Chapter 2
Sit In
Three hundred and twelve dollars, and that was counting the jar of quarters.
Josh sat on the edge of the air mattress with the cash fanned out on the floor in front of him like a hand of very bad poker and did the math again, because doing it again was a hobby now.
Rent on the sublet had eaten the last real chunk.
What was left had to cover food and strings for the busking guitar and the phone bill and the mattress patch kit, because the mattress had a slow leak that put him a little closer to the floor every morning, which felt like a metaphor he was too tired to finish.
But it was Thursday. And Thursday was two hundred dollars.
He said it out loud to the empty room, the way you'd say a thing you needed to believe.
"Two hundred bucks." The window unit chose that moment to shudder, cough, and die again, and the wet Louisiana heat leaned back in through the gap like it had been waiting on the porch.
Josh got up and hit the unit with the flat of his hand in the exact spot that sometimes worked.
It didn't work. Great. Cooking my own set in advance.
He'd fix it later. He fixed things — it was the one skill his dad had left him that hadn't come with a warning label attached.
The keyboard sat propped against the wall, the cheap Casio he'd carried down on the Greyhound in a garbage bag because the case cost more than the case was worth.
Not a real instrument. His dad would've had a whole speech about it, back when his dad still had speeches.
You don't play a toy, Joshua, you play an instrument.
There's a difference and the difference is whether you respect the thing or not.
His dad had respected the thing right up until the afternoon he'd wheeled his Wurlitzer out to the end of the driveway with a piece of notebook paper taped to the lid that said $200 OBO, and sold it to a youth pastor from Kettering, and gone back inside before the guy even got it into his van.
Twenty-two years his dad had played that Wurlitzer.
Wedding circuit, hotel lounges, one almost — one producer, one demo, one callback that came the week after Josh's mom left and never came again.
Two hundred dollars, off the driveway, and his dad hadn't stood in the window to watch it go.
Josh had watched. Sixteen years old, from his bedroom, and he'd made himself a promise so corny he'd never said it to a living soul: that whatever happened, whatever it cost, he was not going to be a man who watched the music leave from behind a window.
So. Two hundred dollars a night. He was aware of the rhyme. He'd decided to take it as a sign instead of a joke, because you got to decide that, that was the whole trick, that was the only trick he had.
He sat down at the Casio for a second before he left — just to touch it, just to remind his hands what they were for on a day the arithmetic had gotten loud.
He played eight bars of nothing in particular, some ballad his fingers went to on their own, soft, unplugged, so the only sound was the plastic clack of the keys and the tune living mostly in his head.
No room. No grin. Nobody to give it to. This was the part his dad had never once seen him do — the playing that wasn't for anybody — and it was the only argument Josh had ever managed against the man's whole bitter case: that the music was worth it even when it paid you nothing. Especially then.
It was why he'd picked this city off a map, of all the cities.
Not for the money, God knew. Because New Orleans was maybe the last place in America where a piano player nobody had heard of could still walk into a room cold, sit down, and get heard.
Where the room decided, not a manager, not an algorithm. He'd bet a one-way bus ticket on it.
He picked his good shirt up off the floor, the one that had been ironed once, and smelled it, and put it on.
***
Perdido at night was a different animal than Perdido at four in the afternoon.
The blue neon out front had come on, PERDID-something, because the last letter was strobing on the fritz — the second D, buzzing and dropping out so the sign flashed PERDID_ and then PERDIDO and then PERDID_ again, a little electric stutter over the door.
Josh stood on the sidewalk in the wet heat and looked up at it and his hands actually itched.
Loose ballast, probably, or a dying transformer in the letter.
Twenty minutes and a ladder. He filed it under later, under don't be weird about it, you don't work here yet, you're on trial.
Inside, the honest ugly daylight room from Tuesday was gone.
Somebody had lit the candles on the little tables and turned the stage wash up warm and low, and the tired velvet had gone from shabby to plush, and the whole place looked like the inside of a held note.
Twenty, thirty people already, on a Thursday, early.
The fat orange cat sat on the end of the bar like a ma?tre d' who'd given up on standards.
