Stories From a Bar With No Doorknobs

by Joaquin Emiliano

It was late.

  Gavin was plastered, thought he might have to call in sick tomorrow. It would be Friday anyway. Gateway to the weekend. The bars would be crowded to capacity. Lots of women, lots of action, lots of opportunities. Thousands of opportunities, spread all over the city like a plague, a cancerous chance at greatness on every barstool.

  Gavin coughed, vomited into the streets.

  The door to the bar opened.

  Through his canted perspective, Gavin saw that Lucky kid step out into the wind. Strike a match, light a cigarette. He stood over Gavin’s body.

  Gavin stared with heavenly conceit, unable to come to terms.

  Lucky wasn’t saying anything.

  Finally Gavin resorted to what was most simple: “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” Lucky replied.

  “Where’s Katie Lynn?”

  “Inside, with the rest.”

  Gavin did his best to keep breathing, but it wasn’t easy. “Why isn’t she with you?”

  Lucky laughed, looked down along Macdougal Street. “I don’t fuck shadows,” he said.

  Lucky walked away with pigeon-toed steps.

  Gavin turned his eyes to the skies and watched the stars with a sick sort of wonder.

  He laid there, waiting for the sound of Katie Lynn’s footsteps.

  It was a brisk April night and everything on the streets crept silently towards some sort of warmth.

  Go to Hell.

  Sandra was a lunatic. Blue eyed and certifiable, straight out of southeast Texas. Possessive to the point where nine-tenths of the law simply would not do. Chalk it up to only child syndrome. That, coupled with the death of her father, and she wouldn’t let me sleep facing away, because from behind, she claimed I looked just like him.

  And by slept together, we can take that down to the letter. Never once fucked, though two nights after we first met, she offered herself to me. Sandra was a virgin, still, at the age of nineteen. I had declined, and in subsequent months, she continued to insist.

  “Why not?” she would ask.

  “It’ll hurt,” I would tell her.

  “I won’t mind,” she would say, choosing her words with the romantic melodrama of a girl who’d been told far too often that she was a talented actress. “I just want to know what it’s like to have you inside me.”

  “Don’t, God, please, say things like that, just listen.”

  “Pain?”

  “Lots. Things will tear and bleed.” I thought about it. “You ever do any serious horseback riding?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, then. Tear and bleed.”

  So between the kisses, hand jobs and oral sex, the screaming arguments at three am, my Jack Daniel's and her jealous talons, home plate was always tossed out. Long after our final days, she sent me a postcard. An aerial shot of the diamond on Enron Field. On the back, what amounted to a thank-you note: Sandra’s gynecologist had told her that her hymen was unusually thick, and had recommended surgical removal.

  “A penis,” the doctor had explained, “would cause a lot of damage down there.”

  Well, maybe not mine, but Sandra was grateful all the same.

  It certainly explained the mailman’s smile that morning.

  I lost the postcard two hours later, riding the 6 down Lexington.

  ***

  Sandra was a Barnard girl. Cozy in her liberal arts cocoon across from Colombia. Twenty-thousand subway stops uptown. The regulars at Creole Nights had told me to watch my back; that too many women in one building could only spell trouble for me, for the whole damn world. But the wisdom of men made about as much sense as the motives of women. Other way ‘round carried the same sad accuracy, so I kept it on with Sandra.

  Kept it on despite the fact that her friends didn’t like me. Didn’t like my attitude, my lack of commitment. Didn’t like my drinking, smoking, ignorance of women’s studies. Didn’t like my anything.

  And I didn’t like them.

  Dana Straus, in particular, I did not like. She was alarmingly slender, wore sleek dresses with revealing slits that seemed almost menacing in their knowledge. Platinum hair cut close; soft, white skin acting as a pillow for her streamlined nose and pale, critical lips. Her eyes shone an aristocratic teal behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses.

  Non-prescription.

  Dana was Sandra’s best friend. We rarely talked. Whenever we did, conversations became contests. Who owns how much of which piece of the pie. Objectification. Cultural constructs. None of it interested me. At least, not the way she sold it.

