Sober

The man who had taken up unwelcome residence at my booth was arranged sloppily, one arm thrown over the back of the seat. His necktie lapped at the tabletop like a dog’s tongue, working side to side with his gestures.

“I can tell you all day that the place is very clean,” he said, “but you won’t understand until you go there. It’s spotless. Sterile.”

He grinned and I caught the liquor on his breath. There was liquor in his eyes, too, a kind of simmering dreaminess. This was a man too steeped in this very moment to care about much else.

“If you picture the most loathsome place on this planet for a drinking man to be,” he continued, “I tell you it’s this place on Dewey street and Germaine Ave. You could hardly call it a bar. More like a library.” He slid a business card across the table.

I eyed it and said, “What the hell are you telling me about it for?”

“I’m not telling you anything at all,” he said, pulling that big fun park grin again. “This is inspiration from on high telling you to steer clear. Alcohol? Not for miles. None of that high-caliber stuff that comes off a boat, and definitely not exotic casks and bottles from all over the globe. Top-shelf wine, whisky older than you? No, none of that. And anything they have got is real swill. Add to that the fact that there’s no entertainment. No shows. You could hardly call it a bar. More like a morgue.”

I finally began to pick up his line of reasoning. Really, I was more like a sailor coming awake with the anchor line coiled tight around his ankle. Too slow-witted to see that this joker was describing a paradise, which was precisely what I needed — third-rate bootleg hooch was proving no cure for my parched misery. Anchor, take me down.

This man was loose and at ease, a feeling I dearly missed. I leaned in and told him, “I haven’t had a good drink in weeks.”

“Well sir,” the man said, turning up his nose, “a paragon of sobriety like yourself, I might mistake you for a regular. I’d never be caught dead there myself.”

The card on the table featured “Corner of Dewey and Germaine” in neat script, but other than those words and the profile of a black cat, it was blank. “What’s this place called?” I asked.

Those words left my lips as the bells hanging over the door rattled. Two policemen strode into the diner, their eyes falling first on the sole slice of pie in the cake bell, and then on the interloper beside me.

The interloper peeled himself off me, his backward glance at the cops expertly disguised by a swipe of his sleeve under his nose. “So anyway, I’ll feed the cat while you’re gone,” he told me, loud enough to be overheard, “Or at least teach him to use the damn can opener.”

“Yeah, that damn cat,” I replied. “What’s his name again?”

“Felicity,” the interloper said. “And remember that cat is not a damn thing but trouble for you.”

Felicity. I pictured the place in my mind, the bar stacked with every color of bottle, browns and greens and see-through clear, and a piano man with jumping hands and a dozen couples swing-dancing, the whole place glowing with a cocktail vignette, hazy with the cool sting of whisky on the rocks.

“Never seen a woman set foot in there,” the interloper said. His knees were angled toward the door now, the policemen locked in his side-eye peripheral. “Something about the place makes ’em shut up. Never hear ’em singing and laughing. Never a knockout in the place, most certainly not on Friday night when new crates come off a truck and the bottles go ‘round the house like they’re pinned to a roulette wheel. Only problem is there ain’t a password to get in. And that password doesn’t change on a week-by-week basis.”

I produced my wallet. “Let me cover the bill,” I said. Taking the bullet like a good little fish in a barrel. But I had to see this place. Twenty dollars on the table. Then forty. Then sixty. At eighty the interloper finally reached and the bills vanished up his sleeve.

“You won’t believe when I tell you,” he said. The table creaked as he leaned his weight into it. His hand went into his pocket and I could see the outline of something in there, something with smooth, hard angles, like a gun. “Sting,” he said softly. The policemen at the counter stood in unison and turned my way.

My guts felt stopped up and tight like I was a bottle that had just been all shook to hell. The cops walked like they were slugging through molasses, and the interloper beside me, his alcohol breath turned the whole diner hot as a fever dream. I was crammed into the booth with nowhere to go. I watched his hand in his pocket and the two cops drawing closer and prepared myself for either the cold metal handcuffs or a hot, wet bullet in my guts.

The interloper chuckled. He peeled back again, now both hands in his pockets. Harmless. The policemen strolled right through the door and set the bells rattling. The man left the booth: his top and bottom halves taking turns, first the feet, then the torso, the drunk-swaying head somewhere in-between.

Before he walked out, he glanced back and said, “You look like you could use a drink.”