32-Cold Reality
Moses Lake, Washington was cold in the winter. If Tom were here, he could tell me how cold, and what the drive was like getting there, and what the hotel looked like, and even how big our tiny room was—all musicians’ rooms are tiny. Come to think of it, though, none of that’s really germane to the mainstream of this symposium, is it? Chalk one up for non-retaining useless information; every negative has a flip-side positive, doesn’t it?
The bar we set up in had an actual raised stage, unlike almost every other gig we’d played so far. It faced a big, empty dance floor ringed by tables with a long bar on one side and a dark, three-tiered, carpeted “lovers” section directly to our left, separated from the bar by a dividing wall. Behind us were wide, floor-to-ceiling glass windows so people could gaze out on the lake, quite picturesque during the day.
Quite frosty once the sun went down. The windows were entirely single pane, affording zero insulation from the outside cold which itself was emboldened by the wind that bodies of water always seem to generate, especially as snow drops.
That’s how I discovered I wasn’t enough of a powerhouse drummer to keep myself warm. Oh, I could raise a sweat, but my fingers, toes, and nose just got all-the-more-icy no matter my effort. So teetotaler and pot-avoider that I was, I learned to drink.
The bar’s specialty was hot-buttered rum, yummy going down, warming somewhere between the second and third mug, and never intoxicating because the alcohol never reached my head; it was too busy de-spasming my capillaries. Fortunately, the wait staff loved Tom’s voice and piano playing (shocker), so the drinks were half-off, even before I stopped the robbery.
We’d been earning scattered applause and keeping a few couples dancing when a smartly dressed man and woman strode across the floor and took a seat on the middle tier to Tom’s immediate, my far left. I have no idea why, but I always scan any audience I stand (or sit) before, going all the way back to junior high school, when everyone had to give oral reports. Most of the kids stared at their paper or a grinned at a friend; I brushed across faces around the room. Maybe I was trying to avoid connecting with anyone. Maybe I thought it would keep my head up. I utterly non-recall my reasoning. But drumming away that night in Moses Lake and skimming the room as usual, I glimpsed movement and shifted my attention to the aforementioned couple.
I’d already noticed them looking over their shoulder, one at a time, at something behind them, but the room was too dark for me to see what that might be. Still, my Cassandra was tingling, so I glanced over now and then as the set went on. They were huddled up to each other… maybe they were just going to neck in their quiet, secluded spot in the middle of the big, noisy hall. My Cassy sense wasn’t buying that.
But nothing happened. We took a break, Tom wrapped me in his always-warm arms, and I had another drink. We got back onstage, a couple more folk had taken seats on the other side of the dance floor; one or two sat at the bar. We played something upbeat. Couples got up to dance. From my eye’s corner, I watched the woman to my left get up, stroll to the back of the section, lift a huge painting off the wall, and walk it down to the second tier, where she leaned it against the dividing wall before returning to her partner. All so casual.
I knew the drill, the same in every bar. Thirty minutes before closing time, the staff would announce “Last Call,” the lights would come up, and everyone’s focus would be on final swallows, money exchanges, and belongings gathering while the wait staff nudged people toward the door. With chaos comes opportunity; the snuggly-boos could easily exit, painting in hand, without notice. We were playing our last set right now.
I motioned to the waitress. She tried to wave me off, but I managed to coax her to the stage and tell her what I saw without missing a beat. She just nodded and went back to the bar, barely glancing at the couple. So I, programmed to think the worst of myself in every situation, ripped myself a new one.
Shit! She knows them! They could be the owners… maybe she’s the manager! Maybe it’s their painting! Why didn’t I keep my damn mouth shut? We’re gonna get fired! The agent’s gonna drop us! Tom’s gonna kill me!
Tom had non-noticed the incident and remained totally non-aware when the waitress came around the dividing-wall corner, picked up the painting, and returned it to from whence it came—never pausing, never looking at, much less saying anything, to the couple. My heart was pounding harder than my kick drum as they got up and left, he with eyes straight ahead, her flinging me a filthy look as she passed the bandstand.
That night when Tom went out to find a local dealer, I clung to Bear, tossing and swaying and rehashing my lifetime of dumbasfuck acts. Such is the waking nightmare of the Adult Child of Abusive Parents, even if they don’t realize that’s who/what they are. The litany is far too long to recount but of course it included the letter that got our new nursing instructor fired (it hadn’t occurred to me anyone would actually read, much less give credence to anything I wrote) and the enemy I made by listing “bosses’ fist fight” as why I was filing for unemployment. By the time Tom reappeared, ready for a quickie, I’d already non-rested most of the night. Sex always put him out within minutes and his snoring lulled me to dreamland, as usual, but I still dragged my butt out of bed ridiculously early because I thought I was supposed to. I had/have no idea why. What was I going to do? Apologize? It was my go-to behavior—whatever’s wrong, it’s my fault, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.
