© Sauce*Box, Fall 1996.
All rights revert to author.
Sex/Ski/Ska
by Kathleen Ely*
That's what I was looking forward to. Kids gone. Just Tim and I on the road to Red Lodge. Left about one, with Chuck, the bass player, nested in the back seat of the big bronze Suburban Tim bought this week, pulling the trailer with the band's equipment. We laughed and talked all the way down, stopping at Taco Bell in Bozeman to fuel up. A gorgeous day, bright and sunny, winter's end light in Montana, cruising along the Yellowstone seeing the results of the recent floods: massive chunks of ice along the banks and fields. Along the way I read Tim and Chuck their horoscopes from a new book I just bought and we all say, yes, yes, yes, as we hear them. Then turn south into the Beartooth Absarokees, where the mountains are touched, say the Crow, where the little people live, where anything can happen.
Red Lodge is one of those little mountain communities now on the cusp of development in the northern Rockies. Those pilot fish that Hemingway talks about in *A Moveable Feast* are everywhere. Once the gold standard killed the silver mines, the hard-working mining families became pea farmers, but today the canning factory stands vacant and empty, a brick shibboleth to the past as you come in to town. Now it's full of hip and groovy little shops and the license plates in town can be from anywhere--the skiing is magnificent and when night falls, you can come rest your aching bones at the Snow Creek Saloon.
You can tell it used to be a cowboy bar: there are brands on the walls and the way back bar, which offered up splinters when I leaned against it. Lined up behind it are forty years of skis from the family who owns the bar. Up front there's another bar with an overhang that has a multi-layered collage of postcards, business cards, photographs, little symbolic tokens of feathers and beads. The CD player was loud (some wierd song I've never heard--"We've got pussy, red pussy, green pussy, dog pussy, horse pussy, wet pussy") and the bar was half full when we pulled in at six.
Up behind the way back bar is a loft that can only be reached by a set of steep steps that goes up the back wall of the building. That's where the band had to unload all its equipment. Up and down the stairs, drums and more drums, amplifiers, trumpet, mellophone, tenor sax, bass sax, keyboard, bass guitar and lead, piles and piles of cords and microphones. Setting up a band is really quite an elaborate process. Every instrument--and that includes the voices of the guys in the band--has to be miked.
Bobbi had booked the band after hearing them when she came up to the Koko Taylor concert in Helena. Tim and I and the Kid were supposed to stay at her house. "House rules," she said. "No puking indoors." She acted tough, a Billings girl who had a baby when she was 21 twenty five years ago and moved to this small town because she wanted her son to grow up skiing. I asked her what she does. "Everything," she told me. "I've painted, I've cleaned, I've cooked and waitressed. I've got a couple of vending machines and I sell T-shirts, too. In the summer, I sell hot dogs on a little wagon I had built a few years ago to the tourii." I fixed a quick meal: spicy French green lentil soup and some of those expensive Indian dinners that come from the health store and then we were off to the bar again.
While we waited at the way back bar, I told Bobbi that I needed somebody to dance with. "Sure," she said. "Plenty of guys here." She took a drag on her cigarette and shook her long hair back. "And they always want to dance with babes like you." I was ready, too: skin-tight gold chinos, pale pink long underwear shirt, a vest made out of somebody's gramma's drapes, beads and pinon nuts around my neck that I bought from an old Navaho woman on the verge of Canyon de Chelles. My hair was wild from having made love when it was wet that morning. I'm wearing dark shades that make me look like a movie star who doesn't want anybody to know who she is. "But I'm too old to be a babe, Bobbi." She shook her head, "Nobody is THAT old, Kathleen."
So Bobbi starts introducing me to everyone who comes in. I'm shaking hands with all these folks and when the music starts, I still haven't found anyone to dance with so I ask a guy and he turns me down, and so does another one, Barry, who's putting up Chuck and Doug--he says his girlfriend is off in herbal school in New Hampshire and he promised her he wouldn't dance with anyone until she got back. Then Bobbi tells me, "Dave likes to dance" and I turn around there is this man with shoulder-length black hair that he's losing down the middle and when he smiles there's a Lauren Hutton split in his teeth. Nice smile.
