It’s only a little past midnight. Outside it’s still snowing. The dark shapes of pigeons on the sill of my hotel room window. I fell asleep with the Celtics game on. It’s over, but the postgame show is still going; they won in double overtime.
The bar downstairs must be still open. I get out of bed, pull on clothing. No messages on the phone. I bring the book of Jane Bowles stories I’m rereading. It’s a small bar, off the vestibule inside the front door. I’m the only customer. The bartender tonight, in a white shirt, wool vest charcoal gray with green lozenges, a black bow tie that seems to press painfully into his soft, tawny neck, wears a name tag that reads mustafa. I order a double Knob Creek on the rocks and say, Thank you, Mustafa, as outgoingly as I can, though after serving me he goes back to leaning against the bar, lost in his own thoughts. The first time I went into a bar for some drinks with Lulú in Brooklyn, the bartender, a woman in her thirties with bare, thoroughly tattoo-covered, pale arms, asked Lulú for an ID. Lulú didn’t have one, and so she refused to serve her. Lulú said that it was okay, she’d just have a mineral water. But I was indignant. This has never happened to us before, I insisted loudly to the bartender. She’s twenty-eight, for God’s sake! I bet if she were a white hipster girl you wouldn’t have asked to see her ID, am I right? I’m right, aren’t I? The bartender coldly told me that if I didn’t lower my voice, she’d ask us both to leave. What a bitch, I said under my breath after she’d turned away but loudly enough at least for Lulú to hear. We left anyway. Out on the sidewalk, Lulú was furious. She’s just doing her job, Lulú seethed at me. She doesn’t deserve to be insulted for doing her job, and you have no right to call her a bitch. I defended myself: That’s just a word everyone uses here, it doesn’t mean anything. Not when a man uses it, she said. I only said it under my breath, I said. And I think her refusing to serve you a drink had nothing to do with just doing her job. I don’t care, Lulú said, standing on the sidewalk, her eyes stormy; she looked as if she were about to turn and walk angrily away. I apologized, told her she was right. Of course she was. Lulú said that if I ever spoke with such disrespect to any person who was just doing their job, woman or man, she’d never speak to me again. She said I was no different from the rich white “bros” I was always mocking. That made me angry. I said vehemently: I’m not like them, and you know I’m not. Then don’t act like them, she said. You have to respect people no matter how little money they have or what they work at. I promised never to behave like that again. Finally we were okay, and we went into another bar, where coincidentally the bartender was another white hipster woman with tattoos covering her arms, shoulders and neck, but friendly, and she served us both without any problem.
I open the Jane Bowles book to where I left off and stare blankly down at the page.
Of course, like Lexi says, our mother isn’t always in touch with reality these days, I say to myself. And I don’t doubt that she mixes up fantasy and reality. But what explanation could there be for Mamita suddenly having been so into The Teachings of Don Juan other than a mother in love, idolizing her lover’s enthusiasms?
Whiskey like a glowing potbellied stove inside me, I didn’t feel like getting into bed and trying to sleep, so I put on my coat and went back out to the elevator without even thinking about it. My footsteps carried me over here, to Arlington Street, along the Public Garden. The old Boston Banana Brahmin nahuales are out tonight, up there in the icy branches and treetops, hunched down inside their black feathers against the cold, lifting a claw to take a puff from an ice cigar and blowing smoke out into the drizzling ice-grained snow, if you can call it snow. It ticks and patters off the sidewalk that’s more like a snow-sludged shallow river. Somewhere around here in the Back Bay, on one of these streets, Newbury, Marlborough, Beacon Street, or Commonwealth Avenue, there must have been the gentleman’s club with its old New England WASP clubby décor and feel where the Banana Brahmins went to relax in the evenings, sometimes inviting their pretty young bilingual secretaries along. Hello
