From Halfway to Easy, an essay:
It is always twilight in the little pub where I tend bar part-time. When someone comes in through the side door and brings with them a slice of bright sunlight, we all recoil from the harsh intrusion. We sigh collectively with relief when the door swings shut, snug in our accustomed, muted interior.
Drinking establishments are funny places during the day, odd collections of business people on the go, retirees, and those who are jobless, homeless or just passing through town. Some, like Albert, strike up a conversation with me or another customer while they down their drafts. “What’s new?” he’ll ask, a rhetorical question followed by commentary on the weather or more frequently, a joke. I have heard the one about the golfer on the desert island three times now. Some customers go directly to the poker machines, postponing or bypassing altogether the consumption of alcohol, while there are those who come in and nurse their drinks in silence for half a day, eyes fixed on the Keno machine. Sometimes I feel like I know the ones who rarely speak as well as I know the ones who babble constantly; it is their regular presence which defines their characters as opposed to anything they might reveal through superficial chit-chat, or even the confidences occasionally revealed as inhibitions slide away. This is not a setting in which one is likely to witness others at their best, their most lucid, generous or heroic. It is not a place to come to observe productivity or creative genius. It is a place of foibles and frailty, black sheep relatives of joviality. They straggle behind and cause trouble, spoilsports.
I am getting used to the company of lecherous, leering men. They line up on a continuum from mild to extreme, and I find the behavior of those who are the least offensive to be at once both irritating and endearing, tiresome yet strangely comforting – not flattering, mind you, never flattering. They are lonely, emboldened by alcohol, unschooled in the social graces of flirtation and banter, and reduced to seeking out intimacy and connection in this improbable place, a place inherently meant to escape such things. I almost admire their gumption. The worst offenders are loud, bawdy, and crude. They grope me given the opportunity, grazing breast or ass with a casual touch should I get too close to their table in my delivery. They throw quarters at me, aim them to land down my shirt, laughing “here’s your tip,” and insinuate aggression into every gesture, glance and comment. These are the men I watch for in the parking lot when my shift ends, the reasons I carry pepper spray on my keychain…
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