"The Tide Pulls from the Moon" William Fitzsimmons

            In a warehouse in downtown LA (location undisclosed to protect the innocent, and those who don’t wish their equipment to be stolen), a girl from Kuwait with perfect skin, and that fine articulation of our language that is relegated only to foreigners, paints large swathes of pinks and blues onto my willing cheeks, while a photographer named David Kafer preps his camera for the next leg of this shoot.  The set, two 8x4ft boards of foam core flanking a plethora of lights that grace a small stool in soft yellow, is one of three workstations on this top floor of the warehouse.  The walls are white and dirty, the bathroom sparse but clean, the desks are freshly-cut slabs of wood that have been thrown together without ever being sanded or varnished, but in each corner, magic is happening.  An immensely elegant Vietnamese gentleman lovingly steams long strings of silk roses of such fine craftsmanship that, although they are of wildly unrealistic colors and patterned cloths, I am tempted to smell them and must hold myself back from touching them.  On the other side of a black velvet curtain that hangs on wire from the high ceiling is a mannequin dressed in a finely-structured, high-collared dress right out of “The Jetsons,” but when I move closer, I see that what I had thought was thickly-layered crinoline, is in fact coffee-filters cut and strung together to form big beautiful frothy loops and bows that make up the bustle. 

            When I had first arrived here, after wading through smog and bustling as quickly as possible past the hordes of strange-looking women in tired heels with tired hair and brightly-painted eyes, I thought I must have the wrong address.  I stepped up to a modest doorstep where two men haggled over the price of silver coins, but that bore the address David had told me,  and warily pulled out my shiny phone in its’ bitty turquoise case, and, hiding the device in my hair as much as possible while it rested against my ear, I asked David in the high voice that I have been working on eliminating from my arsenal of speech, if perhaps I was not in quite the right place. 
           “Coming to get you,” was his response.  And then he appeared, and led me up the stairs into wonderland.  You cannot hear the street below; and even the simplicity – rusticity? - of the building itself cannot mar the elegance that the designers who surround David have leant the place.  Two separate – parlors, is I think the only term appropriate - on either side of the room, boast rich oriental rugs and ever so many sweet Victorian chairs upholstered in white brocade and in dire need of a tea-drinking matron or two.

            In stark contrast to this was the first warehouse that I visited, a few days ago.  The fourth floor full of the same untz untz beat for four hours straight, and everyone there in black leather, pleather, or lace, with maroon lipsticks and slashed tops and a hardness in nearly every eye until I escaped to the roof and found three other model-younglings taking clumsy photos of rather well-formed poses with the grey-orange lights of LA in the background.  I had loved the experience of we four on the fire escape ladder climbing back down to the loft-space where the party proper was taking place, surrounded by confusion as the cigarette-smoke encircled vixens below us were forced finally, to look rather than only to be assured of being looked upon. 

            “She’s ready,” Hya says, dragging me gently from my memory, and stepping back from my face to admire her handiwork.  She brushes the back of her hand under my chin as a cue to look up. 

David, our photographer, nods, waves his hand towards the stool.  “I’m changing the music, too, now.  I think it is time for the really depressing stuff,” he says as he pulls a light back a few inches.  “You know William Fitzsimmons?”

I don’t, but soon enough come to appreciate the breathy, raspy male vocals and gentle guitar remixed with some modern beeps and boops.  It’s like Postal Service unplugged.  It’s like a Conor Oberst for adults: no whining, lyrics straight to the point, truly poignant rather than grating.

“Close your eyes,” he says.  “Chin down, down, right— yes.  But then, to the left, not your body, just the— yes.  Ok, hold. Great [click], great.  Ok, now put your hands up, like this.  Good – don’t look mad! Youuu’re not mad.  Haha, yes.  Ohh, awesome.  You are awesome.  Look at you, that one, good. Ok, hair down.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, go for it.”

I pull out pins and drop them to the floor.  I toss the hair-tie and shake out the hair we have hitherto been fighting to keep neat.

“Ok, pull it to one side.  All of it, yeah.  And then under your chin – will it stay? Hmm.  I’m going to do something.  You don’t mind? To your hair, I mean.”

“Go for it.”
            He carefully sculpts the hair around my face, then jumps behind the camera again.  “And then let it go, just let – yes.  Go for it.  You can just feel out the music.  It’s pretty bad right?  Sad, I mean.”

“Pretty depressing.” I smile--

“No, don't laugh.  I love the laugh, but this is sad.”

“It is.”

“Ok,” he says, and looks through the camera expectantly as I close my eyes and begin to slowly move, almost to dance, bringing hands in to my face, tilting to one side, but all in slow motion, like a softer form of Butoh, like feathers, if they were to be dropped and thereby to float from this immaculately lit and melody-filled 6^th floor towards the dirty street below where a man with a yellowed sleeping pad curls into the alcove of the storefront.  I am still seated, just moving hands and chin and forehead and cheeks and lips into lightly varied poses and expressions – and every click is like an epiphany I’ve bestowed upon us, and every click is a reason to stay, and every click erases another vulgarity some idiot or other has punished me with for the crime of being female and walking alone in a city, and every click mercifully destroys yet another fear, and every click is 

--  my phone buzzes in the corner.  The band, the Birds, they’re coming to LA, too.  They’re bringing me to Malibu.  I make a mental note to research Malibu hookah bars.  I make a physical note to let Tina know that I can’t come to the audition on Thursday.  I make a second mental note to paint my toenails and purchase red wine before the boys get here.

Two days later, he will tell me that we only very nearly reached that magical space, where some human truth pokes through the artifices we've erected in the name of a human soul.  He says it was his phone call.  I think it was my phone call.
And on that same day, two days later, I will hold his floppy-puppy drunk roommate on my lap during a game of pretending that he is my puppet and I merely the ventriloquist, and in a moment of sly retribution, read from my journal instead of the comedic play I had originally intended for this game.
"Human life is a dredge along an uncertain path, through a hurricane; the good, noble, brave and steadfast folk keep their heads down and shoulders to the wind.  They collect windfallen debris, and build - with great patience and difficulty - shelter for their battered pates.  They move forward from thence like snails, their makeshift barriers allowing them to trudge on with longer strides and sometimes, to go so far as to help others find some shelter from the storm.  But we the curious, we the hungry, we who hold space for that void who looks back into us, we the drinkers of darkness - well, we look up.  We collect rain in our mouths, we celebrate the massive, amorphous clouds that send down all those tortures of the storm, we smile through the drowning downpour.  In consequence, we lose the path, we may forget that there is a path, are blown left and right by great swells, we lose our others, and are ultimately left wet, cold, and lost.  But we've eyed the sky, and that sight has made all the difference."

Honey Baby (Coo Coo Birds, "Mexican Cowboys")

May 3^rd , 2013                    Long Branch Ranch, South Bay, California

12pm

            “Iann I need to get on that horse.”

            “Girl… Let’s look at your wardrobe first.”

            “Please, Iann, just tell the guy I know how to ride bareback.”  I touch noses with the immense horse I am petting and gasp.  “Please!”

