Courtship of the Cake

by Jessica Topper

  “Good job, guys. We got them so dizzy, they got all turned around. They’re backward now.” Fingers flying over the frets, he launched into the alphabet backward, twisting the song smoothly from Z to A before jumping off the low stage.

  “Not so bad, for a drunk asshole with his own tour bus.” His whisper in my ear brought heat to my cheeks.

  “You weren’t supposed to remember that,” I mumbled in amusement.

  Next, he launched into a song that anyone who owned a television set in the last four decades would know. All about sunny days and sweet air . . . except Nash forgot the words, and the tune, about halfway through. He clamped his mouth shut before the f-bomb could detonate. Little Delilah did a face palm.

  “It’s been a while, okay? Haven’t had time to watch much TV these days. Gimme a request.”

  “‘Jumpstart My Heart’?” a mom in the crowd yelled hopefully.

  “The MILF in the back wants to hear my breakout song,” Nash drawled, not looking up from his fingers as they turned the pegs of his guitar. “What do you all think, should I make her beg for it?”

  It was my turn to face palm, as a few adults groaned, a few more whistled, and the kids didn’t know what the hell was going on.

  Go Get Her’s biggest hit was stupid-catchy and its lyrics were passably PG-rated and pleasant. So much so, it was hard to believe Nash would own up to writing it. But his one-man version got the kids up twirling and the adults’ hands up in the air. I stole a glance toward Kylie, who was banging her pretty blond head and kicking her hooker heels against the fence in time with the music.

  Everyone, Nash included, seemed relieved to have blown off some steam as that one came to a close. Cupping her hands to her mouth to be heard above the applause, Delilah yelled, “‘Wheels on the Bus’!” with as much conviction as a drunk in the crowd bellowing for Skynyrd’s “FREE BIRD!” The kids in the audience clapped their approval.

  “Okay, Pigtails. There’s something in the entertainment industry called a teleprompter. Do you know what that is?” Delilah shook her pigtails in response. “It’s a little TV that sits on the stage where no one can see it, except for the singer who’s too stupid or burnt to know the words.”

  A little boy tugged on Nash’s jeans leg. “You shouldn’t say the S word,” he scolded, his big eyes earnest.

  “Right, right. Sorry. How about that S word? Is that one okay?” He didn’t wait for confirmation. “So if you want to hear whatchamacallit, ‘Wheels on the Bus,’ you’re gonna have to be my teleprompter.”

  Delilah hesitated, giving me an uncertain look. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “You can if you want.”

  Nash snapped his fingers offstage and the Kids’ Zone MC brought another microphone out for Delilah. He let her take his stool while he stood. “I know the tune, but you need to give me the verse, okay?”

  She nodded, biting back her grin. “You have to do the hand motions, too,” she instructed.

  “Hey. They just pay me to play guitar. And I only have two hands.”

  Delilah rolled her eyes and the audience laughed. I thought to pull out my camera just in time, so I could film her stage debut to show to her parents later. She and Nash went through a call-and-response, going through the traditional verses of the sing-along until he felt comfortable enough to add a few of his own, somewhat questionable, lines. “The towels on the tour bus go stink, stink, stink,” got the kids all plugging their noses, and Nash taught them to pump their fists as he sang, “The bunks on the tour bus go rock and roll,” all the while with a gleam in his eye that went far above the heads of any of the children. I shook my head and laughed.

  “The ladies on the tour bus go . . . ‘Hi, Nash!’” He wiggled his fingers flirtingly.

  “Hi, Nash!” all the kids (and Kylie) bellowed back at him. Oh, this man was insufferable. His ego was inflated about as big as the bounce house.

  “. . . aaaaall over the world!” He strummed a crescendo and mugged for a few cameras. Delilah took a bow and brought the house down.

  “Last song of the day, people. And I promised I’d dedicate this one,” Nash murmured into the mic.

