Sid Stills' Blues (Three-Quarters in the Bag in Alphabet City)

By Whitney Bishop

Sid Stills is a musician who's convinced himself that his time has come and gone, and that the world doesn't need him or his music anymore. It takes a young upstart rocker in the process of defining himself and his own career to convince Sid that he's got plenty of music, love, and life left in him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Whitney Bishop
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310680427

Whitney Bishop

Editor-in-Chief of http://www.shousetsubangbang.com/; stories published there are under the name 'shukyou'.

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Sid Stills' Blues (Three-Quarters in the Bag in Alphabet City)

Published by Whitney Bishop at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Whitney Bishop

Illustrations by Katie Lippincott

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The headache wasn't what woke him, but it was what kept him from going back to sleep once he was up. It rolled through his head like a drum line, pounding its high school marching band arrangements of some once-golden oldie across his brain with all the embarrassing force of the time he'd been sixteen and nearly killed himself with his father's Jack. He hadn't been hung over like this in years, decades. Just one more shit side effect, he supposed, of getting old.

What woke him was the phone. The Damn Agent had bought him the fucking thing, showed up on his doorstep to show him how to use it, and threatened to show up again every time Sid didn't pick up, which was by Sid's estimation a fate worse than answering a phone call every other week or so. Thus he wasn't surprised when he picked it up to see the words Damn Agent on the screen. He'd learned how to program that little feature himself. Sid, he half-mumbled, half-grunted into the receiver end of the weird little rectangle, falling back against the couch cushions and draping an arm across his eyes. He hadn't made it the bed; he hadn't remembered that.

Sid! chirped the Damn Agent, who sounded too chipper for … well, Sid hadn't looked at the clock yet, but he decided the exact time didn't matter as far as too chipper went. Got something I think you should take a look at, really make your day.

Sid ran his free hand across his face, feeling stubble rasp across his palm. He'd run a razor over his face the morning before, but that was a long time measured by the beard clock. Which is…?

The next minute or so of the conversation could have been made of water, for all it ran off the duck's back of Sid's hung-over mind. The Damn Agent was doing all the talking anyway, telling him something about something he didn't understand and which certainly had not made his day yet. He wanted a cigarette, but a quick scan around the room showed that he'd been dumb enough to leave his pack and lighter way the hell on the other side of the room. His Manhattan apartment wasn't big — a palace by Manhattan standards, but a grape looked giant to an ant — but if the goods weren't in immediate reach at the moment, they weren't so good after all.

God, worse than crashing on the couch, he'd fallen asleep in his clothes, nearly down to the article; he'd taken off his shoes and coat by the door per usual when he'd come back from the previous day's appointment, and he'd lost a single sock somewhere in the process of getting shitfaced, but for heaven's sake, he still had his scarf half-wound around his neck. He hadn't remembered that either. He didn't feel hungry, but he didn't feel like he was going to puke either, so that was something. Comfortable as the couch was, he still had a crick in his neck from where he'd pillowed his head awkwardly against the upholstered arms, meaning that when he turned his neck to the left, he could hear the joints pop like a trio of tiny rifles.

The phone went quiet, and he realized the Damn Agent was probably waiting for him to respond. Sure, he said, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, sounds great.

So you'll check it out? asked the Damn Agent, with a note of hope to his voice that made Sid wonder what the hell he'd just agreed to.

If I get time, he said, raking his fingers through his bristly auburn hair, which he'd once claimed was the only thing in God's universe more stubborn than he was. Got to go, and he pressed the button that gave him the other red button to press to end the call. He missed the days of damn reasonable phones, where to hang up the phone on someone you just had to hang up the phone.

He missed a lot of reasonable things.

