Walks Into a Bar, Day 1

A girl and two guys with baseball bats walk into a bar.  Now, that's either the start to a shitty joke, or the start to a shitty day.  More likely the latter, though, given that it was my bar.

She was the best dressed of the three.  Mostly because she wasn't trying to be something she wasn't.  Either she didn't get the memo, or her idea of business-slash-business-casual was a blue tank and an unzipped hoodie.  Either way, though, it worked.  The other guys, their idea of classy was a blazer that barely fit.

"Mornin', barkeep." She said.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon.

"We don't open for another six hours, guys."  I scanned the three of them.

The first guy, on the girl's right, my left, was completely jacked – the type of guy who benched Corollas for breakfast.  On the other hand, he was also like, five feet tall.  I probably should've mentioned that in the opening, but "a girl, a guy, and a midget, two of whom are carrying baseball bats, walk into a bar" doesn't make for a great opening.

There was the second guy, who, after the first, didn't really stand out much.  He probably was more worked out than the average guy, but next to the short dude, he came off more like a kid who hit the gym twice and takes that as license to invest in a wardrobe full of wife beaters and bandanas.

Then there was the girl.  She was one of those white girls with jet black hair.  Maybe she was born with it, maybe it's Maybelene (Maybelene makes hair dye, right?), but the point was she made a conscious decision to have jet black hair.  She could've been a blonde, but that was too passe.  She could've been a redhead.  She could've been the hazel-brunette girl-next-door.  But she chose jet black badddd girl, with four Ds.

Those Ds were referring to her tits.  Which, incidentally, were huge.

All in all, though, they didn't seem like great odds, even if I was only going to be taking out the two guys.  Mostly because I wasn't anywhere near as huge.  Or armed.

"That's cute. "  The girl smiled at me.  It was one of those, "Oops, my bad," smiles with none of the irony.  "So how about we cut the shit.  No more clever jokes, no more staring at my tits, just a couple adults sitting down to talk business."

Damn.  I really thought I was being subtle about it too.

I sighed.  "Alright, you know what, fine, what do you want."

She said something else.  I didn't catch it.  Not because I was staring this time (well, I did glance again), but mostly because I just remembered there was a chair leg under the counter.  One of the stools broke the other day, so I kept some of the pieces in case we needed to fix any of the others.  It wasn't particularly long, but a two-foot long length of hollow metal was probably better than jumping in barefisted.

The odds were still stacked against me, but I had a fighting chance, at least.  Grab the chair leg in my right hand, vault over the bar with my left, duck to avoid the swings, and take out the back of the average-looking guy's knee.  Spin the bar around and bring it upwards between the midget's legs and I'll catch him right in the midget balls.  Then we could talk.

"So?" The girl asked.

"Sorry," I shrugged.  I went to grab the chair leg.  "I wasn't paying attention.  I was too lost in your eyes."

Lock the knee, plant the left hand firmly.

"Oh, my fucking god," the girl pinched the bridge of her nose.  "We're dealing with a fucking moron."

To be fair, they were.

Vault!

-

I don't think I'd had my ass kicked that badly since middle school.

Not by the midget and his buddy, I mean, this is a flashback.  Sorry if that's confusing.

I'd just attempted to break up a barfight, badly.  I didn't catch how it started, and frankly, I didn't quite care.  Fact of the matter was, there were a couple dudes kicking the shit out of each other in my bar, and I wasn't going to stand for that.

'Oh, shit, are you alright?'

That was Abby, my bartender, and probably the only reason people came into this bar.  Abby was an Indian girl, born and raised in England.  Elegant, exotic, and with an ass that could take any dress from mediocre to stunning.  Plus, the accent was a major turn-on.

It was just a collection of a bunch of little things that made her so appealing, the way they stacked up.  The first glance gets you hooked, and you get a little bit more each time you look back.  Each time you look back, it's a brand new little surprise.  There was the way she cocked her head to the side whenever she smiled, the way you could swear you heard the U whenever she said 'colour' or 'harbour', or the way she sometimes accidentally said 'pounds' instead of "dollars".   Next thing you know, you're finding out Abby's short for Abhilasha, and she's spent the last minute and a half teaching you how to pronounce it correctly.  You get it close enough on the fifty-somethingth try. She laughs, cocks her head a bit to the side.  And the next time you come in, she's going through the exact same conversation with whichever lucky son of a bitch got to the bar first.  She was as seductive as only a girl who knew exactly how hot she was could be, and she had so much class that she could turn downright prudish into hard-to-get.

She was my bartender, and she was leaning over me, using a chilled bottle of vodka as an icepack.  I could see down her dress very nicely from here.

I'm going to admit right now that I have a really bad staring problem.  I'm like, male gaze incarnate.  It's a feminist film theory term.  I studied comparative literature in college.  So, on top of a staring problem, I also have a really bad forward-planning problem.  The kind of problem that gets me to think that jumping into a barfight, swinging a bottle in each hand was a good way to resolve an issue.

"Whoo!  Fuck this place!"  One of the guys yelled, flipping a table over as he tried to moonwalk out.

"Your moonwalk sucks, asshole!"  I yelled after him.

Abby giggled.  It was a classy giggle.  The kind of giggle you need to cover your mouth to pull.   The kind of giggle you could butter crumpets to. 'You've really got to stop doing things like that, you know.  You're going to end up hurting yourself one day.'

"Like today," I nodded.

I should invest in a shotgun.  I could be one of those cool bartenders who had shotguns, aside from the fact that I wasn't a bartender.  I was a bar owner.  Who didn't know the first thing about mixing drinks.  Which is why I hired Abby.  This forward-planning problem is going to show up a lot.

I owned a jazz bar – the Silver Spoon.  It'd claim the title for trashiest jazz bar in town, but the competition was pretty stiff.  It's not exactly the type of place or type of crowd you expect to get involved with too many barfights, but you can't really expect too much from new money.

Old money might be snobby, but that's what they are.  Kid with his first million in the bank and a wad of cash in his pants is going to want to show it.  He's going to wear flashy clothes, drive flashy cars, and fuck flashy women.  He's going to be showing up in jazz bars, thinking that all it takes to have class is to be in the same room with it, rub a little money between its thighs and pour some liquor in its veins.  And the less money he has, the more he's going to spend it to keep up the illusion of having any.

Old money?  Old money doesn't have to do that.  You don't have to spend money to show that you have it when you have a name like Vanderbilt, or Carnegie.

New money, they do things like name their children Vanderbilt Carnegie.  That was my name, by the way.  Vanderbilt Carnegie Hoang.  My parents apparently thought that I'd somehow end up successful by association.  This wasn't a name like Martin Luther King, or George Washington Carver.  I wasn't named after Cornelius Vanderbilt, or Andrew Carnegie.  I was named after the connotation of Vanderbilt, the connotation of Carnegie, of Astor, Rockefeller and Rothschild.

They didn't want a kid who'd grow up to head a Fortune 500 company.  They wanted their kid to be that Fortune 500 company.  They wanted their kid to be the entire atmosphere that company exudes.  They raised a child expecting a bank statement.

They ended up with a college dropout who ran a jazz bar, bought with daddy's money, and kept afloat by the skeeziest fucks this side of the Pacific.

Maybe they should've named me Forbes.