The door separating the office block from the warehouse slammed shut behind me, and I pushed a hand through my hair to brush off the dust of the day as I crossed the parking lot to my car. It was quarter-past five, and being October, the daylight had already dwindled to dusk. I hadn’t seen the sky–or natural light for the matter–since my lunch break at noon. Since then the bright blue had bruised over for the most part, and the few rags of cloud sleepily floating in the darkened blue-grey, reflected in their folds the ember-glow of the setting sun, which had lingered at the horizon long enough to cook the lowest strip of visible sky medium-rare before continuing its slide to the other side of the globe.
As I reached my car I paused, keys in hand, sucking in the welcome fresh air and weighing the ritual inanities of my personal life. What to do with one’s self on a lonely Thursday night? I could haunt the aisles of my favorite used book store, but I still had a small cityscape of unread novels waiting for me near my nightstand from the last visit. I suppose I could have stopped at one of the handful of small, quiet restaurants I frequent, grab a bite to eat before heading home to read one of those books and wait for sleep to drive me to bed.
The routine was comfortable, but in all honesty it had become a bit stale. The gears needed greasing with a liberal application of joie de vivre.
Well, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of watching the sands of my evening slip to the lower half of the glass while trying to figure out what to do with it, so I got in my car and headed home. Halfway there I decided to pull in to the grocery store and find something for dinner, maybe break up the dregs a little. And it was there, in the vestibule between the two sets of sliding doors, that fate dropped a whopper into my shopping basket.
I didn’t see it at first, and I wouldn’t have at all if a little kid hadn’t pushed it on me. Or, rather, me onto it. I was walking through the skrish of the sliding door, into the carpeted entryway, as a little boy and his mother were coming out. The kid had one of those small junior shopping carts they give to children to push around so they can feel like they’re doing the shopping too; helping keep their little hands and minds occupied, so they’re less likely to get fidgety and cause a ruckus, and training them to be nice little consumers in turn. I heard “Ethan, watch your cart, honey!” and then found myself dancing to the left to avoid getting said junior shopping cart square in the kneecaps. I ran slam-bang into the cork bulletin board on the wall, feeling the jab of several plastic pushpin ends in my shoulder blades. They must’ve caught in my shirt, because as Ethan and his mother pushed through into the parking lot, her giving me an “I’m so sorry, he’s really a good boy” expression, without actually voicing an apology, I stepped away from the wall and heard them clatter to the floor along with a couple of the flyers that they had been tacking up.
I grabbed the handful of pages off the carpet—mostly ads for local Daycare providers, carpet cleaning services and lawn care businesses, when I came across this sheet of yellow paper with the most enigmatic promise on it:
OASIS SLIM PRESENTS: DESERT BLUES
ONE NIGHT ONLY
OCT. 6th 7PM
Maplewood Cultural Center
Desert blues. There was no description beyond the title and time and place; no picture of the performer or tag to the come-on “Desert Blues” to build up what it might mean. I have to admit I was intrigued. Normally I don’t go for local cultural events beyond the occasional movie on the weekend, but I had just been bemoaning how stale my routine had become. Maybe it was worth checking out. Having taken Friday as PTO for a much-needed three-day weekend, it wasn’t like I had to be at work in the morning,.
I bought my groceries and headed home, all the while pointlessly weighing the possible scenarios of what leaving the house and trying something new might bring. It’s a little head game I play with myself. All it really accomplishes is building my anxiety and keeping me a misanthropic shut-in; but I get excited about something and then create these two ideals in my head—one this incredibly fulfilling experience, the other a banal letdown—and then I let the two wrestle it out in the arena of my psyche until one dominates and I either pull myself up by my sneaker laces and go, or decide it’s probably not worth it and just stay in; maybe read another book or go to one of those handful of small, quiet restaurants and tell myself perhaps next time.
