DocHeart
03-22-2011, 05:40 PM
After twenty-eight years of owning and running the Satin Doll, I’m calling it a day. I just don’t have the energy any longer. All those dim-lit nights, all that smoke, all of the sudden trumpets that keep bursting out of those Miles Davis records – I most genuinely feel that I don’t want any more of them. I’ve heard all the stories a man ever needs to hear in this bar, some of them true. And I’ve seen a few things, too.
You learn to see in a different way when you live in the night. Humans take off layers of privacy in the night. They open up. Some by speaking. Some by being silent.
It’s not that the bar had nothing left to give to its smoky regulars or to the occasional loner drinking alone or to the out-of-the-blue astonishing woman that sometimes called in for a quiet drink but soon ended up being accosted by an admirer. I’m sure the lawyers from Rossi and Benjamin upstairs are sad to see their after-work joint closing down. And the neighbors who frequented the establishment when they could afford it, when the kids were off to their grandparents, when they weren’t too tired from work, when they needed someone to give them a drink and listen to them – they’ll miss it.
But they’ll be missing something that can never be here again, even if I continued to serve them the same drinks, play them the same music, tell them the same jokes. They’ll be missing the bar’s previous existence, before that night. Before the night that makes you want to leave the night, and live instead in the day, in the midst of crowds, alone but with others in the sunshine.
“Is that it, then?”
Andrea is standing behind me. I didn’t realize she was there. It’s four o’clock in the morning. Slim drops of rain fall easily, almost quietly, on the pavement under our feet.
I’m kneeling in front of the entrance, rolling down and locking the shutters for the last time. I haven’t really opened properly for over a week. With the “CLOSED” sign turned permanently outwards, I allowed a few regulars to come in briefly to say goodbye. Most of the furniture and decorations (including her painting of him) had already been given away or discarded. There was enough booze. There was no music. They all asked me what I’m going to do now. I told them I’ve got a motorcycle with a full tank, so I’ll be okay.
“Yep. I’m done here.”
“I take it you’re not coming back to this neighborhood.”
“No. I’m not. What are you doing out here at this hour?”
She turns her gaze to the dark steel sky, to the falling raindrops. “I wish it would rain harder.” Despair chokes her.
***
Last night I stayed up smoking. After twenty-eight years of straight tonic I drank whisky again. It tasted like burnt rubber. It tasted like the excretions of an extremely aroused young, clean-shaven pussy.
Ari walked into the bar for the first time on a clear and crisp November evening back in 1992. I evaluated him immediately: he was the occasional loner. He had a long brown coat on and a hat. He walked like a person who needed to be drunk, slowly and deliberately, looking at the bar stools as if where he would sit would make the world of difference to his night of slouched drinking.
“Welcome to the Satin Doll. Want a drink?”
“Yeah I want a drink. Bring me a bottle of Teacher’s and a glass and put some ice in it. Wait, **** the ice. Just the bottle and the glass.”
I served him. “Not many people drink this brand.”
“And yet you stock it.” He downed the whisky I poured in one large gulp, and I refilled. And then I noticed a large round black stain on the right side of his chest. It looked fresh and shiny under the blue spotlights. And it was too dark and sticky-looking to be anything other than blood that had been seeping out of him and soaking his coat for some time now.
“Well, it’s a scotch for special customers. And I get a few of them every now and then. Say, you don’t look too sharp there. Want me to call for some help?”
“Yes. Call an ambulance. If you can do it without making too much of a fuss you get a handsome tip.”
The man was Ari Dimou, a private investigator. He was a tall man in his late thirties, with thick graying hair combed backwards and a sharp, triangular face. It was wrinkly and clean-shaven. His eyes were tired and angry that night. I suppose that is to be expected when one has been shot in the chest.
I did as he asked and called the ambulance from the telephone in the office upstairs. The other customers didn’t know a thing. He filled and emptied his glass another three times before help arrived. When he saw the flashing orange light through the window he got up and threw three fifties on the bar. The notes were bloody. I grabbed them immediately and shoved them in my pocket.
“Have a good night now, sir.”
“See you,” he mumbled, and walked out, slowly and deliberately.
