by Don Lee
Lyndon didn’t, either. He had Carhartt bibs and coveralls. He had dirty blue jeans and clean blue jeans, and one pair of nice black jeans for evenings out. He possessed only one suit, black, which he’d purchased for his father’s funeral. It was a little tacky-looking, and the sleeves were too short. This had been a major point of contention in his relationship with Sheila: what the hell was she doing with a man who owned just one off-the-rack suit, she couldn’t take him anywhere, she couldn’t get him to go to parties or benefits with her, to the ballet or concerts, to galleries or fancy restaurants, to the city or practically anywhere.
His brother had suggested a therapist. On Sheila’s recommendation, Lyndon had been to several. A Jungian therapist had certified him a classic introvert, feeling drained in a crowd, whereas an extrovert would have been energized. A psychodynamic therapist laid the blame on his parents—uncommunicative father, meddlesome, perfectionist mother. A cognitive-behavior therapist surmised he had social anxiety disorder, a fear of being judged. Lyndon thought they were all hacks and quacks, and when the last one kept saying Lyndon seemed “diffident” when he meant to declare him “indifferent,” Lyndon quit for good, indifferent to anyone who could not distinguish the difference.
He and JuJu set up their stations for the night, cutting up fruit for the garnishes, mixing the mixers, restocking the coolers, changing the kegs, lugging in tubs of ice, washing glasses. They needed extra birdbaths—martini glasses. It was Martini Night.
Beelzebub hadn’t gotten around to fiddling with the décor yet, but he was experimenting with various concepts to draw more business, hiring a DJ for Oldies Night, a dance instructor for Salsa Night, making Nestor, the cook, assay beyond his usual repertoire of burgers and nachos into a vast new menu of happy-hour appetizers, ranging from tapas and dim sum to bruschetta and goat cheese fondue.
The martinis for Martini Night were an abomination. Lyndon was old school when it came to martinis. Fill a shaker with ice, splash in a tiny bit of Cinzano vermouth and immediately strain it out, pour in Bombay Sapphire gin, swirl the shaker seven times, strain it into a chilled birdbath, garnish with two olives. Vodka was outré, any other accoutrements were sacrilegious, and flavoring in the booze was simply heinous. Yet on the Oar House list of martinis was now an Appletini, a Mochatini, and a truly revolting concoction called an Orangetini. It made Lyndon’s skin crawl whenever he had to make one.
Which, thankfully, was not too often, for despite Beelzebub’s efforts, the theme nights and special drinks and appetizers had not lured in a bustling new yuppie clientele. Instead, they had to settle for holdovers from Milty’s old gang and a few walk-ins like Tank and Skunk B., JuJu’s pals, who’d made a habit of trying to stump the bartenders with calls for exotic drinks, names they liked saying: Ginger Not Mary Ann, Dirty Nipple.
They came in just after sundown, and when JuJu asked what they wanted, Tank and Skunk B. shouted in unison, “Adiós Motherfucker!”
JuJu squinted at them. “¿Qué?”
“Adiós Motherfucker!” the boys shouted again, and began cackling.
The drink was not in Beelzebub’s drink recipe book, which meant it was not in the new POS computer, which meant JuJu would have to enter the ingredients for the drink manually into the register—that is, if he could figure out what they were.
“You know it?” he asked Lyndon.
It happened that he did. It was a frat-boy drink, a cruiseship, spring-break, amateur’s drink, a rancid-tasting nail in the head that smelled like rocket fuel, designed purely for projectile inebriation: half an ounce each of vodka, rum, tequila, gin, and Blue Curaçao, two ounces respectively of sour mix and 7UP. While Lyndon made the drinks, JuJu punched them up on the touchscreen computer, and Tank and Skunk B. kept laughing, having a high time, oohing and aahing about the drinks’ aquamarine glow, clinking their glasses and cheering, “Adiós Motherfucker!,” faux-choking and pounding their chests.
JuJu gave them the tab. “Nineteen ninety-five,” he announced.
The boys stared dumbly at the check.
“Each, motherfuckers.”
Thereafter, they stuck to beer.
