by John Marco
A few men like this look. They figure I’m easy (I’m not) because I’m lonely (I’m not that either), and they try to woo me with lies. The occasional guy who enjoys my friendship takes it a stage farther, but we usually agree to go back to platonic after a few months.
Men who look like this guy never give me a second glance. And if one of them had slept with me by accident (and none of them had), it would have been an invitation that came at last call, and the night would end with him chewing his arm off in the morning.
I know that. So when I started talking to Mr. Weird But Beautiful, I did it not because I wanted him (even though I did). I did it because he looked as though he needed some advice.
To understand why he needed some advice, you need to know what my bar looks like. It’s not a fern bar or a sports bar. There are no big screens scattered around, all turned to ESPN. There are no giant booths with huge backs because I don’t want couples making out in my place and getting us slapped with violating the decency laws.
There are round tables of various sizes scattered across the floor, and they get pushed aside on Saturdays, when my favorite DJ comes in to spin the tunes—usually oldies, because I don’t tolerate that hip-hop crap in my bar.
The rest of the time, it’s the juke that’s been here since I bought the place. A pool table against the back wall gives the regulars a reason to return besides my lovely presence.
The bar’s the first thing you see when you come in the door. The back bar is large and mirrored, so it looks as though we have even more booze than we do. I put the expensive stuff back there because the business travelers who’ve just had a meeting in the big conglomerate across the street make it worth my while.
The bar is a classic U and made of expensive wood with a polyurethane top, so that I can wipe the thing off every night. Everyone vies for the twenty bar stools that surround the outside of the U, and during Friday Happy Hour, the line for those stools can be five deep.
Although it’s not fair to call them stools. They’re actually tall chairs with rounded backs that hug the backside of whoever’s sitting there. I bought the things from a bar going out of business about five years ago, and they’re the best purchase I ever made. They keep the hard drinkers—the guys who pass out with predictable regularity—in their chairs. These guys don’t fall four feet to the floor, hitting their head on the bar rail on the way down and thinking lawsuit when they finally wake up.
Guys who drink like that—and every neighborhood bar has them—keep our local taxi service in business, especially weekend nights. I don’t even have to call any more. At closing, half a dozen cabs show up here as if they’d been summoned. I confiscate keys, pour the hard drinkers into the cabs, and sign the tab. Then when the drinkers come back for their cars, I won’t hand over the keys until I get reimbursed.
It works for all of us, and rarely does the hard drinker get mad.
I take care of my people. That’s what I’m known for.
Which is why no one was surprised when I started talking to Mr. Weird But Beautiful.
He started coming in about February, with that uncomfortable look most first timers in a bar often have. He wore a shiny silk suit and a matching silver tie, and he looked good enough to eat.
When he sat at the bar, I was surprised. When he ordered his light beer and piña colada, I waited for the pretty business associate to show up for their meeting.
Only she never came. The beer got nursed and the piña colada disappeared, although I never saw him take a sip.
And as the bar filled up, a bottle blonde stopped beside the empty chair, leaned against the bar, and displayed her assets prettily for him. After she ordered, she turned to him, and he smiled one of those Tom Cruise mighty megawatt smiles, the kind that makes you hot just thinking about it.
She smiled back, and I could tell she was feeling like I was feeling—the right word and she was his.
He had one of those deep Barry White voices, which carried even though he probably didn’t intend it to.
Her eyes danced and she leaned in, just a bit, as he said, “Please say hello to my little friend.”
Then he looked down.
She flushed, grabbed her drink, and left the bar.
And he leaned back, looking very confused.
Now most guys, when they have a pick-up line that fails, try another one. And any guy who looks like him doesn’t need a line at all.
It was a testament to his attractiveness that no woman ever dumped a drink on his lap or slapped him or called him names. Every woman he approached— and by April, he was approaching the desperate ones as well as the pretty ones—gave him that what-the-hell-did-you-just-say? look and fled.
But he never varied his line, he never altered his routine, and he never ever got anyone to say hello to his little friend.
Until, of course, me.
It was just after Easter when I finally had enough. When you have regulars in your place, you develop an emotional attachment to them. Sometimes that attachment is loathing, sometimes it’s friendship, and sometimes it’s pity.
With Mr. Weird But Beautiful, I found myself feeling oddly responsible. I wanted to sit next to him and say, “What? Your mother never taught you manners?”
But I knew that wasn’t the way to approach him. Instead, I pulled a bar stool over to his other side, the side away from the empty stool he hogged every Friday, and said, “Your little friend routine doesn’t work.”
He looked at me as though he didn’t know I could speak English. Maybe he thought the only sentences in my repertoire were “Light on tap and piña colada, right?” and “That’ll be six-sixty-five.”
It seemed to take him a minute to process this new sentence, and then he said, “It’s gotta work.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “You need a new line, that’s all. Half the women in this place would go home with you if you asked them right.”
“I don’t want them to go home with me. I want them to go home with Marty.”
That’s when I sighed. I couldn’t help it. “Look,” I said, “to get them home with Marty, you need to charm them first.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not fair. Marty needs to charm them.”