I never learned who had shot him that night or why. But, without having meant to or planned to, I had earned his liking. Over the fifteen years that followed he came to the bar once a week on average. There were a handful of periods during which he didn’t show for a month or even two, but just as I started to wonder whether he would ever come in again, he would walk in. Deliberately and slowly.
He was always polite to the others, but never accepted invitations to after-hours poker games, nor did he give his attention to the women who often attempted to attract it.
Every now and then, when it was getting quite late and most of the other customers had gone, he would ask me to play “Some day my Prince will Come.” I had a big wooden sign hanging off the wall that read “Sorry, no music requests!” but I always obliged for him. And then he would tell me something of his life. Little snippets disguised as darkly humourous one-liners. “I’ll tell you what I do for a living. I’m a photographer. My specialist subjects are thugs trading down the harbour and husbands and wives ****ing other people.”
On a Christmas eve, he told me to play the record again. It was past three o’clock and I was wishing he wouldn’t. My legs were aching from standing and I wanted to close and go home. I had to ride 300 kilometres in the morning to spend the day with my mother. But then Ari started talking, and I simply had to listen.
He told me of his ex-wife and his daughter. All the gory detail of how she had thrown him out telling him not to come back until she and their kid were on a plane. She would call and let him know he was clear to return to their flat, she said. For a week or so he slept in a discoloured and grimy hotel room downtown, then he decided to go back and beg her to stay. He only found a note urging him not to look for them.
“What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.”
“You can’t have done nothing. She left you like that she must have been mad at you.”
“I did nothing to her.”
“Did you look for them?”
“I did. Never found them.”
“Did you look hard enough?”
“I’m a private eye.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“What are you, some kind of wise guy?” He sprung up and left slamming the door behind him, even forgetting to pay for his drinks.
***
I said before that he never paid attention to women’s advances. And it is true, with one exception. Andrea.
If Ari was the occasional loner, Andrea was the out-of-the-blue astonishing woman. She always came to the bar all dolled up – black mini dresses usually, high heels and shiny red fingernails. She changed her hair every now and then, but whether she chose to allow it to curl away over her shoulders like barbed wire, or to straighten it and let it fall on her back, or to cut it very short so that her thin, pale face resembled that of a pre-pubescent boy, it was always jet black. So, it seemed in the dim light, were her eyes. She was a dancer, I learned in good time, and a painter.
After many nights of sitting in almost-neighbouring bar stools, she spoke to him. I couldn’t make out what she said, I was at the other end of the bar serving. But I saw her beaming him a smile that made me forget to stop pouring. “Woah,” said the customer when the glass was about to overflow. More amazingly, Ari answered her. And Andrea laughed.
A few nights later they walked in together, like couples do. They sat on the stools at the far left corner, underneath the Cab Calloway poster, like couples do. I approached to take their order.
“You’re dating him?” I asked Andrea. “He’s engaged to my sister. What will it be?”
“You don’t have a sister. And we’ll both have scotch, if you have it.” She spoke. He slouched and looked at her sideways, with something that could almost pass for a smile on his lips.
Over the next month or so they came in together twice, both times sat on the far-left bar stools. They never kissed or touched. The occasional loner and the out-of-the-blue astonishing woman need time before they engage in public displays of affection, if they ever do. And Ari and Andrea never did. For the following September Ari started coming in on his own again, and she only visited very early in the evening, when she was certain he wasn’t going to be there.
During a late-night replay of Ari’s favourite Miles tunes, I asked him about what happened. Why he never got together with her any longer. He gestured me to hush and pointed at the ceiling, as if saying that “I Thought About You” was too good to interrupt in order to talk about her.
Months later, during an evening when the moon had just come out and was so bright it made the street outside shine as if it was anything more than a back road, I asked her the same question. She smiled her radioactive coyness, and spoke softly: “I guess some things just aren’t meant to be.” Then she told me about her fat uncle who used to slide his hand inside her skirt when she was twelve, and how Ari, ever so occasionally, reminded her of him. Not through his behaviour or his demeanour – but simply by virtue of dealing with truths so infrequently and unwillingly.
“Does that make any sense?” She asked.
I shrugged.
And so the months and the seasons and the years went by, and Ari and Andrea came in with regular irregularity. The occasional loner and the out-of-the-blue astonishing woman, adorning my bar with “what-ifs” and “maybes” that possibly only I could comprehend.
