But maybe they wouldn’t have Wi-Fi at this camp. I thought about Pillar Two. My commitment to it currently felt a little tenuous. I’d been tempted to run over my phone so I wouldn’t backslide on staying off dating apps. Being occupied teaching in the remote North Woods seemed like it would achieve the same thing, and I wouldn’t have to buy a new phone at the end of it.
It could be a cleanse, if you will. A man cleanse. And whenI came out, I’d be clear thinking and ready to go on Granola with Gretchen. Hell, in the quiet of the forest, maybe the perfect name would come to me. Or maybe I’d be so cleansed and at peace that I wouldlikethe name Granola with Gretchen.
I had liked the symbolism of going on one last date before retiring from men, the ritualistic nature of a last hurrah, but another idea was forming.
“You know how in fairy tales, there’s often a wicked witch, or a menacing old lady?” I asked. “Like in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ There’s that lady who lures them into the woods and… I think she eats them?” I cracked myself up. “But she always lives in a forest, it seems like.”
“Yeah,” Rory said. “I think there’s lots of fairy tales like that. Doesn’t the witch in ‘Rapunzel’ lock her up in a tower in the woods? Why do you ask? Are you about to manifest a Brothers Grimm–themed recital?”
I ignored her questions. “All right. I’ll do it.”
Once upon a time there was a girl named Gretchen. Gretchen grew up to be a badass. And then she went to the woods to become a crone.
2
INTO THE WOODS
Teddy
It was possible that the reality of the North Woods was going to be different from my idea of the North Woods.
To begin with, it was ninety-two degrees when I got out of the van at the Wild Arts retreat that was to be my home for the summer. I knew because the driver, a gray-haired woman who looked like Paul Newman’s fraternal twin sister, announced as much as we drove through a giant wooden archway with a sign that read, “Nature Is the Art of God”: “Ninety-two at eight forty-five at night—uff da.”
She sounded like she was straight off the set ofFargo. But she was right about the heat. It was hotter than the subway platform at 77th Street during a July heat wave. It was hotter than a stage in the literal desert at Coachella. It was hotter than the rage boiling in my jet-black soul.
I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately.
Not exactly, but it was a nice idea. In my case it was more that I had come to the woods because I wanted to finish my fucking album.
No, I had come to the woods because I wanted tostartmy fucking album.
There was also the part where I had nowhere else to go.
Well, that wasn’t true. My decade-plus in the band I’d just burned to the ground had made me plenty of money. I could hole up wherever I wanted to work on the revenge album. But like Thoreau, I was in search of the peace and solitude I hoped nature would provide. When the offer landed in my inbox last week, it had occurred to me that I hadn’t been in actual nature for years. I hadn’t even really been outside that much, except onstage at outdoor shows, on hotel balconies, or getting into and out of cars, for a year.
So it was likely that I was romanticizing the whole experience. I’d forgotten, or maybe I’d never known, that when you were in the woods, you were not alone. You were, it turned out, accompanied by approximately a million tiny mosquitoes and, in this case, one life-size mosquito wearing a T-shirt that read “I Minnesota.”
I had a feeling that despite the cheery shirt, the Mosquito was almost as grumpy as I was.
Except that wasn’t true. She’d been sweet as all get-out to our driver, chatting with her the whole drive from the airport to camp. And when she hopped out of the van, she closed her eyes, sighed, took a deep breath in—she didn’t seem to notice or care that the air was as thick as in any mosh pit—and said, “I’m so happy to be here.”
It seemed to just be me the Mosquito didn’t like. Which… fair enough. I was no picnic at the best of times, and this was not the best of times.
She gathered her hair into a ponytail and fanned the backof her neck. I sympathized. I had long hair, too, and it was a sweaty mess in this heat. Maybe instead of the Mosquito, I should call her Cotton Candy, because that was what color her hair was. Come to think of it, her eyes, too. Her pale-blond hair had pastel-pink tips, and her big eyes were light blue. She was an entire carnival, and that was just from the neck up.
“Hello and welcome! My late additions to Wild Arts! I’m so glad you’re here!” A tall older woman with long white braids strode toward us. I slapped a mosquito as it sank a tiny, poison-tipped ice pick into my neck.
“This is the worst time of night for insects, just as darkness falls.” The woman reached into a fold of the… garment she was wearing and produced a bottle of bug repellant and handed it to me. “You must be Teddy. We’re delighted to have you with us. I’m Marion Kuhn.”
I was probably supposed to know who she was, but honestly, when I’d skimmed the proposal from Wild Arts a week ago, all I’d retained was the fact that it came with a cabin on a lake for the summer in exchange for some “artist in residence” duties I fully intended to phone in. It had been the right opportunity at the right time—a life raft when I was drowning—and I’d signed on without even talking to my manager.
If he was even my manager anymore. I hadn’t spoken to Brady since the last week of the tour. If Concrete Temple was no more, if it had splintered into individual shards, did those individual shards still have a management contract?
Forget management contracts. What I needed was arecordcontract. Because I intended to write a shitload of songs here in Mosquitoland.
“And you’re Gretchen Miller!” Marion exclaimed, turning to the cotton candy mosquito. Oh, wait, I had the perfect namefor her: the Sugarplum Fairy. It encompassed her sickly sweetnessandher annoying buzzing. If cotton candy and a mosquito had a baby, it would be the Sugarplum Fairy, would it not?
“Thank you for stepping in,” Marion enthused. “You’re really saving my bacon.”