            “Weren’t you almost in the hospital the last time you rode bareback?” Iann tugs at her raven curls and laughs at me with huge brown eyes that she has expertly elongated in black kohl.

            “I’d wear pants this time.”

            “Jeans?

            “My onesie.”

            “Is that enough?”

            “Get me on the horse, Iann.”

            “I’ll do my best honeybunny.”

            Iann Ivy (her professional moniker) is my buttercup.  She is a short, bountifully bosomed, and exotically pretty girl with a perma-pout and skin the color of lightly-roasted almonds.  Hers is an easy-going photographic style: I jump in with a pose and she tweaks as necessary. 

“Chin down, chin down – stop.  To the left –”  She snaps a few times as I move, laughs when I make a face.  “Can you… maybe lean your head or Oh! Yeah, actually, do that.  I love it when you just know – but stop touching your nose! It’s fine!” 

            I am standing in front of a mock-up of an old cowboy saloon out at Long Branch Ranch, a faux cowboy town complete with various storefronts, rocking chairs, cobwebby saloon and barn doors, a bitty chapel and one actual working (when the caterers are hired) saloon.  Iann wanders back to me in her citygirl short boots.  “Let’s go change.  I like this for our first location.  The jail and everything is cute but it’s too much.”

            We kick up dust on our way to bathroom.  “Will you-“

            Her laughter tends to peel out from her in waves, and does so now. “I’ll ask about the horse.”

            Suddenly, we hear a strange snorting sound.

            “It’s-“

            “A PIG.”

            There is a foot-and-a-half long snuffly little pink-and-black spottled creature with short legs and a belly so protruding that it scrapes the ground when she walks.  She squeals impetuously at us, and the sight of her cute little pudgy snout and the short little legs she toddles on causes me to squeal, and so pig and girl stand squealing at each other in a tone fit to deafen dogs and men of a certain age, until the bitty thing snorts away under the porch. 

            “Iann!”

            “Go change!”

            I do mean to, too.  I walk towards the bathroom with full intention of donning the vest Iann brought me and the belt from my great-grandmother and a new shade of lipstick, but the little ears that stand at attention on the sweetly snuffling head of that adorable piglet cause me to lose all reason.  I follow her, making idiotic clucking and clicking and kissing noises.  I hike up my skirt and get down on hands and knees towards a little yellow house that is one of only three “real” structures (not facades) on the property.  The sweet creature has disappeared beneath the front porch and I am determined to follow.

            “Kitten? Where are you?  Sarah Rooose.”

            “Right here!”  I call out.

            “Are you under the porch?!”

            “… yes?”

            “Kitten!  Get out of there.”

            A man whom I guess has just stepped outside of the house begins to laugh at the sight of Iann bent over to peer under the porch.  “Looks like you found Honey, huh?”

            “The pig? Is that her name?”

            “Yep, that’s Honey.  She’s a mini potbelly.”

            I gently whisper her name, “Hoooney, here Honey,” in addition to the meowling and clicking noises I’ve been thus far employing, and am awarded the feel of her muddy little snout in my palm.

            “Kitten!" Laughter peels out of Iann at my obvious delight.  "Kitten, get out of there. Oh my god.”

            “Well the pig’ll come on out if you give her some cat food,” the man tells Iann.  I don’t think he hears me.

            “That’s cool!  But how do I get my model out?”

            “Is that a girl under there?  I thought you called for ‘kitten.’”

            He starts walking over to the edge of the porch, and I am able to cover myself again with the skirt I had hiked up to my waist just in time for his arrival.  I hear the floor creak as he leans way over to take a look at the under-porch happenings.  I smile at the surprised, upside-down face of a kindly blonde man in his forties. 

           “Hello!”  He doesn’t move.  I smile wider.  “She calls me kitten sometimes.”

           “Spiders under that porch,” he says dubiously.  I obediently shuffle out back into the sunshine, while he uses a bit of cat food to coax out Honey the adorable mini potbelly pig.

3pm
           After lunch, we shoot a few normal things and finally change into the sweet moss-green skirt and beaded collar that had belonged to a woman known in life as “Beauty,” by he who loved her most.  I wanted to create something elegant but earthy, primal, feminine-spirited, utterly lovely that would call to mind a pagan wonderland and afterlife I hoped she was now enjoying.  I imagined a peaceful scene in which the sequins of her collar glittered in the sunlight while a sweet horse beside me represented all that was wild and free.

            “Just don’t let that girl on the horse,” the kindly blonde man tells Iann as I scowl into the distance.  “He’s a show horse.  You see that wide back?  He has to be so big because the girls do flips on that back.  You jump on there and he’ll just start in on his routine.  Isn’t made for a trail.  But he did just get a haircut!”

            This majestic, newly-coiffed horse wants little to do with me or my idealized vision of nature.  Not only have I been forbidden to ride him, I have also seemingly lost my ability to interact with him at all, now that we finally have the camera out.  He tolerates a pat here and there but his interest is all in Honey.  She toddles nearby to smell a flower and off runs Toby to chase her out of his corral.

            “What do we doooo?” Iann whines.  Her listless gaze follows Toby the horse, who has gallivanted away to the edge of his corral where Honey obliviously noses at flowers just beyond his reach.

            “The only way to get him in frame is if Honey is in the shot, too.  I think we need some bread.”

            Iann leaves me standing awkwardly in Toby’s corral while she explains to John that we need some of the sandwich bread in order to wrangle the animals.

            In the meantime Toby has taken a liking to my hair, chewing it and rubbing his soft muzzle into the back of my neck.  “Please let him stay until Iann gets here…”             

            I close my eyes and lean into Toby’s enormous neck just in time to hear the snap of Iann’s camera shutter.  “Look at me?”

            I do.  Click, click, click.  I suddenly feel Toby beginning to shift.  Sure enough, Honey is near and he is already making moves towards her.  “The bread!” Iann pokes a piece into my hand.  “Honey! Come here, Honey Honey Honey.”

            Toby now seems as equally irritated by our attentions to Honey as he was by her freedom earlier.  The pig snorts happily and trots faster than I’ve seen her move all day, even including when she’s been chased by Toby.  I try to extend the hand with the piece of bread in it as gracefully as possible, tilt my head back to the horse whose jealous bristling I can already sense, and glance down to the piglet who noses my ankle in an impatient desire for the bread.  “Take off your shoes,” calls Iann from about ten feet away.  I take them off carefully, one by one, while still holding my precious bread, and in my haste to toss the shoes out of frame, step in a morsel of horse dung.  I breathe into a relaxed, serene expression, and make the silent, executive decision not to tell her about the crap on my big toe but instead daintily wipe it onto some nearby flowers, making the entire procedure look like part of a ballet-stance-esque pose.

           This is the best day of my life.  Even the tiny piggy footprints that will appear all over my belly from allowing Honey to topple over me as I lie next to her in the hay; and the scratches on my legs from the hay; and the horse snot that Paul will find mashed into the back of my hair will count merely as visceral reminders of a lovely day.

May 4^th, 2013                                    Escalator in Bloomingdale’s

5:30pm

            [Descending]

            “You’ll meet my boyfriend; he’s very nice.  Don’t mind him.”

