smackenzie

Sam Mackenzie was having a pretty good day, despite the fact that he had to work late to cover someone's shift and then rush over to the Bluebird where the jazz trio he played in had a gig. He figured he could go home afterwards and collapse. The late shift was a new idea for Bruce, his boss - Sam worked in a record store called Play It Again, which was on a pedestrian street of other little shops, pubs, cafes, and restaurants. Bruce thought there was enough evening foot traffic to justify keeping the store open later. He'd hired a new kid to help staff this shift, but the kid had "fucked on out of here," as Marley, one of Sam's coworkers, had put it, so Sam took it for tonight. He was a little curious if they'd get customers, and what kind, and besides, he needed the money.

Sam was just twenty-two, recently graduated from college with a degree in music performance, working at Play It Again during the day (and, apparently, some nights) and playing in a jazz trio at night. They were young, the trio, but had managed to get a steady gig at a local club, the Bluebird, although so far only on Wednesday nights. Scott, who played the double bass and was the trio's de facto manager, was trying to get them into Thursday at least, but Teddy, the drummer, kept telling him to hold back and wait until they were more settled and Sam thought they were lucky to have gotten the gig at all. Not that they weren't good enough, but they were young, all of them having graduated from college that past spring, and only really having played together seriously for a year. To make up for that they practiced a lot. Scott's orders.

(Privately Sam thought Scott was kind of a hardass, but part of him loved to play so much that he didn't mind.)

Sam was a saxophone player. His dad had been a jazz trumpeter by training annd inclination (although a high school music teacher and member of third-rate wedding bands for a living) and Sam had grown up surrounded by the music. His dad was a classicist at heart but also loved avant garde, experimental, and fusion jazz, and had even belonged to a group that cut a record, long before Sam was born. That group, the avant garde and experimental band Voice of Venus, had cut their self-titled and only album on an obscure local label before splitting up due to that old favorite, "creative differences."

Sam's dad had been so upset by the dissolution of Voice of Venus that he hadn't even kept any copies of the record. But Sam had heard about them, heard his dad's war stories, so to speak, and had spent ten years so far trying to get his hands on the damn album. He worked in a record store that specialized in the strange and obscure and had been founded as a used-records store (hence the name) and did a good business in mail order, and as hard as Sam worked trying to find this piece of his dad's past, you would have thought it never existed in the first place.

It was frustrating but by now he was pretty much used to it. He kept looking partly out of habit and partly because his father had died when he was twelve, and this was a way of keeping him alive. His mom held on to his dad's trumpet but Sam had taken his old turntable and some of his records when he moved into his apartment (every time he went back to visit his mom he came home with more records, and it was a good thing he didn't have a lot of stuff because it was a small apartment and he was running out of space), and everyone in Voice of Venus had gotten an engraved ring when they made their record - Sam wore his dad's in a chain under his shirt at every gig. He'd started doing that in high school, where he played in the school orchestra and the school jazz band.

Sam knew better than to judge people by their looks, and it always made him laugh (inside, anyway) when people said "Oh, you don't look like a jazz musician." It made him wonder what people thought jazzmen looked like - suits and ties and hats like the poster of Dexter Gordon hanging in the record store, or black pants and turtlenecks and berets like 50's hipster cliches? Did people who said that think only black men played jazz?

Sam was most definitely a white boy, with dark blond hair and gray-green eyes, a hair or two shorter than six feet, and not exactly stocky, but not a stick either. He'd recently started going to the gym, having found a good no-frills one he could afford, and was working on toning and defining (and enduring) rather than bulking up. He didn't understand what the thrill was about those hyper-bulky gym rats, the guys you saw in commercials for Nordic Track or home gyms or that powder stuff they sold in GNC. Besides, steroids made you sterile.

His last college girlfriend, Donnabelle (who only let a few people call her that, Sam included), said he was shaped like Ewan McGregor in, maybe, Nightwatch or Little Voice, although he had the fashion sense of Ewan in A Life Less Ordinary. (Which is to say, no fashion sense at all. Sam had been instantly offended, but had to admit she was right. He dressed like he'd suddenly learned how to dress himself. Donnabelle thought he might be color blind, but no, he was just slightly fashion impaired. He'd gotten better.) She liked a Ewan with a little meat on him, which was one reason she liked Sam. The musician part hadn't hurt either.

(Sam didn't have much opinion on Ewan McGregor. A good actor, sure, kind of cute, versatile, cool accent - but Sam liked taller men who didn't look so much like him. He liked Alan Rickman - again with the accent - especially in Truly Madly Deeply. When he admitted to Teddy that he loved that movie, Teddy had laughed and called him a closet sap. But Sam agreed. He could, on occasion, be a sap and a sentimentalist. Why else would he still wear his dad's Voice of Venus ring on a chain under his shirt, but only for gigs?)

Now he leaned on the counter in Play It Again and watched the sporadic foot traffic outside the store and wondered what had possessed Bruce to implement this late shift thing in February. It was cold out. People weren't too excited about wandering around up and down the street. Besides, it was cloudy and looked like rain, or possibly snow, and who was going to walk around in that?

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