“No matter where we go, all you want to do is find a bar and drink,” Viv complained. It was three o’clock in the afternoon on a rainy Saturday. They were perched on stools at the downstairs bar of the old Union Hotel in Benicia. It was supposed to be a short weekend getaway, a diversion from the stress that dominated their lives.
It began raining the moment they arrived and hadn’t let up since. They took a rain-soaked stroll along the waterfront – wood pilings from old ship yards still visible a few yards out in the murky bay – and laughed when a man in a yellow rain slicker passed them and remarked, “Nice weather for ducks.” It was a funny comment because he meant it literally: a row of ducks were waddling along in a nearby marsh.
“Let’s go to the bar,” Stan suggested. And then he added: “To get in out of the rain.” That would keep her tirade about their drinking at arm’s length for the time being.
They drank a local brew, highly recommended by the bartender who divided his time all evening between serving the small room full of patrons — mostly local color and a few guests of the century-old hotel, like Stan and Viv — and speaking pleasantly into a cell phone as he booked club engagements for his country and western band. He was an older man, with an escaping hair line and gold-rimmed eye-glasses and he went about his business of slating appearances for his band with a passion that Stan found curious.
By ten o’clock both Stan and Viv were smashed. They wouldn’t know it until the next morning, but the pints of beer they were knocking back were sixty per-cent alcohol in content. They drank their beers while listening to a very large black woman sing a medley of smoky old blues tunes, accompanied by a key board player on one of those portable electronic pianos. This is what passed for an evening’s entertainment at the Union Hotel and it had an odd old-time bordello feeling about it. Odd because the Union was a bordello once, sometime around World War Two when the local shipyards were buzzing with activity and sailors regularly passed through Benicia on their way to shipping out from the Port of Oakland or San Francisco.
The hotel room was decorated with a Victorian flourish. A bay window overlooked the Carquinez Strait, where clouds laden with rain still hovered. Stan and Viv undressed quietly, Viv pouring the wine while Stan filled the hot tub in the old white-tiled bathroom.
They were already well into the second bottle of wine – procured from the local Safeway after a quick midnight stroll – when they settled into the soothing water of the hot tub. Stan had been eager for this little romantic interlude all day but his head was spinning and he could see Viv’s eyes starting to waver so he reached out, tweaked a nipple of her large left breast with his thumb and she responded with a smile.
Maybe he tried too hard. Maybe he started to force himself upon her. Sometimes Viv liked that. But the fact of the matter is his intimate caresses were abruptly met with a smack from her hand across his left cheek. He didn’t know what to think. They had indulged in mild S&M games in the past. Was this an extension of that bed play?
Stan hit her back, the first time he had ever struck a woman in his life.
“Do you like that?” he said, striking a creepy balance between menace and sexual allure.
Viv came alive then, throwing her face into her hands and sobbing uncontrollably. There won’t be any sex tonight, Stan thought.
In the morning they agreed that it wasn’t like Viv to hit a man, let alone Stan. When Viv suggested – as Stan knew she inevitably would – that they drink too much, Stan offered that the reasons for Viv’s unusual behavior might be of a more supernatural order.
“Think of all the emotions stored in these old rooms from all of the prostitutes who once worked here,” Stan said. “That’s what got into you last night.”
On the drive back home, Viv’s hand quaking on the steering wheel, she agreed that the malevolent spirit of some long-dead soiled dove might have driven her emotions the night before.
“But, you know,” Viv said firmly, “that spirits are attracted to people who drink too much.”
Originally published by Dead Drunk Dublin
INSIDE THE COMMENTS SECTION: Joseph Mailander imagines how Hemingway and Proust might have handled the bartender’s story.
Hey, this was fun. Lots of detail. Spirits like those who imbibe spirits, eh? Makes sense to me..
Very interesting, RJ, love the moodiness, the simmering violence (no pun intended).
“They drank a local brew, highly recommended by the bartender who divided his time all evening between serving the small room full of patrons — mostly local color and a few guests of the century-old hotel, like Stan and Viv — and speaking pleasantly into a cell phone as he booked club engagements for his country and western band.”
Holy moly—a single sentence—a lot of telling-not-showing to sort out there! There’s almost a short story in there alone!
~~~
Hemingway version:
The room was dark and worn. There were five customers. The bartender ignored them all. He spoke to his cel.
“We can’t make it Thursday—we’re booked at the Haystack—but we’re open all weekend. What? I’m sorry.” Then he snapped the phone shut.
The other couple in the bar were tended to, and well.
The barkeep poured a taste of a local brew and set it down in front of Stan.
“Try that,” he said.
Stan handed it to Viv. Viv nodded. Stan ordered two.
The bartender made another call. “What are you doing to my slide? I just had to turn down a gig, man.”
Viv leaned towards Stan. “He’s too young for bluegrass, don’t you think?”
“It’s easy to think that with a good beer in hand,” Stan said.
~~~
Proust version
It was with copious amounts of inconsolable regret that Stan sat inconsolably pondering why he had brought his perplexing accomplice to this unlikely space; for everything in the bar suggested that its time had passed, and any drink ordered would be a mere footnote to the ruin that time brings on wellworn establishments whose top times of merriment have long since passed. So it ever is when we walk into a too-empty place nearing the end of its lifecycle; the tawdry walls with their weeping walnut wainscott and absurd rococco fabrics, all worn to the pile; the smoke-stained mahogany bar with its crystal cave of offerings; the disinterested bartender, always on the make, in this case promoting his unlikely country and western band on his incongruous cell—it all leads to private, sullen confusion, chaos, even a kind of neurosis from which we feel we can never escape. And yet, moments later, when the hired help recommends a beverage we might like, through obviously feigned enthusiasm, and we still imagine that, despite it all, we might make a genuine find here, and the moment be remedied by an inexplicable expertise that can only be accounted for by sacrament, we take the drink in hand and inhale as though a connoisseur, swirling it over our tongues, noting the sweets and the bitter notes—it is then that we make a hajj of the most incidental trek to the most unassuming of places in our own neighborhood, under our own nose. And after inhaling and savoring thus did Stan and Viv both take stiff draughts of their nectar, and arighted the space and their psyches, even while the bartender noted that the three other scattered patrons were all filled with a similar bliss, and thus could return to the promotion of his quizzical and quixotic, bluegrass self.
Excellent, Joseph. Too bad there’s not an applause emoticon.