The shaker was frozen and stuck to his wet fingers as he pulled it out of the freezer. He kept the ice in it and whatever remnants of liquor that didn't pour out into his glass each time. And now he measured the gin and mixed in the vermouth. He stirred it carefully but vigorously because a martini is best served cold. He attached the lid and opened up the strainer and poured it out into the frosty glass. He dropped in two blue cheese olives and poured just a little bit of the juice into the icy cocktail. The first sip was the best thing that happened to him that day. It wouldn't last long.

He stayed home from work again. He couldn't afford to lose the pay but he couldn't bear to face his colleagues. Steve was most assuredly becoming an alcoholic. At least he waited till noon to start drinking. Most days. For some reason that seemed better than drinking with breakfast. Although he did think about drinking at breakfast. He thought about drinking at school. He thought about drinking when he was driving. He thought about drinking all the time. He felt weak. He felt as if he were deteriorating. And it seemed natural with age. 

He felt like he deserved it.

At school he could be sober. Jeremy, his friend and colleague, taught social studies and played guitar in his empty classroom when he wasn't teaching. He had borrowed a nylon string classical guitar from the guitar teacher's stock, and he would play 12 bar blues over and over again. Steve was a fan of the blues and he played guitar himself. He would sometimes wander into Jeremy's room and grab the guitar from the table and play a few chords that he knew. Steve was always impressed because Jeremy always seemed to know just a little bit more than Steve. But Jeremy had a half a year of sobriety. 187 days to be exact. A fact he wasn't shy to share. A fact that until quite recently had no real effect on Steve. Steve never thought being sober was important until he could no longer be it.

They talked about the blues and rock & roll. Jeremy was the kind of guy who was effusive. He was quick to throw praise around and quick to chop people into bits if he didn’t like what they were spitting out into the world. He was mercurial, but he was a compassionate person. His temper would get the best of him at times. Steve remembered that Jeremy had been an angry drunk. Steve was a sad drunk. Jeremy was the type that when he was drunk he would curse the universe and kick the teeth out of it with his steel-toed boots. Steve was the type who would send ridiculous text messages to women whom he barely knew. If only one of those messages had led to some sort of human resource issue, maybe Steve would be sober by now. Or maybe he would have been fired. All Steve knew was that there was a time at the beginning of the school year when Jeremy seemed to crawl into the ground with his mouth taped shut. Tragedy collapsed his lungs. Everything happened with Jeannie, his wife. The strange relationship between his anger and his drinking seemed to find a resolution. Jeremy was able to make a decision about his story with drinking, and for the first time Steve was envious of Jeremy.

“I'm looking for a drummer. They are hard to find.” Jeremy leaned back in his chair, fingers woven together, supporting his head.

“Drummers are always crazy. It takes a special kind of human being to choose to be a drummer. They're not involved with the melody or the music. But they are pivotal.” Steve had never been in a band with a drummer, but he knew enough of them to know they were always peculiar. 

“I didn't appreciate that in the past but I understand it now. So I'm courting this one guy who plays drums. He likes to talk about 20th century history. I guess I'm in luck. He digs that I teach social studies. I'm pretty sure his favorite teachers were social studies teachers. So I'm hoping I can convince him to join.”

“Have you got an actual band?”  Steve attributed this to the many changes he had seen in Jeremy since he got sober.  And since Jeannie.

“Well, my friend plays bass and I'm going to say that I can play guitar.” He grinned.  “Three of us would be enough, right?” The Replacements were echoing out of the tiny laptop speakers. 

“I’m in love…with that song.” Jeremy patted his palms on the desk.

Steve thought about joining their band but he knew it was impossible. Jeremy was a control freak. Jeremy wrote songs. He was a writer. Steve would eventually reject him. Steve knew this in general. He was always careful when they had conversations because he knew he was capable of saying things that would spark Jeremy's anger. In fact there had been moments. There was the morning when Jeremy came out of his classroom, bellowing at Adelia, the science teacher. Unfortunately, he was interrupting Steve and the joke he was telling her. When Steve twisted and told Jeremy to be quiet, Jeremy got offended in a way that shook his core. It took days for Steve to eventually get Jeremy to calm down. He had to send him a YouTube video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing the blues at a whistle stop in her overcoat and a flower hat. And then he had to wait a day. But Jeremy came around. Steve knew he would.

“Jeremy.”  Steve took a phony casual breath. “How did you do it?  How did you quit drinking?  Was it Jeannie?”  Steve felt her name fall out of his mouth like an egg rolling off a counter.

Jeremy made the most thoughtful face Steve had ever seen him make.  And then it collapsed and he scratched the thinning hair on his round head. “Jeannie had nothing to do with it.”

“But it seemed like you quit right when she got sick.”

“It did.  It did seem that way.”  Jeremy galloped his fingers on his keyboard, inspiring a few random beeps and bops. “It was a dick pic. I sent a dick pic.”

Steve blinked.  Nothing else Jeremy could have said would have been more unexpected.  “Excuse me?”

“You heard what I said. I'm not going to say it again.”  Jeremy looked Steve straight in the eye. The story Jeremy was about to tell had never been told before. In fact Jeremy was surprised he was going to tell it. It was dangerous. Steve had never known anyone who sent a dick pic. He had never taken a picture of his own penis. He didn't fully understand why Jeremy would do it, and so he sat as quietly as he could with his ears open as wide as they would get and waited for what was going to be an amazing story.

