Chris was sober.

It was an accident, and he planned to never let it happen again, but there you go.  Sunday afternoon in Normal, Illinois is not the time or place.

He was sober and it was an accident.

There was a place, though, a place where he knew they’d have beer.  Or whiskey.  And not the liquor store, because of course they had beer, but he needed free beer.  Last he checked the liquor store didn’t have free beer.  Or whiskey.

Last he checked he didn’t have money.

So he went to the Free Beer Place at the time he was sober, and he walked because even though he was sober didn’t mean he had any more money for gas than for beer, and if he’d had money he sure as hell wouldn’t have spent it on gas, which meant he would have been walking either way.

So either way the young couple would have looked at him like he was drunk, would have drifted to the other side of the sidewalk and pretended to look at the other side of the world, the side where he wasn’t.  And even though he was sober, in fact, maybe because he was sober, he wanted to see what was so interesting about their side of the world, and he looked and you’d have to say it was mainly because he’d been drunk on and off since he was thirteen that he fell right into them.

People thought he started drinking when his mom left.  High School Counselor People.  Principal and Teacher People.  Thought he was troubled and hurting and crying for help.  Or something.  People thought a lot.

And sure, he missed her sometimes, but the beer got him in with the guys with guitars, the girls who liked the guys with guitars.  Girls like Michelle, who he met when he was nineteen and illegal drunk on stage at McCovey’s.  She liked drinking, she liked guys with guitars, and she liked Chris drunk with his guitar.

Now he was sober, but still falling over because alcohol’s bad for you and it really does kill brain cells and those are what help you do things like walk straight when you look to the side, and he bumped right into the girl and it was an accident.  All of it, and her boyfriend said, “What the fuck?”

“What the fuck?”

He looked at the boyfriend and felt bad.  “Michelle,” he said, and wondered why the guy hadn’t punched him, because if he was the guy, he would have wanted to punch him.

And the boyfriend said, “What?”

“She’s with the band,” Chris said.

The girlfriend curled into the boyfriend’s shoulder, his arm around her.  But she didn’t look scared.  Confused maybe.  Could’ve used a translator.  But not scared.

When the boyfriend shook his head and said, “Jesus,” when they walked back to their side, Chris saw the short blond hair of the boyfriend, saw it styled and sprayed.  He saw the tucked in shirt with the nice belt and jeans and the brown penny loafers.  He saw the girl’s yellow blouse, beige pants, and when she glanced back, he saw brown eyes under dishwater hair.  She blinked and almost smiled before turning away.

In his room, after the first time they had sex, they drank together.  He was naked, she wore his guitar strapped to her neck, its flat back crushing her flat chest.  She played an A minor, then E minor.  Sad chords, back and forth, rhythmless strumming.

“Where would you live, if you could live anywhere?” Michelle asked.

He ran his fingers through his matted, oily black hair.  “Could be anywhere?”

She drank and went back to strumming.  “Anywhere.”

“Would I have money?”

“Sure.”

“Could I go back in time?” he asked.  “Or into the future?”

She started laughing.  “Where would you live, if you could live anywhere, anytime, with as much money as you’d need to be happy?”

Chris watched her pale arm moving lazily.  Her thin legs opening and closing in time.  Connecting.

“Would you be there?” he asked, and she stopped strumming, eyes wide, words choked, and nodded.

He crawled up between her legs, looped the strap over her head, laid it beside them in bed.
“Then I’m already there,” he said.

Inside the Free Beer Place they were talking.  Laughing.  It sounded like a good time, like a good place to be.  Which is, ideally, what a Free Beer Place should be.  In fact, the more Chris thought about it, he wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with a Free Beer Place that wasn’t a good time, free beer or not.  He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and wiped it on his jeans and frowned because he knew damn well he’d go wherever the beer was free.

Luckily, this Free Beer Place was a good place. And it sounded like a good time inside.

Chris wasn’t inside, though.  He’d been standing on the front porch for a few minutes since his first knock.  Not wanting to be rude, he waited.  They were the ones with the free beer after all.  So he stood in front of the screen door and listened to the good time inside.

