A Man Without a Bar

I sat in a new bar and it felt as though I was sitting in an alien spaceship after being invasively probed with no lube. Everyone else around me was oblivious to the fact, or it wasn't their first time. This was their bar, after all. It was an old rehabbed building with original brick walls and wood floors. Wood beams and exposed ventilation and fancy air ducts. They have lawyer pow-wows here. Wedding receptions upstairs. It's a "venue," the bourgeois would call it. They sit there and cackle as craft beer dribbles down their beards and waxed chins. Six dollars a glass. Wiping gremolata sauce from their puckered Botox lips with absurd black linen napkins they otherwise keep in their laps. 

I don't think I could get used to this kind of place or become one of them. It's too big and sterile. It feels like a vacant uterus or a savings and loan with alcohol for money and bartenders for tellers. I am hoping it gets robbed because I am bored and occasionally rich people need robbed to keep them honest. "John Dillinger was here," I scratch on the bartop with a penknife. Then I leave as a vandal. The nauseating smell of burnt fish from their posh pea puree-serving kitchen and the murmur of annoying haughty voices chases me away. I've never felt more like a mouse in my life. 

No one ever breaks up with their bar. Or maybe they do and I just don't know about these people. We've never met. And if we have, we've never discussed it. Maybe it was when prices went up, as though they only went up here. Or when they felt insulted or got bad service. Or maybe it was that time they were overcharged, which they swear was no accident. When happy hour beers were rung up at regular price by the ditzy bartender who had no business working here other than she simply applied for a vacancy after the owner fired everyone's favorite bartender for no apparent reason. He was someone who gave you no cause to look at your receipt because it was always right, or to ever ask for a refill because he was attentive the way a bartender should be attentive, reliable and without any complication. Portly, kind, empathetic and steadfast. He was never in a bad mood and he was a deep well of both useful and useless knowledge. Devoid drama, the slightest hint of narcissism and histrionics. He even had the hint of a handlebar mustache and the mystique of a good bartender who prided himself in his work and relationships.  

He now works in that hoity-toity alien bar. They hired him right away, he told me. He looked foreign here. Out of place. But perhaps that was just me because I was used to seeing him at the old bar. I went in to say hello. I wanted to thank him for being a good bartender and a friend. He acknowledged me, but he had changed and no longer seemed to have time to talk. At first I thought it was me, but all the bartenders here acted the same way. Impersonal and aloof. Heads down. Serving drinks and buzzing from one patron to another without any sort of expression, hoping only not to spill or forget anything. Bars either have what all the throw pillows at Kohl's call "good vibes only" or they don't. This place didn't. We didn't have time to talk other than to say hello and goodbye. He asked me if I tried the grouper fish tacos, they're to die for. 

Not on your life, kid. 

I only eat fish with legs, I replied, and he smiled but didn't hear me. It was too loud and vacant for crude jokes. There was an echo of silverware clanging on porcelain plates and jewelery rattling. There was music in the background. Some bland folk music that sounded like some hipster groaning through anal sex with a banjo. A savings and loan makes for a terrible bar. It might as well have been an arthropod museum.  

He wasn't the only one who had gone - who I discovered missing when I went in one day for my usual beers and heard the fateful news. It was like someone died. Did you hear about so-and-so? There could be a list compiled of wonderful people no longer employed at my bar. My bar, I brazenly call it. I am sure many other people call it theirs, as though it is their special place, unique to only them, when in truth it is a shared watering hole for all us wild and not-so wild things to quench our thirst for something more than water or alcohol. But decades of loyalty had bought me nothing other than the comfort of calling it my bar. So this is my assessment. My review had I ever cared to leave such a thing. 

Babies have been born and grown, completed their entire education, and are now tax-paying adults from the time my tab first opened to the time it closed. They've gotten married and had babies themselves, all while I was drinking beer. Barrels and barrels of beer. Those missing bartenders worked here a few years like this place was their chrysalis until they hatched and flew away. I never saw them again the way I never see butterflies but for in passing. Maybe I once saw one feeling bread at the grocery. Or another washing her car at the carwash. And I wanted to stop and say, "Hey, do you remember me?" But I never did because I thought they might find it annoying and I didn't want them to think it mattered that much to me or that I was flirting because that certainly wasn't the case. Or maybe I might remind them of the job they lost for no apparent reason at all. So I just let it be and pretended I didn't recognize them. 

