The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [16]
The autumn we spent three weeks in Baltimore, my fellow travelers had been dropping like bug-sprayed flies into love. Tony and Lupe had started using words like forever. Magdelena had us driving hundreds of miles out of our way, linking even the most unlikely cities on routes that would take us through Chicago, so spent was she on an art institute student who moonlighted as a café manager. When she couldn’t possibly justify a trip—no logic can take you from Orlando to New Orleans by way of Chicago—her lover would fly down for a weekend or even a morning. Barbaro had taken up with a busty French journalist who’d been stalking us for a magazine story. I checked out my own cleavage in the bathroom mirror. Unexpected jealousy. Even Madre Pia had started going googly for our young host, a fledgling filmmaker who wowed her with a tour of all the alleys, yards, and storefronts featured in John Waters movies.
I spent days browsing the shelves at Atomic Books, my evenings breathing boredom. There’s nothing so tedious as love when you’re not in it.
Paula happened to be renting a room in our filmmaker-host’s wood-paneled row house. She drew pencil portraits of us all at the round breakfast table, sang in the shower at odd hours. Six feet tall with a full auburn beard, but there was something distinctly feminine in Paula’s fine features.
It was a Tuesday night when I offered to take her out for a beer.
“Don’t drink beer,” she said. “But I’ll have a shot or two of whiskey.”
Nineteen years old, so we had to go to half a dozen places before we found a bartender who wouldn’t card her.
In the green-lit booth at Frazier’s on the Avenue, she ordered three shots of Jack Daniel’s.
She’d been raised in some fundamentalist church, she told me, but since she grew out her beard and rejected the family religion, her parents and brothers acted as if she’d never existed.
“That’s intense,” I said.
But she just looked up at the ceiling, then smiled, resigned. “It’s all right.”
I tried to imagine Paula without her beard, going through the rites in some strict church. I said, “You must have been the star of the choir, with that voice.”
She shook her head. “They didn’t allow singing.”
No singing? But she wanted to change the subject, wanted to know all about our travels. Had we been to New York City?
“Sure,” I said. “ABC No Rio on Rivington Street.”
“I’ve never left Baltimore,” she admitted, then frowned, scratched her beard, took it back. “Actually, I went to D.C. once. On a field trip. We saw the Washington Monument. We were supposed to tour the White House, but the place was locked down. Some rabid environmentalist had fired shots over the fence. Anyway. Some beautiful hills between here and there.”
Paula’s confession filled me with a sudden panic that manifested itself as a series of physical reactions and faraway images: a tightening across my chest, the warmth of an unexpected neon-lit diner on a dusty highway; three quick breaths, crisp white sheets smoothed over a motel mattress; a fluttering behind my nose like a tiny bird trapped in my skull, gas tank on empty and no sign of life between here and the horizon.
It’s not like I think the road is the greatest place on earth. It is not. It’s always too hot or too cold, cramped quarters and salty greasy roadside food. Good coffee is shockingly hard to come by. Performance profits dwindle and rise pathetic-random. Americans are fat, talk wacky politics. Half the time the only radio stations you can get play damnation sermons or eighties cock rock. Strip malls and billboards selling junk you couldn’t pay me to buy blanket the country. But the skull bird, she wants out.
I said, “Paula, Baltimore’s cool, but there’s no way in hell you were born to die here. Let us give you a ride out of town when we go. I can’t say this road show has what you need, but it’s a ride and I bet that’s the best offer you’ll get all year.”
At month’s end, when Magdelena found her new love in the shower with our young host and heartbreak rolled through that wood-paneled row house like a wrecking ball and Tony