Chapter Text
The year was 1959 – or, now it was 1960 – and it was New Year’s Eve, and Llewyn was, somehow, playing a set at the Gaslight.
He’d been coming here a lot for the past couple of years, ever since he came back from the Merchant Marine and moved back in with his parents and stopped feeling like he was alive. He used to play with another guy on the ship he’d been on, Randall, and on their off nights, they’d sing a couple songs they both knew, even wrote a few when the nights got really long, but even after he found the Gaslight, started badgering Pappi, the manager, about his maybe playing one night, music hadn’t really gone anywhere for Llewyn.
Until tonight. Maybe. Three weeks ago, Llewyn had been down here on one of his customary trips, blowing fifty bucks at the bar on drinks he knew would never win him anything in Pappi’s book. He’d been asking about playing for months and it had gotten him nowhere, but that night something had told him to give it one last shot – and, of course, he landed the gig. This gig. New Year’s Eve. By the time Pappi, who had been stoned on heroin on that fateful evening, realized he’d promised what was arguably his best night all year, to a sad-eyed, slow-singing, dead-end folk artist, it was too late to retract the offer.
Llewyn was third up on stage. The two acts before him – a forties-style barbershop quartet who had not managed to please the crowd, and a small-voiced harpist, who had only elicited vulgar comments from the drunker patrons – were, needless to say, less than exciting. But he was nervous nonetheless. He hadn’t practiced much this week, and his best songs were only his best because Randall had been able to hit the high notes. He knew that even as the third act for a post-midnight, New Year’s Eve crowd, he’d have to do better than that.
The crowd wasn’t paying much attention, except for some guy in the middle, sitting by himself at a table, whose eyes, despite their droopy lids, were affixed to Llewyn’s face as if their gaze had been sewn there. Llewyn looked away from this man and down at the mike.
Before this, Llewyn had played for audiences exactly twice, both times on the ship, both times with his singing partner, both times after several shots of scotch. He had never performed alone. With a final sigh to himself, he let his eyelids flutter shut as he moved in toward the mike to say, “Good evening.”
The ambient voices lilted and waned to a whisper. He opened his eyes and was surprised by the crowd’s sudden attentiveness, their ethereal appearance beneath the moonlight streaming in from the skylight in the ceiling, and the yellow flood from the dim stage strip. None of their faces looked real, he thought, and that was helpful.
“I’m Llewyn Davis,” he said, slurring his words on purpose. “This is my first gig here at the Gaslight.”
A couple sparse cheers. The man with the eyes didn’t make a sound, but Llewyn saw the corner of his mouth tip up.
“This first one is something I wrote with a buddy from the Merchant Marine,” he said, and nobody said anything.
He picked the notes out from the strings of his guitar with just his fingertips – the work on the ships had toughed the skin there so that he didn’t need a pick. The tune was familiar enough, having played it on endless occasions on nights in the middle of nowhere, cloaked in moonlight stronger than what was leaking onto the stage. It was the words that gave him trouble.
He fumbled through them. Folk music was new to the scene – Llewyn himself had only heard about it recently, in an article he’d found thumbing through the back pages of a new copy of Billboard. Music with unknown origins. No one had to know that he’d made up half the words he’d just sung. It wasn’t his song, and it would never be his song, and they didn’t have to know that.
Emboldened by this mid-song realization, Llewyn stopped making up lyrics for the third verse. Instead he just played through it, the pleasant, melancholy sound of his guitar streaming through the air like the sad, warm complement to the chilly light above everyone’s heads. When he finished, improvising three extra instrumental verses to the end, there was a smattering of applause, and then people began to look at their watches: it was coming on one, now, and the subways wouldn’t be running much longer, and New Year’s Day was one for solemn reflection, not sleeping off a night of debauchery, so they’d better get going.
Llewyn started his next song, and even though it was one that he’d heard receive praise on the radio some time ago, by the time he’d finished it, the crowd had thinned to half its previous capacity.
The man who had stared at him was still there, though, and did not appear perturbed by the rest of the crowd’s dispersal. He sat comfortably in his wooden bar chair, hands on his belly, leaning back as if he’d drunk too much beer over the course of the evening and now it weighed, uncomfortably liquid, in his stomach.
“My last one,” Llewyn said, looking straight at the man in the audience, “is another one I wrote with my buddy from the Merchant Marine.”
The crowd kept thinning. This song was a long one, nearly six minutes, but Llewyn remembered more of the words this time, and even though the crowd consisted of Pappi and the man at the table by the time he was finished, he felt proud of himself when he strummed out the final chords of his song.
The man stood and clapped for him. Pappi began wiping down the bar, ignorant of anything going on behind him, as was usual when male performers were playing.
Llewyn didn’t have more than a minute to put his guitar back in its case before the man from the table was in his face.
He stuck out a hand. “Hi.”
