![]() Having a job meant she would be able to afford to stay in the apartment she’d just moved into and could start making progress toward her goal: play shows, write more songs, get signed to a label, and make an album. She tried to ignore how relieved she felt to be out of there, and instead tried to feel happy that she now had a job. She had shrunk into herself somewhat while inside the bar, and now that she was outside, she could expand fully back into her skin. The blast of warm air carrying the sunbaked smells of piss and pavement felt good on her chilled bare legs and arms. Laura put her name on the schedule for a shift the next day and walked back out into the daytime, which now seemed even brighter. She was trying not to just let all Callie’s friends become her friends by default. Callie knew everyone, had regular haunts, and would have told Laura (if she’d asked) not to take the job at Bar Lafitte, might even have been able to hook her up with a better-less gross, more lucrative-bar job, but Laura was determined not to lean too heavily on Callie. Callie had lived in New York for almost five years now, because she’d gone to college there. Twelve dollars an hour, plus (possible) tips-she would only have to work fifty-four hours a month, at most, to pay the $650 rent that her best friend and now roommate, Callie, informed her was an incredible bargain, considering their apartment’s perfect location on Third between First and A. The pay was twelve dollars an hour, he said, plus sometimes the bartenders would tip them out. They were there to provide ambiance, like the chandeliers and the nicer-brand soap in the bathroom’s dispensers. Other than that, their job was to walk around in the bar and smile and chat. The ad had read “front-of-house staff,” and their job, as the guy described it, was to greet guests at the door and usher them to a banquette in either the upper or lower section of the bar, depending on how much money they looked likely to spend. He had no way of knowing that they even knew English-and, as it turned out, one of them, Yulia, essentially didn’t-but it didn’t matter, because they weren’t being hired as bartenders or even waitresses. The guy who’d chosen them started training them immediately, without even asking their names. It was painted black, and the banquettes were dark red velvet, meant to give an impression of luxury, but like all bars in the daytime it stank and was sad, like an empty fairground. Laura and the other two women stepped inside and blinked as their eyes adjusted from the glaring heat and brightness of the sidewalk to the chilled darkness of the bar. He walked back a step, pointed to Laura and two others, and told the rest they could go home. He looked at Laura and saw the way she smiled and made eye contact with no hint of wariness in her giant dark eyes, the expression on her face constantly saying something mildly incredulous, like, “Wow, really?” He guessed correctly that she was very new here. A man came out and walked down the line of women, assessing each one for an instant, then made his selections. So she hadn’t brought a résumé, but it didn’t matter. In Columbus, she’d worked selling cheap electric guitars to teenage boys at her family’s shop, and then for a while at the Gap in the outlet mall. Laura had never worked in a bar or restaurant. ![]() The other women in line were also wearing black, and some of them clutched the page of the Village Voice where the help-wanted ad had appeared. Now, at twenty-two, she stood in line outside a bar on the corner of Lafayette and Grand, sweating through a black dress that was absorbing all the heat of the midday sun. She didn’t think about that first song again for years, and by the time she remembered, it was almost too late. She was embarrassed about the whole thing, and so she pretended to herself that it hadn’t happened. This convinced Laura that the first song hadn’t really been hers. The next day she wrote another song: this one wasn’t perfect it wasn’t even okay it was barely a song. Laura started to think that she must have heard it somewhere and remembered it. Callie asked where she’d heard it and didn’t believe her when she said she’d written it, because it was the kind of song that sounds like it has always existed. Her mother made an approving noise and went back to paying attention to one of Laura’s brothers. She played it on her guitar alone in her bedroom, and then for her best friend, Callie, and then for her mother. ![]() She didn’t know that the song was perfect, just that it was as good as anything on the radio. She still thought, then, that making something was primarily a way to have fun. It was the first song she’d ever written, so she didn’t understand how hard it was to write even an okay song, or how hard it was to make anything new, in general. When Laura was sixteen she wrote a perfect song.
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