Life at 8 mph

by Peter Bowling Anderson

  And Yoko Ono, or other divisive love interests.

  Drugs and booze, too.

  Differences in musical direction.

  A musician’s growth impeded by bandmates’ slower development.

  Marriages and kids.

  Apparently, lots of things broke up a band.

  Anyway, boredom was definitely one of them. Don Henley once said he was blessed with a high tolerance for repetition, and it was essential for a career in music. Though we’d heard and practiced our songs two hundred times, various audience members at our shows were listening to them for their first. We had to be willing to play each tune like it was still a new song we were eager to share.

  However, we also needed to write new material to progress as songwriters.

  It was a slippery slope that Bryan, Manya, and I all had to navigate individually and collectively. It wasn’t easy. Manya preferred focusing on new material for the creative challenge, I liked to hone a song until all of its potential was squeezed out, and Bryan bounced between both. It felt like we were driving a car five feet, shutting off the engine, cranking it up, and then driving another five feet in a big circle. It was difficult not to get on each other’s nerves, and what frustrated me most was the quantity of songs for set lists. When we scrapped older songs for newer ones, we couldn’t add length to our shows. Instead of being able to play for an hour and a half with extra material, we were stuck at forty-five minutes with one set. We couldn’t book a gig for multiple sets without playing the same songs twice, which wasn’t allowed unless the crowd was dragged out and replaced while we took five.

  Also, when we went into the studio to record our full-length album, by the time we finished it six months later, some of the songs had grown stale and were dropped from our set list. I said, “How can we drop these songs? They’re on our album.” Out with the old, in with the new.

  Yet I didn’t complain too loudly because we had Manya, whose voice was worth any headache, hindrance, or hassle. It reminded me of a cross between Chan Marshall of Cat Power and Regina Spektor, with a dash of Manya’s own flair. She was barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds, yet an enormous voice twice her size boomed from her tiny mouth. It sounded like a radio clicked on blasting a mastered cut. Her technique, pitch, and control were flawless. She was already on the professional level, she just didn’t realize it. If somebody had been able to convince her, we would’ve read about her in Rolling Stone.

  After we self-released our album, a friend of Manya’s with a local radio show wrote a positive review in the paper and invited us to play a few songs live during an on-air interview. It was an excellent opportunity for heightened exposure, so we quickly agreed. We had to make the most of this chance and capitalize on the momentum, so we agonized over which three songs to perform, rehearsed them countless times, wrote and rewrote lists of potential questions with amusing yet informative answers, and practiced the entire affair in Manya’s garage like it was the actual interview. Bryan and I took turns as the host.

  All of this for a twenty-minute interview on a college radio station. But we’d heard we should play to a crowd of four like they were four hundred, so we were thinking big.

  On the night of the show, Bryan drove us all in our station wagon. I made the mistake of sitting in the backseat, the gentlemanly gesture so Manya could sit up front, yet a bad idea for my motion sickness. I got carsick extremely easily if I wasn’t seated in the front, especially when Bryan got lost in a parking garage on campus and made about twenty-seven turns until he stumbled his way out. By the time we reached the station, my head hung out the window about to erupt.

  I couldn’t even help unload equipment. I crashed on a bench outside the radio station trying not to puke all over myself. Bryan and Manya took turns checking on me, tactfully inquiring if I felt up to staggering inside to play a few songs. We were on in five minutes.

  I gave them the thumbs-up sign and dragged myself inside.

  Thankfully, Manya did most of the talking and I didn’t vomit on anything. Bryan played well and gave a few humorous answers, too. He’d made strides with his self-confidence, growing stronger after the practicum denial. He’d finished the fall semester with good grades and seemed motivated for the new year. I hoped he’d finally turned the corner.

