"The Barfight"

It was another Wednesday at the Blue, myself and Tony and Kelly all elbows across the bar with our drinks in hand.  Talking about movies, making Simpsons references, complaining about our Cubs and Twins and Tigers, half-heartedly ogling the gals strewn about; a lot of small talk, a thing to do to help the beers go down sort of like.

            So the way we were arranged was this:  there were two scurvy fat looking fellers nestled in nearest the bathrooms, followed by Kelly, then Tony, then myself.  There was nobody to my left for much of the night, until these two collar popping young sugarwaifs strut on up and take stools nearest the door.  “What have you got in a Belgian wheat?” one’s asking bartender Kenny, while the other orders up a Mike’s Hard.  Belgian Wheat leans stiffly on his elbow, trying to lock cocksure and not at all ridiculous.  Meanwhile Mike’s Hard is cocksure and keeps bobbing his head suggestively as he sips, akin to a walking chicken or a turkey or something.

            It’s fairly ludicrous to watch these college boys doing their thing and I’m thinking back to my own college days, wondering if I was ever so daft.  Not like them, certainly, but each in his own way like.  They start commenting to each other about their drinks in overloud nasal voices, about clarity and hoppiness and so forth.  I’m having to bite my lip and suppress a laugh by then, but as I always say, far be it from me to be the rude one, eh?  Sage advice perhaps, but once their convo started drifting into the murky waters of politics one of the hefts at the other end of the bar was not above so being.

            Belgian was just remarking to Mike’s about those ‘idiot Tea Partiers’ and the current budget crisis and all, and daft though they are I’m nodding along so to speak.  Then an empty bottle gets set heavily down onto the counter nearest the john.  “Idiot Tea Partiers, you say?”  We’re all craning our heads down the bar to see him, this plump leather-clad thing from out of the Thunderdome - Bill, I think his friends generally call him.  He’s twisting the top off another Bud Light and smiling all big and menacing like.  “What about those idiot Dumb-o-craps who can’t even balance a budget properly!?”  And his buddy - fat man in greasy overalls I think’s called Gary - is laughing it up and flashing a few broken teeth.  He’s a real character even if he doesn’t talk much, and I’m thinking to myself how perfect he’d be in a novel or story someday.

            “Right now the President is trying to get a balanced budget passed,” Belgian whinges in response.  “The Repelicans in Congress are just blocking it for their stupid political reasons.”

“Your President is being a dictator. Congress - which represents the people of America - has spoken! Yet Obama will not let go of his ideas and let democracy prevail.”

“Look, man, there’re two halves to Congress.  The Republicans only have the lower half.  It’s a split legislature at most.”

“The House majority has spoken and they represent the people of America!” and I dare say Bill was standing upright and thundering his fist against the bar.  “Most Americans don't want to raise the debt ceiling - fact! However, do you find it responsible to increase the borrowing level without having a balanced budget? If the Democrats came up with a balanced budget, perhaps raising the debt ceiling would be warranted!”

But Belgian won’t be stifled, climbing to his own feet in less than intimidating fashion.  “The Democrats are trying to balance the budget, you hayseed yomp!  It's just their approach is a combination of increasing revenues and cutting spending. And as to the wisdom of raising the debt ceiling, I've heard sensible arguments to either side. But – hell!!  - if it's a question of hard politics, storming out of a directionless meeting is a fair response to unbending ideological rigmarole.”

Point though he was trying to make, Belgian was well out of order with his ‘hayseed yomp’ remark.  Bill was already walking around Tony and Kelly and coming our way, and I can feel his presence pass by me like an angel of death.  But then he’s past and that presence is lifted from my shoulders and I feel at ease again.  More’n could be said for Belgian, though I have to give him some sort of praise for standing his ground.  Bill comes right up to him, face in face like.  “The Republicans have offered to raise the debt ceiling if he cuts spending.  Fair?”