Llewyn looked him over. He was taller than Llewyn by a solid six inches, and definitely heavier. He was drunk, certainly, but his eyes were kind despite the alcohol, and so Llewyn took the hand he proffered. “Hello. Llewyn Davis.”
“You said,” the man said. “I’m Mike Timlin.”
“Hey, lovebirds,” said Pappi from behind the bar. “We’re closin’ early. Get the fuck out.”
Mike looked a bit startled, but Llewyn nudged him and laughed. “That’s just Pappi. You wanna come out for a bit? Talk?”
“Yeah, actually,” Mike said. He didn’t seem startled by Llewyn’s sudden touch, like some men were. Llewyn took this as a good sign. “Hang on.” He walked back to his bar table, left a bill, grabbed his coat from where it was hanging on the back of his chair, and rejoined Llewyn, this time by the stage door.
Llewyn watched him the whole time, how he moved quickly despite his weight and the considerable amount of alcohol he appeared to have consumed, how his clothes fit him better than Llewyn’s ever had, until recently, how his shoulders rolled with a unique grace as he slung his heavy coat on over himself. He got the sense that Mike was a lot of things Llewyn would never be.
Llewyn held the stage door open for him, and they walked out into the freezing New York air. Streamers and glitter and paper confetti lined the Village streets. People were still out, but bars were closing, restaurants were closing, and the sidewalks were filling up quickly. The subway ran until two-thirty, but it was already two-fifteen and Llewyn didn’t want to end up stuck in a crowded rail car with this intriguing stranger on their way somewhere more amenable to conversation.
But he didn’t have his own place yet, and he’d brought women back to his parents’ house, but he had never brought home a man, and he didn’t really need his senile father to make any assumptions.
Regardless of whether those assumptions would end up being correct.
Or not.
Llewyn was running out of ideas quickly, but Mike spoke up.
“I have an apartment not too far from here,” he said. “It’s a couple blocks south of here, but we can walk.”
Llewyn shrugged, and started following Mike’s lead. He wove their way through the throngs of drunken celebrators fairly easily – his size made him easy to follow and hard not to let through. The walk was brisk and short, for which Llewyn was thankful, on account of his ill-exercised lungs freezing a little more with each breath.
Mike dug a ring of keys out of his coat pocket, dropped them, picked them up, shot a coy look at Llewyn, and then selected the right key from the ring and inserted it in the door. Llewyn had been hoping the tiny vestibule inside would be warm, but he had to wait another five good minutes until Mike unlocked the security door and they entered the stairwell before heat touched his face.
They climbed three flights of stairs before Mike approached a door, and by that point, Llewyn was horrendously out of breath. He didn’t know whether he felt validated, or secondhand-embarrassed when he realized that Mike, who lived here and should have been used to the stairs, was heaving breaths at an equal pace.
Mike unlocked the door, finally, and threw it open so Llewyn could enter first. It was dark, and Llewyn tried to step aside so that Mike could come in and find the light switch, but the second Llewyn stepped left, his hip came into contact with a sharp edge, and the force of his collision knocked something down, and it landed with a crash.
“Shit,” he said. Not a minute in the house of a stranger, and he was already breaking things. The light turned on, and he saw the splinters of a former ashtray littering the floor. “Hey, I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean –”
But Mike was too busy laughing to accept the apology. He waved it off, and Llewyn noticed for the first time that Mike was wearing fingerless gloves, the same kind Llewyn himself had ridiculously worn every winter he’d spent on land, as if he’d have to pick up a guitar at a moment’s notice, and not have time to take off his gloves.
“It’s no problem, Llewyn,” Mike said, and Llewyn tried to ignore the dribble of pleasure that leaked out of his heart when he hear his name pass Mike’s lips.
Mike walked past the shards on the floor and flopped straight onto the couch, belly-down. He let out a big sigh, and for a second Llewyn wondered if Mike had passed out, and he would be stranded here for the night. At least he’d have somewhere warm to sleep tonight – maybe even a real bed, if Mike had already claimed the couch for himself. But then, Mike rolled over and sat up, and said, “So,” and gestured for Llewyn to take a seat somewhere else in his little living room.
As he did, in a ratty orange plush armchair, Mike leaned back up against the couch and unbuttoned his pants. Llewyn didn’t know what to make of this, but as he watched Mike’s head loll a bit on the sofa cushions, he wondered if maybe Mike had somehow gotten drunker since they’d left the bar. Stand up and feel it, and all that.
The kitchen and the little living room were both in the same room, so, with a quick look at Mike, Llewyn got back up out of the orange armchair, crossed to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and returned to the living room area.
“Got you this,” he said, handing the glass to Mike, whose eyes fluttered open and then closed as he smiled, and took the glass from Llewyn.
“Thanks, pal,” he said, and gulped down the water fairly quickly. Llewyn wondered if he should look through some of the cabinets for crackers or bread or something, but he didn’t want to be too intrusive, if he was going to ask to stay over here. In a few minutes, though, Mike had consumed most of his water and was starting to perk up a bit, and Llewyn gave up on his crackers plot.
