"The Flamenco Academy" (6 page)

Who knows? Maybe I would have gotten
completely hooked if Didi hadn’t reappeared. But she did. One
morning when I was gathering up the report I’d written for her
about McKinley and the Tariff of 1890 so she wouldn’t flunk
American history and I already had the long denim skirt on over my
jeans, she honked. My mother and I both identified the honk
immediately. We stared at each other as we worked through a long
series of lightning calculations that yielded the same answer: my
mother was not big enough to stop me. I walked through the door and
out to Didi.

All she said as I jumped in the front seat
was, “Nice skirt.”

I ripped the denim skirt off and stuffed it
under the front seat.

“You have that history report?” she asked,
backing out of the driveway.

I plucked the neatly typed paper out of my
backpack and held it up for her to see. She smiled and nodded, her
eyelids drooping like a cat’s in the sun, then held her fist up. I
tapped it with mine. Didi put the Skank in first, revved the
engine, and we peeled out in a spray of gravel.

I knew I would pay, but I didn’t care. Didi
was back.

Didi returned with a new mantra that we both
followed: Stay distracted. We never talked about our mothers, about
how things were at home. School became an afterthought. We put most
of our energy into the jobs we both got at Pup y Taco, a take-out
place based on a marketing strategy that reasoned, if you don’t
like Mexican food, there’s always hot dogs. The only other thing we
put any energy into was groupieing. Actually, Didi did the
groupieing. I tagged along for logistical support, taking care of
the details the way I always did.

I was the one who made sure that the tank of
the Skankmobile was filled so we could get to the airport where
Didi could flirt with the car rental guy enough to weasel the name
of the hotel where R.E.M. or Ever-clear or whoever was in town was
staying. I was the one who installed the extra memory in her
computer so she could run her astrology program and do charts for
whichever band member she was currently obsessed with. Didi was the
one who played the roadies and got the all-access backstage passes.
She was the one cool and sexy enough to get chosen from the pack of
skinny girl groupies. She was the one the stars would point to as
they whispered to a flunky to make sure she—that one there with the
lips, the mouth, the jeans lower than anyone else’s—was at the
party. After.

I didn’t like thinking about the After part.
The part when the doors closed and Didi was one of the throwaway
girls with the band or a pack of roadies. She called them missions
and that was the part I liked, the part that was like a spy
mission. Scouring the city for glimpses of tour buses, getting
gullible hotel clerks to reveal room numbers, raiding maids’
uniforms from unguarded hampers, swiping tiny bottles of shampoo
and conditioner. The last had nothing to do with getting to the
band; it was just my own little vice. I liked everything up to
meeting the band. The actual band, the stars, held no interest for
me whatsoever. That was when I would leave.

We established our groupie division of labor
the first time I went with her on a mission. Limp Bizkit was
playing at Tingley Coliseum. Built on the state fairgrounds to host
rodeos, Tingley looked and smelled like a big barn. Didi loved it
since security was impossible there. I followed her through the
chutes usually used to herd livestock into the ring that had been
covered with a fake floor and turned into a mash pit. The roadies
picked her out as soon as she appeared. When the show was over,
they herded her toward the tour bus.

She turned my way and asked, “You
coming?”

The prospect utterly panicked me, but I’d
already learned enough from her to give something resembling a cool
reply and answered, “You have your own compulsions to answer to,
but, as for me, just because a sweaty hillbilly in a black T-shirt
with thirty tour dates printed on it has carried Fred Durst’s amp
is never going to be enough reason to let him stick his tongue in
my
ear, much less anything else anywhere else. Period.
Nonnegotiable.”

Didi laughed. She loved my answer since she
hadn’t really wanted me to stay.

The day after a mission, she always gave me
a vague report, which usually meant translating the evening into
“coins of the realm.” The coins of Didi’s realm were blow jobs. I’d
come to accept the blow job as Didi’s standard unit of currency.
But Didi didn’t
give
blow jobs, she
deposited
them.
In her own personal economy, every second she spent on her knees
was another second that she banked in
her
future celebrity
account. Another second that some future Didi groupie would spend
on his or her knees in front of her. All that was incidental,
though. Even meeting the stars was not the point. Sure, Didi would
rather have been with someone famous than any of the boys who
existed in our actual world. But Didi’s secret, the secret that
only I knew, was that the real reason she groupied was to learn how
to be a celebrity. Because Didi knew, had always known, that she
was going to be famous. She just had to hang out with enough famous
people to learn how to become one herself. And if the price of
lessons was a few blow jobs, she considered that a bargain.

