Western Swing (6 page)

We each drank a beer while I drove Daddy's car downtown. Roxanne had taken us two apiece from her parents' refrigerator. I said they'd find out, but she said they wouldn't. Her parents were throwing a New Year's Eve party and they'd never miss four Lone Stars.

“Here,” she said, handing me a straw from the A&W. “You get drunk quicker if you suck it up.”

“Why?”

“I don't know why, but everyone says it works.”

The concert was in the old Baxter Hall on Second Street. We got there early and sat in the car, drinking beer out of straws and looking at all the people on the sidewalk.

“Where's Neb?” I asked.

Roxanne smoked a cigarette, a Lucky Strike. Her long fingernails were painted bright brown to go with her eyes and brown hair. Even back at fifteen, Roxanne fit like a comfortable cat into the sophisticated world of beer, cigarettes, and easy sex. “He said he'd meet us at the door. I talked to him this afternoon and he's bringing a friend for you like I figured.”

“I never knew a real cowboy before.”

“They're the same as those jocks you go out with, only their peckers are pointed like their boots.”

This got us both to laughing with mouthfuls of beer, which got beer all over the front seat of Daddy's car.

“Can I try a cigarette?” I asked, opening my other Lone Star.

“Sure”—Roxanne handed me the pack—“but only if you inhale. I'm sick and tired of butt beggars who hold the smoke in their mouths and try to look cool.”

I lit up, but I didn't inhale. “I saw Ron's pecker once.”

Roxanne seemed to think this was about the funniest thing she'd ever heard. I suppose she'd seen dozens by then. “What did it look like?” she giggled.

“I don't know, like they're supposed to, I guess. It was dark. He pulled it out in the parking lot after the Brownsville game. Ron wanted me to touch it, but I didn't.”

“Was it hard and stiff?”

“I don't think so. It looked kind of gross.”

This sent us into more giggles and more beerspit in Daddy's car. I tried to wipe some off the seat with a Kleenex.

“Jesus, Daddy'll kill me.”

“Too late now. Look at that.” Roxanne pointed at a big woman with a bigger cowboy going into the hall. The woman wore a huge, blond sparkly wig and a belt buckle with blue rocks on it. As she passed, the back of the belt read IMOGENE.

“How do you figure she got those pants on?” I asked.

“A long time ago, then she grew into 'em. Check out this guy.” The original rhinestone urban asshole strutted past. “Maybe he's a pimp for horses,” Roxanne said.

Three couples spilled, laughing, out of a pickup truck beside us. The women were all thin and chewed gum. Two had chrome silver hair and the other had dyed hers an unbelievable zit red. Obviously, all three had spent a lot of time and money making themselves look like they looked.

“Where did all these hicks and freaks come from?” I asked.

“Houston.”

“I need some air.”

Sixteen years old, half-drunk on two beers, walking in to hear something called the Twitty Birds, I started to think. It wasn't easy. I'm sure I was the first girl in my class at Bellaire to think a thought someone hadn't told her first.

These people around me, some even touching me, all had real faces, open to good and bad and love and pain. These people seemed to believe in their own legitimacy, but they weren't like me or my parents or any of my parents' friends. I'd never in my life met an unmarried adult. Or a black person. We had a maid named Bobbie who I took for granted was poor, but I'd never actually talked to her.

These people on both sides of me didn't give a damn about getting into a good college.

That thought staggered me. Here were grown women who weren't bums or degenerates, but most of them obviously hadn't been Sub Debs and had never even thought about what they were missing. I bet not one of those three women with the aluminum hairdos knew the difference between a Lucky Circle Girl and a Jolly Jill. I bet they didn't care. And their dates probably didn't consider themselves washed-up, skid-row hoboes even though they didn't hold membership in a restricted country club.

These people didn't dress like me, talk like me, wear their hair like me, or want the things I'd been told I wanted, yet none of them looked miserable because of it.

Suddenly, in a white flash of teen enlightenment, I realized that people completely unlike me outnumber people like me. KaBoom. Second insight. They were not worth less than people like me.

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk on Second Street. “Roxanne,” I said, “the people not like us outnumber the people like us.”

