Beware the Solitary Drinker Read Online Free Page B

bed.
    I was wrong, of course. She took up with the bass player. Danny, like most bass players I’ve ever known, was mellow. He would play his music—usually without so much as a twitch except for running his fingers along the neck of the guitar and tapping his foot—while the rest of the band bounded around the stage like the Flying Karamazov Brothers somersaulting out of the wings to open their act. Danny leaned against his imaginary wall, his eyes closed, the bass purring out the sounds you feel in your soul, until you found yourself moving in rhythm to the rock beat of the music.
    As I heard it, Danny and Max had been part of a crew running a howitzer 105 in Vietnam, both of them trying not to go deaf so they could play music again back home. A couple of years after the war, when Max arrived on the Upper West Side after ruining the family name in Barnstable, or wherever it was, he ran into his old gunner mate one afternoon on Broadway. They put together a band, called it The Hoods, and did pretty well, playing some downtown gigs at Tramps and the Bottom Line, and, of course, Oscar’s three nights a week.
    â€œYour girl friend ran off with that black bass player,” Eric the Red told me, in case I’d missed it.
    Eric was our Yugoslavian cook, a world traveler lifted up from sheep herding by Tito’s revolution. He’d become a world-class hippie, his long black hair tied in a ponytail, sporting a stringy black beard that stood out stiffly from his chin and tapered to strings at the middle of his chest.
    He’d slipped out of the kitchen to exchange my late night snack—escargot—for a healthy belt of cognac before Oscar returned to perch at the end of the bar until closing time.
    â€œShe’s a real beauty. I’m sorry your heart is broken.”
    â€œShe wasn’t my girl friend. My heart isn’t broken.”
    â€œShe doesn’t even talk to me,” said Eric, “and mine is broken.”
    â€œI’m in love with a fluegelhorn player.”
    â€œMe, too,” said Eric. “Where is she?”
    â€œAt the end of the bar.”
    He stroked his beard and gazed at her lovingly. “She’s with a friend. We should all go to my apartment for breakfast, a joint, and Slivovitz.”
    We did just that. After we necked for a while on Eric’s couch, I dropped the fluegelhorn player, whose name was Cecilia, off at her apartment on 104th Street around five and ran into Angelina and Danny on Broadway, arms around each other, both of them so starry-eyed I didn’t know if they’d even noticed me.
    Pretty much sober myself by then, I read for a long time before I went to sleep and didn’t wake up until four in the afternoon. Even though it was Thursday, I wasn’t working that night because Phil, the other night guy, had asked me to switch.
    I bought a steak at the market at 110th Street, and for the first time in months picked up a copy of
Variety
at the newsstand next door. I ate the steak, looked up auditions in the paper, and wondered about calling the fluegelhorn player. Instead, I went out around nine for a drink at the Terrace. Nick, the day guy, a long-time pal, was reading the next morning’s
Daily News
at the corner of the bar. He slid it toward me when I sat down. The paper was open to page three, and the story he’d been reading was about the police finding Angelina’s body Thursday morning in Riverside Park.

Chapter Two
    I never left my barstool the entire night, just sat there with the paper in front of me, reading the story over and over again until my eyes stopped focusing. I didn’t see the blood or the blows or the hands around her throat. It wasn’t her death I imagined, but her terrifying anticipation of death, like a nightmare that turns you rigid, when you’re so scared your voice won’t work to scream, and you wake up finally in cold sweat but into familiarity and relief. But not for