***
Three weeks ago or so Ari showed up, in an unsurprisingly slow and deliberate manner. He lit up a cigar, a Montecristo. The flavour of the smoke made the air smell like burnt oranges. He had never smoked a cigar in here before.
A couple of guys and a woman had been coming in every night since last January. They always ordered bottles of Chianti. The woman abstained and stuck to water. They were quiet and polite, and well dressed. Expensive suits on the gentlemen, most certainly, and skimpy but luxurious small dresses on the lady. They could pass for business people, but I always thought they constituted a sinful ménage-a-trois. Perhaps I just wanted them to. They were all so damn good-looking I couldn’t imagine anything more appealing: her yellow hair sprawled on the pillow as the middle-aged gentleman with the grey moustache kisses her neck and clavicles, while the youngster with the sleeked black hair and the vertical scar on his left cheek puts his mouth between her legs.
I was taken aback by the amounts of thought I gave them. They kept to themselves, however, and I never felt as though an opportunity had arisen whereby I could crack a joke or say something polite that would open the door to knowing them better.
Ari waved for his usual. They had stopped talking the minute he walked in. When I filled his glass he took a small sip – so uncharacteristically that it gave me the shivers. The trio watched him with their eyes and mouths wide open.
“Got any of those nice pistachios?” asked the man I had never seen consume anything but liquid. I stared at him like someone who’s watching an airliner falling through the window, spinning in flames, headed straight for his back yard. He nodded at me like saying “take cover.” But I did not have enough time to interpret his unspoken guidance.
He drew a pistol from the inside pocket of his coat and shot the trio one by one. First, the woman, in the forehead, forcing her to relax against the back of her chair, her large breasts protruding as her arms hung lifeless from her shoulder. Then the youngster, the bullet going through the other side of his face from the one his scar was on. Then the older man, right through the centre of his chest.
Customers shrieked and ran out in the rainy night, like birds startled by the loud and sudden clapping of a playful boy’s hands.
***
“Well, it was nice knowing you, Andrea.”
I’ve got a full tank. I can ride into the wind and lift the visor off my helmet and let it blow on my eyes: this way, if tears come they will be swept. They will be hurled far, far behind me.
“You too.”
She produces a gun from her purse and points it at my chest.
I kind of had a feeling this would happen. I was just hoping I would be able to get away in good time.
“Andrea, there’s no point. I don’t know anything.”
“You know far too much. I’m sorry.”
Even in the wee small hours of the morning, Andrea is dressed to kill. Her hair is long again, curly and free-flowing. Fur over her shoulders, and shiny boots up to her ankles and a black dress clinging on her chest like the fog clings to the rocks, and you’re unable to see them but you know you’ll stumble over them if you’re not careful.
“I’m going away,” I plead. “I’m never coming back.”
“Some things just aren’t meant to be,” she utters, and I know that these are my last few seconds in life. Do I even have a second? Maybe I’m dead already. I’ll miss Miles Davis. But at least I can sleep solidly. I’ve been awake for so many nights. I’ve seen all of their darkness.
What I guess must be part of her brain hits me in the face as a gunshot rips through her beautiful head. I barely have time to bring my hand to my mouth to wipe away the contents of her skull before another shot is fired, this time into her back, making her fall flat on what remains of her face. She is motionless. The blood only needs a few seconds to form a black shiny pool around her before it starts running down the concrete of the pavement in thick, diverting streams.
I look up and see a man standing twenty metres away. He’s wearing a long coat. His tall silhouette blurrily persists through the rain and fog.
“Got a full tank?” I hear Ari’s voice.
“Sure have.” I respond, shaking, with tears welling up from deep inside me.
“Then you’d best be riding off. This ain’t no place for retirees.”
Through the city centre I ride, noisily, past red traffic lights, past red lights of all kinds. I sail on a ferry to a place I’ve never been before, decide to stay for a couple of nights to catch my breath. Before I know it, weeks and months go past. I wait on tables in a harbour tavern, in the afternoons. During the nights I try to sleep, mostly without success.
I often think of Ari and Andrea and the obscure, unfathomable things that were going on between them. They brought them together and then apart, dramatically and nightmarishly. Not one day goes by without getting cold sweats from the memory of her gun pointed at me. I’m far too old now to have time or opportunity to forget. And so when I’m in my bed in the night, flat on my back, eyes wide open, all I have to hope for is that it all happened because it had to happen. That it all happened for the best. Even if I am unable to grasp it.
