Chapter 8
Anger fueled the first set. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t get off that hamster wheel, even when I got us off tempo a couple of times.
I was playing red and furious for an audience of one in the big corner booth.
Every time I looked in Marisa’s direction, she was fussing with her phone.
At one point I lost track of her, and then the internal compass I had for her pointed me toward the bar, where she was bothering Alex, literally tugging at his sleeve.
It was loud in the room—you’re welcome—and Alex was doing everything he could to avoid being pulled down to her level.
We finished out the set, loud and riotous, my voice nearly shredded. Before the last chords died out, Lourey was in my face.
“What was that about? That was slop.”
But the folks down front didn’t think so.
They clamored for my attention while Lourey and the rest of the band headed for the storeroom for a break among the kegs, away from the crowd of women lining up at the door of the public john.
At set breaks, that windy little ice-cold toilet might as well be solid gold.
I didn’t need the break. I was dialed up to eleven, my blood thrumming through my body. I scoured the crowd for Marisa, but she was gone. The corner booth had been taken by a group.
I sank to the edge of the stage next to the tip jar, exhausted suddenly.
“Buy you a drink?” a man’s voice said.
The guy wore a nice blue scarf and had a wool coat draped over his arm. I knew him, didn’t I? “My drinks are on the house,” I said, lifting my water bottle. “But we’d sure appreciate the consideration in our tip jar.”
He didn’t even blink in its direction. “That was a hard-driving set.”
Over the guy’s shoulder, I could see the bar was swamped, and Alex was at the grill instead of serving. I would need to jump behind the bar—
But then someone else popped up on the other side of the hatch.
It was Oona, earrings as big as Christmas tree balls swinging from her ears.
She grabbed an apron and was soon jollying Lumpy Jim and mixing drinks, holding things down pretty expertly, I had to admit, even though Alex didn’t like just anyone behind the bar.
When she saw me looking, she shot me a grin and two thumbs-up.
If Alex was on the grill, where was Ned? I was scoping the room when my eyes caught on Primary Jim’s as he scanned the room from his post at the bar.
“High energy,” the guy in front of me was saying, as though I’d asked. “Less … emotionally vacant than you can sometimes sound.”
I sputtered into my water bottle. “Buddy,” I said. “When I have a bad show, I know it.” And sometimes, as a matter of fact, I was the only one who did. I looked around for someone else—anyone else—to talk to.
“I’d love to hear your real voice,” the guy said. “Stripped of all the affectation.”
“I don’t think we know each other well enough for you to say that to me,” I said flatly.
“We met out in the alley.”
This guy. “Oh, we’re good friends,” I said. “You dogged me out there in the cold and now you’re inside offering to buy me a beer for the chance to do it to my face? Heck of a kink you have, Jack.”
“You know your performance is hollow, that’s the thing,” he continued. “The look—it’s cute. It turns heads, but you’re worrying too much about staying pretty. I like that you really opened up and wailed tonight. Your voice is probably trashed for the second set, though, right?”
I looked away.
“You could learn to control the emotion, modulate that power,” he said. “But all those cover songs. That’s a dead end.”
And people thought I had too much confidence.
“Covers get the crowd singing,” I said. And tips put in the jar, usually. “You a voice coach or what? What’s your snake oil?”
He whipped out a card and held it out. I had a terrible premonition it would say Steve.
“Bernhardt Kowalski,” he announced.
“Is that your name or your law firm?” I snapped the card out of his hand. Talent management, it said. Gold words on a nice, smooth card. My mouth was suddenly dry. I took another sip of water. “So you’re a scout and you’re into harassing local musicians. Thanks for coming out.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I like your sound. I think. Not sure I’ve actually heard the real you yet. I think you might have one of those voices, as soon as you hear it, you know. You know you’re hearing Neko Case or you’re hearing Ronnie Spector.”
“Linda Ronstadt,” I said. “Loretta Lynn.”
“Sure. Look, I’ve been to enough of your shows to recognize you were playing hot tonight. But stilted, somehow, all the same. One of these days, I’d love to catch you sounding like yourself. Are you signed?”