There was a bit of a predinner rush, if it could be called that, a few more customers, a few Mochatinis, and then the place emptied out again, deadsville, which gave Skunk and Tank B. occasion to hold forth on their favorite subject—sex—not that either, at least in recent memory, had had much more than anecdotal experience with it. Eventually Skunk got around to a story he’d heard from a nurse about a Russian guy who’d come to the hospital because he’d once been in the army in Siberia, and the soldiers there—little-known fact—had nothing better to do than get wasted on vodka and inject silicon into their penises to make them bigger, and this guy’s silicon had migrated up to his stomach, requiring surgery, and the nurse had taken a peek as he was being prepped.
“What’d it look like?” Tank asked Skunk.
“She said it looked just like a gigantic Campbell’s soup can,” Skunk said.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Dude, fuck if I’ll ever be able to eat tomato soup again.”
As they continued to yap, JuJu pondered the empty bar and said to Lyndon, “You know what we need in here? Flat-screen TVs. Images, man. It’s become a spectator culture, that’s the phenomenology of the postmillennial age. People need images flashing around to signify experiential reality.”
“The last thing I need is Ed Kitchell coming in here with his Yell Leaders to watch football games. Because he’d do that, you know, just to yank my chain.”
“Tomorrow night, Lyndey. They’ll be out of town. A little monkeywrenching to soothe the soul?”
Lyndon was tempted, but said, “Can’t risk getting caught.” He went into the back cooler to change the canisters of beverage syrup and CO2 for the soda guns, and when he came out, he found Laura Díaz-McClatchey standing near the entrance, scanning the bar. She looked, as always, as if she’d just left the insurance office, buttoned-down in a taupe pantsuit.
“There you are,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d be working tonight.” She pulled out a stool and sat at the bar, all eyes on her. Lyndon put down a coaster. “What can I get you? Martini?”
She looked at the list of martinis and grimaced. “How about a sidecar?”
A sidecar was a good, old-fashioned American drink, very elegant: cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice. “Sugar on the rim?” Lyndon asked.
“Let’s skip.”
“Preference on the cognac?”
“Martell VSOP?”
Another good choice. Not the most expensive, but smooth and mellow, and it stood up well to ice and mixing.
“With a twist,” she said.
She was impressing him more and more, forgoing the usual froufrou garnish of a cherry and orange slice. He poured, and she sipped.
“Perfect,” she pronounced, and they smiled at each other.
Mandy, one of the waitresses, laid her tray on the counter and, smacking gum, said, “Vodka cranberry Stoli orange juice.”
Mandy had syrup for brains. Lyndon loathed the way she called out her drinks, always having to decode the order. Did she mean a Cape Cod and a Stoli screwdriver? A madras? Two vodka neats with juice backs? There were myriad possibilities.
He noticed Mandy had twisted the bottom hem of her new polo shirt into a knot to expose her lardy midriff. When had showing off how flabby you were become a commendable fashion trend? Who had convinced the diet-challenged functional illiterates of the world that this might be construed as sexy?
“Your eloquence is exceeded only by your charm,” Lyndon said to her.
“Thanks,” she chirped, taking it as a compliment.
Lyndon was going to clarify, but let it go. After she left with the drinks (she had meant a Stoli Cape Cod and an OJ), Laura told him, “You have a way with women.”
“You noticed?” He wiped down the counter, then leaned toward her. “Listen, I’m sorry about the…incident yes
terday.”
“I have to say, it spooked me a little,” Laura told him. She cocked her head and peered at his face. “Is that a black eye?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Did that woman do that to you? She hit you?”
“No, it wasn’t her. It was…someone else. An accident.”
Laura straightened up on her stool. “What are you, the town roué?”
“Hardly.”
“Are you sure? Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing. Sometimes a little experience can be, shall we say, useful.”
This Laura Díaz-McClatchey, she had a way of being provocative.
“Who was that woman with the hammer, anyway?” she asked. “Your ex-wife?”
“No, she’s my—” He didn’t know how to describe Sheila.
“An ex, though?” Laura said. “As in former, erewhile, ancient history, now extinct?”
“Yes,” Lyndon said.
“You’re no longer involved with her?”
Lyndon thought about what Sheila had told him this morning: Nada. Rien. Zenzen betsuni. “No.”
