The Girls With Games of Blood (2 page)

“Oh, be nice,” Andre said. As manager for the city’s top underground radio station, he had tipped me off to some fairly successful acts in the past: the Thermodynamic Kiwis and Todd Slaughter’s Band of Otters were our most recent signees. My reputation at the label, though, would not survive a spectacular blunder made just on Andre’s say-so. Besides, as the ranking hippie-in-residence, I knew my job depended on judging not just what was hot now, but what the kids would be listening to in six months’ time over their bonfires of draft cards and brassieres.

“It’s nothing personal, I’m just kind of burned out on sensitive folksingers,” I said. “If I hear one more Joan Baez sermon, I’ll jump off a bridge. Besides, I think the trend is fading. I heard Dylan’s even playing an electric guitar.”

“But this girl is
incredible
,” Andre said earnestly. “I’ve never heard anything like her. She may not look like much in that photo, but she’s the grooviest thing in the world onstage.”

I looked at the picture again. The girl was in her early twenties, with long black hair parted in the middle. She had heavy eyebrows and wore dark lipstick. Her face was pleasantly round, and her black sleeveless dress showed pudgy upper arms. There was an appealing black-and-white starkness
to her, in direct contrast to the multicolored psychedelia around us.

I checked my watch. The girl’s first set began in fifteen minutes inside the Human Bean, the city’s trendiest coffeehouse, which is why Andre dragged me down here. I sighed. “Okay, Andre, you win. I’ll check her out. But she
better
be the grooviest thing in the world, or you owe me a nickel bag and a date with that receptionist of yours.”

It was a time when everything seemed alive, and not just because of all the acid we were taking. The very air rippled with possibility, laced with an energy to which we all contributed, and from which we all partook. And on that night, the streets were even more filled than usual with tie-dyed shirts, bell-bottoms, dilated pupils, and the sense of impending destiny. So what happened shouldn’t have been that surprising.

The Human Bean — a tiny room packed with round tables and wooden chairs, a mahogany bar across one wall, and a shallow stage along the opposite one — smelled of java and grass. Multicolored shirts glowed in the black lights, and strobes flickered in the corners. The face of Jimi Hendrix, as big as a Volkswagen, watched beneficently from a wall mural behind the bar. In front of the small stage, several kids sat cross-legged and swayed to music only they heard, or that was contained in the joints they passed around.

Someone handed one to me as we settled in at our table, and I took a sociable toke. Andre did likewise, and I ordered a beer and a bag of chips to offset the munchies I always got if I even looked sideways at marijuana. As the waitress returned with our order, the room grew dark and the stage lights came up.

The crowd applauded as the performer walked to the straight-backed chair placed at center stage. Just as in the Polaroid, she wore a short black sleeveless dress, black boots, and big earrings. She dramatically tossed her long hair behind
her shoulders, arranged a capo on her guitar, and finally looked out at the audience with a mischievous little grin.

“They call me Patience,” she said seriously as she settled into the chair. Her voice was deep and full, with an unmistakable Southern twang. “Do you know why? Because I’ve got a lot of it. But be careful.” Then she smiled, and something seemed to radiate from her directly into me, like an electrical cord plugged into an outlet. “That’s a lot of patience to
lose.
”

The crowd woozily cheered. Then she strummed her guitar and began to sing.

The songs she performed weren’t important. The essential thing was that this slightly overweight dark-eyed chick had me, and the whole audience, riveted. In all my years as a passable musician, then as a much better talent scout, I had never experienced anything like it. Not Elvis, not the Stones, not even the Beatles commanded attention to this degree. On an emotional level the performance left me and everyone else drained.

But despite this, I noticed two things about Patience.

One was that after her initial comments she hardly spoke to the audience or even acknowledged it. She stayed super-focused on her music.

The other was that despite the cramped, overheated, and underventilated club, she did not sweat.

Fauvette’s eyebrows rose. “She didn’t
sweat
? How close were you sitting?”

He smiled with the wistfulness of recalled youth. “Ah, you should get out more. The best music is always found in places without air-conditioning, where the heat makes you want to undress and the music makes you want to dance.”

“I guess I’m sheltered,” she said with a wry grin. “But you could really tell she wasn’t sweating?”

“Yeah. It was strange enough I still remember it. Anyway, after the show . . .”

. . . I knocked on the dressing-room door. I was so exhausted I could barely walk, but since I depended on commissions and signing bonuses, I also had a serious work ethic. “Hello?” I said, stifling a yawn, and pushed the door open without waiting for an answer.

I stopped in the doorway. Patience, naked except for a black towel wrapped around hair still wet from the shower, sat with her feet propped on an upside-down trash can. The only light came from scented candles. The dressing room was so tiny her toes almost touched my shins, but like most kids of that time and place, she wasn’t the least bit self-conscious about her nudity. It was provocative only in the sense that it challenged the mores of the square world.

