I bartend at Nick’s on Sixth from Thursday to Sunday nights. Nick hired me four years ago on one of July’s hottest afternoons when I was navigating student debt. Audrey tagged along that day, hoping she could land one shift a week. (I thought her sly attempt to sabotage this opportunity was an ignoble excuse to remind me that she was ultimately the better one.) However, as the universe was on my side for once, I landed the role of bartender and on Audrey’s bad side the entire week. For days, she spewed backhanded compliments and forwarded my calls. It wasn’t enough that she earned the respect and votes of our classmates for prom queen and student class president — standard popularity benchmarks — while I stood in the back rolling my eyes, knowing what was really up.
Pushing seventy-nine years old, Nick still had a youthful soul. He plodded his way with a limp and had one eye smaller than the other, with teeth yellower than our House lager. He smelled like my grandma’s old hope chest and cigarettes.
“Looks like another slow one,” Darcy said, slumped over the bar table, twirling her hair.
“Mm,” I replied as I tried totaling receipts from Jill’s last shift, remembering that I failed terribly at multitasking. “It’s only four p.m. Lushed Up Lucien hasn’t even made an appearance.”
Lushed Up Lucien invariably arrived between four fifteen and four forty-five p.m. He always strode in with the same familiar gait with baggy Dickies pants and white Velcro rubber shoes. His salt and pepper beard shrouded his neck successfully, and his moustache smelled acrid and stale. He slurred his speech, but after years of waiting on him, we understood him between labored breaths and murmurs.
Lushed Up Lucien trudged through the door closer to five p.m. that day. The sunlight filtered through the doorway and cast a harsh beam crippling our vision. We worked in low-light settings with hung pendant lights, few and far between. We liked it dark to hide our deep-seated resentments, shattered dreams, and smeared eyeliner on hectic nights. Nick, with a terry cloth draped over his shoulder, approached Lucien before digging his hands in his back pockets.
“I was afraid you’d never show up.” You’re keeping my business afloat,” Nick said. The two septuagenarians exchanged a few words before Nick guffawed and walked towards the kitchen.
I stared at Darcy, who was applying another trace of her lip-liner. She reminded me so much of Audrey, but Audrey would never be caught dead wearing Daisy Dukes – just an ugly personality.
Lucien threw a small stack of twenties and fives on the bar without uttering a word. He was a free-thinking man if I ever saw one. Deep in the unheard-of training manual that was our daily exchange with Lucien, this meant he was eager for his whiskey, neat. The bills were arranged haphazardly; even an ATM receipt and a blue BIC lighter lay folded between two bills. Lucien never paid with a card, always cash, and never ran out of it. Word around the tavern was that he was using his wife’s wrongful death settlement on booze to grieve and mourn her devastating passing years ago due to a botched plastic surgery.
Before our chumminess over local art and outdoor gardening materialized, Nick and I did not always see eye-to-eye. On the day I asked for an application, he was sitting outside the pub, wiping his neck with the infamous white terry cloth. He glowered at me, wondering whether I was lost or looking for my drunk father. Audrey was out of mind, out of sight, it seemed. Her existence came short of Nick’s peripheral vision, even for standing in front of him with her bright pink polo shirt. He drew his gaze to my wrist tattoo, then to Audrey’s bright pink hair bow, and back to my wrist tattoo. He handed me the application and said, “I got a feeling about you.”
When he offered me the job over Audrey, I thought he was desperate. I worked ceaselessly, earning his respect in the first year. One February, when I served a pair of regulars vodka instead of gin, I became the butt of all jokes just after being demoted to a barback. He emphatically apologized to them for my existence, and I had gone home that night brining in my bathwater, blurting, “Fuck!” every five minutes. I let my toes prune white until they felt tender. I soaked his disapproving stare, which outdid a scowl, into my memory. But his unyielding glare, one I was confused by, burned right through me as if I were a vermin parasitically munching at his garden. That year was hard, but I needed the money to buy my way out of my academic failures.
With his superiority and my aversion to it, we bickered. I had quit several times, using the rusted back door to make my departure. Nick, with his glorious hunch, knew all along that I’d return. He expected me to crawl through the same doorway I bolted out of. I’d slip in quietly through the back when Darcy secured a large rock to prop open the door. I’d then find my apron hung with the others and my name tag in my usual corner locker. Upon seeing this, I glanced at Darcy, who replied, “Don’t look at me.” Then, I knew.
Following a heartfelt conversation about my dropping out of college during our first Christmas Eve work party, Nick eased up. The ever-deep, broadening chasm that I often plummeted into somehow forced itself closed. The surfaces collided, with traces of cracks evident in this momentous shift. His voice split, sounding gentler than usual. He dished out a platitude that I could not recall. But the gesture presented itself to me like a folded warm blanket that I wasn’t sure was for me. I remember that night vividly: Nick was three years sober, and Ezra had been dead for about that long.