The Late-Night Crown

The email came in while I was sitting in my rental car outside the hotel, eating a gas station granola bar for dinner because I'd skipped the conference welcome mixer again. The subject line said "Final Interview Schedule - Director of Clinical Operations." My thumb hovered over it for a good thirty seconds before I opened it. Saturday morning, nine a.m., they wanted me to give a twenty minute talk on patient retention. I had four slides done. Four, out of what should've been fifteen, and I'd had a month to work on it.

Forty-four years old and I was sitting in a Honda Civic with crumbs on my shirt, dreading the one thing I'd worked my whole career for. My dad used to say I could make a funeral feel like a chore. He wasn't wrong. I checked the time on the dash. 7:40. If I left now I could make it to The Brass Note by nine, which was what we'd agreed on, which was the whole reason I was in this mess of a situation anyway.

Six months of voice memos with a guy I'd never met. It started stupid, a wrong reply on some discussion forum about old blues records, and it turned into him sending me recordings of himself arguing with his espresso machine at two in the morning. I sent him one of me reading a patient complaint letter out loud in a monster voice. That was back in April. It was October now. I didn't tell my sister about him. I didn't tell anybody about him, honestly. It felt like if I said it out loud, the whole thing would evaporate.

I pocketed the phone and walked the six blocks. My dress shoes were not made for that. Austin in October was still warm enough that my shirt stuck to my back by the time I saw the neon sign, a saxophone made of pink tubing buzzing over a black door. The place smelled like spilled beer and fryer grease, floor was sticky in that way where every step peels off your sole a little slow. There was a stage at the back with a guy in a cowboy hat butchering a Garth Brooks song, and a KJ in a backwards cap who kept saying "y'all give it up" into a mic that crackled.

And there, behind the bar, wiping a glass with a rag like he'd been doing it his whole life, was Damian Danner.

I knew it was him because of the voice memos, because he'd described himself a hundred times, but also because he was wearing a tight black Rolling Stones tee with the tongue logo half faded, and his forearms were out and there was gray coming in at his temples that he'd never once mentioned. Thirty-nine years old. I'd checked, not in a weird way, in the way two grown men check before they drive to each other's cities. He looked up mid-wipe and our eyes met across that sticky floor, and I swear something in my chest just came loose. Like a bolt rattling out of a bracket I didn't know I had.

"You're staring at me like you've seen a ghost," he called out, and his voice was exactly the voice, that warm gravel thing I'd fallen asleep listening to on my phone with one earbud in.

"That's because I have," I said, walking up. "You look like a bartender."

"I am a bartender, smartass. That's the whole joke of me." He set the glass down. "First round's on the house for the man who came twelve hundred miles to hear me butcher a Whiskeytown song."

"I flew, actually."

"Even worse. Airports, for this." He reached under the bar and came up with a bottle I didn't recognize, smoky looking, and poured two short glasses of something clear. "Mezcal. Don't ask questions, just drink it. It's from a guy I know who brings it back from Oaxaca in his suitcase and I've decided not to think too hard about the legality."

I picked mine up. Over the bar top we did this weird half hug, awkward as hell, his hand clapping my back twice like we were old army buddies, and then we pulled apart and both laughed at how clumsy it was. His hand had lingered maybe a second longer than a stranger's would. Or I imagined it. I'd been imagining a lot of things about this man for half a year.

"So this is real," he said, leaning on the bar. "You're an actual person. I had money on you being a bot."

"Thanks. Great to be here." I sipped the mezcal and it burned clean, smoky, way better than anything I'd have ordered. "That's good."

"I know. That's why I gave it to you free." He looked at me a beat too long. "Damn, Cyril. You're taller than I pictured."

"You pictured me short?"

"I pictured you sitting down. Voice memos, you know. Everybody's sitting down in my head."

The cowboy hat guy finished his song to scattered applause and the KJ got on the mic and did his thing, and I settled onto a barstool with my second mezcal and the interview email sat there in my pocket like a stone. I kept touching my thigh where the phone was. Damian noticed, of course. Six months of talking, he was already reading me like a chart.

"Work?" he asked, nodding at my pocket.

"Promotion interview. Saturday morning. I'm supposed to give a talk and I've got four slides."

"How many should you have?"

