I Love The Way You Call Me Baby

Part 1
He's lost, he's tired.  They've been driving for miles.  She's trying to have an intelligent conversation, full of nervous energy.

As usual, with 40 more miles to go. He needs to pee. All his brain energy is focused on keeping the bladder in check.

"Whatever you say, Baby,"

"Wait. Did you just call me 'Baby' ???"

LONG PAUSE.  Careful and considered.

"Whatever it was I didn't mean ta!"

He hopes that by quoting a fragment from a song, he can stop her from exploding.  It's the first thing that comes into his mind really, every time he finds himself dealing with a woman who is about to explode.  Or a drunk guy at a bar who is eager to punch him.  He knows she knows this song.  The problem is that he can't remember what song it's from.  This puzzles takes up much more brain space than whatever it is she is telling him.

"I can't believe I'm riding around with a guy who uses the word "Baby" in an un-ironic manner.  It's like you are trying to infantalize me!"

His ears catch up with his brain: Hang on, did she just say something about an infant?  Could she be pregnant?

He looks over at her, hoping to say something brilliant.  Pull some great joke out of his ass.  He raises an eyebrow.

"You've come a long way? Baby?"

He flashes his characteristic smile.

He breaks her.

She can't help but laugh.

Miraculously, they make it to the gig without him ruining his only clean pair of trousers.  Although it was a close call when the owner wanted an autograph before giving directions to the bathroom.

Mary Mary by the Monkees

==
PART 2

Sometime during their Sound Check, she wants to get back at him.  She tries teasing him, but he is all focus and frustration.  He climbs off the stage to check the balance of the speakers.

She begins to sing tunelessly:
"Don't use that toilet if you have to go to the bathroom during the show. I can hear you onstage"
She manages to whisper it into the mic in a somewhat sultry manner.

He whirls around.

"KEEP SINGING! I need to hear how it sounds!"

Suddenly she's stung, staring back at his words, surprised and suddenly scared, as if he's asked her to strip.

He thinks: She's so stuck up about things. Such a prude.  How am I even on tour with someone like her, so uptight all the time?

"Wait, wait, wait. What-what should I sing?  You usually . . . "

All her bravado is gone. She's lost without him and his guitar.  He knows she HATES singing acapella, and he's being slightly cruel.  But he likes it somehow.  Maybe he'll throw her a note.

"SHUT UP AND SING!"

Or maybe he'll just yell at her.  Sometimes that works too.

With lasers of hatred beaming from her eyes, she begins.

"I'll buy you Rogaine
When you start losing all your hair/
I'll sew on patches/
To all your underwear"

Her eyes.  They look so mean, but she has twisted the lyrics out of shape.  It's some random hit song on the radio.  "Underwear" is clearly her own invention.

"Keep going!'  He yells over his shoulder as he walks into the shadows, trying to hide a smirk. But it's too late.  They were making fun of the real lines in the song while they were in the car, randomly and not nearly this cleverly.  She keeps going until he falls on the floor laughing.  And nearly ruins his pants a second time.

==
PART 3

It's a small crowd, but after a full set, he decides it's a perfect time to do an encore.  As usual, she has no idea where's he's going with this.

"We have a tradition.  MUSICIANS, that is, have a tradition.  Of carrying on a great song, of carrying on the tradition."  He's very serious.  She looks over at him, dubiously. Wondering where her part comes in.  If he has decided to include her at all.

"Are WE serious musicians?" She asks, both to him and to the crowd, neither of which takes any of this patter seriously.

But he plows forward. "We, of course, being SERIOUS musicians, WE have followed in the tradition of hearing a song and wanting to make it our own.  Excuse me, we take it, make it our own, and thereby-we ruin it.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen!  We, in particular, LOVE to ruin songs!"

"I have no idea where this is going, but I like it!" She interjects. The audience laughs.  They are with them, wherever they are going.

"So here is a song, I'm not even sure what it is called or who sings it, but we heard it on the radio, one of the 'commercial' stations, so it must be a hit,"

"So therefore, we hate it!" Gleefully, she can't let him alone.

"No, no, no.  We DON'T hate it.  We only ruin songs we LOVE!  The songs we hate don't get played at all!"

