Chapter 4: The Unemployed Musician
"Sorry, I'm late."
Andrew stood panting in the doorway, hands on his knees, shirt soaked through with sweat, his hair plastered across his forehead in damp strings he couldn't be bothered to fix.
He couldn't help it. His body was running on fumes. The bar was barely two blocks from the apartment — less than two hundred meters on a straight shot down Bedford — and he'd sprinted the whole way and still nearly blacked out doing it.
The real problem, of course, was that he'd left late. Any musician doing a residency was supposed to show up at least twenty minutes before doors opened — time to check in with the staff, do a sound check, tune up, get settled. It was already past 6:40 when he'd finally gotten out of his apartment. That math didn't work.
"Six fifty-seven," said Gunther.
He was behind the bar, polishing a glass with the slow, deliberate energy of a man who had made peace with other people's failures. He looked like he was barely in his twenties, with a mop of blond hair that seemed to have arrived at that particular shade of light through purely accidental means, and the careful, tired expression of someone who had seen this exact scenario play out before.
He set the glass down and sighed. "Andrew. You know I don't want to do this."
"Gunther." Andrew straightened up and tried to look less like he was dying. "Come on. We've known each other for what, six months? Give me something to work with here."
Before his memories had come back in, the old Andrew had looked down on this bar from a specific kind of oblivious height. It was a small neighborhood joint — booths along one wall, a low stage in the corner, a jukebox nobody used because the owner thought live music gave the place character. The old Andrew had told himself it was a stepping stone. A place to hone his craft while he waited for his father's industry connections to open a real door for him.
His understanding of how the music business worked had basically been: Dad did it, so it can't be that hard.
Asking to keep this job was a last resort. But it was the only resort he had.
"Andrew." Gunther reached under the bar, pulled out a small worn notebook he used for scheduling, and nodded toward the corner stage. "It's not that I'm not giving you a chance. You've been gone over a month. Night before last, someone came in and offered to fill the slot. I said yes. I'm sorry. I really am."
Andrew followed his gaze.
The woman sitting on the stool in the performance corner, cradling a guitar in her lap and humming to herself while she tuned it, was Phoebe Buffay.
Of course it was.
A sour feeling moved through Andrew's chest — not anger, exactly. More like the specific exhaustion of watching a door close on you in slow motion and being unable to do anything about it.
"Look," Gunther said, and his voice shifted — quieter, more genuine. He reached into his front shirt pocket, pulled out a folded twenty, and pressed it into Andrew's hand with the practiced discretion of someone who'd done it before. He snapped his fingers at the other end of the bar. "Get Andrew a beer and the B-combo. On the house." He put a hand briefly on Andrew's shoulder. "I'm real sorry about your father, man. I mean that."
And then he was moving, back into the organized flow of the bar, the conversation over.
Andrew didn't argue. He had no leverage to argue with. He pulled himself onto a barstool and sat down.
The B-combo was a burger and fries — bar food, nothing special, assembled in the back and slid in front of him within a few minutes by the other guy working the counter, a stocky red-faced man named Pat who had been doing this job since before Andrew was born.
"Sorry about your dad, kid," Pat said, and upgraded the burger to a double without being asked, and gave him extra fries, and made the beer a pint instead of a bottle. He patted Andrew's shoulder exactly the way Gunther had, and that was that.
"Thanks," Andrew managed. "I just — I practiced so hard today, and now I don't even have the gig anymore."
He stared at the burger.
[Guitar (Beginner): 4/100]
He had genuinely practiced like a man possessed that afternoon. His fingertips were still burning where the steel strings had dug in — swollen and tender, like he'd spent the afternoon pressing them against a hot stove. Four experience points. That was what he had to show for hours of sitting in his apartment working through chord shapes with the focused desperation of someone who understood, viscerally, that this was the only card he had left to play.
His experience from his past life — years behind a desk, navigating corporate bureaucracy in an entirely different era — was completely useless here. He was, by any practical measure, starting from zero.
The thought that had been circling since yesterday came back around: sell the apartment after the court hearing, pay off whatever he could of Evan's debts, take whatever was left and get out of Manhattan. Go somewhere smaller. Somewhere cheaper. Start something quieter.
Andrew's eyes stung. He blinked it back. He wasn't sad, not exactly — it was more the specific, grinding humiliation of trying your hardest and watching it not be enough. Of working for something with everything you had and still coming up short. That particular feeling, the one that sat right on the line between my fault and not my fault, where the honest answer was somewhere in the middle.
He hadn't had his memories back then. He hadn't known what he was doing. But that didn't change where he'd ended up.