  He cranked up the distortion and I thanked the heavens for small earplugs as he began to jam out a punk version of the old Kenny Loggins crooner “Danny’s Song” for my benefit. His facial expressions gave some of the lyrics a whole different meaning for me, and I couldn’t help but laugh and sing along.

  “Do you want to wait for his autograph?” I asked Delilah afterward. She shook her head. “Okay, let me just go throw this in his case and then you can go jump in the bounce house for a bit, okay?”

  “Ooh, can I throw it? Pretty please?”

  “How can I deny such cuteness? Of course.”

  “Why a dollar?” she asked, staring at the bill I handed her.

  “It’s his tip,” I explained. “And an inside joke.”

  And petty and juvenile, but he deserved it, after his G-string comment to me earlier.

  • • •

  “Well, that went over about as well as a pregnant pole-vaulter.”

  Nash, finally done with autographs and photos, joined me where I waited for Delilah to bounce herself silly.

  “Come on. Not bad for your first time,” I joked.

  “You’re the only one who left a tip,” he complained. “And don’t deny it. I know you sent the kid to do your dirty work.”

  I laughed. “You ready, Dee-Dee?”

  “Ten more bounces,” she hollered back.

  “She yours?” Nash asked.

  “Huh? Oh. No. I borrowed her. From my co-worker.”

  He turned to watch the mayhem in the bounce house, shading his eyes from the sun. How he wasn’t roasting in his second-skin jeans and that black T-shirt was anyone’s guess. I could feel my own sweat beading at my neck, frizzing my curls, and trickling down my cleavage and into my sundress.

  True to her word, Delilah bounced right out of the house after ten hops and pushed her feet into her mini-Tevas. “Did you thank him for your song?” she pecked at me, like a little mother hen.

  “No, but thank you for reminding me.” I turned to Nash. “And thank you.”

  He gave a little nod of acknowledgment. No thank-you for the hands-on healing from earlier, no apology for the dollars in the G-string comment, but like the swift-moving clouds in the crystal blue sky overhead, all seemed to have passed over.

  “One, two, three, whee?” Delilah asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, honey. His back was hurting him earlier.” I turned to Nash. “It’s this thing we do. When two of us walk with her, we hold her hands and swing her up on the count of three.”

  “Back’s fine.” He grunted. “Lay it on me, Slick.”

  Delilah slid her little palm into his hand, and I scooted to her other side.

  “One . . . two . . . three,” she drawled as we all took big steps, “whee!” Up went her feet, and we hauled her into the air and back down, far from where she started. It was a little Mom trick of Jade’s to efficiently cover ground fast when little legs couldn’t keep up. We made it about five whees to where Riggs had just pulled up in his festival golf cart, no doubt ready to whisk Nash away from the humiliation and back to the safe confines of backstage where he belonged.

  “Take a backseat.” He thumbed to Riggs. “I’m gonna drive them back.”

  I stopped in my tracks, surprised, just as Delilah made it to the count of three on her own and propelled out of our grip, landing in a cloud of dust in front of the golf cart. “Yay, golf cart!” she crowed.

  “I don’t think . . . thanks, but—”

  “What? You want me to take a Breathalyzer test before you’ll ride with me?” He leaned against the metal supports of the cart’s roof and gave me a lazy brow arch.

  “No. I just figured . . . you had somewhere else to be.”

>   “Nowhere but away from them.” He jerked his head in the direction of the eager fans that were still pacing along the fencing, hoping to catch a photo or an autograph as he left the Kids’ Zone compound.

  Riggs had already moved to the rear-facing jump seat of the small cart, phone to his ear on a call. Delilah scooted into the middle of the front seat and patted the spot next to her. I sat.

  Nash climbed in, turned the key no bigger than a windup toy’s, and turned to Delilah. “Hang on, kid.”

  Wind and dust kicked up as he floored it, and the sights of the festival blurred colorfully by us. What would’ve been easily a ten-minute walk to the backstage area was accomplished in a mere minute or so. Riggs hopped off before the cart came to a full stop, phone never leaving his ear, and loped toward the production office. “Where to, ladies?” Nash asked.

