The thing that surprised me most about moving back home was the overwhelming gush of esteem and compassion I encountered from the people here. Still, kitchen work was my line, and it made you thirsty. My late-night bar game usually consisted of the sports bar and then this little dive in the downtown of the next town over, for a live cover band.
The little dive was the kind of place that didn’t have any craft beer on tap and sometimes was the home to great acts of violence. Just a couple of months ago, actually, someone was stabbed in there, late at night on a Friday night — no fatalities occurred, but, somewhat troublingly, there was also no news story about the event available anywhere, online. Life was starting to seem like a crazy video game of constant deadly threats and a finite amount of “lives.”
Mandy was one of the bartenders there. She was pretty in a magazine cover sort of way, and maybe even in a porn star sort of way, with a very sexy body. Out of all of them, she had a beauty that most intimidated me, like getting served a really expensive plate of food that was still too hot to eat.
Eventually, though, much of the outside fanfare dissipated, and Mandy and I ended up forming a casual but pleasant friendship. She had this puzzling way of seeming kind of promiscuous and edgy, but also sort of nerdy. She’d show up to bartend in a shirt that said “Hogwarts,” for instance, and I had to confess to having no idea of what that was, she then filling me in on its connection to the Harry Potter series.
At some point, word got to me that she had three kids, so I sort of tacitly, with myself, made a pact to never date her. It ended up kind of being moot, anyway, since around this time, my personal free time became just annihilated by writing projects, from fiction, to a non-fiction book about music I was working on, to my everyday blogging practices, which involved listening to an unwieldy amount of music every week, both good and bad.
All the while, though, Mandy steadily kept bartending there, exuding an alluring dynamic of personae, in the meantime, and even being miraculously nice and smiling to the customers, like this one jacka** who’d lost his debit card and kept trying to yell at her about it. One of the cooks who worked late nights there, a pretty overweight dude with a scruffy beard, would talk to her in a pretty much incessant stream, or so it seemed, if he didn’t have a food order to make. She seemed to possess this limitless amount of patience, through this, standing there smiling and nodding, and issuing nothing but the most benevolent disposition, through all his chatter. And, of course, there were scarier characters than him to deal with in there, pretty much all the time.
The beat seemed to go on, anyway. One thing was for sure: Mandy had the prettiest laugh. And she’d laugh often, and smile often, perhaps stoned, but all the while manifesting this sort of little-girl identity that made you want to bear-hug her, and safeguard her against all the evil things in this world.
One of the last few times I had her as a bartender, she was wearing yoga pants, which seemed pretty out-of-character, for her. Her default was way more tomboyish, it seemed, like loose jeans, or whatever. These pants, anyway, were hunter-green, and showed off a posterior that would definitely get any guy staring. None of us really batted an eyelash. Yoga pants were pretty much the default around Michiana. Actually, I was surprised to see that female Notre Dame students even more them to class. They really didn’t ban those on campus for non-working-out activities?
Anyway, it was another night of Mandy and I hitting on each other, having a great time, me making her laugh at a very pleasing rate, and that cook dude even interrupting us pretty frequently, to seek attention. As always, Mandy was impeccably congenial and cheerful, even through the mediocre behavior of scary men around her. And with me, she wasn’t really my woman, so I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I was lucky to be a man and be alive and get good cheer and attention from this gorgeous girl, who might have been at this time about 36 (I was 41). It was just marvelous.
At one point, that night, Mandy came back from a smoke break. And I swear to God her butt looked skinnier. I probably seem like the biggest pervert on the planet, don’t I? But then, they invite us to look at it. That’s how I thought of the situation.
The very last time I had Mandy as a bartender, I was very surprised to see her not return my “Hey,” after I’d sat down — she made eye contact with me, but didn’t smile or say anything, just tending to somebody else’s drink and walking away, before finally coming back to me, with what seemed like a mocking look in her eyes. She was rail-skinny, visibly about 20 pounds lighter than she’d been three weeks before, the last time I’d seen her. When I saw her expressions, then, I couldn’t even believe my eyes. Her smile had been completely truncated, replaced with this strange, old-lady kind of scowl, which seemed like the ephemeral groundwork of frustration which then, itself, couldn’t even really come to fruition within the miasmic madness of her present mind state. Almost immediately, I made the conclusion that she’d been doing drugs, and something hard. I hoped she hadn’t actually been shooting heroin into her veins, but with the amount of weight she’d lost, and her eerie inability to smile and make any expressive face, I wasn’t ruling it out.
I walked out later that night and felt like Mandy was pretty much a stranger to me. It was a cold, desolate, ominous feeling, but at the same time, the kind of reality that life seems to provide in pretty full plenty, on this planet. It was the same, in a sense, as dealing with any person who really isn’t friendly, any person who’s been driven to an uncomfortable place by this life such that disallows for any mirth on their part, any ability of theirs to make friends with you, or even put themselves in your predicament whatsoever. It was the same as all the people you meet on the streets, in stores, in restaurants, who are just strangers by trade, and who will always remain strangers, to you, and to everyone, no matter what you might try to do to prevent it.
Mandy was just one bartender. Still, I felt the weight of her predicament on me, and it seemed so sad. She’d had this sweetest way of laughing when I said something, like a mouse squeaking, but in a good, almost sexy way, a really feminine way. My mind raced for some sort of solution — rehab, counseling, methadone clinics, anything to get Mandy back, clean, and relating in such a kind way to the public, as she had been doing.
And then it hit me. That’s what she was doing and it wasn’t working for her. What we’re trying to call the solution, the return to her status quo, bartending in that downtown hole, getting scowled at, seeing other girls in yoga pants, getting interrupted by fat cooks in Colts t-shirts, hearing cover bands belt out “Get Lucky” — it just wasn’t good for her. Her bar would get crowded, shoulder-to-shoulder. She’d be right in the center of it, money raining down on her. But she was still unhappy and I wondered if some of it might have been my fault. Truth be told, I had this pretty-much senile habit of hanging out in bars all the time, getting conversation from beautiful girls and then never attempting to get involved with them, or even get their numbers, or anything. She’d been driven to hard drugs by ostensible success, in life, which of course was probably even more heartbreaking than someone stooping to that level on account of poverty and destitution.
I mean, I didn’t know what it was like being a girl. And I didn’t know why Mandy was so nice to that bastard who kept yelling at her when he’d lost his debit card and to that fat cook who interrupted her.
And I didn’t know why we had to live this life amidst so many boarded-up buildings, so many beloved, local restaurants that failed, so many atrocities nationwide, worldwide, so much killing, dying and loss. Our loss of Mandy, finally, just felt like one more natural occurrence in the world — like an 11-year-old girl wearing yoga pants at a high school basketball game, like another school closing, like another four-degree, icy, slippery winter day, on which we were required to still go through all our motions as if everything were fine. The world spat fire and the world spat dust and we took and made the best of it, each of us, probably, in our private mental nooks, living a litany of lies, akin to stepping stones we used to circumvent reality, to usher in a song to support our morale, though not a communal gesture, and hence the less for devolved, coon-show solidarity.