"The Flamenco Academy" by Sarah Bird Read Free Book Online Page A

from her to give something resembling a cool
reply and answered, “You have your own compulsions to answer to,
but, as for me, just because a sweaty hillbilly in a black T-shirt
with thirty tour dates printed on it has carried Fred Durst’s amp
is never going to be enough reason to let him stick his tongue in my ear, much less anything else anywhere else. Period.
Nonnegotiable.”
    Didi laughed. She loved my answer since she
hadn’t really wanted me to stay.
    The day after a mission, she always gave me
a vague report, which usually meant translating the evening into
“coins of the realm.” The coins of Didi’s realm were blow jobs. I’d
come to accept the blow job as Didi’s standard unit of currency.
But Didi didn’t give blow jobs, she deposited them.
In her own personal economy, every second she spent on her knees
was another second that she banked in her future celebrity
account. Another second that some future Didi groupie would spend
on his or her knees in front of her. All that was incidental,
though. Even meeting the stars was not the point. Sure, Didi would
rather have been with someone famous than any of the boys who
existed in our actual world. But Didi’s secret, the secret that
only I knew, was that the real reason she groupied was to learn how
to be a celebrity. Because Didi knew, had always known, that she
was going to be famous. She just had to hang out with enough famous
people to learn how to become one herself. And if the price of
lessons was a few blow jobs, she considered that a bargain.
    We didn’t yet know what she was going to be
famous for. There were plans for the first truly kick-ass girl band
that would make the world totally forget they’d ever heard of
Courtney Love. One night, she’d returned from a mission with an old
Fender that some roadie had given her. I bought a practice pad and
some sticks so I could be her drummer. But the metal strings hurt
Didi’s fingers and I never got the money together to buy an actual
drum set, so we ditched that idea. Didi switched to
singer-songwriter and started working on her material.
    That her voice wasn’t all that good never
really mattered. She had something more important than a good
voice: she could put herself into every word she sang. I think
there was just so much of Didi, so much personality, so much
ambition, so many definite ideas about so many things, that it all
flowed out when she opened her mouth. It wasn’t ever pretty or even
pleasant. But, right from the start, it was all her, all Didi.
    We were lucky that we always wanted
different prizes. She wanted to hang out with famous people and be
famous herself. I just wanted to hang out with her. The biggest
groupie prize Didi ever went after were the Strokes. She discovered
the New York group before they were famous, and, as soon as she
did, all other bands ceased to exist. She loved their aura of
dissipation, the way they harkened back to a lost era of rock ‘n’
roll glamour and decadence that she was certain she would have
ruled over had she not been born too late. Also, as she informed me
about eighty-five times a day, the lead singer, Julian Casablancas,
was “hotter than lava.”
    As for our jobs, Didi called Pup y Taco,
Puppy Taco, but after the renaming she didn’t have much to do with
the take-out joint other than collecting a paycheck. I was the one
who flipped the Mexi-burgers and shredded bales of lettuce for
crispy tacos. She was the one who redid her makeup and stared in
the mirror wondering if Julie would like her better with short
hair. I was the one who pulled the baskets of fries out of hot
grease and scrubbed counters with bleach at the end of our shift.
She was the one who flirted with customers and blasted Strokes
music and turned every shift we worked together into a party that I
was happy to be invited to. My hair always smelled liked tacos, my
forearms were speckled pink and white from grease burns; I did all
the work, and I didn’t care. The twisted,