"RIGHT!" She is all cheer and fun and games at this point, "So, what song IS this?  I'm just curious."

"You want to know the song you are going to be singing?"  He strums his guitar absentmindedly, like he's a cowboy loading a gun.

"I'M going to be singing?"  There's that fear again, just behind her eyes.

"I hope you sing it.  I certainly don't know it!"  The audience laughs again, a little more uncertainly this time.  "Start by singing it straight, and then do what you were doing before.  When we were doing the sound check,"
"Oh that. Hmm. Okay...."
He strums a vague intro, and instead of jumping in with a brilliant line, she giggles.

"Wait, I don't think I can sing it straight!! Just play and I'll sing . . ."
"Usually I like to introduce the name of the song we're ruining, but here I'll just assume you guys will recognize this famous hit.  Or if we are really lucky, maybe by the end of the night, it'll be a whole NEW song!"

He started again, and this time, miracle of miracles, she came in perfectly.

"I'll knit you Rogaine/
when you stop losing all your hair/
I'll bring you flowers/
for all your underwear"

And it just got worse.  But her voice was lovely, and everyone in the audience was drunk, and happy to stay for their private joke, which expanded to include the entire roomful of drunken customers of the bar.  And those people who were fed up with the music business, or the "Mucus Business" as he called it, being sold crap as their only option.  But it was fun to listen to her, making up endless variations on a theme, vaguely resembling a hit song on the radio, that was too precious anyway.

From that night on, members of the audience would hear the song on the radio and be disappointed that it wasn't her perfect, Dr. Demento version of it.  But they would smile anyway.


OTHER VARIATIONS

I'll sew on patches
When you start losing all your hair
I'll buy you flowers
To match your sweater!

I'll buy you flowers
When you start losing all your hair
I'll buy you Rogaine
For all your underwear

I'll buy you Rogaine
To fix your sweater
I'll buy you flowers
To make it better

I'll knit you Rogaine
When you stop losing all your hair
I'll buy you flowers
For all your underwear

Cause I-I-I Love
The way you call me patches
And you-oo-oo-oh 
Take me the way I am!


The Way I Am by Ingrid Michaelson

And never know each other

She was always amazed by the crowds when they were deep in the Magic.

She doubted him at the beginning of every set, but kept the faith as each note was released into the air.

The view from the stage was into a canyon of the universe, stars flashing, ablaze, repeatedly, supernovas dying and being reborn within the chaos.

Why were they taking pictures of him? And Them? Aka The Band, aka the Group, aka the Monsters, aka the Cash Cows, they were the same-even after 40 years. Minute differences in shading from one year to the next were unworthy of such careful documentation.

Walking through the crowds at the convention, she saw scrapbooks of their shared histories. Fans taking pictures side by side. A calendar montage from a movie from 1939. And a constant reminder of how the body and the soul age at different rates. Flip. Dorian Gray. Flip. Dorian Gray. Flip. Dorian Gray.

There was a spontaneous gathering and sing along in the lobby of the hotel. She watched from the balcony; bodies not accustomed to dancing freely, voices strong with song. Her camera froze them into rapturous statues.

She ran backstage to show him and the other guys. But he was bored. They were bored.

Even the Pope gets jaded.

The green room was Waiting for Godot.

I'm disappointed in the taste.

Who am I to want something?

"I'm disappointed in the taste?"

So someone will just be summoned by the ring of a bell, and D will get a new cup of coffee. And he will pay them with a smile, and they will see him posing moodily by the glass door, on his boxers.

But that was me in another life. The scared boy, the humble servant. Offering up the item that was desired and of higher value than my own person. And then running away, backing away.

And somehow my special spark, the music talent, got plucked out of obscurity. There are a million other boys with cute smiles that this may have happened to, but it was me.

The cameras will convince you that you are a god. A minor deity. But experience will teach you otherwise. You will find yourself, again and again. In talented guitarists, in shy, beautiful boys, in funny sour loners. Why wasn't it them,

I still have to remind myself that I am the
Rock God. Or at least playing the role.

She, poor girl, she is caught up in the depression too. A sense of general worthlessness, compounded by the feeling of not being effective in the world.