And so life passes, question marks remaining mercilessly unresolved.
You learn to see in a different way when you live in the night. Humans take off layers of privacy in the night. They open up. Some by speaking. Some by being silent.
It’s not that the bar had nothing left to give to its smoky regulars or to the occasional loner drinking alone or to the out-of-the-blue astonishing woman that sometimes called in for a quiet drink but soon ended up being accosted by an admirer. I’m sure the lawyers from Rossi and Benjamin upstairs are sad to see their after-work joint closing down. And the neighbors who frequented the establishment when they could afford it, when the kids were off to their grandparents, when they weren’t too tired from work, when they needed someone to give them a drink and listen to them – they’ll miss it.
But they’ll be missing something that can never be here again, even if I continued to serve them the same drinks, play them the same music, tell them the same jokes. They’ll be missing the bar’s previous existence, before that night. Before the night that makes you want to leave the night, and live instead in the day, in the midst of crowds, alone but with others in the sunshine.
“Is that it, then?”
Andrea is standing behind me. I didn’t realize she was there. It’s four o’clock in the morning. Slim drops of rain fall easily, almost quietly, on the pavement under our feet.
I’m kneeling in front of the entrance, rolling down and locking the shutters for the last time. I haven’t really opened properly for over a week. With the “CLOSED” sign turned permanently outwards, I allowed a few regulars to come in briefly to say goodbye. Most of the furniture and decorations (including her painting of him) had already been given away or discarded. There was enough booze. There was no music. They all asked me what I’m going to do now. I told them I’ve got a motorcycle with a full tank, so I’ll be okay.
“Yep. I’m done here.”
“I take it you’re not coming back to this neighborhood.”
“No. I’m not. What are you doing out here at this hour?”
She turns her gaze to the dark steel sky, to the falling raindrops. “I wish it would rain harder.” Despair chokes her.
***
Last night I stayed up smoking. After twenty-eight years of straight tonic I drank whisky again. It tasted like burnt rubber. It tasted like the excretions of an extremely aroused young, clean-shaven pussy.
Ari walked into the bar for the first time on a clear and crisp November evening back in 1992. I evaluated him immediately: he was the occasional loner. He had a long brown coat on and a hat. He walked like a person who needed to be drunk, slowly and deliberately, looking at the bar stools as if where he would sit would make the world of difference to his night of slouched drinking.
“Welcome to the Satin Doll. Want a drink?”
“Yeah I want a drink. Bring me a bottle of Teacher’s and a glass and put some ice in it. Wait, **** the ice. Just the bottle and the glass.”
I served him. “Not many people drink this brand.”
“And yet you stock it.” He downed the whisky I poured in one large gulp, and I refilled. And then I noticed a large round black stain on the right side of his chest. It looked fresh and shiny under the blue spotlights. And it was too dark and sticky-looking to be anything other than blood that had been seeping out of him and soaking his coat for some time now.
“Well, it’s a scotch for special customers. And I get a few of them every now and then. Say, you don’t look too sharp there. Want me to call for some help?”
“Yes. Call an ambulance. If you can do it without making too much of a fuss you get a handsome tip.”
The man was Ari Dimou, a private investigator. He was a tall man in his late thirties, with thick graying hair combed backwards and a sharp, triangular face. It was wrinkly and clean-shaven. His eyes were tired and angry that night. I suppose that is to be expected when one has been shot in the chest.
I did as he asked and called the ambulance from the telephone in the office upstairs. The other customers didn’t know a thing. He filled and emptied his glass another three times before help arrived. When he saw the flashing orange light through the window he got up and threw three fifties on the bar. The notes were bloody. I grabbed them immediately and shoved them in my pocket.
“Have a good night now, sir.”
“See you,” he mumbled, and walked out, slowly and deliberately.
I never learned who had shot him that night or why. But, without having meant to or planned to, I had earned his liking. Over the fifteen years that followed he came to the bar once a week on average. There were a handful of periods during which he didn’t show for a month or even two, but just as I started to wonder whether he would ever come in again, he would walk in. Deliberately and slowly.
