Stripes was known as something of a guilty pleasure, a little patch of down-home heartland kitsch complete with friendly, gorgeous waitresses, loud Southern rock on the jukebox, and cheap domestic beer on tap.
In the last remaining block Noah had been holding out hope that the rally, or whatever it turned out to be, would be sparsely attended and quiet enough to allow him to corner this Ross woman for a quality conversation. The odds of a low turnout seemed pretty good. After all, how many right-wing nutcases could possibly live in this enlightened city, and how many among them would knuckle-drag themselves out of their subbasement bunkers for a club meeting on a chilly, rainy Friday night?
The depressing answer to that question, he saw as he rounded the final turn, was absolutely
all
of them.
CHAPTER 8
From the corner of Hudson and West Broadway, Noah could see the overflow crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk. The place was packed wall to wall; light from inside the tavern was dimmed by the press of a standing-room-only audience lined around the interior windows.
Just keep on walking
—this sage advice piped in from his rational side—
write off this whole wretched night, and get home to that nice, hot Jacuzzi.
Maybe a wiser young man would have listened, cut his losses, and punted, but he felt a stubborn commitment that trumped any thoughts of turning back. To stop now would mean the miserable trip had all been for nothing.
Noah checked his look in a darkened shop window, ran a rake of fingertips through his hair until it looked somewhat presentable, straightened his dirty, wet clothing, and crossed the street to wade into the rowdy sea of redneck humanity.
Live music from inside was filtering out through the buzz of the crowd. There were so many people it was impossible to keep to a straight line as he walked. The diversity of the gathering was another surprise; there seemed to be no clear exclusions based on race, or class, or anyof the other traditional media-fed American cultural divides. It was a total cross section, a mix of everyone—three-piece suits rubbing elbows with T-shirts and sweat pants, yuppies chatting with hippies, black and white, young and old, a cowboy hat here, a six-hundred-dollar haircut there—all talking together, energetically agreeing and disagreeing as he moved through them. In the press, these sorts of meetings were typically depicted as the exclusive haunts of old white people of limited means and even more limited intelligence. But this was everybody.
As Noah edged his way inside the door he saw the source of the music, a lone guitarist on a makeshift elevated stage. His appearance didn’t match up with the power of his voice—on the street you’d never notice him, just another skinny little guy with bad skin and a three-day stubble—but he was owning that stage like a rock star. He was in the middle of a 1960s-era grassroots folk song, singing and playing with a quiet intensity that let every note and phrase say just what it had been written to say.
At the turn of the chorus the musician pointed to the audience, lowered his lips to the harmonica harnessed around his neck, and played on with a rousing, plaintive energy as the people raised their voices and sang along.
This music and the mood it was creating, it was a smart PR move if they could make it work. If their enemies were trying to paint them as a bunch of pasty-white NASCAR-watching, gun-toting, pickup-driving reactionaries with racist and violent tendencies, what better ploy could these people make than to subtly invoke the peace-loving spirits of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi? If nothing else it would drive their critics on the left right up the wall.
Noah ducked a passing tray of Budweisers and was jostled from behind as he stepped back to let the server squeeze by. He turned to see whom he’d run into, and there, standing before him, was Molly Ross.
The first thing he noticed was that she’d
In the last remaining block Noah had been holding out hope that the rally, or whatever it turned out to be, would be sparsely attended and quiet enough to allow him to corner this Ross woman for a quality conversation. The odds of a low turnout seemed pretty good. After all, how many right-wing nutcases could possibly live in this enlightened city, and how many among them would knuckle-drag themselves out of their subbasement bunkers for a club meeting on a chilly, rainy Friday night?
The depressing answer to that question, he saw as he rounded the final turn, was absolutely
all
of them.
CHAPTER 8
From the corner of Hudson and West Broadway, Noah could see the overflow crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk. The place was packed wall to wall; light from inside the tavern was dimmed by the press of a standing-room-only audience lined around the interior windows.
Just keep on walking
—this sage advice piped in from his rational side—
write off this whole wretched night, and get home to that nice, hot Jacuzzi.
Maybe a wiser young man would have listened, cut his losses, and punted, but he felt a stubborn commitment that trumped any thoughts of turning back. To stop now would mean the miserable trip had all been for nothing.
Noah checked his look in a darkened shop window, ran a rake of fingertips through his hair until it looked somewhat presentable, straightened his dirty, wet clothing, and crossed the street to wade into the rowdy sea of redneck humanity.
Live music from inside was filtering out through the buzz of the crowd. There were so many people it was impossible to keep to a straight line as he walked. The diversity of the gathering was another surprise; there seemed to be no clear exclusions based on race, or class, or anyof the other traditional media-fed American cultural divides. It was a total cross section, a mix of everyone—three-piece suits rubbing elbows with T-shirts and sweat pants, yuppies chatting with hippies, black and white, young and old, a cowboy hat here, a six-hundred-dollar haircut there—all talking together, energetically agreeing and disagreeing as he moved through them. In the press, these sorts of meetings were typically depicted as the exclusive haunts of old white people of limited means and even more limited intelligence. But this was everybody.
As Noah edged his way inside the door he saw the source of the music, a lone guitarist on a makeshift elevated stage. His appearance didn’t match up with the power of his voice—on the street you’d never notice him, just another skinny little guy with bad skin and a three-day stubble—but he was owning that stage like a rock star. He was in the middle of a 1960s-era grassroots folk song, singing and playing with a quiet intensity that let every note and phrase say just what it had been written to say.
At the turn of the chorus the musician pointed to the audience, lowered his lips to the harmonica harnessed around his neck, and played on with a rousing, plaintive energy as the people raised their voices and sang along.
This music and the mood it was creating, it was a smart PR move if they could make it work. If their enemies were trying to paint them as a bunch of pasty-white NASCAR-watching, gun-toting, pickup-driving reactionaries with racist and violent tendencies, what better ploy could these people make than to subtly invoke the peace-loving spirits of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi? If nothing else it would drive their critics on the left right up the wall.
Noah ducked a passing tray of Budweisers and was jostled from behind as he stepped back to let the server squeeze by. He turned to see whom he’d run into, and there, standing before him, was Molly Ross.
The first thing he noticed was that she’d
Similar Books
