"Right. Anyway, Johnny got in touch after almost twenty-five years. He wrote this song for me," Dean said. "John, do you want to sing this with me? Come on up here."
With a diffident shrug that did not conceal the thrill he felt, Johnny ambled up to the front of the room. Together, he and Dean sang "Nobody Knows Me Back in My Hometown."
Everyone clapped and cheered and Mona took snapshots of the two men together.
It was the last time that Johnny ever performed in public. After Dean died, he gave away his guitar and said it was time to grow up.
After the concert, there was ice cream and cake, and because they knew Dean was leaving the next day, people were reluctant to go. Johnny's neighbors were taken with how nice he was, and a woman called Fran who was a devout Christian, later told Johnny that Dean was the most Christ-like man she had ever encountered. As the party broke up, Dixie remained behind; she was the last to go.
All that night, Johnny was aware of Dixie, the woman Dean had met down in Denver. She was some kind of rival for Dean, although Johnny did not put it that way. She told him, "I want to let you know that I've told Dean, when he comes back, I've got a place for him to stay."
"That's real nice, Dixie. That's really nice," Johnny said, although Dean always had a place with him and Mona. Johnny would always be there for him.
After Dixie left, Dean plunked himself down on the Rosenburgs' sofa and said, "She is in love with me. There is nothing that she wouldn't do for me."
Looking at Dean, Johnny thought: If Renate was here and she looked into Dixie's eyes, and she is as jealous as you said, you'd be in a whole heap of trouble, boy.
The next morning, Dean left Colorado. Mona couldn't bring herself to go to the airport. It was a sad day for all of them. Johnny and Dean had been apart so long and no one knew when Dean would come back.
After I first met them in Loveland in 1988, Mona and Johnny sent me some tapes, tapes of Johnny's phone calls with Dean, tapes where Johnny had put down his thoughts about the reunion with Dean that October in 1985.
"Dean was a confused man," Johnny said on one of the tapes. "After he left Colorado he was even more confused. How can I convey what I felt about Dean, what my family felt? We loved him and he loved us, but we're not the only ones of this planet that he loved, I know that. If anybody ever got to know Dean, a piece of them died when he died. He did what no other American did - Dean became a superstar in a part of the world we call our enemy."
In exquisitely recollected detail, the taped accounts Johnny sent me conveyed his memories of Dean's week in Loveland. If Dean had stolen away a piece of Johnny's life when he left for South America all those years ago, he had given it back.
Letters from Johnny followed me to New York. Mona sent along a jar of her pickled beets, which I had enjoyed in Loveland.
"We're pleased to hear the tapes were acceptable. Gotta tell you it's crazy how we remember even more as the days go by," Johnny wrote.
Johnny also enclosed a note from Dean, which Mona forgot to put in with the beets. It was from Dean to John and it was full of longing. He asked Johnny why they didn't take time for fishing, and for building a fire at night, and using the stars for the roof, while they talked about many things. You could feel how much Dean wanted to be back with his old friend. How much he wanted to go home.
18
"Hi,I'm Dixie."
Her feathery voice was tremulous, almost frightened, when I first met her in the lobby of Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. She was a good-looking woman. In her early forties, Dixie Lloyd Schnebly had on a short fur jacket and polished boots under her slacks and she looked a lot like Ann-Margret.
As Dean Reed's American manager at the time of his death, she had figured as a main character in every news report; she told reporters that he had, without doubt, been murdered. It had taken me a while to reach her; on her answering machine was an announcement that said no one was home but that there was a big dog in the house.
Now in March of 1988, around the same time I saw the Rosenburgs up in Loveland, Dixie was here, shaking the snow off her fur chubby. It was starting to snow outside; a blizzard was on the way. In the Brown Palace lobby, waiters bustled around with huge trays loaded with coffee and cake, and the bellhops rustled up large sets of leather luggage.
In the American West, I realized, everyone was big, or seemed big, and the men dressed up in Western costumes; big tall men in boots and cowboy hats, their wives in full-length minks sashaying around the lobby of the Brown Palace, greeting one another as they waited for the annual stock show to open so they could go and buy cows.
We made an odd, huddled grouping in the middle of all these big buoyant people: Dixie, her feral, rather sexy face close to Leslie Woodhead's; Dixie's friend, Greg, a burly man with an amiable manner, who was there, it seemed, as a kind of bodyguard and who also sold real estate.
Like many Western women, Dixie was self-sufficient, but she deferred to men when there were men around.
She leaned closer to Leslie.
"Gee, I'm sorry I was, like, so hard to get hold of, but you have to be careful," she said apologetically. "There are people after Deano. A lot of people are trying to get at me." Dixie often called him Deano.
I assumed she meant that people were after Dean's story, but she also had something more sinister in mind. She was very nervy. She fiddled with a pendant she wore around her neck.
"A gift from Deano," Dixie said shyly.
"It's pretty," I said.
Like a girl with her first corsage, she smiled.
"When it first came I thought it was, like, junk, you know? And then I took it into a jewelry store and they said it was worth something."
I said, "It must be amber. From Russia?"
She nodded. "I thought that was so neat."
Dixie's conversation was peppered with "neats" and "beautifuls," and she blew raspberries for emphasis. With a husky voice and a fluent way with words, she punctuated her thoughts with funny noises and she rambled, but her intuitions and insights had a loony poetic truth. Later on she did admit that she was considered something of a poet and, diffidently, showed me a few of her poems.
Dixie, or DJ as many of her friends called her, was a woman in a man's world, as she put it, and it took a lot to scare her. She grew up in Wheat Ridge, where, as a girl, she first knew Dean. She still lived in her father's house, although her father was dead and she was on her own.
After high school, she had married a Mr. Lloyd, which was how she got into the oil business in the 1970s when Denver boomed.
Things didn't work out with Mr. Lloyd. Then the oil business dried up and Dixie took up driving a long-haul rig. As often as not she was out on the road, the rig eating up hundreds of miles of Interstate, roaring across America.
At truck stops she ate with the truckers; at night, she slept tucked up in the cab of her rig. No one hassled her, because she knew her way around, she said. She said she also had her eye on the possibility of a secretarial business and she had some property up on the North Slope in Grand Junction, Colorado.
When she met up with Dean Reed in October of 1985, though, when he asked her to be his manager in the US, she set aside all her other ambitions. Dean told her that she would be his Colonel Parker.
Now Dixie rose from the sofa in the hotel lobby, then she sat down again. She seemed to be looking for someone, but she settled down and told the story of how she had met Dean Reed at the documentary film festival in Denver where American Rebel was shown.
* * *
The second screening of American Rebel was on Saturday night, the night after Johnny and Mona had been to see it. Dixie had not been able to get a ticket, but she figured, what the heck, she'd go along and if she couldn't get in, maybe she'd run into Dean anyway. She had known him when she was a young girl and he was a teenager back in Wheat Ridge.