Justin Tussing - Vexation Lullaby

The world had to be full of bushy-browed Judiths.

“You know why she wouldn’t drink the coffee?”

Cross stared at Peter hard, tried to will an idea into his head.

It worked. “She was pregnant.”

Cross leveled a finger at Peter’s heart. Bingo.

Peter didn’t feel like he’d hit a jackpot. “Did you call me out here because you weren’t feeling well, or. .”

The singer patted the air in front of him. “Maybe I went about this the wrong way.”

“I don’t know what this is,” Peter said. “I should have sent you straight to the hospital.”

“I’ve never been a big fan of those places.”

Peter held the long end of the lever. He’d gained the upper hand. “ Those places happen to be where we keep the cool machines. If you’re having cognitive lapses, you need to get that looked at. Bluto mentioned you were off for a few days.”

“He was talking about the tour, not about me. The roadies don’t pack me with the gear.”

“You can’t spare an hour to get checked out?”

“We just spent my last free hour talking.”

Had an hour passed?

“If you were my patient, I’d tell you to make it a priority.”

Cross said, “There’s room on the bird. When I first started, the label paid a voice coach to shadow me. A doctor would probably be more valuable now.”

Had Cross asked if a doctor was more valuable than a voice coach? Was that a question? “What bird?”

“The plane, man. What do you think I’m talking about?”

It was an unanswerable question. Their conversation didn’t make any sense. “Are you offering me a job?”

“Maybe I am.”

Peter wasn’t some shade-tree mechanic. He had a mortgage to service and a ficus that needed watering. Would anyone drop everything to hop on a plane with a hallucinating recording star? “I’ve already got a job.”

Cross smiled. How would Peter describe the expression to Martin? A fox’s smile? A pickpocket’s? “It was nice seeing you again.”

He’d been dismissed. Peter tucked the photo into his backpack — he needed a proper bag, something dignified. He tried to come up with something else to say; he wanted to have the last word, but Cross already held the room phone to his ear and was stabbing buttons with the middle finger of his left hand.

The major rock magazines used to send someone out every year to take Cross’s pulse, but he’s fallen out of fashion or outlived it. The baby-faced smart aleck with the shoelace guitar strap is gone. At best, he’s a haggard stand-in for the counterculture icon who melded Nostradamus and James Dean.

Plus, Cross has a track record of making those magazines look foolish.

In ’76, after he’d stopped performing music for almost a decade, Rock Fan decided to poke his corpse with a stick. They gave their lead critic twenty thousand words to bury Cross. He challenged the myth that Cross was “the poet of his generation” or the “Bard of Greenwich Village.” If Cross is lucky, the writer predicted, he’d wind up in Vegas, doing two-a-days at the Golden Nugget, blowing an oversize chrome harmonica that would dazzle like the crown jewels. In a final insult, the article concluded with one of Cross’s lyrics: “ the dirty pigeons whisper / on the shoulders of the general / that his past is but a wasteland / and his name is lost to history. ” 3

Eight months later Cross released Midnight at the Bazaar 4 to universal acclaim. The critics crawled all over one another trying to praise him — they said he’d put away his childish things and finally found a canvas vast enough for his prodigious talents. Cross ended his exile and went back on tour. He played sold-out shows at Wrigley Field on back-to-back nights in October, a feat that the hapless Cubs hadn’t managed since the 1940s. In the next three years, he would marry the eldest daughter of a Sacramento artichoke king, father a son, Alistair Doyle Cross, and release two more iconic albums.

Then he disappeared, again.

WHEN ROLLING S TONE sent a stringer out to Cross’s Texas ranch in ’83, it was clear that they weren’t interested in rescuing him. The profile opened: “For two hours I sat on a silk damask sofa beside Jim Cross and watched TV while the legend sipped RC Cola from a can. I had a speech prepared for the occasion. I wanted to tell him that I believed Midnight at the Bazaar and Double Ditz to be more important than the Declaration of Independence and the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, combined. At some point — we were watching St. Elsewhere— he began to snore. A woman who may have been his wife came into the room and removed his crocodile boots. She carried the boots upstairs. His feet smelled like rotting meat. It occurred to me 1.) I might snuff him with a throw pillow and 2.) that he might want me to.”

In ’86, with his fan base dwindling and without a new album to promote, Cross announced his plans to play sixty-three dates with a newly formed band. Critics likened the tour to the public viewing of a funeral; promoters guaranteed that the math wouldn’t add up. Before the tour launched, The Atlantic ran a story called “Jimmy’s Bad Idea.”

After twenty-four years and twenty-three hundred performances, the “public viewing” continues. Magazine editors believe he’s only got one more good story in him and they’re going to wait until his body is cold before they stuff him in a box of words.

Maybe they’re right. Then again, people have underestimated him his entire life.

Though it’s getting late, I decide to drive on to Buffalo. It’s only an hour farther west and I have a friend there who’s offered to let me stay in an empty apartment above his garage. “Stay as long as you want,” my friend said, knowing perfectly well that I can’t stay later than Thursday — since after Buffalo, Jimmy hops down to Pittsburgh, then there’s a quick detour into the South before the tour plays connect-the-dots with capital cities and university towns across the Midwest.

On my way to my car, I receive a text from a source on the tour.

The Big Man has a visitor!

Tell me.

He replies almost immediately: +:-)

A priest?!

LOL doctor

My heart is a fist. He’s seeing a doctor?

IDK.

It’s hard to make a big deal about one doctor. The tour attracts all sorts of hangers-on — when Cross hit Europe in ’93 he brought three semis’ worth of gear, fifteen roadies, two makeup people, a stylist, a personal trainer, and a twelve-person gospel choir. It was less a tour than an occupation.

IT FEELS GOOD to be on the road, especially in the fall. In these moments, when winter seems to be lurking over the next hill, I sense the real end of the tour is inevitable and nigh. I especially like it when the tour takes a jog across the upper Midwest, after the combines have trimmed the fields and the winds have stripped the leaves from the trees. Out there it’s hard to forget that when Jimmy sings “ the grain elevators stand / prouder than our churches ,” he’s talking about his home.

No one kept vigil outside Cross’s room. Peter padded down the dim and empty hallway. He found his way back to the parking garage and his crappy car. Numbers stenciled on the parking garage columns counted down: 4, 3, 2, 1. At the entrance to the garage, the endomorph in the yellow Windbreaker held a phone in front of his face; the light of the screen made it appear as though the man was peering through a peephole at a sunny day.

The spectral photographer had disappeared.