“It was drinking that did him in. Finally. I mean, towards the end he cleaned up, but it was way too late. Had the shakes. Couldn’t light up a smoke,” Benny wiggles his hands in front of his face. The girl from Sofia just stares at him. She isn’t sure if he’s the lead singer or the bassist or what. Robert Plant’s hair on Iggy Pop’s frame. Black leather vest. Crisp white Oxford button-down. Snakeskin jeans. She’s not going to care what he does in the end. She’s going to do some blow, and they’ll fumble around, and she’ll sneak onto the bus in the morning and Benny knows it and he’s seen it too many times and he’s looking at the black cherry in the bottom of the whiskey in his fist and thinking about Mesozoic centipedes.
The last thing she said was “I’m from Sofia.” She can’t understand a fucking thing he says even though she learned English like everyone in her year. What Benny speaks is something else, something more pure. She can pick up a word here and there, but the whiskey just keeps digging holes into his vowels until it sounds more like he’s moaning than explaining how some side musician drank himself out of work and the world is worse off because of it.
“The world is worse off because of it.” He rolls the bottom of his glass around on the bar. “Those riffs, those licks. Fuck. I listen to them records and that’s what they done. That’s why they’re magic, better’n any CD bullshit.” He looks over at her. “Trapped in amber. That’s what it is, man. That’s really them in there, in the vinyl. It’s like,” he puts his glass down so he can talk with both hands and he turns toward her on his stool. “The sound goes into the mics and through the wires into the master and goddam I mean, there’s no real—there’s no real separation between things, you get what I’m saying, right?” A wave of whiskey washes over him and he drifts for a second, lost in his head with the echoes of “Deacon Blues.” Her eyes are enormous. Emerald planets in a perfect glass atmosphere. She blinks and stares into his rock star face.
Here’s the thing about boys in Sofia. They work in factories and smoke. They want to leave Moldova and move to America but none of them do. They keep working the line and smoking and soon enough they’re middle-aged balding Europeans. She takes a discreet sip of her whiskey. She thinks about the men in her apartment block. Her Khrushchyovka. She was there earlier in the day, after her shift, ripping holes in her stockings with her girl Djara, leaning up against her uncle’s shitty car by the sidewalk playing American music and smoking. Djara was going off about the band staying at the hotel on a Euro leg through Russia. “So much hair,” Djara crimps a black Sobraine between her lips while she bends down to work a safety pin through her jeans. A long line of men shuffles out past the guard shack in their overalls and dirty shirts. She dips the tip of her cigarette into a blue flame, leans back to hustle a drag and blows smoke into the sky over the factory. It sits up against old apartments like a mountain, with their window sills all black from air conditioner drip. She glances over into her brother’s worn-out face with preorbitals like filthy moons under his eyes and she decides to quit, fuck a rock star, and move to America.
Benny touches her on the leg, just points his finger right through the fishnet. “Take Carlton and Ritenour. These guys made Fagen. Carlton made Joni Mitchel. Listen to that fucking 335. I mean, you can barely hear it on Robbery because fucking Robbie Roberson is all wailing and messy but right underneath him, there’s Larry fucking Carlton building the foundation. Goddam–Aja was the shit.” He sniffs his whiskey. “The sound cuts right into the wax so that connection is, it’s there, it’s like he was touching the record himself. Like he played the music right into the grooves and so get this…” he takes her glass from her hand, puts it on the bar. “…so, get this. When we play that music? When we hear that music?” His hands drift apart, and his eyes lose a little focus, and he floats up into the rafters and she knows this is important even though she doesn’t understand a third of what he’s saying. Something about Steely Dan. But she knows when a guy is having a moment, and she knows she has to move. He might fade back into his own shit and she’ll lose him. She grabs the glasses, fills his paw with the bourbon.
“We toast.”
He grins. “Fuck diddly damn. We toast.”
Here is how it’s going to happen. She’s going to slip off her stool to reach for her purse which she’s been discreetly pushing further and further around Benny’s elbow, and she’ll lean into him a just a little, just for the curvature to click, then as she’s pulling back away from him she’ll glance up into his eyes and do this move she stole from Meg Ryan where it’s like she gets caught in his regard. Totally forgets what she was doing. Either he’ll break magnanimous and hand her purse to her but not really let go of it with a fatherly look on his face, a classy overture. Subtle. Solid. Or he’ll break bold and snake an arm around her back and plant one on her shiny black lips.
“Goddam you’d love Louisville.”
“Bernhard!”
A tan suit full of five foot of nothing shoves itself between them.
“Fucking bands. I swear to God I’m going into real estate oh excuse me,” he hip checks her as he humps the bar waving a twenty, American. The bartender just stares with his arms crossed. His shift ended two hours back. Goddam rock stars. “Goddam Podunk–hey, dude, hey.” The bartender raises an eyebrow. “TNT. Por favor.”
