We opened at four on Sunday to give the churchgoers time to do their morning penance with God and have lunch with their families before coming in to drink with their pals and blow their grocery money on beer and wings.
I hated the bar. I always had and always would so long as my life was tied to it. I hated that it was a haven for men like my father, who preferred the company of their drinking and poker buddies over their wives and kids; men who would steal money from their kid’s piggy bank to gamble it away without a moment’s regret. I hated the bar, but it was all we had and the only way my father could make a living. He had worked at the bar since he was a kid for my grandfather. He barely graduated high school and had never worked anywhere else. Then, as now, he was devoid of ambition and talent. Working the bar was all he knew. It was who he was. If my grandfather hadn’t died and passed on the deed and debts to him, he’d probably be selling shitty used cars in Jersey or pushing buggies at people out front of Wal-Mart. Granted, he drank up much of the inventory himself and always had his hand in the till, but without it, we probably would have been homeless long ago.
We didn’t open the kitchen on Sunday because the fry cook, an elderly black man named Willis Jones who had worked there as long as my dad, insisted on taking the Lord’s day off, but we did a healthy business in beer and shots among the heathens who came in every Sunday like clockwork.
Our clientele was loyal, I had to give them that; mostly older neighborhood guys and a few skanky older women not above blowing you for a couple of beers. They were the hard drinkers, the career drunks, the ones who had kept the place going all these years.
Tommy’s was a dive bar, a shit hole, not one of those fancy uptown joints where drinks are mixed from recipes and secret formulas and cost twenty bucks a pop. We didn’t mix fancy drinks here. If you wanted something other than beer and liquor shots, you were shit out of luck. And asking for something fruity would get you tossed out on your ear.
I had been behind the bar pulling taps for several hours when my father finally came downstairs. He appeared in the kitchen doorway, standing with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slumped, as if the weight of the world was bearing down on him. I glanced at the neon clock above the bar. It was almost seven. I figured he had been upstairs drinking all afternoon, but when he joined me behind the bar his eyes were clear and he wasn’t stumbling over his tongue.
“I’ve got this,” he said quietly. “Why don’t you take a break.”
I didn’t say a word. I just held up my hands and scooted past him to get out from behind the bar. I picked up a round tray and started walking around the bar collecting empties from the tables and booths. Several people said hi and I said hi back, but my mind was a million miles away. I wished that my body could join it.
“Hey, Kitty Kat, what’s shaking?”
I turned around to see my best friend Bethany coming toward me with her arms out and a big smile on her face. She waved at my dad, who gave her a nod, then gave me a hug and slid into the booth I was clearing.
“I’ll have a Coke, waitress,” she said playfully. “And pour one for yourself. On me.”
God bless her. Bethany was always so happy and upbeat, even though her home life was no better than mine and she worked as a topless waitress as a strip club downtown where men pawed and poked her like a grocery store cantaloupe.
She’d told me horrible stories of nearly being raped in club’s restroom and having to fend men off with a drink tray. Then again, she bragged about the money she made on her back and on her knees working there.
She was also a “favorite fuck” of one of the owners, she said, who showered her with gifts and hundred dollar bills. I couldn’t do what Bethany did, but she had her own place and her own car and her own money and wasn’t dependent on anyone other than herself, so maybe the trade-offs weren’t so bad.
Bethany’s perpetual giddiness was infectious and I was so happy to see her I almost cried. She always had a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye. She said life is what you make of it. It can be great or it can be shit. It’s all up to you. I would have loved to buy into that bullshit, today especially, but my life was nothing like I wanted it to be. Maybe because it wasn’t really my life. At least not yet.
I took the tray of empties to the bar and came back with two glasses of ice filled with watered-down Coke. I set the Cokes on the table and slid into the booth across from her. She picked up a straw from the table, ripped off the paper, and stuck it into her glass, then guided the straw to her lips, which were painted a deep red.
I took a sip of my Coke and looked her over. She worked the afternoon shift at Gino’s on Sunday and had obviously just come from work. She was wearing a pair of jeans so tight they looked painted on and a gypsy shirt that fell off one shoulder with no bra underneath. Her thick nipples poked through the material, though she didn’t seem to notice as much as everyone else did.
When Bethany came into the bar every head turned and every mouth dropped open. The old men lusted after her and the skanky old ladies hated her guts. Bethany loved the attention, bad and good.
There was glitter across the top of her chest and her lipstick was smeared, as if her mouth had recently been busy doing something other than sucking on a Coke straw. I could smell the smoke and sex beneath her heavy perfume.
“Did you just get off work?” I asked, working up the best smile I could for her.
“I did,” she said with a nod. She swizzled the straw around the glass and gave me a heavy sigh. “It was a slow afternoon, so the tips were shit, but Tony was there, so it was fun.”
I rolled my eyes at the mention of his name. Tony was one of the club’s owners that Bethany slept with on occasion, and by “slept with” I meant that she screwed him in the back of his car or in the back of the club or anywhere else they happened to be when his cock got hard. She also gave him blowjobs under the table right there inside the club while it was full of people.
She told me about all kinds of things they did that I would never have the guts to do. Granted, some of it made my panties damp and made my clit tingle, but on the sex scale Bethany and I were miles apart. I was still sitting at ground zero and she kept pushing the scale further and further out on the other end.
I had never met Tony, but he sounded like a total rich jerk who treated her like total shit. She said he had a huge cock and loved rough sex. She called him “The Hammer” because of the way he “hammered his monster cock into her”. Her words, not mine. There were times she’d come in walking bowlegged, like she’d been hit in the twat with a bat, but she would just laugh it off and say Tony went up the back a little too hard, whatever that meant.
The real allure for Bethany was that Tony had deep pockets and didn’t mind sharing the wealth. Bethany often came home with her pockets full of hundred dollar bills and new clothes and jewelry he’d bought her. In my mind, she was prostituting herself and I’d told her as much. She just smiled and said a girl had to
do what a girl had to do to pay the bills. After the day I’d had, I wondered if I would soon be of the same frame of mind.
“What’s bothering you, Kitty Kat?” she asked, frowning at me with the straw between her lips. She had been calling me Kitty Kat since the fifth grade. She was the only one allowed to do so.
I blinked at her. “What? Nothing’s wrong. Tell me about your day.”
“Oh, fuck my day,” she said, setting the drink aside and wiping her lips on a napkin, staining it blood red. She reached across the table to put her hands on my arm. “Okay, cut the shit, home girl. This is me. I can read you like a book. What’s wrong?”
I glanced toward the bar. My father wasn’t looking our way. He was lining up shots and pouring drafts for the regulars at the bar. His expression was blank, emotionless. Like me, he was just going through the motions. I saw him glance toward the door several times. I wondered if the people he owed the money to would actually come into the bar to collect. They might come in to intimidate him, but I doubted they’d do anything to him in front of a roomful of people. Rats and cockroaches avoided the light. When they came to collect, it would be in a back alley where there were no witnesses.