Facing the Music by Larry Brown

Author:Larry Brown [Brown, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1987-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

NIGHT LIFE

I decided a long time ago that it isn’t easy meeting them, not for me. Some guys can just walk up to a woman and start talking to her, start saying anything. I can’t. I have to wait and work up my nerve, have a few beers. I have to sit at a table for a while, or the bar, and look them over and find the one who looks like she won’t turn a man down. This sometimes means picking one who is sitting by herself, who is maybe a little older than most, maybe even one who doesn’t look very good. Sometimes I wait until she dances with another man, then go over and make my move after she sits back down. Sometimes, if I see one whose looks I like, I send a drink over to her table. But it isn’t easy meeting them.

I’m in a bar just outside the city limits Friday night when three women come in and take a table next to the dance floor, the last table not taken. I order another beer and look out over the crowd, the band playing, the couples who have found each other drifting over the floor like smoke. Some of the tables have three and four women, some have couples, some have men, and one table has a girl by herself. I check her out.

She has on a black dress and white stockings, is dressed, I think, a little like a witch. She has a bottle in a brown paper sack sitting on the table and she holds onto her solitary drink with both hands. She seems to have eyes for only this. I sip on my beer for a while and eye the creeping clock above the taps and finally I go over. She looks up and sees me coming her way and looks away.

“Hi,” I say, when I stop beside her chair. I wish the band wouldn’t play rock and roll; you can’t even talk over the noise.

She smiles but she doesn’t say anything. I’m going to be shot down.

I lean over and shout above the music: “How you doing?” She says something that I think is “okay” and I feel completely stupid, leaning over her like this. She looks like she just wants me to go away quickly and leave her alone. I won’t score. She won’t dance. Friday night is flying away.

“Want to dance?” I shout in her ear. The black horn player is crouched on the stage in front of the mike, the spotlight on him, his cheeks ballooned out as he blows and sweats, his jeweled fingers flying over the valves. She shakes her head and gives me a sad look. Smoke two feet thick hangs from the ceiling.

“Hell, come on,” I say, putting on my friendliest smile, feeling my confidence—what little I had to start with—ebbing away. They’re all like this. They won’t talk to you, they won’t dance. Why do they come out to a place like this if they don’t want to meet men? “I’m not going to bite you,” I say.

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