The Tour Zone                               by Groucho

A fantasy that takes place somewhere over the rainbow,
in one of many possible realities involving Katharine McPhee,
her McPhamily, McPhriends and McPhans

When I first saw the tour bus, a magnificent many-wheeled vehicle with built-in bathroom, kitchenette, two lounge areas with entertainment centers, and twelve curtained bunks, I thought to myself, well, Katharine, this won’t be so bad. This thing is almost like a rolling hotel.

A week later, it was looking a lot smaller, and I said as much. The other four girls just smiled. “We don’t like to say we told you so,” Paris said with a big grin, “but—“ and they all joined in and said in unison, “We told you so!”

“Oh, just shut UP,” I said.

Paris had finished changing into her nightwear and was on her way up to the front with a portable CD player in her hand. Despite the fact that it was after midnight and we were all beat, we frequently found that after a performance we would just be too keyed up to go to sleep right away, so we would wander around looking for anything to relax us. Most of us hooked up to some kind of music a lot. Lisa sometimes played air-piano along with whatever she was listening to. Mandisa liked to end her day by reading her Bible. Sometimes Jamecia, Paris’ mother, rode herd on the kids, other times she just hit the bunk and was able to attain unconsciousness a lot quicker than we were. Sometimes Kellie and I would sit at the kitchenette and play cards with a real old-fashioned deck of cards or sprawl on the couches in one of the lounges and just talk. We all picked at each other constantly, partly out of boredom and partly just because it was fun.

Lisa followed Paris forward. The two young ones seemed to have found a natural affinity just as Kellie and I had. I wondered if Mandisa felt like odd-man-out in our particular kind of enforced intimacy and frequently asked her to join in our games or just watch a movie with us.

We had a long road trip ahead of us, so we could afford to spend a little time goofing off. There would be time to sleep later, and we may as well watch a movie or talk as toss and turn in our adequate but certainly not overly spacious beds. The standard touring bus seemed to come with enough built-in bunks for a basketball team, so we stored our paraphernalia on some of the unused ones. I dug in one of the large mesh storage hampers full of miscellania my fan club had delivered to us at one of the concerts and came out holding a DVD of Pretty Woman. “How about a chick flick?” I said.

“Ooh, we’re gonna get a dose of love-conquers-all,” Kellie said. “What the heck. That okay with you, Mandisa?”

“Honey, I just want to put my feet up. I’ll watch anything,” she answered.

We all more or less knew the story but enjoyed it as a semi-diversion while we talked through the parts of lesser interest. “I just love this movie,” I said.

“Yeah, you love it so much you’re talkin’ through all of it,” Kellie said.

“Well, I’ve seen it a dozen times. Now it’s giving me a horrible urge to call Chris.”

“At this time of night?”

“It’s earlier in California,” I reminded. “Besides, he should just be glad to hear from me.” I got my cell phone and punched his speed dial.

“What are you gonna do if a woman answers?” Kellie asked.

“Oh, will you just shut UP?”

Kellie laughed and kicked her feet playfully. Sometimes she seemed younger than the two up front, but that was okay. We ragged on each other unmercifully all the time. Chris answered almost immediately.

“No women!” I said, mugging at Kellie.

“What?”

“Never mind, Honey, Kellie just said something nasty.”

Between the drone of the wall tv in the background and Kellie’s teasing it was hard to carry on a conversation. What was I doing? Watching one of my favorite movies. The tub scene was on. Yes, our version of it had been much better. Kellie wanted to tell him hi. And ask him how he’d been able to answer the phone so quickly. What had he done with his girlfriend? I was to tell her his only girlfriend other than me was her. We weren’t making much sense, but then that wasn’t the point. I just wanted to hear his voice and feel like the miles between us didn’t really matter. What did I hear playing in the background? It sounded familiar. Good old YouTube.

“He’s singing to me,” I announced.

“What?” Kellie said.

“I said he’s singing to me.”

“I heard, what’s he singing?” she said, giggling uncontrollably.

“He’s singing ‘I Have Nothing.’ He’s imitating me. Got my phrasing and inflections down pat. Good grief, Christopher, how many times have you seen that video anyway?” I should have left that one alone. “Okay, that’s more details than I need.”

