Same River Twice, part one

SAME RIVER TWICE -- a serialized short story by Bobby Gilles -- Part One:

SAME RIVER TWICE
2006, by Bobby Gilles

Marshall Jameson gave up on country music the night he got clocked on the head with a beer pitcher from the only less authentic redneck at Earl’s Saloon in Louisville than himself: “Buddy Jack” Finkelstein (the former “Ben” Finkelstein, through at least the large percentage of his 36 years that he’d spent as a casual acquaintance of Marshall). Buddy Jack, like Marshall, had gone country about six months ago, and had since acquired about a half dozen Wrangler jeans and shirts, a belt buckle bigger than the World Boxing Championship title belt, a coon dog and a rifle, some proficiency with the rifle but none with the dog, a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, a pickup truck, a collection of George Strait CD’s, a tackle box full of every imaginable fishing lure except one that would lure fish, and an addiction to chewing tobacco.

Buddy Jack had done it to win a bosomy redhead, Jenny Lou Murphy, but Marshall had done it to cash in on a rumored abundance of opportunities for young troubadours of the latest “New Nashville” sound. So there he stood, six foot, prematurely bald but with a certain boyish attractiveness, big-boned and freckle faced, on a creaky, dim-lit stage at Earl’s, singing an original tune halfway through his forty minute set. A piece he’d written called “My Big Ol’ Feet:”

My big ol’ feet, they want you back.
They always seem to make tracks to your door.
My desperate fingers -- they dial your number,
But my heart doesn’t want you anymore.

He’d conceived it as a love song, but then, he’d been drunk at the time, crying as the words seeped from his pen onto a page of the pocket-sized pad that housed all his song ideas. Now, sober and performing for forty or so mostly indifferent carousers, their backs to him as they swapped tales, traded jokes, flirted, squabbled, and ordered more rounds, he sensed that some might regard his lyrics with more humor than pathos. Especially the handful of drunks who were paying attention, laughing, stomping, making “foot” jokes each time he sang the chorus.

He’d have switched back to his repertoire of standards if not for the starry-eyed attention of Jenny Lou, who, though unknown to him, had entered the saloon with Buddy Jack. And if Marshall had remembered that easy-going, “aw shucks” Buddy Jack had once been hypersensitive Benjamin, he wouldn’t have crooned straight at Jenny Lou. Croon he did, though, and so halfway through the final chorus, he noticed from the corner of his eye that something unusual was airborne and on the way. A second later the lukewarm beer splattered his shirt and guitar, and in another second the plastic pitcher bonked his forehead and dropped him to the floor, where he hit his head again and lost consciousness.

TO BE CONTINUED ....