"Bobbi says you're the drummer's wife and you need someone to dance with."
"Nah," I say. "I'm the drummer's BIMBO."
"That's a five letter word, you know," he says.
"I know lots of those," I tell him. "Movie, money, moola, moldy, magic, monks, minty, maybe..."
We dance and then we dance some more. A cowboy steps in, with a big black Stetson and he does his intense cowboy jitterbug with me, picking me, turning me upside down one way and then the other, up and around his big muscled arms. Then the band plays a slow one and David comes back and we slip into that hand-holding, up close thing that passes for slow dancing to a reggae beat. "Who's leading?" asks Dave.
I tell him that I was always the tallest one in class so I got to pass for the boy but if maybe he wants me to dance on his feet he can lead. He laughs and we smile at one another and he asks about the shades. "I feel naked without glasses," I tell him.
"Take 'em off then," he tells me. I just shake my head.
The band is taking off, in a big way, in Montana, and they know it, they play like it. Last weekend at Missoula's Top Hat, they had the crowd at fever pitch and it was hard to even shut down the bar when closing time came. This crowd, of locals and the out-of-town skiers, and folks who drove up from Billings, is making the walls shake, even though they have to crane their heads to see the band high up in the loft. Dave and I dance every number, through "Groove Me" and "Rocky Mountain Reggae" and "The Rivers of Babylon." When the break comes, Bobbi grabs me and says, "Let's go!" and we head off across the street with David and Barry, up to Barry's little apartment, which is a shrine to his gone girlfriend and harmonicas, which he plays in his own band.
I finally take off the shades and David tells me, "With those eyes, you shouldn't hide behind sunglasses." I don't tell him that I hide a lot, that there's a lot to hide. We talk non-stop about books, and the weather, and the quality of tomorrow's skiing, and Barry talks about his girl. I look at her picture and I think, when he tells me she didn't come back for a visit when she was supposed to and told him she was too busy for him to come in February, she's never coming back but he doesn't know it and his heart will be broken. I tell them about my new job working the phones for the Psychic Network. David complains about breaking up with his girlfriend in January, "Nobody in this town has any respect for personal relationships", by which I presume he means that she messed around or had found guys who would. He and I talk about the Internet--I convince him he's not serious about computers if he isn't online. Then it's time to head back and I feel just a tad guilty because I thought Tim was going to join us and he never did and I've never missed him on a break before.
We walk in the front door and I walk down the middle aisle and look up at the loft. Tim spots me and stands up and points his drum stick at me. I put my hand on my breast and shrug and look extremely innocent. He smiles and sits down and starts things up. Like us, the crowd seemed to have prepped well and they start shaking and dancing to the ska beat that the band picks up in their second set--they usually only take one break.
David and I dance, too, and then girls start clambering up on the way back bar and they are dancing in various stages of undress. The bouncer gets up and starts dancing with them, too. David and I are talking underneath all this, an ongoing conversation about nothing in particular but he laughs a lot and so do I. The loft is so high I can't see a thing up there. The Kid gives me the thumbs up and Doug plays his solo smiling at me but Tim is hidden behind the drums.
Then Doug starts up his solo version of "Redemption Song", that he always plays as the last song so Tim can come down and dance his slow seventh-grade-hood dance with me--he's been playing in bands since then and never got any style beyond that. I think it's way too early for that because it's only 12:30, but I go back to the door and Tim takes me in his arms and whirls me on to the sidewalk and we're dancing there under the winter stars of Montana. "Oh, I missed you, babe," he whispers in my ear. "Where were you?" He spins me around and I tell him I just went with Bobbi. And he's happy and we dance some more, real slow and he's leading, then he kisses me for a long time and tells me he loves me and goes pounding back up the stairs to start the next number.
An engineer named Don dances with me next and we do the "Mexican Polka". I hang back by the bar, sipping cranberry juice and thinking of how good a cigarette would taste, although in bars like this you might not as well bother since you get plenty of second hand. Dave asks me again to dance and we do until the night is over.
