👨🏻🎤 Misfits, Jocks and Electric Skye (Part 1)
First Draft Created: 2024-05-06 19:20
Last Updated: 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Skye was finally on his comedown from his big win that morning, which for him meant celebrating.
Naturally, this meant all of us were celebrating too.
Being Skye, he would neither take the money nor take the win from the the lucrative exhibition deal he had scored for his artwork, and would instead take us all - out for drinks. In fact, everything went on his tab - there was no limit imposed on our consumption.
This was a novelty for our crew of artists and writers - The Misfits, we branded ourselves - whose decision to make our passion our craft had all but removed the possibility of an entertainment budget.
He had also taken the opportunity to invite a number of new faces to our group. These faces were new to Skye, too, and were more along the lines of acquaintances of a certain friend who was the type to enthusiastically commit, request to invite his plus three, and then bail on the day due to some obscure reason or other.
Where others might have taken offence, Skye was in his element the more people joined the fray, and he enthused at welcoming new faces without reserve and without fail.
Thus, we now had among our crew several men I had never met, whom I could only describe as "jocks", as they could have been rugby players, or perhaps basketball players, for they had to duck upon entering the bar, and likely, through every door frame they had entered since they were fourteen.
They stood apart from our party, having arrived earlier than any of us - who arrived on Cape Town Time, despite many of us being freelancers of the flexible-hour sort - and they had thus only eventually been identified from a distance as part of the party by a late-arriving friend of the absent friend of the friends.
"Friends" appeared a relative term here - the three guys themselves seemed to be only slightly more familiar with each other than they were with any of us, which was to say, not at all.
To start a conversation now with these outliers and integrate them into the party seemed would require some skill, not to mention some motivation.
Not that their presence bugged me. They were just... well... they looked ...
Blonde Jock fidgeted with the vent zipper of his motorcycle jacket. Tanned Jock stared distractedly over the top of the heads of the other bar patrons, watching the television above display people he probably knew, shredding real-sized waves, far bigger than I'd attempted in the lacklustre surfing phase of my teens. And Shaved Head Jock... I didn't like how he kept staring at people. Perhaps it was simply his disinterest in smiling which added to the intimidation factor of being just that tall, muscular, and antagonistic to hair.
The Jocks stood together on the periphery, each with one arm crossed and the other hand cradling a comparatively minuscule beer bottle. In the left hand, for all of them. These guys cared about the buffalo rule. They had probably learned about it as soon as they'd turned 18.
Meanwhile, our group of mainstays had been caught up in babble about our creations and their progress, teasing and lightly bumping against each other, laughing and joking with the familiarity one has with the type of friends who have served in the trenches of financial struggle intertwined with artistic passion's pain and that same shared resignation surrounding society's misunderstanding of them. A scenario of reunion in which the plight of those one does not know holds little sway over one's attention on the existing bonds of friendship and shared struggle.
Still, despite our conversation's allure, I had broken from The Misfits with some reluctance and started walking towards these three, hoping to at some juncture break the ice for them in the figurative sense at least - for they seemed otherwise far more adept at icebreaking than me - when Skye beat me to the... well to the welcome, bouncing over with a cocktail almost as tall as he was, which is to say, a cocktail, whose colour seemed designed to match his name and hair colour. I took note that his cocktail was in his right hand.
The sudden manifestation of Skye seized my attention away from The Jocks, as Skye's presence, despite his height, tended to, in a similar manner to how people will always stop to point out a butterfly flitting by.
A distraction by Skye was always welcome, and not merely because these three made me feel insecure about both my height and build. Still, it did not hurt that the man approaching was one of the few guys who made me feel insecure about neither, for though I envied his style and esteemed to possess his ease in conversational abilities, he certainly looked up to me in at least one sense of the phrase.
Skye arrived between us, magnetizing all eyes in his direction with zero effort, and beamed.
