by Nick Pirog
Chapter 6.
The Bar(s)
I hadn’t changed clothes, which meant I was still clad in my Bar exam procrastination outfit; blue jeans, a brown hooded sweatshirt, and gray Converse. The night was cool and crisp, the temperature hovering somewhere around fifty-five. Just what you would expect for the end of September.
I didn’t know what fall was, or what the word autumn even meant—there are two seasons in Florida; summer and summer-ish—until I moved to Colorado. Three weeks into my first Colorado October, I found myself enamored with the season. I would carve a couple pumpkins each year for Halloween, then bake the seeds. I loved Thanksgiving. I would cook all day, watch football, have a couple glasses of red wine, take three naps. The only people I would see were the people at Whole Foods and this was fine with me. And as strange as it sounds, I looked forward to getting that first cold of the year. The sneezing, the throaty cough, the sniffing. Going to the grocery store and spending sixty dollars on Theraflu, cough drops, throat lozenges, Cold Ease, a big thing of orange juice, renting a couple movies from the Red Box, and buying a crisp new book. Sad, I know.
But, I wasn’t so sure about fall in Two. When I took a huge inhale of the sharp cold air through my nostrils, I didn’t immediately smile. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions here. Maybe in time, maybe in October, it would hit me. But right now all I could think about was how I didn’t fit. How I was the square block being pounded into the circular hole.
But why?
It wasn’t like there was that much different here. It seemed less of a change than Colorado had been from Florida. So then why did I always have this sensation that something was wrong? That I was the butt of one big joke. That I was Jim Carrey on the Truman Show and everything that was going on around me was just that, a show.
But I guess that’s why I was walking to a bar on a Friday night when I should be studying. I needed to meet someone. Talk to someone who had had the same feelings. Had the same frustrations. I needed Perry Whitcomb to tell me he’d felt like he was Truman at one time or another. (Well, I don’t think that movie was out before he died, so he might not get the reference, but you get the idea.) I needed someone who wasn’t a doctor or a counselor to tell me everything I was feeling was normal. Tell me that I wasn’t a square block.
And I needed someone to tell me about the Borns.
⠔
Pubbar was exactly where Perry said it would be. It was dark brick, with big plate glass windows, and the bar’s name in red fluorescent lettering. There were six people in line waiting to swipe their card and push through the revolving door. I guess there were no bouncers in Two. But I suppose they didn't need them.
Through the window I could see a bunch of flat screen TV’s on the walls broadcasting a soccer game. No wonder Perry wanted to come here. There was a long bar in front with stools lined up and people packed two deep waiting for drinks from one of three bartenders. In the middle of the bar, a bunch of suede couches faced one another. Further back it appeared there was a door leading to an outdoor patio.
I took my place at the back of the line, swiped my card when it was my turn, and pushed through the revolving door.
It didn’t take me long to find Perry Whitcomb. In fact, Perry Whitcomb found me. I hadn’t been inside the bar two seconds, when the whole place erupted. I looked up at one of the large TV’s where they were replaying the goal that was just scored. Then I felt myself being lifted and someone yelling, “Did you see that shit?”
Perry set me down and I turned around, only to find that he had already found his second victim—some poor girl who looked terrified—and he was shouting, “GOOOAAAALLL,” into her right ear at eleven thousand decibels.
I screamed, “Perry!”
He turned towards me. I could see the confusion in his eyes. He hadn’t recognized me. I had simply been the unfortunate person closest to him when the goal was scored. His face exploded into a smile and he screamed, “Maddy!”
He put the poor girl down, rushed forward, and engulfed me in his large arms. After a lengthy bear hug, Perry set me down.