And there is a moment of silence, save for the terse seething of two very close faces.  “No, it’s not fair,” Belgian snaps.  “They’re just offering to raise the debt, not find an equilibrium.”

“I’ll give you equilibrium!!” Bill roars as he grabs Belgian by the easily accessible popped collars.  By this time we’d backed right on off next to the bathrooms.  I’ve never seen an actual bar fight before, but I’m expecting bottles and glass and the like to start flying any minute.  Gary hasn’t even moved from his seat, still watching and chuckling from the far end of the bar.  But Mike’s Hard pulls Bill around roughly by his shoulder and the two seem squared off in the bar’s center floor.  Mind that Mike’s isn’t a big guy either, and Bill’s looking slightly confused as the kid crouches down for a judo attack stance or some such thing.  And then-

It was a beautiful thing to see, a legitimately movie-perfect kick.  I mean, Mike’s really launched himself at Bill, bringing his whole person into the single point of his foot right into the fat man’s solar plexus.  Bill was thrown backwards and Mike’s does the Bruce Lee quiver as he bounces himself around to perfect stillness.  Then fast as lightning Gary pushes past us and brings a bottle down right over the top of his head.  And Bill was back up in a jiff and throwing down at the fallen, bleeding persona of the Mike’s. 
What happened after, I couldn’t well say.  The three of us were already headed out via the service entrance into the crisp blackness of the night, the muffled shouts and cries of anguish and the crackle of furniture fading fast as somewhere sirens perked up in the distance.

"Judy's"

Storm clouds were a-rising at the Blue Rider one Wednesday night.  Not in the meteorological sense perhaps, though it was hard to tell quite what the weather was doing from inside the windowless bar.  Spring was delayed by yet another late snowfall, and tensions were understandably on the ups.  As I was pouring out a glass of Pabst from the pitcher, I was uncharacteristically longing for a cigarette as Karin and Michelle {and by extension, Phil} bickered back and forth across the table.

           “Citizen Kane is an overrated albatross of a movie,” the one was loudly saying, to which the other would vehemently shake her head and spit back, “And you seriously think Seven Samurai isn’t!?  You have the artistic tastes of…”  And so forth.

            I couldn’t help but glare at the flyer that started it all, posted across the door.  The old theater was advertising a midnight reel of Casablanca, touting it as ‘the greatest film of all time.’  Inevitably this sparked discussion, already mentioned.  Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes it lingered on in rhetorical circles, like vultures looming over a very dead horse.  Culture-weary, I checked my phone for the time having given up wearing a watch some years ago.  Only 10.37 yet.  Hours to go before general bar close.  It was time to act fast before I got sucked into this endless rigmarole.

            Downing my glass and rising to my feet, I took my leave without much of a murmur.  The night air was cool and damp and a bit refreshing.  The streets in this part of town were deserted, filled with darkened warehouses and grain elevators and serviced by little bars.  I’d been to them all at least once, save for the one across the way from the Rider.  The pink fluorescent sign out front simply read ‘Judy’s’ in a feminine, cursive twist.

Inside it was your typical dive bar, with the scratched-to-hell pool table, clear plastic box of pulltabs at the counter, jukebox in the corner, and the inordinately large, unmistakably new flatscreen t.v. on the wall above the bar.  The smells of fat-fried pollock and cigarettes and stale beer permeated the dimly lit air, and between the surly regulars at the bar and the Willie Nelson droning at the juke a person couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“Pabst, please,” I said to the bartender - a heavyset fella who fancied himself to be Johnny Cash in an apron - when I thought I’d caught his eye.  I hadn’t.  The regs cut me askance looks and carried on forced conversations about the sport and what, just waiting for a chance to ‘get a load of the new guy’ with earthy, detrimental laughter.

