Nightjar City · Meet the driver

Neon Havoc

At the wheel: Luz Baptiste

Mercedes-Benz CLA

Three jobs in purple ink

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Luz Baptiste can get a room dancing while someone is still coiling the cables. The CLA needed her attention in a much smaller space, starting with the one tool she kept losing.

Look for the purple ink

Luz pins the running sheet for a covered market show to whatever looks least likely to move. This weekend it was the lid of a cooler. Last summer the lid in question belonged to a person who came back for it before the last act. The whole crew spent the gap between songs looking for what came next. Since then, the show sheet also goes in somebody's shirt pocket. It is in purple ink so nobody will mistake it for the list of ice orders.

As a teenager Luz sold orange slices at those shows. The stage lead let her take over on the condition that she never ask a player to do a job that kept his hands from his instrument. This struck her as odd until a drummer came out carrying juice. She has spent years since then learning what to stop doing in time to cue the next thing.

Three places a spanner might be

She brought the Mercedes-Benz CLA to the garage partly because she wanted to see what her speed looked like free of the running sheet. At private practice she began talking about the speakers in the bay, then about a wheel she should check, then about whether the lane looked rough. She took a spanner out at some point. Anyone looking for it later won the opportunity to search a table, a gate stand and the inside of her left boot.

Her friend Vick ran music for that practice. He gave her a little pad with the three jobs she had mentioned written in the order she had said them. She put through a line so hard it tore the top sheet, asked him to put the music back on and finished the other jobs. The spanner turned up in a coil of microphone wire. They had to lift the whole coil to get it into the case without moving their chairs.

“Turn it up once I've crossed off wheels. Wait, that says wires. Let me read it again.”

Luz Baptiste · Getting ready with Vick.

The part she keeps loud

Luz has a sense of when the CLA wants to fall into a quick sweep without fuss. Her trouble is believing she can fix a poor lead-in halfway through it. In private tests, if the first correction doesn't leave the car where she expected, she makes another one immediately. All that activity steals the piece of track where the car might settle on its own. Vick has a recording of her saying three different things while trying to describe one corner. She asked him to keep it because there is enough silence at the end to hear her brakes.

Luz and Ansel from Gold Rush share a table when both need space to empty a tool bag. He once offered her the top of his spotless case as a place to set things down. The whole table looked better organized for ten minutes. She discovered that she had set one of his tools in her boot and kept looking everywhere else out of habit.

The set that runs past nine

She wants a regular practice night on a course with a long steady bend, where she'll have the space to try that first correction alone. Night practice goes against a meeting at the market, and Luz has never asked Vick to take an entire meeting in her place. He has asked to do it once because he has a complaint about a board the brooms keep falling off. It sounds like a small thing unless you are the person who has to put the brooms back.

The next practice sheet has two lines in purple ink and a bright square around the time to stop checking the sound. Luz will bring her CLA and her own spanner. Vick has already slipped a second copy of the list into her trouser pocket.

“Give me the bend and don't tell me if anybody's dancing.”

Luz Baptiste · Asking for one clear practice slot.

Mic at the pits

Lost in the wires

Mack Did you find your spanner?

Luz Baptiste Yes. Vick picked up the microphone cable and the spanner came with it. I checked my boot first. Twice.

Mack Might need laces.

Meet the voice behind the microphone