Chapter 13 Levi
Dante’s car disappears through the gate. I’m left in the kitchen with rib sauce on my fingers, working out what the hell made him snap. My t-shirt collar’s stretched out of shape, and the place on my throat where his knuckles pressed is still burning.
For a man built out of linen shirts and good manners, there’s real strength packed under those pressed sleeves. I felt it. So did the refrigerator.
I’ve been grabbed by angry men before. You go still, you make yourself small and you wait it out, because moving is what turns a grab into a beating. So that’s what I did. Went still and waited for the hit.
It never came. Somewhere in the waiting it stopped being fear that held me against that refrigerator. I stopped bracing and started not wanting his hands to leave.
I’ll have to deal with that.
There was a split-second. His face six inches from mine, whatever was burning in his eyes pointed right at me, and I got hard. Just like that. Getting screamed at in Spanish, smashed against a cold refrigerator, a man’s fist twisting my collar, and there I went anyway.
Because, damn… how could I not?
I don’t know if he felt it. He let go fast and got the island between us. I prefer to think not. I’d rather Dante think I’m a drunk who can’t feed himself than know he had me halfway to my knees just by holding me against the appliances.
And that fire in his eyes, it was about me.
Which makes me wonder about his friend, Little Blondie.
White-blond hair, hands all over the flowers that first day, the two of them moving around each other like they’d done it a thousand times.
I figured they were a couple. But Blondie’s never been at the apartment, and a man doesn’t sleep twenty feet from a stranger with his bedroom door open if there’s somebody else waiting on him.
That’s about as far as I can let that thought run. A man in my situation has no business taking inventory of another man’s fire, or who it does or doesn’t belong to. What I can take inventory of is cash.
I drop onto the couch and count what’s left in my wallet. Between the tequila, the grocery run, the party bus, and last night at Big Tex’s, the fold’s gone thin.
I’m not going to starve. The label’s credit card covers food, and food is the one charge nobody questions.
Liquor’s a different animal. A bottle on the card trips a call inside the hour, because Freddie keeps alerts set for exactly that.
I learned it in Nashville when I put a bottle of wine on room service and the phone rang before it made it to the door.
“We’re building a narrative here, Levi,” Freddie said.
“The narrative doesn’t include a minibar tab. ”
I open the DoorDash app and order breakfast off a diner nearby.
Eggs, bacon, toast, hash browns, orange juice.
Then a second order of biscuits, because the second I picture the food my stomach starts growling.
My body’s been running on a sub sandwich, a basket of fries, ribs, and Dante’s leftover beef and rice for days, and it’s done waiting on me to feel like eating.
The card clears. The food is forty-five minutes out, which means forty-five minutes of time to fill.
My guitar is under the master bed, where I shoved it the first night because I didn’t want to look at it.
I play under stage lights to a sea of phones, four nights a week when we’re touring.
But I stopped playing for me a long time ago.
It didn’t quit on a particular day. First a drip, then less, then nothing.
On the road, my hands are never empty. There’s always a bottle, a joint, a glass, a phone. Right now, there’s nothing worth holding, so I get down on the floor and drag the case out from under the bed.
It’s the Martin I bought at seventeen. The first guitar I ever paid for with my own cash from a summer of mowing lawns.
It’s been on every stage I’ve stood on. I lift it out and the weight is still right.
The sad thing is it never changed. I’m the one who turned into a guy who carries it instead of plays it.
I don’t play the set list I’m supposed to practice. I could play it dead drunk with my eyes shut, and I have plenty of times. All the committee songs about tailgates and girls in sundresses pouring out of my hands while the rest of me wasn’t even in the room.
I play my first song instead. I wrote it right before Freddie signed me and took me away from my daddy’s farm for good. It’s about leaving a place that’s killing you and not knowing if the next one’s any better.
Turns out it wasn’t.
The song was three simple chords, because I was a kid with a guitar and true music doesn’t need to be complicated. Nobody ever put it on a set list. It’s not anybody’s product. It’s all mine, and my hands still know every bit of it. In all this time, my hands were never what went missing.
And here’s what I wasn’t ready for. The song still works.
They didn’t kill it. They buried it under other people’s words, so slow I’d talked myself into believing my music was dead.
My voice comes out rough. I sing for a living, and I can’t remember the last time I sang with no backup behind it. No band, no crowd. The sound of it alone in a room shocks me. Low and raw, before the vocal coaches and the producers sanded it down into something radio could love.
As I play, my head goes quieter. Not the tequila or weed quiet. The music went into the place where the noise lives and filled it, with no chemicals in my blood to help. I’d forgotten that was even possible.
I keep playing. Not a song I already know. Chords I’ve never put in this order, my fingers picking out a run I don’t know yet. D minor to A minor to C, then a turn that resolves on G, and the resolve feels like a breath let go.
A line shows up in my head out of nowhere.
Somebody left a door open so I could breathe.
I don’t write it down. Writing it down makes it real, and real means I’m writing again. I haven’t written a word of my own in years, telling myself all the while that the music I was singing was still mine.
But the line won’t leave. It fits the chords like they were poured under it. I sing it, and my voice cracks on “breathe,” and the crack sounds exactly like the line feels.
Then I stop before the emotion drowns me.
I put the guitar back in the case and close the latches, but I don’t push it under the bed.
I leave it out where I can see it. I sit on the cold floor beside it and let myself feel the ache in my chest, plain and real.
I don’t reach for a bottle or a joint to make it stop.
The gate buzzer goes off downstairs, and a text comes in a second later.
