Nick's Trip (2 page)

“So,” I said lamely, “you sell much Schlitz here, Sherry?”

“We don’t sell it at all,” she said.

“I thought, you know, with the sign and all.”

“We put up whatever the liquor distributors give us,” she said, then shrugged and gave me a weak smile. “Fuck it. You know?”

Yeah, I knew. It was my kind of place and I was due. I returned there every day for the next two weeks and drank with clear intent.

In those two weeks I got to know some of the regulars and became a familiar face to the small staff. Sherry was, predictably, looking for other work, as was the other shift bartender, a stout-faced, square-jawed German woman named Mai who had married and then left a young marine as soon as her green card had come through. There was an all-purpose busboy/cleanup man named Ramon, a little Salvadoran with a cocky, gold-toothed smile who didn’t understand English except when it had something to do with quiff or his paycheck. The cook, Darnell, worked in a small kitchen to the side of the bar. Mostly I saw his long, skinny arms as he placed food on the platform of the reach-through.

Phil Saylor was the proprietor of the Spot. He came in for a couple of hours in the afternoon and I presumed at closing time to do the book work. Saylor was an unlikely looking—short, soft in the middle, wire-rim spectacles—ex–D.C. cop, originally
from South Texas, who had quit the force a couple of years earlier and opened this place. He seemed to make a living at it and to enjoy it. Certainly he enjoyed his abominable bourbon and Diet Cokes, which as owner he inexplicably opted to drink with Mattingly and Moore, the house rotgut.

Saylor’s past explained the unusually large percentage of detectives on the D.C. squad who were regulars. Though the Fraternal Order of Police bar in lower Northwest was still popular with D.C.’s finest, this was a place where cops could drink without restraint and in private. And unlike at the FOP, where they were expected to unwind with “a few” after work, they could do their unscrutinized drinking at the Spot while still on duty. In fact, in my two weeks spent with bent elbows at the bar of the Spot, it became obvious that this was a place where serious drinkers from all across the city came to get tanked in peace, without the presence of coworkers, hanging plants, brass rails, or waitresses who overfamiliarly (and falsely) addressed them as “gentlemen.”

One Monday late in May I watched the bar as Sherry and Saylor retired to the kitchen for a short discussion. I was alone in the place and had gained Saylor’s trust to the point where I was allowed to help myself. I reached into the cooler and popped a Bud and nursed it for the next fifteen minutes while I listened to Ma Rainey on the deck.

Sherry emerged from the kitchen and began to gather up what looked to be her things, stuffing a romance paperback into her purse and then picking up a dusty umbrella from the side of the cooler. Her eyes were a little watery as she leaned in and kissed me lightly on the cheek before walking from behind the bar and then out the front door.

Saylor came out of the kitchen a little later and poured himself a straight shot of Mattingly and Moore. He adjusted the wire rims on his nose as if he were going to do something smart, but instead did something stupid and fired back the shot.

When he caught his breath he looked through me and said,
“God, I hate that.” His face was screwed tight, but I guessed he wasn’t talking about the speed-rail bourbon. “I knew she was giving away drinks to jack up her tips—all of ’em do it, even the honest ones—but there was money missing, five, ten a day, all this past month. I had to let her go, man; I didn’t have any choice.”

“Don’t worry about it, Phil.” I had pegged Sherry for a gonif the first day I met her but felt I had no duty to inform Saylor. I didn’t owe him anything, not yet. “You still got Mai,” I said.

He nodded weakly. “Yeah, and she wants more shifts. But she’s got a temper, man, with me
and
the customers. I don’t think I can handle that German wench in here all the time.” His hands spread out. “I guess I gotta go through the process of looking for a new girl.”

I looked at my beer bottle and saw a thousand more like it on a hundred more dark afternoons. Then I looked into the bar mirror and saw my lips moving. They said, “Hell, I’ll bartend for ya, Phil.”

He pushed his glasses up again and said, “You kidding?”

“Why not? The cases aren’t exactly building up,” I said with understatement, then told the biggest lie of the day. “Besides, I’ve done some bartending in my time.”

