And there was always Baby Joe, who had stayed in touch with me in apparent defiance of the
But now it seemed that all the unfinished business of my life that I had thought safely interred in the past was waking, moving slowly beneath the dry earth and starting to break through. I thought of the words of the poet of another city—
I stared at the pages Baby Joe had sent me.
I took the pages, folded them as neatly as I could, and put them in the top drawer of my desk. I made sure all the monitors and VD players were turned off, checked the latches on my windows, and left.
CHAPTER 14
HER ENCORE WAS ALWAYS the same. She walked offstage, got doused with Evian water by Patrick and Helen, tore off her sweat-soaked tuxedo shirt and replaced it with a sleeveless black Labrys T-shirt showing the double axe and her label’s motto. She gulped down a second bottle of Evian, smoothed her buzz cut with one hand and exchanged her acoustic Martin for a shocking pink electric Gibson.
“Good house,” said Patrick. He was her manager. They’d known each other for thirteen years, since Annie first began singing in campus bars and rathskellers and then coffeehouses when the drinking age was raised to twenty-one.
“Provincetown, we love you!” she yelled, raising her fist.
A wave of screaming applause from the audience. The band stepped from the shadows where they’d hidden all night, giving the occasional muted nuance to Annie’s acoustic work. Annie kicked away the chair where she’d sat with her acoustic guitar. A droning bass line roared out, a few tentative drumbeats; then the opening bars, transformed into something ominous and brooding. Annie stepped up to the mike, standing on tiptoe to readjust it. She grinned, tossing her head back. Her smoky voice rang out, twisting around the odd rhythms of desire and rage and nostalgia: her first real hit, Number 2 on the alternative charts: not bad at all for a thirty- seven-year-old lesbian folksinger from Nebraska.
The audience shouted out the chorus, several hundred women and a few guys singing and swaying, raising their margaritas and Bellinis and Amstel Lights to the diminutive figure on the small raised stage. The music raged on, the chorus repeated again and again as the audience refused to let her leave. Annie grinned, dipping her head so the sweat flew off in tiny droplets and turned to mist in the heat of the spotlight.
Then, Annie heard it. The now-familiar chant rising from a half dozen people at a table in the very front, their voices at first keeping time with the music but gradually growing stronger and louder, running counterpoint to her own husky voice and guitar—
Annie’s smile froze. She glanced up and saw her bassist Linga staring at her in concern.
Still those other words rang out, loud enough now to drown her own.
Annie glared down into the front row of tables with their flailing figures, trying to turn the tiny space into a mosh pit. She shouted the last lines of her song, heard the crash of echoing feedback from the band behind her. She bowed, trying to look as exhilarated as the women screaming a few yards away from her on the club floor. Then she walked offstage. The band followed her into the tiny dressing room, grinning and raising their fists.
Patrick met her there with more bottled water, a paperback book, and a huge sheaf of flowers.
“An admirer,” he said, handing her the book:
He waved the flowers at her, but Annie turned away.
“Boy, they’re really noisy tonight,” said Helen. “Must be a full moon.”
“Fucking amateurs,” snarled Annie Harmony. She gulped her Evian water and tossed the book onto a table. “Dark of the moon.”
“What?” Helen stepped behind her partner.
