Page 68 of Night Songs

And then there was pleasure. Everywhere, all at once. Searing, surging pleasure pushed to its limit, red and orange, like something held up too close to the sun.

I looked up at the sky above me with its endless black pricked with puncture wounds of light. I used to feel like a little wound, like God poked a hole in the skin of reality and made me. Now I felt infinite as the sky, and for a moment, it truly felt like I was more than just the curse. That I could grow and widen until its evil was only a prick of light inmyexpanse.

No longer strong enough to bring me down.

The rest of the tour was like a dream, the logic of it just beyond my understanding. There I was, singing onstage, doing lines in between songs off the amps. We’d go out after and thrash around to frenzied rock in tiny clubs until daybreak. Or if we were feeling mellow, we would light a dirty cigarette in the hotel bed and float out to sea. One night, we woke to our room engulfed in flames, and we had to jump out our second-story window into the dumpster below.

At some point, Martha confronted me. She was worried. She wanted me to slow down for real this time, get clean. I thought she didn’t have a demon in her like I did, that she couldn’t understand.

I told her if she wanted to leave, she should leave.

So she did.

Tate and I traveled to Paris next, which filled my head with noise. A rich, billowing static. Sometimes a rhythm under it like stones dropped in deep water. But always, the static. I wanted to capture the sound and make music from it.

Tate had a friend of a friend with a studio in the city, and we spent a few heady days laying down tracks. We talked about how we were evolving: our sound, our lifestyle, our expectations. What had we been seeking all this time?

We couldn’t remember.

21lulabelle

1975

EIGHT YEARS LEFT

That summer, I was asked to play a Fourth of July show down in Austin. It was ascene.

Thousands of long-haired young people descended on the ranch, kicking up dust with their secondhand boots and handmade sandals. Folks were sitting on blankets and lighting up and dancing to the music with their shirts off.

I was hanging out behind the stage with Tate and the other musicians when Tima showed up in her silver jumpsuit. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, and when she hugged me, I went a little limp in her arms. She pulled away and turned my face up to hers, scanning my eyes.

“Are you okay, little lady?”

“Of course, mama.” I backed away from her and spun in a circle, showing her how good a time I was having. We’d been passing the tequila bottle since that morning, and I was real loose.

She laughed and twirled me around, and it was like old times again. We went over to the BBQ pit where they were serving up ribs and fixin’s for the musicians. I was so geared up for the show that I was almost breathless, and the idea of chewing and swallowing anything made me sick.

Tima saw me decline a plate and arched an eyebrow. “I have never seen Lulabelle Powers turn down food in my life. Must be the heat.” She was trying to make light of it, but I saw her watching me again.

I wondered if she’d been talking to Martha and Phoebe. I hadn’t spoken to Martha since she’d quit the band, so God knows what she’d told them. When I saw Phoebe last, she’d looked at me real close, and I didn’t like it.

Tima and I shook off the awkward moment and caught up. She was touring as a solo country artist and doing well, but it was an uphill battle. Most venues were still segregated in all ways but legal, and neither Black nor White promoters wanted to call her music “country.” They were still trying to tell her who she was, and I could see she was fraying at the edges. She was engaged to a lawyer back in Nashville, and while he hadn’t pressured her to come home, she was thinking about taking a break.

I thought back to when we were eighteen, and we’d sworn to never let anything get in the way of our music. I knew she was up against things I’d never have to face, but I still felt like she was betraying those girls on that balcony, in a way. I, for one, couldn’t imagine going home and being a little wife.

It was ignorant and unfair of me, of course—but that just shows how far gone I really was.

I went on in the early evening in the soft desert air. The crowd was blasted off the last act, and lots of tequila and grass. Violence was starting to brew at the front near the stage, where people clamored for the best spots with unsteady, childish anger. Local toughs in long beards and leather tried to keep the peace, but the crowd could not be tamed. This was why they’d come: to escape their parents, who didn’t understand them, and their bosses, who wanted to rule their lives.

The fighting escalated, and the festival manager warned me it might be dangerous to go out there. There’d recently been deaths at a few shows.

But I knew today wasn’t my day to die. And if anyone could soothe a crowd of beasts, it was me.

Tima and I walked onstage together to sing “Lullaby,” Tima shining in silver, me in my long black dress like Death herself. We huddled around the microphone, and our voices drifted unaccompanied over the endless crowd receding into the horizon.

I watched the angry people at the front look up, curious. The red drained from their faces, and they abandoned their fights. The crowd quieted to a low, atmospheric hum, and they all swayed from side to side in a rippling current, rocking their babies and themselves. I saw one rough in the front row get shiny-eyed, and I imagined he was thinking of his mama when she was happy and young, and so was he.

I’d never reached so many people before. The tree on my chest shook a bit from the weight of it.