From behind the bar, with the same amount of pride that a person from a previous generation might have reserved for a proclamation of home ownership, the bartender announced that she was a vegetarian.
It’s Tuesday night around 10:00, and there are only a handful of people in The Comrade. A quiet girl, still with a little bit of baby fat in her face, sits with her head down, staring at her drink. She’s a friend of the bartender, and she’s waiting for her shift to end so that they can go somewhere else, hopeful that there, something good might happen to her.
The person doing all the talking in the bar is a young man who wants to know what the bartender’s favourite “Veg” restaurants are in town. Instead of listening to her, he takes this opportunity to list all of his favourite vegetarian restaurants, speaking in long, ornate sentences that sounded like they were culled from a luxury magazine,
He feels like he’s full of charm and knowledge, filling the blank pages of a Tuesday night. Each time he orders a drink, he describes it, bestowing upon it some sort of personal narrative that usually included a foreign country. His face was open, almost pleading, and he had the manner of somebody who was used to telling other people why they should like him. He described his apartment, his Blog, and his philosophy on cellaring wine.
It was at this point that I began to look for a sports section to read.
The Comrade is a beautiful looking place, but one that’s had it’s aesthetic so finely shaved that it feels more like an elegant furniture store than a bar. You will not find a stray newspaper there. There are a few artfully placed books, but they’re merely Gatsbian props. It all feels kind of inauthentic, as if the people present are more concerned with what strangers might think of them rather than the people who actually know them. Looking about in this upwardly mobile landscape, you see people posing, hoping to be noticed for who they might be, and not who they are.
The girls who were working there that night were all young, still trying to figure out who they were, with each one likely harboring hopes that they’d be somebody very different in five years.
The man sitting at the bar was only too happy to try to guide them into their future. He asked questions, offering advice that would render them more like him. He was on a roll. Even the quiet girl, now on her second beer, began to speak. With a captive audience, he spoke with hands, until a much better looking man sat down beside him, and the spell was broken. Now distracted, the girls paid less attention to him, and soon enough he fell silent, quietly doodling on a napkin, before paying his bill and getting up to leave.