No one could ever really say why the owner, who was more like Charles Foster Kane than any other person I ever knew (without the enormous fortune), fired all those people. Some say he did so for shits and giggles. Others say he fired anyone who became the bar more than he was the bar. Who challenged his egomaniacal view of himself. He had to be the reason people came or else his narcissism flared up like an angry hemorrhoid and his purpose in life was in flux. Despite firing people right and left, he often complained about not having good help and having to work long hours himself when he ought to be at home smooching his wife or walking his labradoodle. 

I like to think that those people moved on to better things. I assume they do, in fact, become butterflies while here they were but pupae, cutting their teeth in the bar trade, paying their dues. I have very optimistic beliefs of people after they are gone and I no longer see them anymore. They become enshrined in my thoughts and memories like old arthritic football players in Canton. I bet they've become something great, I often think to myself. I half think they are Supreme Court justices or neurosurgeons, or racecar drivers, or some fantastic thing I could hardly even imagine. Also, everyone I ever knew who died is in Heaven, if you ask me.

Or maybe they were abducted by aliens, or they are cooked into the chili and their corpses are downstairs hacked up in the large freezers where they also keep the wings. Some it doesn't matter and I hardly care to recall them. I have to think about them before they come to mind, or someone has to mention their name and remind of something they used to commonly say. I have old lovers that are much the same way. They come back when I put on a certain pair of pants or pass a particular street where they once lived. They were temporary actors in my life, filling bit but necessary roles, they came and went, if I may permit myself to be so egocentric to think of people entirely by their relation to me and of my existence. 

But there are others who I do often wonder about. Who I, in my naivety, might have thought would be here forever as though they hadn't anything better to do with their life than to pour me a drink and listen to my bad jokes and tell some of their own to me. To share breath and experiences and our views on things. To speak of that which we know well and to listen to other things that are entirely outside of our purview. To talk about our families and kids. Our aches and pains. Our jobs and vacations. Those people were like family to me and I do miss them, as silly as that sounds. Like one might miss a favored bagger at a grocery store, or a kind bank teller, or the girl at the post office who is the sole reason some old man still buys stamps and mails letters - just to see her pretty smile.  

But nothing 'round here is permanent besides for the broken urinal and the cheap paneling that has somehow fought off even the notion of paint for 50 years. Even the jukebox that arrogantly once thought it was tenured was proven wrong when it was stolen in the night like an old Jew by indifferent SS men sent by the vile vendor. The Mrs. Pacman arcade game my kids used to play when it was a restaurant and not a bar (it doubles as both), it too was taken, suffering at the hands of the owner's bipolar mania. And most recently and devastating to me, the cigar store Indian which stood guard by the door since I have been coming in, and who greeted me my very first time. He too was removed and put on the reservation of discarded relics somewhere, all in the name of progressive values. Someone told me the owner, that Charles Foster Kane, in his bombastic newfound renaissance of liberal virtue, claimed Apache Joe, as we all called him affectionately, was offensive and wasn't the type of message that they, as a local bar with it's moral obligation to the betterment of the community and the world beyond, wanted to portray. 

"How was he offensive?" I asked the owner directly.

"What do you mean?!" he shot back in elongated enunciated exasperation. He acted surprised I didn't get it. Like I had a wagon full of smallpox blankets outside in the bed of my truck that I was peddling, or that I was complicit in The Trail of Tears or every broken treaty there ever was. Like there was a memo put out that I didn't read and conform to, so he further elucidated, in his condescending tone, "It is a depiction of a Native American in a derogatory and hurtful way to sell a product. This bar doesn't feel that that sort of thing promotes inclusion, nor do we wish to be that product or financially benefit from it." 

It was as though he read from a card written by a PR team. An NPR-PR team. It was an official Twitter statement on their Twitter page because every smalltown bar needs Twitter and to be heard by the whole wide-world. They need to echo the popular worldview into the ears of all us knuckle-dragging bumpkins, beat it to death, be in tune with the latest, and hashtag their every cause so that everyone knows #wecare. They care a lot. They must do their part to indoctrinate everyone else with groupthink and doubletalk and phony sentiments and everything they don't want you to believe is "conspiracy theory." 

I jokingly asked him why he bought it in the first place if it was so offensive, but he didn't reply. He walked off to snap at someone in the kitchen. 

