“That’s not a tux,” Taggert complained as the band set up in the empty ballroom. Taggert’s tuxedo was black and spangled with red accents. He matched all the other band members.
“I’ll be in the back of the room, in the shadows,” Mike said dismissively. “Give me a fucking break.” He was already one whiskey in, having charmed the bartender as she began setting up the bar.
“Cashmere is a first-class operation. People expect that of us,” Taggert said sternly, his bald head turning pink with worry.
“This was the best I could do on short notice,” Mike said. “I’ll get us through this one, and by next time I’ll have it together. All right?”
Taggert realized he didn’t have a choice. “All right. We’re cool.” He took a deep breath to center himself. “Are we ready to rock and roll?”
Tiffany and Brad, the bride and groom, were somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. The formative rock-and roll-years for themselves and their friends were the early 2000s. This meant a set list full of Matchbox Twenty, Nickleback, and Maroon 5—a bunch of pop rock wienies Mike didn’t know by name but whose jangly, ball-less hits made his teeth grind.
* * *
The sound job was as easy as Taggert promised: knock back the volume if feedback bled through, keep the mud out of the bass notes, hit some simple lighting cues, and turn on the recorded music when the band took its breaks.
The whiskey Mike kept cadging from the bar left him loose. The bartender had coke, too. While she was no looker and had a hard-living husk that wouldn’t have been his first choice, Mike got signals that he might get into her pants when their jobs were through.
“Motherfuck!” Mike heard over his shoulder at the sound board while the crowd mingled during the first band break. “It is you.”
A flushed, bleary-eyed guest in a tuxedo clutched a glass as he teetered before Mike.
“Mike Fucking Husted,” he said in drunken wonder. “Gravel Rash rules!” He whooped too loudly, punctuating the declaration with the universal metal offering of the double devil horn salute.
“All right,” Mike smiled cautiously, getting bad vibes instantly. The guy had the leathery skin and dark, dead eyes of a powder keg drunk. When you spent as much time as Mike had in bars, you recognized the sort of guy who routinely staggered along the razor’s edge between being a fun drunk and a toxically evil fuck when he drank too much. He was obviously well on his way to the latter
“Saw you guys, like, a million times,” his fan said proudly. “The Axe Tavern? Pokey’s? Hard Franny’s? You guys tore those dumps up!”
“We tried,” Mike said curtly.
“What happened to you guys?” the drunk demanded. “You were like hot shit, and then you were fucking nothing.”
Mike ground his teeth. “You know, whatever.”
“Man, you guys rocked,” the drunk said obliviously. “Jay Taggert? Motherfuck! That guy could play like Slash and Eddie Van Halen combined! Hey,” he boasted, “I caught crabs once from a girl he used to do. Didn’t he OD or something?”
Mike couldn’t help himself. “Nah. You’ve been watching him. That’s him.”
He pointed in the direction of Taggert, who just returned to the ballroom and headed to the sound board with a look of concern on his face. The disturbance caused by the drunk apparently made its way to the break room.
Taggert didn’t have his hat on.
“Ewwww,” the drunk cringed as he saw his one-time guitar hero approach. But by the time Taggert joined them, his fan worship returned.
“Jay Fucking Taggert. Motherfuck!” he beamed dizzily as he pumped Taggert’s hand. “We mighta had the same crabs!”
Taggert looked to Mike with disapproval as the drunk suddenly grabbed Brad, the groom, and dragged him into their circle.
“Dude, do you have any idea who you got playing your wedding?” he slurred. It took Mike an instant to figure out that the drunk was an older brother. “These guys were fucking Gravel Rash!”
Brad would have been about ten when Gravel Rash was at their peak. “Cool,” he said dismissively, taking his brother by the elbow. “Hey, Shawn, you need to have a seat and chill out. Please?”
Shawn yanked his arm away with an angry sneer.
“Hey,” Shawn blurted toward Mike and Taggert. “You guys gotta play something. Together! Gravel Rash!!!” He whooped loudly.
