Red Hot Blues (5 page)

“It’s done,” I said to him, and I sat down
next to him.

I think I sat down closer than I had before.
I think his leg was almost touching mine.

I was having hormonal reactions: Pure,
female, lustful reactions. No love, just lust. I knew it then. And
I rode the wave, baby. I hadn’t felt this desire, this
yearning—physical only—for a guy in a
long
time. So I rode
it.

We watched the next band, and the one after
that. And then we went on.

When Ace started playing, I lost my
voice.

Ace is a blues and rock n roll
god
.
He’s Elvis. He’s B.B. King. He’s Dylan. He’s the Rolling Stones,
baby.

He’s
so
good
.

We rocked the house. Actually,
he
rocked the house. I lost my voice. I was so stunned that I actually
stared at him blankly, mouth gaping as it hung by the mike, and
looked at him while the entire band waited for me to pick up on my
cue.

I missed it. Lucky for me, I wasn’t the only
one doing that. So was the drummer, a little. And so was the crowd,
hands pausing in the air, jaws dropped.

But you know how it goes when you see a
virtuoso up on stage: There’s that first moment of shock. And then
the house falls down.

The house fell down when I finally started
singing, when I saw his skill and rode that wave. When I matched my
voice to his whining Gibson and we shattered the windows and blew
off the rafters with just pure
groove
.

At the end of our first song, we got a
standing ovation. We did another. People clapped, cheered. Some
actually even
danced
!

They roared. Ace’s ear-length hair became wet
and matted. He was smiling. The darkness I’d seen in his eyes
earlier was gone. It was all joy now. Lightness. He played the
crowd, took over the mike and said, “Y’all wanna hear another
one?”

Y’all
. He was Southern. Not from
Nashville, but Southern.

Of course they wanted to hear another one,
but he’d played them, gotten them excited.

“Because I only got one song in my
repertoire, and now I did two. Y’all sure you wanna hear a
third?”

The girls in the house screamed. And that
pissed me off grandly. There was a skinny redhead in the gallery,
sexy, everything I’m not, bouncing her tits and holding her drink
up, damn near spilling it over herself with her buoyant enthusiasm.
“Oh, damn, you’re so
hot
!” she howled.

I came down to reality. It was just me here,
the fat girl. So what the hell was all that dreaming I was doing
before with shirts off and tongues on breasts and—

Dreaming. That’s all it was.

Ace kept playing the crowd, the girls in the
gallery kept cheering him on. Then he hit a riff, started jamming
it, the drums boomed and thumped behind me so hard that I could
feel it deep in my chest, as if the drums were beating my heart
for
me. And I yowled my soul into that microphone.

Ace and I burned the house down.

In the end, the house roared, more people
walked in. Dollar bills were thrown down from the gallery onto the
stage. Open Jam acts never get tips, but we were getting tips.

Ace started taking his guitar off and people
banged on the tables, screaming, “ENCORE! ENCORE! ENCORE!”

I knew when it was my cue to leave. I clapped
for Ace, because that’s jam etiquette. And I started walking off
stage. They wanted him, they wanted a solo from him, and they were
right to ask for it. Because here in front of me was the next King
of Rock n Roll. And I was glad I got to sing with him.

His fingers had smoked on the guitar when
he’d played it.

But as I was walking off stage, I felt a hard
grip on the softness of my arm, just above my elbow.

Ace had grabbed me. People whistled. Cold air
rushed down from the AC. It’s always too cold in the Blues Bar. I
turned around to face Ace. There was anguish in his eyes. A look
which said,
Don’t go, babe. It’s you and me.

You know, a life is defined by moments, and
those moments are usually very small, almost indiscernible. I
believe those moments happen in some higher realm—a mental link
between two people, or a singer and a crowd, or a speaker and the
crowd—when you hear something, feel something,
know
something that hasn’t been outwardly expressed or communicated.
This was one of those moments: Ace’s head cocked, a pained and
hurting look in his eyes—
what is that look? what is it?
—his
hand on my arm,
gripping
me.

Don’t go, babe. It’s you and me.

I nodded, jam etiquette, faced the crowd.
They cheered. Crowd etiquette.

