Double Team
Chapter 199
“Di immortals virtutem approbare, non adhibere debent.”
(God rewards virtue; he shouldn’t have to furnish it.)
—Gellius (quotation from a speech by Quintus Metellus Numidicus)
SUNDAY WAS OUR DAY OF REST, simply by virtue of the difficulty of getting an audience on Sunday. I’m sure if they’d found venues and audiences, they’d have booked us to perform every day. As it was, when we left Memphis, our stops would be farther apart and every day for the next week. We wouldn’t need to worry about campsites as we’d simply be moving from loading dock to loading dock. I was thankful for the comfortable bed in the motorhome, though I took my turn in the bunk as well as the sofa bed. I think we were all staying focused on being considerate of our mates or the cramped space and long hours would have had us at each other’s throats.
Our campground was on the eastern edge of the metroplex adjacent to Shelby Farms Park. It had miles of trails through 4,500 acres of green space. We got in about ten in the morning and I took off for a run as soon as our camp was set up and stable. Em ran with me for the first 5k and then peeled back around to the campsite. I just wanted to run and breathe the fresh country air.
It was after noon when I got back to the campsite. Most of my wives had gone to the nearby farmers’ market but Rachel was sitting in our narrow patio space with Remas. Aside from the things that were nearby, this campground had little to recommend it. Rigs were parked front door to front door in spaces so narrow we basically shared the patio space and couldn’t extend our awning all the way unless the rigs were jogged toward the front of the sites. The backs of rigs were so close you couldn’t pass through between the slide-outs. I wasn’t sure ours was even extended all the way.
Still, there were Rachel and Remas. I jogged up and gave a very sweaty hug to each.
“You need a shower,” Rachel said. “That’s no way to greet our girlfriend.”
“Not unless I can shower with you,” Remas laughed. “God, I’ve missed you. And it’s only been two weeks!”
“I’ve missed you, too. How about I run to the showers and get back here so we can have a proper hug and talk?” I grabbed a towel and went to the camp showers. It was a good thing it was early afternoon. I could only imagine what these four shower stalls would look like in the morning when 400 units opened their doors to try and get ready for travel.
I pulled on a pair of shorts and T-shirt and made my way back to camp a little more slowly so I wouldn’t start sweating again.
“So, the issue is mostly with the transitions from set to set. That includes your costume changes,” Remas said. We sat at the dining table with Cindy and Donna to go over the changes the school was suggesting. She stressed that we could do what we wanted with their suggestions but she thought we’d like their ideas. I was certainly open to it.
“Anything to make the performance move more smoothly,” I said. “I’m ready to listen.”
“Okay. Your talks and Cindy’s talks provide an opportunity for the other person to change costume and come back out on stage. That works pretty well. The real bottleneck is in the second act when Donna has to come out and basically do an advertisement while the two of you rush through a costume change at the same time. Don’t get me wrong, no one objects to you trying to sell CDs during your concert, but it feels out of place with the kind of message you are delivering in the other breaks.”
“I’ve never felt completely comfortable with that,” Donna said. “I think we all recognized it was a space filler for the costume change. What do you suggest?”
“Well, Ms. Ralston, who will be Cindy’s primary flute instructor at the school, suggested you trade off solos at that point. That would give you an opportunity to show off your individual skills as well as how well you play together. She suggested you scrap Andaluza that you do right before that break. By the way, everyone loves your dancing during the Tangos. Even Ms. Ralston was breathing hard. If we drop Andaluza and you do one of the other lively Spanish pieces you’ve done before, like Albeniz’s Mallorca, that would give Cindy time to come down a little and get changed without risking a wardrobe malfunction. Then when Cindy reenters in costume, you take a bow and go backstage to change.”
“Leaving me on stage alone?” Cindy squeaked. We all laughed. I put my hand on her thigh and she pulled it straight up into her crotch. She might be nervous about what Remas was asking, but that always seemed to make her horny at the same time.
