"The Flamenco Academy" (12 page)

“Yeah, but why do you even want to go?”

“Uh, let’s see? Number one, better than
going home. Number two, better than going home. And number three,
did I mention? Better than going home.”

“Could I just go to your house and eat margs
with Catwoman and you go without me like we always do?”

“No. Come on, Hunker. Come on, you
wiener-happy woman, you.”

There she’d done it, hit the fiction that I
was a hot number always up for a good time.

I didn’t actually agree, just stopped
arguing. We stopped at Wendy’s on Central, ordered Diet Cokes, and
took our drinks and everything we’d bought at Le DAV into the
ladies’ room for a try-on party. Didi sorted through our bags and
hauled out the prima vintage fiesta skirt painted with a
bullfighting scene in fiery reds and blacks. The black tummy tee
she already had on went perfectly with it. The skirt rode low on
her hips and the tee stopped somewhere above her bottom ribs,
showing Didi’s navel ring and the perfectly flat stomach it was
attached to. She painted on some red vinyl lipstick from her purse
and looked like a stylist had spent hours on her.

“Now you,” she said, rooting around in the
bags.

“What about this?” I asked, tugging on the
rockabilly shirt I was wearing. I felt safe in it, covered up.

“Oh, yeah, that’s perfect.” One beat. Two.
“For a remake of
Deliverance
. Here, try this.” She pushed a
pair of late-eighties stone-washed jeans into my hands. I put them
on. Didi circled her finger indicating that I should twirl around.
I did and she shook her head. “No, definitely not. Serious case of
No Assatall.”

I peeked over my shoulder and saw that the
jeans did indeed flatten my butt down like a sack of feed.

“This! This! This!” Didi shoved a flimsy
skirt into my hands.

I held it up. “Uh, are you sure?” The skirt,
a froth of lace and some slinky, slippery fabric, was one of those
homemade creations you can find only in a thrift store, a flight of
fancy that had found no place in its maker’s real life.

“Uh, I don’t think so. I didn’t shave my
legs.”

“You need to shave your legs about as much
as an albino. You have virtually no visible body hair.”

“I’m not really a skirt person.” I handed it
back and started to put my jeans on.

Didi ripped the jeans out of my hands.
“Cyndi Rae Hrncir, you are too young to be saying what kind of
person you are and
way
too young to be saying what kind of
person you are
not
. Put this on!” She held the skirt out and
stared at me, not saying what was in both our minds: I could either
put the skirt on or keep following a path that was starting out too
narrow and would only get narrower.

I took the skirt. “Okay, but just to try
on.” The garment might not have worked for its creator, but it
settled onto my hips as if made for me. A fantasy me who wore
skirts that revealed her midriff.

“Don’t say anything!” Didi ordered as I eyed
myself dubiously. She tugged the skirt down until first my belly
button, then the very top of my pubic hair showed.

“No way!” I yanked the skirt back up.

“You’re right. Pubes are too hoochie mama.
But you have to wear this.” She plucked a cream silk camisole out
of the bag.

“But that’s underwear.”

“Uh, yeah. Put it on! Put it on!”

I was surprised by how good the pale
camisole looked against my skin, which had turned a rosy pink from
all the hours we’d spent cruising with the top of the Skankmobile
down.

Didi fluffed up my hair and painted my face
as if I were her favorite doll. Then she spun me back around to
face the mirror. “See how great I made you look!”

I studied not myself but Didi’s handiwork,
amazed at what she had done. My lips were plump, my eyes sparkled,
my face was a palette of delicious creams and pinks and blues. Even
in the buzzing fluorescent lights of Wendy’s bathroom, I looked
good. Didi had made me look good. “You’re a genius,” I
whispered.

“And tits out!” Didi drilled a knuckle into
my spine and I jerked my shoulders back. “Sexy mama,” Didi
said.

It was as if I had still been carrying a
heavy backpack and had just dropped it. For that moment, that
night, I was light, and free, and sexy.

The skirt felt like a cloud barely floating
around my body as we walked outside. The parking lot was bathed in
silver all the places where the gaudy neon colors didn’t reach.
Didi stopped dead and pointed up. “Hey, look. Have you ever seen a
moon that full?”

