Net worth might have been a bit too generous a term. The men looked like I had imagined the men looked around here, working class, beaten down and very, very rough. They reminded me of the clerk at the hotel where I’d checked in. The guy who asked me how many hours I needed the room – and then sneered when I’d requested a wake up call in the morning. I did it just in case, assuming that we would be gone tonight but you never knew. Always be prepared, always think ahead.

Darla marched right up to the bar, flagged down the bartender, and plopped her curvy ass on a stool. Being seated accentuated that heart shaped ass, begging for hands to hold it. I was increasingly aroused by her, filled with desire to move in on Trevor’s territory. I’d never done that. Trevor had stolen a girlfriend or two from me, although, “girlfriend” might be a bit of a stretch. More like a fuck buddy I’d grown tired of and Trevor took easily. No big deal.

Darla might be Trevor’s fuck buddy, but I had a sense that there was more to her and that Trevor had figured that out, confusing me and making me wish I had more time to contemplate what was going on beneath the surface here. I’d tried to kiss her and she had wanted to kiss me back. Given what was going on with Trevor, I had the feeling that wanting me was not a rejection of him. If that was true, then what the hell was this?

It was nothing.

It was nothing, I reminded myself. It couldn’t be anything. There was no future here. Women like Darla didn’t factor into any part of my world – and yet, here I was, thinking this way. What Darla said, what Trevor said – they were right. I was saying that a lot on this surreal series of events. In an hour or less, I hoped, we’d be on the road and by morning Trevor and I could put this all behind us.

Darla asked me what I wanted to drink, her eyes sparkling, her face flirtatious and knowing, offering a full smile to both me and Trevor and then a sarcastic crack at the bartender. I started to think that putting Darla behind us was going to be harder than I’d ever imagined.

“I’ll have a Sam Adams,” I said.

“A what?”

“A Sam Adams.”

“We don’t have that here,” the bartender said.

“Hey, Mac.” She nodded at him and he smiled back, a stretched out smirk that passed for friendliness. “What do you have?”

“The standard. We’ve got Rolling Rock –

“Give him a Rolling Rock.”

“Rolling Rock?” I said, dubious.

“It’s Rolling Rock, Busch, Miller – you know.”

“No foreign beers?”

Darla just rolled her eyes and mouthed ‘snob’. She looked at Mac, who had that beefy-looking body of an ex-football player gone fat fifteen years later. I knew a lot of guys like him. They worked out at the gym where Trevor and I went and they hung out and talked about glory days from football. Mac took a long drag off a cigarette and then hung it back off the edge of the bar. A series of scars from cherries left neglected were a testimony to the acceptance of this. My Massachusetts sensibilities were a bit shocked and I felt like a prude. Of course people lived this way. Of course people smoked in bars in states where being overprotective wasn’t elevated to an art form.

“Rolling Rock it is,” I sighed, just to settle the argument.

We grabbed our beers and went over to a little booth, the burgundy vinyl torn and duct taped so many times that it all blended into one color that I couldn’t quite see, even with the neon and a handful of white lights embedded in the dropped ceiling. It reminded me of this diner in Boston that had the ugliest décor ever but the best desserts money could buy. There was a jukebox in the corner, but no one was playing music, and at two billiards tables a group of men halfheartedly shot pool, looking bored and at the beginning of a drunken journey for the night.

It was only ten o’clock. The biggest guy in the room came charging over to the table with a giant smile on his face and eyes that practically floated, like ping-pong balls in a fish bowl. “Darla,” he slurred. She sat on the other side of the booth next to Trevor but on the side that didn’t face the wall, and the man shoved next to her, squishing Trevor like a bug. This must be Uncle Mike.

Darla confirmed it by saying, “Mike, how many did you have?” with a groan of familiarity at his obvious inebriation.

“Water and coffee. Water and coffee like you told me.”

“What did you put in the water and coffee?”

“Gin and tonic, and coffee and Bailey’s.”

“Oh, Christ,” she muttered. “That’s not what I meant,” she said, shrugging apologetically at me.

Mike shoved his hand across the booth and I glared but shook it. This guy was the only person in town who was going to fix my BMW? He looked like Al from Al’s Toy Barn in the Toy Story movies, bald on top, receding brown hair, and a body wider than it was tall. He was a big guy, too, so that meant that he was damn wide and fucking tall. He wore glasses, which surprised me – I didn’t think of a long haul trucker as wearing glasses – and a plaid, flannel shirt with a t-shirt underneath that read: something… something…balls.. something. I couldn’t read it around the folded flannel fabric and the rolls of fat.

Trevor looked like he needed to be intubated to resume breathing until Darla shoved Mike as hard as possible to give poor Trev a little space.

Trevor

I kicked Joe under the table, trying to breathe. Darla’s uncle, Mike, was killing me here and then Darla bought us a few inches of space and I could resume proper respiratory functioning.

Joe looked at me and mouthed, “What?”