“You know Chick Corea’s Spain was written as a flute solo. You’re playing a duet arrangement. You could just as easily move the piece before the Suite Buenos Aires and give Jacob the same opportunity he’s given you to catch your breath. Then Jacob reenters in costume and you end on a high point with the last movement of the Suite.”
“I could do that,” Cindy whispered as she pushed my finger into her wetness.
There were a few other suggestions regarding the transitions and one outright criticism suggesting we practice the Bach Flute Sonata with the music in front of us. Apparently, we’d gone astray. They also suggested we drop the Morricone piece and end the set after our Mozart Sonata in C Major. They felt it would be a cleaner break from one style to another and we’d make up the lost length of the program in the added length of Mallorca in the second act. I wasn’t sure about that one. I really liked The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but Remas made a good point that our duet version paled by comparison to the other versions we’d done, even with only Desi’s voice added to the mix.
Cindy and I did a skip through of the new program, focusing on a careful practice of the Bach and on the new transitions. We were all happy to get rid of the advertisement in the second act. After we finished practicing, Donna and I reviewed my spoken messages to make sure I was still on point. I was a little antsy because I wanted to go take care of Cindy. I’d had to wipe my fingers and dry them before I could play the guitar.
“Oh, God! Yes! Fuck me!” Cindy screamed from the bedroom. I looked around. Em was fixing vegetables at the kitchen sink with Rachel. Beca and Joan were outside. That meant Remas must have realized Cindy’s condition as well. We all started laughing.
I grilled steaks that night and we had the Tennessee equivalent of Donna’s farmer’s salad. That night, I slipped into bed between Rachel and Remas, and into each of them.
Monday started the week from hell. Memphis was our first outdoor venue since California at The Shell. It was hard to estimate how many people were there because they all brought their own chairs or blankets to sit on, packed picnics, and drank whatever was in their hip flasks. It was obvious they were there for a good time, though, and we got an enthusiastic reception. We had to use our pickups and amplify the sound because the outdoor acoustics sucked. Two big monitors on either side of the bandshell projected our faces in bigger than life proportions so people at the back of the space and sitting in the bars could see us.
Then our crew grabbed our gear and stowed it in record time. We were loaded in the motorhome by nine-thirty since the show started at seven. Em drove us straight through to Jackson, Mississippi, where we parked in a casino lot and all passed out.
Memphis to Jackson, Miss, to Baton Rouge, LA, to Mobile, Alabama. We hadn’t had any upsets. A few boos from non-reformists. Mostly, people in this part of the country just wanted the music and what we played wasn’t what they normally heard. The worst heckle we got was some guy in Baton Rouge during the tangos who screamed out “Stop playing that Spic music, ya damn Mexicans!” I’m not sure what happened to him, but we didn’t hear another word from him through the rest of the show.
We pulled out of Mobile late at night headed toward Montgomery, Alabama. I didn’t know why they didn’t schedule a performance for us there. I could just imagine standing on the steps of the capitol building playing our music where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the crowds after the Selma to Montgomery march. I don’t suppose that meant much to the rest of my family. They were too young to remember.
Em had been operating on the night shift for the entire week and slept during the day and during our shows. As a result, she decided to push on toward Atlanta. By ten in the morning, we were checked in at Stone Mountain Park on the east side of Atlanta. It had been a seven-hour drive with rest stops. We’d stopped at a Cracker Barrel early in the morning for breakfast.
“Is it even okay for us to stay here as Americans?” Beca asked. “The streets are Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. There’s a statue of them carved into a mountain like it was Mount Rushmore.”
“It’s part of their heritage,” Remas said. “My parents live near here. I hope you don’t mind if I invite them to meet you all.”
“I have slaveowners in my family tree, too,” Donna said. “We just don’t brag about it.”
“At least your ancestors didn’t join forces to fight against the United States,” Rachel said. “If you all want me to find us a different campground, I will.”
