Cadillac Couches (10 page)

“Are you sure you couldn't fall for Finn?” I had to ask.

“Well, honestly, j'ai essayé. And I do wish I could, seriously. I don't know why I can't . . . I guess I'm like some kind of self-contained unit.” She looked sad confessing this to me. It occurred to me then for the first time that her inability to love Finn wasn't just another non-event in her long line of contenders contending. It was a failing. Not unlike my own failings. I went too far; she couldn't go deep enough.

“But feel free to go for him, Annie. You know you and Finn could make a good pair!” Isobel added with a cheeky smile.

“What? Don't be ridiculous! No way. But . . . he is great, you know,” I said.

The mainstage show was coming on in ten minutes so we tried to get closer, but the field was filling up quickly. A man in drag was on stage doing a shtick about the discomfort of porta-potties: how when you go into one later in the day and it's at capacity and you've had a few beers, you somehow gotta try to hold your purse, plug your nose, and negotiate taking a whiz—it's tough to hover in those conditions! And you're truly screwed if you had the god-forbidden hot sauce with the green onion cakes and your intestines are in a hurry to evacuate.

There was something different about this crowd. It took me a few moments to clue in that it was because it was mostly women and girls making up the whole area. They were mobbing the stage. Dan Bern must have been on to something with this Ani Diwhatever.

Isobel wasn't comfortable with lots of women around. Was she threatened? God knows why, she was a Queen Bee. But I was pretty much her only female friend. I could see her bristling at other good-looking women. Women were looking one another up and down all right, but in a women-are-beautiful way, and don't they wear nice things. Like raccoons drawn to sparkly objects. In this crowd I think she was the only one doing accounting; everyone else was smiling. I didn't care that we were road-trip grubby.

It was hot. Hotter than Alberta and more humid. Mosquito count was not too high. They must have sprayed. Bumblebees whizzed over the crowd of femaleness. I glanced over at Finn; he looked pretty happy. Lovelies of all descriptions surrounded him. It was a short-haired, long-haired, curly-haired, Sinead O'Connor shaved-headed, bead-wearing crowd of women smiling in anticipation. Only a handful of men joined the throng. Most of the other guys stood back, watching from afar.

I had never been around this many women before in one place. It was a different energy than at a male performer's gig: Isobel elbowed me to get my attention and nodded toward two women arm in arm, shaved heads, and only wearing black
PVC
bras underneath their denim overalls. They had big black stompy boots and a kind of girl warrior chic I had never seen before.

“Psst, Finn . . . psst . . . is this some kind of lesbian event?” Isobel asked.

“Lesbian event, what do you mean?” Finn repeated.

“Shh,” came from someone behind. I turned to look and it was a ten-year-old girl with braids and an orange T-shirt with the words
QUESTION AUTHORITY
written on it. She was standing beside an older girl who looked like her sister whose T-shirt said
READ CHOMSKY
.

A roar surged through the crowd. There was no one on stage yet but thunderous clapping, ground-stomping, and cat-calling came bursting from the audience. Whooping went on for minutes, building a tidal wave of suspense. The excitement was contagious. I was filled with anticipation for I didn't know what.

And then—a small woman walked on stage.

She was five-foot two-ish, like me. She was wearing a motorcyclist's black leather vest, low, hip-riding jeans, and clunky workman's boots. She had muscular arms and a tattooed collarbone. Ani DiFranco was wearing an Alvarez Yairi WY1, Finn told us. It looked like it might overpower her, but she had a good grip on it, curled in the curve of her breast. She had big, full lips, super-white teeth, a shaved head, wide sparkling blue eyes, a nose ring, and hairy armpits. She was gorgeous!

She started to tune her Alvarez guitar, and the crowd quieted down, anxious to hear her. She spoke up: “You know, people say I'm an angry girl, but uh . . .” She giggled. “I just got a few things on my mind is all.” Her laugh was charming. I could see that she had black electrical tape on her fingers and I wondered what for. Then she hit the guitar with this crazy Spaghetti Western fury, crackling through her galloping chords. It wasn't a matter of her warming up or the crowd warming up to her. Everyone was hooked straight up and straight in. I could understand the tape now, it was so she wouldn't get raw, bloody fingers from playing so crazily hard; like she was trying to break the speed of sound. She played like thunder to her adoring crowd of shaved-headed young followers, hippie girls, suburban preppies, mothers, sisters, and grandmas. Girls, girls, and more girls danced in the front rows, danced so hard the sun-baked ground rose in a dust cloud among us all.