  Yet I also worried that too much of his optimism rode on the band. He was the type of person who stayed driven as long as a dream dangled in front of him. It didn’t matter how far-fetched the aspiration, just that he felt he was making progress toward it. Our songs were on the radio (albeit a locals-only show), we’d recorded a demo and an album (without selling nearly enough copies yet to break even), we had band shirts (a box sat in my room), and we were playing shows (four or five gigs a month to half-filled rooms if we were lucky). I knew that to make real progress, we had to do more—a lot more. We needed to play ten to fifteen shows a month, even if it was Manya by herself doing open-mics. It was all exposure for the band. Bryan and I would have to move to Dallas so we could network and make the type of connections that opened doors. Hanging out at clubs getting to know other bands was just as important as practicing parts. We also needed to find a full-time drummer and a bassist (we’d done a few shows with different musicians, but nothing permanent) so we could flesh out our sound. We needed to find a manager we could trust who believed in us. And we had to be prepared to go on the road.

  But I knew none of this would happen.

  Manya had a daughter and couldn’t roam across the country with an unknown band trying to win fans. It would’ve been different if we were a signed act with major-label backing on a real tour with actual buses, staff, and hotels without letters missing on their signs. But that was years away, if ever. Even if a local indie record label picked us up, it’d be bare bones for quite a while. Bryan couldn’t drop out of school for that, not halfway to his master’s. His parents would’ve sawed off his arms, and then mine.

  I was the only one of us actually in a position to make such a radical commitment, and that wasn’t nearly enough. Besides, I had goals left to reach with Richard, and a few more laps with Bryan at school, and a new relationship with Leslie to cultivate. I didn’t want to abandon all of that to hop back in the van for more peanut butter.

  Yet the band played on, partly to keep Bryan going, partly because I understood this would be my last musical hurrah, and partly because we were good. It was hard to give that up. But I knew we’d have to. I just didn’t realize how soon.

  R

  “Put on my blue suede shoes and I boarded the plane. Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues in the middle of the pouring rain.” I actually listened to Marc Cohn’s song “Walking in Memphis” during my flight to meet Leslie for the first time. For years, I’d wondered what a “beal” was in the line, “Walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale.” I’d never seen the lyrics, so I didn’t realize it was a street, much less the most famous one in town home to legendary blues clubs and the Beale Street Flippers. I thought it was something similar to a banana peel that he’d slipped on, shooting him ten feet in the air. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense, yet I pictured Cohn flying through the air every time I heard the song. Beale Street worked much better.

  I also listened to America’s “Daisy Jane,” with its opening lines, “Flyin’ me back to Memphis, gotta find my Daisy Jane.” Others in the rotation included Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” Chuck Berry’s “Back to Memphis,” and “Maybe It Was Memphis” by Pam Tillis. As I listened, I skimmed William Patton’s A Guide to Historic Downtown Memphis and G. Wayne Dowdy’s Hidden History of Memphis. It wasn’t that long of a flight from DFW to Memphis International Airport, so I didn’t have much time to become an expert on Leslie’s hometown. Yet I was determined to impress her, and her family, with something I’d gleaned. Basically, I wanted to sound like I knew what I was talking about even though I didn’t.

  After speaking on the phone for
a few weeks, Leslie had invited me to Memphis to spend the weekend with her and her family. She emphasized that she wouldn’t be offended if I couldn’t come because of other plans or insufficient notice or a tonsillectomy or anything else that might take priority over meeting her. She definitely bent over backward never to impose or make me feel uncomfortable, which I greatly appreciated. However, I wanted to meet her in person. It was time—we’d been writing and talking for months. We’d both canceled our memberships to the dating site. We were pushing forward together. This was the logical, necessary next step.

  Yet a tonsillectomy sounded a lot safer.

  When we landed and I disembarked the plane, our pilot thanked me for flying with them. I wanted to ask him to take another trip around the block just to stall the inevitable. I was panicking. This was a bad idea. What was I doing here? I wasn’t relationship material. I was a loner who rented rooms around the country while writing songs and books no one bought. Leslie’s family would think she was pathetically desperate. This guy, really? You sure you don’t want to renew your membership? Maybe there’s an ex-con who just joined.

