The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy their company. Sometimes I’d run into the manager or Lloyd or someone else from the greasy spoon at Lou’s after work, and we’d sit at the long, curved walnut bar in the watery afternoon light drinking rum and cokes from blue plastic dixie cups. If I stayed around for a second drink I might see a truck driver I’d waited on earlier in the day, or a construction worker or two, or one of the neighborhood people.

  One Friday afternoon I stayed late at Lou’s, drinking with Lloyd and the manager. As the light faded in the high glass brick windows, our barman stepped out from behind the bar to plug in the jukebox. Until then, I hadn’t noticed a jukebox. I’d only known Lou’s as a quiet place for afternoon drinking, where the shuffle of bedroom slippers on linoleum could be heard; where conversation competed only with steakhouse commercials on an AM radio, and the echoey clank of empties under a high tin ceiling.

  The machine came to life with an a cappella doo-wop intro, its final sad-trombone note resolving into the Spaniels’ “Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite.” Had this song been queued up when the jukebox was unplugged at closing time? As if propelled by the music, two construction workers got off their stools and headed over to the pool table. One fed the quarter slot, the other racked ’em up. That sound—the tumble of rented pool balls—traveled some neural pathway eroded in my brain by nights of barroom loitering and booth parties . . . all that I was missing on the breakfast shift. I put my two quarters on the rail of the pool table, strolled over to the jukebox, and punched in a few songs. There was some really great stuff on there. I sat between Lloyd and the manager, watching the game, waiting for my turn.

  “If you should lo-o-o-ose me, oh yeah . . . you’ll lose a good thing,” sang Barbara Lynn.

  “Who’s playing those fine songs?” asked the barman. When I raised my hand, he put a stack of quarters in front of me and said, “Keep ’em coming.”

  I won my first game on an eight-ball scratch and the next one on a lucky rail shot. Then Lloyd was up, and the manager dragged a stool over to watch us play. Lloyd’s game was stealth: deceptively casual, never an easy leave, but I somehow ended up winning that one too, and Lloyd stuck around to coach me as I took on the next guy.

  “Bank the ten,” he’d say, or “Try the combo.”

  “Put some English on it,” ventured the manager, and Lloyd leaned in and whispered, “It ain’t even about that, kitten. You got this one.”

  A row of quarters appeared on the rail. I’ve never been better than a fair pool player, but the planets aligned that night, as they sometimes do, and soon I was ruling the table. Lloyd would point at a ball and I’d sink it, as though the pockets were magnetized. Everyone kept giving me money for the jukebox and buying me drinks, and the more rum and cokes I drank, the truer my shots were.

  “Cry, cry baby,” sang someone named Garnett Mimms, “Welcome back home.” In a place like Lou’s you can’t go wrong playing songs you’ve heard of by people you haven’t.

  I don’t know how long my winning streak lasted. I exhausted the construction workers, who—like me—had to be up early, and the night customers lined up to take their place. The barman, the cardboard-suitcase bachelors, everyone in the place gathered from the four corners of the bar, all eyes on me. I kept my face immobile for as long as I could, like a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter. When I looked up from the table at one point, I saw the manager stretched out across a booth seat, snoring.

  “Lloyd,” I asked, eyeing the low center of the cue ball as I steadied my bridge, “what’s your favorite part of the breakfast shift?”

  “Favorite how?”

  “What’s the part that really makes you feel good?”

  “Going home, I guess. Don’t try to bank it, honey. You can cut it straight in.”

  “I like the mid-morning cigarette best of all. You know? That buzz you get? Like a virtuous feeling of knowing how long you’ve been up?”

  “Cross-side. Three in the side.”

  “And then you ride home, and sometimes you see someone you know from, oh, from before, and it’s like you’ve had an indescribably, unrelatably weird experience and you can’t explain it to them.”

  “You paying attention? He’s sneaking up on you.”

  “Imagine, say, that you’ve been trapped in an elevator for hours and hours with a talking dog. Lloyd, are you listening? You couldn’t believe it at first—I mean, obviously—but after a few hours you get used to it. And then you escape from the elevator finally—like, through a hatch in the ceiling—only to find that the day has just gone on without you.”

