At an upscale pizza joint in South Miami there’s a woman working the door with long blond braids who looks in the candle light to be about thirty. Tell her you’re heading to the bar and she smiles, gestures teh way, and you go. Keep turning to see her walk people to their tables.
Couple weeks ago you saw her at a gas station on Old Cutler in a BMW with her daughter, a kid, wearing matching…
Pretty tipsy and it’s Karaoke night again, the music’s crazy loud, and while reading somebody launches into a Linkin Park song at the mic and — maybe this is you being drunk and hypersensitive — the vibrations through the bar, through your stool, are running through your torso and seem to be tracing the outline of your organs. Your organs are buzzing.
It’s awful.
But also might not actually be…
Karaoke. You didn’t know.
A middle-aged guy in blue jeans with red suspenders and his shirt tucked in takes the stage with a melancholic rendition of “Love on the Rocks”. You see him at Barnes & Noble sometimes. He goes there with a backpack and a baseball cap and stays for hours. Reads a lot.
His voice is deep and he talks with a cadence that sounds aloof, and every step he takes looks a little…
She was a bar tender at one of the bars in the mall near your house, still is, and since you were going there on a regular basis she got in the habit of striking up conversation. Especially on weeknights. Friendly, smart, compulsively adopting animals. Good company. Call her Rebecca. One night you stop at the bar with a friend. It’s a weeknight, quiet. She buys you both a second round. Some beer…
Every now and then you’ll have a busy morning where you get more things done than you expected but most days you go to bed feeling like you haven’t done enough. Wouldn’t be able to sleep if you’d done nothing, though. You abide pretty strictly by the No Zero Days doctrine and, big or small, there’s something to show for your day. But mostly you’ll find yourself sitting at the bar when Happy Hour…
April 22. Never looks the way you thought.
At work your colleague shows you this book he just bought. A friend of his wrote it. Published by a small house. The author photo is a candid shot, kinda blurry, taken at an event where he’s wearing a suit and holding a microphone. Start thinking about how the author probably poured his heart into this book and a few hundred hours of eager earnest work and how he probably pitched it to a hundred…
It’s late and you’re heading home after work and decide to stop at CVS for a fourpack of PBR. Pull up to the store and fine the PBR’s all gone. Even the big 22-ounce cans you can buy on their own. There’s a few six- and twelve-packs of various beers and while you tell yourself you aren’t in the mood for that much beer tonight the truth is you don’t have that kinda money right now. What they do…
Use the garage today because it’s pouring rain. You know it’s a bad idea because they charge a weekend surplus but for some reason you go along with it. At a bar upstairs the notebook comes out and you do a good amount of work in the sapce of two beers. The bill is $6, plus tip. It’s been about two hours. This is fine. Leaving the garage a twentysomething in the cashiers’ booth tells you the…
Her name’s G. Whenever she shows up and you’re here already, reading, she’ll come over and sit, talk, and on the one occasion you told her you really needed to get through this book she told you to go to a library. She’d leave you alone if you really pressed it but you never do. She has a brazen sense of humor and talks in a growl, sarcastic, her eyelids are heavy like she’s always exasperated…
Last night was open mic and even though you hadn’t prepared a routine, on account of so much work needing to get done and lots of family drama, you went up on stage. Underprepared. Fucked it up. Got down and lingered and had a beer, killed time, drove home and drank more and fell asleep cringing at how badly you’d bombed. Wake up cringing still. In the shower you work the soap into a lather real…
Hungry at the cafe but you check your account and decide it’s probably safer just to stay hungry for a while, ’til Happy Hour, at which point you head south to the usual bar for a halfprice beer and a halfprice appetizer, big enough to work as a meal, and to read for a bit before heading home. At the cafe when you were hungry the barista got up from behind the counter and came over and sat beside…
You’re about to go for a walkthrough at an efficiency in a convenient part of town and, being too excited, you get here an hour early. Can’t go knocking on the door right now. Gotta be punctual, make a good impression. So you go to kill time at a bar about five blocks away. Bring a book. The bar tender walks up to you with this head-tilted squint, and so you start squinting right back at her, and…
April 15. Even when you’re not talking about money, you’re talking about it.
Dad calls to say he doesn’t want you to go on a road trip you’ve planned and the fact of his getting in touch just to say so is enraging, more than it ought to be, and probably mostly because of money. You’re short on money and when you’re short on money everything is worse than it is cuzza the Money Cloud. You’re currently on your way to a birthday party for which you’ve just spent 10% of your…
This particular La Quinta’s in a shady part of town and there’s bad lighting in the parking lot so when you get here at 9:30 it’s almost pitch dark. You walk inside with the McDonald’s bag and the Pabst Blue Ribbon in one hand and your keys in the other, clutched in a jumble, unclear whether you’d swing or stab them at an attacker. The elevator is wood-paneled and smells like 2002 and the hallway…
Only other guy at the bar is thirtysomething and says to the bartender, tall woman all frecklespeckled with red hair, he’s surprised by how relaxed it is in here. He says this is his first visit. “Place looks so fancy,” he says, “everytime I get near it I feel like I gotta book.” She shrugs, wiping the counter in fast circles, “We’re not so fancy.” He asks where she’s from. “Virginia. What about…