“Of course. There's Neb. Wow, his friend is cute, we may have to trade.”

“And the people not like us are just as good as we are.”

“Whoever said they weren't? Hey, Neb, over here.”

• • •

Neb's friend was kind of a nice guy, in an angular sort of way. His face wasn't scarred and all his teeth seemed to line up right. I didn't catch whether his name was Mel or Del. The face matched either one.

“So you're Hot Rox's cousin,” he said with a grin that might have been a leer.

“I'm not a bit like her.”

“Oh.” Mel or Del looked disappointed.

Roxanne laughed hysterically at something Neb said and he put his arm around her shoulders as we walked through the double doors.

The Baxter is a wonderful place for a concert. I'd love to sing there sometime. Hardwood floors, high, dark ceiling, small tables scattered around like a real ballroom. We sat toward the front on the right. No one checked our IDs or anything. It was great—my first experience at being treated like a grown-up.

A waitress in a low-cut blouse and square-dancing skirt gave us each a funny hat and a toy that clicked when you spun it or unrolled when you blew in it. The guys grabbed up the toys you blew in and started zipping us in the ears and tits.

Roxanne jumped right into the spirit, but I hung back some, it all seemed a bit stupid to me.

Without even asking, Neb ordered four tequila sunrises. I caught him winking at Mel or Del.

“Why did you wink?” I asked.

“Got sawdust in my eye.”

I didn't see any sawdust, but what the hell, why push it? If Roxanne wanted to be hustled, that was her business. What pisses me off is a man thinking he can seduce someone who doesn't want to be seduced. All the charm and tequila in Houston wouldn't trick me into doing something I didn't think up first.

Roxanne laughed every time Neb opened his mouth whether he meant to be funny or not. And whenever she laughed, she touched him—on the arm, the hair, the side of the face, somewhere. It grated my stomach. The laugh she used around boys was nothing like her girl laugh. It was all shriek and no sincerity. There are certain women that I like fine until you get them around men and then I can't stand to be anywhere near the bitches. Roxanne is one.

As soon as the lights dimmed, my date—sure wish I knew his name—grabbed my hand and held it between both of his. He didn't intertwine fingers, but held on like a double handshake.

The first band was called Thunder Road, and Mickey was in it. He sat behind a flat thing that looked like an electric bicycle rack, grinning, chewing gum, scanning the audience with this self-satisfied look. The band broke into a fast instrumental, sort of a Texas polka. I liked it.

“What's that thing the guy is sitting behind?” I asked.

Mel or Del stopped gazing at me long enough to check the stage. “The drummer?”

“No, the other guy.”

“That's a pedal steel. You never saw a pedal steel before?”

“Uh-uh. What's it do?”

“Like a guitar strung across an ironing board. You play it with your hands, knees, and feet.”

“All at the same time?”

I sometimes wonder why I chose Mickey. He seemed so worldly, leaning over his steel, nodding his head more to the chewing gum than the music. Maybe not worldly, but Houstonly. I'd just discovered a huge mass of people with a value system different from mine, and Mickey looked like he understood them.

Even sitting down, I could tell he was real tall. His face was all ridges, his cheekbones, chin, and nose stuck out as if he'd recently starved to death—a chewing, smiling skull.

The waitress brought our sunrises just as the song ended, so I was the only one at the table to applaud. The others were digging for money or oohing over the orange and red colors or some foolishness.

“Clap,” I said.

Mel or Del just looked at me with his billfold in one hand and two dollars in the other.

The fiddle player stepped up to a microphone and said they were happy to be in Houston and he hoped everyone has a wonderful New Year's and gets drunk and laid. The rest of the table came round long enough to applaud and cheer that one.

Then the fiddler said, “Since this is the tenth anniversary of the death of country music's greatest legend, Hank Williams, we'd like to play a few of his songs for you.”

Mickey leaned forward, and closing his eyes, moved into the introduction of “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.” I didn't breathe. His fingers made the most beautiful, saddest sounds I'd ever heard, like he touched my insides, casually picking up all the vital organs and squeezing.

