Tiger Dean gave Julie comp tickets and backstage passes. Julie, Blue, Linus, and I stand backstage, marveling at the production, the crew hustling back and forth, the energy pouring from the audience. The punk bands come out first, too loud and sweaty and writhing, but the younger kids love it, screaming and moshing. The weather is perfect, comfortable and cool, the sky cooperating by being endlessly blue and beautiful. Tiger Dean does a set with a band of young guys dressed in identical gray suits and bolo ties. The crowd loves him because he’s Tiger Dean, but as Riley always said, his lyrics suck.
Regan, the singer from Grit’s open mic, emerges from the opposite wing of the stage, dressed in the same raggedy black skirt she wore back then, the same beat-up Docs. She mumbles her name into the microphone and then lurches into her set. People in the crowd weave back and forth, totally into Regan. Far down at the lip of the stage, there are several men on cell phones, watching her intently and holding up second phones to record her. Julie whispers to Linus, “Scouts. Riley told me he sent his old manager her demo.”
Tiger Dean walks onstage as Regan finishes singing, clasps her shoulder in a half-hug. She tromps off the stage. Tiger clears his throat.
“We have a very special guest here tonight, folks. One of my oldest and dearest friends and a fine musician I’m sure you’ve missed for the past couple of years.” Tiger pulls out a paisley handkerchief and mops his forehead. “Now, he’s been going through a real rough patch for a while now and I think he’s on the mend. At least, I hope he’s on the mend.
“Because I need him to write me some fucking songs,” he finishes, mock-whispering. The audience laughs.
Julie leans close to me. “They only let him out to do this show. He has to go right back after. He’s got an alcohol monitor on his ankle. The monitor measures your alcohol consumption through your sweat, so if he even has a tiny sip of something alcoholic, it can detect it.”
Tiger leans into the microphone. “Riley West.”
The audience erupts in applause, calls, and whistles. People rise to their feet, stomp the ground. My heart stammers in my chest. Blue slips her hand into mine.
And then he’s there.
He appears across from us, in the opposite wing, in a simple short-sleeved button-up blue-and-white cowboy shirt with tan piping across the chest. He’s wearing his old brown pants and black sneakers. I wonder where his favorite brown boots are, but then I notice the silver gleam of the alcohol monitor peeking out from the cuff of one pant leg; it wouldn’t fit inside a lean boot. He’s cut his messy brown hair; now you can see his whole face, which looks cleaner, less puffy. Looking at him, I realize with a pang how terrible he really looked all those months, and how I didn’t see it, or how I didn’t want to see it. There isn’t any bulge in his breast pocket. “He’s quit smoking,” Julie whispers. “Cold turkey.”
He’s scared as hell. I can tell because he hesitates just slightly before walking out, slipping his guitar across his shoulder as he walks. His hand wavers as he raises it to the audience and then I notice something I’ve never seen on Riley West’s face.
A furiously red blush.
He licks his lips at the microphone, adjusts it, and sips from the glass on the stool beside him. He does a double take. “This drink tastes like water. That’s not like me.”
The crowd laughs. Someone yells, “Riley, you look great, man!”
Riley shades his eyes and looks out over the audience. “Yeah? You want to date me? ’Cause nobody else sure will, at this point.” Laughter. He takes another sip of water. “This is the first time I’ve ever sung in public with just water in my glass.”
“Do it, Riley.”
“You can do it, Riley.”
Riley takes a deep breath, settles the guitar against his body, stretches his neck, and looks directly into our wing. His eyes lock onto mine.
His face slackens for an instant. I turn my head away, heart thudding. When I glance back, he’s facing the audience, smiling his huge, crooked grin, the grin he gave me the first time I saw him outside True Grit, with Van Morrison drifting in the air, the men playing Go, the punks eating ice cream at the Dairy Queen.
He clears his throat. “You know, I met this girl recently and she was real cute and everything but a little bit sad, you know how girls can get, right? But I thought, Hey, Riley, maybe you need a sad girl, kind of balance you out, maybe if you put your problems with all her sadness, you two can’t help but be happy. Right?”
I freeze. He’s talking about me.
The audience says Ri-ight.
“It worked for a while. But you know me, I screwed that one up. I forgot that we need to, you know, talk about stuff. Or that maybe I should, you know, sober the fuck up.”
Laughter.
“Luckily, I’ve now got a lot of free time to consider the error of my ways, courtesy of the State of Arizona’s excellent correctional and rehabilitation services. And here’s a song about that girl.”
He begins to strum, his body relaxing with each movement, each minute. Once he said to me, “I do this because it makes me feel rich. Not rich like money in my damn pocket. Rich like a sweet kind of heaviness in me.”
