Alec Mouhibian

Baby Please Don’t Go (Published in Liberty Magazine as “Love Song”)

“Was it he, or she, reaching out arms and trying to hold or to be held, and clasping nothing but empty air?” – Ovid, Metamorphoses

He saw a lot of strange things on tour. He’d seen a happy clown. He’d even seen a sad widow. Bobby Lipp looked out from the stage over the casino as the thunderous applause from six people sitting below him died down.

They sat at tables on the dance floor at the west end of Mohican Valley Resort and Casino. Stood up by lady luck. Waiting on openings in the poker room. Or, in the case of one fellow in a suit and tie, there exclusively for the music.

Either way, they were listening to Bobby Lipp’s second afternoon set and none of them could move, not even for a sandwich. Bobby Lipp looked out over them all before putting his glass back on the stool, adjusting his hat, and tightening his strings, just as he did after every song. Electric bells from the slot machines continued as his accompaniment. DING DING DING DING DING DING DING…he loved this gig!

After the set the man in the suit and tie approached him.

“I loved what you played. What kind of music is it?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby says.

“I’m from a record label,” the man continues.

“Look, there’s a bear!” Bobby says, and as the man turns to look he runs away.

It happens every time. The man isn’t always wearing a suit and tie. Sometimes there is no tie and the shirt is unbuttoned enough to reveal a chain around his neck that reads Friends Don’t Let Friends Kiss. Sometimes there is a watch and sometimes there is no watch. Sometimes he’s from a record label and sometimes from a radio station. But there’s always that man and he always approaches Bobby Lipp. Sometimes it’s a woman.

Most people burn their bridges by forgetting to put out a fire or carelessly discarding a still-lit cigarette. Bobby did it the old-fashioned way. He used a torch.

Because he didn’t like bridges. Wings were more his style. So he never recorded a song and had the most peculiar touring schedule of any musician this side of Gabriel. No theatres, no music festivals, no stadiums, no concert halls. Bowling alleys and bordellos were more his style, though often in the latter his gigs were cut short. Sandwich vendors don’t always care for competition.

Bobby liked places where his sound had to compete, where he could play without being promoted. “Never let the same dog fuck you twice,” his father once told him, but Bobby had never scored ribbons for his listening skills, and so through an odd interpretation—odder even than his take on “It Had To Be You”—he was left with the desire never to play more than one gig at any venue, which could not be stitched with his desire to play every day of the year. Wayne Newton, he heard, had a one in 13,000 chance of singing to the same audience member. Bobby decided to do his multiples at the casino, performing at different hours on the different dates (the management, glad to have him, didn’t mind), just to be safe. Of all venues, the casino was his favorite.

You must remember Bobby Lipp. He’s “that guy I heard,” “this singer I once saw.” If you haven’t heard him one of your friends has, the one who plays at the bowling alley or works in the bordello or mourns at Mohican Valley, and told you about it. Told you about the street singer whose voice transcended the sirens. Told you about the performer at the car dealership sale who hit a note that held everyone’s breath, turned every customer’s face toward the salesman’s in a stare of deep recognition.

“Do you have any CDs?” the lady with the bucket of coins asks him.

“No,” he says.

“Why not?” she asks. “Your songs are lovely.”

“I never sing a song the same way twice. And I don’t want to be reminded of how I sang it once.”

“That’s interesting. Tell me, do you perform at weddings? My daughter is getting married in July…”

As she speaks he nods a few times, gently raising his hand to the side of her neck and pinching it, to make her faint. A trick he learned in the military.

Not that Bobby Lipp had any problem performing at weddings. They were usually where he felt most needed. A wedding was the only place he could be ironic by singing love songs. No, his problem was repeat customers—he wished never to play to them, at least not while being aware of the fact. Since the lady would be present at her daughter’s wedding, Bobby could not be. Simple logical reasoning.

You might say that Bobby Lipp was afraid of commitment. You might even call him detached, though you’d have to explain how so many perfect strangers found in his unfamiliar sound such a welcome respite from the ignorance of intimacy. Just don’t think he’s afraid of people. That’s not it at all. He couldn’t do without meeting people, even if once was enough.

Bobby’s high school band conductor saw him for the first time in years at the flower trade show gig. The look on Mr. Ogden’s face, now that was something! Seeing his once-underachieving lugubrious long note wielding sublime powers in an act of literal overachievement—imagine how such a sight would craft a man’s face! It hasn’t reverted since. So what if his students are none the better for it?

Bobby remembered the advice Mr. Ogden used to give and wondered if he still gave it. “Do things you hate when you’re young to provide the basis for future art.” Mr. Ogden could only cite anecdotal evidence in support of this advice. Back in the day, his ephemeral rock group took a quick trip to the charts with a song he wrote called “Paper Cut,” inspired by an injury he got from playing Canasta with his grandmother.

Encounters with artistic types lasted the longest in Bobby’s memory. Bozo, the stand-up comedian dressed up as a clown (or was it the other way around?), at the prison gig. Bozo landed in the pen on conspiracy charges, due to an unfortunate set of circumstances combined with “a comedian’s worst nightmare: telling a joke so unfunny that it’s proven in court to be an expression of intent,” he told Bobby.