She blew a smoke ring from a Mexican cigarillo and regarded me coolly. “Hello,” she said in the same throaty drawl.

“Would you like me to close the door?” I asked.

She shrugged. “If it makes you feel less . . . vulnerable.” Then she smiled, cold amusement twinkling in her eyes.

I managed to shut the door behind me, then handed her a business card. “Hi. I caught your show tonight and —” Another yawn struck me. “Sorry, for some reason I’m just
beat.
Anyway, I really dug it, I thought you were outstanding. Do you have a manager?”

She turned the card over in her fingers. Her nails were painted a shade of dark magenta. “I don’t have much to manage. What there is, I can handle.” She took another drag on the cigarillo. I was fairly used to being around naked girls — that’s why I originally got into music, after all — so I kept my eyes on her strictly from her neck up. Finally she said, “So you want to make me a star, is that it?”

Despite her apparent youth, she had the demeanor of someone older and much shrewder. I mentally shifted from my usual “naïve young chick” spiel to the one I used on other professionals. “No, only the public can do that. But I think I can make you
and
me some money, and would love to get you into a studio as soon as possible. Do you have demos of any of your songs?”

She stubbed out the cigarillo in an ashtray on the floor, put her feet down, and sat forward until her breasts touched her knees. “I’m not completely sure what I do can be captured on vinyl.”

“It can with the right producer,” I said, and yawned again. “You could be the next Joan Baez, or even the next Dylan.” And I yawned
again.

She smiled. “Tired?”

“Very. Your show just sucked all the life out of me. In a good way, of course,” I added with a laugh.

She slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I’m really not interested. Music is just sort of a minor obsession for me right now. A kind of experiment.” She lightly rested her fingers on the strings of her guitar, propped next to the chair. “But I’ll tell you a secret. The first time I saw myself in the mirror holding a guitar was the first time I was able to stand what I saw there in a
very
long time.” She looked back up at me and smiled. “No amount of money or success can really compete with that feeling. Can it?”

Oh, God, I thought, an
artiste.
If I hadn’t been so tired I might have been more persuasive, pointing out that even Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger had to eat, but I wasn’t up to it at that moment. “Will you keep my card, then? In case you change your mind?”

She nodded. “Yes. But I won’t.”

I turned to leave, and stopped in the doorway. “Miss . . . Patience, I just want to say in all sincerity, I think you are a phenomenal performer. I attend concerts for a living, and
yours was the best, most intense one I’ve ever seen. Even if you don’t sign with me, I’ll still be a fan.”

She looked at me oddly, as if this had unaccountably moved her. “Thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“My pleasure,” I said. And I meant it.

Two days later I sat in an exclusive French restaurant, the only guy in the place with hair past my ears, and examined the folder of information that the record label’s private detective dug up on Miss high-and-mighty Patience. There wasn’t much, and it didn’t take long to look it over.

According to the lease on her house, her full name was Patience Bolade. A year earlier, she’d taken some poetry classes at the local university, and worked in an off-campus bookstore. The most amazing thing was that she started performing music in public within two weeks of purchasing her guitar, only
four months
ago. Wow.

And that was all. He found no information on her family, or where she went to high school, or anything. She simply appeared out of nowhere.

The only other bit was that, in the “emergency contact” blank on her lease, she had written the name
Prudence Bolade,
but provided no phone number. He said that coincidentally, there was an old country song about two sisters with the very same names, who both died for the love of a scoundrel.

I found the song he mentioned, an old standard recorded in 1957 by Slack Whitside, the Singing Switchman. The album cover showed him seated on a train’s cowcatcher with a guitar and a phony gap-toothed smile. Apparently he was as much a comedian as a singer, but he performed the song in question completely straight.

“There was two girls by the name of Bolade
No prettier sisters God never made
One dark like midnight, one bright like the sun
But between them a hate to make Satan hisself run . . .”

The rest of the song, based on a true story from his native Tennessee, told how Patience Bolade killed herself when she found her lover in her sister’s arms. Then Patience’s ghost returned, to drive Prudence to suicide. But their restless spirits still haunted the night, and the song concluded with a warning:

“Listen to what I tell you, son, every word is true

The sisters haunt the night, and might fight over you

Nothing can steal your soul and stamp it in the mud

Like being the new play-pretty for the girls with games of blood.”

Fauvette said, “I’ve heard that song. Something about ‘She put a bullet through her broken heart’?”

He nodded. “ ‘She put a bullet through her broken heart, to spite the ones betraying her/But her soul, seeking the Pearly Gates, found her hatred was delaying her.’ ”

“My mama used to sing me that,” she said, looking down at a spot on the bar. She grabbed a cloth and polished it clean. “I hadn’t thought about it in a long time.”