Lay of the Land
Book 4 in “Wonders of My World”

My Rock Star

Based on the true story of Aroslav’s erotic journey around America as told to Devon Layne

THIS IS A CONTINUATION of my three books chronicling my journeys across America and around the world. When I’ve collected enough of these, I’ll publish them as a fourth volume of stories. The story is narrated by Aroslav. Remember, this is the memoir of the avatar of the pseudonym of the alter ego of the author. Believe with caution. Only the names, places, and events have been changed to protect the innocent—me. Every word is true. Sentences and paragraphs, not so much.

Not too Long Ago, Getting to Indy

I don’t always drive and drag my trailer with me. In the summer of ’22, I’d pulled the trailer on a research trip across the northern tier, visiting colleges and high schools in Iowa as I finished the Team Manager series. Then I researched the area where my next series, Photo Finish, would take place in northern Illinois.

My dear Alma Mater in Indianapolis was holding my class fifty-year reunion on homecoming weekend in October, long after I’d returned to my winter base in Las Vegas. I had appointments in the Pacific Northwest before that and I didn’t have time to drive and get to where I wanted to be and back. I flew from the Pacific Northwest to Indianapolis.

I’ve heard all sorts of stories of people meeting at a class reunion fifty years later and falling in love. Who knew? Maybe I’d find my next future ex-wife there.

I am, however, frugal. I shopped airfares and finally decided I could stand a redeye, leaving at eleven at night and arriving in Indy at six in the morning. With a layover in San Francisco. Oh well. I figured my laptop battery could last the night and I’d get some writing done.

There was a configuration change on the aircraft I was flying from Seattle to San Fran, and I ended up in a middle seat instead of an aisle. I was not happy about that, but it was a full plane and I’m notably poor at pushing my way on people who are just doing their jobs. Regardless, there was no room to open my laptop on the plane. I spent the two-and-a-half hours smashed between two large people, working sudoku puzzles.

We landed in San Francisco just before midnight with a scheduled two-hour layover. Of course, the connecting flight was late, so it was closer to three when we actually boarded and pushed back from the gate. Fortunately, I’d been able to work with my laptop plugged in the entire time I was at SFO. And this time I did have an aisle seat, so I set straight to work.

If you have not flown with a laptop recently, let me just say, there isn’t room in the economy seats to have it completely open on the tray table in front of you. The seatback ahead of you will be tilted back and you can only get the computer open about three-quarters of the way, with your hands sandwiched between the screen and the keyboard.

I am a touch typist and could convince myself that I didn’t need to see the keyboard or the screen when I was writing and could simply close my eyes and type. I was working on Exposure (book 3 of the Photo Finish series) and was loving the way words had just been flowing in the series. I’d started writing Full Frame in April and it wouldn’t start posting until October. I was working way ahead.

We’d been out around an hour and a half when I felt the plane shifting directions. We were making a turn. I couldn’t think of anything we had to go around between SFO and IND. That was when lights came on in the airplane, disturbing everyone’s sleep, and we were told to stow our carry-on items because we would be making an unscheduled stop in Denver to take care of a warning light.

We want to take care of those warning lights, you know. At least they didn’t declare that they had to take care of a warning klaxon of death. We landed, disembarked in an empty terminal, and were told maintenance was on its way.

Right. Two hours later, we were sent to another gate where we boarded a nearly identical plane and took off for the remaining three hours to Indy. By that time, I wasn’t even considering trying to work on my laptop. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep until we got into Indy a little after nine o’clock in the morning.

One doesn’t get around the huge cornfield with streets—the way we referred to Indy when I was there in the early 70s—without a car, and I’d rented an economy model that was only slightly smaller than I was. I loaded my rolling suitcase and my laptop case and headed over to the University. It was Friday morning and I mistakenly assumed there would be a coffee shop open on campus. I wandered around a while and managed a cup of coffee at a kiosk in the Union, and went shopping in the bookstore.

On my recent trip pulling the trailer across country, I’d shaken my favorite alumni mug out of the cabinet and it crashed to the floor. I really hate Interstates, and the condition of I70 across the midsection of America was in miserable repair. The road was so rough it had knocked my sliding doors off their tracks, and had shaken the doors completely off two kitchen cabinets. I successfully found a replacement mug, though it had the new UIndy logo rather than the old one. I also grabbed a heavily overpriced sweatshirt so I could wear University clothes.

