Twang (8 page)

I could only nod, staring at his face, which was attractive in a rugged way: a Roman nose and hazel eyes that had lots of smile crinkles, topped by intentionally disheveled sandy-colored hair in a Keith Urban style. He was tall, lanky, in his mid-forties I guessed, wearing khakis and a rumpled Oxford. For some reason I glanced down at his feet, and from what I knew from my forays into shops downtown, he wore very expensive cowboy boots.

“Looks like you created quite a stir,” Mike Flint said, drawing my eyes to his. “How long you been singing?”

“I was born singing.”

He didn’t laugh. “It shows. You’ve got a gorgeous voice, and you were born to be onstage. What you did up there was amazing. You have the gift of truly connecting with an audience. They were captivated, and that’s rare.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, swallowing my pleasure, feeling it spread like soda bubbles through my body.

“You’ve got spunk too. I can tell you’re a hard worker.”

I nodded and didn’t add the word
desperate
.

“Ever think about a career in the country music industry?”

“Maybe.”

He didn’t bother to ask if I wanted to leave, he just said, “We can talk better out in my truck,” and started guiding me by the elbow toward the door. I had to twirl around to grab my shoulder bag and the Washburn.

My heedless trust that night amazed me later. The way I hung on and believed Mike’s every word, never doubted his motives as I climbed into the cab of a huge red truck that smelled like chewing tobacco and cologne. Heart beating like crazy, I crossed my legs, clasped my hands in my lap, and waited as he sat quietly for a while.

“I don’t think you know what you possess,” he said finally.

Responding to this was tricky because I did know. I’d heard it so much I believed it. But if I answered yes, it made me sound like I thought I was really something, and I knew there were a lot of talented singers out there. I also knew humility was a very attractive character trait. “I’ve been told I’ve got a gift,” I said.

Mike nodded. “You’re phenomenal. Like I said, you had that audience eating out of your hand. I never saw anybody get a crowd into a song like that. And here’s the amazing thing—you did it with
no
backup singers. Do you know how incredible that is?”

“Really?” More humility.

Mike nodded, leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. “You got any more original songs?”

I pulled my song notebook out of my bag and handed it to him. He turned the pages, leafing through them with his mouth open for at least ten solid minutes without a word. When he got to the end, he thumbed back through it and paused on the page with “Smoke Over the Hills” and began singing with his pointer finger tracing the lines. His pitch was way off, but he had the melody. He tapped his boot toe as he did the same thing with “River Time” and “Sitting and Rocking Is Good for Your Soul.”

“There’s enough here to make an album,” he said after a loud breath, cradling my open notebook to his chest.

“Really?” I answered in my best amazed voice.

He rubbed his chin before he continued. “Listen, I’ve been retired from Rockin’ Rooster Records for six months, but I’ve also been kicking around this idea that I might launch a new label. If I did, I wouldn’t mind recording you if you can come up with another original tearjerker like ‘Spooky Moon.’ Something that tickles my fancy.”

“Pardon?”

“I said, I’d like to record you if you can come up with another tune that works the audience the way the one you sang in there tonight did.”

“You don’t like any of these?” I retreated to the nervous gesture of twirling my hair around my pointer finger.

“They’re good.
Real
good. But they all seem to be from a young girl’s viewpoint. I want you to write a song from an older female’s perspective, one that pulls the heartstrings. Maybe a woman in her twenties at least, chasing love or something like that? Romantic love gone bad? Wounds of the heart and all.”

I swallowed hard, wondered if it mattered that I’d never had a boyfriend, much less a love gone bad. My warm fuzzy feeling was fast fading. Speaking of getting told on by the moon, I hoped that old lunar ball wasn’t listening as I said, “Um, yeah, sure. Got lots of personal experience dealing with that kind of thing. With romantic love and all.”

“Well, remember, what you want to do is tell a story here. Lyrics that convey a certain emotional arc, you know. Show some tension, some conflict, the way you did with ‘Spooky Moon’ but from an older, brokenhearted female’s perspective.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said.