I wanted to puke. To assail myself with my own fists. To ram them down my throat and turn myself inside out. I wanted to scream but realized I had no mouth. It had quietly disappeared over the years. It had been taken from me. And in the mouth that I didn't have, I had no words. They were stuck in my throat like a sideways cachou. I had no properly articulated words to object to the constant stream of bitterness, hatred and demand for appeasement for any perceivable wrong, not for the sake of anyone begrudged, or even as a complaint of the dead victims themselves, but for the image of the carpetbagging mountebank, extolling his own fraudulent righteous crusading virtue for cheap and worthless vanity points, primarily amongst his like-minded friends. It was all a game.

Apache Joe was just another casualty in a duck row of them that these PC snipers had pegged. Aunt Jemima. The Land-O-Lakes butter girl. Chief Wahoo. Even dear old Uncle Ben. All gone. There was an empty spot by the front door that I knew would never be filled unless they start making wood totems of Ruth Baiter Ginsburg or some other absurd cultural icon of the left.

"Apache Joe got scalped," I murmured morosely to myself. It was as though someone had torn out my kidney. A news story ran on my phone as I sat there and sulked: George Washington Elementary in San Francisco to be renamed because George Washington once owned slaves so he was now a terrible person.  

But this pickled pompous old cod fish with his grandiose worldview who looked down his red speckled nose at anyone who was of a different mind, went on and on, parroting his favorite deranged leftist ideologues, and us regulars were to suffer him and his worsening mood swings and rants because we loved the place and him once before he morphed into an obtuse asshole. He became that of a fat sardine in too tight a can leaving no room for others to wiggle the slightest of disagreements, alienating old friends and patrons alike because he was at that point in life where if you had no need or admiration for him, or his enlightenment, or his many witticisms, he had no need or tolerance for you. 

We were watching someone go through his midlife crisis. What most of us treat with an affair, or a hooker or two, or a sports car and hair treatment, he was treating by spewing hateful caustic commie ideology into the one place where we all thought we were safe from it. And listening to him, that old firebrand, as I finished my last beer so to stumble home one last time, I realized I was slightly off with the Kane analogy. He was much more like Captain Ahab, sailing the sea and coveting the elusive whale, that Moby Dick, so fiercely that he hunted in his stead one whale at a time realizing no particular satisfaction of his insatiable bloodlust to kill, nor a use for the carcasses. Tonight, whether he realized it or not, I was that whale, and some opinion I expressed riled him and thus I was the object of his obstinate fury until I became yet another casualty of his temperamental oral harpoon. 

I didn't argue any further. It was a totalitarian system after all. He reserves the right not to serve anyone, he has said repeatedly (unless, of course, that person is gay or a transexual). There was no point or victory to be had in it. As liberal as he had avowed himself to be and as much a socialist thinker, he never would lend his business to the basic principles of a co-op, or offer a liveable minimum wage or healthcare to his employees. And over his dead body would there ever be a union. In that respect, he was as shrewd a capitalist as the great Ebeneezer himself with no fear of death or of imposing Christmas ghosts, past, present or future. 

I went along as I always went along. Sitting there drinking my beer, making jokes and polite conversation to assuage any bad feelings or bitterness in the air between us. Waiting for a refill until I had enough and I could stagger home and sleep in that euphoric state of inebriation where everything in the world was possible and nothing hurt. I didn't chose to speak on the reverence of Apache Joe. Or of the fact that he was "representation" and that canceling him was not progressive in the least, but rather coldly reactionary. I was no longer in a mood to argue about every thing in the world. Every perceived wrong of every victim there ever was, particularly those at the hands of the United States of America. Or debate every statue being torn down. Every police officer vilified. Whether I wore my face panties to the grocery like a good boy or didn't I. Whether I got the shot or didn't I. Whether I voted for him or him or neither of them. Whether I was in some alt-right third party or I was a card carrying member of the Communist Party, or neither. Whether I liked the new NFL and their flag-kneeling and "black national anthem" or didn't I. Whether I celebrated pride month or didn't I. I just wanted a beer. I didn't give a goddamn about any of it, even when I was being poked with their stick so to provoke me. I just wanted a decent conversation and peace. Actual peace. Not that angry rabid Trump-hating hippy peace. 

I've come to the realization that we've long since lived in a world that has been divided into two types of very distinct people: People who want to do what they want to do and be left alone to do it, and people who want to tell everyone else what they can and cannot do. And as far as I can tell, that will never change. 

