– Scotch –
Moving On
Another year. Another summer. Just another sweltering day. The same as a billion others that have come before, as my mom calls home from the European ‘gap year’ that my folks decided to take three decades after what would have been socially acceptable. After another phone call with my mom nagging and my dad grumbling at her to leave me alone, and she asked me the same questions she’s asked me a hundred times before.
‘Do you have a date tonight, honey? Would you like me to talk to Mrs. Hennessy? She said her daughter is back in town.’
‘Maybe you should reconsider that girl Belle. She’s still single and she’s lovely. Always so nice at the store, and I bet she can cook. She knows the difference between salt and flour, and that’s a whole lot better than that girl Sassy that Luca used to date. Silly girl doesn’t know her head from her ass.’
‘Have you considered going corporate? You have those fancy degrees, yet you continue to sing in your band.’
It’s not that my mom doesn’t like my band, or the guys in it. On the contrary, she adores them. They’ve been her extra children for as long as I can remember, but her love for them doesn’t trump her love for me; her thirty-one-year-old, single, ‘moping’ son who doesn’t even look remotely close to settling down and giving her those grandbabies she’s been begging for.
Not one to play favorites though, I have no doubt she also calls Alex and asks similar questions. He has to bear the same burdens as I do. We’re both single and old, and my mom hates it.
And then there’s my pregnant baby sister. Britt’s in her third trimester, and my niece or nephew will be here in the next couple weeks. That should keep Mom busy for a while at least, but then I know once the new baby smell goes away, she’ll hit me and Alex harder than ever before.
Britt is the baby of the family, but she’s married and pregnant and lapping her big brothers, and that’s going to set my mom into a frenzy not unlike a shark that has just smelled blood.
She’s likely sitting by the phone with a pen and diary poised and ready. She’s waiting for the smallest hint of female companionship for her boys, then she’ll be calling them to discuss suitable gowns and venues and birth control scheduling.
Like our future wives would be open to discussions of lunar cycles and… other cycles.
Not likely.
I love my mom to bits, but she’s mostly batshit crazy, and her desperation for grandbabies is fogging her perception and would scare any decent girls off anyway.
A decade ago, it was about being stand up guys and giving our little sister positive examples to watch and judge her future husband by. It was about never settling and no longer living in the past. It was about finding our one true love and moving on in eternal wedded bliss.
Now, it’s about finding any willing participant, preferably good looking to minimize the chance of creating grandkids that look like the Grinch. But at this point, I bet my mom would even accept Jim Carrey, green hairy chest and all.
Thank god, they decided to take off for a couple years to live the jet setting life they never did before. We still get the three-times-weekly phone calls – from Mom, not Dad – and we receive care packages in the mail. My mom purchased razor subscriptions for us, like a brand-new razor legitimately arrives in the mail every single Monday morning – one at my apartment, and one at the house for Alex. God knows what she sends for Britt.
Despite mom’s fretting and sending my dad crazy on whichever continent they happen to be on that given month, at least she’s not here, sitting on my doorstep every morning and asking me in person why I’m not settled down with a ‘nice girl’ yet.
I love my mom. I love her a lot, but I might throw a frying pan at her next time she asks.
Despite my crazy ass mother and her disappointment that I haven’t set foot in a fancy office, nor have I used my expensive and hard-earned degrees to become rich and successful yet, I find myself back on stage at Club 188, with my band behind me and the dancing crowd in front of me. I’m not rich. But I feel successful.
The couples in the crowd dance and gyrate as I sing about love and sacrifice and broken promises, and the single girls without a date stand close to the stage and reach out toward me.
The club spotlights move high above us, fixed to the ceiling on the second story as the people dwelling on the mezzanine level lean on and look over the balustrades and watch us on the ground floor. The lights are bright and blinding, flashing on us then flashing on the dancers.
Casey ‘Tink’ Hart mans the bar, giving drunk customers the stink eye when they shout their orders at her obnoxiously. Drunks are assholes, and she’s fed up with this show. She doesn’t give a damn about the whole ‘customer is king’ thing. If you’re an asshole, the tiny chick will kick your ass out of here faster than you can pull the keys from your pocket. And she’ll have you on the banned list without remorse if you back talk. Customer’s aren’t king around here. ‘Rollers’ are.