My girl Layna caught this exchange. She was
over on the left, in the back, just ahead of the bar, hidden a
little in the dark but I could see her smirk because of the neon
lights behind her. I could see that she’d seen something here as
well.

We did another song, not as good as the one
we’d just done. It’s never as good as the surprise song. The third
had been the surprise song, where it all came together. But it was
good. The drummer did an awesome set. On the keyboards, Joey
Smythe—he was smoking—played that gospel-style blues up and down
the keys in a crazy combination.

People roared and clapped. I accepted. I
bowed. I clapped in Ace’s direction—jam etiquette—he clapped in
mine. I turned to get off the stage. Some people surrounded me,
surrounded him, started congratulating him, me, the drummer, Joey
the keyboardist. Then three more people were around me, a girl,
that same redhead from earlier, an older man, someone with a drink.
The drink spilled on me. More people, shaking. “Well done!”, “You
were awesome!” “Thank you, thank you.” “Is it the first time you
played together?” A hand, a handshake. “Well done. Awesome.
Awesome!”

And then, when they were all gone, I looked
around.

And Ace was gone.

I wasn’t so much sad as I was disappointed. I
sat down with my Honey Jack and swirled it in the melting ice,
staying for the last few acts. My mind drifted, because that’s what
my mind does, and it drifted to stupid things: His arm—
what
tattoo was that?
—the dimples on his cheeks, his black-black
hair, like mine. They drifted to us walking up Gay Street, on the
edge of the Cumberland River, looking down at it.

It drifted to us talking about music,
guitars, playing tunes, me singing in a barn, him strumming. I
know, pathetic. But that’s what it did. I wasn’t thinking these
things on purpose, they just appeared. I couldn’t concentrate on
the music. My mind was just going wild, going to all sorts of
places. I’ve always been a creative type, and my imagination is
hard to put on a leash.

Layna caught me smiling, and in pure Layna
style, she shoved herself next to me on the seat, and said,
“Darlin, what you still doin here! He ran outside and you let him
go!” Layna’s born and raised in Tennessee. She speaks like a
Southern Belle, and looks like a Hooters waitress.

I slapped her leg. She was wearing high
shorts, exposing her sexy self.
Bitch
. “Stop it!” I
said.

She made her eyes go like saucers and then
flared out her nostrils. Then she came close to my ear (because she
knows me too well to embarrass me in front of the crowd) and said,
“He was totally into you.”

I giggled once, knee-jerk reaction. I rolled
my eyes and looked away from her. These things I can deal with, you
know: Thinking about the guy who “was totally into me” and always
talking about him as such. This is how I live my life. Dreams. What
Ace and I had was now perfect, consummate, and could never be
improved upon: It was the perfect meeting, the perfect encounter,
and if it had gone further, it would be tainted. If Brett had, say,
moved out of state or joined the military and gone on tour for a
gazillion years just before he’d told me to go jump in a lake, that
would have been an untainted memory. And our time together would
have been perfect.

It was the moment
after
that ruined
the perfection.

So having my best friend tell me this random
dude was totally into me, was cool. I could have it. And I liked
it. I’d go to bed thinking about it. And wake up with a smile.

The perfect encounter.

We met, we sang, we left. Perfect.

That is, until I bumped into him outside.

I’d needed some air, so I stepped outside for
a while. He was there. Looking cool, looking bad, looking smooth.
Looking so fucking gorgeous that I had another very female reaction
to it, a physical one, a hormonal one. Uh-huh. You know what I’m
talkin about.

He was leaning against a wall, underneath a
New Orleans French Quarter Style apartment with a wrought iron
veranda; his metallic red Gibson on the ground, cowboy hat on his
head. (I hadn’t seen that hat anywhere near him earlier...) He was
looking at the entrance to the blues bar, where I’d just come out
of. In other words, he was looking straight at me. I don’t know if
it was the sudden brightness—because this street is
bright
with a huge parking lot on the left and then the lights of all the
Karaoke Bars and strip joints on the right—but he looked suddenly
larger, taller, more muscular. Overwhelming.