The steel
wept,
not the quiet tears or uncontrolled sobbing like a woman's crying, but the deep, helpless grief of a man at the end of himself. I couldn't believe the sounds, the pain, the hopelessness of each slowly bending note, and all the while, Mickey smiling, looking down at his hands as if he wasn't even connected to the wails coming from the speakers.

I'd be embarrassed if it happened now, but I was moved, forced to feel strong emotion. Imagine that, Lana Sue feeling strongly. Maybe it was more the steel than the man. Maybe I'd have fallen in love with the first pedal steel player I heard, no matter who it was, but Mickey got the nod that night.

Oh, shit. Let's get as corny as we can here. I was sixteen and semidrunk and the occasion called for corn.
The set ended with my sunrise untouched and my heart stomped on.
Let's see Loren get mushier than that.

As Mickey stood up, he smiled and nodded and looked at me. I know he did.

Wrestling my hand free of Mel or Del's double grip, I said, “I've got to go to the ladies' room.”

Roxanne glanced over. “You want me to go with you, honey?”

“No, I can make it alone.”

She frowned. “You okay, Lannie?”

“Sure, the beer just went right through. I'll be back in a second.”

• • •

It took some time, but I found Mickey backstage. He sat alone in a dressing room, his long legs propped on a guitar case, a fifth of Wild Turkey tucked between them.

“Hi,” I said.

He looked me up and down, slowly, calmly. Later I realized that was the same look he gave porterhouse steaks or cases of beer, but at the time, the look made me tremble and go tin-mouthed.

He didn't say anything, so I jumped right in, talking as fast as possible. “You don't know me, but my name is Lana Sue Goodwin and I'm a virgin but that doesn't really matter because I admire your music and, just watching, I think you could teach me about the world, you know, the people in the world that you sing about. You see, I've led an awfully sheltered life, and I don't know anything about anything, like why people do what they do and how you play that beautiful machine of yours, and you seem to know. Maybe you don't, maybe I'm just being a squirrel, but I don't think so and Christ, you have to grow up sometime.”

Mickey stuck two fingers in his mouth, pulled out his gum, and rubbed it into the bottom of his chair. He opened the fifth and drank. I counted. His Adam's apple rose and fell three times. He grunted once and handed me the bottle.

“Thank you,” I said. I tried to rub his cooties off the bottle mouth without him seeing.

“You a cocktease?” he asked.

“Of course not.” I didn't even know what the word meant. I took a sip and handled it real well—no gasp, no shudder, no gag. I felt real grown-up. “This is certainly smooth whiskey.”

“Certainly?”

“Certainly is.”

Mickey reached for the bottle and took another swig. “You hungry?”

“Sure.” This wasn't exactly what I expected and I wasn't hungry, but I figured I'd better be agreeable or he wouldn't talk to me.

“I need a hamburger.” He stood up about a foot taller than me. “What's your name again?”

“Lana Sue. What's yours?”

“Mickey Thunder.”

“Really?”

“Naw, that's my stage name. Real name is Michael Rossitelli.” We walked across the street to a hotel coffee shop and ate hamburgers and french fries and talked. He told me about growing up poor, playing music, and being on the road all the time. I told him about Pep Club. I asked a lot of questions about his steel guitar. Mickey drew me a diagram of all the strings and their notes and what each of the eight foot pedals and four knee pedals did.

“Why do some make tones go up and some make tones go down and some do both?” I asked.

“Because that's how you play it.”

“But it's so complicated, moving your fingers, feet and knees all at the same time.”

“That's why most steel players don't sing. I can't sing for shit.”

“Is that why you chose steel?”

“Naw, you get to play sitting down. I hate standing up.”

“I want to hear you play some more.”

“Let's have a drink first.”

A couple of hours later—after the Twitty Birds and Roxanne, Neb, and whoever I was with were all gone, after everyone was gone—Mickey and I stumbled blind drunk onto the stage so he could play a song on his pedal steel. I was very drunk. I'd never been very drunk before. A teenager's first drunk is a bizarre, spinning experience that no amount of Coca-Cola and aspirin can prepare you for. God, was I drunk.