I went to the lobby and looked around. Who should I apologize to? The bar staff wouldn’t be back for another twelve hours! And what was I contrite about? Stopping a robbery? Noticing the robbery?
If this were a novel, I’d have learned a valuable lesson from that experience and woulda taken it with me from then on. But it isn’t, I didn’t, and, give-me-a-break, no, I didn’t. I chalked it up to a close call, even when my hot-buttered rums were suddenly free-of-charge. Dumbasfuck—or maybe just too turtle terrified to look reality in the face—I non-accepted the obvious correlation between saving the painting and getting free stuff. Instead, I just breathed a relieved sigh at the happy resolve of the matter and told myself I’d lucked out.
That luck didn’t hold a few gigs later at a club in a few states over. The bar itself was quintessentially rural with rows of long tables and benches to kick, no dance floor, and an arresting odor of beer/pot/cum. We typically played each club for a week, Monday through Saturday, and drove like hell to the next gig on Sunday, so we’d arrived at this one at three-thirty a.m. Monday morning. Lots of dead, used-to-be-four-legged people on every wall, lots of standalone antlers crowded between, and lots of open-carry firearms, big and small, carried… openly. Eye-opening for two suburban Chicago Jews, where only cops and mob members carried holstered or hidden guns.
The guy who unlocked the door and showed us around did his best to put our minds at ease about what to expect. “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine,” he said before reciting a common dive-bar line immortalized in The Blues Brothers: “We like both kinds of music here—country and western.”
“Tom and Claudia” played rock ‘n roll, Top 40—heavy on Billy Joel—a bunch of standards from the swing/big-band era, and some yuppie-jacuzzi jazz. I’ll be charitable (to us) and say we “got through the gig” because the patrons were used to our agent’s weekly rotation. We even garnered some healthy tips with our first-note-to-last-harmony rendition of Misty. Erroll Garner aficionados in North Dakota? Guess it takes all kinds. At the end of the week, we caught a few hours sleep, then took off for the next gig, a Holiday Inn, I think, someplace in Wyoming. Where there was a message waiting for us.
An angry message. From the guy who ran the club we’d just played. Tom, specifically, not me, was to call immediately.
ROTFL! My husband handled the setups and sound checks and vehicle readiness. When something went wrong, he either got angry or he cried. I handled the money and navigation and crises. When something went wrong, I got mean.
So I dialed. The guy must have been sitting next to the phone.
“I can’t believe you stole our antlers!”
“Your… what? We didn’t steal anything!”
“What’s he saying?” Tom asked.
“He thinks we stole his antlers.”
“Antlers? Is he fucking crazy?”
“Antlers!” the man was screaming in my ear. “Where’s your husband? Lemme talk to Tom! They’re gone and no one else coulda taken them so either bring ‘em back or I’m calling the police!”
“Why the fuck would we want your antlers, or anybody’s antlers?” I growled into the phone.
“Antlers?!” Tom bellowed. “What the fuck would we even do with antlers?!”
“Gimme a break, will ya?” I snapped at him. “Look,” I menaced into the phone. “We didn’t steal anything! We wouldn’t even know how to get your fucking whatever-they-are off the wall!”
“I know where you are!” the guy ranted as if I hadn’t said anything. “I know the sheriff in that town! Lemme talk to your husband!”
“Why the fuck would anybody steal antlers?!” Tom groused, throwing a duffel off the bed.
“I’m calling the police!” the guy screamed.
“Go ahead!” I screamed back. “Let ‘em come search our van! It’s stuffed with equipment! We’ve got no room for moose parts even if we wanted them!”
He slammed down the phone. I slammed down the phone. Tom, already in bed, a breath-and-a-half from sleep, grumbled, “Fucking idiot. Fucking lousy stuff, too.”
Ah, comes the dawn! So that’s why Tom hadn’t braced the cold back in North Dakota to find a local dealer. He’d hooked up with the guy who ran the club… who was probably as high as he sounded… and who’d probably traded his precious moose horns for his latest stash—if, in fact, they were missing at all.
Turned out, he was (high) and they weren’t (missing), but that was just the beginning of the larceny. The next theft was very, very personal
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