I hadn’t. It was as if the moon had
graduated that day too and was shining more brightly than it ever
had before. I tilted my head up to let the silvery light stream
over me.

“Wow, I wish you could see yourself. Someone
is going to fall in love with you tonight, sexy mama. Probably
me.”

I laughed along with Didi. The joke wasn’t
Didi falling in love with me. It was her falling in love with
anyone.

The Whatevs’ party had started by the time
we pulled into the parking lot of the Ace High. The motel’s sign,
an ace of hearts, flipped over and over in blinking red neon. As
soon as we stepped out of the car, we could hear the old ZZ Top
song about how she’s got legs and she knows how to use ’em blaring
from an upstairs room. Didi was already bobbing her head to the
music as we followed it upstairs. The matador on her Mexican skirt
swung his red cape from side to side as we climbed the concrete
stairs to the third, the top, floor. The music led us to the door
of room 312. We pounded, but no one heard, so we walked into the
front room of the suite. It was dark and felt tropical, the air
overheated and dense. The only illumination came from a black light
that turned Didi’s smile into a phosphorescent zombie grin. We
stumbled over a quilt of grease-ringed pizza boxes. The black light
made a pyramid of Foster’s beer cans stacked in one dark corner
appear to be floating in midair.

The door to the back room where the real
party was going on opened and a blast of ZZ Top and smoke poured
out. A guy wearing a straw hat that drooped down in front and back,
and a black T-shirt with tour dates printed on it, stumbled out,
fixed his gaze blearily on Didi and me, and yelled, “New recruits!
New recruits!” He could have been any of a hundred roadies or
soundmen who’d waved Didi past security guards and welcomed her
into hotel rooms. Didi beamed. She was home.

“Hey, come on back.” He waved toward the
open door. “Party’s in here.”

Didi turned to me and gave the shrug that
guided most of her actions, the shrug that asked,
Why
not?

“Go on.” I flagged her a wave of permission,
wishing again that I was back at Didi’s house spooning margaritas
with Catwoman.

“I’ll just hang out here for a while,” I
told Didi. Without any discussion, we’d reverted to our usual
groupie MO where I left after the reconnaissance work was over.
Didi danced away and I yelled after her, “I might walk home!”

“Yee-HAW!” The guy in the droopy hat led
Didi away.

I flopped down on an abused couch covered in
the brown tweed Herculon favored by low-end motel chains. The boom
from a throbbing bass pulsed along my spine. I could barely make
out the sound of a laugh that was Didi’s before it was lost in the
thundering music.

I had decided to leave when, drifting above
the roar of the party, I heard another sound, a sound so pure and
crystalline that even though it was barely audible, it cut through
the cacophony with diamond-sharp clarity. As my eyes and ears
adjusted, I realized that there was an alcove beside the Foster’s
pyramid and someone was sitting in it, playing guitar.

For a second, he was nothing but blurred
streaks of ghostly white where the black light caught his nails
rippling over the strings of his guitar. His head was bent down,
resting on the neck of his guitar so that he could hear himself
play, the sound resonating directly into his skull. The music was
unearthly, like stumbling upon a fallen angel playing his harp on
the floor of a steel mill. The party noise fell away and suddenly
all I could hear was the cascade of notes pouring from his fingers.
I didn’t know enough about music to identify the style. It was too
raw to be classical, too rarefied to be rock. Then I stopped trying
to figure out what it was and just listened.

I’d read a theory in
Newsweek
once
about why crack cocaine is so addictive. It said that some people
have receptors in their brains like keyholes. That if you have such
a keyhole in your head, the drug will slide into it, the drug will
be the key that unlocks you. It is this unlocking of a true and
essential self that dooms a person with this chemical quirk to
addiction from the first pipe. I had a keyhole in my brain for the
music this stranger was playing. From the first notes I heard, it
seeped into me, filling an empty spot I hadn’t known existed.