“Great. Just remember, give me some fresh imagery, some poignant stuff.” Mike Flint stretched his left arm so his cuff rode up and he could see his wristwatch. “Okay now. You go home and write it and get in touch with me and maybe I’ll take
you on as a client.” He rustled around in some papers on the dash, found a business card, and handed it to me.

I smiled as I slid it in my pocket. I felt like I’d won the lottery. I couldn’t wait to get back to the Best Western and tell Roy and get going on my new song. I reached for my guitar and opened the truck’s door.

“Hold on.” Mike’s voice stopped me. “You a member of NSAI?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll cover your membership,” he said. “We’ve got to protect our rights, you know? Also, before we plow on, I have to tell you it’s my policy never to sign an artist unless I’m her manager, her agent, and the owner of her recording label. Kind of like a package deal. Understand?”

I didn’t care if I understood or not. My big break was breathing down my neck. “Fine by me,” I said. While he was in such a generous mood, I asked if he’d mind driving me back to the Best Western.

“My pleasure,” he said, shifting the truck into reverse. “I can assure you you’ll be glad to have a veteran like me taking care of you. Entertaining the crowd for one song at the Bluebird is one thing, but becoming what I think you have the potential to be is quite another. I don’t think many folks know how hard it is to get to the top and stay there.

“It’s a lot of work to reach the point I think you’re capable of, Jenny, and even more difficult to stay there. The Nashville scene can be confusing, cutthroat, and now you’ve got someone with experience to guide you and help you build your career.”

It felt odd to be called Jenny, but waves of pure delight rolled up and down me when he said that word
career
, and I managed to say, “Great.”

My heart was beating like a girl waiting for her first kiss as Mike pulled beneath the awning leading to the Best Western’s
front door. I felt far, far away from life in Blue Ridge, Georgia, as I told myself:
This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. You made it! Your dreams have become reality
. I didn’t yet know that Mike Flint was also handing me a shovel, and that very soon, like it says in that Randy Travis song, I’d start digging up bones.

Mike said he’d pay my hotel bill until I got on my feet. He wanted to be sure I concentrated on my music, and not on existing, and he gave me money for food as well. At the outset I was thrilled thinking of this arrangement: staying in my cozy room, listening to music, writing songs.

That very first night, lying in bed after I’d shared my good fortune with Roy, I closed my eyes and began brainstorming. But all I could think of was what Mike had said about a song on love gone bad, wounds of the heart and all, and my nonexistent past in the romance department. The life I’d lived to that point held absolutely no inspiration. Sure, I’d had the schoolgirl’s crush or two from sixth grade to my sophomore year of high school, but nothing had come of these, and since then I’d kept my heart sealed tight for reasons even I didn’t want to see.

I tossed and turned. It was one thing to write songs about things you knew—honest experiences that birthed words and feelings. I’d never felt so absolutely empty. As someone gifted with writing songs, it had always come without a lot of effort. While I was picking apples or doing laundry or taking a bath or talking with someone, part of my mind was off on its own
adventure, braiding melodies and words together. Meanings overlapped from what was going on in real time, to that song always half-exposed in my subconscious. Lyrics, a new melody, could strike at any time.

It was a crazy compulsion when I thought about it, my music constant as a mountain stream. That was why this lack of ideas was so frustrating. I wondered what I ought to do. I had no female friends, and I didn’t dare mention a sensitive subject like romantic love to Roy. For three days I dragged myself around, haunted by that elusive song, by the knowledge that this was my chance, my shot at making it in Nashville.

“You okay?” Roy asked me as we shared a pepperoni pizza at the front desk.

I sighed. “Yeah. It’s just that . . . I’m having trouble coming up with a song I think is good enough.”

“All your songs are good.”

“Thanks. But Mike wants one about a specific subject.”

“ ’Bout what?” Roy tilted his head back to take a humongous bite of pizza, chewing as he looked hard at me with those intense blue eyes beneath the white pompadour.

