Chapter 61 Levi
Nobody orders me to walk back out on stage for a makeup performance. That’s the point of it.
The Saturday storm ate the back half of my set. It gave the internet a clip of me standing there looking stupid at the mic. There’s a hole in the Tuesday schedule, a dropped acoustic slot, and I do what I’ve never done. I call the stage manager and tell her to put me in it.
I want the stage tonight, so I take it.
Except it isn’t only mine to take. Two songs means the band needs to back me up, and the band never signed on for a Tuesday that was never on the sheet.
I make them an offer they can’t refuse. Big Tex’s Roadhouse after, the night on my tab, food and drink till they run us out of the place. That buys me every ‘hell yes’ I need.
The performance is nothing special. Two songs and a wave, a make-good for the people who stood in the rain to watch their headliner walk off into it.
I give them the tailgate single they scream for, then the slower one off the second record that always floats the phones up like lighters.
I tell them I’m sorry about Saturday, that the weather beat me fair.
That it would’ve been dangerous for us all if I’d kept singing.
That I couldn’t hear what the stage manager was saying into my earpiece so I stopped singing.
They forgive me. I’m up here because I decided to be. I picked the night. I picked the slot. For nine minutes, under lights I chose to stand in, Freddie’s leash has so much slack I can’t feel it on my neck.
I climb down off that stage lit up and still buzzing.
There’s a bus full of musicians I owe a night, and a Tuesday night wide open to pay it. I could take them to any bar on this coast. The label would clear it, comp it, post a story about it before we ordered.
But that’s not what I promised them. I promised them the one place on this coast that’s ever felt like belonging instead of business. I pull the burner phone, and text Dante.
Levi: Think Tex would let me land a tour bus of degenerates on him tonight? Or is that too much even for the roadhouse?
The answer comes back fast.
Dante: I’ll ask to give him a heads-up. He’s going to say yes before I finish the sentence. You’re describing the happiest possible evening.
Levi: Ask him for real. I’m not Lee Streeter showing up to bless the locals. I’m asking if there’s room.
Dante: Done. I texted him. His words…tell him to bring every last one of them. They’d better show up hungry.
Levi: We’re on our way.
Dante: Can’t miss this. Heading there now.
I sit in the back of an idling tour bus grinning at the phone like a fool.
The bus rolls up to the Roadhouse twenty minutes later, and through the windows I can see Stormy and Benji have already been at it.
The tables aren’t where they were the last time I came.
They’ve dragged every four-top into one long line down the middle of the floor.
Chairs robbed from every corner and crammed in mismatched and tight, enough seats for a busload of musicians.
A couple of red-checked cloths thrown over the seams like they planned it this way all along. The pool table’s been recommissioned too, draped and reborn as a buffet station. In the twenty minutes it took us to drive over, they turned a calm Tuesday bar into a banquet hall.
Benji meets us at the door with both arms open, already counting heads. “There you are! How many did you bring? Never mind, doesn’t matter, I built for more. Everybody inside, grab a seat. No one stands around in here, we’re not savages.”
Sheila’s three deep at the bar and laughing about it. Out the propped back door, Big Bertha’s breathing smoke into the dark like the bar’s got a dragon chained behind it. The place smells like brisket and beer.
Tex stands in the middle of his kingdom with a big smile on his face.
Dante’s beat the bus there. He’s at the corner table with Mickey when we come in. The night demands one hard thing from me. I have to look straight at the man I’m crazy about and act like he’s nothing to me.
Dante does the cold act beautifully. He gives me a bored quarter-glance you’d hand any famous fella who wandered into your bar, then goes back to his phone.
That look is, I swear to God, the hottest forty-five degrees of indifference anybody has ever aimed at me.
Mickey lifts his beer an inch off the table when he catches my eye. The closest a sheriff’s deputy gets to a wink. His wheels are angled to keep the room in view, the empty seat beside him holding for Benji.
Tex comes across the room. He greets me the same as he does every time, like an old friend.
“Well, look what the tide washed in.” He slaps me on the shoulder and then he clocks the rest of them, a busload of road-worn musicians filing in behind me with nowhere to be. As I watch Tex I realize he’s just been handed a captive audience that has to sit and eat while he talks.