  As I walked through the airport to meet Leslie, I saw a bathroom and debated hiding in one of the stalls until she gave up and left. Tell her I missed the plane, I schemed. Tell her the plane crashed. My thinking wasn’t its razor sharpest, especially since I’d already texted her I’d landed safely. Plus, if we’d crashed, I’d be dead. But I still left it on the table as an option.

  I felt like I’d pried open a container of cobras and couldn’t reseal it. I was certain I’d end up hurting Leslie and it wasn’t fair and it was out of my hands. The longer I continued with this charade, the deeper her feelings, and mine, would intensify, resulting in far worse agony than if I just folded now. I couldn’t pull this off. I wasn’t what she, or anyone, needed. I didn’t know anything about stocks, IRAs, mortgages, landscaping, rewiring, wallpapering, or anything else related to being a husband and father. Leslie dreamed of owning a farm. The only thing I knew about farming was what I’d seen in the movie Witness with Harrison Ford, and somebody suffocated in a corn silo at the end of it, so I wasn’t too keen on signing up. I was ready to give in and walk away.

  But one thing stopped me, or more accurately, one person: Richard. I couldn’t deny my time with him had been more beneficial than I ever could’ve imagined when we’d first met. If I’d followed my instinct to bolt, I would’ve missed out on all the great experiences we’d shared. My gut was no guide. Also, working with Richard had forced me to open up emotionally and become more verbally expressive of what was going on inside. People weren’t mind readers, and sometimes they needed to hear what only I had to offer, regardless of how insignificant I viewed it. Lastly, one of the most invaluable lessons I’d learned from Richard involved joy. He took it where he could find it and reveled in it while it lasted. He didn’t sit around worrying it would slip away or regret it if it finally did. He simply embraced happiness with all he had while he could without wasting a second.

  There was a chance, possibly a strong one, I’d end up disappointing both Leslie and myself if I pursued this. Yet I enjoyed being with her, and I was thankful I’d met her. She made me laugh, and I somehow made her happy. That was worth holding onto as long as we could.

  She was just up ahead. I saw a small crowd of people smiling and waving at my fellow passengers as we trudged closer, one holding a poster that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LAURA!!! Leslie was somewhere in there. At first, I couldn’t find her because she was only five feet, three inches tall. She also hated drawing attention to herself, so she wouldn’t be flapping a poster. More likely, she was ducking behind someone waiting to snare me as I wandered by.

  The birthday girl, Laura, was ahead of me, because she started hugging the woman clutching the poster and then the burly man next to her. Either they were her folks or she was ecstatic to be in Memphis. Maybe she’d had a round or two on the plane. Maybe I should’ve. All three of them walked off together, revealing Leslie.

  It felt like a scene in a movie, except when I walked up to her, I held out my hand to shake. Was she my new business partner? A handshake? What was I thinking? I really stunk at this.

  Thankfully, Leslie smiled and hugged me, correctly chalking it up to nerves. Yet that was only the beginning of my blunders. As we walked out of the airport, I couldn’t zip up my coat. It was chilly outside and I wanted to stay warm, but I couldn’t get the infernal zipper to work. My mom had once proclaimed her strong preference for snaps over zippers and buttons and, clearly, she was right again. I needed to push beyond snaps to an entire outfit made with Velcro. I finally stopped just before reaching the automatic sliding doors, put down my bags, and went to war with that little zipper, yanking on it like a maniac until it caved in and zipped. I looked at Leslie who was doubled over laughing, thoroughly amused by the show, which was a much more positive reaction than I got from the people hustling passed. They looked like they were ready to flag down TSA.

