Chapter 26
I returned to the front of McPhee’s feeling low and mad at myself. About Joey, about leaving Sicily’s house in such a chicken-pickin’ hurry. As I dragged myself toward the sizzle of my burger coming from the kitchen, I realized I wasn’t alone. Silent Jim sat on his customary stool at the bar.
I’d left the front doors unlocked.
As I stood there, trying to decide what to do, Primary—Quin appeared at the circular window of the front door. He came in, making that pinched sorry-for-you face I was already starting to recognize.
“Hey, Doll, how’re you doing?” he said. “Kinda surprised to see the place open today, if I’m honest. But not sorry, you know? Can I get a beer?”
I mean, what other plans did I have?
I crossed the room, flicked the lights on for the main room and kitchen, and went to flip my burger. “You guys want any food?” I asked through the pass-through.
“Not me,” Quin said. He looked sideways down the bar at Silent Jim. He’d left the customary number of stools between them, even though they were the only two customers. “You want to order anything, fella?”
“Just a beer,” Silent Jim said.
I hit the power on the stereo system and found something low and mournful to listen to, then came out and pulled beers. One for each of us.
“Pour one out for your guy?” Quin said. “Or … Let’s not waste the beer, and pour it down our throats.” He lifted his pint. “To Joey?”
I raised mine, though I didn’t think my voice would hold steady enough to say anything. Even Silent Jim acknowledged us, lifting his pint glass a few inches before taking a long drink. I watched, wondering. He was usually a sipper.
Quin surveyed the room. “Were you open?” he said. “Where’s the boss man?”
“Not sure,” I said. “He gave the kitchen guys the day off, but I’d rather … I don’t know. I’d rather be doing something.”
“That good old American work ethic,” Quin said.
Jim made a sound, a cough or snort.
Was he laughing at me? Because my so-called job wasn’t sitting penned in an office somewhere?
The guy had no idea how hard I worked. Forget all the hours I’d killed at the music shop or the shifts here, helping out Alex.
Just for the band, I was always putting in the time, working through chords and learning lyrics and, with the girls, running long practice sessions getting our sound layered and our rhythms tight.
In off hours, I worked to keep my voice limber, protecting it.
It was a lot of invisible work, not just the three sweaty hours we did on the stage.
And just so you remember, all of it paid jack.
I didn’t do it for the filthy lucre, obviously. There was no 401(k). I did it and kept doing it because—
If I stopped, the gong inside me would never sound again.
Quin put his glass down and leaned his elbows conversationally on the bar. “Did I say something funny, buddy?”
“Sitting side by side at a bar doesn’t make us friends,” Jim said. “Buddy.”
There’s a tone men get when they’re itching to kick off. I’d heard it plenty, but usually Alex was there to reach in and quash a fight or escort someone out. I didn’t have much confidence that I could do anything about it if a scuffle broke out between Jims.
“Guys?” I said.
“Okay, we’re not friends,” Quin said easily. “I can live with it. But you seem to have something you wanted to have entered into the record. A perspective? Go ahead.”
The loose tone Quin had taken seemed to deflate whatever steam had been building up between Silent Jim’s ears. He turned his attention to his glass, which was already almost empty. He shook his head. “Never mind. Sorry.”
Quin’s eyes flicked over to me. He nodded his head toward Jim’s glass, and hitched a thumb at himself, the universal signal for buying a round. I poured another beer and set it near Jim’s hand.
“What’s that for?” he said gruffly.
“My treat,” Quin said. “Maybe we’ll be friends by the time you reach the bottom.”
Jim straightened on his stool. “I don’t need handouts.”
“It’s not charity,” Quin said. “It’s incentive. I’d love to hear your story.”
“My story.” Jim shook his head. “Nobody wants to hear about me. Your story, now that’s what I’d like to hear. For a young, seemingly able-bodied man—”
“Thank you,” Quin said. “I do work out.”
Jim rolled his eyes. “You just seem to have a lot of time to sit here among the rudderless.”
I felt like someone at the center court of Wimbledon, my head on a swivel between them.
“Me? I’m … between situations at the moment,” Quin said.
Well, that explained how he could be here all day.
“Between situations,” Jim said. “Yeah.”
Quin watched Jim for a second, his mouth twisting as he seemed to make a decision. “Everyone’s hiring,” Quin said. “You know. But not for anything you can build a life on.”
