Minimum Fifteen
Like any stubborn person, I only checked the weather when I was already outside.
Tonight was no exception, only it was a blizzard. The reward for survival was a modest one: a seven hour bar shift.
Growing up in New England taught me that there were almost never snow days. While standard nine-to-five businesses, start-ups, and schools were sending everyone home early with the next day off, I trudged through the snow-rain-fantasia to get to The Duplex Cabaret and Piano Bar, because bars like ours never closed, not even during Hurricane Sandy, when it remained open by candlelight.
Should I feel proud that I worked in a bar which employed a mailman’s code to its hours of operation? And more importantly, was wet a feeling?
My coworkers and I arrived, each of us with our own anecdote of weather hell. One bartender wore bags over her socks and offered dry pairs for anyone in need.
It was not until I had been at work for two hours and twenty-seven minutes that I served my first drink. That did not count the drag queen in the big blue wig who arrived for her show completely dry in only the way really savvy queens could manage.
The first customers were a polite gay couple and I convinced myself that the night was really going to take off. Several people poked their heads upstairs, surveyed the bar, and then scurried away as if I couldn’t see them and we didn’t just make clear eye contact or that I even smiled and waved and said, “Hello.”
We called these non-customers Meerkat People. I often worked on the second floor of The Duplex, which meant I had the following conversation on repeat for nine years:
The customer would say, “I didn’t know there was a second floor!” and then I would reply, “It’s in the title.”
People heard throbbing dance music as they climbed the stairs, anticipating a lively bar, but instead, they found me.
Their disappointment at making the trek up one flight of stairs to the empty bar was apparent on their faces. They often employed a duck-and-run routine to escaping the bar unnoticed because they believed it would hurt my feelings less.
It didn’t.
Meerkat People were people who never went out except for weekends, and never ventured into bars that were not at capacity, believing that one was not having fun unless elbows were bumped endlessly and drinks spilled casually on the person beside you in a conga line of vodka cran. People like that didn’t understand the fun that could be had when a bar wasn’t crowded. People like me, those of the antisocial bartender variety, looked for bars that were empty. I would provide a list of the empty bars I frequented most regularly but I don’t need company.
Worse than Meerkat People were the customers who, upon seeing the bar was empty, asked the bartender, “Where is everyone?”
Those people inevitably left in search of the bar they hoped would be raging busy at midnight in the middle of a snowstorm.
A fifty-something man we’ll call Ted entered the bar a little after midnight.
He told me everywhere he went had been slow. Again: delivered as if it was totally unreasonable for bars to be empty during a winter weather advisory.
“This place is a real bar,” said Ted. “Do you know why?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you have tap beer,” he said. “Real bars have tap beer.”
Ted interrogated me about the prices of the tap beer before ordering a Bud Light, bottle. Choosing the cheapest option, he took his beer over to the two customers and the drag queen with blue hair, and told them exactly what he told me about how a bar was only a real bar if it had taps, gesturing the whole time with his bottle.
When I realized how chatty he wished to be, I ducked low behind the bar, near the rack of apple pucker and the creme de menthe that no one ever ordered, despite its popularity in the musical Company. I tried to hide underneath the bar, hoping the Duplex Rat was patronizing the piano bar downstairs, hiding until a fourth customer, this time a regular, arrived to tell me I couldn’t hide all night.
“Well, I can try,” I said.
Ted asked me if I gave out free drinks. I told him no.
“I’m an alcoholic,” said Ted.
He informed me of his love for Valium, and he reminisced about all the good times he had while addicted to that drug. I learned Ted did not need me to speak, to nod, to blink. He was happy talking at me. Ted told me about the time he was at the mansion of a famous rapper’s house.
“Do you know who it was?” he asked.
“I do not.”
“Do you want to know?”
“No thank you.”
He did tell me the name, but I wasn’t sure if I should believe him.