Nobody ever gave Tex a finer Tuesday. He raises his voice to the room. “You’ve come to the right place. Don’t worry about menus. You’re eating brisket tonight, every last one of you, and I don’t want to hear a word about hurry or salad.”
“Sounds good, Tex,” I say. “Bring it on. Tab’s mine tonight, all of it.”
“Music to my ears,” he says.
One of my backup singers halfway down the line makes the fatal mistake of asking how long a brisket takes. I should’ve warned them not to ask Tex questions before we unloaded off the bus.
“Funny you should ask.” Tex plants himself at the head of the table where they can all see him and makes no move toward the kitchen.
“Trouble with people these days is they’re all in a hurry.
You can’t hurry a brisket. You hurry it, all you got is a dried-up roast. Took me nine years and a smoker named Big Bertha that runs hotter’n hell to learn it.
My granddaddy taught my daddy and he taught me.
My granddaddy, now, he kept a hound called Pete.
Laziest animal the good Lord ever bothered to finish.
Slept clean through two break-ins, a tornado, and the night the barn burned to the dirt.
Couldn’t hunt, couldn’t guard, couldn’t do a blessed lick of anything but lie in the sun and pass gas.
And Granddaddy doted on that worthless dog like a third son. ”
While he talks, the food moves fast around him.
Sheila and Benji work the long table from both ends, and Stormy comes behind, setting down paper plates of tuna dip and crackers to hold everybody over till the brisket Tex won’t rush is good and ready.
Stormy slides one in front of me and grins like we’re sharing a secret on the way past.
Tex never breaks the sentence. “He used to tell me a dog’s worth isn’t in what he does for you.
It’s whether you’d still keep him on the porch when he’s no use to you at all.
He said it about the dog. Took me till I was thirty to work out he wasn’t only talking about the dog.
” He points down the length of the table.
“Eat up. We’ll keep the plates coming.” He squeezes my shoulder on the way to the kitchen.
Tex just aimed his story at me without once looking my way.
A worthless old hound who kept his spot on the porch for no reason except somebody wanted him on it.
I’ve been working to earn my place since I was seventeen.
I’ve never once been kept around for no reason at all.
My eyes get hot for a minute and then I eat, and let Tex’s next story roll over the table like I belong here.
Then the night turns into the hottest game I’ve ever played.
I’m working the room the way Lee Streeter is supposed to. Black cowboy hat tipped just right, big grin, hand on shoulders, posing for pictures with somebody’s cousin from Alabama. Signing napkins like they’re autographs.
But my eyes keep cutting across the bar to Dante.
He’s leaning there with a whiskey, sexy and more handsome than any man has a right to be, pretending we’re strangers.
Pretending he doesn’t know what my mouth tastes like at two in the morning or how I sound when his fingers are wrapped around my cock.
The burner phone stays low against my thigh, buzzing every few minutes like a secret I can’t quit touching.
Dante: You keep looking at me. Strangers don’t stare at strangers like that. People will talk.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling and fire back one-handed while a guy shows off his daughter’s name inked down his forearm.
Levi: Can’t help looking. There’s a rude man here ignoring me.
Dante: Keep the hat on. You take it off and I might forget I’ve never met you. Levi doesn’t wear a hat.
Levi: That all it takes to get you going? Taking off my hat?
Dante: You know exactly what it takes. I’m the only one in this bar who knows what your voice sounds like when there’s no microphone. And no clothes.
Levi: You better behave.
Dante: Here’s a better idea. You finish being Lee Streeter. Sign your napkins. Then you get in my SUV, and I show you how rude a stranger can be when no one’s watching.
Levi: Tell me now.
I watch him read it, head down, thumbs flying.
Dante: Ask me in the parking lot and I’ll put every filthy word of it in your ear. Twice.
The word filthy causes me to look straight at him.
Filthy Dante.
Damn…
Then the phone goes quiet. I look up in time to catch him sliding off his stool, saying something short to Benji across the bar. Then he’s gone down the back hall, and I’m left standing in a room full of people with a phone that won’t buzz.
I sign a napkin. I sign a hat. Famous fella at a party, dying inside for a text.
A few minutes later Benji lands at my elbow with a loaded tray and his hosting face on full beam. He leans in like he’s taking my order.
“Go to the elevator that leads up to the loft,” he says under the music. “In the back, behind the kitchen door. Hit the button.”
God help me.