“Oh my LORD,” Kellie said, hugging her tummy.

Nothing was really all that funny, but we were tired and lonely, glad of each other’s company, but Kellie had never spent as much time away from home as during the past year, and I hadn’t missed anyone this much since my first week a continent away from home at college. And that had passed quickly when I started getting in the swing of things, befriending lots of fellow musicians and winning roles in more musical productions than I ever had in my life. Our tour performances were set pieces; we knew them by heart and amused ourselves by doing them just enough different each night to keep ourselves sane, so we didn’t need rehearsal time. So when we had downtime, my mind seemed to wander almost inevitably to Chris and I would relive moments we’d spent together. And Kellie would always catch me and tease me that my eyes were getting more glazed-over than a men’s room door, and she knew what I was thinking. And of course I’d tell her to shut up.

Putting my lips directly against the phone, I delivered a mammoth audible smooch directly into the mouthpiece. “Yes, that was me kissing the phone,” I said. Kellie pursed her lips at me and pretended to fall off the couch. “He said to tell you bye because he has to go take a cold shower now.” I kissed the phone again. “I wish I could go with you,” I said. “He says if I could go with him he wouldn’t need the shower.”

“Oh, stop it, I’m bustin’ a gut,” Kellie wheezed.

Mandisa shook her head and rolled her eyes at us.

“I’ll tell him you said goodbye,” I said sweetly.

“Bye, Chris!” she yelled between gasps.

Mandisa waved politely.

I finally let him go and we gave up on the movie. “Oh, sometimes it just feels so good to laugh,” Kellie said. “It just wears me plumb out when I get tickled silly like that.”

“Plum out?” I said.

“Yeah, plumb out. Don’t y’all say that in California?”

“Nobody I know. What do plums have to do with it?”

“I think that’s plumb with a B,” Mandisa explained. “Like a plumb line. That they used to measure things with, you know? It was a weight on the end of a string, and it gave you a good perpendicular line with the floor. An exact measurement. You know, plumb straight. Plumb wore out.”

“I’m just plumb amazed at you two,” I said. Then I noticed that both of them were sitting up and staring at me, and I realized that my mind had been wandering and I was beginning to tear up.

“Are you okay, Honey?” Mandisa asked.

“Did I say somethin’?” Kellie asked. “What did I miss?”

Wiping my eyes, I said, “I just had a little flashback to this afternoon.”

“What happened this afternoon?”

“Nothing, really. It’s silly. I was just sitting in the hotel lobby, having a few minutes of nobody recognizing me and nobody wanting me to do anything, and I looked over and saw a pregnant lady sitting there reading a magazine. She must have been oh, maybe seven months along, you know, at the point where you’re probably not going to get any bigger but you’re not going to have a baby for a long time, and I just got totally fixated on her stomach. And all I could think of was, how would I feel if I looked down at my lap and saw that? I don’t know how to say this so it makes sense, and it makes me feel so guilty, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that I would feel so fat I didn’t know if I could stand it.”

Kellie opened her mouth and I shushed her. “No, let me finish. I know it’s just that I’ve got issues I’ve had for years, and I really thought I had them better under control than that, but all I could think of was good grief, that’s going to be you someday, unless you decide you don’t want kids, which isn’t likely. How are you going to handle it when it’s real, because girl, you are starting to panic at the mere thought of putting thirty pounds back on. I mean panic. My hands were sweating. My throat felt dry and I kept swallowing and swallowing. Finally I had to get up and walk away from her and find a drinking fountain.

“It was just a disturbing couple of minutes, and then all of a sudden there was a million things to do again and I couldn’t process it. It was showtime, and I had to be there, and concentrate and function and do whatever was expected of me. The show must go on, and all that. So I put on my smiley face and shook hands and hugged people and signed autographs and sang and danced, or well, struggled around like I’ve been doing lately, and then I had it pushed down far enough that it went away. Until I talked to Chris. Then it came back.”

“Looks like it’s still here,” Kellie said, sounding a lot more sober than she had all evening.

