When it first started, my parents were all for it. Why wouldn’t they be? I was twelve and Cash was sixteen. Awww … sweet. Thinking about it now, my father actually thought it was a great development. Cash was part of a boy band called Alkaline in a faraway land called England. A quaint place still ruled by a Queen. Quite simply it meant he wouldn’t need to invest in a shotgun for at least a few more years.
For years they used to buy me Cash memorabilia. I had everything and anything with Cash’s name or face plastered on it. Bedspreads, pens, pencil cases, T-shirts, life-sized posters, cushions, mugs, plates, shower-curtains, even a toilet seat with Cash’s face and naked torso. My brother, Brad, bought it as a joke, but I loved it so it stayed. My room and my bathroom looked like shrines to Cash or the big publicity machine for Cash Hunter had just vomited all over my living space.
By the time I turned sixteen, my family didn’t consider my crush so peachy anymore. I came home from school one day and my mother claimed she had accidentally broken my toilet seat while she was cleaning it. Wonder of wonders my father already had a replacement toilet seat handy. My mother took the opportunity to persuade me that the shower curtains were looking old and worn and no longer matched the toilet seat.
A trip to Target sorted that out.
Then the Cash sheets somehow got snarled up in the dryer and my best Cash T-shirts were dyed grey when an old, black sock got into the washing machine by mistake. The mugs started breaking and were never replaced. Brad ordered life-size posters of Nine Inch Nails since they were the other group that I liked. He insisted on hanging them up for me after taking down Cash’s posters.
‘They’re really worn around the lips and cheeks aren’t they? Want me to trash them for you?’ he asked innocently.
Even though it was like a knife through my heart to see my beloved Cash posters being taken down, I knew my family was right. My obsession was bordering on crazy. I was two mugs away from being a stalker. Still, I couldn’t bear to throw my posters away. I’d been kissing them goodnight since I was twelve, so I rolled them up carefully and stored them away in the attic together with my ninety-six scrapbooks of Cash.
From that day onwards I stopped obsessively buying magazines he was featured in, and I forced myself not to go to ILoveCashHunter.com where I normally got the latest and breaking news about him. I even deleted his official website from my bookmark list.
Then when I was seventeen we heard that Alkaline was coming to Georgia. Cash Hunter was going to be performing at the Dome. My parents thought I was over him so they were quite happy for Leah and I to travel to Atlanta to see the concert.
We had to pay $30.00 for parking, wait more than an hour to check in our purses, and the Cokes were $7.00 each, but as I stood there with 70,000 other crazed fans, none of it mattered anymore. I felt more alive than I ever had. It was not like watching it on MTV or YouTube. A live concert was like nothing I could have imagined. Indescribable, really.
The very air was electric. Hundreds of roving spotlights moved over us adding so much heat to the evening that we were all bathed in sweat even before the performance started.
The massive stage suddenly lit up with winking, flashing blue lights and the music started. Nobody told me the vibrations would travel through the concrete under my feet, into my shoes, and up into my flesh and bones. It drummed into my blood and made my heart thump faster and faster. I was so excited the hair on my body stood on end.
Then the stage began to fill with smoke-like fog.
I could hardly believe I was finally going to see Cash Hunter. I thought I would stop breathing when five steel platforms began to rise out of the floor of the stage. The smoke began to clear and the crowd went crazy. My eyes found him immediately. It was unbelievable, but he was on the platform closest to us. The bright light made his hair glisten and his face glowed like an angel. He blew across the microphone.
‘Are you ready to rock Atlanta?’ he yelled into the microphone.
The crowd went wild.
‘Let’s hear that again,’ he shouted, and we screamed until we were hoarse.
Exploding Flash Pots went off as the drums and guitars began the intro. Cash raised up both his hands as if he were a god. Tears flowed from my eyes when his voice filled the stadium. I stared at him, mesmerized.
It was my favorite song. The Girls Who Don’t Say No.
The crowd started pulsing with the energy coming from him. The platform he was standing on grew into a kind of walkway, and to my shocked delight it was bringing him closer to us. He strutted along the expanding metal walkway in my direction and I screamed hysterically.
As he was right over me he suddenly looked directly into my eyes and sang, ‘I’ve been waiting for you all my life.’