“No,” I sighed. “It wouldn’t make a difference. I don’t think we’d find anywhere in Georgia that isn’t proud of their Confederate heritage. That they were at war against the United States doesn’t seem to be in conflict with their patriotism. We should just start a movement to have a statue to Osama bin Laden erected at Ground Zero since that is also a part of our national heritage.”
“That’s harsh, Jacob,” Remas said. “True, but harsh. Please don’t leave. I know it’s kind of disgusting, but I really want my parents to meet everyone.”
“Can we get camped and make sure poor Em gets some sleep first?” Joan said. She had an arm around my sister and looked like she was holding her up.
“Oh! I wasn’t suggesting right now. I did kind of suggest that they could come for dinner tonight, though,” Remas said. “Is that okay?”
“Hop in the car, girl,” Rachel said. “We need to go shopping. And I want a nap soon, too.”
Talk about people fond of their heritage! Remas’s family was proud to be Gypsies. Not only did her parents show up, but so did her two younger brothers and an aunt who seemed awfully attached to her father. I understood why Remas wasn’t thrown at all by a polyamorous relationship.
We had a good time.
It turned out that Acorn was a law professor at Georgia State University and Femi taught nursing at Herzing University. Both pretty high-powered academics. Nonetheless, Acorn wore a sleeveless shirt that showed his full sleeve tattoos and Femi had a backless dress that showed the incredible artwork on her back.
“We’ve been wanting to meet the group that captured the heart of our Remas,” Acorn said. “We’re allies. I’ve done a lot of work on the new bill, reviewing the legal aspects. It’s good to meet you all,” he enthused. “Let’s play music!” Acorn produced a kind of flute and made an instant friend of Cindy. Femi and Alifair had beautiful voices that blended and we learned a ton of new songs from them. I wished Desi was with us.
All told, we sat around our firepit and played way into the night. Several campers from nearby sites came to listen and a few to add their instruments to the jam session. And booze. There was a lot of it flowing around the fire. I confess I had a few too many of some kind of plum liquor. Not that there weren’t a lot of different kinds of alcohol being passed around. I finally carried Cindy to bed when it was obvious she couldn’t draw enough breath to blow her flute.
Atlanta was a riot. Literally.
I was glad we weren’t performing early in the day on Saturday. Everyone in the motorhome was dragging and complaining of headaches. Nonetheless, we disconnected the trailer from the motorhome and connected it to the Toyota Sienna Rachel had rented. It was big enough that all eight of us could ride in it and it could tow what was a fairly lightweight trailer to the venue.
Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta where Center Stage was located was packed with people waving signs and chanting. Someone had organized a demonstration outside and I dreaded the level of heckling we’d have from the anti-reform faction in this town. The auditorium had seating for a thousand but there were nearly that many on the street in front of the theater when we got there at noon. Holy crap!
Except this was a whole different ballgame. The hecklers and protests we’d encountered up to this time were all from people opposing service reform and supporting candidates who held the service wasn’t broken so don’t fix it. This crowd also opposed reform. They wanted National Service repealed.
We’d all had our moments of wishing the twenty-eighth amendment didn’t exist. This crowd was adamant about it. Signs lined the streets that said, “Hell no, we won’t go!” “Repeal 28!” “No more plantation slavery.” And other signs that harkened back to the days of the civil rights movement. “We shall overcome.”
I didn’t know what to think about all this. Emily had been frightened and traumatized when she left for service. Joan had burned her induction letter without opening it. Francie had been desperate, thinking she would never see her child again. And when service corps members were sent to the fields to do hard manual labor, we went on the warpath to get the national emergency ended, to get service reform started, and to free the laborers in the fields of California. We’d succeeded in many ways, needing only to get a solid majority elected who supported the reform bill.
The teens of Atlanta—and as we drove past, I could see that nearly everyone on the street was of or near service age—wanted the service ended and were threatening not to go. That was something I hadn’t seen anyplace else. The threat was eerily like what I’d encouraged back on New Year’s Eve in our broadcast.
We managed to get to the loading dock and our National Service security made sure no one approached our trailer. Outside the grounds of the theater itself, Atlanta police were holding the crowd back. It seemed to be growing by the minute.
