Nine Fingers by Thom August Read Free Book Online Page A

again.
    “University of Chicago,” I spelled out. “We had a six-piece band, jazz, Dixieland, standards, that kind of thing. I played
     piano. Sorry, I already said that. We had a trombone player who had the time-sense of a Tourette’s patient, a clarinet player
     who played in the key of H, a bass player who thought he should be playing lead and everyone else should be playing ‘under’
     him, a drummer who, when he took a solo, sounded like someone kicking a drum kit down two flights of stairs, and this trumpet
     player who we found totally out of the blue and who had never played anything like this before in his life.”
    Vince, I said to myself, you’re babbling. Take a fucking breath.
    “What was this band called?” he asked.
    “Man, we had a lot of names, ‘South Side Strutters,’ “Chicago Dixie Kings,’ ‘Hyde Park Ramblers’—for an extra ten bucks you
     could call us anything you wanted. Lately, we seem to be called ‘New Bottles.’ ”
    “…?” He didn’t even have to ask, just a twist of the head.
    “For a while our trumpet player was calling it ‘Old Wine, New Bottles.’ You know, like playing the standards, but maybe in
     a different way.”
    “Sounds like fun.”
    “Yeah, it was. I’m too young to be talking about ‘way back when,’ but we had a blast. Man, some of the gigs we played—” I
     reminisced.
    We had pulled over the top of a ridge, and down below there was a car half-flipped in the median, an SUV, a Stupid Useless
     Vehicle, and people were stomping their brakes as they tried to get an eyeful, swerving side to side, their red taillights
     leaving trails like tracers in the night. I found a slot to the right of the pack and rode quietly around it. I found a clearing
     in the flow and quietly surged to fill it, then eased back, safely ahead of the fishtailing gawkers.
    That’s what real driving is all about: anticipation, timing, rhythm.
    “So anyway,” I continued, droning on in spite of myself. “We had a great time and then people started to leave and graduate
     and shit. We learned a lot of new stuff that all the new people brought with them. I’m not talking formal arrangements or
     anything. By this point everybody in the band could sight-read, but pretty soon, nobody would need to. People brought in their
     own styles, their own approaches. We started getting better gigs, better money. We evolved almost chronologically, that’s
     the tautological logic of it, and pretty soon it was classics and swing and even three months or so of some Western swing—we
     found a sax player who thought he was a Texas fiddler—and then, of course, bop, the new thing, fusion, whatever.
    “Now here we are, four years into it, we’re all in the fucking union, and the only original ones still with the band are me
     and the trumpet player, and man has he changed some in that time. I mean, not who he is, I don’t think that’ll ever change,
     but what he can play is just in a different league. The rest of the guys have evolved around him. We’ve got a pretty tight,
     mellow group, maybe one more piece needed to complete the puzzle, but that’s just the critic in me.”
    A typical Vinnie conversation—all poured out in a big one-sided rush and no one’s paying attention.
    “Like I said, I manage the band and act as their manager. I record most of the gigs and do the telephone thing with the clubs
     and the radio stations and the free papers like the Reader, ” I continued. I added one of my stock lines, “I’m having almost as much fun doing that part of it. Suits my entrepreneurial
     nature,” I added with a flourish.
    I paused. Our exit was upon us. I hit the directionals, nudged right, and eased around a big slow curve and up to a red light.
    “Well, it sounds like—”
    “We’re about two miles away, at this point,” I said. “A straight shot.”
    He nodded.
    I paused just a little too long. “Hey, sorry. I must have been on autopilot. You were saying