Chapter 5: The Street Cart Hot Dog
"Andrew." Pat tapped the dazed Andrew on the shoulder. "Hey. Everyone's waiting on you."
Andrew didn't hop right up. He looked across the room at Gunther, then at the bar owner standing in the back doorway with her arms crossed and her cigarette going.
He was clear-eyed about the situation. Those people chanting his name a minute ago — half of them probably couldn't have told you who Andrew was if you'd asked them thirty seconds before Phoebe started it. They were chanting because the energy was right and Phoebe's voice carried. The bar hadn't transformed into a room full of fans. It was a room full of people who'd gotten briefly swept up in something and would forget about it entirely by the time their next round arrived.
If he went up there and fell apart, that was it. One song and he was done, and this time there'd be no chanting to bring him back.
The bar owner drew a long pull off her cigarette, let the smoke out slow, and said something to Gunther in a low voice. Gunther turned and came over, wearing the expression of a man doing his best.
"Andrew, what are you waiting for?" He made a small helpless gesture toward the stage. "Go up and play something. But I have to be straight with you — she's not bringing you back on the permanent rotation if you don't play well. That's just where we are."
"I know." Andrew stood up. "Thank you, Gunther. Really." He meant it. Gunther had no particular reason to go to bat for him — they weren't close friends, they weren't family — and he'd done it anyway, out of nothing but basic human decency. That counted for something.
Andrew picked up his guitar, crossed the floor, and stopped next to Phoebe.
"Andrew Sanchez," he said.
"Phoebe Buffay." She beamed at him — that specific Phoebe smile, the one that looked like she'd just been told the best news of her life — and patted his arm warmly. "Go get 'em, pal." Then she glided off toward the bar and left him alone on the small stage with a room full of people looking at him.
Andrew sat down on the stool, settled the guitar across his lap, and exhaled slowly.
The nerves weren't about the crowd size. He'd played this room before. What was making his hands want to shake was the math of it — perform well enough, keep the gig, keep an income, keep the apartment in play. Perform badly, and that particular door closed permanently. No room for a bad night. No safety net.
He looked down at the guitar. At his fingers — swollen at the tips, the skin tender and slightly raw from hours of grinding practice that afternoon, pressing down on steel strings until the pain was just background noise.
Four experience points, he thought. That's what this afternoon cost me.
He looked up at the room.
"I know some of you might recognize the name from before," he said, keeping his voice easy, conversational, like he was talking to one person instead of forty. "But I'm guessing most of you don't actually know what I look like."
A couple of laughs. That was enough.
"This past month has been — it's been a rough stretch. A lot happened. I went through something I wasn't ready for." He glanced down at his hands again. "Thank you for giving me a chance to be back up here. This song's for all of you."
He let a beat of silence sit.
Then he started to play.
"Hello darkness, my old friend..."
"The Sound of Silence" was a folk song from the sixties — understated, melodic, unhurried. Not technically demanding. Which was, if Andrew was being honest with himself, the entire reason he'd chosen it. His skill panel was sitting at a meager four experience points out of a hundred. He wasn't going to dazzle anyone with his technique tonight.
But the song had other things going for it.
The guitar work could be played cleanly enough at his level to sound intentional rather than clumsy. The lyrics, whispered rather than belted, suited the dim warm light of the bar perfectly. And Andrew had something else working in his favor that no amount of practice could manufacture — he was genuinely in it. The month of grief, the afternoon of desperate practice with raw fingers, the job he'd nearly lost, Bonnie's frightened eyes, the court summons sitting on his kitchen table — all of it was right there, and it was in his voice whether he wanted it there or not.
He wasn't technically perfect. He knew that. A trained ear would catch the small imprecision in his chord transitions, the place in the second verse where his left hand was a half-second late.
But he was handsome, and his voice was warm and a little rough in a way that worked for the song, and the emotion in it was not faked.
The bar went quiet. Not the polite quiet of people being patient — the actual quiet of people who had stopped their conversations because something was happening and they wanted to be in it. Someone put down their glass without looking at it.
The song ended.
Andrew lifted his head.
For just a moment there was nothing, and then Phoebe started clapping with the full-body enthusiasm of a one-woman standing ovation, and the room followed.
"One more! One more!" Phoebe called out, practically bouncing on her barstool.
"Thank you," Andrew said into the mic, standing up and picking up his guitar before anyone could talk him into it. "I really hope you all have a great night."
He stepped off the stage before the applause had fully died, because he had a more pressing situation to deal with and he needed a bathroom now.
The street cart hot dog from this afternoon, it turned out, had decided to make its objections known.
He set his guitar at the bar, smiled tightly at Pat, and walked very quickly in the direction of the men's room.
Phoebe, vibrating with fan energy, squeezed past two other women who had materialized to express their admiration for Andrew, and planted herself back on her stool next to Monica.
"Wasn't that incredible?" she said. "His voice—"
"He's mine, by the way," Monica said, still applauding. "I said it first this afternoon."
"I met him first. I gave him my number. There's a process."
"Girls." Chandler leaned forward from Monica's other side. "Are we seriously spending tonight fighting over a guy none of us actually know?"
The front door swung open and a man in a sport coat came in, slightly flushed, scanning the room.
"Hey, sorry I'm late — Pheebs, did I miss your set?" He slid into the booth next to Chandler. "I got stuck on the subway and then I stopped to grab a hot dog from that cart on the corner, and the line was insane—"
Chandler turned to face him with great deliberate slowness. "Ross."
"Yeah?"
"Which cart?"
Ross blinked. "The one right outside, on Bedford. Why?"
Chandler and Monica exchanged a look.
"Did you eat the hot dog?" Monica asked carefully.
"I — yeah, obviously, that's what you do with a hot dog, you—" Ross stopped. His expression shifted. "Why are you both making that face?"
"No reason," Chandler said serenely. "Tell me, how are things with Carol? Happy marriage? Everything great at home?"
"Yeah, things are great, she's been a little — I don't know, kind of distant lately, I keep suggesting she get out more, maybe try a yoga class or something—" Ross stopped again. He had gone slightly pale. "Actually, you know what, I might need to—"
He stood up abruptly.
"Don't tell Carol I was here," he said, already reaching for his jacket. "She's been in a weird mood and I just—"
"Ross—" Monica started.
But Chandler was already gone, jacket in hand, power-walking toward the back of the bar.
Ross stared at the now-empty spot where Chandler had been sitting, processed this information, and then followed at a pace that was technically still walking.
When Andrew came back out a few minutes later, looking pale and considerably more relieved, he found only Monica and Phoebe at the bar. He looked at the empty seats.
"Did your friends leave?"
"Only temporarily," Monica said.
"What happened?"
Phoebe patted the empty stool next to her. "Street cart hot dog."
Andrew sat down heavily, pressed his hand to his own stomach, and stared at nothing.
"Same," he said quietly.
The three of them sat in companionable silence for a moment.
"For what it's worth," Phoebe said cheerfully, "you sounded amazing up there."
"Thanks." Andrew managed a weak smile. "Really glad nobody can tell."
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