Saylor thought it over. “I never had a man behind the bar here. Can’t say any of these guys would notice the difference.” I lit a Camel while he talked himself into it. “I guess I could give you a few shifts, try it out. You start tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said with the misguided, giddy enthusiasm common in long-term unemployment cases. “Tomorrow.”

On the way home I stopped at the MLK Library and borrowed a book on mixology called
Karla’s Kocktail Kourse,
then took it back to my apartment in the Shepherd Park area of Northwest. The book was fine (except for those ridiculous
K
’s in the title) and entertaining with its modern fifties, triangularly matted illustrations, complete with hostesses serving drinks in June Cleaver dresses and the author’s insistence on displaying
cocktails set next to burning cigarettes. I studied into the night; my cat, confused by my diligence, alternately circled and slept on my feet the entire time. When morning came I was ready.

But I was never really put to the test. I found, with some disappointment, that the patrons of the Spot were hardly the type to call for Rob Roys or sidecars, or any of the book’s other extravagant concoctions whose ingredients I had memorized. Neither were they, as Saylor had predicted, unhappy (or happy, for that matter) to see me behind the bar. Generally, their nostalgia for the Sherry dynasty faded with my first shift and their first pop of the day.

As the weeks went by I got quicker with the bottles and memorized most of the regulars’ drinks. I snuck my own music onto the deck and received only a couple of belches, and kept the promise to myself never to drink on shift, which made that first one at the end of the day go down even better. I made few mistakes, though the ones I did make were memorable.

There was a guy I called Happy, partly because of what I am convinced was his inability to smile. Happy had hair like gray seaweed, a flat, veined nose, and heavily bagged eyes. He was taken to wearing baby-shit brown sport jackets with white stitching at the seams. The jackets appeared to have the texture of Styrofoam. Often he’d fall asleep at the bar with his hand limply wrapped around his drink glass. One afternoon he spit a mouthful of manhattan over the bar shortly after I served it to him. I looked his way.

“I asked for a manhattan,” he mumbled loudly.

I thought of the only explanation. “Sorry. I must have used the dry vermouth instead of the sweet vermouth.”

“Listen,” he said with a fierce stare and a voice informed by sixty Chesterfields a day. “When I order a manhattan, I don’t want
any
kind of vermouth, you hear? Pour an ounce of bourbon into a martini glass and drop a fuckin’ cherry in it. Understand?”

I nodded that I did.

For the summer I had four shifts a week and accumulated
quite a bit of cash in the bottom drawer of my dresser. Ironically, I picked up some investigative work soon after I started at the Spot.

The first was a shadow job on the wife of a greeting-card salesman who suspected her of adultery. The salesman had out-of-town accounts and subsequently was away from home three days a week. I spent a good amount of time sitting in my Dodge at the parking lot of her office building in Rockville, smoking too many cigarettes and listening to what was becoming a decidedly boring, unprogressive WHFS. At noon I’d follow her and a couple of her friends to their lunch destination, then follow her back to the office. It wasn’t until her husband left town, however, that she cut loose. On the day of his departure she left work early and drove to some garden apartments off the Pike. Two hours later she was gone and I was reading the name off her lover’s mailbox. The next day they met at Romeo’s apartment for a lunch boff, and I snapped his picture as he walked out the door to return to work. I gave the photos to the husband and watched his lips twitch as he wrote me a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars. It took the better half of a fifth of Grand-Dad that night to wash his broken face from my mind.

Shortly thereafter, the parents of a high school sophomore in Potomac signed me on to get to the bottom of what they hysterically perceived to be their daughter’s growing interest in satanism. I hooked up with her fairly easily through her mall-rat friends and we had lunch. She seemed bright, though unimaginative, and her devil worship turned out to be no more than hero worship. She was into Jim Morrison and her ambition, man, was to visit his grave in Paris. In the conference with her parents I told them that in my youth I had survived a fling with Black Sabbath and early Blue Öyster Cult without killing a single cat. They didn’t smile, so I told them to relax; in six years their daughter would be driving to law school in her VW Cabriolet and listening to Kenny G like all her other friends from Churchill High. They liked that better and stroked me a check for two hundred and a half. After that I resolved to be more selective in
my cases (my bar shifts were keeping me solvent), but I’ll never know if I would have held to it since in any case the phone, for the remainder of the year, neglected to ring.