Like sex, like skiing, dancing ska is one of those experiences that doesn't readily lend itself to description. This wild backbeat grabs hold of you deep down in the kundalini, wherever that is, and wrenches out this hip-shaking, winding you up, winding you down. Sometimes I feel when I dance I'm like a dangerous weapon, loaded and ready to go off. I have this memory of when I was seventeen, getting work as a professional dancer in a club, wearing a white bikini, but that didn't somehow all didn't last too long because my uncle and my father found out what I was doing, I think and put a stop to it. I know I danced every single night of the year I was twenty, at the Top Hat in Missoula, and I know that I can make things happen dancing: I'll start moving and it moves through the crowd like a wave and they're all doing it then. If I'm not careful the other dancers will back away and I'll be the center of attention, letting Tim's drumming pour through me as I shake--no wonder those Shakers found expression through dancing.
So instead I pretend I'm making love and I dance with David trying to match his every move and we sync and its all in rhythym and it's flowing, flowing, flowing out of me, this ska beat, and I close my eyes and all I can feel is my body and the awareness of this other being near me. When I open my eyes, he's looking right through me and we stare into each other's eyes. "Beautiful, beautiful," he's murmuring to me. I wonder where my shades are.
But it's 1:30 and it's closing time and the boys in the band just have to lock the door to the loft to take off. David tells me he's going to go bake brownies--a nice homey touch, I think--and I invite him to dinner the next day, telling him to bring the dessert. I go up the stairs to find Tim and as we stand on the landing, there is David, looking up for a moment. "Isn't that the guy who danced with you all night? I think he's waiting for you," Tim says and he laughs. Then he slips his arm around me and we go off to Bobbi's. He takes a hot bath and we make love amidst the bars of the foldout couch in Bobbi's spare room.
On Saturday morning, we take the Kid and go wake up Doug and Chuck at Barry's with apple strudel from the City Bakery--it's been there since I used to ski Red Lodge as a kid, with its Hungarian owners making all sorts of wonderful treats. We walk to a family diner and eat bacon and eggs and hash browns. Tim and Chuck take off for skiing; I demure, saying it's too warm and I'm not interested in skiing slush. Tim gives me a fifty and I promise him steaks.
The Kid stays behind, too, because he's got to study--he's only 21, a junior at the University of Montana. I tell him I have someone I want him to meet and he walks down the street with me. First we stop at Frank's Meat Processing, which says he's closed on Saturdays but I see the door open and walk in. A big old building made of hand-hewn logs, lined with marble countertops and there is Frank himself, with a stand of huge long sausages. The room is all white with smoke from the smoker and he is spraying the sausages with a hose of hot water. He comes out of the glistening white smoke and mist and asks what we want. He tells me the best thing he has is some fat-free Italian sausages and I get those. I sort of backed out of the room it was so eerie and lovely.
Then the Kid and I went to JK's. Joe Kosorok has lived in Red Lodge his whole life and he's nearly eighty. Half of the fingers on his left hand are missing--who knows, the mines, logging--but he runs a little store full of Black Hills gold jewelry and little plastic gewgaws, yarn and picture frames, not at all like the hep-cat boutiques which are on either side of him. And different, too, because the front window and one whole side wall are filled with accordions and squeezeboxes. I ask him to play and his face lights up. In his brown checked flannel shirt and brown polyester pants half zipped up, with his hearing aids and long dark nose hairs, he could be anybody's grandpa but then he picks up his little chipped Hohner and out comes sweet melodies from Serbia and Finland and Hungary, songs he heard as a child in Red Lodge. "Houpa!" he says at the end of each one.
I make the Kid pick up the big Francini, white with a three octave keyboard and a set of 109 chords. The Kid can play anything and he does and he's making jazz from the moment his fingers touch the keyboard. When we finally decide to leave, he looks longingly at the accordion and Joe gives him his card and tells him he'll give him a great deal on one when he's ready. I'm glad his Mastercard is full up; last time Tim and I found him a huge bari sax at this old barber shop cum music store in Livingston, he bought it. On the way out I buy a set of three copper bracelets to give to Tim for his sore wrist from whacking the trap drum. We meet Doug out front and then Joe's voice comes out on the street; he's got a microphone inside. "Want me to play some more?" We smile and nod and he squeezes away merrily inside, his music tumbling out on the street.