“I was a guest at his house, when I went… I was a guest at his house, only it was too late in the night so I couldn’t buy beer. Can you imagine? I couldn’t buy beer and I didn’t have any pot on me and I’m showing up at this guy’s mansion empty handed feeling like an asshole. He doesn’t care. He welcomes me into his house. Lays out the most massive amount of cocaine you’ve ever seen. Puts it out on a big tray like you’re in Scarface. When it gets to be my turn, I sneezed right into the stash. Thought he was going to kill me. But then I made him laugh and everything was okay.”
He ordered another seven dollar Bud Light, bottle.
Ted gave me a break because torture was most effective when drawn out over time. He moved on to chatting with the two gay boys at the bar who were trying to make out. They got up and moved to the banquettes at the opposite end of the bar in order to escape. Ted, I was learning, possessed not a single social cue.
“You don’t have to go away,” Ted called out after them. “I’ll leave you alone.”
He followed them to the banquettes.
And then he started telling another story.
It was the moment when he informed the boys that he was facing a minimum of fifteen years in prison that I began to wonder if the fourteen dollars he spent at the bar really justified his being there, or my being there, of if the bar should have just closed down for the night.
Ted wandered back over to me. I tried to hide between the drag queen and the regular but Ted came right over. There was indeed no escape.
“My buddy and I, my buddy…” he began his next story as the drag queen and the regular made a covert exit to admire the snow outside.
Ted paused, lost in the moment of the anecdote. He might have closed his eyes and
looked up, sneaking a squint to ensure I was still enraptured.
“My buddy he shot me up on a Monday. Best damn high I ever experienced. I didn’t wake up until Wednesday, and he was dead.”
He raised the bottled beer in a toast to his dead friend, then talked lovingly about his experiences with heroin.
I couldn’t be sure if Ted was telling me the truth. But if he was, and I’d like to believe he wouldn’t lie to me, then Ted was a man about to go to trial, facing a minimum of fifteen years. I hoped his attorney advised him not to take the stand because a monologist like Ted was a cross examiner’s wet dream. I imagined that tonight in the midst of a blizzard, Ted was having one last hurrah before the trial commenced. I didn’t want to stop him from having these last few drinks before his life changed forever, but I didn’t want to let those drinks happen at The Duplex.
He signaled with his empty beer bottle that he wanted another.
“I think we’re done,” I said.
He nodded at me. He left amicably and fast, tipping appropriately on his credit card slip. The speed at which he departed suggested that he had been cut off or thrown out of many bars before, maybe even tonight. When people like that were cut off they seemed mostly impressed to have lasted as long as they did before revealing their crazy, and grateful a burly bouncer was not summoned to remove them.
A week later I was still thinking about Ted.
On the Internet, I learned he had dealings with the police before, and in addition to several smaller lawsuits and bankruptcy, he was arrested and convicted ten years ago for possessing nine bags of heroin, and some pot. After his conviction he appealed the case, citing mistakes made by the arresting officer. He won his appeal.
I wondered more about him, about his friend he lost on one of his greatest nights.
Nights like the blizzard existed in a surreal other-bar. I felt as though I was at the start of an O’Neill play, welcoming transients into my small way-station-of-the-world. Serving drinks was a privilege I bestowed upon my guests rather than obligations of the job. Nights like those I sat around waiting for something to happen: something important, unexpected, defining.
I wondered if Ted knew that, if he picked, specifically, a night in which leaving your house posed potential risk to your life, if because he knew the night would have a strangeness all over it. I wondered all of that too, or if the storm in which we were expecting a minimum of twelve inches and the man facing a minimum of fifteen years were meaningless in connection, made important because they were happening at the same time and because I was so desperate to understand their significance in all that was swirling around me.
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Laura J Morris is a veteran producer of TV ads, living in NJ. She’s an emerging writer with recent work published in Hobart, Sky Island Journal, The Phoenix, Dash, Amethyst Review, and Slippery Elm Literary Review. When she’s not traveling the globe, cooking, dancing, or clicking away on the computer, she’s most likely curled up on the sofa, asleep.