Summer passed and then the fall. When I wasn’t at the bar I spent my time reading, jumping rope, riding my ten-speed and, once a week, sparring with my physician, Rodney White, who in addition to being a reliable general practitioner was a second-degree black belt. Occasionally I kept company and slept with my friend Lee, a senior at American University.

The mayor’s arrest on charges of possession was big news, though that event was more significant for the local media’s shameful self-congratulatory arrogance and their inability to see the real story: the murder rate was at another record high and the gap was widening between the races, socially and economically, every day. But of course there was no story there, no angle. The colonizer and the colonized, just like the textbooks say.

This was also the year that I was to both lose and make two special friends. The friend I made was Jackie Kahn, a bartender at a woman’s club called Athena’s, located two doors down from the Spot. As I was walking past the windowless establishment one evening in late September, I noticed a flier tacked on the door concerning an upcoming “womyn’s” march. I stepped inside and, ignoring a few mildly unfriendly stares, went directly to the bar and had a seat. The bartender gave me the once-over before she asked me what I’d have. She had short black hair and high cheekbones, and deep brown, intelligent eyes. I asked her name first and she said it was Jackie. I ordered a Bud.

After she served it she said tiredly, “Why do you want to come in here, make trouble or something? I mean, we don’t mind getting a few guys now and then. But they’re usually the New York Mary types, you know what I’m saying?”

“I’m a high school English teacher,” I said, feeling a sudden rush from the two bourbons I had rocketed before closing the Spot. “I noticed a misspelling on your flier outside. You have
women
with a
y
. Just thought I’d point it out.”

“That’s the way
we
spell it,” said a humorless type with slicked-back hair sitting to my left. I had the feeling this one didn’t like me much. She confirmed it with her next suggestion: “Why don’t you just move it the fuck on out of here, chief?”

“He’s all right,” Jackie said, surprising me. She was looking at me with a smile threatening to break across her face. “What do you
really
want?”

“A beer,” I said, and extended my hand. She shook it. “My name’s Nick. I bartend over at the Spot. Didn’t feel like having that last one alone tonight.” I chin-nodded to the table in the corner. “Thought I’d shoot a game of pool while I was in here. That all right, Jackie?”

“Sure.” She nodded, then leaned in close and, with an amazingly quick read of my personality, said, “But do me a favor, Nick—don’t be an asshole. Okay?”

I began to frequent Athena’s fairly regularly after work for a beer and a game of pool. An ex-Brooklyner named Mattie would wait for me to come in and we’d shoot one game of eight ball for a five spot. Athena’s was typical of most of the women’s bars in Washington. It was owned by men who saw it only as an exploitable market niche and therefore tended to neglect it in terms of cleanliness and decor. But it was a place to go. To sensationalize the scene would be to give it too much credit; lesbian bars were the same as any other singles bars, with the identical forced gaiety and underlying streams of sadness. People met and fucked or resisted and went home alone.

Jackie and I began to spend time together outside of our jobs, going to the movies or having a beer or two at some of the saner places on the Hill. She was an accountant at a Big Eight firm downtown and moonlighted at Athena’s for relaxation and to escape the masquerade that was apparently more necessary for gay women than it was for their male counterparts. Occasionally she’d poke her head in the Spot to say hello, and invariably one of my regulars would boast that he could “turn one of those ‘rug munchers’ around” if he had the chance. This was especially
exasperating coming from guys who hadn’t even been mercy-fucked by their own wives for years. As our friendship developed I began to pat myself on the back for finally having a close relationship with a woman that didn’t involve sex. It had only taken me three and a half decades to learn. What I didn’t know then was that Jackie Kahn would have the largest role in the single most important thing that I have ever done.