by Nicole Walker
“For me, by speculating that Nina Simone visited me in Utah, it allowed me to think about appropriation, the history of music, the persistence of cover songs, and what it would be like to have a friend who saw things from a different perspective than I or the Utahns I knew.”
My mother, who has been told looks like Faye Dunaway, but kids can’t know what their parents really look like, listened to Nina Simone like she was her best friend. She sang along in her careful-to-stay on key voice while scrubbing the kitchen floor. I knew most of the songs too because so many were covers. I could cover my mom singing, who covered Nina, who covered The Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun, George Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy, Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, and House of the Rising Sun which was a traditional folk song covered first by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1925, then Woody Guthrie, then Lead Belly, onto Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan.
When my mom and I weren’t singing to Nina Simone, we were singing along to the musicals on videotape we owned: Jesus Christ Superstar and the movie version of Hair. Mom, sitting on the couch, with a book in hand, sang “Manchester, England England across the Atlantic Sea” without so much looking at the screen. I, who was seven in 1979 when the film came out, sang along to “White Boys/Black Boys.” When Nell Carter, whom I knew from the TV Show Gimme a Break, sang “White boys are delicious. Black boys are nutritious,” I sang right along. Mom interrupted to say that Nina would have been good in that part. “Do black people always have to play black people?” I asked. She said, “Judas is played by a black guy in Jesus Christ Superstar but a white guy sang the Judas role in the concept album” and the “White Boys/Black Boys” song grew more complicated in my mind. I still know all the words but I still don’t know if it’s racist or not. I mean, everyone is delicious in that song. The white girls love the black guys. The black girls love the white guys. That must be good, right? Music is a history of uncovering and recovering the history of skin color. Nina, sliding away from Tryon, North Carolina, took cover by playing cover songs in New York City—until she needed to take cover elsewhere. I offered her distance and remove in what she would later call the most beautiful place in the world but when she first arrived, she called the middle of nowhere—and truly, the middle of Utah, not on the TV or film screen, is where I found her.
My grandpa, step, but still, my primary and only living grandpa, Walter Mayhew, was born in Duchesne to a family who came from England to colonize that part of Utah. By the mid-1870s, the white, Mormon colonists had pushed the Utes onto a reservation, less than 9% of its former land. The Mormons buried the original name of the town and county for a kind of French Oak, which is pronounced in the French way, Doo-Shane, but everyone calls it Doo-Chez-Nee to make fun both of the French and our Utah selves for wondering who the hell thought settlers from Missouri and Illinois didn’t love their consonants. Burying names and people is a different kind of cover story that most people in Utah do not want to sing loudly about.
When my grandpa came of age, he left Duchesne on a Greyhound bus and never looked back. Not even when he became a Greyhound bus driver himself.. When you are a kid, you think your grandpa only lived the one life—the one with you in it. It’s disorienting to imagine that he lived in the middle of Utah instead of Salt Lake City, where I grew up or southeast of Evanston, Wyoming where my mom grew up and where he met my grandmother who would become his second, or maybe third, wife. In Utah, we sometimes elide the number of times married. The ghost of polygamy drapes a great veil.
The only time I went to Duchesne, at least until I got married and Erik and I took our honeymoon trip on the backside of the Wind River and Uintah mountains, was with my boyfriend Darren. Darren and I dated for four years, from when I was 14 until 18. In some version of Utah, that would count as a proper age to marry, but Darren and I refused the Mormon church and thus stayed at least marriage-celibate.
Darren, who was three years older than me, worked at McDonald’s flipping burgers for Big Macs. Not quite graduating high school, he left home to rent an apartment in Holladay, Utah. He brought his waterbed from his dad’s house in Taylorsville, and a set of pots and pans his mom left behind when she moved to Pueblo, Colorado. At 15, I made my first no recipe meal—bites of steak with gravy, poured over rice. I sat on his couch, finishing my German homework, while he watched episodes of Cheers on TV. When our friends, Rebecca and Trevin came over. I kept doing my homework. Rebecca and Trevin wrestled and Darren kept watching cheers. Sometimes, when I didn’t feel like cooking or when we ate psylocibin mushrooms, the four of us dined on bowls of Grapenuts, laughing until we spit them out, crying about how much chewing made our jaws hurt.
