134. Yours Is No Disgrace

I wasn’t lying about getting up early. We had to be at the Chicago venue by like four o’clock, which meant a six hour drive, leaving at ten a.m., and actually we had to leave earlier than that so we could have time to stop and eat. The wake up call would come when it would come.

In the room, Ziggy was in bed in the dark with the TV on. The whites of his eyes looked like two little blue TVs in the darkness. I sat down on the other bed and got undressed and then sat there like I was too tired to lie down.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he said, his finger on the MUTE button.

It. I could think of so many things that “it” could be. The show, my mood, the elusive “it” of our relationship or lack of one, the fight I’d just had, yadda yadda. “I’d just as soon sleep on ‘it’,” I replied. “What’s to say?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he said, and clicked off the TV and rolled over, cocooning himself in the sheet and bedspread. I mirrored him on the other side, then of course lay there wondering what he was going to tell me, trying to guess, but too proud or too stubborn or too something to roll back over and ask him to tell me now.

Before we left in the morning, we had to sign two black and white glossies, one for the night clerk who I never did meet, and one for the manager to frame and hang in her office. Digger had brought plenty of publicity photos, he assured me. The weather was hazy but cool and self-consciousness was at an all time high as I chewed my calluses and watched the road going by and fretted about my fucking signature of all things–was it too mundane? Did it make me look like I was still a five-year-old putting his name on art projects? I hadn’t really had to sign all that many things in my life.

I did not get out a piece of paper and practice it because I knew damn well the ridicule that would ensue. No thanks.

I spent all of Indiana in a foul mood but I don’t think I missed all that much.