  “Don’t care, don’t care, do not care,” I would insist. “Nothing you have ever said to me is remotely as interesting as you think. You’re not an intellectual powerhouse, Dana. You’re an idea in a dress. A bad stand-up comedian.”

  “Comedienne,” she would correct, sipping from a vodka martini. “Good thing you don’t fancy yourself a writer, or anything.”

  At the end of the night, the ugly little secret was that we agreed on everything except each other.

  ***

  None of this made life with Sandra any easier.

  Egotism, dead fathers, enlarged hymens, and women’s liberation.

  We fought every night.

  Sandra was a drama student. When I told her I’d slept with Maria Felucca, she threw an alarm clock across the room. It blew past my ear, a silver bullet lifting the hair on my neck. Smashed against the wall, wouldn’t stop ringing. I put it out of its misery with a few quick stabs of a Philips head, and the next night, Sandra and I were once again in bed together.

  My face close to hers because the back of my neck was the same as her father’s, and her father was six feet under.

  Same song and dance when I told her about Anya.

  Only difference was I had never bothered to buy a new clock.

  Late in the afternoon, early March, we called it quits. I called it quits. Tired of the fighting. Tired of the everything. Both of us slumped on the floor of a stranger’s bathroom. Lights off, pitch black. Slinging a bottle of that same someone’s Wild Turkey. She cried, and I harmonized, because Sandra wasn’t evil. Life had just gotten to her before anyone else had managed to, and I rode the red line alone that night.

  ***

  One forgotten summer past due found me sitting at Creole nights. In the deep end, back where the regulars made their home. Fortunes favoring the waitress; all tables taken, nobody at the bar but me and my lonesome.

  Evan had just served me a double.

  “It’s going to be a hell of a night,” he proclaimed, Haitian accent elongating his vowels. Sporting a sly and superior grin that made him look twice his size. Thick features ensconcing large eyes. Lights on low, shining off his dome. “It’s going to be a night for pussy. Good fucking.”

  “Are you losing your hair, Evan?”

  “I am losing my mind.” He laughed, got me to smile. “Going to be one hell of a night….”

  Evan wandered down the bar, and I drank for a while.

  And after that while ran its course, the silver chime above the door suggested I turn the page.

  Ill sense of humor on that Friday night.

  The Barnard crew had decided to go slumming. I was caught off guard as Sandra’s friends descended upon me. Animated, all smiles and lively eyes. Slinging jokes, genuine inquiries as to what I had been doing with myself in the months since.

  I pounded my drink.

  Evan smiled at the attention I was getting.

  I took the opportunity to order another Jack. The women dispersed to join Sandra at a distant table. Dana Straus stayed behind. Pulled up a stool, ordered a martini. Lots of olives.

  I stuck with my trademark. Lit a cigarette. “So how about what happened with the house yesterday?”

  “Whose house?” she asked. Dipped her fingers, opened wide for an olive.

  “House of Representatives. An approved open-ended impeachment hearing for Clinton, Lewinsky, that whole mess?”

  She shrugged. “Or we cou
ld just discuss how our respective days went.”

  It was a blue dress for Dana that night, and she talked up a storm. Not a single mention of gender roles, patriarchy, battle of the sexes. After a couple of drinks, she stole one of my Marlboros. She was a social smoker, a lack of commitment that had always bothered me. This time, I gladly sparked my Zippo. Realizing that for all the ire, her slender arms, fingers, seemed constructed for the sole purpose of making cigarettes look good. I got to enjoying those eyes. There was something cold and distant about her. Something detached and uncaring that I liked.

  We ordered another round, and Sandra kept smiling at us from across the way as she flirted with a group of college preps. Doing a little fair-weather smoking of her own. Caribbean music topped off our drinks, and Dana asked, “Do you really like the way you live?”

  “You know anyone who does?”

  “Do I know anyone who really likes the way you live?”

  “I don’t even know what you mean by do you like the way –”

  “Do you really need to suffer so much to write?”

  “I try not to do anything on purpose.”