Jim checked the younger man out before he answered. “I do know. Sorry that you know, too.”
“I used to have a pretty good work ethic,” Quin said. “I can feel it sliding off me, though, the longer I’m off work. An old skin. You give your time over to a job, making choices and putting off everything else, trying to get somewhere … but where?”
“You’re too right there,” Jim said, reaching for his second beer. After he’d taken a long drink, he set the pint glass down.
Quin met my eyes again and nodded. I shook my head. Jim was drinking them far too fast. Quin pulled out his wallet and started laying down twenties, far more dosh than the bill he’d racked up so far.
Fine. He wasn’t the only one between situations. I grabbed a third glass for Jim and put it under the tap so it would be ready when he went to reach for it.
But the first two were already loosening Jim’s jaw. He had a bit of foam at the corner of his mouth. “The minute you want more for yourself or start to wear down, you’re out,” he said. “You can be replaced. Robots, they’re talking now. Robots.” He swiped at his lip with the back of his hand.
“We’re expendable,” Quin said.
Was he just agreeing with Silent Jim—or goading him?
Jim tapped the bar in front of me. “You’ll find out, too, young lady. Only a matter of time.”
“Find out what?” I put the third beer in front of him and pulled down the empties.
“If they get their hooks into you, they’ll use you up, then throw you out.”
I wasn’t too worried about getting caught, you know? I was slippery. I was a greased pig.
But then I had a second to think it over. “They who?”
“The music industry?” Jim suggested. He had some color to him, three beers in.
“You have … aspirations. Your they will be the same as in any other business. Heavy with suits at the top, all big ideas and zero know-how. And the folks down below who actually do the work, not just blow hot air across conference tables? They’re fed into the machine, their labor pulped into product. ”
“Grist for the mill,” Quin joined in cheerfully. I shot him a look.
“And when you’re good and used up,” Jim said, “you’re tossed aside. Who do they think will be left to live in their ugly condos or buy their flimsy, overpriced products, if everyone is gig-economy broke?”
That was a line directly from the philosophy of one Joey Hartnett. It hurt to hear it again. It hurt to think of any future I’d imagined in the music business boiled down to … factory piecework.
“Which industry did you work in?” I asked.
Jim waved me away. “The important thing is, it ended.”
Quin sat back, letting me ask the questions. It seemed to me that more questions should be asked.
“You got … fired?” I said. “Laid off?”
“I got hurt,” Jim said.
I’d insulted him. “Sorry.”
“Hurt on the job—God forbid you have a human body. At the hospital, they put me on pain meds I didn’t ask for and sure as hell couldn’t afford.”
I wouldn’t look at Quin now. Once it’s under your skin, he’d said, talking about Alex. It was a truism I couldn’t allow to get under mine.
“I looked up four years later,” Jim said, staring at the bar, “and it was all gone. Job, prospects. My family. The pain, though. Still know where to find that.”
The stiff way he walked into the pub. I leaned over the bar and said gently, “If you needed some help with addiction…”
Jim looked up sharply. “I don’t.” He caught sight of the pile of cash Quin had stacked on the bar, and added, “And I can pay for my own beers.”
He pulled out his wallet and proved it by putting down a few grubby tens.
He’d overshot the price of the one beer he’d ordered for himself by a good amount, but refused the change.
He slid awkwardly off the stool and strode to the door as quickly as his cramped-hamstring stagger could take him.
When the vestibule door banged closed behind him, I glared at Quin.
“What?” he said. “Didn’t you wonder?”
His fault, for digging at Jim’s history, even though the tender spot was visible from space. His fault, for reminding me how precarious all this was, balancing on the knife’s tip of Alex’s sobriety.
Maybe Quin never had to come up against the reality of loss, devastation. All his money laid out, his good cheer as relentless as that mole in the arcade game offering its head for thwacking. He sure didn’t act like a guy run off the road toward upward mobility.
“So,” he said now. “No word from Alex?”
“We weren’t actually open,” I said.
“What? Oh. Right.” Quin nodded to himself a second. “Right. I’ll leave, then? If you’re okay?”
“In no universe am I okay,” I said.
“Right.” But he gathered himself up, leaving the cash on the bar. I followed him to the door and made sure, this time, both of the locks were bolted, good and proper.