Long ago and far away
The place is dark when I walk in.
Some lights left off around the small stage to make the strippers look better than they actually do.
I hate the cliental here, and hate the fact that my face reflected back fits the typical character here: a tall, lean figure with hard eyes that scare people when I look at them wrong, or don’t want to talk – which is mostly.
My nose is straight only because no one’s been tough enough to make it crooked, though a lot have tried.
I got scars on scars on my knuckles to prove that much.
I lean against the bar my big hands flat over my last twenty, waiting for the bartender, Ned, to notice.
Ned sees me and comes over grinning,
although his thin voice asks me not to make any trouble tonight. He says he
doesn’t need the place broken up like the last time I got riled.
This makes me a little hot since I don’t like people telling me what to do, but
I like this place. It’s one of the few places in town where I feel comfortable,
and I don’t need to get riled at Ned and lose my place here. So I bite my
tongue, ordering a beer as Ned goes on about a fight months old when four cops
had to drag me out.
He claims I was drunk.
I tell him I wasn’t and to get me my beer.
He catches my tone and scurries away.
Ned has a weak face and a pointed nose that makes him look like a mouse.
Some people give him the nick name Mousey, but never say it loud enough for him to put them out.
He delivers my beer and leaves. I sip foam off the top and look around.
The place is small, which is why is always looks crowded, with an oval bar that extends from the front door to the rear, leaving just enough room to get in and out of the toilets. In one corner, the few café tables remain nearly always empty. The men cling to the bar and the stage behind it so they can flirt with the strippers.
Everything here is tit and ass.
But not for me.
I hate things I can’t touch, and you can’t touch the strippers.
Down deep, I got this soft spot in me; even though I’m a man people sometimes call “Mountain.”
I like to touch soft things. Not the usual female places. I mean hair and skin.
As scarred as my hands are, they sometimes ache for something less violent. Yet I’ve always felt clumsy in that regard, fearing I might hurt when I don’t mean to.
Then I see Doris at the end of the bar, hustling some poor sucker out of a free drink and maybe more.
This is a shock since I hadn’t seen her in years, and not on this coast.
She looks as shocked when she notices me, and quickly drops the guy she’s with to make her way up the long bar to me.
Time hasn’t treated her well. She looks much older than she was when I knew her, and her blue eyes had an ache in them that causes me to ache, too.
I know I’m the cause of her pain and my own.
She calls me by my last name, “Hull,” and says she didn’t know I had come back to New York, even though she knew I grew up here.
Everybody comes back, I tell her, and laugh, trying to hide the confusion of emotions, the anger, hurt, and relief at seeing her again.
This is only made worse when she touches my arm.
Acid could not have burned so deeply, yet I can’t pull my arm away.
She still had whatever it that makes her successful in her profession, and despite the aging, she still made me ache in that special way.
Mousey is shocked when he comes to this end of the bar again. He’s never seen me with any women in here before, and asks in his squeaky voice if I want to “buy the lady a drink,” and I do.
My voice breaks a little, which startles him, too.
But then, it’s not Doris that broke me. I was broken long before I met her, by my father, who didn’t believe I would turn out any good, and maybe I didn’t.
But that’s the past, and that’s the reason I grew up hard.
Doris asks me what I’m doing with myself, and I tell her, still snooping around the way I was in LA, although now for less money and for petty scandals rather than the high profile stuff Hollywood always handed me.
I don’t need to ask what she’s up to. That much was obvious. And my looking at her clearly reminds her of the fights we had back in the old days when I objected to her profession and urged her to quit. Every day, we argued, every trick left one more wound in me that wouldn’t heal.
And yet at this moment, this many miles away from where we were back then, I find a new urge rising in me, one that wants to help her keep her secrets, one that wants to hug her and hold her and rock all the pain out of her as if she is a child.
I want to forget that she kept giving pieces of herself away, and realize now that she never gave all over herself to anyone but me.
Yet even now, I need a whole woman, not a mosaic, someone I don’t have to put back together with airplane glue.
She knows this. She finishes her drink, touches my hand again, then makes her way back to the sucker she abandoned at the end of the bar.
I pay for the drinks, leaving the change from my last twenty as a parting gift, knowing I won’t be coming back to this place.