Nobody Bats a Thousand

Copyright 2012 by Steve
Schmale
.
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission from the author

This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is dedicated to my sister and mother with great thanks
for their love and support,

with
special thanks to
Bosko
, Mary Toll, Rex, and yes,
Timbro
                       
             
              
     
                                                                                           
                            
   
                  

“We cannot trust people who are nonconformists. We will make conformists out of them in a hurry…The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization…”

                                        Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s

A BAR
STORY

I truly believe everyone has a cross to bear, and we are all in this together. At least that’s what I tell myself whenever I get so sick of dealing with drunks and regulars and drunk regulars that I feel like taking out an Uzi to clear the room faster than one of Orson Welles’s beer farts. But actually, as far as bar jobs go, this gig isn’t so bad. Big Al, the owner of the place, knows what it’s all about.  He did his time working on this side of the bar. He appreciates that I’ve been around a bit, that I know what I’m doing and am reasonably honest, so he pays me better than any other joint in town would, and here the tips, though not great, are consistent, so things could be worse. Things could always be worse. That’s the other great rationalization I use whenever I need a bit of magic to get me through a shift.

My shift starts at four in the afternoon, coinciding with the start of Happy Hour and lasts until about midnight when I close down the lounge a couple of hours after the restaurant has closed.

When I came into work on this particular afternoon it looked like any other Friday, a bar lined with familiar faces, and people sitting at the six small tables and two large booths in the lounge, being served by Delores a food waitress helping out in the bar until the restaurant got busy.

Eddie, the day guy, for some reason was never anxious to leave. So I piddled around, making sure everything was stocked and ready for the night, letting Eddie milk his exit for the requisite good-byes and tips, when Big Al’s twenty-four year old, big mouthed, Donald
Trump/ Sylvester Stallone-wanna
be son, Little Al, came up to me.

“Tonight’s the night,” he said, happy and excited. “I got Lee coming in at seven as a second bartender
,
and a bouncer who’ll be checking IDs and stamping hands to save you the trouble,” he said. “I’m
gonna
go home and change, but I’ll be back before the band shows up.” Getting no response he mumbled, “Tonight’s the night,” again, then turned and walked away.

Just then Fatboy, who was playing dice for drinks with five or six other guys, showed he was ready for another beer in his patented fashion by precariously balancing his empty longneck Budweiser bottle upside down on the bar.

“I got two in the well, Fatboy,” he said, and I could trust he did. I didn’t know him well enough to judge his honesty on other things, but when it came to drinks he owed or was owed, he was as unimpeachable as the last good Pope. Fatboy always wore a straw cowboy hat, winter or summer, and was about as skinny as the starving Africans you see on the news, but he was called Fatboy because he called everybody else
fatboy, something he had probably done for a good portion of his seventy or so years.

“So what was Al’s kid talking about?” he asked as I delivered his beer.

“The banquet room is always slow in January, so Big Al is letting
J
unior
use it to put on a concert. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it, Fatboy.  I figured you’d probably be at all the rock shows.”

“The only shows I go to have naked women in ‘em,” Fatboy said as he took the dice cup, flopped out a hand, and slid the cup back to Randy next to him who took his time rolling the dice around inside the cup in sort of a bouncy, swirling technique that helped him feel some sort of control over the random hand he was about to produce by smashing the cup down hard enough to rattle glasses up and down the bar. From Randy’s expression you could never tell if he just rolled five sixes or a stiff since most of the time he had a menacing, narrow, deep-lined, dark-eyed look which seemed full of pain or the need to inflict it. If he smiled the expression still seemed full of misanthropic glee, but I knew him well enough to know he was more than just a big, mean, overbearing redneck.  Actually, he was intelligent, had a good sense of humor, and was a good family man with three different families from three different marriages to prove it. Next to him, flanking a mystery patron, were Manson and Mason; partners, as their fathers were before them, in the biggest insurance agency in town though they didn’t seem to spend a lot of time there. Next to them was Bobby Hill who drove a pristine thirty-year-old, red Cadillac Coup Deville big enough to house two large families of Asian immigrants. I suspected Bobby hadn’t changed much since the seventies; his hair was thinning on top but he still had it styled in sort of a hard-dude version of a shag haircut. He always smoked his Marlboro cigarettes squeezed between his thumb and middle finger, always wore a diamond pinkie ring, a gold neck chain made obvious by unused shirt buttons, and he only smiled when he was a little buzzed and had the opportunity to sweet talk some chick as he relived his days of past glories employing a variety of unoriginal techniques in his pursuit of meaningless recreational sex.