Interesting side-point: I read a blurb recently that had ten things men do that make them look old. I’m pretty sure it was factual because I saw it in a Facebook meme. Among the top three were:

1. Wearing a baseball cap.
2. Drinking too much coffee.
3. Wearing college alma mater clothing.

Oh, yes. I might as well go with number four as well:

4. Wearing clothing from Costco.

I was batting 1.000. I hid my alma mater baseball cap, though, and wore my fedora. (Number eight.) You can tell if you are getting the aging thing right, because a bright young college beauty waiting tables or taking your car reservation will say something along the lines of, “You’re looking dapper today, sir.” Which is code for “like an old man.”

Okay, I made my way to the Alumni House and while taking pictures, caught up with a couple of the alumni staff members. I showed them my purchases and told them about the disaster with my previous coffee mug. One of them said, “Oh, you’ll love this then.” He rushed off and came back to present me with a vintage mug from the time I was in school fifty years before and the place was called Indiana Central College. I love it! I wrap it in bubble wrap whenever I’m traveling with it.

It was nearly noon and I decided to see if I could check into my motel a couple of miles from campus. No. Room wasn’t ready yet, but they’d try to have one ready in an hour or so. I went across the parking lot to Denny’s where they kindly gave me a table where I could plug in my laptop and have some lunch with lots of coffee while I worked for a couple of hours.

After checking in and getting a couple of hours naptime, I was ready for my fifty-year reunion dinner.

Fifty Years Ago, Give or Take a Few

I was excited about all the possibilities that college offered to me. I was the first person in my family to go to college for longer than it took my oldest sister to get her MRS degree—about three months. I was experimenting with going out for football, which I discovered I was just as disillusioned with as I’d become in high school. I wore my green beanie like a good frosh and took the harassment of the sophomores. I saw a notice for auditions for a play and decided to try out.

And I volunteered to work on the homecoming float for the freshman class.

I was eighteen years old—almost nineteen. I’d left my girlfriend, Bonnie, back home to finish her senior year of high school, already figuring I’d marry her, even though the most we’d ever done was some heavy petting.

Bonnie was pretty explosive. I’d fallen in love with her older sister, my birthday twin, a couple of years before and had been rejected. That sister was now engaged to be married. Bonnie was determined to show me she was as good a catch as her sister and I was pretty much willing to let her. That included getting her mostly undressed on her living room floor in the middle of the night so we could hump each other to orgasm. Bonnie was the first girl I ever came with.

But Bonnie was 120 miles north of Indy. When I sat down to work on stuffing crepe paper flowers into the chicken wire frame of our homecoming float, I was right next to Paula. And I was pretty much done for from that moment on.

Not that we became an item right away, but we seemed to show up next to each other on a regular basis. Play auditions, float decoration, biology class, Honors English, and speech, to name a few. It seemed we ran around with the same group of people and it wasn’t long before we started a trio with my roommate—soon expanded to a quartet with the addition of Paula’s roommate—that was chosen to represent the college on weekends as a deputation team. We traveled to various churches and sometimes schools where we performed and talked about life on campus, encouraging innocent high schoolers to apply to ICC.

“This next song is one we collaborated on,” I said as an introduction.

“But it dried out okay,” Mike joined in. That was our kind of humor.

Don’t get me wrong. I was completely faithful to Bonnie up to the time she wrote me a letter calling me some very unpleasant names, disparaging my lineage, and declaring that I was among the lowest of low creatures. I have avoided using her actual language. Really, I don’t mind writing a lot about explicit sex. I’d be happy to tell you exactly how big her nipples were and how she wiggled when I got my hand in her panties. But to use the language she used to break up with me—the racial slurs, my parentage, my relationship to certain four-legged creatures—is beneath my delicate constitution.

Here’s a note: Don’t write a scathing personal letter to a writer who is not afraid to return your words. I wrote a parody of her letter, and did not spare the words I hesitate to use now. I questioned her looks, her intelligence, her character, and the size of her boobs. I may have suggested her kisses were influenced by the number of assholes she’d kissed. I told her I was coming to collect the engagement ring I’d given her.

Her response was, “Please don’t kill me.”

Oh, please. Melodramatic much? What I didn’t do, was accept the kisses and other favors she offered when I came to collect the ring and make sure our engagement was permanently ended.

Which left me, as we returned from a singing event the next weekend, holding hands with my future first ex-wife, Paula.

Back to the Class Reunion

It was no surprise to me to walk into the banquet room and straight up to Paula. I didn’t expect any problems with it. We both knew the other would be there. We’d been divorced for forty-three of the fifty years since we graduated. We hugged, gave our greetings, and she introduced me to her husband. Nice guy.

J. Paul Jones, a classmate who was always known as being a little on the strange side (think Dark Shadows long before cosplay was a common thing), waved me over to his table so he could show me that he, too, had published a couple of books. It seemed he was still stuck in the gothic horror genre.

