow song.
We danced, right there on the soggy leaves, their crunch ruffling
under our shoes. We lay down, right next to the beer and
everything, and we kissed more. We touched, he felt me, pushed me
up
again, to the top of the mountain. I whimpered so loudly,
so exquisitely, that I thought the music had stopped for a
second.

He got on top of me, both of us still clothed
but my dress hiked up to expose my center behind my underwear. He
rode me, pushed up below and kissed my neck above. The mental
affinity I was feeling changed to a physical want, a need, an
ache.

The two became confused.

Suddenly I didn’t want just an orgasm, I
wanted to be held, I wanted to be told I was sexy, that I was hot,
that I was everything a boy ever wanted. I clutched his neck while
he pushed up against me, felt him shudder as he climaxed. My legs
wrapped around him.

I felt sexy.

I felt wanted.

I felt human.

He took my panties off, kissed me, there,
lovingly, passionately. He thrust his fingers into me and—again and
again and again and
again
—he brought me up, up,
up
to
the highest highs, chemicals pumping in a body
too young
to
understand them! Chemicals which felt like love, like peace, like
nothing could ever go wrong.

He took his belt off, pushed his boxers off,
found a rubber in his pocket and covered his glistening cock. My
legs were wide, ready for him. My mind, adrift, caught in the
moment, caught in the time we’d just spent outside in the
not-too-cold night. A night which had become so hot by way of our
combined bodies.

He grabbed his shaft, bent down and found me,
touched me with it. Electricity fired through my body. He bent down
so that his lips were by my ear. “Only if you want too, Ginny. No
pressure.”

He wasn’t inside me yet.

And I wanted him to be. All the way.

Call it a primal instinct, call it the Call
of Nature, call it the reaction of cells with millennia of memories
embedded in them, and the satisfaction they
demand
when
faced with the fundamental urge to reproduce themselves for the
good of the race. Call it what you will, but the simplicity of it
is: I wanted him. I wanted him badly.

And I loved him—at least according to my
understanding of what love was at the age of seventeen.

It wasn’t a very good understanding. I know
that now.

“I want to,” I said.

He thrust into me.

I whimpered.

My feet went off the ground. He kissed me. He
rocked me. He pumped. Held me. We whirred.

And then we came. Together.

It was beautiful. I’d never felt so close to
anyone.

“I love you,” he said at the end. Whispered
it. In my ear.

I shed a tear. Because I loved him too, I
thought I did. And I told him so as well.

I held him tight, so tight I thought I’d
never let him go.

But I did. And he went inside. I didn’t see
him the rest of the night. Didn’t see him at all.

He just disappeared. Gone.

I was whirling, spinning, wondering...

No, he loves me, he told me so—nothing to
worry about.

I went home with a smile on my face; walked.
And a buzzing bee of tiny doubt on my mind...

Tiny, miniscule, almost unnoticeable
doubt.

Then, the next day, at school—he ignored
me.

Completely.

And the doubt turned into an unshakeable
certainty.

At school, back behind a wall where no one
could see him talking to the fat girl, probably, he told me what
we’d done had been a mistake; that he was really sorry; that he
hadn’t meant to hurt my feelings.

“I just—I just—I just... I can’t, Ginny. I
can’t. I’m sorry.”

And he walked away. More like ran.

I know what he wanted to say.
I just can’t
date a fat girl.

Brett and I never talked again.

A little bit of me died inside. I wept. I
retched. I held my stomach in pain for weeks—actual pain! I curled
into a fetal position on my bed and
wrenched
with
unimaginable agony.

But I didn’t go back to him. Didn’t beg him.
Because I had too much pride. Too much dignity.

But I lost something that day, something I’ve
never recovered since. I lost something and never got it back.

I lost my confidence.

Three months later mom found a new husband.
And we left the state.

I’ve never been so relieved.

I’d loved him.

And he’d loved me.

On that night, on that soggy ground with
beer-covered leaves that had been rained on earlier, we’d loved
each other. I know this, and so does he. I’m sure he does. Deep
down, I know he knows it.

Foolish love, naive love, at seventeen, is
still love. It’s love to the seventeen year-old. So it’s love.
Plain and simple.

But I was too proud to chase him. I might be
overweight, but I’m not desperate.

Maybe love—
True
Love
—
is one of
those things that lasts only a second, a moment, a minute. Maybe
what Brett and I had had that night can never be repeated. And for
that reason I don’t regret it.

But I can’t say it didn’t scar me. It did. It
scarred me forever.

