Outside, the multitude, the weaving concert-going mass, roiled and heaved; it had been oozing through the gates for hours now, drunk since dawn. Your la-di-da folk, your middle-management sludge and scalper targets, inhabited the amphitheater, breathing the broad fan of plastic seats into a thicket of alcohol fumes. Here floated men in coconut bras, women in Hawaiian-print surfing trunks. And the Lawn People my God, the Lawn People, they didnt care who or what they barfed on; the Lawn People, milling on the grassy slope beyond the amphitheatre, pouring into the standing room section with inflatable wading pools and paper mache shark fins all this, all this, was for Jimmy Buffett. The shimmy of the car stereos met the whir of the cocktail blenders and echoed down the river: dust off the six-foot inflatable flamingos, for Our Jimmy, our soul mate in daiquiri consumption, had come to spread his salt-rimmed mantle of acceptance over one and over all.

Buffetts summer tour spanned a sparse fifteen or so cities this year, and one of them was here he had chosen to come to tweedy Cincinnati, designating us airy and with-it by his very presence, deigning to play for us even as Cleveland (Cleveland!) sailed past us in terms of local machismo and tourist dollars and General Things To Be Proud Of, leaving to muck about in the stinking Ohio River mud. The Queen City, taking a dump upon her throne: the eternally horrid Bengals, who, in an effort to pump game attendance to even respectable levels, were now reduced to advertising home games as a chance to see the opposing team (The Super Bowl Champion Denver Broncos, right in your own hometown!) plus the whole unpleasant business with the race riots in April (Jessie Jackson popping up next to the Chief of Police on CNN, telling us how to run our city! And still the press wouldnt leave it alone) And the Reds, flailing about in second-last place in a crudely amputated Riverfront Stadium, the center-field wall cut away to allow for the construction of a new ballfield. So the long view of the city on ESPN every night, the color pixel beam of Cincinnati projected upon the world, to Chicago and New York and California and places people WENT, consisted of dirt mounds and muddy cranes and Griffey forlornly chasing down the visiting teams home runs but screw it, Jimmy has brought his floating carnival to town; sit down and shut up and and God just be cool for once. Therefore: pass the boat drinks.

I have long suspected that Buffett himself has warm oasis eyes, and I might have rested there for a moment had I not taken an awed step backwards into a supply closet. Accompanied by an entourage of three men, he paused twenty feet away from me at the entrance of his dressing room to bestow pleasantries upon the security staff stationed outside the door, then vanished alone inside, presumably to perform whatever God-almighty ritual famous people unfurl when the transform themselves from Ordinary People into The Famous. The small knot of His People moved on; they had some official function, some important official function no doubt, but precisely what it was had not been explained to me when my supervisor pointed to this spot and said, Stand there until I come back.

"What should I do?" I said, the beige walls, the hospitalness of the hallway housing the room where Jimmy Buffett dressed overwhelming me with their blandness.
He shrugged. Keep the wrong people out, let the right people in. He pointed to a stagehands access pass and moved on, grimly telling the receiving end of his walkie talkie that the confiscated kegs went to the administration office, dammit, not the supply trucks for the stage-right catering tent.

After Buffett arrived I had just barely backed into the closet when he closed the door behind him, completely unaware that one of the people responsible for his safety was peeping at him from around a Hoovervac.

At my feet were extra Igloo coolers and tense coils of leftover amp wires. I was alone in my habitat: I, the permeable membrane between Buffett, Great High Lord of Margaritaville, and the unwashed drunken mob of paying customers. The space between me and the crowd over which I held ejecting power was gauzy, was wax paper, considering I was one of them last year at this time, wandering the lawn in a thigh-length sarong and a $1.99 wreath of fake hibiscus flowers twisted in my hair, whipping around in pouty indignation when my ass was grabbed or my chest stared at. All that vaulted me from the lawn this evening was a two-hour training session, a properly tucked uniform shirt and a blood alcohol level beneath the legal limit. A five-foot-four woman elevated to Buffett-guarding status in her first hour on the job: That is the crack security minimum wage will fetch you.

