Chapter 17 Levi
Tuesday night came at me hard with nothing in my hands.
No bottle, because the two I bought Sunday were gone.
No weed, because the bag went out on the terrace with the ribs.
No Dante to spar with, no jail, no kitchen full of cold barbecue.
Just this ugly fucking house and the Gulf working the sand out past the glass.
And under all of it, warming up the second I made the mistake of going still enough to hear it, the loop starting up.
My guitar got me through Tuesday night. I dragged the Martin out from under the bed again and played until my fingers gave out, and the playing did what the bottle usually does.
I went to sleep on the couch sober for the second night running. I can’t remember the last time that happened. I told myself I’d cracked the cure. Found the new medicine. Cheaper than tequila, and it doesn’t show up on Freddie’s dashboard.
Then Wednesday morning I pick the guitar back up, and I find out what the medicine costs.
I sit on the tile floor by the window, the Gulf going gray-green out the glass.
I play my old songs. Then I play the door line set to the chords I found yesterday.
I put the guitar down in the middle of a bar.
Just stop, hand flat on the strings to kill them.
Booze never asked one thing of me.
The music is asking for all of it. All the pain I don’t want to feel.
I sit on the floor with my hand on dead strings. The restlessness comes out of that. I last until dusk.
The house presses in on me once the light turns down, all that bright going blue and then gray. I slide the terrace glass the rest of the way open and step out to the rail, just to be on the outside of it. The Gulf’s gone black.
And way down the beach, east, there’s a fire.
A big bonfire, throwing orange up against the dark, with the shapes of people around it.
Their noise rides up the sand on the warm air.
Laughing. A speaker playing. The familiar sound of a crowd that’s a few drinks in and going nowhere.
Warmth and people and noise, the three things that worked on me at Tex’s better than the tequila did, sitting right there a quarter mile down the sand.
I want it so bad my chest aches. I want to be a nobody, standing close to a fire, with other people’s voices filling up the place the song keeps prying at. I go back in and get ready to be nobody, which by now I’m getting good at.
Boots off first. Barefoot is a local, a guy from one of these rentals who wandered down.
Faded jeans, rolled up to my knees, an old t-shirt.
The Atlanta Braves cap pulled low, because this coast is Atlanta money on vacation and a Braves cap is camouflage.
I run a hand over the beard in the hall mirror.
It’s filling in now, past the point where the press photo lives. Lee Streeter has a clean jaw.
I leave the phone and go out the terrace, down the steps, and walk toward the flames. The sand’s holding the day’s heat and it feels good on my feet.
The relief hits before I’m halfway there. Every step away from that fucking house, the loop gets quieter.
The fire’s a college crowd. Early twenties, sunburned, kids who’ve been doing this all summer on Daddy’s dime. A cooler. A speaker. Somebody’s got a vape going, and somebody else has that sweet smoke drifting off the far side of the circle, and none of it is why I’m here.
“You from the big house on the hill?” a girl asks, friendly, three beers in.
“Down the way,” I say, waving vaguely down the beach. She’s already lost interest in the answer.
Somebody hands me a beer out of the cooler without asking, and I take it because holding one makes me fit in. I drink off the top of it slow. One beer. Camouflage, same as the cap.
Then I hear the guitar, and that’s the end of me minding my own business.
It’s a beat-up acoustic, a road guitar, and a kid is playing it badly by the fire.
Earnest, three chords, the changes a half-second late every time, singing a song off a playlist to a couple of girls who are being kind about it.
I sit down in the sand a few feet off and watch his hands.
He’s doing a thing I love wrong, and I wince and stay patient at the same time.
“You play?” he asks me, catching me watching.
“A little.”
“Here, man, take it for a while. My fingers are shot.” He’s already up, already handing it over, because there’s a girl by the cooler he’d rather be talking to, and a stranger who’ll hold the guitar is a gift to him, not the other way around. “Knock yourself out.”
And then it’s in my hands.
It’s a worse instrument than mine by a mile, the action high, one string a hair flat, but it’s a guitar and my hands don’t care about the rest. I tune the flat string by ear without thinking about it.
I start playing one of my own songs, the words the label gutted for being too true, and I sing it low into a bonfire for a circle of drunk kids who will never know what they heard. No stage. No phones in my face.
Nobody here is looking for Lee Streeter. Nobody would know him barefoot in the sand. The posters haven’t gone up yet. They don’t even know he’s coming to town. All they hear is the crackle of the fire and my voice coming out rough, going out over the water.
It’s the purest the music’s been since I was a kid singing in a church choir.
A few of them stop and listen. A girl says oh and nudges her friend.
Her phone comes up, screen glowing in the firelight.
She’s filming the bearded guy playing by the fire, because it’s a nice moment on a warm night and that’s what you do with your phone.
I see it and I let it go. Nobody knows me.
What’s there to film but a stranger and a song?
I play it out to the end. The last note goes out over the Gulf. I hand the guitar to the next set of hands that reaches for it, get up out of the sand and dust off my jeans.
I don’t stay long after that. I got everything I came for, and it wasn’t the beer. Most of it’s still in the can I set down in the sand. I lift a hand at the girl who asked about the house and walk back up the beach alone, the fire shrinking orange behind me.
I’m lighter than I’ve been in years. The sand is between my toes and the song’s still going in my chest. I want to tell somebody. One particular somebody.
I let the want burn off with the fire behind me.