“Oi!  Pabst, ma-man and look sharpish.”  I could see myself saying it with a commanding glare and a snap of the fingers like Michael Caine, thin glass and such.  Could almost taste the words on my tongue, but far be it from me to be the rude one.  I instead waited patiently as Willy chunk-a-chunked down to Garth Brooks. 

It felt sort of like sitting in the waiting room at a clinic; only here the others all knew the doctor and there’s a chance I wouldn’t get beyond the forms.  But I’d got the form betwixt my fingers, a crisp green tenner because it’s the sort of place that hadn’t evolved to the card yet.  Which is just as well, I suppose.  Creates an added barrier to entry, keeps the kids out and builds up that generational apartheid stuff that seems to define our body politic. 

“Pants tight enough there, kiddo?” one gruff seed ventured to ask with a chuckle, and I realized then I’d finally caught the bartender’s eye.  Everybody’s, really.

“It’s the fashion,” I shrugged, and I’d wondered why I was there at all.  Point of the thing, maybe.  Only bar in town I hadn’t sipped at.

“Ho! Ho,” he pantomimed for the crowd’s benefit.  “You saying I’m not fashionable?”  The man was a flannel bubble with an intentional ‘Cable Guy’ look about him.  And truth be told, his pants were at about bursting point in terms of tightness; like corded blue sausage casings ending in pointy leather boots.  It was a pot and kettle situation, at best.

“Nah, yer pants are plenty tight,” I told him reassuringly, and I suppose I won a couple of quiet laughs.  I was just hoping this was only a bit of a haze, another trial to go through before I’d get my beer.  Last thing on my mind was a fistfight with the hulking Enus sitting before me.

But by now the bartender was about his business.  “Easy on, Jack,” he says to Enus as he asked me what it was I wanted.  “Just a Pabst, please,” I ordered, keeping an ever-loving eye on Jack.  He had a none-too-comical look on his face, and I was hoping to just get on and out.  The man takes my ten and brings back a beer without any change.  Picking up the hint I quaffed back my beer in two or three gulps, gave the boys a nod, and ventured back out and across the street.  I’d had my beer at Judy’s; that was once enough.

“Dramatic Affect”

     It’s another Wednesday night at the Blue Rider, same as always.  The four of us sit around our usual table, in the corner nearest the door.  I’m finishing my third Michelob Ultra, having recently jumped onto the low-carb bandwagon.  It’s not a bad beer, so far as the light stuff goes.  With me are my friends Phil, Michelle, and Karin, whose pleasant descriptions of their weekends are fast coming to a grinding halt.

     “…so I think I’ll start wearing Patagonia instead,” Phil finishes saying, followed by the appropriate murmurs of moral assent from the rest of us.  Ordinarily the talk at the Blue was a round-robin of conversation, one of the three picking up the tail end and setting off again, leaving me pleasantly to my thoughts and drinks.  But tonight was altogether different, lacking in a certain zest or interest or energy.  No joie de vivre, like.

     “This sucks,” Karin at last says huffily.  “I mean, like, this dynamic.”  She motions around the table.  “We’re just a bunch of boring white people.  We suck.”

     “I know,” Michelle agrees, her biff Phil nodding along in agreement.  “We need a gay guy or something, like all the cool groups seem to have on TV, you know?  Somebody to liven things up a bit.”  And she gives me one of those withering looks.  I don’t add much to the dynamic, I know, but in all honestly there isn’t much more to add.  Ordinarily the three have their bases pretty well covered.

     I get up and grab myself another Ultra, wishing they didn’t go down so quickly.  Not only am I drinking more of them than usual, but the blasted things are a dollar more expensive than the Pabst.  When I return to the table Karin is already on the phone, doing that head waggling emphatic voice thing she does when she wants something.  “Could you please please please come down,” she was saying.  “We desperately need to hang out.  Really?  Alright!!  See you in a bit, hon.  He’s coming,” she tells us triumphantly as she pops her phone into that outlandishly sized pink purse of hers.

     “Who is he, then?” I ask, but nobody hears me.

