Down And Dirty

"Like MacArthur?" said Bagabond.

"More like Sergeant Preston of the Mounties," said Cordelia.

Sunday

"So who are you calling a chickie?" said Cordelia, voice colder than the ocean off Jones Beach.

"What I be sayin'," said the Holiday I

"You want to know how early I had to get up to catch a train out here?" Cordelia demanded. "Do you know how long I waited for a cab at the New Brunswick station?"

The clerk's easy smile started to fray at the lips. "Sorry."

"I'm not a goddamned groupie!" Cordelia slapped an expensively embossed business card down on the counter. "I'm trying to make Holley a star."

"Already was." The clerk picked up the card and examined it. Below Cordelia's name it read Associate Producer.' The escalated job title had been in lieu of a raise. "No shit? You work with GF and G, the folks what do the Robert Townsend show an' all that Spike Lee stuff?" He sounded halfway impressed.

"No shit," said Cordelia. She tried smiling. "Honest."

"And you're go

"Go

"O-kay," said the clerk, gri

"So?"

With a tone of voice that suggested "Don't you know nothin'?" the clerk said, "The main roads leadin' out of Lubbock. The highway to Nashville."

"Oh," said Cordelia.

Buddy Holley had been asleep when Cordelia knocked on the door of room 8420 at 9:25. That had been obvious when he opened the door. His gray-streaked black hair was in disarray. His glasses were slightly askew as he peered out into the hallway.

"It's me, Cordelia Chaisson. Remember? From last night?"

"Um, right." Holley seemed to gather himself. "Can I help you?"

"I'm here to take you to breakfast. I need to talk with you. It's quite important."

Buddy Holley shook his head bemusedly. "Are you the irresistible force? Or the immovable object?"

Cordelia shrugged.

"Give me ten," said Holley. "I'll meet you down in the lobby."

"Promise?" said Cordelia.

Holley smiled slightly, nodded, and shut the door.

Buddy Holley came to the breakfast table in crisp denim jeans, a flowered western shirt, and a brown corduroy jacket. He looked somewhat the worse for wear, but comfortable.

He seated himself and said,

"You go

"Tea for me," he said. "Herbal. I brought my own. The tea selection in the kitchen is pretty shabby."

The waitress came and took their order.

"Around your neck," said Holley, pointing with his glance. "That a fetish? I saw it last night, but I was preoccupied." Cordelia unhooked the clasp and passed the fetish over. The tiny silver alligator and the fossil tooth were bound to the delicate oval of sandstone with a tough strand of dried gut. Holley turned the object over and over, examining it closely. "Doesn't look American southwest-Polynesian? Australia, maybe?"

"Pretty good," said Cordelia. "Aboriginal."

"What tribe? I know the Aranda pretty well, even the Wikmunkan and the Murngin, but this just ain't familiar."

"It was made by a young urban aborigine," said Cordelia. She hesitated a moment. It both excited and hurt her to think of Wyungare. And how, she wondered, was the central Australian revolution, such as it was, going? She'd been too busy with the benefit to watch much news. "He gave it to me as a going-away gift."

"Let me guess," said Holley. "The sandstone's from Uluru?" Cordelia nodded. Uluru, true name of what the Europeans called Ayers Rock. "And the reptile's your totem, of course." He held the object up to the light before passing it back over. "There's considerable power here. Not just a token."

She refastened the chain. "How do you know?"

He gri

Cordelia felt puzzled. "Okay."

"Ever since things went to hell-since they fell apart around 1972," he said hesitantly, " I been lookin' around." He contemplatively sipped his tea.

"For what?" Cordelia finally said.

"For whatever, for anything that meant something. I was just-searching."

Cordelia thought for a moment. "Spirituality?"

Holley nodded vehemently. "Absolutely. The limos were gone, the homes, the private jet and the high living, the-"

He stopped in midsentence. "All gone. There had to be something else besides hitting the bottle and the bottom."

"And you've found it?"

"I'm still huntin'." He met her gaze and smiled. "Lotta years and a lotta miles. You know something? I'm a lot more popular in Africa and the rest of the world than I am here. Back in '75 my agent gave me a last chance and booked me into this crazy pan-African tour. Things fell apart-well, I fell part. I really got screwed up after I backed out of a gig in Jo'burg. Somehow I stole a Land-Rover and ended up drinkin' two fifths of Jim Beam 'way out in the bush. You know how alcohol poisonin' works? Shoot, I was well on my way."

Cordelia stared at him, held entranced by the flat, West Texas twang. The man was a storyteller.

"Bushmen found me. Tribesmen from out of the Kalahari. First thing I knew was a! Kung shaman leanin' down over me and lettin' out the most ungodly screams you ever heard. Later I found out he was taking the sickness into himself and then gettin' shed of it into the air." Holley contemplatively touched the pad of his thumb to his incisors. "That was the begi

"And since?" said Cordelia.

"I keep lookin'. I search everywhere. When I played a string of bars in the Dakotas and the Midwest I learned about Rolling Thunder and the generations of Black Elk. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know," His voice took on a dreamy quality. "When I was with the Lakota, I cried for a vision. The shaman took me through the inipi ceremony and sent me up the hill to receive the wakan, the holy beings." Holley smiled ruefully. "The Thunder Beings came, but that was about all. I got wet and cold." He shrugged. "So it goes."

"You keep searching," said Cordelia.

"I do that," said Holley. "I learn. I been off booze since South Africa. No more drugs either. As for what I'm learnin', it ain't easy to work with a hardshell Baptist growin' up, but that's what I've tried to do."

It occurred to Cordelia that, for all he'd been saying, Buddy Holley still seemed very anchored in the physical universe. She didn't have the same sense of ethereal dissociation that she'd gotten from spiritually transformed rock stars such as Cat Stevens or Richie Furay. She nibbled a bite from her neglected English muffin. "Most of what I know about this, I learned from my aboriginal friend, but I've thought about it. Sometimes, in my job, I wonder whether rock stars, pop singers, entertainers in the public eye in America, are sort of the contemporary equivalent of shamans."

Holley nodded seriously. "Men and women of power. Absolutely."

"They have the magic."

Buddy Holley laughed. "Fortunately the ones who believe they do, usually have nothing. And the ones who truly possess the power, don't consciously know it."

Cordelia finished her muffin. "The performers at the benefit concert next Saturday all have the power." Holley looked wary. "I'm changing the subject," Cordelia said lightly.

"I don't think things have changed since last night. You want me to play all my old standards. I just can't do that."

"Is this-" Cordelia hunted for words. "Is this a crisis of confidence?"

"That's probably part of it."

"Same thing happened with C.C. Ryder," said Cordelia. "But she changed her mind. She's go