“It was just the awfullest feeling. When I tried to imagine being in her place, all I could think of was that scene in Alien where that ugly little beast bursts out of the guy’s chest and scurries off. And I said to myself, self, you have to talk yourself out of this, because this is no good. But there was no time to deal with it so I just pushed it down. And now it’s popping up again and there’s no therapist within a thousand miles and I guess it just feels a little scary. I don’t want to get into repression mode again, where I push stuff down and pile food on top of it. I want to face it. But right now I just don’t know what to do with it.”

For once, Kellie was totally speechless. Mandisa turned to me and held out her arms. “Come here, Sweetie,” she said. “Sometimes there’s just nothin’ like a good ole hug. I don’t know why it helps but it sure does.”

I crawled gratefully across the couch and put my head on her shoulder. “You know something?” I said. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

None of us knew where to go from there, so we gathered up our toys and went to bed. For a few moments, Kellie and I held hands across the aisle. I would have bet money that in the adjoining set of bunks Mandisa was praying. Finally I turned toward the wall and fell into a restless sleep.

I awoke to a feeling of, well, difference. I soon realized it was that we were no longer in motion. I looked out of my bunk, saw everyone sleeping just as I’d last seen them, saw faint traces of moonlight coming in the front and rear windows, and crept out of bed. The bus wasn’t even idling. It was dead still, and the driver was nowhere to be seen.

What I could see was what appeared to be a rather small roadhouse in whose parking lot we seemed to have holed up. Maybe this was just a pit stop, a leg stretching break. That was it. I was managing without my cast, so I grabbed my favorite flipflops, threw a jacket on, and walked across the parking lot, wondering why I’d never noticed the full moon before. And I’d thought country night air would be crisp and clean. Instead it felt sticky and odd, almost hazy. Maybe driving crosscountry was befuddling to the senses in ways I’d never realized.

When I walked through the front door, I had the oddest sensation, almost like the way your ears plug up on an airplane, as though the air pressure had shifted somehow. But I ignored it and walked up to the bar. It looked like a dozen movie sets I’d seen and I supposed this was just your standard, run of the mill roadhouse. It was deserted except for a guy behind the bar who smiled at me and then went on with whatever he was doing. Just for a moment I spooked, turned on my heel, and walked quickly back to the door, but as I pushed it open I felt that same ear-popping sensation and closed it again almost immediately. But not before I’d noticed that the bus looked different. Impossible, of course, but that just did not resemble the bus I had just left. It was sitting in shadows, but still… wasn’t that a light on in the front lounge? There were no lights on when I left.

You need more sleep, I told myself. This crazy lifestyle is getting to you. You need your voice all the way back and two good legs and a couple of nights’ sleep in your own bed. Or Chris’s. That might be even better. Somebody solid and real to grab onto when you wake up in the middle of the night feeling weird. Somebody who’ll tell you everything is fine, gimme a kiss and go back to sleep. Instead, I had five sleeping busmates, a missing driver, and a total stranger behind the bar.

And a slender young girl sitting there having a drink. Of orange juice. Hmm. I sat down beside her. “Hey,” I said. “Looks like we’ve just about got this joint to ourselves.”

“It’s better that way, believe me,” she said, and her smile looked so familiar. She had short blonde hair and the bluest eyes, and what appeared to be a small rainbow tattooed on her right wrist. Noting my interest, she said, “That’s my good luck symbol.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “I guess in a way you could say it’s mine too.”

“It’s a long story. We just stopped here because the driver thought he heard an engine noise. Happens with this bus a lot. We’re just letting it cool off. Then it’s back to the grind.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and the band. The Faultliners. Because we’re all from Los Angeles originally. Kinda stupid, but we like it.”

“Me too.”

“Glad you like it.’

“Actually I meant I’m from L.A. but I guess you could take it either way. I’m on the road too.” I could neither keep my eyes away from her nor figure out exactly why. Something about her just looked so familiar. “What’s your name?”

She tossed her head as though she had a full mane of hair that might move itself out of her eyes if she did. “Oh, I have so many of those,” she said. “I’m one of those people everyone has a different nickname for.”

“Blondie and the Faultliners,” I said. “Joey and the Faultliners. Whoopee and the Faultliners. No, none of those sound right.”