Well, there was no getting back to sleep with his head the way it was, so he lurched himself into a sitting position with all due care he could manage. A cigarette would be great, but it'd have to wait until after the aspirin. A few more negotiations with gravity and he was on his feet, shuffling forward around the room's oversized loveseat (which had never actually been used for love, self- or otherwise) back toward his bedroom. His apartment had about a bathroom and a half, which most of the time was three-quarters of a bathroom more than he needed, and right now he could have let everything that wasn't the toilet and the medicine cabinet fall into the sea. He didn't bother to close the door to the smaller hall bathroom, just flipped up the toilet seat, pulled out his equipment, and let fly; one of the small mercies age had allowed him was that that aspect of his plumbing still worked just fine, and he made several good beers' worth of water into the bowl. He closed his eyes and leaned his cheek against the cool tile wall as he pissed, using the sound the stream made when it hit the porcelain to let him know he was still on target. At last, he was empty again, so he shook off and tucked back in, then set the old creaky pipes to flushing it all away as he turned to the sink behind him to wash his hands.

Of course he'd expected to see his reflection when he turned around — he'd lived here for close to thirty years, after all, and knew all the dimensions and reflective surfaces by heart — but that didn't stop him from getting a mean fright when he came to face himself. He looked like shit, of course, hangovers would do that, but now he sensed something else there, something deeper, beneath the skin, down past where sleep and stubble could ravage. He stared down his own bloodshot blue eyes, then ones he'd inherited from his decades-passed father's side of the family, with something like a vain and crazy hope that, in a Nietzschean way, he could stare into himself long enough that he'd end up with some introspective epiphany, the answer to himself.

He got nothing. Scowling at himself (and feeling a perverse burst of happy sadism when he saw his own face scowl back) he washed his hands before opening the medicine cabinet and finding a bottle of generic aspirin there. He popped three in his mouth and crunched them in his teeth, shuddering down the quinine-bitter taste. It was vile, to be sure, but it was a more effective wakeup than any coffee he'd ever had. He placed the bottle back and gave the medicine cabinet a slam shut without checking it for a second opinion.

A glass seemed too much work, so he stuck his mouth under the kitchen tap and got a few swallows of water, enough to clear his mouth and get the rest of the aspirin into his system. He'd let the place get a bit of a wreck, the way he always did when he was preoccupied, and takeout cartons and boxes piled up on the available counter surfaces; he'd sweep them into a bag and haul them down to the first floor later, if he felt up to it. For all the good things about his beloved old building — among them being that it'd been cheap enough in 1982 to just out-and-out buy both top floor apartments and make them into one — the damn thing didn't have a trash chute, and he'd decided a few years back to take the extra effort it caused him as a personal insult. He'd considered instituting a system where he asked each new delivery monkey to take the last meal's leftovers down for him, but he hadn't yet worked out how much extra he'd have to tip to have it happen, so it was still only in development.

That all done, there was nothing really left for it but to wait for the painkillers to kick in. He grabbed his Luckies, tapped one out of the half-empty pack, and lit it, concentrating on everything but the way his lungs lurched a bit against the hot smoke. He held the air in his chest as long as he could, then exhaled through his nose, feeling dragon-like. It suited him, he supposed: old and cranky and protective of his cave, and foul-smelling to boot.

The late morning light shone down on the buildings out his window, and he cracked them open, trading the smells of new and old cigarette smoke for the scent of mid-day mid-Spring Manhattan, warm and filthy and beautiful. Down on the street four flights below, he could see the people walking back and forth, the old immigrant couples, the suits with their fine shoes, the teenagers in their ever-variable rags, the little kids with backpacks who were members of that rare, rare breed you called a Native New Yorker. Nobody else was from here, not even Sid, who'd latched onto the City like a barnacle the first time he'd seen it on shore leave at the age of twenty-one. It'd taken him nearly a decade beyond that to have both career and money enough to settle down there, but it'd been completely fucking worth it.