I stared at the card, feeling sick. This was another moment I had imagined so many times.
I had been up to full charge from an hour in the spotlight, but now my confidence drained into my boots.
I wasn’t prepared for this exchange, had no idea what to say or expect or ask.
Alex was still at the grill, peering at me with concern through the pass-through.
“I don’t even have a card to give you, Mr. Kowalski. ”
He smiled. “Call me Bern. That’s okay. Why don’t you text me from your number—”
“My phone is— I’m trying to see if I can live without being tethered to technology.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that experiment go on too long. Rising stars need to be reachable.”
To me, that kind of comment was hollow. Music people were like that, weren’t they? Saying what you wanted to hear, seducing you with the promise of a shimmering future. Except I could be seduced in just this way.
“The rest of the band all have working phones,” I offered.
“Good. Have one of them send me the details of your next few shows,” Bern said. “Playing anywhere over the holidays?”
“We have a Christmas Eve show,” I said. The last few years, the girls and I had planned a festive set of seasonal songs and crowd favorites.
Always an early show, because the rest of the band had family, travel.
I was always good for it, though. Christmas was one of those things that was for other people, for those who wanted things that could be tagged, bagged, and mounted.
And if I sounded like Scrooge, the one guy in the movie who doesn’t subscribe to wonder, how do you think I felt about New Year’s and all that raw potential for change?
With Alex in the service industry, the holidays meant serving up Southern Comfort and joy to the lonely folk with nowhere else to be, anyway. But then after everyone cleared out, Alex and I would sip hot chocolate in front of the pub fireplace and talk about them.
This year, Alex had suggested we ask Oona to join in, but I didn’t see any need to mess with tradition, as meager as it was.
“Great,” Bern said. “We’ll just see how things go, no commitments, no pressure.”
He was imagining that I was that sort of person, the phone-less, casual generation-whatever who would be scared off by contracts and formal ties.
Maybe he was right, a bit—but not for the reasons he thought.
“We’ll be in touch,” I said. “Definitely.”
Bern looked me over. He got out his wallet, pulled out a hundo, and handed it to me with a nod toward the tip jar. “Buy a round of drinks for the band,” he said. “Or take your phone out of its clinical trial.”
The bill was already in my hand or I might not have taken it. There was shame in taking money, in needing money. In needing anything.
“Thanks,” I said, dropping my eyes to the silver caps on the toes of my boots.
“Stand up when you’re doing business,” Bern said.
I squinted up at him. He was backlit by one of the hot stage lights.
I stood up. Bern was probably fifty. The scarf at his neck was a deep blue that made you notice his eyes were the same color.
There were guys who might wear a scarf the same color as their eyes, and there were guys who would never, and I usually didn’t come up against the first type.
But I had to admit that the effect was striking.
It had an effect on me, even as he was telling me my own deficiencies. He made me want to prove him wrong.
God, my issues were so bald, sometimes.
“Will you send me to finishing school?” I asked.
“If I have to,” Bern said. “Now in the next set, what if you played something you’ve never played before?”
“That wouldn’t go over well.”
“The audience doesn’t know what it wants, until you show them.”
I’d meant it wouldn’t go over with the band. “We don’t have any originals, uh, fully rehearsed,” I said.
He wasn’t fooled. “Get some worked up,” Bern said. “For now, try to put a little bit of guts into this next set. You know what I mean. And you might be thinking of some questions for me. You’ll want to see my bona fides, check me out.”
“Who else do you work with?” I asked.
“Excellent question. I work with Riverfront Landing, Teek and the Mayfair Sound. Roscoe Branch.”
I knew Roscoe Branch. He’d gone sorta big in the last year, opening up for some visiting singer-songwriter types and touring solid venues beyond the Midwest. “Those aren’t country acts,” I said.
“Now you’re acting like someone negotiating a business relationship,” Bern said, rocking on his heels. “None of my current performers are country, but I’m willing to learn. You and I could teach each other something.”
With butterflies in my stomach, I watched Bern walk away, all the way across the room and back to the side booth he’d commandeered. And then the break was over and his money was in the jar.