(Hope, Arkansas, 6-28-05)

“Adam,” Repha snapped, “Where are you!” 

I had the cell phone pinched between my cheek and shoulder as I drove.  The night was lit by orange fluorescent streetlights.  “I think I’m lost in your neighborhood.”

“I’ve been waiting for hours!” 

“Your directions sent me to the wrong house.  Did you mean right when you wrote left’”

“I don’t know where you are!”  Then she sighed.  “It’s late.  I’m tired.” 

“Should I look for anything outside your home?”

“Adam!  It’s nighttime.  Get real!”

Just then my Hyundai bottomed out in a giant pothole, and my blood curdled at the scraping sound of its underside against the pavement.  “Repha, you told me to go left instead of right on Washington Street!  I wrote it down and remember it clearly.  That’s how I ended up in another neighborhood, because of your directions!”  I was only going about fifteen miles per hour, and a group of teenagers on bicycles suddenly engulfed my car like a school of fish, peering into the windows from beneath their baseball caps before gliding off into the distance.  “I’ve been circling around, pulling into people’s driveways, now I just up messed my new car!”  

“It’s okay,” Repha said, calmer now. “We’re almost there.”  And with some amended directions she directed me to her house.  She came bustling out from under her carport, arms outstretched for a conciliatory hug.  We rocked back and forth, my arms buried in her long gray hair streaked with bright colors.  She was short and thin, and if I squeezed too hard it seemed she might break into a hundred pieces. 

Repha gave me a tour of the house; a kitchen stacked with mystery jars and books, hallways lined with handmade masks of faces screaming or laughing or crying.  She showed me to where I would sleep that night, behind a door marked DO NOT DISTURB!! ARTIST AT WORK.

This part of the house had its own bathroom and a shower splashed with paints, as if a Phoenix had been blasted with a shotgun across the shower wall. 

Repha picked up a squeegee.  “This is your squeegee.  The back of the tub runs downhill,” she pointed away from the drain, “So you have to squeegee the water up into the drain yourself.  Enjoy!”

Back in the kitchen, she revealed an array of beer-making equipment and offered me one of her own brews from the fridge.  “Will you have one, too?” I asked.

“Oh honey, I’m way ahead of you.”  

She poured us both a glass.  I thanked her for her hospitality. 

“For my ‘hospitality’…” she mocked.  “You know, when I came down here from Kansas I was like, ‘Everybody is just so nice!’”  She batted her eyelashes.

“Do you still feel that way?”

“To an extent.”  She shook her head and searched for words.  ”Southern Ladies are passive aggressive…in the extreme.”  I waited.  “And not a lot makes sense down here in Arkansas.  You have to remember, Adam, you’re deep in the Bible Belt.  We’re a dry county.  You have to drive way out of town to buy alcohol.  Even commercial airplanes flying over us have to stop serving alcohol to their passengers.”  I gave her a dubious look.  ”No, I’m serious.  And if you’re a woman, you can’t wear slacks to church, only dresses and skirts.”  She laughed.  “Some girlfriends and I were once playing African drums in a church and they told us we couldn’t wear slacks.  So imagine,” she spread her legs and squatted, “there we are, skirts on, with huge drums shoved up between our thighs, but that’s how they wanted it, just as long was we weren’t wearing pants!”

——

(6-29-05, after the Hope, Arkansas house concert)

An old woman elbowed her way through the crowd and asked me, “Did John Adams also write Nixon in China?”  [I’d just played Adam’s China Gates as my encore.]

“Yes!” I answered, thrilled but also a little taken aback.

She nodded her head.  “I knew it.’”

“So where’d you hear Nixon in China?”

Her eyes flashed with indignation and she took a little step back, sizing me up.  “On the radio!” she spat.