With the breeze blowing in, Sid felt his spirits lift a little, so he sat back down on the far end of the couch. He left the cigarette burning down in the coffee table ashtray, then grabbed an old trusty Taylor from the stand nearby. Once Sid had been bored enough to calculate that there wasn't a place in his apartment where you could be more than a dozen feet from a guitar, and that proximity served him often. He settled back against the cushions and placed his fingers across the strings high on the neck, feeling the easy way the steel settled into the grooved calluses on his fingertips. With his right hand, he plucked a few notes, getting the high harmonics off the strings; the guitar wasn't entirely in tune, but neither was he, and as long no one else was around to care, he wasn't inclined to be picky.

"When peace like a river attendeth my way," he began, growling out the first line of the hymn — then stopped, screwing up his mouth into a frown. His mother's favourite hymn was all well and good, but he hadn't sung it in years, and wasn't feeling particularly peaceful at the moment. Still, it stuck in his head, so he settled for humming the tune wordlessly as he picked out the notes on the guitar, just the plain church-folk version first, then with a more bluesy edge to it that Sid's Pennsylvanian coal-mining Methodist family would have frowned upon. The thought of their faces, politely horrified at the idea of mixing 'that music' with their Sunday best, made him crack a smile. Bless his heart, he'd always been a something of a problem child.

By the time the phone rang an hour later, he'd managed to get some coffee into his blood and to replace most of the previous day's clothing with less slept-in versions of the same articles. He scowled at the screen; what the hell was the Damn Agent doing calling twice in one day? Sid.

Did you listen? the Damn Agent asked with a tone of voice that clearly indicated he expected the answer to his question to be 'no'.

Sid decided there wasn't a hope in hell he was going to be able to bluff his way out of this one. Now, uh…. He scratched the back of his head. Now, what was it again?

The Damn Agent sighed, not in honest exasperation, but more like a parent at the business of wrangling a stubborn toddler. Sid, I want you to do something for me. Can you go get in front of your computer?

That was another beast the Damn Agent had insisted on, and Sid would have gone to his grave before admitting that he had from time to time found it useful, especially when trying to scout the local live music scene without having to go on exploratory walks too far beyond the comfortable perimeter of his neighborhood. Fine, he said, walking over and pulling up the silver cover of the laptop that had never, to his recollection, gone on his actual lap. It gave a whir as its parts spun awake, something with which Sid could sympathize. Okay, here.

Open a browser, said the Damn Agent, and when Sid didn't respond quick enough, he clarified, you know, Firefox. Sid knew Firefox well enough — it was, in fact, about the only thing on the computer he did know, well enough or at all — and he clicked the little orange-and-blue circle that brought up the window. You got it?

I got it, Sid grumbled. He wasn't sure what exactly was happening, but he'd made up his mind already that he didn't like it.

The Damn Agent's smile was audible over the connection. Great. Now go up to the address bar and type in YouTube.com.

Hunting and pecking at the keys, Sid managed to get utube.com into the top line and pressed the Enter key. 'Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation', he read aloud off the flashing image at the top. He'd wound up at weirder websites before, to be sure, but never on purpose.

There was a smacking sound from the Damn Agent's side of the phone. "No, YouTube. You, as in second person, like, y-o-u-t-u-b-e."

Well, why the hell hadn't he said so the first time? Grumbling, Sid erased his previous typing and pecked in the appropriate letters. He pressed Enter before he realized that he'd forgotten to add the key 'dot com' portion of the address, but the browser thought for a second, then spat out anyway a page that had a matching half-red logo at the top. Okay, I'm here. Wherever 'here' is.

See the search bar at the top? asked the Damn Agent, and when Sid grunted acknowledgment, he continued, Okay, search for 'Nathan Vaughn' and 'Times Square'. Got it?

H … A … N … narrated Sid, hoping that up-to-the-minute updates would satisfy the Damn Agent's curiosity about his typing skills. V…. How's the rest of that spelled?

