Well, a friend was nice enough to ask, and I thought maybe it was time to throw some of these chapters up into the solar wind... so here is chapter 1 of my book, "Cage Days." (formatting is a bit goofed up, and for that I apologize...)
Cage Days,
(a liquid novel...)
c. 2009-2011 Lee Skirboll
All rights reserved
Chapter 1:
Root Beer Schnapps
Lording over the Cage was our giant, round mirror, warped and flawed by the ages, clouded by years of smoke and a thousand sad, alcohol-imbued sights. At one time it reminded me of the mirrors in the paintings of Degas, back when I was studying such things, but those lofty visions were quickly replaced by the reality of working at the bar, the “Cage,” and fears that the great mirror would come crashing down, (who knew how Lonnie, our owner, had it fixed there); or by apprehension of my own reflection in it – an image that I didn’t always recognize.
After banging open our front door in what seemed like a deliberately rough way, this guy came in, and before he even made it to the bar, ordered himself a root beer schnapps from across the room. I loved the across-the-room order, implying as it did that I drop everything and serve this imperious guy. The red flag was the root beer schnapps, something for kids, like candy cigarettes. Who drinks root beer schnapps?
But this guy was no kid. He was a big, fat biker carrying his helmet and gloves, sporting a bushy Yosemite Sam type mustache and huge, stupid grin who of course would order a root beer schnapps, whose goofy mustache literally spelled out the words “root beer schnapps” in a knee slappin’ Yosemite Sam kind of way. “Root beer schnapps,” he said again, and banged down his motorcycle helmet, gloves and keys, goggles, jackknife, rabbit’s foot, cheroots, Zippo, and he might as well have said “sarsaparilla.”
I turned to scan our shelves and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror: I too was a big guy, also with a beard, although more trimmed and less menacing then this biker’s. My long hair was tied into a ponytail which I wore beneath a trucker hat, something I’d just started doing as a bartender. On first glimpse I always thought I was fatter than I thought I was; then from there the rest of the picture didn’t add up either, the beard, hat, that ‘aint me, I usually thought.
But it was me, and if I looked into my own eyes and studied them intently I would eventually recognize myself, though I didn’t necessarily have time to do this each time I passed this omnipresent mirror waiting on bikers and such. The trucker’s cap read, “US Ink,” a cherished item I nabbed when I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, no, not as a writer, which I should have been, but in classified advertising, a low totem pole and low self esteem position in any newspaper. Anyway I liked this US Ink hat because the image of an ink truck fascinated me: the ink tanker pulling up, hooking up a hose to the building and pumping ink like it was transfusing a dying patient. Black blood. Fuel. And who doesn’t like the word, “ink?” I rolled it around in my mind like a sweet lemon drop about to go sour.
“Its right there son,” the biker said breaking my reverie, pointing to the bottom shelf which held the grenadine, cherry brandy, crème de menthe, and other college kid, or old person liquors.
“Oh yeah,” I said. In the couple of years I’d been working at the Cage I’d never once poured a root beer schnapps for anyone, and oddly the bottles that I never used I kind of erased from my consciousness, probably only have room for so much up there in the brain. This particular bottle was incredibly dusty and old, and I made a mental note to wipe it down if the mood to clean ever struck me, which it rarely did.
I paused for a second to consider the proper glassware. I liked to serve a drink in something close to its proper glass, even though nobody in the Cage could have cared less. We possessed maybe 10 shot glasses total. Lonnie, our owner, had a bug up his ass about them for some reason and would never order more. “Use what you got and after that, fuck ‘em,” was his philosophy when it came to shot glasses. What was left was a mismatched collection to be sure, each with its white, marking line at different spots on the glass. Some shot glasses looked huge and held nothing, while others looked puny and held a lot. But that’s barware for you. That left the “rocks” glass, which was a good, solid glass, and became our de-facto shot glass since Lonnie wouldn’t buy us real ones. You could pour a nice shot in the rocks glass and it traveled quite easily to its destination without the waitress spilling most of it. Lonnie bitched about this glass as well, saying we were giving away the store, but what the hell did he want us to do then?
I sized up ol’ Yosemite and figured he would neither appreciate nor comprehend the root beer schnapps in the rocks glass. To him this would reek of elitism and snobbery and that is a very bad place to go with your freeform, roving biker drinking root beer schnapps on a sunny afternoon. So I slapped one of our precious 10 in front of him and poured out a nice over the line shot for him. Nothing says “tip me” louder than pouring one over the line. If I saddled up to some bar somewhere and the guy, the bartender poured me a shot on the line I would be so completely humiliated and dumbfounded that I would not be able to drink in peace. Over the line, is on the line if you get my meaning. So I poured one that ol’ Yosemite could really get his whiskers into. A shimmering sweet, root beer smelling shot, which he raised to his lips and… took a dainty little sip. Now that threw me back a loop. I expected him to throw that bad boy back. A sipper! I looked again at the bottle and saw it was only 40 proof, half the strength of regular vodka or whiskey. Jesus where do these guys come from?
