Back to the subject of names. Why the High School Bar and Grill? I was 'tarbending' the other night and had the distinct pleasure of listening to a group of divorced gentlemen in their late 50's go on and on about the various of their girl troubles (apparently, all women are evil). It reminded me of my fictional bar, and my belief that the rules of life, in a relationship sense, truly end with high school.
P.S. If I ever monetized this site (which I won't) Q-tips would owe me big time.
P.S. If I ever monetized this site (which I won't) Q-tips would owe me big time.
Chapter 23: Ottawa. High School Bar and Grill.
For a short while, before meeting Julie, Clay and I had lived together on Mcleod Street in a corner of my Centretown near the Queensway, amongst the minor league hookers of Gladstone Avenue. I had left Mom and the tiny homestead on the incline of Carson Road and joined Clay in this part of the city erroneously called downtown by most from the burbs, near-burbs of me. Clay was working with a small renovator at the time, and I was just beginning the fascinating field of the alternative fuel known as propane, taking the bus to work back within the East End of my mostly life to that point.
The Reader’s Digest version of this spot on the timeline involves the discovery of the Royal Oak some three by four blocks away; a slow noticing that most people of this Centretown separate from the actual downtown of Ottawa seemed to be walking everywhere - out of economics or eventual assimilation into the village that is any neighbourhood situated within a concentrated core … of similar style to folks of the Manhattan variety, New York City proper, never ever bothering to gain a driver’s licence.
And there be no set place where one can stand straight and yodel, ‘Hey, I’m in New York fucking City.’ One is either in Brooklyn, the Bronx, or any of the other boroughs five that make up the area collectively referred to as NYC.
But I apologize for the interruption as I walk home from this Royal Oak, down the streetlamps of Somerset and snow on its sidewalks in this present sense that is me over ten years gone from that initial dunk into the Centretown tank. It is some fours hours into a new day on the calendar as I stare up at a pointy bartizan engineered to the side of a three-storey redbrick and mumble whether or not I would have ever noticed that word and accompanying tiny depiction on the page of a dictionary if I had stayed in the East End, kept my tiny beater of a Chevy Z-24 and its driveway parking that barely exists in this here stretch of town.
Dear Mom, sons do eventually leave home, even in Spain and Italy, but you will always be loved by we two.
And I offer up a string along as I step a left of foot onto the salted pavement of Metcalfe and walk the last block to my current home I believe to have thought the once or twice. I punch in the secret entry code and dive for the futon that be mine set in the flat position this Now, the 27 diagonal inches of Sony that stares me in the face, taunts me from across the vast stretches of a bachelor apartment: but I be strong at this wee-in-the-A.M. and turn on the stereo, search for the university station, go soft for the eventual CD that is maudlin and soothing depending on how long it takes an old Tom Waits cut to fall me asleep well into the mornings and early afternoons that are mine before the going back to High School in the near-burbs; to Prince Holmwood, and his merry lot of gangsters sitting the other side of the kitchen window that is the laying out of food to be run out to various of clientele; the choice bikini-clad Sunshine Girls scissor-clipped from the daily rag and put up on the chit line, left to dangle and divert the Prince’s attention until the brink of busy when space on the visual is at a premium and the ten, twelve saucy tarts that enjoy dancing and anything involved with an acting career must be folded down to make way for the electronic requests for medium-rare rib-eyes plus side baked potato, appetizers of escargot with topping of mozzarella cheese. Wonderful. And he hates it when I laugh or don’t comment on the daily soup sipped on before I climb behind the bar and allow the class to order.
“Them girlies speak to you, don’t they?” Shut up, he yells me. “They aren’t really real, dumbass.” I’m definitely dead at recess, he confides in me. “I’ll tell, and Kes will know that yet another of his kitchen managers is a nut job.” And the Prince he smiles his teeth with those of mine: we share that tiny moment known as restaurant.
“Hey, jackass, did you hear? Mr. Ownership is hiding shit in the Cayman Islands, baby. Yah hah!” Ef walks on by without a word, and he should be permanently gone by now. He is to be driven from the premises with much regret from me, to be a whisper and an unfortunate punch line to an inside joke.
“Kes keeps bouncing my fucking cheque, Holmwood.”
“You bartenders are filthy rich, what the shit?”
“Yeah yeah, buddy.” And he is paid by the hour, bereft of the tip system, yet aware of. I am conscious of a hairy owner that increasingly keeps screwing with our pay, forcing me to short my nightly cash out as the Prince’s dirty little white envelopes are passed to him and kind every second Friday afternoon.