            “Sure.”

            “I mean that he gets a little sarcastic.  If we fight, don’t get upset.  We love each other.  We’re just perfectionists.”

            “Alright.”

            “I can’t believe you said yes, just like that.”

We seem to be actually accelerating towards the cacophonous dining hall of the Westfield Mall.  Dozens of malcontent mothers and aunties sit at cafeteria tables munching on “wraps” or slurping soup from cardboard bowls, lit up by the green-tinged light coming from backlit posters of glamorous women in red silk dresses whose delicate jewel-bedecked wrists are a testament to all that we will never live up to.  We’ve been slinging sunglasses to these poor people for the last four hours. 

            “Let me look at you again!”  My raven-haired, elegant companion delicately lays a long, pale finger where my hair forms a not-quite-widow’s-peak.  “We might braid your hair.  You don’t mind?”

            “I don’t mind.  As long as you don’t mind the grey, here, on my temple.”  I flip my hair to one side and then the other to show her.  “You see?”

            “Oh!  No, it’s fine.  Your eyes are perfect!  I can’t wait.  And you already know how to pose.  You were so funny having people try on sunglasses today– you’ll have to laugh again, like that, for camera I mean.”

            “Sure – before we go any further, I have to ask you –”

            “Yes?”

            “Was the other girl working with us born male?”

            “Oh definitely!” She says brightly.  “But she was so pretty!  Don’t you think?”

            “She was great!  I just…  was curious if anyone else noticed, I guess.”

            We reach the bottom of the escalator.  I’ve been standing on the step in front of Jennifer, and I turn back to her now in confusion.

            “Where are we—”

            “Do you know where we are we going?”

            “I’m following you—”

            “Of course!”  She laughs.  “I meant, ‘Where is Bart?’”

            I steer her towards the bus terminals.  As we march through the sterile, echo-filled hall in our matching white pants and Polaroid t-shirts, carrying our Polaroid satchels that contain the Polaroid water-bottles we’ve been giving out all day, we half-run past the other promotional models who are peddling other wares to the lifeless forms who have huddled into this well-decorated basement in their need to consume.  It begins to make sense to me that so many people to whom we were offering free things were afraid even to look at us.  Patrons of Westfield are under siege as soon as they exit MUNI, from everything to men with possibly-faux Italian accents trying to give on-the-go-manicures to a woman with a painfully high-pitched voice asking them to “Just try these headphones for one minute! Everybody loves ‘em! Everybody LOVES THEM.”

“Soooo, Jennifer, where are we going?”

            “Oh! I’m sorry.  Of course!  The studio is in Oakland.  We’ll get a ride once we get there.”

            “Which stop, though?”  I ask while reaching for my wallet as we approach the BART ticket dispensers.

            “Oh!  No, don’t worry, I’ll get your BART ticket.”  In the time I take to dig through to the bottom of my bag for my wallet, she has already purchased her own ticket and has punched in the information necessary to get mine, too.  The machine spits it out and she holds out it to me,  “And—”

            “Yes?”

            “Just one more thing—” she holds my BART ticket hostage as she says this, her exotic eyes narrowing.  “I go by Jennifer for this kind of stuff,” she waves the BART ticket to indicate our Polaroid shwag, “but my real name,” she hands me my ticket, “is Taelin.”

            It occurs to me as we step onto the BART train that this girl’s place on the gender-identity spectrum, her perfect alabaster-pale skin, and her seeming acuity make her someone obviously quite likable but not necessarily trustworthy.  Her poise actually gives her a mildly dangerous quality – like a tigress. 

            Four hours and countless photos later, I find myself lying on the floor of Ryuuzaki Julio and Taelin's studio, wearing Minnie Mouse ears and a sweet turquoise dress, with 4ft-diameter helium balloons tied to my wrists and ankles. 

            “Does it look kind of like they are lifting me?”

            The photographer snaps the shutter twice.  “No.”

            “Ok, what if I turn to the right, a little, maybe?”

            “You need to lift only the parts that have balloons, right?  They are pulling you up…”

            “And now?”

            “No, it still just looks like you’ve fallen.  Not gracefully.”  He is laughing now, “Oh my god, you have to see yourself.  You are not going to be very pleased, Madame actress.”

            “Be nice!”  Taelin says sharply from the stairs.  She walks up and wraps her arms around his waist in the same languid, elegant manner that she earlier caressed my forehead with forefinger.  Smiling, she glances into the camera viewfinder and starts laughing.  “Ok, she’s done.  Time for dinner!”

West Oakland BART

12am

[Phone held to head]

[ringing…]

            “Hellllo!”

            “Hello, love.”

            [in an awful approximation of a French accent]  “Hello, my buttercream pie, my petite bonbon, my egg sunnyside up with Freeench toast, how are you tonight, my—”

            “Stop—”

            “My sexy Gollum, I cannot wait for your leetle claws, let me hear your growl, my leettle –”

            “Are you aware that I am taller than average for a woman?”

            [In a perfectly normal, if adorably boyish American accent] “What’s up?”

            “No no no, I need for you to acknowledge first that all those ‘little thises, little thats’ are ridiculous.  I—”

            “You are gigantic!  How I fear your stomp!  How are you?”

            “I just got done with work.”

            “At the mall?”

            “In Oakland."

            “For a promotional gig?”

            “For a photo shoot.  I ran off with one of the models from the promotional gig."

            “Ah… And who are these people?”

            “I’m not entirely sure.  We just had a nice dinner though!”

            “…But you’re coming back.”

            “Right.  Via BART.”

            “And will you be wanting a glass of wine, my sweet monster?”

           

May 6^th                                                At Paul’s desk

8am

[Blanket on head, phone inside of blanket and against head]

[ringing…ringing…ringing]

            “Hey listen, this is Sarah Rose: I think we met – to be honest, I am not sure that we ever met; we might be friends on facebook simply because we know each other through the Coo Coo Birds or the kids who live at the convent, or whatever, but I can’t – heh heh heh– well I can’t help noticing that you look a little like me, not a lot, I mean, I want to acknowledge that you aren’t quite as horrifically flat-chested as I am and I wouldn’t want you to think I thought that, you know what I mean, but you do have big eyes and that sort of, that kind of girl-next-door thing but also kind of French – not really French per se, since I’m not French, but that French-ish thing about you  - and so I was hoping you might be able to replace me on a – godDAMNit Paul, you leave my bellybutton alone or I will tear your face off with my teeth – hoping you might want to replace me on a shoot that I have tomorrow, OR I also need to replace this model on a shoot that I am on and so we’d be modeling together, but that one is a two-day thing but maybe it could be fun to collaborate, and since you’re friends with hippies maybe camping would be ok, and I think we’re really quite nearly the same height and could work well together? I know the last-minute thing is ridiculous.  So anyhow give me a call if you’re interested; my number is—”

                        Matt Barkin’s house i.e. Vibrant Films headquarters, i.e. film set

3pm

            “What’s going on, Butler?”