It could be great, I thought. It sounded so exotic: Desert Blues. I was a blues fan—the old stuff; everything from Slim Harpo, Big Maybelle and Lead Belly to R.L. Burnside. I was still mulling it over when I got home. An internet search left me clueless and frustrated. Whoever Oasis Slim was, he didn’t have any semblance of an online presence. No social media accounts, no website, not even a cryptic review of a past show on some online bulletin board somewhere, and the Maplewood Cultural Center’s website had nothing to offer beyond what bare bones information had been enigmatically printed on the flyer. Was it some local guy who played in his garage on the weekends? Someone more invested in the joy of performance than selling CDs or working a regular gig? If so, that would explain the lack of information online. Especially if he was older and maybe not so internet savvy. In that case, though, what if he was one of these boring suburban Strat’ slingers that considered Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn the apotheosis of the genre? I wasn’t in the mood for an evening of middle-aged white guy bar blues.
Well, curiosity battered caution in the last round of deliberation, so I ate, cleaned myself up, and with a film of hesitance coating the inside of my mouth, headed to the Maplewood Cultural Center.
I honestly don’t know what I was expecting. I pulled into the parking lot, a blacktop patch in a cubby hole flanked by identical beige strip malls, and found myself nearly alone there. There were two or three other cars parked near the front of the building, which surely had to have belonged to whatever MCC staff were present. Maybe the date had been changed? I made my way through the front door of the Center, a squat redbrick building with some dark wood facade embellishments, and a foundation-to-roof A-frame peak on the front that led me to believe it had been a small church at some point. Inside I found two middle-aged women sitting at a card table, garbed in chunky sweaters, tasseled wool scarves, and fluorescent lighting so pale it almost looked green. On either side of them stood a darkened doorway.
Both of the women smiled as I approached. “Welcome!”
I proffered the yellow flyer.
“This is tonight, right?”
The woman closest to me took the sheet from me and studied it through her thick-lensed bifocals. “Oh, yes!” she replied, her smile somehow stretching even wider. “Right through the door behind me.” She jabbed a thumb at one of the darkened doorways. “It’s five dollars for the show, and the money goes right back into our cultural event support fund! Would you like some literature?”
There was a look of eager expectancy on her face, the way her hand went to a stack of folded pamphlets sitting on the table before her, but I really wasn’t concerned with their events calendar or whether the five bucks went to pay for future events or bags of that pink hand soap one was likely to find in the bathrooms.
“No thanks,” I replied sheepishly, handing her the five. It didn’t seem to diminish her smile any. She took the crumpled bill and dropped it into a small aluminum-colored cash box, then pressed a small hand stamp into an ink pad and raised it in my direction.
Seconds later I was maneuvering the aisles of the dim auditorium, a smudged smiley face stamped on the back of my right hand. There was a handful of people scattered throughout the room: a bored looking couple sitting in the back row, an elderly man with a houndstooth trilby and a meticulously manicured white beard up front on the right, someone I couldn’t quite make out a few rows behind him. I chose a spot in the middle, near the aisle, and waited.
There was no announcement, no emcee who stepped into the blazing circumference of a spotlight to tell us what was going to happen next. The smiling ladies from the foyer didn’t wander in to thank us for our attendance and gleefully tell us about what wonderful programming might be coming to the Maplewood Cultural Center in the upcoming weeks. The dim lights simply lowered further until the room was in total darkness, and then some scalloped stage lights flared to life. The stage, which had previously been a dark, black patch at the front of the room, was suddenly illuminated. A pair of crimson curtains parted slowly over a platform about six inches off the ground, and there, on a simple metal folding chair, small amp between his feet and sky-blue Fender guitar in his hands, sat Oasis Slim.
I was dumbfounded.
He wore a grey wool suit with a white button-down dress shirt. The two black strands of a bolo tie dangled at either side of the descending strip of pearl-white buttons on the dress shirt, crowned by a steel clasp set with a small bird’s egg oblong of turquoise. His scuffed black dress shoes bookended the small guitar amp as if it might run off if he hadn’t. And his face…well, he didn’t have one. Not that I could see. You see, Oasis Slim’s head looked very much like a cactus, pricks and all.
