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smackenzieThey were in the middle of playing "Sweet and Low" for the third time when the clock in the garage struck eleven. True to his word, Mission shooed them all out and locked the doors. He didn't even wait for Bran to finish the verse he was singing.
"Next Saturday, don't forget," Bran reminded them as they headed out. "Same bat time, same bat channel. I think we'll be fine, we sounded pretty good tonight."
"I could've told you that," Lea said.
"I think you did," Laurie said. Lea shrugged and popped the trunk of her car to put her bass away. Laurie gave her his guitar case and when she looked at it quizzically he asked "You wanna go get a drink or something? I'm kinda hungry now."
"Sure. You guys wanna come?" she asked Mission and Bran, who both shook their heads. She put Laurie's guitar in her trunk and slammed it shut.
"I'm going to bed," Mission said. "I know that makes me an old fart, but I worked today and I'm have to work tomorrow and if I have to miss an entire weekend I don't want to have to miss my sleep along with it. And I did an hour and a half at the gym and I'm exhausted. Night, guys." He waved and went inside his house.
"Ask Marshall to update the site, ok?" Bran said to Lea as he got in his car. "Underworld on the 12th. I think doors open at seven, and we're on at eight. I don't expect Underworld is going to give us tons of last-minute advertising."
"Probably not," Lea agreed. "I'll tell him."
"See you next Saturday." And he closed his car door, cranked the engine (it was an old car), pulled out of the driveway and turned down the street and away.
"We could go to the Shire," Lea said to Laurie, grinning, "see if Michel the bartender's still there."
"It was a year ago. He's probably gone now. They couldn't keep bartenders and probably someone found out he was screwing one of the waiters who screwed him over - that's how he thought of me - and unless the manager's been replaced, she didn't like her staff throwing tantrums and having affairs on work time. So he's probably out on his ass."
"Too bad he's not on your ass."
"Please." Laurie snorted. "He wasn't THAT good."
"Uh-huh. I remember you used to tell me he could make you forget your own name."
"He only did that once." It was a very memorable once, which was one of the reasons Laurie hadn't particularly cared that it was a bad idea to get involved with one of your coworkers. Anyone who could give you a blowjob that almost made you pass out was worth breaking a rule or two for. "I don't want to go back there anyway - there's too many college students."
"So I'm going to assume you want to pick up someone your own age tonight, huh?" Lea waggled her eyebrows and her grin widened. "There's the place on Bremer Street, what's it called...."
"Barcode? We're so not dressed for that." Barcode was one of those "no sneakers, no jeans" type places. It attracted the young and hip, and pretty much anyone who went out solely to be seen by other beautiful people was likely to show up there. Laurie had been once and felt a little out of place. The music was too loud and the boys were too impressed with themselves (although they were a good-looking and well-dressed bunch, which Laurie really couldn't argue with) and the beer was overpriced and they had too many martinis on their drinks menu. "I just want a beer and a burger, or potato skins or something."
"Not Barcode," Lea sniffed. "Are you kidding? That's on Brenner, not Bremen. The Three Pigs. The one around the corner from my building, stupid. We've been there about forty times."
"Oh, yeah." Now Laurie felt really dumb. He liked the Three Pigs. They had good cheese fries and a decent jukebox. Not a lot of good bars had jukeboxes any more. "There. That'll work. We might even get a table."
"If you're going to get food we should sit down, yeah. You wanna follow or lead?"
"Silly question. You can't keep up with me in that rust bucket."
"Watch me."
They stood perfectly still in Mission's driveway for about ten seconds, then Lea made a dash for her car and Laurie jumped on his bike and they played "Can't catch me" all the way to the bar. Laurie got there first, but it was a lot easier for him to park his bike than it was for Lea to park her car - he didn't need a whole car-sized space. He could fit his Harley pretty much anywhere.
"Beat you here," he said when Lea finally showed up.
"I see. What's the wait?"
"Fifteen minutes for a table, or we could sit at the bar. I said we'd wait for a table."
"Cool. Oh, I forgot to give you this." She rummaged around in her shoulder bag and finally pulled out a CD case and handed it to Laurie. He looked at it blankly.