The top guy of the God Squad, now a retired minister, was sitting at our table with his wife, the top girl from the Whore Corps. Yes, those were actually two groups within our class; they weren’t just a figment of my imagination in Exposure. The God Squad were all pre-theology students and sons of ministers. The Whore Corps were daughters of ministers for the most part and chose the name just so they wouldn’t be confused as being like the God Squad.

One of the hosts of the event circulated around and introduce me to the acting president of the college. Our previous president had left the position in the spring.

“Ari has written and published more than fifty books,” he said excitedly.

“Really?” the president said. “What kinds of books do you write?”

“Fiction,” I said.

“Any genre?”

Okay, I tried to be circumspect. But he was pushing the issue.

“I write literary fiction, mystery, and thriller under one name and adult erotic romance under another.”

He grinned and I handed him my card.

“Will you be at the president’s luncheon tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yes. I came a long way for this event, so I bought tickets to everything.”

“You know our president left this spring and is now the president at DePaul in Chicago,” he said, carrying on the conversation as if one of his alumni writing erotica was the most normal thing ever.

“Yes. In fact, my latest series of books takes place partly in Chicago at the colleges on the loop. Notably, DePaul and Columbia. I was there just a couple of months ago to do some research and walked past the DePaul Law School on Wabash.”

“Be sure you see me at the luncheon tomorrow. I want to introduce you to him. He’ll get a kick out of one of our alumni writing about his new school.”

“Yes, I’m sure he will,” I said quietly.

Eventually, the event ended and I headed back to the hotel to finally get a little sleep. It had been a long trip already.

Fifty Years Ago: Snow White and the Seven Little Fuckers

“I’m about to explode!” she whispered in the dark hallway when we ran into each other. Those were all the words we needed before she slammed her mouth against mine and began grinding against my mid-section as we kissed with enough passion to light the fuse.

“We can swing by the dorm and I’ll grab a blanket,” I said. She held my hand as we finished locking the dressing room and shop doors and slipped out of the building on the opposite side from the night watchman’s shanty. We had to be careful when running around on campus at night. There had been reports of a prowler and a new watchman was hired and posted in the middle of campus.

Lena Bowen and I were the student managers of the theatre, and that summer Dr. Richards had decided to do a children’s production and hold auditions for kids to participate. Most of the theatre majors from the college fled at the thought of it, and the rest were assigned to wrangling kids. Except Lena and I. I was the student technical director and she was the student artistic director. Beneath Doc, we ruled.

But with so few other students to depend on, we were practically living on the stage, trying to get the show up. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when we finally locked up and sneaked out the loading dock doors. She stayed hidden in the shadows while I went into the dormitory and grabbed the blanket and pillow off my bed, then slipped out the back door. She met me with another fervent kiss and we headed out to the back park area behind the stadium.

‘Turfing’ was a well-known activity to me. Paula and I went out frequently, but she was on an internship out east that summer. Talk about being ready to explode! Having Lena and I together was like a box of matches rubbing up against each other.

We found a place in the shadows and spread the blanket out, then got into some serious making out.

Some people might not have thought much of Lena’s looks at first glance. She was red haired and freckled, and that was enough to put some people off. It was something that started the fascination with redheads that lasted the rest of my life. And she had an absolutely stellar body.

I could tell that by the fit of her tight jeans, and the T-shirt she was wearing that night. Too dark to see much, but I liked everything I could feel. And I pretty much felt everything. We kissed and petted each other, including her unbuttoning my shirt so she could rub my chest, and me sliding a hand under her T-shirt and ultimately under her bra. They weren’t big breasts, but they were sensitive and delightful.

We weren’t out there to talk. I kind of figured that a guy and girl going willingly into the dark shadows where they couldn’t be spotted from any direction with a blanket on the ground in the middle of the night pretty much spelled out what we were there for. Eventually, I unsnapped her jeans and pulled the zipper down.

“I didn’t say you could take off my pants,” she whispered as she kissed me more frantically.

I thought for a minute I’d misunderstood the purpose of our adventure and started to tug her zipper back up. Her hand caught mine and stopped me.

“I didn’t say you had to stop.”

Okay, that was clear enough even for my addled and somewhat sleep deprived head to grasp. By the time I had her jeans down over her hips and butt, she had my belt off and my jeans unzipped. This was still a new enough experience for me that when she grasped my erection, I just stopped and panted for a few seconds. It wasn’t too long, though, before I resumed.

I was a theatre person and in my head a few lines from my part in Hamlet a couple of years earlier came unbidden.