Was this a put on? Some sort of theatrical flourish? Is this what was going to make the music Desert Blues—a cactus mask? I noticed that the backdrop behind Slim was a very stylized western desert scene that could’ve been pulled from the cover of any pulp cowboy magazine or novelty postcard, replete with a series of sandy plateaus fading into the distance, covered with whiskery cacti. A sun-bleached steer skull and busted wagon wheel nestled in the foreground under the watchful eye of a hungry tempera paint buzzard.
Oh god! Had I stumbled into some esoteric amateur comedy act?
Well, it was weird, but I liked it! I felt like I was seeing something that hadn’t been seen before. And, if it had, how had Slim kept the lid on it so well? Someone—one of the couple in the back row—had chuckled at the reveal; otherwise the room was silent.
Finally, after seconds which had seemed to draw on for hours, Oasis Slim moved. His hand jerked from his guitar to his face—or his cactus rather; the movement quick and jerky, as if he were an animatronic display suddenly switched on. With a thumb and index finger, Slim chose one of the bone-colored needle stickers that covered his head, one from the area that would’ve been his right cheek had he had one, and plucked it out.
Without so much as a second’s hesitation, Slim gripped the needle between thumb and finger like a guitar pick, and began to play.
Whoever Oasis Slim was under that cactus mask, he must have been either damn good, or blind and playing purely by feel and muscle memory. There were no eye holes that I could see anywhere on that bizarre, bulbous green head. Slim started to play a basic twelve-bar blues riff without so much as a word of introduction. Just picking and pressing the strings into chords.
I noticed, a few minutes in, that the room seemed to grow warmer. I began to swab the roof of my mouth with my tongue, noticing my saliva had evaporated and leaving me with a bad case of cotton mouth. I could feel sweat start to bead at the back of my neck, right at the hairline, and trickle down my shoulders and spine like small beetles scurrying for shelter.
Slim played on but the music seemed to fade into the background. The songs were all instrumentals, and didn’t really have a beginning or end, at least not that I could tell. I felt a bit disoriented. I could still hear the tremolo of the strings around me, as if the soundtrack to some movie I found myself in, but the shadows and silhouettes of the dark theater had glommed together and become somehow faded, less definite. It was as if I’d developed some sort of miasma. I could see very little; all was a barely-lit darkness. I could swear, as the music continued, that I could feel the unfiltered heat of a desert sun baking my neck and face until it hurt. I felt downright feverish! I became aware of the coarse grit plastering my pores, the lethargy tempering my joints and muscles.
There was the dry-hinge squawk of vultures somewhere overhead, but I couldn’t see them. The sensation of something brushing against my ankle caused me to grope for it in the darkness. For a second I froze, a cloud of ice blooming in my chest as my fingers found something rough and dry scuffing their tips, but a second investigation found only the coarse cotton weave of my socks.
Eventually the sensory spook show ended. The deluge of strange sensations ceased, the darkness evaporated, and I found myself in the same raggedy seat in the same dark auditorium I’d sat down in. Slim, however, was gone. The few other people who had been in the theater were missing as well.
I took a second to collect my thoughts–or to try rather, but there was little likelihood of any cogent brain activity. My skull was buzzing like a kicked hornets nest.
Once I was sure my faculties were more or less in working order, I made my way to the lobby. The two women were still there, this time out from behind the card table and one was dragging a broom across the parquet floor, the other was half visible through a half-propped restroom door, doing the same with a mop.
“Have a good night!” chimed the woman with the broom. I wasn’t sure what to say, or necessarily how to say it, so I just nodded in her direction and kept moving towards the door.
Once I got home and sat down, made myself a cup of tea, I sat and tried to piece the evening together. An hour had passed from the time I’d walked into the Cultural Center to the time I’d gotten back into my car. And the kicker was, I wasn’t even entirely sure what had happened.
It was an experience, though. I have to admit that even though I wasn’t sure how to process what had just happened, my gamble had paid off in spades! I wasn’t likely to forget whatever it was for some time! More importantly, my thoughts strayed to Oasis Slim himself. How had he done what had he done? And, perhaps more importantly, that cactus head of his had just been a mask, right?
