the speed of thought. It was possible to cover just about every major incident of a lifetime during the average bar band’s set.
When the band waved to the handful of people applauding them and walked offstage, John disappeared through the door at the side of the stage to find them. A couple of minutes later, he was leading the musicians back for their encore.
“As some of you know, it’s a long time since I’ve done this,” said John into the microphone. A couple of people in the bar laughed, either because they knew the story, or because they’d heard him sing before. Tucker watched the kid who’d been staring at them earlier. He was already on his feet and making his way to the foot of the stage. He looked as though he might faint with excitement. John grabbed the mike stand, nodded at the band, and they did their best Crazy Horse impersonation for a ragged but recognizable “Farmer John.” Fucker sounded terrible: too loud, off-key and insane, but it clearly didn’t matter to his one fan, who was leaping up and down with excitement, while taking as many shots as he could with the camera on his cell phone. John finished with an ungainly leap into the air several seconds after the musicians’ last chord and grinned happily at Tucker.
The kid stopped John while he was making his way back to the seat, and John spoke to him for a couple of minutes.
“What did you say?”
“Oh, just a bunch of made-up crap. But it doesn’t matter. Tucker Crowe spoke.”
When Tucker got home that night, everyone was asleep, so he sat down and wrote to English Annie. She was English Annie because she wasn’t the Annie with whom he’d been conducting a chaste but nonetheless morale- boosting flirtation for a while now. American Annie was the mother of Jackson’s school friend Toby. She was in her mid-thirties, recently divorced, lonely and pretty. He’d started to think about her within hours—okay, minutes—of Cat telling him that they’d reached the end of the road. Tellingly, however, the thought of Toby’s Annie hadn’t cheered him much. He’d only been able to see a whole lot of grim consequential inevitabilities: ill-advised sex, his inability to follow through, hurt and the destruction of one of Jackson’s most important relationships.
Well, fuck that. Maybe he should concentrate on flirting with someone who lived on another continent, a woman who only lived in cyberspace and didn’t have a son on Jackson’s Little League team, or indeed any kind of son, which was one of the reasons she’d been so attractively expansive in the first place. Anyway, English Annie had been on his mind in the bar. A couple of the questions she’d asked in her last e-mail were similar to the questions he’d ended up asking himself during his sonic incarceration earlier in the evening, and it seemed like it might be more helpful to think about them as part of a conversation with someone.
Dear Annie,
Here’s another way of proving I am who I claim to be. Have you ever seen that picture someone took of a scared crazy person a few years back? You say you know people who still like my music—well, they’re the kind of people who are familiar with the photo, because they are under the impression that it’s me. They think it’s a revealing, if unflattering, portrait of a creative genius having some kind of breakdown, but it’s not. It’s a fair likeness of my neighbor John, who is a nice guy but not a creative genius, as far as I know. And he wasn’t having a breakdown. He was just flipping out. John went nuts because, not unreasonably, he didn’t like this guy snapping away at him, possibly because he’s got a whole field of cannabis plants in his backyard. (I have no idea whether he has or hasn’t. I just know he’s touchy about trespassers.)
Tucker stopped, and opened the photo library. He’d attached a picture to an e-mail a couple of times and he was pretty sure he could do it again. He found one of him and Jackson outside Citizens Bank Park earlier on in the summer and clicked the paper clip icon hopefully. It seemed to work. But would she think he was hitting on her? Could sending a photo of himself with his cute son, no woman in sight, be construed as some kind of come-on? He removed the attachment, just in case.
Anyway, it’s a good story, right? Around here, John has been christened Fucker (= Fake Tucker), if you’ll pardon my language. And forgive the yoking together a word alluding to Our Lord with an obscenity. And tonight, Fucker sang with a local bar band, thus overexciting a kid in the audience who clearly thought he was witnessing my resurrection. If anyone tells you I’m making a comeback, you can tell them it was Farmer John (which is what he sang. You know that song? “I’m in love with your daughter, whoa, whoa”?)
No, the photo made sense of the e-mail. How else could he prove that he didn’t look like John? And he wasn’t trying to prove that he was better-looking than John. He was trying to show that he and John didn’t resemble each other, and the whole Wild Man of the Woods thing was a hilarious Internet myth. He reattached the attachment.
This is me, outside a baseball stadium with my youngest son, Jackson. I have always kept my hair short since I gave up music, probably because I was afraid people might think I’d turned into someone like John. Plus, I wear glasses, which I didn’t use to. I have spent a lot of time reading the small print of big novels, and
“Big novels?” Why did he feel the need to tell English Annie why he needed to wear glasses? So she didn’t think it was because he did too much jerking off? He deleted the last line. It was none of her business. Plus, that “pardon my language” thing sounded prissy. If she couldn’t cope with bad language, then fuck her… And that phrase begged a few questions. What did he want English Annie to look like? If he knew for sure that she weighed two hundred pounds, would he be pursuing this correspondence? Maybe he should ask her for a reciprocal photo, except then he would really look like some kind of creepy stalker. And anyway, what was he supposed to do with this girl? Invite her to come over? But actually, now that he thought about it…
I’ll probably be coming to England sometime in the next few months to see my grandchild. How far is your museum from London, where my daughter lives? I’d like to see your dead shark pictures. Or do you ever go down south? I don’t really know anybody in England, so…
So what? He scrapped the last half sentence, and then the one before it, too. It was okay to tell someone you wanted to see their dead shark pictures, wasn’t it? Or did that have a sleazy ring to it, too? And, hold on…
The extraordinary news that Tucker had made some kind of bizarre public appearance passed Duncan by for a couple of days. There was so much going on in his personal life that he hadn’t had time to check the website, an oversight which, he later realized, neatly proved one of Annie’s cruel theories about Crowologists.
“I know ‘Get a life’ is a cliche,” she used to say. “But really, if these people actually had anything to do all day, they wouldn’t have time to write his lyrics out backward to see if there were any hidden messages in them.”
Only one person on the message boards had ever done that, and he did nothing all day because, it was eventually discovered, he was writing from the psychiatric ward of a hospital, but Duncan could see her point. The moment Duncan had found something to do—namely, try to grab the steering wheel back from the maniac who seemed to be driving his life—then Tucker had been forgotten. One evening, when Gina had gone to bed early, Duncan sat down at her computer and rejoined his little community, mostly because he wanted to feel normal for a few minutes, to do something that he used to do. Looking at a picture of Tucker taken a few nights before, onstage with a band Duncan had never heard of, really didn’t help with his attempted reorientation. It actually made him