Tink’s husband is a Roller. As in, part owner and operator of the local ‘Rollin On’ fight gym. And so is Jack; my sister’s husband. Which, by extension, makes my sister a Roller too.
Gross.
I refocus on my job, closing my eyes as the chorus rolls around for the song we’re covering. It’s one of my favorites, not because of the lyrics or the band who first wrote it, but because it simply feels good scratching its way up my throat. I sing the raspy tune while random girls paw at my jeans, and the ‘lucky’ ones cop a feel before I step back another foot to ensure they don’t get a second chance. It’s a shame the physical stage area of this club is so small, an afterthought, considering this was more of a high energy, pop-music-played-by-a-DJ type of club before the guys and I approached the former owners and pitched the idea of trying out a live band.
They said yes, we started playing here, and now we’re both winners, because these people love us.
I cup my microphone in both hands and sing softly as I tap my booted foot against the monitor speaker at the front of the stage. This is everything I ever asked for. To play nights with my boys, to play music, to give dancers an experience. For couples to dance and fall in love while they move to my music; it’s about as close to perfect as my life can ever be now.
It’s the most I can ask for, and I’m okay with it. This is my life, and it’s pretty decent. It could definitely be worse.
I open my eyes as Bobby – Tink’s brother-in-law – wanders toward me, making his way across the dance floor on a security pass and moving within feet of me. With cracked knuckles and a shiny black eye, I smile at the reminder of the fight from so recently.
Bobby and his wife’s brother – Jack – in the fight to end all fights. One heavyweight champion chomping at the bit to prove his dominance over the fresher, newer, younger champion – who just so happens to be his brother-in-law… And now that Jack married my sister, he’s my brother-in-law too.
A whole group of us descended on what was once The Shed, and is now the Rollin On Gym, and we stood around like a group of homeless bums as we watched the two guys beat the shit out of each other. It might have been the most fun I’ve had in forever.
Jack might be younger, he might even be bigger, and in the professional fighting world, mid-thirties is old, but in the real world, Bobby Kincaid is still agile as shit, and he didn’t lay down like a rickety old man so Jack could beat on him.
Bobby drops a small nod and wave on his way past, then he moves toward the dark corners of the club. The entire club is packed to regulation; there are people dancing in the light as well as the dark. Bobby’s here tonight making sure nothing bad goes down in the dark.
I stop playing my guitar and my voice cuts off at the same moment Luc’s drums silence and Angelo’s keyboard tapers off, then it’s just Marcus playing the last strains of the song on his guitar, winding us down, romanticizing the crowd.
The lights stop flickering across the room and they stop on me, then I look toward the bar and find Tink’s sassy gaze. She was a girl I met a few years ago in this very club. She was out partying with her girlfriends, and the guys and I happened upon their group. I’d be lying if I said we weren’t interested. They’re a sexy group of women, but it turns out they were all already taken. Tink was in a complicated relationship with the man she now calls her husband, and though she might have been the first woman that piqued my interest in years, it took all of two seconds for me to realize she was in love with someone else, so we fell into an easy friendship instead.
She might be one of the coolest chicks I know.
“Alright guys.” I wait for the moving crowd to quiet and look up at me. “We like to do a lot of covers, because we like to give you all something you know, something you wanna dance to. But we also write our own. This next song is something we wrote in house. It’s a song about a girl I used to know. You know the type; she’s a girl every man probably knew once.” Angelo’s fingers start softly as several of the dancing men in the crowd nod at my words. Yeah, everyone knew a girl like that once. Then we romanticize them and make their legacy something more than it ever actually was.
The romance is better than the real thing.
The guys and I have practiced this a million times before. Even Tink knows this routine by now. She’ll know what song I’m going to sing. She’ll probably even know every word, but what she doesn’t know is that every word I speak is true. Everyone who doesn’t know the teenage version of me would think these are simply pretty words strung together.
Luc joins Ang with his drums, then Marc chimes in as I let my guitar dangle against me unused. I don’t need it this time. This song is just my voice. This song is me speaking to Sammy Ricardo, the teenager who broke my heart, left town, and never looked back again.
Half a second before I step up to my mic, just before I close my eyes and begin telling the story of a tragic love lost, I find Sammy in the crowd just like I do every night we play – still eighteen, still beautiful, still not mine. She’s just a ghost to me now.
Eighteen or eighty, I’ll never again risk my heart the way I did when I was young. I simply don’t have anything left to give.