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“No one controls my mind,” he said seriously. “Only a dumb man confuses his heart with his mind. My heart is yours, but the mind stays.”
Sure most of everything downtown was already closed, Dame and I stopped at a bar along the road. There weren’t many cars outside and a few stray goats and chickens played in the street, but we could hear the music from the outside and saw a few people shuffling in and out.
“Does this look like a good place?” I asked Dame.
“Sure,” he said, opening my door. “As long as they have wine and music, I’m good.”
“I bet.” I grinned at him as we crossed the street.
“Hold up,” Dame said. “You go on inside. I’m going to get something out of the trunk.”
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’ll be right in.”
The Singer
June 23, 2008
Amsterdam
“By the time that man came and sat at our table,” I said to Pete and Kweku, who were sitting beside me at a bar in the airport in Amsterdam, “Dame and I were good and drunk. We were laughing about something and I remember that Dame’s hand was on my leg underneath the table.”
“Were there many people there?” Pete asked, seemingly setting up the scene in his mind.
“A handful. Ten. Twenty,” I answered. “We were having so much fun, I wasn’t paying attention. Men were coming in and out. I could tell the man knew a lot of them by how the others looked on, but I wasn’t counting. It’s funny the things you don’t remember after situations like this.”
“Well, the conversation didn’t start off badly, did it?” Kweku asked, taking a sip of his Heineken.
“No.” I swiveled my stool around and looked at the soloist, who was sitting at the piano, singing an old Liza Minnelli show tune. The man was obviously Dutch and his voice needed a lot of work to be near Minnelli’s. “He kept us laughing. Greeted us like tourists. Asked what hotel we were staying at. Made some suggestions of places we should go visit. He said we looked nice together. Asked how much older Dame was.”
“He was selling himself on you,” Pete declared.
“He didn’t need to. We’d already made him a friend. It wasn’t until the gun came out that I even imagined anything else. The jubilant feeling from the alcohol went fast. I don’t think I even heard what he said to us—something about the watch ... and us not leaving. I wanted to look at Dame, but I was too scared. I just kept my eyes on the gun and then from the corner of my eye I saw Dame jump up. Almost on instinct, I did, too. And so did the man. And then, there was a bang. Everything went still. I looked to see if the gun was still on the table. It was. The man fell to the floor and I went over. I knew he was dead.”
I was crying when I started singing my song in the bar in Amsterdam. It was an accidental crowd of tourists and workers. Some were just biding their time and others looked like this was their regular hangout. But I didn’t care. I’d grown tired of talking or explaining. I wanted to sing. To make people feel what I was feeling. The soloist seemed surprised when I walked over and asked if I could sing. But I supposed he saw the pain in my eyes and he quickly got up and handed me the microphone and after keying a few notes, the final melody to “Dying” was born. I sang it through without the pad and then even added a few verses between the chorus. It was the only way I could sum up how I was feeling, escaping the sadness that engulfed me like flood water.
We walked back to our gate in silence. Kweku held my hand and Pete hung his head low. I wasn’t crying anymore, but the reliving, the telling, had drained me.
“You can’t tell a man,” Pete said when we got back to our seats. Kweku and I looked at him quietly, waiting for him to finish his statement. “That’s it,” he added. “You can’t tell a man.”
“Tell him what?” I asked.
“There’s no ‘what’ to it. It’s anything. Everything. You just can’t tell. When he’s got his mind made up about a thing, you can’t tell him. Not a real man, anyway,” he said. “Now, you’re upset that this happened. And I understand. A life was lost there. But I’ll say this: how do you know for sure that the life that could’ve been lost wasn’t your own?”
“I guess I don’t,” I said.
“You don’t. But can you imagine what that man with you was thinking when all this was going on? Because I’ll tell you now, if he’s a country boy, he knew before that gun came out where the story was going. He knew how many men were in that room and what that man intended to do to you.” Pete nodded with Kweku. “See, when you were just figuring it out when the gun came out, for a real man, that was working time. You can’t ever tell what was in his mind other than that he had to protect you. And you’d better be glad he did. It only shows that he loves you probably more than he loves himself. His heart was working on his mind right there. He had only one shot to get that right at that table. If he missed, if there was another gun in the room, it was coming at him next. That wasn’t no Applebee’s stickup. That was a showdown. Make of it what you want. But remember, you can’t tell a man. Not a real one.”
With Pete’s words in my ears, I tried to play that scene in the bar over and over in my head through the night on that plane. I couldn’t sleep; I couldn’t rest. I just kept trying to see in my memory how Dame might have known what was happening. Where he’d prepared himself. But I couldn’t. My eyes were on the stranger, on the wine, on Dame’s hand on my leg. I wasn’t looking for anything but a good time.
“So what do you think about what he said ... about Dame and not judging him?” I said to Kweku after turning to see that Pete was asleep.
“He had his points, you know? But then, I guess the only people who can say how you should or could feel are the people who were there.”
“I guess I’ll never know, then,” I said.
&nbs