The painter couple, at the art show. She was on a Campbell’s Soup diet. He had painted a portrait of her. “It gets thinner and thinner as she diets, while she remains fat forever,” he told Bobby with a wink.

The novelist, at the flea market. Her serious novel sold widely and won a literary award. The novel’s final third is identical to its first third, which is too boring to remember yet still evokes some vague recognition, making people feel she’s reading their minds. The method was a metaphor of beginnings being the same as ends, or some such. A miserable woman at the time. “I turned to writing popular fiction that sells terribly and now I’m happier than ever,” she told Bobby Lipp.

And Bobby remembered. He didn’t listen, really—Bobby wasn’t much of a listener. But he remembered. Whens, whats, hows eluded his attention; essences rarely did. He’d get the song of a story, and often sing it.

One particular song he sang whenever he noticed an artist in the audience. Naturally his rendition varied a little each time, but the song’s melody always comprised all tempos. One could start listening at a certain point and mistake it for a torch ballad, or a jump-rocker, or anything in between. Lyrically, it’s a patchwork of stories he remembered from tour.

The song’s about Orphy and Eura, the immaculate musician and his dearly beloved. Orphy’s music fell in the transanimate soul genre—leaving as much of an impression on rocks, rivers and trees as on people. Nature was his groupie. With only a voice and a banjo on his knee, he created a sound that steered ships and quelled quarrels. Whether a horn section would’ve made him sound even better is still fiercely debated among music scholars.

One day the young couple took a lover’s walk, when Eura wandered ahead and stepped on an animal. If it’d been a snake it ‘ve bit her. It was a snake and it did bite her, fatally, leaving Orphy mad with grief and his music accented with a sorrow it never before spoke. He couldn’t live without Eura. He followed her spirit to the far reaches of the underworld, banjo on knee, singing iron tears out of the subterranean gods, pleading to allow dear Eura another chance at life. None could deny his music. They let her go. They let her follow him back to earth, under the condition that he never turn his head to look at her until they are both in the light. Along the uneasy path he worried for Eura’s safety. Finally crossing the tricky threshold he turned back to take her in his hands, but it was too soon, for she had yet to emerge from the darkness, from the path of the underworld, and thus vanished with a faint cry of “Farewell.”

That was too much for poor Orphy. He shortly sung himself to death, whereupon he rejoined Eura in harmony and serenaded her ever after.

Here Bobby goes into an instrumental riff and the audience thinks the song is about to end. But Bobby sneaks in one last verse. Addressed to “whom it may concern,” the verse reveals that Eura knew exactly where she was stepping when her foot fell on that venomous snake, and did it as purposefully as she stalled in the darkness waiting for Orphy to turn around and lose her again. The purpose? Giving his music that extra dimension, that accent, the divine gravity that made it truly thorough.

“Beautiful,” wrote the painter couple.

“Wow,” laughed the novelist.

“Hahahaha,” said the clown.

Forget the happy artists’ reactions. What about the sad ones? What about the tall fellow who impersonates a midget for a living? What about the priest who sleeps on the couch because his wife is jealous of God? They loved it just as well.

On this night at Mohican Valley, when Bobby completed the song, things started going awry. Lights went off and on. More slots were out of order than usual. Roulette wheels started spinning ferociously. A ball bounced right off one of them into an old spinster’s eye. Another one spun clear off the table. Electric bells that sounded like natural jingles when accompanying Bobby were sounding electric again. Random gusts of screams now mixed with the falsetto coming out of Elvis nickel machines as the Wheel of Fortune progressive jackpot rose faster and faster and faster and faster until the stage trembled and Bobby jerked his head and in the corner of his vision—eyes losing steadiness, limbs losing strength, throat losing peace—saw what was hiding in the shadows unknown to him at so many of his gigs. He saw his wife.

That’s right, he saw me. He saw me and ran away again. I didn’t want him to see me. All this time I’ve followed him on tour and hid out of sight. So be it if that’s what it takes. You know, it’s not like this was part of my plan. How should I have suspected that he’d try to disappear and never set foot in a recording studio and tell whoever asked that he got his gift for music from his mother? Little does he know. Little do I want him to know, if it ever means he’ll stop playing. Let him hate me.

Of course they would never understand, and I’m fine with that too. They say I destroyed him. They think I’m one of those merciless man-eating bitches who deserves to turn into a tree. They think I was motivated by malice and wine to do those terrible things to Bobby. Fools. They can burn in hell.

At least you know the truth. And you’ll understand why I’m going to keep on following him. This wasn’t part of my plan. I knew he’d run away but never thought he’d try to hide. No, I expected to listen to his albums in the comfort of my own home and catch him whenever he headlined at the amphitheatre, where the crowds would disguise me. I have the right to witness the fruits of my creation, don’t I? At least once a week? Who does he think he is to deny me that?

Goddammit, I’m the one who got him pregnant.