If I were a head taller than Perry then, I was two heads taller than him now. If I’d grown a foot since I’d last seen him, he’d grown an inch. In fact, he looked the same as I remembered. Short and fat, his curly brown hair shooting outward from his scalp, the soft tendrils never having been touched by either a brush or a styling product. His face wasn’t as fat as the rest of him, but the lines were soft, not the lines one would expect to see on the face of a 28-year-old male. No, the face; brown eyes, long almost feminine eyelashes, small nose, and delicate lips, was the face of a twelve-year-old.
I said, “Look at you man. You look great.”
“Thanks man. Yoga. Lots of yoga.”
If Perry Whitcomb was doing yoga, I’m pretty sure he was doing it incorrectly.
I said, “I see you’re still rocking the soccer jersey.” He was wearing a bright green jersey with NA5 stamped on the front in red lettering. The rest of the jersey was covered in endorsements.
“You know it.”
“Who is NA5?”
He pointed to the TV. “North America Five you idiot.” One of the teams scampering around on the TV was wearing the same green jersey. In the top of the screen the score read, “NA5 1, SA8 0.”
He said, “Don’t feel bad. Soccer’s different here. It truly is the ‘World’s Game.’ It’s broken up into continents, North America, South America, Asia, Europe. They each have their own division. Kind of like the NFL. North America would be like the AFC West.”
We went to the bar and ordered drinks. The bartender asked for my card, swiped it, then handed me my drink. I had yet to see cash in Two.
“Does anyone ever carry cash?” I asked.
He scoffed. “Of course not.”
We took our drinks and found a table with a good view of the TV. There were seven minutes left in the game. Perry did a bit of yelling those last seven minutes. Especially when South America scored with less than a minute remaining. He groaned when the final whistle blew and announced that we would be taking a shot of tequila to nurse the loss.
The waitress came around and Perry ordered another round of beers and a couple shots. The waitress scanned his card into a little handheld device, then asked for mine. I handed it to her. She scanned it. When she gave it back, and left, I asked, “What was that all about?”
“What?”
“Why’d the waitress ask for my card?”
“Oh, that. They account for every drink you have. I bought the drinks, but you’re still going to drink two of them, so she had to move them to your account. Ten is the limit.”
I guess now would be a good time to mention that I wasn’t much of a drinker. Yeah, I’d done my fair share of partying when I was younger, but by the time I was 23, I had tired of waking up with a pounding headache, the sweats, heart palpitations, and more than just generalized anxiety. I would still tie one on a couple times a year, but for the most part I was good for two beers, three if I were trying to impress a girl.
Perry added, “And if you have more than one drink, your car won’t start.”
No arguing that one. I knew too many people who had gotten a DUI and another couple who had fared even worse. I made a mental reminder to check for them on Deadbook.
As if reading my mind, Perry said, “So tell me about my funeral.”
So, I told him about his funeral. About how his mom sat in the front row and cried her eyes out. How his step dad lost it while he was giving the eulogy and how our coach made us wear patches with his name for the remainder of the season. I expected him to get a little teary eyed, but he didn’t. In fact, he never even had the far-off look one would expect. It was a little odd.
I asked, “So what have you been up to since you arrived?”
“Let’s see. When I was released from the Fort Lauderdale Adjustment Facility I went to live with my Godfather in Iowa. My dad’
s roommate in college. Died from some weird bacteria infection. Pretty good guy. But, man was Iowa awful. In the end it wasn’t so bad. I made some good friends. Went to school out in California and studied Journalism. Then I moved back down to Florida and worked for a paper down there for a while. Then three years ago, my car broke down in Denver on the way to Vegas. Fell in love with it. Month later, I got a gig at the Denver Chronicle.”
I nodded.
He told me all about his job with the paper. He mostly wrote about politics but he was trying to get his editor to let him write a soccer column. After a lengthy description of the editorial he would have written about the game just played, he asked me, “So did you nail any of those stuck up girls from Saint Tabitha’s or what?”
Saint Tabitha’s was the all-girl’s school adjacent to our all-boy’s school. I told him I dated Sara Evans—a girl a year older than us who was thought to be untouchable— for almost three weeks my junior year of high school.
