smackenzie

If he was late, and he might be, Scott would kill him, and that would suck.

The bus was reasonably full but Sam managed to squeeze himself and his suit bag and his sax case into a seat and out of the aisle. He didn't like riding crowded buses with his sax, because the case was big and bulky and always ended up blocking the aisle. People tripped on it or stepped on it and he'd learned early on he couldn't hold it in his lap with his suit bag, because he'd get to the club (or wherever he was going) and his suit would be all wrinkled, and while he wasn't the most fashion conscious of jazz musicians, he wanted to look good and professional. Wrinkles just weren't professional.

His sax was named Ella, after Ella Fitzgerald, and Sam was very protective of her. (When Sam's parents met, his dad's trumpet was named Parvati, after an old girlfriend. That name didn't last long, but his dad didn't think renaming the instrument would be good for it - he didn't want his trumpet to suffer an identity crisis, which Sam's mom thought was weird but Sam understood - so he stopped calling it by name.) The few times Sam had had to fly on a plane with Ella, he'd taken her in her case as carry-on luggage, not trusting the baggage handlers to not throw her around. He took very good care of his sax, polishing her weekly and changing the key pads regularly and (of course) keeping her in tune and well-played. Denting was punishable by severe tongue-lashing. Serious denting was punishable by serious pain. Fortunately no one had ever dented her, mostly because Sam wouldn't let anyone play her.

There were some old buses in Eden's public transportation fleet that had more leg room than others, and by luck Sam had caught one of them. He pulled his Discman out of his backpack, settled the headphones over his ears, got Ella's case more firmly wedged under the seat in front of him and between his knees, and turned on the disc player. He watched the city passing by the window, dark and damp and wintry and cold and glittery with street lights and lit windows and the occasional string of Christmas lights that someone hadn't taken down off the trees or utility poles yet. He tapped the Discman when it skipped, then hit it a little harder when it skipped again.

"Fucking CD," he muttered, turning it off, flipping it open, and pulling out the CD to inspect it. It didn't look scratched, but then, they never did. It was one of the few things he preferred about albums - you could tell when and where they were scratched. With CDs you had to assume it was there somewhere, unless someone had done something like scrape a key over them.

(Teddy had done that once, just to see if it could be done. Someone had evidently told him that CDs wouldn't scratch, and he took it as a personal challenge. He'd also tried to melt one, but all that he'd succeeded in doing was melting the jewel case around it. At least it wasn't a CD he wanted.)

Sam dug the CD case out of his backpack, put the CD in it, and found the other one he traveled with. He always carried around at least two CDs with his Discman, in case he got bored with one or changed his mind or just wanted a little variety on a long trip. Or in case one turned out to be scratched, like now.

It kind of sucked, actually, because the scratched CD was Miles Davis and he'd borrowed it from Peter Baron, one of the guys from the record store, and when he gave it back Peter would think he'd scratched it. Sam didn't like people thinking he'd ruined their CDs.

Of course, it could be the Discman....

It probably was the Discman, because the second CD, which was Stan Getz, skipped too.

"Well, fuck," Sam said out loud. The guy hanging on to the rail and standing in the aisle next to him looked down at him, surprised. Sam blushed, embarrassed. He'd forgotten how loud he could talk when he was wearing his headphones. "Sorry," he said. The guy shrugged and looked away again. Sam pulled off his headphones and stuck them and the Discman back in his backpack, reached down to pat his saxophone case, and peered at his watch, and then out the window.

Another seven minutes on the bus, maybe. The next stop was the Spanish tapas restaurant, and the stop after that was his. It didn't look like it was raining, which was good. He didn't have an umbrella, and if a wrinkled suit was unprofessional, a soaking wet jazz musician was more so. Scott would be really pissed off, if Sam showed up at the Bluebird soaking wet. But Scott was like a Boy Scout - he was Always Prepared. Sam and Teddy were less so.

There was no one waiting at Sam's stop and no one else apparently wanted to get off, and the bus was almost through the intersection before Sam realized he'd have to signal the driver to stop. Where was his head tonight? He guessed he was too busy running over their set for the evening and thinking up improvisations, but the actual fact was more like I'm kinda hungry and kinda tired and I really need to get more sleep tonight, and I hate being late.

He yanked the cord, the bus screeched to a halt, the guy standing in the aisle next to him looked down and glared (this time Sam just shrugged at him - it wasn't his fault the guy didn't have a good hold on the railing on the back of the seat), Sam wrestled his suit bag and his sax case out of the bus, and the bus doors creaked shut and the bus pulled away. It was about a five minute walk to the club from the bus stop; there was a closer stop, on the corner right by the Bluebird, in fact, but to get to that one Sam would have had to change buses, and this way he just had to make sure he got on the right one at the beginning. If one bus was running late that was one thing, but if he had to worry about two buses running late, especially now that it looked like he'd be working late shifts at Play It Again, he'd go nuts.

