"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.”