Others started gathering to contain him. Some wore tuxes; more family members, probably all too familiar with having to shut down their sad, angry party clown.
“Shawn,” one of them barked. “That’s fucking it!”
Shawn took a drunken swing, missing by a mile. Acid seethed in his eyes; the shit was about to be unleashed. Taggert took control.
“Tell you what, man,” Taggert said firmly, steadying Shawn at the shoulders. “Have a seat. Let your brother and his lady enjoy their evening, all right? In the last set, if everything’s cool, we’ll lay some Rash on ya. How ’bout it?”
Taggert looked past the drunk to Mike with a shake of his head: there was no fucking way that was going to happen.
But it was enough to defuse the situation. That puke-teasing pressure drop that inevitably hits all drunks announced itself to Shawn. He accepted Taggert’s promise with a slurring Gravel Rash Rules!!! accidentally jabbed his aunt in the head with his flaccid devil horns, and allowed himself to be led to a chair.
“Thanks,” the groom said to Taggert with a bit of an edge.
“It’s all good,” Taggert said to Brad with a salesman’s smile. “You good? Come on, let’s get this party going again!”
Taggert shared a disapproving grimace with Mike before gathering his band and heading back to the stage. Mike cut the recorded music, set the volume levels for the musicians, and went back to the bar.
* * *
The last two sets played out without incident. The music got sweatier and more credible as the old folks drifted off. Just past 1:30, the band wrapped up a hellacious version of Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” and the singer started to announce their farewell.
“Aw right! Whoo!” he sweated. “Y’all have been a great crowd, thanks for rockin’ with Cashmere this evening. Congratulations one more time to Tiffany and Brad, many beautiful years of livin’ and lovin.’ We got time for one more song, then we gotta—”
“Gravel Rash!!!” Shawn demanded boozily from the back of the room. He jostled the remaining guests as he elbowed his way to the dance floor. The singer squinted into the dimly lit room.
“So we’re gonna leave you with…” he tried to continue. Shawn was suddenly at the front of the stage.
“Gravel Rash, motherfucker!!!”
His brothers tried to pull him back, but the glassy-eyed rage with which Shawn yanked away indicated his fury was back for one last encore.
“We don’t know that one, brother,” the singer smiled slickly. “But how ’bout you let Lenny Kravitz take us home with ‘Are You Gonna—’”
Suddenly Mike was on the stage, weaving with determination toward the microphone. The next day, he would swear he was just trying to help.
He grabbed the mike from the singer. “Aw right!” Mike shouted. “Let’s do this thing!” He still wore his father’s blue jacket.
He turned as he had so many times to Taggert, waiting to count them in. But Taggert was already in his face. He knew in an instant that Mike was high.
“Get off the stage,” he said grimly as Shawn teetered excitedly at their feet at the front of the low stage.
“Rash! Rash! Rash!” Some younger revelers, new to binge drinking and impressed by Shawn’s blotto panache, started egging him on. Tiffany, herself pretty drunk, began to glare at Brad for allowing his brother to wreck her reception.
“C’mon,” Mike said into Taggert’s ear. “The dude is about to blow. We lay a little ‘Miss Mercy’ on him and he’ll shut the fuck up. You’ll be a hero.”
“Miss Mercy” was a Gravel Rash original, a raucous Chuck Berry–style raveup. Gravel Rash had had a bunch of them, but “Miss Mercy” rocked and without the endless guitar soloing that had been its trademark it could be over in under three minutes.
Taggert looked to the angry bride—his client—and he made the call.
“Chuck Berry, in A” he said tensely to his confused band. “Follow me.”
Mike tauntingly nodded Cashmere’s singer from the stage and posed at the mike stand as Taggert counted them in.
“One, two, three, four.”
The band locked in from the first driving note, Mike eagerly anticipated the first lyrics, and Shawn hooted gutturally as he recognized the song.
And then he vomited great goopy globs of wedding cake and Chicken Kiev all over the dance floor. The boyfriend of the bridesmaid took the chunkiest hit, and he spun Shawn around and punched him brutally in the jaw. One of Shawn’s brothers went for the bridesmaid’s boyfriend, hooking him by the neck and yanking him to the floor. The song came to a ragged end as the first beer bottle flew. Mike never got to sing a word.