But, as we often see, against some storm,
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death—anon the dreadful thunder
Doth rend the region;

So, after my pause, I set to work getting those jeans and panties down and out of the way. I paused to appreciate the thick thatch of red hair around her crotch and to probe into its wet mysteries. I managed to get one leg of her jeans off her foot, leaving them dangling from the other as she pushed my jeans down over my butt. That was about as far as they made it as she pulled my rod into her moist heat.

I still had one hand under her shirt and bra as I lowered my mouth to hers and she guided me in.

“Oh, yes. About to explode,” she said.

“How can I help you?”

“Just don’t come too soon. Let me get my finger on the trigger.”

I slid back and in again as I felt her finger start to rub her clit vigorously. She began thrusting in rhythm with me and I felt the swelling in my balls that presaged a major event.

“Ahhh…” she started. The hand not engaged with her clit clamped behind my neck and brought my mouth to hers as we whined and shuddered our way through an earthshaking climax.

We continued to lie connected, though not trying to repeat the peak. I managed to push her bra and shirt up far enough that I could get my lips on her nipples and love them thoroughly. Eventually, we came down from our high and I slipped out of her. I was feeling the brisk night air against my buns and she reached to cover her breasts again. We both started pulling our pants back on.

“It’s getting cold out here,” I said, still working on having an arm around her so I could hold her close.

“Yeah. I should get home. It will be a short night.”

“I suppose we need to be back on stage by noon to get things finished before final dress rehearsal. Do you want to sneak into my dorm room?”

“No. When I get back here tomorrow, I intend to have had a shower and have clean clothes on.”

“That was really good.”

“Just what we needed. We’ll make it through the rest now.”

“Yeah. Let me walk you to your car. We don’t want the prowler to see you if there is one.”

I walked her to her car and she gave me a ride over to the dorm to drop me off at the front door. We kissed again, just as passionately if not as desperately.

We never got together again after that, but we often gave each other a hug or kiss on the cheek.

Back to the Reunion: Fifty Year Club Breakfast

I continued wandering around on campus early Saturday morning, on an unsuccessful quest for coffee. I found myself in the bowels of the theatre where I’d had my late-night encounter with Lena. There in the theatre trophy case, I read the names of Lena and Aroslav on the first nameplate for the Director’s Award founded fifty-one years ago. Nearly a hundred names had been added over the years, but ours were first.

Of all the people I’d hoped to see at the reunion, I was most disappointed not to see her.

I managed to drive a mile or so away to find a Starbucks and get a large coffee before going to the Fifty Year Club Breakfast. In addition to our nametags, the incoming class of alumni were given a pin which I displayed proudly on my alumni sweatshirt.

Breakfast was decent, though I couldn’t figure out how they could assume that a single pot of coffee would suffice for the seventy or so people at the breakfast—especially since the breakfast and program lasted around three hours. Most of it was in the category of “interesting but not important.” There was a presentation of history of the school, a reading by the University Senior Poet Laureate, and a presentation by one of the student ambassadors. It was funny that the student faces I saw looked the same as the student faces I remembered from fifty years ago.

I was sitting next to one of my classmates, a cellist who had made a living as a roofing contractor. We were the youngest at the table, others going back as far as graduating classes in the mid-fifties. My friend turned to one of the older retired ministers at the table. UIndy turned out a lot of Methodist and EUB preachers over the years.

“John, you’ve been around a few years longer than our class. In your observations, what would you say is the biggest problem we have these days?”

Now, one sure way to get a sermon is to ask an open-ended question of a retired minister, and we were in for ours.

“The country has turned away from God. We’ve lost prayer in the schools and don’t teach morality. The youth are all woke and don’t respect anything our generation stood for or accomplished.”

I’ve blessed you with the short version. He went on until I—having spent some time in the pulpit myself—had to get my own sermon in.

“That’s simply not true, John,” I said. “Today’s youth don’t disrespect what we stood for and accomplished. They disrespect our rejection of our own accomplishments. We protested against a war until it was ended. We marched for civil rights and voting rights until everyone could vote. We campaigned for women’s equality and bodily autonomy. We got interracial marriage approved, and a woman’s right to abortions. We welcomed an entire generation of refugees from Southeast Asia. And here we are today, systematically dismantling those remarkable things that we accomplished. We’re removing voting places, making it harder for people to get to where they can vote and putting costly requirements on them that are reminiscent of the restrictions that kept blacks, Indians, and immigrants from voting in 1965. We strike down the right of women to an abortion and pretend that we know when life begins based on our own religious prejudice. We promote gun violence and threat to enforce our way on others. It isn’t what we accomplished that the youth today disrespect; it’s our rejection of it they disrespect.