But some things 'round here are permanent, like the dim light above the bar, the strict formation of liquors; the tall flyfishing nutcracker in red wood flannel without any nuts and covered in a decade of dust; the various TVs which always play some sport because it cannot be any other way. The advancement of a ball of some kind or another has long-been our grandest preoccupation next to war and sex. There is also the broken screen door, the old-faded sign on the rusty-black metal pole out front which leans over towards the busy street as though it is tired after all this time. Maybe it wants to end it. Maybe this bar wants to call it quits and demolish itself and become a chain pharmacy or part of the hospital. An orthopedic surgery center. Maybe it wants to be another tattoo studio, or a church, or a massage parlor, full of Asian women, named something absurd like The Lotus Flower or Ho Chi Men City. Or maybe it has larger aspirations. Maybe it wishes to relocate to Ft. Lauderdale and sit on the beach and get a whiff of the ocean and coconut-oiled tourists who are full of money and rum, just as maybe that savings and loan downtown once wanted to be a bar for the hillbilly rich. Or a "gastropub," as they call it. 

People break up all the time and no one bats an eye. It is a sad but routine part of life that has long-been accepted and tolerated, and often encouraged. They say things like, "We grew apart" or "We just don't want the same thing anymore." People end relationships with others who they swore they'd love forever, or who they thought would love them forever. But there is no such thing as forever anymore. Not in this absurd world. People sell their house and upgrade to a better neighborhood, even when it means to take on a brand-new mortgage. To start from scratch with a new lender who might not be so gracious and forgiving when they're late on their note. They trade in their car, repeatedly, even when there is nothing wrong with it. They make up things about it when they do. Vicious lies. It has a knock in the engine. The car would vehemently disagree. It would sue them for slander if it could. They're disloyal to their cellphones, too. Their clothes, even when they are perfectly fine. It is not me anymore, they might say. Or, the color faded. Or, it doesn't fit anymore like it used to, they say looking into a mirror at a once favorite flannel or pair of loyal Levi's.

None of this is me. Though I have been very careless in relationships. I was another Ted Kaczynski. I never knew a relationship that I couldn't find a way to blow up. Even when I didn't want to. 

So it is with consideration of all the above that I question how it is that I became a man without a bar. Bars don't leave you. Bars are brick and mortar and aren't temperamental things that change their moods so dramatically that they tell you they're having an affair with Steve. Or that they will not be here when you come home from work. Bars aren't cruel in the way only women can be cruel. They haven't got it in them. Contrariwise, they're the salve to such a wicked wound. They are the open arms, the bosom of your mother you recall when you were three and terrified of the darkness. Sleeping next to her and safe from the monsters that roamed the house unbeknownst to anyone but you. Bars don't disregard you for another and unwelcome you. They're always in the mood and there always seems to be time for just one more. 

Or so this is what I thought. Naively. How could I have seen it coming that someday I would no longer be here just like the rest of them. It snuck up on me as maybe it snuck up on them. It was thieved from me. That which I treasured most. My utopic retreat. My safety zone. My home away from home so long as I had just ten or fifteen bucks for several draft beers and a modest tip. It was my oasis, my watering hole. And so I was left like an animal to fend for myself and find another. But bar after bar disappointed in some way. Too bright of lights here. Too many people there. No windows. Bad odors. Too expensive. Too corporate. I even went to the big city. Like Columbus to the New World. Just as hopeful and just as let down. I stumbled into some nice places which gave me hope, but they turned out to be gay bars. And so like a disillusioned penguin, I waddled home. Never again, my defiant vow.

This bar was like the maple tree I used to climb when I was a kid. Where I leisurely withdrew from the madness of an ever-changing and chaotic world in which I increasingly seemed to no longer fit. This is where I figured I'd be when the nuclear bombs went off. When the aliens invaded. Or when Jesus came back. It wasn't supposed to change, too. It wasn't supposed to leave me behind. It has been here for all my triumphs and mistakes. Through the entirety of three serious relationships and as many jobs. It said goodbye to me when I left Ohio for a new life in Arizona and welcomed me home when that didn't pan out. It counseled me the night I nearly killed a man. Bought me a drink for my birthday more years than not. Mourned with me when I lost my dad. Hosted many nights with the one who got away where we drank and made out like royals, while everyone said, get a room, with ne'er a portentous word as to the eventuality of such inevitable things that are all too great to sustain, knowing I would blow it because it knows me, or because bars prognosticate secretly. Then comforting me when it was all over without the hackneyed cliched words of "I told you so," or "There are plenty of fish in the sea," or "Everything happens for a reason" when it doesn't. 