I get groceries and I find Doug in the fly tying store buying a square of moose skin to make caddis flies. He gives me a ride home and Bobbi is there waiting. I fix everything, European salad, cucumbers with red wine vinegar and garlic, little flowerets of broccoli. That morning she had given me her recipe for green chili--over a hundred years old, she told me--and I made it with a clove of garlic and green chilis and jalapenos and the sausage from Frank's, grinding up two thirds of it into a smooth hot mix of meat and peppers.
We talk about the world and life and realize we are both Scorpios and we have the same purple satin jammies and gold sunny earrings. We worry over the Kid not coming back to do his homework--he ran into some girl on the street it turns out later. We tell each other about our respective boy children--hers is 25, a hot ski-jor racer who's won the annual race four out of the last five years (ski-joring is kind of like water skiing only you use a horse instead of an outboard). His dog turned up missing three days before and they've been out looking for him. Just got his papers the day before and then, he's gone. He made her a grandma, too, but the girl was put out on open adoption and so Bobbi sees her just once in a while when she gets to Billings.
Then the Kid comes home and finishes his homework in front of Rem and Stimpy. Tim comes home and I give him a back massage and run him a hot bath. While he's in there, David walks in with the pan of brownies. We figure out his horoscope, too, and there's much sneaking around as Bobbi and I slip into the brownies. I tell him about my new job as a psychic, "Just means I use my computer to make folks feel better," I tell him. "So what about past lives?" he asks. "I don't know. I'm not THAT psychic." But he looks at me again and I wonder. I tell him my standard prediction: "You're going to live happily ever after--if you want to."
When the band comes, Paul sits next to me and Drummer Girl, too--she's a groupie from Big Timber who follows them around, a wild old-hippy kind of woman. I give them each a copper bracelet--they were for Tim but too small to fit over his big hands--one fits Margaret, but won't fit Paul so I slip it into the pocket of his white silk shirt. I'm hugging him and playing around and I say how stupid I think it is that we can touch guys from here to here but not from there to there.
Margaret says, "But that's how we define monogamy, by where we touch people." I howl at this, "Ooh, I HATE that. That we can touch here"--I put my arms around her shoulders. "But I can't touch you here..." I touch her breasts. "I mean, it feels good. People need to feel good all the time, don't they? How come we can't touch here?"--I massage her breasts. "Doesn't that feel good?" She smiles and nods. "Wouldn't everybody feel better if all their private parts got touched lots by lots of people, instead of all this arbitrary definition?" Everyone agrees with me.
"I was a commandant in the sexual revolution," I tell them. "I thought Reagan invented AIDS just to stop all the good things that were coming out of it. So here we are still stuck--women still making 69 cents on the dollar and still unable to do what they want sexually." I start the steaks on the broiler and lay out the feast, sneaking little half bites of brownie as I go along. David weaves in and out of the conversation and once we stop and look each straight up until Bobbi interrupts with a question.
"And flirting," I go on. "What a lost art! Nobody gets to flirt anymore because it might get misconstrued. How come it is that I can't just lay a big one on Paul here and not have someone think badly of me?" He blushes and gives me a big hug. "Nothing stopping you now," he says, soI lay a big brownie-laden smooch on him.
Tim comes out of the bedroom about then and Bobbi introduces David to him. He approaches like a boxer coming out of his corner--he's a short, compact Irishman, tiny waist and broad shoulders with big biceps from pulling cable and playing drums, strong-jawed with a little white beard just starting from the tip of his chin, and a mass of wild red curls going dramatically white on the sides, and the most intense blue eyes. "Nice of you to dance with my girl all night," he mutters and goes back to his corner for another Export-A straight. Everyone sits down to steaks and green chili. David takes this opportunity to slip home.
Two hours until they have to play and nearly everyone goes off to nap before showtime. Tim falls instantly asleep and I wake him nice and slow before he has to go.
The bar is full when we get there and Bobbi and I hang out, while she's introducing me to half the town. When the music starts, David is right by my side. "Dance?" Then something strange happened. I can't explain it. Not sure I want to. We dance but we're not really dancing. We're dancing but we're doing more. We're doing more but it's hard to tell what it is.