I still hurt because of it.

And, sometimes, I still even cry about
it.

I can’t even tell you why.

The Blues Bar is my favorite night-time joint
in Nashville. My favorite daytime hangout is, by far, out-and-out,
bar none, the library.

I’ve played it out in my mind many times:
Why
did I choose to “settle” here and not anywhere else? I
could room with anyone in any other state I guess. Was it because I
met Layna and we clicked? (The story of her asshole husband rang so
close to my story of Brett that it was an instant connection
between her and me.) Is it because mom is now settled and
comfortable here? Am I afraid of being away from her? Mom’s a
little eccentric, and sometimes you just want to get away from her.
But could I really live in another state? And if she meets another
guy and hops town one more time, will I follow her?

I’m “grown up” now, they tell me. I don’t
feel too grown up. I feel like a girl who gets nervous around boys
and has had her heart broken one too many times. Yeah,
once
.
That was one too many.

Am I here because this bar is the best damned
bar in the universe for Soul-Rockin blues? Or am I here because I
believe the only other library greater than Nashville’s Downtown
library is the very Library of Congress itself?

I think it’s all of the above.

I might not love country music, I might hate
cowboy hats and Daisy Dukes and cowboy boots. But I love Nashville,
I love my bicycle, love Layna, and, most of all, during the day, I
love the library.

It’s three stories—all marble and granite,
huge
lobby, gilded banisters, music section, research
section to the max, old newspaper articles, a civil rights section
that makes you cry (I did, several times). And, when you realize
MLK walked
these
streets, that the sit-ins took place in
this
area, you can’t help but feel there is “something”
here. Something bigger, something larger than life.

Something reverberatingly humane.

I met a guy who said to me once: “I been
everywhere in the states: Las Vegas, New York, LA—I’ve
never
seen a town as crazy as Nashville!” Nashville never sleeps. And
because of that, you can also get sick of it pretty quickly.

Unless you go to the library.

It’s night and day. Sure, they got the kids’
section and the children’s theater (loud!) and the teens section
where they play video games all day. They have the courtyard with a
fountain and children running amok, screaming, jumping,
shouting—the Nashvillean bar-hoppers of the future. But they also
have the reading room.

And the reading room is pure and
pristine...
peace
.

On the second floor there are brown chairs
facing a window where you look out into a small park and you can
just pull a book out and read, read, read...and find some quiet in
this crazy town.

I bring my laptop here sometimes, do my web
design work, and then I read. Sometimes I skip the work and just
read.

As you might have gathered, I read a lot.

I started reading after that incident with
Brett. I think I’ve read over five hundred books since then.

Most of them romances.

That I
can
tell you why.

I started singing as far back as I can
remember. Mom’s a big rock classics fan. And an old hippie. She
plays guitar and sings when she can, but she has more of a ragged
Janis Joplin voice. Mom told me that if she and I had been the same
age, we would have toured America together and done concerts for a
living.

Yeah right.

In some state, somewhere, I took piano
lessons. It never caught on big time, but I can play a little. What
I
really
loved to do was sing.

I sang all the time.

In every school I’ve been to I’ve had a
singing part in the school play or talent contest.

My voice is
big
, like me. It’s the
only thing about me that I’m confident about. I flaunt it as if it
were a pair of firm breasts. I swagger with it as if it were a pair
of long, sexy legs. When I sing, I forget. When I sing, people
cheer, they clap, they ignore what I look like and appreciate me
for something that I know is beautiful about me.

Many great female singers have been big
girls: Aretha, Adele, Beth Ditto.

I sing at the Blues Bar on Tuesday
Nights—Open Jam Night. On other nights, sometimes I’ll sing with
the local bands or some of the out-of-town bands that are playing
at the time because they like my voice. Max T or Vince Summers or
Whitey Jackson. The Parlequins, The Salamander Slings, Three Men
and a Sax—I’ve sung with all these guys. They’ve hit Nashville,
played at the Blues Bar, moved on. I’ve made friends with all of
them. I’ll remember them. They’ll remember me. Because it’s all
about the music. And when it’s all about the music, looks don’t
come into it. On stage, I’m the sexiest girl there is. And I feel
sexy. Because my voice is sexy.

Feeling sexy up on stage makes me forget a
time when I felt most unsexy, unwanted, maybe even a little dirty.
It helps me forget The Day After, when I was seventeen.

I’ve been hit on at the Blues Bar—more than a
few times. Always after I sing. I just can’t go there. I can’t have
another one-nighter.