It screened women for me. Didn't welcome them and, thus, I didn't make imprudent mistakes here. I didn't go home with the wrong one after too many drinks and wake up with a venereal disease, or a missing kidney, or a kid on the way because I got too drunk. I didn't have jealous husband's after me anymore because I slept with someone's wife, all because cheating women didn't come to this bar. This was holy ground. This was my church. My fortress. My sanctuary. It was as though someone circled it with salt and no bad spirits could get in. There weren't any witchy women here for that sort of debauchery. They went to other places that I didn't go and this bar didn't welcome them. 

Perhaps it is obscenely narcissistic of me to presume anything is so much so about me and this place was in anyway mine. I was not a shareholder. Not an employee. Certainly not the owner. I had no stake of any legal kind, thereby, no say in the goings on. I don't understand business practices and I am terrible with money. That isn't how I think. I was just a regular who filled a barstool and drank a few drinks a few times a week and added to the oral history of the place and then ambled home to watch a movie and dream that one day she would come back, which I never admitted to anyone but myself. 

The reason I always looked when the door opened and I caught the glacial shift of the glass against the light in my peripheral was only to see if it was her as it used to be her when I arrived before she did. But it was invariably someone else. Another regular. Someone with a carryout order. Or it was that elderly couple who have been coming here for 58 years. Who lasted. He is a man who knows what he has, the braggadocious drapes boasted in my ear living vicariously through this sweetheart of a senior citizen. He is a man who isn't careless with a woman. It was their subtle way to rebuke me. 

"I really liked her," the Citizen Kane owner mentioned to me, filling in for yet another bartender he had just fired. It was like he could read my mind. It was a good night. He was in a good mood. It was the night after so decided not to come anymore because I wanted to come one last time so not to end things on an altogether sour note. 

"Who?" I reflexively asked. I knew who, which is why he gave me that exasperated glance and then poured me a shot which I sipped to his disdain. Bourbon isn't to shoot, I'll argue to my grave. It is to be enjoyed just like a beautiful woman is to be loved and enjoyed slowly and carefully. I know this now because I am old, after spending years treating women like rental cars.  

"I did too," I admitted somberly finishing the drink in three leisurely swills. It was truth serum. He smiled and collected the shot glasses with his fat fingers in a rare moment of purity. For a moment I was sad I wouldn't see him again, but that passed. It was the old him tonight. His liberal flareup subsided temporarily. And rather than the McLaughlin Hour, per usual, it became a somber wake suddenly as Neil Young strikes and sung "Harvest Mood." Moods often shift in the nightly life of a bar like the ebb and flow of the black ocean on a moonlit beach. It was the perfect night to end my long-standing affair with this bar. 

I suppose I will read of your marriage somewhere. And if fate is not in your favor, of your unfortunate death. I'll probably send flowers, anonymously, if I am still alive. If not, posthumously. I will arrange for them to be sent before I die. I will likely write a eulogy no one will ever read. You will probably die after a battle with cancer because you wouldn't stop smoking. I'd rather imagine you as an old lady, very much in love and content. 

Sitting here I can still smell you occasionally. The cigarette smoke dancing with your perfume. I turn my barstool and when it pules the way it does, there you are for a moment, just barely, in the thin vapors of air before you dissipate and are gone once more as quickly as you came. Back to wherever you are now without having realized you left at all. Oh, but you did. I can assure you that you did. There you are again in that empty barstool beside me, smiling and ordering a drink though you have to be up for work early. It never really mattered though, did it? We burnt up the night and pushed it for as long as we could before we went home and made love and laughed about something ridiculous. Something the owner said to us or about someone else. Some walrus-like expression he grunted. Nowhere do you remember those nights, just as nohow do I forget them. I would beg you to stay a little longer, but it is like asking the wind to be still. You are why I continued to come. To prolong the ever-fading memory of you. For your ghost that sometimes visits here in between thoughts and words. 