He was seated on a straight-backed chair.
Invisible in the darkness, mesmerized by this angelic music, I was
freed from self-consciousness. I sank to the ground beside him,
hoping to keep that sound pouring into my head. He tilted his face
toward me so that the black light picked up the whites of his eyes
turning them into flashes of phosphorescence. His only
acknowledgment of my presence was a small nod as if he’d been
waiting for me to take my place at his feet. I was invisible in the
black light, lost in darkness, nothing but a hopeful smile glowing
in the dark above a lacy camisole floating disembodied as a cloud
in the phosphorescent light.

My pulse fell into time with his playing as
if it were the moon capturing my blood in a tide that surged, then
fell away.

In the dim light I saw that he was as
different from any of the guys I’d ever been this close to as a
human could be and still belong to the same species. Where other
guys were pink and embryonic, he was brown and fully formed. His
black hair, brows, the black lashes shadowing his cheeks had an
etched certainty missing in the tentative pastel fuzziness of the
boys I knew. Those boys were poised to take everything about
themselves back, to change it all if a better idea came along; this
stranger was a finished product. He was a full-grown man in a way
that the boys I knew never would be no matter how old they grew to
be.

He didn’t stop playing, barely looked up
from the guitar, and asked, “What are you doing here?” A seam of
white opened in his dark face as his lips formed the words, hiding
then revealing his teeth so that they almost seemed to blink on and
off like the neon sign that buzzed outside the window. He had a
slight accent. Spanish, but not like the homeboys at Pueblo with
their shorts that drooped to midcalf and wallets on chains. His
accent made his words sound oddly formal and important.

“I came with—” I pointed toward the back
room, then realized that he couldn’t see my hand in the darkness
and couldn’t hear my soft voice over the deafening music. But I had
heard my voice and what I heard was wrong. The sound of my words
didn’t fit this music, this room, this night. They didn’t fit the
person I suddenly wanted to be. In my head I heard Didi’s voice,
teasing, flirty, funny, nasty, challenging. That was who I wanted
to be, so I echoed the memory of Didi’s voice and said in a bold
voice, “I came to hear you, of course.”

The seam of white widened into a full smile.
He stared at me, ignoring his hands flowing over the strings. A
trail of white followed his nails as he took his left hand from the
neck of the guitar and patted the side of his leg. “Come here.” His
right hand kept plucking music.

I edged closer until my shoulder nuzzled
against his thigh.

“
Escuches
. Listen.” He pressed my
head against the polished body of the guitar, then stroked the
strings with the tips of his nails, showing me how he coaxed the
sound out. As the rush of soft notes resonated inside my brain, I
studied the insect scurry of his fingertips across the strings.
Each note was a minute collision of wire-wrapped string and the
tender pad of finger flesh that launched an upward tug of nail on
string. I focused on his right hand so intently that it became a
creature separate from the body it was attached to. His knuckles
rolled like marbles beneath the skin as fingers pulleyed up and
down, floating over the strings, gently drawing sounds that made my
head fill with stained-glass colors: cobalt blue, Prussian blue,
emerald, ruby, colors so deep and saturated it hurt to even imagine
them.

When he stopped playing and leaned over to
pick up a can of beer, the colors shattered and I was dumped back
into a seedy motel room that had, for a few seconds, been
transformed into a cathedral.

I had to ask, “What are you doing here?”

He shrugged and nodded toward the din coming
from the back bedroom. “I was hitching down from Santa Fe and they,
those Whatevers, picked me up.” He put the beer can down and
started playing again as if the words he’d spoken had depleted him
in some way and he needed to fill himself up with music in order to
speak again. And then he sang so softly I was barely able to hear
the Spanish words that stretched themselves out, rising and falling
on the waves of rhythm rolling effortlessly from his guitar. The
chords he plucked, the words he sang were both sadder and more
thrilling than anything I’d ever heard in my life. They translated
the state of gloom and exhilaration I lived in. I saw my father’s
bony shoulders heaving up toward his ears as he struggled to suck
oxygen into his wrecked lungs. I saw my face golden in a setting
sun, laughing until tears ran down my cheeks. I saw myself kissing
the guitarist. He finished with a hail of notes and one quick,
dismissive thump of his ring finger on the face of the guitar.

“I’m not a
cantaor
, not a singer. But
I like that one.”