About a Bar

I thought the place was going to be a real hole. What kind of greedy restaurant owner installs an automated voice saying, “Attention! This parking lot is not free. You will be towed or booted. Please pay at the yellow box,” to greet incoming customers? I swear, it was the same guy who does the answering machine for Moviefone.

The entry way smelled like cherries because of the bathrooms at the foot of the stairs. How appropriate, I thought–a sports bar that smells like outhouses.

A group of people sat at a felted poker table and passed around pitchers of beer, ashtrays, and french fries at the top of the stairs. This wasn’t the kind of bar that only smelled like cigarettes when the trendy crowd shows up for the show, smoking only when they drink. This place smelled like cigarettes every day of the year, I’m sure of it, like the break room at the Marlboro factory.

I guess we expected it to be more of a restaurant than a bar, because we stood waiting for a few moments to be seated until I leaned over and asked the drunk guy next to me, “Do we sit anywhere, or wait?” He must have been busy going over his plan to pick up the thirty-something blonde with short bangs at the bar, because he didn’t hear me the first time. I asked again and he pointed to a booth behind us with seats on only one side. Not quite.

We wandered around searching for highly rare and coveted two-benched booths. I normally wouldn’t have minded cramming in with Mandy and Chris, but I didn’t feel like drawing attention to being an extra wheel. We found one after three-quarters of a lap around the rectangular bar and were promptly greeted by our server who, as I noticed, happened to have a very nice mouth. She took our orders for sweet teas and water and I couldn’t decide how natural a cigarette might look hanging from her lips. I looked at her name tag, Chrissy. Okay, I thought, how many Chrissy’s do you know? How many of them were smokers? There was the one in eleventh. Feisty, definitely a smoker. The only other Chrissy I could think of was a classmate of my sister’s when she was twelve, which I suppose doesn’t mean that she didn’t smoke. George Burns started smoking when he was fourteen, and Toby said he busted some elementary school kids smoking in the ladies room the other day. No, I decided. Her mouth is too nice.

Aside from the groups of six to eight people sitting at poker tables around the room, nearly all of the one-sided booths were occupied by expressionless men alone, and presumably single, who had stopped in for a beer and burger on their way home from work. Some of the men seated alone began leaving after a while. I wondered if they were leaving to meet up with friends, or a date, or going home. If they were the type of guy that you see in movies. The kind who eat nearly all of their meals in restaurants, or over their stacks of remote controls and magazines, because they’ve never bothered to buy a table. The home theater was more important–DVD collection, digital cable, video games, all of that.

I got to thinking that maybe they’re alone because guys really are afraid of commitment and intimacy, of letting anyone know they have insecurities and doubts. Because vulnerability isn’t strength. Forget about that whole flawed humanity thing–we’re demigods, us men. And, by the way, that Achilles was a wuss for getting caught by the ankles. He should be ashamed.

posted by Cameron Lawrence at 22:34