I understand how to emerge from my own, but not to help her out of hers.

I think love is only true in fairy tales

I think love is only true in fairy tales

And then, she appeared in his audience again.

Front row, off to the side.  Close enough to make eye contact over the keyboard.  He recognized her immediately, but as per policy, was careful not to offer any signal. The Beloved Mob picks up on the slightest whiff of favoritism from the stage.  They also give off jealous energy when waiting in line, but at least there, they are organized about fondling him.

This time she was silent.  Just watching him.

Afterwards, they talked.  She seemed completely normal. Her eyes were hard. Boring, actually.  Remembered the handicapped bathroom, but didn't seem eager to resume.  He wondered if she'd come back. And asked her why she was here now.  There had to be a reason.

"Because I was in love.  And now I'm not.  And I see you up onstage.  And it's the purest sense of Love I can think of.  I don't have a sense of it anymore in my life now.  But you are the keeper of the flame,"

He was her white knight on a steed after all.  A grown up version of it.  This is what all the fairy tales were trying to tell you Love was about.

They smiled.  She left him with a sense of longing.  He wanted to live up to her ideals.  And for a while, he did.

==

But, sadly, she kept coming.  And the difference between one perfect night and getting to know someone reared its ugly head.  She clapped, but harder and harder.  Even in unexpected places.  After a dozen performances, she began to see through him.  His jokes were terrible, he knew it, the audience knew it.  She laughed at the crickets.  The space after he told the punchline where nobody laughed.  Eventually, she was laughing at him.

She drank.  Yelled things out in frustration.  Nobody else heard it but him.  Fine, she was gonna be One Of Those. A heckler.  Someone so frustrated in their own lives that they pick on him.  This was something he could fight against.

She waited her turn in line for an autograph.  It was never easy to talk, but there was just enough space between them to look each other in the eye.

"Don't you ever shut up?"
"No, frankly, I don't.  You are better than this,"
"I'm doing the best I can,"
"No, you are being careless.  You think everyone's gonna love you, even if you don't try."
"They usually do,"
"But I'm talking about me. I'm out there.  I'm watching."

That night, he couldn't sleep.  She was right.  He'd been slipping for a while now; and she knew enough to tell.  He'd had plenty of the White Knight kind of love in his life.  Smiles and sex were all too easy.  This was a tougher, meaner, truer kind.

This left the happily ever afters in the dust.  


*I'm a Believer by the Monkees

You're Just a Steppin Stone

You're Just a Steppin Stone

They had met years ago.

She fell in love with him immediately.  This was back when he could still get girls with his star power.  Before he decided to settle down for the umpteenth time with a woman who could and would take care of him.  Back when he still had all his Mojo workin on every audience member.

Funny to think that instead of wishing back his twenties, he was now looking back on the glory days of his early 60's.

She was a great dancer.  Sexually adventurous, available and eager.  That beauty of youth that looks the same on every Girl, before she has grown into the Woman.  And she worked hard to stand out in the crowd, to get him to notice her.  He did without her trying, but as usual, he just sat back and let her do her performance.

Yelled loudest.  Danced hardest. She had an award carved.  "Sexiest Man in the World".

There was minimal conversation after the shows.  The band and hangers on would be hanging out. She was too clever.  Her jokes were biting.  She seemed to agree with everyone, told all the band members how terrific they were.  But picked up on subtleties.  She knew they didn't have enough money to keep everything in good repair.  Weren't organized.  A girl like her could really whip them into shape.  In short, she scared him.

He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.  When girls try THAT hard, there is something else going on.  They want the fantasy of "being selected", He seemed to be low hanging fruit, and once she got him, she might get bored.  Move on to someone more famous, younger, richer.  It had happened before.

And then she stopped coming.  Seemed to be talking to some other man in the audience (Wait, wasn't she a lesbian?  Didn't she say I was the only man?)

She stopped coming.  He forgot because he assumed she forgot.

Or worse.  That she had moved on.

As they all do.

When he did think about her, it was in a minor key.  Maybe he wasn't famous or sexy enough for her after all. He had aged out of his Mojo.  He last best chance to Be Used.  And now, he just wasn't useful anymore.


*"(I'm not your) Steppin Stone by the Monkees