Behind the Music

The singer sang the song. Only one of the lyricists knew this one part of the story behind it, though. His grandfather, now withered and wrinkled, propped him on his knee when he was a small boy. The old man charmed him with chocolate and a scary story, ('if you're big enough to handle a little thrill,' he'd said). It was a cautionary tale, a fable. No one believed it actually happened, but I know the real chain of events. It's my story, my legacy, and I guess I'm the lesson to children to guard their hearts.

There are charms, familiars, dolls, curses, bons mots, blessings, talismans...all kinds of things. But there's ego, conceit, complete lack of self-awareness, desire, jealousy, and need. The first man I met found me sitting on the steps of the museum during lunch time. I worked in the gift shop selling chewing gum and cigarettes to patrons visiting the relics. He sat next to me, leaning down to see my face under my broad-brimmed hat. Ah, yes. He came in for cigarettes and then returned for mints.

"Hi. I saw you earlier in the gift shop, didn't I?" he asked. Of course he knew he had, and the question was a limp ice breaker.

"Indeed, you did," I answered. For the months I worked in the gift shop, I had long, wavy, red hair like Rita Hayworth. My body mimicked the shape of Betty Grable with her cinched waist, and my eyes were strictly my own. Rounded with neither an upward or downward slant. They were wide and wondering, and at this time in my existence, they were the richest caramel. My gaze radiated warmth. If I extended a hand after making eye contact with a squirrel, the squirrel would approach without trepidation and eat from my hand. I was a siren.

"I hate to be so bold," the man said, "but I would like to take you to dinner, if you're free, and, uh, if you're, uh, unattached. Someone as beautiful as you must be attached."

I took him in from head to toe. He must have been a hair over six feet, with a neatly trimmed blond hair. I could see he was close to needing a haircut by how the ends of his hair had begun to curl. He had a nice smile, straight white teeth standing at attention like so many soldiers. He motioned to the area next to where I sat. I nodded. He unbuttoned his suit jacket and joined me on the steps.

"Do you take your lunch outside very often?" He didn't look directly at me when he asked. He seemed to be avoiding eye contact and squinted up toward the sun.

"I like to have lunch outdoors when the weather is nice, and I like to read a bit before my lunch ends. That's what I normally do." I pulled my book my handbag. He took the book from me, gently turning it over in his hands and then flipping to the jacket notes.

"Voodoo? Marie Laveau." He took me in again, looking at me and through me. "Are you into all the voodoo doll, curse, hex, bad juju stuff?"

"I think there's something to it. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence to support something beyond our conventional awareness." I decided to double-down on superstition. "If we don't have the bogeymen to fear, be they religious, mythical, or entirely manufactured, we forget our station, our place in the order of things." The man remained quiet, and he looked unabashedly at my legs, then at my face. I saw the moment he decided to embrace what he thought might be a little crazy.

"When can I pick you up for dinner?"

*****

One of the other lyricists had a mother whose pieces of advice centered around a young man she had known shortly after college. He went insane. His mother swore it was because someone had slipped LSD or PCP into his drink one night when he'd gone out with his baseball teammates--of course, I knew differently and could have set the record straight immediately. Later, however, the woman learned the madness didn't have anything to do with being slipped a mickey. Instead, it came down to the drink itself.

The lyricist's mother married one of the young man's teammates, who described the mystery drink as 'the green fairy.' What the lyricist learned from his mother was to stay away from the green fairy. He later discovered the woman who provided the drink was just as nefarious as the spirit she dispensed.

This all happened around twenty-five years after my museum gift shop stint. At the time I owned a small lounge in Chicago. My hair was long, blonde, and pin-straight. My eyes were crystal blue and wide with innocence, but it was an innocence in appearance only.

One late afternoon, I wiped down the bar in my lounge. The man entered. He announced he played baseball with one of the two local baseball teams. He locked in on me right away. I was always someone's type, and apparently, I was his.

"What's good to drink tonight?" he bellowed. I checked him out from top to bottom without an ounce of shame or embarrassment. He could have been a pitcher, standing at around six foot and four inches. His hair was overgrown, covering the tops of his ears, and was a mousey brown. His hair was the only thing mousey about him, though. His voice was deep and a bit gruff, but his face could have been sculpted by DaVinci. He was a beautiful man.

"I have a black label bourbon," I said, letting my voice trail off purposely. "And...I have a very, very special, very old, and very rare absinthe from Paris, made in the original tradition, from wormwood. I don't serve it often because there have been a lot of crackdowns on the absinthe made from wormwood. Some people don't react well to it." I lowered my voice drastically, "There are reports that people have committed murder when they were under the influence of absinthe." He looked at me skeptically, and again, I looked him up and down, and while I wiped a rocks glass to a sheen I stated, "You seem big and strong, though. But, I wouldn't want you to take an unnecessary risk on something you don't know anything about." Again, I allowed my gaze to drift over his physique. His cheeks pinkened.

"Okay, you've got me. I'll try the absinthe." He put his money down on the counter, and I fetched a cordial glass and placed a sugar cube in the bottom then poured the liquor. We both watched the sugar dissolve.

"Why'd you do that?" he asked.

"I don't know. That's just the way you're supposed to do it. If you don't like it, I can pour you another one on the house."