"What's this?"
"A fruitcake." She grinned. He made a face. Silly friends and their silly senses of humor. "Marshall's last poetry slam. They're recording them now so he had them make him a CD. The sound quality's awful - there's a lot of background noise - but you can still hear him ranting. It's pretty good. And there's a guy with a guitar that Marshall thought you'd like. His poetry - sorry, 'performance art' - it sucks and he's way too interested in himself, but his voice sounds good with the guitar, and his playing actually sounds pretty decent."
Lea's boyfriend Marshall made his living as a mechanic, but to blow off steam and put his English degree to some use he wrote crazy absurd poetry and went to open-mike poetry slams. He did it for fun and didn't have any illusions about how good he was (or wasn't). Lea went along as support sometimes. Laurie had only been once because he couldn't think of a way out of it, and while he thought Marshall was pretty good as a performer, he didn't know the first thing about poetry or the way poetry slams work, and hated to admit at the end of the night that it wasn't something he was eager to do again. He felt like too many people there took it too seriously. Really, it was just like amateur night at some local music club.
"Thanks," was all he said now, taking the CD and sticking it in his jacket pocket. "I'll listen when I get home. Probably not tonight, though."
"You can fall asleep to it. I did. There isn't a lot of screaming on this one." Sometimes, according to Lea, the slams attracted a crowd of poets who seemed to think the louder you yelled, the more passionate you were about your poem.
Laurie pulled the CD back out and turned it over in his hands while Lea got out her cell phone and (Laurie assumed) called home.
"Hey baby," she said into the phone. "Yeah, we're finished. Laurie and I are at the Three Pigs for some food and a beer. I gave him your CD." Laurie held it up, as if Marshall on the other end of the phone line could see it. "Do me a favor? Well, do Bran a favor. We got a gig on the 12th - yeah, I know it's only a week - we're playing Underworld with Mintyfish." She made a face into the phone. Laurie grinned. He didn't know Marshall's opinion on a lot of things, but he was pretty sure Lea's boyfriend didn't like Mintyfish any more than Lea did. "Just update the site. The12th at Underworld, with Mintyfish. We go on at eight, doors at seven. That's it. Thanks, hon." She hung up and stuck the phone back in her bag. "Marshall says hi," she told Laurie.
"Hi Marshall." Lea punched him on the arm. "Ow. What was that for?"
"Being a doofus."
"I'm not a doofus."
"Yes you are."
"What'd I do this time?"
"Nothing yet."
"So stop hitting me."
"No." Lea was grinning hugely now. She loved to tease him. He was pretty sure it was because she could - he wasn't going to haul off and hit her, or say something intentionally hurtful, or think it meant more than it did. The most he'd do was snark back.
"Dork," he said with finality. Lea's expression seemed to say "Of course you are, that's why I love you," so to stall her before she said anything else, Laurie went into the bar to find out how long the wait for their table was.
You really couldn't properly call it a bar when it had a hostess seating people and an actual menu for those people to order from, but the main reason to go to the Three Pigs was to drink. It just happened that they had good cheese fries, good bar food, and pretty decent hamburgers. Laurie got a burger with American cheese and Lea had a slice of apple pie. They made their apple pie with Guinness, which Laurie would have thought was too weird a couple of years ago, but working in restaurants had cured him of pretty much all his food snobbery. Nothing was strange to him any more.
Part of him wanted to talk to Lea about Danny and how were they supposed to figure out if the kid really was gay or not, and was it stupid to want to take him to the Blind Pig and find a cute boy to kiss him. Part of him didn't want to talk to anybody about Danny. Maybe if he was more sure how he felt about it in the first place....
"Something on your mind?" Lea asked, licking crumbs off her fork.
"What?" Laurie said.
"You just seemed really pensive all of a sudden."
"'Pensive.'"
"Yeah. Thoughtful."
"I know what 'pensive' means." He swiped a french fry in the ketchup and ate it. "I'm thinking about Danny."
"Oh. What'd he do?"
"Broke up with his girlfriend."
