“What you’re not is black.”
My eyes flew open but even so, there was only time to see him melt into the crowd.
Effing, bloody, f**king hell.
* * * * *
I knew I was going to do it, right after our never-say-die, always-upon-always, burning-down-the-house, gig-ending, band-defining version of “Ghostriders in the Sky”. I knew I was going to do it, break precedent, maybe even shift the entire center of the band, maybe even pound a crack in our foundation just in order to do it.
Because I had to do it.
Mace had to get it.
If he didn’t get it, I was lost. I already felt myself veering off the path.
And I’d just found my way again.
I wasn’t going back.
I couldn’t.
Nunh-unh.
No way.
It was the end of the night, the crowd was screaming for an encore that the regulars knew they were never going to get. They knew this because they never got it.
Never.
No matter how much they screamed and clapped and stomped their feet, after we sang “Ghostriders”, The Gypsies were, without fail, done.
Until tonight.
The band had had their fil of applause, saying “thank you” into their mics, raising their hands to the crowd and feeling the love. They were turned away and getting ready to pack it in. The house lights were already up. The crowd was just beginning to come to the realization that they’d have to climb down from the high where we’d taken them. I felt the desperate urgency sift out of the applause as it downshifted to appreciation.
That’s when I started strumming my guitar.
Buzz’s head jerked toward me and I felt Floyd’s eyes on me. I noticed Leo glancing around in confusion. Hugo froze to the spot, his eyes on the strumming fingers of my right hand, the contorted fingers of my left pressing the frets.
I didn’t even look at Pong.
I ignored them al as I strummed.
Then I stepped up to the mic.
I gave a soft, “oh yeah,” into it, letting it snake into the quieting crowd, listening to the hum die as I played the chords.
As if rehearsed, Buzz, Leo and Pong came in right on time which it most definitely was not rehearsed, it was a song I played at home, alone, but never al owed myself to sing, never al owed the band to play, a song so deep in my soul, I couldn’t sing it, I was afraid I wouldn’t do it justice.
By that time, the crowd was total y stil , deathly silent and staring in fascination toward the stage.
I was known for never changing lyrics, never changing the words of a song sung by a man to fit it to myself as a woman. This gave me a subtle edge because lesbians thought I was one of them when I sang about women and that was my code to tel them I was a member of the club.
This didn’t affect me, I was happy for the additional fans and lesbians always gave a good vibe at a gig.
They didn’t know that I didn’t change lyrics because they weren’t my lyrics to change. In my head, a song was a solid thing, rendered from marble by its maker and it wasn’t up to me, Stel a Gunn, to take my unqualified chisel to it for my own purposes.
But tonight, I was going to make another unprecedented exception.