We got our equipment to the stage and started setting up while Rachel and Donna talked to the theater management and our head of security. They were concerned that when the doors opened, we would be flooded with protesters and never be able to do the concert at all. The manager had already suggested canceling the performance.
The problem was they weren’t protesting our performance. I’d seen a good number of Marvel and Hopkins T-shirts in the crowd as we drove through and there were even a couple of ‘Recover the Dream’ posters being held up. These protesters were against the very existence of the service. But no one knew what to do. We were still six hours away from our show and had planned to rehearse in the space.
I rifled through V1 memories of protests over the years. I’d been near many. Riots in Watts and Detroit. Marches in Alabama. Sit-ins on college campuses. Kent State. SDS. Moratorium. Draft card burnings. Bra burnings. Million-man marches. Neo-Nazis. In every case, the stiffer the resistance to the protest—police in riot gear, National Guard, opposing interests—the more violent the protest became. Sometimes protests for a position supported by many ended up polarizing factions and losing their support.
I called Cindy and Remas to me and we walked to the far side of the stage. Remas wasn’t performing with us, but she was a great performance coach.
“We need to do something,” I said. Mr. Obvious. They both nodded.
“What do you suggest?” Remas said.
“I’ll do whatever you say,” Cindy said at the same time.
“We need to perform for them. I was thinking we could just let them in to watch our rehearsal but there’s too many of them. What would it take to get a street performance underway?”
“You mean go out there? And play? Are you crazy?” Remas said.
“I might be, but music soothes the savage soul, as LeBlanc was fond of telling me. If we turn the whole protest into a rally and music fest, we could prevent it from turning nasty,” I said.
“Take the idea to Rachel and Donna. I’ll call Dr. Donahue. Someone will need to run interference with the city. Someone high up,” Remas said, tapping her phone. Cindy clutched my hand and we went to talk to our managers.
The conversation was getting heated.
“I won’t endanger the theater, even for the National Service. We have to cancel the show,” the manager said.
“That might do more harm than good,” I said. “They aren’t protesting the show. They’re using it as an opportunity to protest the service. They don’t bear Center Stage any ill will.”
“What do you suggest, Jacob,” Rachel asked.
“That we join the protest.” All four people stared at me.
“Uh… Police are likely to start arresting people for blocking Peachtree Street,” the security guy said. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to go out and get arrested with them.”
“Remas is working on getting a quick permission. Dr. Donahue could go straight to Will Forsythe. Hell, she might know the mayor here in Atlanta. We’ll know in a few minutes. We need some auxiliary equipment. We use our pickups if we can get an amp and speakers on the front steps.”
“The front steps? Of our theater?” the manager exclaimed.
“It’s a natural stage. Half a dozen steps above street level. Wouldn’t work for a big group, but we’re only a duo. We just need an extra boost because it’s outside. We’ll use just our stools. No costumes. Cindy, can we improv a set? There’s no telling how long we’ll have to play.”
“We’ve got a lot of material. I suggest we start right off with the tangos,” she said. She still had a death grip on my hand but she was on board with the program.
“Let me get a couple of guys to the front door,” the security guy said. “We’ve been leaving that to the police but if you are going out there, you’re our responsibility.”
“Don’t do anything that will get anyone hurt,” I said. “We’ll be okay.”
A policeman barged into the theater and headed straight toward us.
“Who’s in charge?” he barked. Rachel took the lead. “You really want to go out there and perform?” the cop continued. “Are you crazy?”
“That seems to be the prevailing opinion,” Rachel said. “If we can get your cooperation to reroute traffic, we think we can keep the demonstration from getting out of control. They’re actually supporters and the sooner we get out there to show we’re with them, the less likely it is they’ll get out of control.”
“This will keep them outside and away from storming the building as well,” the manager said. “I don’t want them to come inside.” He’d figured out an upside for his theater.
