textscI did the work, I did the work, I ran. I ran on a treadmill 40 minutes in the morning, sometimes at lunch. I drove. I drove. I drove to Westlake because that’s where the money is. We live in Hollywood and pay more than I would pay for the same apartment in Chelsea and we can’t afford to live next to where I work. I could rent a house across the highway I guess but if I’m gonna rent I’m not gonna rent one of those houses.
Coming home I can time it. 3:00. Or about 7:30. Sometimes there’s a window. Without Liss I stop at Red Robin if the traffic is too bad. There’s some guys there we watch football and they talk shit about the bogus business deals they’re doing next and I sit quietly and perfect my ability to order the perfect appetizer at a burger joint.
The first time I did that drive I thought I would die.
No sane person would do that drive every day.
If you took every person on the 101 and had their head examined you wouldn’t find a sane one in the bunch.
And there are thousands of us.
There are tens of thousands.
It’s a smaller group than you think.
If you drive that way every day you see the same people.
Same cars.
Same bumper stickers.
Some are on my Facebook.
They tell me about the bars. Guys from Atlanta in for the week telling me about some bar I never heard of that’s right up the road from me. Always these accolades, how great the place is. But always it boils down to some hot waitress befriending you for tips. And she’s never that hot.
She’s like, emphtwenty-hot. Which is how hot most girls are at twenty. Then they slide. Somehow twenty-hot seems hotter when you’re 52 than it did when you were twenty.
Liss may have mentioned that.
When you go to these places with these guys, it turns out not to be the greatest bar you’ve ever been to. It turns out it’s in a strip mall. For me, that precludes the bar being the greatest bar you’ve ever been too, regardless of what’s on the inside, but I guess for some people that isn’t the case.
I don’t drink a lot in bars.
I drink the normal amount.
I drink like a long-haul trucker. One mile at a time.
I don’t flirt with the waitresses either. Some twenty-hot girl that ain’t going home with me? Anyway I’m married.
Hannah has affairs.
We have an agreement.
I mean we’ve had threesomes together in the past. That was before the kids. But we’re in it for the kids. We love each other. We’re emphrealistic. You can’t be getting divorced just because you want to have sex with someone else. It’s not fair to the kids. Plus, marriage is about more than infatuation. It’s about more than just lust. Maybe it’s about being married to your best friend, maybe it is, but it’s more like being married to the person who used to be your best friend. Now you’re something more. You’re part of the fabric. You’re part of the glue. You can’t get married just because you like the sex and you can’t get divorced just because you like it somewhere else.
Me and Hannah have an agreement.
She may exercise it more than I do, but we both have the option.
You don’t have to exercise an option for it to have benefit.
You have to know it’s there.
Candy is a major option.
Candy is there.
Pila told me when he hired her. Candy was in with her friends. Four of them at a table. They drank six bottles of wine, then they came to the bar for cocktails. I wasn’t there. This is what Pila says. He says it was safer for him to keep her behind the bar. He could keep an eye on her. She drinks there too. She drinks with me. This isn’t a bar where you get fired for drinking with the customers. Candy’ll set up a shot for me and leave the extra in a metal cup, pour herself some, give me the rest of the mixer later, keep mimosas going all day. The busboys don’t drink. Sometimes the servers do. The bartenders, if it’s slow. If it’s really slow, definitely. Sunday morning is my favorite time to come. Saturday or Sunday morning. Before brunch. The 10 to 12 slot. I can’t remember when I started coming here.
When Candy moves it’s like ice. It’s like terror. Liss is right she’s like lacquer but she’s also like ice. Long hair, tragedy of dying, somewhere between brown and dirty streaks. Candy’s bar skills are prime. The napkins she makes, the garnish. She cuts with concentration. Her lemon sculptures are almost blue—something about them—yellow turning almost blue in her hands. Thin fingers, sickle nails. Thin body, the kind you’d like to fuck, always some skin showing, too much maybe, and really nothing, nothing, nothing about her that’s nice.