He was always polite to the others, but never accepted invitations to after-hours poker games, nor did he give his attention to the women who often attempted to attract it.
Every now and then, when it was getting quite late and most of the other customers had gone, he would ask me to play “Some day my Prince will Come.” I had a big wooden sign hanging off the wall that read “Sorry, no music requests!” but I always obliged for him. And then he would tell me something of his life. Little snippets disguised as darkly humourous one-liners. “I’ll tell you what I do for a living. I’m a photographer. My specialist subjects are thugs trading down the harbour and husbands and wives ****ing other people.”
On a Christmas eve, he told me to play the record again. It was past three o’clock and I was wishing he wouldn’t. My legs were aching from standing and I wanted to close and go home. I had to ride 300 kilometres in the morning to spend the day with my mother. But then Ari started talking, and I simply had to listen.
He told me of his ex-wife and his daughter. All the gory detail of how she had thrown him out telling him not to come back until she and their kid were on a plane. She would call and let him know he was clear to return to their flat, she said. For a week or so he slept in a discoloured and grimy hotel room downtown, then he decided to go back and beg her to stay. He only found a note urging him not to look for them.
“What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.”
“You can’t have done nothing. She left you like that she must have been mad at you.”
“I did nothing to her.”
“Did you look for them?”
“I did. Never found them.”
“Did you look hard enough?”
“I’m a private eye.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“What are you, some kind of wise guy?” He sprung up and left slamming the door behind him, even forgetting to pay for his drinks.
***
I said before that he never paid attention to women’s advances. And it is true, with one exception. Andrea.
If Ari was the occasional loner, Andrea was the out-of-the-blue astonishing woman. She always came to the bar all dolled up – black mini dresses usually, high heels and shiny red fingernails. She changed her hair every now and then, but whether she chose to allow it to curl away over her shoulders like barbed wire, or to straighten it and let it fall on her back, or to cut it very short so that her thin, pale face resembled that of a pre-pubescent boy, it was always jet black. So, it seemed in the dim light, were her eyes. She was a dancer, I learned in good time, and a painter.
After many nights of sitting in almost-neighbouring bar stools, she spoke to him. I couldn’t make out what she said, I was at the other end of the bar serving. But I saw her beaming him a smile that made me forget to stop pouring. “Woah,” said the customer when the glass was about to overflow. More amazingly, Ari answered her. And Andrea laughed.
A few nights later they walked in together, like couples do. They sat on the stools at the far left corner, underneath the Cab Calloway poster, like couples do. I approached to take their order.
“You’re dating him?” I asked Andrea. “He’s engaged to my sister. What will it be?”
“You don’t have a sister. And we’ll both have scotch, if you have it.” She spoke. He slouched and looked at her sideways, with something that could almost pass for a smile on his lips.
Over the next month or so they came in together twice, both times sat on the far-left bar stools. They never kissed or touched. The occasional loner and the out-of-the-blue astonishing woman need time before they engage in public displays of affection, if they ever do. And Ari and Andrea never did. For the following September Ari started coming in on his own again, and she only visited very early in the evening, when she was certain he wasn’t going to be there.
During a late-night replay of Ari’s favourite Miles tunes, I asked him about what happened. Why he never got together with her any longer. He gestured me to hush and pointed at the ceiling, as if saying that “I Thought About You” was too good to interrupt in order to talk about her.
Months later, during an evening when the moon had just come out and was so bright it made the street outside shine as if it was anything more than a back road, I asked her the same question. She smiled her radioactive coyness, and spoke softly: “I guess some things just aren’t meant to be.” Then she told me about her fat uncle who used to slide his hand inside her skirt when she was twelve, and how Ari, ever so occasionally, reminded her of him. Not through his behaviour or his demeanour – but simply by virtue of dealing with truths so infrequently and unwillingly.
“Does that make any sense?” She asked.
I shrugged.
And so the months and the seasons and the years went by, and Ari and Andrea came in with regular irregularity. The occasional loner and the out-of-the-blue astonishing woman, adorning my bar with “what-ifs” and “maybes” that possibly only I could comprehend.
***
Three weeks ago or so Ari showed up, in an unsurprisingly slow and deliberate manner. He lit up a cigar, a Montecristo. The flavour of the smoke made the air smell like burnt oranges. He had never smoked a cigar in here before.
