irony. Quickly, before she could think twice, she clicked on “Reply” and typed, “It isn’t you really, is it?”
This man had been both a presence and an absence in her life for fifteen years, and the idea that she had just sent him a message that might somehow appear somewhere in his house, if he had one, seemed preposterous. She waited at work for an hour or two in the hope that he’d reply, and then she went home.
Tucker Jerome Crowe (b. 1953-09-06) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. Crowe came to prominence in the mid- to late seventies, first as the lead singer in the band The Politics of Joy, and then as a solo artist. Influenced both by other North American songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen, and by the guitarist Tom Verlaine, he achieved increasing critical success after a difficult start, culminating in what is regarded as his masterwork,
Crowe was born and raised in Bozeman, Montana. His father, Jerome, owned a dry-cleaning business, and his mother, Cynthia, was a music teacher. Several of the songs on his earlier albums are about his relationship with his parents, for example, “Perc and Tickets” (from
Crowe formed The Politics of Joy at Montana State and dropped out of school to tour with the band. They split up before they were offered a recording contract, although most of the members of the band played with Crowe on his albums and tours, and his third album was titled
Crowe toured extensively between 1977 and his retirement, although his live shows are generally regarded as being variable in quality, mostly because of Crowe’s alcoholism. Some shows could be as short as forty-five minutes, with long breaks between songs broken only by Crowe’s abuse of, and evident scorn for, his audience; other nights, as the justly celebrated “At Ole Miss” bootleg demonstrates, he played for two and a half hours to ecstatic, devoted crowds. Too often, though, a Crowe concert would degenerate into name-calling and violence: in Cologne, Germany, he leaped into the crowd to punch a fan who had repeatedly requested a song he didn’t want to play. Most members of The Politics of Joy had quit before the end of Crowe’s career, most of them citing abuse from the singer as the reason for departure.
Tucker Crowe is presumed to be the father of Julie Beatty’s daughter, Ophelia (b. 1987), although her mother has always denied this. He is believed to have achieved sobriety.
Crowe is believed to be living on a farm in Pennsylvania, although little is known about how he has spent the last two decades. Rumors of a comeback are frequent, but so far unfounded. Some fans detect his involvement in recent albums by the Conniptions and the Genuine Articles; the album
Crowe received an honorary degree from the University of Montana in 1985.
While Annie was waiting hopefully in her office for Tucker Crowe’s reply, Tucker Crowe was wandering around his local supermarket with his six-year-old son, Jackson, trying to buy comfort food for somebody neither of them knew very well.
“Hot dogs?”
“Yeah.”
“I know you like ’em. I was asking you whether you think Lizzie might.”
“I dunno.”
There was no reason why he would.
“I’ve forgotten who she is again,” said Jackson. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s your sister.”
“Yeah, I know that,” said the boy. “But…
“You know what a sister is,” said Tucker.
“Not this kind.”
“She’s the same as every other kind.”
But of course she wasn’t. Tucker was being disingenuous. As far as a six-year-old boy was concerned, a sister was someone you saw at the breakfast table, someone who argued with you about what TV shows to watch, someone whose birthday party you tried to avoid because it was so pink, someone whose friends laughed at you a fraction of a second before you left a room. The girl who was coming to stay with them was twenty and had never come to stay with them before. Jackson had never even seen a photograph of her, so he could hardly be expected to know whether or not she was a vegetarian. It wasn’t as if this were the first time Jackson had had a mystery