V-a-u-g-h-n, the Damn Agent supplied, and Sid pressed the appropriate keys, muttering the letter names under his breath as he went along. And then 'Times Square'–

Hang on, hang on. The headache that had been chased away had started crawling back in, and Sid decided to blame it on the damn computer screen's weird glow. It had always seemed too bright to him, especially when compared to his television, like a spotlight you had to stare right into. He entered the last of the words and pressed the 'Search' button, wondering what was going on in Times Square that was important enough for the Damn Agent to spend so much time and effort harassing him about. Things went on in Times Square every day; that was sort of the point of Times Square.

What popped up as the first search result, however, didn't look much like Times Square at all. In fact, as far as Sid could tell from the grainy little picture, it looked like a small recording studio, complete with a scattering of microphones all rigged up around a black baby grand. Looking closer, it seemed even less like a recording studio and more like somebody's house, with a pair of what looked like closet doors in the white-painted walls and a dismal brown carpeted-floor, even a smoke detector fastened just above one of the doorframes. There was a figure at the piano, but whoever it was was bent over the keys, obscuring any identifying details. A bit of text sat beside the picture, like a little card at a gallery, proclaiming the title of this particular piece of modern art 'Nathan Vaughn – Times F***ing Square [explicit]'.

You got your sound on? asked the Damn Agent.

Well, now Sid had gone from suspicious to just plain resentful. He hated covers of his stuff, more often than not because the covers got more famous than his originals (wasn't 'Boardwalk Queen' originally by Billy Joel? he'd overheard asked on more than one occasion), but mostly because they tended to be bad, especially when done by amateurs. Not that it was such a common phenomenon anymore, but if he found himself out at an open mike night and some don't-quit-your-day-jobber strummed the first few chords of one of his pieces, he hit the road. Hadn't he made his displeasure about this evident to the Damn Agent before? He made a resolution to be louder and more displeased in the future.

But on the other hand, it was 'Times Fucking Square', the last even semi-big hit Sid had put out before he'd mostly dropped off the map nearly fifteen ago. Generally speaking, if someone was going to cover one of his pieces, they did one of the more standard love songs, or things from his early career, or things like 'Boardwalk Queen' that were stolen books with his own name scratched off the cover and someone else's written over it in thick permanent marker. He'd never yet heard of someone trying to cover something like this.

As if feeling his hesitation, the Damn Agent sighed. Just put the sound on and listen to it.

Fine, fine, Sid nodded, and he pressed the button on the side of the laptop that let the little box make beeps and whistles to its heart's content; however, doing so made nothing come out of the speakers. Do I have to click on something else?

Click on the first picture there, said the Damn Agent. Now, I'm going to hang up, so I don't have to hear you bitch, Sid mentally finished for him, but when you're done, call me back. If you don't, I'm going to call you in a quarter hour. Exactly fifteen minutes. Got it?

Yeah, I got it. Sid didn't bother disconnecting the phone this time, just let the Damn Agent do it for him. Instead, he clicked on the little picture, as instructed, and waited as another page loaded.

It turned out to be a video that the Damn Agent wanted him to watch, which Sid supposed he should have guessed from the 'tube' part of the equation. When the first frame came up, it was the same room-and-piano setup Sid had seen from the little caption, but now the bench was empty. For a second or two, Sid wasn't actually sure that he had managed to turn the sound on earlier, but then there were a few telltale bumps and shufflings from off-camera, and then someone walked into the frame.

So, um, okay, said the person on the video, standing by the piano bench almost like a ten-year-old announcing a piano recital piece before playing it, this is just a little something I felt like recording.

He was a baby. Not a literal baby, Sid added to his brain's assessment, but really, the kid looked fresh out of high school; the video quality was home-movie grade stuff, but even so the subject's youthful face was visible. He had a shock of strawberry blond hair that seemed to stick straight up from his forehead and settle down as it went on back, though the effect looked more intentional than Sid's own hair's usual independent attempts at verticality. He wore a slightly ill-fitting dark suit over a dark red shirt, and a bow tie perched beneath his chin, something that didn't help the little-boy-in-daddy's-clothes impression. Not by me, the figure on the video (Nathan Vaughn, Sid assumed) amended, rubbing his hand along the side of the piano, but by Sid Stills. I'm just, like, the cover band today. Except it's just me. So … cover boy, I guess.

