The Big Four

Davy Carren

The Huntington is slick with a minimalist rain, so I venture in for a cocktail at the long regal bar. Harry’s behind it, and, as per usual, cracking the worst jokes this side of Contra Costa County. After bellying up, in repair with soaked socks and slippery shoes, I play earnest enough; almost as well as the piano player’s version of As Time Goes By; and tell the scruffy excuse for a limo driver who’s planted on a nicely upholstered stool to my left to scoot it over a bit and spare some elbow room — said room which I then use to firmly plant both elbows on the bar’s polished veneer.

The Huntington’s swanky Big Four Bar is mostly dead at this pre-happy-hour hour. A mystique of ancient silver barons, gilded-age portrait oils, whiskey-drenched cherries, and old varnished wood imbues the place. My eyes wander without seeking. A charming septuagenarian lady in a sequined silver gown’s laughing a riot to Harry’s jokes at the end of the bar. People ice skating down at Union Square might not be choking on her perfume, but I doubt it. Harry tells her, “You’ve got a body like a limousine and a laugh like lemon meringue, Dolly.” It’s a wonder the chump taking up space on my left doesn’t try to drive her away.

Harry eventually wanders over my way. I tell him, “Martini, the only way I know it. On the house, please.” He winks his way to the cheapest gin on the shelf and gets going on it. As he shakes it up the aged lady in the silver gown gets up slowly with a cigarette prodding from her lips and goes outside to smoke it.

Harry runs his eyes over me as he ices a glass. “Uh huh. Heavy on the olives. Plenty of vermouth. And I’m not paying for any of it, Lint For Brains. How’s things?”

“Plenty of nothing. The usual, just like my drink.”

I am in the midst of adjusting every single article of clothing on my person.

“Uncomfortable?”

“As usual.”

Harry pretty much mouths it with me.

I sit there on my fancy stool, legs akimbo under the bar, showing off my socks, head resting on my fists, waiting for something to come along and make me feel alright with the world. Harry’s quick with the drink. It’s just cold enough to be fantastic. I try to sip instead of gulp.

“You know what your problem is?”

I’m flattered at his attention. “Me? I’ve got a lot more than one problem, sir.”

“Sure. Sure. Just like always, coming in here for some of that good-old shelter from the storm. I get it. And I don’t. Just as always. Make sure you don’t get any vomit on your shoes. You’ll end up okay enough, I guess.”

“All of my problems are solved. Thanks to you once more, kind sir. One more for my ego, and another for my soul.”

“Shit. Your only problem is that you drink too fast.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

And I did.

Soon the rumpled hunk of mutton wasting valuable air next to me got up and rumbled out the door. I was so glad to be able to start breathing through my mouth again.

“Ah. It smells rosier all of a sudden. Make me another, Kilimanjaro.”

Harry swiped my empty glass and started in on producing another full one. He didn’t like it at all, but there was nothing else to do. The bar was empty now, with the old lady momentarily gone, and he didn’t really seem in the mood for light conversation. I basked in my newfound isolation. My mind wandered all over the damn place.

We were driving on that part of the freeway that doesn’t exist anymore. Something about nose hair. Remapped surfaces gone extinct. Gassy disasters lurking in the glove box. Somebody’s window was stuck up. A riffling of trash over the floor mat. Teetered hope spoiled in the backseat. Nobody was running up the score as the radio upchucked all over the dial. Saltwater spots on the dash. Get the radiator fixed and toss me the spare from the trunk. I’m more sane than you’d figure when it comes to this stuff.

Medium soft and grisly. Eyes caressing every passing thing. The dreaminess of narrow brick fire-escape alleys. A homeless lady barking at white walls while hustling by with a stuffed unicorn doll in tow. The lunch-hour masses out in full force, one-hundred-dollar dim-sum affairs and three-martini desserts. Showy gray curls of cloud huddle and smear the low sky. Rest is anything but assured. Scrambles go green at gridlocked intersections; pedestrians weave and hustle through the ambient gurgle of stalled traffic. Nobody’s socks are mismatched. A flower vendor is dismayed.

I get nervous in grocery stores and bowling alleys, but I’m fine in hospitals. It’s that antiseptic glow, smooth, blanched softer and somehow warmly worn. The strict tidiness of it all. Soft footwear padding down mopped halls. People dying hooked up to machines in dour characterless rooms filled with light.

A crooked whine like broken guitar strings, hatches closed, rusted. Clangs of metal sheets screaming against rebar. The click and moan of steady scrapes with a rake through concrete gardens. Rum runs through the rain gutters, drips in boozy plunks from the eaves. Tracks scarred through rows of yew trees and boxwood hedges, burnt scarlet sage and even some white marguerite. An acrid whiff of spent rubber. Dents like dimples in rummaged smiles over corrugated steel siding. Rails, a tinny screech and a harrowing yowl all through it all.

The days get later and later. Evening rots away through TV shows and back aches. My life seems no longer like the great thing I’ve been told that it should be.

Tugged all the way to this. And then a fresh drink to snap me out of the mushy reverie.

“Perfect. Just what I needed. By the way, Harry Old Sport, what ever happened to that elderly dame at the bar’s end?”

“Her. She stepped out for five minutes fifteen minutes ago, and she won’t be back for half an hour.”

“What’s her case history? Some Tallulah Bankhead wannabe?”

Harry smiled his worst smile, the one he keeps in his back pocket just in case. “That woman’s going to drive me to not drink.”

“Now that’s the sort of talk I expect. That’s much more more like it out of you. I’ll toast right here to it.”

Which I did.

And I didn’t spill a drop.

A rambling fit shuddered through me: “Old habits live easy. Ever wonder about the grandness of this place? The color of the bricks? Like sandstone or something. The windows that open upwards and out? The songs like old trains?”

Harry just glared at me — not completely unkind, mind you. But I got the picture, in focus, clear as my throat was about to be, any minute now.

“I am not an alcoholic.”

“No?” Harry had a rough time stifling a good belly laugh. “Then what, may I ask, are you?”

“I’m a drunk. There’s an avalanche of distance twixt ‘em. Fluctuat nec Mergitur, sir. Tossed but never sunk.”

Harry went back to the end of the bar where the bejeweled geriatric lady was now seated once again.

I sat there, like a dope, and I drank my drink, and I thought about my wife, who was dead, so whom I guess was no longer my wife, or anybody’s anything, and I thought about when she was my everything, and I was hers too, and we’d come in here to this wonderful bar after dinner almost every night, and the piano player would play any song in the world for us, and everyone was in love with her and so they put up with me, until she stopped occupying the seat next to me, and then it came to be that things went and got all wrecked as some soused conductor’s baton for Yours Truly, and so now it’s just me and these martinis here, and it’s almost Xmas already, and hey, there, you delicate tulip you, could you spare some love for a sap like me? Mine’s all gone and done and used up, and I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere for quite some time.

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