Suddenly I hear my guitar singing
and so I start singing along
and then somewhere in my chest
all the noise just gets crushed by
the song... Ani DiFranco, “Imagine That”
The tickets have seat and row
assignments, but when we get inside,
it is standing room only,
and we are pressed, body against body,
to get close to the stage. I stand back
six heads deep from the microphone
and think this, this is good
enough and wait for another
hour in a sea of bobbing lesbians
who pride their spiky hair and unnatural
piercing and seem excited to be
close enough to other females to brush
their asses or touch their arms under
the guise of “crowd.” But it doesn’t bother
me tonight -- me, who despises people
in general, let alone mobs of girl-on-girl
love, allow the lesbians to yank on my pigtails
and step on my toes because I get to see
Hammell on Trial. At least, he opens the show
and makes the first round of solo guitar magic
seem beautiful and grotesque as he
offers us his pulse because he thinks it
will be useful, sings a song about killing
his girlfriend’s son and then another song
about how god said “thou shall not kill,” and I
am glad that I understand the irony.
His guitar looks like the only true victim
of his homicidal tendencies: battered
and babied with what he repeatedly
calls “Berkeley Tough Love,” whatever
that is. He shakes his face like a bowl
of jello and at the end of his set, sticks
his guitar pick on the peak of his sweaty
forehead. “Give it up
for Ani,” he says, before jabbing
his guitar in the air one last time.
The lesbians cheer, and so
do I. It is another twenty
minutes of female compacting
before the main event. And I
think I’ll die from the exhaustive
heat of standing, still wearing my coat
because there isn’t even enough
space to lift my arms to take it off.
I listen to a groupie behind me tell
her cohorts about how the crowd has changed
since Ani got married -- to a man, no less --
how now straight couples have the nerve
to ruin the air of raucous, liberated women
with shaved heads and a taste for cunt. And I
almost want to turn and apologize
for the intrusion, except I am there
with my female roommate and am not
the obvious sore thumb in the audience she
is referencing. How dare the
straight people invade their bisexual
musical goddess’s inner-space! I shift
my weight and try not to laugh at her
blatant unacceptance of heterosexuals
and bounce jokes of reverse discrimination
off my brain until the lights fall
dark and the pressed body of the crowd
cheers in one breath, with one arm reaching
towards the stage as the lights come up
to reveal a hobbling Ani DiFranco, apologizing
for breaking her foot last week, and then sitting
with her guitar in her lap, playing “Back Back
Back,” one the lesbians and I can sing
along with and the true concert is underway.
I close my eyes and tongue the words
in the back of my throat, think about how
I’d used them like a one-night stand and left
a line from the song on the digital doorstep
of my would-be boyfriend, tell me boy boy boy
are you tending to your joy or are you just letting
it vanquish? And I scream those same words now
into the back of the neck of the tiny lesbian
in front of me, wondering if the simple phrase
had meant as much to him as it does
to me, but I lose sight of him
in the sweaty pulse of the crowd
gasping to the beats of a single woman
on a stage with a solitary guitar, her
hair in twisted blonde dreadlocks, her
fingers banded with black duct tape
and plastic nails that provide her with a pick
on each finger, ultimate artistic control
over her guitar. One nail breaks
and she takes a moment to bow her head
and pray towards the Mecca of Crazy
Glue, saying “It’sallgood” and winking as
the nail sticks in her thick, knotted hair.
She talks very little between songs
because she’s left with nothing new to say
since she says it all in her songs, since she hides
nothing in her lyrics. Her words are like vitamins.
Her life is as open as her sexuality, and why should
she rhapsodize between songs when she can
put her life into lyric and beat her tough fingers
against the steel flesh of her guitar? She sings
and invites us all to sing with her, smiles
with an open mouth and dilating eyes, throwing
her entire body, as restless as her mind, into
her melody, even though she can’t rise
from her chair. I take in the scene, smell the sound
of a felt song waft through the air and see
what I’ve heard for years in her captured/
recorded voice. She’s almost too honest to trust,
but I’m sucked in, and I rock with the current
of unity in the space. I feel the words, even
the ones I don’t recognize, from within my skin
and want to take up room because I can, want
to sweep the sea of the room into my pocket
to take home and swim through later when I’ve flushed
the salt from my eyes and taken the time to see
that she does, indeed, have the kind of beauty that moves
and the capacity to level me with her words. Magic
is cliché but the sentiment is not. There is an amazing grace
about this woman, this performer, this artist
who doesn’t think it’s right living for what she
can’t define. All that’s left for me is to sing
with my eyes turned up towards the smoke-infested lights
and allow myself to get lost in the sea of bobbing lesbians
in the middle of a dance floor, standing room
only, to see Ani DiFranco, live, in concert,
one woman, one chair, one guitar, one night -- god,
this could never be long enough...
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