His heel rolled off and down the curb, into pain and into trash. Apt metaphors for his life, all of them, he joked inside his drunken head as he stumbled home. It was some absurd hour; it always was – maybe it was daylight saving’s time. Regardless, it was 4:30 a.m. and Reggie had been kicked out of the bar early. He had slurred his way distastefully up to the stage during a break in the jazz band’s set and, through flattery, convinced the band’s drummer he was fit to sit in for a couple of songs.
A few drinks later and oblivious to earlier claims, Reg was called to the stage by Oberon, a thick-set black man from New York City who had tasted both his share of women and his share of competition. Reg looked up from a nursed drink, with an ego as hollow as his wallet, and remembered. He slid off his stool, and patted a friend’s arm in a wounded, pseudo-confident kind of way. As he fell toward the stage, he staggered and knocked over a chair.
He grabbed Oberon’s hand as the big man tried to ignore his way past Reg and their hands – one sweaty and one greasy – briefly met in the half-hearted shake drug dealers are used to. Reg sat back on the drummer’s stool and leaned against the wall of the club for support. He picked up the sticks and looked over at the piano player. A sagging man of 32 years, the man leaned over the ivories with a clichéd limp cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a limp, globetrotting whore slumped over a table in the first row – a drink in her hand, tilted and balanced. He grinned a weak smile and started up a standard. The bass player sighed loud enough to be heard over the intro and stood up from his seat, setting his stand-up against his chest and feeling for a groove with half his mind and only 3 fingers.
Reg realized then how drunk he was. The people near the bar, who were farthest from the stage, were drowning in Las Vegas haze – half heat and half smog. The ones sitting near the stage were still visible. Sluts, all of them. The ex-pats shined in their fake suits, while their equally fake broads burst out of their tops as often as they fell to the hardwood on their way to the powder room. Reg looked at the sticks in his hands and pretended to feel the music. He was trying hard to figure out what time signature the two washed-up musicians were playing in and trying much, much harder not to throw up. He swallowed his constitution’s weakness and plowed into the song as softly as his inability would allow him. It was a disaster.
The piano player’s whore had known from the start that Reg was no good. But as the musical train derailed into a field of plump, oblivious cattle, even the others began to notice. The managing consultant from Chicago looked into his screwdriver, up at Reg, down at his drink again, over at his girl on the floor by the bathroom, and became solemn. What was her name again, he thought? Reg’s incompetence began to register and he began to grimace; thinking of his wife, he got up and left. The bartender, looking nervous, ignored an obvious plea for over-priced beer and stared as the stage unwound. The bass player simply stopped playing, mid-song, leaned his bass against his chair, picked up his drink and walked off stage toward the bar. The piano player smirked, checked his whore to make sure he wouldn’t have to carry home two sets of equipment, and just stopped – staring stupidly.
Reg, stupid as he was, wasn’t dumb. He drifted off musically and did a little flourish to finish off. No one was impressed. But it didn’t matter that much. Reg’s friends – met only once or twice – had already left. The bartender refused him any more drinks, and Reg, his ego thumb-screwed into oblivion, rolled his eyes and shoulders and legs toward the door and out into the humid night. As he looked at the moon through the trees and tried to walk straight, he rolled his heel off the curb and nearly broke his ankle.