She tossed down the remainder of her juice and laughed. Where had I seen that smile? “It’s more like Kenny Scott and the Faultliners,” she said. “His mom liked Kenny G. But that didn’t rub off on him in the womb. He plays strings. Any kind of strings. He’s the lead guitarist, but he can play bass, he can even play steel guitar. Or banjo. Or mandolin. Or ukulele. I even saw him thumpin’ on a stand-up bass once. Maybe that’s why we can play so many different kinds of stuff. Nobody knows quite what we are. We’re in search of an identity.”

“What do you think you are?”

“Oh, rockabilly-bluesy-poppers, I guess,” she said. Again that smile that I kept thinking I’d seen before.

Without thinking, I said, “And does he know you’re in love with him?”

She goggled at me. “What?”

“Sorry,” I said. “That’s none of my business.”

She made a little face involving raising her eyebrows and pressing her lips together. “Shows, huh?”

“I just know what it sounds like.”

“He’s really amazing. Over-talented but under-appreciated.” A cell phone rang and she fished it out from under her vest. “Hey, Case!” she said. Not wanting to appear to be eavesdropping, I tried talking to the bartender while she spent a brief time on the phone. In a few moments I heard her say “Bye. Love you too.”

“Hmm, sounds like I guessed wrong there,” I said.

“No, that’s my big sister. We check in with each other all the time when I’m on the road. We both keep odd hours so we call each other whenever. She’s the sane kid. I’m the weirdo.”

I looked her over as unobtrusively as possible—nothing obviously dyed, no observable piercings, jeans that some might have thought a bit too tight, but then I’d heard my mother say that about me too. An altogether attractive girl. In fact, a disturbingly attractive girl. She drew me, and I wanted to sit and talk to her for as long as she’d let me. “You don’t look weird to me,” I said at last.

“Well, maybe it’s just my gypsy lifestyle. Everybody thought my sister would be the musician because of the way she loved to sing, but she surprised everybody. She finished school early, married one of her teachers and had a baby, and now she’s working in a clinic in Brentwood. She was a girl in a hurry. She wanted it all and she wanted it now.”

“She’s a doctor?”

“Dog doctor,” she said, finishing her orange juice and smiling at me over the rim of the glass. “Are you ready for this? Let me tell you the funny part.” She leaned toward me and patted me on the arm, for all the world like she’d known me all her life. It seemed perfectly natural, in fact just the sort of thing I’d do. “They raise dachshunds. Purebred long-haired dachshunds. Wire hairs too. Most people don’t even know there is such a thing but they’re the cutest little rascals you ever saw. Those little short legs just crack me up.”

A bass hoot sounded somewhere outside. “That’s my cue,” she said, setting her glass down on the bar. “The blue bus waits for us.”

“The Doors,” I said. “That one goes way back.”

“Yeah, I grew up listening to all kinds of music. My grandma always said an artist should be exposed early to a lot of the best and a little of all the rest.”

“Really?” I said. “I guess a lot of musicians think alike.”

“Gotta go,” she said. “Walk me to the door?”

She draped one arm around my shoulder as we walked, and I admit to some uneasiness, but it didn’t come from her per se. It was from my reaction to her. It felt so right and natural for us to be affectionate with each other and that perplexed me. I’ve always been a toucher, one of those who find it natural to pat people on the hand or arm, or give spontaneous hugs, and there have been times when I’ve been totally startled when someone pointed out a picture of me obviously clutching the leg of some poor guy who was trying to pretend it was all in a day’s work. Sometimes, when the guy was a member of the band, it was. I would have no recollection of it at all because it had been something I’d done without thinking. But this felt different. “Here’s a hug for good luck,” I said, and we clung together like the traditional long-lost friends.

“You know what?” she said. “You kinda remind me of my sister. The one I was on the phone with. Maybe that’s why it’s been so much fun talking to you. I wouldn’t let on to the guys, but I get kinda homesick on the road sometimes.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

Someone was standing just inside the door of the bus but I couldn’t see him very well. All I heard was a man’s pleasantly deep voice saying, “Come on, Pook. The world is waiting.”

I must have given her a funny look because she said, “Yeah, Pookie. That’s my stage name. My crazy dad calls me that, and it just kinda stuck. Oh well, you know what they say, you gotta have a gimmick.”

