Free Sideways by Rex Pickett Page A

a hand on my shoulder and said, “Order me something, I’ve got to make a phone call.” He unfolded his cell and strode outside, seeking privacy.
    I surveyed the scene. The Clubhouse’s customers were a mixed crew of locals, the early crowd made up of construction and service workers and other minimum wagers, shooting pool and quenching their thirst with pitchers of beer. The men wore jeans and T-shirts and grease-stained baseball caps, and the women were in tight jeans and halter tops. It had the feel of a place that could get downright rowdy given the right amount of excessive drinking.
    The bartender came over to take my order. He was a quiet man with thinning red hair and a cadaverous face, courtesy of too many bartending jobs breathing other people’s cigarettes, bending a tin ear to the incessant palaver of wrecked lives, and enduring countless soul-withering 2:00 A.M. close-ups.
    “What’s up tonight?” I said, nodding toward the dance floor.
    “Karaoke,” he replied.
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Yeah. What can I get you?”
    “Any Pinot?”
    “What?”
    “Pinot Noir. Red wine.”
    “No.”
    “Any red wine at all?”
    “Cabernet and Merlot. That’s it.”
    “Pour me two glasses of the Cab.”
    “Coming right up.” He turned and crossed to the back of the bar, uncorked a bottle of already-opened Firestone—a mediocre local winery that valued quantity over quality—filled two generic wineglasses inappropriate for Cabernet, and put them down in front of me. I laid a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and he plucked it away, rang the order up on his register, then returned and fanned the change out on the bar as if I were going to contest the transaction. A nasty scar dividing one side of his face caused me to imagine that he once had to defend himself over just such a misunderstanding. He turned his attention back to a TV bolted into the wall, not interested in conversation.
    I sipped the overly oaked Cab, puckering at its harshness and total absence of forward fruit. It was the kind of
    A shrill noise interrupted my reverie. I swiveled around on my stool for a view of the dance floor. A young woman, with long, ropy black hair tumbling over a Pea Soup Andersen’s uniform, had mounted the stage and was turning on the karaoke apparatus, creating a few seconds of ear-splitting amplifier feedback. Her cronies, who were dawdling around the pool table, whistled and hooted as she selected a song, wrapped a hand around the microphone, and waited for the music to kick in. A Fleetwood Mac song—“Landslide,” for Christ’s sake!—started and the girl came to life, imitating Stevie Nicks’s familiar voice and stage movements, singing so ingloriously out of tune that I wondered why she would actually want to
pay
for the privilege of publicly humiliating herself.
    As her performance droned on and her tone-deaf voice blared away in ever bolder flourishes, her contingent of supporters broke into wild howls of execration, shaking their fists and beating their cue sticks against the floor. It was as if her intent wasn’t to prove whether she could sing, but to be the self-appointed object of her friends’ derision. I reached the twin conclusions that she
did
have a purpose in life, and that Jack and I weren’t exactly at the “in” spot.
    Jack materialized out of the crowd and claimed a bar stool next to me. He reached for his glass and took an ample mouthful of wine in a show of anger.
    “Local swill, sorry.” I raised my chin toward the karaoke stage where “Stevie Nicks” was winding down her act.
    “I heard.” Jack shook his head. “Jesus. That’s frightening.”
    I turned to him. He had a sour look on his face. I assumed the phone call had upset him. “Call Babs?”
    “Yeah,” he said unhappily.
    “How is she?”
    “Fine.”
    “How she holding up?”
    “Okay, I guess.”
    “What’s happening?”
    He plunked his glass of wine down and it clinked loudly on the bar. “She’s on my case,” he