“Um, he wants a tear-in-your-ear kind of ballad,” I replied, picturing Mike’s straight, white teeth in the truck’s dome light as he held the door open for me. “A guitar-drenched, slice-of-life snapshot. A song carved from my own experience.”

Roy nodded. “Okay.”

“About love,” I added after a bit and felt a twinge of sadness for Roy and his loss. “Love gone bad—from a female’s perspective,” I amended quickly. “A girl in her twenties at least. He said to write lyrics that ‘convey a certain emotional arc.’ He wants tension and conflict.”

“Smart man,” Roy said around a mouthful.

“But I don’t . . .” my voice trailed off. I reached down for my napkin to blot my lips. “I’m just not feeling it. It’s like I’ve got
writer’s block or something.” I heard myself using a whining tone I didn’t like. “I’ve never had trouble writing a song before.”

“Aw, come on,” Roy said, lifting another floppy, greasy piece of pizza from the box. “This ought to be easy as pie.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” he said, nodding and chewing, “women love songs about men who done them wrong getting their comeuppance.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, in my experience, it’s a powerful emotion when a woman gives her heart to a man and he stomps it flat, so to speak. You know, she’s a virtuous woman, has eyes only for him, and he does her wrong by two-timing her with her best friend? Or by hooking up with some floozy in a bar?” Roy paused to tug another slice of pizza loose from the box. It was truly amazing how much food that man could throw down.

“Women eat that kind of thing up,” he said, licking sauce from his fingers. “You need to put some vengeance in there too. Have the man meet with some misfortune. A barfly shoots him, or he gets hit by a train, or he crawls back to his woman, begging her forgiveness and she shuts the door in his face. That way it would, you know, empower the women.”

I took a sip of my Coke, sat back in my chair chewing a bite of pizza crust, and pondered.
Surely it couldn’t be that simple, could it? Some formula, some collective fantasy about revenge that got women enthused? Some ‘Ha ha, you deserved it’ kind of mentality?
All of a sudden, I felt a rush of knowing. My heart sped up as I realized the brilliance of what Roy had said. In my mind’s eye, I could see my song forming. It would feel wonderful to let a virtuous, wounded heroine have her vengeance.

At 2:23 that morning I sat cross-legged in a nest of covers on my bed, nibbling a Chick-O-Stick Roy gave me, my notebook
open in front of me. It was not the slam-dunk I’d assumed. I kept scratching out lines that fell flat and lifeless words that led absolutely nowhere. Words like
He done me wrong, and my heart is breakin
’, and
I gave him my love, it was his for the takin’, but he
—I had no earthly idea how to write about the heart of a woman done wrong, I felt no emotional connections to my wounded heroines. Everything sounded phony. I threw the pen, slammed my notebook shut and switched off the lamp. Sighing and flipping over onto my stomach, I forced my eyes closed. After a spell I began to drop off into that no man’s land, that space between consciousness and sleep where mental blocks crumble. And that is when it came to me.

First, I heard the unmistakable roar of the V-8 engine in my father’s Chevelle as it approached the cabin, felt my heart beating in my ears as I sat up on my pallet and peeked out the screen at the hazy gray of almost daybreak, the bliss of sleep evaporated. I remembered the sound of my mother’s expectant feet running from their bedroom at one end of the house, through the kitchen, the words just flying out of her mouth, “Thank God, thank God, he’s home; he’s finally home,” and then the front door opening and my mother saying, “Oh, no. No, you don’t, Omer. You’re not bringing another tra—” and him cutting her off saying, “Out of my way, woman!” real loud, laughing, drunk. I snuck to the door to look. My father had a strange woman hanging from his arm. She was glassy-eyed, a loose smile on too-red lips, her blouse hanging off one shoulder so low you could see her bosoms. Mother closed her eyes, said, “Lord, help me,” then looked at my father and said, “Omer, you’re nothing but an old tomcat, prowling around from one honky-tonk to the next, picking up trash and bringing it home.” Then my father threw back his head, laughed, and said, “I’m a honky-tonk tomcat.”