“The sweet.straight.cash, mommajammer,” as he pulls down those paper girls posing on an out-of-our-season beach. “Nothing on paper, Henry - cease to exist,” is his offer to me through an opening that is me occasionally retrieving food to serve within the bar area of blended daiquiris, frosted margaritas. I pass around the imaginary hat and collect towards an institution of the proper makeup for his shaky disposition, and once the while people nod that they understand the young man that drives us all crazy on the daily basis of work, High School Bar and Grill, East End, Ottawa, gratuities pretty please.
Ef will leave with the promise that we are still friends, the remains of what brought me into this biz.
Ef should depart with the maximum of poetry involved with a cook saying all casual to a bartender, “Wouldn’t be so tough without your bitch Ef around, hmm, zero?” Said head cook gives this to me with an adjustment to the tin foil antenna he has fashioned to his ball cap.
During cohabitation with X, Prince Holmwood was my porn pseudonym: the name of a first family pet and the street that I lived on at the time of a certain say before it became necessary for her to put into motion the separation that is me describing our breakup using this love of a dog meshed with an address.
Ef will exit the building ringing of a theory within the service industry.
Ef is the spelling of a human being I choose to rather not name in the specific.
“Hey, Jackass, try the soup? Good, yeah?” And a nod from me because I love the Prince’s cheesy cheddar chicken. I then walk behind my bar that is the various of levers pulled to allow a liquid to flow from a pressurized keg within a large fridge; glasses wait for the shots of vodka and Kahlúa used in the making of a Black Russian done without the free pour performed in TV shows that never have an actor ask for a specific brand - “I’ll have a beer” and we are supposed to believe that it is just understood by the two parties as to the exact choice. Sorry. Sorry for the fact that most times there be no centre rearview mirror in movie cars when the camera peers in from the outside, that any vehicle used in the portrayal of the past never has a single ding on it and is of museum quality in the sense that everyday cars were always Turtle-Waxed and chrome-domed regardless of era. Sorry, but would You care for me to lie and think that I will not be glad to see Ef hand in his resignation, move on from the passive revolt that is the staff turnover beginning to repeat itself into a dearth of longtime friends; and I don’t really care, for the non-simple fact that I am up to something close to 210 Q-tips in my collection. Wonderful, and strange. The pure amusement that the 5-steps of resolution be the same ones involved when being refused further service at a bar: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally ultimately the Acceptance of events.
In front of the Sony Triniton switched to Off, I seriously do not care beyond the way that people are hired on looks because the audience collectively prefers pretty whilst watching the play - even as they deny it. I could lie and believe that art has stopped imitating or reminding life, or that I do not prefer blondes despite the very fact that I have never been with one. It would be wrong of me to say that Bruce Willis’ character wasn’t dead through almost all of the Sixth Sense, that the little guy who ‘sees dead people’ didn’t know this fact all the while.
This be why that blank of television and I do begin to make up things, because while I no longer fib I still feel that itch for certain release. My Clay just happens his way into a coffin that will be discovered centuries from now, in a field dug up by those with a knowledge of the languages of the past. Upon the lid will be his name, hometown, and the bit about him being the brother of someone called Henry, son of Linda. I suspect of him worrying over the type of wood he would be dwelling the passage to the Great Beyond in, a maple or a nice oak devoid of any knots, stained and at least three coats of varnish applied, wet-sanded between each. This little I know enough of the finishing process to continue lying on a bear-trap futon set to the sleep position, passing within a world that is the ceiling of a bachelor apartment at 4-and-a-half-in-the-A.M. Me and the sound of Tom Waits, enjoying the lack of boob tube that I assume still works, was physically plugged in by me in that month of June, first day of new apartment back in Centretown.
A shift of the body, a brief behind the eyes thought that Ef should be gone from the establishment which I call the life that be the freedom within this industry we both ply; a pick of schedule, the tips, the free alcohol coupled with a serious lack of heavy lifting. I envisage him leaving this field and becoming a government worker in our fabulous federal town Ottawa, or perhaps something exotic as Fred and the world of banking that he now climbs.
I open my eyes once the more and hum along with Mr. Waits and his song about his Ol’ ‘55, forget the imagined and watch the growing shadow of a cactus that I have very much hurt in the past. José, Tall Sanchez - may God rest Pepé’s soul in the shoebox beneath my futon - remind me that is to become morning in the span of an hour or so in front of a TV remained to Off for quite the while now.
