Straws | Page 2

kiss on the
cheek. It seemed the polite thing to do.
The computer was already on. He powered up the monitor and it
blinked and showed his email program. Halfway down the screen was a
message labeled "Your cat is on the roof" from someone named Murray
Black. It read:

You will probably think me a coward for doing this in email. So I'm a
coward already. The bad news is that Sugar Hill passed on
PALOMITA. Yeah, I know. Turns out they're closing down their North
Carolina office and consolidating all the operations in Nashville. The
guy you talked to after the Local 506 show is no longer with the
company, and is in fact leaving the business entirely. (Can't say I blame
him.) This will be all over the Internet tomorrow. Jeff, I don't know
what else to do. I would love to be your manager but the sad truth at
this moment is, there is nothing here for me to manage. I don't believe
it's the record, it's just the business. I know that doesn't help a lot right
now.
*
It was the things he did remember that made him feel like he was in
free fall. He knew Palomita. It had come out on Warner's, and had won
a Grammy for Album of the Year.
He put his name into Google and came up with a home page. The site
had his photo and a list of his homemade CDs for sale. They were the
albums he knew. He clicked on the Bio link and read the three skimpy
paragraphs there.
Nothing he read matched his own memories, which were vivid and
detailed and indisputably authentic. Like his first night in LA in June of
1970, barely 20 years old and driving up into the foothills to pick out
the letters of his name in the infinite recession of lights. Opening for
Linda Ronstadt at the Troubadour in the summer of '71, retreating from
the onslaught of celebrities and kingmakers to the bar, where he met an
amiable kid from Texas named Don Henley. Then sitting on the
balcony of his Laurel Canyon apartment that December afternoon in '75,
watching the breeze stir the eucalyptus as Henley offered him the lead
guitar slot that Bernie had just vacated.
There had been the craziness at the end of the 70s that had culminated
in his hanging off the wrought iron grill of a hotel balcony by one hand,
ten floors above the Champs-Elysées, scaring himself into changing
his life. His first day back in the studio, two years sober, laying down

the first tracks for the first solo record. The day he saw Kathleen for the
first time, walking out of the surf at Laguna, August 22, 1990, orange
hair, orange one-piece suit, the sunset exploding orange behind her,
knowing that she was the one. Playing the final mix of Palomita for her
in the front room of their house in San Miguel fifteen years later, the
voices of the street kids and the smell of jacaranda floating in the
windows.
He grabbed the phone and dialed his home number. On the third ring a
man's voice answered in Spanish. Yes, this was the right number, yes,
San Miguel de Allende. No, and he was truly sorry, but he'd never
heard of a Jeff McCoy and knew no one named Kathleen.
*
The website had samples from Palomita. He was surprised by how
similar they sounded, even with him playing all the instruments himself,
to the studio versions he knew.
He pushed the chair back from the computer and looked around the
room. It had a musty odor, the smell of mold growing in the back of a
closet. The wooden floors were stained and dented, the rug worn
through in the center. He let himself, carefully and tentatively, try to
imagine what it must be like to live here.
There was a framed, autographed photo of Don Gibson on the wall, and
just as he knew the way from Wal-Mart to this room, he knew why the
photo was there. Gibson, after failing at three different record labels,
had washed up in a trailer park north of Knoxville where, in a single
afternoon, he'd written "Oh Lonesome Me" and "I Can't Stop Lovin'
You" back to back, the songs that revived his career and went on to sell
tens of millions of copies.
To cling to that dream of a Don Gibson moment, as each year the odds
grew longer, seemed a nightmare beyond endurance.
Somebody had told him once that if you could see your hands in a
dream, you could take control of it. He looked as his hands and

whispered, "I'm ready to wake up now. I'll count to three. One. Two..."
*
Jess was