Пит Таунсенд - The Age of Anxiety

At first there was no response.

Walter tried the magic words. “Is that girl looking for her birth mother?”

Everyone in the audience looked around at everyone else. What a question!

But incredibly, one by one three arms went up, then four, then finally seven.

Walter laughed. He could hardly believe it. None of us could. What he had intended to be a demonstration to Floss that if her daughter was alive, she would one day be found, had suddenly become infused with genuine possibility. The child might be found. Tonight.

He looked at Floss, who was laughing back at him.

Up in the lighting gantry to the right of the stage, as I learned later, Molly was concentrating on her job. The controlling bar of the huge spotlight she had trained down on Walter was set at a high angle, and she was stretching awkwardly to keep it steady.

Over the earphone communication system she heard the lighting director give her a command.

“Molly, cut your lamp.”

Cut the lamp? She didn’t understand. There were only three stage spots trained on Walter. The rest were spread around the field, another seven “Super Troupers” as they were known. The entire lighting crew was winging it, being inventive, taking initiative. Everything was turning out beautifully.

This time Frank could be heard on the intercom, more firmly. “Cut your lamp, Molly. Do as you’re told.”

She did as instructed and was removing one of the headphones when the director spoke again.

“Molly,” he said. “Weren’t you born the spring of 1995 in a clinic in Bern?”

Every light operator sharing the earphone system in the thirty-man team heard what he asked. A few of them laughed. Molly had not heard anything Walter had asked of the audience; her headphones were still tight to her head. She had only heard the director.

All her colleagues searched the stage to find her.

One by one all the spotlights in the park found her up on her lighting tower. Nine spots lit her up like a superstar in space.

A girl in a star.

The cherubim hidden in the robes of Nik’s darkest angel.

The crowd began to applaud. It was merely a ripple. They couldn’t know what was going on, but some of them clearly sensed it was something special.

Walter and Floss looked up, and Molly gazed down at them.

Walter beckoned to all the girls who had raised their hands to come forward. But all of us onstage behind him had seen Molly’s face up in the lighting tower. We saw Floss’s stunned smile as she looked up at the girl.

Maud’s face, too, caught my eye as she compared Molly with Floss back and forth—mother to daughter—and I knew then that Molly was Floss’s daughter. My daughter?

Two long-lost children, found within months of each other. I remembered Walter’s visions of a child in a star—was it in one of his soundscapes? By some incredible mischance, or perhaps a miracle, Walter’s visions were taking on new power, especially as embodied in the music that night. Floss’s amazing and tragic life adventures, her own adoption and finding Molly, suddenly took on operatic significance. Could it be a mere coincidence? Maybe… but in the context of the concert, it was full of poignancy and momentousness.

Then I saw that Walter knew what he had to do. He positioned himself like a statue, his harmonica in his right hand ready to play, held in what appeared to be an attempt to keep light from his eyes. His left hand was stretched out as though he were balancing on an imaginary surfboard, his knees slightly bent and turned a little to the right, his body twisted slightly at the waist. When he took up this pose, the audience knew they could soon expect a powerfully explosive harmonica solo, and the girls began to scream and the boys to shout.

It was a night at Dingwalls writ large. Steve Hanson wrote of the event in his autobiography.

At Dingwalls with Big Walter and the Stand, there had always been a moment when we would find some direct connection with the audience. They would as often as not be half-drunk and, if our set had been long, they would be tired. But when Walter adopted his famous “stand,” the atmosphere would transform into one of complete anticipation and wonderment. It was as though we were all waiting for an orgasm to complete, one that had begun but stalled for a moment.

At some of the stadium shows in the eighties and nineties with Hero Ground Zero, there would be a similar moment. Patty would stand poised, her tambourine fluttering rapidly in the air, the music silent, the breeze blowing her dress. The tambourine sounded like a rattling hiss. The audience were hanging. Patty was like a sparrow hawk that had spotted a field mouse. And when she finally brought it down to her side, and the rest of us in the band took off, the energy and tension in the audience would be released in what felt like a spiritual ascendance.

Really, you have to be a musician in a big band at a huge concert to know how that feels.

And when the four of us were together again at Hyde Park, performing Walter and Harry Watts’s soundscapes, when we were done there was nowhere else to go. Floss’s lost daughter Molly had been found. She had been in our midst all along. Walter took up his position and when he finally began to wail his heart-wrenching harmonica solo, we all ascended.

This time when the music ended there was applause, and it was gratefully acknowledged.

We heard the band walk off.

We heard the technicians leave their posts.

Soon the audience was gone, and the cordoned area in Hyde Park began to clear.

An hour later it was all over.

This time the silence was appropriate, delightful, and free of tension and expectation.

The show was over.

Selena looked at me with love and a little lust in her amazing blue-green eyes; was it possible she really saw me as an attractive older man? Was this extraordinary young woman really going to take me on?

I lowered my head and she seemed intuitively to know what I was thinking. Shame flitted over my face.

Selena hugged my arm and gave me one of her knowing looks. I knew then that if she didn’t betray me, if she stayed with me, I knew there was no doubt that I would love her until the day I died. She laughed at me in a relaxed, natural way. Was the psychic in her off duty for now?

I am Louis Doxtader. Dealer in Outsider Art. After the wonderful concert we all gathered backstage in the hospitality tent. I didn’t tell Selena what Floss had told Walter before the show, the rape, the drugs, the mystery of who the father might have been. Of course the last thing I wanted to do was encourage any more discussion of what might have happened at that wedding.

But I was aware that Walter was giving Selena very dirty looks.

Maud was standing with her arm around Molly, who really did have many of Floss’s features. Could Molly really be MY daughter? I had always thought at the height of my heroin use that I probably had no sperm. I could hardly get an erection back then.

Around the tent, laughter was breaking out as it does on such occasions after a performance. It always feels too loud, too raucous, the sound of people who want to let go at last and have fun; the sound of musicians and technicians, managers and agents who are relieved the show is over, everyone is safe, and the ship may sail again. Glasses clinked, corks popped. From somewhere in the marquee the smell of very strong marijuana wafted over. It was now my turn to keep a firm grip on Selena. I wanted to kill her as much as I wanted to fuck her. Then suddenly she pulled herself free of me and began jumping up and down in very small leaps, fists clenched.

“I have to tell them,” she said.

“Tell them what?” I was starting to panic all over again.

“What you did,” she said, looking at me with her brow furrowed.