One Last Thing Before I Go

each other’s eyes. The only thing worse than not having your dream come true is having it come true for a little while. Ray moved down South to work for his brother-in-law and they never heard from him again. Silver still ran into Danny on gigs once in a while—they overlapped in some of the same wedding orchestras—where they would share a rueful grin, a lazy man-hug, and would occasionally, when the band heated up, throw old familiar riffs at each other that no one else could hear.
    It would have been easier to swallow, he suspected, if Pat had crashed and burned, as they all expected (hoped) he would. But years later Pat is still out there in Los Angeles, winning Grammys and sleeping with movie stars, and Silver’s only consolation is the shrinking residual check he still gets every month for “Rest in Pieces,” which sadly remains his greatest source of income, his orchestra gigs and professional masturbation notwithstanding. Publicly, Danny and Silver wish Pat well. Quietly though, at gigs, when they’ve had enough from the open bar to loosen their tongues, they are not above expressing the sincere hope that Pat is, right at that moment, snorting that fatal cut of blow off some model’s ass, or sliding the business end of a shotgun past his pouty, front-man lips to the back of his throat. If Pat did kill himself, they’d both find it in themselves to say generous things when the VH1 film crew showed up.
    * * *
    Tonight he is playing a wedding with the Scott Key Orchestra. Silver slaps away at his kit, pretty much on autopilot, ignoring the one or two drum geeks that always stand on the side to watch. Every so often at these things, someone figures out who he is and he draws a slightly bigger crowd, but after a while they all come to realize that there’s nothing any more exciting about watching a once-famous drummer than any other drummer, and they go back to their arugula salads and filet mignon entrees.
    They are seven pieces and two backup singers tonight. You do this long enough, it isn’t even music anymore, just trained monkeys being put through their paces. Scott stands at the mike, singing “The Way You Look Tonight” with too much lounge lizard lilt in his voice, compressing the lyrics and stretching the odd vowel for effect, and you just have to be thankful that Sinatra isn’t alive to hear it. Baptiste grins at Silver and rolls his eyes. Silver nods back and tosses in an offbeat fill that throws Scott, who misses his mark. Scott turns to glare at Silver, who smiles vacantly, playing dumb. Baptiste laughs. We are all losers, Silver thinks, each in his own way.
    * * *
    Once in a while, after a gig, he can get laid. If he hasn’t sweated too much, if he is wearing the larger tux, the one that manages to streamline his gut, if they’ve played a good set and the energy is up and there has been ample time for bar breaks, so that everyone in the band is feeling happier than their personal realities would normally dictate, if all of that has happened, then there are backup singers, dance motivators, waitresses. It all turns on a complex sliding scale of how badly everyone doesn’t want to go home.
    Dana is one of the backup singers. It takes Silver three trips to load his drums into the back of Jack’s car, and when he’s done, Dana is still smoking in the parking lot. She is thirty-five or so, and a knockout at fifty feet; slender, with great legs and a luxurious mane of auburn hair. Only up close do you see how tired her eyes are, and a hardness in her features that has set in over time as life failed to live up to her expectations. One of life’s unassailable truths is that no one sets out to be a backup singer.
    She takes off her shoes in his car. She’s been standing and swaying in six-inch heels for six hours. As he wordlessly steers them to the Versailles, she puts her feet up on the dash and cracks the window, her hair fluttering wildly around her. He can see in her profile the cheerleader she once was, the homecoming queen. There was a time when she had the world on a string; friends, the quarterback, and whatnot. Now she is going home with the fat marching-band geek just to feel alive, or at least less lonely. Maybe she doesn’t see it that way though, because if she did, she’d wait until the car had gathered enough speed, then throw open the door and hurl herself onto the thundering blacktop.
    Once in his apartment, Silver rejoices invisibly. He has not had sex in quite