The song is a slow one, a real foot-dragger, as he liked to call those types of ballads. The kinds of songs, he told me, that shuffle along sadly and that most anyone can memorize easily and sing along to.
I’m fixated on him, the ease of his fingers on the strings, the difference in his face, the unraveling that’s happening in my own body. The feeling of utter, inescapable sadness that I feel, watching and listening to him sing about me. His voice is different without cigarettes and alcohol. It’s leaner, more interesting. The song is called “Who Knew I’d Make Her So Blue.” Gradually, I realize it’s a song about the night he found my kit and we fought in the kitchen; it’s a song about both of us.
I didn’t talk to Riley. I never told him how I felt until it was too late. I just let him lead me, because I was so grateful to be noticed. And he didn’t talk to me, either, because he was drunk all the time, or felt he needed to be, and I never said Stop.
This song is his talking, just like my comic, just like Louisa’s composition books, are our ways of talking.
This song is his sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry. To me.
When it’s over, Julie has her fist in her mouth and Linus is dabbing at her eyes. Blue squeezes my hand so tight the bones hurt. The audience stands up, roaring. Riley takes another drink of water. He says, “Wait just one moment,” and walks off the stage, in our direction.
The closer he gets to me, the more the world tilts, warps, silences, like clouds are moving in my ears, but I stand steady. Julie says, Oh. Linus says, Riley. Blue lets go of my hand and steps away.
He has a new smell now, clean and burly, oatmeal soap and a little aftershave. No deep smell of tobacco and sweat and alcohol. When I raise my eyes to his, they are full of water.
He opens his mouth to say something and then thinks better of it. He lifts my hand, closes something inside my fingers.
And there it is again: that little zing of electricity, a hot wire from him to me, from me to him.
When I open my eyes, he’s back onstage.
He sings John Prine’s “Christmas in Prison,” two Dylan songs from Nashville Skyline, and then he pauses.
“You know, these kids today—”
Laughter.
“I’m just a short-order cook, really, and I used to work with all these damn hipsters all the time and they’re always pecking away at their little phones and having funny little conversations like, hey, what if Coldplay did a Madonna cover, or what if Jay-Z did Joan Baez. You know, that kind of shit.”
“Have my baby, Riley!” A woman, cackling.
Riley answers, “Did you not listen to that first song, lady?” The audience laughs.
“Anyway,” he says, clearing his throat. “There was one person, she’s here right now, as a matter of fact, and I wrote that first song for her, if you must know—”
People in the audience start craning their heads in every direction. I step behind Blue.
“That great girl, she had a great idea. It’s gonna knock your socks off.”
He tilts his head back dramatically and then lets it fall forward. Just before his chin should smash into his chest, he jerks his head back and up and begins furiously picking at the strings. “I got chills,” he growls. “They’re multiplyin’…”
It takes a moment, but then the crowd howls in recognition, probably picturing Sandy and Danny juking along the teeter-totter boat in the fun house at the end of the movie, Sandy’s hair all frizzed out, Danny going apeshit for her leather pants.
Ellis loved everything about Grease and we watched it all the time and every time, she’d say, “But totally? I’d do Kenickie, not Danny,” and every time, I’d pretend she’d never said that before, because that’s what friends do.
Riley is giving me her song.
Julie and Linus laugh. Blue raises her eyebrows. The audience claps in time, begins to sing along.
Out from the wing comes Tiger Dean carrying a bass guitar, and a very heavy, jowly young dude dressed in tiny Captain America underwear and nothing else, strapped into a marching snare drum and banging away.
They sing in unison with Riley, the three of them marching in a circle around the stage, turning the song from a lazy, sexy countryish cover to a rousing, mean-tempered thing.
Ellis was right, I think without sadness. She would have loved this song, sung this way.
All of the people outside Congress at the main stage are on their feet. Phones are held aloft, flashes percolate in the crowd. Other bands leak onto the stage, join the fray, add voices. Regan Connor appears, slightly embarrassed at the antics, but she’s game, stomping her boots and singing, too. Julie and Linus jump up and down, singing along. Blue stands apart. She’s the only one who notices as I turn and walk away, out of the wings. She takes my hand again.
I look back at the stage. Riley’s with his people, in his place.
Blue leans close to my ear. “What is the cereal doing, Charlie?”
“The cereal is not eating me.” I repeat it until she says I can stop.
“Let’s go,” I say. We leave the backstage area and make our way through the hangers-on, the crew, leaving Riley West behind.
We take the long way home.
