High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [51]
At last they knocked, and I let them in. They were cheerful and embarrassingly subordinate. “Get those changes worked out?” they asked, as if I’d been pacing all night, frowning in my headphones, memorizing modulations and fingering patterns and stunning new chord sequences.
“You guys are great,” I said. It was the truth. They were kind enough to pretend there was work to be done and a show to put on and it’s all going to be big fun.
If you ask me, making a fool of yourself on purpose is a scary enterprise. That thought had entered my mind right away, when I first got a letter from Kathi Goldmark asking if I’d be willing to get together with a bunch of other authors and play music for the American Booksellers’ Convention in Anaheim. Kathi is a media escort, whose profession involves chauffeuring and nurturing authors when they’re on book tours; many of these authors, in the weakened condition induced by too much travel, apparently confessed to her their secret rock-and-roll pasts. Little did we know we would be held to these confessions when Kathi cooked up a scheme. Her form letter offered three boxes to check, suggesting these alternatives: (1) Yes, wild horses couldn’t keep me away from a concert in Anaheim! (2) No, I am much too dignified to do such a foolish thing. (3) I might have to wash my hair that night; talk me into it. I checked box #3.
I’m not dignified at all; that wasn’t the problem. My friends, under pressure or bribe, will tell stories about me that involve, for example, go-go dancer impersonation and flamboyant petty thievery. (I once helped relocate the Big Boy from his post in front of the Bob’s Big Boy establishment to the front porch of an archenemy. The Big Boy weighs a ton.) Dignity has never put any rocks in my road. But when I thought over this band idea, it occurred to me that lots of things could keep me away, wild horses being the least of them. I may be fun at parties, but only if I can make it look more or less like an accident; I’m not a show-off. To put myself onstage in some kind of crossover talent show seemed audacious.
I received Kathi’s recruitment letter several months after she’d mailed it from San Francisco; I was in the Canary Islands, and out of the communicative loop, to put in mildly. After I checked box #3 and dropped my letter into the bright yellow “We-pick-up-mail-when-we-feel-like-it” box down the street from my apartment, I thought that would surely be the end of that.
In February ’92, when I moved back to the U.S., a mound of unforwarded mail was waiting for me, shaped something like a faithful dog but much larger. In it I discovered about twenty hot-pink envelopes containing urgent communiqués from Kathi Goldmark. It seemed I was the keyboard player for an all-author band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. Apparently I’d held this position for months. I called Kathi and told her I found it worrisome. Maybe all the other people were first-rate musicians, and I would embarrass them. Or maybe we’d sound hideous. She sent me a tape that Stephen King had made of himself playing guitar and singing. The first of my worries was expunged, and the second, certified.
So we did our crossover talent show, and made a big hit with the tipsy booksellers and publishers of North America, and somebody got the idea we should do it some more. I pointed out that while hit-and-run is one thing, repeat offenders generally get the punishment they richly deserve. If we kept playing, somebody would notice that the Rock Bottom Remainders sounded like Hound Dogs in Heat, with the advantages of modern amplification technology. My fellow band members didn’t think this should pose any significant problems.
That winter it became clear that we really were going to do it, something big, possibly a road tour, in the spring of ’93. I felt ambivalent. I was finishing a novel, and knew that soon enough I would have to be on the road way too much, promoting the new book. Also, my personal life had become a protracted crisis. I’m a cheerful person on the whole, but ’92 was