"There he is." The bartender — Retta, he'd gotten that much on Tuesday — pointed a bottle at him from behind the zinc. "Ohio. Get over here before you play, eat something, you look like a coat rack somebody dressed."
"I'm okay, thanks, I'll grab something after—"
"Sit."
He sat. She put a muffuletta in front of him, half of one, olive salad soaking pink into the bread, and a glass of water, and stood there with her arms crossed until he picked it up, and it was the best thing he'd eaten in about two weeks and he had to slow himself down so he didn't inhale it in front of her and give the whole game away.
"On the house," Retta said, watching him not-inhale it. "Don't argue with me, it bruises my feelings and I take it out on the register."
"Thank you." He meant it more than the words could hold, so he grinned around it, deployed the good one, the one that made people feel like they'd done something great. "You're my favorite person in this city, officially. Sworn in. It's done."
"Mm." She wasn't fooled, he could tell, and she let him have it anyway, which was its own kind of kindness.
Over her shoulder, at the far end of the bar, Marcus stood with a rag over one shoulder and a clipboard he wasn't looking at, watching the room fill.
He didn't come over. He'd nodded once when Josh walked in — one downward inch of his chin, the nod you'd give a delivery — and gone back to running numbers behind his eyes.
Okay. Cool. Warm guy. Real cuddly operation you got here.
"Nes is already up," Retta said. "He likes you, by the way. He won't say it. He said 'the boy'll do,' which for Ernest is a marriage proposal."
Josh laughed, and it startled out of him crooked and real, chipped tooth and all, before he could dress it up. Retta caught that too. She caught everything. He was going to have to be careful around her.
***
The set was the easiest hard thing in the world.
That was the part nobody back home had understood, not his dad, not the guys at the music store, not the girlfriend who'd left a note.
Playing a room wasn't the hard part. Playing a room was the only place Josh had ever known exactly what he was doing.
The hard part was everything on either side of it — the money, the doubt, the 3 a.m. — and for two hours on a low stage under a warm light, all of that went quiet and there was just the tune and the people and the job of making them feel a little less alone than they'd felt when they walked in.
He opened easy. Nes on the upright beside him, patient, a foundation you could pour a house on.
Josh comped and listened and set the old man up, fed him the changes clean, and when Nes took a chorus Josh sat back into the pocket and grinned at him and Nes almost — almost — smiled at the neck of his bass.
A table down front figured out they were hearing something good and got quiet.
Then another. By the third tune the room had tipped over into that thing Josh lived for, the collective lean-in, forty strangers deciding at once to pay attention.
Between tunes Nes leaned in, not looking at him, worrying a tuning peg that didn't need it.
"You listen," the old man said, like he was reporting the weather.
"Most of 'em your age don't listen. They just wait their turn.
" He plucked the string. Satisfied. "You'll do.
" Then he counted off the next number like he hadn't said a word — but Josh sat up half an inch straighter on the bench and carried it through the whole tune like a hand on his back.
He won't say it, Retta had warned him. Josh decided not to ruin it for her.
He gave them everything. That was the deal he'd made with the universe a long time ago: they didn't have to know he was broke, they didn't have to know the AC was dead and the mattress was on the floor by morning.
They got the light, all of it, every watt.
Nobody in this room was going to look at Josh Keller and see a man watching the music leave.
Near the end of the first set he took Bye Bye Blackbird up-tempo and let it run, and the crowd came with him, and he could feel it building toward the kind of finish that gets a Thursday crowd up out of their chairs — so he built it.
Threw in the flashy right-hand run, the one that always landed, and looked up and out at the room while he did it, gave them the grin, invited them in to the big finish, come on, you know you want to, and they came, they clapped over the last eight bars, whooping, a couple of them on their feet, and it was great, it was exactly the shot of it he needed, warm and loud and enough to almost drown out the arithmetic.
He came off the stage lit up on it and Marcus was standing at the bottom of the two steps.
Not clapping. Not smiling. Just there, arms crossed, that heavy-lidded look that gave away exactly nothing.