“At least a year before Jeannie was diagnosed, I was online and hunting.  I had signed up for Tinder and was actually meeting and dating younger women. Much younger women. 19, 20, 21. Try not to judge me on this. I realize these young women were not much older than our students, but they were older. I could see a difference. Things at home with Jeannie were terrible. I don't know if she had cancer yet, but she definitely didn't want anything to do with me. I don't think we had sex in the previous five years. But we had Liam and we had our families and the expectation that we were happy. We were happy. I mean I was in love with Jeannie in high school. She was two years older and the most artistic member of her class. You can see it in the yearbook superlatives. She had her hair cut short on one side and long on the other. She wore turtlenecks and long black skirts.  But nothing could cover up her amazing figure. Cross country might have been for the dorks of school but it did wonders for Jeannie’s butt and her long long legs. She wanted nothing to do with me in high school. But I chased her. I was friends with her brother, and I chased her even after she left high school. Even while she was going to Community College. I was mad about her and when I finally got the chance to sit down with her as an adult, I was somehow able to cash in all those years of crushing on her and  earn her attention. We got married and made Liam and bought a house. I became a teacher, and she went to work for Ethan Allen Furniture. She was amazing at designing showrooms all across the country. It was a very good life, but of course like everything it didn't last.

 “Once everything fell apart, I found myself so lonely. One of our students approached me on Facebook years after she graduated. She confessed that she had a crush on me.  I thought she did, but I never did anything about it of course. Well I probably gave her extra attention and that didn't help, but I never did anything inappropriate.  After she contacted me on Facebook I did something inappropriate. I took her to a hotel room and had sex with her. It was like being with Jeannie for the first time all over again. She was young and strong and skinny. I threw up. I didn't even make it to the toilet. I threw up in that little sink that's outside the bathroom. I took her home in silence. I never saw her again. She blocked me on Facebook.

“But now I had a taste for it. I wanted someone like her. someone young and open, who would laugh at my jokes every time. I made a profile and spent hours on Tinder. Several times I was successful. Sometimes the young women advertised that they wanted a sugar daddy. Sometimes they just liked being with an older man. I wasn't a sugar daddy, but I certainly was happy to buy dinner and a gift or two if they came back for a second night. I had one simple rule though. I never clicked on anyone under 20. I figured that was old enough. 2 decades. Halfway through college is enough distance between when they might have been my student as a senior and when they weren't.

I was in the throes of this fever when Jeannie got sick. You would have thought it would have stopped me but it didn't. All the nights that Jeannie spent in the hospital left me alone and free to cruise up and down the Tinder highway. My drinking picked up as well. Sex with these young women certainly didn't fill the empty spot inside of me and the guilt that I felt was overwhelming. Beer.  Beer was a friend. But Beer was a friend who whispered in my ear and told me that the dating app was set up to make sure that even an 18 year old was actually an 18 year old. So one night when I was very very drunk and Jeannie was very very sick in the hospital, I clicked the wrong person. Genesis. That's what she said. That's what she called herself. And without any prompting and for absolutely no reason whatsoever, I sent her a picture of my dick.”

Steve wanted a martini.  He wanted three.

“Talking to her the next day I began to suspect that something was wrong. She told me she was working at a school to help clean. She said it was her job. I thought about how at our school Mr. Bob would often bring in the juniors and seniors to help clean. Service Learning hours. But I had never known our school system to just hire young people for a summertime job. I had hoped that maybe she was 18. Even if she was a student, I was hoping she had just graduated. I was careful in the way I talked to her. I didn't want her to tell me she was under 18. I didn't know much about the law at the time. I just assumed that if she lied I would be safe. I later found out that wasn't true. I later found out that I had committed a pretty serious crime. The crime was punishable by a minimum of one year in jail.  A crime that could be tried at anytime.

“Then I did something that I regretted. I looked up her screen name. Her name on Tinder was Genesis but she had a screen name as well. Most likely her Snapchat. I looked it up and found someone who could easily be considerably younger than even 17. I went to her online and I told her to please delete my picture. I told her that I could have my life ruined if that picture ever got out. She promised that she would delete it. She understood what I was saying. She even apologized but still she could be 12 years old. Do you hear me Steve? She could be 12 years old.”

Steve Looked over at Jeremy's guitar. It was nicked and bruised. It had seen better days.

“ There was nothing I could do. I would sit in school and imagine the principal coming back with two men in suits. Two detectives who would take me away in handcuffs in front of everybody. I walked my dog and looked at all the cars that were parked in the neighborhood. I was looking for the one car that might be the car of law enforcement, watching my every move. I wanted things to change. I gave up Tinder, and I gave up the sex. I went to the Maryland Food Bank and I volunteered. I would go there on Saturdays. I started volunteering at other places as well. The soup kitchen downtown had openings for people who wanted to come in early in the morning to help get the kitchen ready. I would do that before school every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. When I drove through the city I would always have a stack of $1 bills sitting on the seat next to me. The rule was that anybody who approached the car asking for money would get a dollar. I had to do something to take the stain off of me. I had to do something to make amends. And that's why I stopped drinking.

“ And that's when Jeannie died.”

There was a long ugly silence.  Steve put all the pieces together in his head finally. He realized exactly what Jeremy had been saying. He had not quit drinking because Jeannie was sick or because Jeannie died. He quit drinking because he was an asshole. He was afraid he was going to be caught and convicted of being a pedophile. Steve felt like his teeth were loose in his head and so he closed his mouth tightly.

I buried my wife and I buried Tinder, and I haven't had sex with a single living soul since. but I'm sober. Thank God I'm sober. I believe in a higher power. I believe there's something outside of myself that is bigger than I am. And I believe I am the luckiest man alive. But I still look over my shoulder. I still wonder about the door knock. And Liam will rush to the door and find the two detectives. They will have to take both of us. They can't leave Liam alone. They can’t leave a 12 year old all alone without a mother or a father.”

“And children by the million wait for Alex Chilton

To come around, 'round

They sing "I'm in love

What's that song?

I'm in love

With that song”