            “Et tu Brutus?  The hell does everyone get off calling me ‘Butler’ these days?  You know that my parents gave me the singular most feminine name in possibly all of history?  I have a beautiful goddamned name is what I am communicating to you—”

            “Why don’t we take a deep breath…”

            “And I goddamn cannot find another mermaid ANYWHERE in this idiotic town.”

            “And we are breathing out all of this mermaid whatever drama, aaaaaand settling into here.”

            “Where’s John?”

            “That is not his real name.  You can talk to your costar after two more deep breaths – Is that a tent?!  You just casually carrying around backpacking gear?”

            “I’m going camping tomorrow, which is why I need MERMAIDS, but they have to be mermaids who are also willing to hike and get dirty –“

            “Ok great, three more breaths, no more mermaids, his real name is Zach, GO.  Go, Butler.”

            “I’m going, I’m going.”

May 8^th                        Glass Beach/Fort Bragg Campground

7pm

            It has just finished raining, but we’ve found our mermaid:  Audra Horridge, whose heterochromatic eyes and sharp wit entranced me in high school, shall be my fellow model.  She’s slept most of the way here, her long hair spread over the backseat of our photographer’s car, and both her blue eye and her brown eye have that glassy newly-awakened shimmer as they look out at the ocean which will serve as our backdrop in the morning. 

            The air is cold and the sand beneath my grateful feet is wet from the rain, but from as far back as I can remember, I have been drawn to water, and have thought it a crime to get near water without getting in it.  I sit on the wet dune, and untie my shoes.

            “What are you doing?”

            “Got to at least stick my toes in the water.”  I’m Ken Butler’s daughter, after all.

May 9^th            Warm dry tent, subzero sleeping bag deployed successfully; cramp in leg but I don’ mind, no sir

6:30am

“Sarah Rose!  Wakey wakey!”  Our designer Kaytee Papusza's soft voice calls to me from a land beyond my current nest, from out in yon wild wet-cold-landia.

            Quoting my younger bother, from when he was eight years old, I moan, “I’m not reeeeady.”

7:00am

            “Bacon?”

            “No pig.”

            “Eggs?”

            “Doesn’t sound like pig.  Yes.  Mmm.  Fetus.”

            “You’re sick.”

            “I know.  Does that mean someone is still making me eggs?”

            “Mimosa?”

            “Save me a sip for after the first set.  My eyes will start to get wonky.”

7:30am

Our make-up artist, Becky, sits on her hands at the picnic table we’ve allotted for make-up.  She is trying to warm them before they touch my face.

“Do you have on any product?” she asks sweetly, examining my face.

“Just dewdrops, darlin’”

8:30am

            Kaytee settles the cool pearl-inset, metallic cage corset into place against my warm skin so that Sass can continue building my hairpiece, so that my morning sunrise sun-salute crown (hand-built by a stylist nymphette called Sydney) has a firm platform to sit upon.  Sass’s sweet girlfriend Sharon, the teeniest lumberjack ever, presses a small batch of whole coffee beans into a leftover Hersey’s wrapper and begins swinging at them with the blunt end of a teeny hatchet.

            “You forgot to bring a grinder?”

            “Didn’t realize they were whole when we bought ‘em last night.”

            I nod.  I am fairly certain that Sharon and I are the only ones to have utilized the hatchet at all this trip.  In the land of ultra-femmes, she and I rise to the mythic level of Tarzan.

           

5:00pm

            I am down to my last “look,” the love-child of Sass (our hair wizard) and environmentalism:  after a day’s worth of wearing sweet, glamorous, ethereal mermaid dresses, I will don sleek black hairpieces (full wings smothered in a black tar-like substance) and black hairspray to portray the “Oil Spill Mermaid.” 

            “What’s the outfit that goes with it?”

            Kaytee laughs.  “Well, girls, I made a collar.”

            “And—”

            “No, no, it’s just the collar.”

            “We’ll do beauty shots,” says Regina, “Close-ups only.  You can even wear your pajamas; just cheat the top down a little to expose your shoulders.”

            I put on the collar, some chains over my shoulders, and we take some photos in front of a jutted out rock.  I frown at the seaweed-strewn edge of the sea, where inky black rocks tumble back and forth with the tide.

            “So clearly…  and I don’t mind, I really don’t, but clearly what needs to happen is that I need to get in that water in my nude underwear with my head towards shore and be the washed-up oil-spill mermaid.”

            “You want to get in the water?”

            “It’s not about want; I’m just saying it would be beautiful.  So clearly it’s what I have to do.”

            Regina, our photographer, glances over my hair, and the ocean. She says simply, “I mean, if you’re willing.”

            Audra cheers me on.  “Definitely you have to!  I’ll hold your pants.”

            Accordingly, I remove these non-mermaid articles of clothing and dip myself into the cold water.  In my "real" life, I hate being cold more than anything else in the world, but the fog that swirls around me and the water that splashes my goose-pimpled skin feels like a most welcome baptism.  I have tried thus far, perhaps a little too heavy-handedly, to strip away the "magic" or the glamour that too often is associated with "the industry," leaving you instead with the simple, often awkward, rarely magical realities of the world of fashion photography.  However, as part of this wild, all-girl team of supportive designers, stylists, photographer, and models, I feel like a participant in art, rather than in fashion.  There was an unabashed joy I took in carefully spreading out this fleetingly youthful body of mine along the sand, flexing my toes to give an illusion of calf muscles that I have not actually earned.  Audra joined me, too, flinging aside modesty to hold the form of grecian marble in the sunset light and assume a pained expression as the mermaid mama to my drown'd self.  We slipped into shapes that mimick Michaelangelo's Pietà, and holding each other, embody in two women the work of our nine-woman team.  

10:00pm

            Audra and I doze on and off in the backseat of Regina’s car, waking each other with exclamations.

            “I can’t believe we did it!”

            “I can’t believe you were down.”

            “I can’t believe you were down.”

            My phone rings.

            “Hello?”

            “Hey, Sarose.”

            “Yasu-san?”

            “Can you work tomorrow?”

            “What time?”

            “Call time 9am.”

            “Where?”

            “Oh, you don’t drive, do you?”

            “…no”

            “Ok, ok, can you call Nao?  We’re not even sure yet whether you have the role.”

            I search my phone for “duocreative” numbers and the one I want comes up right away.  It only rings twice.

            “Salah Loze!”

            “Naomichi-san!

            Audra laughs as I cover the speaker and tell her, “Of course I know that my emphasis is on all the wrong syllables.  We butcher each other’s names, and it’s like a bonding thing, ok?”

            Meanwhile Naomichi explains that they are replacing me in a role that has already been cast.             

            “You didn’t audition for this one.”           

            “I know! I haven’t auditioned since I’ve been back.”

            “Yeah, but the director likes you.  We have one more option: someone who actually auditioned, but we’ll call you back.”

            “Ok.”

            I force myself to sleep until the next call comes in at 11:00pm.

            A few of the grips, production assistants, and schedulers who also work for Japanese TV have told me that “moshi moshi” is an acceptable way to answer the phone but I prefer shouting their names.

            “Naomichi-San!”

            “Salah Loze!  We have you set.  Bring lots of clothes.  Not too nice, but casual and cute.  Ok?  Meet us at 7:45am at the downtown Travelodge.  We drive to Fairfax.  Don’t be late!”