  “No, not the fourteen. That’s one of his. You’re solids.”

  “You walk down the street and the rush hour traffic flows past, indifferent to you and your hours of confinement with the talking dog.”

  “Okay, kangaroo, time for you to hop on home.”

  “Okay.”

  “You need a ride?”

  “Yes, please.”

  On Monday, when I tapped on the glass at quarter to six, Lloyd let me in. I saw over his shoulder that Osman, instead of being in the kitchen mixing biscuit batter, was sweeping the floor, ineffectually poking his broom under tables and around chair legs. His cheeks were flushed and his dark-lashed eyes were narrowed, turning his usual expression of philosophical gloom into something else—perhaps anger, or humiliation, or both.

  Lloyd met my questioning look with a cocked eyebrow, and then I noticed an unfamiliar man counting bills at the cash register. What had happened here, some sort of audit? This person was dressed for the office, perhaps an office with a casual dress code. He wore large, rimless glasses and a blue striped oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a coppery tan, and his hair looked like it was growing out of an expensive cut. The man looked up and walked over to me with his right hand extended.

  “Hi!” he said. “I’m Michael. I’m taking over around here as of today. No, not taking over—I’ll just be taking on the management duties going forward. But I want you to know that I’ll be here with you guys, shoulder to shoulder in the trenches. Like I told Osmond, we’re all going to pitch in from now on wherever we’re needed. And Osmond, I want you to know that no one here is above pushing a broom. Not even me! Excuse me.” With that he disappeared into the stockroom.

  “Where . . .?” I looked around for the manager.

  “Fired,” answered Lloyd. “And watch out for this one. He sneeze with his eyes open.”

  So began the era of Michael. As promised, he pitched in everywhere. He never stopped moving and always seemed a little overheated. When he mopped his face with a handkerchief you could see a spreading dampness under the arm of his oxford shirt. He ran around making toast and answering the phone and, yes, stabbing frantically at the counter stools with a broom while the cabbies lifted their feet; but he left little piles of sweepings everywhere, and he burned the toast, and his rushing and darting disrupted the coordinated rhythm of movement in the narrow passage between the counter and the grill. He seemed to especially like working the cash register. He would send the cashier to bus tables or do dishes so he could take over. The Hamily, the truck drivers, the slip-and-fall artist, the neighborhood activist: Michael rang them all up with the same impersonal cheer. Then he would disappear into the stockroom, and for a while the pre-Michael equilibrium would return.

  When it was slow, and even when it wasn’t, Michael was chatty. You might even say he was prone to talking jags. I found out that he had been a lawyer—it was unclear how recently—and that in fact the owner of the greasy spoon had been his client. He said he’d replaced the rheumy-eyed manager “as a favor to the owner” and was vague about the circumstances under which he had stopped practicing law. Embarrassingly, he took a liking to me. He opened up about his recent divorce, how he was petitioning for visitation rights so he could have his son at his condo for sleepovers. Massachusetts family law, he said, was stacked against him. “The father, for all intents and purposes, has fewer rights than a gran
dparent or even a maternal aunt or uncle,” he explained.

  He buttonholed me for advice about his kid.

  “Just be there for him,” I suggested vaguely.

  In a moment of weakness I invited him to join me at Lou’s after work. I instantly regretted it, but he seemed so grateful for the friendly gesture. Sitting next to him at the bar, I realized that I hadn’t seen the old manager there since the night of my winning streak.

  Once, Michael’s ex-wife came into the restaurant. She walked up to him and said nothing—just held her hand out, palm up, her expression suspended somewhere between disgust and rage. She looked like she might be a lawyer too. You could see lines and hollows of exhaustion under her makeup. Michael, also without saying anything, took a wad of bills out of his front pocket and put it in her hand, and she spun around on her pumps and left. I found that my jaw was clenched in sympathy with hers.

