by Nick Hornby
It had been a long time since Tucker had been anywhere to hear a band, and he couldn’t quite believe how familiar it all felt. Shouldn’t something have moved on by now? Did you really still have to lug all your equipment in by yourself, sell your records and T-shirts at the back of the room, talk to the crazy guy with no friends who’d been to see you three times this week already? There wasn’t much anyone could do with the live music experience, though. It was what it was. Bars and the bands that played in them didn’t have much use for the shiny white Apple world out there; there’d be processed cheese slices for dinner and blocked toilets until the world melted away.
Tucker went to the bar and got their drinks, a Coke for himself and a glass of Jameson for Fucker, and they sat down at a table at the side of the room, away from the tiny, low stage and the lights.
“But you’re doing okay,” said Fucker.
“Yeah.”
“Wondering whether you’ll ever have sex again?”
“Not yet.”
“You should.”
“If you can find someone to sleep with, anyone can.” Fucker was seeing a divorced English teacher from the local high school.
“You don’t have my charm, though.”
“Lisette probably thought you were me anyway.”
“You know what? That picture has never done me the smallest bit of good with a woman. Think about that, my friend.”
“I have. And the conclusion I’ve drawn is, it’s a picture of you, not me, and it makes you look like a bug-eyed psycho.”
The houselights went down, and the band ambled out onto the stage, to the general indifference of the drinkers in the room. They weren’t young men, the musicians, and Tucker wondered how often they’d been tempted to quit, and why they hadn’t done so. Maybe it was because they hadn’t been able to think of anything better to do; maybe it was even because they thought this was fun. They were okay. Their own songs weren’t anything special, but they knew that, because they played “Hickory Wind” and “Highway 61” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” They knew their audience, anyway. Tucker and John were surrounded by gray ponytails and bald heads. Tucker looked around to see if he could spot anybody under forty and saw a young man who immediately looked away when Tucker caught his eye.
“Uh-oh,” said Tucker.
“What’s up?”
“That kid over there, by the men’s room. I think he’s recognized you.”
“Cool. That never happens anymore. Shall we have some fun?”
“What do you call fun?”
“I’ll think of something.”
But then it got too loud to talk much, and Tucker started to get gloomy. He had feared the onset of gloom. It was the real reason he hadn’t wanted to come out in the first place. He’d spent a lot of time doing nothing, but the trick to doing nothing, as far as he was concerned, anyway, was not to think while you were doing it. The trouble with going to see bands is that there wasn’t much else to do but think, if you weren’t being swept away on a wave of visceral or intellectual excitement; and Tucker could tell that The Chris Jones Band would never be able to make people forget who they were and how they’d ended up that way, despite their sweaty endeavors. Mediocre loud music penned you into yourself, made you pace up and down your own mind until you were pretty sure you could see how you might end up going out of it. In the seventy-five minutes that he spent with himself, he managed to revisit pretty much every single place he’d have been happy never to see again. He worked back from Cat and Jackson to all the other screwed-up marriages and kids; the professional wasteland of the last twenty years ran alongside them, like a rusted-over railroad running alongside a traffic jam. People underestimated the speed of thought. It was possible to cover just about every major incident of a lifetime during the average bar band’s set.
When the band waved to the handful of people applauding them and walked offstage, John disappeared through the door at the side of the stage to find them. A couple of minutes later, he was leading the musicians back for their encore.
“As some of you know, it’s a long time since I’ve done this,” said John into the microphone. A couple of people in the bar laughed, either because they knew the story, or because they’d heard him sing before. Tucker watched the kid who’d been staring at them earlier. He was already on his feet and making his way to the foot of the stage. He looked as though he might faint with excitement. John grabbed the mike stand, nodded at the band, and they did their best Crazy Horse impersonation for a ragged but recognizable “Farmer John.” Fucker sounded terrible: too loud, off-key and insane, but it clearly didn’t matter to his one fan, who was leaping up and down with excitement, while taking as many shots as he could with the camera on his cell phone. John finished with an ungainly leap into the air several seconds after the musicians’ last chord and grinned happily at Tucker.
The kid stopped John while he was making his way back to the seat, and John spoke to him for a couple of minutes.
“What did you say?”
“Oh, just a bunch of made-up crap. But it doesn’t matter. Tucker Crowe spoke.”
When Tucker got home that night, everyone was asleep, so he sat down and wrote to English Annie. She was English Annie because she wasn’t the Annie with whom he’d been conducting a chaste but nonetheless morale-boosting flirtation for a while now. American Annie was the mother of Jackson’s school friend Toby. She was in her mid-thirties, recently divorced, lonely and pretty. He’d started to think about her within hours—okay, minutes—of Cat telling him that they’d reached the end of the road. Tellingly, however, the thought of Toby’s Annie hadn’t cheered him much. He’d only been able to see a whole lot of grim consequential inevitabilities: ill-advised sex, his inability to follow through, hurt and the destruction of one of Jackson’s most important relationships.