On a warm summer’s eve, Darren’s dad, Rex, called the apartment from jail saying that Darren had to go to Duchesne. “You have to ask your grandma for the bail money. You have to go get it.” Rex was from Duchesne too although I have no idea if my grandpa and Darren’s families’ paths crossed. I imagine they must have. How many Davises and Mayhews live in a town of 1500 people, give or take a couple hundred, depending on the decade?
It’s only an hour and forty-minute drive to Duchesne from Salt Lake but it felt much longer. As teenagers in Salt Lake City without a lot to do, we drove a lot back and forth across the streets of Salt Lake but longer trips were confined to driving the thirty minutes from Stansbury Lake to Windsurf with my old boyfriend, Monty, and his new wife Maria. An hour and forty-minute drive seemed monumental. We may have as well gotten married, spending that much time together alone in a car.
We arrived at his grandparents—a ranch house that may have been farm-adjacent at one point. People didn’t do much but ranch cattle in Duchesne but his grandparent’s house seemed more suburban than rural. Darren got out of the car, not waiting for me, and knocked on the door.
His grandmother did not embrace him. She held the door wide open for him to step through. She poked her head outside to see me standing beside the car, having no idea what to do with myself.
“You may as well come in too.” I dragged my shoes through the dust bunched up against the walkway, the grass having burned off a long time ago, hoping that if I took long enough, she’d give up on me and leave me to wait by the car. But she stayed door open until I slipped by her, my arm brushing against her bulbous stomach—the direction I suspected my stomach would go too when I was her age and lived in a ranch style house.
Darren, his grandma, and I sat on a green velour couch that promised to suck me into its cushions and lose me where the change went when it too wanted to avoid strangers and difficult conversations. The grandpa sat at the edge of theLazy-Boy that he kept unreclined. It was clear we would not be staying for dinner.
No one said anything. We had no stories. I was a sophomore in High School. I could have told them I studied German but they might ask why and I’d have to explain about Joel, who took German and convinced me that it was the language of geniuses. I wanted to be a genius. Or at least convince Joel to think I was.
Darren’s grandparent’s house smelled like all houses of grandparents, except these grandparents, being members of the LDS church, didn’t drink coffee—instead, a layer of mildew, hairspray, tuna fish and maybe a hint of urine wreathed around the room. If sound had boomed, or even whispered, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed the smell but lack of ordinary sensation highlighted the weirder ones. I kept my feet on the floor and tried to keep my posture straight to suggest Darren had done well by himself. A girl with good posture is worth diamonds.
If Nina had been there, she would have said something. She would have made us all say something. “How long have you lived like this?” She would have said. “You can’t stay in a house all day, sinking into couch cushions. There is too much mercury in tuna. Twice a week. That’s all you can eat. Now, let’s see if we can get a drink around here.”
Instead of taking us tothe liquor cabinet or the bar, because in Duchesne, there is neither, Nina would have marched us out to the banks of the river. The Duchesne River contributes to the Green. The Green merges just a little bit south and east with the Colorado. This may be Nina’s first visit to any arm of the big river. Here, she would have found the four-color palette of the Rocky Mountains: tan, blue, green, and silver. In this part of the U.S., the desert asserts itself. Trees grow, grasses thrive, the sky rounds, but sand weaves its color behind and under, through and beside all the others. Dirt is the canvas and there is not enough paint to go around.
Truly, Nina would probably not deign to visit Duchesne. If Utah in general hasn’t much Jazz, Duchesne has negative zero. What would she want with cows, beige sand, and a green couch? But I would have loved for someone to have taken me to the river—to get me out of that house. To show me an eddy in the river. To show me how to see fish through water. Being from the arid west, I knew only little about streams although I did have a gift for finding salamanders. It’s something to look for when you’re digging in window wells of houses whose water table once rose to the level of foundations.
