Blues night at the bar. [OPEN.] Who: Valerie and OPEN What:Blues Night. Where: A bar about two miles from Bathos When:between 9:30 pm and 2:00 am Warnings: TBA (unlikely)
The bar wasn't built for blues. Valerie remembered when she heard this music in smoky lounges, in cold Harlem air, on scratchy Victrolas. She remembered when people would sing it like it was never going to die, but like it was illegal all the same. Bars these days never reminded her of the way things used to be. Health laws made the air too clean and the furniture too scrubbed. The alcohol smelled too rich and mellow, and the people were all tired and languid. The singer got paid $30 an hour plus tips while they thought it was worthwhile for her to be there, and it wasn't even close to enough to making a living.
She came to sing all the same.
The stage was about a half-foot off the sticky floor and the single blue curtain was so moth-eaten you couldn't drop it. There was room on the stage for her, the piano, and the microphone stand. The drummer, when he was there with his brush, had to sit all the way behind the curtain. She had a dress on that was worth four times her night's pay, a black sheath that glittered with rhinestones picked out in a tiny starfall pattern across her breasts and waist and down into a single trail that stopped where the slit started an inch from where hip met thigh. Valerie knew where the tips came from, and no music lovers came here.
Well, not many, anyway.
She was three songs into her first set. The man beside her had turned on his piano bench with a bass on his leg, plucking an unhurried tune. The pianist was a father of three that couldn't get the itch out of his fingers, and he wasn't there for the money either. Howard was a nice man, and she liked him even though he would have preferred their relationship to be a lot more heated than it was. The bar filled but it never got rowdy this late; Valerie wasn't there to sell shots, she was there to sell regrets and the drinks that numbed them away.