A few months ago, I was studying intensively at a local bar that often has live music, just zoning out and thinking and outlining about the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past number of years now and have made myself into quite the expert in, and I was in a super productive streak as the jam night was breaking up, and just a little bit later than that this one (scruffy) (skinny) (bearded) (white) guy with rings on his fingers and a torn dirty t-shirt is chatting with this girl a few stools down from me, and then he glances at my dictionary and lolls his head onto the bar to look at what's written on the spine of the dictionary, and he starts to want to talk to me, and I'm like, "Sorry, usually I would love to talk, but I'm really in the middle of something right now, and I don't want to break it," and he then asks me if I'm set up to continue as I order another beer from the bartender, and I say yes, and he's like, "Cool, man," and he goes away affably.
And, later that night he circles back around, and I'm at a different place in my work, and he sits down on the stool next to me and we talk some -- he is totally on board with how I am spending my life, like many artists I know are, and he asks me if I am "fulfilled," further explaining that artists can usually never be "happy," but they can be "fulfilled" -- and he also says that he's a traveling musician who plays keyboard for some singer, and he says that his bandmates are at a hotel by the interstate and he Uber-ed into town and has been drinking all day, and he has to meet them in a few hours before their tour bus leaves town to head out to go to their next show.
And, I tell him about my one (white) friend from (Mississippi), and how the past few years he's been a traveling musician, and how he converted his truck into something he can sleep out of, and he just keeps a membership at Planet Fitness so he can take a shower whenever he needs to.
"Sounds like he's doing better than me," he was like.
"What do you mean?", I was like. "Like with gigs?".
"No, I don't shower enough," he was like, quite seriously.
He was also telling me that he tried doing the music thing in Brooklyn, but he didn't have any success with it until he moved to Texas.
"Because competition is so cut-throat and people sabotage each other in a scene like New York, even though everyone thinks that it's best to be there?", I was like.
"No," he was like, "I was doing too much cocaine."
At some point, too, he looks into my eyes and he's like, "What would it take to remember this moment forever?", and twice within five minutes he asks me how old I am, and also towards the end of the night like around 1am or so he buys a logo-ed t-shirt from the bar, taking his shirt off and standing there in the mostly-empty bar with his pale hairy chest as he goes to try it on, and then when it fits, he takes it off again and stands there shirtless like that and gets some scissors from the bartender, to rip it up around the sleeves and neck, to have it look better, somehow, when he wears it.
. . .
(Later I text my one [white] friend from [Mississippi] about this guy and the band he was traveling with as the keyboardist, and he had two things to say, for one, yes, he did know that band, and for two, that guy sounds like a drummer.)
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