But not even ghosts are forever. They get bored and leave, I suppose. Several people I have drank with for the last twenty years have died and yet still remain, or they haven't came back at all. There are those who have died and those who have moved away or stopped coming for one reason or another. They're still here for a while. They sometimes visit, but they don't stay. Apparently, there is still a last call on the other side of eternity. They flee in the blink of an eye. I suppose we all have other haunts and no one is exclusive to just any one place but me. I only had this place because it was our place. And leaving here means I will no longer be able to meet you, if ever you do come back in more than just a memory. 

Maybe it was all that. All them leaving while I stayed. Maybe the new girl overcharged me once and I didn't want to seem like a skinflint haggling about the price of a salad and five happy-hour beers, so I just didn't come in the next week, or the next. Or maybe it was because they fired my favorite person, or because another one quit, all without any consideration for the customers who enjoyed their company. Who came for them because they were the internal organs of this place. A bar is supposed to be that which fills the void in life, not the void itself. Bartenders are supposed to have personality and make you feel better for coming in, for choosing their bar over all others. This was supposed to be that oasis, or else it is Applebee's and the soulless drudgery of soccer mom's with coupons and cheating dad's ogling the pretty waitresses. Pop 40 and new country crossover on the shitty restaurant PA and bartenders named Zack and Kylie working their way through college with pins on their chili-red polos and corporate promotions for chipotle-glazed salsa chicken and Alaskan lemon-grilled salmon. Try the key lime cheesecake, they say. It's scrumptious!

Not on your life, kid. 

Or maybe tht was all an excuse and I finally closed my last tab here because I need to let you go. And coming in, I was holding on. It was never mine, it was ours. 

I once half-imagined my body would be buried in this bar when I died. Interred in the bar itself. A glass bartop and walls would be installed like the seven dwarves did-up for Snow White so that anyone drinking here could see me lying there rotting a little more each day. Anyone could eat and drink right above me. And maybe someday you will return and kiss my leathery crumbling lips and I will suddenly regenerate and come back to life. I suppose we all think of ourselves as notable regulars worthy of such a glorious enshrinement and as someone someone else might want to save and restore. I suppose that is a fallacy of being human. Or maybe I will be in an urn on the shelf shouldered between the Maker's Mark and Stoli. Maybe we imagine our ghosts here when we are gone, thought of by someone else who probably will not think of us at all. This is our chrysalis. We are the pupae, and when we are gone we become butterflies flying off to somewhere else. Somewhere far more grand than here. That is how I think of you, wherever you are. I dream and hope that you are loved abundantly and love in return as you ought. Real love is being selfless enough to want the best for someone who doesn't want the best for you.  To think of someone who doesn't think of you. To still love someone who no longer loves you. And real love is also letting them go. 

I suppose a time in life comes when things do change. When we change and fall out of love with our favorite things and places and sometimes people for one reason or another. I don't like to think of it, but maybe it is just how it goes. Maybe it's when our hair grays and falls out. When our skin sags and our bones ache and we begin to realize our mortality and that the days and hours ahead are less than those that have past. When we begin to die rather than to grow. And places no longer feel like home because all the people who made them feel that way are gone. 

So instead of going to the bar, I vowed to do other things. To make a new life for myself. I made a bucket list and though I was only 44, it felt necessary. It was a list of new things. To go other places like the aforementioned other bars. I went to a titty bar In the big city with big city girls and watched them dance to bad music desperate for attention, even moreso than money, starved for genuine affection. There was something very sad and pathetic about the end of their act when they gathered dollars tossed for them on stage, raking with both arms before the other girl came on. Occasionally, there was a swift black midget in a white bowtie and sneakers who helped them gather their money with a push-broom. I watched him more intently than I did the women who seemed like they were stuck in a perpetual state of girldom.  

I didn't buy any dances or tip anyone at all. It wasn't the place for me. I drank and the girls would come by and luridly try to talk me into a dance the way a used car salesman would try to talk you into a Pontiac Firebird with four bald tires. But I declined and eventually they stopped coming and the word must have spread like the Bubonic Plague that I didn't tip because, in quick collusion against me, they all acted as though I didn't exist. They didn't look at me anymore or come by and sweet talk me. They were birds of prey looking for other rodents and at themselves in all the mirrors. And I looked around and could see them as I saw myself in the bar, interred in the bar itself. Only they were naked in thick glass cases that hung on the walls where they rotted, too. And no one seemed repulsed or to care at all. They were always ornaments and they all think they are Lana Del Rey. 