"Really? Why?"
"He thinks he might be gay."
Oh, god, the expression on Lea's face was priceless. She stared at Laurie open-mouthed, a fork full of pie stopped halfway up from her plate. She blinked. She was probably trying to think of a snarky response.
"Must run in the family," she said finally. Not quite what Laurie was expecting, but almost up to her usual standards of sarcasm. She popped her fork in her mouth, chewed, swallowed. "What brought that on?"
"A guy on the soccer team. Danny's got the hots for him."
"So he thinks he's gay?"
"Not the soccer player, no." Laurie sighed. "I promised to take him to the Pig so he could find a boy to kiss. I figured that's the only way to know for sure if he really does like boys." Lea was looking at him strangely. "Bad idea?"
"I have no idea," she said. "If that was me, my brothers would kill you."
"For trying to help you figure out if you were gay or not?"
"For taking me somewhere with the express intention of finding someone for me to hook up with. Remember the first time I brought Marshall home to meet the fam? Hector told him if he did anything to me, if he even raised his voice, he and Max and Gene would fix it so no one even found the body." She gave Laurie a significant look. "They didn't even want to think of me kissing boys, much less sleeping with them."
"So?" Laurie said. "I'm not gonna tell anyone that's why I'm taking Danny to the Pig. Well, he knows, but neither of us is going to tell Mom or Jeremy. Can you imagine that? Mom would have a fit and Jeremy would blame me. Like being queer is contagious."
"I'm just saying I think it's really funny that your solution is to get Danny laid."
"That comes later. I don't want to freak him out. Kissing first, and if he likes that we'll move on. One step at a time, you know?"
"What'd he say when you said you'd take him out and find him a boyfriend?"
"He shrugged. You know how talkative he is." Lea nodded. "But he didn't look turned off. For all I know he'll have changed his mind on Tuesday and decided he really does like girls after all. If you ask me, I think he's probably bi. I mean, I knew when I was seventeen that I was gay. I didn't have to figure it out."
"Either he's bi or he's been repressing it." Lea finished her pie and reached across the table to snag a french fry.
"We're gonna find out."
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total words: 13,331
"Next Saturday, don't forget," Bran reminded them as they headed out. "Same bat time, same bat channel. I think we'll be fine, we sounded pretty good tonight."
"I could've told you that," Lea said.
"I think you did," Laurie said. Lea shrugged and popped the trunk of her car to put her bass away. Laurie gave her his guitar case and when she looked at it quizzically he asked "You wanna go get a drink or something? I'm kinda hungry now."
"Sure. You guys wanna come?" she asked Mission and Bran, who both shook their heads. She put Laurie's guitar in her trunk and slammed it shut.
"I'm going to bed," Mission said. "I know that makes me an old fart, but I worked today and I'm have to work tomorrow and if I have to miss an entire weekend I don't want to have to miss my sleep along with it. And I did an hour and a half at the gym and I'm exhausted. Night, guys." He waved and went inside his house.
"Ask Marshall to update the site, ok?" Bran said to Lea as he got in his car. "Underworld on the 12th. I think doors open at seven, and we're on at eight. I don't expect Underworld is going to give us tons of last-minute advertising."
"Probably not," Lea agreed. "I'll tell him."
"See you next Saturday." And he closed his car door, cranked the engine (it was an old car), pulled out of the driveway and turned down the street and away.
"We could go to the Shire," Lea said to Laurie, grinning, "see if Michel the bartender's still there."
"It was a year ago. He's probably gone now. They couldn't keep bartenders and probably someone found out he was screwing one of the waiters who screwed him over - that's how he thought of me - and unless the manager's been replaced, she didn't like her staff throwing tantrums and having affairs on work time. So he's probably out on his ass."
"Too bad he's not on your ass."
"Please." Laurie snorted. "He wasn't THAT good."
"Uh-huh. I remember you used to tell me he could make you forget your own name."
"He only did that once." It was a very memorable once, which was one of the reasons Laurie hadn't particularly cared that it was a bad idea to get involved with one of your coworkers. Anyone who could give you a blowjob that almost made you pass out was worth breaking a rule or two for. "I don't want to go back there anyway - there's too many college students."
