gin house!”
To which the other singers and the crowd responded, “School house, out house!”
Mickey: “Highway number nineteen!”
Crowd: “People keep the city clean!”
Teddy recognized the song, “Nutbush City Limits,” the old Ike and Tina Turner hit, and of course he thought again of Jacy, because this was exactly the kind of song she would’ve belted out back in the day. Only there was no Jacy anymore, so it was the Bob Seger version they were playing, Mickey’s voice all rasp and grind.
“Nutbush!” he called.
“Nutbush City!” the crowd roared back.
“Nutbush City Limits!”
Everyone in the room agreed. “Nutbush City Limits!”
Teddy glanced over at Lincoln, who was shaking his head but also grinning ear to ear, having finally realized that he was the only one not in the know. “Tell me something,” he shouted, so as to be heard over the roar of the guitars and the pounding drums and the frenzied crowd. “How did I get such dicks for friends?” But he had his phone out and Teddy watched him switch it from photo mode to video. With everybody in the joint on their feet, his only chance of getting a clear shot of the band was to climb up on a chair, so Lincoln did. Teddy followed suit, sorry all over again that Theresa was no longer in his life. If he, too, made a recording, he’d have no one to share it with.
Maybe, he thought, Mickey was right. Maybe it wasn’t too late to try a new tack. Maybe give the monastery a chance. What he couldn’t quite decide was whether that would constitute a bold new direction or just a timid recycling of the old divinity school idea. At twenty-one, having given up on love, cloistered life had seemed a sensible option. Like so many serious young men back then, he’d been genuinely taken with the idea (Merton’s, actually) of a simple, consecrated life, far outside the madness of the secular world. But now? Who was he kidding? At some point, probably not long after starting Seven Storey Books, it’d dawned on him that he in fact hated Merton and despised how he’d turned his back on the world in favor of religious devotion. Ego-driven, self-deceived little shit that he was, old Tom had been every bit as competitive about piety as he’d been in the pursuit of carnal pleasure. Perhaps because so many people had concluded wrongly that Teddy was gay, he’d always rejected any suggestion that Merton might be, but now he wasn’t so sure. Why had he been so vague and coy about his sexual adventures in Seven Storey Mountain? Why did he seem to hang out only with men? Even Aramis, Dumas’s middle Musketeer, a serial adulterer even as he prepared for the priesthood, had been less dishonest.
“Nutbush!” Mickey howled, the song’s refrain having come back around again, and the emotion on his friend’s face was one Teddy hadn’t felt in such a long time that he at first couldn’t identify it. Joy. Pure, unadulterated joy. What Mickey loved now—rock and roll played at a very high volume—was what he’d loved as a boy. Recognizing what filled his soul to bursting, he’d cleaved to it, and across the decades they had remained the most faithful of lovers. It also occurred to Teddy that his not letting him and Lincoln in on whose band was playing tonight was exactly the kind of secret Mickey loved to keep and then reveal at the precise right moment, as if to prove that the world truly was a magical place full of wondrous surprises. Otherwise, just as Lincoln said earlier, he really was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. He’d stayed in the steamy sorority-house kitchen washing pots because he preferred doing that to flirting with pretty girls in the front room. There was only one Theta he ever cared about, and he never pretended otherwise. He’d punched that SAE pledge because those stone lions out front, whatever they represented to him in that drunken moment, had in fact pissed him off. Why, at the last possible moment, had he changed his mind and gone to Canada instead of reporting for duty in Vietnam? Well, okay, Teddy didn’t have a clue, but he was confident that the answer, if revealed, wouldn’t be complicated, because Mickey himself wasn’t complicated. No general studies major, he knew who and what he loved; in other words he knew who he was. If Troyer had arrived at a different conclusion, he was full of shit.