“So she’s just a stalker, a wigged-out ex-lover who’s so enraged and embittered with you, she’s inflicting bodily harm on your truck and besmirching your reputation in front of every woman you associate with. Is that the gist of it?”
“That about sums it up.”
Laura nodded. “All righty. I can live with that.” She extracted a scrap of paper and a pen from her purse. “I can’t stay, but the other day, you were saying something about dinner.” She wrote down her phone number and slid the paper across the counter. It was an ATM receipt. She had $83.57 in her checking account.
“Tomorrow night?” Laura asked.
Why not? he thought. Hadn’t Sheila told him to go ahead, to move on, to forget about her? “Tomorrow night,” he said.
She stood and took out her wallet. “What’s the damage?”
“It’s on me.”
“Call me,” she said at the door.
As he entered the comp on the register, JuJu knocked into him with his shoulder. “Lyndey, you old dog, you!”
“Shut up, JuJu.”
“You’ve been holding out on me, Kemo Sabe. Who’s the chica? Where’d you meet her?”
“I got a massage from her,” Lyndon told him.
“Oh, I see,” JuJu said.
“Not that kind of massage.”
Yet Lyndon felt good. The day had taken an unexpected turn, an intriguing dip and declension. Sheila notwithstanding, he hadn’t had a real date in years.
The night progressed quickly, busy all of a sudden, actually two-deep at the bar at one point. This was a different type of crowd than they were used to seeing, more affluent, sophisticated, definitely out-of-towners. A lot of gin and tonics, Cosmo’s, and margaritas. They were savvy enough to decline the specialty martinis and order them dry or dirty. Most of them were visiting Rosarita Bay, it happened, wonder of wonders, kudos to the mayor, who knew what she was doing after all, for the chili and chowder festival.
But as this wave of customers was beginning to thin out, Sunny Padaca, the big-kahuna pot dealer, decided to make an unpropitious visit. Sunny was a Filipino-Samoan moke from the wrong side of Oahu, and he came in with two of his vato buzz-cut crew, mowing through people to the bar, a barrel felling trees. “Howzit, brah,” he said, grinning at Lyndon. He wanted three Kamikazes and three Anchor Steams.
“A little off the beaten path for you, isn’t it?” Lyndon said as he prepared the shooters. Sunny never dropped by the Oar House, preferring to ensconce himself in the Memory Den, a dive near the harbor.
“I like to diversify once in a while,” Sunny said. “Check up on the little people. What have you been up to? You and the pogo stick keeping out of trouble?” He gazed over at JuJu, and then at Tank and Skunk B. “Or looking for it?”
Oh, fuck, Lyndon thought. He knows. Sunny had heard about the plants, and he assumed Lyndon and JuJu were planning to sell the pot, horning in on his action.
“I never look for trouble,” Lyndon said.
“Yeah? You sure about that?” Sunny said. “Because I’ve been hearing things to the contrary. Little birdies are tweet-tweeting little rumors, rumors that you’re engaging in some extracurricular activities.”
Here it comes, Lyndon thought. Adiós, motherfucker.
“You know what the tweet-tweet is?” Sunny asked.
“No.”
Sunny beamed. “I hear you firebombed that developer’s trailer. Damn, that is fucking righteous, Linda.”
“That wasn’t me,” Lyndon said, his knees sagging with relief.
“Yeah, right.” Sunny laughed. He held out his fist for a conspiratorial bump, and Lyndon, not wanting to be ungracious, knocked his knuckles against Sunny’s. “You have some serious cojones, bruddah,” Sunny said. “I didn’t figure you to be such a badass.”
“You’re giving me more credit than I deserve.”
“No, really, you’re a man after my own heart.” He looked over again to JuJu, Tank, and Skunk B.—Larry, Curly, and Moe—and suddenly he wasn’t smiling anymore. “You don’t take shit from anyone, yeah? Someone pisses on you, you piss right back. You let them know you’re not fucking around, this is serious business, it’s not for amateurs, people can get hurt.”
Oh, fuck, Lyndon thought. He lined up the shots and beers on the bar. “On me,” he said.
“Hey, that’s da kine, brah.”