“You nail her?”
“If by nail her, you mean rub her left boob for twelve minutes once, then yeah, I nailed her.”
Our beer and shots came. Perry proposed a toast to my fondling Sara Evans, “Perfectly sculpted left tit,” and we slammed down the tequila.
Perry was excessively curious about my sexual conquests—possibly because he hadn’t had many of his own, but more likely because he was perverted—and I happily obliged him with a few highlights. He high-fived me on more than one occasion, then said, “I still can’t believe that was you in the video. I had like ten different people e-mail it to me in one day.”
“I’m famous.”
I asked, “How bout you. How the ladies treating you here?”
“Batting them off with a stick my man.”
I bet.
Perry spent the next ten minutes telling me all about the women he’d “had.” His stories were so detailed and well—bizarre—that I decided there was no way he could be making it all up.
For example: He met a girl at his “Favorite Porno shop,” who ended up being a stripper. When he asked her if he could take her to Outback for a steak sometime she said, “No,” but she did ask him if he wouldn’t mind babysitting her three kids that evening because her usual sitter was unavailable. He said yes and then when she got home at four in the morning after stripping all evening she asked if he wanted to be paid in cash or blow jobs. He picked the latter.
I’m sorry, but you simply can’t make that up.
This of course, led to story time, and the two of us spent the better part of the next hour narrating all the crazy stuff we’d seen, done, or heard about. Perry, who had the alcohol tolerance of a Russian potato farmer, kept ordering drinks for me, and well, I kept drinking them.
While I still had my wits about me, I asked Perry, “Can I ask you something?”
He nodded.
“When you first got here, did you, like, feel out of place? Like you were the butt of some big joke?”
“Of course man. That’s what everybody feels like. Shit. They tell you that you died and you came to this new place. Might as well tell you that you’re a fucking alien. Of course you’re going to feel out of place. Shit, man, when I first came here I was terrified. Pissed my bed every fucking night.”
“Really?”
“Really. But then over time, you start to adjust, and then one day you don’t think about it anymore. It just is.”
In my brain I thought the words, “Well, it’s good to hear that from someone who has been here, who has been in my shoes, and has a bit of perspective,” but the alcohol decided this needed to come out as, “Thanks man. Man, that makes me feel better. Man, thanks for inviting me out. Man, I really needed this. Seriously, man. “
I couldn’t stop saying man.
Man.
Perry nodded and we clinked glasses. I believe the letters, “BFF” may have been uttered.
Man.
There had been one more thing I wanted to ask Perry about, but I couldn’t remember. Then it hit me. I leaned forward in my chair. Perry was bringing his beer up to his lips to take a drink when I said the words, “What’s the deal with the Borns?”
Beer exploded from Perry’s mouth. Then he began violently coughing. After ten seconds of hacking, he leaned forward and said, “What did you say?”
I repeated the question.
His eyes darted around the room, left, right, up, down. “I don’t know who has been telling you what, but they don’t exist. Never have. It’s a myth, a legend. Let it go.”
“A myth?”
He leaned forward and said, “Let it go.”
I leaned back. If I had been sober, my mind would have been reeling. Trying to figure out what Perry’s reaction meant. But, my synapses weren’t firing as quickly as usual. Plus, I didn’t have much time to deliberate. Two cute girls had just taken up the two empty seats at our table.
Perry winked at me, then flagged down our waitress to order another round.
⠔
“You will have forty-five minutes to complete section four. You may begin now.”
The woman clicked her stopwatch, then took up her seat at the desk at the front of the room. The exam was being held at the university downtown. I was one of about sixty people scattered throughout the large auditorium. I read the first question on the computer screen. I only got a third of the way through. I took a deep breath. Concentrated. Swallowed. It passed. I let out a long exhale. Read the question again. This time I got halfway through the first question before I had to stop. This time it did not pass.
I jumped to my feet.
