A quote: “Desperado, oh, you ain’t gettin’ no younger | Your pain and your hunger, they’re drivin’ you home | And freedom, oh freedom, well, that’s just some people talkin’|
Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone ” ~~ Glenn Frey and Don Henley
I’ll start with a story …
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He didn’t wake up easy. Last night was a blur.
“Hey, babe, you in the bathroom? Babe?”
He sat up, slowly and tried to remember where he was. All these years touring and hotel rooms blended into each other. As he stumbled to the bathroom, he noticed her side of the closet was empty and her suitcase gone.
“Shi…”
When he finally felt human enough to leave the room (it sure took longer these days), his check in with manager and crew done, he slipped on sunglasses and braved the outside. Argh. Did it have to be so bright? But he remembered what city this was and pulled out his cell phone.
He looked up from the menu as she spotted him across the restaurant. He was startled for a moment, taking in the salt-and-pepper hair, the more rounded figure. She read his face before he could rearrange it as she slipped into the booth across from him.
“You know, Rick, it has been 40 years.”
He cleared his throat, “Yeah. How’d that happen? And you look great …”
She laughed, unrestrained, eyes twinkling and he saw the young woman he had loved … and left …
They had drinks and small talk. Appetizers and quiet smiles. He wondered, out loud, at how fast the years had gone by. She pointed out that they only talked on the phone every few years … and usually when he broke up with his latest lady.
“Hey, not true!”
“Hey, yes, absolutely! Three years ago it was … um … Brenda? Who left today?”
He sighed, “Rachel. I think.” He smiled at her, “I should have married you.”
She snorted, “AND you say that every time, too.” She reached out, taking his hand, “We wanted different things. You got your career, and I got my family. My kids, my grandkids…”
Her hand went to his face, “I have no regrets. But I worry about you. Those front rows are still filled with adoring 20-something women, some with backstage passes. They never change …”
“But I have,” He closed his eyes, “The years didn’t stop for me.” He turned her hand up and kissed her palm, “Really. I should have married you.”
She leaned forward, pulled her necklace out of her blouse. A man’s wedding ring hung from it. “Jim passed two years ago. I’m still a widow.” She stood from the table, ready to leave, “There’s nothing we can do to rewrite the past. But there’s always a new chapter ahead.”
He watched her as she left. Like last time, she never looked back.
He paid the check and followed.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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.featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
CDC says: He paid the check and followed.vowing to himself never to push her out of his heart again.
RIP Glenn Frey
Wombat Lace says: As the bus pulled into the arena lot for the next show, he sighed. This city was not one of his favorites. Noisy, smelly, litter-strewn, smoggy… definitely not a favorite. He sighed again, but picked up his guitar and headed off the bus. There was always the possibility of the One.
Several hours later, he donned a workman’s coveralls, pulled his signature long hair into a ponytail under a cap and followed his usual routine, honed by years of practice, of helping set up the stage. At first it had been a way to help relieve the pre-show tension while staying away from the substances that enslaved so many of his fellow performers. Then it became a way to connect with the crew. Now it was a way to covertly observe the audience in search of the One.
The One wasn’t at every concert, but showed up often enough that he kept looking while moving speakers, adjusting microphones. Sometimes with a group but often alone, the One came in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it was a skinny pre-teen with braces and glasses. Sometimes it was a white-haired senior citizen. His eyes would be drawn, almost like a magnet, to the One who inspired him to keep writing, keep performing and keep away from the bad stuff.
And there she was. Far back. on the end, a middle-aged woman watching everything on stage with such intensity it fairly exuded from her. He smiled as he motioned to the venue manager.
She would never know what she had done…until the lifetime concert passes arrived. With a note from him, simply thanking her for coming to hear him perform.
Cameron says: Oh, I like this. Kind of like a guardian angel for the man.
Wombat Lace says: Thanks, Cameron! First attempt and I went a little over the length. Glad you enjoyed it.!
Cameron says: Bah. We aren’t fussy about that. But it really is a challenge trying to keep the story intact while getting the word count. You can imagine how much tougher it was in the beginning when it was one hundred words.
Cameron says: I was in my Sophomore year of college and moved into an apartment in a retirement community. The price wasn’t too bad and supposedly it helped us young people connect with the older generation and the older residents feel like they were still alive.
My roommate was Mister Bryant. Nice guy if a touch grouchy. We’d spar about the issues of the day and he’d happily point out flaws in my arguments.
Things changed one afternoon after I’d come home from midterms. My computer was blasting some music from my collection as he’d walked in. I thought he was going to be annoyed with me but he frowned as if remembering something from his past.
“You like that?” he asked.
I nodded. “This is the kind of stuff they made back when you had to have talent. It was a shame they broke up so abruptly though.”
He walked into his room and came back with a picture. It was that band and the date on the picture was from their last year together. “It was a good show and we ended things well.”
“That’s you?”
He showed me the battered Fender and nodded. “Nice to be remembered,” he said.
Wombat Lace says: Great story! I like the relationship between the curmudgeon and the whippersnapper.
Cameron says: Thanks. There are colleges who have living arrangements with retirement communities just like I described. Figured this would be a fun twist.
When had things started changing?
Laurel Sinclair looked out over the audience, trying to remember the shifts over the past few years. Right after the Energy Wars, everyone was just glad for peace. But the undercurrent was there, probably had been there ever since the Miracle of the Lightning Bolt, the revelations that the US had their own projects to counter the Soviets’. The extreme secrecy had necessitated bending the rules on human experimentation, and a lot of people were not pleased to discover the lapses that had resulted.
But the real shift had come when attitudes changed from “those experiments were wrong, but the people touched by them deserve our sympathy” to “those people are tainted and need to be marked out so they can’t blend in and pretend to be clean.” The point where even the rock star’s daughter could be rejected from a prestigious school not on the basis of test scores, but because Daddy was the gene-modded clone of a disgraced admiral from a previous generation’s war.
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