Chester Anderson: The Butterfly Kid

“Sure,” Pat veered. His conversation was generally erratic. “Let’s warm up.”

We retired to the alley behind The Mess and, dodging inquisitive moths et ah, smoked a few pipefuls of marijuana, which was still illegal in those days. We firmly believed it improved our playing, and perhaps it did.

When we were properly stoked, we wandered onstage and started tuning. We had among us some 120 strings (most of them mine) to put in order, and tuning could be a fairly poignant experience. To keep our audience happy, we made a more or less comedy routine out of tuning, an ad-lib blend of topical jokes and hip ambiguities, from which we broke without warning into our most popular song, “I’m in Love with a Girl Called Alice Dee,” carrying everyone within earshot along with us. What the hell is earshot?

That got the evening started, and for a long while I was too busy with keys, dials, and switches to notice anything else. It was during Patrick’s solo, while Stu and Kevin were scanning the house for new soft young round ones and Sativa was staging a private latihan, and I was counting noses (each nose representing one four-dollar cover charge, of which we Tripouts were entitled to one-third — which is sixty-six point six cents per nostril, if you like to think along such lines)… It was during this that I noticed our boy Sean, the Butterfly Kid himself, sitting in the front row at a table all alone.

Right.

Sean wasn’t making butterflies, thank God, just sitting with his hands in his pockets, which was something of an accomplishment, looking slightly hypnotized, like all the rest of our audience. I wondered what’d happen if he tried to applaud after the set, then decided not to worry about it.

I drew a yellow index card from my right cheek pocket, wrote on it in red, “butterfly boy here Grab Him!” and propped it up on my console. The Tripouts’ warm-up routine made it necessary for me to write down anything I wanted to remember.

Pat’s solo ended in a burst of ethnic gaudies, and before the house could gather itself to applaud, we segued into “Green Sleeves and Yellow Hair,” one of my tunes, ending the set with a proper bang. We liked to run a good tight show.

The kid clapped a total of two golden moths, and then resorted to tapping the tabletop hipply with his right index finger like the rest of the audience. Before the frantic clicking had a chance to fade, we were off stage and Al Mamlet, a very funny man, was on and running through his first riffs.

I grabbed the kid by a handy shoulder (inadvertently traumatizing him), whispered, “C’mon, baby,” and half-dragged him into the back room.

My colleagues had already split. Our schedule allowed for ninety minutes between sets, and they liked to spend the time hanging out on the Street. It’s fun to be even a little bit famous.

“Okay, Sean.” I was firm and comforting, like a pastor or slightly older uncle — somebody wholly unlikely to administer a spanking. “First question: where did you go?”

“Go?” Still scared.

“Yeah, go. I was talking to you in the park and then you disappeared. I saw you. Or rather, I didn’t see you. Where did you go?”

He looked slowly around at the back room, hunting for eavesdroppers maybe, but finding only cobwebs and poorly stacked old lumber. This gave him confidence. “Oh yeah,” he mumbled, “I went home.”

“Dallas?”

“Dallas? Hell no, man: Fort Worth!”

“That’s boss. How?”

“How?” Oi. If Sean was going to make a habit of repeating everything I said, I might easily go bald before I got any information out of him. “How?” he redoubled. “Well… To tell you the truth, man, I don’t rightly know.” He threatened to sniffle.

“Hey, baby, don’t cry! There’s nothing to… I mean, just… Oh shit.” I gave him my only clean handkerchief, red silk, and he noisily blew his nose. Emotional people embarrass me.

“Anything wrong back here?” That was Charley. Sometimes he worried. He was afraid somebody might break a law or something on his premises.

“All clear, Chaz,” I guaranteed. “Just talkin’ to an ol’ buddy of mine from Texas.” The whole truth seemed uncalled for.

Charley looked dubious — one of his better looks — but went peacefully away. Meanwhile the kid stopped sniffling.

He half smiled. “Hey, y’all play Good.”

“Thanks. Now what…”

“What do you call that thing?”

“What thing?” Interruptions!

“That piano thing you was playin’. What’d you call that?”

“That’s an amplified harpsichord.”

He opened his mouth to launch another question, but I beat him to it. “I’ll explain later,” I promised. “What were you thinkin’ about just before you went home?”

“Huh? Oh yeah. I dunno. I was just a tad bit homesick, like. You know.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that. You were homesick. Maybe you had butterflies in your stomach.” We winced. “But why did you come back?”

“Man, I hate Fort Worth!’

“Oh.”

We were silent long enough to hear Mamlet, out front, yell, “And then they told me what it was For! ” while the audience broke up gloriously. Al is a very funny man.

I, meanwhile, was scheming as hard as I could under the circumstances, hunting for some way to open this kid up. Those butterflies of his were bugging me.

Then, “Where are you stayin’?” I remembered my own Village puppyhood.

“Me? Here ’n’ there. I dunno,” meaning the kid was up tight for a pad. Right. Now we were back where we’d started in the park, upward of too many hours ago.

“Need,” I insinuated, “a place to crash?” Playing it slow.

“Well…” Yes.

“You’re welcome to use my Guest Room for a while, if you want to, until you can find a place of your own.” I was hard pressed to keep a note of pride from marring the precisely nonchalant tone in which I performed this ritual incantation. Guest Rooms are scarcer in the Village than gold-plated diaphragms.

“Gee thanks!” Pause. “I mean, ah, if like you don’t mind… I mean…”

I explained that of course I didn’t mind and delivered a small but polished lecture on Village mores and the tribal custom of the pallet on the floor. Within, I exulted. There wasn’t much in the world that I wanted more than any old explanation for those damned butterflies.

Then, “You do look kind of beat,” I recited, strictly from memory.

“Um.”

Right. “When did you sleep last?”

“Oh man, sleep? I dunno. Thursday?”

“Oh yeah? C’mon.”

I still had half an hour before the next set, so I led Sean tenderly out through the dark auditorium, pausing to collect his guitar and put him on my tab, and on out to the street. There we encountered Mad John, the spherical pride of New Orleans, lewdly eyeing an anthology of tourists from Ohio.

“Greetings,” he offered. He was wearing gaudily-trimmed green lederhosen and an Alpine cap with a pigeon’s tail feather hanging from its band, his standard Village tour guide outfit, but he didn’t have his usual cash-and-carry following tagging along.

“Howdy, Swamprat,” I sang out. This was meant to make him sputteringly furious, a most engaging spectacle, and usually worked, but not tonight.

“Look around,” he said with word and gesture.

I looked. “So?”

“They’re gone.”

So they were. No moths! The only nearby reminder of the plague was a clutch of wibberly GI’s wearing uneasy expressions.

“You’re right!” I rejoiced. “Wow! Later.”

I hauled Sean away before Mad John could start rapping, and we practically ran down West Third Street. “What,” I panted, “happened to the,” gasping, “butterflies?”