Chapter 20: The Truth Comes Out
America has a homeless problem that most people would rather not look at directly.
At the root of it, the common thread is usually isolation — people who've lost their connections, their family, their safety net. But the roads that lead there are different for everyone.
There are middle-class people who stretched too far and got buried by debt. Veterans back from overseas who came home with wounds nobody could see and no real system waiting to catch them. People who got swallowed by addiction. Retirees who worked their whole lives and still came up short. People who lost everything to a medical bill, a divorce, a flooded basement.
There are working people — regular jobs, no bad habits — who put everything they had into a down payment, then got blindsided by a tax lien, or alimony, or some expense they never saw coming, and watched their finances collapse in a matter of months. They live out of their cars. They shower at truck stops or wash up in park bathrooms with a gallon jug.
Some have it worse than that. No education, no credit history, no ID, no references — landlords won't touch them, employers won't touch them, and so they end up living day to day on whatever they can find, with no clear way back.
Most of these people didn't end up here because they stopped trying. They tried. The math just didn't work in their favor.
Andrew thought about that as he played, watching a man a little ways down the path who'd stopped to listen. If he hadn't had the thing that happened to him — the awakening, the memories, the shift in how he saw everything — he probably would've ended up somewhere on that spectrum himself.
His situation before had been a mess waiting to happen. Inheritance tax, property tax, the debts Evan had left behind, a half-dozen other obligations piling up on top of each other, and nothing on the other side of the ledger except a high school diploma and no real skills. Once the money from selling the apartment ran out covering all of that, there wouldn't have been much left to work with.
Good thing I didn't come into this after I'd already hit bottom, he thought. That would've been a different kind of story entirely.
He held onto that thought for a moment — the specific mix of relief and unease that came with it — then let it go and went back to playing.
His guitar playing was genuinely good at this point. Good enough to hold a crowd, good enough that a band would have taken him seriously as a session player. Combined with the fact that he wasn't hard to look at, there was probably a ceiling somewhere above where he was currently standing.
But this wasn't the era where you could record something in your bedroom and wake up famous. The music industry in New York right now ran on connections and compromise and a particular kind of patience Andrew didn't have and wasn't interested in developing. You saw it all around you — talented people waiting for a break that was always one more step away, always conditional on something they hadn't agreed to yet.
Joey Tribbiani was one of the most naturally charismatic people Andrew had ever met, and the guy was still grinding through auditions for bit parts. That was the reality of it.
Andrew wasn't built for that kind of long game. Too much of it was out of his hands, and too much of the cost was the kind you paid in ways you didn't get back.
He played until he needed a rest, rested until he felt like playing again. He wasn't here to maximize anything. The practice was the point, and whatever he made on top of that was a bonus.
By four o'clock he was done. He'd been at it intermittently for the better part of the afternoon and his guitar experience had gone up, though not dramatically — progress at this level came in smaller and smaller increments the further along you got. He didn't have natural talent as a foundation; what he had was the system, and the system moved at its own pace.
He checked the guitar bag. The case had collected a little over a hundred and forty dollars in cash, plus — he fished them out and counted — eleven slips of paper with phone numbers written on them in various handwriting.
He stared at those for a moment.
Even when you couldn't go viral, being easy on the eyes had its advantages.
At this rate I could have a food truck in three months, he thought, and felt a flicker of real excitement before his brain caught up to it. First day. Novelty factor. The numbers wouldn't hold. Busking was unpredictable and inconsistent — good for supplemental income, not for building toward something with a deadline.
The bar gig was steadier. And there was still room to negotiate his rate up if he played it right.
He pocketed the cash, tore the phone numbers into confetti, dropped them in a trash can, shouldered his guitar bag, and headed out of the park.
Two hours later. Central Perk.
"Wait, you're actually doing a food truck?" Chandler asked, looking more engaged than he usually let himself appear.
"That's the plan." Andrew had made his decision sometime in the last hour. A food truck made more sense than a storefront — less overhead, fewer fixed obligations, and more flexibility. He'd also been reading about conversions. A lot of commercial food trucks could be modified into something closer to an RV, which fit the longer-term picture he'd been building in his head.
Ross had opinions about vehicles, and once he started, he had a lot of opinions about vehicles. Andrew listened, agreed at reasonable intervals, and let him go. Chandler sat with his drink and occasionally said something dry and slightly unkind about whatever Ross had just said. It was comfortable, in its way.
At about six-ten, the door opened.
Phoebe walked in wearing a red dress that she had clearly chosen on purpose.
Chandler made a sound.
"Don't," Phoebe said, smile disappearing instantly. "Whatever that sound was, never make it again."
"My sincerest apologies," Chandler said, in the tone of someone who was not sorry at all.
Phoebe dismissed him entirely and turned to Andrew. "How do I look?"
"Really good," Andrew said. "Where are we going?"
"I picked the place already." She smoothed her skirt. "Come on."
"After you," Andrew said.
Chandler made a collapsing motion against the bar, like a man being slowly poisoned by secondhand awkwardness.
Phoebe didn't acknowledge him. She led Andrew out the door with the energy of someone who had somewhere to be and was pleased about it.
The restaurant turned out to be closer than Andrew expected — two subway stops, maybe fifteen minutes door to door. Which was fine. What wasn't fine was the quality of Phoebe's smile as they got closer. It kept getting wider in a way that had nothing to do with Andrew's company and everything to do with something she was anticipating.
He knew that smile. It was the smile of someone sitting on a punchline.
They ordered. Everything was normal. The food came.
And then a woman in a chef's coat and a tall white hat came out of the kitchen, spotted their table, and stopped dead.
"Phoebe? Andrew?"
Monica. Of course it was Monica.
Andrew pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. There it was.
Phoebe speared a cherry from her salad, ate it slowly, and said, with complete satisfaction:
"I won."
"PHOEBE." Monica's voice climbed several registers at once.
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