Either that, or I just felt smaller. And
pudgier.

“Hey,” I said. What else is there to say?

He had a foot up against the wall, cowboy
boots. He was...
smirking?
...at me. A cigarette dangled from
his lips, unlit. He took his hat off, laid it on a plastic garbage
can that said “Dolly Carton” on it.

“I was hoping you’d come out soon,” he
said.

My heart shuddered.

“Oh?”

He grinned, evilly, confidently, so
goddamn
alluringly that my heart thrummed. This guy was
good. Oh yeah, he was
good
. And he knew what he was
doing.

He would use me. This much I knew. Because
boys only use girls like me. Only problem is...it was working.

I stumbled to a chair on my right. Well, it
felt like I stumbled, because my legs were losing strength, and it
felt like my heels were going to snap.

I caught him, very deliberately, looking at
my stocky legs, down to those red pumps I was wearing, lingering
there, then, slowly, eyeing me up the legs again, lingering
you-know-where
for a second; looking up, up, up, staying a
moment on my breasts, then stopping at my lips. He licked his own,
and, finally,
endlessly
, his glimmering eyes settled on
mine.

He smiled.

God, I feel like I’ve just been fucked with
his eyes.

And...boy did it feel good.

I was speechless, shivering a little. It
wasn’t cold. It was actually quite hot, early June, no rain for a
week. I had sweat forming in a light sheen all over my skin. But I
was trembling. My eyes flicked to him, then to the street, then to
him again.

I was a mess. A total mess. His eye-sex had
disoriented me. It had both turned me on and scared me. I wanted to
know what his game was, and I also didn’t want to know.

Yeah, I was screwed.

“You said you sing here often?” he asked.
Making conversation.

His voice, so deep, so confident. It would
sound great if he also sang.
Or if he talked to me close in my
ear while hovering above me...

“I...uhm...yeah, a few times a week
sometimes.” I crossed my hefty leg over the other. That female
reaction I told you about earlier was in full rage right now. I was
going to need a change of underwear.

Silence.

Well, silence between us, because on my right
there were people hugging and singing and laughing. There was a
dude sitting on a stool outside the only English Pub in Nashville
(which also offers Karaoke) telling people “you can smoke inside!
And there’s no cover fee!”

But between me and Ace—nothing.

I looked back at him. “Where you from?” I
ventured, trying to break the silence.

He took a Zippo from his pocket, lit his
cigarette. Looking away, he said, “I’m from a little of
everywhere.”

We were still a street apart. Granted, it’s a
small street, but it’s a street nonetheless.

“You just passing through?”

He shrugged, looked down at his feet.
“Sure.”

Silence again.

“You smoke?” he asked, holding the lit
cigarette a little away from him, towards me.

“Not anymore.”

“You shouldn’t. Your voice is...” He breathed
in deeply, widened his eyes... “Wow! Just...
wow
!” He shook
his head, grinned a little.

I’ve heard that before, and it never gets
old, and it never stops making me feel all warm and fuzzy. And I
can also tell when it’s genuine. I’m not good at telling when guys
are being genuine about my body (I generally assume they’re always
lying when it’s a compliment), but about my voice? I can tell.

Ace was being genuine.

Ace was truly floored by the way I’d sung.
That’s cool. It doesn’t go to my head. Not really.

“Thank you. Your guitar playing
is...something else as well.”

He looked down at his metallic Gibson, a sexy
brand of guitar that emulates all that’s best in a woman:
Curves
.

He shrugged. Looked away again. Said
nothing.

Uncomfortable moment.

“If I came by here next Tuesday,” he said,
“would you sing with me again?” He looked straight at me.

A tsunami came tumbling over me with bricks
and debris swimming all around me, but I managed to answer—a pat
answer, a quick answer, an answer that didn’t really sink in until
much later that night: “Sure.”

Then silence again. Not even a wind in my
ears. Just dead, muffled silence. Even Mr. English Karaoke was
quiet for a moment.

Ace smiled, his deep dimples showing up, his
dark brown eyes gleaming brilliantly. Then he picked up his guitar,
strapped it on his shoulder, strummed a C chord once. And said,
“Cool.”