Black-out

 

The casino venue was small, but the crowd was appreciative.  It was a convenient place to perform – after her show, Jessie signed autographs and posed for selfies with her fans and, then, walked across the gambling floor to her hotel room in the adjacent tower.  The gamblers were pre-occupied and didn’t pay any attention to her.

Jessie’s crew loaded out the gear at the dock behind the stage and, within an hour, the instruments and amplifiers and their coils of cord were on the road.  Casino staff manned the mixing board and sound quality had been excellent.  Jessie’s tour manager commended the sound board operator and offered the man a job with the tour.  The operator was a slender man with long hair tied in a pony tail and silver-rimmed glasses; he looked young but was middle-aged when the lights came up in the auditorium at his mixng board.

“Too much time on the road,” the sound man said, “I’ve got a family.”

He said that he had toured with Sheryl Crow and the travels had taken a toll on him.

The tour manager shook hands with the sound board operator and they parted.  

Upstairs, Jessie sat on her bed and scrutinized the tour schedule.  The TV was turned-on for company but there was no sound and she wasn’t watching.  A slight scratchiness in her throat troubled her.  Her cell-phone rang: it was the tour manager praising her performance.  He was calling her from one of the casino’s bars.  Jessie could hear women talking loudly in the background and the distant circus sound of slot machines. 

“How do you feel?” the tour manager asked her.

“I’m tired,” Jessie said.  “Terribly tired.”

“Well, get a good night’s sleep,” he replied.

“I’ll try.”

The next show was in two days, four-hundred miles away.

Jessie dimmed the lights and pulled the black-out curtains across the window that looked down on the cement desert of a parking ramp’s top level.  She took her pills, put on the jersey in which she slept, and stretched out on the bed.

She was still awake at 3:30 in the morning.  Jessie sat up and stumbled into the bathroom to find her medicine.  She wondered if the first faint light of dawn was tinting the sky, but decided that, if she saw the sunrise, nothing at all would get her back to sleep, so, she didn’t part the curtains to look outside.

It occurred to her to phone her tour manager but she expected that he would ignore her call.

A half-full bottle of champagne was on the round table near the TV.  The television showed her ads for health care products, rejuvenation creams and balms to firm sagging skin and freshen the face.  The sound was turned down.  Jessie picked up the champagne bottle and flung it at the TV screen but missed.  The bottle rapped off the wall, spraying champagne in all directions.  A drizzle ran over the screen distorting the images.

Jessie retrieved the bottle which was now empty.  She pitched it onto the tile floor in the bathroom where the glass broke.  Then, she followed the bottle into the toilet, cutting the heel of her foot.  For some reason, she felt no pain at all.  

Jessie picked up the bottom-half of the broken bottle and held it close to her face.  She thought that if she gouged out an eye, she wouldn’t be able to perform and could recuperate in a hospital somewhere.  Lifting the bottle to her face, she scrutinized herself in the mirror.  Now what?  Her face was expressionless, a pale, haggard mask in a halo of shattered hair.

As she expected, the tour manager didn’t answer her phone call.  She thought about going to his room and pounding on the door, but, then, realized that she didn’t remember his room number.  She cut into the back of her left hand with a piece of broken glass.  To her relief, this was painful.  Then, she wrapped her hand in a wash rag and called her agent.  After a half-dozen rings, he answered.

Jessie told him what had happened.  He asked her to find the tour manager.  

“I can’t,” Jessie said.  

Jessie and her agent had been a couple for a few years, but the relationship had soured.  Jessie said that she needed his help.

“I’ll get in my car and drive up there,” the agent said.  He was in the city about four hours away.

He told her to leave her room and go down into the casino where there would be people around.

“Don’t make a scene,” he said.

“I can’t be with people,” she replied.

“I don’t trust you alone.”

She said that the situation was under control and that, as long as she knew that he was coming, everything would be fine.

“No, I want you to go to the casino and get something to eat,” her agent said.  He told her that he would call when he was a few miles from the venue.  “Keep your phone on,” he cautioned.

Jessie sat in the room for an hour.  Bad thoughts troubled her and, so, she put on slacks and went down to the casino.  

Jessie thought the waitress would “comp” her a drink since she had left her purse in the room in the tower and had no money.  But the waitress didn’t recognize her as the performer who had sold out the house the night before.  Her feet were bare and the gash in her heel had opened and was bleeding.  Security was called and she was ushered into a conference room where gauze and a large bandage from a first aid kit was applied to her heel.  The waitress brought her some chips and peanuts and a tall glass of Coca-cola with ice.

Her agent arrived a few hours later.  He asked her: “Now what?”  They had breakfast and, then, went to her room to pack.  The agent waited until nine in the morning and, then, made a half-dozen calls.  After that, they walked to his car in the parking ramp and began the drive to the city.

Jessie and her agent had forgotten about the tour manager.  Later, Jessie mentioned him and, as they were driving, the agent called and said that he was fired.    

****

She couldn’t drive because of her medication.  Jessie called an Uber to drive her to the studio.  

