Your pilfered-monies pile is two and a half feet high and it takes you the length of an episode of COPS to count it. Earlier that morning (you now wake up early each morning, without a hangover, feeling glad and clear-headed) you purchased paper money-bands from an office supply store and imagined the cash stacked in crisp and tidy piles as in the heist movies of your youth, but you are disappointed to find that the bills are frayed and crazy and that the stacks resemble kinked hair pushing out from under too tight headbands. At any rate, you have over three thousand dollars. You need more than this but not much more; you want to quit the bar and move on but you cannot, yet; you are anxious to carry on, as you feel that your time at the bar is limited in that you will soon either be fired/imprisoned or "be killed." You do not know how you will "be killed" — there are any number of ways — but one thing is certain: The hearts of the bar are against you, and they do not want you around them any longer.
Discuss Sam, the black cocaine dealer. He dislikes you now. He has his children with him and they do not like you and will not accept your offer of candy or maraschino cherries. Discuss Ignacio, who no longer tells you his impossible-odds penis-adventure stories. Discuss Raymond, who will no longer speak to you and whose rancid coffee breath you have not smelled in several weeks. You have been pushed from their society and you are confused to find yourself hurt in the same way you were hurt in the schoolyard those many years back when the boys took your new ball away and you were forced to play with stones in the dirt and sand. The whiskey continues to sting going down and you notice that the seals on the Jameson bottles are all broken. You realize they are empties that have been filled with well whiskey, the assumed reasons for this being to hurt your feelings, which it does, and to save the bar money, for if an employee is going to steal (as you are suspected of stealing) then there is no reason to furnish him with his drink of choice, when his drink of choice is a fine Irish whiskey. It makes you sad to think of a grown man (you believe it is Simon) funneling this nasty liquor into an empty Jameson bottle and you wonder if he feels happy as he is doing it, or does he also find it sad? A week goes by, two weeks, and he no longer offers to pour you a cupful with a creeping smirk on his face.
You decide you will not drink the well whiskey any longer and now purchase three or four airplane bottles of Jameson on your way to work, sipping these slowly throughout the night in plain view of the regulars, who taunt you, asking how much these cost, and you turn to tell them that it does not matter because after all you are not the one paying for them. Who is paying for them? they ask hopefully. But you are not so angry as to answer the question honestly. "I make my enemies pay," you tell them, and they turn to each other and say, Oooooh.
Lancer returns from the cozy abyss of the semi-successful Hollywood actor-writer to visit with his old workmates. This returning to the bar is an important event for him, though you cannot understand why, as he was around for only a few months, and yet when he bounds through the front door he acts as if he is falling in with beloved college chums at a ten-year reunion. He has a collection of people with him who look as though they were manufactured by aliens. He introduces them to you and they claim to have heard all about you, and they smile and beam at you and you do not know exactly why but after a time it becomes clear that Lancer has told them stories relating to your ability to render yourself useless. His dirty-blond hair has been bleached and he is deeply tanned; he is playing the part of a wisecracking swimming pool cleaner in a television pilot, he says. You ask him if he is enjoying himself and he replies by pointing to the breasts of one of his new friends. You ask him if this part he is playing is good or bad and he says that the quality of the piece is irrelevant — he is a working actor in Hollywood and the odds against this happening are so great that he would take the part of a singing shitpile if it kept him out of bars like this one. "But you seem to think it's the greatest thing in the world to be back," you say.
"Only because I don't have to be back," he says. "I mean with you I'm sure it's different — you work, you have your wife, you'll probably have kids, right? You're all squared away, but I have dreams, you know? Big dreams. And none of them were going to come true in a place like this."
Lancer says that the airing of his show is fast approaching and asks if you would like to come over to his new house in the hills for the pilot bash and you, imagining how terrible a party at Lancer's house with Lancer's friends and Lancer's musical selections would be, say that you most definitely will not be there and Lancer, who had expected this answer, laughs, and he tells his friend that you are "one of a kind." He turns to you and says with a serious, straight face, "Will you watch it at home, then? Will you watch it at home and root for me?" And though you know you will not you tell him you will, and it means so much to him that your heart breaks a little, and you wish Lancer success in this strange world he has flung himself into and he hugs you and thanks you and when he says goodbye he hands you a hundred-dollar bill, which makes you ashamed, but he says there isn't anything to be ashamed of and you put the money in your pocket and walk him to the door. He and his friends are going to some other more glamorous bar, he tells you, a bar on the Strip, and you mock-retch and he winks and smiles and throws you a mint and is gone. This is the last time you will see Lancer in your lifetime.
You feel the hundred-dollar bill in your front pants pocket and you receive an inspiration, and here is what it is: You walk back into the bar and up to Simon, handing him the money, claiming to have found it on the ground. With all of his suspicions regarding your moral fiber, this is the very last thing he would presently expect you to do, and you can see his mind working, trying to find your angle in this, but at last he decides that there is none — he believes you have found and then turned in one hundred dollars in cash when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to slip the bill into your wallet. At the end of the night, after no one has claimed the money, Simon decides to split it with you, and he says that his faith in you has been restored and you say you are glad. He says that he is sorry for all the things he has been saying about you to the owners and you say, what? He says he will call them in the morning and take them all back and you say, what things? And you are so curious about these secret, evil words that you momentarily forget your stance and open your wallet to tuck away your fifty dollars and Simon sees how much cash you have, and that it has been stashed quickly and haphazardly, and there is no reason for you to have these hundreds of dollars when you have not worked for the past three days and were overheard complaining to a customer earlier about times being tight with your wife gone and the rent resting on your shoulders alone. So Simon, now knowing in his heart that you are a thief, takes the fifty dollars back and puts it in the cash register, and his eyes are swimming in vodka and cocaine and you are worried he will strike you with his cold South African hands but he only turns you toward the door and tells you to go home and get some rest and that you should clear your schedule for the next day because you will be receiving an important telephone call, one that you will not want to miss, but that even if you do miss it, it will not miss you, that is to say: You will be receiving a telephone call that will impart to you news of such consequence that it will transcend its own means of transmission.
Discuss the miracle that visits your life the next day when the phone rings and it is the voice of the owner's wife but she does not fire you or worry you with talk of police and prison as you had been expecting but informs you, through her chokes and sobs, that her husband has died in the nighttime of a massive heart attack. She says there will be a private wake held in three or four days at the bar and that it will be like old times, which you do not understand because which/whose old times is she referring to? She says that each attendee may, if he or she wishes, speak a few words in honor of the deceased, perhaps a fond memory or two, and you say that you will possibly take part but your experiences with the owner were limited and you wonder (to yourself) if you should speak of the time he broke wind in the storage room but did not apologize or even acknowledge it? Or should you discuss the time you caught him picking his nose in his office and you told him to pick a winner and he said that they were all winners? The owner's wife says that she thinks of each employee of the bar as her extended family, and you say, you do? She says that she wants you to know that the owner loved you personally and you say, he did? She says that she knows you loved him too and you do not say any words in response but make a neutral noise, which she luckily does not ask about, and the conversation moves on to practical business matters.