She sang anthems. I looked around; all the girls knew all the words and were singing their hearts out:

I am not a pretty girl

that is not what I do

I ain't no damsel in distress

and I don't need to be rescued

so put me down punk

wouldn't you prefer a maiden fair

isn't there a kitten

stuck up a tree somewhere

There was no leather-trousered male in sight on stage, but I was falling in big-time heart-throbbing love. A new kind of hero worship had hit me.

She had breakup songs. She had revolution songs. She had fuck-you songs and fuck-me songs. She had the gift of the gab. I had never seen anything like it before. She was no earnest folkie. She was no ridiculous Madonna serving up her sex on a platter, pretending it was original. She was fresh and raw and playful and flirtatious with her shit-disturbing politics, her vulnerable love songs, and her way of playing guitar that sounded like she was twanging all our collective nerves and veins and ligaments. It was visceral and incandescent. I could see fire and mountains and lashing rain and gyrating bodies and tranquil seas, trembling desires, lusty encounters, and brave acts. It was all there, coming out of her little body and mighty fingers.

Ever since she started playing, I'd had a tingling feeling at the base of my skull. A creeping feeling of well-being. It was new, tingling instead of twitching. I was connecting, part of something, and proud. I wasn't even conscious that I had lost Isobel and Finn. Mouth agape, I just let it all pour inside me through every orifice and pore. It felt like watching a natural disaster, from a safe distance.

Between rocking songs, she played some jazzy improv music and just started talking while jamming, like Van Morrison does sometimes: “You know, there's a lot of bullshit out there in the world for girls to wade through . . . I was in a clothes store the other day and I was shocked to discover the latest fashion crime: size zero. Have you heard of this? I'm serious . . . it's for real. I mean, what the crap is that? No really, what the hell is that? I was just trying to buy like a gaunch or something . . .”

“Whooooooooooo,” roared the crowd, egging her on. She stopped talking and lost herself and put all of us in a trance with the wacked acid-jazz medley she played on electric guitar.

“Since when are women built to be a size zero? And is that the point, that as women we should strive to do nothing but spend our time starving ourselves just so we can be a
zero
? You wouldn't see a guy buying a pair of size zero pants, now wouldya? I mean, God . . . But anyways . . . we got way more important shit to do . . . like world domination! Ha! . . . I'm no zero, are you guys zeroes?”

“Noooooooooooo . . . woo . . . woo . . . woo . . . rrrrrrrrrrrr,” whistled the crowd.

“I don't want to preach at y'all, that stuff just pisses me off and I gotta get it off my chest!” She laughed again and snorted in an endearing donkeylike way, hamming it up. She must have been the class clown. She finished tuning, and a few chords into her next song, the crowd went nuts. “Blood in the Boardroom,” it was called. The audience was euphoric.

Sitting in the boardroom,

the I'm-so-bored-room,

listening to the suits talk about their world

. . . I wonder can these boys smell me bleeding thru my underwear.

They can make straight lines out of almost anything . . .

I can make life. I can make breath!

I was in the throes of the crowd, celebrating bloody underwear! Lifted by the group's oozing exuberance, I was transfixed. I had been moved; just like all these women beside me had been at some point or another when they first heard this woman. My body was a fusilli noodle, at one with the crowd and tunes, swaying and bending, contorting and springing. Ani DiFranco sang in the sun for an hour, driving us crazy with her percussive finger-plucking. People threw roses and incense, T-shirts and books and lipstick and food and panties on the stage. We danced through her twenty-song set. The music went straight to my hips. I was deep in the heart of this crazed crowd. We danced so hard, we were dirty and dusty and smiling big. Her final rock encore was so intense, the dancing so enormous, the sky clapped and a sun-shower came down on us and washed the dust off our faces and made some mud for our feet to play with and splash up our legs.