"So I'm going to assume you want to pick up someone your own age tonight, huh?" Lea waggled her eyebrows and her grin widened. "There's the place on Bremer Street, what's it called...."
"Barcode? We're so not dressed for that." Barcode was one of those "no sneakers, no jeans" type places. It attracted the young and hip, and pretty much anyone who went out solely to be seen by other beautiful people was likely to show up there. Laurie had been once and felt a little out of place. The music was too loud and the boys were too impressed with themselves (although they were a good-looking and well-dressed bunch, which Laurie really couldn't argue with) and the beer was overpriced and they had too many martinis on their drinks menu. "I just want a beer and a burger, or potato skins or something."
"Not Barcode," Lea sniffed. "Are you kidding? That's on Brenner, not Bremen. The Three Pigs. The one around the corner from my building, stupid. We've been there about forty times."
"Oh, yeah." Now Laurie felt really dumb. He liked the Three Pigs. They had good cheese fries and a decent jukebox. Not a lot of good bars had jukeboxes any more. "There. That'll work. We might even get a table."
"If you're going to get food we should sit down, yeah. You wanna follow or lead?"
"Silly question. You can't keep up with me in that rust bucket."
"Watch me."
They stood perfectly still in Mission's driveway for about ten seconds, then Lea made a dash for her car and Laurie jumped on his bike and they played "Can't catch me" all the way to the bar. Laurie got there first, but it was a lot easier for him to park his bike than it was for Lea to park her car - he didn't need a whole car-sized space. He could fit his Harley pretty much anywhere.
"Beat you here," he said when Lea finally showed up.
"I see. What's the wait?"
"Fifteen minutes for a table, or we could sit at the bar. I said we'd wait for a table."
"Cool. Oh, I forgot to give you this." She rummaged around in her shoulder bag and finally pulled out a CD case and handed it to Laurie. He looked at it blankly.
"What's this?"
"A fruitcake." She grinned. He made a face. Silly friends and their silly senses of humor. "Marshall's last poetry slam. They're recording them now so he had them make him a CD. The sound quality's awful - there's a lot of background noise - but you can still hear him ranting. It's pretty good. And there's a guy with a guitar that Marshall thought you'd like. His poetry - sorry, 'performance art' - it sucks and he's way too interested in himself, but his voice sounds good with the guitar, and his playing actually sounds pretty decent."
Lea's boyfriend Marshall made his living as a mechanic, but to blow off steam and put his English degree to some use he wrote crazy absurd poetry and went to open-mike poetry slams. He did it for fun and didn't have any illusions about how good he was (or wasn't). Lea went along as support sometimes. Laurie had only been once because he couldn't think of a way out of it, and while he thought Marshall was pretty good as a performer, he didn't know the first thing about poetry or the way poetry slams work, and hated to admit at the end of the night that it wasn't something he was eager to do again. He felt like too many people there took it too seriously. Really, it was just like amateur night at some local music club.
"Thanks," was all he said now, taking the CD and sticking it in his jacket pocket. "I'll listen when I get home. Probably not tonight, though."
"You can fall asleep to it. I did. There isn't a lot of screaming on this one." Sometimes, according to Lea, the slams attracted a crowd of poets who seemed to think the louder you yelled, the more passionate you were about your poem.
Laurie pulled the CD back out and turned it over in his hands while Lea got out her cell phone and (Laurie assumed) called home.
"Hey baby," she said into the phone. "Yeah, we're finished. Laurie and I are at the Three Pigs for some food and a beer. I gave him your CD." Laurie held it up, as if Marshall on the other end of the phone line could see it. "Do me a favor? Well, do Bran a favor. We got a gig on the 12th - yeah, I know it's only a week - we're playing Underworld with Mintyfish." She made a face into the phone. Laurie grinned. He didn't know Marshall's opinion on a lot of things, but he was pretty sure Lea's boyfriend didn't like Mintyfish any more than Lea did. "Just update the site. The12th at Underworld, with Mintyfish. We go on at eight, doors at seven. That's it. Thanks, hon." She hung up and stuck the phone back in her bag. "Marshall says hi," she told Laurie.