The rain began outside. It started as a light shower but blossomed into something more serious. The baseball player continued with three more shots of absinthe, and it turned out he didn't mind the sugar cube. His head bobbed in time with the rhythm of the rain on the roof.

"I've got to go outside. The rain is creating the most beautiful sounds and beat. I've got to experience this fully."

He left the lounge and went outside. He didn't go farther than the sidewalk, but I watched him through the window. He took off his shirt, swung it around his head, and let it fly into the night. He danced then, swiveling his hips, clenching and unclenching his glutes, and he continued to dance for around thirty minutes. Eventually, I had to have him brought in because the lightning had begun. The baseball player followed me back into the lounge, his head lowered, tears mingling with the rain droplets making their way down the planes of his beautiful face.

His voice came out thick when he told me about his fear of lightning. His freshman roommate in college had been struck dead by lightning while they were at baseball practice. His roommate wanted to get a few more hits before he finished for the day. He begged his roommate to pack it in for the day, and then there had been a violent burst of light followed almost immediately by a loud crack of thunder. He remembered seeing the singe marks on his friend's finger tips. His shoes had been blown off, and the pitcher saw more burn marks on the tips of his roommate's toes.

The pitcher came back several more times, and I poured him more absinthe. Eventually, he had to stop playing baseball because he went to his parents' house one evening after leaving my lounge. He choked his mother to death, and hit his father in the face so many times, he broke his father's neck. The pitcher didn't go to prison, but he did go to a mental hospital. After the pitcher passed away, an autopsy was performed, and I heard from someone the pitcher's brain included dark-looking veins or rivulets or chasms or crevasses: "It looked like the veins that run through blue cheese, but these veins were thick and looked like something on a map leading you directly to the pits of hell."

*****

More recently, it was the 1990's, I made the acquaintance of one of the lyricists. We were in a night club the night we met. The lyricist had drunk more than a few cocktails by the time he had enough nerve to approach me with his ridiculous pickup line. "You look so familiar. Have we met before?" I was slightly disappointed he wasn't more imaginative, but I went along with it. We had never met before, and after tonight, I would be a distant memory and an embarrassing lesson learned.

He made no effort to be discreet and made his intent so obvious, I almost laughed. He eyed me up and down and back up again. He licked his lips. He wasn't a bad-looking guy, and he was very upfront with his big-dick-energy. I decided to look him up and down, too, to see if being commoditized fazed him at all. I was as opaque as he was in his object for how our meeting that evening would end. We had completely opposing itineraries.

"I'm a song writer. Me and two of my buddies are almost finished with a real hit. We think somebody big is going to record it when we're finished with all the words and music." He told me the song was about this woman who was seriously bad news.

"Ooh, please read me the lyrics so far. I would love to hear the stories about this woman." I clapped my hands eagerly and did some exaggerated fan-girling. During this part of my life, my hair was a sleek black bob, and my eyes were dark, so dark it seemed light and warmth were sucked into them. I wore low-rise jeans that rode below my hip bones and a tank top that left around three or four inches of bare midriff.

The music was loud, the bass throbbed to the point we felt it under our shoes. There was a dry ice machine pumping out vaporized carbon dioxide, which dialed down the effects of the strobe lights. There were party drugs making the rounds. A little coke, MDMA, some pot, some ne'er-do-well guys with rohypnol.

He read me the lyrics. He hummed the small portion of the tune they had cobbled together. "It's not done yet. We're still working on the third verse or stanza or whatever. This song is going to be such a hit. I might be able to retire off of the royalties. Who knows? I've got a great feeling about this one, though."

I leaned toward the man, invading his personal space, and slipped my fingers around his belt buckle. "I'll bet I can help you with the last verse." I tugged him toward the dance floor where we danced close to each other. "Who is going to sing your song? Anyone I know?"

He mentioned the singer's name, and I almost swooned just a little. It was sort of humbling after he'd read me the lyrics to know I was the woman who inspired the song.

After dancing for a few songs, both of us hot and sweaty, I ran a finger from his Adam's apple down along his chest, where each button on his black shirt held on for only as long as the guy would take to get some girl into his bed. I wasn't just some girl, though.

"Do you want to get out of here?" I whispered in his ear. "My hotel isn't far." I licked the outer rim of his ear for good measure.

He nodded. We left. He held my hand as we ambled down the street. I let him kiss me in the elevator. It was wet and sloppy. His lips felt fleshy against mine. It was a shame such a good looking guy wasn't a good kisser. In my room, I poured him a vodka and soda and dropped a sleeping pill in the glass. The pill quickly dissolved, and I handed him the drink.

"Aren't you going to have anything?" he asked. "I don't want to drink alone."

"Of course I'm having something." I showed him my glass with sparkling water, fanning my fingers above the glass like I was showing off the prize on a game show. We clinked glasses, and he downed his drink in one go.

He sat back in one of the club chairs and leaned his head back. "I may have had too much to drink," he admitted. "I don't want to disappoint you, but I may not be able to perform."

"Oh, I'm not worried. I'm not worried one little bit," I answered and gave him a wink.

He nodded off shortly. I didn't need the money, but there had to be a lesson in this, hadn't there? I took his wallet and left him there. For good measure, I took his pants, too. I thought it would be funny when he left if he had everything but his wallet and pants. I didn't know if that would make it into his song, but he could tell his writing team about the mystery woman, and the three of them could continue to cobble their song about this crazy life of hers...or theirs.