Not last night, but the night before, I was working at the empty bar, making “funocopters” with the coasters by flinging them around like frizbees, occasionally landing one in its proper place, on the bar, in front of a chair, where an imaginary and buxom patron would gratefully glance my way, order a PBR, tip me fifty dollars, then lean over the counter to kiss me. I work at a divey place.
After fifteen minutes of coaster-tossing, the manager, D, came in from some work in back, ordered a Red Hook, didn’t pay for it, and said “follow me.”
He broke out a ladder from the utility closet, climbed into a crawl space over the game room, and proceeded to hand down to me an Ampeg amp head, a dual-15” 400-watt speaker cabinet, a patch cable, and a lock-nut Ibanez metal shredder with tuning knobs on the bridge and a mint-green Corvette-style paint job.
We set up shop in the corner and D quickly blasted off to Volume Level Ten, picking away some Metallica riffs and occasionally stopping to flex his fingers and stare at his hands. “Hurts to bend the strings,” he explained. He had been cutting metal to repair some element of the bar six months earlier, the machine blade slipped, and hot, sharp metal nearly sliced the fingers on his left hand clean off. These Metallica licks were the first notes he’d played since the accident.
Soon he graduated to some “Eruption” and some Nuge, a real 80’s wailer. He’d moved from the East coast to LA, Axel Rose style, with big dreams. Woke up at 30 with a bad hangover and no record deal, shucked north and started a restaurant. The details of the trajectory are unclear, but the arc suffices.
After some abortive Hendrix “Foxy Lady” efforts and a few more beers, D passed the guitar OVER THE BAR to me. In what must’ve been the luckiest stroke of fate cast on me in at least four days, just at that moment a dude and a chick walked in. They work at the restaurant next door, a Texican high-end meat market type joint. I whammed out a big E-minor chord and gave the whammy a little shimmy. I was in business; the Ibanez played like a true axe, hardly any action, easygoing frets, just begging for a shredding.
“What’s going on here?” asked the dude in what must be the only possible reaction to a bartender who just stroked a dipped-out chord.
“Nothin much, just jammin’,” I punctuated this last with some Blues-Box wheedles. “What’ll it be?”
She ordered a Citron shot with a sugared rim--and he--a vodka with a Coke back. I passed the guitar back to D, who jammed some Dokken riffs into the couple’s ears. The couple tried to sit through the onslaught, but they just couldn’t hang. I knew from previous conversations with the dude that he was into techno music and DJing, so it didn’t surprise me that D’s guitar heroics didn’t pass his muster.
They left in a hurry, and as soon as the door closed, D jammed out on some more minor pentatonics, business be damned, pausing only to yell, “You don’t like it! Fuck you! Don’t come back!”
I had to kick D out of his own bar at about 1:45 a.m. FYI George Lynch is from Spokane, WA. Maybe the West isn't as soft as I thought.
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