“How soon can you be ready? The chief says to give you the support you need. I don’t know who you know, but I’ve never seen a permit turned around that fast in my life,” the cop said.
“If we can get the amp and speakers set up, we can be ready in thirty minutes.”
“We have portable equipment,” the manager said. “Are we going to do this?” I looked around at the people on stage. They all had a determined set to their mouths.
“Let’s do it,” I said. Everyone went to work.
“Where are Beca and Joan?” I asked Remas as we headed toward the doors. I noticed she had a video camera in hand and it reminded me that I hadn’t seen the two website geniuses.
“Joan has her computer up on the roof. She’s tapped into the theater portal. Beca has moved across the street to the park with a camera and a stepladder.”
“Alone?” I cried.
“No. She has two security people with her. Our security boss here called in another dozen people so none of us will be alone.”
“And you have a camera.”
“I’ll be doing the closeups for the stream.”
“Stream?”
“Joan has already gone live to your patrons and the school is rebroadcasting on a ten-minute delay to the National Service cable station. The same one that carried your New Year’s Eve concert.”
“How the hell did they manage that so fast?”
“Dr. D knows magic.”
“There’s too many of you to fit inside the theater!” I called as Cindy and I walked onto the steps in front of the theater. “So, we decided to come out to you. Are you ready to tango?”
The crowd erupted in cheers. Cindy and I didn’t bother with any other introductions. We just launched into Piazzolla’s Libertango and started dancing as we played. Cindy and I had done rehearsals in which we just kept cueing each other as to what piece we wanted to do next—usually the lively tangos and Spanish music. We just kept going. We’d played for nearly three-quarters of an hour when Donna and Rachel handed us bottles of water. I stepped up to the microphone.
“What a great idea this was,” I said. Cheers. “We all need to have our voices heard. You know that’s what our tour has been about this month: Getting the reform bill heard in congress. I know that seems like an awfully small step. Those of us in service or about to go into service aren’t going to be helped by a new law. But it would take even longer to get the twenty-eighth repealed. And think about it, folks. Do we really want it repealed? I’ve carried that sign around school as well. Things were so bad in parts of the service, I thought we had to repeal it. But I found other parts that worked well. Many parts that were fulfilling people’s dreams. People who want educated are getting educated. People who want training are getting training. People who just want to have a good job and a peaceful life are getting the opportunity to do just that.
“In some places. In other places, the service is broken. People are shoved into jobs that don’t suit them. They’re being denied the very things we were promised when the twenty-eighth was passed. That’s why the system needs to be reformed.
“Cindy and I and others in our pod are starting our service in three weeks. I’ve got the same butterflies in my stomach about it that you have. But I believe we’ll succeed in changing what needs to be changed and serving in a capacity that truly suits our aptitude, talent, and desire. What we’re going to need—all of us who are serving in the next two years—is to have a congress and senate that are committed to recovering the dream. Everyone who is eighteen and older is registered to vote when they fill out their preliminary service profile form within thirty days of their eighteenth birthday. Use that right… that privilege… to make your voice heard more permanently than just a rally on the street. Vote for pro-reform candidates.”
There were a lot of cheers and applause. Cindy and I both perched on our stools, slightly facing each other and began Pujol’s Suite Buenos Aires.
By four o’clock, other instruments had begun to show up. A group of six players with conga drums joined us and as they took over for a set, Cindy and I escaped inside to use the bathroom. There were public restrooms in the park across the street, and people joining the protest were able to use those facilities. A National Service crew brought in more portable bathrooms. The sidewalk was soon lined with food and beverage carts. A section of the street right in front of us was cleared of people for a dance area and there were some pretty good dancers out there.
We were joined by some more guitars, some woodwinds, and a saxophone trio, and they all jammed with us, just following our lead.
By ten o’clock, we were all exhausted and the crowd was breaking up. I’d spoken about once an hour with a short message about making the National Service our own and recovering the dream. The protest turned into more of a pep rally. I think Rachel and Em were the only ones awake on the drive back to Stone Mountain.
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