     With the expected arrival of another the talk picks right back up, Karin describing her friend Colin with Michelle and Phil winding themselves up into an absolute circus of excitement.  When this Colin finally strolls in after maybe ten or so minutes, Karin and Michelle both jump up to hug him.  They briefly introduce Phil and myself, and with an emphatic whoop-whoop Karin orders up a round of brightly-colored Mike’s Hards, which I suppose is the new Zima.

     The gals hedge Colin in between themselves, their combined energy about double what it normally runs at.  Phil leans in to Michelle’s left, doing his best to outdo them in the gesticulating party atmos they’ve created.  Even I take things up a notch, leaning forward on my elbows and nodding here and there as I sip at my Mike’s.  It’s a sweet thing, a sort of cappuccino of the beer bar universe.  Frankly, I’m not much into sweet anymore.  But they’re unstoppable as the next two rounds come to table, sickly pastels in clear bottles.

     It’s my turn to buy another round, so I belly on up to the bar to order myself a real beer in addition to four Mike’s.  Not even an Ultra; I’m thinking Guinness or the like at this point.  Something bitter and real and palpable to savor.

     “Gawd, she never shuts up,” Colin hisses as he unexpectedly sidles to the bar beside me.  “Why do you hang out with them?  No offense, but you don’t seem to be their type.”

     I think about it, having not really ever thought about it before.  True, that nameless feeling crops up from time to time, that out-of-place sensation.  I suppose it’s always been a for-granted, ‘Wednesday nights at the Blue.’  Like church.  “I dunno,” I tell him.  “I like this place, I suppose.  And listening to them lets me unwind a bit.  It helps to sort of go limp and tune out, just listen to the sound of their talking like.”

     Colin laughs.  “Buy me a drink?  Like, a real one?”

     “Yeah sure, those help too.”  I order two pints of stout and three candied Mike’s, and looking over at the corner table I don’t think they’ve noticed Colin’s gone.  

"In Reast"

It was a Tuesday night at the Blue Rider, and I was locked in a game of world domination across the corner table with two friends and a stranger.  I had the Confederate-looking grey armies at my disposal, and in that historical mindset was clinging to life in the remote north Asian provinces of Ir- and Yakutsk.  I’ve never much cared for Risk, truth be told.  I don’t like dice games, for starters; something about pinning your hopes to the impersonal mathematical calculations of chance.  I also never much cared for the unofficial table alliances, the resulting blocs, and the inevitable me-sitting-around-for-an-hour-waiting-for-the-end.  Because it is a long game, which for most is reason enough to avoid it.

            Friends Phil and Sam were locked over the Americas and Africa, turning a blind eye to the verdant fascist monstrosity that is Tyler.  I’d only just met Tyler.  He’s the sort of guy people meet and ask each other ‘where did they find this guy?’  A gargantuan, Panama Jack-looking fellow with a neatly clipped moustache and an omnipresent glaze of sweat on his enormous forehead.  He’d got Australia and Europe in his meaty grasp, and now he was gunning for all of Asia.  Silently gloating with that broad grin and the Oliver Hardy, half-eyed smugness routine.  Because this game was evidently meaning a lot to his sense of self-respect.  And I really wanted to beat the fat bastard because of it.

            So we’re there finishing off our third pitcher of the night, trying to keep the conversation light and pleasant.  I say ‘trying’ because this Tyler guy wouldn’t stop trying to talk politics; apparently he’s big in the local Tea Party circuit, in addition to being an objectionable heifer.  So I was liking this guy less and less, yet all the while preparing myself spiritually for the painful defeat inevitably coming my way, when my phone dingles.  Not a ring, mind, but the little text ‘dingle.’  After a bit of fishing about in my jacket, I find the text reads