“Hey!” he shouted into the mike above the tussle. The whiskey and the coke and the adrenaline had the room beginning to spin. “What the fuck, motherfuckers?”
Cashmere’s singer came back to the mike to take back control of the room. Mike drunkenly shoved him off the front of the stage, onto a different bridesmaid and then down into the vomit.
The singer came back up in an instant, yanking Mike down at the legs and then leaping on top of him on the stage. They began to thrash and punch wildly. The crash of a knocked-over cymbal punctuated the beginning of what in a movie would’ve been a wackily choreographed barroom brawl, but was in real life pathetic and clumsy and just long enough to make things ugly for everyone.
Hotel security threw on the house lights and one of the guests—an off-duty county sheriff—took control. Thick-necked and crew-cutted, he forcefully pulled apart everyone who didn’t have the sense to leave the dance floor on their own. But when he got to the stage, he seemed to employ added gusto to the lanky scuzzball in the blue jacket who was on the stage when the fight broke out.
He yanked Mike up from the floor by his lapels, but Mike came up swinging without sizing up the brawn of his adversary. Flailing with doped-up frenzy, he drove a decent punch into the sheriff’s ear before the now-furious cop shoved Mike backward.
Taggert and some others held the cop back long enough for him to think better of kicking the shit out of Mike. Bleeding from his ear, he yanked himself away from the arms holding him back and produced his badge, pointing furiously at Mike.
“Sit down,” he snarled. “Don’t fucking think of leaving.”
Beyond the cop, Mike could see the red and blue flicker of police lights dart across the ballroom’s opaque curtains as a squad car rolled into the parking lot.
The vial that he stole from the bartender had shattered in his pocket during the fight. The broken glass cut his thigh; his pocket was sticky with nearly eight ounces of bloody cocaine.
* * *
When John bailed Mike out the next morning, he didn’t recognize the torn, stained blue jacket his brother wore.
“What did they say?” John asked in the car, exasperated and mad. “Exactly?”
Mike was tired. His head hurt.
“Dunno,” he sighed to the passing traffic. “The vial broke, the coke got mixed with the blood, so they can’t measure it the usual way. If they can’t prove there was enough to show intent to sell, they have to bust it down to possession. They might just give me community service.”
“You punched a sheriff.”
“He was off-duty,” Mike complained. “They gotta cut me slack on that.”
“With your record?” John asked skeptically.
“Yeah,” Mike sagged dispiritedly. He turned to John for the first time.
“Don’t tell Mom.”
John tried to study his brother as he drove. Something new was at play here.
They drove in silence while Mike stared out the window. He unconsciously picked at one of the frayed rips in the blue suit coat and took a deep breath.
“For all those years, I wasn’t around. Or I was, but I was fucked up,” Mike began quietly. “Now, me and her are living in the same house, we got nothing but time. But even if I wanted to make things right with her, she can’t make sense of it anymore.”
John knew his brother never spent much time alone in his skull, contemplating. The morning he spent in that jail cell had obviously given him time to think.
“Intent to sell would get me a year. If I was lucky,” Mike said hollowly.
“You’ve done the time before,” John said.
“Yeah. But even if it was just six months…” Mike trailed off, staring dead ahead. “It doesn’t look like she’ll still be here when I get back.
“She’ll be here, but…”
He tapped his head as the truth of what Mike was dealing with struck John hard. Because it was true. And because Mike had found his way to it.
The silence hung in the air. “She’s going so fast,” Mike said.
Another long silence. Neither knew how to be this way with each other.
“So then this is the time you have,” John finally said decisively. “You just have to hold it together, stay straight, until one of you goes away. Until then, you’ve got time.”
John saw his brother’s eyes well up before he turned away. He watched his brother’s shoulders heave as he tried to hide his crying.
This was the time Mike had, John thought to himself. Things could not wait any longer.