He sat down next to Mike on the couch. “So,” he said, angling himself toward Mike, “was there something you wanted to talk about?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mike said. He repositioned himself on the couch, leaned forward a little more so that he was closer to Llewyn’s face. “I saw you sing tonight, at the Gaslight.”
Llewyn tried not to laugh. “I know, that’s where we met.”
“Nice,” Mike said. “You were really good.”
“Thanks,” Llewyn said. “I’ve been playing a while, so I better be.”
Mike giggled, and it was kind of a silly, uncharacteristic thing. “Really? How long?”
“Few years.” It wasn’t exactly a lie – Llewyn had picked his first guitar up straight out of high school, nearly five years ago – but he had only been good enough to play for real for about a year.
“Well,” Mike said, “I sing, and I play too, and I’ve been for a few years, and I was wondering if you wanted to maybe collaborate sometime.”
It came out so fast, so confidently, that Llewyn didn’t really know how to react. He felt his smile, a phantom of the laugh he’d tried to hold back a moment ago, linger on his face for much longer than he felt was socially appropriate. “Oh,” he said, not really knowing what else to say.
Mike, who seemed unfortunately to have sobered up considerably in the last several minutes since Llewyn had given him the water, waited patiently for more a response. “So?” he prompted, when he didn’t get an answer.
But Llewyn still didn’t know what to say. The only other person he had ever worked well with on any sort of project was Diane, and the only project they’d been successful at was making and rather quickly aborting a child. He pushed the thought out of his mind before it could sour.
“Uh, I don’t know,” Llewyn said finally, and he could tell it wasn’t the response Mike had been hoping for.
“What’s stopping you?”
Llewyn shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m better as a solo act,” he said, and he was sure Mike could also feel the hollowness of that statement.
“Hm,” was all Mike could produce. Llewyn watched as processed this information, nodding his head, the shine in his eyes betraying the speed at which his brain was moving as he, most likely, thought about how bad Llewyn could possibly be as a partner.
Llewyn watched Mike for a long while. After a while, he relaxed a bit more against the couch, let out a couple of deep breaths. The clock on the wall above the radio told him it was 2:30 in the morning; apparently their walk to Mike’s apartment had taken much longer than Llewyn had felt it had.
“Is there anything I can say to convince you?” Mike asked finally, and Llewyn was a little startled by the resurgence of his voice.
Llewyn pushed his lips together, thought about it for a second. “I mean, I don’t think so. Last guy I worked with was a few years ago, when I was in the Merchant Marine, and –”
“Your buddy,” Mike filled in, and Llewyn nodded.
“Yeah. Him. And we didn’t get around to doing much,” Llewyn said. Sometimes he thought about Randall, and how all their nights together had been fraught with self-interest of solipsistic proportions. They had more fights than they wrote songs, which was why, after they docked almost two years ago, Randall went one way, and Llewyn went his own, and Llewyn never heard from him again. He often wondered about him, if he had gotten married, or gone into music too. Sometimes, if he’d had something to drink, Llewyn wondered if he liked to fuck guys like he had when Llewyn still knew him.
“Why’s that?” Mike asked.
“Well, there were a lot of reasons,” Llewyn said, and yeah, a lot of those reasons were that sometimes he and Randall blew their afternoons by blowing each other instead of actually writing music. And when they weren’t doing that, they were fighting, and the more Llewyn thought about it, the less sure he felt about which of those things he was more ashamed to admit to Mike.
But Mike raised his eyebrows like he needed details to be convinced about Llewyn’s shitty partnering abilities, and so Llewyn sighed and said, “We fought a lot.”
“About what?”
Llewyn sighed. It was closer now to 3:00 in the morning, and he wanted nothing more than to pass out already. “I don’t know, creative stuff, ambition stuff, the whole shebang.” He ran his tongue over his front teeth. “It wasn’t a great time.” And it wasn’t, when they weren’t fucking.
“That’s too bad,” Mike said. “But it is worth mentioning that creative differences change from person to person. You might not get the same experience partnering with someone else.” Then he clapped a hand on Llewyn’s shoulder, and it was heavy and warm and affectionate in a way Llewyn had, in all his years of service and almost-vagrancy, forgotten about. Something in the gesture made his uncertainty wane.
“I’m going to bed now, Llewyn,” Mike said, and Llewyn tried to ignore the little leap his heart gave when his name passed Mike’s lips again.
Mike stood up, and Llewyn noticed again that his pants were unbuttoned. He watched Mike, whose hips were at Llewyn’s eye-level, cross the room to the small dark hallway that led to another part of the apartment.
He was so mesmerized that he entirely forgot to ask if he could crash on the couch. “Hey,” he shouted after Mike, but he heard a door close. Since Mike hadn’t said anything to the contrary, Llewyn figured he wouldn’t mind if he passed out here for a bit, and snuck out before Mike got up the next morning.