The Wishbones Read Free

a number of reservations—the uniforms, the cheesy tunes, Artie's reputation as a ballbuster—but he quickly came to realize that the rewards went far beyond the two hundred dollars he got for playing a four-hour gig.
    It turned out, amazingly enough, to be a blast. People drank at weddings. They danced like maniacs. They clapped and hooted and made requests. Every now and then, when the chemistry was right, things got raucous. And when that happened, the Wishbones knew how to crank up the volume and rock, with no apologies to anyone.
    Dave had friends who were still chasing their dreams, playing in dingy clubs to audiences of twelve bored drunks, splitting thirty-nine dollars among four guys at the end of the night, then dragging themselves home at three o'clock in the morning. He saw the best of them growing exhausted and bitter, endlessly chewing over the thankless question of why the world still didn't give a shit.
    Dave himself still hadn't completely surrendered his dream of the Big Time, but he had moved it to the back burner. Someday, maybe, the perfect band would come along, a band so good that noone would be able to say no to them. Until then, though, Dave was a Wishbone, and it was a helluva lot better than nothing.
    Afterwards, because the event came to seem so significant in retrospect, he sometimes found himself trying to reconstruct it in his memory, as though the smallest detail might hold the key to some larger mystery.
    The Wishbones had just finished setting up when the Heart-string Orchestra broke into “Like a Virgin,” their next-to-last tune of the night. If Madonna had happened to wander into the Sundown to check out the showcase, Dave thought she would have approved. Phil Hart gave the song a hilarious deadpan interpretation, as though it had never entered his mind that some people might find it amusing to see a seventy-three-year-old man with artificial hips doing a dignified shimmy at the mike stand as he sang about being touched for the very first time.
    Dave leaned his guitar against his amp and stepped down from the rickety wooden platform that served as stage #1. He waved to the waitress, a brassy-haired woman of indeterminate age named Hilda, and mimed the act of bringing a glass to his mouth. Hilda nodded, but moved across the lounge in the opposite direction to wait on some paying customers, a young couple holding hands across the table and gazing at each other with that blissful prenewlywed intensity that would somehow evolve over the next two decades into the vacant stares of the long-married. It wasn't until Ian sidled up to him a few seconds later that Dave realized he'd been frozen in place, the invisible empty glass still tilted to his lips.
    “Mick Box,” said Ian.
    “Shit,” said Dave.
    At every Wishbone function, Ian tried to stump Dave with a piece of rock trivia. He specialized in obscure British musicians from second-rate bands of the early seventies.
    “Take your time,” Ian taunted. “It'll come to you.”
    “Mick Box,” Dave chanted. “Mick Box … Mick Box … Mick Box …”
    “You probably haven't thought about this band for fifteen years.”
    A face began to take shape in Dave's mind. Narrow, ferrety features. The obligatory hair.
    “I'm seeing a mustache,” he said.
    “If it's a Fu Manchu, you're definitely getting warmer.”
    “I want to say Mott the Hoople, but that's Mick Ronson.”
    Dave's eyes strayed around the lounge as he attempted to place the mustachioed Mick in a band he hadn't thought about for fifteen years. Up on stage #2, Phil Hart was twisting his way through a musical interlude in “Like a Virgin.” On stage #1, Artie was lecturing Stan about proper Wishbone attire, frowning and jabbing his finger in the direction of the offending work boots. Stan kept nodding like a kid, mouthing the words, “Okay, okay,” over and over again.
    “I give up,” said Dave. “Is it Slade?”
    “Close,” groaned Ian. He winced as though pained on