Hey u are in reast

this is the cops of

the boss and

tomrrow the Fbi

will get u good

morning

It took a couple reads through, but I still had no idea what the thing was all about.  It was a 410 number, which doesn’t quite ring a bell with me.  East coast maybe?  West coast?  And what the hell does ‘reast’ mean?  Or is it a place?  Many such questions spun about in my brain.  Such as who ‘the cops of the boss’ entail, and why in the world the FBI would want to get me, in particular.  I actually began to feel a bit nauseated, trying to think of things I may have done.  I don’t download movies or do drugs.  I once got quite a bit of music from the LimeWire back in college, but that was years ago by now.  Certainly the wheels of justice don’t move that slowly!   The mind was drawing blanks all over, but in the back of it I knew it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with me really.  I’m not a bad person, outside the pale of occasional speeding and routine corner-cutting.  Certainly nothing bad enough to warrant tangling with the FBI.  Above all, the whole thing smacked of wrong number. 

“The hell is this?” I asked of the table, showing the text to Phil and Sam.

“Maybe they’re finally cracking down on commies,” Tyler suggested with an evil snigger.  Phil suggested I should text something back.  Of course, as to ‘what’ I hadn’t a clue.  Truth be told, if it were some sort of dirty cop, tipoff situation, I wanted nothing to do with any of it.  Some Harvey Keitel-ish, as-played-by-Nick-Cage illiterate detective on the other end, completely unhinged and maybe a little coked up.  Probably wouldn’t take kindly to their illegal tipoff in the hands of the wrong person.  They might be so inclined as to drive across the country non-stop in a diaper, hell bent on wreaking horrid vengeance upon me.  Something to that effect.

But what did ‘reast’ mean?  I’d generally prided myself on a large, well-rounded vocabulary.  Not knowing this word was actually the most troubling bit.  Besides which, who would I know that would text so poorly, using words like ‘reast’ besides?  It had an other-worldly, dystopian Big Brother sort of verbage to it.  Thought crime; you no read, kind of thing.  Whoever it was meant for, it would be the last sort of warning I’d want to receive in advance.  With a lurid sense of foreboding in the pit of my stomach, I finished off the last of my beer and decided to call it a night.  There would be things to look up, and it was a perfect excuse to cut Tyler’s victory short.  The fascist pig.

"Velvet Elvis"

       It was a Wednesday night at the Blue Rider, same as always.  The four of us sat around our usual table, in the corner nearest the door.  I was finishing my second glass of Pabst, eyes wandering around the room while Karin and Michelle kept a heated conversation about something, or perhaps nothing in particular.  See, Phil is seeing Michelle and Karin sees absolutely nothing in me at all, so at these weekly functions I play a supportive fourth round the table.  Usually this has me listening in to the iambic pentameter of the talk, throwing in the appropriate exclamations when needed.  We’ve settled so well into the Blue because the conversations seem to run more smoothly when I’ve got something to look at, and the Blue Rider is the most spackle-laden bar of them all.  Not your typical Applebees stuff, what with the frames and polish and cornballishness.  No, the Blue has a bizarre, borderline-troubling Steadman air to its décor, a truly loathsome collection of local art that covers every orifice save one.

       It was the save one that had caught my eye this evening, having more or less milked the last from the zombie John Wayne portrait, or the double-vaginaed phoenix perched over the doorway.  Opposite the bar about chest level between the three-part lithograph of the shitting stickman and the hunting picture where even the deer is wearing aviators, a good sized two-by-three foot swath of wall lay bare.  At an appropriate lull in the conversation I brought my empty pint to the bar and summoned Kenny, an easy feat as it was fairly dead that night.  Unlike the stuff on the walls, there was nothing even slightly interesting about Kenny.  Just your run-of-the-mill, middle-aged, middle-set, Scandinavian-looking barman.

       “Another Pabst,” I tell him, pulling three dollars from my wallet.  As he’s doling it out from the tap I venture to ask him, “So what’s with the blank spot on the wall over there?”