            I snuggle back into my coat and sleep again.

3:00am

            I arrived home about a half-hour ago, packed my suitcase and organized my make-up, and am ready to catch my last few glimpses of the inside of my eyelids, but I cannot sleep.  I lie awake wondering how it is that after losing their actress for the role of “woman who has been physically abusing her husband,” mine was the first name they thought of to replace her.  I try to lull myself to sleep with the notion that it’s my anime-esque over-wide eyes that make me great potential candidate, but the logical side of me won’t allow me to discount the very real possibility that the producers at Duocreative just really do think that I am crazy.

"After Midnight" (Eric Clapton, "After Midnight" single)

March 25^th, 2013            Memphis, Tennessee

This morning I left, for the first time in many days now, alone.  I went seeking my preferred side of the camera, and found soulmates – but I’ll start from the beginning.

Aside from a few playful minutes in front of Rocky’s camera, I haven’t modeled in about a month, and I anticipated with a silent, private glee that singular tingle in the limbs that can only come from forced quiet: parts well-placed and in harmony with the peaceful expression that I like to call “the vapid.”  I think I was startled to find, when I did, how deeply modeling thrills me.  When first I mastered the rare art of jutting one’s shoulders forward and chin out to one side, in order to accentuate the clavicles, I remember thinking that I was like a baseball power hitter who’d finally found his stance.  At age nineteen, when my mentor at the time, Jean-Joel Lawrence, proudly pronounced, “you’ve found the good mouth,” I felt a tumultuously joyful pride, as if I had unearthed a dinosaur in my own backyard, .  When learning the perfect angle at which to set my chin was compounded by the trick of cheating my eyes back to camera a little, I think I expected the mayor to award me a master key to the city for my monumental discoveries.  “Oh Gavin [Newsom would have been mayor at the time],” I’d have mumbled through immaculately poised lips, with my chin to the left, eyes unfocused, and clavicles jutting forth like bayonets, “I already have all the keys to life.”

Today was a gift, then:  I’d been in touch with a photographer since we’d left San Francisco and while I wasn’t sure what to expect at first, I liked the way he talked about his wife.  We agreed to meet at first for coffee, but CG was not in approval:

“I don’t know, Butler.  Who is this guy?  He wants to take pictures? I don’t like my babies going off alone with people we don’t know.  We’ll come with you.”

But the Babes whisk CG away to Ardent, and I step out of the hostel, bag in hand, alone.  I head into a coffeeshop to meet my photographer: unassuming, but sharp; gallant, but kind; warm but never patronizing, in short, the delightful conundrum named Tom Spatig. 

I describe to him the peculiarity of the bus, beginning with the long benches that flank either side and which “force us to face each other every morning,” I say, “and I remind the boys of that, too.”  I go on to sigh about the stage, which was the media lounge back when we had Joelle, our long-haired, sweet beauty and photographer; Nicole, our bright-eyed directing imp with an ever-ready and ever-sought-after laugh; and Hilary, whose astute, exotic eyes and immaculately long legs kept me on my toes.

“I have such a hard time getting along with women – but together the four of us were a well-oiled machine. I want to be like them:  I want Joelle’s easy grace, and Nicole’s fierce work ethic, and Hilary’s command.  And we’re all the same – we communicate like guys, straightforward, hurling pieces of information to each other like table tennis players on steroids. 

It’s like: ‘Bam! We’ll find another railroad track like the one in Marfa and knock out our next shot there. Bam!  We have to go for 3pm if we want the light continuity. Bam!  Someone put a little dirt on his cheek, the right side.  Bam! Guh-reat!’  And it gets done.”

            We turn to our own task at hand, despite the cold.  Tom drives us to the wrong side of the tracks and we take a full length photo under an overpass, a head shot as I sit in the crotch of the huge “M” that graces an otherwise humble median separating four completely unnecessary traffic lanes, and another couple of photos out by a huge stadium that has since been repurposed as a shopping center. 

Everything in Memphis seems to have been created on the principle of, “if you build it, they will come,” but not enough of “them” have ever come to fill all of the housing complexes, small commercial spaces, gaping parking lots, or ridiculously multi-laned highways.  Rather than being oppressed by the glaring travesty of city planning that creates so much emptiness in Memphis, I am elated by the opportunity to play.  With so much of the city put to no specific purpose, a person has a chance to define space rather than to be defined by it.  We are like children come upon the neighbor’s discarded refrigator-shipping box, forming so many half-pieces of civilization into full stories through the lens of Tom’s camera.

            “What about those girls we saw just outside the café?  They don’t play table tennis?”

“They braid hair.  They… Listen, I frankly don’t know what their goals are, what it is that they’re doing, and it makes me antsy to be around.  Ever since high school I’ve had some group of boys I hung around with, and generally boys who have intense dreams and a sense purpose, or at least always a task at hand.”

“Always boys?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s something about being small: if the wolves are going to close in anyhow, I might as well just get a wolf-pack of my own, make them be on my side. I’m a wolf, too: I like the aggressive approach.  And I don’t mind keeping them in line.”

“You need,” he says, and laughs, “I mean that I think you should - meet my wife.  It may not obvious at first anymore, but she’s fierce inside.  You can see it in her eyes.”

            He is right.  We’ve abandoned fighting the biting wind in favor of having a beer with Cheryl.  When she first approaches the table, I am suddenly, acutely, aware of the torn backpack I carry, the beer stain on my chunky purple hiking boots, the glaring brightness of my green raincoat.  By contrast, she is in light blue jeans and a mauve sweater, with neat, simple blonde hair flowing over her shoulders.  Hers is an effortless, neat, calm to my grungy chaos.  We are both quiet for a moment, until Tom encourages her to tell me about her black belt in karate.

            “My ex-husband once called the cops on me.  He was threatening me, so I did what I had to do, and eventually I broke his arm.”

            “Oh god, I broke a guy’s nose in Austin.  He said the word rape; I was afraid.  I was only holding my heels in my hand so that I could run if I had to.  I didn’t even really process it all until I had made it back to bus, and was scraping off a piece of his nose-flesh from my pumps onto the curb.”

            Cheryl is still the sweet woman I saw at first, the loving, headstrong wife to a sensitive (but very masculine) artist, but I see in her the beast I celebrate in me.  For whatever reason, there are people in this world who enjoy the luxury of nonviolence.  They have been, miraculously, careful enough to never have been alone at night, or wealthy enough never to have ridden public transportation – or else they are simply naturally more guarded.  I think it is a fault of our eyes: a curiosity and hunger for life there that some have mistaken for naivite.  More’s the pity.

            I discover throughout the first forty-five minutes that Cheryl had been a model, as well as her sister’s caretaker (in older age), and also how they met.

            “I met her in Vegas,” says Tom, with a wink, “she’s my Vegas showgirl.”  He elaborates when we both give him the same withering look that she was in fact a stunt skydiver, “a wild woman!” at a time when he was organizing an air show for the Navy. 