  “Home, Jeeves!” Delilah pointed due west.

  “Her dad is a glassblower,” I explained. “He’s set up over by the festival merch.” We were off once again, bumping along the gravel path toward vending.

  Festivalgoers stopped in their tracks at the sight of one of the headlining artists blowing past them in a golf cart. Some gave his name a shout-out, others gave chase for a few yards before realizing he wasn’t going to stop and chat. The laminate around Nash’s neck fanned out behind him in the wind, reminding me of an eager dog with its head out a car window, tongue out and ears flapping, enjoying the breeze. Delilah clutched my knee as we careened down a small hill, her eyes tearing from the wind. “The wheels on the golf cart . . . ?” she prompted.

  “Kid, I’ll give you your dollar back if we never have to sing that again.”

  “It wasn’t my dollar, it was Dani’s,” she informed him.

  Nash pretended to drive off the path in shock, much to Delilah’s delight. Then he pulled a three-sixty, causing even me to squeal and grab hold of the bar alongside the seat. We were off again, in a beeline in the direction of Delilah’s pudgy pointed finger.

  Travis tried to play it cool as his child was delivered by rock star messenger, but I could tell he was on the brink of losing it, especially when Nash handed Delilah a few of his engraved guitar picks to keep.

  “I’d better get back to work or Maxine will have my head,” I sighed. Trav and Dee-Dee waved us off, and Nash puttered toward backstage once more. Without Delilah as a buffer between us, I searched for something to say. “You’re good with kids,” I began.

  “I’ve got one.” The words came out slow, as if he was testing them out for the first time.

  “Oh? How old?”

  Nash squinted, not taking his eyes off the path in front of us. “Older than Delilah. Younger than you.”

  “Well, I would hope so,” I chuckled. Nash couldn’t have had more than five years on me, at most. “Do you get to see him much when you’re on the road?”

  “I’ve never met him.”

  Despite the open frame of the golf cart, our conversation felt keenly intimate. I was at a loss for what to say.

  “Would you like to, if given the chance?”

  “Can we get a ‘Fame and Fortune’ tonight, Nash?” a guy asked as we slowed to cross the barricade into the backstage area. He had a Press pass on, notepad in hand, and a photographer was trailing behind him. Nash gave him a thumbs-up as we pulled past security. “Is that a yes?” the guy called.

  Nash came to an abrupt stop along the edge of the tree line near the artist compound. He pulled the brake and hopped out. The photographer scuttled alongside the reporter to catch the exchange.

  “Sometimes,” Nash said, and I knew it was more for my benefit than for the reporter’s. “I don’t get to choose.”

  Rock and Rote

  Go Get Her’s front man and I fell into a pattern as our rock-and-roll circus moved from town to town, just as routine as load-in, sound check, and curfew. Nash automatically became my first client of the day, even if his name didn’t always make it onto the schedule on the clipboard. I loved a challenge, which made him my ideal client. Whatever ache or pain he had woken up with, I massaged away, while he swore like a sailor being dragged to his watery death by a sultry siren. Our sessions were becoming the stuff of legend among the other therapists and the musicians who frequented the massage tent.

  One rainy morning, I received an SOS text from Riggs with a series of cryptic numbers to follow. It was the key code to Nash’s tour bus door lock.

  “I can’t keep coming to you, China Doll,” he managed through thin, tight lips between gaps in the pain. Squirming, like the plush sex-den bed at the back of the bus was his personal torture rack. “Not every time.”

  “Have you seen a doctor yet?” I asked, caught somewhere between my own personal ethics and the Hippocratic oath. He always gave me the same answer: he’d go when the tour was over. It was against my better judgment to keep working on him when I didn’t know the root of his problems. But there was no denying I provided the relief that let him perform each night.

  “Bringing tears of joy to my eyes, every damn day when I rise,” he’d joke, panting at the end of each session like he’d just completed a half marathon. But often before we began, pain robbed him of the ability to speak.

  “Everything’s going to be all right.” It was a mantra that came out of me in a whisper as I smoothed his hair out of his eyes and got down to work.