Your Dasher is at the gate.
I put on my sunglasses and go down to meet them. The driver’s a kid in a Mustang with a primer-gray door, and he hands the bag over without looking up from the screen in his other hand.
I set it on the island. The smell hits before I’ve got it unpacked. Grease, butter, coffee. My appetite is coming back.
I eat standing at the island, the way I eat everything in this house.
Eggs first, then bacon, then hash browns shoveled in with a fork that’s too heavy and too nice for the job.
I tear into the biscuits I didn’t think I wanted and want them most of all.
I don’t slow down. I drink the orange juice in one go, too sweet, too cold, and I don’t care. Every container scraped empty.
When it’s all gone, I stand there a second, hands flat on the cold stone, fuller than I’ve been in a long time. Then everything catches up. The food, the night I didn’t sleep, the hour I just spent being a person instead of a product. My eyes won’t stay open.
I make it to the couch. The soft throw is still bunched at one end, the one I lifted off Dante that first day and never gave back. I pull it over my shoulders and lie down facing the open terrace door, where I can see the room and every way into it.
The line plays on the back of my eyelids, set to the chords, and I’m too full and too tired to fight it. I close my eyes and sleep. The kind where you surface every few minutes to check the room and count the open doors and go back under.
The phone rings later and it cuts through everything. I come up on one elbow, heart already going, and grab it off the coffee table.
The screen says one word. FREDDIE.
Freddie doesn’t call. Freddie texts. A call means the plan changed, or I’m the problem, or he wants my voice in his ear to hear how far gone I am.
I answer. “Hey, Freddie.”
“How are you doing, Levi?”
Levi. Not Lee. When it’s business he calls me Lee. When he’s assessing damage, he calls me Levi. The name is a thermometer.
“I’m good. I’m fine. Resting after eating a big breakfast.”
He knows I just ate breakfast because the credit card activity showed him the DoorDash order. I play along as if I don’t know that.
“Have you been practicing the set list?”
“Yeah. Every day.”
I haven’t opened the email with the set list. I don’t know what’s on it.
“Good.” Freddie’s voice is the same temperature it’s held as long as I’ve known him.
The temperature you keep when you manage situations instead of people.
“I need to let you know the lineup goes public in about ten days. Then it’s straight into press and the show.
The Panhandle Country Bash announces on every platform.
Posters in Panama City Beach and along the coast. Press to the local outlets and the country trades.
Your name and your face will be everywhere. ”
“Ten days is late,” I say. “They’ve been selling tickets since spring.”
“They’ve been selling tickets on a lineup you’re not on.
Their headliner walked with a back injury eleven days ago and they came to me on their knees.
That’s how you got a slot you did not earn this year, and it’s why everything is bolted together with tape.
They announce you late, they announce you loud, and every ticket they’ve already sold gets better overnight.
Nobody down there knows you’re coming, Levi. That’s the play.”
“Yeah, I get it.”
“The photo’s the one from the Rolling Stone session last year. White shirt, guitar. Marketing approved it.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Is there going to be a problem?”
“Not at all.”
“Have there been any incidents?”
“No.”
My short stint in the Bay County drunk tank didn’t hit my record. Nobody at the Bay County Sheriff’s office has reason to tie my real name, Levi Mason, to Lee Streeter. Not yet. But once the face is on every pole, somebody in that station could remember me. That is a problem for later, not today.
“Keep it clean, Levi. Ten days, then press and appearances into the show. I need you sober, professional, camera-ready. That’s the job.”
“I know what the job is, Freddie. I’ve been doing it for years.”
“Do you? The last three times I handed you the job, you showed up drunk. Memphis, you threw a monitor off the stage. Knoxville, you didn’t show. Dallas, I pulled you out of a bar fight forty minutes before doors. I’ve given this talk seven times. I don’t have an eighth time in me.”
“I hear you.”
“If you can’t do the show, tell me now. I’ll pull your name before the announcement and we’ll sort the contract. But if your name goes on that poster and you don’t show, or you show up like Dallas, the label drops you and your deal’s gone. That’s not a threat. That’s just the numbers.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Sober and rehearsed?”
“You bet.”
I can hear him breathing. I’m a bet he placed a long time back, and the odds were great until they started sliding.
“Get some rest,” Freddie says. “I’ll send the updated set list by Friday. There may be changes. The label wants to open with the single.”
He hangs up. No goodbye.
Ten days until everything here blows up.
I think about the poster that’s going up with my clean jaw. The photographer told me to tilt my chin and drop my shoulders. Dropping the shoulders was a performance too because they haven’t dropped since I was a kid.
That photo of me is going up on poles. In storefronts.
On the screen at Pier Park where they’re building the stage.
Every person I’ve crossed in the last week will see it.
The lady bartender, Sheila, who called me ‘honey’ and fed me fries.
The big man, Tex, behind the bar. The cop who picked me up on Front Beach Road.
Dante.
He’ll look at Lee Streeter’s face and see the man who’s been sleeping on his floor, and he won’t be thinking, “that guy’s famous.” It’ll be “that guy’s been lying to me.”
I told him my name was Levi. That much is true. Levi is the name my mother gave me before everybody else took the rest. Lee Streeter is the lie.
In ten days, the truth of it won’t matter, because the lie will be louder.
I pull the throw up tighter around my shoulders. The first real line I’ve written in years came because I was sober, and I was sober because a man in cognac leather shoes told me no and stuck to it.
Somebody left a door open so I could breathe.
I don’t write it down.