It's not a total dead end, he told himself, biting into the burger. I've still got the guitar. I've got twenty dollars. Tomorrow morning I'll take it down to the subway entrance on Bleecker and busk. People do that. People make a living doing that.
He'd never in his life imagined he'd be seriously considering the logistics of busking for pocket change in a subway station.
"Hey, handsome." Someone sat down on the stool beside him. "Rough night?"
Andrew didn't look up. "Sorry. I appreciate it, but I just lost my gig, I'm pretty broke right now, and I definitely can't buy you a drink. I'm not trying to be rude."
A beat of silence.
Then the woman leaned over and spoke quietly to Pat. "Is that Andrew? The guy who used to play here?"
Pat glanced over. "Yeah. His dad passed a few weeks back. He's been out since then, and — well." He made a small gesture toward the stage, where Phoebe was now playing a gentle, meandering chord progression that sounded like it might become a song about a cloud named Gerald.
"Oh," the woman said softly. "So Phoebe took his spot."
She turned back and looked at Andrew — really looked at him, the way you look at someone when you're quietly taking inventory. Reddened eyes. A face that would've been strikingly handsome if it weren't currently doing its best impression of a man getting rained on. A thin frame. Fingers wrapped around a beer glass, swollen red at the tips from hours of guitar practice.
Something shifted in her expression.
"I need to talk to Phoebe," she said, mostly to herself. She knew Phoebe performed here for free — had never taken a dime for it, said the music was its own reward and also that Gunther let her eat the leftover mozzarella sticks. Taking a paying slot from a guy who'd just lost his father felt wrong in a way that Monica Geller was constitutionally unable to ignore.
She slid off her stool and crossed the room.
Andrew watched her go without really registering any of it. He took another bite of his burger. The fries were good. That was something.
"Gunther." Phoebe's voice rang out across the bar with the bright, carrying force of a woman who had never once in her life been shy about being heard.
Gunther looked up from the register. "What's up, Phoebe?"
"Did you seriously give away Andrew's spot while his dad just died?" She wasn't angry — Phoebe rarely did anger — but she was absolutely, completely serious, in that particular Phoebe way where the earnestness of it hit harder than shouting would. "That's not okay. You have to give him his slot back, or I'm not playing tonight."
The bar got quiet. These things had a way of happening — a conversation tipped sideways and suddenly everyone was listening instead of talking.
Gunther rubbed the back of his neck. He liked Phoebe. Everyone liked Phoebe. But this was complicated. He knew Andrew's playing. He knew it well. The only reason Andrew had gotten the residency in the first place was because Evan had done a favor for the bar's owner years ago, and nobody was going to call in that favor now that Evan was gone. Rehiring Andrew off his own back, without authorization, was the kind of thing that could land Gunther in a genuinely awkward conversation with the owner.
"Phoebe, listen, his skill level—"
"Andrew! Andrew! Andrew!" Phoebe started clapping in rhythm, grinning now, turning to face the room.
A few people at the nearest table picked it up immediately, because New Yorkers, when presented with an opportunity to make noise in a bar with social permission, will almost always take it.
"Andrew! Andrew! Andrew!"
It spread. It got louder. Someone in the back joined in. The jukebox-that-nobody-used was definitely losing this competition.
The door in the back swung open and the bar's owner stepped out — a woman in her fifties in a blazer and slacks, reading glasses pushed up on her head, looking like she'd been in the middle of doing invoices and had heard something that required her physical presence. She surveyed the room, frowned faintly, and beckoned Gunther over with two fingers.
Gunther went. They talked briefly. He came back with a different expression.
The front door swung open.
"Hey, Pheebs! I made it, I told you I'd—"
The man who stepped in was wearing a plaid flannel shirt over a white tee, sleeves rolled up, sporting a mustache that was trying slightly too hard. He stopped dead just inside the doorway, taking in a bar full of people chanting someone else's name, and his face ran through several stages of processing.
He looked left. He looked right.
Then, with the energy of a man who had decided to commit fully to a bit regardless of outcome, he raised both fists above his head and started pumping them to a beat.
"Chandler! Chandler! Chandler!"
Nobody joined in.
His chanting dropped in volume, then in conviction, and finally in speed, until he was basically just moving his mouth.
He lowered his fists. He looked around the room.
"Okay, so." He brushed his hands together like he was clearing a counter. "Name-chanting. Not the move anymore. Got it." He gave a small wave to the room in general. "Carry on. I'll just — yeah." He pointed vaguely toward an empty booth. "I'll be over here. As you were."
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