FOR WEEKS NOW I’ve been staring at the back of Keith’s head and the hat he never takes off from my comfortable headrest inside Marcus’s shoulder. Sweet, kind Marcus. Keith is nothing like Marcus. They are both book-smart and incredibly talented musicians, but Keith is vain and insecure. Marcus is just insecure. There’s a biblical difference. Insecure men can be great men, but add vanity and they can be dangerous.
The foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in September are beautiful from the window of this bright yellow short school bus the six of us call home. Keith, Marcus, Dean, Chaz, Paco the dog, and me. We stopped counting days when their 2001 tour reached a hundred. Their next gig is only thirty miles away in Birmingham, and I can’t wait to shower and finally have some alone time. We usually crash at the opening act’s house for the night. They tend to be local, with real estate, and eager to host bands higher up the ticket from the big city. Always hospitable enough to let us use their clothes washer and dryer.
At most of the shows my role is to sell band CDs, t-shirts, stickers, and buttons to get us enough gas to the next town. Some nights, if there is extra time or a last-minute cancellation, I get to play a few songs. I’m constantly practicing my beginner repertoire. Traditional folk music, or covers of Dylan and Donovan, anything gut-punching with only three chords. Occasionally we pick up other girls, long lost or almost-loves of any of the boys. They ride with us for a few states, fill the bus with free snacks, and keep us entertained with bubbly, wide-eyed energy. It’s been a long stretch of the tour without any on-board guests, the south is bare-boned, and the silence has become melodic.
Keith, the band’s self-imposed leader, never stops writing and never ever takes off his baseball hat. All this time, I’ve never seen his entire face. Somewhere across Texas, seeing his actual head had become an obsession of mine. He sleeps and swims with a hat on. I imagine he’s hiding an early bald spot, which is sad at only twenty-four years old, but at some point, he will have to succumb to exposing his true self and take the damn hat off. Once, when I was about to take a picture of the group by the Grand Canyon, I reached up and touched the hat. “Come on, just take it off for one shot,” I said. Keith grabbed my wrist. “Stop it, no. I don’t want to,” he said, tossed my arm and stepped back. He was not amused by my efforts.
Ever since, in my dreams we start kissing and I slowly take his hat off, and we end up fucking hard and fast against the cold vinyl seat of the bus. It feels so real I wake up startled, believing I’ve cheated on Marcus with his best friend. It’s so frustrating. I don’t even like Keith and am in love with Marcus. Sensitive, handsome Marcus.
“There it is, that weird sign again!” Chaz yells out. We all look up in our sun-drenched daze and squint at a huge billboard on the side of the tumbleweed highway that reads “Freak Animal Petting Zoo 50 Miles Ahead,” the same billboard we saw 100 and 150 miles back. Whoever runs the joint is really creating high-stakes anticipation. Then I remember there’s no competition. We are in the middle of nowhere. The only other signs we’ve seen for days have been for gun outlet malls and firework warehouses. I snuggle back into Marcus’s chest. He starts softly singing an old folk lullaby. “She walks these hills in a long black veillllllllll.” Keith and Chaz chime in, in harmony from the front of the bus, “She visits my grave when the night winds waillllllllllll.” Dean, our driver and drummer, grabs a tambourine off the clever hook he installed on the metal roof just above the driver’s seat and starts tapping it with his knee. I join and take the high part, “Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but meeeeeeee.” It’s a perfect moment. As the final note descends we all feel its comfort in our bodies, souls, and minds. Then we chuckle, and the giggles fade into the road sounds of the pavement’s hypnotic thumps.