  She played with her straw, must have known I was watching. “I feel as though you want to say, furthermore…”

  She had a point. “Furthermore, I don’t suffer. I just like drinking and being left alone. Half my parents’ friends were executed or tortured by some of the most evil men to ever walk the face of the earth. What suffering? I’m a nobody.”

  A trace of a smile appeared behind the rim of her drink. “Your life is showing.”

  I fell back on misdirection. “And I’ve never claimed I was a writer. I’m a college student. Sandra, strangers, these guys –” I motioned with my head towards whatever regulars might be underground that evening “– they call me ‘writer.’ You just kind of take them at their word.”

  “Is your writing any good?” she asked.

  “It might be, someday.”

  “Couldn’t we just fuck and get it over with?”

  The answer was yes, of course. “You really think Sandra would be all right with that?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well, there’s you answer.”

  “Did you ever love Sandra?”

  I helped myself to some Jack, ice cube sliding down my throat. “No.”

  “You think she loved you?”

  “She loved her father.”

  Dana reached under the bar and touched my thigh. I touched hers. Smooth skin. She gave me a squeeze. I followed suit, then we both brought our hands back to our drinks.

  “Oh, shit,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  She moved away from the bar, went to join her friends.

  I lost myself in a bottle that night, but I remember leaving with a stranger and a smile.

  ***

  I was working my way through a six pack and a poorly written piece of fiction when the phone rang. It was two days later.

  “We should talk,” came Dana’s voice.

  “Ok.”

  “Not over the phone.”

  Couldn’t imagine where that little piece of paranoia had originated, but I agreed.

  “I’ll be down at Creole Nights around nine,” she said. “Meet me there?”

  “All right.”

  I hung up, went back to the story.

  “Who was that?” Milo Blue asked from across the room.

  I turned in my chair, cigarette clamped between my teeth. “That was Dana.”

  Milo nodded. His face was serious, light caramel skin exhibiting an excessive amount of worry lines for someone his age. Within those brown eyes, I recognized memories of a wounded squirrel we’d found as children while exploring the wooded slums of Verona, North Carolina.

  “You thinking about the squirrel?” he asked.

  “Yeah. That was a dirty day.”

  He stroked his chin. Through dormitory walls, the sound of laughter, so severely carefree, gave silent reminders that we were hardly adults.

  “I ain’t thinking about squirrels,” he said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I absolutely must advise you against whatever you’re thinking.”

  “And I’m thinking we’ve always lived vicariously through one another.”

  Hardly a sustainable way to maintain a friendship.

  But it ended the conversation faster than our time together, and soon, nine-zero-zero rolled around.

  I was on the last paragraph. The clock was trying to knock me around, as usual, but I wasn’t in the mood to step down.

  “Milo,” I called out over my shoulder. “Go down to Creole Nights and tell Dana I’m running late. Would you?”

  Milo slipped a Marlins cap over his floppy do, threw on a jacket. I stayed another ten minutes. Belted out the last few sentences. A dog barked, somewhere down in Washington Square Park, and I smiled as the final words came into focus.

  ***

  I stopped at the magazine stand by Ben’s Pizzeria.

  The man gave me a smile. “How are you, my friend?”

  “You never ask me for my ID anymore.”

  “I know who you are, Lucky.” He handed me my smokes. “I know what you need.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” he replied, taking my crumpled twenty and making change.

  The streets were barren that night.

  I walked down the steps to find Creole Nights was faring no better.

  Far better, it turned out.

  Milo and Dana were standing in the middle of the floor, the only ones trapped in a wonderland moment. Zephyr was behind the bar, laughing. From atop that catwalk of damp coasters and plastic empties, a woman stared down at her audience. Short stock, with the slightest plump to her figure. Her jeans were tight, allowing for a bit of that thick to bulge over her belt. Tee-shirt hanging off a chair in the corner. She was dancing on the bar, topless. Smiling glamorously through fleshy, Latin lips. Down and to the left, an old man was snapping pictures. Panama hat at an angle, suspenders and corduroys. Thinning silver combed back. Camera resting on a nose of purple blood vessels, split down the middle like a nubby little pecker.