-
The entertainment for this next evening is to be a message from the very depths of a friendship; it involves the urging of another’s life, all in the process of a restaurant robbing me of my will to give - and quite simply it is my word of mouth that is passing for reliance; I am gossip in the form of someone trying very hard to tell the truth about what happens after leaving my bachelor apartment of Centretown, as I pay my $2.50 and climb on the 95 and ride the Transitway back out to this High School Bar and Grill.
“Why the fuck do you continue here?” I ask of him, red in my eyes, his recognition and avoidance of my male gaze being the bastard that he can be. “Leave. Just leave this place.” It is a Friday night, only beginning. I am behind my fabulous bar talking to this manager, a man a guy a friend in his thirties I choose to endow with pierced nipple and call Ef for reasons I have referred to of that personal nature.
It is then his turn, and this similar tone of words: “You don’t send me flowers anymore, Hen. Why the hell should I then listen to you?” But he is not receiving the very fact that is me warning him of the impending Malthusian equalizer about to create itself upon our establishment of 167 occupants allowed at any one legal time. This Ef person he smiles and his chest heaves up and down as I set up the workings of my bar for a night in these near-burbs a mere hair away from imminent disaster. “Hen,” he does remind, “you used to send me roses every other Thursday.” And it is the sheer breadth of this humour of his that I fail to properly capture.
It was the foggy side mirror of a car that I boot kicked during a walk home down Bank Street in the second half of winter that led me to this: Perhaps things could have been done in the different. I should not have bored her to absolute death with my care for the calm of the routine that set in, stopped the me that occasionally caused her to be reminded of her nasty secrets that I have spilled in the quiet of this say.
“Go-the-fuck-away!” - and these the playful words of my Ef and certain other casual things said by friend I shape to You after the sense of being left for good by her.
“If you don’t leave this place I will definitely start to make shit up … about you,” I done say and begin to plead with this letter of the alphabet. I wipe the long oak of my bar and add this to the official register: “And we are out of grenadine.”
“Wicked!” Ef says to me in this Now involved with relating the extended sentences of private conversations. “We will handle this lack of the colour red,” he does to me with an arch of his back; the night, it has started, and the customers begin to ask and speak in modifiers of little or more, add this and hold that, too weak and too strong. My clients love me, and I do not lie, for a great actor is not embellishing, merely believing for a spell. And sorry for this absolutely tremendous grasp of the mundane, but I feel the need to express of each and every performance, this one that I be within this now that is the pop gun in my left hand, a bottle of Smirnoff in the other: I smile at my good friend the manager and proceed to free pour a vodka tonic: one closes their eyes, counts to 3 and big whoop - that be an ounce of liquor let from a spout, give or take an eighth from the profits of the owner of bar, his employee working his way up to something in the range of 211 used Q-tips stuffed in a box and cherished beneath a bear-trap futon. If wanted, Ef can say to me stop doing that, use the jigger - and I will, in a sec or three, right after performing a 7-and-7: specifically, Seagram’s rye whisky and Seven-up. It’s what Johnny Travolta ordered in that disco bar in Saturday Night Fever, it’s what I concoct this Friday night, High School Bar and Grill, somewhere in the East End of Ottawa.
“Do you believe that you are in the right business?” Ef nudges me this and shrugs and then leans up against the wood; having brought me into this world, he could very well be asking me to vacate it by the look on his face that I have never fully described to this You behind my raised eyebrow. And sorry for this omission of his necessarily modern coif and the manner with which his father be the teller of dirty jokes said within a glass of Johnny Walker Gold that makes us friends laugh and Ef cringe - his old man the smile of an East Coast accent, Halifax to be of the proper. “Seriously, Hen,” he asks of me after all these years.
“You got me the freaking gig, buddy. And yes, thanks, and yes I do blame you entirely.” The chit machine is plying me for a Singapore Sling, an amaretto sour - two very good reasons to verify someone’s I.D. if I were serving that table and not entering cheap gin into a sarsaparilla glass filled with ice, orange and lemon juice, avoiding the kiss of grenadine but floating a soupçon of cherry brandy on top. “Garnish that for me will ya, big boy.” Love, camaraderie, and my way of avoiding what his problem is with me in these here near-burbs far away from children with distended stomachs scrolling the African savannah for a morsel of meal or a safe sip of water, hold the vodka and perhaps turn the channel.
We two have the memories that form a relationship into what be considered friendship keeping our very eyes from taking on the squint of a spaghetti Western. “This is beyond you no longer sending me flowers, Hen.”