The air was cold and damp (no big surprise there) and Sam hustled down the street and around the corner to keep warm. He was kind of surprised and not that thrilled to see the club was practically empty - wasn't Scott supposed to have flyered places, at least? Done some kind of publicity? Or was that Teddy's job now? Or was it his? He had a brief moment of panic and then remembered that Scott had taken on all that stuff in his role as unofficial (ie, unpaid) manager. So why weren't there more people here? Was it because they were playing Wednesdays? When he was in college the weekend started on Wednesday.

Oh well, they'd just have to play as if the place was packed to the rafters. It was one of the things Sam had learned from his dad, to act as if you had a full house even when you didn't. His dad said it made the few people in the audience feel special, and if they felt special they'd bring more people to feel special with. Sam wasn't too sure about that now - they'd been playing to half-empty rooms in the Bluebird for a couple of months now and as far as he could tell their "special" audience hadn't passed on the word. Maybe he should say something to Scott, although... what would he say? Marketing wasn't Sam's strong point. He was the saxophone player and unofficial musical leader of the band, he wasn't the publicist.

But anyway, he told himself, trying to bring his thoughts back into line, someone's here, and Joaquin still wants us to play, so we can't be doing that bad.

Teddy was already suited up and sitting on the stool behind his drum kit, tightening a snare with utter concentration when Sam walked past the little stage on his way to the back office, which doubled as a dressing room. There was another room back there, but no one was sure what it was for since Joaquin, the club owner, kept it locked. There was a sign on the door that said "Band only" but no band had ever been in it, at least not that Sam or Teddy or Scott knew. Teddy had asked the bartender about it before their second gig, but the bartender (whose name was Leo) had just shrugged and said he'd thought it was where Joaquin kept the extra bar napkins.

(Leo was not the most curious bartender the boys had ever met. He was very laid-back and unconcerned about things that didn't directly affect him, which was most things, and he never ever pried into anyone's affairs. They fell under the heading of "things that didn't directly affect him." If he'd been a musician he might have thought differently abot Joaquin's mysterious locked room.)

Scott was tuning his double bass in the office when Sam shouldered the door open and then kicked it closed. He was also suited up, although his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and his tie hung loose, and he wasn't wearing his jacket. But he was obviously prepared to go on stage, which meant Sam was late.

"Sorry," Sam said, shrugging off his backpack and draping his suit bag over a chair. "They had me working a late shift at the store. Didn't I call you and tell you that?"

"Yeah," Scott said, apparently absorbed in his bass. He plucked strings and listened to them thrum. "Is this a regular thing?"

"The late shift or me working it?"

"Both." Pluck, thrum, tighten. Sam glanced up from kicking off his shoes to watch Scott listen to his bass, trying to gauge his mood. It was always hard to tell with Scott unless he was actually yelling at you.

"The later shift is a regular thing. Bruce thinks we can get foot traffic at night." Sam shucked off his rugby shirt and jeans and pulled his suit out of the bag. Not wrinkled, good. He stepped into the pants. "I took it tonight because I kinda need the money, but I don't think they're gonna want me to do it all the time. I mean, I had to book right out of there to get here on time." He pulled on his shirt, buttoned it up, tucked it into the pants, and couldn't find his belt. "There's no one out there."

"I saw," Scott said. He played a few notes on his bass, then laid a hand on the shoulder and spun it around. Sam grinned. Scott could sometimes be a really flashy player. "I gotta talk to Joaquin again about going to Thursdays. There are always more people closer towards the weekend."

"He hasn't told us he doesn't want us. We must be doing something right. Where the fuck's my belt?"

"Look in your bag." Sam did. His belt was curled up at the bottom. "I was thinking we'd do some more improvisation tonight, ok?"

"Works for me." He threaded his belt through the loops on his pants, buttoned up his shirt, dug out his tie, slung it around his neck, and popped open his sax case. He took a minute to stroke Ella fondly before taking out the reed case, picking out a reed, and sticking it in his mouth. He sucked on it, moistening it, while he put his saxophone together and Scott chattered on about how he was going to convince Joaquin to move them to Thursdays, or at least let them try playing another night.

"Wednesdays are dead, man," he said. "Gonna go see if Teddy's ready. It's about time."

"'kay," Sam said around his reed. He took it out of his mouth and fixed it to the mouthpiece.

"Three minutes to warm up in here."

"Three?"

"That's what you get for being late."

"Come on, it wasn't my fault I had to - ok, it was, I could've said no."

"Yep." Scott heaved his double bass out of the office and out to the stage, and Sam did some scales to warm up, followed by a few exercises he'd worked out in college to get his mouth and hands ready.

It didn't take much - he practiced every chance he got - and three minutes later he'd put on his jacket, clipped the neck strap to his saxophone and slung it around his neck, and headed out to take his place on the Bluebird's little blue-lit stage.

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