I had been all right up to that point, but the experience made me aware of just how irrevocably far from the mainstream I had strayed. I entered the Ruby Reght the Rustaurant around the corner and had a bowl of hot and sour soup and some sauteed squid. Then I walked to Metro Center and boarded the Orange Line for a short trip to the Eastern Market station. I crossed Pennsylvania and headed down Eighth Street.
On the corner was the bar in which I first met my ex-wife Karen. They had changed both the ownership and the decor, from early eighties new wave to rustic Wild West saloon. I looked in the plate-glass window and saw cigarette-smoking Cambodians shooting pool and arguing. One of them had a wad of ones grasped tightly in his fist, his features taut as he shook the bills in his opponent’s face. I kept walking.
I passed carryouts and convenience stores and cheap ethnic restaurants. I passed the neighborhood movie theater so hopelessly run down that it was no longer advertised in the Post, and a record-and-drug store. I passed two bars that catered to lesbians. I passed a bus stop shielding loud groups of young men wearing L.A. Raiders caps and red jackets, and quiet older folks who could no longer laugh, even in cynicism, at their surroundings. Karen and I had lived in this neighborhood during the early days of our marriage.
Toward the end of the street an MP in full dress was directing traffic near the barracks. I crossed over and headed to a bar whose simple sign had caught my eye: THE SPOT. Other than the rectangular glass in the transom, there were no windows. I pushed on the heavy oak door and stepped in.
There was a room to my right painted dark green, housing a few empty deuces and four-tops. Beer posters were tacked to three of the walls and on the fourth was a dart board.
I stepped down into the main bar, which was to the left and ran the length of the room. There were two hanging conical lamps, which dimly illuminated columnar blocks of smoke. A blue neon Schlitz sign burned over the center of the bar. Billie Holiday was singing in mono through the speakers hung on either side of the room. There were a couple of regulars who didn’t glance my way and a redheaded woman behind the bar who did. I had a seat at the stool in front of the area she was wiping down.
“What can I get you?” she asked, seeming mildly interested to see a new face. She was in her twenties but had crossed the line from youthful optimism to drugged resignation.
“I’ll have a Bud,” I said, breaking my daytime drinking resolution.
She pulled a long-neck from the cooler and popped it with a steel opener that looked heavy as a weapon. I waved off a glass as she set down the bottle on a moldy coaster touting Cuervo Gold. After she did that she didn’t walk away.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sherry,” she said.
There was more silence as she stood there, so I pulled a Camel filter from my jacket and lit it. I blew the smoke down, but some of it bounced off the pocked mahogany bar and drifted in her direction. She still didn’t move. I thought of something to say, came up blank, then looked up at the cursive neon tubes above my head.
“So,” I said lamely, “you sell much Schlitz here, Sherry?” height="0em"›
“We don’t sell it at all,” she said.
“I thought, you know, with the sign and all.”
“We put up whatever the liquor distributors give us,” she said, then shrugged and gave me a weak smile. “Fuck it. You know?”
Yeah, I knew. It was my kind of place and I was due. I returned there every day for the next two weeks and drank with clear intent.
In those two weeks I got to know some of the regulars and became a familiar face to the small staff. Sherry was, predictably, looking for other work, as was the other shift bartender, a stout-faced, square-jawed German woman named Mai who had married and then left a young marine as soon as her green card had come through. There was an all-purpose busboy/cleanup man named Ramon, a little Salvadoran with a cocky, gold-toothed smile who didn’t understand English except when it had something to do with quiff or his paycheck. The cook, Darnell, worked in a small kitchen to the side of the bar. Mostly I saw his long, skinny arms as he placed food on the platform of the reach-through.
Phil Saylor was the proprietor of the Spot. He came in for a couple of hours in the afternoon and I presumed at closing time to do the book work. Saylor was an unlikely looking-short, soft in the middle, wire-rim spectacles-ex-D.C. cop, originally from South Texas, who had quit the force a couple of years earlier and opened this place. He seemed to make a living at it and to enjoy it. Certainly he enjoyed his abominable bourbon and Diet Cokes, which as owner he inexplicably opted to drink with Mattingly and Moore, the house rotgut.
Saylor’s past explained the unusually large percentage of detectives on the D.C. squad who were regulars. Though the Fraternal Order of Police bar in lower Northwest was still popular with D.C.’s finest, this was a place where cops could drink without restraint and in private. And unlike at the FOP, where they were expected to unwind with “a few” after work, they could do their unscrutinized drinking at the Spot while still on duty. In fact, in my two weeks spent with bent elbows at the bar of the Spot, it became obvious that this was a place where serious drinkers from all across the city came to get tanked in peace, without the presence of coworkers, hanging plants, brass rails, or waitresses who overfamiliarly (and falsely) addressed them as “gentlemen.”
One Monday late in May I watched the bar as Sherry and Saylor retired to the kitchen for a short discussion. I was alone in the place and had gained Saylor’s trust to the point where I was allowed to help myself. I reached into the cooler and popped a Bud and nursed it for the next fifteen minutes while I listened to Ma Rainey on the deck.
Sherry emerged from the kitchen and began to gather up what looked to be her things, stuffing a romance paperback into her purse and then picking up a dusty umbrella from the side of the cooler. Her eyes were a little watery as she leaned in and kissed me lightly on the cheek before walking from behind the bar and then out the front door.
Saylor came out of the kitchen a little later and poured himself a straight shot of Mattingly and Moore. He adjusted the wire rims on his nose as if he were going to do something smart, but instead did something stupid and fired back the shot.
When he caught his breath he looked through me and said, “God, I hate that.” His face was screwed tight, but I guessed he wasn’t talking about the speed-rail bourbon. “I knew she was giving away drinks to jack up her tips-all of ’em do it, even the honest ones-but there was money missing, five, ten a day, all this past month. I had to let her go, man; I didn’t have any choice.”
“Don’t worry about it, Phil.” I had pegged Sherry for a gonif the first day I met her but felt I had no duty to inform Saylor. I didn’t owe him anything, not yet. “You still got Mai,” I said.
He nodded weakly. “Yeah, and she wants more shifts. But she’s got a temper, man, with me and the customers. I don’t think I can handle that German wench in here all the time.” His hands spread out. “I guess I gotta go through the process of looking for a new girl.”
I looked at my beer bottle and saw a thousand more like it on a hundred more dark afternoons. Then I looked into the bar mirror and saw my lips moving. They said, “Hell, I’ll bartend for ya, Phil.”
He pushed his glasses up again and said, “You kidding?”
“Why not? The cases aren’t exactly building up,” I said with understatement, then told the biggest lie of the day. “Besides, I’ve done some bartending in my time.”
Saylor thought it over. “I never had a man behind the bar here. Can’t say any of these guys would notice the difference.” I lit a Camel while he talked himself into it. “I guess I could give you a few shifts, try it out. You start tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I said with the misguided, giddy enthusiasm common in long-term unemployment cases. “Tomorrow.”