            I learn that Tom’s mother Ruth, has relearned to drive after a stroke and had her first outing today, to get her hair done.  We order beers, and I propose a toast to my deceased grandmother (“Happy Days,” she’d say) who would have been jealous of Ruth’s ability to drive. 

            “We would never have heard the end of it if she’d gotten wind that some other ‘little old lady’ somewhere was allowed to drive herself to the beauty shop.  She was like us, Cheryl.  She was wild, too, but when she got older, all that fire somehow got translated into glittery nails and sequined hats.  And she definitely gave a few people a crack in her day.”

            “Did you bathe her, too?” Cheryl asks with a candor I find comforting.

            “Yes! It was my favorite part.”

            “Mine, too.  The warm water, I think, calms them.  Bath time is always nice.”
            “It’s good to be there until the end.”

            “It’s good to be there before the end, when it still counts.  Did your grandmother see the dead, at the very last?”

            I nod. “I mean, I think so.  It seemed like she was seeing ghosts all around us.”

            Even with the promise that Tom will return for me the next day to bring me to the studio for a proper-length shoot, I am sad to leave these beautiful new friends, but tonight is Zweng’s birth-eve.  He’ll turn 28 at midnight, and I go to buy candles, thinking I'll place them into shot glasses.           

I make it to the bar where my crew has gathered just after Midnight, and they clamor around me.  “Where were you?” ask the girls, “I’ll bet you missed us,” says Neil.  I hardly have the energy to answer them: I am trying to discreetly wait for Zweng to step away from the bar so that I can order him his birthday drinks.  “Distract him!” I tell the girls, but he stands at my elbow like a little boy, “Did Butler get me candles?  What did you get? You’re like my mom, Butler!”
            After unsuccessful attempts at melting the bottoms in order to stick the large “2” and “8” shaped candles to the inside of the shot glasses (a task that the bartender nobly encourages), I finally stick them to the bar itself, light them in front of the 13 shots of jagermeister (his request, not my choice) I’ve got lined up, and call over Zweng.  He blows them out with a cry, takes a shot, and begins dancing wildly.  Either CG or Jonny has put ZZ Top on the jukebox.             

“Butler, this is the album I used to play over and over, when I was just some punk kid in high school.  I learned how to play drums playing along to this album, and it was recorded here, and now here I am, I’m twenty-eight years old tonight, recording in Memphis, at the same studio.”  I squeal as Zweng grabs hold of me and tosses me up, catching my bum under one arm and plucking at my spine as if it were a guitar with the fingers of the other.  “How can we keep making life this amazing.” He asks the raucous room.  He lets me go, and suddenly becomes more calm, although I see a glint in his eyes.

“Butler, what if we,” he fiddles with his birthday candles, “still know each other when we’re this old?”  I look down and realize he has moved the candles so that they now read “82.”

            “Guh-reat!” I say,  “But I’ll be wearing sequined hats by then.”

Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby (Louis Jordan, "G.I. Jive")

March 19th, 2013           South Padre Island, Texas

            When we pulled away from  South Padre Island at 10am, I had my arm pinned under  the bass drum, and the fake zebra fur that had covered the drum was pinned to my margarita-stained cheeks.  We had never quite transitioned the stage from its’ performance position to the proper sleepytime state, and so pillows and instruments competed for space in, on, around the sandy bodies that had wearily made their way back here before the party had even ended.

            We’d decided that morning to make it out to South Padre Island and spend a day at the beach.  At 1am, fatigued from an afternoon of splashing out in the waves, an evening of hot-tubbing, and the day in full of flipping the bird to boys who had hoped that I was as desperate for attention as everyone else in this “Spring Break” wasteland of humanity where reason and self respect go to die, I’d downed a cheaply-made margarita from a bar whose name I never even glanced at.  A live band was playing covers of all the pop songs of the last 20 years that happen to refer to the ocean.  A drunken boy in a red shirt said he liked the way I move and then almost hit the gangly guitar-player who refused to quit playing Blondie’s “The Tide is High” in order to instead cover “I like the Way You Move” for my personal benefit.  The breakers of spring were all wearing t-shirts that recounted either their academic endeavors, latest travel destination, or sexual prowess, in the form of a poorly-formed pun.   I talked to another boy with a name impossible to remember and that I felt oughtn’t belong to a human. He’d been arrested earlier that day “because I’m big,” he’d said with a pout.  I reassured him that he looked nice to me, and he said, “but you’re not the kind of girl to kiss,” and I agreed, but left him with a pat on the back.  I danced with the wide-eyed and light-footed Dave before returning to the bus just as the bars were closing.  The plan was to gather the drunkards spilling out from the bars and make a round of the major hotels to drop them off.

            To our shock, almost the entire crowd dispersed into separate gas-guzzling SUV’s, peeled out with cries up to the gaggle of girls we had sitting up on the roof, and disappeared into the night.  We were able to get a few strangers on board with us, but there were neither enough of them to justify charging them, nor few enough to simply give up entirely.  The last thing that I recall is snaking my way through the mini-crowd of neon-clad, tequila-filled girls, toward the safe crook of Jonny Cat’s arm as another couple of Destroyers-of-the-Vernal-Equinox entered the bus with the same high-pitched queries as the last.

            I awoke, anyhow, with my contacts still in and my neck crooked, curled into a ball away from the sleeping forms of our Shaman, Eddy, on one side and our equipment manager Chris on the other.
Recognizing my tour-mate, I let my left leg slide toward Chris’ back a little to give it a stretch– but he shivers in his sleep, and so I recoil back into my fetal position.  The bus can be more comfortable than a bed when we’ve arranged ourselves correctly but the current modus operandi is one of chaos and my normal nestmates are nowhere to be found: where is Ian?  Why did Jonny leave? 

            As we’re pulling away, Ian and Drew appear with tales of basking in a warm pool all evening, and just as suddenly, the cherub-faced JonJon hops down from the top bunk with a cry that his wallet is missing.  Despite his declaration from the night before that I am something of a shrew: a dark, self-conscious, pedantic woman with a constant frown to greet all of his boisterous joy, JonJon chooses me as the audience to the tale of his evening.  He’d walked off with one of the beauties who’d been trying out the pole.  Her name was Paradise and she wore blue contacts, and JonJon didn’t mind that the color of her eyes was faux because, like the Little Prince who values the fox because he’s tamed him, JonJon had made her his own by showing her the ocean for the first time in her life. 

            “I put my wallet in her little backpack and held her hand and we walked out on the ocean.  We held hands the whole time.  I never got to show someone the ocean for the first time before!  I need to find that chick, for my wallet,” he says.  There is much discussion, delay, more discussion, a visit to a gas station to use the restroom, a visit to the dorms to return “no-name,” a long-haired vixen who had flashed us as part of a gopro video about Drew, and through all of it I do nothing but change sleeping spaces: top bunk Jonjon had vacated, to the bench seats, to a hammock with one pillow and my ridiculous fur coat covering me, and finally back to the sleeping pad once I see Ian has returned to it.  A man with one leg (or, to be more accurate, about one and two thirds of leg) has joined us at some point while I was sleeping.  He invites us to stick around so he can BBQ us some shrimp, and when we tell him we have a show to get to, he instead make it an invitation to come in and use his shower. 

