he fantasy begins with reality. It is Saturday night in Flagstaff, the whole night stretched out before me. I'm wandering the downtown blocks alone, staring into the windows of clubs and trying to measure how I might feel on the other side. I could just go back to my seedy roadside motel, huddle under the sheets which I suspect to be unwashed, fall asleep watching cable TV. I could call people on the phone, talk my way out of lonliness. But it's a Saturday night in Flagstaff, for Chrissakes, the whole night stretched out before me.
"Where's the best show in town?" I ask a couple walking on the street.
"You like rockabilly?"
I dunno. Why not?
"Well the best show in town is a rockabilly show at the Alley."
Like everything in Flagstaff, it's a block away.

The fantasy begins with the bass player. He plays a stand-up bass and wears a Ramones T-shirt and makes eye contact with nobody but just plucks at the thick strings furiously, two pieces of slicked-back hair fallen loose across his brow, so of course I have to be in love with him.
The lead singer looks like Ritchie Valens. So yes, there are other people in this band, but mostly, there is the bass player. He lies the bass down on the floor, keeps playing it as he hits his knees. He lies the bass down on the floor, keeps playing it as he climbs up on top. He is balancing himself on top of the bass, while plucking the thick strings furiously, and not making eye contact with anyone and the hair, at this point, is out of control. It's killing me.
"This is relentless," says the cute med student sitting behind me. We are hooting and hollering, thinking about dancing. The cute med student goes to Columbia, but he spent the semester interning on an Arizona reservation. Later he will tell me about how weird it was, to work in this place where the older generation went to the medicine men and chanted the traditional songs and the younger generation listened to Eminem and demanded birth control pills, a place where he so clearly represented this divide, where he was such an outsider. But now we are just hooting and hollering, watching Ritchie Valens drop to the floor and scream "Chupacabra! Chupacabra!", watching my bass player love pound the fuck out of those strings. Pound is the verb here, pound the bass, pound the beers, pound the ground, pound the table. I'm in love, I'm alive, I'm invisible, I am lost in it. People start to crowd the dance floor, touching each other's bodies, forgetting their fears. They are clumsy and laughing, full of sex and booze, wonderful to watch as my mind roars with thoughts of the bass player. I am a 13-year-old girl, clawing her face at the sight of Elvis. I am a 15-year-old girl, writing the football captain's name in purple ink all over my binder. I am a 7-year-old girl, crying over Justin Timberlake. We girls have always had it bad for a man on a stage.
After the music ends, I run up to the band, who stand by the bar, avoiding the equipment.
"You guys are fucking rock stars." I will cringe about this later. "I wanna know how come more people aren't here. I wanna know why all of Flagstaff isn't here tonight."
"You from around here?" asks the drummer.
"I'm from Austin, Texas. It's the Live Music Capital of the World."
"Austin?" asks Ritchie Valens. "We love Austin. We played at the Black Cat once."
"Hey," says the guitarist. "It's my birthday tonight, and we're having a little after-party at the hotel. Why don't you join us?"
"Are you sure?" I look at the bass player. He scans the crowd over my head.
"Totally," they say.
"Rock on!" I say, throwing one fist in the air.
"Rock on!" they say, throwing their fists in the air, except for the bass player, who's still scanning the crowd. I leave, laughing to myself, or laughing at myself, or laughing with myself, or at any rate, laughing. Like I just got away with something. Like I have this great secret.
It's 1:15am.

The reality begins with the guitarist. He is throwing up in the parking lot of the hotel. "I'm cool, man," he says when I approach him.
"The guitarist is throwing up back there," I say to the drummer when I arrive.
"Eh," he says, handing me a beer. "It's his birthday."
The after-party is small. It is, in fact, just me and the band, plus the guitarist's girlfriend, a Christina Aguilera-lookalike named Sandy who is obsessed with Priscilla Presley.
"One thing people don't know about Priscilla is what a prisoner she was," she says. We are sitting on the king-sized bed, smoking. "Like the way Elvis picked out her hairstyles and her clothes." She finds a plastic cup on the floor and uses it as an ashtray. "He even picked out her fingernail polish."
I tell her I didn't know that.
"Exactly. And how he was always having affairs. Always. But if she even, say, looked at a chauffeur, that chaffeur would be fired."
I tell her it doesn't seem worth it.
"It was a prison," she says, getting a little emotional about it. A wet smudge of red lipstick is stuck between her slightly crooked front teeth. It seems like girls with slightly crooked front teeth are always getting lipstick on them, which seems like a double curse.
Ritchie Valens is passed out in the next room.
The guitarist returns from puking outside. Opens another beer.
The bassist of my former rock star fantasy says one thing, and one thing only the entire time I am there. What he says, in response to one of the drummer's stories, is this: "So did you finger her twat or what?"
I stay for two hours, about two hours longer too long. At one point, Sandy loses it, running to the bathroom and crying about some horrible thing that happened in her past that she doesn't want to talk about but that still really upsets her, she's sorry but it comes out sideways sometimes. When she returns, the guitarist rubs her bare foot with his hand.
"Elvis could have had any girl in the world, and he chose her," she says, now a little teary from the whole ordeal. "And it turned out to be such a curse, in a way."
I tell her she knows a lot more than I do about Priscilla Presley.
"I just read her autobiography. You can ask me anything."
I ask what Priscilla thought about her daughter's marriage to Michael Jackson.
"Well, actually the book was written before that."
I ask Sandy if she's a big Elvis fan.
"Not really. I just read all the time these days. Last week it was Johnny Cash. Before that, George Jones." She looks around the room at the guys, on the floor and the bed in various states of drunk, and lowers her voice. "I know it sounds exciting to be with the band, but it gets a little boring on the road."