There are sunny girls. There are nappy girls. There are lovely girls. There are delicate girls. There are dainty girls. There are daffodil girls. There are buttercup. There are beautiful women, graceful ones, there are polished, ancient works of art.
Candy isn’t one of them.
Here’s who we have at the bar. We have Ash. She’s a lesbian, she manages the place. If I was stuck on a desert island with any of these people, it would be Ash. Ash is loving with a sense of humor. And some perspective. Ash is my age. Maybe 10 years younger. Then you have Tara. Tara has beautiful hair, black, and she’s the right size for a woman, the size women were when I was young. Not like today. Tara’s pretty. She could be a pin-up girl. Candy isn’t like that. Tara comes in on her day off, her and her sister. They have classic beauty, if not classic clothing. Their dad comes in after work. He drinks a shot and a Corona, then he leaves. He’s a cop. Then you have some guy bartenders and you have some male and female servers and you have the kitchen, which is all Mexicans, and the busboys, who are all Mexicans, and you have the hostesses, who are all jailbait that even I’m smart enough to stay away from. Description of them would cause this story to be unpublishable in North American markets (hence my hesitation).
Then you have Candy. Candy is new. This is the third time I’ve seen her. We’ve never really talked, but I can tell. There’s a kind of hunger in the way she sets out the napkins. The little hostesses fold them with disregard, with cluelessness. Candy presses like an iron. Like she’s in barracks. She’s making the bed emphand she’s doing the inspection.
Her lemons: precision.
She cuts the entire lemon peel away from the fruit in one slice.
When she’s done she wraps the peel around a straw and holds it under a plate for like half an hour. Then she has the most perfect garnish in the world.
Tara comes on shift she drinks and we tell stories.
Candy comes on she takes every vase off every shelf, polishes the invisible side of the counter, and segment-by-segment removes every goddamn bottle from every area of the bar, wipes down the place where the bottle sat, then she sterilizes the outside of the bottle.
Then she steams the glasses.
This is that kind of bar.
This bar isn’t in a strip mall.
This bar is beside a lake.
The lake is hard to get to.
You don’t just emphhappen by this lake.
The houses on this lake, they don’t belong to just anybody.
Like: that house over there: that’s Judge emphJudy’s.
They shoot shows at this bar. Guys with money show up here. They park in the tow-away zone next to the dumpster. But they park Lamborghinis, and Candy steams their glasses.
This is the kind of conversation me and Tara have:
“You workin’ today?”
“Yeah, Chris’s shooting a commercial. Do a shot of J"ager with me?”
“You know it.”
“Don’t you ever feel hung over?”
“Every day.”
This is the kind of conversation me and Candy have:
(Candy leans across the bar and takes a slice of avocado off my Mexican Benedict. Her skinny little tits are showing; no bra. She looks over her shoulder, paranoid, scoping out Pila, who’s sitting by the TV watching his game. She cranes her face back around to me, reaches over, picks up my phone in slow motion.)
I’m watching Liss play with the shark.
Candy scrolls through my texts and she sees some stuff she likes. She smiles. She brings her phone out of her back pocket. She shows it to me. She smiles again. The text says:
RED AND WHITE
“Do you know what that means?”
Liss is reaching for the shark.
I’m nodding.
Candy shows another text:
SOMA THAT PEPPEMYNT :it says.
“You know what that peppermint is.”
“Yeah,” I say. I know.
“I knew you did,” she says. She gives my phone back and she takes her phone back and she looks at Pila and she creases my napkins and Candy is bubbling over with smiles. “I knew,” she says, “from the moment I saw you, that you and I were bad news. Even my boyfriend,” she says, “he doesn’t know about it. People like you and me,” she says, “we have to stick together. We,” she says, “keep this very very quiet.” Her face cranes back around, surveys her boss, then she cranes it back to me. “Does Pila know about you?” “No. Does Pila know about you?” “Hell no. Let me make you another one of these. Is that Don Julio? Give me twenty minutes until my break and then I’ll take you out to my car and show you some really, really good shit.”