  The flash popped and popped, nonstop, shots that sent blinding white light all over her body.

  The woman leapt from the bar, onto the floor, still strewn with cigarette butts from the previous night. Her tits bounced once. She stuck out her finger. Pointed, along with dark brown nipples, towards Milo.

  “Would you like to touch my bebes?” she asked.

  Her accent was a gentle mix of Puerto Rican and a psychotropic wrecking ball.

  “Yes, man!” Zephyr crowed, jaw unhinged. “Touch her bebes!”

  Milo walked over, fish on a hook, wearing a glorious smile of crooked teeth.

  “You can touch my bebes, you know...” She grabbed his hands, guided them up and down her body, helped his fingers caress, pinch, do what was best left behind closed doors.

  Without so much as a cue from the music, they began to dance together.

  Zephyr cheered, and Dana inched her way to my side.

  “Let me see your bebes,” the woman purred, pressing her hips against Milo’s. He was a short motherfucker himself, and for the first time in his life, I believe he actually appreciated the fit.

  She tugged at his shirt, lifted it over his head. Tossed it aside.

  It landed on Zephyr’s head. He raised the shirt up high. Twirled it around, all the while cackling in tune to Buju Banton, lyrics insisting the east was the best, there’s no life in the west.

  Milo danced, finally let his hands go free as hers.

  I felt something at my side.

  Dana’s hand, holding onto mine. She absently rubbed her thumb against my palm as the two of us watched what could only be described as Milo dancing with a topless woman. The old man kept a straight face. Sturdy, serious. Walked the perimeter, capturing the seconds. Dana’s hand moved to my back, slipped under my jacket, dragged
her nails across my shoulder blades. I moved my hand to the back of her neck, pressed, let go, clamped down in a reverse chokehold. Zephyr laughed, mercury rising. Milo kept dancing, the flash of the camera blinding us all within that little dive on Macdougal, and then

  the music ended.

  The dance was over. The woman reapplied her top. Bowed to Zephyr’s applause, the only sound left in the joint. Her and her old man were gone. Milo was left with a bare chest, thirsty grin. Dana with her arm on my shoulder, my left hand on her ass.

  I turned to her. “How about we reschedule for tomorrow?”

  “How about we do,” she said, and walked out the door.

  The music came back on, Inner Circle warning us about bad boys, bad boys.

  I walked up to Milo, handed him his shirt.

  “Cover up your bebes,” I told him. “You look like an insane person.”

  The two of us made a night of it, and we drank and drank and drank…

  Should we ever come this way again, I’ll be sure and tell you more about him.

  ***

  I walked into Creole Nights, up two hundred I had won in a game of dealer’s choice earlier that afternoon. It hadn’t dawned on me yet that I would never be a pro, but time being, I was content with my tiny pond. Tiny minnows, easy to figure, and they kept me in the business of drinking. Business had been very good that day, and it was looking to be an even better night.

  The tables were all taken, clientele sprawled across the bar. Laura was seated at the end, drinking a martini, surrounded by Haitians. I made my way over. The regulars greeted me with indulgent smiles, and Ayizan stood up from the seat he had taken next to Dana.

  “Especially reserved for you, Lucky,” he gushed.

  A little something Zephyr found intensely amusing.

  I sat down, ordered my usual.

  “How about a double for the regular price?” Zephyr asked, still giggling.

  “Sure, thanks.” I turned to Dana. “What’s going on with Zephyr?”

  “He thinks our situation is funny,” she replied. Red satin dress this time around.

  “You told him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, there’s no such thing as a secret down here. Zephyr may live by the tender’s code, but these hunchbacks are bound to tell Sandra first chance they –”

  “Doesn’t matter…” She took a sip of her drink, popped an olive in her mouth. “I already told her.”

  “Last night?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  From across the bar came a fevered, high-rise shriek. I turned and saw Sandra seated at a table. Don’t know how I could have missed it. She stood up, stalked over. Face flushed, matching her crimson hair. She was angry. Angry, and a dozen or so drinks off the mark.