Nina might sit on a slab of granite sticking out over the river. “You have no idea how good you’ve got it,” she might say, waving her arm to usher my eyes toward the river and the vast hills and mountains beyond. “You could lose yourself in this place for days.” In Tryon, North Carolina before she left for Julliard, Nina’s dad took her fishing on the Pacolet for largemouth and spotted bass, black bullhead, and catfish. In 2017, a large die off of catfish occurred along the river. Fish and Wildlife attributed the fish deaths to disease which they imagined would be “self-limiting.” It was not “self-limiting.” The fish keep dying. The clarity of the water covers a host of upstream sins.
For Nina, whose time on her river preceded the times of dead fish, fished her limit. But if Nina could sit with me on the river, there was a sense even this western water was not the pure water that it once had been. As Heraclitus said, you never step in the same river twice. Lucretius would not have believed in purity. Nina sung a song about that. It was called Ain’t Got No. I Got Life. She sang that even without shoes, or wine, or friends or money, one still had their eyes and their feet. And their life. The water clicked around the river stones to the beat. The Green River pulling her voice up and out like it pulled the Duchesne toward it. I watched them both flow toward the southeast. “I’ve got my hair,” she sang.
“I know that song,” I would have told her. “My parents make me listen to the Hair soundtrack like once a week.”
“I saw the show in the city.”
“New York?”
“Mmhmm. Then after their show, I took Lorraine with me to The Village Gate, that old club on the corner of Bleeker Street and Thompson, where I played that song for the first time. I did indeed have my hair. And my lungs.”
“My mom said she saw them. Penises. In the aisles. During the Broadway show. I wish I had been there.”
“But you’re not even here. You’re inside, sitting on a couch, waiting for someone to tell you where to go? What’s the point of stones if people aren’t going to come out and look at them?”
I would have picked up a stone, set in my palm. I did not want to be one of those people. I wanted to be one of these people. A Nina and a Nicole by the stream, singing the soundtrack to Hair that my parents listened to, and mom sang to, once a week.
But instead of actually investigating the lime in the stones by the river, I stared at the plastic cowboy arranged on a shelf above the television that looked like it might have once been Darren’s dad’s toy. Or maybe it was a tchotchke of the Eastern Utah kind. Darren stood up from the green coach, signaling it was time to go. His grandfather handed him an envelope which I assume was full of money. Who trusts an eighteen-year-old boy and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend to drive cash across half a state? Who lets their eighteen-year-old son take that cash to the bail bondsman?
His office was across from the library, down the street from the bar. The sign flashed Bail. Cash. Open 24 Hours. Not only in New York City. In Salt Lake City too.
This time, I did stay in the car. Nina slid into the driver’s seat to sit with me.
“First bar I went to was down this street,” I told her. “Juniors. Jamee Kidd who got pregnant in high school. Her face was so open and full of joy. She was a great mom. Married at sixteen, divorced at twenty, married again, divorced again, finally changed her name to Moon so she and her face could stay that way—single and inviting. Her husbands did not like her effervescence. They both spent a lot of time trying to cap those bubbles, flatten that soda.”
“I knew a girl like that, back in North Carolina. She had five kids by the time she was twenty-seven.”
“Oh, that’s a song too. Emmylou Harris. Red Dirt Girl.”
“No, that song is about a girl in Alabama. This one is in North Carolina. She served eggs and hash browns at a diner. Chicken fried steak. Grits. That kind of thing. Her mama took care of the littlest babies. But five! Five kids.”
“It’s too many. She would have fit out here pretty well. Five kids is the norm. Heck, Darren is one of four. His slightly older sister was named Rexanne. Just in case the male heir never arrived. But he did, in the form of Darren. And now Rexanne lives in Venice Beach.”
“Here’s a fact: If you have four or five kids, you’re going to lose one or two to Venice,” Nina would have said.
“I’ve never been to Venice,” I admitted.
