Every once in awhile a loud, guttural exclamation emerges from the poker table. Everybody looks back at the older men playing cards, trying to see if anything dramatic has happened. A short, stocky man in a satin Twin Dragons Kick Boxing jacket just won a big hand on a bluff.
It’s probably his lucky jacket, the one he wears out for cards, the one that reminds him of his days ascending, a jacket that he imagines still commands respect from all the gathered on this winter night. He’s standing up in victory, like he just knocked somebody down, like he just knocked the entire goddamn table down.
The waitress wears a clinging, striped dress and has short, blonde hair but for a long thin strand at the back that she’s braided. She talks quickly, does everything quickly, in fact, and likes to express herself through the flamboyant use of her body. Her body is the central component of any conversation she’s having, and it is her that the young man has come to see.
They sit together and do a shot, firing the empty glasses across the bar like the cowboys they know themselves to be. Boxing is on the TV, and the fighter the two of them have agreed, “Looks too nice to fight,” gets punched in the head. This repeats in slow motion, his sweat exploding into the air around him like fireworks, beautiful stars now lifting free from gravity.
The young man has his hand on her back, moving it softly, slowly around, and he is so happy, so proud to be the guy going out with her, alive in these days he will one day look back on with a disbelieving, hazy longing, while the man to the other side of them, still in his FedEx uniform, dozes on his stool, his dreams unknown.
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At Sanagan’s Meat Locker the guy working the cash wore a baseball cap that said Jimmy’s Coffee. It had brownish, indeterminate stains and smudges on it, and somehow this made it look deadly cool. I told him I liked his hat, and he said, “You like all the meat stains on it, don’t you?” I nodded. “Yeah, whenever I’m in the back room I’m constantly getting banged about by all the hanging carcasses, it’s like getting whacked in the head all the time by those pugil sticks on American Gladiators!”
Later, I went to Mackenzie’s Pub on Bloor. The man sitting to my left had a shaved head and haunted eyes. He stared straight ahead, his right hand slowly, almost tenderly caressing the sleeve of his jacket. He never looked over at anyone or up at the bank of TV’s above the bar, but straight through the skyline of liquor bottles in front of him and into his fragmented image staring back at him from the mirror. He seemed intense, maybe even angry, as if immersed in a circumstance that was overwhelming and forced– Led Zepplin playing chaotically in the foreground, as if emanating from his head and not the sound system all around us.
When I got the bill from the bartender for $19.89, she exclaimed, “Good year!” I didn’t know what she meant and said, “Sorry?” “Oh, 1989, I was in high school then, it was a good year,” and then a small, embarrassed, maybe even somewhat melancholy laugh, before she turned to another task.