  The register started coming up short at closing: ten or twenty dollars here and there, until one night it was a few hundred light. The owner wanted to file a police report, but Michael intervened, and they let the cashier go without getting the cops involved. But money kept disappearing. One of the dinner waitresses got fired, and another cashier. Then one morning I came in to find the owner in the restaurant there, conferring with Michael and Lloyd. Michael said he’d found the stockroom door ajar when he’d opened up. Some cases of canned goods were missing, and some hams, and half a dozen frozen turkeys: obviously an inside job.

  This time the owner did call the police. Several hours later, as the breakfast rush was winding down, a cruiser pulled up and double-parked outside the restaurant. Through the glass, we saw the owner and Michael talking to the two cops on the sidewalk. After a few minutes, they came inside and went straight back to the kitchen. I skipped my mid-morning cigarette break in the alley door and sat at the counter instead, watching Lloyd scrape the grill down. Finally I gave up waiting for him to say something.

  “Who do you think . . .”

  He shook his head, dispelling my question.

  The sounds of conversation from the kitchen got louder and more agitated until, just as the early lunch rush was kicking in, Lloyd took off his toque and went back through the swinging doors. Orders started to pile up. The new cashier was plating blue-plate specials as fast as she could.

  Finally, Osman emerged from the kitchen in handcuffs, a cop gripping each elbow and the owner trailing them. Osman stared straight ahead, chin up and shoulders square, as they steered him through the lunch crowd, out the front door, and into the back of the cruiser. I went back and saw Lloyd packing up his knives while Michael looked on with an unreadable expression.

  “Watch your ass, Kitten,” said Lloyd as he brushed past.

  After work I found Lloyd at Lou’s, as I’d known he would be. We had the place to ourselves except for the barman and, at the other end of the bar, an old man sleeping on his folded arms with his hat sitting on the stool next to him. Lloyd ordered us some rum and cokes. When his change came, he gave me a quarter and said, “Why don’t you plug in the box and hit 17A for me one time?” The barman nodded, so I did as he said.

  “If you should lo-o-o-ose me,” sang Barbara Lynn as I sat down. I looked around, wanting to memorize everything: Lloyd’s quiet profile, the blue plastic dixie cups, the corona of dust hovering in the shaft of sunlight over the old man’s bald head.

  “Well, what do you know about that?” said Lloyd, breaking the silence.

  “You don’t think Osman—” I remembered him angrily poking his broom around the table legs on the day Michael showed up.

  “Oh hell no. You know who took all that shit, and the money too.”

  “Poor Osman.”

  “Here’s to poor old Osman. And kitten, I wouldn’t suggest waiting ’til it come around to you.”

  “I don’t get it, though. What does Michael want with a bunch of hams?”

  “He’s on the pipe, sweetie. One ham, one rock.”

  “Crack? No way.”

  “Don’t you smell what come out of that stockroom after take a break?”

  I thought about Michael mopping his face with his handkerchief. “But he’s a lawyer!”

  “Oh brother. Just watch your ass.”

  I don’t know if it was because I’d been tipped off or because things were catching up with him, but it seemed to me that Michael really started to fall apart after Lloyd left. The ballast was gone, I suppose. Michael hired new people to replace all the ones who had gotten fired to cover up his petty, crack-scale embezzling, and then he started churning through the replacements. I thought about inviting him out for another drink, just to shore up my position a little, but I knew I should quit before my turn came.

  The end came suddenly for me, as it had for the others, and despite the cloud of inevitability that hung over all of us, it managed to catch me off-guard. I went down to the stockroom looking for coffee filters and found Michael there, absorbed in the task of massaging pipe with flame. Inhaling, he raised his head, and his eyes surged with toxic adrenaline as they met mine. My luck had run out. I walked out the alley door and into the melting August sun, and the next day I slept until ten o’clock.

  The Smockey Bar

  As is often the case with bartenders, a lot of people knew Smockey a little. Smockey wasn’t talkative, he didn’t call you “Sport,” he betrayed no particular enthusiasm for anything except WWII documentaries on the History Channel, which was always on in his bar. But if you spent enough time there, you learned a few things about him. For instance, his name wasn’t really Smockey. That was a sort of stage name that he’d inherited when his father died. Smockey the Elder, a South Philadelphia Italian, had opened up the bar in what was then a Polish neighborhood, so he gave it what he thought was a Polish-sounding name, “The Smockey Bar,” and he became Smockey. And when he passed the bar on to his son, he passed the name on too.