They were talking.  Laughing, and he couldn’t make out many words.  He recognized voices, though, worked with most of them at Steak-n-Shake, where he’d washed dishes for six years.  His dad was the night manager, got him the job in high school.  Said, “You’re lucky.  Mexicans got the busboy market pretty much cornered.”  Chris smiled but wasn’t sure what he meant, maybe his dad wanted him to be Mexican. It didn’t matter though, he got the job and within the first week all the managers told him individually that maybe it was best if he let the servers bring the dishes and he could just wait in the back for them.

“Beer anyone?” he heard from inside.

He pushed the doorbell.

In his room, after the first time he locked up onstage, they drank hard.  He was crumpling cans as he drained them, squeezing the last drops from each.  She looked at his guitar propped at the wall, at the clothes piled in the corner, at the cds scattered next to the clothes.  Took a drink, looked around, took a drink, looked around.  At anything but him.

It had caught him offguard, how the strings disappeared from his fingers.  He couldn’t feel them.  He’d been playing along, coughing like he had been for a week, and then he saw Michelle angling towards the stage and he lost it.  The touch.  The feel.  It just disappeared, and she looked like she’d cry.

Now in the room her knee bounced in a nervous electrified twitch, matching the bounce of her gaze, and his tongue felt thick and heavy and useless.  He reached out and touched her and the bouncing stopped as her knee settled and her gaze locked onto the far side of the room.

“Where are you?” is what he wanted to ask, but his dumb tongue wouldn’t budge, and it didn’t matter because what he really wanted to know was how he could get there.  She drank and stared at the wall, and drank, and drank, and drank.  He turned up his can, crunched it, and let it fall to the floor.

He stood and walked to the guitar.  Looped the strap over his neck.

“Baby?” she asked, and he turned to her, saw hope in her eyes and started to play.  “Oh baby,” she said, and swallowed hard on her beer, tossed it next his pile, crawled towards him on her knees.  “I’m here,” she said looking up, and he closed his eyes, felt her fumble for his zipper while he played and played and played.

Fat Nice Guy was rolling a joint.  Chris had forgotten, it also happened to be Free Weed place, but that wasn’t really his thing.  It was Fat Nice Guy’s thing, though.  Fat Nice Guy lived there with Skinny Nice Guy, who handed Chris a Free Beer and sat on the couch.

Chris looked at his Free Beer.  Pabst Blue Ribbon.

“Don’t have any Bud, do you?” he asked.

Skinny laughed.  “Sorry, man,” he said, and Chris shrugged, clawed the tab and pulled.  That was the only problem with Free Beer, he thought, chugging a third of the can in one breath.

The joint skipped over his shaking head, and Fat asked, “How’s Michelle?”

“Good,” Chris said.  “She’s with the band.”  He finished his beer.  “Got anymore?”

“In the fridge,” said Skinny, and Chris wandered into the kitchen.  Inside the refrigerator was beer.  On every shelf.  And an empty bottle of ketchup in the door next to something in tin foil.  He drank three.  Opening a new one, he stood in the doorway of the kitchen and living room and watched the group.  Skinny was a waiter, pulling in more tips than anyone except the pretty girl that worked a couple evenings a week, and Fat was a cook who always slid plates of food to Chris while he worked.  They sat on their couch, surrounded by co-workers he knew and friends of theirs he didn’t, under a purple hippie tapestry from Mother Murphy’s, in front of a coffee table littered with PBR cans, crumpled Zig-Zags, and a frisbee loaded with weed.

He finished his beer, grabbed another and sat on the floor in the living room.

“She’s good,” he said to Skinny, who stopped in the middle of a conversation with the little blonde waitress to look at him.

“What’s that?”

Chris took a drink.  “Band’s getting ready for practice,” he said.  “She’s there.”

Skinny nodded slowly.  “Michelle?”

“We’re doing new stuff,” he said, and he wished she were there.  He always wished she was there.  She liked to talk about places they’d go when the band hit it big.  Europe and England and Asia.  How happy they’d be when they met new people in new places.

He finished his beer and felt Skinny’s hand on his hip when he stood and almost fell over.  Felt himself balanced, heard Skinny ask if he had it, and went for a piss and more beer.  It was like the last time he’d been there, only that time he’d fallen, smashed into the coffee table and broke the bong.  He smelled like dirty bongwater for days until his dad asked him to take a shower and change clothes.

That wasn’t really his fault, though.  It was the coughing, knocked him right off his feet.  Been coughing for a week, ever since he’d fallen downstairs at practice.  He rubbed his side where the knot still tugged at his ribcage, and couldn’t remember which had hurt worse, the coughing or falling.  Landing, he decided, but it was sleeping in the rain that made him sick in the first place.