"Fifteen. Maybe more. I don't even know anymore." I turned the glass on the bar. "I've been dodging it for a month. There's a part of me that thinks if I just don't prepare, then getting it won't count, and if I don't get it, it won't hurt."

"That's the worst plan I've ever heard and I once watched a guy try to pay his tab in loose change taped into a roll."

"It's a great plan. It's failing beautifully."

He laughed, that real laugh from the memos, head back a little, and I felt it in my stomach. Two grown men, a bar top, and I was grinning like an idiot at a guy in a Stones shirt. Twenty-two years of careful routine, same dental practice, same Tuesday salmon, same safe quiet weekends, and it had all cracked sideways in about nine seconds of neon light.

"Hey, new guy," a voice slurred next to me. A woman, maybe fifty, drink in one hand, the other grabbing my sleeve. She'd clearly been at the front of the karaoke line since the doors opened. "New faces gotta sing. House rule."

"That is not a house rule," Damian said.

"It is tonight, bartender. Look at him, he's got a singer's face. Dentist, probably. Y'all got good mouths, you can sing."

"I'm not singing," I told her, and she just tightened her grip on my sleeve and turned to Damian like he was the referee of the whole establishment.

"Oh, he's singing," Damian said, and the smile he gave me was pure trouble. "Come on, Cyril. You've done worse. You sent me a memo of you singing the national anthem in your car in June. I still have it. I've played it for people."

"You did not."

"I absolutely did. Two people. They cried." He slid off his stool and leaned both elbows on the bar, right in my space, close enough I could smell beer and cigarette smoke and under that some kind of soap. "Here's the dare. You sing one song, anything, and I'll tell you the thing I've been not telling you for about four months. The thing I keep almost saying in the memos and then chickening out on."

"That's blackmail."

"That's a dare. Big difference. Legally huge difference."

The drunk woman was already feeding the KJ a five dollar bill and yelling something about Survive, and I looked from her to Damian, and the mezcal was warm in my chest, and the interview email was a stone in my pocket, and I thought, what the hell, I've flown twelve hundred miles to be somebody else for one night.

"Fine," I said, standing up off the stool. "One song. And if I humiliate myself, you owe me a second mezcal."

"Deal. And I'll tell you the thing either way, I just wanted to see you sweat." He squeezed my shoulder as I walked past toward the stage. "You're gonna be fine. Pick something with feeling."

The KJ handed me the mic and scrolled his list. "We got I Will Survive queued up, big man. You want it?"

I looked out at the sticky floor and the neon and Damian leaning on the bar with his arms crossed and that grin, and I said yeah, queue it up.

I will Survive is a lie of a song. It sounds easy. It is not easy. There's a part in the middle where the melody jumps up and if you can't hit it, everybody in the bar gets to watch you fail in real time. I hit about half of it. The other half I shouted, and shouted counts, because by the second verse the drunk woman was singing along with me and so was half the bar, and Damian was laughing so hard he had to grip the edge of the bar top. When I finished, some guy in a boiler suit banged his pool cue on the floor like that was applause, and I walked back to my stool feeling eight feet tall.

"You owe me a mezcal," I said, sitting down. "And your thing. You said you'd tell me the thing."

"I said either way, and either way isn't yet. Either way is later, after close." He pointed at the crowd. "I don't do emotional confessions during the peacock portion of the evening."

"Peacock portion."

"You've seen the hat guy. This is his hour."

So I sat and watched the peacock portion. And I watched Damian work. That was the part that got me, honestly. The singing was noise, but Damian behind the bar was something else. He moved down the line of glasses with a bar towel, quick little turns of his wrist, and he didn't watch his hands once. He'd look up at the stage or at the door or at me while his hands kept going, automatic, like he'd done it so many thousand times his body had memorized it and left the rest of him free to wander. Six months of voice memos and I'd never once thought about his hands. Now I couldn't stop.

It was a strange thing to be thinking at my age, forty four years old, two marriages behind me, thousands of mouths looked into, and there I was getting hung up on a man drying a rocks glass. But his forearms were working and his shirt collar was open and the neon from the stage slid across his jaw every time the lights cycled, pink then blue then pink, and I thought about what it would be like if he leaned across this bar and kissed me. Just leaned