“Hey barkeep,” he said still licking stray drops of root beer from his mustache hairs. “Can I axe you something?”
I nodded in a way barkeeps nod that could be yes, could be no.
“Tell me,” he said, “what are you, some kind of Jew?”
I heard an audible “clunk” as my space-time continuum shifted noticeably to the right. I knew I only had seconds to respond to this, because a question like that, asked by a person like Yosemite, throws the delicate power balance of a bar, essentially its law and order, into temporary disarray. Without the power balance, or more accurately, the power imbalance, whereby the bartender holds a majority of the power, and the customers hold little or none, there would be nothing to stop macho, swaggering, alcohol-fueled men, men who already writhe with pent up aggression, lust and competitiveness, (and women too, lets face it) from taking over. There are unwritten laws, or codes that have been operating in bars forever to hold this at bay. Some of the codes are spatial, like a customer will never touch the bartender, or break the imaginary plane of the bar by reaching over it, or god forbid, coming behind the bar like matter and anti-matter colliding. Other codes concern how money is handled, and appropriate questions you can ask a bartender about his personal life. Questions like, “are you some kind of Jew,” were certainly not kosher in these parts, and would be read by me anyway, as confrontational. I was at least smart enough to know that if somebody is in your bar challenging the power imbalance, they probably have more in mind than sipping sweet, root beer flavored schnapps in the middle of the day.
“Are you some kind of Jew” is a little gem of a question. Literally the answer would be either “yes” or “no” depending on whether in fact you were a Jew or not. Since I was Jewish, then the most honest, quickest and to-the-point answer would have been, “yes.” Then if I was smart, which I am not, I would have wiped my way down the bar, checked on the coffee drinker at the other end, and hightailed it into the kitchen, back alley or basement for a bit of a breather. However my mind tends to wander. Suddenly I am 11 years old and swimming with my younger sister in a motel swimming pool in Margate, New Jersey, when a group of pale, sunburned kids suddenly surround us and ask, “Hey did you kill Christ?” They seemed to seriously want to know and splashed water at us to prove this.
“Obviously not,” I responded.
“But the Jews did,” They sang, “The Jews killed Christ. And you’re a Jew, aren’t you? So you’re a Christ killer. Christ killer!” they sang again, splashing away.
This was maybe the first time I was aware that I looked Jewish. That people would assume I was a Jew just by looking at me. Was it the nose? The skin tone? Well my sister and I got out of there with our horns and hooked noses intact, but we were upset and humiliated having been bullied in this way. In Pittsburgh we lived in a predominately Jewish neighborhood, the type of place, I would soon learn, that doesn’t exist in too many cities out there. Sadly, at the time I hadn’t yet studied my Jesus Christ Superstar to the extent I had in later years, so I was not as well versed on the specifics of who may or may not have killed Christ. If I had, we and the bullies could’ve have had a nice, poolside discussion about Pontius Pilate and hand washing and the complicity of the Jewish priests. But no, it was just chlorine mixing with our tears at that point. So my point is if a root beer schnapps drinking biker wanders into my potentially volatile power imbalance and randomly asks me if “I am some kind of Jew,” my first reaction is not to offer back the most timely and accurate response.
For instance asking a person, are you Jewish? is the kind of simple phrasing that could easily be a genuine desire to know, yet you still have the problem that, as people like to claim: in America, we don’t ask each other what religion we practice. But closer to the truth is that America, a country that likes to think it was founded on the precept that we don’t ask each other what religion we practice, we ask all sorts of prying and personal questions every chance we get because we are nothing if not the nosiest fucks out there and cannot stand NOT knowing what religion a person is, due to the fact that we have constructed many elaborate theories as to why people act certain ways based on their skin color, eye shape and whether they killed any messiahs or not, and we are continuously conducting field work on the subject. So if I ask you if you are a Jew, it is mainly because I’m working on a bunch of Jew theories right now, and I normally don’t get too many chances to see or speak to any real, live Jews, so when I do get one in my sights I’m apt to start conducting some serious Q&A.