"Hi Marshall." Lea punched him on the arm. "Ow. What was that for?"
"Being a doofus."
"I'm not a doofus."
"Yes you are."
"What'd I do this time?"
"Nothing yet."
"So stop hitting me."
"No." Lea was grinning hugely now. She loved to tease him. He was pretty sure it was because she could - he wasn't going to haul off and hit her, or say something intentionally hurtful, or think it meant more than it did. The most he'd do was snark back.
"Dork," he said with finality. Lea's expression seemed to say "Of course you are, that's why I love you," so to stall her before she said anything else, Laurie went into the bar to find out how long the wait for their table was.
You really couldn't properly call it a bar when it had a hostess seating people and an actual menu for those people to order from, but the main reason to go to the Three Pigs was to drink. It just happened that they had good cheese fries, good bar food, and pretty decent hamburgers. Laurie got a burger with American cheese and Lea had a slice of apple pie. They made their apple pie with Guinness, which Laurie would have thought was too weird a couple of years ago, but working in restaurants had cured him of pretty much all his food snobbery. Nothing was strange to him any more.
Part of him wanted to talk to Lea about Danny and how were they supposed to figure out if the kid really was gay or not, and was it stupid to want to take him to the Blind Pig and find a cute boy to kiss him. Part of him didn't want to talk to anybody about Danny. Maybe if he was more sure how he felt about it in the first place....
"Something on your mind?" Lea asked, licking crumbs off her fork.
"What?" Laurie said.
"You just seemed really pensive all of a sudden."
"'Pensive.'"
"Yeah. Thoughtful."
"I know what 'pensive' means." He swiped a french fry in the ketchup and ate it. "I'm thinking about Danny."
"Oh. What'd he do?"
"Broke up with his girlfriend."
"Really? Why?"
"He thinks he might be gay."
Oh, god, the expression on Lea's face was priceless. She stared at Laurie open-mouthed, a fork full of pie stopped halfway up from her plate. She blinked. She was probably trying to think of a snarky response.
"Must run in the family," she said finally. Not quite what Laurie was expecting, but almost up to her usual standards of sarcasm. She popped her fork in her mouth, chewed, swallowed. "What brought that on?"
"A guy on the soccer team. Danny's got the hots for him."
"So he thinks he's gay?"
"Not the soccer player, no." Laurie sighed. "I promised to take him to the Pig so he could find a boy to kiss. I figured that's the only way to know for sure if he really does like boys." Lea was looking at him strangely. "Bad idea?"
"I have no idea," she said. "If that was me, my brothers would kill you."
"For trying to help you figure out if you were gay or not?"
"For taking me somewhere with the express intention of finding someone for me to hook up with. Remember the first time I brought Marshall home to meet the fam? Hector told him if he did anything to me, if he even raised his voice, he and Max and Gene would fix it so no one even found the body." She gave Laurie a significant look. "They didn't even want to think of me kissing boys, much less sleeping with them."
"So?" Laurie said. "I'm not gonna tell anyone that's why I'm taking Danny to the Pig. Well, he knows, but neither of us is going to tell Mom or Jeremy. Can you imagine that? Mom would have a fit and Jeremy would blame me. Like being queer is contagious."
"I'm just saying I think it's really funny that your solution is to get Danny laid."
"That comes later. I don't want to freak him out. Kissing first, and if he likes that we'll move on. One step at a time, you know?"
"What'd he say when you said you'd take him out and find him a boyfriend?"
"He shrugged. You know how talkative he is." Lea nodded. "But he didn't look turned off. For all I know he'll have changed his mind on Tuesday and decided he really does like girls after all. If you ask me, I think he's probably bi. I mean, I knew when I was seventeen that I was gay. I didn't have to figure it out."
"Either he's bi or he's been repressing it." Lea finished her pie and reached across the table to snag a french fry.
"We're gonna find out."
words: 2172
total words: 13,331
