And wouldn’t you know it, the wife God told him to take was Sister Jennifer, the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the believers.
Now, I thought, we get down to it.
Sister Evangeline had gone along with it for a while, believing, of course, that her husband’s dream was a divine revelation of the Lord. Pentecostal Enochians don’t smoke, drink, dance, wear makeup, or play music during services, but if God tells them to bed a sixteen-year-old-hey, go for it. And gone for it they had, until Brother Woody tried to give Sister Evangeline’s Cadillac to his new wife, Sister Jennifer. Sister Evangeline went ballistic, and apparently wound up overdoing what was supposed to be a simple dramatic suicide attempt.
As Ted Koppel introduced the guest for the discussion portion of the show, I laughed so hard I almost rolled off the side of the bed. I couldn’t take it anymore, so polished off the beer, buried myself beneath Marsha’s thick comforter, and pretended I could smell her hair on the pillow.
Maybe it’s a measure of how frazzled I am these days, but I dropped off to sleep without setting an alarm clock. I’d completely forgotten my nine o’clock appointment with Mac Ford. I awoke in stages: first this dreamy, languorous, aroused state; then a dim awareness that there were other things that should have been on my mind; then a growing sense of panic; and finally, full-blown hysteria as I got my eyes open enough to hone in on the alarm clock, which read 8:25.
I shot out of bed and dashed for the bathroom, brushed my teeth, then scrambled around the bathroom until I found a package of pink disposable razors intended for legs rather than cheeks. I lathered my face with bar soap and raked the razor over stubble, hoping I wouldn’t open up a spurter.
I could shave and wash my face, comb my hair, and get most of the sleep out of my eyes, but I couldn’t disguise the fact that the same clothes I had on yesterday were going back on today. I took a wild guess that Mac Ford wouldn’t care, even if he noticed. I was a little embarrassed about Alvy Barnes, though.
What the hell, I thought as I ran out the door with fifteen minutes to get from Green Hills to Music Row, you can carry this personal-grooming stuff too far if you’re not careful.
Decades ago, the two parallel avenues that make up Music Row were just a couple of residential streets in Nashville. As the music business moved in, more and more of the older homes were taken over for commercial uses. Some of the most powerful independent record companies, agents, managers, accountants, and lawyers had set up offices in renovated old houses. Mac Ford owned one of them, and I was driving like hell to get there before nine o’clock.
All the craziness was for nothing. I pulled into a pea-gravel parking lot in front of a gray, nondescript two- story Cape Cod. I had about ninety seconds to spare before being late as I stepped through the oak-and-beveled- glass front door. Beige leather sofas sat in front of an open fireplace in what had once been someone’s living room. Behind them, against the opposite wall, a receptionist sat at a desk manning a phone system that had eight lines all lit at once. I stood before her, trying to calm my breathing after the mad rush through town.
“May I help you?” she asked quickly between flashing lights.
“I had a nine o’clock with Mac Ford,” I said.
“I don’t think he’s in yet. Let me check with Alvy.”
I sat down while the receptionist juggled the phone lines and tried to reach Mac Ford’s assistant. I settled into the soft, cool leather with an audible squish. The morning newspaper sat rolled up on a coffee table between the sofas. I picked it up and unfolded it. The news media having the attention span of a Chihuahua on methamphetamine-flavored Alpo, the hostage situation at the morgue had already faded to Section B importance. Today’s lead story was on another shoot-out at a local public high school, this one ending when a Metro cop assigned to security duty had to blow away a sixteen-year-old who wouldn’t drop his 9mm Glock because it would’ve dissed him in front of his homeys.
I shook my head and whispered: “Fucking Looney Tunes …”
By the time I finished the story, with the requisite sidebar about how the anguished parents were going to file police-brutality charges and one motherthumper of a civil suit, Alvy Barnes had descended the wide oak staircase with an apologetic look.
“I’m sorry, Harry, Mac’s not in yet. And I haven’t heard from him.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to keep a smile on my face. “Can I hang around for a bit? I’d like to see him before he leaves town this afternoon.”
“Sure,” she said, very sweetly. “Why don’t I get you a cup of coffee?”
“That’d be great. Cream and light sugar, if you’ve got it.”
“I’ll bring it right in.”
Alvy walked down a hallway behind the receptionist and disappeared. She seemed intelligent, and was certainly young and attractive in a Generation-X sort of way. I never thought I’d be old enough to look at women that age and think:
I wondered if Mac Ford was sleeping with her.
Alvy returned with a steaming Styrofoam cup of coffee that felt as good going down as CPR to a dying man.
“That’s great,” I said after the first sip. “Thanks. I’ll just sit down here and catch Mac when he comes in.”
She smiled again and put her hand on my arm. “I’ll take care of that. He parks in the back and sneaks in through the rear stairway.”
“Hiding out, huh?”
She leaned toward me, her hand brushing against my forearm even harder. “There’s a few out there he needs to dodge.”
I watched her walk back up the stairs. I tried to avoid an avalanche of lascivious fantasies without much success. I sat down and picked up the paper with one hand, the coffee cup firmly glued in the other.
Section B was local news, with Day Six of the hostage story as the lead. A little clock in the upper right-hand corner of the page ticked off the hours that the crisis had gone on. A sidebar described the
On page four, buried beneath a two-column story on a zoning committee meeting, was a short piece about this afternoon’s funeral for Rebecca Gibson.
I finished the paper and my coffee, then checked my watch: 9:40. Was Mac Ford doing a Phil Anderson-like dodge on me? Had I become a pariah? I shifted restlessly on the couch, impatiently flipping through the classifieds, growing more irritated by the moment.
Ten minutes later I stood up and stretched, about ready to blow the whole morning off. Alvy Barnes suddenly rounded the corner upstairs and scooted down the flight of stairs. She stopped on the landing.
“Good, you’re still here,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Mac just got in. I said something to him, but you know how-”
“Yeah, I understand. He still got time to see me?”
“Sure, c’mon.”
I followed her up the stairs and down a long, carpeted hallway on the second floor. While the first floor was a model of decorum and cool professionalism, the upstairs could have been decorated by a graphic designer in the middle of a psychotic break. Splashes of neon paint covered the walls, with movie and rock posters outnumbering country-music posters at least two to one. A stuffed groundhog perched in one corner, with a straw hat planted fashionably on its head and a corncob pipe stuck in its mouth. We passed open office doors with T-shirted agents in jeans and thousand-dollar snakeskin boots making deal after deal. I could hear shouts, arguments, pleas, manipulations. Inside one large office, a Xerox machine painted in desert camouflage clicked away.
“You guys are busy up here,” I commented to the back of Alvy Barnes’s head.
“Oh, this is nothing,” she answered, outpacing me down the hall.
We entered an anteroom that had been converted into Alvy’s office. It was a little more staid than the rest of the floor, but still revealed chaos as the operative mode.
“Wait just a moment,” she said. She walked over to a large heavy door painted bright chromium white and opened it. A cloud of blue smoke drifted out of the crack she’d stuck her head into, along with the booming rumble of a loud reggae beat. Ford’s office, I surmised, must be heavily soundproofed.