Throughout all of this, Jonjon sleeps on the floor, oblivious to the fact that no progresss has been made in recovering his wallet.  Finally we all agree that JonJon must stay behind on the island in order to fulfill this reconnaissance mission, and the rest of us will go forth to McAllen. 

            “Doesn’t anyone feel like we’re marooning him?” I ask, looking down at Jonjon’s pink-white cheekbones. His fingers are curled into his mass of blonde hair and the nuggets of foliage he’s collected there. He is wearing one shoe and smiling in his sleep.

Jonny, who is observing Jonjon as well, says: “Just leave him by himself on the island? He’ll die.”

            “Have some faith.  It’ll be good for him.”

            “Even if he can’t find his wallet and that girl, he can always stay with no-name.”

            “What if he can’t even find no-name?”

            “He can stay a night with this guy.  He just offered.”

            “That’s right, sure.  Come stay with me.  He can help me carry this beer back inside, since nobody seems like they want it.  You all are great kids.  We’ll find some women together.  Women love the parlor tricks – I can take this guy right off, the leg, I mean– ”

             “He won’t want us to leave him.”

            “We have to just tell him this is his only choice.  He’s on a holy mission to find his wallet.”

            “Yeah! Consequences  He has to figure it out.”

            We wake up JonJon to tell him we’re leaving, and that we’ve decided he should stay here.  To our surprise, he is delighted,

            “Oh, dudes! I’ll see that chick again!  The one on the beach.  I’ll probably hook up with that chick tonight!”

            “Ok good; now hold still.  I gotta write some numbers on your arm.”

            “What?  Why?  I don’t want that chick to think I am getting a bunch of girls’ phone numbers…”

            “You’re gonna lose your phone, dude.  Don’t lie to yourself, ok?”

            Ian, Zweng, Drew and Chris tackle him down in order to write their phone numbers on him. 

            “Don’t make it look like girls’ handwriting, ok?”

            Ian signs his name to the number he’s scratched into JonJon’s left forearm.

            “And you can find someone with facebook to find us, too.  Like Jonny did that one morning.”

         
            Our crusty old seaman has successfully removed the false lower portion of right leg and is sitting on his bottom, waving the nub goodbye to us, and as the bus pulls away from him we all wave back.  “Pray for Jonjon,” someone calls out.  I nod; go back to writing; slip into my day. 

When we get back to McAllen, I go with Mayra to the little clothing shop she owns, and, in a fit of desperation for estrogen-based contact, I touch and try on every single frothy-laced pink scoop-necked delight the store has to offer.  I eventually buy a pair of heels, that in their height and strappy elegance make me wonder how I could ever return to the world of the busso-boys again.  The chirpy laughter of the saleswomen, the perfectly folded onesies and cream blouses and well-executed darts on sleeveless heart-neckline dresses are nearly as satisfying to my soul as were the first lines of Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s poetry when I wondered to myself at age seventeen if anyone had ever felt that way.

         
            Hours later, we’ve gathered back together on the bus and are pulling up to Sahadi’s. 

            “Has anyone heard from Jonjon?” I ask [again].  His phone has been dead for a couple of hours.

            Miraculously, as we pull up, we see an old pick-up truck that has Jonjon and our one-legged bandit both in the bed, sitting cross-legged.  They have arrived even before we have, and remembered not even the address to the house we’ve been staying at (and which was written somewhere on him), but the address of the show and the time we ought to be there.  He has his wallet in hand and the kindly old seadog with him asks me for a dance once the music starts.  Ah, serendipity.

6:07pm            McAllen, Texas – the Dr’s house

            “Where are we going?”

            “Four hours ago we were going through Austin again, to pick up Shawnee, and then up to Memphis – “

            “Why do we have to go back to Austin?”
            “I’ll get laid in Austin.”

            “To get that girl Shawnee who’s flying in to meet us.”

            “There are checkpoints between here and Austin.”

            “I don’t think we need any more girls then.  There are girls in Tennessee, right? No checkpoints.”

            “Actually, we’re picking up Kayla, too, so there are two girls we’re getting in Austin.  Two girls!”
              “Yeah?  I don’t know man.  I really hate checkpoints.”
           

2:16am                        Austin, Texas – “Jack in the Crack”

            We went through the checkpoint anyhow, although with no trouble and onward toward the girls we need to pick up in Dallas.  I’ve been sleeping, for the most part, and texting the girls I miss so much, all while comfortably wedged between Jonny Cat and CG.  I woke up briefly around 10pm when Jonny switched spots with Zweng, and again around midnight in order to tuck blankets in around Zweng, asleep at a nearly perfect right angle to me.  Just now I awoke again in order to use a restroom that turned out to be out of order, and JonJon asked if I’d take his place and help Ian stay up.

            So here it is, my first ride in the Babe.  In the space of time it’s taken for me to make the switch, Rocky has disappeared. 

            “He texted his Austin girl and she came to get him.  He said he’ll be back in 15 minutes,” Ian explains.  “Am I in first?  This feels like third.”

            “First is right in the middle, but a little to the left,” says Drew.

            “Oh, don’t mind that sound,” Ian says referring to a strange buzzing that has just begun somewhere to my left.  "That’s how you know she’s having a good time.  This car is… She’s a little donkey.”

            The interior of the babe is dark, but with a flip of one switch can be lit in purple and gold rope lights.   Just as Ian is putting on some music via his phone, someone from the busso calls, interrupting it.  “Yeah, we’re right behind you!”  Ian is disgusted.  “Some people!" He says, while plugging his phone back into the speaker system, “have no respect for Ray Charles!”           

            A few minutes later, “Do you think that there are mom and pop gas stations in Texas?”

            I have known for awhile now that Ian is not well.  He snapped some time ago, back in Marfa, I think it was, and mine is the unwitting ear to the nonsense that sooths his lawyerly soul.
            “What?” I ask, “You mean a family business where they pump their own gas out of the ground in the yard?”

            “Yeah, their children wander around covered in oil.”

March 23^rd            Little Rock, Arkansas

            I find the cold grey swampy sky and the skeletal deciduous forest below it both nostalgic and exotic – nostalgic for the time I was in Ireland with my family but also exotic because of a sense ingrained in me from childhood that the fog holds magic. The forest Guinevere and Arthur – or else Guinevere and Lancelot – loved in looked like this.  The grasses over which the beautiful Finn McCoul trod were at once as green and also inhospitable as these.  The trees that beguiled the mighty Finn as he searched for the brown-speckled hide of his wife-turned-deer were as black-specked, orange-topped, and aggressive as these spindly birches that ache through the seemingly endless indgo-grey sky.  There are spots where the grass ends, and the ground disappears entirely into long boggy brown pools covered in the brown leaves the trees have left behind – and it must be in these that the Tuatha de Dannan, the old kings and goddesses of Ireland, the “good people” of the forest, are hiding and waiting for me…if only I could find the strength to dive from the windows of this bus.