I’m not immune to this kind of research either. Bartending has led me to several rich lines of inquiry regarding the behavior of my fellow humans. Why do so many black people drink Heineken? Why do so many lesbians drink microbrews? Why do so many Jews drink Canadian whisky? Why does this kind of curiosity manifest itself as racism in some people and anthropology in others? (I’d met a number of anthropologists over the years, as my mother decided to earn a PhD in the field when my sister and I were in our teens; a pursuit, in the 1970s in Pittsburgh, PA, that was by no means encouraged or supported by anyone but my patient father, and of course, her selfless, low maintenance children… Anyway Yosemite wasn’t far from the type. Grizzled looking guys most of them. Beards were mandatory.) Some say all anthropological pursuits are inherently racist, and yet there I was: self-styled dive-bar anthropologist doing field work there in the dank. As such I could then allow that ol’ Yosemite had become as “interesting” to me as I was “interesting” to him. Conversely it also meant that Yosemite had become some kind of anthropologist as well, so I should have answered in response to his original query “What are you, some kind of Jew? with, “what are you? Some kind of anthropologist? That would have been funny. But I didn’t ask Yosemite if he were some kind of anthropologist. Among other ills, I tend to suffer from an acute lack of comeback ability.
“Are you some kind of Jew?” was still hanging out there, as Seinfeld would say, like a big matzo ball. So I wiped down the bar, put the bottle of root beer schnapps back on the shelf, sticky and dusty as it was. I turned back to face him but had nothing to say. I was afraid. I was afraid of him and unsure of my control of the power balance when really challenged. I did not want to be confronted or tested or splashed in a swimming pool, I didn’t even want to pour drinks for people in a bar or wipe anything, or clean anything. I just wanted to lord over my tiny domain, rake in tips and spend my hard earned money in other bars, tipping other bartenders in their domains.
Of course he who hesitates is lost. Suddenly the door banged open, and in walked Jimbo and Nate Dog, two irritating regulars who I was never more happy to see. They were both adjuncts of what we called the “Oy Vey Mafia” at the Cage, a group of Jewish loan sharks and toughs who often gathered in the bar to celebrate some festive occasion or another, like when one of them was released from prison, or had just beat a rap or something like that. Jimbo and Nate Dog were hangers-on to the core group, errand boys, or maybe just friends of the main guys, but close enough that they would require my undivided attention. They also posed a complicated bar-problem for me, as Nate Dog and Jimbo, when seen together created a rare, yet problematic construct known as a “paradoxical drink-buying pair.”
Paradoxical Drink Buying Pairs a) refuse to let anybody buy them a drink, and b) insist on buying drinks for all those around them. If two such people enter a bar at the same time, a paradox develops where each insists on buying the other a drink, and neither will accept a drink from the other, quickly resulting in a locked causality loop from which it is difficult to emerge. A bartender must act quickly and decisively to break the loop if any business is going to get done. It is not a random decision either, choosing one person over the other can result in tip retaliation for weeks to come. In these cases I would normally default to the “whoever spoke first rule” – whoever orders drinks first will be the one to pay – a simple rule that has saved me countless hours of listening to two blowhards attempt to impress each other and the whole bar by buying each other a drink.
However Nate-dog and Jimbo presented advanced levels of difficulty since neither of them actually spoke their order aloud. They were nodders, gesturers, regular drink drinkers, and I’d have to know who shifted, nodded or eyeballed me first to know whose money to take. If I didn’t look carefully I have to default to the “who has their money out” rule, which in this case would always be Jimbo, or the “who is the better tipper rule,” which in this case would also be Jimbo. This was kind of unfair to Nate-dog, who’s personal style dictated that he never, ever let his money touch the surface of the bar under any circumstances. He always waited until being asked before handing over any cash as his lifelong goal was to one day receive a drink on the house. Jimbo, on the other hand, threw what seemed like an unending supply of crumpled bills haphazardly around the bar top like annoying fall leaves. He trusted me to take the proper amount and throw the correct change back on the pile. At that moment though I didn’t have the luxury of time, so I grabbed the money for both their drinks out of Jimmy’s pile, earning a disappointed look from Nate-dog, but I had other things on my mind.
Yosemite was sitting by the window munching on his own mustache in a wholly distasteful way, and I needed to some how address him.
“Hey Lee,” Jimbo said, peering at himself in the mirror. He hunched and shrugged his shoulders, played with his belt and crotch, sniffed and snorted and combed his slicked back hair. “What do you know?”
“Well Jimmy,” I said. “What do I know? Hmm. That’s a good one.” I was talking too loudly and my voice sounded dumb and unnatural. “A good question. I’m getting a lot of good questions in here today, that’s for sure. Yep. Today must question day. Is it? Is today question day?”
The two looked at me like I was insane.
“What the fuck?” Nate-Dog said, taking out a toothpick and working it around.