Lyndon grabbed JuJu from his station. “We’re going out tonight and cutting down the plants,” he whispered.
“Take it easy. He doesn’t know anything.”
“Tank and Skunk talked.”
“They didn’t. I made them swear on their mothers. You’re being paranoid, Lyndon. Sunny practically French-kissed you just now. He’s never that friendly with anyone.”
“He’s playing me.”
“Come on,” JuJu said. “Everything’s cool.”
Everything was not cool. Woody and Ling Ling appeared at that very moment, creating a small stir, ridiculously overdressed for the place, his brother in another one of his slick suits, Ling Ling in sparkling red sequin.
“What the hell are they doing here?” Lyndon said. He’d told them he was busy tonight, they would have to fend for themselves, and had given them several good dinner suggestions, all of them out of town.
“I told Ling Ling to drop by,” JuJu said. “A problem?”
Yes, a problem. He hadn’t wanted Woody to know that he was moonlighting as a bartender, particularly after their discussion earlier today about his money woes. He still couldn’t believe Woody had gone through his accounts.
“Cute shirt,” his brother said.
Ling Ling leaned over the bar and animatedly kissed JuJu on the cheeks, and Tank and Skunk B. gawked.
“She’s in a good mood,” Lyndon said. “Got a head start at dinner?”
“She’s actually on the wagon tonight,” Woody said. “Your little helper’s become my little helper. He’s had a positive influence on her. She can’t shut up about how alive she feels. Get a Maker’s on the rocks? And a ginger ale for her.”
Lyndon poured the bourbon for his brother, who took out a money clip of crisp folded bills with a flourish.
“It’s on me,” Lyndon said.
“Oh?” Woody said. “Well, thank you kindly.” He flicked off a fifty, dropped it into the tip jar. He raised his glass and drank, glancing up at the jumble of ornaments suspended from the ceiling, then eyed the pool table in the back of the room. “Ling Ling, you were in Black Widow Undercover, weren’t you?” he said. “Did you really learn to play pool for that, or was it all special effects?”
Woody had been a fair pool player in high school, hustling orders of french fries and burgers in the rec room of the Watsonville YMCA.
“I think I hear a challenge in that inquiry,” Ling Ling said. “Prepare to be humiliated.” She placed her hand on his forearm, as if being escorted into a ballroom, and they cut a r
egal swath through the bar.
“Where’d all these women come from all of a sudden?” Tank asked JuJu.
“Yeah, what’s going on at that farm?” Skunk B. added.
“You know who she is?” JuJu said excitedly.
“Orangetini gin Sierra Tanqueray tonic,” Mandy called to him.
Oh, fuck me, Lyndon thought. But things began winding down; they’d be closing soon. Bars had to shut down at midnight in Rosarita Bay, an antiquated, provincial regulation for which Lyndon was thankful. There’d be an hour of cleanup, and if he was lucky, he’d be home in bed by one-thirty.
“You’re pulling the tap wrong,” Beelzebub told him as he was drawing a beer.
“How so?” He was pulling the tap handle as he’d always pulled it, the way he’d been taught on his first job in New York, grabbing it at the base and tugging it with a quick smooth motion.
“Pull it from the top.”
“That’ll put air in it. It’ll draw foamy.”
“Exactly,” Beelzebub said. “We want more foam. The difference between no foam and an inch of foam is forty-three glasses per half barrel.”
There was a commotion near the pool table, Woody and Ling Ling high-fiving each other. Apparently they were playing as a team against someone, and then Lyndon made out who their opponents were: Sunny Padaca and one of his posse. Sunny did not look happy.
“Friends of yours?” Beelzebub asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You haven’t been entering all your comps.” Beelzebub had a handwritten list on an index card, and he was checking it against the POS computer. “You’re missing two Kamikazes.”
“What have you been doing, spying on us?” Lyndon asked. He wouldn’t have put it past him to have installed a hidden camera.
“I hired a bar spotter,” Beelzebub said.
“You what?” Lyndon asked. He’d paid a narc to watch them? Lyndon recalled a woman who’d sat at the bar most of the night, scribbling in a journal and nursing coffee. He’d taken her for a wannabe poet.