Well, fuck that. Maybe he should concentrate on flirting with someone who lived on another continent, a woman who only lived in cyberspace and didn’t have a son on Jackson’s Little League team, or indeed any kind of son, which was one of the reasons she’d been so attractively expansive in the first place. Anyway, English Annie had been on his mind in the bar. A couple of the questions she’d asked in her last e-mail were similar to the questions he’d ended up asking himself during his sonic incarceration earlier in the evening, and it seemed like it might be more helpful to think about them as part of a conversation with someone.
Dear Annie,
Here’s another way of proving I am who I claim to be. Have you ever seen that picture someone took of a scared crazy person a few years back? You say you know people who still like my music—well, they’re the kind of people who are familiar with the photo, because they are under the impression that it’s me. They think it’s a revealing, if unflattering, portrait of a creative genius having some kind of breakdown, but it’s not. It’s a fair likeness of my neighbor John, who is a nice guy but not a creative genius, as far as I know. And he wasn’t having a breakdown. He was just flipping out. John went nuts because, not unreasonably, he didn’t like this guy snapping away at him, possibly because he’s got a whole field of cannabis plants in his backyard. (I have no idea whether he has or hasn’t. I just know he’s touchy about trespassers.)
Tucker stopped, and opened the photo library. He’d attached a picture to an e-mail a couple of times and he was pretty sure he could do it again. He found one of him and Jackson outside Citizens Bank Park earlier on in the summer and clicked the paper clip icon hopefully. It seemed to work. But would she think he was hitting on her? Could sending a photo of himself with his cute son, no woman in sight, be construed as some kind of come-on? He removed the attachment, just in case.
Anyway, it’s a good story, right? Around here, John has been christened Fucker (= Fake Tucker), if you’ll pardon my language. And forgive the yoking together a word alluding to Our Lord with an obscenity. And tonight, Fucker sang with a local bar band, thus overexciting a kid in the audience who clearly thought he was witne
ssing my resurrection. If anyone tells you I’m making a comeback, you can tell them it was Farmer John (which is what he sang. You know that song? “I’m in love with your daughter, whoa, whoa”?)
No, the photo made sense of the e-mail. How else could he prove that he didn’t look like John? And he wasn’t trying to prove that he was better-looking than John. He was trying to show that he and John didn’t resemble each other, and the whole Wild Man of the Woods thing was a hilarious Internet myth. He reattached the attachment.
This is me, outside a baseball stadium with my youngest son, Jackson. I have always kept my hair short since I gave up music, probably because I was afraid people might think I’d turned into someone like John. Plus, I wear glasses, which I didn’t use to. I have spent a lot of time reading the small print of big novels, and
“Big novels?” Why did he feel the need to tell English Annie why he needed to wear glasses? So she didn’t think it was because he did too much jerking off? He deleted the last line. It was none of her business. Plus, that “pardon my language” thing sounded prissy. If she couldn’t cope with bad language, then fuck her . . . And that phrase begged a few questions. What did he want English Annie to look like? If he knew for sure that she weighed two hundred pounds, would he be pursuing this correspondence? Maybe he should ask her for a reciprocal photo, except then he would really look like some kind of creepy stalker. And anyway, what was he supposed to do with this girl? Invite her to come over? But actually, now that he thought about it . . .
I’ll probably be coming to England sometime in the next few months to see my grandchild. How far is your museum from London, where my daughter lives? I’d like to see your dead shark pictures. Or do you ever go down south? I don’t really know anybody in England, so . . .
So what? He scrapped the last half sentence, and then the one before it, too. It was okay to tell someone you wanted to see their dead shark pictures, wasn’t it? Or did that have a sleazy ring to it, too? And, hold on . . . “Do you ever go down south?” Jesus Christ. There was a reason he’d given up talking to people he didn’t know.
nine
The extraordinary news that Tucker had made some kind of bizarre public appearance passed Duncan by for a couple of days. There was so much going on in his personal life that he hadn’t had time to check the website, an oversight which, he later realized, neatly proved one of Annie’s cruel theories about Crowologists.
“I know ‘Get a life’ is a cliché,” she used to say. “But really, if these people actually had anything to do all day, they wouldn’t have time to write his lyrics out backward to see if there were any hidden messages in them.”
Only one person on the message boards had ever done that, and he did nothing all day because, it was eventually discovered, he was writing from the psychiatric ward of a hospital, but Duncan could see her point. The moment Duncan had found something to do—namely, try to grab the steering wheel back from the maniac who seemed to be driving his life—then Tucker had been forgotten. One evening, when Gina had gone to bed early, Duncan sat down at her computer and rejoined his little community, mostly because he wanted to feel normal for a few minutes, to do something that he used to do. Looking at a picture of Tucker taken a few nights before, onstage with a band Duncan had never heard of, really didn’t help with his attempted reorientation. It actually made him feel rather giddy.
It seemed to be genuine. There was no mistaking the man from the infamous Neil Ritchie photo—the same long gray dreadlocks, the same discolored teeth, although this time the teeth were visible because Tucker was smiling, rather than because they were being bared in anger.