The backseat of the car was spacious.  Jessie was relieved that the driver didn’t recognize her and that his English was too sketchy for him to make small talk.  When she asked him to navigate the drive-through at a McDonald’s, he didn’t exactly grasp her request and she had to repeat herself several times and gesture to the right side of the road where the fast food place was located.  Jessie handed her driver a twenty and told him what she wanted from the menu; he didn’t have any trouble ordering – fast food is an international language.  The sleek and flawless upholstery in the new car smelled of aloe and mint.  The driver handed her the food and the receipt and fumbled in his pocket until Jessie told him to keep the change.  Before eating, Jessie found a pen in her purse and wrote a few words on the receipt which she, then, folded and put in the pocket of her slacks.  She ate her breakfast as if she were performing a duty of some kind.  Then, she leaned back on the seat and closed her eyes.  The morning traffic was heavy and the ride to the studio took another twenty minutes.

The recording studio was a concrete-block bunker embedded in a parking lot next to a bank and a mortuary built to resemble a New England Protestant church.  The session players hired for the occasion were overweight and disheveled – the opposite of the handsome athletic musicians with sculpted manes engaged for Jessie’s show-bands.  These were blue-collar workers who lived in the suburbs with their wives and petulant teenaged children.  Of course, the session players were accomplished musicians with an unerring ability to sight-read and improvise.  They were deferential to Jessie but kept their own counsel, ignoring her during breaks as they chatted about football and basketball.  At first, Jessie felt rusty and out-of-sorts and she thought her voice sounded raw.  “I’m just croaking,” she told the sound engineer.  He assured her that she sounded good but said that he would adjust the electronics to take some of the hard edges out of her voice.

The first couple tracks were slow going.  But by mid-morning, Jessie felt more confident.  Recording was different from singing in concert and required a different set of skills.  She had cut twelve records and, after a few hours, the discipline came back to her and the work went well.  The medications made her mouth dry and she drank Aqua Fina bottled water between takes.  Jessie sometimes closed her eyes when she sang and the darkness in her head swarmed with images, whirling lights and colors and tiny figures that seemed to be wrestling on a red stage.  She felt exhaustion like an ache in her belly and legs, a pervasive sore feeling that made her want to lie down on the couch in the break-room and sleep.  Every time, she shut her eyes to find a note or negotiate a turn in a song, she feared that she might fall asleep, drown in the darkness without finding a way up to the light.

The studio was engaged until three in the afternoon.  By two-o’clock, the tracks planned for the day were, more or less, complete.  Jessie’s eyes burned as if she had been smoking for hours although, of course, cigarettes were prohibited in the sound-proof cubicles of the studio.  (The session players went into the alley between the studio and funeral home to smoke.)   Her meds were sapping her strength and, sometimes, she felt as if she were dreaming.

The sound engineer suggest that they “knock-off.”  

Jessie said that she had a melody in her head that she wanted to record before she forgot it.

“We can pick it up tomorrow maybe,” Jessie said. “But I want to make a demo.”

“What song?”

“It’s a new one,” Jessie replied.

She went to the piano and sat down next to the keyboard player.  Then, she picked out a simple tune, playing it one note at a time and, then, tipping her head as if listening to something very faint and far away.

At first, the melody didn’t come out entirely right.  Jessie shook her head and said that the tune was wrong.  She turned some notes upside down and played one of the phrases backward and, then, nodded her head.

“That’s it,” Jessie said.

The keyboard player repeated the notes that she had played, picking out the melody from its beginning to end.  Then, he played the tune more quickly and added some chords.

“Yes, that’s it,” Jessie said.

A couple of other musicians repeated the melody on their instruments and the percussionist tapped at his symbols and built a back-beat with the bass drum.  Jessie said that she felt nauseated and left the recording studio for the corridor to the toilets.  She was gone a few minutes, long enough that the Sound Engineer conferred with the others as to whether someone should go and check on her.  But before the conversation concluded, Jessie had come from the restroom, walking slowly and unsteadily as if she had fallen and was now gingerly testing her limbs and joints for injury.

Jessie sat on the stool in front of the microphone.  She held in her hand a white ribbon of paper on which she had scribbled some words, nothing more than rhymes without the rest of the lyrics.

“Let me try to sing this,” Jessie said.

Her notes were written on a receipt that she held up close to her nose and eyeglasses.

The musicians played the melody and Jessie sang some lyrics, at first tentatively but, then, with more authority.  After a couple of takes, Jessie was singing with full-throat.  The melody slithered forward under her voice.  

“What do you call this?” the keyboard player said between takes.

“ ‘Backpack Angel’,” Jessie said.

****

The record climbed slowly on the charts.  The single, “Backpack Angel,” was covered, with some acclaim, by several other artists.  Jessie’s original, as a single, debuted at 8 on the Billboard charts and, then, made its way to number one.  The song held its position for almost half a year.  It was Jessie’s most successful single and became her signature song.  

When interviewers asked her what the lyrics meant, she said that she didn’t know.  

During a spot on public radio, the host asked Jessie about the song’s inspiration.

“You know, I can’t recall writing that song or recording it,” Jessie said.  “It was a dark time in my life.  There’s just a hole in my memory around that song.  It’s strange that I’m pretty well known for a song that I can’t recall writing or, even, singing in the studio.”

“That is strange,” the host replied.  

“Where does it come from?” Jessie asked.  

“What?”

“Music,” she said.  “I mean, music in general.  Where does it come from?”