  I liked the place right away, just based on the sign: black lettering on a white field, the kind of Plexiglas sign that lights up at night, though it was afternoon when I first stopped in. It was on the ground floor of a narrow row house—just wide enough for a long bar and a few small tables and a pay phone. The walls were paneled, stained dark and coated with a glossy spar varnish. I thought at first that a trick of perspective was making the room appear to taper toward the back, but in fact the building wasn’t square. It must have been built as an afterthought to fill in the slightly trapezoidal space between two older houses.

  Smockey had the place to himself when I first came in—an old man in a vest with a nice full head of Grecian Formula-black hair, brushed straight back from his forehead. He was sitting on a stool by the door and looking out at Passyunk Ave. I sat near the front so he wouldn’t have too far to walk.

  “A lager, please,” I said as he dumped my ashtray and swabbed the bar with a grey dishrag.

  “Woant a gleyce?”

  “Sorry?”

  “A gleyce? Or you just woant the bottle?”

  “Oh . . . no glass. Just the bottle is fine.”

  He fetched himself an O’Douls and went back to his stool, and we sat in companionable silence until a couple of other old guys came in and started chatting me up. I recognized them. I’d seen them sitting in lawn chairs outside the barbershop on 10th Street, a few blocks away. Introductions were made all around, and I stayed for another lager. At some point a kid came in—really a kid, maybe not even in high school—and bought a six-pack to go.

  “You know, Smockey,” I said when the kid was gone, “I don’t think he was twenty-one.”

  “Bah. He ain’t even eighteen,” Smockey said.

  There was no jukebox at Smockey’s, but if there had been, it would have been loaded with Sinatra. The walls were covered with Sinatrabilia: posters, signed photos, even a moody, heavily impastoed oil painting of young Frank leaning against a lamppost. It was that kind of place, an old man’s bar. The inner circle of regulars were guys with names like Taffy and Bimbo, old friend
s from the neighborhood who split their time between the barbershop and a La-Z-Boy when they weren’t looking in on Smockey. The place belonged to them, but I think Smockey liked to have young people around, too. There were plenty of other old man bars in the neighborhood—places with the same dark paneling and nicotine stained mirrors and shelves sparsely stocked with Old Granddad bottles and bowling trophies—but the Smockey Bar had a particular geniality that encouraged mixing. Sometimes, later in the evening, every barstool would be occupied, and union plumbers would rub shoulders with bookstore clerks. And as the volume rose from all those minds meeting, Smockey would turn on the closed captioning so he could follow along as the Luftwaffe got its ass kicked in the Battle of Britain.

  I started coming in regularly, and he set me up with a tab. Before long he was trying to get me to buy the place off of him.

  “Why would I want to do that?” I asked. “You’re like a farmer, Smockey. When was the last time you had a day off?”

  “She’s got you there, Smock,” said Taffy.

  Smockey probably hadn’t had a day off since he started helping his dad out behind the bar when he was ten years old. He himself had no help; he was there seven days a week. If it wasn’t busy, he took an hour off in the afternoon to go home for lunch, but otherwise, he made do with whatever he had warming in the ceramic steam well behind the bar: canned chili, beef stew, clam chowder and oyster crackers. He’d never married—he lived with his sister around the corner—and now he was old, and stiff, and he’d heard all Taffy’s jokes, and he was ready to retire. He wanted to go fishing. There was a picture of a bass boat taped to the cash register, and a postcard of a beach in Florida. But there was no Smockey III.

  It became a routine between us. “When are you gonna take the joint off my hands so I can move to Florida already and get warm for a change?” he’d ask as he plunked a bottle of beer in front of me, and I’d wave him away. But secretly, I fantasized about it. What if I raised the money somehow and took over? Every decision for the rest of my life would be made. I imagined myself sitting on his stool by the window and gazing out at the pizza place across the street, slowly shrinking and desiccating, my hair getting blacker and blacker as I presided over my wedge-shaped time capsule.