That I hovered between Buffett's air-conditioned backstage world and the boozy carnival outside was all the more humbling when one considered his function in this one-airport town. Buffett, although properly famous for his knack for rhyming Martinique with African parakeet, was not so much an entertainer as a summertime safety valve. It was Pirates of the Caribbean Fantasy Camp for these people. The tax accountants and systems analysts and benefits managers staggering through the concession lines out there, their daily world awash in khaki pants and ten-line phone systems and memos in bold fontthey werent so much getting a drunk on as lusting after the tropical phosphorescence of the barefoot lifestyle Buffett represented. And even if one missed out on the CD box set celebrating Buffett the singing sailor, there was always Buffett the clothing line (specializing in a series of horrifying Hawaiian shirts about which the sponsor himself has said, Thats not the type of thing I would wear,) and Buffett the Margaritaville Shop chain stores (Lost Shaker of Salt, $4.99.) Hes spun off three books one fiction, two non-- and a stage musical. Its cash on a mango-garnished salver, this Buffett franchise, dazzling pirate swag beyond anything he ever sang about and who can blame the man? The fans, aching for the Cessna-powered hippie sunrises he is said to chase, are the ones providing him with the lifestyle we were too pale and lawn-hemmed to lead ourselves. If we cant haul off and search out the ultimate Brazilian wave, well, lets all chip in and get Buffett to do it for us; he was to the gumbo born and can verse the life better than we can anyway.

And that was why Buffett, commanding a sellout crowd of over 20,000 people at $27.50 a ticket to start (to start!) sat where he was, tucked behind the dressing room door as thousands of careening fans smashed their voices up against the walls, eager for his very presence, and why I stood where I was, rendered five and a quarter an hour to just stand there, the guardian of his privacy; a body, a blonde picket fence in the security staff obstacle course to be hurdled if one wanted to taste the oxygen he, Buffett, The Famous, breathed. The white collars out there trampling up the lawn and stickying the house seats were not, one may safely assume, clamoring to hear tales from the life of a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who lived in her parents basement and who, in order to pass the time from one weekend Mass to another, concocted far-flung sexual fantasies involving Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart and certain scenes from the major motion picture Body Heat. If that life were set in song and tshirts, it would sound like a single, poignantly played kazoo and wear even worse. And that is why I bought the box set, sucked at the trademark tequila elixirs, and fell respectfully back into the supply closet in the face of the life I steadily paid someone else to live. Buffett, writer, and Ellis, writer: If the twenty-foot gulf from the supply closet to the dressing room door had a causeway, it was too narrow for me to venture.

Eventually the Permeable Membrane emerged from the supply closet so as to better hear Buffetts laugh echo down the hallway as he conducted a telephone call (Jimmy Buffett uses the phone! just like Ordinary People!) "Its rough, its rough," I heard him say, and the tired ring to his voice dripped from the beige of the walls.

The stage manager knocked on his door and opened it a crack. I shrank up against the closet again. Five minutes, he said.

"Yeah?" said Buffett. I could hear him smiling; the five-minute warning was for some reason highly amusing. What was rough was also apparently survivable.

"Yeah," the manager answered over his shoulder as he approached the exit where I was stationed. There was a sneeze from Buffetts general direction. "How you doing," the manager said as he passed me by, then rounded the corner to the staircase where the cascades of customers washed up and washed up against the very edge of the stage, every available molecule shoved aside. I glanced at the door, shut again, then stared after the stage manager, now melded into the mob. He had passed from one side to the other so effortlessly: Five minutes, reason all the world has gathered here... How you doing, security chick... one side, Banana Republic shoppers... all without a single moments depressurization. The man did this every day!