“I believe that I told you that I was never much of a dancer: Of course it was gonna be all chocolate and poetry in the beginning, but hey hey, now it is just me and the barnacles before you, bitch.” I pause and then add this to the proceedings: “I would kiss her every single, fucking day - do you get it … man?” My friend, this manager that I tend to appreciate and forget, whispers nothing in this span of being male. My machine that be the tail end of the electronics producing a request for a taste of alcohol or maybe pop, spits out a piece of paper with the word Cosmopolitan typed out all serious. We two share the smile and I free pour the various ingredients to this female of drink as my life does move on into the Friday night of the continuation of what I have been trying to paint for quite sometime now: I would simply kiss her every single day.
An answer to that question of his.
-
We make a point of going out for beers afterwards; it is contrived and a necessary moment in the friendships that drift apart for whatever reasons.
We sit at the Oak, get Fonzie to flip a twoonie and the loser agrees to keep his job. Best 2 out of 3. 4 in 7. And he won’t just let me win now that we no longer be that close of friends. We are fellow employees with a history, relaxing at my local pub and pretending that we are telling the whole story to one another, that the world hasn’t moved beneath the two of us. He has been without a girlfriend for a couple two three years now, and I am still with my individual mess that be me with You, struggling with the first person. Apologizing to the air between.
“What’s stopping you?”
“A lack of suitors,” he tries, and I says to him a No. “Just stuff, Hen.”
“I like that - stuff.” The man had said nothing to me, but I believe him out loud: these eyes of mine looking out at the Ef that used to be him training me until the industry of dealing with the entertainment of people slowly slipped us from the realm of playing with each other on a permanent basis. “Here we go: the most letters in the alphabet wins; I’ll get a pen from Fonz and we’ll write them all down - every girl, every letter smelled.” A truly male solution to a predicament that one of us has to lose before the end of this night I manifest. “M is for Morven, she was Scottish and she taught me to always look at the shoes, the shoes tell everything about the man.”
“And the woman,” he adds, and kicks one of his black Reeboks up towards my face. “I refuse to play this game, Hen.”
“I abhor sweatshop labour, but nonetheless, here we both are, in winter, dressed up pretty in the black foot leather of teenagers toiling away in a foreign land.” Me and my comfortable Nikes.
“F is for Fiona, I suppose.” He pauses, and I lean. “She was the first time that I hit the pipe - hash, not heroin. My roommate had to put his Walkman on to drown out the noise we made.” Fantastic, I gave him. “Yes. Yes,” he smiled; and so our slow walk down memory lane into the names that constitute life - for a night and a talk about stuff.
“I, myself, wish to receive credit for the letter X, but invoke right of safe passage. Can your people agree to this measure without any bloodshed? Hmm?” Absolutely not, he turns me down. Fonzie agrees, and I proceed to threaten them both with a walkout on friendships and bar tabs. “Give me this one concession, please.” The proper noun without the tale.
“Give us something more than imagined privilege, Hen.”
“Ok. I believe that I said something to the extent of kissing her every day, did I not?”
“That is the future - the, um, maybe you might; tell us a story for fuck’s sake.” The tunes from the satellite radio are loud, the customers even more, and there is this hum that is the collective of a pub giving refuge and a place to argue to those of us in Centretown, small village England.
“X is a girl I refuse to go further with.” Wasn’t she a bartender, Ef toys of me. “Yes, yes she was. She was the finest performer I ever had the pleasure of.” Pleasure, he prods. “Carnal knowledge did present itself, you skid, but the desire was in the elsewhere.”
A sigh. “K is for Khalida, and her daddy fled Jordan with a suitcase stuffed with Yankee greenbacks” - Ef, and this say of his after the necessary pause into this Friday that continues to argue and brag with itself.
In pure Centretown fashion X should walk through the door and sit down with the two of us. She knows we both, is well acquainted with Fonzie the man that makes every girl feel that they the only one in the room.
With reality she avoids me and remains to the bars and restaurants of trendy Elgin Street a mere three city blocks away from the stink of Bank.
She should, really, just arrive and resolve this petty conflict that I have either created or highlighted; her speak would be of the love one must dig from the bounty of people met and served, the joy of working with university students and their quest to pay for an education. She would tell us to relax, or think of a number between 1 and 100 and make us choose, stand firmly by her decision.
In pure Centretown fashion this sorry Friday night that now be Saturday morning should end by her moving towards kissing me smack on the lips in front of all of these brilliant heroes, the girls and mostly boys of Bank Street.
“But that’s not gonna happen, is it?” I ask Ef for a hug and he turns me down flat.
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