Page 9 of Not So Goode
Nothing but that beat for a good thirty seconds.
Then, still bathed in darkness, Myles bellied up to the microphone as I watched him offstage.
“Here in the dark, sweetheart, it’s where we got our start, you and me, baby, just makin’ sweat, makin’ love, we got it down to an art…” he drawled the words in a low growl which he somehow managed to make sound predatory and seductive and syrupy all at the same time.
Ladies and gentlemen, the annoyingly talented, stupidly good-looking, disgustingly charming, the one and only Myles North. My best friend, currently my employer, and world-famous, globe-trotting, chart-topping, record-smashing bro-country superstar. Luke who? Jason who? Sam who? Nah, son. Myles North, that’s who. Triple platinum debut album. Third person ever to get the Big Four at the Grammies, and for that same debut album—album, record, song of the year, and best new recording artist. And now, another album of the year for his four-times platinum sophomore album.
Yeah, he’s fuckin’ annoying like that.
Especially because he’s also the nicest, most genuinely kind person I’ve ever met, down-to-earth despite his bonkers amount of talent and charisma. I want to hate him for being so goddamn annoyingly perfect, but I can’t because I just love the idiot boy so damn much.
Don’t tell him I said that, though. I got a reputation as a hard-ass to maintain.
I tuned the Gibson for the next time he needed it, which was in four songs. He had the red Fender next and after that was Betty-Lou, his favorite and a family heirloom, an antique Martin classical acoustic signed by Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Merle Haggard. Vocals only after that, and then the Gibson.
I checked the tuning on the Fender for the third time, because that song, “Whiskey and Lace,” is his biggest hit, and the crowd always goes nuts for his big solo in that one, so the tuning has to be keyed in right. Betty-Lou I didn’t touch—no one but Myles himself was allowed to so much as breathe on Betty-Lou.
It was sacred, and rightly so: Myles’s grandfather had been a small-time country singer; mostly dive bars and honky-tonks in the area of Texas where we’d grown up. But over the years he’d shared a dive bar stage with Willie, drank beers with Johnny, and smoked pot with Merle, and gotten his beloved guitar signed by each of ‘em. And then, years later, Myles’s dad, also a local dive-bar circuit singer, had lent it to Waylon Jennings for a whole set at a show, once. So that guitar had serious country music mojo attached to it by the time Myles inherited it, and since then, Myles has shared the stage with that guitar with quite an impressive roster of big names, and while he’d not added any signatures to the holy three already on there, he, being superstitious as hell, figured just having it on stage added to the mojo in the thing.
I had to admit, you felt something shivery in the air whenever you heard that guitar start singing.
The next few songs went off without a hitch, and the crowd here in—where the hell were we? Pittsburgh, maybe? —was going bananas. The rowdy, rollicking songs that had made Myles North a household name within a matter of a couple years took a backseat whenever Betty-Lou made an appearance. The moment the houselights dimmed, the crowd hushed, instantly went dead silent, expectant.
My best friend picked up the guitar from her stand near the drumkit, sat on the stool I brought him, settled the guitar on his thigh, adjusted the mic, and then grabbed my arm before I could vamoose offstage. “Hey, ya’ll, how about a fine Pittsburgh how’d’ya do for my best buddy, Crow?” He clapped me on the back, forcefully pivoting me by the bicep to face the crowd. “Little known fact about this sexy motherfucker here is, he can play guitar better’n I can. Fact of the matter is, he taughtmeto play. You also may or may not know that he writes the music for damn near all my songs, always has. Maybe one of these days I’ll get him to stay for a few minutes and regale us with his rendition of ‘Sing Me Back Home’.”
I smiled tightly at the crowd—I could only see the first few rows, the rest being lost in the glare of the lights—and waved, once, as the crowd screamed and whistled and clapped.
“Not fuckin’ likely,” I muttered. “Gonna kick your ass for this, Myles.”
Myles just laughed and let me go. “He’s got a wicked case of stage fright, ya’ll. He’s threatenin’ to kick my ass for puttin’ him on the spot like this. Now, hecould, you know, him bein’ a barroom brawler from way back, but he won’t, ‘cause he loves me like a brother, and he knows this pretty face is keepin’ him employed at the moment.”
I cackled as I thankfully regained my place out of the spotlight and behind the curtains. I gave Myles the double bird. “You’re an ugly piece of shit, Myles!” I called, more confident now that I was offstage.
“Hear that?” Myles said, laughing. “Ugly piece of shit, he calls me. Mighty big words from someoneoffstage. Come back out here and say that to my face, you big damn sissy.”
“Just play the fuckin’ song, toolbox,” I yelled back.
“Toolbox,” Myles echoed, laughter fading. “Been his favorite insult for me since we were just kids.” He picks the strings with his first two fingers and thumb, adjusts the tuning, continues picking out the melody to his crooner ballad, “If I Could Stay.”
Damn the man, he could move from joking with me to killing the crowd with that tearjerker ballad without missing a beat, and the crowd ate it up. Of course, the way he sang it, every woman in the joint was wishin’ it was her he was singing it to, and every man was wishing it was him singing it.
I went back to work, retuning, checking, and making sure I had strings ready in case he snapped one. By the end of the show, Myles was drenched in sweat and exhausted, but flying high as a kite on adrenaline. He’d done not one, but two encores, the last encore being mostly him doing bits and pieces of outlaw country requests shouted from the audience. Finally, he strode offstage with Betty-Lou in hand, grinning from ear to ear. He beelined for Betty-Lou’s custom-made case—bulletproof, crush-proof, waterproof, fireproof, and biometrically coded to his thumbprint, with embedded GPS tracking. He locked Betty-Lou away, and then that case went into another separate wheeled, foam-padded, locked case. Yeah, he took the security of that instrument more seriously than he did his own life.
That done, he clapped me on the back. “That was a hell of a show, buddy.”
I just glared at him, unmoved. “If you didn’t have a show tomorrow, I’d break your fuckin’ nose for that stunt.”
He just grinned, clapping me on the back again. “Crow, my friend, one of these days it’ll happen.”
“No, Myles. Not any day. I don’t perform. I just play for me, for fun. You ain’t ever gonna get me on the stage in front of people. I don’t want that attention.”
He shook his head as we went through the argument we’d been over a million times. “You have God’s own talent with a guitar, Crow. Shit, if you don’t want attention, you could be a session musician in Nashville. Everybody from John Mayer to Rihanna would suck their own dick to get you to play on their albums.”
“Pretty sure Rihanna doesn’t have a dick, dick.”
He just shoved at me. “What if you faced away from the crowd and just played?”
“No. We been over this a million times, Myles. I’m content being the tech. Quit askin’.”