It was incredible that anyone who’d ever heard of Tucker was in the crowd to see it: the band were, as far as it was possible to tell, a distinctly ordinary bunch of pub-rockers who played bars all over Pennsylvania but not much farther than that. It turned out that the young man who got the scoop was in the middle of the same sort of Crowe pilgrimage that Duncan and Annie had embarked on in the summer. He, however, had set out to try and find Tucker, and it looked as though he’d struck it astonish ingly lucky. But why “Farmer John”? Duncan would have to think about that. A man as deliberate and as thoughtful as Crowe would be trying to say something with the song that broke a twenty-year silence, but what? Duncan certainly had the Neil Young version; he would try to find the original before he went to bed.
There was more, however. The witness, who identified himself only by his initials, ET, had managed to speak to Crowe when he came offstage, and Crowe had spoken back.
So I thought well I have to try and I went up to him and I said Tucker I am a big fan and I am so happy to see you singing again. Dumb I know but you try and think of something better. And then I said Will you be singing your own songs onstage anytime soon and he said YES and also he had a new album coming out. And I said yes I know Naked and he said no not that piece of shit.
Duncan smiled to himself. The self-deprecation proved—perhaps, in a strange way, with even more certainty than the photograph—that this was indeed Tucker. It was an old pattern, exemplified in countless interviews from the old days. Tucker knew that Naked wasn’t a piece of shit, but it was entirely typical of him to describe it as such on its release, to an overeager fan. Duncan decided he wouldn’t pass this part of the story on to Annie, though. She’d misunderstand, come to the conclusion that Tucker was validating her opinion of the album, when in fact he was doing the opposite.
I have a new album coming out an album of covers of Dean Martin songs but done kind of roots rock and I kind of went WOW and he smiled and then went to sit with his friend and I thought I can’t bug him again. So I know the Dean Martin bit sounds weird but that’s what he said. I cannot tell you how amazing it all was I am still shaking.
It seemed wrong that he couldn’t share any of this with Annie. Gina would be excited when he told her in the morning; but then sometimes he wondered whether her excitement was entirely genuine. Occasionally it felt to him as though it were a little theatrical, although maybe he wouldn’t have arrived at that word were it not for her background. But then, she was a performer, and she performed, even when there didn’t seem to be very much motivation for her character. She couldn’t possibly understand what Tucker’s reemergence meant—she hadn’t put the time in—but she would jump up and down and shout “Oh my God” anyway. Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t tell her, and then he wouldn’t end up disliking her for her phoniness. Annie, however, had lived through the entirety of Tucker’s disappearance, and she would grasp the emotional impact of the news immediately. Did his relationship with Gina prevent him from sharing things like this with Annie? He thought not. He looked at his watch. She wouldn’t be in bed yet, unless her habits had changed profoundly since his departure.
“Annie?”
“Duncan? What’s the matter? I was in bed.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
He hoped she wasn’t going to bed early on his account, but he feared it might be an indication of depression.
“Listen. Something rather amazing has happened,” he said.
“I hope it is something amazing, Duncan. I hope that normal people would share your excitement.”
“They would if they knew what it meant.”
“It’s going to be something to do with Tucker, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She sighed heavily, which he understood as an invitation to continue.
“He sang. Live. In a bar. He joined a, well, an apparently rather mediocre band for an encore of ‘Farmer John.’ Do you know that song? ‘Farmer John, I’m in love with your daughter, whoa-oo-o-ah.’ And then he told someone in the audience he was making an album of Dean Martin cover versions.”
“Right. Good-o. Can I go to bed yet?”
“Annie, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I know you can see how amazing this is. And you’re just pretending it’s boring because you think
you can get back at me. But I’d hoped you’d be above all that.”
“I am excited, Duncan, honestly. If we were on video-phone now, you’d see I was beside myself. But it’s also late, and I’m tired.”
“If you want to be like that.”
“I do, really.”
“So you don’t really see us being able to build some kind of friendship.”
“Not tonight, no.”
“I suppose . . . Stop me if you feel this analogy is inappropriate, or, or, off. But I do feel that Tucker is our child, in a way. Maybe more mine than yours . . . Maybe, I don’t know, he was my son, but he was very young when we met, and you adopted him. And if my son, your stepson, had done something remarkable, I’d want to share that with you even if . . .”
Annie hung up on him. He ended up writing an e-mail to Ed West from the website, but it wasn’t the same.
For the next few days, the message-board regulars shared everything they knew about the song, in the hope that they could decode Crowe’s message to the world. They discussed whether the “champagne eyes” of the farmer’s daughter were significant—was Tucker acknowledging the role alcohol had played, and maybe was continuing to play, in his life? Even with all the critical ingenuity they had at their disposal, there wasn’t much they could make of the rest of the lyrics, which were of the “I love the way she walks/talks/wiggles” variety. Could it be that he was simply announcing his love for a farmer’s daughter? There were probably several in his immediate vicinity, so why couldn’t he have fallen for one of them? (And of course it was impossible to imagine a farmer’s daughter without imagining a pair of apple-rosy cheeks, and perhaps even a becoming heft around the waist and the bottom. Compare and contrast with the pale, size-zero beauty of Julie Beatty and her ilk! If he was truly in love with a farmer’s daughter, then the old, unhealthy West Coast days were really over.)