“Marty can work his magic in the privacy of your own bedroom,” I said. “You—”
But by that time, Mr. Weird But Beautiful was giving me the what-the-hell-did-you-just-say? look. He flushed and he was starting to get out of his chair when I grabbed his wrist.
His muscular oh-so-strong wrist.
“I’m trying to help you here,” I said. “It’s been nearly three months, and you can’t get a girl to spend thirty seconds with you. You’re going about it wrong.”
He pulled his wrist from my grasp. “First, I don’t want her to spend time with me. I’m trying to fix up Marty. Second, Marty and I do not share a bed or even a house. Third, what the hell even makes this your business?”
“Nothing, I guess,” I started, but by the time I finished the third word, he was gone.
Without paying for his beer or his piña. And, as usual, the beer was barely touched, but the piña was gone.
It really bugged me that I never saw him drink it.
Especially this time. When I was sitting beside him from the moment I set the drinks down.
I figured that was the last I’d see of Mr. Weird But Beautiful, so I wrote off the drinks and went back to my routine. No one asked after him, even though a few of the regulars noticed he was missing.
These were the closeted guys, one of whom got very drunk on a Friday in March, sidled up to Mr. Weird But Beautiful, and said, “I’ll say hello to your little friend,” in a suggestive voice, and nearly got tossed across the room.
Mr. Weird But Beautiful left after that too, although that time he paid, hands shaking. He did come back, though, the following week, and when his closeted stalker came up to him a second time, Mr. Weird But Beautiful held up his hand.
“Look,” he said in a polite voice, the s
ame voice he used for his pick-up line. “I vote Democrat. I believe in equal rights. I know we should be flattered because you’re probably a very nice man. But believe me when I say that my friend and I are not your type.”
The closeted stalker nodded once, then went back to his chair, probably trying to maintain some dignity. He never approached Mr. Weird But Beautiful again, but he did watch from time to time, maybe hoping Mr. WBB might change his mind.
Although I could have told him that he wouldn’t. A guy who doesn’t change his pick-up line is not going to change his orientation, no matter how much the other party hopes he will.
Believe me, I know. Because most guys are oriented toward beautiful—or at least pretty—and no matter how friendly they are, no matter how much they talk to me or flirt with me, they’re not going home with me, and they’re certainly not going to invite me to spend time with their little friend.
At least, not when they’re sober. And I’ve been a bartender long enough to know they’re not worth a damn when they’re drunk. After a while, you look for meaning, you know? Just a kind word, a phrase, a bit of understanding.
I try a little kindness once a night, just to keep my hand in the game, which was why I talked to Mr. Weird But Beautiful in the first place.
Sometimes kindness pans out. Sometimes it doesn’t.
And sometimes it leads you places you never thought you’d go.
He came back the next afternoon. Mr. Weird But Beautiful, who never darkened my door on any day but Friday, had shown up on Saturday wearing a blue chambray shirt, faded jeans, shit-kickers with no added heel. If anything, he looked even more delectable. The blue shirt stretched just enough to show the muscles on his chest. The jeans hugged his ass the way . . . well, the way I wanted to.
He didn’t sit at the bar. Instead, he took a table in the middle of the room.
And since none of the cocktail waitresses would go near him, I had to wait on him. From the bar, I said tiredly, “Beer and piña, right?”
He looked at me, those blue eyes flat, his expression reserved, his tone one you’d use with a six-year-old. “Just the beer.”
So I brought him the light, still foaming over the stein, and onto the tray. Man, was I out of practice.
I set down the napkin, then the beer, and started to leave, when he said, “I’ve been thinking about our conversation.”
“Good,” I said, and returned the tray, wiping it down before I set it near the server’s station.
“And I’d like to ask you a few questions,” he said just a little louder.
Jodi, the cocktail waitress, raised a single eyebrow. It was her who-does-this-asshole-think-he-is? look.
But there was no one else in the place. So I told her to man the bar (she used to tend, but didn’t make as much in tips; if I had assets like hers, I’d waitress too), and I walked back to him.
He kicked out the chair beside him. I sat. This wasn’t going to be an easy conversation.
“So why doesn’t it work?” he asked. “That line, as you call it.”
My turn to give him the incredulous look, and I almost hauled out one of the sentences I’d been thinking since he first came in—“What? You were raised by wolves?”—but if I did, he’d bolt, and he’d spend the rest of his life trying this stupid gambit at bars all over town until he finally gave up and stayed home— alone—for the rest of his life.
I couldn’t decide if that outcome was a crime against nature (his gorgeous nature) or just the way things should be.
For a minute, I toyed with answering the question delicately. But I’d tiptoed around delicately the day before, and it hadn’t worked. This guy had spent all night wondering why “Say hello to my little friend” repelled women. He wasn’t going to get delicate.
He might not even get blunt.
“Look,” I said in my best I’ve-been-around-the-block voice, “we all know that most men name their penis, okay? We know you have a close relationship— a friendship—with that part. We just don’t need to know it from the moment—”
“You think Marty is my penis? Are you nuts?” He stood up, bumped the table, and knocked over the stein. I slid my chair back so I wouldn’t get doused in light beer.
