Big Easy

I don't know where this is going. I would like to develop a short story but all I have is this atmosphere. I know this bar. It is there on the South Side of Houston. So the easy part was describing it. What happens next?

It was a big room. The waitresses’ arms and legs were decorated with tattooed fantasies and they wore skirts just concealing enough so you had to guess the end of the story. . It was called the ‘Big Easy’ and it lay just outside the Loop on the south side of Houston. The name suggested New Orleans but there was nothing of the frayed grandeur of that city around this section of Houston, it was just frayed. The building was almost a cube, but somewhat wider and deeper than it was high. It wouldn’t have taken an architect to design it, just a builder with a square and a plum line. On the left as you entered the place were three pool tables with a couple of raised benches against the wall behind them, for spectators or players between games. On the right was the stage, and just in front of that a wooden dance floor maybe big enough for about ten jiving couples. There were tables arranged between the dance floor and the bar at the far end of the room opposite to the entrance. Here and there around the room an occasional neon beer sign glowed tastefully, otherwise the walls were decorated with old posters featuring various blues artistes who had passed through. Behind the bar a clutter of liquor and wine bottles sat below a gantry with two rows of optics. Next to the optics a row of beer taps was arranged above a grubby looking stainless steel sink. All in all it looked better in the dark.

I had been coming here once or twice a week for just over three months now, and I was becoming a familiar face to the waitresses, and occasionally I got a friendly nod from one or other of the regulars at the pool tables. It was dowdy but I liked it, mostly because it was a relaxed kind of place and the crowd was neither one thing nor the other, just a mix. Young and old, rich and poor, black and white, and everything in between; middle-aged Harley riders and well pressed young oil traders, labourers and tool pushers, everybody seemed to fit right in. And the music was good, which was why I had come in the first place.

The band on stage now was blowing out Elmore James’ ‘Dust My Broom’. The lead guitarist was a white boy with long, blonde hair. Behind him the rhythm guitarist was about thirty with the look of an Irishman about him. The drummer was a pale skinned black man of indeterminate age, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, and the bassist was a stooped, elderly, black man, so immobile you had to look closely to make sure his fingers were moving on the strings. The dance floor was crowded and the people at the bar, and sitting at the tables, were relishing the kid’s performance. I watched him for while and turned back to the bar to pick up my beer. As I turned ……