“You decry people being woke as if that was something contrary to the religion you profess to practice and preach. Every Christian who takes their faith seriously must confess to being woke. We were called to be aware of and concerned about social injustice. Instead, you wrap everything you dislike up into the term woke so you don’t have to consider the fundamental principle that is supposed to underlie your very faith.”

Everyone at my table was staring at me, including John.

“Sorry. I quit preaching forty years ago. Didn’t mean to start up again,” I said.

Before anyone could respond further, my friend asked me, “Did you protest?”

“Yes,” I said. “I stood right out there on Hanna Avenue with a flag held at half mast during the Moratorium. I wrote. I objected to the draft and the war. I protested from the pulpit and in front of the school.”

“I remember that day,” he said. “I sat on the roof of the auditorium just over there and played my cello in memory of those who were lost. We made a difference, didn’t we?”

“We did,” I said.

I found out they’d set up a hospitality table for alumni in the Union and I could finally get another cup of coffee. I could also meet with some of the other alumni who were coming in from around the State for homecoming and the President’s luncheon.

I introduced myself to another of the older ministers, Rev. Ottman, who had heard my rant at breakfast.

“Ari, Aroslav? You aren’t by chance Rev. Joyce Layne’s son, are you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I am.”

“I was sad when she passed away. What’s that been, twenty years ago?”

“1999. There was quite a celebration at the home for her.”

“I was there. We sang the Bishop’s Hymn. Your mother was a revolutionary. The first woman ordained in our state. She started a movement and hundreds of women have followed her footsteps into the ministry.”

“A lot of them stopped to give us their condolences and tell us they’d gone into the ministry because of my mother’s example. Funny. Even my ex-wife, Paula, credited her with her own journey into the ministry after we divorced.”

“Well, it’s no wonder you can speak with passion and conviction. Can I lean on you as we walk over to the luncheon?” Rev. Ottman asked.

Fifty Years Ago: Rock Star

The college radio station broadcast from a booth located above the left wing of the stage. The antenna was on top of the building and broadcast at a powerful 10 watts, which was just barely enough to cover the campus. The newest dormitory had an intercom system built into it and the station was available in the rooms of that dorm. The broadcasting program, such as it was, was included in the Speech Department, which was, by extension a part of the theatre department. So, of course, theatre majors were encouraged to participate on air.

Which required a license. We were all given a mimeographed study guide with what was likely to be on the test and met together on two Saturday mornings to get into the studio and control room so we could identify the equipment.

We were slated to go to the federal building to take the radio telephone operators test on the next Saturday. Unfortunately, I had an impacted wisdom tooth on Friday and was in abject misery. I managed to get to the nurse’s office. She couldn’t help me get into a dentist, but she gave me ‘a little something for the pain.’ That little something came from the local pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly. It was called Darvon.

I was told to take the pill when I got back to my room.

There was a water fountain across the hall from my room, so I stopped there to get a drink and take the pill, then stumbled across the hall to my room.

I woke up in the morning, lying on the floor just inside my door with no memory of how I got there. What I had was a foggy head and a background throbbing in my tooth. But it was exam day and I had to join the other testees on the trip downtown.

I could not to this day tell you anything that was on that exam. It seems it took about two hour or maybe less. When I was finished, I was issued my third class radio telephone operators permit. I have no idea how well or poorly I’d done. I’d passed.

I started my broadcast schedule the next Tuesday with a two-hour show twice a week. We were learning our parts for Hamlet at the time, so I decided to practice my English accent on the air and began referring to myself as The Hart. Back in high school, I’d taken the pen name Nate Hart for my poetry to keep my speech teacher from knowing I was reading my own poetry at speech contests. I played a lot of Simon and Garfunkel and made the “57th St. Bridge Song” my theme.

I admit that it was hokey to the nth degree. I didn’t talk much, but did so in my fake English accent and practiced my lines. I even read some of my newer poetry, which sounded a lot like a slightly British version of Rod McKuen. Then I wrote down the required readings every hour and signed off at the end of my shift. I got along fine for most of that year.

Then I got a cease and desist order in the mail!

I realized the accent was bad, but didn’t think it merited that. And after looking at the letter a while I made two crucial determinations. First, I didn’t think this letter came from anyone official who had the authority to tell me to stop what I was doing. Second, it wasn’t my accent that was at issue, it was my name, The Hart. It seemed the name or something rather close to it had been in use by a garage band who felt I was infringing on their name.

I called the phone number thoughtfully included in the letter and spoke to Nat Hart, the other owner of the name.

“This is Aroslav. I use the pen name Nate Hart,” I said. “Since I read my poetry on the air, I use the name on the radio, too. I have a letter from you wanting me to stop using my name.”