I could feel the stares on my back as I bounded down the stairs. Everyone thinking the same thing: AGAIN?
As I neared the woman at the front she looked up and shook her head.
I said, “I’m sorry.”
“You know, we have a scheduled fifteen minute break when this section is done. Can’t you hold it?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Okay then. But this is the last time.”
This of course, is what she’d said the last two times.
I nodded my thanks and double-timed it to the nearest exit. I didn’t make it to the bathroom. I didn’t even make it to the trashcan that I made it to the last time. I did, however, make it to a large fern nestled up to the corner of the window.
After I’d watered the plant—my throw up was mostly water by this point—I took a seat on the bench and rested my elbows on my knees.
Six years ago, fresh out of undergrad, three buddies and I had taken a trip to the Bahamas. We drank heavily each night, but on the fifth night we partied until the sun came up. Unfortunately, when the sun did come up, we were supposed to go SCUBA diving and since I’d put down a three-hundred dollar nonrefundable deposit, there was nothing that was going to stop me from going. While everyone else was being SCUBA certified in the small hotel pool, I was on all fours in my wetsuit throwing up my small intestine. Over the course of the next five hours, I would throw up on the boat, throw up fifty feet under water, throw up on a rare sea turtle, barter with God to kill me, and barter with a sea turtle to kill me. That was the single worst hangover of my life.
Today was a close second.
After Perry had bought a round of shots. The girls—I couldn’t remember their names—had bought a round of shots. And then I bought a round of shots. And then the girls. And then Perry. This is when things start to get fuzzy.
Fast-forward six hours to my waking up under my dining room table, clad in nothing but Perry’s bright green soccer jersey.
Go figure.
I walked to the drinking fountain and took a long drink. There was a vending machine and I stuck my ID card in and got a Snicket bar. I didn’t think I was going to be able to stomach it. But I did. So I got another.
When I returned to my seat, I had about twenty-five minutes to complete the section. I was starting to feel a little better and I was able to com
plete most of the questions. The next four hours weren’t nearly as bad as the previous four and I was surprised at how many of the questions I knew the answer to. But I had probably scored close to a zero for the first four sections, and even if I got every question correct in the remaining sections, I still wouldn’t even come close to passing.
When I got home, Darrel was sitting on my front step. We walked to a burger joint a couple blocks up the street and I replayed my night at the bar and the nightmare that followed. He couldn’t stop laughing when I told him about having to leave the test on four separate occasions to vomit. We headed home early. He’d gotten the job with the Denver Police Department and he started tomorrow morning and I was plain exhausted.
I took another shower, then put on some sweat pants and a hoody. I opened the refrigerator to get a glass of orange juice and saw that my jeans and the sweatshirt I’d been wearing the night before were neatly folded and tucked away in the vegetable drawer.
I shook my head.
I pulled the clothes out. I vaguely remembered one of the girls giving me her number and I reached my hand into the front pocket. There were two folded napkins.
I must have gotten both their numbers.
Player.
I unfolded the first napkin. Inside was a phone number. I unfolded the second napkin. Inside was not a phone number, but a message. My breath caught in my throat. When had he put it in my pocket? When he had hugged me good-bye? Had he slipped it in my pocket when I was leaning against the cab?
I walked into the bathroom and flushed the napkin down the toilet. That had been written at the top of the napkin with stars around it: *FLUSH THIS DOWN THE TOILET IMMEDIATELY*.
As strange as this was, the following messages were far stranger. I stared at myself in the mirror. Could it be? Could it be true? But how? Scribbled on the napkin had been three short, cryptic messages. The first message read: IF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE HERE, NEVER SPEAK OF THE BORNS AGAIN.
The second: YOU MUST NEVER TRUST ANYONE.
As crazy as these first two were, it was the third that got me. It was those last three words that I couldn't shake. At the bottom of the napkin, were the words: YOU DIDN'T DIE.