Michelle could do that to him sometimes.

When he sat back in the living room, Fat and Skinny were playing guitar.  Skinny played bad and knew it, but everyone liked him.  Fat had his Martin D-35 in his lap, not the black Johnny Cash version, but still with mahogany blocks and a dovetail neck joint.  Fat could play.

His back to the couch, Chris tuned out the music and everyone laughing.  Focused on his beer.  It was his eleventh or twelfth, and he’d gotten used to the cheap PBR.  Wasn’t slowing him down as much.

“Chris,” said Skinny, and he looked up.  “There’s something wrong with my guitar, can you fix it?”

Always something.  He just came for Free Beer.

“What’s wrong?”

“It sounds like shit,” said Skinny, and everyone laughed.  Skinny held the guitar towards him, black Epiphone with its yellow-orange sunburst.  “Can you help?”

A joke, a joke, there was nothing to fix but a joke.  Cold in his hand, Free Beer, all he wanted and now they wanted something which meant the beer wasn’t free it just didn’t cost money.  They wanted him to play and he wanted to drink and not listen to their music or everyone laughing.

“Sure,” he said, and turned up the bottom of the beer in his hand.

“Need another?” asked Fat, and Chris shook his head, snagged one of the three stashed next to the couch.

Taking the guitar from Skinny, he remembered the first time he’d heard them play.  Skinny said something about having figured out how to play Wish You Were Here, the opening part where dude’s playing along with the radio, and Chris would’ve cringed if he hadn’t wanted more beer.  “That’s good,” he said when Skinny was done.  “Not like some I’ve heard,” and Skinny laughed and agreed, no, it probably wasn’t.

Now, with a room of people watching and a shelf of Free Beer waiting, he had to play.  Something.  He never knew what to play.  That was Michelle’s job.  She picked the song and he played it, or she made him smile and he played what her words sounded like in his head, or she made him cry and he fell down the stairs on his way in to practice and slept in the rain and coughed for two weeks until his dad saw the blood he spit in the driveway and made him get pills from the doctor.

So he played that.

And the room stopped talking.  The people in the room.  And they quit drinking, and Chris held a note with his left hand and rubbed his closed eyes with his right hand, and if he could have seen himself he would have agreed he looked like a monkey.  Not with the hair and the thick rubber-like skin, but the way his monkey hand curled and rubbed at his monkey eyes, and if he’d seen himself he would have thought it fit because to pay for his beer he performed like a monkey.

All he could see was Michelle, and his right hand came down, picking and strumming and he twisted and felt the knot tug at his ribcage.  It hurt and and no one was talking or laughing.  He closed his eyes and saw Michelle, one of only two people on his side of the world, knelt over Brad, the fucking lead singer, giving him head.  He played that, his left hand scrambling over the ebony fingerboard with his eyes closed, felt the rain drip, drip, dripping on his face, felt the cough for weeks, heard Michelle telling him it didn’t mean anything, she was his girl.

He played quicksilver notes to replace what he hadn’t said when he took her back in his arms and smiled and tried not to cry and said it was fine, he forgave her.  Because he didn’t forgive her, but he couldn’t leave her because while she may have wanted to go to Europe or England or Asia to meet all the new people, he’d never wanted any of that.  She was his fingers on strings.  She was the places he wanted to go, the people he wanted to know.

He stopped, grabbed his beer and swallowed until he hit bottom.

“Jesus,” he heard, a girl voice from over there somewhere.

“She’s with the band,” he said, and handed the sunbursted Epiphone to the kid sitting nearest.  Reached around the couch, grabbed the two Free Beers, and stood.

“Got practice,” he said.  He turned to Skinny, “Could I have some roadies?”

Skinny came out of the kitchen with two Free Beers and walked him to the door.  “You good?”

He nodded, double-stacked and double-fisted, gave a monkey look at his hands and held out his left.

Skinny reached over and cracked the top can.

“Michelle,” Chris said, and Skinny smiled, opened the door.

“I know,” he said, and Chris walked in her direction.

Jared Ward has had work accepted at West Branch, Evansville Review, New Delta Review, The Dos Passos Review, Zone 3, and others.  He is currently in the University of Arkansas MFA program, and is prose editor for decomP.