Where Were You?

Letter 01

I was on the fair board. We had the hay left over from July and nobody wanted it moved twice, so it became the fence. Mrs. Fasnacht asked us for three hundred folding chairs. I asked what for. She said the last band. I said the last band could stand like everybody else. She said they could not.

We carried the chairs out of the 4-H building at seven o'clock and set them in rows. I locked the gate at ten after three in the morning. They were still playing when I left the infield. I am still not sure they had started.

Letter 02

My dad drove me down on Saturday and waited in the truck with the radio. I saw all four Kittens bands in one day and I did not know until later that it would never happen again.

The singer from Machine Gun Kitty stood at the side of the stage the whole last set with her arms folded. Somebody said the singer on stage was her sister. I bought a tape from their table. Nothing on the table cost more than five dollars. I still have the tape and I still have the stub.

Letter 03

We sold lemonade for fifty cents and ran out at four on Saturday. A man from the Wichita band came to the booth on Sunday and asked if the ice was made from city water. I said yes. He said that was fine. He paid exact change. They all paid exact change.

Letter 04

I drove Bus B for thirty-six days. Bus A was the quiet bus. Bus B was not. The lady from Atlanta ran Bus B and everybody knew it, including me, including the bus.

Four seats were taped off with names on them for the ladies from Huntsville. In thirty-six days I never once saw anybody in those seats. I saw those four at every show. I have thought about it more than I would like.

Letter 05

I was on the local crew. They put me on the tent. We set two hundred and twenty chairs in rows before the flaps opened, and a man from New Mexico walked every row and straightened four of them.

Around midnight I went in to check the generator and I sat down for a minute. I woke up at two-thirty. They were still playing the same thing. Nobody was upset with me. A woman in the next chair had a sleeping bag and offered me half.

Letter 06

You could smell the smoke from the parking lot. They had a trailer with two smokers and a stage built on the back, and they played on it, and the meat cooked the whole time.

Between songs the bass player put her bass down, opened the firebox, looked, wrote something in a notebook, and picked the bass back up. Nobody in the band waited for her. They did not have to. She was back by the count.

Letter 07

We had twenty rooms booked under Fasnacht. At one in the morning a man came to the desk and asked me the field elevation. I said I believed it was about thirty-six hundred feet. He wrote it down on the back of a key envelope and thanked me.

In the morning the bus drivers had coffee in the lobby and argued about the route through New Mexico. The bus with the quiet people left first.

Letter 08

I brought a sleeping bag because I had been at the residency the year before and I knew. There were thirty-one of us on the floor by the end. The drummer played with brushes in slow circles. I could hear it with my eyes closed. That was the point.

Letter 09

They played on a flatbed on the square at four o'clock, and a man in a pressed shirt read a briefing to the courthouse for five minutes before they started. People came out of the bank to listen.

That night at the rink we had forty-seven paid, and I sold out of pickles by nine. The lady who sang with the gold hoop earrings bought the last one. She said it was the correct amount of pickle.

Letter 10

Five men from Wichita got out of a van and the first thing they did was kneel down on my slab and knock on it. Then they stood up and nodded and carried their equipment in. I poured that slab in 1971. Nobody ever knocked on it before.

Letter 11

There were twelve of us. I know because the man from Tucson counted us out loud before they started, and then he turned around and gave his band a five-minute briefing like there were a thousand.

Later the lady from Atlanta did her whole set for the twelve of us, every word, and pointed at each one of us at least once. The drummer from Washington counted in every song at the top of her voice. I did not know it was anybody's last show. I think they did.