Dancing in the Dark (10 page)

            They have been working since high school at a large chicken factory called Swift’s. Moira is 17. She says that it’s a big company, standing with her dress tucked into sloppy blue jeans, and rubber boots with the tops rolled down, not much point wearing running shoes, too much falling debris. “Not from plucking, stupid,” Harriet said to one of the boys who took them for dinner at the Italian place over at Blenheim, “we don’t pluck the fucken bastards, we tear them with our bare hands.” She had held up one hand in the middle of eating her vitello picato or whatever the guy with the big moustache called it. “No we don’t,” Moira had said, she was in giggles, a big plastic bag of dark insanity, the 2 suits they were with were really getting their money’s worth even though they weren’t going to get laid, although Harriet thought her guy was sort of cute, he had a dark blue suit and short-cropped sandy hair and blue eyes. Sure, that’s cute. The Co. isn’t cute. The Co. just moves chickens on a conveyor belt. The girls tear them apart. The Co. makes money. They have been late about 5 times this month. Moira is chewing gum. Juicy Fruit. Harriet is chewing gum. Beeman’s. You have to chew gum. It seems to keep the smell of fresh chicken and fresh chicken guts out of your nose. Harriet would rag her. She’d put on an accent like the Mayor’s wife and she’d say, “No, I don’t want those bloody chickens up my nasal passages.” Moira would laugh despite herself. Harriet was the active one, Moira was the laugher, Moira could laugh at almost anything. “We should be communists,” says Harriet, she’s kidding. She always comes up with wild ideas, and then she breaks up and Moira breaks up too. Moira’s standing there with a cigarette in her mouth. Not much raspberry lipstick left by 4:00 p.m. She’s plump and giggles. Harriet’s thin and dramatic with red hair. It’s a big Co. Sure. Biggest except for the Rawlins Furniture Co. And you’ll break your back in about 3 places for sure if you work over there. “They wouldn’t know what to do with us then,” she says. “They don’t know what to do with us now,” says Harriet. Moira brushes a stray bit of gizzard from the big white Co. apron you wear while you’re working on the belt. It’s stained like
a county police accident blanket. “They’d piss themselves,” she says. Her lips are a little tense. She thinks she’s 6 weeks pregnant. Isn’t totally sure for a fact. Doesn’t know how the hell it happened. Tearing chickens apart since high school hasn’t done her any harm. Just spoiled a few suppers and turned her off chickens. Must have made a mistake. “They’d barf their guts out, wouldn’t they?” she says, letting her blue eyes run up and down the big wire-patterned frosted windows.

            Tom Garrone, tall, curly dark hair, 26, was up in the blue air in the spring of 1986 in New York, tumbling, “Hey, what’s going on? Hey, what’s going on?” like a long arms, long-legged 6’3 ½” open-mouthed, tumbler pigeon.

And then he landed on his feet in May and it all began happening the way it was supposed to happen. 26 years old. Like natural.

Like natural, he lucked into a couple of trial songs, and then a whole album, post-punk dirges with some bright hopeful colour leaping up in the minimalist images – for a promising, going places group out of New Jersey originally called the Desperados.

Now he can pay the rent, and actually put money in the bank, and even more amazing – direct some of his attention back to his writing. Because what Tom really wants is to be a writer, and he wants to write a novel as good as
The Stranger
or as good as
100 Years of Solitude
.

Now the events in his life are happening much faster than they actually do in the lives of pigeons. They have already been down to Jackson, Miss., for a weekend gig, and gotten in trouble, and they played 3 places in Georgia, coming slowly back north, and one hot 2-night blitz at a club called
HOT ZONE
in Washington, D.C. They’re back in New York now, with a large rented blue and white tour bus parked outside their rehearsal space warehouse, and Tom is already exhausted.

It’s late afternoon and he’s at a store on 34th Street called Madonna. He’s buying a couple of shirts, one denim, and one white with vertical red and blue stripes, which seems like a fairly innocent thing to do on a late afternoon day. It’s New York, there are millions of people, Tom isn’t from New York, the weather outside is bucolic. And a song called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is going through his mind. Not for any special reason, it’s catchy, it’s a Cyndi Lauper song, he just likes the lead motif at the beginning of the song before her voice fades for a moment and the bass takes over.

Tonight there’s a big send-off party for the Desperados before they take off tomorrow and the beginning of a midwestern tour, at least 4 or 5 weeks,
he isn’t really sure, a lot of hotels with sawdust on the floor, first stop – Bloomington, Ind. Bloomington, Ind., USA.

There’s another album in the works, and he wants to work on it, and he wants to begin his novel about 2 musicians and a young woman botanist going to Florida to rediscover a friend’s grandfather’s farm. He likes this picture, and he likes his life in New York now that things have gotten better, now that he’s not tumbling in the blue air. But he’s not really crazy about the idea of going on this tour.

There won’t be that much for him to do anyway, just hang out, do things with Whitney. Whitney is Tom’s girlfriend, extraordinary, moody, beautiful, 24, ambivalent and quite often frustrating. Whitney is the sliding centre of Tom’s mixed-up life these days. She’s the fabulous young singer who fronts for the Desperados. She’s a big fan of Tom’s songs. But off-stage, unless they’re in bed or having a late morning breakfast together, she tends to fluctuate all over New York.

So, he grabs a cab and heads downtown for 6th Street.

Tom arrives at the party around 8 o’clock. Loaded with parcels, he didn’t want to bother going home first, he was coming south by cab anyway. The party started early, it’s been going for hours, some of the guys are planning to knock off early around 12, Hayden, the arranger and keyboard player, is expecting some magazine people.

The huge main room of the loft is full of people, painters, photographers, musicians from other groups, friends, and ex-wives.

He spots Jack from a distance. Jack said he’d meet him here, and Tom didn’t stop for supper on his way south anyway, he just stopped for a hot veal sandwich and some coffee. He waves, he can talk to Jack later. Whitney is here, although where Tom isn’t sure and doesn’t stop to think especially, Whitney can take care of herself. He puts the parcels at the far end of the improvised bar, gets a drink, a nice cold Lite beer, and sure, ok, he’ll try one Fletcher’s, a notorious southern whiskey of about 86 proof. Then he surveys the crowd.

Whitney is wandering around, several blocks away at the far end of the enormous room. There are lots of people, wall to wall, as the saying goes, if you’re into walls. Not really Tom’s best atmosphere. Tom is conscious of
Whitney wandering loose like the mythological fox his father used to tell him about who set the corn fields on fire. Maybe the fields in the story were wheat fields, Tom can’t remember all the details from his father’s stories.