Chapter 1
Nobody at The Undertow knows I wrote one of the most downloaded songs in music history. They just know me as the bartender who overpours, which is exactly how I like it.
But when Yumi stomps on the fuzz pedal and my indie rock cover band crashes into Blur’s ‘Song 2,’ for three minutes the hiding stops. For three minutes I am not a bartender at this crusty seaside dive. For three minutes I am actually someone.
The goosebumps confirm it every time, even when I wish they wouldn’t. The crowd — sullen fishermen with pending divorces and college kids burning through their parents’ money on Dollar Shot Night — all shout woo hoo! right on cue, and I briefly remember that I used to want something more than this.
Then it’s over and I’m hopping off the stage to cover Nancy’s smoke break. “Great set, Gigi,” she rasps, grabbing her Kools just as the crowd floods the bar.
“Do you have anything that doesn’t taste like Dunkin’ hazelnut dipped in ass?” A kid in a URI hoodie yells.
Tonight’s dollar shot is Frangelico and Midori — it's part of my genius plan to get rid of the overstock booze that no one orders. These kids will drink anything.
“Not for a buck,” I shout, pulling a pint of Sam Summer just as the keg starts to kick.
The next hour is a blur of sticky receipts, wrong orders, empty kegs, and at least ten people asking me if we take Venmo. It is, in other words, a Thursday...followed by a Friday and then a weekend and then another week exactly like this one, which is fine. This is fine. I made my choices and I’d make them again and the fact that I had to force myself to go on a date last night to break the monotony is neither here nor there.
My date, for the record, chose the Macaroni Grill in Cranston because of his ex, Gina — who was, of course, our bartender — and ended with me as unwilling currency in a jealousy game with a woman he might still be married to and with whom he is entrenched in an ugly legal battle over a 2017 Toyota Camry.
I am, as previously established, completely fine.
When the crowd finally thins, only the regulars remain. Everything quiets — classic rock softly floats through the well-worn interior, muffled banter from the smokers outside rides in on the cool briny air.
I pour Yumi a diet coke — extra limes, extra extra cherries — and lean against the bar calculating tonight's tips.
“You guys were so right,” she says. “We can pull off the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”
“Of course I was right,” Meredith, our drummer, agrees in her thick Rhode Island accent.
Our band’s repertoire is mostly indie rock covers from the 2000s and 2010s with some late 90s sprinkled in. Yumi is the conservative of the group and even has a safe word for when we get too ambitious: Ashlee Simpson. It's meant to evoke a cautionary tale of Icarus-type musical hubris and was deployed earlier at practice when I started the opening riff to “Phenomena.” Meredith was so annoyed she sarcastically suggested we just learn that Santana/Rob Thomas song and become a supermarket-core band.
Suddenly Yumi’s phone illuminates and she groans, sliding off her stool to deal with whatever fresh chaos her kid has generated.
“Probably some book report she forgot about,” she says before disappearing outside.
Meredith watches her go. “Well that blows.” She shakes her head and takes a long sip of her beer. “Oh hey — speaking of things blown. How’d that date go?”
“Less than memorable,” I shrug.
“Okay, well—” Meredith scans the bar. “What about that guy?” I steal a glance. He’s roughly our age (early 30's), well-dressed, chunky glasses, thick dark hair, nursing a beer and looking at his phone.
City, I think. Definitely city.
“Eh,” I say.
“Don’t be a snob,” Meredith says, unbuttoning the top of her secondhand boilersuit with its name patch reading: Hank. “If you don’t go over there and talk to that little slice of pumpkin pie, I will. Because, frankly, I look good tonight.”
“You look like your submarine is double parked outside,” Yumi says, reappearing.
“What would I even say?”
“True,” Yumi says flatly, spotting him at the end of the bar. “What could you, the bartender, possibly say to the guy who needs another beer.”
“Get over there,” Meredith commands, reaching over the bar to roughly tug down my neckline, revealing the top of my very old, very beige bra. “And mention that you conveniently live right across the street.”
I fix my shirt. “Don’t be weird about this.”
I take my time getting to him. When I finally do, he looks up — dark eyes, surprised.
“Refill?”