“You guys ready for another?” I said even though I had just served them. “Here, its on the house.” And I slapped another Coors Light in front of Nate-Dog and poured Jimmy another Jamison’s. This got their attention. I rarely ever comped these two, even though they both, especially Nate-Dog with his hidden money, lived for the day when a free drink would come their way.
“Thank you sir!” Nate-Dog said. Jimmy took a sip of his new one, and pushed his half-finished old drink toward me. I emptied it into the sink with a pattering of ice.
“For instance,” I said taking a breath, “The gentleman down at the end of the bar there was just asking if I weren’t a Jew? Or how did he phrase it? Was I some kind of Jew or something?”
Both Jimbo and Nate-Dog looked at me for a second, then looked down at Yosemite.
“Now why the fuck would somebody be in here axing you that?” Nate-Dog said. “That’s just ignert.”
Jimmy adjusted his neck in the mirror.
“I don’t know I said,” starting to regret saying anything. “Seems like a weird question to me.”
“I’ll say it’s a weird question,” Nate-Dog said, “that is a damn weird question.” He got up and moved one seat closer to Yosemite. Yosemite just kept smiling to himself.
“Say there friend,” Nate said addressing Yosemite. “What you drinking over there?”
Yosemite did not respond.
“Lee,” Nate Dog said, “what’s that he’s drinking?”
“Root beer schnapps,” I said.
“Root beer snaps?” Nate-Dog said laughing. “What the hell is that? Jimbo! You ever heard of… what was it?”
“Root beer schnapps,” I said again.
“Root beer snaps,” Nate-Dog mispronounced again.
Jimmy swirled his ice. “Gimme another one Lee,” he said.
And I reached for the Jameson’s.
“Lee,” Nate-Dog said. “Pour my man over here another one of his root beer snaps.”
I poured Jimmy his Jameson’s, opened another Coors Light for Nate, and went to pour Yosemite another root beer, but he quickly placed his hand over his glass.
“I can buy my own drinks,” he said.
Nate-Dog stood and took a wet, sloppy sip of his Coors. He had moved somewhat behind Yosemite now. “No one’s saying you can’t, friend, I just want to get one for you. Lee, get him one, go ahead.”
But Yosemite’s hand was still covering his glass, and he said, “well I was thinking maybe I should just jew him out of one like you two did.”
“Alright,” I said, “that’s enough.” My voice was shaking. “You’re done,” I said. I felt like an asshole. Fight your own battles I said to myself.
Yosemite didn’t seem worried in the least. He smiled up at me while still protecting his glass.
“If you’re trying to start something, I wouldn’t if I were you,” I said.
“Whelp,” Yosemite said rising from his seat, stretching, hiking up his pants. “If you were me, then you wouldn’t be no Jew now would you?”
At that point Nate-Dog bear-hugged Yosemite from behind and held him at bay while Jimbo came up next to him pressed very close in and whispered something in his ear. Then the three of them left abruptly, Yosemite sandwiched between them. I stood watching them walk out the door.
The screen door slammed and I noticed that Yosemite’s gear was still with me, and his helmet teetered for a second from the commotion, then suddenly dropped to the floor with a loud clunk. I knew that once those helmets were dropped like that they are never the same.
For the rest of the day I waited for the three of them, or even one of them to return. But neither Jimbo, Nate-Dog or Yosemite showed up. At one point I had walked around and replaced Yosemite’s helmet on the bartop, but otherwise I didn’t touch anything including his still unfinished shot of root beer schnapps. The shot stayed where it was throughout the day. People came and went, ordered food, left me a buck or 50 cents here and there until the sky darkened, Curtis showed up and it was my time to leave. For my last act I got a rag of warm, soapy water, and wiped down the grenadine, crème de menthe and root beer schnapps bottles of their ancient, cigarette imbued dust. In the mirror was a wavy image of myself, haggard looking; shaggy, pointy beard; five o’clock shadow; sunken eyes; holding dirty bottle and rag. I do look pretty Jew-y I thought. Jewish ink trucker. Nice.
Curtis and I did the cash register business and I was about to leave when Curtis pointed to the shot of root beer schnapps and motorcycle stuff on the bar. “Is this person coming back?” he asked?
“I’m not sure,” I said, and swept all his stuff into the empty helmet and stowed it behind the bar. Then I finally took Yosemite’s shot glass of root beer schnapps from the bar and held it up. “Elijah aint comin I guess,” I said and tossed it cavalierly into the sink where I heard it crack against the stainless steel and break. Now we were down to nine, I thought, and could imagine Lonnie’s cackling face. I should have served it to him in a rocks glass after all.
end of Ch. 1
