The ambulance driver quit his job the next day. Later that night, he was officially an amateur musician, singing to eleven people at a bar fifty miles away.
His first song, “My Song for You,” got a lot of applause, though his second song got none, but that was probably because he didn’t know there was a one-song limit. “So sorry,” he said after that was explained to him.
But as he apologized to the bar manager, something happened. A voice he had never heard before rose up from somewhere around the center of his body, skipped his mouth altogether on the way to his head, and then, once it was there, rattled around and echoed so loudly that it almost literally knocked him off his feet. “I’m not sorry at all!” shouted this voice, a voice that actually took him more than a moment to recognize as his own.
It was the voice he always sang with from then on.
The ambulance driver put out dozens of albums with hundreds of songs over the years, but none was as popular as the children’s song he wrote to amuse his young son at bedtime, “I Was Walking Along,” which he volunteered to perform at his son’s kindergarten class and which was such a hit that he was invited back to perform it there every subsequent spring.
The song went like this:
I was walking along (I was walking along)
I was singing a song (I was singing a song)
Got a hole in my shoe (Got a hole in my shoe)
Stepped in a puddle too (Stepped in a puddle too)
Had to roll up my sock (Had to roll up my sock)
Rolled it up to my knee (Rolled it up to my knee)
Rolled it up to my waist
Rolled it up to my head
And then I went to bed!
Then the children screamed like this:
“Again!”
“Again!”
“Again!”
Do you know what it’s like to sing a song that started inside you to a room full of laughing, dancing children, who keep singing it even after you stop?
It feels like the world is made of music, and you are the world.
One or two more people died each year in Grant County than before, but it was always a number within the statistical margin of error.
Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins)
I had seen his picture enough and read about him enough to know that I loved Tony Robbins, or so I thought at the time.
When he came to our town, I found out where he was staying, and I knew people who worked at the hotel, and I knew he was a man who appreciated bold gestures, so I went for it. I entered the room while he was in the shower, wearing what I thought of as my best first-impressions dress, and when he came out and saw me, he immediately asked me what I was doing there.
“I’m here because I love you,” I said.
“Your feet,” he said. “What are you doing? What is that?”
“I’m walking on eggshells,” I said. “To impress you. Isn’t that your thing?”
“No, my thing is hot coals,” he said. “Walking on hot coals.”
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed to have gotten wrong something that was so fundamental about him—even though that’s often how it goes, I’ve realized since, that we overlook the few things we’re sure we already know. “Oh. I don’t think I could ever do that.”
“Yes. YES YOU CAN,” he said, with the superhuman intensity that made me pursue him in the first place. God, he was like ten human beings compressed into one. “You can do anything you put your mind to,” said Tony Robbins. “Anything. You hear me? Anything. Anything. Anything.”
“I want to fuck Tony Robbins,” I said. “That’s what I want to do. I want to fuck Tony Robbins and look in his eyes and see that he’s in love with me, too.”
He looked at me for a while. His face looked very confused and humble, but I could tell by the way his eyes squinted especially hard at certain parts of my dress that he was also, secretly, checking me out.
“No,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘no’?”
“It’s just not going to happen,” said Tony Robbins.
“Yes it is,” I said, summoning and then faking more intensity than had ever been inside me before. “Yes, it is going to happen. Yes: I am going to fuck Tony Robbins!”
“You are? You are?” Something about my intensity awakened something in him. The challenge fired him up in a way that my looks, so far, hadn’t.