Jim straightened on his stool. “I don’t need handouts.”
“It’s not charity,” Quin said. “It’s incentive. I’d love to hear your story.”
“Mystory.” Jim shook his head. “Nobody wants to hear about me. Your story, now that’s what I’d like to hear. For a young, seemingly able-bodied man—”
“Thank you,” Quin said. “I do work out.”
Jim rolled his eyes. “You just seem to have a lot of time to sit here among the rudderless.”
I felt like someone at the center court of Wimbledon, my head on a swivel between them.
“Me? I’m… between situations at the moment,” Quin said.
Well, that explained how he could be here all day.
“Between situations,” Jim said. “Yeah.”
Quin watched Jim for a second, his mouth twisting as he seemedto make a decision. “Everyone’s hiring,” Quin said. “You know. But not for anything you can build a life on.”
Jim checked the younger man out before he answered. “I do know. Sorry that you know, too.”
“I used to have a pretty good work ethic,” Quin said. “I can feel it sliding off me, though, the longer I’m off work. An old skin. You give your time over to a job, making choices and putting off everything else, trying to get somewhere… but where?”
“You’re too right there,” Jim said, reaching for his second beer. After he’d taken a long drink, he set the pint glass down.
Quin met my eyes again and nodded. I shook my head. Jim was drinking them far too fast. Quin pulled out his wallet and started laying down twenties, far more dosh than the bill he’d racked up so far.
Fine. He wasn’t the only onebetween situations. I grabbed a third glass for Jim and put it under the tap so it would be ready when he went to reach for it.
But the first two were already loosening Jim’s jaw. He had a bit of foam at the corner of his mouth. “The minute you want more for yourself or start to wear down, you’re out,” he said. “You can be replaced. Robots, they’re talking now.Robots.” He swiped at his lip with the back of his hand.
“We’reexpendable,” Quin said.
Was he just agreeing with Silent Jim—or goading him?
Jim tapped the bar in front of me. “You’ll find out, too, young lady. Only a matter of time.”
“Find out what?” I put the third beer in front of him and pulled down the empties.
“If they get their hooks into you, they’ll use you up, then throw you out.”
I wasn’t too worried about getting caught, you know? I was slippery. I was a greased pig.
But then I had a second to think it over. “Theywho?”
“The music industry?” Jim suggested. He had some color to him,three beers in. “You have… aspirations. Yourtheywill be the same as in any other business. Heavy with suits at the top, all big ideas and zero know-how. And the folks down below who actually do the work, not just blow hot air across conference tables? They’re fed into the machine, their labor pulped intoproduct.”
“Grist for the mill,” Quin joined in cheerfully. I shot him a look.
“And when you’re good and used up,” Jim said, “you’re tossed aside. Who do they think will be left to live in their ugly condos or buy their flimsy, overpriced products, if everyone is gig-economy broke?”
That was a line directly from the philosophy of one Joey Hartnett. It hurt to hear it again. It hurt to think of any future I’d imagined in the music business boiled down to… factory piecework.
“Which industry did you work in?” I asked.
Jim waved me away. “The important thing is, it ended.”
Quin sat back, letting me ask the questions. It seemed to me that more questions should be asked.
