The Avro on Queen East
On Thursday night I stopped into The Avro, a new bar on Queen East. The place has a hipster dive feeling to it, giving off the salvaged vibe of a place where the owners might have spent a lot of money in order to make it look like they hadn’t spent any at all. It was a good place to drink, and I was delighted to discover that they sold birthday cake– with a candle burning on top and served on a paper plate– for three dollars a slice.
After a few minutes a couple came in and sat by me at the bar. The man was near fifty and very proud of his hair–which clearly coiffed at an expensive salon– flowed easy and full to his shoulders. He wore those dramatic black frames that suggested he wanted to be noticed and immediately set about proving this to be true. He needed his presence to fill the bar.
Boisterous, he began to try to flirt with the much younger, tolerant bartender. Confidence, like cheap cologne he’d just applied, rolled off of him in clouds as he bragged about the dinner he just had at the Ruby WatchCo.
He was sharing himself with all of us, setting the room aflame, he must have thought.
His eyes lighting up, he turned to the pretty 23 year old in the white undershirt, who was sitting beside him at the bar. She had been having a conversation about dogs with a friend, and the man with the hair imposed himself on the conversation. Assuming some authority on the subject, he pronounced on various breeds, dropping in little bits of sexual innuendo whenever he thought he could get away with it. Encouraged by her neutral receptivity, he reached out and touched her bare arm, and immediately her face pinched into a startled, Vulcan severity. Sensing that the boundaries that he had been pushing were about to snap, he turned back to the woman that had accompanied him into the bar.
A blonde woman somewhere in her late 40’s, she had the fit, worn, sun-saturated face of somebody that might have been a tennis ace 25 years ago. As her date drummed the bar, singing along to the 70’s kitsch that was playing– his fingers sparking cocaine– she pursed her lips and let her eyes fall out of focus. Looking through the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign and the 45’s that decorated the wall by the beer fridge, it was as if she was staring into the past, remembering that tennis match when she was beaten by the Soviet, the point at which her life pivoted, moving ever downward to this moment on a Friday night when she found herself ignored, once again, by a man who wanted everybody’s attention but hers.