"HIIIII-IIII!" Raising his voice above the music, he switched the cocktail to his left hand, his now-free right flicking his hair out of his eyes to meet each guy's in succession with the type of open frankness that fully distracted me from taking note of who else was blushing at the connection's strange intimacy, and offering a little wave around the group.
"Thanks for joining us! Anyone want more drinks?" he enthused.
I had already been made aware that Skye hadn't been the one to invite these guys directly - he didn't know these friends-of-friend-who-cancelled - so the reaction of all three - like their attendance - was not something I had been expecting.
I was, in fact, not even sure that these jocks had even met our man of the hour, who had been all over the room and barely involved in Misfit conversation, and in fact suspected that these gents had simply been buying their own drinks rather than impose on a stranger's tab.
As a result, I was taken aback at the immediacy and markedness of their response to Skye's welcome.
Surfer Jock immediately straightened up, running a hand through his hair. Blonde Jock noticeably puffed out his chest, angling himself more assertively towards the direction of Skye. And Shaved Head guy looked... well his jaw dropped for a moment, before swiftly closing.
The eyes of three jocks darted left and right at each other and I watched rapid telepathy in action, three faces updating with the speed of revelation common in the players of team sports - split-second calculations of would-be friends and conversants-in-arms becoming sized-up frenemies and obstacles to a competing goal, at least for tonight.
Three jaws set themselves. Several veins in foreheads bulged. Three pairs of eyes returned to lock on Skye. I did not appear to have been noticed, despite having caught up to the group two seconds after Skye, albeit hanging back a metre or two, as I possessed neither Skye's energy of a thousand suns, nor his glow, the level of which lived on disarm. Just call me ninja, I suppose, though my natural invisibility was a bug, not a feature.
"How about..." Blonde began.
"Let me..." Surfer interrupted.
"Let us," with a sideways glare that silenced the other two, Shaved Head overruled: "Buy you a drink".
Skye's eyes grew as large as saucers.
"But it's all on my..."
"No, please," Surfer interrupted again.
"We insist." Blonde affirmed.
Skye beamed. "Sure!"
He looked behind him, up at me, the light of socialisation dancing in his eyes. "I'm sure we'd love to join you!"
Three more pairs of eyes all bored into me, finally noticing me for the first time.
I doubted their intentions were cause for concern. Based on the flush still lingering on all three sets of cheeks, the foot-shuffling, hair smoothing, the sudden drop of clasped arms to hang stiffly at sides apon Skye's arrival, and the careful attempts to not grip beer bottles too tightly - another thing I assumed these guys had learned to mind besides doorframes.
Still, I decided to keep an eye on them, and on Skye.
Because, well, Skye.
"I'd love a drink" I emphasised. I closed the two steps between us to drape my arm around Skye's shoulders like a python dropping from a tree to claim a nearby animal.
Skye gave a little squeal and nestled under, despite his knees buckling from the unexpected weight. Snaking his arms around my waist, he leaned in to hug me as if wanting to be instantly absorbed. Only a heartless monster could resist that, I thought.
I watched the faces of all three jocks drop slightly, three sets of shoulders momentarily slumped. Then, glancing at each other, they squared them again, and the next moment, all three were heading - striding - racing each other? - towards the bar as if it were trying to lose them in crowd. Which hopefully, we wouldn't soon too.
"We're going with them," I urged, grasping Skye's arm as soon as The Jocks started heading off.
Skye, as usual, didn't protest or even seem to notice I was pulling him. He scuttled alongside me, giggling and several times stopping to wave at someone in the bar before being jerked along by my pace, which didn't let up.
I doubted these guys were anything to worry about. But still. Always watch your friends' drinks.
One day, I would just have to nut up and explain to Skye why so many jocks wanted to buy drinks for guys like him.
As well as many totally average, not-too-tall-not-that-short guys.
👨🎤 Misfits, Jocks and Electric Skye - Part 2 (Conclusion) ⏭
Thanks for reading!
You can 💬 comment feedback on this story on my draft blog!