So after the other bars and the strip club didn't work out, I went to church like it was the last resort, which, indeed it actually is. I thought of how good a name that would be for a motel or a bar: The Last Resort. That is how I amused myself. I built it in my mind and filled it with colorful patrons and guests and bartenders and bellhops. Then I blew it up and it no longer exists. All this while waiting for communion while the preacher droned on about God knows what. But communion was the only drink they served and it was grape juice in a cup the size of a thimble. And there was no socialization beside the quick handshakes and hellos and goodbyes of people in a hurry briefly before and after service. There was no sports talk or reminiscing apart from Jesus did this or that. No one seemed to listen to what anyone else was really saying when they did talk. Everyone looked at everyone else absently and they all just seemed eager to speak. To be heard. To give their input on the bake sale or the mission trip to Haiti that didn't interest me in the least. But maybe I just didn't belong. I felt much like a pearl in an oyster. And in the agitation of my discomfort, maybe I was too critical of church in place of the bar, or I needed to give it time. Putting money in the collection plate and getting nothing in return irked me because I was frugal. Besides, the hours were horrible. Why ever they picked Sunday morning, I just don't know. 

But I found myself at home in an antique store that was once a large-old warehouse downtown. Maybe when it was a shoe factory it dreamed of one day selling antiques. The owners refurbished it nicely, but it still had the form of an early-20th century sweatshop where I could hear people suffering, but happy to be employed so not to starve. I thought it would be nice if they put in a bar and served alcohol, but they were good Christian people, so instead they had a Mr. Coffee pot and gingersnap cookies in a glass cake dome on a paper doily. Certainly alcohol would increase their sales on impulse buys alone and make the place more profitable. Maybe they would go for wine since Jesus made wine. Then they could introduce a wine-and-cheese singles night. Maybe I would find myself there, among a new crowd once again feeling like I belonged and meeting someone I could love. 

But by coincidence or providence, while I daydreamed all the while browsing the three levels of seemingly endless antiques, I found Apache Joe, the cigar store Indian from the bar, priced to sell for $750 bucks, as the tag read. And the phrase, "Priced to sell," ran circles in my mind over and over, squealing like a ridiculous pig.

I didn't really have the money to buy that old Injun friend of mine, just as I didn't have the money to buy you that ring, but I overdrafted my account and did so anyway. I couldn't let him go again. I remember at the Halloween Party that you once raised your hand and did that Indian thing with your other hand, tapping your mouth as you hollered, and then saying "How!" in your deepest Indian voice. But Apache Joe didn't reply and you said you thought he hated you. And we laughed about it but I assured you there was no way anyone could do anything but to love you. And you told me it was the nicest thing anyone has ever said to you. I have, inside me, transcripts of our love affair if ever you should require them. Apache Joe had heard it all. It once amused us and I don't believe we ever went into the bar without acknowledging him like so. Apache Joe was a part of us and, thus, he was like family to me. A kid I never got to meet  or to know. I wonder if you ever think of him. Or if you even remember. 

I had to have help carrying him out, and so a young man who worked there helped me and we lugged him down the stairs and out like we might have carried a corpse or a very drunk friend. I took him home and with the help of a neighbor put him in my living room next to the fireplace where he finds it most agreeable. Sometimes I sit there and we talk about all the people we used to know. He has seen them all. The lovers and the haters. The happy and the sad. You and I. All of them who have came and went from that old bar of ours. I don't expect I'll ever return to it. It's been long enough that it would be strange if I did like I would need to reintroduce myself and I wouldn't know what I was returning to, or who. Maybe that is how you think of me. Like some old bar. Something rather than someone you don't know or want to know anymore. 

Apache Joe and I smoke cigars, drink whiskey and listen to Dean Martin records. "You Can't Love Them All" is his favorite. I don't know why, but he says I should write a story with that title. I told him I will. I asked him if he thinks I'll ever get you back. He chuckled and said about the time he gets his land back. We laughed. Someday we will probably get the cancer, he added as we blow big halos of smoke above our lofty heads. Smoke signals, I call them. They are smoke signals for you. Then he asks me if I want him to pour me another drink, and I slurred back, very much drunk already and nearly passed out in my chair, "You'd be a Daisy if you do." 

I can see a lot of past on his faded face, but very little future, my dear. This world, it seems, has gone on without me.