“Here’s a true fact: I had to post bail once,” she said.
“Did you get arrested for protesting the government?”
“No, for tax evasion. The U.S. government can find you even in Switzerland.”
“Did you go to jail?” I asked.
“I posted bail. $10,000. Then I returned to Europe and played a few shows. I wired the rest of the money. Eventually.”
“Too bad Darren’s dad doesn’t sing. Maybe he could pay his own bail that way.”
“Not everyone can remember words to songs,” she said, cutting Rex some slack.
“Or how to play the piano. Not everyone can go to Juilliard. Or be Young, Gifted and Black,” I teased.
Nina sang the tune of the title song a couple of times. Nothing more of the song than the title because singing so might infringe on copyright. Record companies are notorious for going after writers who quote lyrics in their book. Write your own damn words, they seem to say.
“That is another true fact,” Nina’s voice lilted just a bit. Not enough to call it a song. Not enough to call the police.
Darren came out with a sheet of paper. He opened the door, pulling the veil that kept Nina there with me out the window. She left me with nothing but questions. Did we have to go to the jail now? Did we exchange paper money for official looking paper that we could exchange for his dad?
Darren shook his head. There’s a system for knowing when someone posts bail.
“Do you think he’ll pay your grandpa back?”
Darren put his yellow 1971 Volkswagen Beetle, the car I was learning to drive on, into first gear. He didn’t answer. Even though we’d been back and forth across half the state, I made it into the house almost on time.
My dad sat in his blue recliner, bluer than Darren’s Grandfather’s in Duchesne, tilted all the way back so his body was mainly horizontal, a re-run of MASH flashing blues and greens from the TV. Even prostrate, my dad could pull his glass of Chardonnay to his lips, sip and not spill.
“How was your day?” he asked, just a little bit slurring.
“It was fine.”
“Good.”
I nodded and sat on the couch until the theme song spilled out of the TV as the credits rolled. Nina didn’t appear to sing but I knew the words anyway. I could play the song, croaking out, “Suicide is Painless”. It brings on many changes. But I can take or leave it if I please” on the piano that my parents kept in the basement—where I could be alone, imagining Nina Simone at The Village Gate on the corner of Bleeker and Thompson with a hundred people around to sing with me.
I heard a knocking on the sliding glass door that opened onto the deck that my dad stained with linseed oil every summer. My dad, too happy with his chardonnay and Lazy Boy, didn’t hear the soft knuckle against the door.
“We have to get out of here,” she whispered. “If you stay here, you will have that show’s theme song stuck in your head the rest of your days.”
So I slid out into the night, tiptoeing down the linseed-oil massaged wood of the deck onto the manicured grass of the backyard. At the back fence, Nina lifted her long skirt, leveraged her foot on a cross plank and pulled herself over the top. I followed, saying, “we could have used the gate” as I jumped down to meet her on the blacktop surface where the church goers parked and the boys played basketball at the Ward House that shared a property line with mine. Or my father’s, rather.
“We can get out for a little while.”
I sized up my free sense. I looked at her and said, “I think we’ll need bicycles.”
She agreed.
We rolled my bike and one of my sister’s from the side door. Nina lifted her skirt. I tucked the bottom of my jeans into my socks. Maybe we could make it back to the river by daylight.
Growing up non-Mormon in Utah, I often felt like I had to speculate a culture for myself. My parents, who had lived in New York City, returned to Salt Lake, disappointed to leave the diversity and culture of Utah. But there is diverse history in Utah--much of it imported, some of it buried, some of it ignored. For me, by speculating that Nina Simone visited me in Utah, it allowed me to think about appropriation, the history of music, the persistence of cover songs, and what it would be like to have a friend who saw things from a different perspective than I or the Utahns I knew.
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Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021) Sustainability: A Love Story (2018) and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. (2019). She has previously published the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013),and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story (2019) with Sean Prentissand Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013) with Margot Singer. She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a noted author in Best American Essays. Her work has been most recently published in the New York Times, Longreads, and Ploughshares, among other places. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.