Babbling concluded, Nathan sat down on the bench, rested his fingers atop the keys for a moment, and began to play. A deep, rich sound carried out despite the shit quality of Sid's computer speakers, much the same as Sid's original arrangement but slightly uptempo and with added notes to compensate for a lack of strings. It was not unlike what Sid himself did to the piece when it was just him and the keys, though he tended to slow things down live, not speed them up. Well, the kid seemed like a nervous little thing, so he supposed it was to be expected.

As for other expectations, Sid hadn't quite known what he'd been braced to hear to come out of the boy's mouth, but whatever it had been, it hadn't been this: a bold, clean tenor, with all the style Sid had come to associate with modern popular music, but without any of the associated loss of quality. Any nervousness in body language or tempo was entirely absent in his rich, confident, lyrical tone. In what was clearly the lower third of his register (though already a fourth up from Sid's original key), he sang, "Now the girls are all clothed down in Times Square today / and they're walking their kids with identical names / on past store fronts and windows that all look the same / but the signs still say Times Fucking Square…."

This was beyond wasn't-half-bad; good goddamn, this was good. Even before he'd clicked, Sid had already been writing his stock praise for the unknown singer, figuring it was the Damn Agent's friend or nephew or some such, and what good would it have done anyone for Sid Stills to shit on a homegrown homage like that? But now, hell, he wouldn't even have to pretend. He sat in his seat, light-years more rapt than he'd ever expected to be, as the little bit in front of the piano belted out a heartfelt rendition of what had been Sid's circa-1995 attempt at registering his displeasure with the gentrification of midtown. It had been popular at the time with the crowd who'd been less than happy with the corporate steamrolling of the formerly seedy Times Square, but the same fans now took their nuclear families on outings down its squeaky clean sidewalks. Sid hadn't been there in years. Probably couldn't smoke within a ten-block radius of it. Hell, this was New York City; you couldn't smoke anywhere now.

Now here he was, listening to his lament for the lost strip clubs and dive bars from the mouth of a kid who probably wasn't old enough to remember when it had been anything but Broadway Disneyland — and to his lasting shock, not only was he not annoyed, he was loving it. His problem with other people's covers, amateur or otherwise, tended to be that no amount of technical skill could give a piece heart and no amount of soul could save a tin ear. This kid, however, had managed in the space of a four-minute song (two entire minutes shorter than Sid's original, but it was faster and the kid left off a verse) to convince Sid he had both in spades. Damn that Damn Agent, he'd been right.

The kid didn't bother with any repeats of the chorus at the end, just played himself out with a little riff on the first line of 'New York, New York' that must have been his own innovation, then sat there for a moment after, fingers still poised on the keys, as though waiting for someone else to tell him what to do, or at least remind him how the world that wasn't music worked. Then the screen went dark, surprising Sid, and five new picture rectangles replaced the previous image of the kid at the piano. All five had captions that included the words 'Nathan Vaughn,' and he selected the topmost one of them, wondering what would happen.

Another page opened up, this one much like the one he'd just been viewing, except now the text at the top read 'Nathan Vaughn – 1manband medley'. It started playing, and the top left corner of the screen filled with an image of the kid in front of a drum set, still wearing a bow tie, but this time sporting a large pair of studio headphones. He nodded out a four-count, then kicked up a beat that wasn't just the work of an amateur with a pair of sticks — this kid could actually, legitimately play the drums. After a couple measures of this, a second image appeared just below it, this one with the same kid playing on a fretless bass. A third took the other top corner, showing the kid standing and playing on a pair of keyboards, one at each hand. Finally, the fourth quadrant filled, this time with the kid's face much closer to the camera than before as he belted out (accompanied by his three other selves) a song Sid had never heard before.

The video continued much in this vein, weaving in and out of songs all unfamiliar to