When we pull into the venue parking lot, we eagerly jump out to stretch our legs. To our surprise, the venue is a Chinese buffet-style restaurant that doubles as a punk rock bar with a stage in the back after dinner service is over. Our looks say we live with no fear of who or what we will find inside. We stick out around these parts anyway. Marcus’s beard has grown so long he scares the locals who think he could be in Al Qaeda. Hippie Chaz is wearing one of his Grateful Dead t-shirts, making plans to score any kind of drugs he can supposedly without us knowing. Keith looks like our school teacher taking us on some kind of twisted field trip in a tight tweed suit jacket. The sleeves aren’t quite long enough for his arms, and he’s now wearing his knit hat even though it’s eighty degrees. Maybe tonight will be the night he just can’t take the heat anymore and finally takes the hat off, releasing me from its seductive powers. I’m wearing stiletto-heel boots on hard gravel and my favorite long, embroidered flower skirt I scored at a church thrift shop in Birmingham, Alabama. I’ve got one of Paco the dog’s bandanas wrapped around my long curly gold hair. Dean is the oldest, tallest, and most responsible. He does all the talking for the group and handles all the expenses and repairs for the bus. As usual, he’s wearing a worn out MC5 Detroit band t-shirt with Levi’s and leather flip flops. He disappears inside for a few minutes and comes back out grinning. “They have coffee and hot meals for us, then we can set up for soundcheck while Alessandra puts together the merch table.” High fives all around. I beeline inside for the bathroom and some much-needed female privacy, which I put to use by shaving my legs in their sink.
Later that night, I sneak out to find a payphone. The boys played their best and will be drinking until the bar says there’s no more to drink on the house tab. I take a deep breath and stare at the receiver for some time before picking it up. I put the quarters in and dial a familiar number. I know no one will pick up on the other end. He never picks up because it’s a beeper answering service. I just like to hear the recorded sound of his name, and feel the sharp pain of abandonment it makes in my chest before hanging up. I do this on most of our stops, two or three times a week, and tell no one. I head back to the bus and curl up into one of the loft beds Dean strategically built above the back row of seats. The neon building lights keep me company as I drift away.
In the morning everyone is hungover and cranky. The bus smells like damp boys. Chaz is missing again. At first everyone panics that he’s overdosed somewhere, but we’ve done this dance before and he always turns up. Marcus is already up, reading a large Henry Miller hardcover. He is a self-imposed road scholar. Smart, thoughtful Marcus. Dean is out in front of the bus with the hood up. He’s in his happy place wrestling around with the engine. I compulsively stare at Keith again. He’s changed hats. How did he do it without anyone noticing? Without me catching a glimpse of his true self underneath again? I try to focus on something else about him. I zone in on a huge whitehead zit just underneath his nose.
That’s when Keith demands everyone’s attention. “I made a list of all the mistakes we made, and the notes we missed during the set last night,” he blurts out. His chronic need for self-improvement is exhausting. I roll my eyes and hide back under our Walmart Snoopy-print comforter. “I’m serious, guys, we all need to do so much better,” Keith insists, realizing he is only talking to himself. Marcus is deep in his pages and doesn’t look up. Keith grabs an empty beer can off the bus floor and throws it at Marcus. “Dude, I’m talking to you!”
I jump out of the loft like a puma ready to protect and instantly Keith stands up to block my way to Marcus. “Settle down, Yoko,” Keith sneers at me.
“Oh, fuck you, Keith,” I yell back. “Why don’t you squeeze that zit. Put a hat on it while you’re at it.”
I’ve always known how to end an argument by saying the worst insult possible. “Alessandra, stop!” Marcus says as he looks up from his book. He doesn’t like conflict or insults unless he is poetically hurling them at himself. His Rembrandt smile is gone and I can see from the piercing look in his eyes he is disappointed in me for saying such a wretched thing. Marcus hurts and feels betrayed on behalf of his bandmate. Their Midwest bromance, which started when they were young children and continued straight into their attending the same university, will always be more important to him than ours. Just then Chaz shows up with his cheesy wide smile and long tousled hair.
“Oh my geez, I had the best night! Big girls are the best. The bigger the better, I say!”
The tension breaks; I take a breath. I try to fix the situation with my rich girl allowance, my knee-jerk reaction that settles all kinds of drama. “Let’s find a Denny’s and get a big hot breakfast, my treat.” My dad gave me a bunch of travelers checks when I stopped home for Christmas. At first my parents were extremely disappointed that I decided to take a gap year from college to learn how to play the guitar and sing in dive bars with a bunch of garage rock dudes. But when I started calling them from every American city possible, the very first in my entire Italian first-generation immigrant family line to explore the nation, my father became proud of me. I could tell from the softness of his voice when we spoke on the phone—my father was otherwise never soft—and from the eager history questions he asked about places I was seeing and the people we were meeting.
