AFRICAN MASKS

I got off stage after belting the blues and Fingers handed me a note. He’s a regular at

the Cantab Lounge, the celebrated local dive bar in Central Square, Cambridge, that

hosts an open jam session on Sunday nights –and he has a few less fingers than the rest

of us. The note said: “You did a great song/I think you did great/all of us/You and

yours/We did appreciate/Keep your pretty voice/If we want to hear you sing again you

shall be our choice.”

Signed,

Fingers

It was sweet, a sweet moment in a room smelling faintly of beer and Pinesoll, lit with

Christmas lights and the baseball game. All of a sudden, a millennial in the crowd

quickly videotaped the notebook page, capturing Fingers’ slurred benevolent writing,

and my face. The whole incident was broadcast into the virtual reality stream. Famous

for a minute, I guessed. Two vodkas under my belt and beginning to melt into

melancholy, I fold Fingers’ note, and stick it into my pocket and leave. The white-

haired over-weight bouncer with his thick black glasses wishes me well. “Anytime, you

come back anytime.”

Not the satisfied singer, all aglitter with applause, I walked quickly past the

businessman who I’d craftily directed to give the bandleader a five spot to let me sing.

He’d tried to pick me up but I told him I was involved with someone and had to wake

up early the next day. Billie Holiday’s gleaming white magnolia, her sassy smooth

delivery of one of her signature tunes, “Fine and Mellow” – was any of that in the

version which I’d just performed? I wondered as he faded…a figure in a navy suit and
yellow tie leaning against the 7-11, clutching himself in the cold. I proceeded on, past

the big granite post office, and the Medieval looking Episcopal church down Mass Ave.

And took a cab to your room. Your Caribbean blue room enclosed with the night and

to those African masks you hung up all around, sagacious and primitive and sacred—a

tribe of shamanic masks suspended in judgment, displaced from their culture,

juxtaposed with the flag of Oklahoma which is your home state and is light blue like

your eyes

“Lola,” you said, rolling out of bed. “Are you all right?” “My God, it’s like 2 am or

something.’.

“Hey Blondie, I’m here,” I announce, buzzed and sad. I wanted to prowl against your

flat chest in those whole cotton pajamas you sleep in. I wanted a hot desert in a single

bed, just for a few hours, against the cold glow of performance. I wanted those masks

from Ghana to peer into my soul with their painted eye-slits and wooden cheekbone

angles. To chant or shout or murmur--something.

You held me, still half-asleep, the masks enacting a ceremonial madness to my reverie.

But I couldn’t fall asleep. Did you love me then? Or was I taken in like an exotic

refugee? You said, “Just don’t make a habit of this, Lo. As the moon shone through the

uncurtained window, glinting its white beams, I dreamed about Billie Holiday singing

“All of Me” while the Masks grimaced and everyone by the bar at the Cantab danced in

front of the cash register with the tacky black velvet paintings behind—of a caged

leopard and a Rubenesque red-haired woman lounging.

When he spoke to me, Fingers in a polyester red suit had made coded gestures like one of the
dwarves in David Lynch’s original “Twin Peaks” TV series. If only I could have figured out
what the signals meant. Now I watch “Black Mirror” on Netflix, a creepy drama like “The
Twilight Zone” of technology gone awry. Still content to be taken in like a stray, I finally fell
asleep next to you. At dawn I woke with a mild headache and marveled at your flaxen hair.