“Steve.” Benny says this guy’s name like a machine shutting down for the day. The velvet fog of Becker and Fagen hanging in the air blows away and Benny turns his entire body into a bass clef hunched over a glass.
“Wot the fock!” She manhandles the suit away from the bar.
“Nope.” The suit holds up a radio. “Nope. Fuck off or I call a badge.”
Fuck. Security will shake her down for cash and she’s holding a sizeable wad in the hopes her plan to smuggle her Russian ass into the USA in the underwear of an American rock star works. The suit reads her like a book. He waggles the stiff rubber antennae at her. “Right. Ok. You think Benny is in the band.” He holds the radio a little higher, pops the transmitter twice with his thumb. There’s a rough bark of static from Benny’s hip. Benny reaches down and twists the squelch knob till the static chokes out. She catches his eyes in the mirror, but he looks down into his glass.
Steve opens a bag of bullshit onto Benny and the girl from Sofia and the music and the rest of the room disappear.
She turns proper to the bar. She crosses her legs. She kills her whiskey, lays a ten spot down in front of her empty glass. Never even looks at the bartender but magically, the glass is full when she picks it up and knocks it back. Smuggling herself into America is getting expensive. Worse thing is, she actually likes Benny. Doesn’t give a shit if he’s not in the band. So, he’s security. What the fuck. He’s all access. The suit kills his TNT, racks his tumbler on the bar, wiggles it at the bartender, and keeps talking.
“–who the fuck’s gonna front for that shit? And so now I have to pay the cop who was watching the bus while it got siphoned by–I will guarantee you–another cop. And I’ll have to pay for the diesel at two and a quarter over because who the fuck is going to deliver diesel? We got enough to make the end of the parking lot if we’re lucky. And where are you this whole fucking nightmare? Trying to fuck Suzi and the Greencards here while I’m handling it. This whole fucking place,” the suit swings his empty gin glass up and around to generally blame the whole of Moldova. “We might as well be in Alabama.”
She can’t really see Benny now because the Suit’s got a paunch and he’s leaned backwards against the bar under a light, but she sees Benny’s meaty finger very quietly push a sawbuck toward the bar mats and the barkeep glides over with a bottle of Old Overholt. As he’s pouring, Benny slides the ten spot over to tap her empty glass and the bartender over pours and winks at her. She tilts her glass at Benny, catching his eyes in the mirror behind the bar. Benny knocks back his bolt of rye. She does the same. She’s still gonna hustle him for a visa but now that she knows this asshat is his boss she’s getting all Solidarno?? The bartender fills them up again. Benny is smiling grimly at her, listening to the drone. She tilts her glass and says, “Steely Dan,” quietly. Benny says it back into the mirror.
“–and then he–what? Steely Dan? Fucking fern bar musak bullshit.” Steve hustles his balls through his cheap slacks. “Hasn’t been a decent song in America since Muskrat Love,” and he just keeps going. Benny drops his face into his hand. Rubs his brow with all the weight of the rest of the tour with this shit horned fuck weasel standing on his last nerve when two absolutely stunning women walk up to the bar in identical Prada dresses with their red clutches and high contrast makeup and the girl from Sofia sings very quietly:
“Babylon sisters…” and Benny fills it in, “shake it…” and she do do do da da das her way through the bridge then he belts it out in a passable ersatz Fagen “So fine so young,” and she drops right behind him with “…tell me I’m the only one,” and holds it and the bartender is pouring vodka martinis for the Prada twins and he smiles so broadly the two women laugh and she and Benny start singing loud to drown out the Suit until he gives up and stares at them as they finish Aja and she and Benny lock eyes for a beat and the suit sucks in air to start up again so she plants her hands on the edge of the bar and she doubles down and belts out “Worry the bottle mama, it’s grapefruit wiiiine” with a whiskey snarl and Benny backs her up and then the Babylon sisters lean into them and all four scream sing their way through the chorus while the suit crosses his arms and puckers. They finish and Steve doesn’t look up or anything and it’s like the whole bar shut up for a second then he opens his mouth and she and Benny sing out “Effff Emmm” like they’d planned it, but they can’t finish because everyone in the bar laughs.
“Fine, whatever. Just do me a solid and talk to the fucking fixer about the gas.” He glances at her. “You can blow him later.”
Benny stands up off his stool. It’s unhurried and liquid and just without any drama he’s looming over the suit who shuts up mid word. Benny hands her her purse but he doesn’t really let go of it. He looks down at the suit with a face full of disappointment.
“Her name is Sofia, Steve, and you’ll tell her you’re sorry and you’ll comp her for a bottle and you’ll relieve her of your company.”
“I’m your fucking boss!”
Benny slips the radio off his belt and lays it on the bar. He nods to the bartender who is already sliding a bottle of rye across the oak bar. Benny looks at her with a Kentucky sunrise in his eyes and let’s go of her purse. They walk off through the lobby bar, Benny’s arm around her waist, bottle of rye at his hip. Never looked back.
It says Malina Klimek on her visa, but he’s called her Sofia ever since.
