Tango In The Night Part 1: Big Love

I Keep The Dream In My Pocket

Hollywood Hills, California
Sunday, May 24, 1987
(8:30 pm)
********************

The first thing Stevie noticed when she woke up was the sound of the Valerie Harper sitcom she liked starting on TV. "Life is such a sweet insanity...The more you learn the less you know...In the heart of every family is a love that starts by letting go..."

The second thing she noticed was Lindsey, remote in hand, sitting propped up against the pillows on the other side of the bed. He was mouthing along to the theme song, tapping his foot. "Step by step and day by day, reaching out along the way...Hand in hand we'll face our fears, together through the years..."

"Lindsey?" He turned around to the groggy sound of his name. His lips curled into a gentle smile.

"Feeling better now?" He played with a stray blonde curl he picked up from her shoulder.

"What happened?" The events of the afternoon were fuzzy at best, and it was slowly dawning on her that it was dark outside, and that Valerie was on TV at eight-thirty on Sunday nights.

"You've been out for about four hours," Lindsey informed her. "Stevie...are you sure that stuff you're taking is good for you? You're really not yourself at all...and you're so exhausted all the time..."

"It'll get better," she mumbled, turning into her pillow again. "I'm sorry about all of this...you could have gone home."

"Stevie..." He turned into her, sliding lower down against the pillows until they lay face to face. "Are you seriously telling me you didn't think I'd still be here after all of that?"

Once her tears had begun they'd been impossible to stop. Lindsey had rocked her like a baby in his arms as she'd cried over the situation, telling him she didn't know how to stop loving him even though she'd tried so hard with everyone else. She'd told him she wished Joe would have hung around so at least she could try to move on, that he was the only person who'd even come close to making her forget him. She'd told him she knew he'd told Christine their secret, but the thing that made her angry about it was that he could open up to Christine about things but he never shared a damn thing with her anymore. After begging him to hold her until she stopped shaking and beginning to mutter incoherently about "Gold And Braid" and Javier Pacheco, she'd cried herself to sleep, and he didn't have the heart to leave.

"We've got to figure this out," Stevie said, ignoring his question. "I'm not going out on tour again listening to you sing about me shacking up, Lindsey...I can't do it again...not now, not after..." She didn't complete that sentence. She didn't have to.

"This is going to be a mess, isn't it?" Lindsey was already dreading the tour. He was dreading watching John polluting his mind and his liver, Mick doing the same and jumping around like a madman, watching poor Christine try to wrangle her two best friends into hotel rooms at night while trying to work out a new relationship, but most of all, he dreaded singing about Stevie two feet away from her every night and not being able to tell her that he loved her, that he'd leave Cheri in a heartbeat if she told him she wanted him back and she wasn't going to run this time.

He wished they could cancel the whole damn thing.

They lay there for awhile and listened to the television. Valerie Harper, who they used to watch as Mary Tyler Moore's best friend Rhoda years ago in their first apartment in Los Angeles, was playing a woman raising three sons while her pilot husband was away all the time. Lindsey was thinking about how much things had changed, even on television. Every sitcom was about the American family, every drama show about doctors or cops. Gone were the days when people like Stevie and himself traveled around like gypsies singing about love and life and dreams and the state of the world, when music and media said something...and now everything was corporate...even rock and roll.