“Sure. Actually—” he stops. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Do the shot special with me. Midori and Frangelico.”
“Is that legal?”
“Sorry, bro, but The Undertow doesn’t have, like, smoked Japanese whisky.”
I don't know why I'm being a smartass. Maybe it's because my jeans are 90% spandex and his are the type you have to explain. Maybe it's because he's a long way from Alphabet City and about to shoot his presumably easy shot with the townie bartender.
“I meant a real drink, not a dare,” he says, sliding his credit card across the bar. His Rolex glints in the warm glow of the neon bar signs and Christmas lights we forgot to take down this year. When I pick it up it’s thick and heavy — the kind of card that doesn’t have a limit so much as a suggestion.
“Guten Abend, Mr. Bond. Sure you don’t want a martini?”
“Two martinis, shaken not stirred,” he says, and I realize I walked directly into that.
I spy Meredith at the jukebox in the corner. She mouths hot. City guy follows my gaze.
“Hey,” he calls over to her. “Can I make a request?”
“Sure thing, brown eyes,” she calls back.
“‘Forever or Whatever’?”
The bar goes quiet. Every head turns toward him in slow unison — the way zombies do when you make a noise from your hiding spot in a truck stop bathroom.
Okay, so admittedly some of our older clientele know about my past. These stalwart regulars are now staring at this guy like he just walked into an old west saloon and ordered a shirley temple.
The opening riff starts.
My opening riff.
The shaker slips from my hands and hits the rubber mat at my feet and for a moment the only thing I can hear is the song I wrote at twenty-three on a mattress on the floor of an apartment in Allston. A song I just walked away from. Something I have spent ten years pretending I am completely okay with.
“Meredith.” My voice somehow comes out evenly.
“He wanted to hear it,” she shrugs, taking the stool next to him. I look around for Yumi for support. She’s already gone.
“How do you know Gigi's little secret?” Meredith slaps him on the back.
“Max,” he says, not answering, and shakes her hand like this is a business meeting. Then he looks directly at me. “And most people in the industry know that Gigi Campbell wrote one of the most downloaded songs in history and then just—” he tilts his head slightly— “disappeared.”
The word lands somewhere uncomfortable and pinches in my chest.
“I didn’t disappear,” I say. “I’m right here.”
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s the part I don’t understand.”
Ten years I’ve been back in this town. Ten years serving drinks to every sad fisherman within a twenty mile radius, watching the bar fill up and empty out and fill up again. Nobody has ever sat across from me and said that’s the part I don’t understand like I was a riddle worth solving.
“I work for Globenetic,” he says, placing a business card on the bar.
“That sounds like an evil corporation in a Bruce Willis Christmas movie,” Meredith snorts.
“I’m not evil,” he says with the exhausted tone of someone who has had to defend himself before. He explains it — media company, absorbed record labels, a band creatively falling apart, months of collaborators that haven’t clicked. “Legally, I can’t tell you who the band is yet. But you and these guys have two of the most downloaded songs in history. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a sound.”
“Yeah, well lightning doesn’t strike twice,” I say.
“Sometimes it does.” He doesn’t look away.
I want to tell him I am extremely fine and extremely okay and that nobody needs to come find me because I was never lost. But standing here in The Undertow with my song playing and this man looking at me like maybe I could be something worth finding, the lie is harder to hold than usual.
Instead I make two perfect martinis and slide one across the bar.
“Call me if you want to talk about this seriously,” he says, nudging the card toward me. “And if I never see you again — at least I got to see the great Gigi Campbell play live.”
He drains the martini in one pull and walks out into the humid evening without looking back.
Meredith waits exactly three seconds.
"Gigi."
“Don’t.”
“He knew you wrote it.”
"Don’t."
“He came all the way to Rhode Island—”
"Meredith."
She raises both hands and mercifully drops it.
I wipe down the bar. Stack the glasses. Do the things I do every Thursday night at closing, in this order. Then I pick up the business card.
I don’t know why. I tell myself it’s curiosity. I tell myself I’m just reading it. His name, his title, the Globenetic logo in clean sans-serif. A phone number.
I tell myself I’m going to toss it.
I put it in my pocket instead.
