The Dance A/U Part 1: Crash Into Me

In A Boy's Dream

Santa Monica, California

February 2, 1997

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Lindsey Buckingham was forty-seven years old and had never been married.

Having touched fame for the first time at twenty-four years old, he had watched from the sidelines as his peers had come into the music business with wives and girlfriends from "back home", and then proceeded to let alcohol, drugs and various other things lead them to abandon those hometown girls - many of whom were mothers to their young children - for a string of girls on the road, many of whom were blonde, all of whom were entirely too young to be out so late, and were then either cast aside and deemed "crazy, man" by the men he knew or else they'd entered into an ill-fated marriage that had cost them half of everything according to California state law. A stint in rehab and two divorces later, many of his contemporaries were just getting started on third marriages, new batches of children whose adult half-siblings resented them, and their Behind The Music specials on VH1 aired all of their dirty laundry.

Sitting at a coffee bar near the Santa Monica Pier and waiting for Kristen Messner to show up, Lindsey thought of something Barbara Nicks had told him over a decade ago, when Stevie had disappeared directly after the Rock A Little tour and a phone call to the Nicks house in Arizona had confirmed what he'd hoped was happening - Stevie had checked into rehab for her addiction to cocaine.

"The thing that kept you two from making it work ten years ago was never joining the band, honey." Barbara had answered the phone early that morning when his search for Stevie had finally led him to dial her parents' home number at seven in the morning. Barbara still woke up at six every morning and so did Jess, even though he was retired now..."old habits dying hard" being her reason. She'd laughed it off, and Lindsey noticed, perhaps for the first time, that Stevie had her mother's laugh.

"How could you say that, Barbara? We were doing just fine years ago, then Mick Fleetwood reels us in and we're doing lines off a black lacquer piano at five in the morning and Stevie is telling me that she needs space and the relationship is too dark. What do you call that?"

"I call it my daughter learning from me when she was very little that if something is broken, you either fix it or you find a new purpose for it," Barbara told him. "You don't throw it in the trash. Did you ever stop to think that if your relationship was broken when you guys were still on our own making the duet album, she sensed it was broken and repurposed it to save you both so you could enjoy your nice lives and be the artists you were both born to be? I don't hate you, sweetheart...far from it! I love my daughter, but here's the thing...Stevie is the easiest AND the hardest person to love at the same time. I don't just automatically side with her when she calls me crying about you or anyone else, for that matter. You are a very gifted boy, honey, and she's an amazing talent...so maybe you both had to repurpose this before you wound up seeing it get tossed in the trash."

"I still love her, Barbara," he said, trying to keep his composure and not let her hear him crying.

"I know you do, sweetheart. Let her get her head screwed on straight out there first, and if the purpose changes again, she will come to you. She still loves you too."

"Oh sure! Have you seen her all over Joe Walsh like he's a life preserver on the Titanic?"

"Joe Walsh is a deeply disturbed and hurting man. Stevie can't figure out if he's a wounded bird or the statue it's resting on, so she cleans up his mess and admires him all at once," Barbara said. "That's not love, Lindsey. That's obsession. What you two have...that's love. That is love in its purest form...and when it's meant to be, you'll be there and so will she, and it will happen."