I mouthed back, “Don’t worry.” I made a slicing motion with my hand across my neck. Lifting my arm up and putting it around Darla’s shoulders bought me a couple more inches and she snuggled in. It was nice – this was nice. I knew Joe had his nose turned up at the ratty bar but I liked it. Some of the best gigs were done in places like this where people just came together to drink and hang out and have fun and listen to music. In Sudborough you went to a music performance to be seen, or to listen to the ‘right’ music, or for a charity event.

The dive bars in Cambridge, and Charlestown, and seedy little places on the South Shore had given me a glimpse of what it was like to not have to be perfect, to just be good enough to give someone a smile, a bounce in their step, something to dance to or hum along to, or just sit and be with. Darla was like that for me but right now her Uncle Mike better move over a little more or I was going to pass out. She shoved her hip, hard, against his and he shouted, “Hey!”

The room had gone quite quiet and as I looked around people were clustering around a small stage I hadn’t noticed when we came in. “What’s going on?” Joe asked, pointing.

People were standing there with their amber bottles of beer, chugging them down and leaving the empties on small tables set up strategically to collect them. A barmaid was hopping, slinging handfuls of bottles out to customers in a rhythmic pattern that was a bit artistic to watch, how she wove and bobbed and knew exactly which beer to deliver to which body.

“Open mic night,” Mike said, laughing.

“You drink more beer, Uncle Mike, and they’re gonna have to open you up to fix you,” Darla joked, nudging him in the ribs.

He groaned, chugged down the rest of his beer, and then flagged down the barmaid. “Cup of coffee.”

A hand crept over my upper thigh. We were in such close quarters on this bench that I looked down to make sure that it was Darla’s.

“It’s open mic night? You gonna sing?”

“What?” I groaned. “You have got to be kidding me. Here?”

“What’s wrong with this place?”

“Nothing a fifty-five gallon drum of industrial bleach wouldn’t cure,” Joe said.

Darla kicked him under the table. “Ow!” he shouted.

I held my hands up. “I don’t have a guitar.” I didn’t want to sing, none of these people knew my music, and besides, I hadn’t prepared, I was exhausted, hungry again – we hadn’t eaten much. In fact, I grabbed the barmaid and asked, “What do you have for food?”

“If you can fry it, we can feed it to you.”

I ordered a basket of some cheese fries and wings and mozz sticks. Within minutes a huge buffet of food was spread out before us and in those five minutes Darla had cajoled me into at least being open to the idea of performing at open mic. But I’d held out one condition – let me watch a couple of acts before I decided to capitulate.

We munched on food that my mother would have freaked out knowing that I ate – food that wasn’t organic and that had enough grease to clog my arteries five times over. It tasted so much better knowing she wouldn’t approve. The guys who took the stage were remarkably talented. There were a few who would give William Hung a run for his money in the race to the bottom but there was a grunge rock element here, a lot of guys who had voices that could have competed with the best of them in the early ’90’s. I peered at them, beer bellies swollen but arms and legs still strong and firm, faces bloated by age and drink, and I realized that most of them were in their late thirties or early forties, a little younger than my parents, and that this is what happened to people who were fed on the inside by music but never took the leap to go pro.

Would I end up in some Massachusetts equivalent of this little redneck town, singing my heart out at summer festivals on the green, trotted out at alumni events or church auctions at the local Unitarian Universalist congregation? Not that there was anything wrong with that, if that was what you wanted. That’s not what I wanted. What I wanted was both here and not here and as my eyes met Joe’s, we shared a look that seemed to say, Not this, not here and yet, isn’t this fabulous…what an adventure.

All of the boundaries of my life were chiseled away by my growing resolve to blast through the ones that mom and dad had put in place and figure out where the real ones really were.

Darla

Trevor had to sing. He had to sing. Everyone I knew in this room needed to see his brilliance, what had drawn me to him from the internet. Fate and fortune, and serendipity sent him my way through Josie first and then through the hand of God – or at least, the hand of Peyote.

“Please,” I hissed. “Do it for me. Come on. You said I don’t ask for anything – I’m asking for this.”

He planted a kiss on my cheek and then pulled back, looked at Joe and looked back at me and sighed. “You get me a guitar and I’ll do it,” he said.

Joe looked at him quizzically, then shrugged and dug back into his wings.

The waitress brought Uncle Mike his coffee. She was a new girl I’d never seen before – there weren’t many. Within a few days I’d know her name, and the names of all of the guys she’d ever slept with, and all of the ways that she’d pissed off somebody in town, and if she really was new and nobody knew her then she’d be gone pretty quickly because the only reason you stayed around here was if you had a reason to stay around here.

The first act got up on stage. We weren’t finished with our food so we sat and watched. It was Steve Keenan. He was about five years younger than me, still in high school, and he got up and he sang some song that might have been Jason Mraz? Not sure – Bruno Mars? Sometimes the two blended in my mind. Whatever it was, he was OK, not great, but you could tell it was a first attempt getting up there and we applauded wildly for him when he was done because why not? Why not encourage somebody when they’re trying to do what their heart tells them to do?