Page 62 of And Still Her Voice
River had interrupted my fantasy and I certainly didn’t need Mother Mary or Freud’sInterpretation of Dreamsto decode my dream about my hunk of burning love, but then I realized it wasn’t Elvis with me inBlue Hawaii. Who was it? I couldn’t see his face.
“No, I—I thought you were Tony.”
“Tony?”
“Yeah, we need to talk.”
“But first, you’ll never guess who I ran into,” River said.
“Elvis?” I panted.
“No.”
“Martin Luther King, Jr.?” I rubbed my eyes.
“Not him.”
“Well then, who?” I asked.
“My father.”
The subject of Tony would have to wait. River sat on the edge of his twin bed telling me how after I left the club, a man named Marvin Monk came backstage, claiming to be his father and told him the story about how he and his mother had been together one summer in New Orleans. “He was a jazz pianist. I just knew it,” River said, quite charged up. “It makes sense. My mother couldn’t play anything but a radio. Anyway, he said that when she went back to college that fall, she discovered she was pregnant. When her parents found out she was ‘knocked up,’ forget marriage, they sent her to the farm in Iowa to live with her grandparents. The bigger surprise was when I turned out to be a Black grandbaby.” River smiled and then quickly sobered. “Later, she married a farmer who didn’t want me around, so I ended up living with my great-grandparents, and after they died, I hit the road, did drag shows and that’s how I ended up in San Francisco.”
“Wow.”
“Marvin told me that my mother wrote him about how she’d made a mistake.”
“But back then, they couldn’t have gotten married anyway,” I said.
River shook his head. “After a while, she did let him know about me. He told me that if he’d known from the beginning, he would have found a way to marry my mother or at least see me. She let him know she’d seen me perform recently in Iowa.”
“Wait, she was at our concert in Des Moines and she didn’t come say hi?”
He shrugged. “Apparently. He told me that when he saw the billboard up on Beale Street advertising the band, he just knew he had to see me,” River said. “I can’t sleep now.” He picked up the magazine I’d dropped to the floor and started pacing the tiny room.
I couldn’t imagine what River was going through. “So, how did you leave things? Will you see him again?”
River shrugged his shoulders, “Not sure.” He riffled through the pages. “Says here,” River said, pointing to the page, “the Swami ‘tells acid heads that LSD is nowhere, informs young rebels that they owe obedience to their parents and advises draft protesters to serve because it’s the law.’ Bullshit. I wish I had some LSD to counteract the trip I’ve been on tonight.”
“Is that how it works?” I asked. “It counteracts?”
He shrugged his shoulders and then reached for his shoe under the bed and pulled out a fat joint. “What the hell, we don’t have to be anywhere until tomorrow night.”
“You mean tonight.” I pointed to the clock that read four-forty-eight a.m.
He lit the doobie, took a hit, and passed it to me. We sat up in our twin beds talking until noon, listening to the Beatles’ “White Album” on the little record player we’d purchased in Tulsa. We talked about life and the crazy families we were born into. We tried to interpret the lyrics and what it would be like to visit India like the Beatles had, to meditate and to compose songs. “Let’s do it!” River said.
“Do what?” I handed back the joint. He toked on it and held it in. “Let’s go to India.” He blasted out the smoke. “Did you know Martin Luther King, Jr., was influenced by Gandhi?”
“That sounds like a lovely idea,” Grandma said. “I remember the time—”
“Oh shit, Grandma. Not now,” I said with a laugh, but then the notion of going to India to learn how to be free of her crossed my mind. I pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes to see if I could chase Elvis down in my dreams, and pretty quickly I drifted off into a deep sleep, but by then Elvis had already left the bedroom.
***
Twilight, and I woke to the sound of River singing in the shower. It was time to get ready to go out and grab a bite to eat before our next gig. Towel wrapped around his trim waist, he dripped out of the bathroom in a fog of steam.
“Did you get any sleep?” I asked as a light flashed outside the window, the sound of a loud pop following. I heard someone yelling as River dropped his towel, turning toward the window. Of all things to recall during a crisis, I remembered looking and thinking,Lord have mercy!before he shouted, “Get down!”