  Leslie drove me to the Booksellers at Laurelwood, a large bookstore with an extensive variety of works, including a thorough children’s section and a bistro. It was here we had our first meal together—our first “date”—and I finally got to put a live face with the words I’d been hearing and reading for months. I’d seen pictures of Leslie, but one-dimensional representations offered only so much information. They didn’t come close to conveying the warmth I felt in her smile, the adoration I saw in her brown eyes, the unmasked joy on her beautiful face. For some bizarre reason, she looked thrilled that I was sitting across from her in one of her favorite hometown nooks, the waiting and anticipation finally over. I was real and this was actually happening and she could touch me, which she now did as she reached over to hold my hand. We were together, and it felt like a lifetime ago that I’d considered looking into a dating site. It was strange how the force of a relationship skewed time. Perspective and priorities realigned to leave enough room for the continent charging downstream. All else waited its turn.

  A year ago, I never would’ve gotten on the plane.

  Something had changed in me. Initially, I dismissed it as fear of winding up alone. I was merely desperate, flailing my arms out here in the bottomless unknown for anything that might keep me afloat, my broken boat long out of view. Yet there was an undeniable yearning I couldn’t pretend away, and putting someone else first had sparked it. Once I started placing others’ needs above mine, my little boat wasn’t big enough. I needed space to receive encouragement, to learn to accept it as unconditionally as it was offered. And to tell others how I felt. To make sure they understood their importance to me. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but the alternative wasn’t enough anymore. The process had begun and couldn’t be reversed. I was transitioning or, more accurately, sinking all the way to the bottom because I had to know what awaited me. Just like Richard, not knowing wasn’t acceptable. I had to find out who was down there, tucked behind a rock, and where she might lead.

  Chapter Thirteen

  How to Hold a Fork

  When I returned from Memphis, Richard wanted to know everything that had happened, what Leslie’s family was like, where we went, when I was getting married.

  “What?” I exclaimed. “Married? I just visited her for the first time.”

  He laughed, and said, “Look at me and Della. Slow poke.”

  “You guys floored it in the express lane. I drive the speed limit.”

  “You need me to chaperone you two?”

  “No, thanks. You’d steer us straight to church for the ceremony.”

  He laughed even harder, followed by coughing and sweet tea. Then he said, “I could do it myself. I’m a reverend.”

  I smiled while nodding. “You charge too much.”

  “I’ll give you a discount.”

  “What can you do for me?” I couldn’t resist using his line.

  At that, we both cracked u
p.

  Richard’s topic of marriage felt highly premature, yet it did make me wonder if he worried about me leaving. At some point, I would. It was inevitable. We weren’t going to spend the rest of our lives together. I didn’t think. I was learning not to jump to assumptions, so I tried to remain open on all fronts.

  So far, Richard had been unsuccessful in finding a suitable replacement for Troy. One dog a friend had trained couldn’t perform all the necessary tasks, while another pooch we found through a local instructor grew defensive any time someone approached Richard. We wanted a service dog, not a bodyguard. As disappointing as these results were for Richard, it did allow us more time alone. When Troy was still here, Richard tended to focus on him, especially when we were out in public. But now it was just us, and as unlikely as I would’ve imagined it at the beginning, I’d come to enjoy hanging out with Richard. Our bond had deepened over these last several months. Often, it felt like I aided him the most with companionship. More than school, letters, errands, or whatever else we did, having me around all day to talk to and to joke with seemed to lift his spirits. He wasn’t in this alone. I completely understood I’d never provide the type of love, fulfillment, and affirmation Della introduced into his life, or that Michael and his kids gave. They were on another level I couldn’t touch.

  But I could be Richard’s buddy. I doubted he’d ever had one, at least not without emotional strings attached. When was the last time someone other than Della spent the day with Richard just to have fun? Not because it was the right thing to do, but the most desirable choice? My employment excluded me from this list. I had to be with him. Yet the longer I spent my days driving him around and feeding him chicken salad and tea, the more I missed him on weekends when I was free to do what I wanted. He made me laugh, which had risen nearly to the top of my character-traits heap. Someone with a good sense of humor and a positive outlook simply made life more enjoyable, and with disillusionment constantly angling for a clean shot, friends like Richard became priceless. If I had to help him take a drink to get to be around that kind of optimism, so be it. A small cost to plunk down. I was still cleaning up.