            It’s funny how quickly the new becomes old again:  Carl Elliott, while writing my favorite book Better than Well, noted that after four to six weeks of living and writing on the beach that the waves had already lost their luster and fallen to the background and that his mind had begun to wander elsewhere.  The underlying desire to be continuously kept in wonder; the need for exoticism, the search for the ever-stranger-than-the-last thing is what drives the heart of a traveler or artist.  I wouldn’t say that the bus has grown old just yet, mainly because we are never in one location long enough that we learn it fully.  I don’t even yet know the rocker boys I am traveling with well enough for them to have grown boring: the conversations have yet to run dry.  Oddly, the movement factor in and of itself has grown old; the pace of things no longer seems exotic: far stranger are the moments of quiet when we have time to reflect with one another on what it is we believe, or how it is we learn. 

            Last night at the historical Stickyz venue in Little Rock, AR, Michael Warren Grant (MG) and I were talking and I said once again how odd it was that I haven’t read even a page of the four books I brought on the trip with me.  I thought I’d have needed to buy new ones by now at least, but the truth is that I haven’t been reading books because I’ve been too busy reading the people around me.  I take notes on what they say, but I also read their expressions and the way their bodies curve into or away from one another, or each one’s relationship to the bus, to the stress of the road, or the need to be always shoveling more media into the infinitely ravenous gullet of the internet. 

            I’d been taking time for something like self-pity, a longing for the science-types that I seek out in my selfish and somewhat naïve desire to pick up knowledge by osmosis: the jargon of microscopy, a vague sense of time dilation, a near-ability to recognize different coding languages.

            I just want to be full enough with reference, inference, creativity, that I can read “See Spot Run” and extrapolate from even that that meager scrap of written effort a sense of what it is to human.  My greatest desire is to open my eyes to each person we meet on this trip, judge as I may, but all the while giving myself the opportunity and time to learn each one’s story.  It isn’t just the ones who can articulate their own tales who are worth listening to.

March 24^th, 2013            Memphis, TN

A reflection of desire:

            “I just want 7^th graders in Minneapolis to be crying while listening to this one year from now; I want kids on mushrooms watching our videos and flipping out, ‘oh dude, is this really happening?  Look at his hands, man, oh dude, how does he do that? Mannn.’  That’s all I want.”

Snippets of jargon:

            “So we’re doing it at 88?”

            “You said there’s a tape delay around here?  Two track or something?

            “We’ve got something a little more lo-fi. Hampton calls it the kaslap.”

           

            “You have any idea about when they stopped making Fairchilds?”

            “No, although – you know Hampton called up Long Island directory assistance, got the name of whatever it was that Fairchild became.  Man.  They had huge transformers in there; made more of a difference than the tubes.”

            “So they’re recording to tape, am I right?”

           

            The boys have already been in the studio yesterday, and on into the night – I only dropped by for a moment myself before hitting Beale St with the other kids.  As a tourist trap, it’s at least as nice as the old crab shacks along the wharf in San Francisco used to be, back when the crab crackers were hot deadheads and you were guaranteed to hear a live version of “Johnny B. Good” if you sat inside at the bar.  Personally speaking, the guys playing old blues standards were to me like guardian angels sent to me from the wharf, or maybe Hunter's Point Senior Center.  When Dave and I had first arrived, we'd run out into the night hand in hand splashing puddles and screaming "Horns! Where are horns?!" until we found and followed the trailing sound of a trumpet into P & H cafe.  Guinness in hand and butt shaking, I was finally home.  But I digress.

            We arrive at 2pm and the sound engineer greets us with “Good morning,” as Zweng nonchalantly goes over to the kitchen area and cracks open a beer.  At least I made them get up in time for breakfast this morning.

            Ardent Studios is laid out much like a labyrinth, with a tiny patio-garden as its’ center.  The general progression of wonders tiers best when the studio is entered from the side door, which faces the parking lot.  Immediately to the right are offices, and a brick wall to the left.  You make another right into a hall that is flanked by an open mini kitchen area on your right (where the 101 North Brewing Co keg is being tapped for artistic growth), and the doors to studios A and B on the left.  The mini kitchen area forms two sides of the glass box that is that center garden.  If you continue down the hall you reach a strange closet on the left that holds shelves on one side stacked sound blankets and concrete slabs, and on the other side piles of old mixers, pianos, guitars, and one ancient computer stuck with a faded postit-note reading  “Why???”  Walking through this closet, you reach a tinier hall, although better lit, that leads to studio C, where the boys are recording.  This teeny hall is hung with records from ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin, Toots in Memphis. Al Green, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Joe Walsh, Don Nix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and is as quiet, solemn, and full of ghosts as an old cathedral (or I suppose it’d be a Baptist church, out here).  In the bathroom at the far end of this tiny hall are two books: an old black-and-white coffee table book of Beatles photos and a paperback entitled, “Presidents: All You Need to Know.”  The tiny, glassed-in, center patio garden has a eucalyptus in each corner, some tall, robust, likely Japanese grasses around each tree, but otherwise cement ground, and a 6 ft high fountain in the center that spills into a 4 ft diameter brick-lined pool.  The wrought-iron bench is too cold in this weather to enjoy, but even standing outside for a minute brings to mind the same sense of wonder, reverence, peace, and need to create beauty that the Berkeley City Club (a Julia Morgan building where I’ve performed theater) inspires.  Ardent studios to them, and by proxy to me, is what the Giants locker room was to my brother.  It’s what the Globe is to any thespian. 

            A young man with a ukulele, a quarter-smile, and a plethora of tales about records gone by, tells me that the clan is coming to town this week.

            “Don’t much like your family, huh?”

            “Not my clan, the KLAN.”

            Signal a record scratching to a full stop.

            “I’m serious,” he answers the silence, “they’re coming to demonstrate because – well, the city parks here are named after Civil War Veterans.  The city wants to change the names to something a little more… benign.  Klan doesn’t like that.”

            “Oh my –”

            “Oh, don’t worry.  If the Klan comes here, they’re going to die.  I have friends talking about protesting, but honestly?  Just stay home.  This is where Martin Luther King Jr. died.  Trust me that no one is going to allow them to get away with this.”

            I nod.  Jonny appears, saying, “Jesus, my neck hurts.  I think I fell on my neck.  Butler, you aren’t really the type of girl to just give massages, are you?  That’s ok.  I know you aren’t.  It’s just that my neck hurts.”

            I have hit a period of unwonted maternal passion for these boys, and pull Jonny’s head to rest on one knee, and then Zweng's to rest on the other.  Zweng’s forehead is facing up and I use my thumb to stroke his third eye, while Jonny is facing down into the tiny bits of thigh fat that I am for once thankful, and I stroke his long gypsy hair.  To CG I give a sweet wink and assure him of his manifest destiny as the one true prince for Honeybaby, for all of the honeybabies. 

            “I’m so proud of you!” I tell my little murder of crows, and then I leave them to their recording so that I can bombard the sweet night watchman who “was depressed and useless 28 years of my life – I’m 29 years old,” with ever more questions about how it was that Lavinia, Tennessee, population 200, came to spit out one of the most articulate men I have ever met in my life (accent not withstanding).  I am already half-determined to make it my next project to write the life and times of this mysterious Buddist/ukulele blues master.