The longest chapter title started as a placeholder too good to leave holding a place. Is someone crossing the street twice, or getting hoodwinked prior to doing so?
We open with a Carter lyric, follow with a callback to chapter 29’s opening line on a time travel fake-out, find ourselves back in the van—and most importantly get another look at THE LIST. Things have changed since we last encountered it, and not fully for the better.
Having Local Boy’s daughter Sistine appear on the list was the reason for the whole time-travel swapped in the womb machinations set into motion back in chapter 19. Took a few drafts to figure out how and when to best reveal this. When she was there from the jump it sucked some of the drama out, but having her added later felt like a bit of a cheat. Eventually I justified replacements being allowed only after failures by the redhead’s own seemingly2 arbitrary rule.
The book doesn’t fully spell it out, but the gist is Dave Alexander got removed from the list because the Redhead failed to save him and his slot goes to Sistine. Alexander was kicked out of the Stooges after an incident at the Goose Lake festival. You can imply she got him kicked out of the band but it didn’t change his fate—and from there you can assume the same explains the mysterious absence of Brian Jones.3
Tidbits:
- In chapter 23 the redhead suggested she’d save the five remaining women on the list next. You know she saved Billie Holiday since in our timeline Bille isn’t in the 27 Club. Britney Spears is crossed out. 4 Janis is still dead by the same logic as why Billie is alive; Mia Zapata & Amy Winehouse are still listed PLUS Sistine is added. Two steps forward, one step back.
- Nelson & the redhead’s plan is revealed as intentionally getting Sistine on the list so they can get her off the list. It may or may not have been set into motion when the TP narrator saw the pair on a date at the end of Timely Persuasion.
- “That’s a different Jim Morrison we saved.” More specifically, the one who sang “Fasten up your seatbelts for a bumpy ride.”
- Having done way too much research on seatbelts, the existence of this Wikipedia page delights me.
- Once there was a list of Canadian musicians following the “no rush to visit our northern neighbor” bit, but it was forced and distracting and pushed the limits of disbelief suspension for Local Boy to hold Northern greats in equal esteem.
- The “Years from now and years ago” shift into third person narration intentionally mirrors chapter 21 of Timely Persuasion while once again recapping a chunk of the TP storyline.
- A rough timeline behind the timeline changes in the convoluted explanation5 of the plan behind the plan: a) Sistine Timmons dies at 25. b) Her brother & her husband separately cook up time travel plots to prevent her death.6 c) They spend 2 (or 3…) books stepping on each others toes.7 d) The moral of the story is the whole thing won’t work unless they team up.
- An older draft had Daphne slamming on the brakes in a previous chapter lead directly into the near hit and run here. When I rearranged some scenes I decided to make brake slamming a habit of hers.
- Local Boy astutely asks how he can see his older self in 2000 if the list still says he dies at 27. The redhead’s response “because your son remembers you being here” is the factual answer. “And because my plan is going to work” is just her being overboard and self assured.8 Later, her dodging the question on how the members on the list can actually be changed whereas in other cases only memories change is me taking the old “slightly explainy style” feedback to heart by intentionally elucidating9 less.
FOOTNOTES
- I briefly tried using double lines to cross out names on the list in this chapter as another play on the title, but it looked dumb. Part of me wishes I had the list names properly illustrated vs. done with handwriting font. One looks too much like a misplaced underline sometimes. ↩︎
- Emphasis on seemingly. Everything has a reason in the redhead’s world. ↩︎
- The same tactic was successful in saving Guigsy, however. ↩︎
- Although this happened in 2016, I wouldn’t rule out the redhead’s involvement both then and in 2008 when BS was actually 27. ↩︎
- Someone recently (and accurately) called TP’s time travel “pretty complicated.” I said this book was less so. Maybe I was wrong… ↩︎
- Chicken vs. egg doesn’t really matter here with time travel involved. ↩︎
- “Throw a bunch of lines out ’til you get it right…” ↩︎
- Oh no, I know: AWAB. ↩︎
- See image below. (This hadn’t happened when I wrote the book, but did when I wrote this commentary post.) ↩︎