       “Actually,” he says with a grin, “it’s an interesting story, there.”  He hands me my glass and palms my cash, and I take a stool at the counter.  “See, we used to have a velvet Elvis there.  It’d been up for ages, decades maybe.  Might’ve even been the first picture in the bar, but that’s neither here or there.  When I was a young man, still at the college, I started work here.”  {Not to break from the narrative, but it was a stretch to imagine Kenny was ever a ‘young man,’ ‘in college’ notwithstanding.}  “Well we used to have an old jukebox over by the door, where you guys’ table is now.  There’s never been a lot of space for dancing, but from time to time someone’d make do.  Well one night it was pretty slow in here, a Tuesday say.  There’s this gal Betty – Big Betty we called her, for obvious reasons – and she hits the jukes and starts dancing with her man.”

       “What was his name?” I asked with instant, stupefying regret; I don't normally interrupt stories.

       “Can’t remember, actually.  Prolly another Big-something; all of Betty’s guys were pretty big.  But they were dancing that Checkers number, ‘the Twist.’  And God if that isn’t a story in itself!  Big Betty doing trunk twists in public…  So they’re twisting around in the bar, and suddenly our waitress Sylvia lets loose a scream.  It was horrible, nearly dropped the glass I was wiping.  She swears up and down that Betty’d gone and changed into Aretha Franklin for a bit, but it’d stopped when she quit twisting.  Understandably, we couldn’t quite believe her.  Betty hadn’t felt a thing, and you couldn’t blame her man and I for not watching.  Eventually Sylvia went off home to get some rest, it being a slow night and all.  And Betty gets back to twisting.  Truth be told, I’ve never really seen her dance much else.  But then, by Christ, sure enough if she doesn’t turn into Aretha Franklin right there before my eyes, skin hair and all!

       “‘Betty!’ I said, ‘You’ve turned black!’  And no sooner does she stop dancing but she turns back.  Course, this time her guy saw it too.  We had an awful time trying to make sense of it.  Seems it only happened when she would dance in front of the Elvis, and then only if she twisted.  And you know, then I gave it a try and – hell! – I turned into a twisting Aretha Franklin too!  It was the craziest thing, but kind of wonderful all the same.”  And Kenny got this soft look in his eye as he gazed silently over at the blank spot on the wall.  “Of course, it was fun was all.  Betty’s guy tried it, then Big Betty again.  Twist and turn into Aretha and stop and turn back again.  Like magic.  Within the week, the place was wall-to-wall and lined out the door with people wanting to give it a try.  Mr. Rasmussen, the owner, decided to start charging a dancing fee.  People still tried, but they were none too happy about it any.  And for a while, the boss was thinking about changing the name of the place to something like Aretha’s or the Dancing Elvis.  But then old Horst Keeler got stuck, and we had to take the picture down.”

       “What do you mean, ‘stuck’?” I asked, completely amazed at the story.  I’d always wanted to be Aretha Franklin for a day, but had never known such things were possible.

       “Well, I mean he didn’t change back.  He stopped a-twisting, but Ms. Franklin stayed in the room, only with Horst Keeler’s voice.  Might’ve lost the place over litigation if he hadn’t caught ill and died over the shock of it.  Yep, it was a bit of a buzz kill.  Nobody’d go near it, and even if they would, Mr. Rasmussen wouldn’t let them, for fear of it happening again.  So he took the painting down, and that was the end of it.”

       “Jesus,” I exclaimed, “but what happened to the painting?  And how come nobody’s ever mentioned this story before?”

       Kenny just laughed, “Nobody knows what’s become of it, and most everybody’s gotten sick of hearing it.  You were just the first person to ask about the spot on the wall.  Was kind of nice, telling it again.  I’d almost forgotten.”

       “Well good story, Kenny.  Best one I’d heard all day.”  And slipping an extra dollar onto the counter, I brought my untouched beer back to the corner table and settled back into group iambics.