"I have great respect for my personal relationships," I tell him over the noise. "That's good," he says. "That's very good." And then we look at each other some more. He has this whacky smile with the little split between his teeth. I'm not wearing the shades and he looks me right in the naked eyes. I keep reminding myself not to say anything I'll regret but this little shiver goes through me and I tell him, "Um, but this is really odd, um, I really, um, oh, shit, um, I think we have a great affinity." Then he takes me up in his arms and give me this hug and it is like I have been hit by a bolt of lightning, this awesomely charged moment as I'm lifted off the ground.
After that dance, I can't take it anymore and I wander off and tell Bobbi, "There's something about that man." She just shakes her head and says, "As if everyone can't see it, babe. Tim can, too, you know," nodding towards the loft. But I can't see him up there and my head feels like I'm in some kind of swaddling and I feel these waves of confusion come rushing up like Rock Creek last when it flooded. So I sit down in the red corner couch to watch for a moment and there goes Dave up to Bobbi and she's shaking her head and putting her hands outspread. I can read her lips: "I'm not having anything to do with this."
So I ask a couple of other guys to dance and they do. Drummer Girl and I do some very erotic turns and the crowd clears away to watch and then I turn around at the end of the song and David is standing there and we move together and dance the rest of the night, not talking, just dancing and dancing, every dance until the night was over. At the end of the night, I bow to him with my hands clasped together as if in prayer and thank him. He just shakes his head and smiles.
I can't find Bobbi and the band has to load up--I just stay out of the way while they do that usually. I tell Tim I'm going to walk home "See ya in a bit," he says and kisses me goodbye.
Dark, clear Montana night just cold enough to remind you it's still winter in the northern hemisphere. Ten million stars. Salty sweat on my lips. Dark-eyed man's eyes still there. Lovers' bed waiting. Dark, clear Montana night just cold enough to remind you of all the mistakes you have ever made. Twenty million stars. Dogs barking on the back streets. Dark-eyed man's eyes still there. Lovers' bed waiting. Dark clear Montana night just cold enough to remind me that you can live happily ever after--if you want to.
I sit up reading *The Alienist* until Tim gets back, then we play a torrid game of "Spite and Malice"--he wins. We make love and fall asleep in each other's arms.
In my dream, I have to tell Tim that David and I are having a baby and he tells me I'm too old and I tell him I know and I am sorry and I look at my legs and they tell me I'm too old and the dark-eyed man's eyes fill with tears and he tells me I'm not too old and we cry together and I wake up that way in Tim's arms, crying. He doesn't wake, then, but when he does we make love again.
Tim packs everything up and I clean up the kitchen and talk with Bobbi. I leave her my card and tell her I should call David and tell him thanks for the brownies so she gives me his number and he tells me he was just thinking about me but I ignore this and get my thanking done and get off the phone. It's past three by the time we leave and we talk about the night and how odd it all seemed and what with all the talking about sex and temptation and possibilities and how men and women see these things by thetime we get twenty minutes out of town we stop at an old cemetary and end up making love in the front seat. Four hour drive home with the headphones playing loud and talking softly and holding hands. Pick up the dogs, take hot baths--I always do mine from his because his is so hot it would burn me--make love again.
And yet, when I fall asleep, I dream of David again. We're walking through some place high in the French Alps where my relatives live and then it goes all eerie and lovely like in Frank's place, strange white mist, and he tells me, "It's amazing we could find each other in all this." But we did, we did, we did, I tell him. I'm here, I tell him.
I call him first thing this morning. "This is really strange," I say. "I'm having a hard time not thinking about you." I can almost hear him nod. "Yup," he says. "I've been thinking about you since you left." We talk about his dog, gone missing now, too, and my kids. "I wish I would have kissed you," I break in to this desultory conversation. "You couldn't," he says. No, I couldn't and I wouldn't. Oh, but I should have...
* * * * *
* © 1996 by Kathleen Ely; from her book, Calving Season, to be published in 1997 by Pecan Grove Press, San Antonio, Texas.
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