“It’s my name!” the young woman said. “I’ve just released a premiere self-titled album and am setting up an entire tour, but our label says we have to clear our right to use my own name. So, you have to stop using it on the radio.”

“Miss… um… Nat, you’re telling me I have to stop using my own name, that I’ve been using for years? So you don’t have to stop using yours? That doesn’t make sense. Can’t we work something out?”

“But I don’t know if you’ll have a good enough reputation to support our brand. Especially if you’re writing poetry. I can’t even get your stupid radio station here.”

“I can appreciate that. I might not want my name associated with terrible music, either.”

“We aren’t terrible!”

“Neither am I!”

I was a little ticked that this unknown entity wanted me to quit using my immensely popular name on our ten-watt radio station. At the same time, it was nothing more than a slightly bruised ego.

“Look, we’ve got a concert in South Bend next weekend. I’ll give you a ticket so you can come and see the show and see how good we are. We might not be as big as The Beatles, but we’re going to be really big and we really need to work this out.”

“Okay,” I said suddenly. “I planned to go home to Elkhart next weekend for my birthday. Give me two tickets so I can bring my date to the concert.”

“Yeah, right. Look, okay, but you have to buy the vinyl.”

“If you’re good, I’ll buy a copy to play on the radio here in Indianapolis. That doesn’t mean I’m giving you my name. We’ll just talk and see what we can come up with.”

My motorcycle was a 105cc Sears bike. When I got out onto the highway, I just opened it up as fast as it would go and tried to keep from getting run over. I could usually cruise at about sixty unless there was wind. Catching the draft of a semi could pull me up to sixty-five.

Regardless, I got up to Elkhart for my birthday celebration and then rode my bike over to South Bend where the band was playing pretty good-sized performance hall.

Alone.

I had two tickets, but no date. I no longer had a girlfriend in northern Indiana since I broke up with Bonnie. Paula flat-out refused to ride any distance on the back of my motorcycle—which would have dropped my speed to about 40 anyway. Even my little sister was busy and couldn’t go.

I got to the auditorium, left one ticket at will call to be resold, and went in to find my seat. A great seat. At least it would be if the band was any good. I felt bad about the empty seat next to me.

They were. Good, I mean. I was one of about 500 people standing in front of their seats dancing. This girl could really wail and her instrumentalists and backup singers were right on. And she was seriously cute. I mean sexy! She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater that showed an incredible figure. She danced up one side and down the other as she sang out some great blues and rock.

I tell you, by the end of the show, I was ready to give her my name. In fact, I was considering asking her to marry it.

I dug in the envelope I’d been given when I picked up my ticket and pulled out the backstage pass on a cord that I put around my neck. I was headed toward a side door when one of the stage crew saw me and grabbed me.

“This way, fella. You can join the band for a beer in the green room.”

“I’m Nate Hart,” I shouted to him over the roar of the people leaving the auditorium. I don’t think he understood.

“She’ll be in her dressing room. Over there,” he said pointing at a door.

I went to the door and knocked. It swung open and that vision of loveliness dragged me into her lair. There were a lot of flowers in the room, her guitar, her head mike, and an open bottle of Seagram’s Seven. She popped the cap on a couple bottles of 7-Up, poured them over ice until they were about half full, then filled them the rest of the way with whiskey.

“Well? What did you think?” she asked.

“You’re spectacular,” I said, raising my glass. She touched it with hers.

“You don’t have an English accent!”

“It’s fake.”

“Then its no problem for you to give up the name, right?”

“The accent’s fake, Miss Hart. The name isn’t. I’ve got published poetry out using that name. I can’t tell you I’ll just stop using my name. There must be a couple thousand other Nate Harts in America. Probably more than that in England. Let’s just figure out how I can keep from infringing on you and you can keep from infringing on me.”

“Shit!” she said, sinking into a chair. “Of course there are more. You’re just the only one I’ve found who’s a public personage. You can call me Nat.”

I wanted to pshaw her and tell her I wasn’t that much of a personage, but I wasn’t going to just let her walk over me. Which was unusual, because I’d let just about any woman walk over me at that stage of my life.

“Call me Ari. That’s my real name. There’s things I can do for you, you know. I want to buy the record and take it back to Indy to play on my show. I think I can get you some significant play on our station.”

“That would be cool. Um… I could come down and do something live with you. You know, an interview and sing something?”

“I like that idea. You know what else, I work some with the Artist in Residence series at the college. Maybe I can get you a concert there.”

That was only a slight stretch to the truth. I was one of the drivers who went to the airport to pick up guest speakers and take them to the college. But I was willing to go meet with the committee and see if we could get a new artist inserted into the schedule. I knew they were often looking for fresh talent.

