Pretty clipboard woman hands him his FAQ/disclaimer.
He flashes his absurdly beautiful smile at her.
She takes off all her clothes.
I’m kidding.
She doesn’t do that.
But she wants to.
“X,” I call out to him so she knows he’s actually meeting someone here.
Clipboard lady gets everyone’s attention and shepherds us all outside. The bus is an open-air double-decker behemoth festooned with pictures of famous landmarks and grainy photos of surprised, not-entirely-pleased-looking celebrities.
“Upper or lower deck?” X asks.
I choose upper. It’s a nice day and just overcast enough that we won’t bake in the sun.
“How many of these tours have you been on?” he asks as we climb the stairs.
“None,” I say.
“Really?”
“I’m from here,” I remind him.
“All the more reason,” he says.
The first half of the tour is, to my surprise, pretty interesting. Even though we don’t see any celebrities, our guide tells us funny stories about previous sightings. There was one famous reality TV star who they caught picking his nose when the tour bus pulled up next to his car. She doesn’t say who the star was but gives us enough clues to figure it out.
When we hit Sunset Strip, X turns to me with an are you seeing what I’m seeing? look on his face.
“What?” I ask.
“That’s the Roxy,” he says. “And Whisky a Go Go.” Both the Roxy and Whisky a Go Go are famous nightclubs. He says the names with such reverence that I can’t help feeling a little excited for him.
I look out at them, but I know that where I’m just seeing another average building, he’s seeing history.
“You haven’t gone yet?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he says. He gets out his phone and starts taking pictures. “Man, you know what kind of legends played the Roxy? Bob Marley and the Wailers. George Benson. Jane’s Addiction. The Doors were Whisky a Go Go’s house band for a while.”
I look back out at the buildings, already starting to see them differently. “So your dream is to play there?” I ask.
“I’ll get there,” he says.
“Are you always so…confident?”
“You were going to say ‘cocky,’ weren’t you?”
“No,” I lie.
He gives me an I don’t believe you at all smile.
It’s a nice smile. I move us on from it. “You want to be a musician?”
He shifts position so he can face me better. “We’re really doing this thing?”
“What thing?”
“What Fifi told us to do. The get-to-know-each-other thing.”
“If there was a ballroom dance mafia, Fifi would be the kingpin. Our lives will be easier if we just do what she says.”
“I feel you,” he says with a quick laugh. He looks back at the clubs as we pass them. “I’m a musician already. What I want is to be a rock star. I want world domination. I want the big stadium. The sold-out shows. The cover of Rolling Stone. The induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
“The groupies,” I interject.
He laughs and shrugs.
“But the odds are so against you,” I say.
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” He sounds defiant and tired at the same time.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to tell him that his probability of making it is low. I wonder how his parents feel about his big dream. Parents don’t usually love it when their kids take risks with their futures.
“You know what, though?” I say. “If everybody thought about the odds, there’d be no rock stars in the first place.”
His smile comes back, and I’m happier about it than I probably should be.
Our bus pulls up to a stoplight. A few pedestrians wave like we’re the actual celebrities.
“So you moved out here to become a rock star?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
He examines my face for a few seconds. I get the feeling he’s trying to decide how much to trust me with. “A friend of mine died last year. Clay. He was our bassist.”
“Oh, X, I’m so sorry.”
He nods down at his hands. “Me too.”
I don’t think he’s going to say anything else, but then he does. “The band was me, Clay, Jamal on drums and Kevin on keys. We almost called ourselves The Lonely Onlys.”
“How come?”
“Not a whole lot of Black kids in the Lake Elizabeth school system,” he says with a smile. “Clay and I knew each other from middle school. We met Kevin and Jamal at band tryout freshman year of high school. We said it was a miracle that there were four of us.” The memory of the day is in his eyes. “And before you give me a hard time again, I didn’t pick the name X Machine myself.”