The air was moist, with colors of the nighttime getting set, in the late winter evening sky. I’d just returned home from a day of errand running, checked the mail, caught glance of the Santa rug still on the porch from Christmas, and once again, walked inside, feeling empty. Then I thought, damn, I better take that rug out to the garage, or to the basement, decided on the garage.
When I got out there, the girl next door, who was a bartender, looked at me shyly, and then looked down.
“Hi,” I said.
I got a smile from her three miles long, the size of a tank. She was buxom in a way that girls tend to be in the 21st century, and she stood erect, crossing her arms, seeming to not really have anything to do.
“Did you work today?” I asked.
“Yup,” she said, with just a faint glimmer of a smile left on her face. Beyond her, the neighbor over there was letting their dog out, sort of toggling the ground with his face in an agitated state. “My boss was fu**in’ crazy too.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, “that one. Well if you wanna come in for a drink, be my guest.”
I’d never invited her in before, it was something about this cuspid day around the beginning of spring that made me do it. I didn’t really seem to have anything to do either. Plus, there were no TV shows I watched, I didn’t even have TV service, so there was the extra, weighty, labyrinthine element of really not missing anything, if I were to spend an evening socializing.
“Just knock,” I said, “if you want.”
Well, I caved in, and ended up listening to the Michigan – Michigan St. game on the radio, like a true guy. It was a good game, a bunch of guys doing stuff I couldn’t do, broadcast by my homey up in the sticks in Niles. All the while, I felt the smile of that bartender, Gwendolyn, stretching out before me, and I felt the ways in which she inundated my past, making nice with all my former elements, smoothing out all my former trials.
There was one more roll of wrapping paper in the corner still, so I took it down to the basement. When I got back up, I heard the knock. I thought maybe it hadn’t been the first knock, since I’d been down there.
“Hello,” I said, stepping back, a little nervous.
I got a perfunctory little “hey” back.
Feeling a little tense, I made my way over to the kitchen, thinking either she’d follow or she wouldn’t. She just sat down on the couch.
“I have a couple things,” I said, from in the kitchen, “Edmund Fitzgerald or this Barefoot Sauvignon.”
“I’ll just take a Fitz,” she said.
I poured us each one, and I had glasses from random breweries from around the country.
She didn’t say anything, she just leaned back, going “ahh.”
“Are you off tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yup,” she said, sort of skirting discussion, looking toward the window.
“Got any plans?”
“Grabbin’ coffee with my friend,” she said. “That’s about it.”
“Starbucks?”
She nodded.
“You should drink local,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” she answered, “it’s just a tradition.”
“I know what you mean. There’s this one Applebee’s I always go to, or sometimes, at least, and I’ll just order a Budweiser and just watch the Michigan or IU game.”
She smiled patiently, nodding.
“I went there one time with my dad and sister, in ’07. It was February, freezing rain, and I had to drive back down to Indy afterward.”
“But it always just brought back memories for ya?”
“Yeah, exactly. It seems like I have a transcendent experience every time I go there, even if it’s just talking to the random 22 year old dude who’s bartending. It’s all couples in there, people in their best faces and worst clothes.”
She nodded patiently, and just looked down at her porter, not really melancholy, but not really jovial either.
“Sometimes,” I continued, “it’s those old moments in life that are so hard to let go of.”
I could feel her eyesight on me now, but I just looked down. I thought of the next time I’d go into this bar, and have Gwendolyn as a bartender. Across town, there would be men working in the factories, trudging through the days amidst rumblings of machines, men eating the same thing for lunch they did the day before, at the same time, in the same room, with the same people, listening to the same dronings, as their bosses were out at a different restaurant on their hourlong lunches, getting a different memo from corporate, or on their conference call, planning a different vacation to a different island for their vacation time. All in the eyes of a youth, this ran clear, the division of the masses, the architectural flaws that send so many of us struggling, so many of us violent and hopeless, while continually society is measured by its neon lights.
You could drop out of school, or you could drop out of situations, too. I thought of that youth, having to go to school every day, and be around the same people, learning some oblong sh** to make our president look good, so he could go on and only be angrier, and hornier, a teenager on the brink, everything dorky, nothing looking like anyone’s success except the man’s. I looked up at Gwendolyn, and wondered if she thought about all of this, or if I just wanted her to be my desultory bartender, and nothing more. I thought she looked needy, her face had an intricate pattern to it that was familiar.
All of a sudden I felt like all my needs were met in life, so I said, “I’ll be right back,” and went and grabbed my guitar. I started playing some random chord progression in E, G and A, and I noticed as Gwendolyn started tapping her feet along to it. It made me want her. I thought about the wetness of her beautiful garden, and how girls don’t really mean bad, they just need a delicate balance of things, we all need so much more that we think we do.