Jodi tossed me the bar rag, but she wasn’t getting anywhere near good ole WBB.
“Who else would he be?” I asked as I set the rag on the table and went for some bar napkins.
“My friend,” WBB said. “You know, the guy who comes in here with me. The guy who drinks the piña coladas.”
“I hate to tell you this, pal,” I said as I tossed half the napkins on the table and the other half on the stain spreading across the floor. “But you come in here alone.”
I expected an argument. I expected him to tell me all about this Marty, who accompanied him. I expected to hear every detail about the delusion.
Instead, WBB said, “That fucking son of a bitch,” handed me a twenty, and walked out of the bar.
He walked back in an hour later, dragging an ugly little man who had blood dripping from his nose. WBB picked up the little man—who couldn’t have been more than three feet tall—and said,
“This. This is my little friend. Marty the fucking bastard. Say hello, Marty.”
“Hello,” the little man said in a nasal tone. He was dripping blood over the floors I had just cleaned the beer off of.
“Hello,” I said. “Do you want to press charges? I can call the police.”
The little man shook his head. Blood dripped everywhere.
“Show the nice lady what you can do, Marty,” WBB said. “She’s been kind to me. She deserves to know.”
I flushed at the word “kind.” No one had noticed before.
Marty closed his eyes. His nose was still dripping.
WBB shook him. “Show her.”
And Marty disappeared. But the blood kept dripping on my floor. Ping, ping, ping.
Jodi and I exchanged glances. I’d seen a lot of strange things in my bar, but that was the first legitimate disappearing man.
“Now,” WBB said. “Explain what was going on.”
He shook his fists. Only Jodi and I knew that there was a little guy between them.
Either that or WBB was David Fucking Copper-field.
“Tell them,” WBB said.
“We had a bet,” the little guy said, and reappeared as he spoke. He was dangling between WBB’s hands and looking as forlorn as a human being could. “We bet that no matter how good-looking he is, he couldn’t get me a date.”
“The rest of it,” WBB said.
The little guy sighed.
WBB shook him again.
“We handicapped him,” the little guy said, “by making him say, ‘Say hello to my little friend.’ You know, like in golf. Figuring the good player needed a level playing field with the ugly player. Me.”
“Ugly.” WBB said. “Damn straight.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d seen bar bets before. But judging from WBB’s face the day he first came in— all stunned at the way the bar looked and smelled— he didn’t. He had no idea that cheating was part of the process.
“How much was the bet for?” I asked.
“The year-end bonus,” WBB said. “Five grand.”
“He doesn’t need his,” the little guy said. “People give him stuff because he’s so pretty.”
I stared at WBB. His beautiful blue eyes flashed. He was furious.
He shook the little guy one more time for good measure. “Tell her the rest of it. I’d say, ‘Say hello to my little friend.’ And then you what?”
The little guy cleared his throat. “I disappeared.”
He vanished then quickly reappeared.
“To everyone except me,” WBB said. “I could see the little bastard.”
“I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but he disappeared long before you came into the bar. If he really was with you.”
“He was,” WBB said. “Tell her.”
The little guy shrugged one i
mprisoned shoulder. The movement looked like it hurt. “It’s my only talent. It’s all I can do. I trained it. Because people always looked at me with pity. I’m short and I’m ugly, and you wouldn’t believe the jokes.”
“So you turned the table on your friend?” I asked. “A man who was going to help you? You played a trick on him?”
“He promised he wouldn’t,” WBB said. “He promised he’d stay visible.”
“I did!” The little guy said.
“To me,” WBB said. “And only me. The man who believed in him. I figured once someone talked to him, she’d want to go out with him. I used to think he was clever.”
The little guy tried to wipe his nose but WBB held him fast.
“I believed in him,” WBB said, and dropped him.
The little guy bounced in the pool of his own blood.
“Fucking bastard,” WBB said, and left.
And, of course, I never saw him again.
His little friend, on the other hand, haunts my bar like an out-of-work Rumplestiltskin. I think he makes his living by winning bar bets.
Like, “Betcha I can’t appear and reappear.” Like, “I can make a piña colada vanish without even touching it.” Like, “I bet a handsome man like you can’t get a woman to give me a second glance.”
I let him stay. He’s a curiosity. Now that they’re used to him, the regulars place bets right alongside his. The entire place is getting rich.
Except me.
Because there’s a part of me that still wants the fairy tale. You know, you help the gorgeous guy, and even though you’re a plain Cinder Ella, he sees through the grime and makes you his princess.
But WBB hasn’t come back. I haven’t even gotten enough courage to ask his little friend for WBB’s real name.
I know real life is not a fairy tale.
But I also know that tiny men who look like Rumplestiltskin can’t disappear at will.
And yet this one does.
Somehow that’s not quite enough to overcome my belief in the way the world really works.
You see, I own a bar. I know that people never change their orientation. And WBB, for all his willingness to help his little friend, was oriented toward beautiful—or at least pretty.