On both sides of this group were two other groups, actually three and four man gangs of Friday afternoon regulars wearing good suits and cheap ties. All of them had well-paying jobs I suspected, even though they were, to a man, at least to me, as cheap as watches bought from a Tijuana street vendor. All were doing their thing of vying for the attention of one of our resident middle-aged, high-tone barflies who, despite time, booze, and road miles, still looked pretty damn good. Mary Ann was six-feet tall and voluptuous. She drove a Mercedes, the only thing she salvaged from her last marriage, and she always treated me like a servant even though we both knew she didn’t have two dimes to rub together. This kept her worried whenever her glass was near empty, fearing the slim possibility an admirer somewhere in the bar wouldn’t offer to buy her a drink, and she would end up looking foolish fondling an empty glass, a fear she rarely if ever had to actually confront.

Mary Ann looked good but had a rough time stacking up against her col
league
Jane, surrounded by a group of guys at the other end of the bar. Jane was a sexy freak of nature, invitingly exotic, and somehow still gorgeous and thin despite her years of barroom allegiance. She had beautiful lightly-freckled skin, black eyes, long black hair, and was still built as firm and full as a twenty-one year old doing a spread for
Playboy
,
which sh
e was rumored once to have done
. But beyond just her looks she was a real piece of work, an extreme larger-than-life
personality, a local legend, a walking dichotomy capable of
out swear
ing
and out
drinking a clubhouse
full of Hell’s Angels, or able to become
so soft-spoken, articulate, and sophisticated s
he could make the Queen of England
seem
as loud and obnoxious as Howard Stern with a head full of speed
locked
in a room full of midgets and strippers.

At one time or another, Jane had been thrown out of nearly every bar in town, but with me she always played by the rules. If she started to stretch them
more than the situation allowed
I’d just remind her she was a lady; she’d always cool it and that was that.

I saw these two women almost every day. They always seemed to be working somebody for something,
but by observation, speculation, and intuition, I figured Jane or Mary Ann never went home and screwed any of the poor schmucks who doted over them.  In fact, looking at these cats with their saggy bodies, and thinning hair or bad toupees, the fantasy was about all they could handle anyway. So they were happy just trying to keep the ladies happy, and the ladies were happy being in the spotlight, fielding their admirers’ regard. Come to think of it, that night just about everybody on both sides of the bar seemed contented. The guys rolling dice were damn near gleeful, probably because the mystery roller in the middle seemed to be losing every round, and I was happy, as far as that goes, being I was working and all, because everything was simple and smooth. I knew what everyone in the entire room was drinking and was in tune enough to anticipate when they needed another. I could go about my business nearly anonymously without much extra thought or bother working as a team with Delores, who was great to work with, a one-in-a-thousand type,
who was
always so friendly and happy that no one around her was allowed to slip into a bad mood.

Being more than caught up on everything, and having a little free time to reflect, I looked around the room and started to think how much this scene, the people and the atmosphere, reminded me of my
first bar gig back in the
seventies. I’ve wo
rked a lot of places since then;
rock’n’roll
, disco, and C&W clubs, dinner houses, and for a short time a high-class hotel. But that first job is special, like a firs
t love, and though it was over
twenty-five years ago, when I was in my early twenties, some memories are as clear to me as if they had happened the night before.