We didn’t yet know what she was going to be
famous for. There were plans for the first truly kick-ass girl band
that would make the world totally forget they’d ever heard of
Courtney Love. One night, she’d returned from a mission with an old
Fender that some roadie had given her. I bought a practice pad and
some sticks so I could be her drummer. But the metal strings hurt
Didi’s fingers and I never got the money together to buy an actual
drum set, so we ditched that idea. Didi switched to
singer-songwriter and started working on her material.

That her voice wasn’t all that good never
really mattered. She had something more important than a good
voice: she could put herself into every word she sang. I think
there was just so much of Didi, so much personality, so much
ambition, so many definite ideas about so many things, that it all
flowed out when she opened her mouth. It wasn’t ever pretty or even
pleasant. But, right from the start, it was all her, all Didi.

We were lucky that we always wanted
different prizes. She wanted to hang out with famous people and be
famous herself. I just wanted to hang out with her. The biggest
groupie prize Didi ever went after were the Strokes. She discovered
the New York group before they were famous, and, as soon as she
did, all other bands ceased to exist. She loved their aura of
dissipation, the way they harkened back to a lost era of rock ‘n’
roll glamour and decadence that she was certain she would have
ruled over had she not been born too late. Also, as she informed me
about eighty-five times a day, the lead singer, Julian Casablancas,
was “hotter than lava.”

As for our jobs, Didi called Pup y Taco,
Puppy Taco, but after the renaming she didn’t have much to do with
the take-out joint other than collecting a paycheck. I was the one
who flipped the Mexi-burgers and shredded bales of lettuce for
crispy tacos. She was the one who redid her makeup and stared in
the mirror wondering if Julie would like her better with short
hair. I was the one who pulled the baskets of fries out of hot
grease and scrubbed counters with bleach at the end of our shift.
She was the one who flirted with customers and blasted Strokes
music and turned every shift we worked together into a party that I
was happy to be invited to. My hair always smelled liked tacos, my
forearms were speckled pink and white from grease burns; I did all
the work, and I didn’t care. The twisted, tweaked math nerd part of
my brain loved nothing better than organizing complicated tasks,
adding columns of numbers in my head, and doing the tax without a
calculator. When I got into a perfect groove—five burgers working,
a load of tots in the fryer, and figuring tax on three Mexidogs,
one Big Red grande, and two Sprites chico—I was as high as Didi
ever got on weed, Ritalin, and Stoli.

Our boss and the owner of Puppy, Alejandro
Trujillo, just shook his head when he found Didi slacking or
sleeping. He was a good guy, always telling me I should look out
for myself more. But Alejandro and everyone who thought Didi was
using me were not getting the whole picture. The whole picture was
that I was out of my house and I wasn’t thinking about Daddy. The
whole picture was that when I was with Didi I could breathe.

The highlight of senior year was the night
the Strokes came to town. Through her Internet sources, Didi found
out they were coming before the tour dates were even set. That gave
her a long lead time to consult with other groupies online, like
the Kumfort Gurlz in Phoenix, who told her that Julie had a thing
for Japanese anime. With that information, she put together a
killer Japanese schoolgirl outfit complete with pigtails,
sailor-collared middy blouse, chunky Mary Janes, kneesocks, and a
pleated skirt so short she had to bikini wax.

We already knew from chatting up the Hertz
Rent-a-Car guy that the band was staying at the Hilton on
University. My job when we got to the Hilton was to stand guard and
watch for managerial types. Didi, holding the red vinyl zippered
Domino’s Pizza delivery case that she’d stolen for just such
occasions, went up to the reception desk. Her Japanese schoolgirl
pigtails were tucked under a red, gold, green, and black Rasta cap.
Jeans and a schlubby T-shirt covered the rest.

As always, Deeds had done her homework and
had the name of a roadie written on the Domino’s order slip. Deeds
gave the front desk clerk the guy’s name, checking the order slip
as if she couldn’t remember what it was.