We drive away from the Chinese restaurant-venue parking lot into a two-lane highway of dry brush and bland shades of gray and clay. Everyone is staring out their own window. Dean notices something ahead and points for us to look up, and we do. Another “Freak Animal Petting Zoo” billboard. This one says with finality “ . . . Next Right Turn, If You Dare!” Dean switches on the dashboard radio and Led Zeppelin starts to roar over the bus speakers. We start tapping our hands on the seats and stomping our feet on the floor. It’s unanimous. We are making the right turn. We don’t know why, but freak petting zoo, here we come. Maybe we are looking for a connection to the unknown, maybe we are just bored of ourselves and each other.
Next thing I know we are standing in a very sad, dirty, unkempt sandlot. The patchwork wire fence wrapped around the desolate property creaks back and forth in the wind making the scariest sound possible. An older woman comes out to greet us and is missing several front teeth. She asks us for twenty bucks, then tells us to go around the house to the backyard to experience the animals. We quietly follow her directions. The first thing we see in the yard is a glass tank of a dozen tarantulas that appear to have been spray painted in neon colors and a sign dangling off it declaring “Radioactive Spiders from Space!” The air is hot and dry. I feel pity for the spiders, watching as they move slowly, crawling over each other. Something very grim is upon us. I turn around in search of Marcus’s hand but find him a hundred or so feet away in the middle of the yard standing still and staring down in a trance. As I walk towards him, I see trash all over the ground, mostly in the form of candy wrappers. I reach for Marcus and take his hand. It’s cold to the touch. He is looking at two chickens with their butts stapled together, I guess to create an illusion of a two-headed chicken. They are trying to make sense of how to walk, which they can’t do, so they just keep falling over.
I realize very quickly I’ve got to get the boys back on the bus before a violent fight occurs between them and the owners of this ungodly place. “Okay, let’s wrap it up. We are out of here,” I say loudly, dragging Marcus back towards the exit. I find Keith on the way back weeping, hunched over, sobbing by a mutilated three-legged cow that is foaming at the mouth. “Don’t look, come with me, it’s okay.” I take his arm in my other hand. “Everybody back on the bus right now. We’re going.” This time, they listen to me.
We skip breakfast, our appetites replaced with nausea. We agreed to use the money to treat ourselves to a motel room for the night at our next destination, Asheville, North Carolina, about three hours away. I offer to drive and take the next shift behind the wheel. The alarming experience of witnessing so much animal abuse has destroyed the boys’ stamina. They are tender on the inside. Within minutes they are sleeping deeply, a long overdue rest they badly need. I, on the other hand, am adrenalized with anger. I drive and stare at Keith’s hat in the rearview mirror. He looks like the small child version of himself, innocent and helpless. I imagine the hat as one of the little cotton caps they put on newborns in the hospital before handing them back to their mothers for their first feeding. I think of all those trapped animals and their cruel, toothless mother. My obsession with Keith never taking his hat off finally starts to unravel as I watch him sleep. Keith is also trapped. It dawns on me, it’s not a sexual attraction I am feeling; It’s the yearning desire to save him from himself and set him free from his male chauvinistic shackles, and the belief that my doing so would somehow make the world a better place for all women.
When Keith wakes up a few hours later, he starts tuning the instruments one by one. The guitar chords ping, ding, dong, ding-dong, over and over like church bells or the long temple sounds monks meditate to. Of the ten or so instruments on board, there is one old acoustic guitar, a rare and gorgeous vintage Gretsch Hummingbird he can’t ever tune just right. I have a natural gift for tuning instruments by ear, so when he gets exasperated from trying to tune it himself, Keith often brings the old guitar to me. He looks at the rearview mirror after a while of not being able to get it right and we make eye contact as I’m driving. “You should open for us tonight. It’s Saturday and there will be lots of people out,” he declares. “Sing that Joan Baez song you play so well. The one about the silver dagger.” I smile and accept the invitation, knowing full well I’ll sing whatever I want when the time comes and the stage spotlight, like a question beaming for an answer, shines on me.
About the author:
Alessandra Iavarone was recently awarded a Poet & Author Fellowship at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and had a nonfiction piece published in Jenny Magazine. She is passionate about funding the arts and serves on the Board of Directors of the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance (DVAA). For nearly a decade, Alessandra toured nationally with the Brooklyn-based psychedelic band Tomorrow’s Friend, where she was the principal songwriter and frontwoman.
The artwork for this piece was taken by Alessandra Iavarone.
Love the writing — musical, and funny (road scholar :)), and moving.