A couple of guys and a woman had been coming in every night since last January. They always ordered bottles of Chianti. The woman abstained and stuck to water. They were quiet and polite, and well dressed. Expensive suits on the gentlemen, most certainly, and skimpy but luxurious small dresses on the lady. They could pass for business people, but I always thought they constituted a sinful ménage-a-trois. Perhaps I just wanted them to. They were all so damn good-looking I couldn’t imagine anything more appealing: her yellow hair sprawled on the pillow as the middle-aged gentleman with the grey moustache kisses her neck and clavicles, while the youngster with the sleeked black hair and the vertical scar on his left cheek puts his mouth between her legs.
I was taken aback by the amounts of thought I gave them. They kept to themselves, however, and I never felt as though an opportunity had arisen whereby I could crack a joke or say something polite that would open the door to knowing them better.
Ari waved for his usual. They had stopped talking the minute he walked in. When I filled his glass he took a small sip – so uncharacteristically that it gave me the shivers. The trio watched him with their eyes and mouths wide open.
“Got any of those nice pistachios?” asked the man I had never seen consume anything but liquid. I stared at him like someone who’s watching an airliner falling through the window, spinning in flames, headed straight for his back yard. He nodded at me like saying “take cover.” But I did not have enough time to interpret his unspoken guidance.
He drew a pistol from the inside pocket of his coat and shot the trio one by one. First, the woman, in the forehead, forcing her to relax against the back of her chair, her large breasts protruding as her arms hung lifeless from her shoulder. Then the youngster, the bullet going through the other side of his face from the one his scar was on. Then the older man, right through the centre of his chest.
Customers shrieked and ran out in the rainy night, like birds startled by the loud and sudden clapping of a playful boy’s hands.
***
“Well, it was nice knowing you, Andrea.”
I’ve got a full tank. I can ride into the wind and lift the visor off my helmet and let it blow on my eyes: this way, if tears come they will be swept. They will be hurled far, far behind me.
“You too.”
She produces a gun from her purse and points it at my chest.
I kind of had a feeling this would happen. I was just hoping I would be able to get away in good time.
“Andrea, there’s no point. I don’t know anything.”
“You know far too much. I’m sorry.”
Even in the wee small hours of the morning, Andrea is dressed to kill. Her hair is long again, curly and free-flowing. Fur over her shoulders, and shiny boots up to her ankles and a black dress clinging on her chest like the fog clings to the rocks, and you’re unable to see them but you know you’ll stumble over them if you’re not careful.
“I’m going away,” I plead. “I’m never coming back.”
“Some things just aren’t meant to be,” she utters, and I know that these are my last few seconds in life. Do I even have a second? Maybe I’m dead already. I’ll miss Miles Davis. But at least I can sleep solidly. I’ve been awake for so many nights. I’ve seen all of their darkness.
What I guess must be part of her brain hits me in the face as a gunshot rips through her beautiful head. I barely have time to bring my hand to my mouth to wipe away the contents of her skull before another shot is fired, this time into her back, making her fall flat on what remains of her face. She is motionless. The blood only needs a few seconds to form a black shiny pool around her before it starts running down the concrete of the pavement in thick, diverting streams.
I look up and see a man standing twenty metres away. He’s wearing a long coat. His tall silhouette blurrily persists through the rain and fog.
“Got a full tank?” I hear Ari’s voice.
“Sure have.” I respond, shaking, with tears welling up from deep inside me.
“Then you’d best be riding off. This ain’t no place for retirees.”
Through the city centre I ride, noisily, past red traffic lights, past red lights of all kinds. I sail on a ferry to a place I’ve never been before, decide to stay for a couple of nights to catch my breath. Before I know it, weeks and months go past. I wait on tables in a harbour tavern, in the afternoons. During the nights I try to sleep, mostly without success.
I often think of Ari and Andrea and the obscure, unfathomable things that were going on between them. They brought them together and then apart, dramatically and nightmarishly. Not one day goes by without getting cold sweats from the memory of her gun pointed at me. I’m far too old now to have time or opportunity to forget. And so when I’m in my bed in the night, flat on my back, eyes wide open, all I have to hope for is that it all happened because it had to happen. That it all happened for the best. Even if I am unable to grasp it.
And so life passes, question marks remaining mercilessly unresolved.