
Most who darkened the doorway here, belonged; he did not...Too young, too clean, too smooth, too quick to try to engage. What ever his angle was, it stuck out and didn't fit. Amid the sad lushes, angry hicks, and disgruntled cops who haunted the joint, he was all wrong if that could even be said in such a situation...
He often appeared during the rare rushes, after 2AM, and would cozy up to this or that cluster of drinkers. Most seemed to know him and accept him, though there was always a distance or remove. He'd buy a round of shots and laugh louder than the rest at their tired quips. Most of'em had known one another for decades, their banter well-worn and instinctive as breath, while his attempts at conviviality rang false, grating...
Why did he come here? This wasn't the spot to make friends or find love, unless scraping the bottom of a barrel was one's idea of romance. It was mostly a closed society, unwelcoming and unbending in its customs and rites. His presence had to be in the service of commerce, selling some sort of oblivion unavailable from the dusty bottles behind the bar. No proof at all to support this idea except a rock-hard gut feeling. A bartender's sense that someone else was profiting from their unquenching need to forget...
While it wasn't in the job description to ascribe motives to the clientele, seeing the same types night after night encouraged and often necessitated all kinds of speculation. Most were easy to pin down: the everyday joe who needed two shots and a beer to get a kind word out, the over-the-hill party girl desperate for just one more night as Belle of the Ball, the old duffer who'd seen it all and told it all the same way over and over and over again, the ugly couple who took their bedroom quibbles out to the tavern to make them seem more interesting than they really were, the angry alkie looking to focus his anger at a fixed target, and many many others...Encountering one that didn't fit was rare and a little unsettling, so this particular intruder demanded more attention than the rest...
To say that our interactions were unpleasant would overstate it, though an undercurrent of mistrust certainly hovered in the immediate vicinity. His forced mirth and chumminess was hardly valued or reciprocated. For the most part though, all the misgivings and suspicions could be tolerated, until the night he had to be cut off...
That evening it was round after round and he got louder and louder until it became necessary to make the good times go away. Apprised of the situation, a new side of him appeared. Seething, threatening, dark eyes flashing fury, he refused to believe his fun could be halted so abruptly. He hung around another half hour casting his death stare my way, then left promising to be back...At closing time, he was lurking in the shadows across from the door, in the underpass. Forty five minutes later though, with the dishes clean, garbage tossed, chairs up, and bar gleaming wet, the coast was clear. The grudge would wait, the anger apparently not great enough to cohere into action. He'd be back and so would I and we'd play this thing out another night...