“You’d do that? For real?”

“Heck yeah. You handle a crowd like the one tonight as if you were born into it. I’ll arrange play on the radio and use it to promote the concert. We’ll get a big launch for you.”

“Ari, that’s wonderful!” she said, wrapping her arms around me and giving me a kiss. She pulled back and looked at me. “Um… I get emotional easily. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Kiss me again.” She did and it was my turn to just stare at her. “I’ve been using my pen name in all kinds of things. Radio. My writing. You know, I perform on stage in theatre shows and sometimes go out to area churches and schools to promote the college. I’ll promote your concert, too.”

“You’re kind of nice, Ari. Not at all what I expected when I wrote that letter,” Nat said.

“You’re a lot nicer than I expected, too. How about we get some information exchanged and set a schedule for you to come down for that interview.”

We did set things up and I sorted out about all the money I had on me to buy three of her records. Then she gave me a fourth one and signed it ‘To Aroslav, with my love, Nat Hart.’ I figured someone would see that and think I was sending love letters to myself.

The committee was surprisingly easy to sell on the concert. Once they heard the record, they went about setting the date immediately. They knew how to work with agents and musicians, so we got it set up pretty easily. Then I went to work getting play time on our station. I set up the time for Nat’s interview on my show and then went out to one of the other big radio stations in Indy.

The program director was pretty condescending at first. He took the meeting with me just because he felt he should do something to help aspiring students in radio broadcasting. His tune changed when we played the record. I told him about the upcoming concert and that I would have her on my show for an interview. I suggested he might want to do the same and he was all over it.

I talked with Nat at least once a week. Our dorm had three payphones in the very limited lobby space. My room was only a few doors down from the lobby and it got to be a joke among some of the guys to run down the hall yelling “Call for Aroslav from Nat Hart!” I’d tear out of my room and down to the lobby to find out which of the guys was trying to put the make on her over the phone while waiting for me.

I was pretty excited the day of her interview on my show. It was the week before the concert. My show aired from eight to ten at night on Tuesday and Thursday. Sounds like prime listening time, right? Well, Naptown radio picked up the opportunity to interview her on Friday morning during their drivetime. I’d need to get her downtown in time for the early broadcast.

“Welcome to the Count Aroslav Show,” I announced in my British broadcasting voice. So, I was no longer the The Hart. “I’m here with rising sensation Nat Hart who will be performing at the arena Friday night next week. You won’t want to miss this performance. Nat, welcome to the Count Aroslav Show.”

“Ari, it’s such a pleasure to be in the studio with you.”

“We’ve been playing cuts from your newest release here on Indy Radio. Tell us a little about your background and how you got your start in music.”

From there we were off. Over the past few weeks, I’d gotten to know her pretty well over the phone. We gelled when we got together and were firing questions, answers, and one-liners one after another.

I read one of my poems during the broadcast, as I usually did, but didn’t mention my pen name.

Mnemosyne, goddess, why now—when Lethe’s river held me?
Why wake the mem’ries of childhood beneath my furrowed brow?
Why stir the dreams I had hidden and sorrow I forgot?
Why the torrent of unbidden lust and passionate desire?

Night is filled with faces but names escape me still—
Treasures and favors given and lovers yet untried.
Sol is my guide in daytime and scoffs at my muddled mind,
Thalia laughs at my antics and Melpomene cries.

Aching, my heart is o’er burdened with unfulfilled visions of love.
Fingers emitting emotions to transfer my words to a crowd—
Ghosts that have no substance, anonymous critics of form—
Cursing my labor as nothing but fantasy living alone.

I followed that with a cut from her album and she giggled with me about how she wasn’t worried about my poetry becoming so popular it would compete with her. At the same time, she said she thought it was sweet and I didn’t confess that I’d written it about her. I was pretty infatuated.

Our broadcast space was small. It was really only built for one guy in a chair and the equipment that heated up the room. Having Nat in the studio meant we were close together and we often touched. Accidentally, at first. Then more and more often and on purpose. I had to use both hands to get records started and to flip the microphone switches, but between operations, I found it more and more often occupied by Nat’s hand. And then during the playing of one of her cuts, I turned to her and her lips were right there next to me. I nearly passed out before that cut came to an end and I had to pant into the microphone with a PSA I read off the clipboard.

Finally, I pushed back from the microphone so she could get right up to it and she sang and played her acoustic guitar with a new song she promised would be played at the concert next week. It was amazing. She was just beautiful. I kept imagining she’d written it for me. She looked straight into my eyes while she sang. When she finished, I put on my theme music and signed off. We got out of the booth in time for Lance to slide in and get ready for his ten o’clock broadcast.

