Excerpt: What You Need Comes in a Bottle

Sandy is a tall lady in blue jeans. She lets me look on her music while she plays guitar and sings, across the room from my dad pumping his accordion open and shut. He bought me a tambourine for Christmas and I bring it every Saturday night.

Everybody comes to the back room and sets up their music stands and their instruments. Arlo sticks little metal hats on his fingertips with his banjo in his lap. Warren starts pulling wooden benches down from where they're stacked against the wall and setting up his corner; he has some jugs that he blows into, and an empty plastic Alhambra jug that he puts upside down between his legs and bangs on. We have one of those at home, too, but it's half-filled with pennies.

A few other people come with guitars—Rich, who plays with his eyes closed, some one else I can't remember. Jack brings his spoons. John brings this thing that's like a big metal bucket, upside down, with a broomstick stuck inside, with a string tied too it, and another thing that slides up and down the stick to make the string tight. My dad calls it a base.

When we get to the cafe, my dad orders a coffee. Paul makes me a hot chocolate, and I sit at the bar and we tell each other riddles until he gives me a pack of cards to go play solitaire. When I get bored, I wander into the back room, where the walls are covered in corrugated metal, and the floor is sticky, and there is a low wide machine that vends cigarettes. There are wooden benches stacked up against one wall that they take down Thursday nights for the poetry readings. Since it's Saturday, the band needs all the room; they are all standing in a circle—fifteen, twenty people—with music stands and black three inch binders filled with songs. There are some songs I like best and sometimes they let me pick the next one to sing. I like Big Brown Bottle, because Sandy sings it like the blues. I guess it's not a great accordion song, but I don't care. My dad bought me a little accordion and tried to teach me how to play it, but I like the tambourine better.

Everyone has a tall glass with beer except my dad, who's drinking coffee. They are also all smoking. My dad smokes cigarettes even though they told me at school it makes you die and I begged him to stop because I don't want him to die. They have a little cigarette, though, that someone rolled up with a tiny piece of tissue paper and licked all over, and they pass it around the circle; everyone takes a puff or two and passes it to the next person, holding it between their thumb and index finger, even though my mom holds her cigarettes between her index and middle fingers. My dad doesn't smoke it. Some one lights a stick of incense and leans it on the cigarette machine, where its burning tip sticks out off the edge. After a while the room gets really stinky, and they're playing some song I don't really like, like Salty Dog or Long Tall Sally. I want to sing the song where She appeared to be eighteen or nineteen years old and then by the end of the song, after she takes off her wig and her make up and her glass eye, she appeared to be eighty or ninety years old, but Sandy tells me we can't always sing the same songs because there's a lot to practice. I go back outside to play solitaire and wait for my mom to come pick me up.

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Sandy is a fine, lovely lady. Her long limbs flex under cotton and denim, her long fingers working the neck of her guitar; I could stand to have them work my cock. Not in front of the kid, of course. Nothing in front of the kid. No drinking, certainly no pot. Not that she knows what it is, but I wonder when she'll be old enough to understand. One day, we're gonna have a beer together. She'll grow up pretty like her mother; hopefully, a lot less bitchy.

Sandy's sweet with the kid, though. She would hate me for my thoughts because she's such an upstanding lady, and really likes the kid. I could ask her, later, after a few more drinks, after Lu comes and picks up the kid and takes off, when it's just us adults here and some beer and some pot and the music; I could ask her if she wants to go across the street to the Lonely Palm and have another drink, the two of us, see what happens. She doesn't have anyone at home to stop us. That could work, if she were drunk enough to forget the kid, forget my wife, not care. . . I don't care, why should she? She didn't last time.

The kid is sweet, though. Doesn't look too much like her mom yet; looks like my sisters when we were all kids, with all that stick white hair like a pile of hay on her head. She plays that tambourine like it was part of her body. No one's ever seen rhythm like that in a five year old. She's a better musician than half the cats in here. John with his "base"--the thing doesn't play any actual notes, I don't care if it looks authentic or even is authentic, the goddamned piece of crap isn't on pitch! And Rich, playing with his eyes closed, as if he had memorized all five hundred songs in the book, well, I can see your lips moving, man, because my eyes are open, and what my eyes see is that your lips are moving, and they are singing the wrong words.

Arlo's a good man, though, his banjo's got a sweet sound, and Warren keeps a good rhythm on the jug; we are, after all, a jug band. We've gotta keep the jug. And Sandy, well, she's a natural looker with those brown curls and the Navajo turquoise rings on her fingers, and she has a dusty, dirty voice that works nice on most of the songs.