Page 92 of Levi

“These boots were purchased for a Halloween costume,” he says, one hand leaning on a stranger’s tailgate. “Rhinestone Cowboy. I won that contest. They were engineered for a condo with marble floors and an elevator, Dante. I wore them from the Uber to the couch and back. Their total career mileage before tonight was sixty feet, and none of it was on grass. I’ve already got blisters on my blisters.”

“There’s a med tent by the gate.”

“I don’t need a med tent. I need infrastructure. Who puts a concert on grass? Where are the walkways? I did a wedding on a polo field and I laid plywood. I would be fired for this. I would fire myself for this.”

“You’re limping.”

“I’m not limping.” He draws himself up, favoring the left boot every step. “Limping is involuntary. What I’m doing is distributing my weight strategically. It’s a technique. Dancers use it.”

He distributes it strategically onto my arm for the last hundred yards, and I steer him by the elbow around the worst of the ruts.

A guy in an airbrushed eagle shirt raises a beer as we pass. “Nice jacket, brother!”

“Thank you! It’s vintage!” Benji glows the next fifty feet. “You saw that. Tell me you saw that. I told you I’d blend. This outfit is perfect.”

“He can see you from space, Benji.”

“Blending is not invisibility,” he says. “Blending is when a place decides you belong in it, and this place has decided. We’re in! That man and I are friends now. I’m basically local. Damn this fucking field!” He stops to unstick a boot heel from the sand, while holding onto my arm. “The outfit is a success. The boots are a mistake I’ll be paying on through Tuesday. I regret nothing except everything below the ankle.”

I buy two waters at the first stand and hand him one. “Drink. You’re wearing leather in ninety-five degrees.”

“Leather breathes. It’s a natural material. It was alive once.”

“So were you. Drink the water before you pass out.”

He drinks it. All of it, glaring at me over the bottle the entire time, which is how Benji has always taken orders from me. I almost laugh, twice, which is more than I’ve managed in a day.

The first opener goes on with the sun still up. A kid, twenty at the most, thanking the field after every song and playing everything a hair too fast. The crowd claps and keeps drinking. He’s background to their conversations.

“They gave him the daylight slot, Dante. Do you know what that does to a person? There’s a million dollars of lighting rig over that stage doing absolutely nothing, because the sun is up, so that kid has to matter for thirty minutes with no help. I’ve watched brides get better production at a beach ceremony. We should riot on that child’s behalf.”

“He can’t hear you, Benji.”

“He can feel it. A crowd is one organism. I know crowds, and this one is being rude.”

The second act plays to a livelier crowd, and between sets the bachelorette party on our left adopts Benji. By the first chorus he’s four rows over in a line dance he learned in one pass. The fringe earns its money. For two songs he is the most popular man in the pit, taught a boot slide by six women in matching pink hats.

He comes back grabbing my shoulder while standing on one foot to give the other foot a rest.

“Worth it. Don’t ask my feet, they’ve stopped speaking to me. The bride is named Samantha, I’m invited to the wedding now, and I’ve already fixed three things about her reception. Her planner has her doing a sparkler exit at nine-forty. In August. Children will be present. I gave her my card.”

“You were gone ten minutes.”

“You can fix a seating chart in six if the bride trusts you. Samantha trusts me.”

The sun goes down between acts. The crew resets the stage, and the field packs itself tighter toward the rail. Then the rigs light all at once, the field makes a sound I feel in ribs, and Lee Streeter walks out.

The man I’ve been taking care of came into rooms sideways. Bandana, chin down, sunglasses to cross ten feet of parking lot. He sat at Tex’s bar trying to take up less of it. He slept on floors with his jeans on.

He needed feeding, needed watching, needed me.

This man takes the stage like he owns the place. Shoulders back. Chin up. Boots planted on the center mark. The lights hit him, he opens his arms, the crowd screams at him, and he stands in it completely at ease.

And God help me, he looks good up there.

That’s the insult buried in the middle of everything else — the shoulders, the planted boots, the stage rig doing for a field what one lamp did for me across a couch.

Thousands of people wanting the same man I wanted, and not one of them knows they’re all wanting a costume.