  These private pain parties were invite-only. Sometimes Riggs would oversee, but mainly it was just Nash and me. Never the Dramettes. And certainly never the other members of Go Get Her.

  Despite the magic we accomplished each morning, when the tour bus was rocking late into the evening, I never came knocking. Besides, the artists weren’t the only ones who knew how to party like rock stars. On the rare off nights when we didn’t have to rush to pick up stakes, or had already set up camp somewhere in preparation for the next tour stop, the hospitality crew let its true hair down. Even Maxine would turn a blind eye to our midnight antics, as long as we cleaned up after ourselves and were ready to report to work come morning.

  Spin the Bottle Karaoke was a crew favorite. Whoever was pouring the shots got to spin the bottle, and whomever it landed on was forced to sing the spinnee’s choice from the eclectic array of CDs we all brought. It often resulted in hilarious pairings, like Jade and Travis doing a death metal duet, or Deuce from catering shaking his massive ass in his striped Zubaz chef pants and channeling his inner Shakira to our screaming Waka Waka chorus.

  “You know I got it. These hips don’t lie!” our hulk of a chef boomed, and aimed his Jack Daniel’s bottle squarely on me. “Let’s see if our Blondie has a little Blackheart in her.”

  “Ha, you’re on.” Laney and I had caught many a Joan Jett show in our youth, from the Bowery to the Birch Hill. As Deuce cranked up “Bad Reputation” on the boom box, I let Joan’s trademark growl rip from my throat as I hopped up on the picnic table beneath the strand lights and did a low-slung air guitar to the opening riff as my colleagues cheered me on. Who needed black leather and eyeliner? I just widened my eyes, snarled my lip, and dove in. Not giving a damn, just like the song said.

  What I hadn’t noticed was the small entourage that had gathered on the other side of the wire fencing that separated production and hospitality from the talent. Nash stood with a few of the other headlining artists, arms crossed and legs splayed, one heel turning over in his expensive, broken-in rocker boots. Light from the hydraulic towers set up backstage to brighten the night pooled down, setting his blond hair ablaze like a fiery crown. His eyes were trained on me as I kicked my way down the Solo cups littering the picnic table in my ragged cutoff jeans and combat boots. Let him look. I didn’t care.

  No, no, no . . . not me, me, me.

  I head-banged in time to the chorus, wishing I had Joan’s pin-straight, black shag that would never frizz in the damp night like my kinky pile of pale curls. Go Get Her’s bassist leaned in
to commune with Nash’s ear. The lead singer’s brow lifted as he nodded, and I could only imagine the conversation going on in their Ol’ Boys Club. While Joan could strut the strut with her training-bra chest, I was probably channeling sexy lumberjack in my tank top and the half-buttoned flannel I’d donned to get through the unseasonably cool night.

  War whoops and fists punched through the midnight air as I scissor-kicked myself over the keg and ended my song. “Spin, spin, spin!” mixed with chants of “Chug, chug, chug!” and the Jack bottle was thrust into my hand.

  Nash had leaned an arm forward, his fingers curled in the chain link. Now his other hand grabbed hold, as if he was thinking about scaling the fence. It looked like the VIPs were on the outside looking in, for once. A small smile played on his lips as I made my way over to him.

  “What’up, Doc?” he drawled, gaze never leaving my lips as I took a fluid haul from the bottle.

  “You lost?” I rasped, the whiskey adding a layer to my usual husky tone. Behind him, laughter and conversation among the other musicians drifted in the smoke-filled air, and I smelled the skunky burn of pot.

  “Not all who wander are lost, China Doll.” He fingered one of my curls, coaxing a silken spiral through the chain link to his side of the fence. “How about a drink?”

  I held the base of the bottle up, and his throat throbbed as he took fluid swallows. Meanwhile, all conversation had stopped on my side of the fence, as my co-workers watched the festival’s hottest act drain half a bottle of their hard-earned Jack, its neck propped through the wire fencing.