Oh boy, did I know. I could just hear Chris’s voice, manic with enthusiasm, as he almost literally bounced up and down on the bed we’d kicked Kellie out of again after Greatest Love Songs night. “You’ve found your gimmick! You can stop wondering what you have to do.”

“What are you talking about?” I’d said, batting him with a pillow. “And calm down before you burst something vital.”

“You! It’s just you! You’re the gimmick! You just unleash that sultry, sexy side of you, stick her in a dress that’s cut down to here and slit up to there and march her around the stage like a lioness looking for something to chew on, and BOOM! The next American Idol! Oh, I know you just sang the hell out of it, but that’s not what they’re gonna remember. Count on it.””

I remembered hiding my face in my hands and letting out a long “Oh-h-h-h!”

“What?”

“I can’t do that every night!”

“Then you make ‘em remember her. I dunno, give ‘em a smile, a wink, wiggle something at ‘em, do that…thing you do. You know.”

“That thing I do.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes! That thing where you kinda lower your head and push your hair back while you’re givin’ the camera one of those looks that could melt the lens!” I could tell from his look that we weren’t quite on the same page. “What?” he said, bending it into two exasperated syllables. “What did I say?” He sounded the way I imagine men have for centuries when confronted by a female brain working in a way that seemed alien to them—totally bewildered.

“Mom’s got this book about the big studio era in Hollywood,” I said, “and a couple of years ago I was reading about the big stars of the 30’s and 40’s, and I remember Rita Hayworth talking about how she never seemed to be able to have a successful relationship because she said guys went to bed with Gilda and woke up with her. Her image sure didn’t do much for her.”

“Wait,” he said. “What are we talking about anyway? I was talking about what you have to do to win a contest. You’re somewhere else. You’re not talking about Simon, you’re talking about me.”

I realized he was right. “I don’t think that’s me,” I said. “Something you feel like you should practice in front of a mirror isn’t really you.”

“Sure it is,” he said, bending over until we were roughly nose to nose. “Maybe not all of you, but it’s part of you. Look, I know who you are. Part of you is the lioness, and part of you is Krazy Kat, part of you is serious Katharine who just stands there and sings her face off, as Randy says, and part of you is the girl next door, and…oh hell, I’m just making this up as I go along, but it’s all you. All that stuff’s wrapped up in one glorious girl, and I wish I could wake up with her tomorrow, but I can’t.” Then he’d peeled my hands away from my face and kissed me long and slow and I wanted it to go on forever.

“You okay?” my new friend was saying to me. “You look like you went someplace else for a minute.”

“I did. Well. Now you’ve got to go someplace else. So, break a leg, kid. Not literally. I just did that and it’s no fun, believe me.”

She frowned at me, the voice from the bus said something, so low I could hardly tell what he was saying, but she heard him. “I’m off to conquer the world,” she said. “The show must go on. And all those other clichés.”

I noticed again that strange oppressiveness in the night air that constricted my throat and made me feel vaguely uneasy although I couldn’t say why. Someone had driven the bus much closer to the door and she reached it in a few steps. I didn’t want to watch it drive off so I stepped back inside the building.

Suddenly, from somewhere deep inside my head, I heard an instant replay of the man’s deep voice I’d heard from somewhere within the bus. What he’d said gave me the shivers. “Move your butt, McDonald. I’d hate to leave without you.” Who in their right mind would name a kid Pookie McDonald? But as soon as I’d asked myself the question, I was afraid I knew the answer.

I ran out the door, expecting to see a big blue bus chugging off into the distance, but there wasn’t a sign of movement, not a tail light, not a far off rumble, nothing. All I saw was the familiar Idol bus sitting right where I’d left it.

I reboarded the bus and walked straight to my bunk, hardly noticing anything around me. Kellie’s curtain was only half shut, so I peeked in at her. She was flat on her back, eyelids twitching as some frantic dream played itself out inside her head, and dead to the world. But she was there. She was real. And everything looked exactly like it should look. I still didn’t know where the driver was or why we’d stopped, but for some reason I didn’t care. I just knew I wanted to crawl into my own bed, or reasonable facsimile thereof, and drop into