I heard the smooth ripples of steel drums float up, muffled, from below; the dressing room door closest to me flew open and four female dancers clattered past, hopping into high heels, tugging grass skirts down around their hips. Their makeup positively screeched. I flattened myself against the wall; they tossed me smiles as they turned to tumble down the steps. The crowds voice rose from a cocktail party rumble to an expectant roar.
Buffetts dressing room door cracked light again, then swung all the way open, and he stepped into the hallway, alone. Replacing the unlettered red tshirt hed been wearing was a canary Hawaiian shirt, scattered with a print of six-string guitars. He shuffled along in flip-flops. Buffett was heading back the way he had come, preparing to enter the stage from the left. He was about my height, barely taller. I saw his back. I saw the curling remnants of his hair, brushed close to his neck. I saw the way a pair of yellow wristbands circled his lower arms. I saw precisely what he was: a fifty-four year old man who had snorted and smoked his way through the sixties and seventies and then jounced through the eighties and nineties on a tour bus.

This was my last chance, to run after him his bodyguards would shove him onto his bus and peel the hell out of here even before the last note of the encore had been struck, before the last drunk had screwed, so as to break north before the patron traffic constipated the interstates. This was my last chance he was walking away and I would never, ever, again tread this water between his world and mine, although speaking to him before being spoken to would lose me my job, but who cared, who gave a flying fuck, with the piece of shit uniform shirt and the nonsense of the five and a quarter an hour there he went, another day pushing down his legs and his lower back and arms as he steadily burnt himself away inside a small clear shotglass, the endless push to promote a palm-breezy life eroding away the upper edges of his middle age. He would likely be frightened or worse annoyed if I pounded down the steadily increasing linoleum gap between us, touched one of the slumping shoulders, and smiled my eyes hello, and said I wish I knew you in real life, Jimmy, and you knew I was going to be born, didnt you, when you wrote "Changes in Latitudes"? Because of you I am going to live on a sandbar when I grow up. Okay, then, have a good show.

But he was old, and he was tired and ill, his rounded back said, and I loved him enough to leave him alone.

The crowd wailed and keened: he was on stage. The rise and fall of his amplified voice shimmered over them; I could discern the pitch and yaw of it but never a distinct verse or phrase. He was talking to them, addressing the Lawn People, the inebriated systems engineers in the pirate tricorners. Our Jimmy had slipped now into the same chummy, amused drawl I heard when he answered the stage manager.

The first number slid into a chorus I titled my head, slatted my eyelids. The blare of the speakers faced away from my station, and although the stage ran the length of the hallway beneath me the music was indecipherable, a wash of salsa beat and steel guitars and somewhere in the pudding the rough cheerful tenor of Buffett. The narrow window along the opposite wall revealed little but the lemony glare of the headlights on the equipment buses. I was seated in the humid hurricane core, blind and deaf to the howling chaos just outside the stairwell.

The bass vibrated in my sneaker soles, anchoring my torso and spine, a tether to the musical mixing bowl below. It was a gentle bass, and a friendly one; the white negative of the punishing mechanical beat I would later endure while working the N*Sync concert N*Sync, the boy band wonders, who rammed the VCR tape marked Concert into the audiomix machine and pushed play. This town knew N*Sync not; we owed them nothing, they carried us nowhere. The city, the crowd was a transfer blur on a souvenir shirt to them; we were merely another stop on the tour. one of their warmup acts had bounded onstage yelling, Whassup Toledo! grind and thrust and choreograph your little arm-pumps while you may, dear boys, for within the space of a pennant race or two you shall be a punchline wherever you go.

Meanwhile, outside, Jimmy played and Jimmy sang, everybody's arm dangling in the ocean. He played and he left, the crowd still demanding an encore, still not ready to disembark from the boat, and by the time I got home to check the concert reviews on his website (Margaritaville.com, dear swabbies) I found a banner ad announcing that the concert scheduled for tomorrow, some five hundred miles from here, had been postponed. Jimmy Buffett, it said, was too ill to go through with the performance.