The crowd wouldn't let her leave the stage, so she took a swig of water, sat down, and put a tam-tam between her legs. She sang Prince's “When Doves Cry” a cappella. Just her ragged voice and the brooding drum. It was hair-raising and beautiful like a swim at dawn. I was listening so acutely, almost gulping in all those lovely sounds she made. I saw her biceps beating the tam-tam and I understood how important it was to be fully alive, fully engaged with life. It was like sunlight, after years of candlelight. I'd been too much of a night owl, spent too much time indoors with the curtains drawn.

I had been rapturously inspired before, many times, but I'd never had a female hero before. I made a run for the record store tent. I had to restrain myself from pushing people out of my way to get to her stack of
CD
s and tapes. She had several albums, but I could only afford two of them. I chose her first one and her most recent release on cassette because then we could play them in the car. I read some of her liner notes while I waited to pay. She was only in her twenties. She had her own record label: Righteous Babe Records. Behind me there were dozens of young girls trying to get their hands on her music.

I made my way back through the crowds, heading to where we had been sitting before the show, figuring Isobel and Finn would know to go there. I was buzzing with excitement, dying to share the experience with them. So excited, I could barely breathe. What a rush to see a woman do it like that—get up there and kick serious musical ass.

Plowing my way through the crowds I wasn't really concentrating on where I was going and I walked smack into a girl. I actually head-butted her by accident. We both rubbed our foreheads and looked at each other.

“Sorry, wow, I'm really sorry about that,” I said.

She had long romantic red hair and peaches-and-cream skin with freckles. I felt a cloud of foreboding when I looked at her one hazel eye and the other green one. I scrutinized her face, wondering what the likelihood was that this could be the same girl, the same buck-toothed
free spirit
Sullivan had written about.

She laughed and rubbed her forehead again. “You're sure in a hurry for a person at a folk fest, is there someone you gotta see?” Her laugh was scratchy and sexy.

Was this really her? I hope she's not an Ani fan too.

Cowboy hat, a mini-skirt. She's just like I dreamt her to be. Except in my nightmares she was larger than life and I was a Lilliputian.

I must have fainted. Again.

Am I sleeping?
It's warm and I'm tired. Oh, oh . . . what is that? Am I being kissed? Jesus, what's going on? That feels weird. My nose is itchy . . . 
I tried to shake my head back into consciousness, my eyes were heavy and I felt a mouth on me again. A dry, unfamiliar mouth, smothering me. It was breathing into me. Then it pulled away.

The next time I opened my eyes just in time to see her mouth coming toward me. She was plugging my nose too. There was a tent of red hair cascading around my face. She tasted like something tart, something . . . iced tea.

I jerked up when I understood finally what was happening. The she-devil was giving me mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration.

“Hey, are you okay? You just fainted. You passed right out. And I didn't think you were breathing . . . I think we gotta take you to the medi-tent.”

“No, no, I'm fine, I'm sure it's just the sun, the beer, the dope, the music, you know . . .”

“Well . . . shit. Are you breathing fine?”

“Ya, thanks for that, Alicia,” I said, still confused.

Her eyes opened wide. “That's not my—”

I took off running, through the crowds, hoping she wouldn't follow me. I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand, trying to rub off her bizarre kiss. I felt stung, and slapped. After I was sure I was lost in the crowd again, I stopped for a rest breath and went to hide behind a Moroccan food tent. Gasping. An old man came back to get some more supplies for his kiosk. He looked at me and said, “You shouldn't take drugs, you know, it's very bad for young girls.” Then he wagged his finger at me, like an elementary school principal. He grabbed a water bottle from his cooler and gave it to me. I drank it all in one long gulp, grateful once again for the sweetness of strangers.

I shifted my canvas arm bag from one shoulder to the other. I remembered the Ani DiFranco tapes and pulled them out. I sat down in the shade of a tree. I looked at the crowds around me, making sure I was anonymous again, with no demons in sight. I pulled out Ani's song lyrics. My eyes were bubbling over with tears.