“So, we’re supposed to be at Naptown Radio at six-thirty tomorrow morning,” I said. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“Where am I…? Ari! I thought you had that arranged!”

“Oh, no! Everything we had all figured out and I missed that? I know you and your band are all set for next weekend, but I’d better get on the horn and see what I can find for a motel.”

I took her into the theatre office and sat behind Doc’s desk to look up motels in the yellow pages.

“This sounds okay, I think,” I said. “I picked up the handset and started to dial. Lanie’s hand reached across to press the switch hook. I looked up at her.

“Ari, don’t you, like, have a room?”

“Yes, Nat. Of course. It’s in the men’s dorm. I mean…”

“You could get me in, couldn’t you? It’s late and no one will be around. I could use the bathroom here in the theatre to brush my teeth. And we’d be out before anyone is even close to being up in the morning, wouldn’t we?”

“Nat, do you want to come back to my dorm and sleep with me?” I asked, trembling slightly. I was hoping I was hearing her correctly.

“Yeah.”

I led her to the theatre dressing rooms so she could wash up and brush her teeth before we slipped out through the parking lot to get to my dorm. She was right. Thursday night wasn’t a late night out for most guys. There were a couple in the lobby and they just stared open-mouthed at us as we rushed down the hall to my room and inside.

“Your room’s neat,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief.

“Thursday is inspection day. We have to pick up clean sheets and towels Wednesday evening and have our beds changed and everything neat and clean before chapel on Thursday morning.”

“I’m relieved. Do you have a roommate?”

“Yes, but he has a girlfriend in Evansville. He takes off after classes on Thursday and doesn’t get back until class on Monday morning. So, we should be undisturbed.”

“Then kiss me again, Ari. Like we did in the studio. I kind of liked that.”

“Yeah, kind of,” I said as I took her into my arms.

No matter how sexy you think it is when you read about it, having two people crowded into a single dorm bed is never really comfortable. It’s pretty ghastly. We did our best to take up as little space as possible in that bed, which included parts of my body sharing the same space as parts of her body. We kept kissing as long as we were having sex so we wouldn’t get too loud, and eventually, I welcomed the weight of her body on top of mine to sleep for the night.

“Am I a rock groupie now?” I whispered to her as I held her naked body against mine.

“I don’t think there’s a group to be part of yet, so I think you’re just a rock lover. Kiss me lover. We’ll never get up in the morning if we don’t go to sleep soon.”

We got up and slipped out of the dorm early enough that we could stop at the TeePee for breakfast on the way downtown. I think no one was the wiser. The interview at Naptown Radio went well and she sang her new song, which they put on a play schedule with the announcement of her concert the following weekend.

The band was being paid out of the ticket sales. Of course, all students got in free, but there were sufficient people buying tickets that the gym was a sell-out and Nat Hart skyrocketed out of Indianapolis on her way to a brilliant career.

I’ve carefully left out any clues as to her music and who she really is. I asked her once if a song she’d sung was about me, but she said she couldn’t really write a song about me unless she titled it “For Aroslav.” I was simply too oblivious to take small hints. She made me promise to never reveal our little affair until one of us was dead.

Back to the Reunion: Visit Me in Chicago

I oriented myself to the new buildings and construction on campus. The old dormitories were gone. The Union had been expanded and now occupied the space where my dorm once stood. There, about where Ace the Greyhound now stands, is where I made love with Nat Hart. I saw a notice a few weeks ago that she was among those incredible talents we lost this year. I could still almost feel her weight on my chest in that little bed.

I walked with Rev. Ottman to the old administration building—the first building on campus—and had a seat at one of the outdoor tables where we welcomed and chatted with several other people, then listened to the recognition of our former president and the unveiling of his portrait for the gallery.

After lunch, the interim president spotted me and brought me to the departing president’s attention.

“Aroslav is a writer and put your new school into his most recent book,” he said.

“That’s great. I’d like a copy of it.”

“This one is only available in eBook. I’ll send you a link,” I said. “I was just down on Wabash a couple of months ago and walked by the Law Building and a couple of others. Most of the action in my story takes place around Columbia College Chicago, but a lot is between the two schools at the Camera Warehouse.”

“I’ve got an office just around the corner from there. Next time you’re in Chicago, stop by and I’ll make sure you get a tour.”

“I’ll be happy to.”

I was glad the flight back to Seattle on Sunday wasn’t as stressful as the one out to Indy. I didn’t bother trying to work. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, thinking—maybe dreaming—of my rock star.

❮ NOLA

Donate!

Comments

Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.

Lay of the LandBook 4 in “Wonders of My World”