The clerk, who’d no doubt already parried
teams of hyperventilating teen girls, balked. “The Strokes put a
hold on all deliveries.”

“Strobes?” Didi acted like she didn’t
recognize the name. “I don’t know from Strobes.” Maybe because of
the pizza, maybe because the Strokes were from New York, Didi
slipped into her best
Goodfellas
goombah impersonation.
“This”—she paused to check the order slip where she’d written the
roadie’s name—“Justin Patterson, he ordered a pie. I’m delivering a
pie. End of story.” She rapped the reception desk with her
knuckles. “You explain to him why he didn’t get his pie, okay,
pal?”

As she was pivoting away, the clerk, half
realizing he was being tooled, but also half not wanting to risk
infuriating a hungry roadie, called after her,
“Five-twenty-six.”

Didi never finagled the room number of the
famous guys, the ones she was really after, which was anyone who
got onstage. The clerks knew better than that. They might give her
the number of a roadie or the chiropractor traveling with the band.
But that small opening was always enough for Didi, who, once she
got into fame’s orbit, could always manage to home in on the
celestial body with the heaviest gravity.

I casually joined Didi on the elevator. As
soon as the doors closed and we were hidden from the clerk’s view,
we jumped up and down squealing a few times before she handed me
the Domino’s box, Rasta cap, and the jeans and T-shirt she stripped
off. We got off at the fifth floor. Didi stopped at the mirror
above a dried flower arrangement, fluffed up her pigtails, spritzed
on some CK One, and spit her gum into the sand of the ashtray
imprinted with the hotel’s logo. We found room 526 and Didi
collected herself before knocking.

As usual, a lank-haired roadie who looked as
if he’d just gotten up answered the door. The room behind him was
filled with roadies and sound-men who had the same stunned,
hungover look. It was like the day room at a mental ward with
everyone smoking—cigarettes, joints—and the room littered with
hamburger wrappers and Big Gulp cups. Someone was watching
Reservoir Dogs
on cable. As always, it amazed me to see Didi
turn on her high-wattage charm for these losers, angling for
backstage passes and access to someone higher on the rock ‘n’ roll
food chain. The guys beamed big as troops at a USO show as Didi
stepped into the room.

“Where’s Julie?” was her first question. She
never had any problems getting what she wanted. I handed the
princess to the rock plebeians who would deliver her to their
aristocrats and then I left.

I remember everything about the next
morning. Sunday morning when Mom went to worship services at the
HeartLand compound was my only time to be alone with Daddy and I
looked forward to it all week. Even though she never said it, my
mom was punishing me for being friends with Didi by banning me from
the sickroom. She shooed me out, saying that it upset Daddy for me
to see how bad off he was. It didn’t. She was the only who was
upset. If I objected, though, she’d get even more twitchy and
weird. She’d make her tiny hands into tiny fists that she’d shake
beside her pink head until it turned red while she shrieked, “I
can’t take it! I can’t take it!” louder and louder. I knew she was
wrong, but what difference did that make? I’d tell her I was sorry
and to, please, calm down. Then she would blubber and tell me I had
to stop being so difficult, that she couldn’t take any more. She
told me that I was lucky, I had inherited Daddy’s strong nerves and
I had no idea what she was enduring. I had to be strong the way
Daddy always had been or else.

Or else what? I wanted to ask because I
didn’t want to imagine how things could get worse than they
were.

When Daddy and I were alone on Sunday, he
tried to tell me not to let my mother bother me, but it was getting
harder and harder for him to talk. I’d heard her on the phone the
week before saying, “No! No hospice. We don’t need hospice here and
we don’t need talk like that.” I knew what hospice meant and it
scared me. I was scared all the time except for when I was with
Didi. Not that we ever talked much about our fathers. But, at odd
times, like when we were in the middle of a burnfest on what
goobers the Pueblo Heights Whore-nuts were, she’d stop, catch my
eye, and ask, “You doing okay?” I never did much more than nod, but
I didn’t have to. That question was everything I needed. It said
that she understood that about 99 percent of the time I was putting
up a front and if I didn’t, I’d start crying and never stop. That
my life was horrible and we both knew it was going to get a lot
worse.